Chapter Five

ten years earlier

The village of Biddicote, Surrey, England

Biddicote was uncannily pretty. The ‘uncanny' bit being down to the fact that the large population of witches living there used their various special gifts to help them maintain the old buildings and keep their gardens flourishing. Whether it was Mr Ashworth ensuring the local authority awarded Grade II listed status to the quaint shops in the market square, or Jaz's mum making sure every flower bloomed (for a small fee, naturally – witches had to make a living too), it all helped to keep the village picture-postcard perfect.

At that moment, though, Kay couldn't have cared less whether the thatched Tudor cottages leaned at the most aesthetically pleasing angle beside the country lanes, their window boxes full of bright flowers, petals glistening from being freshly watered. It barely registered that the pond on the green reflected the clear blue skies, broken only by the ripples of the ducks, swimming towards the pristinely painted white bench where a mother and child waited with the offer of birdseed. She had much better things to bother her head with.

The weather was of slightly more interest, since the late June temperature had allowed her to pair the bright pink Converse high tops she'd received for Christmas with her favourite summer dress. It swung about her legs, just over the knee, and had a bodice which made the most of the chest she was secretly hoping would develop a little more over the next few months, or years at least.

Even that barely mattered, though, because she was going to meet Harry. Going on a date with Harry.

The two months since she'd last seen him had been the longest of her life, and not just because of how much she'd missed seeing him. So much had happened in that time, and even though they'd texted each other frequently, him offering her words of support and consolation in the face of her parents' sudden divorce, it hadn't been the same as speaking to him in person.

Once both their exams were over, she'd finally screwed up her courage and sent him the text she'd been drafting in her mind ever since Beltane.

Kay: Would you'd like to go out sometime? Just me and you? I've missed you. We don't have to tell Joe if you think he'll be weird about it. He's still not really talking to me anyway.

After her initial burst of bravery, doubt had crept in. He'd always answered her really quickly before, but as time crept on and a week had passed, she'd worried that she'd read his feelings all wrong. Then, finally, he'd replied.

Harry: I've missed you too. Meet me at the cave on Saturday? 7 p.m.?

He'd missed her too! And he wanted to meet up! It was the best thing to happen to her in months. A patch of bright blue in a relentlessly grey sky. Just like his eyes.

Her stomach flipped at the thought of going down to the cave again, her mind straying to the memory she'd replayed over and over again. His fingers playing with her hair. Him leaning in towards her. She was so sure he was going to kiss her last time, and now they were going on an official date, how much more likely was it to happen? She wondered how his mouth would feel on hers. It looked so soft. Harry Ashworth's lips were the kind of pretty it was worth thinking about.

Slipping down the alleyway behind the old post office, she walked until she came to the stile which broke up the hedgerow. She climbed over nimbly enough, but almost lost her glasses as she jumped down onto the path. She wasn't used to wearing them yet and was doing her best not to worry about what Harry would think of them. She'd sent him a photo of her modelling them and he'd said she looked ‘very chic', but maybe he was just being nice?

No. He liked her. He wouldn't have said yes to going on a date if he didn't.

The path wasn't as clear as the one down from Ashworth Hall. It wasn't meant to be, but she still managed to find it, the concentration of magic like a distant hum in the background. She took a couple of wrong turns, but when she got there, she wasn't late. Harry hadn't arrived yet.

She took a seat on the fallen log before the cave in the clearing. The dirt was soft under the soles of her shoes and had smudged them with an unfortunate brown colour. She dusted them off with her hand for a moment, seeing if it could be rectified with manual efforts, and when that didn't work, she took a deep breath, reached down to her centre of energy and muttered the words of the cleaning spell she'd seen her mother use a million times to deal with stains.

She gave a little gasp as her shoes were suddenly spotless. It felt a little like going to write with a fountain pen and accidentally pressing too hard, so the ink came out in a splat. Something about discovering your affinity allowed you to focus the magic more effectively, but it took a while to get used to using that power. Or so everyone said, anyway. After all that time waiting and dreaming of the day her gift would emerge, Kay wasn't entirely sure she wanted to get used to using it.

Still, for the moment, it was definitely useful to be clean. As long as she didn't wander around and get them messy again, Harry's first sight of her today would be a put-together one. Not like that time she'd been trying out face-packs with Tina and come out of her bedroom, bumping straight into him, with skin the colour of Shrek's.

Twenty minutes later, her butt was starting to hurt from the bark of the log.

She checked to see if he'd sent her a message to say he was running late.

Nothing.

After forty minutes, she double-checked to see if she'd got her wires crossed about which Saturday they were meant to meet.

Nope. Definitely this one.

At ten to eight, she was beginning to feel chilly and her heart had slipped down to sit with her feet in her very clean shoes.

She got up and walked around the clearing a little. Just in case. He might have got the time wrong, so she'd give him until eight. Harry's dyslexia sometimes meant he got a little muddled about arrangements or didn't manage his time particularly well. So, she gave him until 8 p.m., and then an extra ten minutes after that in case he was running late …

And then she had to face up to the fact that he wasn't coming.

Why wasn't he coming?

Walking back up to the village from the valley was harder work, each step tiring, her shoes dragging through the dirt and dust, the skirt of her summer dress too flimsy to keep her thighs warm as the wind picked up and she constantly had to pull it down.

She could have sent him a message to see where he was, but at that moment, she wasn't sure whether she wanted to know the answer. There was a chance he'd innocently forgotten, but there was also the possibility that he'd changed his mind.

As she went past the pub on the green, a cheer went up inside, drawing her attention through the leaded window. And there he was. Smiling. Punching the air in victory and hugging the other teens from the sixth form who were old enough to drink now.

He was watching some kind of match with them all. He wasn't even into sport, was he?

Either he'd completely forgotten about their date or he never intended to come and meet her at all .

Tears burned at the back of Kay's eyes and in her throat, but she wasn't going to cry. Especially not now, because somehow he must have felt her watching him and he was looking back through the window, straight at her, his arms hanging slack at his sides, his wide mouth downturned at the corners as some pretty girl from his class wrapped herself around him and planted a kiss on his perfectly freckly cheek.

He had known. He hadn't innocently forgotten, otherwise he'd be hurrying out now to apologise to her. Instead of staring at her with that grim expression.

He'd stood her up and been caught out.

She crossed her arms over her chest and glared back at him. It didn't take long for her humiliation to succumb to anger. She was about to storm in there and confront him about it, when suddenly, like tearing a wax strip off a shin bone, he turned and disappeared deeper into the pub.

Kay waited. Again. She couldn't help herself. Maybe he was going to come out and talk to her?. Like the decent person she'd thought he was.

Instead, her brother appeared. His face in that scowl he almost constantly had when he looked at her these days.

She turned away. She didn't need to deal with that on top of this.

‘Hey, Kay. Wait.' Joe's voice was rough, like he was having to drag it out of himself to speak to her.

‘What?' She stopped and looked back at him, arms still tight across her chest, fingers digging into the bare flesh of her goose-bumped upper arms.

‘Harry asked me to give you this.' He stepped forward a couple of paces, coming down the smooth stone steps of the pub and waiting by the big tub full of roses, but moving no further, so she had to go over to him. In his hand, he had a folded napkin.

‘When?' she croaked, reaching out and plucking it from Joe's fingers.

‘"When" what?' Joe sighed and looked up at the sign for the pub rather than maintaining eye contact with her.

‘When did he give you this, to give to me ?' Perhaps this was a note to tell her he wanted to move their date, and Joe had just forgotten to give it to her. Or withheld it on purpose, just to hurt her the way he kept telling her she'd hurt the entire family when her gift came in.

‘Just now,' Joe said, like she was an idiot. ‘I'm going back in.'

It hadn't sounded like a lie and she had to face facts; if Harry had wanted to change the date or time of them meeting up, surely he would have texted her like a normal person?

Joe paused in the doorway. Sighed again and tromped back down the steps. ‘Are you going to be OK?'

Kay bit her lip. ‘Why wouldn't I be?'

‘I don't know. It's not like I wanted to think about you having a crush on Harry, y'know, but I'm not blind.'

Kay's cheeks flushed. Had she been so obvious?

Joe shook his head. ‘Look, why don't you come to Dad's with me later? Get away from the house?'

She took a deep breath, attempting to exchange one pain for another. ‘Did he ask you to convince me to come?'

‘No.'

‘Then no. I don't want to see him, anyway.'

‘Urgh, you're so stubborn, Kay. Suit yourself. I'll be back Monday.' And with that, he disappeared back inside the pub.

She looked down at the napkin. It had her name printed on it in beautiful black script, complete with curlicues. A twinge went through her chest – she could see the pen within Harry's agile fingers, the concentration on his face. He'd told her how his father had made him practise for hours every day in the lead-up to his GCSEs to improve his handwriting. It had paid off, she supposed.

She ran the rest of the way home. Went straight up the stairs of their small cottage, into her bedroom and threw herself down on the bed. Tears were already swimming in her eyes when she opened the napkin and read it:

Kay

I'm sorry I agreed to meet up with you when I knew I couldn't go through with it. I hope you make things up with Joe. He's being an idiot but he's hurting too. Good luck with your exam results. Sure you'll ace them.

Harry

??

The rush of pain she felt was so fast it burned up and blazed into anger instead. He'd drawn a smiley face underneath his name.

A. Smiley. Face.

On a napkin.

What the actual hell?

He hadn't even put any effort into it. She knew what a talented artist he was and yet he'd signed off with the kind of quick scribble a five-year-old could manage.

As she stared at it, mouth open, eyes blurry with tears, her breathing came faster. A bubble of hatred and pain grew and grew, like a balloon stretched thin, ready to burst. He was an awful person. Selfish and arrogant and stupid—

She gasped and dropped the napkin.

Harry had infused that smiley face with magic. That tiny image. Brimming with power to … make her hate him? She never would have thought he was stupid. Even if he didn't want to go out with her. Why would he do this to her? Influencing her – against the tenets – crossing a line even witches who were strangers didn't cross with each other. He might not want them to date, but she'd thought they were at least friends. You didn't treat friends like this, it was so … violating .

Why? Why would he do this?

Was it just so she would leave him alone? Had she been pestering him? It had been obvious to her friends, obvious to Joe, that she was infatuated with him. Had she been making things up in her head about how much they got along when really he was just wishing she'd stop trailing after him with goo-goo eyes?

Acid rose at the back of her throat.

And he must have known she would be able to tell he was trying to influence her. Even if that horrible little smiley face didn't work for longer than a couple of minutes, the point was made. He didn't want her to like him. He didn't want her anywhere near him.

She picked up the napkin again, a tear dropping on the bottom. It was such crude magic, clearly he hadn't had time to finesse it as he'd scribbled her a note in the pub, but it was still clever enough to tug at her natural response to feel hurt and pissed off at him.

She shoved it in the back of her diary and dumped it in the drawer of her bedside cabinet. Then she flopped onto the bed again, burying her head in her arms, forgetting about her new glasses and succeeding in bashing the bridge of her nose with them. Which was just too fitting really.

Why? Why had her affinity only shown itself just after Beltane? Having the ability to see the genuine feelings between people was no use to anyone – especially when it came after Harry had stopped visiting because he needed to concentrate on his exams. If it had happened just a week earlier, at least she would have known never to bother asking him out. The one thing it could have been useful for. She would have been disappointed, yes. But not embarrassed and rejected. Instead, she'd ended up with divorcing parents and utter humiliation.

There was a knock on her door and her mother's soft footsteps came towards her. Tallulah rarely came out of her own room since Kay's dad moved out. The intensity of Kay and Joe's anger at each other was too much for her on top of her broken heart.

Another thing for Kay to feel guilty about.

As if it wasn't enough that her ignorance about her own gift, her silly excitement, had meant she'd asked question after awkward, stupid question about the bonds she could see linking them all, until it became obvious that her dad no longer – if ever – loved their mum. She'd been so shocked, she hadn't even been able to hide the discovery. Joe was right, Kay had hurt them all.

‘My darling girl,' Tallulah took her by the shoulders and folded Kay into her arms. ‘What happened?'

‘Ha-Harry,' was all Kay managed to splutter.

‘Oh, sweetheart.' Her mum's arms tightened, her cheek resting upon her head, and Kay felt tears soaking into her head. ‘Don't you worry, we'll get through this together. It's a privilege and a curse that being empaths make us feel this deeply. And so often for the wrong people. But we'll survive,' her mother managed to say between her own sobs.

The last piece of Kay's heart, battered from the collapse of her parents' marriage and the distance of her brother and her father, broke away. A Harry-shaped hole, that had once been filled with hope and the giddy high of a teenage crush and friendship, was now empty of anything but hatred for him and bitterness towards her own special brand of self-destructive magic.

If she never saw Harry Ashworth again, it would be too soon.