Page 71 of Weave Your Magic

‘Holy shit.’

‘Wiccan shit, more like.’

Stevie dipped her head in closer. ‘So what now?’

Susie wrapped her arms around their friend’s shoulder. ‘We can’t ask you to get involved, babe. It could be dangerous. You keep everyone tucked up here, let them help themselves to ales and crisps. Temps and I will,’ she looked up at the ceiling, ‘figure something out.’

A wounded pinch screwed up Stevie’s neat little face. ‘Hey, I’m a coven apprentice. You can’t shut me out just when I could actually be useful! Besides, I was on that beach the night Tee did her accidental casting. Maybe you need me to complete the spell, to reverse it?’

With a frown, Temperance mumbled, ‘She might have a point.’

‘I do? See! So do we head back to the beach and dig out the wedding dress again?’

‘No, we have to go bigger. I don’t think just trying to apologise again for what I did will work, it’s like we have to strike out more than that. And there’s something else.’ Her eyes were wide.

‘Something else beyond a purple storm and potentially the end of our village?!’

Temperance grabbed Susie by the wrist, and then Stevie. ‘Come to the loos with me. Quick.’

Margie watched the three women hurry off to the back of the pub and leant over to Gary. ‘These girls, they can never go to the bathroom alone, can they? Hang on – has anyone seen my Abel?’

Susie unlocked the cubicle door and stumbled out, her eyebrows disappearing into her hairline. ‘Those poor Gullivers. I had no idea. Do you think Mum knew, Tee?’

With a shake of her head, her big sister replied. ‘I don’t think so. I feel like she would have told us if a centuries-old curse was at work right under our noses. And I’m really sure she would have tried to break them out of it if she could. I want to find a way to help too, but obviously that’s going to have to go second on the list after “Saving our skins from a magical hurricane and being struck by other-worldly lightening.”’

Outside, another boom of thunder filled the sticky afternoon air.

‘If this wasn’t so trippy – and terrifying – it would actually be kind of ironic, you know?’ Stevie asked, only getting blank stares in response. ‘You made a spell to bring back Abel, your true love. But he’s under a curse that will always push him away from love, in the end. Like two magnets with the same kind of end always spinning and twisting each other away?’

‘It certainly is a fuck-up of epic proportions,’ Susie said, leaning back on the tiny old radiator in the ladies’ room. ‘Maybe now is the time we call Mum with an SOS, Tee?’

‘I don’t know what she could do on another continent.’ Temperance felt her heart sink further down, like a lead balloon. ‘And F kept telling us that it has to come from me, since I’m the one that kick-started it all. God, if I could just take it back I would! I’d give anything, anything!’

She caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. It hadn’t been replaced in generations and the surface had brown dots of age. Somehow, Temperance felt like she’d aged a good ten years just in the last week. Her red lipstick was now entirely gone, thanks to that boiling hot fifteen minutes with Abel on the cellar floor. The skin just under her collarbone still had the heat of a blush from when she’d felt herself come back to life under his touch. But knowing what’d he given up, to save her from heartbreak – family, friends, his home: his whole life, really – she desperately wanted to take that burden from him. It wasn’t fair. He’d given so much and got so little back in return. And here she was, the author of her own tragedy, who’d tried to call in the love of her life like he was a takeaway pizza. With little thought and even less effort. Abel had taken the hard path, for her, and it felt like she’d just stayed tucked up in a feather bed all these years, blissfully ignorant. She’d given up nothing.

Temperance saw herself nod in the mirror. Only she knew she hadn’t moved.

Wait – what?

She gasped. ‘I know. I know what it is I have to do. I’ve been trying to reverse the wrong curse. Stevie, tell me that thing about the irony again, about the magnets. You’ve just cracked it, and literally on your second day as coven apprentice.’

‘Oh my god, for real?’

‘Temps, what are you thinking? Your eyes have gone funny.’

Temperance pressed her palms together. ‘We’re going to need some things. The wedding dress, the belt tie. My beanie. A couple of sturdy buckets. The firelighters from the pub. Abel’s hoodie – the one he left behind, with all the disgust in it. And a few raincoats.’

‘Raincoats, right. What kind of powers do they need to have? Do they, like, enchant the water not to be wet or something?’ Stevie asked.

‘No, they’re just waterproof. It’s cats and dogs out there.’

‘What are we washing?’ Susie ran her fingers through her hair.

‘Nothing. We’re way beyond that. I’m not going to run from the wildfire in my nightmare any more – I’m going to start it.’

Chapter 24

‘Tell me again when you learned how to control a wildfire safely?!’ Susie yelled over the howling rain. The wind was bullying all three of them on the clifftop, pushing and pulling them in any direction it pleased, their shoulders going one way, their legs another. The rain had gone from big flouncy drops on the green to hard little bullets being pelted by the storm right into their faces. The beach below them was, by now – naturally – deserted, the holidaymakers sprinting up the rocks for cover at the first sign of clouds. But Temperance, Susie and Stevie had walked into the eye of the storm.