The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 30

CHAPTER THIRTY

he Very Secret Society of Witches met on the third Thursday of every third month, but that was just about the only thing that never changed.T They never met in the same place twice; the last meeting, for instance, had been in Primrose Everly’s firelit drawing-room (yes, she called it a drawing-room), and the one before that had taken place on a cold, wet pier in the Outer Hebrides. This meeting, on the other hand, was on a fine April morning in a quiet, beautiful corner of Norfolk.

And there were a lot more than twenty-one people in attendance.

It had taken Mika a long time to convince Primrose and Jamie, both quite intractable in their own ways, to consent to what Primrose had roundly declared a harebrained scheme. Frankly, Mika was amazed it had only taken a few months to get here, considering she had been expecting to have to battle the pair of them on this for years.

Of course, the wards had helped. They’d needed to be recast, and Mika couldn’t do it alone, so she’d pointed out that she needed the other witches here.

For his part, Jamie’s objection was not to the idea itself but to the invasion, as he put it, of strangers into the territory he guarded in the most curmudgeonly of ways. “Why can’t you do it somewhere else?” had been the refrain. “Cast the wards, then take the kids and definitely take Ian, but just, for the love of God, do it somewhere else.”

In the end, it had not been Mika’s reasoned arguments, impassioned pleas, or shameless sexual favours that had swayed him. “I’ll agree to this,”

Jamie had said, his eyes twinkling wickedly, “if you stop making excuses and just open your magical tea and potion shop.”

So Mika had (heroically, she felt) overcome her terror of catastrophic failure. She and Ian had converted the barn into a beautiful, whimsical, olde-worldy kind of potion shop, and she had created a website full of artsy pictures of tea leaves and herbs, and Primrose had immediately sent all the witches in the Society the link and address.

Mika had sold all of her first batch in less than a week.

Which meant Jamie had to agree to them hosting the next meeting of the Very Secret Society of Witches, a meeting that, after much arguing with Primrose, would be quite unprecedented.

Because everyone was invited. Every witch in the Society was welcome, of course, but so was every person who had raised them, grown up with them, or loved them (as long as they were still trusted, and wanted to, of course). Primrose resisted and protested and had an infinite number of very sensible reasons to reject this idea out of hand, but even she was unable to withstand the force of Mika in the full, passionate throes of determination.

So on that spring morning, with a fat, golden sun in the sky, the sea holly in bloom on the dunes, the ocean an endless blue, and bluebells growing wild in the woods, the front garden of Nowhere House had been transformed into something that Ian said was perilously like a party.

All the witches had come, of course, and a fair few had accepted Mika’s invitation to bring others. Belinda Nkala brought her older brother, a slightly bewildered and bashful Black man in his forties, who came with a lemon cheesecake he’d made himself and which made him an instant favourite; Hilda had brought the two loving Korean aunts who had raised her, her five boisterous cousins, an ill-tempered cat, and her fiancée Kira (“Who is now my wife, not my fiancée, and she knows everything!”); and Agatha Jones, to everyone’s shock, brought a boyfriend who was somehow even more ancient than she was.

It felt like something out of a dream to Mika, standing at the edge of the garden and watching this strange (one might even use the word irregular) assortment of people drinking tea, eating cheesecake, and showing off their spells and spellbooks with pride.

Lucie and Ian had taken charge of the buffet table. Circe, deeply suspicious of the ill-tempered cat, was following the creature around as if to make sure no perfidy occurred on her watch. Ken had been deep in conversation with Belinda’s brother for half an hour now, the two of them enthusiastically discussing football, and Altamira, rather pleased to find herself much fussed over by so many adults, was solemnly listing every single swear word she knew.

Elsewhere, Rosetta was with Belinda, gazing up at her with a look of total adoration, like she couldn’t quite believe she existed. Mika didn’t know what it must feel like to be ten years old and to discover the existence of a beautiful Black witch like Belinda—who had purple streaks in her thick, black coils of hair, a Scottish accent, and a kind, sensible way of dealing with any nonsense—but she imagined it was quite possibly one of the top three experiences of Rosetta’s life. Meanwhile, Terracotta was showing off her mastery of the animation spell.

“You’ve got to come visit me in Wrexham,” Sophie Clarke was saying to Hilda and Kira as Mika passed them, her blond curls bouncing enthusiastically. “And you, too, of course, Mika! I have to hear more about your librarian!”

“If I can get him to overcome his chronic aversion to social interaction,”

Mika called back, “you might actually get to meet him!”

But before Mika could make her way indoors to the library where Jamie had cloistered himself, she was waylaid by Primrose, who, a saucer of cheesecake in one hand and a fork in the other, actually seemed to be enjoying herself.

“We won’t be making a habit of this, of course,” she said, because she was Primrose, “but, for what it’s worth, dear, you’ve pulled off something very special.”

“I appreciate you saying so,” Mika said, absurdly pleased with this compliment. “I know the world won’t transform overnight, and I know you still have your doubts, but thank you for trying.”

“Hmm,” said Primrose, her cheeks pinking slightly as she moved on.

Mika went inside.

Jamie was in an armchair in a corner of the library, behind several bookshelves, obviously hiding lest one of the children try to browbeat him into coming outside. He gave her a wary look as he glanced up from the

enormous book sitting open on his lap.

“No,” he said.

Mika put the book on the floor with great care and took its place on Jamie’s lap. His wary, implacable expression softened and he nuzzled her cheek. “I know you hate people, so I won’t pester you to come outside,” she said. “I’ll just say, once, that I would love it if you did.”

“I don’t hate people!”

“You do,” Mika said lovingly. “You have the soul of a cantankerous old man who yells at little kids to get off his lawn.”

Jamie obviously felt this was unjust. “Kids are the only people I like!”

“I think it’s going well,” said Mika, watching his hand idly trace circles on her knee.

“I’m not surprised. It was a good idea, even if a part of me still wishes it was a good idea you’d executed far, far away.” He pulled a face. “If nothing else, I refuse to come outside and have Primrose observe me like a specimen beneath her microscope. She does it every single time. I don’t think she’s completely sure how I feel about you.”

“Out of interest, how do you feel about me?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know exactly how I feel about you.”

“You have to say it!” Mika said indignantly. “You read books! You know Swoony Words must be said! Words like You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Or like My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and—”

Jamie looked amused. “Do you know any romantic declarations that weren’t written by Jane Austen?”

“Well, they’ve been on my mind. You can thank Rosetta’s Captain Wentworth obsession for that. She’s about to move on to Mr. Knightley.”

“Is thank the right word? Or would blame be more appropriate?”

Mika sighed. Truly, this was tragic.

“Oh, well,” she said, cheering up. “You’re going to be stuck with me for a long, long time. I’ll get you to say it sooner or later.”

The corner of his mouth lifted in a smile, the smile he only ever gave her, the one that crept slowly into his eyes and lit them up like the sun. Her heart kicked in her chest. She’d never seen him look at anyone the way he looked at her. Who needed words?

She hopped off his lap and left him to his book, but before she reached the door, there was a thump as he closed the book and stood.

“If I loved you less,” he said quietly, the words no less true for the laugh that threaded through his voice, “I might be able to talk about it more.”

Mika spun around, cannoning into his arms. “I love you, too.”

“I know you do.”

“Does this mean you’ll come outside and meet everybody?”

“Reluctantly,” said Jamie wryly, “and with tremendous ill grace, but yes.

I will.”

Mika smiled happily up at him, then leaned up on her toes to kiss him, slow and deep. “I’ll make it up to you later.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

So they went outside together, and Primrose did indeed scrutinize Jamie critically, and Hilda decided they were going to be the best of friends, and Altamira insisted on swinging off his arm, and Mika felt that the day was at

last perfectly, wholly complete.

So, for that matter, was she.

Maybe, somewhere out there, there was a witch who would uncover all their secrets, a witch who would build a lasting bridge between witches and non-witches. A witch who would, in short, transform the world. It was a lovely idea, a vision of a golden future, but Mika was content with the knowledge that the witch who conjured it would not be her.

She, Mika Moon, would not be the witch who transformed the world, but she was making it a little better, day by day. She had once believed witches would never have friendship, community, and each other, but here they were. She had once believed she would never have a family, but here they were, too. She, who had once believed she would never leave a mark on

anybody, knew now that the marks she had left were unerasable, as much a part of forever as the sea.

And, really, who could ask for more than that?

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