Gosh. If I told her that, I would have to admit that I had gone near May again.
“Just another suspect.”
“Wow,” she said. “You are doing a really great job, you know! We’ll know who killed Clover in no time at all with you on the case!”
Luckily for me, Vicky was always in her own dream world and she didn’t even seem to pick up on my contradictory thoughts. I had a theory that the more that a person lived inside their own head, the less likely they were to be affected by other people’s thoughts. She was humming along to the radio. It was an 80s country ballad. “Hey, I wrote a song a bit like this last week,” she said. “I’ll send you the link.”
I had to turn it down when Kylie got up for a moment, and I was hopeful that maybe she was going to leave the house or do something interesting. But she was only changing a song on the stereo.
“Darn,” I said.
Vicky was quiet as well.
She had something to say to me. “I guess this would be a lot easier with your powers. I’m sorry I screwed everything up, Ruby.”
“You didn’t.”
Vicky hung her head. “No, I really did,” she said in this strange, heavy tone, and I could see the outline of a four-leaf clover just below the collar of her band t-shirt.
I had to ask. “Why do you have Clover’s necklace?”
She looked up at me in total shock, like she had been caught out. And she was very unprepared. She opened the door and began to run down the street, much to my total horror.
I called out after her, “Vicky! You can’t do that in the middle of a stakeout!” I was probably just making matters worse. I was about to climb back into the car when the front door of the house opened, and Kylie Leonard walked out. I thought she would look straight at me and yell, chase after me, maybe even call the police.
But then, just like magic, I was back inside the car. In an instant. For a second, I freaked out. Had I just teleported? And then as I stared at Kylie, I had a vision. I could see her, down at the Leonard’s Milk factory, staring into a giant vat of white liquid.
And she looked frightened for her life.
Maybe I really did have powers after all.
Okay, so randomly, spontaneously transporting had been sort of terrifying. But there was a thrill to it, for sure. I could see how I would really enjoy being a witch. And these visions were a new thing. Totally different from the clairvoyance I had experienced before. Now I could see how scenes played out when I looked at people. Like I was not just reading their thoughts but seeing their actual memories.
“Oh wow,” I said, trying out one of my new-found skills when I got to the office the next morning. Instead of using the door, I just imagined that I was behind my desk, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting there, without having actually moved my body. I felt a little like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. The power had been in me all along. I hadn’t even needed the ruby slippers. Oh wow, Ruby—that was my name.
“Just wait till I tell Vicky about this!” She was going to love the Ruby reference for one thing. I had told her to come straight down to the office because I had some exciting news to share. I wasn’t sure why she had acted so strange the night before, but I was willing to put it behind us for the time being just so I could talk to her about my news.
But she didn’t look so sure that this was a good thing. Or so excited.
So, I tried to explain it to her properly. “See? I’ve always been able to do stuff like this. I don’t even need the help of spells or anything like that.” I shrugged. “So, what is the big deal with me being able to perform the exam that Geri set for me? That is just a technicality!”
Vicky shook her head. “Something’s not right, Ruby…”
I thought she was just jealous because she didn’t have these powers. I refused to listen to her.
“Magic is a practice, Ruby, just like music. Or anything that requires a skill. That is why they call it witch ‘craft.’ It takes training and perseverance.”
“Then how come I can suddenly walk through doors. And why do I have these visions?”
“I think you are under the influence of someone else’s spell, or powers,” she said. Then she stopped. “Speaking of. There is something I need to come clean about.” She pulled the clover out from underneath the collar of her shirt. I stopped. I hadn’t realized she was wearing it that day. “This was Clover’s,” she said. “And I’ve been wearing it since she died.”
“I thought that you and Clover weren’t even close,” I said. “Apart from your shared love of couponing.”
Vicky shook her head.
“We weren’t, you’re right. But that’s not why I have her necklace.” She lowered her voice. “You can’t tell Geri any of this…”
“My loyalty is to you, Vicky, over Geri.” Though at that stage, we were keeping so many secrets from Geri that they were in danger of all bursting out the next time I saw her.
“There is a belief that if you take one of the belongings of a dead witch—something that they were wearing at the time they died—then you can take on some of their powers.” She stared up at me. “And I need all the help that I can get.” She was shaking a little bit. “And one of Clover’s powers was vision. Another was being able to teleport. I think somehow those powers have transferred to you, via me.”
I didn’t know what to be more shocked by. Hadn’t she just been telling me off a few minutes earlier for taking a shortcut when it came to magic?
“I know, I know,” she said, still gripping the necklace. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I had the necklace. It is cheating. It’s very much looked down on in the coven, and Geri would not approve.”
Yeah, I had seen how aghast she had been when she’d seen that book I’d borrowed form Vicky on my shelf, so I believed her.
But hang on. “She was wearing that when she DIED? Vicky, that means that it is evidence! You shouldn’t have it! It should be with the police.”
She tugged it hard and pulled it right off her neck. The clasp snapped off and fell to the floor. She handed it to me. “You give it to them, then.”
I squeezed it in my hand and felt a little electric shock go through me. Suddenly, my visions were even stronger than they had been. That giant vat of milk was bubbling in my mind again. Along with this vision of a black cat.
I had to get back to the farm.
“What’s happened to my mail?” I asked, snapping the lid of the mailbox shut and looking up at the birds in the tree next door for help.
They were chirping and saying that they liked my new hair color.
“Thank you very much!” I replied brightly. “Always nice to get some compliments from my beautiful friends. But I was just wondering—you haven’t happened to see what has been happening to my mail, have you?”
Just a chirping—hmm, it sounded a little bit like the word ‘Vicky,’ but that couldn’t have been right—and then the rosellas flew away.
“Thanks very much for your help!”
I had to think about how funny it was, the way that animals communicated with each other, compared to the way humans did it. It was very much a case of they would tell you only what they wanted to tell you—less of an even exchange than in human relationships. There was less obligation, and you couldn’t force anything out of them, that was for sure.
My intention had been to march in and ask little miss Indy exactly what she knew about this black cat that I kept having visions of.
But I had gotten so cold that my legs were no longer working. And as much as I tried to concentrate on getting inside of the house, visualizing myself in there without having to actually move myself in there now that my limbs were numb, I couldn’t do it. What do they say about pride coming before the fall?
Because the next thing I knew I was falling to the ground, and I was out cold.
My luck—maybe even my magic—had run out.
12
There was something—or someone—lightly stroking the back of my hand
, but they pulled away when my eyes sprung open.
“You hate hospitals,” I said to Akiro as I tried to sit up in the very stiff hospital bed. It was difficult because there was an IV drip attached to the inside of my arm.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you have been feeling unwell?” He shook his head. “According to the nurse, your blood pressure was so low that you should have actually been dead. You should have gone into total shock and shut down. And yet here you are, still alive,” he said with relief.
The nurse looked concerned as she checked over my chart. She lowered her voice so that Akiro couldn’t hear. “He’s right. It’s amazing that you are alive. Kind of like a miracle. Though, to be truthful, there have been a lot of weird things happening the last few days.” She shrugged and backed away from me like she was a little scared.
“What did she say to you?” Akiro asked in concern as she started to leave the room.
“Just that I need to stay in a bit longer until my blood pressure has been returned to normal.” But I knew deep down that there was no way that any human medicine or interaction could fix this problem. The hex had completely taken over me. And now I was the walking dead, apparently.
I wanted to tell him everything. He was the only one who’d even bothered to come visit me in the hospital. Probably the person who cared about me most in the world. I owed him the truth. “Akiro, there is something I need to tell you…”
But he was glancing up at my monitor and frowning at it. “It seems like everything has just gone haywire, doesn’t it?” He shook his head. “All this mind-reading stuff, or whatever it is, it’s just wrong. It’s kind of supernatural, isn’t it?” He looked down at me. “And I don’t like to mess with it. I don’t want anything to do with it.”
“Oh.”
He almost made a move to take my hand again but pulled it back at the last moment. “What did you want to tell me?”
I shook my head. “I just wanted to thank you for being here for me. I think I need some rest now.” He nodded and told me that I would be in good hands in the hospital overnight and to try and get some sleep. But I knew I wasn’t in good hands. I had to take care of this hex myself.
But first, I was going to have to get myself out of the hospital.
“Psst!”
I was getting used to being woken up by things that seemed like dreams or hallucinations. Outside of the hospital window, I could have sworn that I saw Vicky hovering. Like, just hovering. On a broom. I pulled the drip out of my arm and raced over to her.
“Get on board!” she said.
“We can’t just fly out of here!”
But apparently, we could.
“Are you sure this is going to hold the both of us?” I asked as she backed the broom into the window and I put my leg over it the way I would get onto a horse. Only it was much thinner than a horse, and I squealed a little and pulled back.
“Hehe, I am sure…”
But I still wasn’t confident about climbing onto the back of this thing. Vicky must have realized that I was nervous. Nervous about how skilled she was at driving the thing, for starters.
“Trust me, it’s just like handling the guitar, and I am an expert on that!”
Well, playing guitar was the one thing that Vicky was good at, so maybe handling a broom was the one witch thing she was good at as well.
“But can’t people see us?” I whispered, clinging to Vicky for dear life until I’d managed to relax a little. I realized it was a little like riding a horse and all I needed to do was just go with the flow and ride along with the rhythm instead of trying to go against it.
Vicky shook her head while she concentrated on getting us to, well, wherever it was we were going. I hadn’t asked. “Nah. Have you ever noticed that humans don’t exactly pay attention to what is going on around them? They’re usually staring at their own feet. Even if they looked up, they wouldn’t believe what they are seeing! They would just think they were imagining it. So, you’re all good.”
But I felt a little panicked at that. “You mean there is no cloaking spell? We aren’t invisible?”
She laughed. “Whoa. Invisibility spells? Now that’s complicated. You won’t get to one of those until you are at least at a fifth-year level.”
But she was right. No one seemed to look up or care that we were flying around above the buildings, up at the height of the clouds. We had the skies all to ourselves, except for the rosellas, which I was surprised to see up there, flying around at night.
I felt like I was one of the birds. I’d always KNOWN I was one of them!
They chirped back at me, and I felt so free and wild. This was incredible. I had to get myself one of these broomsticks.
I didn’t want to ever go back down to earth, but I could feel the broom start to tilt in a downwards trajectory.
“Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly realizing that we would have to land somewhere. And that Vicky must have been taking me somewhere. Seemed so logical, but until then, I had just been so focused on escaping the hospital that I hadn’t much cared about where we were actually going.
“I am taking you to where it happened.”
Right. Oh geez. She was talking about Clover’s death, wasn’t she?
We landed in a small clearing in the woods, and I realized that we were only about 50 meters from my house. Vicky told me that Clover hadn’t lived far from me, at the bottom of the hill that I called home.
“Geri thinks that it is bad to come back to the scene of the crime—that we can soak up the energy. So, she forbade any of us from coming out here,” Vicky said as she put the broomstick down on the ground.
“So, who put Geri in charge anyway? And why does everyone just have to do what she says!”
Vicky stared at me. “You really have no idea how this witch thing works, do you?”
Well, no, I supposed I didn’t. But it still seemed unfair to me that one person had so much control over what everyone else did. It was like people weren’t allowed to think for themselves or make their own decisions. And there were witches like Vicky, who had such individual personalities. It was a shame to see that dulled down.
“Did you hear that?” I asked, spinning around to stare into the woods.
Vicky shook her head. “Nah, but my hearing isn’t that good after so many years of loud music. Both playing and listening.”
“It was a growling sound. You really didn’t hear it?”
Vicky stood very still for a moment and tried to listen again.
“Come on, even a deaf person would be able to hear that growling…” It was a rumbling noise, like something from a jungle, not the relatively tame woods of an Aussie country town.
Vicky was just staring, blank, looking a little grim. I thought she still couldn’t hear it and she was still just listening in, but then I realized—she was scared. She was trembling. “I hear it,” she whispered, swallowing her words as she started to breathe faster. “It’s coming from the woods.”
We both heard the tearing sound as giant paws came crashing through the trees and the shrubs. And suddenly, there was a beast in front of us, bearing large white teeth and a terrifying open jaw.
Black fur. The largest black cat I had ever seen.
I then understood what my visions were about. May’s husband was the Gippsland Panther.
13
There is a certain satisfaction in being right, even if no one else knows it and even if the fact that you are right means that your life is then in mortal danger.
“Run!” Vicky screamed.
“Run?!” I asked, almost choking on my own words as I somehow managed to point to the stick on the ground. “Shouldn’t we fly?!”
Vicky looked shocked. “Oh, yeah, right.” She tried to run for the broomstick, but the panther was in front of it. And it snorted, inhaled, and gave her a glare before it bent its head and bit the stick in two.
“Oh my gosh, and I don’t even have a backup!” she squealed as she jumped out of the
way while the wood cracked and snapped inside the jaws of the giant cat.
Least of our problems, Vicky not having a backup broomstick. We were about to be devoured by a giant cat. With very sharp claws. He lowered his nostrils and snorted. I was the one in his line of sight.
“Come on, Vicky, there must be a spell for turning panthers back into humans,” I said shakily as I backed away. I stared into the creature’s eyes and wondered where my affinity with animals, my ability to communicate with them, had gone. Because it looked like this panther was about to tear me apart.
“Oh! Yes!” Vicky was desperately trying to figure out the words to a spell that might help, but I was frightened she was going to turn us all into panthers if she tried it. “If this is what I think it is, there has been a curse placed on the man inside the cat. Sort of like a werewolf. Gets activated around the time of a full moon as well,” she said, sounding excited and hopeful and breathless at the same time. “So I need to do a curse-reversal spell, and I actually know one of those!”
I closed my eyes as she started to say the words, because one of two things was about to happen: I was going to get devoured by a panther or I was going to turn into one. No matter which way it went, I didn’t want to see.
I opened my eyes and I was still a human. With human hands and everything.
And so was Mark Sheridan.
He was blinking like he had just been woken from a deep sleep. Far away. He looked around, completely disorientated. In total shock. He kept looking at his hands just like I had been. Like he couldn’t believe that they were actual human hands and not paws, and then he glanced up at me in this strange, questioning way. I couldn’t figure out whether he was angry at me. Yes, he was definitely angry at me. I was just glad he didn’t have claws at that moment. But who knew how long they would take to sprout again? I didn’t know whether Vicky’s spell was temporary or a more permanent solution.
But Vicky was ecstatic. She was jumping up and down and clapping for her own good performance. “I’ve never been able to master that one before!”
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