When I woke up I was in bed, my own bed. Someone had stripped off the filthy, ripped evening dress, and it lay draped over my desk chair like a dishrag, with Seth’s jacket beside it. I was wearing a clean cotton nightshirt – and it felt amazing. I thought about weeping with gratitude. Instead I yawned.
‘Anna?’ A dark head poked round the door and Emmaline came into the room wearing an expression of worried delight. ‘You’re awake! How do you feel?’
‘Like crap.’ I stretched. ‘But kind of fantastic all the same.’
Everything hurt, everything was stiff. There were weeping sores on my wrists and ankles, stinging with dried sea-salt, but I had a goose-feather pillow under my head and that made up for a lot. Plus I could hear the thunder of bathwater in the tub and the most unbelievably mouth-watering odours were coming from downstairs. It was as close to heaven as I was likely to get – at least for the moment.
‘Oh, Anna.’ Emmaline sat on the bed and then, in a most uncharacteristic gesture, she leant over and hugged me. I felt her chest heave as she struggled to contain tears and then she straightened, wiping her eyes determinedly. ‘Well. Gosh. OK, by the way, you stink.’
‘I bet I do.’ I lifted a lock of my matted hair, stiff with seawater, blood and various other gross bodily fluids, and sniffed. ‘Urgh.’
‘There’s a bath waiting next door.’
‘I can’t wait. What day is it?’
‘Saturday. Your dad’s due back tomorrow. So don’t worry.’ She grinned. ‘You just scraped in under the wire.’
Saturday. So that whole endless nightmare had been only a week. A week! It seemed incredible. Impossible.
‘Honestly?’ I asked uncertainly. ‘I was only gone a week?’
‘Honestly. It felt like a lot longer to us though.’
‘You’re telling me.’ I put a hand to the sores the bridle had left on my face and then sat up painfully. ‘Owwww.’
‘I’ll put a slug of antiseptic in,’ Em said, eyeing my various cuts and scrapes and bruises. ‘Christ, they really put you through the ringer, didn’t they?’
‘Pretty much, yup.’ I ran my hand cautiously through my hair, trying to ignore the pain that the movement caused. ‘Em, what happened? How did Seth find me? And what was that stuff in the syringe?’
‘Well … it’s a kind of long story. Are you up to it?’
‘Yes, I think so. At least, maybe I should have a bath and some food first.’
‘Tell you what,’ Em said, ‘I’ll bring you up something to eat in the bath and I’ll tell you while you wash. Don’t worry,’ she said, seeing my face. ‘I’ll turn my back. I’ve got no desire to see your lady-bits, believe me. But the state you’re in, you look liable to sink without a trace and Mum would be pretty pissed off if we got you all the way back from the Malleus, only to let you drown in the bath.’
‘Just one thing,’ I asked before she left. ‘Have you … have you seen Caroline? Recently I mean?’
‘Yes.’ Emmaline gave me a funny look. ‘She was waiting at the bus stop this morning actually. Why?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ I felt suddenly weak. Weak with relief, relief that it was all over, that I didn’t have any more blood on my hands. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
I couldn’t suppress a whimper of pain as I lowered myself into the scalding water. The mixture of antiseptic and bath foam stung every scratch and cut – and there were plenty. But once I was in, the water felt so good I wasn’t sure I ever planned to get out. When Em handed me a plate of toast and a mug of hot chocolate, there really didn’t seem much reason to move ever again.
I began to demolish the toast with wolfish bites and Em settled herself on the floor with her back against the side of the bath and prepared to tell her tale.
‘So, I expect you worked out what happened after you left – which, at first, was not a lot. We all thought you were in London, so we were pretty surprised when Mum got a call at the shop asking where you were.
‘It was your grandmother. She got worried when you didn’t turn up in London, and at first she thought you were just late, but when she couldn’t contact you or your dad she decided there must be something seriously wrong.
‘Well, Ma had no idea what was going on, but she offered to go round to your house and see if you were there. As soon as we got there we knew something had happened. We let ourselves in …’ Emmaline broke off at my questioning look and shrugged. ‘What? It’s magic, not rocket science. Locks are not a big problem. Anyway we could hear your phone beeping as we walked through the door, which was our first clue that something was wrong. Then we found your rucksack was still in your bedroom, along with your purse and your train tickets, and it looked like there’d been some kind of scuffle. There was a window broken at the back and stuff knocked over. It didn’t take much to work out the Malleus were responsible.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Well, first of all we panicked. Ma called Abe, Sienna and Simon, and we all sat round in our kitchen with your grandmother – which was pretty uncomfortable, I can tell you. Then we panicked some more. We tried everything – spells, charms, scrying. And between us we got some answers – but they weren’t the ones we were hoping for and they weren’t pretty.
‘So we were busy crapping ourselves, metaphorically of course, and pondering the weirdness of being in an alliance with one of the senior Ealdwitan after what happened last year, when Abe realized he’d seen you after you were supposed to have left for London, on your way to meet Seth.’
She stopped, significantly, and I hunkered down in the bath and took a gulp of hot chocolate, refusing to be drawn on that one. The silence stretched, broken only by the drip, drip of the hot tap, and I knew Em was waiting for my account of things. But eventually she gave up and sighed.
‘So we rang Seth,’ she continued. ‘He was slightly …’ She gave me a sideways look over the edge of the bath, ‘Hmm. Well. You know.’
Yes, I knew. Too many adjectives sprang to mind.
‘And rather rude to me into the bargain,’ Em added primly. ‘But when he understood what we were going on about, he was the only one who came up with a plan. And it was a bloody good one. It just terrified the bejaysus out of all of us.
‘Basically, Seth’s argument was that he was the only person who stood a chance of getting anywhere near the Malleus without getting killed – and the only person with a cover story. His idea was that he’d offer to give evidence against you. He’d get to wherever they were hiding out, try to get in contact with you, and then chance it from there.
‘Well, the first part of the plan seemed OK – it was dangerous for Seth, no question, but he was right that he was the only person with a chance of getting close to you and getting out alive. But the second part was suicide. There was no question of chancing it – we knew they’d have drugged the magic out of you and that left one girl, probably in a pretty bad state, and one guy, alone against a whole army of nutters. No, he’d be pulverized and you’d end up being fried just the same.’
I shuddered. It had come too close to that for comfort.
‘It was your grandmother who came up with the second part of the plan. At first we didn’t think it was any better than Seth’s idea of chancing it – it wasn’t suicide, but it was pretty close to it. But the more we talked and argued, the more we realized it was the only option available.’
‘The syringe,’ I said, suddenly understanding.
‘Yes.’
‘What was in it?’
‘Magic,’ Em said. But her voice made the word sound closer to ‘poison’.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. Em shifted uneasily and cleared her throat.
‘Look, there’s stuff. Scary stuff, about w—’ She flinched and then spat the word out. ‘About witches. Things you don’t know. Things I didn’t really know – just rumours.’ She shuddered against the side of the bath and the surface of the water trembled in sympathy. ‘And it turns out it’s all true.’
�
�What do you mean? Stop skirting round this – what happened? What did you do?’
‘Have you ever heard of transfusions?’
‘What, blood transfusions?’
‘No. Not blood. Magic. We’d all heard the rumours, that … well, that some witches can take the magic from one person and transfuse it into another, to give them the ability to do stuff beyond their own power.
‘It was your grandmother who first suggested it – and at first everyone said she was crazy – that it was too dangerous, that you could die.’ Em sighed, and ran her hand through her hair. ‘We all skirted around the truth, too chicken to say it, until eventually it was your grandmother who laid it on the line: we didn’t have any choice. If we didn’t do this, you were going to die anyway.
‘After that it was only a matter of finding the most compatible person. The problem was, they still don’t really understand the matching process. That’s one of the reasons it’s considered so incredibly unethical, because it’s so dangerous.’
‘Dangerous how? For who?’
‘For everyone. I don’t know how they do it, but I know it’s not like taking blood. They kind of … drain them. And because they haven’t completely worked out the compatibility issues there are a lot of deaths. The person they inject often dies. Their body rejects the stuff and shuts down. I mean, clearly you’re fine, so I think … but it was a huge, huge risk.’
‘And the other?’ I whispered. ‘The person they take it from?’
‘Yes. They often die too.’ Em said. She put her head in her hands. ‘They go into shock.’
‘Who … ?’ I stopped. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Emmaline spoke. Her voice was a whisper.
‘Abe.’
‘Abe?’ I swung round in the bath to face her, water slopping over the sides to the floor. ‘Abe? Is he OK?’
‘Not really. Not at the moment. Your grandmother reckons he’ll recover.’
‘Oh God, Abe! But why? Why would he risk his life – for me?’
‘Why?’ Emmaline’s voice was weary and she refused to look at me. ‘For God’s sake, Anna, why do you think? Why did you risk your life for Seth? Why does anyone lay down their life?’
She got up, her back still turned, and draped the towel she was holding over a chair.
‘I’ll go now. Let you get out.’
The door clunked shut behind her. And I was left alone and bewildered.
I pulled the plug and watched the cloudy water swirl down the plughole, leaving a silt of filth and grit and blood in the bottom of the bath. Then I turned on the tap and soon not even that remained, not even that evidence of what I’d been through.
I looked down at my arm, at the spreading black bruise on my forearm where Seth had jabbed the needle in to save my life, and suddenly it all made sense – the storm, the sense of flooding power, of possibility. Abe … Abe had given me all that. He’d done more than just offer me his life – he’d offered me his power too.
I found I was crying, tears streaming down my cheeks. For a long time I just stood there in the steamy bathroom, weeping into my towel. Then I heard voices outside the door, and heard Maya’s voice through the wood.
‘Anna? Are you coming? We’ve got supper on the table.’
‘Come out, darling.’ My grandmother’s warm, rich tones. ‘We’re all longing to see you.’
I straightened, scrubbed at my face, unlocked the door, and walked out into their welcoming arms.
I wasn’t surprised to find that neither Seth nor Abe were there. The house had that indefinable sense of release when a place is inhabited solely by women. What was surprising was Maya and my grandmother’s new-found camaraderie. They sat and chatted like old friends over the kitchen table as I stuffed my face with stew and dumplings, clucked together over my injuries, and colluded in persuading me to larger and larger helpings of apple pie for pudding.
At last I laid down my spoon and said, ‘I want to see Abe.’
They exchanged a look, all three of them, and then Maya nodded.
‘OK. He’s at our place. Sienna’s over there with him. Well … you may as well know. She’s nursing him. He’s not very well.’
‘Because of the transfusion,’ I said; a statement, not a question, but Maya nodded.
‘Yes.’
‘But he will recover.’ My grandmother put her hand over mine. ‘He’s not in shock, which is the real danger. He’s just very weak. He gave more than was perhaps advisable. We rely on the donor to tell us when to stop, when they begin to feel weak, and he … well, he carried on perhaps a little too long.’
‘Oh, Abe.’ I put my head in my hands and Maya stroked my shoulder.
‘Darling, we’re not saying this to make you feel bad. It was his choice. But I just didn’t want you to go in there unprepared.’
‘And Seth?’ I asked. ‘Where’s Seth?’
Maya shook her head.
‘I don’t know. Maybe Emmaline does.’
But Emmaline didn’t.
‘Christ, witch. You look like shit,’ Abe said in a hoarse voice. ‘What did they do to you?’
I had to laugh, though it came out shakily. It was so exactly what I’d been thinking about him.
‘I was about to say the same thing to you.’
He shrugged.
‘Yeah, well. I’m just malingering.’ He coughed and then nodded at the open laptop propped on a footstool beside his makeshift bed. ‘It’s really just an elaborate excuse to work from home. I’ll be up and about tomorrow.’
I looked at him sceptically, not so sure. He was lying on the sofa, completely limp, and there were dark bruises under his eyes and shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. His normally olive skin was clay-coloured and even his snapping dark eyes were dull and lustreless.
‘Abe,’ I twisted my fingers, ‘Abe how can I ever … I mean, I owe you—’
‘Anna, leave it.’ He cut me off uncomfortably. ‘Don’t make this into a big deal.’
‘But it is a big deal. You saved my life – you and Seth.’
I knew straight away the coupling of their names was a mistake. His face twisted in disgust and he looked away, out of the window.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said distantly, ‘I’ll leave the white charger and the shining armour to him, thanks. Look, it worked; you’re alive; I’m pleased. I’ll be good as new in a few weeks; there’s nothing to owe. Can we leave it at that and forget it?’
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘Sure. Consider it forgotten.’
But of course that wasn’t true. Even after Abe’s strength and magic came back, it would always be there – this huge thing between us. Abe was part of me now – I’d felt his magic pulse through my body. There was no going back from that.
He softened and pulled me down beside him on the sofa, tracing his fingers over the half-healed welts on my wrists and then tilting my chin gently to angle my face to the light. I heard his breath catch in his throat as the sunshine lit the cuts and sores, illuminating them to full effect. Then he swore very quietly and looked away.
‘Anna, what did they … what … ?’ He broke off.
‘A bridle,’ I said shortly. ‘A witch’s bridle. And manacles on my hands. Don’t worry, they didn’t torture me or anything.’
Well, not unless you counted drugging, electrocution and imprisonment as torture. But I guessed the kind of thing Abe was thinking of. At least I could be thankful I’d escaped that.
‘No?’ He tilted my face to his again and looked at me. ‘Are you sure? You wouldn’t – you know – be brave about this?’ Hide things, I suppose he meant. Try to protect people from the truth of what had gone on.
‘I’m sure,’ I said. I met his eyes and he must have seen that I meant it, for he let go and nodded. I managed a laugh. ‘They barely spoke to me, in fact – I think they were so terrified I’d turn them into toads. So no, no torture or interrogation. Just lots of drugs and not a lot of food.’
‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said, sounding li
ke a pernickety great-aunt. ‘It doesn’t suit you. You’re too thin. I can see your hip bones, for goodness’ sake.’
‘So are you,’ I retorted, hitching up my jeans crossly to cover the offending bones. ‘Your cheeks are hollow. You look cadaverous.’
‘Nonsense, I look distinguished. It’s my Kafka look.’
‘Kafka? That’s your style icon?’ I snorted. ‘I think you can do better.’
He laughed and then hit me gently on the arm, and I pursed my lips and pretended to sulk.
‘So, be honest, was it cool?’ he asked slyly.
‘Was what cool?’
‘Having my magic instead of yours. I hope you made the most of it. I’m curious – was it different?’
‘It kind of was,’ I said slowly, trying to think back. ‘It was the weirdest thing, because you know what I did to get us out of there?’
‘No, tell me.’
‘A wind. A whirlwind.’
Abe nodded slowly, and then shrugged.
‘Well, I’ve always been good with the weather.’
‘And so was I – just for a bit. It was kind of amazing actually. I felt … strong. Practised. I just knew the storm would obey me. It’s never been like that before.’
‘Anna.’ Abe’s hand gripped my arm. ‘You could have that, you know. You just need to trust yourself. Look at what you’ve done – there’re plenty of witches who’d give their right arm for your power. You don’t need mine or anyone else’s. You just need to let it out.’
‘I know.’ I looked down at my hands. ‘I know. I let myself in for this and dragged you down with me. It was my fault. If I’d taken your advice, yours and Em’s, and practised – learnt how to defend myself—’
‘That’s not what I’m saying; I’m not blaming you.’ He heaved himself painfully up on one elbow. ‘I’m just saying …’
He stopped. His face was grey and tired and for a minute I thought he was going to faint.
‘Yes?’ I asked.
‘I’m just saying,’ he said wearily, ‘you don’t have to choose. Between love and magic. You could have both.’ He looked me in the eyes and my heart skipped a beat. ‘There are people who could give you both.’
A Witch in Love Page 25