Page 13
The thing a great many witches never understood about magic was its heart.
It grew in the bones of witches, just as it had once grown in long-lost creatures like wyverns and six-tusked elephants, but what so many of those witches did not realise was that what it wanted was to be loved.
It could be tender in one witch’s hands and violent in another’s, it could be vast or it could be small, it could be a night sky or teeth or lightning, but the one thing that never changed was that what it sought and what it repaid, above all else, was love.
There had been a young girl, once, who had loved magic with every bit of her heart, and so, when she had needed it, magic had repaid her with a spell.
A spell that had transformed an inn into a flame in the dark, an outstretched hand to the ones falling over the edge and a warning to the ones pushing them.
No one could make sense of the spell. It wasn’t how spells were supposed to work.
And yet.
Albert Grey had spent years trying to understand Sera’s spell, or, rather, seething at its existence and trying to conjure something just as vast and unending for himself.
He had never been able to because Albert Grey ruled with a boot on the neck of anything and anyone he was ruling, including his own formidable magic, and what he had never realised was that his magic, recognising that it was not and had never been loved by the man who wielded it, had simply decided not to play along.
It did as it was told because it did, after all, have a boot on its neck, but it did not do one bit more.
Meanwhile, across the country, a certain innkeeper was about to discover that when you hold tight to the little magic you find, when years go by and the world loses much of its colour and still you refuse to forget the magic, magic will go out of its way to show you that it remembers you too.
When Luke got in his car, with Posy buckled into her booster seat in the back, and drove into the wild, hilly wilderness of Northumberland, he had the address of Verity’s cousin’s cottage in the car’s satnav and the most efficient route plotted out ahead of him.
(“You will arrive at your destination in three hours and six minutes,” said the satnav helpfully.)
The drive went just about how he’d expected it to, complete with two bathroom breaks and a stop for Chinese takeaway. In hindsight, given the way things had gone over the last few weeks, such a suspiciously smooth journey ought to have been a dead giveaway that everything was about to go tits up.
When they pulled up outside the cottage, all of the lights were on. That was Luke’s first sign that all was not as it should be.
The second sign was the literal sign outside the cottage that proudly announced that there was a dentist’s office within.
The final nail in the coffin was the dentist’s receptionist, who assured him that yes, he did have the right address, but also yes, this was indeed a dentist’s office, and no, she was not aware of any Verity Walter or any of said Verity Walter’s family members.
Naturally, Luke called Verity, who didn’t answer.
“I’m getting the impression she lied through her teeth,” Luke said to Posy. “What I haven’t yet worked out, though, is why.”
As she had more pressing matters at hand, specifically watching a YouTube video of someone going up and down a set of escalators in Sweden, Posy paid him no attention.
With no alternative but to accept the inevitable, Luke shook off his exhaustion, got back in the car, and started driving again.
He hadn’t yet decided whether to go back to the Guild or back to his parents’ house in Edinburgh, but as both were in the same general direction, he drove back along the route he’d used to get here and hoped he’d find the choice easier in a couple of hours.
Then, about ten minutes into this second trip, somewhere near a hamlet called Bay Horse, something very odd happened.
First, the satnav switched itself off and simply wouldn’t come back on. Moments later, when Luke felt around for his phone, it was unexpectedly and inconveniently out of reach in the passenger footwell.
“I guess we’re navigating the old-fashioned way, Posy.”
Signposts, however, weren’t easy to come by.
It was only just after five o’clock, but the clocks had just changed, and the nights had started sweeping in early, especially once you left behind the streetlights and lit windows of cities.
The rural roads were black as pitch. Luke aimed north, or tried to, but found that every time he reached a crossroads or came to a fork in a winding lane, there was always one particular direction that beckoned, that simply felt right .
Into a valley, around a bend, up a twisting lane, and then—
The headlights caught the movement of something small and white up ahead.
Since he expected to see a cat or rabbit (or, indeed, literally any other normal small animal), it took Luke a few extra seconds to clock that the creature standing in the middle of the road and inquisitively watching his car approach was, impossibly, bones .
“What the—”
Luke hit the brakes, and the car squealed to a halt very, very close to the bone creature. It gave a single, excited flap of its skeletal arms.
No, not arms. Wings.
Wait. Bones. Lancashire. Weird technical glitches. The way he’d driven this way just because . If he added all that to Verity’s inexplicable behaviour…
“Posy, stay put,” Luke said, unclipping his seat belt without taking his eyes off the bizarre bone creature.
“Stay put,” Posy agreed.
He’d barely taken a step away from the car when the sound of footsteps thudded from somewhere beyond the low stone wall nearby. A woman burst through a gap in the wall, ran right into the beams of his headlights, and scooped the bone bird into her arms.
In the few seconds before she dodged out of the beams of the lights again, Luke saw a jumble of pieces that didn’t quite resolve themselves into a whole.
An oversized, burnt-orange jumper falling off one shoulder.
Bronze skin. Long, dark waves of hair haloed in gold by light coming from somewhere behind her.
Black leggings and boots. Ragged, bitten fingernails on the hands clutching the bundle of bones to her chest. Wide brown eyes that reminded him of a deer on the verge of bolting.
Then the disjointed pieces snapped into place and Luke arrived at the unwelcome realisation that the face he was looking into, while older than he remembered it, was unmistakable.
“Of course it’s you,” he said, resigned. “Hello, Sera.”
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13 (Reading here)
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54