Chapter Ten

2.30 p.m.: saturday 30 october

Centraal Station, Amsterdam

331 miles and 24(+1) hours and 30 minutes until the wedding

Instead of heading straight outside once they got off the train at Centraal Station, they went deeper inside to where it backed onto the ferry docking. Harry went to each of the information desks there to figure out their travel options, while Kay bought them coffee and grabbed a couple of seats as people streamed past.

‘Well, the bad news is, there are still no flights landing in the UK and no ferries directly from Amsterdam until tomorrow morning … and that's going to Newcastle.'

‘Newcastle? Bloody hell. How long does the ferry take?' She handed him his coffee absently.

‘Twelve hours.' He winced.

Her mouth fell open. That wouldn't work at all. ‘I'll completely miss the wedding ceremony.' And barely make the reception, even if she raced the length of the country to arrive in the clothes she'd been wearing for two days at that point.

Her blood pressure sky-rocketed as she began lamenting the fact that she'd thrown in her lot with Harry and his itchy magic compass. Maybe they should have split up in Dusseldorf. She could have gone to stay at Ilina's and just been patient.

A tingling started in her fingers, matching the beat of her frantic pulse, and she had to close her eyes and take a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. She supposed the only bright side was that if she was really going to miss the wedding, at least it would guarantee Joe a special day without her destroying it with her crazy magic. What if she accidentally set fire to Sandy's dress or something?

She jumped as Harry's hand lightly touched her wrist. Opening her eyes, she found him watching her, his brows slightly furrowed to cause a tiny crease between them. ‘There's sort of good news too, though.'

‘Yeah?'

‘If we can get to the Hook of Holland, we can get a ferry to Harwich.'

‘Where's Harwich? Is that closer to home than Newcastle?'

‘Yes. It'll only take a few hours to get to Surrey from there. And the next one leaves at eleven, so we'll arrive first thing tomorrow morning.'

She nodded slowly. ‘Nothing sooner?'

‘'Fraid not. I'm sorry. I know it means missing the rehearsal dinner, but it's the best option out of not very many options.' He gave her wrist a consoling squeeze, making her belly flop over, and then he dropped his hand.

‘It's OK. The wedding is the most important bit,' she said, though she hated the thought of missing the dinner. Particularly when her mum and dad would be there, brooding, at opposite ends of the table. Mum would definitely be taking one of her magic mood-blocker pills. And drinking a lot of wine. Goddess, Kay hoped there wasn't a scene. Joe and Sandy didn't deserve that.

‘So, I'll grab us tickets?'

‘Let me come and pay for mine.'

‘We'll divvy up the expenses once we get home. I'll try to figure out our best options for getting to the Hook as well. We'll need to be there for boarding at half past nine.'

‘Is that far from here?'

‘I don't think so. We should have plenty of time to get there.' He offered her a reassuring smile and disappeared off to queue again, while Kay braced herself and phoned her brother.

‘Oh, crap,' Joe said, when she explained the ferry situation and broke the news about the dinner, already sounding a lot more harassed than he had first thing that morning. Was it only that morning? It felt like days ago at this point. ‘I suppose it's not the end of the world. I'm not even quite sure why we need a rehearsal dinner … There's not a single flight? No, don't even bother to answer that. Of course you'd be flying back if you could, rather than taking a ferry. You're going to hang around in Amsterdam all day and most of the evening on your own, though? I don't like the sound of that.'

‘It's fine,' she tried to reassure him. ‘Well, I mean, not fine, obviously, because I was really hoping I'd be able to make it back, but it's not a problem to be stuck in Amsterdam for a little while. Then I'll be travelling to the Hook in time for the ferry.'

‘Right. So, you'll only be wandering around Amsterdam, on your own, for most of the day and then taking a train or something at night. By yourself.' His tone made it clear that he didn't think that was a better scenario.

She chewed on her lip and decided that it wasn't fair to let him worry about that, on top of everything else. ‘I'm not on my own.'

‘No? You're with someone from work?'

‘No.'

‘Who then? Don't make friends with random people, Kay. That's not any safer.'

Kay let the patronising tone go because she knew he was extremely wound up about the wedding, she'd just broken some bad news to him, and despite all that, his main concern was her safety. ‘It's not a stranger. I'm with Harry Ashworth.'

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the phone. ‘Say again?'

‘Harry Ashworth. You know. Who you went to school with?'

‘Of course I know who Harry is. I'm just struggling with you two … bumping into each other? I mean, I assume this is a coincidence, unless there is something you're not telling me—'

‘No,' she jumped in. ‘Totally a coincidence. We were both in Prague and when the flight got delayed at the airport, we ran into each other, and since we're both heading in the same direction …'

‘Well, sure. Makes sense. Especially if Harry's secondary affinity is helping him figure out which route to get you home.' Joe released a breath. ‘Oh, that makes me feel much better.'

Kay went to respond and stopped, realising that Joe already knew about Harry's itchy magic compass. But that definitely wasn't something he'd known he had back when they were doing their A levels together. So Joe must have found out since. And Harry had known random facts about Kay's life … and been invited to the wedding. ‘Are you … Joe, are you still in touch with Harry?'

Another pause. ‘Yes?'

‘Why are you saying that as though it's a question? I assumed you'd lost contact.'

‘No. I just …'

‘What?' Spit it out , she wanted to say, but restrained herself because he didn't deserve her blowing a gasket down the phone at him.

‘We stayed in contact. We meet up quite regularly. As regularly as I manage to meet up with anyone these days.' He gave a beleaguered little huff, which she knew was more to do with the demands of his job than the demands of the wedding.

‘You're friends still?'

‘Well … yeah.'

‘H-how? I thought he'd ditched you after your A levels?'

‘No. Not at all.'

‘But you literally never mention him.'

‘OK … see, I just figured it would upset you. I know you took it hard when he …'

‘Stood me up? Dropped me completely?' Her hand tightened on her phone at the memory of Joe handing her the napkin with Harry's scribbled message. Thinking of how he'd barely wanted to look at her at the time doubled the pain.

‘Both. You know we weren't exactly talking back then and by the time we were, well, it was obvious that it would upset you.'

‘Was it?'

‘Yeah. Mum said never to mention the Ashworths even as a family.' He gave a soft laugh. ‘You know how she is. She couldn't bear feeling how upset it made you.'

Kay's cheeks flushed. She had been upset, obviously, but her mother had made it sound like she was having a Bella Swan-esque breakdown. She knew her feelings must have been a lot for her mum to deal with, on top of her own, and she appreciated the protective sentiment, but she was capable of telling Joe if she didn't want to talk about something, she didn't need to be coddled. The reason she and Joe had fallen out so dramatically after the divorce was because they didn't shy away from being honest with each other. Or so she'd thought.

To prove the point to herself, she pushed her hair back from her face and spoke as neutrally as she could. ‘If you thought I was so traumatised, why did you stay friends with him? Sisters before misters, no?'

Regardless of her easy tone, Joe sounded squirmy. ‘Because … I knew what was going on with him at the time. And we were basically kids. He's not a bad person, Kay, he just screwed up. Maybe I screwed up a bit too, all right? We weren't on talking terms, but I still probably should have hauled him over the coals more about it than I did. Then, by the time you and I were cool again, it would've been weird to say: "Right, I've got a bone to pick with you now."'

‘All right, I guess I can see that,' she said, all the more grudgingly because she knew he couldn't be using his gift on her to make her see his point of view. ‘But weren't you annoyed at him on your own behalf. He used you.'

‘How did you figure that one out?'

‘Because you were always helping him with his work, leading up to his A levels. And then when they were done, he dropped you.'

Joe sighed. ‘Kay, like I said, he didn't drop me. I tried to stay out of the house as much as I could that summer, then I went away to university. I kept in contact with him, but you weren't to know that, obviously. The thing with helping him with his A levels …' He cleared his throat. ‘Look, I'm not proud of it, but his dad paid me to tutor him when he found out what my gift was. That's why Harry started coming around all the time, initially. I was saving up for that car, wasn't I? Harry and I had always been around each other through secondary school and got along OK, but we weren't what I would have called friends. But then when I started to tutor him, we got to know each other better and we were hanging out as much as working and I felt bad for taking the money, but Harry said not to worry because I was helping him and actually it meant he could come over and spend time with us, get some downtime too, without his dad constantly getting on his case …'

He trailed off and Kay sat down heavily on the cold metal bench.

‘You think I'm awful for charging his dad to help him with his dyslexia, don't you?' Joe carried on, his voice pained. ‘I do feel like a shit for it. Especially since it was the thing that made me realise I wanted to go into teaching and now when I see how hard it can be for kids, I can't believe I did it—'

‘No,' she interrupted, like she was suddenly waking up, because there was no way she was ready to start thinking about the other implications of what he was saying just yet. ‘No. That's not shitty, Joe. You get paid to teach now, don't you? It's fair enough. It's a great use of your gift.'

‘That's what Harry always says.'

Of course he did. She felt like she'd put together some puzzle pieces years ago, figured it all out, and now she'd dusted the box off, it turned out the image didn't match. She'd forced pieces together that didn't belong. Finding out you were wrong about something was never a very comfortable feeling, but when you added the fact that it meant Kay was the only person Harry had decided he didn't want to continue a friendship with, it stung.

Joe had said he liked hanging out with both of them, so what had gone wrong? By trying to break out of the friend zone, had she freaked Harry out? It still didn't make his treatment of her respectful – he could have spoken to her, told her no thank you – but it not being the end of some underhand scheme to get what he wanted from Joe made it less of a character deficiency and more like one of those growing-pain moments, which everyone sometimes messes up. Goddess knew she'd messed up plenty. This news was having the simultaneous effect of making her think of him as less of a bastard, and herself as more of a reject.

Perfect.

She rubbed a hand hard over her sternum. ‘Look, I'm sorry I dragged all this up now,' she said in a thick voice. ‘I know you've got a million things to do, and I better call Mum.'

‘Yeah,' Joe drew the word out slowly. ‘Good luck with that.'

She gave a watery laugh. ‘Thanks.'

They hung up and before she could chicken out of it – and also maybe because she didn't want the time to think too much – she immediately called her mother.

It sort of worked to snap her out of the stupor as she couldn't concentrate on her own misery when her mother's was so apparent. After they'd exhausted all the possibilities so her mum truly understood Kay was never going to make it to the dinner, they moved on to the strategy for her mum coping, with Kay encouraging her to enjoy it and not worry about her dad being there.

Even as she said these things, she wondered whether she was an enormous hypocrite because she had clearly let herself obsess over Harry and the emotional injuries she'd perceived he'd inflicted on her. Her parents had been married twenty years and there was no ‘perceived' about it.

Not to mention what Kay had recently learned about herself and her extra ‘gift'. Her presence would have brought all those feelings into stark relief, over and over again. Her mum hadn't stood a chance at ignoring how she felt and moving on from it with Kay around.

By the time she got off the phone, she was shaking, her eyes burning. Harry was walking over to her, and when he caught her eye, he accelerated his pace, taking her gently by the upper arms.

‘What is it? Has something happened? Are you OK?'

What had happened? Good question. A wake-up call? A good hard slap around the face telling her she was again responsible for causing people around her additional pain? That she'd assumed a bunch of stuff about him and her brother, and now she was wondering how much she'd got wrong over the years.

‘It … it just occurred to me that, not only did I cause my parents' divorce, my mum has never been able to get over it, because of me,' she admitted, because she had to admit something. And it wasn't going to be that she'd made a mistake about him . Something lay down that path, and she was far too anxious to follow it and find out what it was at the moment.

Harry's eyes darted over her face. ‘Kay, the divorce wasn't your fault. Your parents' marriage was already dysfunctional. You just saw what your mum couldn't. Or even, what she could see, but couldn't face up to. As for never getting over the divorce, I don't understand?'

‘Because I was always there exaggerating her feelings. I still am, always there, exaggerating her feelings. She turns to me for support and what I'm actually doing is making her painfully aware that she feels terrible. That she feels humiliated and hurt.'

‘First off, no. You do not exaggerate people's emotions. They are just more aware of them around you. Secondly, you don't determine what the emotions are. They are what they are. Third, you don't even live with your mum. She's been living on her own for the majority of the last eight years if I've understood Joe correctly. And, finally, it's not your fault that it happens. It isn't something you can control. Just like I can't control the feeling about where I'm supposed to be or the eye thing. They're just there. Part of us.'

She stared up at him, the strength in his hands on her coat and the stern set of his jaw, accentuating the angle of it as a muscle popped. He was serious. And she knew he couldn't influence her this way – with a sheer force of his will – but it still seemed to filter through her as though it could.

It was a good point about her not having lived at home full time since she was eighteen or at all since she was twenty-one. She wasn't sure she could believe him necessarily about things not being her fault – because clearly the divorce wouldn't have happened if her gift hadn't revealed that her dad didn't love her mum anymore – but this secondary gift he said she had wasn't something she could feel happening or will in anyway so—

‘Hang on. What eye thing?' She stared up into his eyes. Did they have something magical about them? Because she'd always felt like she was falling into them and if it was magic, then that might mean she was not as pathetically infatuated with him as she thought.

‘My eyes change colour according to what the person looking at them wants to see. What's most aesthetically pleasing to them. It's an influencer thing to help …' he trailed off and cleared his throat, a blush touching his cheeks.

‘To help make you attractive to them?' she concluded slowly.

He nodded and Kay watched his eyes like she was waiting to see something happen, like they would change colour in front of her like a mood ring, even though they'd always been the same to her. It made sense. That beautiful blue touched something within her soul. It was too perfect to be real.

‘What colour are they really?'

Her own face heated up as the subject of finding him attractive was now firmly inserted into the small space between their bodies. Even though he'd said it was a general thing. It was to help make him attractive, not because you found him attractive already.

‘It doesn't matter. But … not the colour of bluebells.' He gave a shrug and stepped back, shoving his hands in his pockets. She cringed internally, remembering when she'd made the comparison inside the cave. Your eyes are like bluebells, your magic is so impressive, I'm going to follow you around Biddicote like a puppy unless you hit me on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and send me away.

An awkward silence stretched out, as though they were in their little bubble under the umbrella still and all the people passing them by were drops of rain separated from them by the magic.

‘So. Feeling better?' Harry asked with a rueful smile as though he could tell he'd knocked her for another loop.

‘Er … yes. Thank you.' She nodded, even though it wasn't true. They had other things to worry about.

‘Right, so. I have the tickets, but all the car-rental places nearby don't have anything available until tomorrow at the earliest. There is one on the industrial estate outside of the city, but I actually have friends who live here, and I thought I might ask them if we could borrow theirs instead.'

Kay tightened the belt on her coat in lieu of pulling up her socks, because that's what she needed to do. ‘You think they'd be OK with that? Would you be asking to drive it all the way back to England or leave it at the ferry port? Because we'll need to drive when we get to Harwich too, won't we?'

‘I don't think they'll mind if we borrow it for the whole journey. They hardly ever use the car. And if we swing by there and they can't for some reason, we'll be halfway towards the industrial estate anyway.'

She nodded. Were his friends witches or non-magical? She should probably ask so she should probably ask, but, equally, she was beginning to feel a little exhausted by all the revelations about Harry and his life and his magic – not to mention how they seemed to spark revelations about her own – and she wasn't sure she could face mingling with his friends and rearranging more of the puzzle. Some space would really be good.

‘Why don't you go sort that out and I'll do some sightseeing, until you're ready with the car and it's time to go? I might go get myself some clean clothes as we're going to be stuck overnight again.'

Harry frowned and she knew he was entitled to look a little miffed about that. You go sort everything out, and I'll go have a jolly. It wasn't a good look, admittedly. But she felt like her emotions had been siphoned off into a cocktail maker, several scoopfuls of crushed ice and bitter lemon added, then given a violent shake.

‘Come with me to Leon and Alex's,' Harry said, after a moment, in a tone that was half request and half persuasion. ‘You'll freeze out in the snow and all this travelling is exhausting.'

‘I could go to a museum, as well as the shops, and get some early dinner? By the time I've done all that, it'll probably be time to head off.'

‘Maybe, but that's going to cost you and doesn't exactly give you rest time. We can figure something out with the clothes if that's bothering you. And they run a café; Leon is an amazing cook. We'll be comfortable there, honestly.'

Kay sighed. ‘Why are you pushing this so much?'

‘Because …' He dropped his gaze from hers, seemingly settling it on her tote bag for a moment. ‘Because I'll be worried about you otherwise, Kay. Once it gets to the evening, there are some parts of Amsterdam that aren't great to walk around by yourself. The closer you get to the station in fact.'

It sounded so close to what Joe had been saying that it niggled painfully. Not because she minded people wanting her to be safe – but because it was big-brotherly . ‘That's true of any city, Harry. I live in London.'

‘Exactly. You know it.'

‘I'm not a kid.'

‘Believe me, I'm aware . But … what if you get lost? And we struggle to meet up on time? It just makes sense for us to stick together. I'll come with you if you really want to see the city that much. Forget borrowing the car, we'll get the rental.'

Now she was facing him tagging along with her anyway, there was really no point in objecting. She shook her head and grabbed her bag. ‘No. It makes sense to go see your friends and ask for a favour. Let's do that. I'll come with you.'

‘Great.' He gave her a big smile and picked up his duffel bag too, turning to lead the way.

They walked through the station again, the low ceilings and artificial lighting at the centre giving way to doors out onto a wide pedestrianised square, made all the brighter for the carpet of white hiding the pavement.

In contrast to the modern, clinical feeling inside the train station, Kay was shocked to turn and see it was housed in a grand old building of red brick, three or four storeys high and stretching out far past where she could see. There was a crest with lions looking down on the square and pointed dormers.

‘Are we going to get a tram there?' she asked, cinching her collar together as snowflakes drifted down onto her hair. The tram stops were a lot more obvious than the ones in Prague had been and the rails were right there in front of them.

‘Only if you really want to. Amsterdam isn't massive, and I could do with stretching my legs. Do you fancy seeing some of the city?'

‘Sure.' Considering that she'd just been suggesting she go sightseeing without him, she could hardly say no. And besides which, as she looked out and saw the first canal, reflecting the warm colours of the buildings and the Victoria Hotel on the corner, the city stretched out before them, dusted white on its gabled roofs, she did want to walk through the streets and see what it was like.

Harry pulled out the umbrella but didn't put the spell on it again for some reason. Perhaps he needed to recoup after all the drawing with the little boy on the train. As they walked down the main thoroughfares, passing big shops, cars, bicycles and trams eased past them, forcing the snow into slushy grey piles at the edge of the pavement. Then they turned off onto some quieter streets, which only one or two cars ever drove through. The bridges over the canals were gently curved affairs, barely noticeable until you were on top of their cobbles, looking down to see long canal boats gliding beneath their arches.

Kay nudged the handle of the umbrella and Harry obliged by tipping it back a little so she could look up properly, loving the way the buildings were narrow and tall, their roofs like milkmaids' hats, as they huddled either side of the roads. There were shiny black bollards to prevent cars driving through, capped with snowy hats, and places for bikes every couple of houses. Because there wasn't as much traffic, the snow was settling more and it crunched beneath her feet, making her toes numb. As they turned the corner, she slipped and skidded and Harry reached out to grab her arm, steadying her.

‘Thanks,' she said and swallowed, trying to stop her heart from galloping up into her throat. Telling herself it was because she'd nearly landed on her butt – not because he'd pulled her close to him and his eyes looked bright and beautiful against the neutral backdrop of the brown town houses with the cream and white lintelled windows.

Those blue eyes. To make him more attractive to her. His magic must be as on the fritz as her own if it thought she needed any more convincing to find him attractive.

And that, right there, was what lay down the path she was too scared to travel.