Page 12 of Uncharmed

Her feet landed side by side inside the final box of the drawing on the ground.

For a fraction of a moment, nothing happened at all.

Just the right amount of incidental, paused time passed for a child to hop straight out of the final box, if they happened to follow that same unlikely sequence with their feet.

Enough time for them to safely jump out of the drawing before they would ever notice how the paint suddenly shone with a magical reflection of the moonlight.

And how the words Tonitru, Fulgur, Pluvia twinkled back at the stars in an iridescent patch of puddled water.

Thunder, Lightning, Rain.

‘Come on, come on,’ Annie said with a pained expression.

She knew exactly what was coming. Her heart began to quicken.

She just about had time to tuck her hair behind her ears and lock her arms across her chest to brace before the asphalt beneath her feet unlatched itself.

The thirteenth square swung open like a trapdoor and Annie couldn’t help but squeal as she plummeted through the playground floor.

Her hair whipped upwards and behind her and she clung to the ribbon that secured her hat to her head.

After what she assumed must be a slow-motion charm to cushion the fall, Annie lost her footing only ever so slightly on the eventual landing.

Gracefully, she caught her balance against the pale stone walls, then smoothed her hair and gave the curls a perfunctory bounce, exhaling with triumph.

At least that dreaded plummet was over for another little while.

She peered way up at the entry just in time to see the tiny, far-off trapdoor close itself and shut off the last of the moonlight.

Annie headed further in, through the foyer to arrive at the atrium.

Selcouth’s headquarters boasted an array of beautiful décor, as was only appropriate for the home of the United Kingdom’s esteemed coven, but the atrium in particular could steal any witch’s breath.

The mosaic beneath her feet, depicting an otherworldly sun and moon, spanned the enormous round room.

Its domed roof was equally beautiful, lined with a blanket of radiant physical magic, as though each spark were stitched together in an iridescent quilt.

Annie couldn’t help but take a moment to admire it, quietly counting her blessings on every visit.

The cerulean blue of the tiles below provided a stunning clash to her fuchsia heels, she appreciated, and she waved at a cluster of witches who were passing by with greetings.

Pressed into the walls of the atrium were twelve doors and each bore its own giant bronze zodiac figure above, fastidiously guarding whatever lay behind it.

One wooden door was arched in a sharp point and a monstrous bronze scorpion was poised above, its pincers and tail curled into a threatening stance.

Annie softly waved a hand towards the middle of the door and a metallic clanging rang out through the hall as though she’d used an invisible door knocker.

‘Enter.’ A voice from within, after a thoroughly disapproving sigh, that sounded rather like it would prefer that whoever it was did the opposite of accepting their invitation.

‘Only me,’ Annie called brightly. She slipped off her coat from under the cloak and placed it on the hatstand, which bowed like a butler as it accepted her goods onto its arm.

Against the sombre, dark wood and gothic feel of the office, the pastel pink of her coat (and the rest of her ensemble) looked like some kind of universe malfunction.

‘There you are. I was beginning to wonder whether you’d been mauled by wild dogs.’

‘I’m not sure we get many of those around here, Morena. Mostly Labradors and spaniels, as far as I’ve noticed. Although I’m still not convinced that a children’s playground was the safest choice for the House to reincarnate itself.’

Annie glanced at the moon dial in the corner of Morena Gowden’s office.

A leaking patch of pale moonlight that waned through a gap in the high ceilings showed that it was precisely on the hour of eight.

Tiredness tapped behind Annie’s eyes. Her feet tingled and her lower back grumbled, but she shook it off as quickly as the spell would allow.

She was grateful as ever for the extra energy that Splendidus Infernum provided to supernaturally maximize her productivity.

She made a beeline for the corner desk that sat adjacent to Morena’s own and took her seat behind it.

She lined up her fluffy pen, pink notebook and a marshmallow-scented candle at perfect, perpendicular angles.

She lit the candle with a point of magic, then swept up a mountain of scrolls that had been added to the desk since her last visit.

Most importantly, she tucked the fluffy pen behind her ear to get into the spirit.

‘Quite on the contrary. Children don’t bat an eyelid when a fairy comes to remove a tooth previously lodged within their own skull, right from underneath their pillow as they sleep. The little miscreants are alarmingly relaxed with all manner of the supernatural.’

‘Oddly enough, that does make sense,’ Annie conceded.

‘And,’ Morena continued, not even glancing up from her work, ‘the cherry on top of the cauldron comes in the form of opportunity to scare the living daylights out of any little blighters who do fall in. I shall be appearing in their nightmares for years to come with any luck.’ Morena gave a rare smile at the thought.

Everything about the tall, spindly witch who Annie was apprentice to was razor sharp and intimidatingly immaculate, from the cut of her high cheekbones to the mathematically precise, silver-grey victory curl beneath the brim of her hat.

Her unfaltering, dark stare and the ghostly contrast of her deep burgundy lipstick gave Morena a sort of elegantly haunted look, which Annie had always considered extremely chic, if not slightly terrifying.

While the rest of the coven seemed to quake in their cloaks when Morena entered the room, Annie had always held an inexplicable soft spot for her.

It was Morena’s sister and fellow Sage Witch, Bronwyn, who Annie tried to avoid at all costs, a little sceptical of her always-cheery disposition.

Her impossibly good nature felt somehow superhuman, strangely untrustworthy to Annie.

Either that or there was some sort of complicated, questionable spell afoot – something she knew about all too well.

Annie squinted cautiously as she unfurled the first of her papers.

Now in her second year of apprenticeship, having sailed through Selcouth’s endarkenment trial, her time at Hecate House was largely spent buried underneath mountains of ancient books for research, with Morena as her counsel.

Most of the work was done remotely to fit around her hectic Celeste schedule, visiting Hecate House only when she was summoned, but Tuesday nights usually took her to the depths of the library to turn page after dusty page, sometimes even triggering unex pected incantations.

Last week, she’d almost been hit square in the forehead by an ageing curse.

She’d squealed so loudly and suddenly that Morena had come flying in and thrown a protection spell across the room, smack-bang into the face of her own portrait above the fireplace.

She was furious about the damage and had decided that it was Annie’s fault entirely.

Annie was privately touched that she had leapt to her defence, but didn’t dare say it.

It would give Morena an aneurysm to think that she had inadvertently offered a kind gesture.

‘Speaking of nightmares...’ Morena looked up. ‘Don’t start on all of that yet, Andromeda.’

Annie swallowed. That was never a good conversation starter.

‘You’re probably curious as to the reason for your unscheduled summoning.

I fear our usual order of proceedings may have been halted for a time.

’ Morena tented her spindly fingers together, leaning on her desk.

Her left eyebrow was so sharply pointed that it almost pierced her hairline. ‘We have...a stray.’

Annie paused. Her pointing finger hovered in mid-air while magically rifling through the scrolls. As her concentration broke, the papers dropped into a heap. ‘A stray?’

‘So to speak. A girl. The poor waif has come into her magic and doesn’t know what to do with it. It seems to be causing rather a...predicament.’

‘The first of her family? That’s unusual,’ Annie replied cautiously.

‘Highly unusual,’ Morena said. ‘We haven’t had a new kindling of magical lineage for some time and we were certainly not anticipating one. Regrettably, we find ourselves rather ill prepared.’

‘That’s never good,’ Annie said nervously. It was very unlike Morena to miss a trick. She was usually full of tricks in fact, while Annie provided the treats. It was a partnership that was neatly witchy in that way.

‘The girl is an orphan. She currently resides in a foster home under the care of an elderly couple, non-wicche. In a rather inconvenient set of circumstances, the gentleman is now in hospital after she accidentally set the net curtains on fire.’

Annie gasped.

‘Not as dramatic as it sounds. The shock brought on a particularly nasty bout of angina for him.’

‘Were we not monitoring her development? I’m sure I remember a girl up north having her debut fairly recently...’ Annie’s mind wandered and she rifled through her top drawer to find the records that the coven kept of newly debuted wicche-folk.