by Willow Mason
With my heart pounding, I ducked my head down so I couldn’t see him and hoped the reverse was true.
“Beep, beep, beep,” he said in a tone that suggested he was having a great time. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
I closed my eyes, hoping it would aid my invisibility and ignored the amused taunts of the cat.
“Ooh. Here we go. This is progress.”
As I raised my head to look again, the man fiddled with a couple of dials, a beaming smile on his face.
“Now, where do you start and where do you finish?”
Knowing it was probably true but still unable trust it fully, I raised my eyes again. The man had his hand out, trying to touch something the spell bounced his hand away from. His frown began to cut through the beaming smile as the beeps grew frantic.
Annalisa glanced at me, wrinkling her nose and waggling her whiskers.
Annalisa began to lick her paws.
The panther didn’t deign to answer, and I stared at the man’s increasingly frenetic efforts with concern. If I jumped out there, it would give him a shock, but probably not enough for him to run away.
I might just startle him, then have a whole boatload of questions to answer. Like, why was there a dead body in the forest?
I didn’t know what the cat was looking at, but I saw a strong-featured, handsome man in front of me. The appeal was slightly ruined by him squatting and running his hands above the form of a dried-up corpse, but he still seemed impressive.
Not a penny-pinching dead-soul authority-fearing man at all.
I stared at her.
Before my frustration could blow the top off my head, Annalisa sat up and languidly yawned, then stretched out her back.
With one jump, she landed a foot away from the crouching man.
His eyes widened, his face drained of blood, and with a strangled yelp he jumped to his feet and ran away.
“Thank you,” I said, walking over once I was sure the strange man and his machine were out of sight. “I owe you one.”
Chapter Five
Finding the vehicle turned out to be more difficult than I’d imagined. The manufacturer’s logo on the keyfob had worn down enough to be unidentifiable, so I had to walk along a lot of streets pressing the button before we finally struck gold.
“Woo-hoo,” I shouted, opening the door to jump inside. “It’s about time. Shouldn’t you get out of view since you’re not meant to be seen by the public?”
The small rush of joy I’d experienced upon finding the car, faded away. “Remind me not to hire you as a life coach,” I muttered, twisting the key in the ignition. The engine turned over a few times, then choked to a stop.
No surprise. From the array of red lights on the dashboard, I chose the fuel gauge as my primary concern.
A woman ran down the driveway of the house we were parked in front of, waving her arms as though we’d be able to miss her bright-yellow smock.
“Yoo-hoo,” she called out. “Hello?”
I tried to wind down the window, but either the button didn’t work, or the car battery was the next down on the list of concerns.
“Hey, there,” I said as she pulled level, giving up on the window in favour of opening the door. “Can I help you?”
“Is this your car?”
“No,” I said, smiling. “It belongs to my aunt. She asked me to pick it up and drive it home but I’m afraid it’s out of petrol.”
“She didn’t tell you that?” The woman took a step back, shaking her head and planting her hands on her ample hips. “What a piece of work. She left this outside my house four days ago, saying she just had to pop down to the garage to get a top-up petrol can.”
I nodded, trying to arrange my features into a suitable array of commiseration. Whatever my expression landed on wasn’t adequate judging from the way the woman folded her arms.
“It’s not funny. I’ve had this eyesore parked out here for days, spoiling the street. What if I’d had friends over? Where are they meant to park?”
Judging by the way she presented the scenario as a puzzle, I guessed no friends were beating a path to her door. “Sorry. I’ll just fetch some petrol from the garage, then I’ll be out of your hair.”
After performing a quick calculation of what was left on my debit card, I frowned. “It might need a new battery as well.”
“There are jumper cables in my garage,” the woman offered. “Anything, if it means I see the back of this heap of junk.”
My standards must be too low. To me, it just looked like a slightly older model of car, not a junker. “Where’s the nearest garage?”
“Down that way,” the woman said, pointing. “Take a right at the first corner and it’s up by the next intersection.” She folded her arms and leant forward, creasing her face with worry. “You’re not going to abandon it again, are you?”
I held my hands up. “No, I promise I won’t.”
As I headed down the road, Annalisa decided she was above a walk, remaining on the backseat of the car. As a stiff Easterly wind nipped at my thin cardigan, I envied her the warm patch of leather seat in the sun.
When I put the can of petrol on the counter, I asked the attendant if anyone else had brought one recently.
“I don’t know what you mean by recent,” he said, giving me a concerned frown as I ran the card through. Perhaps he was reflecting my expression as we both relaxed when the transaction went through.
“Within the last week?”
“We sell a dozen or more of those a week,” the young man said. “More in summer when the season gets going, down at the beach.”
I had vague memories of holiday campers flooding into Briarton come late spring and departing with the first whiff of autumn.
“It would’ve been a
woman,” I said, and his eyes lit up.
“Oh, yeah. That’s unusual. I haven’t sold one to a lady like yourself in a long time. Maybe a few months ago.”
So, the woman in the woods had parked her car three days ago, lowering the tone of the neighbourhood, and never made it as far as the garage. I timed the walk back to the vehicle and found it just short of four minutes. Hardly a marathon.
“That’s a pretty cat you’ve got there,” the yellow-smocked woman remarked as I drew closer. Her face had settled into a pleasanter expression, probably upon seeing the petrol in my hand.
“Sure is,” I agreed with a wink to Annalisa. “Although, you should see her when she’s in a foul mood. All teeth and claws.”
With the can emptied into the tank, I tried the engine again. This time it turned over more sluggishly but managed to fire up a spark. I waved goodbye and pulled out into the road, trying to picture the route home from here.
I nearly drove off the road at Annalisa’s comment, then frowned as I tried to work out how to do it.
No matter how grim the job sounded, my familiar was right. I could hardly leave the lady in the woods for the strange man to come beeping his machinery over again. Nor did it feel right to abandon her there, subject to the elements. Not when there was a chance to restore her back to normal.
The trek wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. The worst of it was avoiding eye contact with the dead lady and getting the body from the edge of the woods into the boot of the car. As much as the supreme had told me about the protection spell—and the man with the machinery had proven its worth—it still made me feel creepy to drag a body around in the open daylight.
Not as much of a creep as when I clunked shut the boot. Then I felt like a serial killer taking home a victim as a trophy.
The car started again but with a great deal more reluctance this time. I tried to cast an engineering spell on the vehicle, a feat that ended with a lot more of the pretty sparkles from the day before but no discernible effect.
After turning into Conker Street, the car lurched forward and back, bunny-hopping though there was no clutch. Just as I drew level with my house it quit in a cloud of black exhaust.
“You hardly count as little,” I grumbled, opening the door and trying not to cough. “Is your cloaking spell still on or are you about to scare all the neighbours?”
The panther gave me a disgusted glance before slinking in front of me.
I caressed the trunk of the car, then followed the cat up to the house. It felt like a full day had passed already and it wasn’t even midday yet.
Half an hour later, I stared at my phone, feeling lonely. Ten minutes after plugging it in to charge, a text message alert sounded, sent from Jared’s number. I was wondering if I could trust myself to read it but not respond when the supreme turned up.
“You shouldn’t be here,” was my greeting. “The whole idea behind me taking one for the team is that every other witch distances herself.”
“It’s also my job as supreme to help you with any troublesome matters.” Genevieve bustled past, her hair coming dangerously close to the low ceiling. “You look like someone who’s having a bad day, which doesn’t instil confidence.”
“Bad breakup.”
“And don’t we all have one of those stories? You got her out of the woods okay?”
“She’s in the car.”
Genevieve frowned but kept her lip buttoned and I was too upset to follow the unspoken comment.
After a few moments of silence, she saw Annalisa slinking into the kitchen. “Oh good. You caught up with your familiar, then? It’s one less wild cat I need to hunt down.”
I couldn’t imagine her hunting down the panther but kept that thought to myself, though obviously not hidden enough given Annalisa’s huff of amusement.
“Do you have an idea of what to do next?” Genevieve asked when small talk failed to eventuate. “I can always put a hypnotising spell on the police chief if you want to ask him for a plan of action.”
“It’s a kind offer, but I’m going to trace the vehicle ownership, then talk with anybody who knew her. Hopefully, that will give me a lead on how this terrible thing happened.” I chewed on my thumbnail—my eyes drawn to the boot of the car parked outside. “I’ve already discovered she was attacked somewhere between her car breaking down and the short walk to the garage.”
Genevieve’s frown told me something was wrong. When she wasn’t forthcoming, I rubbed at my eyebrow where it desperately wanted to twitch and sighed. “What’s the matter?”
“The woman wasn’t attacked,” the supreme explained. “Or she wasn’t attacked there. She would’ve been the one doing the attacking.”
I filled up the kettle and popped it on, pulling a jar of instant coffee out of the cupboard. “Do you want one?”
The moue of disgust on Genevieve’s face gave me the answer.
“But if her body is the one in the woods…?”
“The suckling left her there, but it must’ve been in her for a while to cast such a dry spell on the poor woman. You need to find out where it went after leaving her. That’s the best bet. You could track down her home life and everyone in it and still never get to the bottom of who it infected next.”
“You’ll need to tell me more.” I sat down, cup in hand, ready to take notes if necessary. “How do I work out who has a suckling on board?”
“Never mind that now,” Genevieve said, pulling at my elbow. “Drink that fast. I want to take you to the library and see if you can open the door.”
Her face glowed with hope. I’d seen the same expression before and knew it would only lead to disappointment. That’s the trouble with being a weak witch, people always expect more than you can deliver.
I frowned, and she caught the thought from my head.
I shook my head, and the panther hissed in frustration.
With that vote of confidence, I skulled my coffee and left the cup in the sink to wash later. “Come on, then,” I told the supreme. “Let’s go see if I can fulfil my destiny.”
Chapter Six
The library was on the other side of town; hidden at the end of a cul-de-sac, down a long driveway that meandered back and forth like a slow-moving river before terminating in a circular car park.
“Where is it?” I asked, not wanting to sound like a dummy but unable to spot anything of interest. Before us was the tangled start to a forest—again with the forest—and behind us was the street. Eventually.
“You can’t see it?”
Okay. So the disappointment was already starting. I shook Annalisa awake and booted her out of the car, then had to wait for my pins and needles to subside before I could follow.
“I can’t see anything except the car park we’re standing on, the woods in front of us, and the drive.”
The supreme closed her eyes and her lips twisted. With a sense of frustration rising in my chest, I turned in a circle, staring really hard. So hard. Harder than I’d ever stared at nothing-much-of-interest before.
A shimmer caught my eye, right beside the deadened stump of an old oak tree. Not wanting to concede defeat unt
il the last possible moment, I headed that way, tilting my head at different angles. I alternated between opening my eyes wide, then narrowing them until I could barely see through my eyelashes.
Just as I turned away in disgust, the same shimmer occurred. This time when I turned back, an enormous building stood there. Stone blocks of differing shades of grey formed the backbone of the structure while long pale green fingers of lichen crawled up the sides.
“Where did you come from?” I stepped forward and pressed my palm against the wall. The stone felt simultaneously hot and cold, raising a crop of gooseflesh along my arms.
The building made a low hum, and I pressed my ear closer, a shower of tingles spreading out from my scalp and cascading down my spine. It sounded close to an ASMR video I sometimes listened to when I was stressed—a woman with long fingernails scraping a large block of ice.
I’d thought that sound was the closest to ecstasy I could get, but this structure added a depth of vibration that rolled my eyes into my skull. If I’d been alone, I would have stood there longer—all day, all week—but the supreme snapped her fingers, jolting me back to reality.
“Great. You can see the building right in front of you. How about the door?”
After stepping back, I couldn’t see a break in the wall. I followed the line around the corner, down the side, around the back, and along to the front. No sign.
With one triumph already under my belt—Annalisa’s smirking rejoinder,
I grasped at the handle. Behind me, the supreme called out, “Thank goodness.” I turned it, began to push it inward, then suddenly I was back inside the car.
“What?”
My mind couldn’t grasp what had happened. The building was gone. Annalisa and Genevieve stood near the edge of a forest, the supreme with her shoulders slumped.
“It was worth a try,” she said in a defeated voice, joining me in the car. “Perhaps the powers skipped a generation.”