Of all the places Mika had ever lived since she’d left Primrose’s house (and as she never, ever lived in one place for more than six months, there had been an awful lot of places), the one thing that they all had in common was the sea. From the tiny shed she’d rented from a lovely old couple in Cornwall to the crumbling cottage she’d found in Lancashire, she had let herself be led by what she could see out of the window. If there had been so much as a glimpse of ocean, she’d said yes.

In short, she loved the sea.

(Well, within reason. A bitterly cold, rainy pier in the furthest reaches of the country? No, of that she was decidedly less fond.)

It was the sea she was looking at now, through the window of her flat, as she waited for her kettle to whistle. Nowhere House was in Norfolk and this was Brighton, and yet the sea here was just as it had been there when she’d seen it yesterday: wild, foamy, and a perfect, sparkling, silvery blue.

It didn’t matter if she was looking across a garden with a tree house or through the shutters of a tiny shed or out of the window of a slightly grotty flat—the sea was the sea. It frothed and frolicked and had a beastly temper, but Mika would never wake up one day and find it gone. It knew all her secrets. It knew her. And it stayed.

The kettle whistled, but she didn’t notice. Instead, she considered the peculiarities of Nowhere House.

By the time she’d gotten back to the flat the previous night and checked her phone, there had been an email from Ian waiting in her inbox. It had included a contract, one that had informed her that she had been hired for a two-week trial period followed by at least six further weeks of unspecified tutoring, would be paid a very decent wage, and that her employer was one Ian Kubo-Hawthorn.

Had they told Lillian about her? Would she even care? It seemed unlikely, considering she appeared to be so unconcerned about the home, friends, and children she’d left behind that she couldn’t be bothered to fly back from her excavation for a few days and sort out some paperwork.

There were still a number of unanswered questions looming over this whole thing, but none of those questions had stopped Mika from signing the contract and emailing it back. She didn’t understand all the peculiarities of Nowhere House, but she did know that there were three young, untrained, uncertain witches there and her doubts could not be allowed to get in the way of her giving them whatever help she could.

Someone knocked at the front door, tugging Mika’s attention back to the present, the kettle, and the distressing lack of clean teacups.