Page 19 of Witch You Weren't Here

Right. He’d be expecting her to use her magic to clean the sheets. It was a lot easier than changing them fully. Or it should be. In fact, he was probably wondering why she hadn’t just done that in the first place, instead of freaking out about the very normal circumstance of people having sex in bedrooms. The suspicious boot was on the other foot now.

‘I’ll be fine now, thanks.’ She looked pointedly at the door.

‘Great.’ He nodded hard, like he was trying to convince himself, and opened the wardrobe in the corner of the room, pulling out a small holdall that was at the bottom. ‘I’ll just go brush my teeth so I’m out of your hair for the rest of the night.’

She backed up, almost to the wall, giving him a wide berth as he passed her to use the small bathroom that adjoined the bedroom.

She unzipped her suitcase again, riffling slowly through for her pyjamas to give her an excuse for not getting on with magicking the bedsheets clean. To add insult to injury, she was now stuck sleeping in the bedsheets as they were, because if she sought out a fresh set, that would also make it obvious that she wasn’t using her magic.

What was her life coming to? Trying her best to hide her magic in public, while simultaneously trying her best to hide the fact she couldn’t do magic from other witches.

The buzz of his electric toothbrush ceased and she gathered all her own toiletries together, swapping places with him in the bathroom with a brief ‘goodnight’. He was in a pair of loose pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt and it was only when she closed the door behind her that she realised the bag he’d taken from the wardrobe had already been in the apartment.

She knew he was capable of a lot, but turning it invisible and levitating all afternoon and evening was very unlikely. And unnecessary. Presumably, he’d been booked onto the same flight back to Heathrow as her. Why hadn’t he taken it with him earlier at the airport? Maybe he’d been given a tip-off by his extensive magical network about the storm and hot-footed it over to the airport without bothering to pick it up? Being an Ashworth meant that hundreds of witches respected you and/or felt they owed you something in return for the protection of Biddicote. And all he’d had to do was be born into the right family.

She brushed her teeth and removed her glasses, so she could clean her make-up off, after she got changed. As she blinked between swipes of the cotton wool pad across her eyelids, she saw the shimmer starting at her abdomen, the glimmering rope of energy, coming into focus, and turned her back to the mirror, tipping her head up to the ceiling.

Nobody wanted to know how people truly felt about others. Not even her.

Kay had no idea what time it was when the noise woke her up, but she knew it was the darkest hour of the night. No street lights were even on outside.

She levered herself up in bed, disorientated. ‘What? What?’

Not at home. Not at the hotel. Not at her mum’s …

The gravelly voice from the other room, swearing, followed by the creak of springs, brought it all back. The tail-end of a dream that had featured Harry and restraints fading away. She didn’t want to think about whether the restraints were because she was attaching him to a runaway horse, or to a bed …

More creaking and swearing.

‘Oh God, what now?’ she groaned.

‘Kay? Are you awake?’

‘Unfortunately.’

‘I might need a bit of help.’

‘With what?’ she asked, even as she was stumbling out of bed and shoving her glasses onto her face. Technically, she didn’t have to sleep with her glasses off – they’d been crafted by an alchemic witch, they wouldn’t break – but it was more comfortable sleeping without the bits of plastic bending around her head.

‘It’s probably best for you to come in here and see.’ He sounded oddly strained.

She pushed the folding door back and flicked the light on, blinking hard in the glare. And then again as she tried to figure out what was going on with the sofa bed.

Harry had pushed the coffee table out of the way to make room for it, but it wasn’t the whole way out. Instead, it was making a shallow zigzag shape and Harry was balancing on the peak of it, bracing himself over the gap where it folded out from the base.

‘Wh-what?’

‘The sofa bed appears to have malfunctioned. And it’s trying to eat me.’

Kay’s stomach went cold. Was this her doing? She’d been dreaming about Harry – had her magic done this while she was sleeping? Had it ever done that before and she just hadn’t noticed?

‘Er … could you help me get free?’ he carried on, breaking her from her panicked thoughts. He tugged his leg and the sofa bed made the creaking noise again. That explained that.

She moved to the other end of the sofa, where she could see his left leg was actually down in the void. ‘Why don’t you do your gravity-defying trick on it?’ she asked. ‘The one you put on my bag earlier.’

He frowned. ‘Are you really annoyed because I put that charm on your suitcase? You’d prefer to lug it around and tear a ligament?’

‘I’d have preferred you to listen to me when I said I didn’t need your help with it. Not do it regardless so I fall on my butt when I go to move it.’

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