"Wouldn't it be easier to save your own seeds?"
"No."
"But—"
"For fuck's sake, just pick the foods you want to grow so I can place the order. It will take a couple days to get here."
I should have known better than to show the internet to someone who had never seen it before. Because an hour later, the cart had over two-hundred dollars worth of seeds collected. I didn't even fucking object when the witch added things like asparagus that took years to grow.
She would be here, after all.
And, I reminded myself, it was all a one-time purchase if she knew how to do shit like save her seeds. She could even build up a seed vault for future witches.
Why the idea of future witches sent a strange, sharp pang through my system was beyond me, though.
"I need to rest if I am going to start the garden tomorrow," the witch declared, taking a deep breath, making her tits press up against the thin material of her cloak, her nipples hardened from the chill in the room. "Are you bringing me back to the basement?"
"No. Just sleep here."
What the fuck?
She belonged in the basement.
That was where all the generations of witches went. That was where we'd agreed they belonged. To help the transition, to make sure they became compliant, to break their spirits enough to have them do what needed to be done.
If I allowed her to walk around the estate, make demands, sleeping in my fucking bed, what were the chances that we could break her spirit enough to bend her to our will?
She shifted down in the bed, one of her hands pressed to her full stomach, the other over her head, toying with her hair a bit, the cloak slipping open down to her navel, revealing the outline of her tits. Her eyes drifted closed as she hummed something soothing and ancient—some song of her coven—and I had a startling realization.
I didn't want to break her spirit.
I wanted her to stay just as she was.
What the fuck was that about?
Chapter Five
Lenore
The days stretched long even as the sun moved further away.
On my first full day out of the basement, I opened up a large garden under the watchful eye of Ly. And, as it turned out, I caught most of his demon friends glancing out of windows as I dug up the weedy grass and turned the dirt, sprinkling the grounds of coffee from the kitchen into the soil after asking Ace if it would work like tea did, adding needed elements to the dirt.
It was far too late, of course, to plant a summer garden, but it was early enough in this climate to plant various fall and winter vegetables.
Beets, carrots, onions, broccoli, bush beans, small cucumbers, and salad greens.
Everything else would need to wait until the spring unless I could convince the demons that I could plant some crops in front of the massive windows they had in each of the rooms of their home.
At the very least, some herbs.
I didn't know if the issue was their demonic nature, or simply not knowing how to cook and therefore, what tasted good, but I could not wrap my head around the fact that they did not even have basil or oregano stored for cooking.
Aside from my garden, I wasn't given much to do. There were no elderly to care for, no babies or children to teach, no chores to be carried out.
So on the third day, while Ly was watching something bloody and horrific on that awful television set of his in the living room, I took myself down to the basement, sorting through all the books left there over the years by Ace who, as I learned, was a lover of reading and learning.
True, it made him smug and superior-sounding when you tried to discuss a topic with him, but I was not opposed to learning the ways of this new world I had never known.
I tossed books to the side about governments and economics, choosing instead to read the guides about electronics, about how appliances worked, what the internet was, how the heating worked without fireplaces. I also became fascinated by a thick, old tome with browning pages and patchy ink that talked about The Burning Times and the Inquisition and about how the Old Ways got hidden away. How, over time, humans not only forgot that witches and demons and other creatures existed, but vehemently denied their reality, calling them figments of writers' imaginations, the stuff of children's stories.
No wonder the women of my coven got such strange looks when we went to town, why Marianne had insisted on silence from us if we accompanied her on a trip. Unless we were visiting the stores with the crystals and talismans, incense and candles, where people seemed fascinated by us. Marianne would take a place in a back room and shuffle her cards for waiting women, telling them of their best paths in life, getting money in return, which we used to purchase items we couldn't provide for ourselves. Materials and needles, things of that nature.