by Willow Mason
A fountain of smoke poured from the insect, an explosion of magic and light and a billion different dancing colours. I inhaled deeply, soaking the power into my lungs and feeling it expand inside me, galloping into my bloodstream and reaching into the farthest reaches of my body with every beat of my heart.
I stared at my free hand—the sparkles of magic squeezing out of my pores. A myriad of colours—green, red, cyan, magenta, orange, yellow—the brightest whites and the deepest golds.
When the beetle was spent, reduced back to its original size, so small it easily scuttled into a crack in the floorboards, I sat back. My hands crossed over my belly and I breathed deeply and slowly, just existing in a body which felt both normal and utterly changed.
The magic pulsed and throbbed inside me, finding places to reside, spilling out of my mouth and rushing back inside on the next breath, fighting to stay in its new home. Its rightful home.
For the first time since I was a young girl, my body felt completely mine. Absolutely as it should. Nothing missing, nothing stolen.
A tear leaked from the corner of my eye as I bowed my head in thanks.
My mother might have died believing magic was a curse, but she’d never had hers stolen away without her knowledge. Even with her beliefs, she’d never given her power away until it turned deadly inside her.
Her beliefs—misguided or not—had taken from me the one thing that made me feel complete and I hadn’t even known.
In relief, in ecstasy that my body finally felt like something I should rightfully be inhabiting, I knelt on the kitchen floor and cried.
Chapter Fourteen
“You know the drill,” Aunt Florentine said through pursed lips. “Just give it another go. It’s not like we have anything else important to do… like finding a missing or kidnapped paraplegic and giving Isabella her only chance at life.”
“Thanks. So supportive.” I twisted my neck from side to side until the bones of my spine snapped and popped. “How about putting some pep into your next pep talk?”
My aunt patted the side of her gleaming bob, her equivalent to rolling her eyes. “I believe in you.”
I stared at the shimmer where the library building kept appearing and vanishing. When I’d woken up, I felt sure my restored powers could easily get me through the door, unlocking the treasure trove of knowledge inside. Now, an hour after I’d arrived and with nothing so far to show for it, my confidence had waned.
Annalisa bumped her head against the back of my knees, and I reached down to give her a reassuring pat. Reassuring to me, that was—I don’t think she cared one way or the other.
“Open,” I said, my hands raised in an approximation of every stereotypical sorcerer I’d ever seen on TV. “Open up now.”
The building swayed and blurred in the strengthening morning light. Long grass swayed in the wind, catching a breeze and losing it again as the structure reappeared.
“Stay still!” I yelled, losing my last shred of patience. A fierce rod of magic smoke snaked towards the wavering library.
The building snapped into focus, as solid as my own body, then shattered apart.
“Where did it go?” I walked forward, expecting to hit against the physical form or find myself transported back into the car as it had done before. But I encountered no resistance. I made it across to the far side of where the structure had been, kicking at a clump of grass that had nothing built upon it.
“Desdemona?” My aunt’s voice was querulous, and I spun around to face her, surprised at the thread of weakness. “Are you inside?”
“Inside what?” I held my arms out. “There’s nothing here.”
In confusion, I moved to her side, watching her expression collapse into relieved lines as I made the quick journey.
“There’s nothing to get.” I whirled around to face my aunt. “Can you still see the building?” When she nodded, as puzzled as me, I clicked my tongue. “There’s literally nothing there.”
“It takes time to see it.”
“Nothing. Here.” I stomped across the empty field before returning to the circular carpark. “It’s like some colossal joke.”
“You’re not pulling our legs, are you?”
I swivelled to face my aunt. “No. This isn’t a prank.” I strode along the edge of where I’d seen the building, kicking up against an old piece of concrete as I did so. When I took a closer look, the edges were charred and farther along there were more blocks, marking out a foundation for a building long gone.
Was that what my mother had run from? Had she somehow destroyed the library and placed the section under a spell to cover her tracks?
“What are you thinking?” Aunt Florentine had her hands on her hips, staring at me with open suspicion.
“Nothing. I have no clue what’s going on.”
True, except one thing was evident. We weren’t going to find any information lying in the clearing. I screwed my face up in concentration, trying to think of an alternative plan.
“Patrick said he didn’t think Isabella was blind,” I said after a long pause.
“And? What of it?”
The thought danced across the tip of my tongue, then pirouetted out of reach. I gave a frustrated sigh, running my fingers through my hair.
“Spit it out, girl. We can’t stand out here all day. There’s still a parasitic suckling on the loose.”
“A parasite.” I rolled the word around in my mouth for a while, teasing it into a new shape with my tongue. “The encyclopaedia said it restored witches to health.”
“It said the suckling fed on them. What are you getting at?”
“In return for restoring their health.” I saw a book written in braille. The tidy house, everything in its place. Clear mantels and side tables. No memorabilia on display. “What if I was right and Isabella was blind? What if eyesight was the health the suckling was restoring to her?”
“It hardly seems—” My aunt broke off abruptly, staring into the middle distance. “The wheelchair. First a blind woman, then a paraplegic.”
“Teri Anson said her daughter had recruited the suckling. She’d sought it out. Why would someone go to all that trouble if they weren’t getting something good out of it? Not a parasitic arrangement but a symbiotic one?”
Aunt Florentine slapped a hand against her thigh. “A library full of information would come in handy, right around now.”
I followed my thought along to a roadblock. “If their relationship was of mutual benefit, why would it turn on her?”
A flashback of Jared turning from steady boyfriend to monster in the space of a few months came to mind. Still…
“Leaving her to die in the woods?” I gulped in a mouthful of air and jiggled my shoulders to relieve the muscle tension. “The relationship would have to be downright antagonistic to warrant such an extreme response.”
My lips twitched and I pressed them together to withhold the laugh. “This is serious.”
“I suppose it doesn’t get us any closer to finding Blair Candlewood, anyway.” A sigh escaped my lips. “Do you think the supreme would’ve heard back from the council by now?”
“No.” My aunt took a few steps back towards the car, then stopped and clapped a hand to her forehead. “I’m
an idiot.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “But about what, specifically?”
My aunt tilted her head to one side and stared at me with an intense gaze. “Do you want to put your newfound powers to real use?”
A surge of light spun out of my fingertips, something my aunt took as a yes.
“There’s an old spell up here,” she tapped the side of her head. “It’s for locating people but I’ve never had the power to use it.”
“Why didn’t you say so? Tell me.”
Instead, she wrote it out on her phone. When I stared at the type, the strange words made my head hurt.
“Don’t worry about sounding them out correctly. Just picture Blair in your mind and let the words follow.”
I pictured the man from the grainy CCTV stills and mumbled the spell under my breath as best I could. With the last word read aloud, I sat back, waiting for something to happen.
Nothing.
“Should I give it another—?”
A flash of brilliant yellow light dazzled me, cutting my words off like a knife. An arrowhead of smoke poured towards the car.
“Come on,” my aunt called, already halfway into the driver’s seat before Annalisa and I reached the side door. “We can’t afford to let it get away.”
Luckily, the car easily kept pace with the travelling magic signpost, especially once we emerged from Briarton’s fifty-kilometres-an-hour constraints and Aunt Florentine put her foot to the floor.
We chased the arrow along the highway, then along a hard-packed dirt road, the tyres slipping on the surface as we rounded bends not used to seeing traffic from one month to the next.
“I’ve heard about off the grid, but this is ridiculous,” I yelled as the track turned into the forest, barely discernible under a coat of brown pine needles and dried cones. A sudden thought pierced my heart with an icicle of dread. “You don’t think he’s been abandoned in the woods by the suckling, too?”
“Only one way to find out.” My aunt’s confident words were soon dealt a blow as the track became impenetrable. We jumped from the vehicle, stumbling through the dense woodland as the arrow continued to lead apace.
“Is that a car?” I pointed to a glint of metal, lost it behind the trunk of a wilding pine, then picked it up again as the sunlight sent a reflective ray burning into my eye.
“A caravan.” My aunt’s crowed in victory. “Thought he could escape us by going camping? What a nut.”
The silver-sided vehicle was propped up by blocks under its towbar, deep trails in the grass behind it showing where it had recently been dragged into place. The truck that had towed it was parked farther into the woods—proving its four-wheel-drive domination over my aunt’s tiny Honda.
I ran over and pounded on the door, my nerves and excitement pushing aside any concerns for my wellbeing. When no one answered immediately, I shouted, “We know you’re in there, Blair! Come out with your hands up.”
Silence greeted my enthusiastic call, and I pressed my face close to the small windows, trying to peer through the net curtains. I shrugged at my aunt and she stared at the ground, perhaps scanning for footprints.
Good luck with that. The combination of wild grass growing with abandon and pine needles dampening down any bare patches meant a bear could have had a dance party and we wouldn’t know it. I scraped my foot across a covering of tinder-dry leaves and debris, watching as the wind gusts removed the evidence in a second.
“We could try—”
I broke off and held a finger to my lips as the caravan shifted. Just a tiny bit, the weight distribution tilting from front to back.
“Blair Candlewood!” My aunt’s shrill voice pierced into my ear like a fancy new drill bit. “Open this door immediately before we have to open it ourselves.”
Another long silence greeted her command. Just as I held my arms up, trying to find an energy pattern to unlock the door, he burst out, staggering on the uneven ground. “Don’t hurt me!” Blair waved his arms wildly above his head. “I’m unarmed. I’m helpless.”
“Hopeless, more like,” my aunt said in a dry voice. “And we’re not going to hurt you.”
“Thank goodness.” The man dropped to his knees, sobbing, his chest heaving. “I’ve had such a terrible time. You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
“Get up.” I grasped him underneath the arm and dragged him upright, then pointed him back in the direction of Aunt Florentine’s car. “And you can work on your explanation while we’re driving back to town.”
“Better make it a good one,” my aunt said, staring at her mobile phone just as mine beeped to say it had a text. “Because it looks like you’ll be telling it to the entire coven.”
Chapter Fifteen
Instead of fine-tuning his speech, Blair Candlewood fell into a snoring sleep almost as soon as my aunt pointed her Civic in the direction of home. The red marks where he’d repeatedly scratched his head and the rumpled state of his clothing indicated it had been a while since he last dozed.
“Why would Genevieve call a meeting now?” I read the terse message over and over while my aunt drove, trying to piece together some sense from its brief order.
“My best guess is that the governing coven found out what’s been happening.”
I glanced over at my aunt whose eyes were fixed to the road. “That doesn’t sound good.”
Her lips were pressed so close together they were in danger of disappearing. “It’s not. At this point, we can only hope that our supreme has something else up her sleeve because being regulated and micromanaged won’t be any fun.”
I wrinkled my nose a little and stared into the backseat as Blair gave another almighty snore, sounding like he’d inhaled half the seat cover. “Didn’t realise we were having fun now.”
Aunt Florentine chuckled, then threw back her head and laughed gaily. She reached over to squeeze my knee, even though the road was so rough it almost tore the steering wheel from her remaining hand. “Yes, you did and yes, you are.” Her elbow nudged into my side. “Just admit it.”
The shock and weirdness of the past few days spun through my head as I tried and failed to understand what she meant. Fun? The body in the woods. The paranormal investigator I’d hit over the head. The giant panther who treated me like a servant.
“Wow.” My aunt recoiled, tossing her head as she regained control. “That was a doozy. I guess your enhanced power increased reception.”
The return of my powers. The spells that caused mayhem. The strange people in town who were fast blossoming into my closest friends. The renegade boyfriend actually HELPING for a change.
“Yeah, okay.” I scraped a few strands of hair behind my ear, swivelling my eyes to the side. “I guess it has been kind of fun.”
“That’s my girl.” My aunt checked on our passenger in the rear-view mirror as she turned onto the main road through Briarton and headed straight for my house. “And since today might be our last chance to enjoy ourselves, we’d better make the most of it.”
She pulled up outside my house with a screech of tyres, leaning over to jerk Blair awake. “Time to wake up, sunshine. We’ve got an important meeting to attend and a few more guests are joining us.”
He shuffled over, his expression dazed as Patrick and Jared joined him in the back seat. His features escalated into alarm as Annalisa was forced into his lap—her kitten form belying the eighty kilos of muscle suddenly weighing down his thighs.
“Uh—your cat seems to have a weight problem.”
Her true form must have peaked through the spell because Blair’s face turned very pale.
“Shuffle up,” my aunt ordered. “Our neighbours are also coming along for the ride.”
Effie waved from the side of the road while Meredith, her kunekune familiar, attempted to bite off her own tail.
“What�
�s wrong with the pig?”
I glanced at Blair, surprised he cared given everything else that was happening. “She had a tumour,” I explained, encouraged by Aunt Flo’s nod. “When the vet operated, she lost some brain function along with the cancer.”
“Road trip,” Effie exclaimed, hooking one arm around Jared’s neck as she clambered inside. One of her legs balanced atop his while the other barely fit on the seat with the door closed. She smiled an apology to Patrick. “Hope you don’t mind a lapful of fresh bacon.”
Considering the alternative was a hefty dose of panther, he handled the situation with grace. “Not at all. Any friend of Desi’s is a friend of mine.”
I guessed that meant we were friends, then.
“Will this car fit along the track to the circle?” Effie asked, shoving her head into the gap between the front seats. “Last time we had a full coven meeting, I spent half the journey terrified a motorbike wouldn’t make it through.”
“If you were travelling with Desmond, I’m not surprised.” My aunt huffed out a breath. “That boy wouldn’t know what an appropriate speed was if it smacked him in the head. But don’t worry, we’ve widened the path.”
Since I’d had to fight my way through to Isabella’s body—presumably near the coven meeting circle—it was news to me. However, my aunt wasn’t lying. The vehicle pushed through the undergrowth with no trouble. It took me a few minutes to understand it was because the ferns and thick bushes weren’t real. We were driving through the middle of a spell.
“Party time, people.” My aunt pulled up to the left of a large clearing, nodding through the windscreen to a group passing by, none of them familiar to me.
Agatha Rhodes waved from the other side of the clearing.
“Someone must’ve extended an invite,” Effie answered. “She’s attended these meetings for years, now.” She shot the panther an amused glance. “Something you’d know if you ever bothered to come.”