Page 52 of Uncharmed

‘Oh, I’ve been up for hours. I woke up fresh as a daisy again. Not a single haunted communication for two whole nights, can you believe it? So I saw them all on their way when the rain stopped. It seemed as though you two were busy, I didn’t want to interrupt again.’

Annie gasped. ‘Maeve, it’s absolutely not what you . . . There’s only one bed . . . We didn’t have any other . . .’

‘Take your time, have a nice relaxing morning. I’m off out for a walk, it’s a beautiful day now that the storm has passed.’

Annie just whimpered, frozen to the spot.

‘Shame neither of you are, y’know, like a witch or something,’ Maeve said, shrugging on her coat and skipping out to join Mage in the meadow. She held on to the edge of the door as she turned back to Annie, an unmissable, mischievous glint in her eye. ‘If only, hey? You’d think that magic could solve these kinds of logistical problems pretty easily.’

Annie’s face burned the colour of her hot pink dressing gown.

Chapter Twenty

DON’T OPEN IT

Once Maeve had stopped cackling at the turn of events, Annie managed to cobble together what she hoped was a vaguely believable story to explain her transformation from perfection to distinctly imperfect.

‘I assumed it was a mid-life crisis, but ditching caffeine also explains it,’ Maeve said breezily, scooping the guts out of a pumpkin and plopping them into a bowl. ‘I too would lose the plot within the first morning of such a decision.’ Annie had decided that pumpkin carving felt like something that might calm her nerves and let her take out her frustrations on an unsuspecting gourd.

‘A mid-life . . .?! How old do you actually think I am? Actually, don’t answer that,’ Annie said grumpily, having managed to spill a bowl of cereal, break the vacuum cleaner and bang her head on the bookshelves before midday. It seemed that the spell had been carrying a lot of the legwork for natural clumsiness, as well as everything else. ‘I don’t think my ego can handle the answer.’

While her risk factor was seemingly in the red, it had been Maeve who’d suggested to Annie that perhaps they should let Hal take a turn at magical guardianship. In the days since the storm, he and Annie had taken to communicating in sheepish looks and furious blushes. Both sides were yet to make any mention whatsoever of the compromising position that they had woken up in together.

One quiet Sunday afternoon, Hal dragged Maeve away from her sketchbooks to help in his search for a particularly uncommon form of ghost orchid running low in his Alchemy stash – an opportunity that earned an entirely unenthusiastic reaction. But, as a result, Annie found herself with a rare afternoon alone to decompress. To begin with, she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with herself, pointlessly flapping from one room to the other, but soon found that curling up in the armchair with books and perpetually reheating mugs of hot chocolate was in fact very good for her soul. It was only when the warlock suggested to Maeve that the one thing missing from their autumnal setup was a bonfire, around which to share a conversation about the basics of healing magic, that Annie reluctantly surrendered her pillow fort. Annie may have felt different to who she was before, but she was still powerless to resist charred, gooey marshmallows. That was just a rule of the universe.

For a little extra warmth against the chilly night, she threw on a plaid shirt that had been left lying around over the top of her flowy pink dress. She may not have been perfect any more, but it would still always, always be pink. She pulled the long sleeves over her hands in a comforting way that made her feel like some kind of tiny soft creature. The exact, soothing sensation that she required to quell the puddle of feelings that sat so heavily in her chest: dread, regret, frustration, a selfish wonder whether she should just get it over with and inevitably return to the clutches of the spell already . . . They were all new, unfamiliar feelings to her touch and they glowed like white-hot coals when she brushed against them.

With a grumpy huff, she took a seat on a hay bale that Hal had placed around the small bonfire, which spat a spectacular spray of rainbow sparks, courtesy of Maeve’s magic. She’d argued for fireworks, but Hal had argued back that Annie was too much of a risk factor to introduce any form of rocket for the evening. She was inclined to think he was probably right.

Hal’s dark features were lit and shadowed in the glow of the fire. She noticed his Adam’s apple bob as she sat down across from him and stretched her hands out to warm them. ‘That’s mine.’ His voice sounded thick.

‘The shirt? Oh, sorry. I just found it and it’s freezing. Do you want it?’ She went to shake it off her shoulders.

‘Keep it,’ he grumbled, then took a moment while he smooshed a melted marshmallow between two crackers. ‘Looks better on you, anyway.’

In the dim fire light, neither of them noticed Maeve roll her eyes so hard that she almost toppled backwards off her hay bale.

Underneath the silver spyglass of a waxing moon peering down upon them, it dawned on Annie that she had no obligatory tug towards a midnight finish line any more. The hour didn’t matter. She wasn’t required to spend her evening watching the clock, counting down minutes instead of enjoying them. For tonight and the rest of her nights at Arden Place, she could just be. Hal was making Maeve laugh hysterically with an impression of a troll he’d encountered in the depths of Devon several summers ago and Karma was curled up by her side.

The gloomy, pessimistic feelings didn’t disappear entirely. But Annie was slightly startled as she realized that, for the first time she could remember, everything in her felt . . . alive. Awake. Mixed. Musical. Her joy was like a blanket that she’d pulled out from a box in the attic – a little unfamiliar, a scent that smelled like a memory, but something soft and comforting to rediscover. A world away from the emptiness that she usually fought to bat away whenever she found herself standing still. While these early days without the hex were proving difficult, the quiet orchestra of flora and fauna that flooded the nocturnal meadow was a pacifying soundtrack for her to consider that, while many things appeared to have gone terribly wrong, this moment with Maeve and Hal somehow felt altogether right.

‘Do you want a s’more?’ Maeve asked, barely able to get the words out between the glue of stringy marshmallow that stuck her lips together. She grinned a chocolatey smile and Annie laughed.

‘I would actually like several s’mores. These s’mores are about to solve every single problem in my life,’ Annie said, summoning one of the long sticks that Hal had gathered for marshmallow-charring purposes.

‘Why don’t we do this every night for dinner?’ Maeve asked.

‘Because, contrary to popular belief in this house, you do need to eat a vegetable once in a while,’ Hal said gruffly. ‘Your shared passion for sugar is alarming.’

‘I just care very passionately about all forms of sweet treat,’ Annie said, twiddling her marshmallow in the flames. ‘Also, s’mores is the best lip gloss flavour, so I have double the vested interest.’

‘I didn’t even know that existed,’ Maeve said with a tone of wonder.

‘Oh, I still have so much to teach you, child.’

Maeve responded by prodding Annie’s upper arm with a cooled but half-melted marshmallow on the end of her stick, which earned a squeal in return.

Hal suddenly sprang up from his hay bale and rushed around the fire. ‘Annie! Will you please be . . .’ Coming up behind Annie, he reached a hand around her waist to move her arm away from the bonfire and grab her stick, which had promptly burst into flames while she was distracted by Maeve. She gasped – whether more at the flames or the proximity of him pressed against her again, she wasn’t entirely sure. Hal gave a sigh of relief once he managed to extinguish the marshmallow.