Anderson was slow with the note. Amanda watched her small eyes navigate the handwritten jags and curves, reading it once, then twice, interrogating it for every sliver of meaning. She turned pink, then red, her mouth chewing at the words. The note spun across the table from the sharp motion of her hands as she sat up straight to scan the room. Her glare finally landed on Amanda, who met the woman’s furious gaze with a wink.
‘You fucking bitch!’ Cups and plates shuddered as Anderson slammed her fists on the tabletop, standing as though the impact had launched her to her feet.
The sound might as well have been a bomb going off, every woman jumping in their seats. Those around Anderson hurried to get out of her way, trays tipped, food scattered and cutlery skittered across the floor.
‘I’ll fucking have you. You start on me, and you’re going right to the fucking hospital.’
‘Come on, then,’ said Amanda, climbing out of her own seat, every part of her feeling watery and weightless. ‘Come on then, you technologist bitch. Magic for the UK! Magic for the UK!’
Everyone was backing away as Amanda stepped out into the aisle, already performing the cantrips that Marnie had taught her. She tried not to think too hard about what she was doing, ignoring the tingle in her scars and the fizz in her blood, letting the fledgling muscle memory do its part. Her hands were already aching from all the practice she’d done through the night, the tendons unused to so much work.
She’d always hated magic, her father had seen to that. But if her time in Siberia had taught her anything, it was that the world didn’t care what she thought. Magic was going to be used against her and it could help her. Though she still shunned it, still felt uncomfortable at its touch, she wasn’t going to shy away when she had no choice. There were some who would call that progress.
Reaching for her power, she felt it rise up to meet her pull, like flexing a half-forgotten muscle.
Hair fluttered and ears popped as the air pressure changed.
Anderson hesitated, surprise crossing her face, then resolve returned. She strode towards Amanda, determined to knock her down before she had finished casting.
She only had a few seconds, but Amanda didn’t dare hurry. The rush of power was exhilarating, the feeling of falling and flying all at once, the euphoria after a workout.
Her fingers throbbed, pressing against one another, twisting around, her knuckles and wrists aching. She didn’t dare stop, didn’t know how to, the only way out was through. She could feel the power building inside her, but she could feel it leaking too.
Where she pictured the power within her growing like a perfect sphere, she could feel it bending, spreading, growing tumours.
The cast was imperfect and the only way to stop the lumps from pulling her apart was to excise them, earth them elsewhere. Cutlery around her tarnished in a spreading circle, the fluorescent lighting above began to sputter, the gas inside the tubes shooting with multicoloured lightning.
Everyone was retreating now, fighting to get out of the way. Even those who had never seen magic in the flesh recognised magical fallout when they saw it.
Amanda was barely hanging on, her teeth gritted, blood rushing to her head, her vision beginning to darken around the edges. It felt like she was upside down. She worked her toes to stop her falling up into the ceiling.
Anderson was bearing down on her, no weapon but pure anger and her tattooed knuckles. She planted a foot and swung, aiming for Amanda’s jaw.
Amanda unleashed, pushing her palms out flat towards Anderson’s chest.
For a long moment there was nothing but black and a flatline hum in her ears.
Then everything was commotion – alarms, shouts and plimsolled feet all about her head. People were grabbing at her limbs and she realised that she was on the floor. She made to pull away, but a rough shake warned her against it.
Lifted back to her feet, her head swam as an ache set in, so profound it felt like her brain had frozen and was beginning to crack.
‘Say it,’ a voice urged in her ear. ‘Say it!’
Opening her mouth, all she managed was a croak, her tongue a flat, dead slab in her mouth.
Marnie shook her again. ‘Fucking say it. Say it or it’s the fucking gallows.’
But say what?
There were faces all around her, wide-eyed, asking if she was OK. Some were fearful, some excited. Others were taking advantage of the lack of attention, reacting to the drama like schoolchildren, climbing over the tables, shouting and hollering and fighting.
The guards were pushing their way towards her, Peterson in the lead, his riot stick already in hand. If they allowed her to cast again, the world would fall on all their heads, the anti-magic police more brutal and cut-throat than they could ever imagine.
‘Say it,’ Marnie slapped Amanda’s cheek, trying to rouse her. ‘Say it. They’re almost here.’
What was she meant to say? She could feel the words lurking in the back of her mind, but they wouldn’t come out.
Peterson drove a fist into Amanda’s gut, robbing her of breath and spreading her lunch all over the floor.
More hands grabbed her. One guard had her left arm in an Abra grip, fingers interlocking to keep her palm flat and prevent further casting.
As she struggled to breath, trying not to choke on the sick that still clung to her lips, she could feel her toes dragging on the floor as the room moved around her. The doors leading out in the direction of solitary drew closer.
‘Say it!’ she could hear Marnie, still shouting. ‘Fucking say it.’
It all came back to her.
‘M—’ Amanda coughed, spat down herself to clear her mouth. ‘Magic for the UK.’ It was barely a mumble, just her mouth performing the shapes, her tongue and lips feeling thick.
She tried it again.
‘Magic in the UK!’ she croaked, louder this time. Then again and again, louder and louder until it was ringing throughout the room.
She was holding her head back and yelling it to the ceiling over her headache and her fear and everything that was about to happen.
‘Magic in the UK! Magic in the UK! Magic in the UK!’
Chapter Five
Everything hurt.
She’d already sweated through her clothes, every inch of her soaked and shivering on the thin mattress in her solitary cell.
Performing magic without the marks or tattoos or training came with fallout. Every muscle throbbed, her bones ached, hot like steel rods fresh from the foundry under her skin. The world around her was a blur, obscured by the fog of pain. The thin fluorescent light was too much even when she kept her eyes closed. Every sound was like a needle in her brain.
Time was as smeared as her senses. Coherent thought came in snatches.
She knew she was in solitary. It’s where she had expected to be taken. Memory filled in the blanks around her. She’d been here before. She knew the bare room, the bulbs fixed in the ceiling, the thin mattress and the bed that creaked with each movement.
She was aware that people had come to talk to her, though she couldn’t say if that had been ten minutes ago or the day before. Their words had meant nothing, but the increasingly frustrated tone had left an impression.
Somewhere out there, people were deciding what to do about her. She was a problem. A pebble rolling around the cog work, threatening to catch between the teeth – something to be extracted and broken down before it made any more trouble.
She was at their mercy, unable to defend herself, unable to explain. Any time she closed her eyes, she feared the spike of daylight to wake her, her feet off the ground, on her way to the noose. Try as she might, her mind was fixed on it, unable to concoct some plan against the faceless enemy of bureaucracy as it decided her fate.
More visits. More questions. Food. Someone rolled her onto her back, thumbed at her eyelids, letting in the blaze of the light above. She wanted to fend them off, didn’t know if she did. Shouts made her head ring, someone pushed her. But she couldn�
�t remember the question, couldn’t line her thoughts up with her tongue. Someone took the uneaten food away.
Two men came to examine her. She woke as they pulled her around, undid her clothing. She understood some of their words. They talked about her scars, talked about blood magic. She spoke, her words clumsy and trapped between her teeth.
When the door closed behind them, she wasn’t sure what she’d said.
They couldn’t let her hang. They couldn’t just throw her life aside. Didn’t they realise she didn’t want any of this? She’d just wanted to be left alone.
She tried to get up, to get to the door and slam her fist. Get them back in here. She had things to say. But when she opened her eyes a crack, she was still on the bed, every inch of her itching.
They were deciding her fate and she couldn’t participate, no matter how desperate she was. There was no trial, no legal proceedings. She had given up the right to such things the moment she’d performed magic. There was more that she had been meant to say – pro-magic political drivel she’d seen on TV.
Had what she’d done been enough? The thought spun around with the rest of the room. It was everywhere she looked. Had her and Marnie’s plan worked? Was she headed for Coldwater or the noose? No one would tell her. Or they had and she couldn’t remember.
She knew she was getting better when the nightmares returned alongside the dark thoughts twisting through her head.
Here she was, in clothes that had seen too many washes, drenched in sweat and stale vomit, in a small bare prison cell ranting about the rights of magic users. She was totally and utterly alone, her fate in the hand of faceless strangers, databases, paperwork. No power, no agency.
And she deserved it. She deserved all of it.
Muscles still sore, she began to pace the room, enduring the hurt. Unleashing that power at Anderson, for one golden moment it had felt like a release. She’d relished every second of the planning, the preparation and that final pay-off, hurting that loathsome bitch and, for one moment, putting one broken piece of this fucked-up world right on its arse where it belonged.
No more art classes, she supposed. Whether they sent her to Coldwater or not, she wouldn’t have to sit through another of those things.
She’d never talk to Jamison again.
The thought paused her. Anyone watching would see her freeze in the middle of the cell.
They’d sent word he was sick and all she’d done was nod. She might have made a joke even. But she’d never called him or sent him a message. She’d tried a few times, queued for the phone, picked up a pen and then she just… hadn’t.
Now she never would. She deserved that too.
She bit at her fingernails. Even cried a couple of times. Waiting was a sick pit in her stomach that swallowed time and spat it back out.
Suddenly exhausted, she collapsed back onto the bed, falling immediately into a deep sleep.
The nightmares came more vivid than ever. Michaela screaming and blaming her, covered in the blood of her family. Steph, the girl she’d betrayed, standing at her side, her fingers missing, bleeding onto her shoes. She couldn’t see Caleb, but she could hear him behind her, that familiar rasp of his breathing. The sound was stiffer now, that last broken wheeze before she’d choked the breath out of him.
Amanda woke as Steph reached out for her with the bloody stumps of her fingers, her clothes soaked through with sweat. ‘I didn’t mean to do it!’
As if waiting for their cue, they came for her.
It was still dark, the dawn only just beginning to rub the shine off the night through the slit of window.
Two men and no decorum, the lights slammed on. She was just trying to pull her blanket up over herself when the door clanged open and she was told it was time to leave.
Her hands twisted behind her back, held once again in an Abra lock, cold cuffs went around her wrists, the chill on her skin enough to rouse her. She realised that she had recovered, her mind was clear.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
Neither guard replied, each man taking an arm and carrying her down the corridor.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded. She jerked her arms, but their grips only tightened, their march barely faltering from her outburst.
‘Amanda Ellis,’ one started talking, words loud to drown her out, tumbling from him like lines he’d rehearsed, ‘you are to be executed for illegal magical practices by order of…’
She began to struggle, her plimsolled feet sliding uselessly across the slick floor as she tried to kick back against it, propel them the other way. But the men were too strong, their holds too tight, their stride relentless as gravity. The talking guard didn’t falter in his monologue of state-sanctioned legal bullshit.
Her plan hadn’t worked. She had been so certain that it would, a tiny spark within her convinced that she would never die.
The struggle to escape consumed her, pushing all other thought aside. She could barely think, her muscles bunching, her body a frantic heart as it tried to escape the men. She was shouting again, screaming, desperately, ‘Magic in the UK! Magic in the UK!’ like they were the only words she knew.
But the grey corridors passed around her. They turned a corner, then two. The man had finished his pronouncement, the pair falling into a heavy silence. A steel door opened right on cue onto a small courtyard, towering walls on all sides, windows enclosed in metal muzzles.
A gallows stood in the centre.
A man stood on its raised platform, his hand holding the noose, waiting for her.
Already tired from the fighting, Amanda’s energy fled in the cold morning light. ‘Please,’ she moaned, tears and cold sweat running down her face. She couldn’t stop shaking. Her feet didn’t have the strength for the stairs and so they carried her up. ‘No. Please.’
But the men worked as though she wasn’t speaking at all. One of them began to recite some legal proclamations. They were just sounds to her and, from the monotonous way he plodded through them, to him as well.
The rope went around her neck, stiff fibres rough against her. She gasped like it was a hit of cold water. She’d failed. She’d never see her daughter again. She tried to fix Michaela in her mind, all of her children: Darren and Emily. Her husband, Simon.
The bag went over her head, her breath hot and foul over her face and now she began to shout, deep breaths causing the cloth to choke her. She could feel the trapdoor beneath her creaking under her feet.
Oh God, she didn’t want to die. She didn’t want—
A phone rang, its flat, electronic bleat cutting through the ceremony. It managed a single cycle before the receiver was snatched up.
The courtyard held its breath and Amanda sagged, her legs finally giving up, the hemp cutting into her neck.
‘She’s for Coldwater.’
Chapter Six
In the space of those three words, everything had changed. Where a moment ago the guards had been passionless, cold as the rollers on a conveyor belt leading the meat to the mincer, now they were nervous.
But any relief she might have felt was short-lived as they removed the rope and her handcuffs. A jacket was thrust into her arms, three sizes too big. Pulling it on, she saw the Coldwater Justice Service logo on the chest.
The guard held out new cuffs: a short length of metal bar with a ring at either end, out of which came two black plastic hollow hands. Twin snaps sounded, her hands trapped like she was holding two pint glasses.
There were more corridors and soon she was outside again, not a courtyard but the real outside, the sky cold and grey and huge above her.
The coat was welcome, but the plimsolls, fine for a tiled prison, were not for the chill spring. Her toes were already beginning to numb as she was walked towards a waiting prison transport.
The driver was standing by the door and Amanda knew instantly that they were a Coldwater guard. It was the mirrored face mask, the body armour that covered them head to foot.
Despite he
rself, Amanda felt a shiver at the sight of the figure. She’d seen plenty of them before on the television, but never in the flesh. This was anti-magic police. The Kevlar was warded up the arse to fend off blasts and curses, the baton likewise to pierce magical protections.
This officer would have been trained in all sorts of combat magics. But the scariest thing about them was that they had carte blanche when it came to the law. They could stamp on Amanda’s head until her brains leaked out and the only consequence would be the extra paperwork to get the stains cleaned up.
Ushered up the stairs and into the transport, she was escorted down a narrow door-lined corridor, each opening onto a tiny, empty cell no bigger than a two foot square. On the surface, it was just like every other prison van, but, underneath, Amanda suspected that the walls, floor and ceiling were etched with protective wards.
Sent into a room, it wasn’t until the door closed and she heard the sound of the lock that she began to sob again with relief. It had worked, thank god it had worked.
* * *
It was a long journey, the seat growing uncomfortable beneath her as she watched the world beyond the glass. She stared at it all in a daze, the scenery competing with the grey corridors, the guards, the noose she had left behind. It had all passed around her like a vivid nightmare, clinging to her, replaying itself over and over.
Buildings became motorway, an endless stream of cars, countryside and business complexes. Motorways became towns became trees, fields, hedges. The roads grew narrower and, on the final turn, ceased to be road at all, the van lurching over a sodden dirt track, hemmed in by a thick cluster of trees.
The van came to a stop on the other side of the treeline.
The sight of the ocean brought tears to Amanda’s eyes. After having spent so long indoors and behind high walls, she had almost forgotten that the world could be so vast, that the human eye could see all the way to the horizon.
The water was a steel grey, the coast anaemic sand and malnourished scrub that huddled in clumps, shivering against the cold. A concrete apron had been constructed where land met sea, the ocean kicking up spray.
Strange Ways Page 6