CHAPTER TWENTY
o,” said Sera.“N Theo unleashed the full force of his pleading puppy eyes on her. “Pleeeeeease?”
“I can’t do it,” Sera said, refusing to allow that look to melt her heart. “I refuse. I’ve taken you there three times already, Theo. Three. Times. Alex, your grandma can take you both.”
“She says she’s done it three times too,” Alex said with a
grin. “She says it’s your turn.”
“No,” said Sera at once.
Theo spun around to look at Luke, who didn’t even wait for the question before saying, “Not a chance.”
Theo protested this injustice immediately. “You haven’t ever been there. Not even once!”
“And I intend to keep it that way,” Luke insisted.
Alex giggled. “I don’t think we’re winning this one, Theo.”
“Why don’t you ask Malik?” Sera asked impishly.
On cue, Malik strolled into the living room, a sleeping baby propped against his shoulder. “Ask me what?”
“Can you please, please,please take Alex and me to Nicholas’s tourney at the Medieval Fair this Sunday?” Theo asked at once.
Malik, ever amiable, said, “Yeah, why not?”
“Yay!” Theo whooped. “You’re thebest, Malik! Thank you!”
Having thus achieved this most ardent of goals, Theo and Alex dashed happily out of the room.
“Ta,” Malik said dryly to Sera, who grinned back at him.
“Joke’s on you, though, because apparently this means I’m thebest. Luke, do you want me to take Posy too?”
“God, no, she’d hate it,” said Luke. “Thanks, though. I’ll take her to the coast for the afternoon instead. She’ll get to splash about in the obscenely cold sea and eat her weight in salty chips, so she’ll be happy.”
“I owe you,” Sera said to Malik, and she meant it with her whole heart. If Nicholas were to ask, she would perjure her soul without hesitation, but the truth was she found jousting mind-bogglingly tedious. There were only so many times she could watch two people riding full tilt at each other with wooden sticks in hand before she started to wishshe were one of the wooden sticks so that she might be swiftly demolished and put out of her misery.
Theo and Alex, on the other hand, being youthful and therefore not yet jaded by the cruel passing of time, loved it.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re a grouchy old codger trapped in the body of a young woman?” Malik asked when she repeated this observation.
“How do you feel about cabbages and peppers planted side by side, Malik? Do they, perhaps, makeyou a bit grouchy?”
“Don’t you bloody get me started on that,” Malik said affably. “God, I need a cuppa. No, actually, I need a triple espresso. Here.”
And, displaying highly questionable paternal instincts, Malik deposited baby Evie in Sera’s arms and walked off to
the kitchen to procure himself a hefty dose of caffeine. Sera was aghast. “Really?” she shouted after him. “Me? When everyone knows I’m about as nurturing as a dustpan?”
“If by everyone, you mean just you, then you’re absolutely
right,” Luke agreed equably.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re the only one who thinks it” came the withering reply. “Everyone else knows that you are, in fact, a nurturer. You’re scowling at me while simultaneously snuggling that baby.”
“I am not!” Sera could not quite resist rubbing her cheek against Evie’s downy brown hair, but that was for the sensory enjoyment and most certainlynot because she was doing any nurturing.
Luke shut the book he’d been reading. Firelight flickered in his eyes. “You smother Theo in kisses. You’ve stuck with Clemmie. You keep Matilda’s plants alive because you know she loves them. And,” he added, with an unexpected, wicked
grin, “I’ve seen the photographs.”
Sera froze. “What photographs?”
“The ones on Jasmine’s phone. Of the zombie chicken last winter. Wearing a sweater you took off one of your old dolls.
Because you were afraid he might get cold.”
“And just think,” said Sera, “I could have spared myself this mortificationand kept my magic if I’d just let Jasmine go meet her maker all those years ago.”
“I heard that!” Jasmine called sunnily from her bedroom
next door.
“You were supposed to!”
Evie stirred awake, regarded Sera for a few fraught seconds, considered bursting into tears, and then, apparently deciding Sera was an acceptable substitute for her father, went promptly back to sleep.
Luke’s phone vibrated with a text. He glanced at it and, abruptly, the warmth in his face was gone. Without a word, he left the room.
It took Sera a good three minutes to wriggle off the sofa without jostling Evie. She returned the baby to Malik and went outside. All three kids were kicking a ball around under the oak tree by the side of the house, and Matilda was gardening on her beloved patch, but Luke and Jasmine were standing at the edge of the patio, looking expectantly down the length of the garden.
Jasmine turned to Sera. “Posy and Luke’s mother is
dropping in for a visit, but, well—”
“She can’t find us,” said Luke.
“Her satnav’s not working?”
“Her satnav’s fine,” Luke said in a clipped voice. “She says she’s driven up and down that road over there half a dozen times now, but she can’t find the inn.”
Sera couldn’t help feeling like she was being accused of something. She crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “I don’t decide who the magic lets in, and I don’t decide who it keeps away. It obviously doesn’t want her here.”
“Sera, this is not Nicholas’s father,” Jasmine said gently.
“When the magic kepthim away that time, it had good reason. More to the point, Nicholas didn’t want him here.”
“Do you want her here?” Sera asked Luke. “Does Posy?”
Luke’s jaw clenched. “Sheis our mother.” Sera couldn’t help noticing that wasn’t an answer. “If she wants to see Posy, if she wants to see where Posy’s living, she gets to.”
“Posy’s happy here. What if your mother decides she doesn’t like what she sees and wants to take Posy back to
Edinburgh with her?”
“I’m going to do that sooner or later.”
Why did he keep saying that? Yes, it was true, but why did he feel like he had to keeptelling them? And why did it hurt every time he did?
Sera suppressed that thought and said, “Ifyou take Posy back, you’ll be doing it because it’s what’s best for her. Your mother, on the other hand—”
“—gets to do it anyway,” Luke said shortly. “Whatever you think of her, whateverI think of her, she’s still Posy’s mother.”
“Apparently only when it’s convenient for her!” Sera said sharply. She looked down, scuffing her socked foot against the stone slab beneath her. “I’m not being difficult, Luke. I just don’t know what you want from me. I’m not what’s keeping her away.”
“It’s your spell. You could ask it to let her in.”
Every single part of Sera hated that idea. Pushing back against her own spell? She trusted her magic. It had earned that trust, over and over again. Pushing back against a choice it had made felt wrong.
“My love,” Jasmine said softly, crossing the patio to take Sera’s hands in hers, “I know you think you’re responsible for everybody here—”
“Iam responsible,” Sera replied at once. “I didn’t plan it, or ask for it, butI’m the gargoyle of this particular castle.
It’smy job to keep everybody in it safe.”
“But you don’t have to do it alone,” Jasmine insisted. “You don’t, Sera. I’m here. We’reall here. Maybe it is a mistake to let Posy’s mother in. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, this is not all on you.”
Sera gave in. The night sky in her mind wheeled, the stars glimmering with a question, and she answered it. The magic pushed back, gently, doubtful, but she repeated her request.
Make an exception. Let her in. The magic relented.
A minute later, a car came to a halt outside the garden gate. Sera went back inside.
It had been easier than she’d expected, asking the magic to make an exception, but it had left her feeling unsteady and exposed, probably much like Nicholas felt if someone asked him to take off one particular piece of his armour.
“Come on,” Malik said, taking one look at her, “we’re
going out.”
“Where to?”
“Nowhere. We’ll just drive.”
So that was what they did. Up the narrow, twisting roads lined with crumbling stone walls, down into the green valleys, past bare, leafless trees. With music on and a baby asleep in an infant seat in the back. Talking about nothing in particular.
Theirs was the sort of old, familiar friendship where talking about nothing in particular was the kindest, most comforting thing they could do for each other. The other things, the big things, were understood but went unsaid because sometimes saying things out loud made them hurt that much more. It was why Sera had never told Malik in so many words about the magic and the clipped wings and the terrible sadness that snuck up on her with no rhyme or reason, but he had seen wildflowers blooming in teacups and he had seen glimmers of translucent Seras out of the corner of his eye and he had held her hand when she’d cried about big things and small things. It was why Malik had never said in so many words that he was rootless, banished like his parents and grandparents before him from his ancestral homeland, but she had sat beside him all through the night his mother had died and she had seen the rusted key he wore around his neck and she had stared, time and time again, at the old cartoon framed above his fireplace of Handala, a
little boy who never grew any older and never would, either, not until he got to go home again.
They didn’t talk about the IMMIGRANTS OUT! poster they’d once seen at the Red Lion, their favourite local pub until that exact moment, but it wasn’t a coincidence they’d started going to the RedRose after that. They didn’t talk about the way it messed with their heads to belong to this country, at least on paper, and still know from experience that that white flag with a saint’s red cross on it was something to be afraid of.
Theirs was a friendship built on the unspoken, shared understanding that you can love the home you’ve made with the whole of your heart and still know the land it’s built on will never claim you.
Theirs was a friendship that did not talk about the things that cut deepest, but it understood that those things were there, and respected them, and gave them space.
So Malik didn’t ask Sera what was bothering her that afternoon, and even if he had, Sera couldn’t have told him because she wasn’t sure she even knew. So they drove and talked about nothing in particular. Until it was dark, and dinnertime would soon be upon them, and they had to go home and get shit done.
The first thing Sera saw when Malik dropped her off at the inn was Posy, collecting pebbles outside the front door, and a knot in Sera’s chest loosened. She hadn’t realised until that moment just how afraid she’d been that she’d come home and Posy, sweet, headstrong, joyful Posy, would be gone.
“Oh, Posy,” she said. “You’re still here.”
Posy smiled up at her. “Sera’s house. Posy’s house.”
Sera smiled back. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
They went inside together. Sera, still feeling a bit shaky and exposed, didn’t ask any questions about what had happened when Luke’s mother had been here. She helped Jasmine and Nicholas make dinner, but skipped eating it and went upstairs instead. She put her oldest and softest pyjamas on, got into bed, and fell asleep at once.
Predictably, forgoing dinner and going to bed at half past six meant she woke just after midnight with a peckishness that wouldn’t be ignored. As the chocolate stash in her bedroom was woefully depleted and she probably ought to eat something that wasn’t pure sugar anyway, she made her way down the creaking stairs and down the dark hallway.
She froze.
There was a ghost in the kitchen.
It was ridiculous, really, to feel like she’d been betrayed by ahouse, but betrayal was exactly what she felt. She’d thought she and the inn had an understanding that she would put up with all the other ghosts as long as it never showed herthis one.
Yet there she was, glimmering faintly at the edges, ever so slightly translucent. Not a child, or a girl, but Sera from just a few years ago. Deeply sad, savagely angry, and more than a little wild.
Sera tried not to think about those months when things felt like they were at their worst, before medication, before she’d asked for help. Shehated that version of her. Hated the fights she’d have with Jasmine, the speed with which she’d lose her temper, the long days of not being able to get out of bed, the dark and terrifying things she’d think about doing. Hated, more than anything, the way it felt like she simply had no control over anything, not even herself. It was one of the sharpest, most crooked things on her memory lane, and she tried not to get too close to it.
And still, there she stood, thatother Sera, in the middle of the kitchen, perfectly framed by the open doorway.
Trembling, wrists pressed to her ears, mouth open in a silent scream of impotent rage and grief, until keeping all that bottled up simply didn’t work anymore and,bang, she kicked the nearest thing. Hard enough to dent the cabinet door.
Hard enough to break two of her toes.
Sera watched, rooted to the spot, as the ghost staggered back, first shocked, then crumpling in pain. She slid to the floor, back against the wall, and started to cry, head buried in her arms, arms clutched around her knees, the foot with the broken toes sticking out and away.
That moment was what had finally convinced her that she needed help, but it had come later. Right then, watching herself, Sera wasn’t thinking of the later. All she was thinking about was how much she’d hated herself in that moment, hated what she’d become, hated Jasmine for dying, hated Clemmie for the resurrection spell, hated the Guild for abandoning her, hated the country for rejecting her, and hated herself all over again for hating all those other things.
She’d felt nothing but rage and desolation and ugliness.
Her heart raced, panicked, fluttery, taking her right back
to that moment— And then— Footsteps. Quiet. Careful. Not Sera, frozen in the dark hallway. Not the ghost, breaking into pieces on the floor.
Someone else.
Luke stepped into the frame. Had he been in the kitchen the whole time? Had heseen—?
He had. He had seen the whole ugly spectacle.
So why— Instead of recoiling, instead of walking away, Luke stepped closer. The other Sera didn’t react. Of course she
didn’t. She didn’t know he was there. She wasn’t real, not anymore. He knew that too. He had seen enough of these strange, translucent fragments of memories to know that they were just echoes, pieces of history that the house kept
safe, unaffected by the present.
So why was Luke still there?
He didn’t say a word. He just sat down on the floor, shoulder to shoulder with a ghost, keeping her company.
In the hallway, Sera knew it didn’t,couldn’t, change the memory, because that night had already happened and Luke hadn’t been there, but what it could do, what itdid do, was a simple magical act of transmutation. She saw the memory through his eyes. And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying.
I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self.I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.
Her hand lifted to the opposite shoulder, to the exact spot where the ghost’s shoulder touched Luke’s. She shouldn’t have been able to feel anything, of course, yet she could swear she did. As if that touch, that moment, had crossed the boundaries of time and space, travelled miles of night sky and stardust, and become infinite.
