Roxy & Jones

by Angela Woolfe

  “More woebegone witches in need of our care,” Mortadella said gravely before turning and swanning back up the steps. “Let’s get you two witchlets checked in before the rush.”

  “Jones, we can’t do this!” Roxy hissed. “Carry on pretending we’re witches, I mean. And we definitely cannot stay here!”

  “Relax,” Jones hissed back. “We’ll just find out what we need to know and then get the hex out of here.” She chuckled at her own joke before bounding up the steps to join Mortadella. Roxy staggered up after her, struggling under the weight of her hair, and reached them just as the glass door opened.

  “Wow,” breathed Jones. “This is epic.”

  They were in a kind of atrium, but one with no ceiling: just open sky way above their heads. More marble fountains divided the vast hall into smaller sections: a chill-out zone with squashy white beanbags and cauldron-shaped mugs stacked up beside a tea urn; an area with brightly coloured exercise mats where a group of women of various shapes and sizes did indeed seem to be doing some kind of yoga on their broomsticks; a little snack stall and some tables dotted among palm fronds where witch guests in white towelling robes sat with pots of tea and plates of cake.

  “Goji-berry-and-bran muffins today,” Mortadella said with a smile as she saw Jones’s nose twitch. “One hundred per cent vegan, and so good for you!”

  “Oh.” Jones looked disappointed.

  “I’m very proud of this whole place,” Mortadella added, gazing around with Roxy and Jones as if seeing it through their eyes. “Let’s face it, we witches have always needed a safe place. Never more so than these past twenty years.”

  “For sure,” agreed Jones. “So, look, before we check in, I have this weirdly specific question—”

  “And I have a few questions for you, too,” Mortadella interrupted, opening the door to an office just off the atrium. This was another beautiful, rather sparse room, with huge windows and wooden floors. An elegant vase of lilies stood on a glass coffee table at the centre of a small circle of white leather beanbag chairs. She sank elegantly into one of these chairs. “Well, just one question, actually,” she went on regarding them with her deep green eyes. “Why are you lying about being witches?”

  Roxy’s hands tightened on her hair-do. Beside her she could feel Jones stiffen too.

  “Who says we’re not witches?” Jones mumbled.

  “Oh, darlings!” Mortadella laughed quite kindly. “Even if I hadn’t known the moment I saw you, I’m afraid you gave yourselves away when you couldn’t see past the Invisibility Shield on the enchanted minibus! But don’t worry, girls. I’m not here to judge you. There is no judgement at the retreat.” She raised a theatrical hand to one side of her face to whisper, “Well, perhaps only if you’re really, really bad at broomstick yoga.”

  Neither of them laughed.

  “Look, we’re not here to do anything bad!” Jones blurted out. “We just need to talk to a witch. We need a bit of witch-based information.”

  “Information?” Mortadella’s serene gaze clouded slightly. Jones’s answer had evidently taken her by surprise. Perhaps, Roxy wondered, she had thought they’d snuck in for her autograph or something. “May I ask, please, precisely who you are working for?”

  “Oh, no, we’re not working for anyone. Just ourselves. I’m a treasure hunter, see – well, a collector, maybe I should say – of ancient artefacts, and…”

  “So you aren’t agents of Minister Splendid?”

  “Too blooming right we’re not!” snorted Jones.

  “We know what he’s done to your people,” Roxy added hastily. “We certainly wouldn’t work for a man like him.”

  “Oh, the Minister isn’t so bad really. I frequently work with his agents – I help them out with information they need; they leave us alone – it’s a good arrangement. After all, we’re both on the same side against Dark Magic.” Mortadella was watching them very closely now. “My question to you girls is: are you?”

  “Are we what?” Roxy asked stupidly, and then stopped. There was, quite suddenly, a pulling sensation in her forehead, right between her eyes. It was gentle and not-at-all unpleasant, rather like having a head massage from the inside, and it was clear that Jones must be feeling a similar sensation, because she was rubbing her forehead with the heel of her hand and frowning as if wondering what was going on in there.

  “Are you on the side of Diabolica?” Mortadella asked softly. The pulling sensation increased for a moment and then stopped, just as suddenly as it had started. “I can see,” the witch announced, her face relaxing into its serene beam again, “that you are not. I am reassured that your hearts are pure. Well, mostly pure,” she added with an elegant wink in Jones’s direction. “Might I advise, for your own sake, that you let go of your burning anger towards your stepfamily? Harbouring a desire for vengeance will destroy you more than it will destroy them.”

  “Hey!” Jones looked astonished. “How on earth did you…?”

  “Now you, my dear child…” Mortadella was peering at Roxy, far more intently than she had looked at Jones, and with an expression of rapt fascination. “You are more of a mystery to me, though I cannot tell why.”

  Roxy couldn’t help feeling a tiny bit chuffed for a moment. She’d never been mysterious before, not once in her whole entire life.

  “She’s the mysterious one?” Jones sounded faintly put out. “What’s she got to be so mysterious about?”

  “Plenty!” Mortadella was still gazing at Roxy. “Of course, there’s the obvious secret right at the surface: the secret that she keeps about her half-brother, the world-famous rock star. But I’m struggling to go any deeper—”

  “What on earth do you mean,” Jones interrupted, “her half-brother, the world-famous rock star? She doesn’t have a half-brother who’s a world-famous rock star.”

  “Um,” muttered Roxy. “I kind of do, actually.”

  “WHO?”

  Roxy took a slow, deep breath. “H-Bomb.”

  “H-Bomb is your brother?” gasped Jones.

  “Yes.”

  “From H-Bomb and the Missiles?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he’s … incredible.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re so … average.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean that.” Jones looked abashed. “You’re normal, that’s what I meant.”

  “Compared to my super-talented, world-famous, rock-star half-brother? Yes. I am.”

  “Oh, this is good,” urged Mortadella, leaning in and raising her hands in a praying gesture. “This is healing.”

  This was all just getting plain weird, Roxy thought, and what had happened to Jones’s single-minded desire to dig out the information about the witch’s tower and then get the hex out of here?

  “Hang on,” Jones said. She frowned. “His real name is Hansel, right?”

  “Yes. Hansel Humperdinck. We call him Han, mostly.”

  “Huh. That’s so weird. Your brother and sister are called Hansel and Gretel.”

  “Oh.” Roxy blinked. “That’s … that’s true.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. I mean, the chances that your brother and sister were actually the Hansel and Gretel, the same ones that got captured by a child-eating witch and held prisoner in a gingerbread house, the ones with the horrible stepmother and the cowardly dad…” Jones stopped. Her forehead creased. “You said your dad has had other wives, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” Roxy had started to feel sick. “And … my brother and sister had one stepmother who was so horrible they never even talk about her.”

  “Riiiiiight. Still, it’s unlikely that it really was them. I expect they’d still be freaked out by it all, even now they’re grown up. Like, phobic about sweets or something.”

  There was a pause. “My sister is phobic about sweets.”

  “Ah,” said Jones. “Yeah. You mentioned that. But hold on! Hansel and Gretel took all the witch’s treasur
e when they escaped, right? So they’d be incredibly rich.”

  “My dad is incredibly rich,” whispered Roxy. “He’s never said where he got his money from, but my brother and sister have never wanted a penny of it. No matter how little they’ve had themselves. His money always made them sick.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “OK, so this is major-league awks,” said Jones, shifting on her feet and fiddling with her hat. “I’m … uh … I’m not all that good with, y’know, emotions and all that stuff…”

  “You were about to tell me,” Mortadella interrupted graciously, “about this witch-based information you are seeking?”

  Roxy was grateful to Mortadella for the smooth change of subject, but she could hardly stop her own mind tumbling.

  “And something else…” she mumbled. “My brother’s songs … most of them are about witches.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say most… I mean, yes, there is that one about the pale green skin and the warts on the nose. And true, there’s ‘Here I Am, Stuck in the Cauldron With You’. Oooh, and there’s the one where he sings about being locked in a cage…” Jones stopped when she saw Roxy’s face. “So,” she said quickly to Mortadella, “we’re on this kind of mission, you see. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything about a certain E-V-I-L S-P-I-R-I-T escaping from a certain M-O-U-N-T-A-I-N P-R-I-S-O-N?”

  “Ah,” Mortadella sighed. “We have all heard the rumours, yes. It’s why I thought you might be Minister Splendid’s agents. Whenever there’s imminent magical danger they want our help, and believe me, there’s no bigger danger than this.”

  “Which is why we’re on the case!” said Jones proudly. “We’re looking for something that’s been described as a witch’s tower. Do you have any idea where that might be?”

  “Well, that would almost certainly be my dear friend Witchalina McWitch’s family fortress! The McWitches are the only family whose tower is still standing. MOOOOOH tore down most of them during the Great Clean-Up, but they allowed the McWitch family to remain in their home in return for keeping an eye on the mountains. After all, the tower is right at the foot of the Blizzy Lizzy Mountains. If any Diabolicals escaped prison, they would have to pass them.”

  “Perfect,” Jones breathed. “So it can’t be too far from here, right? The mountains are only a hundred miles from Rexopolis, and we’ve driven fifty miles of that already.”

  “Not far at all. Let me look up the exact address so you can pop it into your sat-nav.” Mortadella reached into the pocket of her hoodie and pulled out a phone in a rather snazzy diamanté phone case. She scrolled for a moment. “Witchalina McWitch, Witch End, North Road, BL2 1WW.” She turned her phone so the girls could read it from the screen.

  “Got that?” Jones asked Roxy.

  Roxy blinked at the screen, still dazed. “Yes. But I don’t want to go up there with you, Jones. I just want to go home.”

  “Come on, QG!”

  “I mean it. I want… No, I need to go home. I’m sorry. Oh,” Roxy muttered as a text message popped up on Mortadella’s phone, looking – oddly – as if it had been written in Latin. “There’s a message for you.”

  Mortadella took back the phone. “Oh, that’s wonderful news! My spell provider has just updated an outmoded enchantment.”

  “Awesome,” said Jones abruptly. She was staring at Roxy. “Kid, you can’t actually do this. You’re letting me down. You’re letting yourself down!”

  “I’m going home, Jones.” Roxy couldn’t meet her friend’s eye. “You can’t persuade me otherwise.”

  “Great.” Jones’s voice was heavy with bitterness. “Well, then. So, I guess, if you’re not cut out for saving the world, there’s nothing I can—”

  “Perhaps,” interrupted Mortadella brightly, taking Jones’s arm, “you’d like to come with me to our fabulous Spell-ness Zone, and see my lovely new spell put into action? Give your friend a moment by herself to clear her head?”

  For once, Jones seemed to recognize a pointed tone when she heard one.

  “Yeah, all right.” She stood up and followed Mortadella to the office door. “Look, I can’t make you stick this out,” she said, turning back to Roxy for a moment. “But all I can say is this: now we’ve come this far, I’ll be blooming unimpressed if you bottle it.”

  16

  As the door closed behind Jones and Mortadella, Roxy walked out of the atrium and down the marble steps outside.

  She hadn’t the faintest clue yet if she was leaving Jones behind for good or just needed to clear her head.

  Roxy sat down rather suddenly on the bottom step.

  It was fair to say that, of all the astonishing things that had happened to her so far today, this one was the biggest shock of all.

  She’d read the story of Hansel and Gretel just once, in a tattered Child’s Treasury of Fairytales borrowed from the library, and she knew it – obviously – word for word.

  Now she closed her eyes and summoned up the book’s pages in her mind’s eye.

  Once upon a time, in a dark, dark wood, lived a brother and sister named Hansel and Gretel…

  OK, so where was this dark, dark wood? According to Gretel – who dodged any questions Roxy had ever asked about their lives before she was born – she and Han had grown up in “south-east Illustria”, near Awesomeland theme park and the border with Placedonia.

  They lived with their father and their stepmother, a cruel and heartless woman who wished to be rid of them…

  Roxy raked over the fragments of what she knew about the stepmothers her brother and sister had had before she was born. They’d definitely mentioned one called Babs, a foul-sounding woman with the habit of cancelling birthdays. Then there was Marcie, who’d done something unspeakable to Gretel’s pet kitten. Really, it was hard to think of any stepmother they’d had who hadn’t come under the category of Cruel and Heartless … not to mention That One they never spoke about.

  Roxy was thinking so hard about Gretel, and the little she’d told her about their early lives, that it was not, at first, a terrible shock to see Gretel herself walking across the gravel drive towards her. In fact, she almost thought she must be imagining it.

  But no. It. Really. Was. Gretel.

  For a moment – a long, horrible moment – Roxy assumed Gretel had come for her.

  Yet right now, it didn’t even look like Gretel had seen her. She was too busy talking into her phone.

  “… sure, I can do that,” Gretel was saying. “I’ll need a dozen of our best guys, though.”

  Roxy scrambled off the steps. Crouching low, she ran as fast as she could towards the only object large enough to shield her from view: the minibus.

  “… obviously we’re all focussed on the prison break right now,” Gretel was saying. “Yes, Minister Splendid… No, Minister Splendid… I do appreciate that you’re upset your daughter’s head has been turned into a tropical fruit, sir, but I don’t think that could possibly have anything to do with Bellissima…”

  Gretel’s voice sounded weird.

  Still bossy, yes, but with none of the usual peevish weariness. This was a completely different kind of bossy: clipped and dynamic and no-nonsense. And why on earth was she talking to Minister Splendid about the prison break? Surely, if she ever spoke to her boss at all, it would be about his loo?

  Not to mention the fact that none of this sounded AT ALL like Gretel was here to track down her rule-breaking little sister.

  Roxy, her back flat against the minibus, used the wing mirror to spy on Gretel, who had now reached the palace steps.

  She wasn’t wearing her pebbly glasses. Her mousy hair was pulled into a sleek, high ponytail. Her grey loo-cleaner overalls had been replaced by an ankle-length scarlet Puffa coat, and on her feet were – no! – high-heeled lipstick-red boots.

  Gretel didn’t wear high heels. Certainly not bright red ones. Gretel wore fluffy slippers the colour of cowpats, and cleaner’s rubber clogs the colour of, well, cowpats.

  “I’ll a
sk Mrs Smith when I see her, sir,” she was saying. “She’s heading straight here from Sector Seven… Well, I should think she’ll be here any minute now, sir… No, sir, there’s no suspicion any of Mortadella’s witches are involved in the breakout,” she added, more sharply than before. “None at all. We’re just here for her help.”

  Baffling though all this was – especially given the fact that Gretel had claimed nobody called Mrs Smith even existed – Roxy tried to focus on the important information. Which was that Mrs Smith was going to be here, at the retreat, any minute now.

  And Jones was still inside.

  If anything was going to put paid to Jones’s mission to save the country – nay, the entire world – it was Mrs Smith and her SMOG units catching them. And charging them with treason. And locking them up without a trial.

  Roxy had to do something, fast.

  Gretel was still standing on the front steps. There was no way Roxy could get past her without being recognized. No, not even with Frankie’s appalling hair-do: it was ghastly, but it hardly qualified as a disguise.

  “I’m quite sure the fruit-head thing will wear off soon, sir.” Gretel was wandering away from the entrance now as she continued to talk on the phone. “Yes, I will ask Mrs Smith if she knows a counter-spell, but I don’t want to put her in a bad mood about unauthorized magic, sir. You know I’ve already got my doubts about her recent methods…”

  Roxy, unnerved by how close Gretel was getting, scurried into the minibus. She crouched on the floor for a moment, beside the driver’s seat, and looked around.

  Immediately beside the tip of her right ear was a control panel, just like those on a normal car or bus, with a key to start the ignition, a button for the windscreen wipers and a button to turn up the heating. But Roxy could see several buttons unlike any she’d seen in a vehicle before.

  One said INVISIBILITY SHIELD and the other said FLIGHT MODE.