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Temperance had never been chucked out of a pub before. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to her, and she’d never dreamed it would happen because she smelled so bad.

‘You’re green around the gills, Temperance Molland, and you smell like pond water to boot.

Clear off out of here and help outside,’ Margie, landlady at The Witch’s Nose, had told her this morning.

Margie has been like an official granny to Temperance her whole life, but the kind of gran who told you when your skirt was too short as she fed you a massive Sunday roast. You didn’t mess with Margie.

So Temperance had given up stringing up FairyFest decorations over the bar, echoes of synthetic coconut coming back to her even though she’d scrubbed her tongue like she was removing barnacles from the bottom of a ship, and she stumbled outside to set up the kids’ treasure hunt.

Temperance itched at her scalp. She’d not fallen asleep on the beach since she was nineteen, maybe.

She didn’t remember bringing so much of it back home with her in her hair or her knickers last time.

That meringue of a wedding dress was like a tent in itself, though, and she’d slept so deeply next to Stevie and Susie by the firepit.

Even those mad dreams didn’t shake her awake. Dreams like she’d never had before.

Thunderclouds so dark they were purple, rolling towards the village like a herd of wild horses, spooked and seething.

A hand trailing through knee-high wildflowers, but everywhere the fingers dance, the blooms turn instantly to fire. Burning like sparklers right down to their roots, leaving only ash on the wind.

The mottled glass of Try Again splintering and fracturing right through the middle as the door slams shut.

Temperance had sat in the sticky doom of a hangover before: the roll of her stomach, the sweaty sense of guilt that she’d said something to someone she shouldn’t, the painful thump of dehydration behind her eyeballs.

But this doom was different. This doom went deeper, into the marrow of her bones, it pulled at the roots of her hair like it was making her stand to attention, as if her whole body was trying to say: danger is coming . Get ready .

She told herself for the seventeenth time this morning that it was just hangxiety talking and tomorrow this would all be a silly memory.

There were no curses here. No horror-movie storms or wildfires on the cliff paths.

The shop was perfectly intact. Not that she’d checked this morning but .

. . it was all fine. Fine. The lead lining her stomach would melt away just as soon as the alcohol evaporated from her system. Totally fine.

The festival volunteers had put together some tiny organza bags filled with marshmallow mushrooms for the children’s toadstool hunt around the village green.

Temperance had the task of hiding them in clever but accessible spots for children aged three and up, a job which at least involved lots of salty fresh air to help bring her back to life.

She sucked in a lungful as she stood looking out over the grass.

It was 9am and the village was still mostly asleep.

Dew sparkled on the ground and a swallow swooped low to snap up a tasty insect.

Hugh and Praveen from the committee were the only other people around: timidly using a rubber-ended mallet to knock in a fairy circle of tent pegs with papier-maché ‘stones’ glued on top in the middle of the green.

Temperance suddenly marvelled at how much of her life had taken place on this green.

She had learned to walk here, to ride a bike.

Temperance could so clearly remember the exact moment she did a perfect cartwheel here aged twelve and then instantly knew it was a totally babyish thing to do, and so not cool.

She used to share sandwiches with Abel in the bus shelter when she’d had enough of Susie and just wanted to vent to her best friend.

They met there at least once a week. Until things between them changed, and felt altogether different.

And then, the night after Temperance turned seventeen, when she was fizzing with a magical knowledge only she and her mum shared, she went to find Abel at the bus shelter with a slice of birthday cake especially for him.

He was gone. Only a note on his hoodie waited for Temperance on the bowed wooden bench. The closest thing she got to a goodbye.

She felt her feet moving her towards the shelter now, scattering a few sweet bags in the potted plants and behind parking bollards.

Still waiting for the heavy haze of doom to lift around her heart, Temperance went to sit down.

But as her hand reached out for the well-worn wood, the doom only seemed to find an extra gravitational pull within her, pushing her heart down directly on top of her stomach.

The purple clouds .

Burning flowers.

Cracks in glass.

Why couldn’t she shake this dream? How badly fermented was that old bottle of Malibu?!

As much as her rational brain reminded Temperance that her body was out of whack after too much alcohol and a short night’s sleep out in the wild, another part of her kept whispering: danger, danger!

The part of her that knew magic existed, that weird things were woven just underneath the fabric of the ‘real’ world, out of sight but still pulling the strings.

That everything in this universe of beautiful chaos was linked by energy, recycled over and over again, and that one tiny push of a domino on one day could bring down a skyscraper the next.

She gripped the sleeve of her sky blue cardigan tightly.

No new feelings there. Could the wedding dress have left a strange kind of nightmarish imprint on her, perhaps?

It didn’t feel possible: that dress had only stirred up the very best, most glorious feelings.

Temperance was sure it couldn’t cause one wince of pain to anyone.

Something else swirled around her heart, cinching it in like Stevie had cinched her waist last night.

It was like watching a beautiful, priceless vase on the edge of a high shelf teetering back and forth, back and forth: the terrible dread that a smash was coming, you just didn’t know exactly when.

Someone was in trouble, someone close by. Someone important.

Susie .

Temperance quickly stashed the remaining ten bags of sweets under the bench – sod the kids, they wanted easy wins anyway, didn’t they? And she whipped her head round to face The Witch’s Nose again, and seek out her baby sister .

But there.

Standing in the fairy stone circle.

A very rumpled, slightly irritated – twelve years older but unmistakeably – Abel Gulliver.

The belt around Temperance’s heart loosened by one notch.