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Susie wiped her crumby hands on her leggings. ‘OK, sorry. Tell me. Tell me everything.’

‘There was,’ Temperance’s hands wheeled around, grasping for the right words, ‘danger coming to the village – a storm, wildfires. Something going seriously wrong at the shop. And this big, heavy veil of doom in the dream. It’s stuck with me all morning. Then when I saw Abel . . . my heart . . .’

Susie worked very hard to keep her eyebrows in their natural place. ‘Your heart?’

‘My heart was telling me that it’s him. The danger is coming for him.

It feels like magic somehow, only not the usual Molland magic.

There’s something . . . big going on here.

Like a spell was cast.’ She let out a long, shuddery breath, leaning back against the landing wall and trying to ground herself in the thick, moss-green carpet.

Susie frowned. ‘But we can’t cast. Right? ’

‘The Mollands don’t cast,’ Temperance’s mum had told her on the night of her seventeenth birthday, in the Witch’s Nose, as Lee told her all about the powers she’d just inherited and they both pretended the rosé wine Temperance was sipping was her first ever alcoholic drink.

Lee’s voice was uncharacteristically steely as she said it for a second time.

‘Mollands don’t cast. It’s something other witches can do but our family don’t lean into that side of our abilities.

But that doesn’t mean we’re not powerful witches.

To me, it’s like we’re holding the reins to these big powerful, beautiful horses that are racing away in different directions.

We can feel which way they’ve been running and we can steer them gently onto a new path if we need to.

It takes skill, you have to be an incredible listener and be able to hold your nerve. ’

‘So we can’t, like, put spells on people?’ Temperance had asked through her thick fringe, her hands making the wine glass go warm and sweaty.

‘No. That’s not within our powers. And I understand that you’ll want to find out more about this world and you might start to research Wiccan customs. But do not try to cast, Temps. It’s not for us. It can be . . . extremely dangerous, OK?’

Temperance nodded, her head woozy. ‘Is it dangerous to . . . is it illegal to be a witch?’

Lee had smiled sadly. ‘No, babe. Not anymore. But I can’t pretend that you wouldn’t get a load of weird looks and sniggers and even,’ she smoothed a hand over her hair, playing with the ends, ‘insults, if you wore that part of your identity on your sleeve. That’s why I’ve always kept it to myself.

But it’s your decision to make – just yours. ’

Temperance stared into her pink drink. ‘Ah huh.’ She and her mates from school were into roller derby and scribbling Lady Gaga lyrics on their backpacks and finding somewhere in Devon that served Bubble Tea.

She couldn’t really imagine how they’d react if they knew she could feel their deepest, darkest fears just by grabbing their cardigans.

Just like her crush on Mr Soames, the young physics teacher with prepattern baldness, her magic was best kept secret.

Lee licked her lips, dislodging a little of her cherry-red lipstick.

‘You know how you used to ask about your name? Why you were the only Temperance at school? Possibly the whole of Devon, to be honest . . .’ Her mum had looked intently into her eyes.

‘Well, when I was first told about my own powers, at seventeen,’ her eyes glazed over, ‘I wanted to know everything about where this magic came from, who’d gone before me, who were the first witches even?

And I’m talking pre-internet here, so I went to the library.

And what I read scared me, to be really honest, love. ’

Temperance felt her heartbeat thump in her throat. Oh no. Oh god. Am I going to turn into a hag at eighteen? A dragon at twenty-one? Will the house burn down if I sneeze?!

‘Hundreds of years ago, being a witch was illegal. In fact, it was punishable by . . . death. Now,’ she grabbed Temperance’s hand, ‘that’s not going to happen here and now.

But it did happen, to all kinds of women.

Women that, for whatever reason, others saw as a problem.

A problem they wanted gone. They made up wild lies about them hexing or cursing others, making crops fail, and they held these sham trials to prove their case.

Women died on the basis of gossip, of jealously.

The last women to ever be executed for witchcraft lived in Devon, in fact. ’

Lee squeezed her daughter’s hand more tightly.

‘When I read that, I vowed I would never use magic, and I would never tell a soul what I was. I started wearing gloves everywhere just so I wouldn’t feel anything.

Luckily for me, this was 1985 and the neon glove thing was big.

For months and months I tried to push it down, deny it all. ’

‘What happened?’ Temperance didn’t like how pale her mum’s face had turned or how gravelly her voice was.

‘I made myself sick, for a while. I bottled up my powers, I bottled up my worries. I think I . . . hated who I was, without knowing it. All I would do is pour over history books about the witch trials, terrorise myself with it.’

‘But you don’t feel like that now.’

Colour came back into Lee’s cheeks. ‘No! Not at all. I am so glad I am who I am, so glad. Two things really helped me see the light. While I was obsessing over the history, I took about twelve million buses one Saturday to go to Rougemont Castle. Do you remember I took you guys a few summers back? In Exeter. But this first time I was still about seventeen. There’s a plaque there that commemorates the last women to lose their lives in the trials.

As there was no one else around, I kept my gloves in my pocket.

I touched the plaque. And even though it’s metal – and I’ve never felt this before or since with any other kind of solid thing – I could feel the memory in it.

Love, pain, strength. Definitely the traces of other magic too, from other witches who’d been there to pay their respects.

I wasn’t alone in feeling the heartbreaking cruelty of what had gone on back then.

It gave me hope. Hope about people. Hope about the best version of people. ’

Lee shifted up closer to her daughter on the creaking padded bench.

‘The second thing that changed it all for me was looking down into a pair of the deepest brown eyes I’d even seen.

The midwife told me that she’d never seen a pair so dark, like midnight on the perfect summer’s evening.

’ She smiled and wiped a threatening tear from the corner of her eye.

‘And all this big, fierce love in me said I wasn’t going to let anyone tell you to live in fear, to hide who you were, to step back from your power.

And so I named you Temperance, and your sister Susie, after two of the last women to be lost to those trials.

Because we’re reclaiming that stolen power and no one is taking it from us. ’

‘Woah.’ By now, Temperance had drained her glass.

‘Yup. Happy birthday, kid.’

Teenage temperance had kept her word not to share the truth about their powers with Susie until it was her own time, and she’d also kept the truth from friends over the years.

The only person she might have come close to sharing it with was Abel.

But when he took off without explanation the next day, never to be seen again, that took the decision out of her hands.

And when Susie did come of age, their shared abilities only brought them closer as sisters.

Sat next to each other on Temperance’s bed in the here and now, Temperance and Susie stared out of the tiny window as The Witch’s Nose sign squeaked back and forth in the breeze.

Temperance was still in her towel – feeling too stuck in what she was trying to say to be able to think about what to wear.

What’s the perfect outfit when you need to warn the boy that broke your heart that he’s in some kind of mortal danger?

‘Now don’t leap in until I’m finished, OK?

’ Susie turned to her big sister. ‘Let me pose you a hypothetical, like we’re seeing this from the outside, yeah?

Then when I’ve finished, you tell me how it seems.’ She cleared her throat.

‘I have a friend. Let’s call her . . . Chastity.

She had a big First Love. A real Dawson’s Creek of a situation, if you will.

But her Pacey upped and left before all these teenage longings could be satisfied. ’

‘Who’s the Dawson in this thing?’

‘There’s no Dawson here. It was never about Dawson and you know it.

Anyway, Pacey runs away. Chastity-slash-Joey never knows why, despite dropping all the hints around Pacey’s Gran for, like, twelve years.

Chastity’s little sister even once, long ago, busted her improvising a bonkers little spell to locate him, featuring about forty candles and a road map of the British Isles.

Luckily only one sofa cushion was singed that day. ’

Temperance’s cheeks flushed hot pink.

‘Chastity has lived her life, had some other boyfriends, but no one ever comes that close. She’s looking for true love.

She’s very vocal about that. One day she finds a wedding dress absolutely stuffed with the purest love ever.

Which she can feel, because she’s a witch.

Should have led with that.’ Susie paused to tip her fingers in a salute to the pub sign.

‘She drinks too much one night. Has a bad dream while sleeping on the beach and tanked up on expired rum. But because on a normal day she can feel the magic in some things, she is maybe ,’ Susie scrunched up her eyes, ‘seeing the magic in things that are in fact just ordinary. Ordinary worries. Storms and fires are bad, they’re scary.

Seeing your ex with yesterday’s mascara on your cheekbones is cringe.

But does it necessarily mean any of it is linked?

Or in any way magic? Maybe Chastity is still,’ she pinched her fingers together, ‘this much drunk?’

Temperance folded her arms. ‘I know the difference, Suse. I can feel it. The difference between putting on a nice warm coat and enjoying it because it’s made from really good wool, beautifully stitched.

And putting on a lovely coat that warms you from the inside because it remembers friendship and trust in its fibres.

The way you can listen in to the magic, the memory, by opening yourself to it, being still and tuning in.

This feeling I have, about this danger – there’s no stillness.

I’m not tuning into this one: it’s blaring right in my ears, whether I want to listen or not.

it’s like a Stevie Nicks song on concert speakers.

It’s loud. It’s deep. It’s taking no prisoners.

It’s not like having a perfectly good dance around to some Ariana Grande and then switching the radio off.

I can’t turn this off, it is shouting in my heart all the time.

And I felt it before I saw Abel on the green.

I’m not making it fit around him. I’m not even that bothered about him at all! ’

Susie kept her hands firmly wrapped around her mug and her tongue in her cheek.

‘But I can feel he’s in trouble. Big trouble. So I can’t . . . as a good human being, just let him toddle off into the jaws of some awful tragedy. I mean, if for nothing else than for poor Margie. She’s like a surrogate gran to us, right?’

Her little sister nodded, waving her right hand over the duvet cover to tuck it more tightly around them both.

‘And as much as Abel has apparently lost his sense of humour and become a moody douchebag in the last twelve years, he’s technically still one of us. We can’t let him come to harm, can we?’

‘No. But . . . saying you’re right about this magical danger . . . which for the record I’m not . . . what do we actually do about it?’

Temperance bit her bottom lip for a moment. ‘You’re on shift in a bit, aren’t you?’

‘In three minutes, to be precise.’

‘OK. You get to the pub, and do not let him out of your sight, Suse. Seriously. I’ll try and come up with some sort of plan.’ She gulped. ‘Abel’s not going anywhere until I work out what’s happening here. Even if this village is beneath him. He’s staying whether he likes it or not.’