Page 87 of Rewitched

She was right. How could she let this go, forever? “I’ll try, for you. For me.”

Her younger self nodded, satisfied with the answer.

Belle nodded back the very same way, and before she could say another word, the reflection turned back to dust-covered glass. Back to herself as she was now.

She hadn’t left that version of herself behind. Her fears ran deep. But so did her magic.

She started. A sudden light from underneath her left wrist, leaning on the open grimoire page, beamed like a golden aura. The words of the allegory glowed underneath her arm, sunshine itself come to guide her the right way forwards. The grimoire declared her Clairvoyancy challenge to be her third success. She had gained what she needed from the spell—more than she could possibly have imagined that she’d need.

She opened the bedroom door to find Artorius and Rune both waiting on opposite ends of the landing, Artorius jolting backwards from very obviously having his ear pressed against the wood, a water glass still in his hand like an old-timey sleuth.

She eyed him suspiciously. “You knew that was going to happen, didn’t you? That my younger self would persuade me.”

Artorius shrugged, scuffing the toes of his slippers together. “Might have had an inkling.”

She rolled her eyes and turned to Rune. “He told you all about his cunning plan?”

Rune smirked. “We both had a feeling that it was only ever yourself who would be stubborn enough to persuade you.”

29

Just Us

ARTORIUS APPROACHED THEIR final branch of lessons with renewed levels of enthusiasm that even he seemed surprised by. Belle was reminded of a child who’d been left to their own devices with a bag full of trick-or-treat sweets. Three challenges remained, as did three moons, including Halloween. It was almost, but not entirely, impossible. While they were all too aware that the grimoire remained frustratingly unlit for the allegories of Earth Sorcery and Incantation, there was one branch of magic which they had yet to approach: Necromancy.

The art of communicating with the dead was the branch that Belle had, understandably, been most wary of. Rune had double-checked immediately that she wasn’t confusing things with necrophilia, which would have been an entirely different issue altogether. She had made it clear that she simply couldn’t shake the images that immediately sprung to mind: zombie eyeballs falling out of sockets, pirate hats crumbling on skull and crossbones, witches performing unspeakable acts in graveyards (too close to home). Artorius did his best to convince Belle that these assumptions were entirely Hollywood.

“You’re being ridiculous, young lady. You know as well as I do that any form of reanimative Necromancy, resurrection, weaponising the dead, etcetera, was absolutely stricken from the code about a hundred generations ago.”

“Weaponising the…I miss the bookshop,” Belle said under her breath.

“No plans to raise an army of the deceased anytime soon?” Rune asked, busying himself with some form of Selcouth paperwork, which he had summoned to get on with while Belle and Artorius launched into their twenty-ninth moon of study.

“Maybe Wednesday,” she replied.

“It’s frustrating how popular culture tends to tar all Necromancy art with the same brush these days. It’s always killer zombie this, contacting demonic presences that. Hell forbid it’s ever considered astral art anymore, never sympathetic magic…” Rune said, muttering to himself.

“Go on, Grandpa, tell us more about the good old days,” Belle replied.

“Pop down to the study and find my notes on death magic, will you, Belle?” Artorius asked. “They’re in a small pile on my desk somewhere.”

She headed downstairs to the study, knowing full well that the “small pile” he referred to was actually a chaotic spread of loose pages, jotted notes and half-filled notebooks covering the whole office, with little to no organisation system. She began rifling through the papers, looking for anything that might specifically reference chatting to summoned souls or catching up with the dead. Noticing the words “under the umbrella term of ‘spirit,’ ” she lifted up a small paperweight on top of a large stack of files to reach for it.

She froze. In her hand, she held a small crystal pebble, like a shard of stained glass. The paperweight was full of inky colours, slowly moving and swirling inside, smoke behind glass like tiny storm clouds gathering.

For a moment, a feeling of dread leadened her insides. Why was her missing sooth stone in Artorius’s study? She snatched it up, examining it so closely that she felt her eyes cross. No, it wasn’t her sooth stone, something wasn’t quite the same. It was almost identical in shape and style, but it was mirrored, the intricate carvings made in the opposite direction to her own. The colours, the nature of its movement behind the glass, was the very same but twinned.

“Did you get lost along the way?” Rune leaned around the door. “What have you got there?”

Belle spun on the spot to face him. “Is this what I think it is?”

Rune held out his hand to take the stone from her. He examined it closely, turning it over in his palm. “A sooth stone. I didn’t know the old warlock had one. Funny, it looks—”

“Just like mine?”

Rune nodded, looking every bit as baffled as Belle. “It was just sitting there next to his pen pot, being used as a bloody paperweight. But there’s no doubt about it, right? That’s a sooth stone. Or have I crossed the bridge to full-on insanity?”

“If you’re there, I am, too. And there’s absolutely no question. This sooth stone is the other half of your own. There are some wicche family sooth stones that are all connected, chipped from the same larger piece of glass, for example, or carved in intertwined designs that fit when they’re placed together. Often, you’d never notice the connection unless you examined them together very closely. It’s a neat design choice.”