Oliver’s lament reached Alicia about the same time as Duchess showed up in the kitchen, looking disdainfully at her as if asking what the point of her being there was if the empress of the household’s bowl was empty.
“Your dying servant haven’t given you your Butterbeer today?” Alicia asked the cat as she tasted her concoction and nodded in satisfaction with the taste of it. With her wand she summoned one of the biggest mugs in the kitchen, and then the bottle of whiskey – Scotch, not Fire – from Olivers cabinet. She measured out a healthy dose and then took a second look at the bottle, comparing the remaining content with the moans and groans that came from the other room... and added a little more. Maybe she oughtn’t be giving him alcohol, but he needed something to soothe that throat, and if she could get him to sleep, not only would that be a couple of hours less that he believed himself to be dying, he might actually get to feeling a bit better afterwards, all of which Alicia could only see as good for both of them.
Like Oliver, Alicia had ended up in the water too, though when she her hands had been shaking too much for her to be able to stop a massive bleed in one of the people they had hauled out of the water, she had cast a drying Charm on herself. Oliver, however, had mistaken being a hero for being stubborn, and at this point Alicia was certain that that was what had not only let to him catching a cold, but possibly even made him vulnerable to the Flu. She herself, it seemed, were slipping by with a small case of the sniffles.
Once the whiskey was mixed with the tea steeped with a cinnamon stick and a couple of cloves, Alicia took a moment to fill the cat’s bowl with half a bottle of Butterbeer.
“You know I get your brooms when you die, right?” she asked Oliver when she carried the tray with the toddy, a couple of biscuits and a fresh pack of Kleenex to him.