Chapter 7
Rowan paced barefoot across the wooden floorboards of her flat.
She’d been doing it for the best part of an hour.
Back and forth between the living room window and the kitchen, replaying the coffee with Callum like a song she couldn’t get out of her head.
His face. The easy way he carried himself.
The firm grip of his handshake and the rush that had gone through her when their skin touched.
The way he’d said ‘I got the feeling you might’ with that quiet, knowing smile.
This wasn’t her. She didn’t do this. She didn’t pace her flat thinking about a man she’d spoken to for twenty minutes. She was Rowan Kerr. She was the one who held the coven together. She was practical, grounded, and disciplined. She didn’t get flustered.
And yet here she was, barefoot and flustered, turning the same thoughts over and over like a mantra.
It wasn’t just attraction, though. That was the part that unsettled her.
If it had been simple attraction, she could have filed it away and moved on.
She’d done that before. But Callum came wrapped in something she couldn’t untangle.
A man she couldn’t read, carrying a symbol from the Veil, with grandparents who’d arrived in the sixties.
And she’d sat across from him and lied about what she knew, and liked him anyway, and now she couldn’t tell where the wanting ended and the worry began.
She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. Half seven.
She thought about calling Isla. Picked up her phone. Put it down again.
“Get a grip of yourself,” she said aloud. She dropped onto the sofa and reached for the remote. Something mindless. Married At First Sight Australia. Anything to stop the loop.
She’d barely found a channel when her phone lit up on the coffee table. She leaned forward and looked at the screen.
Isla.
She picked up and tapped the video icon. Isla’s face appeared, slightly too close to the camera, the way it always was. She was sitting in her flat above Moonlit Pages, the bookshelves visible behind her, a mug in her hand.
“Isla. How are you doing? Everything okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s fine,” Isla said. “I just wanted to let you know – after I shut up shop, I was looking through Jean’s papers again, and I think I found something.”
Rowan’s mind, which had been spinning in circles for an hour, went perfectly still.
“Oh,” she said. She walked over to the kettle and flicked it on. “Well, I’ve got some news for you as well. But you tell me what you found.”
“Okay. I would grab a cuppa if I was you.” Isla said.
Rowan laughed. “Yeah, I’ve just put the kettle on.”
“Of course you have,” Isla said, smiling.
Rowan watched through the phone as Isla settled back into the armchair by her window. Outside, the last light was fading over Byres Road, the rooftops catching the amber glow of the streetlamps coming on.
“Right,” Isla said. “So, I was tidying away all the papers. Putting the ones we’d looked through into one box, and the ones we hadn’t into another, so we could still work through them. And I saw something at the top of the unseen pile. One thing led to another, and I just kept reading.”
“And?”
“Jean talks about a Veil Walker. Specifically.” Isla paused. “It’s not a diary as such. More like an occasional journal. Not something she wrote in every day. But she wrote about this.”
Rowan poured the water into her mug, added some milk and leaned against the kitchen counter.
Outside her own window, Clarence Drive was settling into the evening.
A couple walked past under the streetlights, their voices carrying faintly through slightly open window.
The sash windows rattled gently in a gust of wind.
“What did she say about the Veil Walkers?” Rowan asked.
Isla looked down, as if reading from the page. “Well, the entry started with: I think I might have ruptured the Veil.”
Rowan set her mug down. “What?”
“I know. That was my reaction. So, I kept reading. It was about two pages long. It turns out Jean had actually been involved with a Veil Walker. In the mid-sixties. She believes he came through after the rupture in 1960.”
Rowan walked through to the living room and got comfortable in the big armchair. “What do you mean, involved?”
Isla met her eyes through the screen. “Romantically. That’s what it sounds like.
I’m still working through the rest of the box.
I brought it upstairs with me. But it looks like she was romantically involved with a Veil Walker.
And that involvement is connected to the Veil rupturing, or she thought it might be. ”
Rowan’s stomach sank.
She sat with her legs over one arm of the chair and rested her back against the other arm, with her two hands wrapping around the cup.
Jean, who had spent her entire life protecting the Veil, who had trained Rowan, and who had died sealing it. She had been involved with a Veil Walker, and it had possibly caused damage. Real damage.
And now Rowan was sitting in her flat, heart racing, because she’d had coffee with a man who might be exactly the same thing.
“Does it say anything else?” Rowan asked. “How exactly did it cause a rupture?”
“It doesn’t say specifically. It just mentions it.
That’s how the journal entry started. But Rowan – think about what that means.
Jean spent her whole life trying to repair the damage to the Veil.
Decades of protection work. And the sealing that killed her – that was the final act.
She gave her life closing what she’d helped open.
” Isla paused. “What if that wasn’t just about the original coven’s mistake in 1960?
What if part of what she was atoning for was this? ”
The silence between them stretched out. Rowan could hear the faint hum of traffic from Byres Road through Isla’s end of the call, and the ticking of her own kitchen clock through her other ear.
“I’ll read through more and call you if there’s anything else,” Isla said, more gently now. “But I thought you needed to know.”
Rowan shook her head slowly. Isla caught it through the screen.
“What is it?” Isla said.
Rowan took a breath. “I met him.”
“Met who?”
“The man. The one from the shop. After I left Moonlit Pages this afternoon.”
Isla’s eyes widened. “You met with him? Where?”
“He caught me watching him from a bus stop, actually. So, I didn’t have much choice.”
She told Isla the rest. The coffee. The sixties. The lie.
Isla was quiet for a long moment. She could see her thinking, the way she always did, turning it over carefully before speaking.
Rowan leaned over and put her cup on the coffee table.
“Rowan,” Isla said. “Given what Jean’s journal says – you know what this could mean.”
“But we don’t know he’s a Veil Walker,” Rowan said. “Not for certain.”
“It’s looking that way, though, isn’t it? All the evidence is pointing in that direction.”
Rowan’s palm went warm. Not hot. Just warm, the way it did when something connected to the Veil was close or active. She looked down at the brooch mark fused into her skin. It wasn’t glowing. But it was awake.
She pressed her other hand over it and said nothing.
Her shoulders dropped. She let out a heavy sigh and sank deeper into the armchair, pulling her knees up. Through the tall sash windows, the streetlamps on Clarence Drive threw long shadows across the ceiling. A bus groaned past somewhere on Hyndland Road.
“I know it does,” she said quietly. “It does. I’ll find out more. I don’t know how yet, but I know where he works. And he lives on Hyndland Road. It wouldn’t be difficult.”
“That’s true,” Isla said. “So, what are you going to do if you find anything else?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about anything else since I left him.”
Isla tilted her head slightly, studying her through the screen. “What is it that’s got you rattled? Is it the fact that you might be getting involved with a Veil Walker? Or is there something else?”
Rowan looked at the screen. At Isla’s gentle, intelligent face, waiting without judgement.
“I don’t know,” Rowan said. “There’s just something. There’s a connection there. And I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.”
Isla was quiet for a moment. “I’ll keep reading through Jean’s papers tonight. If I find anything else, I’ll call you.”
“Thanks, Isla.”
“Be careful, Rowan.”