Actually… I can’t believe I did that. I’m not putting that into my report. Sent a mortal to a white witch to be cured of a debilitating aliment. Nup, that wouldn’t go down very well at all, even if I do need the kid for my research. Hatchesput is old school, and very much so, evil comes first in her book. Big picture stuff doesn’t even rate with her, and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of Hatchesput.
Oh,
Hexed security guard with virial infection. One week of Ebola like symptoms.
There, that one sounds pretty good, like I’m on to something…or something.
Yep, I’m back to writing that blasted report, four bullet points so far. I’ve also decided not to mention my lunch time tryst with Teddy. I could try and make out that I’m turning him, but I’m not sure they’d all agree that having sex with an angel is a good thing for evil doing. I’m pretty sure there’s never been any sexual relations between angels and dark witches in the past. In part because in the old days, when dark witches picked their immortal bodies, there was a line of thought that you needed to be as ugly as possible to project optimum evil. Thankfully that line of thought hasn’t really held out over the years. We younger witches – well, there’s only Pulania and I – tend to use our looks for other evil benefits. My memories of some of the Solstice celebrations – clothing optional – are not pretty ones, Hatchesput’s droopy boobs are the least of it. I doubt if there could have been any physical attraction, at all, in the past.
Actually, to be honest, what I’m really doing now is trying to work out a plan forward. We can’t do a lot of the stuff we used to, the money just isn’t there to compete against the goodies beavering away to counter contagion in America and Europe. Even the Ebola outbreak (which had major funding from Viagra sales) was a bust, it was supposed to kill millions, but instead it only knocked off a few thousand. Long gone are the days remembered by the older witches, when half of Europe could be wiped out by a bit of black death.
What makes it worse is that with the economic downturn this lab is operating on a fraction of the money we’ve had in past years. I used to have a staff of twenty seven people. All gone now. Some of them permanently. Well, they shouldn’t have asked for a payout. Not that I killed them or anything. I just sold them to a prescription drug lab in Pakistan. Made a packet. Oh! Bullet point five:
Sold eight unproductive lab workers into slavery in Pakistan.
Actually, that was pretty evil, now that I think about it. And that might be just enough to get us past Hatchesput for a couple months more. Well, that solves my immediate problem, but it still leaves me with the long term one. At least it’s not just me, Pulania’s lab is in exactly the same situation. Maybe we need to face facts and somehow pool our resources.
Time to make a phone call.
“Pulania, dear…” but she interrupts me before I can even start.
“You’ve had sex.”
“What? No, hello? And how could you possibly know that anyway?” I ask.
“I’m a witch, darling, we know stuff.”
“Humph, that’s not one of my powers, do share.”
“Sorry darling, that one’s a trade secret.”
Bitch. “Bitch.” It’s better when you say it.
“Now, who is he? Someone I know?”
“Well, I’m not going to tell you. Nup, and no, you don’t know him.”
“Did you leave him alive?” Pulania asks. It’s a fair enough question, dark witches are bit like black widow spiders that way. We tend to eat our lovers, sometimes literally.
“Yeah, he’s still around.”
“Ooo, seconds!”
“Nup, find your own, he’s all mine.”
“Aahhhh.” I can hear her pouting over the phone.
“Business time girl, I had a reason for calling you.”
“Oh? What? This is a serious call?”
“Hell yeah, we need a meet. Tonight at seven, my place, wear a miniskirt. We’re clubbing it afterwards.”
“Party time! You’re on Amura, I’ll wear my bestest cocktail dress.”
“Just don’t forget to wear some knickers, last time was a bit embarrassing after you passed out on the pub floor.”
“Hey, I’ve started shaving since.”
“Modern day girl, well done, wear knickers anyway.”
Chapter 6: An obsidian blade
“Crap.” There are two figures under the lamp post where I’m supposed to meet Gil. I can tell from here that one is Gil. The other, well, the other isn’t expected, and much less wanted.
It’s already night. The lamp post throws a little light on the two figures. I’m approaching in the dark, and I’ve taken my obsidian knife from my hand bag. I’ve gone into full blown stalk and kill mode. This might not be good, there are creatures that prey on magik and Gil has a little bit. Familiars, especially young ones, can be vulnerable to such creatures, and some of those creatures can seem quite human.
It isn’t until I get a bit closer that I start to relax.
“Shit, Gil, what’s this?”
“Hey, we dyed her hair black, see.”
It’s Susan fecking Collingsworth.
“So I see, that was pretty quick, wasn’t it?”
“What can I say?” Gil replies. “Things went shit over heals at school, and we bonded in the aftermath.”
I can tell Susan has been crying, her mascara is running at the edges. She turns away from me, she’s scared, and there are a few more tears. Shyly she turns back, there’s water in her eyes.
Hmm, I cross my arms and go into foot tapping mode, I need more from Gil.
“Well… you said she could join us.”
“Yeah, but we’re going to my place tonight, you know what that means.”
“See,” Susan interjects, “I told you she wouldn’t want anything to do with me.” More tears, and some flat out crying.
I roll my eyes as Susan buries her head in Gil’s shoulder. Gil looks at me and shrugs back.
“Have you told her anything?” I ask through grit teeth. I’m actually, really, really angry. Dangerously so. The obsidian knife is still in my hand, and maybe I should use it.
Don’t. Gil mouths to me, shaking her head. But this little problem is easily solved. It’s what knives are for.
“You said it would be alright,” Gil reminds me.
“So I did.” My words are hollow, I’m not wavering. “But, not, like this.”
“She can be one of us.”
“Hardly.” I take a step forward.
“Yes, I can.” Little miss prim and proper has come out of her funk and has gathered enough strength to face me. I stop, the knife is pretty obvious and Susan’s eyes widen when she sees it.
“Convince me.” Let’s give her a chance, if nothing else it’ll be good entertainment. But right now, I’m thinking this will be another bullet point for my list.
“You’re a witch!”
I smirk at the accusation, she just means it in the nonliteral sense, if only she knew.
“But I do know, I’ve always known.”
“Hang on…” my mouth is hanging open. “How… did you just read my mind?”
She nods her head. “I can only do it when there are strong thoughts.”
I take the knife and use it to start cleaning under one of my nails. “Interesting. So you know where this is going right now, do you?”
Susan nods her head. She knows if she doesn’t change my mind, and soon, she isn’t going to walk away from this. “I have Fae blood,” she blurts out.
“You said that you’ve always known about Amura?” Gil steps up prompting Susan, in an effort to help her out.
“Yes, yes, I’ve always known. Gil is your familiar, it’s very unusual.”
They must have seen my posture relax a bit, because they both take a breath. “And you’ve never told anyone?”
“No, it’s part of the covenant. We’re not allowed to tell anyone.”
I put away the knife, she’s protected by
the covenant. “Blessed be thy feet, which have brought thee in these ways.”
“Blessed be thy knees, that shall kneel at the sacred alter.”
With that she comes toward me with open palms upturned, I return the gesture, our fingers intertwine as we meet. Fancy this, Susan fecking Collingsworth is of a lesser coven.
“What’s going on?” Gil asks.
Well of course, she wouldn’t know.
“It’s part of the covenant, between the Fae, or witches as our coven calls our kind, sealed over a millennia ago. There are all types of covens, but we are honour bound not to kill our own. Susan, here, carries just enough Fae blood that it can’t be spilt be me. She’s the daughter of one of us.”
Chapter 7: The cottage in the forest
We’re having pre-party drinks, waiting for Pulania. I’m going for vodka, neat. This is all a bit much for me. I’m also acting the nice party hostess and topping up everybody else’s glasses, but I’m looking sideways at Susan as I do it.
“What are you doing Amura?” Gil asks me. “You keep looking at Susan all funny like.”
I’m trying to look at Susan through the side of my eye, it’s the only way to see magik. But I don’t have a chance to explain.
“She’s trying to see if I have any magik. You have to look at someone indirectly, through the side of your eyes, to see it.”
Humph, she’d been pretty quiet to this point, but she does know a bit. She wasn’t too phased by the magikal path either, though to be honest it’s not always that obvious that it is a magikal path when you first travel it.
“Does she have any then?” Gil asks.
I just shrug, “she has some, but I haven’t worked out how much yet.”
“It is I, Pulania!” The door has burst open, and Pulania’s standing there all dramatic like. Well, I left it unlocked. She likes to make a bit of an entrance, and I’m sick of replacing doors. She’s about to gush out a massive hi, when she spots Susan.
“Who’s this?”
“What? No hello?” I quip.
“She’s got the clap.” Yep, that’s Pulania, right to the heart of the matter.
“Yeah, we know. Actually, I was going to ask her something about that.”
Pulania has her bronze dagger out. I can tell that introductions are in order.
“She’s of the Fae.” Do I need to say anything else? Nope, apparently not, the dagger is gone.
Hmmm, I turn to Susan. “A bit of your history, oh dark haired one.” I’m still trying to get over those raven locks, they really suit her. “Why do you have the clap? There are white witches who can cure that.”
“Oh, by the way…” Gil interrupts. “Suuusannn…” she drags out the name, what the ficketty feck is she doing? “this is… Pulllannniaa.” Oh, right, I get it. Slap the forehead moment.
“Oh, sorry, introductions. Susan, this is Pulania, Pulania is part of my coven. Pulania, this is Susan, she’s from our school, we don’t know who the frig she is any more, but she does have Fae blood, and she knows enough to be able to invoke the covenant.”
“Huh. Intriguing.”
“Well that’s a bit of an under-reaction.”
“Yeah, well, my first reaction was to slit her throat, now I’m at a bit of a loss.”
“Join the club.”
Gil steps up again, to lend another hand. “You asked her about her history.”
Good familiar, if she were a cat I’d be rubbing her between the ears right now.
“Yeah, about that,” I prompt Susan. She has another sip of the margarita I mixed for her. Hey, can I use that as another bullet point? I mean she is under age.
“Well… what would you like to know?”
‘The clap.” Pulania and I say in unison.
“Double jinx.” Got her!
“Oh… ah, there was this boy.”
“Really.” I roll my eyes, this girl is not a narrator.
“He seemed nice. I didn’t know he was infected, or anything. I thought he was clean. But, well, I guess he wasn’t.”
“Nothing new there,” I comment to Pulania.
“Nothing new,” she replies. We both have our arms crossed, not that we mean to be intimidating, it just comes naturally to us.
“Where did this happen?” I ask.
“His bedroom.”
“Ficketty feck, I mean where? In what country?” I ask impatiently.
“Here, here in town.” Well, we’re not actually in her town right now, but I guess she doesn’t know that.
Pulania and I share a look, that’s not right, there shouldn’t be anything like that sort of bacteria in Pennsylvania.
“Have you seen him since?”
“No, we only went out a couple of times, and then…well, he just disappeared. His house is empty, nobody knows where he’s gone. He and his family were only new to town, too.”
“That sounds like some sort of setup to me,” Pulania says. I can only nod my head in agreement.
“Something’s going on here. We’ll have to find out what. She’s Fae, but they’ve targeted her. If one be taken so might we all.” It’s a phrase from the covenant, we are bound to help if one of our kind is attacked, this sounds very much like an attack to me, albeit an extremely subtle and subversive one. We were lucky to find out about this at all.
“What about your mother? What’s she got to say about all this?”
“My mother died when I was about seven, she’d started to teach me a bit about the covens, but she died before she could teach me much.”
“How did she die?” I ask.
“She was hit by an ice slide from the roof of a building, it broke her neck.”
That wasn’t likely, witches have a sixth sense that would have warned her of anything like that. I’m not saying anything about that to Susan though.
“What about her sisters?” Pulania asks.
“Good point, yes what about them?” I add.
“Sisters? I only have one aunt.”
I roll my eyes again. “Her coven sisters?” Idiot.
“I never met them.”
Pulania and I share another look. That was unsettling, any coven was bound to look after a daughter of their own.
“Are they all dead?” Pulania puts words to my own thought.
“Hmm, we can’t answer that now,” I reply. “What about this clap, a white witch should be able to cure that. Why haven’t you been to see one?”
“I don’t know any.”
And there we had it in a nutshell. She was an orphan, but more than that, she was an orphan of a missing coven. She didn’t even know enough to find a white witch.
“We’ll have to talk to Hatchesput about this.”
Chapter 8: Hatchesput
I’m a bit nervous as I make the call.
“What d’ya want?” the voice on the other end is dour as dour can be.
“It’s me, Amura. Is Hatchesput available?”
There’s silence for a moment. “Yeah, she’ll speak to you.” The clipped tones don’t fill me with a lot of confidence. I put the phone on speaker, so that the others can listen in and contribute if necessary.
“Amura, dear, do you have your report ready?” oh my god, she called me ‘dear’. Shit, shit, shit.
Pulania comes over and hugs me. This is bad, this is so bad.
“Umm, ahh, yes, I’ll send it right over.” The paper, still on my desk at work, evaporates in flames to reappear in Hatchesput’s hands.
“Well, you slimy little git. I see you’ve been up to some evil.” Oh, I relax, it’s all good, it’s bad – you know what I mean. Pulania lets out a breath and pats me on the shoulder as she eases back. She’s a good bad friend.
“I especially like the bit about contaminating the pets. That’s a pure stroke of evil against the innocent. Well done, Amura. It’s not really witch of the month stuff, but I think you’ve turned a corner.”
Really, she likes that one? Well, you can never really tell, can you?
“Abou
t selling the technician’s into slavery. How much did you get?”
“Seventeen thousand quid a head.”
“Yeah, now listen to me girly, next time you want to sell a technician into slavery, talk to me first. Pakistan is old hat. I know a drug cartel in Colombia that would have paid a good 50% more.”
What? I thought that was my most evil move. “Yes, your Evality.”
“Supreme Evality.”
“Yes ma’am, Supreme Evality.”
“Now you just keep to this line, Amura. See if you can up it a bit. Solstice isn’t far away, and to be honest, you were a candidate for the main event.”
I shudder, crap, I was for the knife. I hadn’t realised things were so precarious. There’s always a sacrifice at Solstice, and sometimes, very rarely, it can be the coven’s under performers. Crap.
“But just keep going the way you are, you little toad, and we’ll change the program.”
Shit, I’m not out of the woods yet. But at least she’s not calling me ‘dear’ any more, that was a definite death call.
“Yes, your Supreme Evality.”
“Now, what’s this call about?”
I quickly explain the situation about Susan. When I’m finished, there’s silence, but that’s okay, I know that Hatchesput is just ruminating, she does that.
“Hexabus! Pull Amura off the program for Solstice.” We hear Hatchesput yell out to her senior administrator. “Put Pulania in her place.”
Pulania blanches, her eyes have bugged out to twice their normal size.
“Your Supreme Evality!” I splutter, “Pulania is right here with me, she’s helped sort this out!”
“Oh, well, oh…Hexabus! Pull Pulania too. I guess we’re back to goats this year.”
There is an audible grumbling in the background.
“Listen up you two egg heads,” Hatchesput is all business now, “don’t pat yourselves on the back too much about this, but well done. You’ve both been falling off on the contagion side of things, and I don’t mind telling you, the coven has been disappointed. But there are other ways to exercise evil, and this is one of those. It’s plain that there’s a threat to the covens. You two have uncovered that, so now I want you to make this your top priority. Find the threat and neutralise it. We’re counting on you. Fail at this, and we might be having a double celebration at Solstice – if any of us are still alive to celebrate it.”
The Dark Witch Page 3