“I don’t know if there’s a different term for it, but that’s what my mother called it,” Ian explained. “It happened to her once when I was a boy. She miscalculated in her potion-making and there was an explosion. When I ran upstairs to find her, she was on the floor, silent and asleep, and a tiny leaf had bloomed at her throat. I didn’t know what to do, but my father put her to bed and told me not to worry. Two days later, Mother woke up her usual self and told me she’d been hibernating.”

“So it’s something witches do when they’re badly hurt?” asked Rosetta. “They kind of shut down until they’ve healed themselves?”

“Exactly.” Ian tweaked Altamira’s snotty nose. “See? Mika will be fine. She just needs some time to heal.”

Jamie listened to all this over the sound of his own thundering heart, and found that it didn’t make him feel a whole lot better. But then maybe nothing would until Mika woke up and he was able to see without a shadow of a doubt that she was indeed okay.

His voice was little more than a growl as he turned to Terracotta. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

She immediately shook her head. Thankfully, shock seemed to be the worst of what she was experiencing.

“Okay,” Jamie said brusquely. “No paramedics, then. We’ll take her upstairs.”

Rosetta and Altamira ran ahead to open doors. Jamie crossed the house quickly and carried Mika up two flights of stairs to the attic. She still hadn’t made a sound, hadn’t twitched so much as a toe.

“Ian, pull back the covers so I can get her into bed.”

“What can I do?” Terracotta’s uncertain voice asked from the doorway behind him.

You’ve done enough came to mind. Jamie didn’t yet trust himself to answer her without saying something he knew he’d later regret, so he clenched his jaw and kept his attention squarely on the reassuring flutter of a pulse at the base of Mika’s throat.

Once Ian had pulled back the daisy-patterned duvet, Jamie laid Mika carefully down in her bed. Circe jumped up beside her, putting her wet nose into the crook of Mika’s neck. Jamie smoothed the damp strands of hair off her face before he realised what he was doing and took a quick step back, the hand he’d touched her with clenching and unclenching at his side.

This shouldn’t have shaken him so badly. Ian was the one who panicked, flew into theatrical furies, and lost his head. Jamie got irritated, but not much else. And he always, always kept his head screwed on straight.

What the fuck was wrong with him?

He turned to Ian. “So we just let her sleep? That’s it?”