After Addie finished talking with the woman on the phone, he walked me around the corner to a red Toyota and handed me a blindfold.
“Just in case” he looked at me slightly apologetically “For what it’s worth I pinkie swear I won’t abduct you.”
I probably shouldn’t have gone with him, but that was starting to become a theme of things, I made him roll down all the windows and leave the doors unlocked while we drove, for all the good it did.
“Sid, Cassidy, we don’t really do last names, she’s ex-military, kind of our leader. She’s hardcore, but nice when you get to know her. Jodie, she’s our bruiser, she’s only a kid, like you, you’ll get along great.”
Addie barely looked nineteen. Magic, or just good skincare? I didn’t ask.
“Katrine, she’s our planner, probably the leading world expert on magic, she knows more about it than me, for sure. Can’t do magic, not enough X chromosomes, that’s her theory. Loves to talk though, if it feels like she’s showing off, she probably is.”
The car lurched slightly. An unexpected traffic light? A car cutting us off? Armed police? I heard Addie mutter something under his breath about indicators.
“Just don’t act too awkward, and you’ll turn out fine. They’ll love you”
We finally arrived in what might have been Camden forty-five minutes later, standard movie stuff I imagined, stop me from memorising the route. I tried not to think about what the ‘just in case’ scenario was. I handed the blindfold back to Addie and he walked me into a tired-looking corner shop, with the sign flipped to ‘closed’. A groggy but alert woman sat behind the counter, cradling a takeaway coffee. She had short blond hair, absently tied back and a weathered, lined face. She looked up with dull grey eyes and stood, practically lifting herself out of her chair, and walked out. She was a good inch or two shorter than I was, but looking at her made me feel small.
“This her?” she asked to Addie, rubbing her eye.
“No,” he said, “that fell through, so I grabbed another 20 year old and hoped you wouldn’t notice.”
“It’s six-thirty in the morning, Kat and I have been planning the job all night, Addie, I’m really not in the mood.”
His smile never wavered, but he beckoned me forwards.
“Chloe, meet Sid. Sid, this is Chloe.”
I shuffled forwards.
“Hi… i’m-”
“Chloe, yeah. You mentioned. I’m Sid”
She held her hand out and I took it. She squeezed just a little too tight for a few seconds before letting go, and I felt her ring, on the same finger as Addie, dig into my palm.
“So he says you have questions? Fire away, I ought to give Kat her three hours sleep.”
“Right, yes, questions.” Seriously, why did I not write these down? “RWHS, the ones who died outside my flat. What were they there for? Why did they die?”
Sid drank from her coffee before answering and brushed past me into one of the two or three aisles. “Royal Witch Hunters Society, they’re an MI6 sub-organisation, created by James VI to eradicate the world of the scourge of witches,” she said the word witches while making air quotes, “You know the rest, a… an uneasy friend of mine got his eye on you and saved you. Pepperami?”
I took it. Oddly, the feeling of eating something without having paid for it made me more uncomfortable than her admitting to murder, or being an accessory to one at least.
“Why do they want to do that? Eradicate all of you, I mean.” I asked between mouthfuls.
“You know history, right? King James and magic, not a big fan of it.” She opened up a fridge and pulled out some sliced turkey, never looking at me while she talked. I looked back at Addie, he’d disappeared, probably to another corner of ths shop.
“So it was real? The Salem Witch Trials, he was right?”
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“Oh no, not at all. He was just a man with his head in the clouds who hated women. But it’s been 400 years, the RWHS have uncovered things, and they still have the same mission.”
She pulled a few slices of bread out of a bag, before tying it back and leaving it on the shelf.
“And why me?” The way Addie had talked, he’d thought I knew magic. I didn’t, I didn’t know anything about anything. Sid didn’t look up and started making a sandwich next to the register.
“Because you’re- or at least they think you are, one of us. A witch,” She waved a butterknife with cheese spread in the air to symbolise air quotes, “Speaking of which,” I chuckled awkwardly at her pun, she didn’t seem to notice “Tell me about you.”
“I’m… Shit, I really don’t know what to say. I’m twenty-one, I work at Starbucks, I dropped out of uni. What else do you want to know?”
“Lots. I want to know how they found you, I want to know how you do magic, I want to know who you are, but that can wait till later.”
I wasn’t magic, I couldn’t do magic, but Sid, the tired-looking woman with a splotch of mayonnaise on her lip, terrified me too much to admit that.
“Try this,” Addie reappeared behind me and pulled off his copper ring. “She’s new, I don’t think she knows much, or even if she’s able.”
I wanted to say something clever, ‘She’s also standing right here.’ or something to that effect, but I stayed quiet. Addie breathed in and blinked twice as if he was drowsy, and handed the ring to me.
“Imagine setting something on fire, I mean really imagine it. The heat, the image, all of it. Focus everything on that.” I did as he asked, squeezed my eyes and thought. It was strange, the copper was almost unnaturally warm in my hands as if it had been in hot water. I hadn’t noticed it when he handed it to me but it was almost uncomfortable to hold now. After about thirty seconds of looking like an idiot, Sid plucked the ring out of my hands and slipped it on. She looked at Addie inquisitively, then back at the ring.
“Shit,” she peeled the top off her sandwich, threw it up into the air and pointed two fingers at it, and a line of fire leapt out of her hand and set the bread alight.
I jumped. Of course, I did. Fucking magic? real, actual, magic? I wasn’t sure if I had believed him before, but seeing it was entirely different.
Fuck.
Sid reached back and folded the remainder of her sandwich in half and stuffed it in her mouth. The bread hit the ground, mayonnaise side down, and Sid held her other hand. The flames died down, leaving a strange eggy smell and blackened bread on the ground.
“You probably shouldn’t have used the mayo bread for that, huh.” Addie reached out and Sid gave him the ring back. “I’ll get Jodie on it, she won’t mind,” Sid replied. I still didn’t know what my questions were, but they had changed, that was for sure. “Lennie was right. Damn that man and his nose”
“Speaking of which,” Addie clapped his hands, “It’s quarter to seven. She’s clearly magical, so why don’t we introduce her to the team?”
There was a trapdoor under a rug behind the register leading down a ladder, about fifteen feet. An old bomb shelter, Sid commented while I climbed down. The area underneath was spacious, larger than the shop, it probably stretched under the road. There was a fridge, a door with one of those funky inclusive bathroom signs with a mermaid and a centaur on it. One of the corners was closed off behind a bookshelf, there was a desk there with a chair, both the kind of thing you’d find in a school. The books ranged from old, leatherbound treatises to Holly Smale, and the desk was covered in papers, with a MacBook opened on top of a yellowed, cracked tome of some sort. There was a TV mounted on one of the walls, someone had gone through the troubles of putting wooden planks to cover the bare stone bricks, and a mess of wires under it led out to a PS2. There were two sofa-beds making a V shape in the centre of the room, the open side pointed at the TV, both in the bed configuration, with sleeping shapes passed out on them.
Sid pulled a cord that turned on the lights, an equal mix of soft yellow lights and harsh, white LEDs, and clapped her hands. “Up, both of you, come on!” A young woman shorter than me groggily writhed for a second to get the pillows off her and sprang up, hand already on a gun I hadn’t seen. I jumped back, but she saw Sid’s hand move to stop her and slowed down, before putting the gun back down on the sofa and rubbing her eyes. She was wearing joggers and a yellow sports bra and looked South-East Asian. Indian, maybe? She wasn’t muscular, not in a body-building way, but her arms had some kind of definition. Climbing? She looked a bit younger than me, but not by much.
“Jodie, this is Chloe. She’s joining our group for the time being,” I was joining their group. Of course, I was, what else had they brought me here for? ‘Hi Chlo, magic is real and the government wants to murder you. Have fun!’
Jodie gave me a quick once-over and nodded at me. “Jodie,” she said and limped tiredly to the fridge, pulling what seemed like breakfast out of it. At the same time, an older woman groaned herself awake. She had long hair, just starting to go grey, and sharp cheekbones, with large, soft, brown eyes. She was wearing what looked like yesterday’s clothes, jeans and a hoodie, and she pulled herself up, pouting slightly at the indecency of it all. “What time is it?” she asked Addie, “Quarter to,” I answered. I had been awkwardly frozen there for nearly a minute, doing exactly what Addie had told me not to do.
“Quarter to…?” she looked at me, then to Sid, then back at me.
“Seven. Quarter to seven. AM.” I answered again. She looked at Sid again, slightly annoyedly, and then called over to Jodie,
“Fuck off, I’ve barely slept. Can you get me something? I don’t mind what.” Jodie grunted in affirmation. She looked at me, “You must be the new one. I’m Katrine, resident Historian, Arcanist and Woman-in-the-Chair” So she was the one Addie had been talking about. Jodie came back, with four pots of yoghurt. She handed two to Katrine and took two for herself, and the two of them started eating wordlessly. Addie turned to me.
“Well, welcome to the team!”