Page 11 of Uncharmed
Chapter Six
THE STRAY
Annie, sensing in the pricking of her thumbs that it was going to be a popular Monday for the cherry buns in particular, had taken herself off to the kitchen to whip up another tray of the favourites in preparation.
As soon as customers spotted them behind the counter, studded with plump currants and coated in their glistening snowdrift of icing, they were (understandably) powerless to resist. It may also have had something to do with the nifty cosiness enchantment that Annie folded into the flour, the pillowy dough leaving customers comforted as every soft mouthful conjured the precise sensation of being wrapped up in a duvet on a cold winter’s night.
The freshly baked buns were warm and yellow gold.
Annie summoned the enormous punnet of cherries from the cupboard to finish each one with a flourish of shiny red, like a kiss.
But before she could place the first gem into the icing, her attention was caught by a speck of rogue magic in the corner of her eye, skipping its way across the countertop like a rolling penny.
It wasn’t her own; it didn’t reflect pink.
Funnily enough, her first thought was Pari.
Wherever it came from, the spark of magic halted at the tub of cherries.
She squinted more closely, feeling slightly like she was going mad, but they really were moving.
Quivering, little blurred dashes of polished red that trembled in the tub like shaken marbles.
The cherries began to levitate and flew across the wooden worktop to scatter themselves across the buns.
They hopped to and fro, before settling with purpose.
Eventually, Annie understood. They spelled out a distinct, red message in the white icing.
Hecate House requests you.
The coven.
As Selcouth’s communication went, it was relatively subtle, which Annie was grateful for.
She had warned the communications department several times that their delivery was often ill-timed and inconsiderate to a witch based in this non-wicche realm.
In the past, Selcouth had scrawled messages with levitating chalk across the Celeste menu board in front of a bustling cafe.
Annie had caused mild disaster, diving across the counter at breakneck speed to grab the chalk for herself.
They’d made messages appear in scatterings of flour while Faye was helping her bake, stamped the star-shaped crest through baguettes like sticks of rock, even animated a gingerbread man once to pass on their request. That one had required all of Annie’s most skilled powers of distraction, bursting into very loud song to divert everyone’s eyes from a tiny iced gentleman shouting into his biscuit megaphone.
‘I wonder what they could want,’ Annie muttered to herself, picking off the cherries and moving them to where they were supposed to sit in the centre of the buns.
An unexplained summons from anyone always set fire to the embers of her anxieties, reinforcing that constant, smarting feeling that she was in trouble for something, but one from the coven was particularly unnerving.
She wiped her fingers absent-mindedly on her apron.
As far as she could calculate and as far as she could rely on the spell, she hadn’t done anything wrong – even if it felt like she must have done.
Selcouth had a tendency to err on the side of dramatic, but whatever the reason, a coven summons meant a long night ahead.
She glanced up at the clock and calculated how best to split her time for the rest of the day.
She had just about finished the buns in time for the rush, but she couldn’t clock off yet, Faye and Pari would be run off their feet.
What felt like days ago, she had stopped to inhale a lunchtime sandwich in a matter of seconds, while she juggled the eggs delivery (thankfully not literally) and navigated the celebration cake collections simultaneously.
And she’d promised a tray of cupcakes to Mrs Harris for her daughter’s birthday.
..A little bit of magic could speed up that process, at least.
A flicker of pink sparks sent equipment flying through the air to ready itself in front of her, while rows of paper cake cases lined up neatly in rainbow order.
A box of eggs landed to her left and each one waited patiently on the edge of her mixing bowl to dive in gracefully like synchronized swimmers.
A heavy sack of sugar huffed and wheezed its way across the kitchen with great effort, clutching onto the edge of the stool at the halfway point to take a breather.
Annie could leave those ingredients to work while Faye and Pari were occupied and, luckily, she kept her coven uniform stowed neatly beside her dress rack, hidden underneath the pie dishes for safe keeping.
The lilac dusk had turned into night across the city and Annie could finally take notice of the summons.
It was much later than she’d intended to set off for Hecate House and she knew that the delay would not be well received.
But the perfection that Splendidus Infernum provided did not extend any further than affecting her own self, which meant the inevitable, imperfect ways of life could not always be avoided.
A huddle of teenage girls had rocked up to Celeste after school and nursed thick, frothy strawberry milkshakes for hours while they filled the cafe with laughter.
Annie didn’t want to rush them, watching from the corner of her eye with a wistful smile.
They seemed to melt into one another, the girls speaking a different language of inside jokes and references that anybody else would struggle to understand.
It felt impossible to think that she could ever be so relaxed with her friends, so herself around anybody.
Precious moments of girlhood like that were not something to be rushed, so she’d let them stay in the bay window until they dragged themselves home for dinner.
She sent each of them away with one of her sprinkle-covered, wish-laced sugar cookies for good measure and, in a fair exchange, they’d told her that they liked her shimmery eyeshadow.
Annie wrapped her arms around herself tightly.
Her breath bloomed in front of her, patent heels catching the orange bursts of streetlights as she walked.
She passed the local bookshop where she would often drop in samples for the booksellers, the newsagents that always saved a copy of her favourite fashion magazine, the only dry cleaners that she ever trusted with her jackets.
Even magic couldn’t fluff up feathered cuffs like they did.
The latest incarnation of the London entrance to Hecate House, changing every full moon to prevent discovery by non-wicchefolk, had proven to be a handy one that month, just a short walk from Celeste to the local playground of all places.
The entry gate, plump carved pumpkins adorning either side and Halloween bunting strung through the railings, was locked at night, but a quick spell made light work of that.
Everything around felt earthy and damp, the flowerbeds all swollen with rain.
Crisp leaves freshly shaken down had softened to a chocolate cake mixture underfoot, so Annie picked her way carefully along to avoid her heels slipping.
The playground was deserted but for a skinny fox who was nuzzling his way through the bin.
He debated scarpering when Annie set foot inside, but his senses evidently picked up on the safe presence of magic and he returned to his treasure hunt.
As a gust of wind breathed through the chestnut trees, the roundabout circled in a slow churn and two swings swayed back and forth, their rusty chains clinking.
Annie ducked her head underneath the climbing frame, feeling the cold, flaking paint beneath her fingers.
She stepped towards the hopscotch, but stopped short of placing her feet inside the first square to pull the cloak and hat from her bag.
Both were neatly folded in dust bags and she unfurled each item of Selcouth uniform with great care.
The pointed coven hat would never be her accessory of choice, but she had made the best of it, adding a billowing pink organza ribbon to the brim, which she fastened in a neat bow beneath her chin.
The coven cloak, however, was a thing of beauty.
Whoever had first designed it all those years ago had Annie’s full seal of approval in sorcery style.
A billowing piece of velvet that reached the floor, it made her feel somewhere between a celestial witch and a woodland princess.
Traditionally purple, she had subtly tinkered with hers to have, of course, more of a pink tinge to its glimmer.
The fabric was embroidered with the most delicate details of the night sky’s constellations, so finely sewn that it looked like a scattering of starlight itself.
She had always felt that starlight was powerful.
Each witch, warlock or wicche’s cloak was their own bespoke design, so that the pattern revealed the night sky’s alignment at the moment of their birth.
Annie had plenty of beloved pieces sitting pretty in her wardrobe, but the cloak trounced them all.
Fastening it at her collarbone with the mother of pearl brooch that she had added, Annie gave a determined and high-pitched ‘ hmm ’. It was time to enter Hecate House.
‘Three.’
She muttered it to herself as she stretched her right leg across the hopscotch with an inelegant jump, skipping the first two boxes entirely. Her heels landed on the chalked tarmac with a clip-clop. Coordination was not her strong suit and she was glad that nobody was around to witness it.
‘Seven, then nine,’ she reminded herself with a wobbly leap into the seventh box, teetering in her shoes as she stretched to land safely inside of it, then took a step into number nine.
‘And thirteen.’