The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 28

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ika was sitting cross-legged on her former bed in the attic, plucking absently at the loose threads at the end of her yellow jumper andM staring into the middle distance, when Jamie came to find her. He sat down on the edge of the bed, drawing one knee up to nudge hers, and there was so much compassion and so little judgement in his eyes that she leaned on his shoulder and traced distracted lines along his palm.

“Is this a terrible idea?”

“You didn’t think so an hour ago,” Jamie said reasonably. “You thought this was our only way out of this mess.”

“Altamira’s very cross with me.”

“Speaking from experience, she won’t be by the end of the day.” He tugged his palm out from under her trailing finger and laced their fingers together. “For what it’s worth, I think you did the right thing.”

Mika made a face, torn between dread at the thought of what was coming and humour at the absurdity of the situation. “If someone had told me a few weeks ago that I’d turn to Primrose for help—”

“If someone had told me a few weeks ago that I wouldn’t shudder at the

sound of her name—”

They both laughed.

“It’s nice to be home,” Mika said softly. “I missed this attic.”

“Are you willing to share it?”

She smiled. “Only if you bring pink gin.”

“As much as you want.”

Her phone rang, interrupting the too-brief peace of the moment. “It’s

her.”

“That was quick.”

“She’s where I got my speed spell,” Mika said ruefully, and answered the call. “Hi.”

“Mika, I’m afraid I cannot find this house you spoke of,” came Primrose’s crisp, precise voice, sounding slightly aggravated. “The satnav informs me that I’m in the right place, but I see no house.”

“Oh, give me a minute and I’ll come find you,” Mika said. “It’s very easy to miss the gates because of the wards.”

She hung up and clambered off the bed. Jamie gave her a questioning look. “You want me to go with you?”

“No, I should talk to her alone first. Keep the girls inside as well, okay?”

It took more than a minute for her to get downstairs, put her shoes on, and jog all the way down the drive to the gates, but Mika’s phone didn’t ring again, so she assumed Primrose had discovered how to be patient in her old age. She stepped out between the gates, looking left and right along the narrow country lane, and spotted Primrose’s sleek black car about twenty yards farther down the road, parked on the verge, hazards flashing.

Mika waved to get her attention and stepped aside to let the car pass.

Primrose cut the engine the instant she was within the gates, abandoning the car on the drive and getting out with a look of intense curiosity on her face.

“These wards are very powerful. Who cast them?”

“I’ll get to that part.”

Primrose snorted. She inclined her head at the house. “So this is where you’ve been since you left Brighton. And that story about the class reunion

at UEA?”

“Sorry.”

“I can’t imagine what I’ve done to make you feel like you have to lie to me,” Primrose said, frosty and rigid, like she might be genuinely upset and trying to hide it. “Never mind. What about the unlikely tale you told me over the phone? About three young witches and a solicitor who knows too much?”

“That was all true,” said Mika, as they started walking in the direction of the house. “The solicitor’s in the garden shed.”

“I was under the impression you didn’t approve of tampering with memories.”

“I’m starting to see that some things aren’t quite as black and white as I thought they were.”

“Well, I am more than willing to remove all memories of magic from the solicitor’s mind. It is, after all, in all of our best interests.” Primrose studied the main house up ahead, her eyes tracing the graceful, rustic lines. “Where are these young witches you speak of?”

“They’re inside. Out of curiosity,” Mika went on, “could you re-create these wards if you had to?”

“Not by myself. I could approximate something close, perhaps.”

Primrose pursed her lips as if it pained her to admit she couldn’t do something. “My sister was the one with the talent for protective enchantments. You could have probably benefited from her help, were she still alive. Why do you ask? Where’s the witch who cast these wards?”

“Well, the thing is, Lillian’s dead.” Mika grimaced, and failed to notice the way Primrose jerked to a stop like she’d been electrocuted. “There’s a lot I’ll need to explain that I didn’t get into on the phone. These wards will break in the spring. She cast them every year while she was alive.”

“Mika,” Primrose said urgently, and there was a look on her face that Mika had never seen before. “What did you just say?”

But before Mika could answer her or ask what had made her look suddenly like she might faint, they were interrupted by the sound of the house’s front door opening. There was no sign of the children, but Jamie, Ian, Ken, and Lucie came out of the house in a rush, their eyes on Primrose,

their faces every bit as ashen as hers.

Mika was bewildered. “What in the—”

And then, a croak from Ian: “Lillian?”

Lillian?

Primrose had gone completely still. “You knew Lillian.”

“You knew Lillian?” Mika demanded.

“You’re not Lillian?” Jamie asked.

“Why would she be Lillian?” Mika wanted to know. “How could I possibly have gone to fetch Primrose and come back with Lillian?”

“This is Primrose?” Lucie asked, wide-eyed.

Christ on a bike, this was downright farcical. What the hell was going on? Why would anyone think— Mika sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, God.”

Everyone stood frozen as the penny dropped, as the outrageous unfairness of this new reality hit them one by one.

“You told me Lillian’s sister’s name was Peony!” Mika protested.

“Peony?” Primrose whipped back around to face her. “My name was Peony.”

Mika was aghast. How had this happened? How had she called Primrose for help, only to summon the one person besides Edward they absolutely did not want to find out about Lillian’s death?

Ian let out a quiet groan. After a moment, with a sigh, like the weight of the world’s grief had suddenly fallen upon her, Primrose reached for the silver chain around her neck. Mika saw now that there was a familiar- looking locket at the end of the necklace, only this one was engraved with the letter P.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Lucie, of all people, which was almost as shocking as anything else that had happened today.

Primrose put the locket away. “Lillian was my sister. My twin sister. We were identical. We were born Peony and Lily Smith, but we changed our names when we left our aunt and uncle’s home at the age of twenty. We never wanted them to find us, you see.”

“Wait,” Mika said slowly, conscious of something odd. “You said your sister was dead. You already knew Lillian was dead?”

“We hadn’t seen each other in about fifteen years, but I felt it the moment she was gone.” Primrose’s eyes searched the grounds, tracing the gables and chimneys of the house rather wistfully. “So this was her home.

We lived apart after we left home, but it was only in the last thirty years or so that she became secretive about where she was living. We had a difficult relationship.”

Mika looked at Jamie and found him looking back at her. There was no blame on his face, but she felt furious with herself anyway. No, there was no way she could have known Primrose had once had a different name, or what that name was, but even so, she couldn’t believe what she’d done.

Primrose knew Lillian was dead. Primrose was Lillian’s sister, which made her the girls’ guardian. And Primrose had very fixed ideas about how young witches should be raised and a cast-iron will giving her the authority to do exactly what she wanted with these three particular young witches.

The only reason she hadn’t turned up to take the girls sooner was because she hadn’t known they existed, or where to find them, and Mika had just told her both of those things.

Mika took a breath of cold sea air. One thing at a time. First the gargoyle, then the gorgon.

If only she’d known that the gorgon was a whole lot more powerful than she’d suspected.

“Minerva Hawthorn!” Primrose suddenly exclaimed, and Ian looked startled. “You’re Minerva Hawthorn’s son! My word, I haven’t seen you since you were knee-high.”

Ian gave her a weak smile. “I’m afraid I don’t remember that.”

“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” Primrose’s eyes drifted back to the house, like she was searching for some trace of Lillian in it. “Was she happy in the end? Lillian?”

Mika saw the others glance at each other. “In her own way, she was,”

Lucie said cautiously. “She was often away. She was an archaeologist.”

Primrose smiled. “No, she wasn’t. Or rather, she was, but that was just an excuse to get her to places all over the world.”

“An excuse?” Jamie’s eyebrows drew together. “An excuse for what?”

“My sister and I had a difficult childhood,” Primrose explained. “I’ll spare you the worst of it, but in short, our aunt and uncle discovered very early on that we were witches and did their utmost to stamp it out of us. On one memorable occasion, there was an attempted exorcism that almost killed us both. We reacted to this upbringing in vastly different ways.

Lillian became reckless while I became cautious and mistrustful. She

wanted witches to live out in the open while I wanted the safety of secrecy.

That’s what she was doing, using the cover of her work as an archaeologist.

She was obsessed with the possibility that somewhere out there, there might be a place where witches live openly, without fear, without prejudice. The last time I saw her, fifteen years ago, we had a towering row about it.”

There was a pause after this, and Mika felt a surge of pity for the absent Lillian. She had made choices Mika would never understand, but this? This she understood.

“Reckless or not, I still can’t fathom what she was thinking when she brought three witches here to live together,” Primrose went on, sounding genuinely aghast. Mika tensed. “That surge of power Mika took the blame

for, was that the children?”

“I was the cause,” Mika said firmly.

Primrose nodded, frosty and imperious as ever. “Well, we can talk about all that in a bit. First, the solicitor. You need me to extract all of his memories of the events that took place today, correct?”

Mika led Primrose to the garden shed, made sure she had Edward spelled and docile, and then left her to it. She knew, from scattered memories across her childhood, that Primrose’s memory magic was delicate, difficult, and took a long time.

While Primrose worked, Mika went into the house to check on the children, who were working on a jigsaw puzzle in Altamira’s bedroom (the jigsaw puzzle, the one that had caused so much trouble) and pretending they weren’t dying to know what was going on outside. Mika told them the truth, briefly. They were more riveted than troubled by the news that Primrose was the mysterious Peony, but Mika suspected that was because they hadn’t considered the possibility that they might actually be taken from their home and family. They were still certain the grown-ups would fix everything.

By the time she went back outside, armed with a tray laden with cups of sea holly tea for everyone, the sun had dipped below the horizon. Mika put the tray down on a table of knotted vines and sought shelter from the cold beside Jamie, leaning her head into his chest and breathing in the scent of

pine needles and the ocean, which never failed to make her feel better. He tightened his arm around her, playing absently with a lock of her hair.

“What will happen when she comes out?” Ken asked quietly.

“We’ll decide where we want Edward to wake from the spell, so to speak, and put him there,” said Mika. “The driver’s seat of his car makes the most sense. Then Primrose will wake him up and he won’t remember a single thing he discovered today. In a way, we do get to turn back time.”

“And start this fiasco all over again,” said Ian gloomily.

But Mika suddenly laughed. “No, because when Edward wakes up, he’ll see Primrose. Who needs a glamour spell when you have an identical twin?”

Some time later, Primrose exited the shed with her usual straight-backed grace, leaving the door open behind her. She looked old and frail, the way she always did after using so much of her power, but she also looked satisfied.

Ian peered into the shed with the liveliest interest, noting that Edward was lying prone on the floor. “Is he dead?”

Primrose gave him a scathing look, like she’d expected better from Minerva Hawthorn’s only offspring. “Of course not. He’ll have a bit of a headache, but he’ll be fine. I have removed all of his memories of today’s events. I cannot do anything about the suspicion with which he seems to view you all.”

“Well, the thing is,” said Mika, “it’s in all of our best interests if we remove Edward from our lives for good. And I think there’s a way.”

Primrose listened to Mika’s idea in silence and, by the end, looked almost amused (if it were in fact possible for Primrose to be amused by anything). She waited, sitting on a stool and daintily sipping from her cup of sea holly tea (“This is very nice, poppet. One of yours?”), while Jamie, Lucie, and Ken moved Edward from the shed to the driver’s seat of his car.

Primrose stood and moved to stand a few feet away from the car, pinning a charming, if chilly, smile to her face as she woke him up.

Everyone watched, breaths held, as Edward yawned, opened his eyes, and glanced around him as if he was slightly confused by how late in the day it was. He opened the car door and clambered out, adjusting his cuffs.

Then he saw Primrose and his face was an absolute picture. “L-Lillian?”

“How are you, Edward?” Primrose said, all grace and poise. “As you can see, I am alive, well, and thoroughly exasperated. While I commend you for your diligence, I’m afraid you’ve wasted rather a lot of my time and I don’t appreciate being ordered to present myself on your say-so.” She sniffed.

“Your work has been excellent in the past, so I will not make a formal complaint to your superiors, but let me be plain when I say that I will no longer be requiring your services or that of your firm.”

“What? But—”

“I’ll send a letter to the firm, of course. And you’ll forward all the paperwork to the house, naturally.”

Primrose’s manner of steamrolling someone was so polite and so utterly unfightable that Mika was not surprised to see even Ian eyeing her with respect bordering on awe.

It didn’t take long for her to usher Edward back into his car, press a pair of Ian’s snowman-shaped cookies into his hands, and speed him along with a queenly wave.

Even Mika, who had seen Primrose run roughshod over the most formidable of nannies, the most truculent of tutors, and the most opinionated of witches in just such a sweet, merciless way, was impressed.

“We cannot let Lillian linger in limbo forever,” Primrose announced, as they watched Edward’s car vanish through the gates. “I propose we give it two or three months, and then we’ll report that she had an accident abroad. I have a handful of acquaintances in other countries who would be happy to corroborate our story, and if Lillian’s remains have to be examined, we can use magic to mask their true age.”

“And her will?” asked Jamie, narrowing his eyes. “We can’t exactly enact it if we haven’t reported her death.”

“But we know what it says,” said Primrose. “At least, I have a very good idea of what it says and I’m sure there’s a copy in the house I can peruse.”

She patted him gently on the shoulder. “Whether or not we report her death, I am legally responsible for the children in that house.”

“You could refuse to be,” said Mika. “If you did that, the kids’ guardianship will go to Jamie, which is where it should have gone in the first place.”

Primrose sighed. “Don’t make this difficult, Mika. You know they can’t

live here together.”

But Mika knew no such thing.

The gorgon had fought the gargoyle, but Mika was going to fight the gorgon and, what was more, she was going to win.

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