Be My Spell

Chapter Two

The warmth in Phoebe’s face vanished the second the latch caught. The bright, optimistic mask she wore for the village fell away, leaving her shoulders looking smaller, her twenty-eight-year-old face looking older and infinitely more tired in the dimming afternoon light.

She walked over to the ancient, brass-trimmed cash register. She didn't open the till, she knew to the penny what was inside, and it wasn't enough to cover a grocery run, let alone her commercial overhead. Instead, she reached underneath the counter and pulled out a small, crumpled stack of papers held together by a rusting bulldog clip.

She flipped through them, her breath catching in her throat as she hit the red ink.

The electricity bill was first, stamped with a secondary, final notice that practically screamed off the page. Then came the invoice from her local honey supplier, a man who had gone to school with her father. The guilt of her late payment felt far heavier than the monetary value. And finally, sitting at the bottom of the stack, was a neat, typed letter on crisp white paper from Mr Abernathy, her landlord.

“A further two-week extension, Miss Axel, out of respect for your late grandmother’s long tenancy in Oakhaven. However, the estate accounts must be balanced, and I cannot allow the rent to fall three months into arrears. If the outstanding balance is not settled by the first of the month, we will have no choice but to initiate the repossession of the premises.”

The first of the month was exactly eight days away.

Phoebe dropped the papers onto the counter, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes until dark spots danced behind her eyelids. "Well," she whispered into the empty, aromatic room. "If the bank takes the shop, I suppose I can always try selling wild nettles out of the back of my rusted hatchback. Nettle soup is highly underrated. Mostly by people who have actual food to eat."

She tried to force a laugh, but the sound died in her throat, sounding brittle and thin.

The familiar, cold ache tightened in her chest, the quiet, lifelong fear that she was just a temporary fixture in the world, a ghost passing through rooms that belonged to other people. She had built The Bluebell Apothecary to plant roots. After a chaotic childhood spent shifting between distant aunts and crowded flats after her parents died, this shop was supposed to be her permanent home. It was her anchor to the earth. But the soil was drying up, and the earth was rejecting her roots.

A sharp, metallic clack-thud cut through the silence.

Phoebe blinked, snapping her hands away from her face. She looked toward the front door. A single letter lay on the worn welcome mat, having just dropped through the mail slot.

It hadn't been delivered by the local postman, Tommy, who always knocked twice and yelled a greeting through the glass. This letter had been dropped by someone who didn't want to chat. It lay there, completely out of place against the faded fibres of the mat.

She walked over and picked it up. Her fingers instantly registered the texture. The envelope wasn’t made from the cheap, flimsy wood-pulp paper of her utility bills. It was massive, thick, cream-colored linen parchment that felt distinctly, unashamedly like wealth. On the reverse side, a heavy, dark emerald-green wax seal bore an elegant, embossed crest, a stylised branch of blackthorn wrapping around an old-fashioned, intricate iron key.

Her name and the shop's address were written across the front in a sharp, flawless calligraphy that looked like it had been penned by a scribe.

"Definitely not a late notice," Phoebe muttered, flipping it over in her hands, her curiosity piqued. "Unless the debt collectors have drastically increased their aesthetic budget."

Using a small, bone-handled twine knife from the counter, she carefully slid the blade beneath the wax seal, popping it open with a satisfying crack. She pulled out a heavy sheet of matching parchment inside. The letterhead was stark, elegant, and entirely intimidating: Sinclair & Associates, Legal Executors & Trustees, Royal Mile, Edinburgh.

Dear Miss Axel,

On behalf of the estate of the late Eilidh Ross, and under the direct instruction of the current executor, we wish to formally retain your services as a specialist folklore herbalist and botanical archivist.

The Ross estate encompasses a private, highly restricted collection of late-18th and early-19th-century botanical manuscripts, currently housed in the private library at Blackthorn House, Edinburgh. These documents require immediate cataloguing, preservation assessment, and the translation of colloquial historical herbal methodologies.

The residency is fixed for a period of exactly six weeks, commencing immediately. Due to the highly sensitive, rare, and fragile nature of the archive, the compensation for this contract is fixed at £15,000, with half (£7,500) disbursed upon your arrival and the remainder paid upon completion of the catalogue.

A private vehicle will be dispatched to collect you and your equipment on Friday morning at precisely seven o'clock, should you accept these terms.

Respectfully,

Graham Sinclair, Esq.

Phoebe stared at the page. The letters began to swim before her eyes. She read the compensation figure again. Then she read it a third time, running her thumb over the raised black ink to ensure her mind wasn't playing a cruel, stress-induced trick on her.

Fifteen thousand pounds.

It wasn't just rent money. It was the electricity bill. It was the honey supplier. It was six months of absolute breathing room. It was new glass jars, a repaired roof for the back storeroom, and the guaranteed survival of the only place in the world that made her feel like she actually belonged. It was a miracle wrapped in cream-colored linen.

"Blackthorn House," she murmured, the name tasting heavy, ancient, and distinctly cold on her tongue.

She walked back behind the counter, her ancient smartphone clutched in her hand, and typed the name into the lagging search engine. It took three full minutes of a spinning loading wheel before the details finally appeared on her cracked screen. When they did, the ambient warmth of the apothecary seemed to dim.

The screen filled with sharp, monochromatic images of a sweeping, dark-stone estate situated on the isolated, volcanic outskirts of Edinburgh. It was surrounded by towering stone walls, iron gates, and dense, encroaching pine woods that looked as though they were trying to swallow the property whole. The architecture was like severe Gothic Revival meets modern minimalism with massive glass windows cutting through ancient, weathered stone.

But it wasn't the house that caught her eye, it was the name attached to it in every single article.

Calder Ross.

The headlines pulled up in a ruthless, metallic parade of business journals and tech blogs. Ross Tech Dynamics Restructures: Calder Ross Finalises Absolute Control.

Billionaire Entrepreneur Calder Ross Pulls Conglomerate Out of Public Trading.

The Hermit of Edinburgh: Inside the High-Security Fortress of Tech's Most Ruthless Mind.

There were very few photos of the man himself, and the ones that existed were candid, snapped from a distance by aggressive photojournalists. Phoebe zoomed in on one image. It showed a tall, broad-shouldered man in a flawless, tailored dark coat, stepping out of a black sleek vehicle. His jaw was a hard, uncompromising line; his dark hair was cut with military precision, and even through the grainy lens of a long-distance camera, his eyes looked like fragments of shattered grey slate.

He didn't look like a human being. He looked like an institution. A man who dealt exclusively in cold algorithms, high-end global security software, and unyielding, machine-like discipline.

He was everything Phoebe was not. He was code, concrete, and absolute control. She on the other hand was mud, marigolds, and spontaneous chaos.

"He looks like he hasn't eaten a single carb or laughed since 2018," Phoebe whispered to the maidenhair fern, staring at the screen.

An intense internal tug-of-war pulled at her chest. To leave her shop for six weeks felt like a terrifying risk. Oakhaven was safe, even if it was breaking her heart and her bank account. Going to Edinburgh, stepping into the high-security orbit of a cold tech-empire and a house that looked like a gothic fortress, triggered every protective instinct she had.

If she shut these doors for nearly two months, would her few remaining customers forget she existed? Would she return to find that her temporary life had simply folded up and vanished in her absence? The fear of being a transient ghost in her own life roared to the surface.

She looked down at the red-inked bills on the counter. Then she looked at the heavy linen letter, the ink of the £15,000 figure gleaming in the low light.

Survival first, she reminded herself, a familiar, quiet resolve hardening in her chest. You can’t worry about being temporary if you don't even have a roof over your head.

She pulled out a sheet of her own modest, slightly unaligned stationery. Taking her fountain pen, she dipped it in dark ink and began to write her acceptance, her messy, looping script a stark, human contrast to the perfect type-print of the Edinburgh solicitor.

By Thursday evening, the reality of her decision had settled into the very air of the shop.

The small, one-bedroom flat above the apothecary felt hollowed out, its small rooms stripped of the vibrant personality Phoebe usually projected onto them. Her entire life had been easily, terrifyingly condensed into a single, battered brown leather suitcase and two sturdy wooden crates filled with her preservation tools, glass slides, and reference texts.

She had always travelled light, a habit from a childhood spent packing cardboard boxes between relatives' homes but seeing her entire existence fit into a single trunk never failed to leave a bitter little taste in her mouth. It was a physical reminder of how easily she could be erased from a space.

Phoebe walked through the darkened retail space one last time, the beam of her flashlight cutting through the rows of amber jars, casting long, dancing shadows against the walls. The air was cool now that the radiators had been turned down to a low, survival-only baseline.

She stopped in front of the main window display, reaching out to touch the leaf of a prized cutting of rare, historical heartsease her grandmother had given her years ago, the very plant that had inspired her to study folklore herbalism. She filled the glass watering bulb and set it carefully into the rich, dark soil.

She paused, pulling a small green Post-it note from her pocket. In neat, careful print, she had written “Needs water only on Thursdays. Please keep her away from the drafty window pane.”

She stuck the note to the rim of the terracotta pot. But as she pulled her hand away, her thumb caught the edge of the paper, smudging the ink of her signature at the bottom into a blurry, illegible streak of blue-black ink.

Phoebe stared at the smudged ink for a long moment, the flashlight beam trembling slightly in her hand. A ghost of a sigh escaped her lips, misting in the cooling air of the shop.

She turned off the flashlight, stepped out onto the damp, cobblestone street, and turned the heavy iron key in the lock. The sharp, heavy click of the deadbolt sounded definitive, echoing loudly in the quiet night air of the sleeping village.

She looked down the empty, mist-shrouded road, then turned her gaze toward the north, where the distant, invisible silhouette of Edinburgh waited. She felt incredibly small, completely displaced, and entirely untethered, a temporary visitor passing through her own life, heading toward a cold, looming destination that didn't have room for mud, warmth, or her.