A Potion to Die For: A Magic Potion Mystery by Heather Blake Page A

leather-bound journal filled with homeopathic recipes.
    Picking up the worn leather book, I held it between my hands and could practically feel folk magic pulsing between my palms. I reached into the hidey-hole and nudged the box from the left side and carefully lifted it out.
    Two entwined lilies had been carved into its top—an image identical to the one on Delia’s and my lockets. I lifted the lid off the box and gazed at the stunning engraved sterling silver bottle swaddled in luxurious velvet.
    Slightly tarnished, the bottle stood about six inches tall and had the diameter of a half-dollar. More a flask than a potion bottle, this container held exactly a year’s worth of Leilara drops. Tears, really.
    Leila’s and Abraham’s tears.
    As I grated wild carrot, I thought about my great-great-grandparents. Of how Leila had fallen in love with Abraham and followed him from New Orleans up to northern Alabama, and, in the hope that her love was strong enough to change his sinister ways, turned her back on her family, who warned against marrying the voodoo practitioner.
    Of how every day was a struggle for her to keep her energy pure, because she could feel his darkness. She had no charmed locket like Delia and I had; she simply had a heart full of love and good intentions.
    I thought of how they’d married and had a daughter who’d inherited her mama’s way of feeling other people’s emotions and her talent for folk-magic remedies.
    And of how one June day, while picnicking along the Darling River, when Abraham was bitten by a poisonous water snake, Leila felt his pain, his anguish. She tried to save him by sucking the venom from his wound.
    Of how they both died, wrapped in each other’s arms.
    And of how every year on that day—and only that day—an extraordinary double lily blooms in the spot where they died and cried magical tears.
    Engraved vines and lily leaves decorated the outside of the bottle. I pulled the stopper from the Leilara and carefully inserted a dropper and extracted two teardrops, depositing them into the hangover potion. Steamlike white tendrils rose from the liquid and swirled into a spiral before dissipating. Tomorrow, Francie Debbs wouldn’t have so much as a twinge of a headache.
    A few minutes later, after I’d cleaned up a bit, a knock came on the door just as I had finished putting the Leilara back into its hiding space. Since I didn’t need it for the love potions, because my customers had abandoned me, I’d leave it here. I liked knowing it was safe and sound.
    “Carly? You going to be all day?”
    I grabbed the potion bottle and opened the door.
    Dylan’s face peered inside the workroom, and he looked around suspiciously.
    “I’m done,” I said, holding up the bottle.
    He gave a sharp nod and walked ahead of me toward the back door. I couldn’t help myself from admiring his backside. I wasn’t proud of that fact, but, hey, some things were impossible to ignore.
    Ainsley, standing at the back door, strained to see any goings-on. I held up the bottle, and she grinned ear to ear. “Lordy be!”
    The bottle slipped from my grasp, and using moves I didn’t know I had, I made a grab for the falling bottle and was able to get my hand under the glass just in time. I wasn’t able to catch it—only break its fall. It hit my palm and rolled off—into the break room.
    Ainsley let out a cry and came rushing toward me. “It’s not busted, is it?”
    Dylan threw his hands in the air at her intrusion into his crime scene.
    I simply stared in horror as the bottle rolled over the spot on the floor where Nelson Winston had been lying dead as a doornail a few hours earlier.
    A large smear of blood had colored my off-white tiles a rusty brown. I immediately felt queasy, but Ainsley had no qualms as she rushed past me, stepped over the bloodstain, and snatched up the potion bottle.
    “Out!” Dylan ordered her, pointing down the hallway.
    Without a fight, she slunk away, the potion bottle