Witchcraft was something of myth and fairy tales, but here it was; undeniably real.
Daryl stood there, staring at Carol while she hugged herself in the dim light of the cell. She didn't look quite as queasy as she'd looked when she sought him out earlier, but she didn't look fully restored to health. Her proverbial sea legs, clearly, still had not been found.
"It's some kind of…curse," Carol said.
She swallowed down, hard enough that Daryl heard her swallow, with the last word. He wasn't sure if she was swallowing against the nausea, against the tears that were still causing her to hiccup at intervals, or if she was swallowing out of something like fear.
"I don't think I'd call it a curse," Daryl said, his own stomach flipping uncomfortably as he even ventured to think, for the first time since he'd begun to digest the news only moments before, of what he might call this.
"She's a witch," Carol said.
She was talking about the woman who they had found walking down the side of the highway with nothing more than a small bag slung over her shoulder. She had, for a companion, a young girl of hardly ten years old that had never, to Daryl's knowledge, spoken a word. The old woman appeared to be about a hundred years old. She was toothless, and she barely stood over four feet tall. Still, she was one of the happiest damned people that Daryl had ever met—even if he couldn't always understand her mutterings.
"She's absolutely a witch," he agreed nodding her head.
"She did this," Carol said. "She—made this happen."
Daryl stared at her a moment and then laughed to himself. He swallowed the laughter down immediately when Carol's expression shifted to a furrowed-brow glare of warning. Daryl shrugged his shoulder.
"I ain't gonna say that witch woman ain't had no part in it," Daryl said. "But—she weren't exactly workin' alone."
