Page 6 of Rewitched

The button was pressing of its own accord to anyone who happened to be watching. Finally settling on a station, music quietly hummed alongside bubbly splashes coming from a sponge working diligently against last night’s plates, which positioned themselves neatly on the drainer. Across the worktop, a stack of post shuffled itself into tidy piles. One was for brown envelopes demanding money, another for shiny flyers from pizza places and window cleaners. The most important pile was across the room, a rainbow of brightly coloured envelopes, which had been busy lining themselves up on the coffee table for several days. As an orange one addressed to Belle Blackthorn landed on top, ready for her birthday tomorrow, the kettle boiled itself with a soft babble.

“I swear I literally just paid this,” Belle muttered, ripping open a particularly uninviting-looking water bill and immediately casting it aside on top of the microwave to deal with another day. Only the most astute of eyes would have noticed the neat flick of her finger that guided a teabag from jar to mug.

“Considering one member of our trio uses their own spit and tongue to wash, we don’t half get through a lot of water.” Belle spoke to the cat at her feet, who was weaving her way in and out of her ankles with a purr. “All right, Jinx, all right. Greedy guts.”

The cat was distracted from her quest for food by a rogue spark of magic that flittered by, weightless in mid-air like the translucent wings of a moth. She frantically batted at it with her paw.

“I really need to hoover. That stuff gets everywhere.”

A handful of reliable household charms aside, Belle was a dab hand at keeping her unique abilities largely to herself. It wasn’t that she was ashamed to be a witch. After possessing her powers for very nearly fifteen years to the day, her home was packed with telltale signs of the truth. They were quietly proud but subtle enough to not invite unwelcome questions or complicated answers. Crystals were positioned for charging in all the right sun spots (although there weren’t a lot of those, because she would have been paying double the rent for a south-facing terrace). Her bookshelf was lined with a few almanacs and rune guides passed down from her mother, now wedged inconspicuously between childhood favourites and splattered cookbooks. Bottles of moonwater, peacefully powerful. Coloured candles for all requirements. Dream and shadow work journals. All small signs of a quiet witch, like whispers woven here and there, but the secret largely kept itself these days. Nobody ever noticed the magic, dusted through all corners of her life like dewdrops caught in cobwebs, because nobody was ever looking for it.

Magic for Belle was a comforting constant, which felt like home on the occasions that she did call upon it. It was just that, when working long hours through the week and living in a small maisonette above a café, the faint smell of espresso lingering from dawn until dusk against the clockwork sirens of London traffic, she found there wasn’t a whole lot of use for practical magic.

Belle’s powers were not completely dormant; they were just a little sleepy. Running a small and somewhat chaotic bookshop hardly required creative hexes or mystical menageries to be whipped up on request. She did now throw together the weekly horoscopes for the Lunar newsletter after the team discovered her knack for surprisingly accurate predictions, but even that only required a quick side glance into a miniature crystal ball that she’d deftly disguised as a paperweight. She certainly wasn’t bothering the natural order or creating too much divine chaos when she miraculously managed to fix the broken photocopier or match a customer to their perfect historical fiction with a quick Lectio Adaperio incantation. In fact, the most sparks that ever flicked from Belle’s forefinger probably came when the end of the tax year rolled around. It was complicated, time-consuming magic, squaring it all with Pecunia Tributum, but it saved her from wading through the chaotic records she failed to keep on top of at Lunar and was therefore worth the effort. Cheaper than an accountant, too.

Belle gave Jinx a scritch behind her inquisitive ears and received a quiet meow in return.

Even as a fifteen-year-old sorceress with fresh powers at her fingertips, those powers hadn’t had a chance to display themselves with too much exciting fanfare, given the setting of a sleepy northern town and an all-girls school. A new haircut here, a vanished spot there, some particularly great cakes with colour-changing icing for friends’ birthdays. An underrated highlight had been using her powers to implode a tape recorder to avoid the beep test during a PE lesson.

Then, magic had been actively difficult and painfully awkward to handle. Belle had always been a force of calm, physically recoiling at the thought of causing a fuss or drawing attention. And if you’re trying to avoid the spotlight, it’s a bad idea to get bold with your magic around teenage girls, who are finely tuned into spotting that sort of weirdness in a heartbeat. The whole witch thing had been largely mortifying, often showing itself of its own accord before she had mastered keeping her magic in check. Eventually, she had learned to control it. Even embrace it.

But the chance for her magic to prosper and shine had continued to dwindle ever since. Once, the purposeful dimming of her powers had been through shame of being different. Now, at one day before thirty years old, it was instead a case of magic slipping into the shadows, barely noticed, forgotten and neglected over time.

Belle flung herself down onto the green sofa covered with layers of blankets and a small fort of cushions that she shared with two flatmates: one human (allegedly) and one tortoiseshell feline. The latter leapt with a chirp onto her chest and settled with contentment on her shoulder.

It wasn’t that she was too dull or boring or unadventurous for magic. She had her fair share of adventures and travels under her belt; she had largely done what a girl in her twenties was supposed to have done, as far as she could tell. But as life had begun to unfurl like two silk ribbons, one in front and one behind her, Belle had learned that following the non-magical ebb and flow without too much resistance tended to make things easier. While trying to tread through life successfully, she fought to keep magic subdued: ticking boxes, making everybody happy, never causing a fuss.

And realistically, what does one even do with magical powers, anyway?

Lying flat with the cat balanced under her chin like a warm, only slightly suffocating beard, Belle flicked out her left index finger in the smallest of gestures and aimed it over her head at the kettle, which swiftly poured itself into a kitschy cauldron-shaped mug. Her finger absent-mindedly wound three clockwise circles in the air, and a teaspoon echoed her movement. Infusing her intentions was one of the old habits that she’d picked up from her mum. Stir clockwise to bring positivity, anticlockwise to banish negativity.

The mug floated gently from the kitchen to park itself on a coaster. As it approached through the air, steam billowing from the rim, the bedroom door across the living room flew open, and Belle leapt up to slam her hand down onto the mug. She winced as droplets of scalding tea splashed over the sides.

“Right, I’m going, I’m going. Don’t talk to me, I’m late.”

Ariadne, wrapped in a thickly padded coat and a giant scarf that could have doubled up as a duvet, hurtled out of her bedroom, always a matter of minutes from mattress to door.

“And I mean it. Don’t you dare eat that last croissant. It’s got my name on it, and the thought of it is giving me one vague ray of hope to cling to through my meetings of death.”

Belle’s heart thumped from the adrenaline rush. Luckily, Ari continued to spin like a whirling dervish from key hook to shoe rack, entirely oblivious to Belle’s flash of panic.

“That croissant is all that’s good in my miserable, hideous life right now.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Belle called.

“I will murder you in your sleep.”

“All right. Staying away from the pastry. I hear you.”

Ari’s constant faffing at any given time was a contributing factor to Belle’s witchery having remained secret for so long. Her hair was wet and hastily braided, leaving damp shadows on her coat as she grabbed the coffee cup waiting on the side, filled earlier by Belle as part of their finely tuned daily routine.

“You better. Late meetings this afternoon, but I’ll be home for tea. Love you, love you, bye bye bye bye…” Ari’s voice trailed out into the corridor as she slammed the front door behind her.

Belle audibly exhaled as she collapsed back on the cushions. One day, her blood pressure would learn to handle the rush of disguising magic at the last possible second. Blowing on the remaining contents of her mug that wasn’t now splashed across the carpet or her pyjamas, she slotted the stack of birthday cards up against a vase. Glancing at the clock, she grimaced. She should probably get a move on, too.

Escaping her attention in the morning’s rush was one unassuming matte black envelope which, in her hurry, caught on the door’s breeze and flew from the table. It had escaped from her apron pocket when she shut up shop the night before, cleverly gliding inside the paperback at the bottom of her handbag. Arriving at Flat 31, the envelope had shrewdly manoeuvred itself onto a folded blanket on the bed but remained unnoticed when a cat parked her furry stomach directly on top of it for the evening. It really had tried its level best that morning, determined to follow her back to work in her coat pocket, but acted a fraction too slowly and slipped from sight again. Sent sailing under the sofa, it bore a silver star illustration, entwined with three words.

Tonitru, Fulgur, Pluvia. Thunder, Lightning, Rain.