The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

s the days passed, life at Nowhere House settled into a gentle rhythm.

This wasn’t to say that it was predictable, because it certainly wasn’tA that; the teaching of young witches was nothing if not unexpected. Mika might find herself brewing potions with the girls on one day, then have to fish Altamira out of the cauldron on the next. There was no telling when Terracotta would turn up and, if she did, when she might be in an even more quarrelsome frame of mind than usual. And just as Mika had warned the others on that first day, her presence at Nowhere House had attracted even more magic to the area, which demanded more of her attention than she was used to.

But, on the whole, there was a pattern to the everyday lives of the household and, much to Mika’s surprise, there was space for her in it. She quickly became the Person Who Made the Tea, as it was universally agreed that she made the best tea (“Of course I do,” she said, not very modestly), and she just as quickly became Ken’s favourite person to help him in the garden (“Being a witch does have its perks,” she said, a little more modestly). When she wasn’t teaching the girls or gardening with Ken, she went over to the cottage to help Ian with his dubious beekeeping ambitions, took Circe to the sea, showed Altamira how to properly feed the koi, helped Lucie fix broken odds and ends around the house, and spent an inordinate amount of time napping.

There were game nights and lazy TV afternoons and haphazard football matches in the garden and elaborate adventures involving the tree house and two planks of Ian’s beehive wood (apparently, they were supposed to be a pirate ship). There was spellcasting, potion-making, and an entire afternoon’s worth of Mika helping the girls make and decorate their very

own spellbooks. Sometimes everyone went their separate ways, whether it was Rosetta to the library to use Jamie’s computer for some supervised online time in one of her favourite fandom groups, or Terracotta to the kitchen to make pumpkin pie with Ian, or Altamira to the sofa with Lucie and Lucie’s laptop for a virtual coding lesson. And sometimes the whole house came together, like the morning everyone abandoned whatever work they were supposed to be doing and they all went down to the beach because Terracotta had somehow coaxed, pleaded, and browbeaten Ken, Lucie, and Jamie into agreeing to a race with one child on each of their shoulders. Mika and Ian, both of whom were spared by virtue of having shoulders Terracotta deemed too flimsy for this purpose, watched from the dunes and cried actual tears of laughter.

A gentle rhythm, indeed. But it was more than that. It was peace, the kind Mika was beginning to see she had never known. She hadn’t understood how exhausting and heartbreaking it had been to hide such a big part of herself all these years, to reshape and contort herself into something more acceptable. She hadn’t realised just how heavy her mask had been until she’d discovered what it was to live without it.

To be at Nowhere House was to put herself in very real peril, so why, then, did she feel safer than she ever had before?

There was a meteor shower on the first night in December. Mika didn’t waste the opportunity, and she stayed up late so that she could catch the star shavings falling from the sky. These precious, luminous shards were one of her Can’t-Do-Withouts and her tiny vial was almost empty.

Yawning, Circe jumped off Mika’s bed and padded closer. She stopped in the open balcony doorway, uninterested in stepping out any farther into the cold.

“I’ve been thinking about what might happen if I combined star shavings, lavender, pollen, and moonlight,” Mika said to her. Circe blew out a sleepy breath. Mika nodded. “I know, I know. You think it’s a bad idea

to put stars and moonlight in the same potion. You think they’ll be too powerful together, or that they’ll react unpredictably because neither comes from the earth.” She clicked her tongue thoughtfully, catching a luminous shard drifting past her. “But what if I combined them and something spectacular happened?”

Circe huffed, snuffled her cold wet nose into the side of Mika’s neck, and went back to her warm, comfy spot on the bed.

“You’re right,” Mika agreed. “It’s a bad idea. You’re such a good influence on me, Circe.”

It was always irksome when an idea went nowhere, but Mika knew by now that there would always be new ideas.

She’d just topped up about two thirds of the vial when, from below her attic balcony, she heard a quiet growl of pain. Circe’s ears pricked up.

The growl was, of course, unmistakable. Jamie probably hadn’t meant for anyone to hear him, but she was on the balcony and he must have had his window cracked open.

She glanced at her clock. Twenty past two. She’d noticed that Jamie slept very little, but this was late even for him. Why was he still up?

“Stay,” Mika said to Circe, who was obviously so warm, comfortable, and sleepy that she didn’t bother to dignify this with a response.

Laying her tools down carefully, Mika opened her door, slipped down the stairs, and avoided the creaky floorboards (When had she gotten so familiar with the house that she knew which floorboards creaked?) in her path down the hallway. She paused outside Jamie’s door, which was open just a sliver, and tapped her knuckles quietly against the frame before sticking her head in.

The room was lit only by a lamp on the nightstand. It was a very Jamie- ish room, which was to say it was perfectly tidy: every book on the shelves was ordered, a laptop and paperback (with a bookmark in, of course, because to leave a book open on its front was practically a capital crime as far as Jamie was concerned) were stacked neatly beside the lamp on the nightstand, and even the soft, round, grey rug was in the exact centre of the room. Incredible.

Jamie was on one knee halfway between the rug and window, picking up what looked like small pieces of broken glass off the floor. There was blood

on his left hand.

“Cut yourself?”

He looked up, obviously startled to see her, and then gestured for her to come in. “Watch out for the glass,” he said with a cursory glance at her bare feet. Well, she assumed it was supposed to be a cursory glance, but then he noticed that the rest of her legs were bare too and he blinked. “Why aren’t you dressed?”

“Because it’s half past two in the morning?” Mika rolled her eyes. He, of course, was perfectly decent in a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants. “Before you call a priest to cleanse my soul, please do behold that my T-shirt is practically down to my knees.”

Reluctant amusement tugged up one corner of his mouth. “We’ll have to save the exorcism for another day, then.”

“A wise decision. I knew you could be sensible when you put your mind to it.” Winding a tendril of magic around her finger, Mika summoned all the tiny pieces of glass and collected them together in a neat, glittering ball that hovered in mid-air and sent reflected light dancing across the room. “Disco or bin?”

“I think you know I’m going to say bin,” he said, still sounding amused.

“It’s true, I would have keeled over dead if you’d agreed to a party. Into the bin it goes, then.” There was a rattan wastebasket in the corner of his bedroom, so she floated the pieces of glass into a sheet of loose paper and scrunched the paper securely around the glass. “So what happened?”

“Couldn’t sleep. I decided to try that time-honoured tradition of drinking myself into oblivion. Dropped the empty glass before I could even start.”

He gestured to his desk, where a bottle of whisky and a second glass tumbler still sat.

Over the past couple of weeks, with Edward’s visit drawing nearer, Jamie, Ian, Ken, and Lucie had all, in their own ways, been showing signs of increasing nerves. Ken spent even more time in the garden; when he wasn’t flat-out avoiding her, Jamie was moodier than usual; Ian had been

getting shrill; Lucie was constantly rushing around the house and keeping herself almost manically busy; and Mika had spotted all four of them in intense, whispered conversation on a few occasions. She had tried to assure them, repeatedly, that the girls were gaining more confidence and control by the day and she had the magic well in hand, but she supposed it was easier for her to say it than it was for them to trust in it.

Mika assumed now that this was at the root of Jamie’s insomnia, but she also suspected he wouldn’t want to talk about it (not to her, anyway), so she kept her mouth shut.

He plucked a shirt out of his hamper of dirty laundry, dabbed away the blood on his hand, and examined it. “It looks like just a few scratches. I don’t think there’re any glass slivers inside. Thanks, by the way,” he added, gesturing to the floor where the glass had been. “Did I wake you?”

“No, I stayed up to collect star shavings,” she said, and she smiled at the fact that he didn’t even blink. “Come on, I’ve got a balm upstairs that’ll get rid of those scratches in a jiffy.”

As she led the way out of his room, she snatched up the bottle of whisky and the remaining tumbler. When he arched an eyebrow, a most enviable trick, she shrugged. “What? I, too, have been known to drink myself into oblivion every now and then.”

Back in the attic, she poured out half a tumbler of whisky, drank about half of that in one gulp (and deeply regretted it because, no matter how many times she gave it another chance, whisky was always horrible), and handed the rest to Jamie. She found the balm in one of her crates of potions and handed him the jar. “Put a little of that on any scratches and let it sit for a few minutes.”

He did as he was told. While he waited, he picked up the tumbler.

Somewhat appalled to find herself watching the movement of his throat as he swallowed, Mika turned away and went back to the meteor shower. The smaller of her two cauldrons was still bubbling, fortunately, and she gave it a stir, checked the thin curl of smoke coming out of it, and tapped a second silver spoon gently against the side of the cauldron.

“Why are you doing that?”

Mika glanced over her shoulder to see that Jamie was in the balcony doorway, leaning against the jamb with his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, watching her. There were faint, exhausted shadows beneath his eyes, but he looked curious.

“The tapping? It’s like a song,” she said, a little too aware of how close he was. “Well, more like a mathematical formula, I suppose. It’s all about the pattern. It’s how I get the stardust to come to me. The sound and the cauldron smoke draw it out of the sky.”

On cue, a tiny, luminous speck drifted down into her free hand, light as a feather and as small as a grain of sugar. She held her palm out to Jamie. He blinked, straightening abruptly.

“Go ahead. It’s safe now that it’s in my hand. You can touch it.”

His hand wasn’t quite steady as he reached out.

“Jesus,” he said, letting out a short, low laugh threaded with wonder.

“We’re touching a star.”

“Just a very tiny sliver of one,” she said, unable to stop herself from giving him a radiant smile. It was the wonder that undid her. “Does it make it more or less magical if I tell you that, scientifically speaking, we’re all made up of stardust?”

He didn’t even hesitate, raising his eyes to meet hers. “More. Definitely more.”

Electric energy crackled between them. Mika held his stormy gaze for a long moment, her heart thrumming as fast as a hummingbird’s wings.

“I should get some sleep.” His sandpaper voice sounded lower and rougher than usual. Very gently, he closed her fingers over the star shard,

dimming the light. “Good night.”

And just like that, he was gone.

Two nights later, Mika was huddled over her spellbook, the end of her pencil in her mouth, trying to figure out the right rune to cast a tricky Keep

Yourself Warm Even When Foolishly Swimming in the Sea in the Winter spell, when someone knocked at the attic door.

From the way Circe perked up, even going so far as to abandon the pig’s ear she had been ecstatically chewing a moment ago, the person knocking could only be one person. Mika was so surprised that she almost forgot to

respond.

“Oh! Um, come in!”

The door clicked open. “Hey.” Jamie said from the doorway, rubbing the back of his neck. There was a bottle in his other hand.

The corners of Mika’s mouth curled irrepressibly up. “Hi.”

“I, er, could hear that you were still up, so I thought you might want a drink.”

“In that case, come forth and make yourself at home,” she said merrily, patting the rug beside her. “As you can see, Circe’s very happy you’re here.”

So began another pattern in Mika’s strange new life. After that second night, there was another, and then another, and so on. Jamie would bring the whisky, and Mika would set him to work helping her with whatever spell or potion she happened to be in the middle of, and they would sometimes say actual words to each other. These words might be about spells, or about the children, or about how the two of them had been mysteriously locked in the pantry together that day and Ian had most unconvincingly sworn up and down that he had had no hand in it whatsoever.

“How does he keep forgetting I’m a witch?” Mika wanted to know. “He had to have known I could spell the door open!”

“What did he expect us to do inside a pantry anyway?”

Mika couldn’t resist teasing him. “You can’t think of a single thing?”

She’d been hoping for a blush or a comically horrified look, but instead he held her gaze for a moment, his eyes dark, and she was the one who looked away first.

Another time, he decided to be irksomely observant and came upstairs with a bottle of pink gin instead of the whisky. Then, while she used her mortar and pestle to grind dried lavender flowers, he scratched Circe’s head

and said, “How come she doesn’t shed anymore? There used to be a lot of golden hairs all over the place when you first arrived.”

“Oh, I spell it away.”

“Sorry?”

“Her loose fur,” Mika explained, examining the lavender with a critical eye. “I use a spell to get rid of it twice a day. That’s why nothing rubs off on the furniture or carpets anymore.”

He stared at her. “But you didn’t used to do that.”

“I’ve always groomed her once a week, so I didn’t need to. Anything she shed in between just got hoovered up whenever I cleaned.”

“So why are you spelling it away now?”

Mika glanced up, irked. “It’s pet hair, not a diamond heist. What’s with the inquisition?”

“Curiosity. You seem weirdly reluctant to answer the question.”

Great. Now she was going to have to tell him. She pretended the lavender needed more grinding and watched it with the attention one might give a ticking nuclear device. “It bothered you, didn’t it?” she said. “The hair? Just like disordered books and chewed pencils and ink stains bother you? Well, I’m a guest in your home. Not making your home uncomfortable for you seems like the least I can do.”

He didn’t seem to know what to say. Mika decided the lavender flowers would be useless if she kept hammering away at them. She emptied the contents of the mortar into her cauldron, then set a witchfire underneath to extract the essence from the flowers.

By the time she was done, Jamie seemed to have rediscovered his powers of speech. “You don’t have to do that. I didn’t know you’d noticed.”

“It’s fine. Circe enjoys the spell.”

Another pause, and then: “You’re not a guest.”

Once, after a number of these late nights, they talked about what kind of future witches could expect. “A lot can happen in ten years,” Mika said, in response to his wondering what might be different in five, ten, or fifteen years. “I honestly have no idea what’s in store for us or what the world will

be like by the time the girls are grown. But there’s every reason to hope that they’ll be able to have almost any life they choose.”

“Is yours the life you chose?”

“Altamira told me she wants to make video games when she grows up,”

Mika said, sidestepping the question. “Which sounds to me like a completely realistic and reasonable dream. Surprisingly so for a seven-year- old. And it’ll probably make her a lot of money, which, speaking as someone who had so little of it at one point that I had to sell pictures of my feet to men on the internet, is very useful.”

“Rosetta wants to read books and be part of wholesome bookish

fandoms.”

“Also realistic and reasonable.”

“Terracotta wants to be a Pokémon trainer.”

“Knowing her, she’ll probably find a way to make that happen.”

“Mika.” His voice was stern. Grey eyes pinned her in place. “Is this the life you would have chosen for yourself?”

“It didn’t used to be,” she said, and then blinked, flustered by how much truth that revealed. “I mean, I don’t know. There’s stuff I would want to be different, if I had my way, but there are also a lot of things about my life

that I like. It’s complicated.”

“What would you want to be different?”

She shied away from looking too deeply for an answer. “It would be nice if Terracotta didn’t hate me,” she said, a cop-out if there ever was one.

“Mostly because I can’t keep her safe if she won’t listen to me. And, to be perfectly honest, I lay most of the blame for her behaviour at your door.”

“Of course you do,” Jamie said drily. “Why wouldn’t your inability to win Terracotta over be my fault?”

“You’d let her get away with literal murder,” Mika pointed out. “And I say literal literally because she quite frequently contemplates my murder and I’m pretty sure you would help her hide my corpse.”

“I have been known to hide many a corpse in my time.”

“Of course you’re not taking this seriously. Like I said, you’d let her get away with murder.”

“Why do I get the feeling you don’t like her very much?” Jamie asked. A muscle twitched in his jaw, and Mika wondered suddenly if they were still talking about Terracotta.

“I like her plenty,” Mika said. “She goes out of her way to wind me up, but she’s also a stubborn, brave little girl who’d do anything for the people she loves. Why wouldn’t I like her? What I don’t like is the fact that we have very little time, she’s determined to waste it, and you’re letting her. We talked about this weeks ago. You don’t trust me, but you’re not supposed to let the kids pick up on that. They have. Terracotta knows how you feel and she takes her cue from you.”

His eyes were like metal. “I can’t make her trust you. Trust is earned.”

“It is,” Mika agreed, looking him right in the eye. “But that’s only possible if someone’s willing to give you a chance.”

When disaster struck, as disaster inevitably does, Mika was somewhat distressed to find that, on account of being knocked out cold, she was unable to take any satisfaction in being proven well and truly right.

It was a cold, grey morning, over halfway into her time at Nowhere House, and it started with the resurrection of what had become a frustrating and repetitive argument.

In short, Terracotta, upon hearing the story of Altamira levitating in the attic on Mika’s first day and Mika’s dire warning about its risks, had promptly decided she had no greater desire in life than to levitate.

Her first approach had been to accuse Mika of inventing tales of peril to cover up the fact that she couldn’t levitate. Mika, who discovered in that precise moment that she had an immense capacity for pettiness, had responded by finishing the rest of the lesson from a spot approximately six feet off the ground.

Not to be defeated, Terracotta had then demanded that Mika teach her how to levitate, too. Mika had explained that it had taken her years to get it right. Terracotta had replied with the opinion that perhaps she was a more

talented witch and would get it right a whole lot faster. Mika had had to remind herself of every last minute of her thirty-one years in order to resist the childish temptation to suggest a duel so that they could determine who was truly the more powerful witch.

No matter how trying Terracotta might be, and she was very trying indeed, Mika could not help but feel that demanding an eight-year-old meet her with figurative pistols at dawn was not the behaviour of a responsible caretaker.

For weeks, this argument had repeated itself like some sort of ghastly time loop Mika could not break free of. So on that particular cold, dreary morning, when a lesson in the garden devolved into Terracotta dredging up the levitation question again, Mika, who was already somewhat preoccupied with rescuing Altamira from the enthusiastic attentions of a colony of seagulls that the girls had accidentally summoned, lost patience.

“No,” she snapped, batting one of the last seagulls away. “I’ve told you before, you’re too young to learn how to safely levitate, especially outdoors, so stop asking. Maybe your next tutor, God help her, can have that dubious pleasure in a few years.”

There was no response from Terracotta. Mika, now extracting feathers out of Altamira’s hair, assumed Terracotta was scowling at her behind her back, which was both familiar and harmless, and so she finished dealing with the aftermath of the gull invasion without worrying too much about it.

But when Rosetta let out an alarmed squeak, and Altamira looked past Mika with enormous eyes, Mika spun around and found that Terracotta wasn’t there anymore.

“Up here!” came the joyous, triumphant cry.

Mika’s heart dropped like a stone.

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