Chapter 4
The hex had been the worst mistake of Dina’s life. She could trace its origins back to when she was only thirteen, and feeling the first flutterings of love. And something else that wasn’t quite love but left her blushing and tingling in strange new places.
Her body had woken up for the first time that summer, her senses eager to explore. Her magic, too, had come into fruition. Oh, she’d been able to do spells before then. Small ones, like turning a light on and off, and levitating a feather or a pen in the air. But this magic was stronger, wilder.
It came with her first period and tossed her as if she were a single swimmer on the open sea, lost in its current. Her mother had helped her navigate it, teaching her the different forms of witchcraft, letting Dina learn which ones suited her most. She taught her how her magic would change each month along with her cycle, and how she would be at her most powerful a couple of days before her bleed. Something about the pain of premenstrual cramps added to the potency of a witch’s magic.
Dina had been able to perform magic in a way that astounded her at first. She had summoned a spirit of luck the day before her yearly school exams, just because she could. She was a reckless teenager, and her crush on Luke Montgomery had only made things worse. Luke was the guy that every single girl fancied.
Dina hadn’t been one of those girls, not at first. She’d played it cool, staring at the back of his head in maths class and admiring his tanned forearms in PE. But then he asked to borrow a fountain pen and she lost all her remaining chill, melting into a spluttering, bumbling mess.
That night, Dina did something she really shouldn’t have. She waited until her parents were asleep, and snuck into the living room where her mother kept her spell books. She knew she couldn’t cast a love spell—all the books on witchcraft she’d read made it quite clear that that was impossible. But what about a fate spell? A spell to draw herself and Luke together, until eventually he would have to fall in love with her. Teenage Dina was too na?ve for her own good.
The spell had a lot of components. A red rose petal harvested during a full moon; a white candle, left outside all day to soak up the sunlight; a piece of paper with Luke’s name on it; and finally a spoonful of honey, poured onto the candle, to bind him to her. It would take time to prepare, and thankfully the summer holidays were just around the corner.
Dina spent most of her holiday preparing for the spell in secret. When the first week of the new school year came around, she was ready. Except, when she saw Luke again, he’d grown some peach fuzz on his upper lip and wouldn’t stop talking about his video-game kill ratio. Whatever ounce of infatuation she’d had for him over the summer had dissipated almost immediately.
Dina remembered hiding away the candle and the rose petal in her drawer, and not thinking of them again until she met Rory.
If Luke had been a teenage infatuation, Rory was the first real love of Dina’s life, and had inspired the realization that Dina also desired women.
Dina had met Rory when they were both nineteen, fresh out of sixth form and straight into bakery school. Dina knew she wanted to open a café, and although she was already a talented baker, even without the assistance of her magic, she was sure there was so much more she had to learn. Rory wanted to be a pastry chef and had dreams of moving to Paris. She had a short black bob that curled a little at the ends, and eyes so green they looked like moss after the first spring rain. Dina suspected that there was a witch in Rory’s family line, as now and again a spurt of magic would flash around her, before fizzing into nothing.
Dina remembered the tanned skin of Rory’s forearms as she kneaded dough beside her in the student kitchen, the way desire had bubbled up within her. They’d started dating, and Dina had fallen head over heels for Rory within two weeks. She was young, she had no guards up, no expectations. She only knew that she loved Rory and wanted to be with her. She was a little foolish.
As can often happen in relationships between two women, things got serious fast. Dina would spend multiple nights a week at Rory’s flat, baking and fucking until sunrise.
Rory was the first person outside of her family and close friends that Dina told about her magic. One evening they were alone in the library, reading about the colonial history of chocolate, when Dina used her magic to heat up their paper cups of cold tea. The more she showed Rory her magic, the more Dina mistook the expression on her girlfriend’s face as delighted awe—when, in fact, it was shock.
When Dina scored highly on her tarte tatin recipe, Rory sneered that she’d only got that score because she’d cheated with magic. In the weeks that followed, Rory would blame Dina for every low score she received, every time something went wrong with a recipe.
She should have realized what was happening. Her witchy instinct had sent her flickers of warning that telling Rory about her magic wasn’t a good idea, but she’d resolutely ignored them. She should have walked away then with a bruised heart, and not waited around for a broken one.
They agreed to take a break over the Christmas holidays, to see if they could salvage their relationship in the new year. Dina was hopeful—they still spoke every day. Dina had gone home to her parents, Rory to her family in Dorset.
She’d even revealed to her parents that she was dating someone named Rory.
“Oh, I knew it! You’re glowing, just look at you,” her mother had said, pinching Dina’s cheeks. “It’s good to have a man in your life, habiba. I like the sound of this one—Rory. A good name.”
Dina was ready to blurt out that she was in fact dating a woman when her mother said, “Maybe one day I can be a grandmother.” She said it with such hope in her eyes, and Dina was struck by the realization that if she came out to her parents now, she’d be crushing that hope. So she kept her silence. Her mother wasn’t exactly traditional, she was a witch after all, but she had been raised in Morocco in the sixties, not a place with a booming queer community. A comment here and there from her mum had suggested to Dina that she was very happy for other people to be queer, just not her daughter.
As that holiday had worn on, the stream of text messages from Rory had slowed to a trickle, until one night Dina woke up to a text that said: I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.
Dina couldn’t bear it. She needed Rory. A memory from years before resurfaced, and she dug through her childhood drawers to find it. The rose petal, now dried between the pages of a book, the candle charged by moonlight. The scrap of paper.
Sitting on her bedroom floor, Dina scribbled Rory’s name on the paper, lit the candle, and performed the spell. Nothing happened immediately, though Dina felt the spell take effect. It was as if she was suddenly able to sense Rory at the periphery of her mind, an invisible string connecting them. The fate spell had worked. She saw a text on her phone from Rory: I’m on my way, baby, I’ve missed you. It’ll take me a couple of hours in the car.
An hour later, Dina felt something strange down that string, and her heart jumped to her throat, as if she were suddenly inside a falling elevator.
A call came in a moment later, from Rory’s phone.
“Is this Dina?” a man’s voice on the other end said.
“Yes, is everything all right? Where’s Rory?”
“Rory’s okay, but she’s had a bit of an accident on the motorway. We’re taking her to hospital now.”
“Oh god. Fuck. Can I talk to her?”
“I’m sorry, but she’s unconscious at the moment.” The paramedic gave Dina the details of the hospital they were taking Rory to, and she ran to her car immediately. She wouldn’t remember much of the drive or arriving at the hospital—it was one big stressful blur. All she could think was that she could no longer feel the tether between herself and Rory—how much danger was Roryin?
It was the early hours of the morning when Dina was finally allowed to see Rory. She looked so small in that bed, the clinical lights making her skin even paler than usual. One side of her face was bruised, her lip scratched. The doctors explained that Rory had been speeding down the motorway and the car had slipped on ice. She was speeding to reach me faster was all Dina could think, guilt seeping through her. What had she done?
Dina sat by Rory’s bedside and cast a small healing charm on her. It was the least she could do. When Rory awoke, she didn’t smile at Dina. She just stared at her with bitter accusation in her eyes.
“You did something to me, didn’t you?” she said. “With your magic.”
Dina wanted to denyit.
“It was a small spell. To…to bring us back together.”
“How fucking dare you. Jesus Christ, Dina. It was like I was a puppet, watching myself texting you and calling you “baby” again, and jumping in that car. I didn’t want to do it. I kept trying to stop, but I wasn’t in control of my body, you were.”
“I’m so sorry,” Dina sobbed. “It wasn’t meant to be like that.”
“Oh? And what was it meant to be like then? I could have died. All because you couldn’t let go. We were over. Whatever this was”—Rory gestured between them—“it was finished months ago, you just couldn’t see it. I was trying to let you down easy.”
“I never wanted to hurt you. I just love you so much.”
“Forcing people to do your bidding isn’t love,” Rory spat. Something had loosened inside her, Dina could feel it; a low vibration growing. Whatever magic had been dormant in Rory was now stirring. And it was angry.
“You know what, Dina? I hope one day this happens to you, so you can understand what you did to me. Everyone who loves you will be hurt, do you hear me? Everyone who loves you will be hurt, just like you hurt me.”
Like an icy shroud, Dina felt the curse settle onto her shoulders in that moment. Rory hadn’t intended it, but her raw, untrained magic and anger had combined into an unshakeable force. A hex had knotted itself to Dina’s soul, and it had remained there ever since.
When she finally arrived back home the next morning, her mother tried to ask her what had happened. Dina grumbled something about a breakup and told her parents to leave her alone. She desperately wanted to tell her mother. She wanted to say, Fix it, Mama, fix my mistake. But every time she came close, she remembered that there was no way she could tell her only part of the truth. Nour would need to know everything about the relationship, including the fact that Rory was most definitely not a man. Dina had just lost Rory; she couldn’t lose her mum too.
All these years later, and the hex’s oily shadow still clung to Dina. It showed no signs of weakening. Every single time she felt a relationship was going well, the hex would find a way to fuck it up, hurting the people around her.
Once, Dina had been dating a guy for a few months—ahead chef at a London restaurant. On the same evening that he’d told her he wanted to introduce her to his parents, his oven glove had caught fire—one that Dina had bought him—inflicting burns across his hand.
Another time, Dina had been seeing a woman called Eliza. She was one of those amazing people who never ran out of energy, and even dragged Dina on hikes every weekend. They’d been walking up Box Hill when Eliza had shared that she might be falling for Dina. A second later, Eliza had tripped, hitting her head against a rock that was nestled in the grass. The dark irony of it hadn’t been lost on Dina.
One perverse trick of the hex was that the more Dina liked someone, the more it tried to hurt them. She’d tried everything to fight it. Cleansing spells on herself, unbindings. It didn’t matter what she did, all of her romantic relationships were doomed to fail.
She’d pretty much stopped dating, only allowing herself a one-night stand here and there so that she didn’t turn into a nun. She could never let herself fall in love again; it was too dangerous.
But here were the tea leaves, and the message was clear: Romance is on the horizon.
Well, maybe it was all right if it was just romance. Romance didn’t have to mean love, did it? And how bad could it be, really, to never let herself get close enough to love someone again?
Dina asked herself that question a lot these days. Sometimes she looked in the mirror and saw that same young girl who had fallen in love with Rory looking back at her, with her frizzy hair and plumpness that threatened to spill out of whatever clothes she was wearing. Some days it took a lot of time to find ways to love herself again.
She fell asleep that night ruminating on the tea leaves’ prediction, and spent the following day at home, preparing and packing for the weekend, throwing all kinds of outfits in her bag to change into as her mood suited her.
She fished around in her wardrobe for the bridesmaid’s dress that Immy had bought her a few months ago. A dark forest-green brushed-velvet dress that molded to Dina’s curves—what she lacked in the boob department she made up for in ass. Dina Whitlock never traveled light.
She had a train to catch. Dina gathered her bags, and tucked a soft blanket into Heebie’s travel carrier, along with the toy pumpkin filled with catnip that was theoretically meant to keep the cat calm while traveling.
She put a spell on her plants to stay watered while she was away. Dina had a lot of plants, so the spell took some time to settle onto the leaves, coating them in a glistening dew that would remain there until she returned.
Dina threw a few spell candles and herb pouches into her bag, though her mum would no doubt have enough for both of them—it was more of a safety blanket to have them with her. Heebie had already curled up inside the cat carrier, kneading the pumpkin, and would soon be asleep. Brewing a quick hot chocolate in a travel flask, with an added spark of comfort magic to keep her going until she was home, Dina locked up her flat.