The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

t was only eleven o’clock, but as far as Jamie was concerned, the day had already started badly. A professor at Durham University had mislaid twoI rare books; Altamira and Terracotta had had a colossal row over a mysteriously missing jigsaw puzzle, which had ended most ominously with Altamira threatening to hide dead fish around Terracotta’s bedroom; Ian had started hatching increasingly batshit schemes to deal with Edward; and, to top it off, Jamie, who was already worn out from far too little sleep, found that he was actually (stupidly, absurdly, senselessly) looking forward to staying awake because he could spend that time in the attic with a certain witch. (Why? Why did he like going up there? She asked questions he didn’t want to answer, made fun of his scowl, blamed him for Terracotta’s mistrust of her, told him he was made up of stardust, made him laugh, was outrageously nice to look at—wait, wasn’t he supposed to be thinking of reasons not to go?) Anyway, he had a skull-rattling headache, Ken and Lucie wouldn’t be back from the supermarket with the week’s shopping and more painkillers for another hour, and somewhere far too close, Ian was hammering screws into a beehive and none too subtly pretending he was hammering them into Edward’s head instead. Each ferocious thud of the hammer echoed just as ferociously in Jamie’s head, but he knew he probably deserved it.

Then the day got considerably worse.

It was the sound of Terracotta’s voice that first got his attention. He was on the upper level of the library, tracking down a book a scientist in Glasgow had requested, when he heard a high, clear voice from the garden outside.

“Look! I’m doing it!” There was joy in Terracotta’s voice, but also an edge of savage satisfaction. “You said I couldn’t do it, but I am!”

Curious, Jamie looked out of the nearest window. And just about had a heart attack.

Terracotta was a good twelve feet up in the air, sitting astride a fucking branch like it was her very own broomstick.

For half a second, he cherished the valiant hope that this was an activity that had been planned and executed perfectly sensibly, but he dismissed that thought at once because he had heard Mika rejecting Terracotta’s demands to learn levitation a dozen times. Even if this hadn’t occurred to him, the sight of Rosetta and Altamira gazing up at their sister in horror, and Mika’s furious, pale face, would have put paid to any foolish hopes.

“Terracotta, get back down here now!” Mika’s voice was stonily calm, but Jamie could see the panic she was trying very hard to hide. “It’s too windy for you to be up there!”

“Pfft,” came the insolent reply. “I seem to be managing just fine! You just don’t like that I did this without any help from you at all. In fact,” she went on, forcibly struck by the realisation, “I think this pretty much proves that we don’t need you, so you can leave and—”

It happened so fast that Jamie didn’t even have time to blink. The branch beneath Terracotta jerked, as if tugged by a gust of wind. Mika raised her hands to cast a spell. Terracotta let out an angry shriek of “No!” and tried to wrench herself away from Mika’s spell. Mika rose into the air, her hair whipping across her face, pulling Terracotta back.

It seemed to Jamie, remembering it later, that Mika should have had no trouble getting Terracotta safely back to the ground. After all, hadn’t she rescued Altamira from an accidental spell or burst of wayward magic countless times already?

The difference, of course, was that she’d never had to fight Altamira to do it. Terracotta, on the other hand, fought tooth and nail. And Mika, who was forced to fight both her and the enormous surge of magic around them, was powerless to stop what happened next.

There was a brilliant, blinding flash of light between the two witches in the air. It speared out towards each of them, like Zeus’s thunderbolts, and it looked for one awful instant like they were both going to be struck with the magical blowback.

But then, in that single fraction of an instant, Jamie saw one of Mika’s hands clench into a fist.

The air trembled. Time held still. Jamie saw every impossible detail: the angle of Terracotta’s branch as it fell, Terracotta’s wide and frightened eyes illuminated by that brilliant light, the white knuckles of Mika’s clenched fist. He saw the light spearing towards Terracotta stop, shudder, and then reverse direction like it was being rewound in slow motion. His heart had time to give a single violent thump.

Then time sped back up and the entire explosion of light slammed into Mika, knocking her to the ground. Altamira screamed.

Jamie ran.

By the time he reached the French doors, Ian was halfway across the garden. Jamie overtook him, arriving first at the scene. One glance told him that Terracotta was safe, back on the ground and trembling like a leaf. Circe was nosing at a terrifyingly still figure on the ground, whining and barking.

Rosetta was on her knees next to them. Altamira had tears streaming down her face.

For a moment, Jamie was frozen, ice in his lungs, too afraid to look.

Then he was beside her.

“Mika,” Rosetta whispered, shaking one limp shoulder. “Mika, wake up!”

“Is she dead?” Altamira sobbed, saying out loud the words Jamie had been trying very hard not to even think.

Ian scooped Altamira up into his arms, making soothing noises.

“Nonsense, darling,” he said briskly, the croak in his voice betraying his own distress. “She’s fine, isn’t she, Jamie?”

“J-Jamie? Is she okay?” Terracotta.

Jamie pushed up the sleeve of Mika’s oversized white sweater and reached for her wrist. In the horrible heartbeat of silence before the flutter

of her pulse beat against his fingers, he had time to see that there wasn’t a scratch on her and she almost looked like she was asleep. Eyes closed, face very cold and pale, strands of dark hair sticking to her damp skin. She didn’t so much as stir when he touched her, didn’t make a sound, but he could feel that stubborn, hummingbird pulse in her wrist and relief made him feel almost light-headed.

“She’s alive,” he rasped. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pushed it into Rosetta’s hands, then scooped Mika’s cold, still form into his

arms. “Call 999.”

Ian intervened. “We can’t do that!”

Back at full height now, Jamie turned to stare Ian down. Mika’s head flopped against his shoulder like a doll’s, and now that he knew she was alive, his relief was rapidly transforming into panic, fury, and a number of other feelings he wasn’t quite sure he could name.

“Why can’t we call a fucking ambulance?”

“And say what?” Ian countered. With Altamira on one skinny hip, he reached out with his free hand to press it tenderly against Mika’s cold cheek. Jamie resisted the entirely irrational urge to jerk her away. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Jamie, but paramedics, doctors, and hospitals will ask more questions than we can answer.”

“You know, Ian, I can’t help but feel like awkward questions are a small price to pay if they can keep her alive!”

“I don’t think Mika will feel the same way,” said Ian, but he looked uncertain. “Besides, if magic did this to her, magic is the only thing that’s likely to fix it and ambulances don’t exactly come equipped for—wait a minute!” Ian’s tone shifted abruptly, and his eyes sparked blue with recognition. “What’s that below her throat?”

They all peered at the base of Mika’s throat, where, in the space right between her collarbones, a single, tiny, spring-green leaf had sprouted out of her skin.

“Ohhhh,” Ian breathed, sounding both relieved and amazed. “She’s hibernating.”

“She’s what?” Rosetta said doubtfully. “Hibernating? Like a bear?”

“I don’t know if there’s a different term for it, but that’s what my mother called it,” Ian explained. “It happened to her once when I was a boy. She miscalculated in her potion-making and there was an explosion. When I ran upstairs to find her, she was on the floor, silent and asleep, and a tiny leaf had bloomed at her throat. I didn’t know what to do, but my father put her to bed and told me not to worry. Two days later, Mother woke up her usual self and told me she’d been hibernating.”

“So it’s something witches do when they’re badly hurt?” asked Rosetta.

“They kind of shut down until they’ve healed themselves?”

“Exactly.” Ian tweaked Altamira’s snotty nose. “See? Mika will be fine.

She just needs some time to heal.”

Jamie listened to all this over the sound of his own thundering heart, and found that it didn’t make him feel a whole lot better. But then maybe nothing would until Mika woke up and he was able to see without a shadow of a doubt that she was indeed okay.

His voice was little more than a growl as he turned to Terracotta. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

She immediately shook her head. Thankfully, shock seemed to be the worst of what she was experiencing.

“Okay,” Jamie said brusquely. “No paramedics, then. We’ll take her upstairs.”

Rosetta and Altamira ran ahead to open doors. Jamie crossed the house quickly and carried Mika up two flights of stairs to the attic. She still hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t twitched so much as a toe.

“Ian, pull back the covers so I can get her into bed.”

“What can I do?” Terracotta’s uncertain voice asked from the doorway behind him.

You’ve done enough came to mind. Jamie didn’t yet trust himself to answer her without saying something he knew he’d later regret, so he clenched his jaw and kept his attention squarely on the reassuring flutter of a pulse at the base of Mika’s throat.

Once Ian had pulled back the daisy-patterned duvet, Jamie laid Mika carefully down in her bed. Circe jumped up beside her, putting her wet nose

into the crook of Mika’s neck. Jamie smoothed the damp strands of hair off her face before he realised what he was doing and took a quick step back, the hand he’d touched her with clenching and unclenching at his side.

This shouldn’t have shaken him so badly. Ian was the one who panicked, flew into theatrical furies, and lost his head. Jamie got irritated, but not much else. And he always, always kept his head screwed on straight.

What the fuck was wrong with him?

He turned to Ian. “So we just let her sleep? That’s it?”

“That’s what Father and I did,” said Ian. “Mother was fine, and Mika will be, too.” He put a reassuring hand on Jamie’s shoulder, but Jamie shrugged it off, too profoundly on edge to stay still.

“Do you think she can hear us?” Altamira wondered. She bent her lips to Mika’s ear and whispered intensely for a minute. Jamie caught the phrases Very sad and Miss you, which hit him like a kick in the chest.

Terracotta had crept closer. She wrung her hands in front of her. “I didn’t mean for her to get hurt,” she whispered.

“No one doubts that for a minute, my sweet,” Ian said severely, “but let me tell you, you are in a world of trouble!”

“It’s my fault, so I should be in trouble,” said Terracotta without the slightest hesitation. Jamie could tell it was difficult for her to look him in the eye, but she did. “She wouldn’t be hurt this badly if she’d let one of those lightning bolts hit me.”

“She’s older than you are, and more powerful,” Jamie said evenly, working very hard to shut down each of the wild, feral feelings rattling around inside his chest. “Frankly, Terracotta, it seems to me that she’s kinder than you are, too. There’s no telling what the lightning bolt would have done to you. So she absorbed it herself. None of which would have been necessary if you hadn’t done something you have been repeatedly and

expressly asked not to do.”

“I just thought . . .”

“You thought she was getting in your way for her own amusement?”

Jamie finished for her. “You thought she was making stuff up because she didn’t want to be shown up by an eight-year-old? Yes, you’ve made that

very obvious. And that’s on me as much as it is on you because I assumed the worst of her and you took your cue from me.” He let out a short, humourless laugh because Mika had said the same thing and he hadn’t wanted to listen. “I should have put a stop to it a long time ago, but the choices you made today are all on you, Terracotta. And they were inexcusable. You could have been hurt. You could have hurt one of your sisters. You did hurt Mika.”

Terracotta nodded again. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I owe Mika an apology, too, but this one’s for all of you.”

“What about my missing jigsaw puzzle?” Altamira wanted to know.

“Are you going to say sorry for stealing it?”

“For the last time, I did not steal your stupid puzzle!”

“It can’t have just walked away!”

“We’re witches! Maybe it did!”

“Just you wait,” Altamira said bitterly. “Let’s see how you feel when your whole room smells like stinky fish!”

“It can’t smell any worse than you do!”

“Oh!” Altamira gasped, the light of a Valkyrie in her eyes. “Want to bet on that?”

There was a pause, and then Ian and Rosetta burst into the relieved, hysterical laughter that comes after a big shock. Jamie didn’t feel like he was even close to laughing yet, but he put an arm around Terracotta. She wrapped hers around his waist, which of course made Altamira demand an equally sizeable hug, and then Rosetta squeezed her way in, too.

Ian stood, letting out a long breath. “Tea?”

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