“There are three children living in this house,” Ian said firmly, looking Mika straight in the eye. “All three of those children are witches. Jamie, Ken, Lucie, and I know they’re witches. We know about witches. Lillian told us. Because she’s a witch.”

“Ian,” Lucie protested.

“Hold on,” Mika said, well and truly taken aback. “Lillian is a witch? The woman who owns this house? The archaeologist who’s never home?”

“The very same.”

“And she told you about witches?”

Ian nodded enthusiastically. “So you see?”

Mika’s thoughts tumbled over each other as she tried to make sense of what she’d stumbled into. It added up, didn’t it? There was so much magic here that it had to be the home of a witch, or in this case, a number of witches. And what about the magic she’d felt at the gates? What if what she’d really felt was the presence of wards, a set of protective enchantments placed around the house and gardens, hiding the children inside? Mika herself had grown up in Primrose’s warded house, a place where spellwork and accidents would go unnoticed by neighbours, passers-by, and even other witches. What if Nowhere House’s wards were the reason Primrose didn’t know these particular children existed?

Did Primrose know Lillian existed? She must. Lillian was very likely one of the witches who had, at some point, declined Primrose’s invitation to join the group that was absolutely not called the Very Secret Society of Witches.

“You don’t believe me,” Ian guessed when Mika stayed quiet.

“I don’t not believe you,” Mika replied cautiously.

Brusquely, Jamie said, “Come here.”

Unfazed by his tone, Mika crossed the kitchen to the open French doors and stood beside him. Jamie was looking outside again. Mika followed his line of sight into a large, beautiful back garden with a thick hedge around the border and undulating heathery dunes beyond it. A vivid patch of giant sunflowers interrupted the line of the hedge, beside which was a small wooden gate that led, presumably, over the dunes and down the other side to the sea.

Jamie wasn’t looking at the gate; he was looking at three girls playing in a tree house at the far end of the garden. Mika squinted to see them better. The oldest, a Black child with long limbs, very dark brown skin, and thick coils of dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. She sat with a book on her lap. The other girls looked younger, one with peachy skin and straight, shiny black hair to her shoulders and the other with a messy light brown braid and brownish gold skin more or less the same colour as Mika’s.