Chapter 7

Brew

The scent of tea filled my nose as I entered the warehouse where we stored it for the infirmary, and our own personal family use. My magic tingled within me, as if able to sense that I was so close to the source of my power.

The smell of the dried leaves was invigorating and I wanted to roll around in it like a cat getting high on catnip. It would garner some strange looks from my siblings and I was sure Mum would kill me if I did something so wasteful so I restrained myself.

That seemed to be one of the things I was getting a lot of practice with at the moment.

My gaze strayed to Katie on the other side of the room where she was having an animated conversation with Cami. Although it seemed mostly one-sided, which wasn't a huge surprise, Cami dominated pretty much any conversation she was in.

Katie looked over in my direction, and our gazes locked. For one moment, it felt like the world faded around me, and nothing mattered but my best friend's sister.

And then she looked away.

That was not a good sign.

I wondered how much she remembered from that night outside the tavern and how seriously she'd taken my tipsy confession. I'd been worrying about it constantly since, and I'd been dreading Oliver bringing it up. The two of them were close, there was no way she'd be able to keep quiet about me doing something dumb. But he hadn't said anything yet.

Hopefully, she'd just brushed it off as a joke, the same way she did all the other times I'd flirted with her. As much as my feelings were true, it didn't seem mutual and I didn't want to make her uncomfortable. It was probably for the better that she didn't reciprocate, I didn't want to complicate our lives or those of the people closest to us. Like Oliver who would not be happy about me starting a romance with his one and only sister. And that was before I considered the delicate balance between the four families who ran Purple Oak. I couldn't pretend to understand precisely how it all worked, but Mum had been explicitly clear with me when I'd started showing interest in people.

The children of the other four families were off-limits. And that included Katie.

Jasmine marched into the warehouse and clapped her hands, putting an end to the chatter. When we were younger, I'd always envied her easy way of commanding people. She was so good at it, and it felt like I should be better considering I was the oldest. Now I was grateful for it. I didn't really want to be the one in charge, I was much more comfortable in the infirmary.

"It's going to be a long day so let's get started," my sister said.

"Loosen up, you sound like Mum," Cami responded.

I snorted but held back my laughter. I knew how my sister was and she meant business. There'd be no messing with her today. Everyone was going to do exactly what they were told.

Jasmine set her hands on her hips, in exactly the same way as Mum did. "And if you don't quiet down, Chamomile, I'll tell you off like Mum."

That shut Cami up instantly. It was impressive how full-naming worked, no matter who did it.

With everyone quiet and in line, Jasmine handed out the notebooks and delegated the tasks. "Earl and Chamomile , you are taking the right side. Katie and Brew, you're on the left. Any problems, call me over and I'll come check."

Hesitation crossed Katie's face, and I winced. She definitely remembered what happened at the tavern. That was unfortunate. The last thing I wanted was to make things awkward between us.

A part of me wanted to suggest a change in the way Jasmine was splitting the teams, but I didn't want to draw attention to what was going on between us.

I cleared my throat as I made my way over to Katie. "So..."

Katie cleared her throat and held up the scales. "I'll weigh, you write? Or I'll write, you weigh?"

"Ah, you know the drill." And she was going straight to making sure that we were on task. I shouldn't be hurt by that, especially when it was my fault there was something hanging between us, but it still stung.

"It's not my first tea stock day," she reminded me.

I nodded, not really knowing what else to say. It was true, both the Fields siblings had been helping out from a young age. That was how things were around here, they helped us, we helped them. That was the delicate balance that Mum was always talking about and it could not be upset.

I twirled the pencil. "I'll write."

Katie nodded and turned her attention to the shelves in front of her, selecting a bag of tea. "A-thirty-one," she said.

I looked down the list and tapped my finger against the page. "It's meant to weigh one pound."

"All right." She dropped it on the scale and added the counterweight. "One pound."

"Great, so this one is rat-free." I put a tick by it while Katie put the bag back on the shelf and picked up the next one, reading out the reference number attached to the tag.

"Also a pound," she said, moving on to the next before I could say anything.

We repeated the process several times over, checking the weight of the bags and noting down whether it matched what was in the log. It was incredibly tedious and monotonous, not helped by the heavy silence between us. I wanted things to be normal between us, but I could feel that she wasn't receptive to me flirting, or even joking, and I didn't want to make her even more uncomfortable than I already had with my revelation that my feelings for her weren't entirely friendly.

"Where's Banjo?" I tried after the latest round of weighing.

"At home. He's keeping Grandpa company," she replied, somehow managing to avoid looking at me.

"Ah."

We lapsed into silence again, but it wasn't comfortable. If anything, it was the complete opposite.

And I hated it. More than I could have ever imagined possible. Oliver might be my best friend, but I was also close to Katie, and feeling as if I'd lost her sent pain lancing through my heart. Life without her just wasn't the same.

I cleared my throat to try again. "How's Oliver getting on? With Howie?"

That got a little chuckle out of Katie, which felt like progress. "Disaster. Either there's something wrong with the boy or the owl because those two are not seeing eye to eye."

"One would think Oliver isn't an owl ward at all," I joked.

"We both know he is, we were there when he bonded with Rocky." Katie smiled fondly. "I was so glad when they bonded because up till then, Rocky's nightly presence had been scaring me a bit."

A smile pulled at my lips at the memory. "Me too. Rocky used to sit on the roof right next to my window and hoot all night. I thought it was there to kill me. I was so glad when Oliver tamed him."

Katie finally looked at me and scoffed. "You don't tame a familiar, Brew."

"So what do you do?" I leaned against a shelf, curious about her answer. I knew the basics of what being a ward entailed, and what she and her brother had told me, but we'd never talked about the real stuff.

She turned around to look at me, a seriousness in her eyes that I wasn't sure I'd ever seen before. "It's a bond that goes deep into your soul." From her expression, I knew she was thinking of Banjo. "It's like there's another living creature that is part of you." She touched her shoulder where her ward tattoo of Banjo sat.

"That sounds intense."

"And wonderful. And devastating." Her hand drifted to her shoulder where her other ward tattoo rested, the one for the family dog she'd first bonded to when she was thirteen. "They never leave you. Their soul is always linked to yours. Even in the darkest moments you know they're there. That's a ward bond. There's no taming involved, it's a union of souls."

"It's beautiful." She was beautiful , especially when she talked like that.

"Mmm." From her expression, I could tell she didn't want to talk more about the intensity of the bond, which meant that I needed a change of course for the conversation if I wanted to keep it going.

"I wonder what kind of familiar I would have if I was a ward," I mused.

Laughter returned to Katie's eyes, and I almost sighed with relief. "That's a hard one."

"Because I'm so loveable? Maybe I'd have a dog too," I mused.

She shook her head. "A cat. No, a fox." She snapped her fingers. "A squirrel. You have squirrel energy, Brew."

I laughed. "I don't know if I should be insulted or not."

“Squirrels are fun."

A warmth filled my chest but it came with a bittersweetness. So that was how she saw me. Just a fun man, not that I could blame her. I hadn't exactly put my best, most gallant, foot forward when it came to her. I was all jokes and lame flirty remarks, no wonder she thought of me as a fun raccoon.

I wanted to insist that it should be something different and to try and get her to see me differently, but I knew that wasn't my best course of action. It would be better if I just left the situation as it was. There was no need to make things more complicated between us than they already were, even if I wanted to.