Page 40 of Uncharmed

Chapter Eighteen

FAMILIAR SCENES

M aeve woke up tired and cranky, but Annie knew that it was only because she was smarting from the embarrassment of being so vulnerable – not a trait that came naturally to the girl.

Annie had heard her up even before she was, treading the creaky floorboards to make snacks and sit outside on the porch as the dawn broke.

She had turned down the offer of short-distance transference and even trying her first tarot-card pull, which was when Annie knew there was something really wrong.

Instead, she seemed compelled to just draw.

Maeve set up camp at the dining table with her sketchbooks and pencils, drawing with a fervour as though her arms were separate from the rest of her body, head bent low over the table so that her dark hair hid her work.

It was only when she resurfaced, leaned back against her chair to stretch her wrist and assess her art, that Annie caught a glimpse of the drawing.

It was the same character again that Maeve seemed to draw for comfort, the dark-haired girl who always cropped up in her work.

Annie busied herself with the butter and sugar that she had begun to work on while Maeve was content.

It was quiet across the cottage and its meadow .

Annie too felt insular and reticent, a little shocked by the realization that she had come to about her future without Splendidus Infernum .

A little treat was the only answer for it all.

It felt good to sink her hands into the sandy mixture, to be baking for pleasure, not under pressure.

Time seemed to stand still and watch on with a small, secretive smile at Arden Place.

‘You drew that?’ Hal asked, stopping as he passed through the house with a giant bucket of freshly picked, extra shiny red apples slotted onto his shoulder.

Maeve only nodded, flexing her fingers around her pencil.

He raised his eyebrows to silently ask for permission and, when Maeve didn’t object, he raised the sketchbook and held it towards the window to admire it more closely.

‘That settles it,’ he said gruffly. ‘We’re sending you out onto the streets to earn your keep, kid. You’ll make us millions.’

Maeve blushed at the Hal-style compliment and let out a self-conscious snort of a laugh.

It was the first smile she’d shown all day.

Something about Hal’s relaxed, comfortable nature had clicked for her as much as it had for Annie.

Maeve dropped the secrecy around her art whenever he asked about it.

He had already insisted on hanging above the fireplace the canvas she had created with her paint magic, and asked her to recreate the sky sketches she’d produced among the stars.

Having come to understand his strange, thoughtful candour a little more, Annie was grateful for it.

It seemed to wrap a blanket around her own anxious, tightly wound presence, softening her sharpest edges in ways that she hadn’t known she needed.

‘A friend of yours?’ Hal asked, tapping the sketch as he returned it to Maeve.

‘Sort of. I guess she is,’ Maeve replied.

He didn’t push it, only giving his signature ‘ hmm ’ in return.

He shuffled the bucket of apples back onto his shoulder, shooting Annie a lingering, pensive look before he left, which made her pause.

‘We should talk,’ he called to her decidedly while stepping out onto the porch.

She gave him a small nod from the kitchen, which he returned with a hat tip as he marched off across the meadow.

Annie glanced back to Maeve, who was tapping the pencil rapidly as she contemplated her work from all angles. The suffocating guilt from her realization that the hex was wreaking havoc with Maeve still clung hotly.

For the first time since beginning her pact with Splendidus Infernum , when she was just Maeve’s age herself, Annie had vowed not to take a bath before bed.

The looming prospect was already making her feel slightly sick, rather ironically filling her with an anxiety that matched the level of worry she normally felt on everybody else’s behalf because of the spell.

The possibilities of what this might really mean, who she might become and what might come crashing down around her, were too vast to allow herself to consider.

Who was she if she allowed herself not to be perfect?

What even was the alternative? She crumbled the butter and added an extra generous dash from her jar of serendipity cinnamon.

She would need all the good fortune she could get.

‘What are you making?’ While Annie’s thoughts dragged her to a far-off place, Maeve wandered into the kitchen and leaned in beside her.

‘Friendship fancies. They’re mainly to cheer you up, but I also thought they might be useful in getting to know Hal a little better. He still feels like a bit of a mystery, don’t you think?’

‘Not really,’ Maeve said with a shrug.

‘Oh. Well. They look very pretty on a doily, but the drizzle is also my secret alchemy blend to strengthen a friendship. Grains of paradise, rose quartz reflection, moonlight milk for ease and harmony...’ Maeve pulled a face.

‘Don’t worry, it still tastes of chocolate,’ Annie explained.

‘It just helps to bring out the potential of a blossoming bond. He’s such a closed book, but this should help.

We don’t even know where the warlock wanders off to every day.

’ She gave a determined nod, pleased with herself for the idea.

‘I know,’ Maeve said. ‘He goes to the stables.’

Annie hesitated. ‘He does?’ Then hesitated again. ‘We have stables?’

Maeve didn’t seem to be listening too closely, more concerned with dunking a teaspoon into the bowl full of fondant icing. ‘Are these like the French ones? I like the pink ones best.’

Annie smiled, unable to not take that as a personal compliment. ‘Me too.’

They worked together in a comfortable, caffeine-accompanied silence, the scent of coffee and vanilla sponge stitching together sweetly.

Maeve occasionally piped up with an undiplomatic question out of the blue.

How would it feel to walk into Hecate House?

Scary, but spellbinding. What were Annie’s friends really like?

Funny. High maintenance. Unpredictable. Did she miss her parents?

Every day. Was she going to go back to the bakery?

Of course. She loved working with Faye and Pari, though she was constantly chasing her tail.

Why did she keep working there, then? Because she couldn’t just start all over again.

Of course she could, Maeve reasoned. Annie didn’t have a comeback for that.

‘Come on, enough of the interrogation for today,’ Annie said, giving Maeve a gentle shoulder shove. ‘Let’s take these out to the resident lumberjack pirate cowboy. He likes you better than he likes me.’

Maeve raised a sceptical eyebrow, as though Annie had said something entirely obtuse. ‘Oh, you’re serious? You’re even more oblivious than I thought, then.’

‘Oblivious to what?’

Maeve blew her lips together in a scoff, then shoved a whole friendship fancy into her mouth whole. She held her hands up, as though she couldn’t possibly answer with a mouthful of cake, and wandered off back to her artwork with a grin.

Balancing a tiny pink saucer of tiny pink cakes on a tiny pink doily, Annie carefully made her way out to the stables, after Maeve helpfully pointed out their location as somewhere between the stream and.

..well, trees. Annie picked her way through the long grass, squealing every few moments when her ballet pumps encountered a muddy puddle, until she gave up and used a quick dash of magic to switch to her pink wellies instead.

After a small run-in with an army of toads at the stream, which almost sent her running straight back to London, Annie discovered that Maeve was right.

The small, rickety stables of Arden Place were tucked well away and woven into the woods.

Nestled within the trunks of two impossibly large, hollowed-out oak trees, the stables were surrounded by thick, knotted roots, which formed a fence that opened up onto the back of the meadow as strings of flame-like will-o’-the-wisps cast a calming, supernatural glow between the surrounding silver birches.

Drinking contentedly from a crystal-clear thread of stream that looped around the stables was a beautiful, dappled red-brown horse, the colour of conkers and identical to Hal’s hair.

She soon found the warlock, too. Hal was slumped back in a camping chair, one leg slung over the other, Stetson pulled low over his face.

Annie watched as he chewed on a mouthful of apple while he read a book, then held out the same apple for the horse to snaffle the rest of it.

It seemed to be a finely tuned routine that they’d repeat every few minutes.

When the stallion returned for the next snack, Hal gave him an absent-minded stroke on his muzzle.

It was such a contented scene that Annie felt reluctant to disturb it.

She let it hold for a precious moment, appreciating it, capturing it for herself, before she cleared her throat.

Hal immediately threw the book away and leapt to his feet so suddenly that the horse reared back onto its hind legs with a startled whinny. Realizing it was Annie, Hal dropped his defences and gave a gruff throat-clear. He turned to soothe the horse.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt Boys’ Club,’ she said. ‘I come bearing gifts.’

‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s a bad idea to creep up on a warlock and his familiar? You’re asking for trouble.’

Annie didn’t know what she’d anticipated Hal’s familiar to be (an ill-tempered honey badger, maybe, or a slightly cantankerous ass), but a majestic, noble stallion was not it. ‘ This is your familiar?’ She took a few uncertain steps closer.