Escape to Witch City

by E. Latimer

  Emma’s throat was tight. “Eliza, move!”

  The creature bounded forward, one hand outstretched, the other clinging to the ledge. Finally, Eliza moved. Her entire body had gone stiff, and her brow was creased with concentration, but she lifted her hands.

  The flames on her arms shifted abruptly, flickering once before vanishing into her skin, as if they’d been sucked straight into her blood. A breath later, fire burst out of her hands, and two huge, roiling balls of flame bloomed in the air over the roof with a furious roar. They lit up the entire side of the hotel, illuminating the mossy roof, glittering off the cracked windowpanes. Clumps of smoldering moss and leaves rained down onto the streets below.

  The creature screamed and reeled back, pale eyes huge in its gaunt face. It scrabbled for purchase on the ledge, claws screeching on the stone, and then it fell.

  Emma leaned forward, hands over her mouth, and saw it plummet down, flipping end over end, skinny limbs flailing. It fell past the roof and out of sight, and the high-pitched keening cut off abruptly.

  When Emma looked back up, it was to see Eliza picking her way carefully toward them. Her dress was singed in large black patches over her shoulders and collar, but there was no sign of flames anywhere.

  The others watched, silent. When Eliza finally reached the window, they grasped her and drew her over the sill. Emma didn’t let her go, instead hugging her tightly, full of relief. Edgar and Maddie clung to her too, and for one odd moment they stayed that way.

  Eliza smelled like smoke, and her skin was still very warm, and Maddie’s hair tickled Emma a little on one shoulder. On the other side, she could feel Edgar’s elbow poking her. Still, it was strangely comforting after everything.

  A moment later they broke apart. Maddie was beaming, and Edgar’s face was bright red. Eliza cleared her throat and rubbed the back of her neck, glancing down at her shoes.

  “I-I…sorry,” Edgar stuttered. “I just…we thought you were going to die.”

  “It’s okay. I thought I was going to die too.” Eliza brushed at her burnt dress and shrugged. “I knew that if I couldn’t get my power under control, I would. It’s hard to control when I’m scared.” She took a breath and looked around at all of them, expression grave. “But…I realized you weren’t about to leave me, and if that thing got past me, it would go for you next. I couldn’t let that happen. It was like that thought gave me control over the fear.”

  A smile curved one corner of her mouth. “You know, I think I’m getting the hang of it—even without my coven around to teach me. I think you all just helped with that.”

  Emma nodded slowly. For the first time since she’d left the palace to be tested, something warm eased through her insides, taking over the fear.

  So that was why Eliza had stood her ground. Emma had thought she was frozen with fear, but she’d actually been determined to protect them. Wordlessly, Emma reached out and touched Eliza’s arm. Eliza smiled back before they turned to look out the window one last time.

  The winding, grassy streets and ivy-covered tops of the buildings below were empty. There was no sign of the monster.

  They made their way back down the stairs and through the hall to the entryway, all of them treading very quietly. Once outside, they jumped at every little squeak of the porch, and Maddie hushed Edgar furiously when he stumbled, his boot thumping on the wooden floorboards.

  Emma held her breath the whole way, and then paused abruptly at the top of the stairs, her mouth falling open at the sight spread out below them.

  There was still no sign of the monster. Instead, the streets laid out before them appeared to be entirely filled by birds.

  They were everywhere: perched on the roofs of empty carriages, lining the windows and eves of buildings, filling the branches of the nearest trees—all of them huge, black birds with glossy feathers. As Emma and the others stood on the porch, they were greeted with a great rush of noise. Rustling wings and clicking beaks and soft croaking.

  Behind her, Edgar gave a strangled cry and stumbled back, hands flying to his mouth. Emma turned to see him staring around, face filled with utter horror. She’d hoped he’d be comfortable enough to tell them soon, but this…well, he could hardly deny this was magic, could he?

  “Is that your power, Ed? Birds follow you?” Emma finally said.

  For a moment she thought he would deny it. He was shaking his head. His mouth worked soundlessly, as if trying to provide excuses but failing to come up with anything. Then, at last, he seemed to deflate, shoulders slumping.

  “They come when I get scared.”

  “That’s magic.” Eliza looked out at the birds, brows raised. “That’s what happens when you’re untrained and you’ve got strong emotions.”

  “Just ignore them,” Edgar muttered. “Eventually they go away.”

  Eliza looked like she wanted to argue, but Edgar began making his way down the stairs. They walked single file down the street, and surprisingly, the ravens cleared a path for them. It was like walking some strange, feathered gauntlet of watchful black birds.

  The ravens followed their progress, beaks turning as the four of them went past, hundreds of black eyes following their every step. A shiver dropped down Emma’s spine as she stared at them, but none of them seemed to notice her. They were all looking at Edgar. Watching him.

  She swallowed hard. “What do they want, Ed? They must be here for a reason, right?”

  Edgar did not answer this. Instead, he marched forward at full steam, his shoulders rigid. His posture said that he was ignoring the birds so thoroughly they might as well not be there. That he denounced their evil magic and would have nothing to do with it.

  He didn’t slow his pace until he was forced to—when the city gave another great rumble and the ground heaved beneath them. Emma squeaked in alarm, shooting an arm out to grab him by the back of his shirt.

  A great white archway had risen up before them, and Emma immediately had a strange jolt of recognition. The weekly trips to the park; her mother’s nagging insistence that she wear her best dress and the shiny shoes that pinched her feet. The time she’d nearly fallen off her horse and her mother hadn’t even noticed, too busy soaking up all the attention as her procession rode down the wide lane.

  Hyde Park had just appeared before them.

  No one said anything, but it was obvious they would have to go through it, for the park stretched out on either side as far as the eye could see.

  Emma felt a wave of despair as they made their way slowly to the thick stone archway. If Forest-London kept moving like this, how on earth were they supposed to get to the other side of it? They could be stuck wandering forever.

  As they stepped under the archway, Maddie sucked in a breath, and Edgar and Eliza both paused. Edgar let out a groan of dismay. Emma stopped just behind them, trying to process what she was seeing.

  Hyde Park had changed.

  When they’d visited, Emma and her mother had mostly stuck to the riding path or the promenade along the river. The promenade had been her favorite. It had been almost peaceful, with slender, leafy trees growing on either side, forming a kind of open tunnel you could walk through.

  But the trees she was looking at now were not at all like she remembered.

  It was as if whatever spell had settled on this strange In-Between had mutated them. They were massive, towering over the promenade and the fences along the outside of the park, their roots snaking up through the pathway and upending stones.

  The neatly trimmed lawns were gone too, replaced by wild, hip-high fields of grass that rippled in the wind. There were benches all along the pathway before them, though it was as if the earth was attempting to swallow them up. Vines and ferns and tiny saplings were growing around and through the slats of the seats.

  It was a tangled thicket, like some kind of jungle, and Emma had a sudden, unwelcome thought: if
there were wild animals here in this strange overgrown London, this was where they would be living.

  No one spoke for a moment, and then Edgar, still staring up at the thick forest before them, said in an awed voice, “What do we do? Do we keep going?”

  Emma wasn’t sure what to say. She turned to the others, hoping that someone else might have an idea. She wasn’t sure how she’d ended up in charge of what direction they went. She’d expected Eliza to have opinions, or for Edgar to order them to move this way or that. But they were all staring at her expectantly.

  She cleared her throat. “We have to get to the other side of the city, right? We could try to go around, but that could take a lot longer. I guess…I guess we should just cross through. We’ll stick to the path.”

  Or what was left of the path.

  No one else seemed to have any suggestions, so they forged onward, entering the thick forest and keeping to the path as much as they could. The going was slow, as they had to dodge around cracks in the pavement and pieces of the path that bulged up, thanks to the roots beneath. It was eerie the way the trees towered over them, impossibly thick-trunked, the branches stretching up so high they cast the entire pathway into shadow.

  They moved at a middling sort of pace. Edgar was the slowest of them, trailing along behind, and every few minutes, Emma checked back to make sure he was still there. No one seemed very happy, but she noticed that Edgar looked more miserable the deeper into the forest they went. She dropped back a little, reaching out to poke him in the side as they came over the next rise in the path.

  “What’s the matter?”

  He blinked at her, and then glanced up ahead to where Eliza and Maddie were pushing through the underbrush, Maddie complaining loudly to Eliza that there was a rock in her shoe.

  “I’ve always had a raven or two around.” He kept his voice low. “But I never really thought about it, or even noticed it much, because the castle is so loaded with thistle. I think it pretty much kept it under control.”

  She nodded, waiting for him to continue.

  “The first time it happened—I mean, truly happened—I was with her.”

  Emma’s mouth dropped open. “Your mother?”

  He nodded. “It was on a hunt through the forest. We were after pheasants that time, I think.” He grimaced, and then shrugged. “Anyway, we’d broken away from the group, because I’d told her I didn’t want to hunt witches when I was older. She was furious, lecturing me about what the witches had done to our family. She told me I was joining the witch hunters when I turned eighteen, that it didn’t matter what I wanted, and I started panicking.” He swallowed, looking up at the treetops like he was picturing it. “That’s when they showed up.”

  Emma nearly walked into a tree branch, she was so fixated on his story. She brushed it away impatiently. “What happened? Did she see them?”

  “No, that’s the absolutely mad thing. She was so angry at me. She was jabbing at me with her finger, just red-faced and furious, lecturing about personal responsibility, and I look up and the trees are just filled with birds. Every branch in every tree. But it’s like”—he hesitated—“it’s like they knew to be quiet, or something. They didn’t make a sound, and she just…never looked up. Not once.”

  He fell silent for a moment, and Emma shook her head in disbelief, stepping over a rock jutting up in her path.

  “It seemed like something out of a dream, except that I always noticed them after that, and I knew. I knew I was going to fail The Testing.” He shrugged, face mournful. “And I did. Twenty-five percent.”

  “I’m forty.” Emma shrugged when his eyes went wide. “I think I knew too, though I didn’t want to admit it.”

  Edgar only nodded in reply. His expression was strained, and she thought about suggesting they take a break for a few minutes so he could sit down. Before she could say anything though, she heard a distant sound—a quiet, faraway thump-thump, thump-thump.

  It was familiar. She’d heard it in the hotel. Not the too-slow version of the monster’s heart, but the steady, deep pulse she’d heard before that.

  Witch hunter.

  Fear blossomed in her chest, and she glanced around at the trees, at the shadowy spaces between them. There was no movement there, no dark figures flickering between them.

  But she knew it was him. “Hold on, I hear him. I hear the witch hunter.”

  Edgar staggered to a halt, a look of dismay on his face. “But…he disappeared. We saw it.”

  “Maybe it was this place moving.” Emma searched the trees again briefly, stomach fluttering. Still nothing. “Maybe he’s found us again.”

  “What do we do?” Maddie, too, was darting sharp looks around at the trees, eyes wide. “Do we hide?”

  Emma tried to gather her thoughts. He was following them, but his heartbeat sounded distant, too quiet for him to be close. She lowered her voice. “We keep going, but I think he’s following us, hoping we lead him to Witch City. We’ll have to lose him at some point. For now, we pretend we don’t know he’s there.”

  It wasn’t a good plan, but it was a plan. They pressed on, and eventually the heartbeat faded away. But the deeper they went into the woods the more Emma felt like something or someone was watching them from the shadows between the trees. Now that they were walking again, she kept seeing little flickers of movement between the trunks. Was it just the mix of shadows and sun filtering through, or was something actually moving there?

  She picked up her pace without even really meaning to, ignoring the brambles scraping at her face and clothing, scratching her cheeks.

  The path was barely visible now, but they pressed on until a loud rustling sound from up ahead stopped them in their tracks. Emma shook her head in frustration. The sound of the blood rushing in her ears was so loud that it drowned out everything else.

  “Is it the witch…” Maddie started to ask, but her words trailed off as something slid out of the bushes before them.

  It was not the witch hunter, but a slender, inky-black cat.

  Emma blinked, startled. She’d expected the witch hunter, or maybe the horrifying, face-shifting monster, but certainly not a house cat.

  The animal sat back on its haunches and tilted its head, blinking right back at them.

  A laugh slipped out before Emma could stop it. She’d been worried about the wild animals that might be lurking in this park, but it was this tiny black house cat that had come to stare her down. She supposed it made sense: if people had lived in this abandoned London at one time, they’d surely had pets. And now those pets were living in the wild.

  The cat padded forward and then stopped, settling back on its haunches again, apparently content to sit and examine them as they examined it. It had very green eyes and a white-tipped tail with a crook in the center. The cat twitched its tail at them and blinked, and to Emma’s surprise, it seemed to look directly at her.

  A beat later, the cat stood up and turned around, looking back over its shoulder at them. It jerked its tail at Emma as if to say, Well? Come on! Then it trotted off, vanishing into the thick of the forest.

  She turned to look at the others. “I think it wants us to follow.”

  Maddie blinked and Edgar frowned, shaking his head. “It’s a cat. Cats don’t want anything. They’re just cats.”

  “Have you ever actually met a cat?” Maddie snorted, and Eliza was nodding.

  “Cats aren’t just cats when you’re dealing with witches,” was all Eliza said. She was the first to turn and begin moving in the direction the cat had gone.

  Edgar pursed his lips. For a moment he looked as though he wanted to say something, but he just shook his head and followed.

  It was hard to keep up with the cat, especially because its black coat blended with the dim forest surroundings, but Emma would catch a glimpse of it as it jumped over a fallen log or wove around a cluster of ferns.
Occasionally, she’d see its eyes glow green in the darkness before winking out again, and she realized the cat was checking over its shoulder, making sure they were still following. She felt her chest swell with something that might be hope.

  A cat leading them to Witch City made a strange kind of sense.

  Eliza had hinted that, for witches, there was more to cats than met the eye, and Emma thought she might have been talking about familiars. She only knew about familiars from what she’d read in the books—ominous warnings about black cats and sewer rats that served as witches’ companions and had a direct link to their masters’ minds. It seemed they were often sent to spy on upstanding citizens. But if this cat was a familiar, it was only helping them.

  Finally, the trees came to an end, and they came out of the forest onto a steep, grassy bank that dipped down to a large expanse of dark water. After climbing over a thick-trunked tree that had fallen across the path, they found the cat sitting at the top of the slope, just before the knee-high grass began.

  The feeling of hope swelling in Emma’s chest expanded as she looked out over the lake. She knew where they were now. This was the Serpentine, the famous boating spot enjoyed by London’s elite. She and her mother had walked this very bank, though of course the grass hadn’t been nearly as tall.

  When she looked around for their guide, Emma saw that the spot at the edge of the slope was empty. The cat had vanished.

  Not knowing quite what to do next, the group decided to take a brief rest on the shore of the lake below. Edgar sat down on a fallen log and began rifling through his bag, while Maddie and Eliza argued in low tones about where walking around the edge of the lake would lead them. Emma’s stomach gave a great growl, which served to remind her that she had a handful of very squashed almond scones in her dress sash from their time in the palace earlier.

  The four of them devoured the flattened pastries with gusto.

  “There’s a teahouse along here, I tell you,” Maddie said between mouthfuls. “I’ve been here before. We should stop in. I’ve heard the Earl Grey is to die for.”