“On a weekend? That’s not like him.”

“I suspect he decided to set off on an adventure,” said Jasmine. “His coat and bicycle are missing.”

This struck Sera as suspicious. Theo, who tended to stay up late reading and normally stumbled yawning into the kitchen after everyone else had already finished breakfast, was not the sort of child who decided to embark on adventures at dawn.

“I’ll text him,” Sera said, mouth full of jammy toast. “He never goes anywhere without his phone.”

A moment later, the merry trill of an alert echoed from Theo’s bedroom above them and proved that this was not in fact the case. Where could he possibly have gone, and why wouldn’t he have taken his phone with him?

“Where’s Clemmie?” Sera demanded suddenly.

“If I had to guess, asleep,” said Jasmine, always prepared to believe the best of everyone.

Sera, who was not by any means prepared to believe the best of anyone, let out an unladylike snort. Before she could put her mind to the mystery of where Theo and Clemmie might be, however, a piercing, plaintive cry pealed across the garden.

“SERAAAAA!”

Sera had no one to blame for this but herself.

She could have abandoned the inn years ago.

She could, at this very moment, be living on one of those tiny islands off the coast of Norway with only a polar bear for company.

She’d decided to stay. She’d decided to take on more and more of the running of the inn.

And she’d cast the spell that had brought people like Matilda and Nicholas to her door.

Sera had made her bed.

If only she could go lie in it.

“Could you call Alex for me?” she said to Jasmine, shoving her socked feet into the pair of red wellies by the back door. Alex was Theo’s best friend, so it stood to reason that their house was the most likely place he’d be.

“SEHHH-RAAAA!”

Sera clomped out into the cold and sun, making her way down the garden to the spot where, fifteen years ago, Jasmine had died.

The garden hadn’t changed a whole lot since then.

The stone patio right outside the kitchen had new raised beds for herbs and edible flowers, there was now a chicken coop near the beehive, and Matilda had dug herself a vegetable patch.

Other than that, time had more or less stood still.

The orchard of fruit trees was still there.

The grass was still too long and the wildflowers too wild.

Sera came to a halt beside the vegetable patch, which was near to bursting with the colours of its harvest. There was a wheelbarrow beside it, as well as a trowel, a bright red watering can, and a wooden stool topped with a teapot and cup.

It was an idyllic picture, so long as you ignored the two people glowering at each other right in the middle of it.

The first of the two was Matilda, a smallish and oldish Black lady who had arrived almost two years ago, pronounced the inn perfect, and had never left.

She was the first of Sera’s guests who had seamlessly segued into becoming a lodger.

Clad in brown dungarees, she had a straw hat wedged over her cloud of grey corkscrew curls and was pointing an accusing finger at her archnemesis. “Sera, make him go away!”

“Malik,” Sera said, exasperated, “I love seeing you every Saturday, I do, but you know what would make me love the experience even more? If you gave me the week’s delivery without making Matilda’s voice go all high and screechy first!”

Malik, the extremely fetching archnemesis in question, pointed to the vegetable patch.

“I’m a farmer!” Unlike the rest of them, with their mix of accents, his voice was all Lancashire.

“There’s a time and a place for minding your own business, but the sight of cabbages and peppers planted side by side isn’t it! ”

“Now you listen to me, my boy,” Matilda cut in, before Sera could reply. “If I wanted your advice, I’d ask for it! I am in the twilight of my life! I have earned the right to grow my vegetables, hunt for mushrooms, eat eight meals a day, and sing rousing drinking songs without interruption!”

“Rousing—” Malik cut a look at Sera, obviously trying to decide whether to be annoyed, incredulous, or simply delighted that he was thirty-eight and had been referred to as a boy.

Feeling that his sensibilities, so offended by the cabbages and peppers, might go either way, Sera intervened.

“Quit it, both of you,” she said. “This week, it’s the cabbages.

Last week, it was the sunflowers. I don’t care how many crimes against gardening Matilda commits, Malik!

You’re just going to have to learn to not look!

And as for you,” she went on, spinning round to Matilda, “Malik has a job to do and other places to go to. If you don’t want him examining your handiwork, don’t waylay him every time he walks through the gate! ”

“I waylay him because a farmer should appreciate excellent produce when he sees it!” Matilda insisted. “Look at those pumpkins! Look at my precious babies! They’re perfect! But did he mention the pumpkins? No! He couldn’t get past the cabbages!”

“ And the peppers,” Malik reminded her. He clutched the old key hanging around his neck as if it were a talisman that might protect him from the horrors before him. “And are those artichokes?”

“I like the artichokes,” said Sera.

“Jesus, it’s a miracle any of this has grown.”

Sera, who snuck out in the dead of night twice a week to cast reviving spells on Matilda’s beloved plants with the minuscule amount of magic she had left, said nothing.

“You don’t deserve to have such beautiful cheekbones,” Matilda informed him, snatching the teapot off the stool. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to top up my tea and forage for mushrooms.”

Malik, who seemed both surprised and pleased by the tribute to his cheekbones, loped off in the direction of the van parked outside the gate. “You want to give me a hand with the crates? El sent you a massive pot of fahsa too.”

Sera bought all the inn’s fruit and veggies from Malik and his husband Elliot’s farm, which was quite a lot even when they didn’t have any extra guests.

It took the two of them two trips to move a handful of wooden crates and a tureen of Yemeni stew from Malik’s van to the kitchen.

After they were done, Sera pressed homemade honey into Malik’s arms and walked him out.

“Until next week, love.” Malik climbed into the driver’s seat. “As always, ta for supporting the efforts of your local farmers. El may be the better cook, but I take comfort in knowing I have the best cheekbones.”

Sera laughed. “Dinner on Wednesday?”

“We wouldn’t miss it.”

She watched him drive off, shielding her eyes against the sharp, angled sun. The last twenty minutes had left her with a throbbing pain precisely behind her left eyebrow. She shut her eyes, pressed the heel of her hand to the spot, and summoned the little magic she had left.

Most witches possessed a respectable amount of magic, enough to glamour an undead rooster or fix a broken chimney. Some had more than that. Some had less.

Sera, these days, had even less than less.

Years ago, when she had closed her eyes and reached for her magic, it had answered her instantly.

Now it took a moment or two. Now it was like standing in the dark, calling for help and hoping to see the glow of a rescuer’s lantern.

She was always afraid that this time would be the time she’d call, and call, and get no answer.

But there was still a little magic in her, and it answered. Just a few stubborn, twinkling constellations of stars. Not enough to glamour an undead rooster or fix a broken chimney. A headache, though? That , it could fix.

Sometimes Sera wondered what she’d have done if she had known what the resurrection spell would cost her before she’d cast it. She liked to think she’d have cast it anyway, that she’d have chosen Jasmine over her magic, but every now and then, in the guilty quiet of the night, she wondered.

“Bok!”

Apparently, Roo-Roo had lost interest in annoying the chickens.

Sera nudged him away from the open gate with the toe of one wellie.

The inn was at the bottom of a narrow, winding country lane that hardly anyone except delivery drivers and the occasional guest ever found themselves on.

Sheep-dotted farmland, wild woods, and green hills stretched out for miles around.

It was a half mile up the lane to the nearest pub and another mile beyond that to the nearest Tesco.

A zombie chicken, therefore, could probably slip through the open gate and meander around the nearby countryside for a bit without being noticed, but it was best not to take any chances.

Sera could do without breaking any more of the Guild’s laws.

She turned back to the house. It was a three-storey, 1840s hodgepodge of cream stone and brown brick, with multiple chimneys and sharply slanted red roofs long faded by the sun, and looked like it ought to belong to a Victorian dowager.

The ivy climbing the walls was so overgrown that very little of the original brick was visible.

The house was surrounded by low, weathered stone walls on all sides, and a shallow brook babbled its way past one corner.

The front of the inn faced the same winding lane as the back, just farther uphill, and above the front door swung an ancient sign that read Batty Hole Inn .

Sera was lucky fairy tales weren’t real, because a wolf could huff and puff and absolutely blow the whole thing down.

Moreover, the house needed lit fires and Sera’s heat spells for ten out of twelve months of the year, most of the furniture was old and worn, the hot water was a bit sputtery, the Wi-Fi was temperamental, and Clemmie left claw marks in the wood whenever she fancied a tantrum.