Page 8 of Uncharmed

‘I’m sure Ruby doesn’t want to hear about my utterly calamitous love life,’ Annie laughed, waving away the subject before it could claw itself too firmly into the room.

She was already starting to feel her face warm with embarrassment.

She held the back of her hands against her skin to try to cool it down. ‘Is it hot in here?’

‘There’s been a few warlocks over the years, but she always seems to end up with a broken heart, don’t you, babe?’ Vivienne said, not gentle in her tone or expression. ‘And here we are, still no rock on that finger. It must be getting cold without one.’

‘We’re constantly trying to set her up with every gorgeous warlock we can think of.

We’ve even moved on to non-wicche now – and still no luck,’ Harmony said softly, pouting as she patted Annie on the knee, her own ring emblazoned with an obnoxiously massive emerald that caught the mirrorball lights.

‘It’s the least we can do. Planning weddings is honestly such fun.

You’re missing out, Annie. I don’t know why you don’t just find someone! ’

Annie smiled serenely. ‘I’m fine as I am. Everything is just fine.’

‘It’ll happen when you least expect it,’ Romily said with a cool nod. She leaned back and swilled her frosted martini, studded with pale fruits that looked as though they were made of glass.

‘One witch’s spinsterhood is another witch’s independence,’ Vivienne said. ‘But we totally admire your tenacity, Annie. You’ll catch up. Who needs a hubs? Take mine, if you’d like. Half of the Sorciety seems to. Fortunately, his money and magic remain firmly mine if he wanders too far.’

‘You’re so brave,’ Harmony said with wide eyes at Annie, surprisingly sincere with her condolences considering almost everything that left Harmony Morningstar’s mouth was carved backhanded by a double-edged sword.

Annie laughed. ‘Again, thanks, Harm. But I am the polar opposite of brave.’

‘Look at you,’ Harmony said admiringly. ‘You’re wearing suede in the winter months. You’re totally brave.’

‘She’s right, Annie. To be on your own,’ Vivienne said, ‘especially with things still so... precarious for you.’ She emphasized ‘precarious’ with a pointed eyebrow.

Her voice dripped with so much white-hot pity that it felt like spots of acid rain that Annie should have thrown up an umbrella to.

‘I wouldn’t say precarious,’ Annie said, inhaling to push down the flood of uncomfortable feelings that the conversation was starting to crack open.

They didn’t mean it the way it sometimes felt. They loved her. She was always the first one at the end of the phone line on a bad day, when they needed to talk about their problems and offload them onto willing ears. She was part of the gang. They truly cared about her, were always so supportive.

The spell reminded her to keep herself in check when too much of their company started to make her skin itch.

‘You know. Since your dad,’ Harmony stage-whispered, as though she were embarrassed to say it out loud.

Harmony’s eyes darted to both Romily and Vivienne, tripping over herself at the prospect of opening up their favourite topic of conversation.

It hurt, but Annie understood the interest. Scandals like theirs didn’t happen often.

‘Am I missing something? What’d your old man do?’ Ruby asked after a loaded pause. She snapped another ginger biscuit in half and used it to point across the circle between them.

‘It’s nothing. All a very long time ago,’ Annie replied, giving the girls a look she hoped would signal to steer the subject somewhere else.

Vivienne gave a dry laugh. ‘Rubes is going to find out sooner or later. It gets brought up at practically every symposium, even after all these years. Annie’s dad was...well, he’s not exactly a revered and respected member of the Sorciety like the rest of our fathers.’

‘Not a member of any kind. At all, in fact,’ Harmony said between giggles and Vivienne spluttered in return, both covering their mouths as though to chastise themselves.

‘Harm, don’t be unkind,’ Romily said. Harmony sulked with a flounce.

‘It was terrible for Annie of course, wasn’t it, babe?

But the whole thing was maybe even more awful for the rest of us.

I still can’t believe what he put us all through, making the whole Sorciety suffer. And your poor mother. Just dreadful.’

‘Sounds to me like complicated family stuff. Probably isn’t anyone else’s business,’ Ruby said, directly to Annie rather than to the circle. Annie gave her a weak smile.

Vivienne interrupted. ‘I’m afraid Griffin Wildwood made it everybody’s business when he started gambling his supply of sacred magic, as though it were a handful of dirty pennies.

Honestly, Annie, I still don’t know how you’ve lived it down.

The thought of him tossing his and your magic around in all those revolting wraith lairs.

Mortifying, truly.’ Vivienne rested her chin on her fist, a twinkle in her eye.

‘Endless rumours, the Wildwoods’ magic stocks rising and plummeting so sharply.

..Suspicions were raised. Even Selcouth knew something was afoot and we all know they’re useless,’ Harmony prattled on, leaning so far forwards into the circle that she was almost bent in half.

‘Can you even imagine? It put our whole existence at risk. The coven could have discovered us. We really had no choice. My own father worked on the case, he told me everything. All the gory details.’

‘Much surveillance later and guess what? The Sorciety discovers that not only was he losing his own precious magic at careless, breakneck speed, but Cressida and Annie’s, too,’ Vivienne said.

Romily sipped calmly and quietly, as though she were lamenting the whole situation afresh. ‘Gambling his own wife and daughter’s magic. Can you even believe it? Such loser behaviour.’

Annie stayed quiet and picked at the iced detail on a biscuit marigold, the girls’ voices muffled in her head as though she were hearing them from underwater. She crumbled a sugar petal between her fingers.

‘His days here were numbered after that, of course,’ Vivienne concluded, stirring her short, honey-coloured cocktail with her finger in mid-air. Although over ice, the drink smoked dangerously in her palm, like a fire had just been put out inside the glass.

‘That’s...Wow, that’s awful,’ Ruby said.

‘Isn’t it just? I mean imagine risking the Sorciety like that. Something so prestigious and sacred, that’s been running the magical hierarchy for centuries. So reckless,’ Romily replied. Although not quite so unbridled as the other two, even she was purring as the gossip sparked and caught fire.

Ruby gave Romily a baffled look. ‘No, I mean awful for Annie. I’m sorry that happened to you.’

Annie shrugged it off, still smiling. ‘No need to apologize. Not too much of my magic was lost, thankfully. The same can’t be said for my mother’s powers but.

..’ She pushed down the bundle of memories that began to unravel itself.

Stumbling, smashed glasses, slurred excuses, blurry apologies.

‘Mum and I were used to things falling apart and having to build them back together. He was an unpredictable man at the best of times.’

Although she knew it wasn’t her fault that her father had fled – she was a grownup who could acknowledge that other grownups made their own decisions of free will – Annie couldn’t help but still feel a strange responsibility for Griffin’s choices.

It burdened her, even now, so many years later.

It was a childlike part of her that she knew was formed from hurt, but that knowledge didn’t make it any easier to ignore that tugging question: What if?

What if she had behaved differently, been a better daughter, a more impressive, perfectly polished apple of his eye?

Perhaps he wouldn’t have done the things he did.

Perhaps she could have saved him, pulled him back from the brink.

Years later, such an unanswered, whispered possibility clung to the walls of her mind like condensation in the cold.

‘What happened to your mom?’ Ruby asked.

The question that Annie always dreaded being asked – when she had to weigh up whether to lie or to dump the uncomfortable, ugly truth onto somebody she barely knew.

‘Strange things happen to a witch whose magic is taken from her,’ Annie said quietly.

‘She tried her best, but she couldn’t cope.

She...she left to find him when I turned eighteen and never came back. ’

Guilty by association with her husband’s misdemeanours, Cressida had faced the chop from the Sorciety without so much as a chance to defend herself.

She took it admirably well – at least publicly.

Privately, she began to wither in all ways, a hollowed spirit of the radiant woman that Annie had been in awe of her whole life.

‘That’s rough,’ Ruby replied gently, mouth squashed to the side in a diagonal line. ‘Families are messy.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ Harmony said. ‘My family is rather neat and tidy.’

‘Blood is thicker than water,’ Vivienne said smugly. ‘And magic is thicker again.’

‘Always hated that phrase – usually tossed around by people who’ve never been let down by someone who’s supposed to put them above all else,’ Ruby said, brushing biscuity hands on her jeans. ‘From what I’ve learned over the years, families are never as shiny as they seem.’

The three witches looked at Ruby as though she had suddenly started speaking in tongues, a mixture of bewilderment and aversion on their faces. Annie heard Harmony mutter a quiet ‘Ew’.

‘Anyway,’ Romily said firmly, twirling the stick of glass-like fruit in her drink. ‘We’ve all moved on, haven’t we, Annie? You’ve done such a wonderful job at rebuilding what they left of the tattered Wildwood reputation.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Annie winced, spinning her own frothy, shimmering pink cocktail by the stem of the glass. ‘I’m just trying to not let anybody down. I’m forever grateful to still be welcome here and that you all stuck by me when you didn’t have to.’

‘As I keep telling you, patience is a virtue, babe,’ Romily said and gave her a wink. ‘You’re doing so well in your role at Selcouth and everyone here enjoys you immensely. You’ll earn your Crescent one of these days.’

Annie’s ears pricked up. ‘Is there any word on that? Has your mother mentioned anything? I know you said you were going to try to put a word in...’

Of the six significant families who governed the club, the Whitlocks, Cinders and Morningstars were half of them and Romily’s mother was the Supreme Herald at the helm of it all.

They were yet to use their influence to help Annie win Crescent status at the Sorciety, the fully fledged membership that she was still desperate to secure to protect herself.

As she spoke, all three seemed to flash their pins in unison, silver emblems of an overflowing cauldron wrapped in a pin-sharp crescent moon.

Abundance and secrecy, the Sorciety’s most precious values.

Romily pulled a sad face at Annie. ‘Haven’t had a chance, babe. Honestly, between the solstice cruise and planning the Sorciety fundraisers for All Hallows, I’ve been run off my feet. I’m seeing Mummy for lunch next week so I’ll try again then, if she’s in a good mood.’

Annie was embarrassed to admit it now at thirty-two, but she had never questioned the Sorciety’s existence while growing up wrapped in its enticing caress.

It was only when the Wildwoods fell dramatically from favour that it had opened her eyes, made her question its nature – and whether the claims of the spellborn could truly be considered fair.

As a child, she (often hand in hand with Romily) had dreamed of the night that her mother and father would include her in their surreptitious evenings.

Alongside the Whitlocks, they would disappear for nights in their finery, leaving the girls with a nanny and a kiss on the head.

There was never any explanation of where they were going.

Her mother only ever whispered one clue to her, over and over, that had inked itself into Annie’s young mind: ‘To where everything is perfect.’

When she had finally been allowed to peer behind the curtain and join them in the Sorciety, Annie had blindly fallen in love with the beauty of it all, the way everything shone, the splendour matching up to her mother’s promise.

Being included and accepted was too fragile a feeling to tinker with.

Now that she was older and (allegedly) wiser, it was one of several problems with the magic system that felt unsettling.

But she was tangled in a sticky velvet spiderweb, one that kept her trapped within delicate silver strings, but still ensured she felt held and supported.

The Sorciety was the closest thing she had to a family.

Its fickle world could often leave her feeling lonely, but without it, she was truly alone.

She owed them everything. She couldn’t let them down.

Annie just smiled.

‘You know we always do what’s best for you, Annie. Apart from all of that nonsense in the past, you’re absolutely perfect,’ Romily added, raising her glass.

‘I didn’t think the Sorciety had room for much compassion. How come they let you stay after all that crap with your parents?’ Ruby asked. Before Annie could answer, Vivienne jumped in on her behalf.

‘Annie’s a useful girl to have around the place, aren’t you?

’ Now it was Vivienne’s turn to wink at Annie.

‘They just love her over at the coven, so she’s a handy contact for the Sorciety.

Keeps an eye on things for us, new witches and warlocks who make themselves known, any changes in stance or unrest beginning to rise – we’re the first to know.

She’s our very own super sleuth sorceress. ’

It all felt precariously interlinked, like a dainty paperchain; its beauty was reliant on her perfect performance.

Romily smiled fondly. ‘Never one to let us down, are you, babe?’

Annie smiled, pleased to have found herself firmly on their good side. No, she wasn’t.