Page 10 of Rewitched

She threw off the blanket and jumped up from the sofa. Jinx, disrupted from her nap, slunk away in a sulk to find an alternative bed. Belle shot to the phone and quickly made a call. The same call she always made whenever there was a major, minor or medium crisis unfolding in her life.

“Pick up. Pick up…” She was grateful to hear a click as the ringing stopped, followed by a lot of noisy fumbling at the other end. “Hi, Mum.”

“Hello, love. So glad you called, didn’t want to interrupt. I’m out with the dog to collect my moonwater, and I’ve lost my glasses again somewhere in the woods, so the signal might not be great.”

“What do your glasses have to do with the signal? No, that’s not the point. Mum, I’ve had this letter…” Belle was interrupted by a triumphant cheer from her mother.

“Oh, it came? I’m so relieved, mainly so that I don’t have to keep the secret anymore. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve nearly spilled. More to the point, I can’t believe I’m old enough to have a daughter reaching the EquiWitch. Oh no, Wolfie, bad girl. Don’t eat that…”

Belle sighed. She loved her mother more than life, but talking to Bonnie Blackthorn on the phone sometimes felt like a trial in itself: one that tested for levels of superhuman patience and stoic mental stability.

“Listen a sec, Mum. What is this? It’s got to be a mistake.” Belle turned the letter over again, as though expecting the message to have changed in the last few seconds to something that made sense.

“Darling, it’s in the book,” Bonnie said casually.

Belle steadied herself against the wall, appreciating the coolness on her clammy palms. “The book? This cannot be happening.”

“Besides,” Bonnie continued breezily, seemingly not overly concerned about her daughter’s unfolding breakdown at the other end, “elders of the coven aren’t allowed to tell you about it. As much as I might have wanted to, we can’t interfere. We can’t push you to be doing special things with your magic. The EquiWitch is supposed to be a nice surprise, a party of sorts for celebrating your powers having blossomed in full. You can’t have your mad mother being all embarrassing and pushy about it, nagging you…Oh, Wolfie, put that down.”

“A subtle shove in the right direction might have been nice,” Belle said.

“And how would I do that without being seen to be ‘meddling, guiding or assisting your witchery and discovery,’ hmm? As the book specifically dictates against.”

“I don’t know, Mum…Maybe an ‘Oh, hello, Belle. Any plans for your birthday? Have you got a cake? And have you done a bit of reading up about the fact you’re about to be inexplicably stripped of all of your magic and cast out into the dark abyss of nothingness?’ Something along those lines.” She spoke in an emphatic whisper so as not to wake Ariadne, but Belle could hear herself getting more frantic.

“Belle, it’s the law of Selcouth. The law of every coven across the world. You must be left alone to explore your own endarkenment. From the minute you left home and were no longer considered to be learning under my roof, I had to take a step back, let you out into the world. And this is the final stage of it all. You can’t be guided through it, told how to make magic your own. Endarkenment is your journey to embark on, your responsibility, for the young witch to discover herself.”

In the distance, Wolfie barked with enthusiasm. Likely at an unsuspecting duck, which the enormous hairy Irish hound, her mother’s familiar, had something of a penchant for.

“Wolfie, leave that poor duck alone,” Bonnie continued, confirming Belle’s suspicions. “The fifteen years of the endarkenment journey are about you and your powers growing, how they both blend together naturally. The process of finding yourself in the magic. Getting into the groovy groove of things…”

Bonnie was attempting to calm her daughter, but words like “endarkenment,” “finding yourself” and “groovy” were not helping. Belle gave a resigned sigh, tapping her head against the wall. Her mother carried on anyway in between calls for Wolfie, who had a habit of sprinting off into the woods and returning from the bracken with something furry carried carefully in her chops. Thanks to Wolfie’s ability to track down injured creatures, Bonnie consistently had her greenhouse full of recovering, blanket-wrapped squirrels, hedgehogs, baby badgers and birds while she charmed them back to full health with her arsenal of curative concoctions.

“I tried to drop some subtle hints, keep reminding you to pick up the grimoire once in a while, but—Wolfie!—I kept forgetting until after I hung up. And I wrote a note on the fridge to remind myself to remind you of the consequences, and I started, but then there was all that business with the cobwebs in my big bottle of eel scales on the top shelf, and…Wolfie, there you are! Oh, stop harassing the ducks, will you?”

Belle wedged the phone between her head and shoulder, wrapping the spiral cord like a finger trap. “So, this is really happening?” Her voice cracked. “I’m going to lose my magic?” The uneasy brewing in the pit of her stomach swilled. She felt a little light-headed.

“No, Belle, you are not. Of course you’re not. You’re an extremely capable witch,” Bonnie said matter-of-factly. “I take it you didn’t see it mentioned in the book, then? You haven’t had a little read recently?”

Belle could tell her mother was trying as hard as possible to sound airy and unbothered, not judgemental or concerned, which in turn always made her sound entirely judgemental and acutely concerned. The book she was referring to was looming in the corner of Belle’s eyeline. If it had been a person, it would have waggled its fingers and raised a captious eyebrow.

Of course, she had not read the book.

In fact, she’d barely touched the book for several years, and it stood ominously in the corner of the bookshelf now like a neglected beast grown too big and too dangerous to touch the longer it was left alone. Belle had always told Ariadne it was a poetry anthology from university. In actuality, it was the sacred grimoire of her coven, but that would have been a more complicated conversation.

“I…must have skipped that chapter,” Belle said, lying through her teeth. Better than disappointing her mother.

She tore her regretful gaze away from the grimoire to grasp at her last ounce of balanced logical thought. She needed to get off the phone as quickly as possible to silently stew in her own despair. Her mother’s advice was always welcome—until it wasn’t.

“But it’s fine, it will be fine. So fine, Mum. My life is obviously…suitably magical.”

Belle glanced over at Jinx, whose back leg was currently in the air at a right angle while she washed in a very unladylike way on top of a pile of Jim’s overtime sheets. To the left, an empty sharing packet of crisps that she and Ari had demolished the night before sat amidst a selection of tea-stained mugs. To the right was a cactus that had possibly started rotting. How they’d managed to kill an unkillable plant, even with an assortment of floral magic available to her, she wasn’t entirely sure.

“What exactly does the coven expect from me, though?”

Belle heard the line muffle loudly again, followed by a distant swear from her mum and a noise that she recognised to be the sound of an active spell. Like TV static but more focused, like the crack of a whip.

“Sorry, love. Tried to siphon off a little moonwater and dropped my phone straight into the pond. Bloody mobile telephones. Think I’ve managed to save it with a quick Exsarcio Electri. Although if you hear any muddy-sounding splashing on the line, I might have to turn it off and on again.”