Marveling that the witch hadn’t commented on Philippe, who was still lying prone on the floor, I obeyed her. As soon as I slipped the boots over my legs, they leeched to me, coming home, it seemed. I sighed as I felt all my skin moisten, unwithering, returning to normal just like that.
“Can’t even make a house call without havin’ to come back to this shit,” Amari said with a head shake. “I knew you’d be a challenge. Warned you over and over again ’bout how them boots work, but you’re full of yourself. I’m hopin’ you finally learned somethin’, though, since you’re back here again like a tamed pup.”
Back here again?
She moved farther into the room, and I stood, intending to act as a guide, just as the young girl had done before she’d left.
The witch waved me off. “I know my way ’round my own digs. Besides, I have Jean-Marie to wait on me most times, though she’s left for the night. It’s part of her tutorin’. And I wish I didn’t have to explain that to you every time you slink back here.”
“I’ve been here before?”
“Well, you don’t often bring amours with you.” Amari gestured toward Philippe.
“Yes, about him . . .”
“He’ll be out for a while, judgin’ on what I know you can do with those skills of yours.”
Could she see, in spite of that blindfold, with some sort of witch vision?
She sat in a chair behind the animal-bone table, then gestured for me to take the one opposite. Reaching under the table, she came out with a small crystal ball, setting it down, gesturing for me to touch it. The moment I did so, the boots hugged my feet, not violently but with comfort.
“You haven’t been here for two days, Lilly. I was worried.”
Clearly, she hadn’t begun to divine me with that ball, or whatever she had planned. “I wish I could tell you what was occupying me. I woke up in a small hotel at dusk, not knowing where I was.”
“Nothing new there.”
Was I ever going to find out the reason?
Amari clucked, and I noticed that her mouth was lovely: red lips tipped up at the corners. A chin with a dimple.
“Child,” she said, “I don’t envy you, but them boots were the only solution when I found you out by the road a week ago.”
A week ago? When Philippe had that vision of me?
“You’d just come into town,” Amari said. “Stole some poor soul’s pickup on your way here from Lord knows where else. Some time ago—you’d lost track ’bout how long it was, I guess—you were in Southern California.” Cal-ee-fornia.
“What was I doing there?”
“If you’d write all this down in a journal, like I tell you to, I wouldn’t have to explain. You been dependin’ on me to always catch you up, but you’ll be doin’ some writin’ tonight, like it or not. Next time you come here, you’ll be readin’ that instead of listenin’.”
I almost told her that it’s hard to read without any lights in here, but I could always go to the porch, yes? I had high doubts that one argued with Amari.
Those blindfolded eyes seemed to look into mine. “I’ll tell you once more and once only. Burnt to a pitted mess, you were, but somehow you were alive and kickin’. Later, after I divined you, I found out why that was.”
“And?”
“Oh, I’m not going through that complicated story again. A woman gets tired, you know.”
Amari gripped the top of the ball, and I knew that I would be experiencing my tale through it.
But the witch wasn’t ready to give it over to me just yet.
“Your truck had run outta gas down the road,” Amari said. “You’d crawled the rest of the way here, ’cuz somewhere along the line, you’d heard that there was a witch outside New Orleans who healed folk. You were so wounded you’d almost run outta gas, too.”
“So you helped me?”
“That’s what I was born to do. Help, not hinder.”
My chest constricted. I wasn’t getting the sense that I had known people like this back “home.”
“The boots,” I said softly. “You used magic and healing to create those boots, and when I put them on, the burns . . .”
“Go away. When you take ’em off, you go back to bein’ burnt. Nature heals, Lilly. We’re all a part of it. We’ve only just forgotten.”
The boots . . . vines from the bayou. An enchantment from a white witch.
“I remembered something when I arrived here,” I said. “You had told me that there’s a price for these boots. I thought you meant money. I even believed that I might have stolen them from you.” I touched one boot, gently. It seemed to respond, pulsing under my fingers.