Page 75 of Summer L.A.W.

“Okay. Today, we’re focusing on something purely botanical. No romance. No chemistry. No men who look distractingly good peering into microscopes,” she said as soon as she was finished summing up yesterday’s disaster.

Wally gave her a look that said. Try harder.

“Fine,” she amended. “No humans who look good doing anything.”

He accepted this with a tiny hop.

Magda flipped to a clean section and wrote: Experimental Potion Concept: Emotional Resonance Enhancement.

“This is perfectly sensible,” she told the page. “A potion designed to help plants respond to their caretakers’ good moods and resist bad ones. Therapeutic gardening. Completely practical and safe.”

Wally made a snickering sound that should have been too undignified for any creature except perhaps Victoria’s raccoon.

Magda tapped her pencil defensively. “Stop judging. Emotional resonance is a real thing. Plants pick up on energy. There are studies. Lots of studies. I think.”

She stood and crossed to a cluster of ferns near the trellis. The fronds swayed lightly in the breeze, possibly in sympathy.

She cleared her throat. “Okay, little guys. Hypothetically, if your caretaker is feeling… conflicted, how does that affect your growth? Are we talking droopy? Stunted? Or is there some kind of⁠—”

Wally thumped his tail in warning.

“Scientific inquiry requires vocalization,” she argued. She leaned in closer to a particularly fluffy fern, gently touching one frond. “If a person were experiencing, let’s say, heightened emotional resonance with another person, what would that do to a plant’s⁠—”

A voice behind her said, “Should I come back later, or are you taking confessions now?”

Magda froze.

Then she turned, very, very slowly.

Sebastian stood at the garden gate, hands in the pockets of his lab coat, eyebrows raised in cautious bafflement.

Of course, he was wearing the lab coat. Of course, he had caught her caressing a fern like it was giving her affection.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” she blurted.

He stepped closer. “It looks like you’re interrogating a fern.”

“I was testing emotional resonance.”

“With a fern.”

“Yes.”

Wally burst into muffled wallaby giggles.

Magda shot him a glare that promised dire consequences.

Sebastian tried to hide a smile, but it tugged at the edges of his mouth anyway. “Should I be jealous of the fern?”

Magda sputtered. “No! Why would— This is botanical science!”

He tipped his head. “You’re bright red.”

“That’s chlorophyll proximity heat,” she lied boldly. “Also, I’m a natural redhead. We turn bright red outdoors without a hat and sunscreen.”

Sebastian laughed, warm and unexpected, the kind that curled through her ribs like a sunrise. “Magda, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

She wished the earth would swallow her. Preferably in front of witnesses so her ghost could get one of her sister witches to document it.