A Broom Too Far

by Mara Webb

  My mouth was gaping slightly, I consciously brought my lips together. Quin thanked Imogen for her time, and we wandered out to the paved area beyond the doors. I didn’t need to look at Quin, we both knew. We both mentally moved the teacher into the ‘no’ pile with Hannah’s brother. If it wasn’t for Hannah then Martha would have lost her job months ago. Imogen was still a ‘maybe’, but it sounded as though Robin was the one to watch.

  Marnie started to run towards us from across the field. My brow furrowed as she drew nearer, ‘This better be useful,’ I thought, ‘there is already enough information swirling around my head.’ When she reached us, she was slightly out of breath.

  “Hey, I found you, okay, listen…” she breathed in and out heavily then looked around before speaking again, “the weird thing in the woods, the thing Tom mentioned to you, I overheard a bunch of the cheerleaders whispering about ‘Trying again tonight at twelve’ and they are going back to the clearing in the trees. That must mean the place behind Imogen’s house.

  “It might be nothing, but I want the person who hurt my cousin to be brought to justice. If this is related to her death, then you need to check it out. If you give me a minute to check through my phone, I have her address somewhere.”

  We were patient as Marnie plied us with information, pouring it over us. That was that then, we had to go to the woods behind Imogen’s house tonight, at midnight.

  12

  It was mid-afternoon before we got back to number thirteen charm close. Quin and I hadn’t spoken much during the car ride, even he had managed to stay quiet, much to my surprise. There was a lot to process. It had been a strange enough day speaking to Quin when he looked like someone else, never mind the ups and downs of the University gossip.

  The current understanding was that Robin, a member of the cheerleading squad, had gotten in big trouble for trying to cheat on an exam and that Hannah was the one who informed the University that she had stolen the paper from the teacher’s desk. If anyone had a motive to kill Hannah, it was Robin.

  Imogen might also have wanted Hannah dead. None of the squad were gifted dancers, but maybe Imogen had just snapped. She was the captain, the face of the team. It must have been embarrassing to lead a team onto the field during a big game and perform that badly. Either way, it sounded like both Imogen and Robin would be in the woods together tonight, with the rest of the dud dozen.

  I pulled onto the driveway and reached to put the car in park when something cold and flat slapped me across the face. Before I had time to react, I was hit again, then again. I put my arms up defensively and prevented the fourth blow. I looked in the direction of my attacker. Quin was wielding an old CD case he had found in the passenger side door.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I yelled.

  “I have to hit you to end the spell! You’re you again! I was helping. See look!” He slapped himself hard across the face with the CD case. “Do I look like me again?” Fur sprouted from his bald skin quickly.

  “No,” I said, “No, I think maybe you need to try again a little bit harder.”

  He slapped himself harder with the plastic.

  “Oh, there you go.” I smirked. That’ll teach him for smacking me with a CD in my own car, ungrateful little fluff ball. We walked into the house and were greeted by a chorus of meows from the kittens. Quin set about telling them all the adventures we had been on since we left the house this morning.

  He spoke hyperbolically about every element of the day. At no point had we been ‘chased by a knife wielding imp’ or ‘almost arrested for using black belt karate on a civilian’. I filled all the cat dishes with some tuna and then wandered upstairs to spend some time alone. I needed to check out the address Marnie had given us online, plan what time we needed to leave, where we could park, and how to enter the woods unseen.

  I unplugged my laptop and lifted it off the desk, brought it to the bed and got underneath the covers. It was so cold today; I had been fantasizing about getting snuggled with a blanket for hours. When I opened my emails, I remembered that I had an O.W.L. assignment deadline coming up that I hadn’t started. I wasn’t even sure what the assignment was. I had been given a long list of assigned reading, but it had covered quite a few topics.

  I clicked on the latest email from my school. As was the tradition with any correspondence from O.W.L., I was immediately shot in the face by a shower of confetti firing powerfully out of my laptop. My mouth had been slightly open, so I was now pulling small pieces of tissue paper off my tongue as I read the contents of the message.

  ‘Dear Ms. Nora Wildes,

  As we approach the holiday season, we are setting a slightly lighter assignment for you to complete. What is required of you is to immerse yourself in the scenario laid out below, you will then need to prepare a document which outlines what you would need to do, why you would do it and in what order. The scenario is thus:’

  As I read, I heard growling start to rumble from the laptop, the faint sounds of rustling leaves and a bird cawing as if far away.

  ‘You wake up on the floor of a Jungle. It is pitch black, but you can feel your wand in your hand. You have no memory of how you got here, where you are or who is close by. You are to assume that danger is ever present, one wrong move in any direction could lead to your gruesome, horrible death. Proceed with caution, not everyone will survive.’

  ‘Really just have some fun with it! It’s sort of a virtual escape room, how would you stay alive and make it out of the jungle before you are killed by an anaconda or a poison dart frog? Once you have prepared your ideas carefully and sent off the draft to your tutor, you will take part in a Virtual Reality session in which you will perform your spells as you have written them. Just a silly way to see who has the best survival plan, obviously you will be in no real danger, but if you are bitten by a VR Jaguar you will feel it. Best of luck!’

  Confetti fired again but I had closed my eyes and mouth just in time. Okay, so I had to read back through the book ‘Prepping for the apocalypse: Witch edition’ in order to avoid getting mauled by a virtual cat, great.

  I used a map website and input the address I had for Imogen, manipulating the image on the screen to show me different angles of her house and the houses surrounding it. I could see the woods behind the house and a small dirt path that disappeared into the trees. The path weaved between two houses that were angled in such a way as to prevent any windows overlooking it. No one would see us there.

  My cell phone buzzed on the bed next to me, it was Brent. “Hello?” I said as I answered. I realized I hadn’t spoken to him since he had shot me the ‘sad eyes’ when Ryan had visited.

  “Hi, are you free to talk?” he said, already setting the tone of the conversation as a sad one.

  “Sure, is everything okay?” I didn’t know what was coming but I was nervous. We weren’t technically dating, so it wasn’t as if he could break up with me. I don’t know what I was nervous about.

  “Not really, my mom had a flood at her house so I will be leaving town for a day or two to help move her to a temporary place.”

  “Oh, that’s awful! Is she alright? Is there a lot of damage?” I didn’t know much about flooding other than it is not something you want when you have carpeting.

  “She’s fine, just need to wait for the insurance to help out with the flooring and the darn washing machine to be replaced, it was pretty much just the utility that got hit, it got the kitchen a bit too but nothing serious. I just thought that maybe we could use the time apart to think about what we want. I mean, I know what I want. I think you’re not sure yet.”

  Now I knew what I was nervous about. He was calling me out, I had to choose him or Ryan. Ryan hadn’t said explicitly that he had any romantic feelings for me, all that had happened was that he had shown some concern for my wellbeing and I had whipped up a romance in my mind. That was the problem though, I wanted him to be interested in me.

  “I know that a girl like you could get any guy in the world.
I just...I want to be the guy you choose. If, by the time I get back, you think you might want to make this official then I will be right there. I feel that we have something worth keeping. Just think about it, okay?” He was not quite begging for my heart but trying to prod me in his direction.

  “Yes, yeah. Of course. I will think it all over. I’ve just had a lot going on recently and you’ve got caught up in it. I will give it the time and consideration it deserves; I promise. Give my best to your mom,” I said, and then held the phone to my ear for a few moments, just listening to the dial tone. He had hung up.

  What now? On the bike trip we had been falling in love, I was convinced that we were heading in the right direction. How had things gotten so messed up so fast? My blossoming romance was now fraught with tension and doubt. I was in the firing ling for revenge by the Huxley’s for a murder I hadn’t committed, and someone still had the stolen illegal books from my attic.

  I had hours before I needed to head out to spy on Imogen and the gang, I had to distract myself somehow. What better way to kill time than to do something productive? I moved my laptop back to my desk and dragged the blankets off my bed to create a nest in my office chair. I sat down, wrapping my legs up in fabric like a cocoon. I had one of the books on my desk from the recommended reading list, so I opened it, grabbed a pack of sticky notes from a drawer and started to make annotations.

  Using the O.W.L. server login I was able to browse their online library for other books that might be useful, I selected a book on jungle survival for humans, primitive technology, jungle wildlife and basic orientation. Many of these were aimed at non-magic techniques but were written by witches or wizards that had, for one reason or another, found themselves stranded in a rainforest.

  I also consulted the website of a witch that records audio versions of all sorts of magic textbooks. Quin had introduced me to Joan when I had first started reading magical texts and she was a lifesaver. Due to a series of misunderstandings and curses, Joan was a witch that could never stop talking. She and her husband cashed in on the problem by having her record audio versions of all textbooks, and the odd miscellaneous literature for the right price. It meant that I could multitask, listen to a textbook while I was shopping or cooking.

  I ordered audio versions of all the books I had on loan from the O.W.L. library, I figured I could start listening to one in the bath before we went out tonight.

  I opened a new word document on my laptop and made bullet points of my initial ideas. In the prescribed scenario it was dark, so obviously I needed to find some way to assess my surroundings, develop an awareness of the danger around me and defend myself. I needed a plan in case I was so deep into the jungle that I would need to survive multiple days and nights.

  As I typed up some of the key ideas from pages I had marked in a book with sticky notes my mind wandered back to Brent and Ryan. When I had been married, I had never felt like this. Greg had been fine, but it was never a passionate love affair, he had never performed grand romantic gestures or given me the impression he would lay his life on the line for me. Maybe they just grow them differently here in Sucré.

  Greg was in a new relationship now, and I had been in freefall until I got here and inherited my magical powers. This whole bizarre, terrifying, electrifying experience had given me a purpose and a direction when I had nothing. This all started because my aunt Edith died and left everything to me and now, I was in such a mess that—

  Edith.

  I hadn’t even thought about the fact that she was missing from the mirrors. I needed to call Ryan.

  13

  I picked up my cell phone and opened the contacts to search for his name. Scrolling down to ‘R’ and looking at his name I considered whether this was a good idea or not. What would I say? There was so much of this saga that I couldn’t share with him. Was there any way that I could bring up the mirror situation without having to mention everything else? I put my phone down and made my way downstairs to find Quin.

  “Hey Quin, I need to ask you a few things, can I borrow you for a couple of minutes?” I asked as he was showing his familiar students some techniques for hiding effectively.

  “Sure! Okay I need you all to start a game of hide and seek guys, so take turns being the seeker. The aim of the game is to sneak up behind the seeker and pounce on their tail, you got it? Seekers, you are trying to move silently through the house! Mark, you are the seeker first. Off you go!” Once he had finished giving them their instructions, he slowly walked over to me and sat down next to me on the bottom step of the staircase.

  “Is this about tonight? I can see really well in the dark because of these cat eyes, obviously I have cat eyes, I am a cat. What other type of eyes could I possibly have? Oh, that’s a great idea, should we give you cat eyes for our super-secret spy mission into the dark woods behind a murder suspect’s house? Then you could see everything! You wouldn’t be able to climb a tree as well as me...unless...should we give you cat paws too?”

  I somehow could still be surprised by how much Quin can say without saying anything at all, although he had, even more surprisingly, suggested something useful. “Cat eyes would be great Quin. Is that going to be painful to do?”

  “No way! You have those hay fever eye drops in the fridge, right? I don’t know why, pollen isn’t a huge problem this time of year,” he said.

  “I bought it when I lived in my last apartment, I never even opened it. It just got moved here by the same magic that brought all of my other stuff.” I hadn’t thought about those eye drops since the day they came home with me from the drug store. It suggested that Quin had been rummaging around in the refrigerator again.

  “Unopened is way better. All we have to do is put a little charm on the bottle, put a drop in each eye and voilà, cat eyes. They will look a bit weird, for you I mean, but as long as you don’t bump into anyone that expects you to have human eyes you should be fine.” He stood up and turned to face the kitchen.

  “No wait just hang on. We’ll get to that in a minute, I need to ask you about the mirrors. Where is Edith? I don’t understand what has happened to her and it is just another thing on my crazy to do list for this week. I would ask someone from the council to help but I don’t know what I can say to them, I don’t know where to start looking if I was going to read through the books in the attic. Do you have any ideas?” I was desperate and it was coming across in my tone.

  The events of the last few days had been building up and I couldn’t cope anymore. Tears grew into huge droplets in my eyes and I started to cry into my blanket. I needed a more adulty adult to fix all my problems, what a nightmare it was that I had to solve all this on my own. In other circumstances I would ask Edith for help, but she was missing from the only place I could communicate with her, so now what?

  “Come on,” Quin said. “We can start looking in the attic together, we still have a couple of hours until midnight, how long will it take us to get there?”

  “The internet said it’s a fifteen-minute drive, so if we get there and lie in wait, maybe leave at 11:30?” Quin nodded in agreement and then we went to the attic together. Once we were both through the attic hatch, I sat down on the rug in the center of the room and dabbed at my tears with my sleeve.

  “Is there a chance this is related to scrying?” Quin asked, pulling a book down from a shelf.

  “I could not have less idea what you are saying, is that even a word?” He was being silly to make me laugh and it was working, I felt the weight of defeat lift from my shoulders.

  “Scrying? It’s a real word all right. I’m not sure how to explain it really, it’s sort of a way to see something else by using a crystal ball or a reflective surface. Some people use scrying to see into the future but that is really difficult. I don’t think I have ever met anyone that could pull it off, it takes an enormous amount of power. Seeing into the past is not as hard but still requires skill.”

  “I don’t follow.” My forehead creased as I listened, Quin nu
dged the book along the ground towards me. ‘The Art of Mirror Scrying’ was an incredibly weighty publication, I wondered how many of these had been printed. The cover was a shiny black, it reminded me of looking out of a window when it is dark outside, I could see my own reflection, but I could also vaguely make out the movement of something underneath the cover.

  The longer I held the book the clearer the something became; it was the author twirling in circles holding a piece of cardboard advertising her next book.

  “Do I need to read this whole thing, or can you give me a quick summary?” I watched the author on the cover hold up copies of her new book that were written in Spanish and Japanese.

  “The book will do a better job explaining it than me, I’m a bit rusty, but here goes. There is a chance that Edith is acting as a ‘scry spy’ and is just waiting for us. Someone broke in here to threaten you, she will have seen the whole thing, you put mirrors all over the house. The mirror was all scratched up, so she definitely saw that. I think there is a chance that she has moved to the mirrors of someone that she thinks we should spy on.

  “So, we use scrying to see what she can see in those mirrors, then we can know what she is trying to tell us. I’ve explained that badly. Let me start again. The year was 1832 and in the town of—”

  “No wait,” I interrupted. “Okay so we spy on someone using the mirrors because Edith is there making it easier for us, right? What do we have to do to scry?” I picked up the book and turned to the contents page, running my finger down the chapter titles to search for something instructional. I flicked through the pages to get to page 273, the chapter titled ‘Spying on the enemy, HOW DARE YOU? The how to guide.’