The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 25

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ika drove for over three hours. She could have used her speed spell, of course, but she didn’t want to go any faster. In fact, if it wereM possible to simply drive the Broomstick forever, she would have done that.

There was only one place she could go. She couldn’t go back to Nowhere House. She couldn’t go to Primrose, who would ask questions Mika could not and would not answer. She had no one else.

But there was a tall townhouse on a quiet street in the city of York, and she had a key.

It had struck Mika, packing her clothes in the attic, that no matter what she did, she always found herself right back in her childhood, so she might as well use the house it came with. She was thirty-one, but here she was again, just as she’d been as a child, trapped on the hamster wheel of her mind, conducting a postmortem on every memory to find out what, if anything, had been real. She had always understood, at the end of the previous postmortems, that the answer was nothing. Nothing had been real.

Her caretakers had been paid to look after her, and some had been kind and some merely nice and she had not mattered to any of them. Some had left without hurting her and some had left after Mika had been shunned, used, or lied to. And always, in the end, she had been forgotten.

Over the years, Mika had embraced all the things that made her different and had discovered that she liked herself very much. But what was that worth without human connection? How was it possible to live, truly live, without the companionship of other people, without a family formed in any of the thousands of ways families could be formed?

It was a bit like that old philosophical question about a tree falling in the woods, wasn’t it? If no one remembered her, and she didn’t matter to

anyone, did she really exist?

She had been a ghost until Nowhere House, leaving no trace of herself on anybody, but she had thought for a few precious weeks that maybe she had at last come alive. Maybe, like Pinocchio or the Velveteen Rabbit, she had at last been made real.

And now she didn’t know. She didn’t know what had been real. Had those late nights in the attic with Jamie been part of the bigger scheme to save his family? Had every kindness from Ian, Ken, and Lucie been underpinned by probing questions to determine how useful she could be?

So went the hamster wheel, round and round, until she brought the Broomstick to a stop in a tiny driveway in front of the familiar white door of a townhouse.

Circe poked her head between the two front seats and gave the house a long, unimpressed look.

“I know,” Mika agreed. “But it’s all we’ve got.”

Inside, the house was exactly as it had been the day she’d left for university and never returned. The furniture was old, simple, and spare. The walls were blank, the floors dusty, the corners strung with cobwebs, but Mika could see past all that to the crayon scribbles artfully concealed under a cushion; to the long-faded smudges of a child’s face pressed against the window to catch a glimpse of the world outside; to the tiny, walled patch of grass at the back where a little girl had collected daffodils and daisies. She saw echoes of the coats that had once hung from the hook by the front door, tweed coats and puffy coats and waterproofs, and she saw the scratched edge of the kitchen table where that same little girl had once knocked out a

wobbly tooth.

It was a house riddled with ghosts.

“Maybe we could live in the Broomstick,” Mika said to Circe. “It has the space.” Circe snuffled sleepily. “You’re right. We need indoor plumbing. I guess we’d better stay, then.”

The heating, water, and electricity were all working because Primrose would never dream of letting a house she owned go to total ruin, so Mika took down the dusty curtains, stripped off the faded cushion covers,

retrieved a set of bedding from the airing cupboard on the landing, and set all of it to wash in the washer-dryer in the kitchen.

She spent the rest of the night hoovering the carpets, scrubbing the surfaces, and spelling away the spiders and dead moths that had taken up residence in the house. She moved the furniture around, put the freshly washed curtains, covers and bedding back in place, and scattered the few books she’d brought with her. By the time she was done, the house didn’t look like the one she remembered anymore.

She was so tired by then that she couldn’t think straight, which was exactly the point because the hamster wheel had finally stopped. She stumbled into the shower, had a good, long cry, and fell asleep in the bedroom that had once been hers.

The best way to keep the hamster wheel from turning was to distract herself with a useful, practical task, so Mika allowed the next few days to blend into each other as she focused obsessively on the problem of Edward. She got the food shopping delivered, left the back door open so that Circe could have a run in the walled garden whenever she wanted to, laid out her cauldron and potion-making supplies, checked her spellbook, and brainstormed.

She didn’t know the runes for a spell that could glamour her to look like somebody else, assuming such a spell existed in anything but theory, but was it possible to brew a potion that could do the same thing? What would she need? What plants and ingredients did she know of that might produce the effect of a very specific illusion?

But with just four days available to her, she didn’t think she had the time to concoct a potion as unfamiliar and complicated as that. It was more likely to backfire than not. On the other hand, a simpler potion, one that was less effective than a glamour but far less risky, might work. She could adapt a potion she already had in her arsenal, which would allow her to make the most of the little time she had.

She scribbled on scraps of paper, switching between a dozen open tabs of research on her phone. Maybe she could brew a tea to confuddle the senses and make the drinker more likely to believe a lie?

At no point did it even cross Mika’s mind to abandon the inhabitants of Nowhere House to the consequences of their own choices. She was still too raw to interrogate her complicated feelings for the adults of the house, Jamie in particular, but the way she felt about the girls was not complicated at all. Rosetta, Terracotta, and Altamira deserved the best, most joyful lives possible, and that would only be possible if they stayed together, in their home, with the people who loved them so much that they’d literally hidden a corpse in their back garden.

So Mika checked and rechecked her spellbook, studied plant lore, and experimented over her cauldron.

At first, the riddle of the potion kept her wholly in the moment, lost in a dreamworld of tinkling spoons, luminous stardust, and gentle bubbling. She was hyper-focused on the riddle that needed to be solved, so there was no space for anything else.

It didn’t last, of course. In the quiet moments, with Circe looking mournfully out of the window, Mika couldn’t get away from how much she missed the home she’d had for so brief a time. She missed the gables, the crash of the sea, the salt on the air, the people.

How could she possibly miss them this much if none of it was real?

Before she knew it, it was Christmas, a fact she noticed only because the townhouses on either side of her were suddenly reverberating with laughter, clinking cutlery, and carols. Mika, who did her best to be sunshiney every other day of the year, found herself feeling downright grinchy. She couldn’t help it; Christmas had a way of dialling everything up in intensity. Yes, there was the joy, goodwill, and kindness, but there was also loneliness.

She ignored the festivities on the other sides of the walls and stayed curled up on the sofa, a cup of tea in one hand, Circe at her feet, and the

cauldron simmering gently on the kitchen table.

The sound of a knock at the door took her by surprise. Quite certain that it was a well-meaning neighbour coming to drop off a gingerbread cookie their toddler had decorated, which was the only reason anyone had ever knocked on Mika’s door on Christmas Day in the past, Mika uncurled herself from the sofa, mustered up a smile, and opened the door.

Oh.

Pine needles and sea salt.

Jamie rocked back on his heels, one side of his mouth lifting in a faint, crooked smile. “Hi.”

The sight of him on her doorstep, this doorstep, did something funny to her. Her breath caught, and for the space of a heartbeat, she forgot that she was angry, she forgot that she’d been lied to, she forgot that she was in pain.

She wanted to throw her arms around his neck and sob. She wanted to lose herself entirely in his lean, solid warmth and rough, sandpapery voice and his stupid, irresistible pine-needle-ness. She wanted to look into his anguished, stormy grey eyes and see something true.

So for the space of that beat, as her heart shuddered violently against her ribs, she just imprinted every detail of him on her memory: the tiny white scar at his hairline, the way the dimming afternoon sunlight brought out the blond in his brown hair, the muscle twitching in his angular jaw, the hope and longing in his grey eyes, the way his whole body was braced as if he expected a blow to fall.

Then the heartbeat was over, and she took a deep, shaky breath and remembered.

“I told you I’d be back in time for tomorrow,” she said evenly. “You didn’t need to come here to convince me.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here? No, how are you here?” Her brow furrowed.

“How could you possibly have known where to find me?”

“You put this address down on the contract you signed for Ian.” Jamie’s eyes searched her face. “I’m sorry for just turning up out of the blue. I would have called first, but I didn’t think you’d answer.”

Her heart felt like it was going to burst, and her feelings were all over the fucking place. Circe, with perfect timing, pushed her way past Mika and bounded into Jamie with a joyful bark, giving Mika the opportunity she needed to wrestle her messy, chaotic heart under control.

She turned away, leaving the door open. “I guess you’d better come in.”

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