“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear, and it was very difficult not to kiss him. (But she didn’t, because while she might be a full thirty-one years of age, she would never be old enough to allow Primrose to see her kissing someone!)

Primrose and the girls, it turned out, got on like a house on fire. By the time they’d stopped telling her every detail of their lives, night had fallen.

“Oh!” Mika gasped. “It’s snowing!”

Her car keys glinting in her hand, Primrose prepared to set off. She allowed the girls to give her a hug, then turned back to Mika. “What about you? Should I expect you to use the house in York?”

“No, you absolutely should not,” said Terracotta at once, stomping to stand in front of Mika and directing the full and mighty power of her belligerence on Primrose. “You can’t have her. She’s ours.”

Jamie had said it was a leap of faith to love people and to let yourself be loved. It was closing your eyes and stepping off a ledge into nothing and trusting that you’d fly instead of plummet to your tragic and poetic demise.

So Mika stepped off the ledge at last, into nothing, and wouldn’t you know it? She flew.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Very Secret Society of Witches met on the third Thursday of every third month, but that was just about the only thing that never changed. They never met in the same place twice; the last meeting, for instance, had been in Primrose Everly’s firelit drawing-room (yes, she called it a drawing-room), and the one before that had taken place on a cold, wet pier in the Outer Hebrides. This meeting, on the other hand, was on a fine April morning in a quiet, beautiful corner of Norfolk.

And there were a lot more than twenty-one people in attendance.

It had taken Mika a long time to convince Primrose and Jamie, both quite intractable in their own ways, to consent to what Primrose had roundly declared a harebrained scheme. Frankly, Mika was amazed it had only taken a few months to get here, considering she had been expecting to have to battle the pair of them on this for years.

Of course, the wards had helped. They’d needed to be recast, and Mika couldn’t do it alone, so she’d pointed out that she needed the other witches here.

For his part, Jamie’s objection was not to the idea itself but to the invasion, as he put it, of strangers into the territory he guarded in the most curmudgeonly of ways. “Why can’t you do it somewhere else?” had been the refrain. “Cast the wards, then take the kids and definitely take Ian, but just, for the love of God, do it somewhere else.”