Burnt Snow

by Van Badham

  I fell to the ground next to Nikki as ceramic shrapnel flew. My hand touched the wet fabric of her robes and I saw crystals of white salt dissolving against it. Above my head, a crow screeched. Another bolt of lighting flew through the air, illuminating the scattered Finders before it struck the tree that Brody was tied to. The air wailed with the sound of splitting pine. More sparks flew. The beams of Brody’s frame cracked. Brody fell with the shattered wood onto the ground.

  Nikki was in my ear. ‘I’ve broken the circle!’ she barked as the swooping black shape soared through the confusion. ‘Do it – do whatever you have to do!’

  I was on my knees, about to sprint towards Brody when I heard Marlina screaming, ‘Kill him! Kill all of them! Kill them now!’

  Terrified, I turned towards Brody, only to see Elton had leaped to his feet and was racing at me with a weapon that looked like an axe. I stretched out my hand and focused a gold cloud of Will around the knife that was still in my grasp. Something at my right distracted me – a Finder was about to stick a sword into my side when the vast wings of a huge crow flared in the space between us. With a blood-curdling caw, the crow’s beak sliced at the Finder’s face and the man fell back. Just as Elton raised his axe to bury it in my head, I swiped my knife in the air and erected a wall of solid energy around myself. Elton smacked into it face first, tumbling to the ground in a flurry of black robes. The crow fluttered above me for a couple of seconds as the magic glittered and dissolved. The bird cawed for my attention as he dropped something silver from his mouth into my half-open hand. I had just enough time to carve a new magic shield in front of another oncoming Finder as I gripped the silver object. Again, a head-smack, a fall. I glanced quickly at what I held.

  It was my pendant.

  The blue stone shone and, with a sudden burst of happy energy, I dropped the pendant around my throat and roared. Another blue bolt thundered from the sky, striking a Finder and setting her robes on fire.

  Not far from me, Nikki was on her hands and knees, keeping her body over the breach she’d made in the salt circle even as a Finder struck her back with a stick. With a leap, I knocked the man down. My claws tore through the skin of his neck and cartilage of his voice box, seeing, for a second, the broken, bloody tubing of his throat spill through the wound before he fell to the ground. The weight of my body landing on his chest caused his ribs to crack. Rolling him under my paw, my nose sniffed for Brody, then bounded over the fallen man and across the clearing.

  Brody, still drugged, was clumsily defending himself from a group of attacking Finders, using for a shield the unconscious body of a Finder he held by the neck. I roared, swiped, clawed, reared on my hind legs and tore at his attackers, until a sudden, excruciating pain exploded in my shoulder.

  I gurgled a vast roar, moaned, swallowed air. Blood sprayed from where Elton had cleaved his axe into my shoulder. Even as another bolt of blue lightning shot out of the sky and burned a Finder into cinders, Elton threw himself at me, clinging to my back with one hand.

  With the other, he pushed the axe deeper into my flesh. The blue, protective magic of the stone that I’d absorbed into my bear’s body burbled as it tried to heal me, but Elton’s pressure on the axe head was greater than the rate of flesh repair. I groaned, rearing, trying to throw Elton from my back, and from the corner of my eye I saw Finders tearing the body from Brody’s hands. Staggering, Brody took another Finder by the neck and threw him into an oncoming group of his attackers, some collapsing as the flailing man knocked into them. I roared, sure the axe was going to cleave in half the bones of my shoulder, and stumbled to my side. I was too weak from blood loss to make a healing spell, but I tried to roll Elton from my shoulder into the ground. Too fast for me, he pulled his axe out of my cleft muscle.

  It was the worst pain I had ever known. I roared in agony. Then his axe fell again, this time into the side of my neck. The splatter it made as it hit the flesh was sickening. My head clouded with darkness as I felt blood draining from the gaping cut.

  I fell to the ground. Elton leaped off my back and walked round to face me. ‘We got her!’ he cried jubilantly, raising his axe over his head.

  I didn’t have enough energy left to moan. I vaguely sensed Finders gathering around him from the vibration of their footsteps on the ground.

  ‘The righteous will have their roast tonight!’ said Elton, leaning towards me. ‘Every mouthful of you makes us stronger.’ His hot breath was foul on my wet nose. Elton stood back. He laughed. ‘Victorious night!’ he called to the Finders assembled around him. He raised his axe. My eyes closed. The blue magic in my system furiously reknit the wounded cells, but it wasn’t fast enough. The last thing I would ever see was Elton’s black silhouette in torchlight, the axe above his head. I groaned out a long, despairing wail.

  But another blue lightning bolt shot through the air. The noise of a cawing crow arced above Elton’s head as the bolt struck him in the back. My eyes reopened only to see the skeleton of Elton’s body flash like an X-ray of bones in a blue man-shaped bag. His eye-sockets glowed like nuggets of white-hot metal and his skin sizzled, popped and fell away.

  ‘It’s not her!’ I heard a Finder cry.

  ‘Others – there are others! Run!’

  As the burnt pieces of Elton fell to the ground in lumps, blue flames spread from his carcass, racing across the ground to the feet of the stunned Finders who hadn’t been as smart as their comrades and run. The flames caught the hems of their robes, setting the fabric alight. Some tried to run now, but soon the clearing under the black-ash remains of the pine tree was filled with the terrible screams of Finders who rolled on the ground as blue fire consumed them, burning them to death.

  I was lying there, only strong enough to keep my eyes open, when I felt a warm sensation, like the flood of water in a hot shower, pour over and through my body. My arms, I saw, were human again, and the rushing river of pain in my shoulder and neck was ebbing away. The gushing blood ran to a trickle and then dried on my healing skin; after a moment it flaked to ruby-coloured powder and fell away. I was unsurprised to sense the magic of three white candles radiating from the darkness.

  I rolled my eyes towards the source: pairs of human hands were carrying the candles out of the shadows of the trees into the clearing – one descended from the tops of the trees, two progressed along the ground. A solitary woman’s voice chanted a Finnish healing spell at me, low and dark.

  I lifted my head and weakly pushed myself onto my hands. I instinctively looked to where Brody had been fighting and saw him passed out against the broken remains of his wooden frame. In the distance, I saw Nikki rise to her feet groggily and dust herself off.

  All around us were the bodies of Finders. The torches flickered as the white-candle bearers floated in a group towards me.

  My mother floated down from the treetops, then landed beside me, a candle in each hand. Ashley Ventwood, dressed in black with a crow on her shoulder, joined my mother, also holding a white candle. The blonde-haired, under-the-house Marlina came up behind them. The crow descended from Ashley’s shoulder and turned into Izek. He was also wearing black.

  I sat up. My mother was wearing her youthful persona – her auburn hair streamed out behind her in fat curls. She wore a black tunic dress and flat, black suede boots, and a black satchel was over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m very disappointed and concerned you haven’t been telling me what’s been going on, Sophie,’ said my mother. She nodded towards Izek. ‘You’re lucky you’ve got friends who are more sensible.’

  79

  I didn’t even attempt a half-hearted smile. Izek took one of the white candles from my mother’s hands, and he and Mum and Ashley stood around me in a triangle as ghost Marlina looked on. They placed the candles on the ground and my mother led the other two in song. My wounds healed rapidly, my heart pumped like a whirring machine.

  ‘I don’t want to leave her here,’ I heard Mum say. ‘Even if we get all of them it’s still dangerous …�
� Then Mum patted my head.

  As my breath started to cool in my lungs and my heart rate slowed down, my mother touched the sapphire at her neck. As she held the stone, a flick with her other hand suddenly directed another blue lightning bolt towards someone in the far distance. The energy radiated from her hand into the darkness; there was a shallow scream and the distant sound of a body falling.

  ‘Don’t kill everyone, Taika,’ Ashley said. ‘The boy is mine already and my apprentice has a shell I’d like to get back – intact.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said my mother, turning to me. ‘How many Finders were there?’

  ‘Thirty,’ I said, a little breathless.

  ‘I counted thirty-one,’ corrected Izek.

  ‘She was helping me,’ I said, nodding towards Nikki. Still at the breach in the circle, she stumbled around as if in shock. She had removed her robe and was picking through the clothes of an unconscious body on the ground in her underwear. From her lack of reaction, I knew she couldn’t see the blonde Marlina. ‘She broke the salt circle. She’s on—’ I glanced at the dark faces of my mother, Ashley, Izek, the bizarre disembodied Marlina, ‘she’s on my side. But her sister—’ I stared at ghost Marlina. There was something on her skin, a pearlescent glow. ‘Are there two sisters?’ I asked Ashley.

  ‘No, there are two Marlinas,’ said Ashley. ‘The zealot and the drude. This weak, far-from-home little drude is what remains of my apprentice. When they kidnapped and tortured Marlina, we had to force the witch spirit to split off from her body. That’s what makes the zealot as vicious as she is. Taika, we have to find Marlina’s shell,’ she insisted, pulling on my mother’s sleeve.

  ‘They’re doing something outside the house – they’re moving,’ said Izek, looking into the distance.

  ‘Staying or leaving?’ asked my mother. Izek shrugged.

  My eyes were still on the spectral Marlina. ‘She used to come with you to the Point,’ I said. I remembered what Kylie had told me about the Point. Rituals … orgies … drinking blood …

  ‘Still does, as a drude,’ Ashley said, giving a snakelike smile. ‘It’s very atmospheric.’

  I shivered, and jumped in my skin when my mum put her arm around my shoulders.

  ‘Next time you see thirty Finders in a vision, Sophie Morgan,’ said Mum, frowning, ‘I expect you to tell me. If Izek hadn’t got me, they’d be chewing the joints of your bones right now.’

  ‘Were they really going to eat me?’ I said, still incredulous. Izek lifted me to my feet.

  ‘The ritual is – you can correct my Finnish pronunciation, Taika,’ said Ashley, ‘karhunpeijaiset. Celebration of the bear. It’s complex group magic to separate the soul of the bear from its magical knowledge. They eat the flesh so they can absorb the magical knowledge of the bear, but the ritual prevents possession by the witch the bear contains. They would’ve roasted him, carved the meat off his bones and placed his head in the branches of the big pine. Then had feral stomach problems as they realised they had eaten a person, and not even one who could turn into a bear.’ She giggled.

  ‘Why marry me to him?’ I said, pointing at my bloodstained dress.

  ‘Distract the bear’s soul,’ said Ashley. ‘It’s part of the separation ritual.’

  My mother shuddered. ‘Peasant magic,’ she said, then she looked at me with amusement. ‘Don’t worry, Sophie – without parental approval, it’s not binding in a court of law.’

  Something distracted Izek; he touched my mother on the arm. ‘They’re regrouping,’ he said.

  ‘How many?’ said Mum, hand reaching to her sapphire. ‘Are they close enough together for a fireball?’

  ‘What are you going to do to them?’ I asked Mum.

  ‘We’re going to kill them,’ Mum said, as if it were the most obvious answer in the world.

  ‘Kill them?’

  ‘There are eighteen,’ said Izek. ‘One is badly hurt. Some are staying at the house. The others are moving in a circle around us. They are drawing salt.’

  A bang, then a whooshing sound. I felt something fly through the air past my stomach. The missile landed against one of the trees, exploding in flames and a spray of salt.

  ‘We should move,’ said my mother as Izek transformed himself back into a crow and flew in the direction from which the missile had been shot.

  ‘Where’s the flesh Marlina?’ asked Ashley as another missile hurtled through the air. This one landed in the distance, on grass. Again, a small explosion, a spray of salt. Fire burned in the grass where it landed. I saw Nikki cowering, even as she took a Finder’s knife into her hand.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said to them. ‘Are we leaving? How are we leaving? I don’t want to kill them. Please, Mum, I—’

  ‘Sophie, you took a man’s neck out – we watched you do it. These people are Finders,’ said my mother. ‘Finders who know you have bear magic. We’re not leaving until every last one of them is dead or they will hunt you down until they’ve got your body on a fork.’

  ‘I can’t leave Brody and Nikki!’ I said.

  I ran over to where Brody was still slumped against the pole.

  ‘Leave him!’ Ashley cried behind me. ‘He’s immune to the salt!’

  ‘He’s not immune to the bombs!’ I said, crouching by his side. Before I touched him, I quickly removed my pendant, dropping it on the ground. Another missile flew over my head, exploding into a tree with a smash, a spray, a tail of fire. ‘Brody, you have to get up,’ I said, touching his face to wake him. ‘They’re firing missiles at the trees – you’ve got to get up.’

  ‘Sophie, come on!’ called my mother, standing still.

  ‘I did the right thing, 19,’ he said, his eyes closed.

  ‘You always do,’ I said. Another missile flew over my head. It hit a tree and exploded in two showers of salt. ‘You always do the right thing, Brody. Please, get up.’ He was too heavy for me to lift. I looked around for help. Nikki was running towards us, but my mother and Ashley were deep in conference. Another missile flew, smashing into a tree. It occurred to me that if salt was everywhere, soon I wouldn’t be able to walk across the ground without shoes. My skin would melt.

  I frantically tried to yank at Brody’s arm. ‘I don’t always do the right thing,’ he said, slumping into my shoulder. ‘I’ve killed someone.’

  ‘We all have!’ I said, glancing around at the bodies on the ground. ‘We were fighting – it was them or us. We had to. We had to, Brody – just get up!’ I didn’t think I had actually killed anyone – I had mauled them, and badly – but this was not the time to clarify the point – I just wanted to get Brody to his feet.

  ‘In the snow …’ he said. ‘Back home, in the snow.’

  ‘I don’t care!’ I said as Nikki appeared at my side. ‘I don’t care about any of it, because I want you to get out of here, and I want you to get out of here with me.’ I was surprised that Nikki seemed so calm.

  ‘He won’t move?’ she asked. ‘Who’s the chick with Ashley Ventwood – why are they here?’

  I didn’t want to explain. ‘Help me!’ I begged her. She slid under his other shoulder. Another missile flew over our heads, hit another tree, caused another explosion. Between the two of us, Nikki and I hauled Brody to his feet. The small fires the bombs had started amongst the trees and grass had started to take. A couple of tree trunks were burning, flames crawling upwards towards their branches and the kindling of their leaves. ‘Come on, Brody!’ I pleaded, trying to get him to balance on his feet and take his own weight.

  Ashley, I saw, had disappeared with the ghostly Marlina. My mother was walking towards us, determined and calm, even as I was sweating and panicking, convinced that a strike of salt bomb to the face was only seconds away.

  ‘Can’t she do a spell or something to make him lighter?’ asked Nikki as Mum approached.

  ‘Nikki, you saved me – you saved me, I’m so grateful,’ I babbled. ‘Before anything else happens—’

  ‘I just wanted to get back at M
arlina,’ said Nikki, with a shrug. ‘That’s for cutting up my arms, bitch! I’m going to have to smear myself in aloe vera for weeks to make sure it doesn’t scar. Is she even still alive?’

  I nodded, again not wanting to explain. ‘What do you think she’ll do to you?’

  ‘She’s tortured me, kidnapped me and dragged me out to some dangerously weird loser festival in the middle of nowhere. What else can she do? She’s totally not imaginative.’

  Before I could say anything else, my mother was standing in front of us.

  ‘You’re Marlina’s sister,’ Mum said to Nikki. I noticed that Mum had replaced her youthful face with her regular Mum one. ‘I believe you saved my daughter’s life.’

  ‘Mrs Morgan?’ asked Nikki, stopping where she was, eyes wide.

  Despite everything, I groaned.

  Another missile flew over, landed in the dry twigs under the tree, exploded, starting a fire. ‘Are you going to help?’ I demanded of my mother as Nikki and I stumbled forward with Brody. Already pinpricks of pain alerted me to salt upon the ground. ‘They drugged him with something.’

  ‘How’d you know about putting water on a salt circle?’ Mum asked Nikki.

  ‘They were talking about it in the house,’ said Nikki. ‘Trying to cut off a water source. I thought if I got that stupid robe wet, they wouldn’t notice. It was heaps heavy but it worked.’

  ‘Mum, help us with Brody!’ I said. The leaves in the trees above us were beginning to catch fire. The whole canopy would be burning soon. I strained under Brody’s weight on my shoulder, even if his feet were staggering forward.

  ‘That was very brave of you,’ said my mother, ignoring me.

  Nikki stared at my mother. ‘Sophie’s my friend.’

  ‘But Marlina’s your sister,’ said Mum.

  ‘But you do that for friends,’ said Nikki. ‘And Sophie’s never carved a bunch of satanic smiley faces into my arms with a knife.’

  My mother smiled. ‘Your sacrifice means everything to us. I hope you know that.’ She put her hand on Nikki’s shoulder.