“Why would I do that?” Primrose asked, her eyes instantly shrewd and suspicious. “Even if the old spell hadn’t shown us exactly what happens when too many witches get together and lose their heads to arrogance, you know accidents are inevitable when too much power gathers in one place. Look around you,” she went on, lips pursed as she indicated the phones clutched in almost every hand. “In this world, someone’s always watching. How long do you think we could keep our secret?”

“But—”

“No, Mika,” said Primrose, and she was utterly unyielding. “You know how this works. Alone is the only way we survive.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was a little after five o’clock when Mika said goodbye to Primrose and wobbled back to the Broomstick on legs of jelly. It was cold, dark, and wet, an utterly wretched December evening, and not even the insistently merry sound of festive music from inside the hotel could cheer her up. Like the fairies of old, who were repelled by cold iron, she felt like she’d spent too much time in the crowded, brightly lit, fast-paced world normal people inhabited and she longed for a crackling fireplace, the click of knitting needles, and the lullaby of ocean waves.

She longed for Nowhere House.

Mika fumbled with her keys, feeling leaden, shivery, and dizzy with exhaustion (and perhaps also from an excess of sugar. That fifth scone might have been overkill.). Once she’d gotten the car unlocked, an almost impossibly difficult task, she almost fell into the driver’s seat. The heating came on immediately, but it didn’t do much for her shivering. She leaned her heavy head back against the seat and groaned silently. There was absolutely no way she could pull off a speed spell right now, but just the thought of over two hours of driving made her want to crawl into the back seat and just go to sleep there.

Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea.

She was just trying to figure out if she even had the energy to get to the back seat or if she was just going to have to stay right here for the rest of her days, when the door on the driver’s side was yanked unceremoniously open and a tall someone glowered down at her.

“Hey!” Mika protested. “It’s cold!”

“Then move over.” Impossibly, that was Jamie’s voice, stern and unsympathetic. “I’ll shut the door once I get in.”

She moved like she was fighting quicksand, her muscles protesting as she clambered over the handbrake and fell into the other seat. As promised, he slid into the driver’s seat and shut the door. She blinked dizzily at him. Half his face was in shadow, the other lit only by the ambient light spilling out of the hotel, and she was quite certain there were two of him.