Page 9 of Secrets of the Forgotten Heir

And then I saw it – or rather, Ididn’t.

My stomach dropped.

Maddie’s face was ashen, her eyes wide with the worry she’d been trying to hide from me. I finally understood thefear that had emanated from her since the moment she’d broken into my apartment the previous night.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered brokenly. ‘That’s the main reason I needed you to come back.’

Chapter Six

It should have hit me the moment I’d walked into the cottage. The Eternal Flame was gone.

When I went in, the cool air should have set off every alarm bell in my being. The cottage was always warm – not warm, it washot. You never needed more than a T-shirt; the raging Eternal Flame kept us hot in winter and scorching in summer. Now the cottage was cold and dim.

I stared at the empty fireplace, my mouth open in disbelief. The grand structure with the runes carved into its stone was empty. There were no logs in it – there never were – the Eternal Flame needed no combustible fuel.

The Flame was inherently magical. There were rarely licks of anything as pedestrian as red and orange; it changed colour all the time, from the brightest white to emerald and purple. Sometimes I used to lose a whole afternoon watching it shift and swirl. But there were no flames changing colours now, just grey stone. The fireplacewas cold and empty. Completely, utterly bare. Not a flicker of fire to be seen.

‘How?’ I turned to Maddie, eyes wide. ‘What the hell happened?’

She wrung her hands. ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said quickly. ‘I couldn’t! You know that. You remember all the times we tried to put it out as kids...’

She was right. If you told three boisterous kids that something was impossible, you could bet your life they’d try to prove you wrong. In our case that impossible task was extinguishing the Eternal Flame. We’d tried buckets of water, buckets of ash, blowing really hard – yes, that one was stupid, but we were young and operating with the logic of children, which is to say no logic at all.

With hindsight, what we’d done was idiotic. If we’d somehow succeeded, we’d probably have been grounded for eternity.

We hadn’t considered that the Flame’s power helped maintain the most powerful wards in the village; I wasn’t even sure if we’d understood that Witchlight Cove remained hiddenbecauseof the Flame. We wanted to prove we were stronger than this supposedly all-powerful magic. Spoiler alert: we weren’t.

‘When?’ I stuttered, my brain still frozen with shock, guilt and horror because I was the freakingguardianandI’d abandoned my post, and now the Flame wasgone.‘When did it go out?’ I still couldn’t tear my eyes away from the fireplace. I must have looked into it a thousand times before and not once had it been this desolate.

‘A week ago.’ Maddie swallowed hard. ‘I thought maybe it would come back. The wards around the village haven’t dropped, so I thought it was a glitch.’

She was right: I’d felt the barrier as we’d arrived. Surely if it hadn’t fallen, the Eternal Flame must be nearby? Could it have been stolen? But alarms would have been sent to all the covens if someone had tried to steal it, and that hadn’t happened.

The Flame was supposedly impossible to extinguish, so what did that leave? I refused to accept that it had simply gone out.

Maddie continued. ‘I kept waiting for it to come back of its own accord, but with Banks making his proposals to the council I started getting worried.’

At the sound of the developer’s name, I turned to look at her. ‘You think he had something to do with it?’ I asked sharply, cogs finally whirring. ‘If he wants to take over the place, maybe he wants to show that we’re unfit to hold the guardianship.’ At that moment it would have been hard to argue with him, even in my own head. ‘The Guardian Who Abandoned Her Post and Letthe Eternal Flame Mysteriously Vanish’ wasn’t exactly a glowing endorsement.

It had been a mistake to leave the Flame in Maddie’s care. Even so, it wasn’t her fault it was gone but mine. She wasn’t a Stonehaven; I was.

I thought about the guilt and fear I’d felt from her; she’d been tying herself in knots over this for a full week. My own guilt deepened.

‘I thought he might have something to do with it,’ Maddie admitted slowly. ‘But if he has, why hasn’t he already gone to the council and told them? As far as I’m aware, he hasn’t even been inside the house yet.’

‘And now we definitely can’t let him in!’ I said, alarmed. ‘No one can come into the house until we know what’s going on.’

The relief that billowed from her was so strong it almost took my breath away. She was passing the torch back to me, so to speak, and her feeling was understandable. The unfamiliar responsibility settled over me like a stone shroud. ‘Okay. We need a plan. Who else knows?’ I asked. ‘Have you told Yanni?’

Maddie shook her head. ‘No. Nana has enough to deal with – she’s basically running the police station on her own. She has Dove, but they’re a two-woman team tryingto police the whole village. The last thing I wanted to do was burden her with this.’

‘True,’ I agreed. ‘And she’d probably let the covens know.’ Yanni was a stickler for rules and regulations; she’d want to do the ‘right’ thing, which was to be open and transparent. I wanted neither; I wanted to be very opaque and secretive, thank you very much.

‘Exactly. It can’t get back to the covens,’ Maddie said. ‘You know how they are about me – they barely treat me as a real witch as it is. They’ll start persecuting me immediately!’

I grimaced. ‘You and me both.’

Our situations with the covens were very different, but neither of us was nestled into their bosoms. As a guardian, my mother – and subsequently me – had to stay impartial, much the same way Yanni had to be as the chief of police when she dealt with the different magical residents. As for Dad, I’d always thought he didn’t care about being in a coven; despite being powerful he seemed to dislike using his magic and avoided it when he could. He didn’t want a coven to increase his power when he didn’t care about power in the slightest. Knowledge was his thing; he loved to learn and to teach.

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