Page 30 of Witch You Weren't Here

‘If you come out of there now, I won’t report you, OK?’ the voice offered.

Kay ripped the door open and flew out to see the flight attendant watching with an unamused expression. ‘It’s not what you think—’

‘Honey, I’ve been doing this job for ten years, OK? The truth is, I’m really not bothered, but I do need you to return to your seats for safety reasons.’

Kay nodded and did a brisk walk of shame back to her seat, clutching the headrests as the plane dropped more frequently into pockets of turbulence. Far more than she’d ever experienced on other flights.

She ignored the disgusted look on Dean’s face as she moved past his row. The wife had actually taken the seat in the middle now and was holding her husband’s hand as he flinched every time the plane juddered. So maybe they weren’t so estranged after all. Just in need of a little breather.

Or maybe when she’d been there sitting with them, she’d exacerbated all their niggling irritations with each other?

No. What Harry said couldn’t be true. Witches didn’t have more than one affinity. Did they? She supposed he could hardly make it up if it was widely known about in the witching community.

Kay buckled up, contemplating the fact that they were starting to hit the bad weather and they hadn’t even been up in the air forty-five minutes. How much worse was it going to get? Infuriating as Harry Ashworth was, there were bigger things to worry about.

Like whether they would make it to Paris at all.

Chapter Eight

7.30 a.m.: saturday 30 october

Dusseldorf Airport

382 miles and 31(+1) hours and 30 minutes until the wedding

Kay wasn’t sure there was anything more demoralising than watching a baggage carousel slowly empty of luggage, while all she had was her tote bag from the plane.

Except maybe watching a baggage carousel empty in an airport she wasn’t meant to land in at all.

After another twenty minutes of tense compulsory seat-belt time, the plane bumping and dipping to increasingly worried noises from the passengers, the captain had announced they needed to land. It took another thirty minutes of turbulent flying before they’d touched down in Dusseldorf, wind and rain buffeting the plane. Then they’d had to wait on the tarmac for twenty minutes before they could even get off the plane. It was no wonder there had been a mishap with the luggage in all the changes.

Admittedly, she’d recognised several people from her flight who had their suitcases, but by this point she was kind of expecting a calamity with her name on it around every corner. And after almost an hour of genuinely being worried the plane wouldn’t make it to safe ground, she was still too overcome with relief to worry about it. Now she needed to decide whether to try to deal with the lost-luggage situation, or the being-stranded-in-another-European-country situation, first.

Luggage initially, she determined, since there was probably a time limit on reporting it missing. She needed to deal with something. Feel like she could deal with something. Plus, the queues of confused and stressed travellers might have gone down a little by the time she was done. It was yesterday evening all over again. Except, this time, at least she wasn’t going to bump into Dean. He’d be running screaming from her, because she highly doubted that Harry had managed to track the salesman down in the airport and reverse the effect of the sketch he’d done. However that worked.

Did he need to destroy it? He’d said it could fade naturally, but how long would that take? Did it depend on how susceptible the person he’d tried to influence was? How much they were willing to embrace the suggestion?

In the bar yesterday, she’d disagreed with Harry about influencer magic being like hypnosis, but she did know that suggestibility played its part. Her father mostly motivated people to do what they already wanted to do – whether that was in their best interests or not was still up for debate. Joe helped people understand things easily and it worked best with the children he taught because they wanted to learn. It always worked best with a willing audience.

She had been a willing audience. That smiley face couldn’t have been that powerful. It had been tiny, dashed off quickly by an adolescent witch, it could barely have contained any magic. And yet it had impacted her like a wrecking ball through all her feelings for him. She’d been mad at him on the plane for treating her in the same way as Dean, but had she been as ready to hate Harry as Dean was to be so disgusted by her, just because she didn’t want to have sex with him? Deep down, was her reaction to being rejected that petty?

If Harry hadn’t gone about everything in such a thoughtless way, if he’d broken it to her gently, rather than letting her hope, would part of her still have hated him? It seemed unlikely, because she’d adored him. But she’d been angry at the time. Angry at her family, angry at the world, like a typical teenager.

And she’d been acting that way ever since Harry had shown up by the astronomical clock in Prague. Like he’d dialled back time and she was letting all her good, adult sense be blown apart by beguiling smiles, twinkly eyes, floofy hair and hurt feelings. She had a hierarchy of problems and he should be somewhere down the bottom. The top spot was currently taken by lost luggage.

Kay marched through the airport, heading for the baggage-claim information desk. Luckily, on all the blue signs around the airport, there was a handy translation into English, so she found it without too much hassle and got in line.

She considered texting her mum to update her, but until she knew what she was doing, there didn’t seem much point. Were there going to be any flights at all taking off? The weather had been pretty atrocious out there. She flicked through reports on her phone as she waited and the endless warnings of red, red, amber, red, snow, high winds, fire, flood, the apocalypse, made her chest tight in a way that was very different to the pressure feeling she’d noticed at the airport in Prague – but no less concerning when it came to her magic. She was beginning to feel like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.

Popping in her earphones, she put on some music and did her best to chill out until she got to the desk. The customer service person assisted her with filling out a form with the details of her missing bag and Kay reminded herself to be grateful she’d lost it on the way home rather than on the way out there.

Heading back into the main terminal and taking a look at the departures board made her forget the gratitude. Nothing was currently taking off from Dusseldorf. It looked like their plane had made it in by the skin of its teeth.

‘Crap, crap, crap, crap,’ she muttered to herself. What should she do? Queue up to speak to someone about when the next flights might be leaving? Start researching alternative means to get home? She chewed on her thumbnail and looked around her. The prospect of hanging around for hours in the crowded airport with a bunch of highly stressed people was not appealing – and when it came to her magic misfiring, it was downright worrying. For a moment, she even kind of wished she’d bump into Harry again, just for a familiar face. Regardless of the bad blood between them, he had been helping her – often in an annoying, high-handed kind of way, but the intention was there. It wouldn’t be awful to feel like she had someone on her side.

But he wasn’t the only person around here that she knew. Ilina lived in Germany. Maybe she’d be able to give her some advice about travelling?

Kay headed out of the main crowd towards the eateries and found her friend’s number in the recent calls list.

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