For one thing, there was the dog hair. Hadn’t anyone considered the fact that dogs shed their fur all the goddamned time? What had possessed them to invite a dog into the house? No matter where he went, a collection of golden hairs seemed to follow him. They were on his clothes. They were on the chairs. They were on the carpets. They were even in his car (How? The dog had never been in there!). The only refuge he had from the hair was his own bedroom and he didn’t think that would last much longer because, for some unfathomable reason, the dog had decided she liked him.

Jamie returned to his desk to find Circe sitting upright beside it, tongue out and tail wagging, waiting eagerly for him.

“You know you’re not supposed to be in here,” he said, and even his own voice was intolerable. Where was the bite? Christ, he sounded almost fond.

Most irritatingly, Circe was a very well-behaved dog, which made it hard to resent her presence. While she refused to stay out of the library altogether, choosing instead to sit with her head on his knee while he worked at his desk, she never went near the bookcases, never tried to chew a shoe, pen, or valuable book, and never distracted him when he was busy. So, fine, maybe he was almost fond of her. Fond-adjacent.

On the other hand, he was absolutely not fond of Circe’s owner.

Also irritatingly, it was difficult to say exactly why Mika bothered him so much. There were secrets in this house he didn’t want unburied, and he didn’t trust her not to somehow destroy the life they’d built, but those were things that would have troubled him no matter who Ian had invited into their lives.

Why did she specifically get under his skin? He couldn’t exactly object to her interactions with the others. She was friendly, she treated the children with kindness and humour, and Ian, Ken, and Lucie had obviously taken to her. And he couldn’t object to her tutoring, either. In just an hour of watching her work with the children, it had been obvious that she was a little green, but she was a talented witch and she seemed to genuinely care.

Her tutoring was working, too. It’d only been a few days, but all three girls could now make their pebbles move. Rosetta had even gotten her pebble to do backflips.