Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  Until then, I had things to do. Tomorrow, I’d find a way to cut the bracelet off Fran’s hand. Right now, I had to clean all of the kit I’d inherited and arm myself with fighting tools for the days ahead.

  When that was done, I had to take care of a very sick crow.

  33

  I spent the next hour in and out of the house, going into the garage to pour soil from my mother’s gardening supplies into a large, unused planter pot. I found a bucket there which I filled with salted water, grabbed white candles from the sideboard and took all these things outside to the deck. I sat between the sliding doors to keep most of my body within the protection of the house, and then, item by item, I buried, aired, washed and smoked every single thing that had been in the white plastic box, chanting the Finnish spells as I went, my eyes repeatedly drawn to the dark ash tree.

  When I was done, I packed everything away except for a packet of matches and the flowerpot, into which I stuck the fat orange candle. I went inside, plonked the kit box on the dining room table and searched the fridge. I found some roast beef and took this and a cupful of water out to the backyard, setting them down beside the candle, which I lit. Then I walked to the ash tree.

  Under the dark shadows of its branches, I tilted my head back and cooed. I heard a flutter. A scramble. I cooed again. I saw black movement above my head. Another flutter. ‘Izek, I need you,’ I whispered. ‘I’m in trouble and I need you.’

  Yet another flutter, then a fall – a black wing was in my face and I started as the withered crow flapped weakly in my arms. I managed to straighten my arm enough for the bird to grip his talons into my skin. The skin was pierced and I gasped, but I held my arm straight.

  As the crow steadied, it shocked me how weak and ruined he looked. His talons were gnarled and grey, his beak was scratched and his eyes were rheumy. I brought my arm close to my body to steady the bird against my chest, and when I used my free hand to hold the bird’s back, I could feel that his feathers were oily and some were falling out. Carefully, I walked to the deck and sat down next to the flowerpot, settling the crow into my lap. I chanted over the glowing orange candle a spell to bring his energy back. The crow ruffled his feathers; he blinked his cloudy eyes. I pulled out the roast beef from the packet and fed it into the crow’s mouth; he ate greedily, messily, snapping at the offered meat. When the meat was gone, I brought the cup of water to his beak and, tilting back his head, tried to pour the water into the crow’s mouth as he shivered and shook. After some minutes, the crow stopped trembling in my arms, ruffling feathers that seemed only to have plumped slightly. He looked at me with eyes that were less cloudy, but the animal was still clearly in pain.

  I could only imagine that turning Ashley into a tree had cost Izek so much energy that he couldn’t bring himself out of his crow form. ‘I can’t keep the candle out here, I have things to do,’ I whispered to him, stroking the feathers of his swollen neck. ‘I’ll bring more food for you later.’ As I carried him back to the tree, lifting my arm until the weak bird could hop onto a low branch, I was fearful that his recovery could take days – but I couldn’t risk leaving a candle under the tree. All the magical business I’d done on the deck was enough of a risk already.

  I grabbed a little lavender from the garden, spat on it and applied it to the talon marks on my arm, as well as to some of the lingering lacerations from Sunday night, singing the purple energy into the wounds like a nursery rhyme.

  Back in the house, I closed the sliding doors and pulled the bag of stones from the cleaned-up kit. My heart panged when I remembered my grandmother teaching me the names of the stones when I was a child; I thought of her in the hospital bed with the lump of garnet around her neck and I wondered if my mother had been able to get a stronger stone to her in the intensive care unit. With her powers returned, my mother’s ability to heal my grandmother would have improved, but I knew that the intensity of the spell Nanna had used to transfer her knowledge to me was so overwhelming that it should have killed her. To bring her back from where she was would take a sorcerer of a power at least equal to her own strength. It saddened me to realise that, while I may have a copy of her knowledge, magically I was as weak as a kitten in comparison. So, I guessed, was my mum.

  Shaking these thoughts from my head, I refocused my attention on the stones. They were common stones – things I guessed Marlina could have bought in a flea market. Rose quartz, for love. Sodalite, for meditation. Tiger’s eye, for breaking curses … Other stones, and a round lump of black onyx. Onyx, I knew, was a memory stone.

  I held the black crystal in the palm of my hand and closed my fingers around it. Breathing in, I asked the onyx to tell me where it had been.

  34

  The stone pumped images into my brain. It had slept thousands of years under the earth, until with a crack it was chipped with a pickaxe and then it was in American hands, cut and polished and bagged with other stones. It waited in a dusty room before it was boxed and put on a plane. Thumps of the box onto the ground, darkness, thumps again. A woman in a pink dress who smelled of patchouli oil poured the bag of stones into a plastic dispenser, and there the onyx waited for weeks before a girl with bleached blonde hair squeezed it between her finger and thumb, sliding it into a pouch with other stones: amethyst, fluorite, aventurine. The onyx came out of the bag in the girl’s house. Went back in. Came out. There was no magic on this stone until it was washed, by me. It was not an exciting story.

  Then a thought struck me, and a spell spoke its process in my ear. I reached into my pocket, pulled out Jeules’s ring and set it on the table. The kit had a silver candle and I set this in the flowerpot sand. I lit the candle, put the onyx in my left hand and Jeules’s ring in my right. ‘Mitä sinä muistat?’ I asked the ring, in song. What do you remember?

  The flame of the silver candle flared from the wick as if it were white gunpowder in a firecracker. I lurched back in my seat, my pendant bouncing on my chest. The onyx burned in my left hand, the ring was as cold as ice. Both my hands stung and I couldn’t restrain a groan of searing pain. Hold on! screamed my pendant as the white flare from the candle widened into a funnel of light. My hands struggled to keep their grip on the onyx and the ring, even as their temperatures began to equal against my skin – it was like trying to cling onto a rope in the middle of a vicious tug-of-war. The white funnel started to fill with misty pictures. As my hands shook with the tension between the ring and the stone, I tried to focus on a vision forming in the light in front of me.

  A man lay with his head in a pool of blood. His hair was wet and flat with red liquid, which poured over his forehead. He was drooling from the corner of his mouth, his eyes were dim; saliva mixed with the blood under his chin. His cheek was on cold cement.

  It was Jeules.

  ‘Well done, Simon,’ said a dark voice. Two black leather shoes stepped into the pool of blood. A silver ring dropped into the bloody puddle by the man’s foot. Jeules’s tired hand reached for the ring; without the strength to put it on, he cupped his weak hand over it and smiled. His eyes closed.

  They opened again in a white bed. His face was clean. His hair had been clipped against the side of his head, revealing massive lacerations to his scalp. Jeules was shirtless, and above the sheets he stared at scabbed-over markings made in the flesh of his arms. The markings I could see were symbols that I recognised – sun signs, a burning cross, the Eye of Providence. Looking down his arm, he saw the silver ring on his finger. He kissed it. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the ceiling.

  Then Jeules was reading the brown pages of an old book at the desk of a dusty library, his eyes flitting back and forth across the lines of text. As he read, he dragged his ring-bound knuckle over the page; his eyes lit with silver and he laughed. He turned his ring hand over and the words from the book were reprinted in a shifting pattern of letters in his palm.

  The same palm rammed into the forehead of a woman who was tied to a wooden chair. Jeules was in a black robe. Around the chair was a ci
rcle of salt on a cement floor. Faceless people in robes were watching him. The woman’s face was a pulped and bloody mess. Her eyes couldn’t open for bruises. Jeules rammed his palm into her forehead so hard that the chair fell backwards and the bound woman tumbled to the floor. He leaped at her throat and, choking her, pressed his ring hand against her forehead. It sizzled. The woman gurgled, choking while trying to scream. Flesh melted under his hand like steak against a hotplate. He smiled, joyous.

  The ring hand held a razor. It cut an Eye of Providence into the shoulder of a naked girl with a shaved head. Tears ran down her face. ‘A few more, Marlina,’ he said, smiling.

  The razor flashed against the chest of a woman he held by the hair – they were under a night sky. She was wearing a white dress. She screamed as Jeules pushed her towards a group of people in robes holding torches alight. ‘No one can hear you!’ barked Jeules, hurling the girl to the ground. Black trees circled them. They started chanting. There was a circle of salt stretching into a black forest. Jeules laughed, the girl tried to crawl away. From his ring hand fire lit like a spark on butane. He stuck his burning fingers into her scalp and her whole hair was ablaze – my own nostrils filled with the stench of burning hair – the woman was screaming and screaming and screaming …

  … and that woman was me.

  Gasping, I threw my hands open. The onyx and the ring skittered across the dining room table and clattered to the floor. The candle blew itself out. The vision disappeared. I was wet with sweat and panting in pure fear.

  This was a man sticking up posters at Yarrindi High with a roll of masking tape around his wrist. A man with bouncing blond curls against a collared shirt. He wasn’t a witch-trapper, he was a witch-killer, a serial murderer with a particular hatred for young women.

  Did Joel Morland know what happened on the side he had chosen?

  35

  I was desperately thirsty and ran to the kitchen sink, downing three tumblers of tap water in rapid succession and pouring myself another. I splashed water on my face and didn’t dab it away – I wanted to keep my skin damp, I wanted to cool down before I grew paws and a muzzle and tore up my own house.

  I slammed the glass of water onto the table. I snatched the onyx stone from the floor and dumped it, the burnt-down candle and the flowerpot into the plastic box. I shoved the lid on top of the box and hauled it to my room, then I marched back to the dining room.

  Jeules’s ring glittered on the carpet. In an incredible fury, I grabbed it from the floor and rammed it into the glass of water. Rage burned through my entire body. As fur threatened to sprout out of skin, I cupped my hand over the open end of the glass and shook the tumbler over my head, hearing the water and the ring splatter inside it. With all my anger, all my fury at this ridiculous, exhausting, nonsense day – and all the monsters in it – I channelled my bear’s anger into the water, the glass, that cursed silver ring.

  ‘Olet loukkaantunut! Sinua loukkaantunut!

  ‘Huijasit! Sinua on huijattu!

  ‘Voit leikata! Tulet verta!’ I screamed, adding, ‘You’ll cut your own throat next time, demon!’

  I roared.

  At the sound curdling from my throat, the tumbler exploded over my head. Water and tiny shards of glass sprayed around the room. I closed my eyes as the needles of glass were about to fall from the air. ‘Koilta!’ I cried, with a burst of Will.

  I was hit with an instant wave of tiredness as the shards of glass transformed into tiny moths and hovered around the room. Within seconds, the silver sliver of moon that hung in the afternoon sky attracted them, and the moths emptied from the dining room. They poured away through the gap in the glass doors, a grey smudge that grew indistinct as it flew skyward.

  Izek cawed from the ash tree.

  I squatted on the floor and picked up what had been Jeules’s ring. It was my ring now – he’d learn soon enough what that meant after I got it back to him tomorrow. I zipped it into my pocket to make sure I brought it with me to school in the morning.

  Just then I heard something at the door. A key turned in the lock. Dad came in. He was in grey suit pants and a pink shirt with a red tie. He had short hair and glasses. He looked so normal and Dad-like that when he said, ‘How was school, Soph?’ I didn’t even answer. I just ran straight into his arms, and buried my face in his warm chest.

  36

  The story I told Dad was that my favourite teacher at school had had a miscarriage and the replacement teacher hated my guts. I told him that Belinda was picking on me, but I didn’t tell him that she’d done anything more than threaten me. I wanted us to stay normal, Dad and I. I wanted him to always wear a red tie with a pink shirt and he and I to live in a world where there was no magic, no murderers and no filthy scumbags like Jeules who smiled when they tortured people to death.

  While I changed out of my uniform – half of it Fran’s uniform – Dad made me dinner, frying some steak in a pan, steaming some vegetables. Tired and depleted from the spells I’d cast, it was wearing old pyjamas and eating cooked carrots and broccoli that worked the simple magic of comfort.

  Dad set us down in front of the television and reminded me that bullies were the most frightened people on the earth. ‘Belinda sounds like a really unhappy person,’ he said. ‘And I’m sure the casual teacher is just nervous. It must be really hard on the self-esteem to come into a school working around people who’ve got long-term contracts when you haven’t.’

  I smiled, wanting so desperately for that to be my reality – and Jeules’s reality – that I almost burst into tears.

  ‘Dad,’ I said when we were washing up, ‘Mum told me that you’ve got some heavy stuff going on at work.’

  Dad frowned. ‘I don’t want you to worry about that when you’ve got so much on your mind.’

  ‘How do you do it, though?’ I asked. ‘Knowing that if these dudes found out that you know what you know they’d …’ I chose my words carefully, ‘cause problems?’

  ‘I just keep my head down,’ Dad said. ‘I’ve reported what I know to the police, and I have to trust that doing the right thing will yield the best results. The thing I’ve learned over the course of my life, Soph, is that it’s worth taking free advice. The police are the experts, they’ve told me what to do and I’m doing it. That’s all anyone can do.’

  ‘But how do you just … exist, around the bad guys, when they’re in your space, and … ?’

  ‘I remind myself I’m one of the good guys,’ Dad said with a sad little smile.

  ‘Is that enough?’

  ‘I’d rather be me than them,’ he said, stacking the plates away.

  ‘Bad things can happen to good people, though.’

  ‘Of course they do – anyone tells you different, they’re denying reality. Bad things happen to everyone. As you get older, though, you tend to see that while bad things happen to good people, really bloody terrible things happen to bad people. There’s got to be some kind of cosmic fairness or we’d all just give up.’

  ‘Do you think Belinda Maitland will be randomly attacked by poisonous snakes?’ I asked, hanging up the dish-drainer.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t want to see that.’

  I had to be honest. ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘No, I think it’s unlikely she will be attacked by poisonous snakes.’ He laughed. ‘I’d say she’ll probably get over herself in time. And if she doesn’t she’ll just create a lot of enemies, feel lonely and isolated and lead a very unfulfilling life. You get back from people what you give out. And in the spirit of the personal growth opportunities life provides us, Sophie Morgan, I want you to call your mother.’

  37

  ‘How’s Nanna?’ I asked down the phone.

  ‘No change,’ said my mother. ‘It’s very concerning.’

  ‘But you – now that you can – have you been in there?’ I asked. ‘Into the room, with, you know, rocks, candles …’

  I wondered how much I could say before my mother would notice that her lip-loc
k spell had been undone.

  ‘There’s something going on,’ my mother said. ‘What we discussed the other day by the beach … Your nanna’s gone somewhere. Some place, beyond her mind. I’m trying everything I know but it’s not enough – it’s not just physical. When I said she may not want to come back—’

  ‘You don’t know that. Mum, she had a heart attack.’

  ‘A tietäjä doesn’t have a heart attack, Sophie – your grandmother could knit herself three new hearts if she thought one wasn’t working. I’m frightened that I don’t know how to bring her back. I need help – I’ve been trying to phone your uncle but I can’t get through.’

  ‘Uncle Tim?’ The uncle that sprang to mind was Dad’s brother, who ran a golf shop in Coffs Harbour.

  ‘No,’ my mother grunted, hearing the confusion in my voice. ‘Nanna’s brother, Veli Otso. From Helsinki. He’ll know exactly what I should be doing, but I can’t reach him.’

  ‘Can’t you use psychic internet?’

  ‘The servers seem to be down,’ Mum said, without irony. ‘As long as there’s no change in Nanna’s condition, we’re no worse off, at least. Anyway, how’s school? Your dad said you stayed with a friend last night. No problems? You managing to stay human?’

  ‘Barely,’ I said with a forced laugh.

  ‘Please be careful, Sophie. That business with the birds could attract some odd people to town. You understand what I mean?’

  I almost told her about Jeules, but I stopped myself. To talk about him to my mother would be to reveal how I knew what he was – about the ring, the colours on things, the Encyclopaedia of Finnish Magic that Nanna had funnelled into my head. The knowledge had been implanted in me and not my mother for a reason. Nanna had put herself in a coma to trust something to me … I wasn’t about to betray her gift, even if I didn’t know her reasons for giving it.