Witch in Hiding (#1 in the Witches Trilogy) (EDITING)

Eight: Confessions of a Shopaholic

When I imagined E-gic, I was thinking magic supermarket. Some Leaky-Cauldron type thing hidden by a street somewhere, only visible to magical creatures.

But no. When my friends said market, they meant market. If anything, it's more a Diagon Alley than a Leaky Cauldron, gigantic and winding, but spread out across a large field marked "private property", a sprawling mass of commerce with everything from tables set up under canvas tents to permanent structures in plaster and brick. Set in dozens of vaguely defined rows, it's not packed so tightly it's claustrophobic, but busy enough to emit a hum of energy.

"Everyone here is a magical creature?" I murmur.

"Yep," Van grins. "Now come on, I need a new brazier."

We pass under a large archway that serves as the market's entrance. Its full name is inscribed on it: Emnaygaiwc. Emna what? Is that Welsh?

"It's practically the reason why there's such a huge magical creature population in this area. People fly into the country just for this," Jess tells me as we walk. "Only opens on Saturdays. Sells everything from food to jewellery to potions."

"That's legal?"

"Sure. The black market is somewhere else."

"We're crossing the border," De warns. "Anyone sustaining?"

No one says anything. "Sustaining?" I ask.

De points at a thick red line drawn in the grass. "Transparency zone. Cross that, you automatically turn into your normal form unless you pay to disguise it. It's for safety, so you know what everyone's capable of." She indicates a small booth set up in front of the line. A bored teenager with a nametag sits at it playing with his phone. Apparently not many people sustain.

"This is my normal form... right?" I have a sudden vivid nightmare of green skin and a hooked nose.

"Yeah. Anyone?"

The others shake their head. We cross the line. The change isn't gradual, as I expected, but instantaneous: one moment my friends are regular teenage girls, the next they're an entire menagerie of the weird and wonderful.

Jess' ghost form is not much different from her human form, but drifting a foot off the ground and, when the sun hits, translucent. Mel's skin is drained of colour, not in a chalk-white way but in a desaturated way—there's still a hint of a tan, but it's faded into a greyish pallor. Her eyes are rimmed red, and when she grins at me, the teeth are there. "You're not sparkling," I observe.

"No," she grimaces, "that's ridiculous. I hate the sun."

"But you're an athlete."

"Sunblock. Which reminds me, I need to get more. I'm running out."

Van is strangely normal. "Werewolves have human forms by definition," she explains, although when she looks straight at me, her eyes are yellow lizard's pupils and her tongue is forked. Her dragon genes, apparently. It should scare me more, but I've been out and about to enough Halloween horror events that I'm good and desensitised.

De, though—it takes me a moment to place the tall, curvaceous, alluring beauty next to us as my skinny, quiet friend. I remember the myths about succubi and blush again. De glances at me and arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow; it's only then that I spot something unsettling in her eyes, and acknowledge the air of supernatural unease that she radiates. Her face is enchanting, almost impossible to look away from, but the more I look, the more nausea rises up in me. There is something very, very wrong with the thing in front of me.

I tear my eyes away and keep on moving. The rows are set up such that they face the entrance; we plunge into the centre alley. Jess eyes a set of studded gloves thoughtfully before moving on. "Like most other shared spaces in the magical world E-gic is privately owned. By an enterprising leprechaun, I think."