They had found a tiny carpark a few minutes’ walk away, and instead of staying in the car, Mika had accompanied Jamie to the entrance of the gallery. His shoulders were tense, his posture rigid, and she wished they’d never come.

“Will you be okay?” Mika asked at exactly the same time Jamie said, “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“Yes,” they both answered, also at the same time.

Mika laughed. Jamie even cracked a smile.

“I won’t be far,” she said.

She watched him enter the gallery, and once he was out of sight, she gathered up the friendly gold dust around her and let it guide her to a spot where it was quieter. There she found a low waterfront wall to perch on in the bright, cold sunshine, and fished her phone out of the pocket of her knitted yellow coat so that she could reply to the stream of texts Ian had sent her in the last hour or so.

The first seven texts were anxious queries about whether Jamie seemed himself, while the eighth seemed to be an ode to his grief that there had been no flamingo pink wool in stock at The Lost Sheep.

If you see a reputable wool shop while you’re up there, dearest, the text ended by saying, please get me all the flamingo pink. All of it.

Mika was just about to reply to this request when she noticed a familiar prickly sensation start in her thumbs and spread slowly up her arms until they were covered in gooseflesh.

There was a witch close by.

She hopped off the wall, took a step away—

—and walked right into a perky, blue-haired Korean cannonball, who was holding the hand of a shorter, perkier, black-haired Korean cannonball.

“M-Mika?” Out of breath, the cannonballs came to an abrupt halt, stopping their relentless forward momentum with such speed that they nearly fell over. The blue-haired one gave Mika a single panicked look before hugging her. “What a surprise to see you here!”

“Hilda?”

“Of course, silly!” Hilda had grown up in Liverpool, so her chirpy Scouse voice would have been unmistakable even if the hair hadn’t given her away. “Who else?”

Mika was stunned. The sight of another witch in the wild, outside of the familiar, specific setting of a Very Secret Society gathering, was so alien that she just blinked a few times. Were they even allowed to speak to each other? Hilda, too, seemed at a loss.

“Hiya,” said the other cannonball, coming to their rescue. “I’m Kira, Hilda’s fiancée. Are you the same Mika from the book club?”

“I—” Mika looked helplessly at Hilda, so startled to hear that Hilda actually talked about her at home that she didn’t know what to say.

“Yes,” said Hilda quickly, and pointedly. “This is Mika. From my book club. My virtual book club. She lives in, er—”