by Ruby Loren
I reached out my own hand, but she grabbed it.
“Don’t,” she warned.
I opened my mouth to ask why she was the only one who got to poke around in another world, but it didn’t seem like the most important question right now.
As I watched, January screwed her eyes up and focused on the tear. I saw her dark magic leave her and push the edges back together, but they resisted. The golden magic - my magic - just stayed there.
January’s eyebrows went up a little further. She turned to consider me. “There aren’t many people whose magic can stand up to mine. What spell was this? You’re a witch, aren’t you?”
“Yes. No… I’m not sure,” I admitted, wringing my hands and wishing I had my magical swords back. It had been nice to have something to hold. “I can’t make spells work for me,” I admitted.
She looked curious. “Really? Can you just think stuff and it happens for you?” I realised her body had tensed up. This question was important for some reason.
“The opposite. Sometimes things happen - usually when I’m angry or threatened. Back there, when I was fighting the monster…” I looked sideways at her. “That part was probably the witch trial, right?”
She smiled a little. “I wouldn’t know. I never had a trial.”
“But you have…”
“Magic? I know. But I don’t exactly fall under the category of witch. I only learned about the trials recently. Your magic is supposed to be peaking and how you do in the trials triggers something that makes it settle. I guess it’s like growing up and becoming an adult.” She pulled a horrified face for a moment.
I smiled. “Who’d want to do that twice?”
“Exactly. Anyway, I think I never had a trial because I’m not a witch, but I don’t know how that’s decided.” She returned her attention back to the void. “Could you try to close it?”
I tried not to be alarmed by the slight note of desperation in her voice. “I’ll give it a shot. Earlier on… in the fight… I thought I might have figured something out.” I frowned and tried to find the magic inside me that I’d found before. I attempted to recapture that moment
“Uh-oh,” said January, just as I thought I might have it.
I risked opening an eye. Something was coming towards the rift… flying at speed. It was dark and still far away, but some extra sense warned me that it had seen us in our world and was coming for the tear. Something else warned me that it might be able to get through.
I tried harder, asking, begging, whatever it was that had made this happen to stitch the tear back together again.
And then it started to work.
I watched as gold threads of magic began to tie the space back together, like grass growing over a bare patch of earth.
Just like grass - it was taking forever.
“Any time you want to speed up, please do,” January said, frowning and then sending her own black spears of magic through into the void between the worlds. They hit the black writhing flying thing and seemed to bounce off. “Give me a break,” she muttered.
I tried to make the gold thread tying go faster. The flying thing let out the most hideous sound I’d ever heard. For some reason, that seemed to help. Perhaps my magic needed to have the fear of whatever-that-thing-was put into it, but the tear started to repair faster.
January shouted and unleashed another dark magical volley into the breach. This time, I saw it make contact, and the monster flinched. It was just long enough for the final threads to link together, shutting out that dark world from view and hopefully from leeching into this one.
“We probably just saved the world and no one will ever know,” January commented, looking pale and drawn. I could tell that the magic had taken a lot out of her. “But… you’re also the one who put it in danger in the first place.” She turned her pale blue eyes on me.
“I don’t know how I did it,” I repeated and then added, “Sorry,” as it seemed like the decent and British thing to say, no matter how bad the situation had been.
The other woman nodded. “I’ve done some world-ending stuff myself in the past. Don’t worry about it. But… I’d invest some time trying to find out what you did, and how you did it.”
“Believe me. It’s high up on my ‘to do’ list.”
She smiled and looked at the space where the tear in the fabric of time and space had been. It looked like normal dead air now. “I’d make it my number one priority.”
A twig snapped like a bone breaking in two, somewhere near to the trees to our left. We both froze and turned. I watched January’s magic curl around her protectively before she concealed it from me with a single sideways glance.
I pretended to be looking elsewhere, but I’d witnessed more than enough in the time we’d spent together. She was unlike any other witch I’d ever met. Her power was just incredible. Even with my lack of experience in seeing the unseen world, I could sense it outstripped mine by a factor of a million or so. But even with all of that power, she hadn’t been able to undo whatever it was that I’d done.
Nothing moved in the woods, and after a moment, we both relaxed again.
“Hey… is, uh, being able to summon weapons from nowhere normal?” I asked.
She glanced at me. “No. That was what attracted my attention, by the way. No monster tramples through this forest without my knowing.” Something dangerous flashed in her eyes for a moment.
“Your forest?”
“Witchwood Forest.” She smiled at my confused expression. “That’s another thing about witch trials. They never take you far from home. It would take too much juice for the transport spell. Trust me.” She spoke like it was from personal experience, before cocking her head at me. “You’ve never managed to make a spell work? Have you tried different types of magic?”
“All of them,” I confirmed, grimly. “I thought I was going to be a non-magical dud until a couple of months ago. When something did start to happen, it was a surprise. But… I guess I’m a dud after all.”
“Hardly,” January said, and she meant it. She sighed. “My old mentor would have known what to do. He always did.” She looked at me. “Do you have someone who might be able to help you figure things out?”
I could tell that she was hoping I’d say yes. I didn’t blame her for not wanting to hang around with the witch who’d nearly ended the world. “My aunts are pretty old, and they’re both witches. I’m sure they’ll know,” I said, knowing I sounded unconvincing. The thing was, they hadn’t seemed to know anything up until now. I doubted this strange experience would change anything.
January nodded seriously in my direction, seeming to consider every inch. Something told me I wasn’t making a great impression.
“Get out here right now, Gregory!” she shouted, nearly making me jump out of my skin in shock.
A tall, blonde man slunk out from where he’d been lurking in the darkness between trees. First, I noticed how attractive he was. Then, I noticed something else.
“He’s a…”
“…vampire,” the man finished, inspecting his spotless fingernails. “Aren’t you the observant one?” He turned and looked at January. “You said you were coming to The Witch’s Wand with me tonight. You do remember we’re together, right? Or are you missing your bounty hunting days?”
“Don’t tempt me,” January told him, turning her gaze back on me. “I’ll be seeing you.”
Somehow, it felt like a warning.
I watched as she walked towards the vampire, who was clearly enjoying her state of undress.
“Pervert,” she told him before I felt the air move, as if all the energy was being sucked from it. Where January had stood, a tall black unicorn was now in her place. The unicorn looked at me, and I saw that same dark magic she’d shown earlier focusing around her horn.
I did some rapid blinking.
It was no wonder January had never been dragged on her own witch trial. She had both magical abilities and the ability to shape-shift.
I watched her gallop away into the night with the vampire almost matching her speed. I’d heard rumours ever since I’d returned to Wormwood. I’d dismissed them as just more nonsensical folklore, but here I was, seeing it with my own eyes. The black unicorn… and if the other rumours were also to be believed, possibly the most powerful magic user in the entire world. I’d even heard rumours that she was immortal, but I had no idea how that could be true.
I had no idea about a lot of things.
I stood for a moment longer in the middle of the forest with its broken trees and new clearings. Then, having forgotten my phone in the inconvenient shadow summoning transport session, I looked at the stars and figured out which way was home. It was going to be a long walk through the forest before I even reached the trees near Wormwood, but for the first time since I’d come back to town, I felt like there was nothing that could stop or harm me. I had magic. And I was just beginning to be able to use it.
The first opportunity to test it out came when I heard something crashing through the undergrowth towards me. It sounded like a badger with asthma. Fearing that my witch trial might not have been as over as I’d imagined, I reached inside and found that strange golden light. When I opened my eyes again, I was holding a golden bow and arrow. I pointed it in the direction of the approaching fiend and waited.
And that was how I nearly shot my familiar.
11
Secrets and Spies
“Hemlock! You could have been a pin cushion!” I shouted, angry both at him and myself for not knowing he was there.
“I…ran…” he panted. “Let’s…do…this!”
“The trial? You missed it,” I told him.
He stopped panting and looked at me. And then he looked at the golden bow and arrow, that I now didn’t know what to do with. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing much. I fought a monster with a magical pair of swords and a spear. After that, I accidentally opened up a tear in the fabric of reality that nearly let through some demonic thing from another dimension. It’s okay. I patched it back up again.”
Hemlock snorted. “Drama Queen. You don’t have to prove to me how bad your witch trial was. I’m stuck with you no matter how lame you are.”
I rolled my eyes and looked down at the golden bow. Pulling it out of nowhere had been one thing, but without using it… how did I get it to go away? I frowned and experimented with pulling the threads of magic back. Ick. That felt all kinds of awful. I dropped the bow and arrow to the ground and looked at it. Then I took a couple of steps away.
It disappeared.
“Neat illusion,” Hemlock said.
“It wasn’t…” I started to say, but then I just sighed. I could complete a witch trial and nearly destroy the world, but winning an argument with Hemlock was still an impossibility.
“I feel different, by the way. Look, my whiskers are alive with magic!”
I looked down and observed he was correct. They looked like miniature sparklers. “It goes well with the eyelashes.”
“You’re hilarious. So… what really happened? You were fine… right?” For just a second, my annoying cat looked anxious.
“Feeling guilty for not being here?” I smiled at the thought. Hemlock was the most self-centred cat-thing I’d ever met.
“No! It’s not my fault. The shadows left me behind.” He fake sobbed into his paw. “But I felt where you were, and I knew you’d probably die without me, so I ran all of the way. Most of the way.”
“Yeah… you’re really selling the heroics. Especially as you arrived after all the action had finished.” We walked through the first clearing that I’d carved out when the volley of arrows had struck. There were no sign of the arrows, which had been conjured by magic, but the trees were every bit as ruined. It was no wonder January had come to investigate just what the heck was going on in the forest.
“Was there a hurricane here?” Hemlock looked mildly interested.
“Something like that.”
He looked up at me with his green eyes. “I feel like you’re keeping something from me.”
I laughed at him. “I already told you the truth. You just didn’t believe me.” I walked a little faster, and he had to trot to keep up.
“Wait. Wait!”
I stopped walking and looked enquiringly at my hanger-on.
“Carry me?” he said, holding a limp paw up with a pitiful expression on his face.
“I thought you were all magically powered up now? Surely you don’t need a witch who can only do illusions to carry you around like a little pet dog?”
Hemlock looked at me for a long moment. “You’re not your usual sunny self. Don’t tell me you’re bitter that I wasn’t here to help you out? You survived, didn’t you?”
“I did. And it wasn’t by using illusions or spells, either,” I said, walking faster still.
“Whoa whoa!” Hemlock called after me, before running beneath my legs, forcing me to stop or fall over. “I’m listening, I swear. What really happened?”
I looked down at my annoying cat, before I took a big breath and told him, in great detail, about the way my witch trial and what had happened afterwards had panned out.
Hemlock blinked at me. “Did you ask the vampire about the vampire who was in the shop?”
I threw my hands up in the air. “That’s the first question you think of?”
Hemlock’s tail twitched. “The other stuff seemed self-explanatory. Tear in reality, magic weapons, unicorn shifter… blah blah. The only curveball was the vampire. You should have asked.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I guess I was busy trying to comprehend everything that had just happened. And that there’s a real-life unicorn living locally.” If childhood Hazel could see me now, she’d be very jealous.
“I guess we’ll have to solve our vampire problem by ourselves,” Hemlock said, trotting onwards towards home, apparently forgetting how tired he’d supposedly been a few seconds ago.
“We’ll?” I raised my eyebrows at his retreating form.
“You said you can summon magical weapons. Summon a magical stake,” came the reply.
I mimed strangling him behind his back, before stalking onwards. We were a long way from Wormwood, and the longer I delayed walking, the longer I would be in Hemlock’s company. “We don’t even know if this vampire is a bad guy. He said he didn’t have anything to do with Bridgette’s death.”
“I’ve got news for you, kiddo… people lie. I bet vampires do it even more often.”
I kicked a pile of leaf litter as we traipsed further through the trees. Somewhere behind us, in Witchwood Forest, I heard the howls of wolves. Now I could say for certain that they weren’t dogs. The unseen world indeed, I thought, remembering my aunts’ words to me when we’d first met. It had been easy to explain everything away when I hadn’t had proof of magic, but now that I was the very thing I’d never believed in, everything seemed possible.
“Is it true that after this trial, a witch’s magic becomes fixed?” I still wasn’t sure what January had meant by that.
Hemlock rolled his eyes. “I still think that’s an old wives’ tale to make witches who fluff up their trials and mess up their magic think they’re doomed to mediocrity forever.”
I looked at him. “They’re not doomed?”
“Who knows? Do I look like I hang out and gossip with other familiars?”
“Uh… yes,” I said, trotting to keep up with him now that I sensed he didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “Hemlock… who have you been gossiping with? Hemlock?”
The little black cat ran on further, cackling under his breath.
For a second, I considered conjuring a golden lasso to drag my conniving familiar back to my side, but it was a battle I’d never win. No matter how many kitty treats I confiscated, or times I grounded him, Hemlock was always just going to be Hemlock. “On the plus side, it’s not like my ego will ever need downsizing. I get my daily dose of reality check from the animal that’s s
upposed to be my best buddy,” I said aloud.
“I’m not your friend. I’m your worst nightmare!” his voice came back from the darkness.
I threw my hands up in the air again and stalked after him. I could be the greatest witch in the world, and I’d still be sniped at by my pet cat.
When midnight struck, I found myself on the roof of the mayor’s office.
After the night I’d had, it wasn’t even the most surprising thing to have happened. It was probably a part of why I’d made the crazy decision to spy on the mayor in the first place. The worst had already happened, right? I’d ditched Hemlock at home. Although he was good at sneaking around, he would also think nothing of throwing me to the wolves and getting the heck out of there, should the situation turn bad. Also, I was still peeved by his lack of support at my witch trial. I’d definitely got the impression from my aunts that familiars were usually present and even instrumental in their witch’s survival. I suspected Hemlock had stopped off for a snack on his way to come ‘rescue’ me.
It hadn’t been difficult to locate the mayor’s office in the town hall. It was the only one that still had the lights on at this late hour. Climbing up on the roof had been the most challenging part. I was hardly action woman. I’d been even more glad that I’d left Hemlock at home when I’d finally hauled myself up over the edge of the rooftop, having climbed up using a ladder I’d stolen from behind a nearby shed. I was definitely not cut out to be a burglar.
“I can pull weapons out of thin air, but I have no Buffy skills to go with it. That is so disappointing,” I muttered. Why couldn’t my magic have gifted me something useful - like killer abs?
I sucked up my whining and inched forwards on my stomach towards the skylight. Conveniently, it had been left slightly open to let a breeze enter the otherwise closed-off office. I slowly moved my head over the glass and looked down into the office of the man who seemed to be hiding more secrets than anyone else in Wormwood.