The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 24

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ika strode up the dunes. Somewhere inside her, there was a dark and hollow dread, and an impossibly deep sea of anguish, but they wereM buried so deep that she hoped they’d never find their way out.

She marched past the heather and sea holly, the glow of a thousand firefly-like lights lighting her way. By the time she entered the garden gates, the stars were ablaze in the wintry sky and the peculiar, persistent sunflowers were glowing so brightly, they looked like they were on fire.

There was a swan on the koi pond. This wasn’t terribly unusual because wild ducks and swans had been drawn to the pond before (and had always, in the polite way of wild things with a good understanding of magic, left the koi alone), but the still, silent, ghost-white shape did nothing to keep Mika’s dread away. Behind her, the sea whooshed, a lullaby that steadied her as she approached the patch of sunflowers.

She held her hands up, palms out, like she was holding an invisible ball in front of her. What she was actually holding was the magic around the sunflowers, and she threaded it around the stems and petals and roots of the flowers until she had control of them. Slowly, the entire patch of sunflowers lifted out of the ground, along with two feet of rich, dark soil, and Mika gently brought the patch to rest on the grass nearby. The sunflowers dimmed as the gold dust left them and curled around her wrists and waist instead.

Mika cast a new levitation spell, this time on the object at the bottom of the long, dark hole she’d unearthed. Something pale rose into the air.

So it was true.

Mika lowered the pale thing to the grass at her feet and immediately drew her hands back to tuck them in the warmth under her arms. The glow

of gold dust and fireflies hovered around her, making it impossible for her not to see the pale thing for what it was.

It was a skeleton, white and pristine, wrapped in the remains of a soft, striped wool blanket that Mika was almost certain Ian had knitted. A skull, a spine, a femur, toes. Bones. There was no stink of decay and no suggestion of rot, just the damp, earthy scent of soil and rain.

It was almost funny. She, with all her irregular ideas, had never once suspected this. Honestly, all this needed now was an old locket, and it

would be the perfect Gothic tale of— Ah. There it was.

Around the neck of the skeleton was a tarnished silver locket with an engraved letter L.

She’d had to see it for herself. It wasn’t that she hadn’t believed Jamie when he’d told her, exactly, but some things you just have to see with your own eyes. And he’d been telling her the truth, for once: here in front of her, retrieved from where she’d been buried and hidden beneath the impossibly perfect sunflowers, was all that was left of Lillian Nowhere.

Mika had been here for weeks, and there’d been a corpse beneath the sunflowers the whole time.

“Where’s the rest of her?” Jamie sounded hoarse and haunted, his voice right behind her. He’d followed her up from the shore, quiet, waiting. “She shouldn’t be just bones so quickly.”

“She’s a witch,” Mika said numbly. “The earth took her, and gave you the sunflowers in return.”

And, just like that, the dread and anguish found her.

She spun on her heel to face him. “When did she die?”

“June,” Jamie rasped. “It was the night before she was supposed to leave for South America. She was walking across the kitchen to get a cup of tea and she just dropped. She was gone before she hit the floor. It must have been a heart attack, or maybe an aneurysm.”

“So Lillian’s been dead the whole time I’ve known you,” Mika said, keeping her rage and anguish contained in as low and tight a voice as she could muster. “Do the girls know?”

“No. Just the four of us, and now you.”

“Why?”

Jamie looked out across the night, his hands clenched tightly in the pockets of his coat. “For most of the time I’ve known her, Lillian was very open with us about her will. It was one of the few things she was open with us about. She let us see it. It said that when she died, Ken and Lucie would get some money, I’d inherit her house and the rest of her possessions, and the legal guardianship of the girls would go to her sister Peony.”

“Peony? This is the sister you mentioned once, the one you’ve never met?” Mika asked incredulously, something like horror and pity finding space in the middle of all the pain. “She wanted her to take them?”

Jamie nodded. “We tried to talk to her about it, but she was adamant that she wanted the girls to have an adult witch in their lives, someone who could protect them if she wasn’t around anymore.”

“Someone to cast wards,” said Mika. “Like the wards she cast, the ones that will break in the spring.”

“Except the best possible life isn’t always the one where you’re safest,”

Jamie said quietly. “You, of all people, know that.”

“I do.”

“Taking the girls away from the only family they’ve ever known will do more harm than anything that might happen when the wards break. We tried to tell Lillian that, but she refused to listen.” A muscle flickered in his jaw.

“The girls are ours and we’re theirs. We’re their family. We can’t lose them.

But there’s absolutely nothing we can do to fight the will. I asked.”

“That’s the real reason you were at the solicitor’s office that day in the city? It wasn’t about your father’s will?”

“I wasn’t expecting you to ask me why I was there, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. I’m sorry. But yes, I was there to ask them if there was any way around Lillian’s will. There isn’t. The only way I’d get guardianship of the girls would be if Lillian’s sister refused to take them, and that’s too big a gamble.”

“So instead of reporting Lillian’s death, you buried her.”

He nodded. “Honestly, I don’t know what we hoped for long-term. That we could somehow hide Lillian’s death for a decade, until the girls were too old to need a legal guardian? It sounds ridiculous and half-baked, and it was. We panicked, and we did the only thing we could think of. We buried her. We needed to buy ourselves time to come up with a better plan.”

“And Edward?”

“Edward has the will, so he knows exactly what’s in it and has the power to act on it.” Jamie’s breath fogged white between them. “About a month before Ian sent you that message, Edward rang saying he hadn’t been able to get hold of Lillian for months and he was concerned. We tried telling him she was somewhere with no phone service, we said she was busy, we pulled just about every excuse out of a hat, but it didn’t fly with him. He sent us a formal letter informing us that he’d be here on the twenty-sixth of December and he expected Lillian to be here, too. If not, he’d report her as missing and us as covering up that fact.”

“Okay,” Mika said, still bottling every wild, painful feeling up as tightly as possible. “Maybe I’m wholly lacking in moral fibre, but I actually get all that. You couldn’t let anyone find out Lillian was dead before you figured out a way to keep the girls, and you can’t let Edward find out she’s dead now because you’ll lose the girls and he’ll be able to report you for committing a crime. And you can’t let him report her as merely missing, either, because that’ll lead to the police pretty much camping out here, which will in turn lead to them most likely finding Lillian’s remains and will probably end up exposing the girls’ magic to boot.”

“That’s pretty much it.”

“The part I don’t get,” she said, and her voice cracked as all that bottled anguish threatened to explode, “is me.”

“We were out of ideas,” Jamie confessed. “Then Ian saw your videos.

We’d already been talking about how restricted the girls’ lives were and how little they knew about their own power, so the part about needing a tutor was true. But the timing of Ian’s message to you was because of Edward. We hoped you’d able to help us. Ian thought that if we could just get you here, then maybe, once we’d gotten to know you and knew we

could trust you, we’d tell you the truth. And maybe you’d be able to disguise yourself as Lillian to get Edward to back off.”

“Which explains why Ian was so keen to find out if I could glamour myself,” Mika remarked rather bitterly, the sense of betrayal almost too much to bear. Had there been an ulterior motive in every conversation she’d ever had with these people she’d grown to love?

“Mika—”

“You did get to know me.” She cut him off. “You got to know me so well that I told you I’ve been used and manipulated and lied to before, and I told you what that did to me, and at no point, not once, did you stop me and admit that you were doing exactly the same thing. Jesus, Jamie. We kissed in the woods, for fuck’s sake. Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?

Why did you keep lying to me?”

Jamie’s eyes were stormy with guilt and regret, and it took him a moment to say it.

“Because we couldn’t trust you not to tell the other witches.”

Ah, there it was. She had put herself at risk by coming here, she had put her whole soul into teaching three wonderful children how to use their power, and she had let every person in this house into her heart—and still, they hadn’t trusted her. Nothing she’d done had been enough. She hadn’t been enough.

It was the obvious explanation for the lies she’d been told, of course, but she’d needed to hear him say it, just as she’d needed to see the bones beneath the sunflowers.

Quietly, feeling almost as if she was in a dream, she returned the bones to the grave in the ground and moved the sunflower patch back into place.

Gold threads of magic dug deep into the soil, twining the roots of the flowers back into the earth.

“I’m done,” she said, very softly. “You were right. You hurt me, and I’m

leaving. You know us both very well.”

“Mika, please—”

“I can’t be here,” she said, and added, as an afterthought: “I’ll come back on the twenty-sixth, just for Edward’s visit.”

“Forget about Edward for a minute. Just listen to me—”

But she couldn’t listen. She couldn’t bear to. So she just kept talking. “I don’t know how to glamour myself, but there might be another way to trick Edward into thinking Lillian’s still alive and buy you some more time. I’ll see what I can come up with. It’s the least I can do for the girls. Then I’ll get the rest of my stuff and leave for good.”

He said nothing more.

“Thank you,” she added. “For telling me the truth, even if it’s come just a little too late.”

When she walked away, he didn’t stop her.

She crossed the dark, silent house she’d come to love, past the girls sleeping soundly in their bedrooms, and went up to the attic that had, for so short a time, been the most wonderful home she’d ever had. There, she packed up a random assortment of clothes, the smaller of her two cauldrons, and her potion-making supplies. It was only when something dripped into the cauldron that she noticed she was crying.

She packed one more thing: a silver key, taped to the inside of a copy of Sense and Sensibility, Primrose’s favourite book.

Then she dried her tears, woke Circe, and they left the house together.

Outside, the night sky was a pale, wintry white, still promising a snowfall that probably wouldn’t come. There was a silent figure out by the barn where the cars were parked, and Circe ran to him, whining piteously. It was a sound Mika wanted to echo, a forlorn, distressed cry of confusion and betrayal and anger, but she just quietly put her things into the boot of the Broomstick.

“Tell the girls I’ll be back to say a proper goodbye to them on the twenty-sixth.” Mika’s voice wobbled, but she forced herself to speak.

“Circe, it’s time to go.”

With another heartbreaking whine, Circe left Jamie’s side and clambered into the back seat of the car. As soon as Mika shut the door, she pressed her wet nose to the window glass.

Jamie put a hand on the glass, but his eyes were on Mika. He swallowed, his voice cracking. “I’m so sorry. I lied for a lot of reasons, but I never, ever

wanted to hurt you.”

In the pale half-light of the Solstice night, Mika had the fleeting impression that his eyes were shining like diamonds, unshed tears refracting

the light.

She got in the Broomstick, and left.

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