Page 6

Chapter Six

It should have hit me the moment I’d walked into the cottage. The Eternal Flame was gone.

When I went in, the cool air should have set off every alarm bell in my being. The cottage was always warm – not warm, it was hot . You never needed more than a T-shirt; the raging Eternal Flame kept us hot in winter and scorching in summer. Now the cottage was cold and dim.

I stared at the empty fireplace, my mouth open in disbelief. The grand structure with the runes carved into its stone was empty. There were no logs in it – there never were – the Eternal Flame needed no combustible fuel.

The Flame was inherently magical. There were rarely licks of anything as pedestrian as red and orange; it changed colour all the time, from the brightest white to emerald and purple. Sometimes I used to lose a whole afternoon watching it shift and swirl. But there were no flames changing colours now, just grey stone. The fireplace was cold and empty. Completely, utterly bare. Not a flicker of fire to be seen.

‘How?’ I turned to Maddie, eyes wide. ‘What the hell happened?’

She wrung her hands. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said quickly. ‘I couldn’t! You know that. You remember all the times we tried to put it out as kids...’

She was right. If you told three boisterous kids that something was impossible, you could bet your life they’d try to prove you wrong. In our case that impossible task was extinguishing the Eternal Flame. We’d tried buckets of water, buckets of ash, blowing really hard – yes, that one was stupid, but we were young and operating with the logic of children, which is to say no logic at all.

With hindsight, what we’d done was idiotic. If we’d somehow succeeded, we’d probably have been grounded for eternity.

We hadn’t considered that the Flame’s power helped maintain the most powerful wards in the village; I wasn’t even sure if we’d understood that Witchlight Cove remained hidden because of the Flame. We wanted to prove we were stronger than this supposedly all-powerful magic. Spoiler alert: we weren’t.

‘When?’ I stuttered, my brain still frozen with shock, guilt and horror because I was the freaking guardian and I’d abandoned my post, and now the Flame was gone . ‘ When did it go out?’ I still couldn’t tear my eyes away from the fireplace. I must have looked into it a thousand times before and not once had it been this desolate.

‘A week ago.’ Maddie swallowed hard. ‘I thought maybe it would come back. The wards around the village haven’t dropped, so I thought it was a glitch.’

She was right: I’d felt the barrier as we’d arrived. Surely if it hadn’t fallen, the Eternal Flame must be nearby? Could it have been stolen? But alarms would have been sent to all the covens if someone had tried to steal it, and that hadn’t happened.

The Flame was supposedly impossible to extinguish, so what did that leave? I refused to accept that it had simply gone out.

Maddie continued. ‘I kept waiting for it to come back of its own accord, but with Banks making his proposals to the council I started getting worried.’

At the sound of the developer’s name, I turned to look at her. ‘You think he had something to do with it?’ I asked sharply, cogs finally whirring. ‘If he wants to take over the place, maybe he wants to show that we’re unfit to hold the guardianship.’ At that moment it would have been hard to argue with him, even in my own head. ‘The Guardian Who Abandoned Her Post and Let the Eternal Flame Mysteriously Vanish’ wasn’t exactly a glowing endorsement.

It had been a mistake to leave the Flame in Maddie’s care. Even so, it wasn’t her fault it was gone but mine. She wasn’t a Stonehaven; I was.

I thought about the guilt and fear I’d felt from her; she’d been tying herself in knots over this for a full week. My own guilt deepened.

‘I thought he might have something to do with it,’ Maddie admitted slowly. ‘But if he has, why hasn’t he already gone to the council and told them? As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t even been inside the house yet.’

‘And now we definitely can’t let him in!’ I said, alarmed. ‘No one can come into the house until we know what’s going on.’

The relief that billowed from her was so strong it almost took my breath away. She was passing the torch back to me, so to speak, and her feeling was understandable. The unfamiliar responsibility settled over me like a stone shroud. ‘Okay. We need a plan. Who else knows?’ I asked. ‘Have you told Yanni?’

Maddie shook her head. ‘No. Nana has enough to deal with – she’s basically running the police station on her own. She has Dove, but they’re a two-woman team trying to police the whole village. The last thing I wanted to do was burden her with this.’

‘True,’ I agreed. ‘And she’d probably let the covens know.’ Yanni was a stickler for rules and regulations; she’d want to do the ‘right’ thing, which was to be open and transparent. I wanted neither; I wanted to be very opaque and secretive, thank you very much.

‘Exactly. It can’t get back to the covens,’ Maddie said. ‘You know how they are about me – they barely treat me as a real witch as it is. They’ll start persecuting me immediately!’

I grimaced. ‘You and me both.’

Our situations with the covens were very different, but neither of us was nestled into their bosoms. As a guardian, my mother – and subsequently me – had to stay impartial, much the same way Yanni had to be as the chief of police when she dealt with the different magical residents. As for Dad, I’d always thought he didn’t care about being in a coven; despite being powerful he seemed to dislike using his magic and avoided it when he could. He didn’t want a coven to increase his power when he didn’t care about power in the slightest. Knowledge was his thing; he loved to learn and to teach.

Maddie’s situation was stickier than mine. Both Yanni and her mum were shifters, but Maddie’s dad was a merperson. Despite being only a quarter witch from her grandfather, she’d somehow ended up with a witch’s alchemical powers but the covens didn’t really consider her to be one of their own. They tolerated her because of Yanni, but they’d probably rather have had me join them than her, and that was saying something.

Unfortunately, the six covens were linked to every person in the village. Some had grandchildren who are half-werewolf or daughters-in-law who were sirens – but they’d all got a connection to the magical community.

‘If the covens find out the Flame’s gone out, there’ll be panic. Riots,’ I said quietly. The village took bad news poorly.

‘I know. Who’d have thought it would have been a good thing for you and me to be ostracised?’ Maddie gave a strained smile. We were lucky that the wards still seemed to be in working order – but that begged the question where on earth was the Flame if it was still doing its job? Because it sure as hell wasn’t in the grate.

Maddie blew out a long breath. ‘I think one of us needs to be here at all times to keep out intruders, to stop them from finding out the truth.’

The property had extensive wards at the best of times, but they ran on the Eternal Flame’s energy and if it wasn’t here we could well be sitting ducks. A lock would keep most people out, but we couldn’t afford for anyone to find out about its absence until we had a plan to get it back. Right now we had sweet FA. ‘I agree,’ I said without hesitation.

‘Great.’ She checked her watch and grimaced. ‘I need to be at the fayre in twenty minutes, at least for the first couple of hours.’

‘So I’m on the first shift?’

Guilt washed over her again. ‘I’m sorry to do this to you, Bea. I’ll be back as soon as I can but, like I said, I know there are some mermaids waiting, and some shifter parents, too.’

‘Shifter parents?’ My eyebrows raised. ‘Why do they want your help?’

‘It’s a long story,’ she said. ‘They’re only small jobs, but every little helps, doesn’t it?’

We were fifteen when Maddie had realised she had the rare ability to harness the power of the Eternal Flame to create wards; Dad had surmised that had happened because she’d spent her life around it. Her problem had been transporting power from the Flame to the person who needed it.

It was the rebellious teenagers in us that came up with the idea of magical tattoos. Maddie learned that she could use the Flame to create ink then tattoo the ward onto someone’s skin; as long as it was visible, the magic worked. Over time the tattoos faded and needed to be re-inked if someone wanted to keep them; that was a great marketing tool because she always had repeat business.

‘You go,’ I said firmly. ‘Eva and I are—’ I stopped mid-sentence as a thought struck me. ‘Maddie, have you been making all your wards without the Eternal Flame?’ My heart clenched. ‘You haven’t been...? You haven’t been doing…?’ I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.

As she stared at me, I knew she could tell exactly what I was thinking. Offering the most watery of smiles, she shook her head. ‘Don’t worry. No sorcery has taken place within these walls. I swear it.’

I exhaled in relief though I didn’t entirely relax. ‘So what have you been doing?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been giving the magic a bit more in return,’ she said vaguely.

I frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that I would never abuse magic and you should know that!’ Her voice was sharp.

This time, the guilt I felt was solely my own. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ I reached out to touch her arm. ‘I’m sorry.’

The tension eased from her frame. Given the rush she’d been in only a minute before, I assumed she was about to leave but she moved closer and wrapped her arms around me. It was the first time we’d hugged since I’d left Witchlight Cove a decade ago.

Tears pricked behind my eyes and I wasn’t sure if they were happy or sad ones. All I knew was that I was never letting us go this long without seeing each other again.

We pulled apart. ‘I’ll stay in touch if I need anything,’ she said briskly, surreptitiously dashing tears from her cheeks. ‘The ward on the house should hold for a little while longer.’ She smiled. ‘I guess you should reacquaint yourself with the house.’

She looked down at Eva and her smile widened. My dog had already made herself very much at home: she’d climbed on the sofa, rolled around on the flowery fabric and now she was stretched out. A thin sheen of yellow fur was already coating the cushions. If the Eternal Flame ever did come back, it would probably have a layer of dog hair on it, too.

‘Maddie,’ I called as she reached the door. ‘Bring back a pasty for me and Eva, will you?’

She winked. ‘I’ll see what I can do. You want anything else?’

I glanced at the cold, empty fireplace and exhaled slowly. ‘Yeah. Bring back a bloody miracle while you’re at it.’