“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and caldron bubble. Cool it with a baboon's blood, Then the charm is firm and good.”-Shakespeare; Macbeth.
Hestia rummaged her way through the cupboards, Hex, her black cat winding around her legs at her feet. The wolfsbane was somewhere around here, she muttered to herself. It was the last ingredient she needed for the lovers’ curse potion her most recent client wanted, a curse for a cheating lover, always a good source of money. There were always jilted lovers looking to get revenge. She also had another love potion that a young college student had requested to get the attention of another boy in his biology lab.
Well, if she could not find the wolfsbane maybe she would just concentrate on gathering and assembling the ingredients for the love potion that her second client had requested instead. Now, she thought, humming a random tune to herself, to find the actual recipe in her book of shadows. She turned, pulling a large cloth bound book from her kitchen shelf and thumbing through the book until she came to the right recipe. “Eureka!” she yelled, her cat scurrying away at the sudden sound.
Hestia came from a long line of witches, dating as far back as the Salem Witch Trials. The spells she had learned had been passed down through generation after generation of family witches from her mother's line. Her own ancestor having managed to escape being burned at the stake, a fate that many women, "witches", had not been able to. At the end of the Salem Witch trials, 25 innocent women died, some in jail, some through being crushed to death, and many, the majority, hanged or burned. Hestia's own family had secreted their familial book of shadows, hid it somewhere safe, and it was this book of shadows that had been passed down through generation of generation of women in her family until finally it had passed down to her.
At least this recipe, she thought, she had all the right ingredients.
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