Page 42 of Uncharmed

Chapter Nineteen

A BAD DAY

A nnie awoke the next morning with a startle that made her whole body twitch.

She flung out an arm with a violent jerk and bashed the bedside lamp from table to floor.

Half asleep, she snuffled a mini snore and bolted upright.

She licked her lips, finding them dry and a little chapped.

Lip balm, immediately. She smacked them together, noticing a slightly stale feeling in her mouth that tasted worse for wear.

Water, too. She could hear faint conversation and laughter downstairs between Maeve and Hal and the jangle of pots and pans being moved around the kitchen.

Had she really slept in? That almost never happened.

In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time that it had.

Annie was always the first awake, the one who made sure that everybody else’s day started perfectly.

Something wasn’t right. Her brow crumpled and she gave a small hiccough of a burp when she stretched.

Her hand shot to her mouth, mortified by the noise, and that was when she noticed.

The polish on her pinky finger was chipped. Genuinely, really chipped. A shard of the hot-pink paint completely missing in a jagged streak across her nail. Annie gasped.

Her hand moved to the top of her head and she touched her hair tenderly all over.

She could feel that it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

It was...messy? And unkempt? Her neat French braid had unravelled, flyaways sticking up every which way.

And there was...frizz. A lot of it. Her nose wrinkled and she faltered before taking an uncertain sniff of her pyjamas.

An actual, genuine, human-like scent emanated from her raised arm.

It certainly wasn’t vanilla or sugar or coconut.

‘Oh...no,’ Annie said, horrified. She scrambled out of bed, shoving the quilt to the floor, tripping over her own feet as she shot to the mirror. Her hands flew to the drawers below and she gripped the edge to steady herself as an awful, nauseating realization began to dawn.

‘Please, please. No, no no...’

She poked and prodded at her face. Streaks of purple had appeared in crescents under her eyes, days and months and years of almost no sleep revealing themselves.

Faint traces of worry lines had etched their way across her forehead, at her temples, between her mouth and nose.

Her eyes looked a little bloodshot, crumbs of sleepy dust settled into the corners.

Small flakes of mascara lined the lower lashes and, for the first time since she had been fifteen years old and immediately implemented Cutis Lumen magic on the case, one singular red spot had reared its head on the top of her left cheek.

Annie hadn’t expected it to change things so drastically or so quickly.

One measly evening cold turkey from the spell and she was already.

..imperfect? It was so unfair. Worse than imperfect – as if her body were making up for lost time as the spell drained from her system.

She was a complete mess. She let out a low, mournful wail that sounded slightly like a wounded animal.

She could not let Maeve or Hal see her like this.

Peering over the banister to scope out their whereabouts, Annie crept as quietly as she could downstairs, avoiding the specific steps she had noted as being exceptionally loud and creaky during midnight trips from the bathtub.

She could just about make out the blurry heads of Maeve and Hal sitting out on the porch together in the late morning sunshine.

They seemed to be scruffing the head of some kind of furry creature that had come to join their conversation.

She couldn’t quite focus on whatever it was, her usual 20/20 vision failing her.

Reluctantly, she fired her magic back towards the bedroom to summon her glasses.

‘Ow!’

One of the arms poked her straight in the eye as they flew into place. At least her magic still worked, she supposed.

Attempting to creep past unnoticed, Annie continued her silent descent of the stairs – until it wasn’t quite so silent.

Her fluffy socks slipped on the wood and she fell down the last few steps, making such a racket that Hal and Maeve’s heads spun towards the cottage.

They shot to their feet and sprinted inside, to find Annie clambering to her feet like a baby deer on ice.

She gripped the banister and forced her usual beaming smile onto her face.

‘Morning! I had a lovely trip, thank you for asking,’ she prattled, doing her level best to make everything seem as normal as possible. Maeve gawped very unsubtly.

‘Are you alright?’ Hal asked with a single raised eyebrow.

‘Mmmhmm,’ she chirped. ‘Wonderful, in fact. I can’t believe I slept in, can you believe that? I’m so sorry you guys had to sort out your own breakfast this morning. Did you manage?’

‘Luckily I’m very skilled in the fine art of cornflakes. And you’re not here to wait on us. You’re not working on shift, you know,’ Hal answered. ‘You sure you’re doing okay? You look a little...’

‘Different? Right. Woke up on the wrong side of bed, I think. Maybe a little peaky. Under the weather. Nothing that a lovely hot shower won’t fix,’ Annie said, darting as quickly as she could to the bathroom outside, leaving Hal and Maeve sharing an unspoken, baffled glance.

She bolted to the bathroom and dove straight underneath the running water.

‘Oh my...’ she squealed. Annie shot backwards away from the ice-cold stream, stumbled and reached for the edge of the tub to steady herself, but managed to tug down almost the entire shower curtain from the rail and wrap herself in it while she desperately clung on to find her balance. ‘This cannot be happening.’

‘Annie, what’s going on out there?’ Hal called through the back door, opening it a fraction.

She panicked and grabbed in a hurry the towel draped over the privacy screen.

‘I heard a crash. Do you need help? Did you fall again?’ Her hair was hanging in wet rat-tails around her shoulders, bright blotches across her skin from the violent water temperature.

She flailed, cursing under her breath while sort of tiptoeing on the spot as she panicked about where to go and what to do.

Nothing came to her. The spell had turned its back on her entirely.

‘I’m coming out there,’ Hal called. She heard his heavy steps tread the path down to the bathroom. He rapped his knuckles on the privacy screen and gave it a moment before peering his head around to the bathing area. ‘Annie?’

Annie breathed out an awkward, sharp laugh and, for some inexplicable reason, tinkled a wave. Terrible idea. A moment later, she darted to keep her towel held up.

‘Oh, sorry, sorry.’ He shot a hand up to cover his eyes. ‘I just...I didn’t...I mean...’

‘No, it’s okay, I just slipped. And then accidentally...And then I didn’t.... And I just...’

Both of them reddened at their clashing words, avoiding eye contact in all possible ways they could muster. Hal raised his eyes to the skies and Annie steadied herself by taking a long breath.

‘Do you need any help or...’

‘I’m good,’ she said, her voice squeaking awkwardly.

He nodded, pushed back his unkempt hair and turned to leave for the cottage again. ‘I’ll just...’

‘Right, absolutely.’

‘Great.’

Once Hal had vacated the vicinity, Annie decided that she should probably rely on magic to save her dignity – or at least what was left of it. She quickly cast her ever-reliable dressing spell to transform the towel into an outfit that would make her feel better.

One of her favourite dresses appeared on her body, reliable and comfortable, a cute floral slip that she’d had for years.

But something wasn’t right. The white T-shirt underneath was terribly wrinkled, as though it hadn’t seen an iron for years, like something plucked from a heap in a rush.

It smelt of last week’s perfume and there was a slightly disconcerting, unidentified splodge on the dress, too, something spilled that had gone unnoticed, maybe?

The fuzzy velvet hat should have been a fun statement, a perfect finishing touch, but instead felt, to put it plainly, mortifying.

The outfit had been perfect in her mind’s eye, but now that she saw it in reality.

..Well, it wasn’t right at all. It had looked so much better in her head.

Annie was stumped. Another usually reliable, fashionably astute spell had failed her.

‘Have you had some kind of breakdown overnight?’ Maeve had ventured out to take Hal’s place.

‘No! Don’t be so rude,’ Annie scolded. ‘I’m...trying out a new look.’

‘Well...’ Maeve sunk her hands into her jeans pockets and shrugged. ‘At least the hat’s not pink. That’s a fun change for you. I just came to ask if you were baking this morning.’

Finally, something that couldn’t go wrong. ‘Absolutely I am. I’m making anything and everything you can possibly request and it will all be sensational. And I will do it while wearing this very fun hat,’ Annie said decidedly. ‘I’m pulling it off, aren’t I?’

‘That’s exactly what you should do with it,’ Maeve mumbled.

Baking would make everything feel better again.

It was the thing that made sense when nothing else did.

Annie promptly lost herself in the task at hand, relieved to finally have some way to prove that her perfection did not entirely rely on Splendidus Infernum .

Some of her magical abilities were genuinely her own talent and that was very much the case when it came to making little treats.

There was nothing that she couldn’t do when it came to sugar-dusted sorcery.