The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches — Chapter no 9

CHAPTER NINE

amie stacked books with unwonted ferocity, hoping the satisfying thump of heavy, dusty volumes colliding would work out some of his ill temper.J Had it only been three days since she’d arrived? He felt like it had been months since he’d known peace. (Now, admittedly, it had been months since he’d known peace. He hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep since that night in June. But that wasn’t what this was about. This was about her.) For one thing, there was the dog hair. Hadn’t anyone considered the fact that dogs shed their fur all the goddamned time? What had possessed them to invite a dog into the house? No matter where he went, a collection of golden hairs seemed to follow him. They were on his clothes. They were on the chairs. They were on the carpets. They were even in his car (How? The dog had never been in there!). The only refuge he had from the hair was his own bedroom and he didn’t think that would last much longer because, for some unfathomable reason, the dog had decided she liked him.

Jamie returned to his desk to find Circe sitting upright beside it, tongue out and tail wagging, waiting eagerly for him.

“You know you’re not supposed to be in here,” he said, and even his own voice was intolerable. Where was the bite? Christ, he sounded almost fond.

Most irritatingly, Circe was a very well-behaved dog, which made it hard to resent her presence. While she refused to stay out of the library altogether, choosing instead to sit with her head on his knee while he worked at his desk, she never went near the bookcases, never tried to chew a shoe, pen, or valuable book, and never distracted him when he was busy.

So, fine, maybe he was almost fond of her. Fond-adjacent.

On the other hand, he was absolutely not fond of Circe’s owner.

Also irritatingly, it was difficult to say exactly why Mika bothered him so much. There were secrets in this house he didn’t want unburied, and he didn’t trust her not to somehow destroy the life they’d built, but those were things that would have troubled him no matter who Ian had invited into their lives.

Why did she specifically get under his skin? He couldn’t exactly object to her interactions with the others. She was friendly, she treated the children with kindness and humour, and Ian, Ken, and Lucie had obviously taken to her. And he couldn’t object to her tutoring, either. In just an hour of watching her work with the children, it had been obvious that she was a little green, but she was a talented witch and she seemed to genuinely care.

Her tutoring was working, too. It’d only been a few days, but all three girls could now make their pebbles move. Rosetta had even gotten her pebble to do backflips.

Maybe the problem was Mika’s perpetual good humour, which was alien to him and even worse than Ian’s boundless energy. That had to be it. She was so aggravatingly, relentlessly sunshiney. And, like the actual sun, she seemed determined to nurture every green or living thing in sight. It was absurd. In fact, just yesterday, he’d gone outside to speak to Ken and had found her kneeling on the front path, spoon-feeding a bee. A bee. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to save the bees. Of course he did! Yet for some reason, Mika naming her pets after folkloric witches, Mika spoon-feeding a bee, Mika’s eyes dancing with mischief? Made him want to move to a flat with glass walls and a city skyline view and exactly zero woodland sprites. Zero.

Yes, he was aware that this was unreasonable.

He hadn’t always been this glass-half-empty. As a rule, he didn’t like to look back into his history, but he cast his mind there now, dodging the thorniest, brambliest parts of his memories. He was After-Jamie, but there had been a Before-Jamie once and that was where he went, to that little boy in Belfast. Before-Jamie had had a beloved goldfish, and a brown school satchel that his mother had lovingly embroidered with quotes from his

favourite books, and a father who’d pick him up after school and put him straight on his broad shoulders.

Before-Jamie’s glass had been more than half-full. He hadn’t looked for the worst in people. He’d trusted that even when things went to hell in a fucking handbasket, everything would turn out okay in the end.

After-Jamie knew better.

Even so, it was possible that resenting someone for having a staggeringly lovely smile was a tad over the top.

Almost as if he’d summoned her just by thinking of her, the library door creaked open a little further and Mika poked her head around it.

“There she is,” she said, shaking her head at Circe, who barked lovingly in response. “I’m sorry, is she bothering you?”

“No, she’s fine,” Jamie heard himself say.

What—and he could not overstate this—the fuck? He’d just had the perfect opportunity to politely rid himself of the dog, the dog’s owner, and the dog’s persistent fur. Why hadn’t he taken it?

Mika stepped farther into the room, obviously interested in the library.

Brilliant. That was all he needed. He watched her with what he hoped was a

polite but forbidding expression.

It didn’t have its intended effect.

“How does the library work?” she asked curiously, craning her neck to look up at the second floor of old, crinkly books. “No one browses in person, obviously, so do you have to post a parcel every time a kid requests a copy of Peppa Pig’s latest adventure?”

That startled a laugh out of him, which made her spin around and stare at him with a look that was just as startled.

“It’s not that kind of library,” he said, looking away quickly. “It’s a private collection. Less Peppa Pig and more old, academic texts and reference materials. There are books here you can’t get anywhere else in the country. Everything is listed on the library’s website and I usually get requests for books from professors and academics. They used to come here, but once the girls arrived, that stopped. So yes, I do have to send the books in the post each time.”

“What if they get lost?” she asked, looking slightly horrified at the possibility.

“Part of my job is to digitize every book in the library so that there’s no risk of permanently losing anything. Ideally, we’d loan out that copy rather than send the actual, physical book, but legally speaking, we’re not allowed to circulate unauthorized versions.” He pointed to the three books stacked neatly beside his laptop. “And if a request comes in for a book I haven’t yet had a chance to digitize, I pause whatever I was doing before, scan the book in, and then send it off. It’s not a perfect system, but . . .” He shrugged, trailing off.

She nodded, approaching one of the bookshelves. He stood up, walked around his desk, and leaned back against it so that he could keep a wary eye on her, but she touched the books with a careful, light hand.

“You should do that more often, by the way,” she said, her eyes on the spine of the book in front of her. “It’s nice.”

“Do what?”

“Laugh.”

Jamie blinked, taken aback. He crossed his arms over his chest, suddenly not quite sure what to do with them.

But Mika didn’t seem to expect a response, and an instant later, she had vanished behind a row of bookshelves. He didn’t follow her. Instead, he looked down at Circe, who looked back at him as if to say Yes, that did just happen.

His phone chimed with a text alert, and he tugged it out of the front pocket of his jeans.

Ian had sent him a screenshot, followed by a text: He’s not budging. Dick.

Jamie, the reigning king of the school of glass half-empty, had expected no less. He pinched the bridge of his nose, blowing out an exhausted breath.

That was, of course, the moment Mika chose to reappear from between the shelves. She looked at him with a small crease between her eyebrows and said, quite gently, “Are you okay?”

He surprised himself by telling her the truth. “Some days, I think I’m too tired to keep keeping secrets.”

Jesus, what the hell was wrong with him? Why didn’t he just tell her all about his childhood while he was at it?

“Just some days?” Mika asked, eyebrows raised.

He almost smiled. “Lots of days.”

“Me too,” she said simply. She knelt on the floor to give Circe a bit of attention, her pale bronze hands vanishing into the depths of the dog’s soft golden fur, and tipped her head up to look at him. “Is it a general sense of weariness or did something specific happen?”

He chose his words carefully. “Lucie emailed Edward to try to push his visit back a few weeks, to give us more time. She’s the only one of us he doesn’t detest, so she hoped he might agree if she asked.”

“But he didn’t,” she guessed.

“He did not.”

This is not something that can wait indefinitely, Edward’s email had said, according to the screenshot Ian had sent Jamie. I know you agree.

Jamie could state with absolute certainty that nobody agreed.

“At the risk of flogging a dead horse, has anyone tried speaking to Lillian again?” Mika asked. “I know the odds aren’t good, but if you can convince her to come back . . .”

Jamie wanted to laugh, wholly without mirth, but he only said, “There’d be no point trying.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s obviously not my place to say it, but no matter what her reasons are for being away so often, she should be here now. She left the rest of you with a ticking bomb and the very least she could do is fix the—”

“The girls are not a ticking bomb,” Jamie interrupted sharply.

“I was talking about the solicitor, not the girls,” she said.

He exhaled. “Sorry.”

“But,” she went on, watching him carefully, “I expect it would be normal to struggle with looking after three children who are different from—”

He cut her off for the second time, his jaw clenched with anger. “They’re kids,” he snapped. “Some days, they’re the funniest, sweetest humans on the planet. Other days, I’m tempted to throw them out the window. Because

they’re kids. Not because they’re different. Looking after them is difficult because, again, they’re kids.”

Jamie stopped abruptly, knocked off balance by something intensely vulnerable in her eyes. Regret replaced his anger.

“Mika,” he said quietly, “if your battalion of nannies and caregivers ever made you feel like a burden because you were different, they were wrong.

Not you. You do know that, don’t you?”

“They didn’t know I was a witch,” she said, a little too quickly. “Not until they saw something they shouldn’t, and then they were gone, so they never had a chance to treat me any differently.”

“They may not have known you were a witch, but they knew you were different,” he guessed. “They must have known from the start that you weren’t like most of the other kids they’d known. And I assume they made sure you knew they knew that.”

She blinked quickly and swiped an unsteady hand across her eyes. Jamie was furious to discover that, after days of wishing Mika’s sunshine good humour into oblivion, it turned out he did not like the total absence of it.

“Yes,” she admitted, addressing his shoes. “They always knew I was different. It took me years to work out how to behave like I was expected to.”

His voice was shot through with anger again, but this time it wasn’t directed at her. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“Thank you for saying that.”

She turned to go. Circe followed her.

At the door, Mika paused to look back at him. Her gaze was steady as she said, “If the girls want lives outside of this house, they’ll have to learn to fit in, too. I wish they didn’t, but the world isn’t as kind as we’d all like it to be.”

“It could be,” he said, and couldn’t quite believe those words had come out of his mouth. When had he become the optimist?

Mika smiled then. “Maybe.”

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