Page 1 of A Witch in Notting Hill

Willow

S hit. Shit, shit, shit. This was bad. Not like the time I accidentally made my elementary school disappear bad, or the time I accidentally teleported my sister to Montreal bad, but it was bad.

But it was fixable, right? It had to be fixable. I was sure it was fixable.

“Just hang on, Vera,” I muttered, mostly to myself, because I was no longer sure whether my manager understood English. Did cats understand English? God, what have I done? “I’m going to fix this, Vera, I promise. Just, uh, hang in there.”

I scrambled around my trailer, looking for what, I wasn’t entirely sure. I didn’t even know how I turned her into a cat in the first place. How the hell was I supposed to know how to turn her back?

Being a witch was hard.

Being a bad witch was even harder. Way harder than being an actor.

In the books and the movies, everyone makes being a witch seem so easy. A flick of the wrist, a Latin chant, a flying broom, et voilà . You’re having the time of your life. No disappearing schools, no sisters in Canada, no seemingly irreversible spells.

Meanwhile, in reality, you refuse one measly romance contract, then somehow turn your manager into a cat right before the summer solstice party.

Which happens to be the party of the year.

And also the party where she was apparently going to introduce you to your would-be co-star after she convinced you to sign the contract.

Only there was no contract, and now no Vera, either. Only me, already sweating through this gown, and Vera in cat form blinking at me with a panicked expression I was certain wasn’t far from my own.

Okay. Think, Willow. How did we get here?

Vera suggested I do a romance, for what felt like the millionth time lately, and I declined, for what also felt like the millionth time, because she already knew I’d never do a romance.

Romance made my powers a little wonkier than usual, even when it wasn’t real, and I never thought it translated well to the big screen, anyway.

Maybe that was because I didn’t have a ton of experience off-screen, which was yet another reason not to try to make it work.

When catastrophe follows seemingly every time you get close to someone, you tend to avoid romantic encounters all together.

So I declined, but Vera pressed the issue because the money would be good and my powers had been pretty stable lately, so it might not be a bad time, and then I tried to put my foot down and firmly refuse, so I reached out to touch her forearm to make sure she was really listening, and before I knew it. .. she was a cat.

That part, however, was exactly like the movies. A puff of smoke, a soft meow, and here we are.

Was it something I said? The way I touched her arm? Did it have something to do with the solstice? I ripped the colossal headband off my head and tossed it across my trailer, raking my hands through my hair and no longer caring about the hours it took to tame my unruly waves into a bouncy blowout.

“Vera, what the hell happened?” I moaned without lifting my head from my hands. All she did was meow in response. Which I suppose made sense, since it was all she could do.

This obviously wasn’t the first time my powers had gone haywire.

As a kid, they would short-circuit during heightened states of emotion: when I was fighting with my sister, failing math, trying to play sports.

Honestly, this predicament was how I’d gotten into acting in the first place.

I’d auditioned for the school play after my magic had interfered with every other club or activity I tried, and something clicked.

I could be someone else onstage. Someone who was finally good at something.

Someone who could keep her magic more or less under control.

Until eighth grade, that is. When I had my first real crush and immediately lost it.

Before that, spells would fail when I was actively trying to cast them, which made them relatively easy to reverse, since I knew what they were in the first place.

But where Fletcher Cohen was concerned, spells would happen seemingly out of nowhere.

I’d be in class, minding my business and trying desperately not to stare at the side of his head, and before I knew it, the power would go out or snow would fall from the ceiling or everyone in class would be floating around like Mylar balloons.

Needless to say, I didn’t have a crush again for a long, long time.

And needless to say, it was a blessing I went to a magic school or I don’t think I’d have had a single friend.

So when I started acting professionally, I made sure my contract had a no-romance clause.

Acting was supposed to be the one thing I knew I could do right.

The one thing I was good at, where I didn’t have to second-guess myself or compare myself to my family.

I couldn’t risk malfunctioning on set and ruining a movie, or outing myself in the first place, so I steered clear entirely, and up until now Vera had been cool with that.

And as far as relationships went, I steered clear of those, too. It was hard enough to date with my busy filming schedules, not to mention learning to balance my rising fame with my easily overstimulated personality and my desire to keep my powers under wraps. It was all a lot.

My hope was that I’d figure out how to gain control sooner rather than later and be able to risk a chance at a normal relationship someday, but honestly, that was at the bottom of my priority list. Especially now, as I stared at Vera where she sat on the floor, pinning me with her marble-eyed gaze.

“I’m going to get us out of this,” I said, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she furrowed her brows. “ You out of this,” I corrected myself. “I’m going to get you out of this. Just as soon as I, uh, figure out how the hell I got you into this.”

Remembering I’d tossed my journal in the bottom of my bag before I left the house, I dug it out and riffled through page after page of notes about spells.

Some I’d mastered in childhood, like making plants grow and mending holes in clothes and fixing broken household items and replacing stolen desserts before my sister and I got in trouble.

Others I was still learning—because being a witch essentially meant a lifetime of learning—like how to heal a broken limb or break up LA traffic.

If only I had a spell for finding a spell.

But I didn’t, and no matter how many pages I flipped, I found not a single note about turning your manager into a cat. Or back into a person. Or shape-shifting at all, frankly. I hadn’t even known it was something I could do until ten minutes ago.

And just as I was about to scream at the top of my lungs, there was a knock on my trailer door.

“Willow?” A man’s voice. Deep, rumbling, instantly recognizable. “It’s Kit Hayes.”

Kit Hayes. Presumably coming here because I was now late for the party, where he thought we were going to connect ahead of the movie we would be starring in together. We hadn’t met face-to-face before, but we’d been in each other’s orbits long enough for Vera to get in his ear, apparently.

“Hi!” I shouted through the door, my voice unnaturally high in my state of panic.

“Are you ready?”

“Ready?” I asked, looking at cat Vera with wide eyes. “Ready for what, exactly?”

“The party?” He laughed, but only because he was confused and not because any of this was funny.

“Vera mentioned we might walk in together, you know, to drop a hint about the film.” Are you serious?

I mouthed to Vera. If cats could shrug, she would have.

“She said to drop by at nine, but I can come back if it’s a bad time. ”

“What is wrong with you?” I whisper-yelled at her, trying to keep my hands from flailing around and casting any other spells.

“What was that?” Kit asked through the door.

“Oh, not you! Sorry, just, uh, finishing up a phone call. Just a second.” In an effort to appear normal, I flung the door open, which I immediately realized was a mistake.

I hadn’t seen Kit this up close before, and he was even hotter in real life than he was on the screen.

Tall, angular, impeccably dressed, leaning against the doorjamb of the trailer with his hand high above my head.

For a fraction of a second, I understood Vera’s vision.

Until my stomach jumped and the lights flickered and I felt a familiar, dangerous sizzling in my fingertips. At least this time I had a warning.

“Hi, I’m so sorry, I’m going to have to meet you there,” I sputtered, trying to keep my smile from wavering despite the increasing terror at whatever was about to happen.

When I started to close the door and he slapped his big hand against it before it shut in his face, I felt my hair stand on end. Stay calm, Willow. Come on.

Normally, I could come face-to-face with a hot guy and not have to worry the sky was falling. But since I was already in a state, and the currents were still racing through my veins and this trailer and the air between us, I was fighting an uphill battle.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I can wait if you want, or I can—”

“I’m fine!” More shaking. A dull buzzing sound. A warning meow from Vera. “I’ll meet you there!” I pushed the door back against his hand, and he let it slam, the sound ricocheting obnoxiously between us. I knew I was being rude, but what was the alternative?

With my back against the door and the atmosphere seeming to settle now that Kit was out of sight, my breathing returned to normal. Well, normal was relative. My breathing returned to what it had been before, which still wasn’t great. I needed to make some moves.

“All right, Vera, you’re going to hate this, but we have to go.

” I unzipped my gown and dropped it in a heap on the floor, and I could have sworn she gasped.

“I can’t go out there and leave you in here like this, can I?

” Silence. “Exactly. And the solution to this isn’t in this trailer, so we need to get the hell out of Dodge before I turn anyone else into a household pet. ”

I changed back into my street clothes, relieved to trade my stilettos for my well-loved Sambas and the gown for sweatpants and a crew neck, and called my driver. He was in front of the trailer before I even knew where we were going, but I knew it needed to be far from here.

With Vera in my arms and my hat pulled low in the hopes that no one (especially the vicious paparazzi) saw me sneaking away from the party, I slipped into the back of the car and took out my phone to do what I always did in moments when I needed guidance or comfort: listen to an old voicemail from my grandmother.

It took only a minute of scrolling to find the one I was looking for. May 1, 2009. The one I listened to every time something went wrong. Really wrong. I clicked Play and immediately relaxed into the sound of her voice, turning the volume up in case somehow Vera could hear it, too.

Hi, Wills. It’s me, Granny Annie. I heard what happened at school today. Being magic is hard, isn’t it? Even at my age, I still lose control sometimes. Remember last Thanksgiving? Boy, was that a scene.

The memory made me laugh every time. Granny accidentally had a few too many, and before any of us knew it, the turkey was climbing out of the roasting pan and threatening my mother with a steak knife.

You don’t have to call me back or anything, she continued, but I wanted you to hear this, so listen close.

Your powers are a gift, my girl. Even when they feel like a curse.

And ultimately, your magic has nothing to do with what spells you can and cannot conjure at all.

You are the magic, Wills. The spells will work themselves out.

And even if they don’t, we’ll always have something to laugh about, and there are far worse things than that.

And if you find yourself really in a bind, you know I’m always here, darling. Our magic might not be transferable, but I’ll always find a way to help you. And if I can’t—

I knew the voicemail by heart, which meant I knew the exact words that were coming next. Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner?

—Coven and Codex can. I know, I know, London is a long way from California.

But trust me. If I can’t sort you out, the bookshop can.

Come to think of it, bookshops are always the answer, aren’t they?

Oh, listen to me, rambling away like an old bat.

I love you, honey. And I don’t want what happened today, or in the past, or whatever happens in the future to make you doubt your magic.

Okay? Give me a call if you need me. Okay, I love you. Bye-bye.

Of all the times I’d listened to the voicemail, I’d never once internalized the bit about the bookstore.

I’d never thought Gran wouldn’t be around to answer my questions, so I never bothered to make a plan B.

But in classic Granny Annie fashion, she made the plan B.

It had been sitting in my voicemail this whole time.

And with sudden, crushing clarity, I knew exactly where we needed to go.