Free Big Beautiful Witches: I Married A Warlock by Georgette St. Clair Page A

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    “Anyway,  I’ll have Manfred show you the door. Do call in advance next time before you come; it’s what people with manners do.”
    Fiona gritted her teeth and bit back a sharp retort.  Queasiness swelled up inside her and she clenched her fists.  She’d feel ill for hours after she left today.
    “Wait,” Delphine protested.  “I want to see if she can help with these headaches I’ve been having.”
    “Nonsense! She can’t help you. She’s not a doctor.”
    “You said you didn’t want me to go to the doctor!  But my head is killing me. And I’ve been throwing up so much my stomach hurts.”
    “Mother!” Fiona gasped. “What have you done?”
    “Fiona, you will leave at once.” Desdomona’s voice rose even higher.
    Fiona turned to the soup that Delphine was rejecting, pointed her wand at it, and concentrated. Within seconds, the little bits of leaves floating on the top had grown into a large curling vine with big glossy leaves.
    “Purgeweed!” Fiona yelled, furious. “That’s why you came to my store the other day! That’s why you were rummaging around in the bins! You stole purgeweed, and gave it to Delphine without her knowledge or consent!”
    “What?” Delphine leaped to her feet, staring at the soup in a mixture of horror and fury. “I thought I was dying! How could you?”
    Fiona’s father set down his newspaper, looking alarmed.
    “That is not just disgusting and appalling, it’s illegal!” Fiona was shouting at the top of her lungs.
    “She’s under my legal control until she’s 21! I have two more years to make her into something that some half way decent wizard will condescend to marry!” Now Desdemona was shouting too.
    Delphine burst into tears.
    “Don’t try to quote law at me, mother! Especially not when it comes to herbs and their legal uses!  Those herbs are expressly illegal for consumption by anyone under the age of 21, and it is also a violation of law to give non-medicinal herbs to anyone, of any age, without their consent.”
    “Desdemona, what were you thinking? That could cause a terrible scandal.” Their father threw down his newspaper and stood up. “What would the men at the club say if word of this got out?”
    “That’s all that you care about?” Fiona swung towards him, eyes blazing with fury.  “Your wife is trying to poison your daughter, and your only concern is the scandal it might cause?”
    “I hate both of you! I HATE you!” Delphine, an air elemental of no small power, sent the bowl of soup whirling across the room, spraying soup across the hand-flocked wallpaper and then crashed it into the wall, where it shattered to pieces. She leaped up and ran from the room, rushing from the house.
    “Now see what you’ve done? She was finally starting to look halfway decent! By the Crystal Ball, she would have actually been attractive!” Desdemona’s voice quivered with self-righteous fury.
    “I’m through with both of you,” Fiona said, in tones of ice, casting a look of contempt at her parents.  She walked outside; Delphine was already sitting in the passenger seat of her car, crying.
    “I can’t believe she did that to me!” Delphine wailed, wiping at her nose with her sleeve. “Am I really that hideous?”
    Fiona felt a red tide of fury swelling inside her.  She thought of the damage that her mother had done to her self-esteem from years and years of vicious insults and subtle jabs, and now that Fiona had escaped from her grasp, she was sinking her poisonous claws into Delphine. Well, not if Fiona could help it. 
    “No, you’re not hideous; she’s just a crazy bitch who’s trying to make us feel responsible for her social failure. You know what? Nobody wants to be around her because she’s unbearable, but she blames us for the fact that she’s a social reject.  You’re beautiful.   Now we’ll go to my shop, I’ll get you some herbs for that headache, and you’ll feel well again in no time.”
    “I’m never