Chapter 6
VI
Mina: We don’t keep the occult room open to the public, but if you come around any time, I’ll let you in. Don’t ask my husband Heathcliff about it, unless you want a lecture about the dangers of magic and the proper handling of spellbound books.
We get too busy finishing the painting, cleaning out the backroom, and making pre-inspection plans to visit Nevermore Bookshop, so I leave Rafe at the shop after dinner with a promise that we’d check out the occult collection as soon as we can.
The next day, I wake in my cold, Warrickless bed, make tea, water the garden, check on the bees, and walk into the village to collect Rafe for his first excursion outside the shop as a human since his curse.
We’re both unsure if simply being in my presence is what keeps him human, or if he’ll randomly transform back into a cat when he gets a certain distance from the shop, but today’s the day we find out.
At least, we’ll find out if I can get Rafe out the door.
“You have to wear something. You can’t walk around the village naked. People will talk.”
“Let them talk! Let them marvel at my magnificence. I agreed to wear those wretched garments for the purposes of painting the shop, since my masculine physique is so glorious that you can’t
focus on your work when in my presence—”
“That’s not the reason.” My cheeks burn.
“—but I will not be seen out in public in garments that look like a rabid badger got bitten by an accountant. I’m a cat. I have standards.”
“Don’t you mean an accountant who got bitten by a badger?”
“No, Autumn. I do not.”
Finally, after promises of pies from Celeste and an online shopping session, I manage to coax Rafe into putting on Warrick’s clothes.
As he stuffs his tail down a trouser leg, I replay the sensation of his naked body pressing mine into the counter over and over again, and a very different kind of excitement races through my veins.
We stop for pies and then meander toward my cottage on Badgers Lane.
The walk takes forever because Rafe keeps getting distracted.
He bends down to smell flowers and taunts the cats he sees asleep on garden walls.
“It all looks so different when you’re not ten inches tall.
” He points to a statue of Winston Churchill near the war memorial.
“That thing is terrifying from the ground. He means serious business with that finger.”
We pass by a garden wall overflowing with flowering wisteria. Rafe stops to sniff, his blue eyes sparkling. “I’d forgotten how much I love wisteria. As a cat, it has this nasty, musky odour, but today it smells like candy floss. And look.”
He bounds over to the garden gate, where a bursting bed of pink and purple zinnias overwhelm the winding path. Rafe reaches over and plucks one of the purple blooms. His fingers brush my earlobe as he tucks the flower behind my ear.
“Beautiful,” he says. I assume he’s talking about the flower.
“You shouldn’t steal flowers from people’s gardens,” I say. “Especially not this close to the Midsummer Festival garden competition. If they catch you, heads will roll.”
“I’m a master cat burglar; no one’s going to catch me. I’ll just say you did it. Oh, look, dahlias!” He skips off down the road.
Soon, we’re both breaking off flowers and handing them to each other to smell.
He tucks his favourites behind my ear, and I loop mine through his belt, so we both look like we’re filming a cottagecore influencer video.
My bees dance happily around us, their buzzing almost as loud as the humming in my veins.
Rafe points out his favourite cattish nooks and the territories of his friends and foes.
By the time we reach my garden gate, he has me viewing the village completely differently.
“This is my cottage,” I say. “Wait here, I need to tell the bees about you.”
How quickly I’ve started to think of the cottage as mine, instead of ours.
I leave Rafe at the garden gate and step along the path until I reach my hives. The bees with me rejoin the swarm, which buzzes in greeting, looping and murmurating around me. Look, Mamma’s home, they seem to say.
“Hello, I see you’re all busy. I just wanted to tell you that I’m bringing a visitor into the garden. He’s going to help me carry my mead bottles away, but this is good news. If you’re nice to him, there might be a treat in it for you. Are we good?”
The buzzing rises half an octave.
“Good.” I turn back to the gate and wave to Rafe, who takes several steps back, runs at the gate and leaps over it, clearing the iron rungs by mere millimetres. He lands crouched in the lavender bush.
“The gate does open,” I grumble as I pull him out.
“Force of habit.” He grins, cracking his knuckles. “I keep forgetting I have opposable thumbs again. No latch will outfox me now. Take me to your meader. Get it? It’s take me to your leader but with mead—”
“Yes, Rafe, I know how puns work. The mead is—”
“Hello, bees!” Rafe bounds over to the hives, waving his arms. The bees startle, racing back to the hives.
“Careful, you don’t want to get stung.”
But as I watch in amazement, the bees don’t attack. Worker bees land in his hair and on his shirt, climbing over him as if investigating him. He grins wickedly at me as bees climb over his face.
“Hey, they tickle!”
His tail spriongs out of his trousers, pointing jauntily skyward. The end kinks like a periscope.
“The bees like you.” I hold out my hand, and several workers land on my palm.
I shouldn’t be out here without my bee suit.
I’ve been using it even though I don’t need to because Warrick doesn’t want me to draw attention to my powers.
I know the bees won’t sting me unless something surprises them, but if Harry looks over the fence and snaps pictures of me commanding the bees, he’ll be able to convince people I’m a witch.
“What’s not to like?” Rafe makes a kissy face at one on the end of his finger. “I think they’re flirting with me.”
“You are ridiculous. You know worker bees are sterile.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t appreciate such a fine specimen of manhood.
Hey!” He screws up his face as he reaches into his trousers and shoos out some bees.
“That tickles. You stay away from the family jewels unless you’re offering a dowry.
Maybe we should do the mead now. These ladies are getting a little too friendly. ”
I lead Rafe away from the bees before he gets a stinger where no stinger should ever go. I throw open the door to the large potting shed my grandmother built.
“The barrels are enchanted.” I lower my voice, in case Harry’s listening over the fence.
“They’ll automatically refill. I’m going to try to work the enchantment backwards, so that when the inspectors come, they’ll appear empty.
But we need to move my current mead stores to Celeste’s shop in case the enchantment goes wrong.
This is my brewing bench, and it’s also where I process the honey from the hives. ”
“What happened here?” Rafe kicks the dark stain on the ground.
“I tripped and spilt a honey harvest.” I make a face as I quickly usher him past. “That’s a sticky mess you don’t want to see. Here’s where I keep my bottles.”
I show him the second, smaller room at the back of the shed, where my grandmother used to lock away some of her more dangerous spell ingredients. The entire room is filled with bottles stacked in plastic tubs, each tub labelled with the batch and honey botanicals.
“Wow. Were you storing it so you could drink your way through the apocalypse?”
“Something like that.” I feel the blush warming my cheeks.
The truth is, when I made mead, I always imagined myself surrounded by friends, drinking and singing and telling stories and having a wonderful time.
But it’s a silly dream. I don’t have friends.
“There used to be more, but Warrick took some as gifts for his clients. He even took a crate to a friend of his in the liquor industry. He thought they might be interested in licensing my recipes. But they weren’t. ”
I smile, to show him that I’m not sad about any of that, but my voice trips over the final word, and Rafe frowns. He starts to say something, but I can’t handle the way he’s looking at me, so I cut him off. “There are two wheelbarrows behind the shed. You fill them while I do a little magic.”
I set out my tools to work the enchantments to empty the mead barrels.
My neck prickles from Rafe’s gaze as I crush vervain and jasmine flowers in a mortar and pestle.
I definitely don’t watch his muscles working under my husband’s shirt as he hauls out crates of mead.
I’m focused utterly on sprinkling my crushed herbs over the barrels while repeating the incantation backwards.
It will take a few hours for the barrels to feel empty.
While we wait, Rafe and I pick up a wheelbarrow each and head back to the village. By the time we arrive at the shop, I’m gasping for air, and my t-shirt sticks to my back beneath the warm sunshine. I curse Warrick for insisting I didn’t need to learn how to drive.
“I could have driven over after work and picked those up,” Celeste says as we haul the bottles inside and stack them against her sacks of flour and sugar.
“We’ve imposed on you more than enough,” I grunt as I drop a heavy crate on top of the stack. “Besides, Rafe needs the exercise. Word on the street is that he’s been shown up by Mr Muffins.”
“That’s a lie. Don’t believe a word she says. Mr Muffins quakes before my magnificence.”
It takes two more trips to move the bottles into Celeste’s shop. Rafe and I return the wheelbarrows to the cottage.
“You know, I’ve never tried mead,” Rafe says as he packs the last few bottles into a single box he’ll carry back. It’s from my blackberry and elderflower batch – a protective mead. “I didn’t play enough D&D.”