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Temperance finished rinsing her hair and let the hot water run over her shoulders for a minute. ‘Right here. On the green. Just now.’ She could feel each hair on her arms rise as she thought about Abel standing there, like a vision plonked down directly from her daydreams.

‘Wha . . . How . . . What did he look like?’

Temperance closed her eyes. Taller than six foot, cropped blonde hair and a stubbled jaw. She was suddenly extra aware of how naked she was. ‘Good,’ she said wistfully.

‘Hence the rush to clean yourself up, right.’

‘No! It’s not that,’ she stepped out of the shower and wrapped a big towel around herself. Temperance pulled open the door, a puff of steam unfurling behind her onto the landing. ‘I had this dream last night. And I think it was about Abel.’

Susie crunched down on the crispy toast, her eyes wide. ‘And it was so filthy you needed a shower.’

‘What?! Suse, I’m trying to tell you something real here. I had a dream – a really bad dream. One of those nightmares that feels so real that you have tears on your face when you wake up.’

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.