Page 61 of Witch You Weren't Here

2.15 a.m.: sunday 31 october

The North Sea

194 miles and 11(+1) hours and 45 minutes until the wedding

Kay watched the black lines appear on her skin, tickling but also tingling as Harry infused the lines with his magic. He paused every time the ferry moved to avoid ruining the image he was putting on her arm, but she focused on when he was going to start drawing again, what it was going to be, instead of thinking about the waves crashing and the big lump of metal they were on tipping over.

His concentration face was back. The tunnel vision as he created and allowed his magic to flow through him. She supposed she was getting a double whammy of it. Both being able to see it and feel it. If it worked like that.

He finished the first image and it made her smile, a spark of calm swirling beneath her skin and touching at the edges of her panic.

Straight away, he moved along to start drawing the next thing. And on and on he went until her arm was covered, and inside she was simmering with different feelings. He wasn’t just concentrating on one emotion. It was a bundle of them, coaxing positivity against the fear swamping her. Like a school friend knocking at the door and asking if they could come out to play: serenity, happiness, humour, curiosity, bravery. Little delicious sips which lit her up from inside, some that hit a humming note more clearly than others. As she watched him draw, their village was slowly revealed. The walk up to her old front door.

‘I’ve run out of arm,’ he said as he finished putting the final touches to the rose bushes at her mum’s house on the back of her hand. ‘Do you think that’s enough?’

She raised her arm to let her eyes run along the images as her head fell back on the pillow. Either the storm was calming or her calming down had made the weather ease back. Or perhaps the storm had never been as violent as she had at first thought it was.

She could have said to Harry that she was feeling a bit more in control of herself. Among other things. Her skin tingled, magic seeping down into her muscles and running through her bloodstream, as well as entering through her eyes and alighting on parts of her brain that conjured memories to match the emotions and the images. She could feel the languor of a summer’s day as she walked down to the green in their village, the bumble bees droning lazy and slow at the honeysuckle bushes lining the lanes. She could smell the lavender in the garden outside the vicarage – that heavy scent that brought drowsiness along with it.

‘Do you need to stop?’ she asked. ‘You’ve barely recovered.’

He studied her face. ‘I’ve got more than enough energy for my gift. You know how little that takes up. If you need me to, I’ll do this all night.’

She licked her lips and shifted further onto her back to push up the sleeve on her other arm, all the while thinking she could probably just take her jumper off entirely under the pretext of avoiding smudging. Rather than the truth, which was that she wanted to avoid melting from all this proximity and his hands on her skin.

Instead, though, she watched as he started drawing again, doing it upside down for her, this time creating a tableau of their journey together, with the clock from Prague, the pretty buildings in Dusseldorf.

‘You must think I’m so stupid,’ she blurted out.

‘Never,’ he replied without even looking up at her. ‘Why would you even say that?’

‘Because I hardly understand anything about magic. How easy it is to use your gift – how we can have a blend of affinities – I’m so clueless.’

‘You know plenty, Kay.’ He shook his head, his hair tickling her chin as he moved further up her arm. ‘You just had a bad experience, so you chose a different path. I can understand that.’ He paused as the ship rolled again.

‘Nothing good ever comes of letting your fear stop you, though, does it?’ she murmured.

‘I respectfully disagree.’ He flicked a stylised line across her arm, making a train suddenly appear in motion, a sense of steadiness rolling over her. ‘Sometimes we have to listen to our fears, they help us remove ourselves from dangerous situations.’

‘You’re talking about actual harm, though. Not just … feelings, right?’

‘Our feelings can do the biggest amount of damage to our lives, can’t they?’

‘Especially when you’re a witch who can accidentally brew up a storm,’ she said, drily.

He looked up at her for a moment with a half-smile, hearing the humour in her words. ‘Do you still think that’s what happened?’

‘Things are calming down now, aren’t they? Thank you.’

‘My pleasure.’ He let the tip of one of his fingers trace beneath a tree he’d drawn just above her elbow. Goosebumps broke out over her flesh. ‘Did you ever think that maybe – if you do have another affinity for weather – you just helped? Like I said, it’s really unlikely that you caused a whole weather system. But a little pocket of calm in a storm? That’s doable for some witches. It never occurred to you to believe your magic was helpful rather than damaging?’

She was quiet as his words sank in. It was sort of what he’d been saying earlier about her seeing her gift as a curse. And she’d had good reason to believe that, because she couldn’t see a single way it could help anyone … but she’d also assumed her ability to make people aware of their feelings had made things worse with her family. She hadn’t stopped to consider how it could be a good thing. Maybe it was why her friendship with Ilina had clicked when they’d met in person at the conference?

And now she’d done the same thing, thinking about the possibility of her having a weather affinity, assuming it would only do something bad.

‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘it didn’t occur to me that it would bring anything good. My magic never has.’

‘Have you ever really given it a chance to?’ He tilted his head. ‘Magic grows with us. I’m always learning more about the nuances of how my gift works. I didn’t know this would work as well as it did.’ His thumb pressed into the tender juncture of her elbow, stroking gently.

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