by Mara Webb
We walked along the high street and into the throng of shoppers inspecting the market stalls. Almost immediately, Kate and Effie wandered off and I was left to fend for myself. So much for them showing me around. I could see children running through the crowds with daisies in their hands and small, wicker baskets over their arms. The weather seemed to have everyone in a good mood.
“Sadie!” a voice shouted. I turned to see a strange woman beside one of the market stalls, and quickly recognized her as Sage, the owner of ‘Coaled Water’. Her shop primarily sold tea, but also housed a number of other witch-related things.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked. I stepped closer and saw that she was selling books on palm reading, tarot cards and small bags of herbs. There was also a small display of jewelry with crystals and precious stones, a few bundles of candles and several jars of what looked like water but were labeled as ‘moon water’.
“I’m good child, it’s good to see you in the sun,” she smiled. “I sense that you have been hiding yourself away.”
This woman was weird, there was no denying it. She was short, and the lenses on her glasses were so thick that it made her eyes look as though they shouldn’t fit in her head. Her red curls fell down over her shoulders and I wondered if she thought I’d re-styled my own hair based on hers.
“I haven’t been hiding, it’s just—”
“Remember what I told you,” she interrupted. “You are letting too many people into your personal space.”
I supposed that the conversation I’d had with Sage had helped me come to the decision that I needed to step away from the whole Miller-Ryder mess for a while. In the end, it seemed as though the two men had made that choice for themselves anyway.
“Yeah, I know,” I nodded. “What are you selling today? What is moon water?” I picked up a jar and lifted it up to the light to inspect it. Sage jumped up to snatch it back out of my hands and give me an unhappy glare.
“It’s moon water, surely that implies that you don’t contaminate it with direct sunlight!”
“I honestly had no idea, sorry,” I said. “What is it? What do you use it for?”
“Well, it’s water that has been charged under a moon,” she scoffed, laughing slightly as if it was obvious. “And it’s uses… well that’s the customer’s choice, really,” she replied, carefully placing the jar back in place. “You buy it, you add your own intention and maybe a crystal or two, then you can use it to bathe in, water your plants, or in cooking. I’ve heard people use it to clean their brushes when painting too actually.”
“Sounds good,” I said, forcing a smile. It sounded like a bunch of nonsense, but there was no use saying that out loud. I mean, I was a witch and I had just had a friend completely change my hair with the touch of her hands. Who was I to turn my nose up at something like this?
“Kate said you have been learning about the different types of witches. Have you figured out your own specialty yet?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I admitted. I had been wrestling with it since Kate had first explained it all to me. Effie was a kitchen witch; she had no doubt about it. That meant that her magic was grounded in cooking and protection spells. Kate said that she had spent some of her teenage years practicing divination but had since moved into more cosmic witchcraft. I think she said that was mostly horoscopes and astrology, but she had been talking very quickly at the time and I had struggled to take it all in.
Greta, my dead cousin, was a sea witch. Well, she had been when she was alive. Since her murder, she had been travelling around the islands in ghost form and it seemed that her magic was less potent now. In her prime she had been able to manipulate the waters around the island, the weather and the cycles of the moon. This was a set of skills that she had been sharing with Ryder before she died. Ryder.
The thought of him made my heart ache. I’d had two guardians, Miller and Ryder, and now both of them were avoiding me.
“Do you have anything for good fortune?” I asked Sage.
“And by fortune, do you mean money?” she said.
“No. I would like to bring my bad luck to an end, do you have anything for that?” I pressed.
“Not here,” she said. “But back at the store. Follow me.” She pulled a toggle above her head and black drapes fell down on all sides of the stall, obscuring the view of the goods inside. She pinned a ‘back in five’ sign to the fabric and gestured for me to follow her.
I looked back over my shoulder to see if I should tell Effie and Kate where I was going, but I couldn’t see them anywhere. Oh well. I ran a few paces to catch up to Sage who was almost jogging through the crowd to get to the alley that led to ‘Coaled Water’, her store behind the Italian restaurant on the high street.
She unlocked the door with a small key that she had tucked behind her ear, and we walked inside together. I watched as she locked the door behind us and considered that I might have just walked into a dangerous situation. This was the exact type of bad luck that I was hoping to avoid, the irony was painful.
“I don’t sell everything out in the open,” Sage said. “There are people that would abuse magic if left to their own devices. So, I keep it locked away in the back.”
“But…?” I smiled. “You have something for me?”
“Yes, but I can only trust you with these things because I know you are being trained and that Effie and Kate would never steer you wrong. You have good friends.” She was right. “And with Greta helping you too, I can’t see a way that this could go wrong.”
I watched as her face suddenly grew solemn and I wondered what ‘worst case scenario’ she was imagining. Her concern didn’t fill me with confidence. Sage walked around the counter and disappeared through a door.
It sounded like someone was throwing metal pans around back there, I heard at least two glasses smash onto the ground and Sage throw out a lot of explicit language, before ultimately returning with a paper bag in her hands.
“Here you are,” she said. “Take this home with you and try it out after sundown. I’ve slipped a notecard in there, which won’t mean much to you, but Kate will know it.”
“Is it written in a secret code or something? Like a witch language?” I asked, intrigued.
“No, nothing like that. I just have bad handwriting and it looks like a scribble to most people,” she laughed.
I considered looking into the bag but decided I would rather take my time looking over its contents later. I handed Sage the amount that she had written on the outside of the bag, and then stood for a moment as I looked around.
“Where do you get all this stuff from? Do you have it shipped in from the mainland?” I asked.
“It’s made, child,” she laughed. “My sister and I make everything you see here. I live in a community of witches too, so it’s a good earner! Magic folk eat up stuff like this!”
“I can imagine!” I replied. “Thanks for this, Sage.” I stepped towards the door, taking one final inhale of the air in the store that was tainted with the scent of patchouli oil. The first time I’d been in here the smell was so strong that it was difficult to breathe, but now I found it comforting. I grabbed the handle, but felt Sage’s hand on my arm suddenly, she was pulling at me to turn around.
“Tread carefully,” she warned. The color of her eyes had gone, replaced by whiteness.
“Sage?”
“Tomorrow brings Beltane. Not everyone in Hallow Haven treats this day the same, some have celebrations of their own that are best to be avoided,” she said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“If you are called, don’t listen.” At that, the color in her eyes returned and she released my arm. “Oh, sorry, did I say something creepy? That happens from time to time, I think it’s the pollen in the air to be honest with you.”
“Uh, maybe get an antihistamine,” I joked nervously. I reached behind me to pull the door open, stepped out onto the street, and made a break for it, running until I was back in the crowd.
&nbs
p; “Sadie, there you are!” Effie called out. “Where have you been?”
I held the paper bag behind myself to hide it from Effie’s view. “Er… just around,” I lied.
“Well, I bought a bunch of flowers and little baskets, so we can go leave these on doorsteps today, or tomorrow. I mean, Beltane is technically tomorrow but I think you can do this the day before,” she said.
Beltane?
That is what Sage had said, but what did it mean?
3
Before I knew it, we were walking away from the market and into the residential area that surrounded the center of the island. I bought a small backpack from one of the stalls on the way and stuffed the paper bag from Coaled Water inside. Kate and Effie had bought at least ten baskets between them, so we were theoretically about to knock on ten houses before running away. It seemed like a weird way to tick off an entire street full of people.
“Are you sure that it’s okay to do this today?” I asked. “You said ‘Beltane’ was tomorrow, is that significant?”
“That depends,” Kate grinned. “If you’re Wiccan, then yeah. But the rest of us are probably fine.”
“I don’t feel reassured by that,” I grimaced.
“Dude, we are giving out flowers, for free, to strangers,” Kate replied, leaving dramatic pauses between words. “We are gonna get hit by a freight train of good karma, I just know it! This will put a smile on everyone’s face, and we will get to walk around in the sunshine, everyone’s a winner. I even brought extra sunscreen, so we don’t burst into flames!”
“Me too!” Effie laughed, pulling a spray bottle of SPF fifty out of her purse. “Jinx!”
“Don’t be joking about jinxes right now,” I moaned. “Which house are we hitting up first then?”
We were on a quiet street that was lined with tall trees, each in full bloom with pink flowers and the scent of freshly cut grass hung in the air. I loved my beach-side home, but this street was something else entirely.
“Probably best if we just stick to this street,” Kate began. “If we go to the lower ground then we will just be giving flowers to our neighbors and that feels weird.”
Kate and Effie lived in the lower ground, an area of the main island that flooded every time it rained. Their home was held up on twenty-foot-high wooden stilts, so it didn’t get damaged in bad weather.
“Wouldn’t giving stuff to your neighbors be good though? Do you know the people on this street?” I asked.
“Nope!” Effie answered. “But the lower ground is boring. There are weird people living on the far side of the island and I’m not gonna be walking that far to hand out flowers, and this street is so pretty!”
“Yeah, I know Mil—” Kate stopped herself. She was about to say Miller’s name, likely to point out that his house wasn’t all that far away.
“Look, I’ll go first, and you can see how easy it is.” Effie grabbed a handful of yellow flowers and tucked them into the basket in her left hand. She ran up the path through the front yard of the closest house, placed the basket on the doorstep and rang the bell.
Kate laughed at the panic on Effie’s face as she turned and began to sprint back towards us, leaping over the fence like a hurdle jumper running track.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked Kate.
“There’s no one home,” she said. “I can sense it. Nobody was ever going to catch her, and she looks like she is being chased by a police dog!”
“I’m glad you find it so funny,” Effie moaned. “It’s your turn.”
Kate filled a basket with flowers and ran up the path of the neighboring house, rang the bell and then ran back towards us.
“You are still holding the basket!” I shouted as Kate approached. She’d forgotten to put it down. Kate spun around, threw the basket in the air and used her magic to guide it down onto the step.
“Cheater!” Effie scolded.
“I guess I’m next,” I said. “I feel like everyone is out at the market, no one is ever going to catch us.”
“You’re probably right, just do one and then we’ll hang on to the rest until tomorrow,” Effie shrugged. “We can go grab some lunch after this, and then—” Effie was interrupted by an incoming call on her cell phone.
I picked up one of the baskets that Effie and Kate had piled up on the sidewalk, stuffed a few flowers into it and made my way up the path of the next house along the street. I glanced back at Kate and saw that she was chasing after a butterfly, not unlike a cat in a meadow.
Normally their attempts to take my mind off my problems were a little better than this. Although they had been keeping me occupied as much as possible since I discovered the woman in Miller’s house, maybe they were just out of ideas.
This front yard wasn’t quite as elaborate as the others. There was a lawn area that had been mowed recently, but no blossoming shrubbery. The driveway had a motorbike parked on it and I tried to think if I had seen a single person riding a bike like that since I moved here. I put the basket down on the step with my right hand while my left started knocking on the door.
I realized that I was putting the basket down by a pair of shoes that had been left outside. Not just shoes but hiking boots. Ryder’s hiking boots. Oh no. I’d already knocked. Would he be home or at the markets? Maybe he was working, there was no way he would close his store when there were so many people in town today, right?
I turned and lifted my left foot to start running. I needed to get out of here and off the street, just in case Ryder was home and he saw me standing outside with Effie and Kate. What if this wasn’t even his house? Maybe he had a new girlfriend, and this was her house and he’d walked here and left his boots outside. I was spiraling at this point.
My foot didn’t really move, not far anyway. It seemed that the Chuck Taylors on my feet were no longer tied in a neat bow, but had shoelaces loosely trailing along the ground. If I was lucky, then I would be able to just run away and deal with the shoelace issue somewhere else. If I was really lucky, then my magic would fix the laces and I could get out of here in one piece.
As I’d said to Sage, though, I was having a run of bad luck recently. While all these thoughts were rushing through my head, my imagination flooding my mind with images of Ryder kissing random women and magic shoelaces, I was hurtling to the ground. I’d tripped, my hands barely out in front of me before I hit the ground.
My ears were ringing. I’d hit my head on the sidewalk and I could feel stinging on the palms of my hands from grazing them on the ground. Voices surrounded me and I could easily identify Effie’s and Kate’s, but there were two other people there that were talking over each other.
I opened my eyes and was not entirely surprised to see Ryder leaning over me. I sat up and tried to push him away, but the dizziness caused me to struggle, and he sat on the ground beside me to prop me up.
“You should bring her inside,” Ryder said.
“No thanks,” Kate hissed. “She’d be better off at home. We can get Brielle to check her out, she doesn’t need you.” Brielle was their cousin; she was a doctor.
“Brielle could come here,” Ryder replied. “She can lie down and—”
“The answer is no,” Effie replied.
“Wh-?” I groaned.
“There is no use getting into an argument about it,” someone said. I knew that voice. I looked over in the direction of the house and saw a figure approaching. It was the woman that I had seen in Miller’s house. Why was she here with Ryder? Who was this person that had invaded my life?
“I want to go home,” I mumbled.
“I can take her,” Ryder said.
“No, we will take her. You are obviously busy,” Kate said, grabbing hold of me and pulling me up onto my feet. What did she mean by that?
“I’ll get food, you get Sadie,” Effie called out. She was running down the street towards the market and before I had chance to say anything else, I was surrounded by a flash of white light. The lasting image was of Ryder’s concerned
expression, and the indifferent look on the face of the woman behind him.
Kate had used her magic to transport us back into my kitchen.
“When did you all learn to do magic like this? I feel like you weren’t doing this a few weeks ago,” I said.
“Magic has trends, just like fashion. Some things are classic, some things come and go,” Kate explained. “Transport magic is kinda like shoulder pads, they are really in right now.”
“Are shoulder pads in?” I asked.
“Of course they are! Haven’t you seen Heathers?”
“The movie from 1988? That Heathers?” I chuckled. My head ached as I laughed, but the pain was wearing off. I hadn’t knocked myself out, so I was grateful for that at least.
“Are you trying to tell me that movies from thirty-three years ago aren’t dictating the current fashion of people on the street? Ha! You’re kidding yourself,” Kate laughed. She poured a glass of water for me and sat down at the kitchen table in a chair across from me. My morning had started with us here, it was a full circle moment.
I took a sip from the glass, let out a long sigh and then looked over at Kate who was now painting her fingernails. Where did all the polish come from?
“Is anyone going to tell me who that woman is?” I asked.
“Woman? What woman?” Kate replied. She was almost as bad a liar as I was.
“You know exactly what woman,” I said. She didn’t look up to make eye contact and I felt as if the answer to my question must be so terrible that she didn’t think I could handle it. Kate, of course, was a mind reader, so she quickly realized that my imagination was getting away from me.
“Look,” she sighed. “It’s not what you think.”
“Oh? Then why not tell me the truth?”
At that moment, Effie burst into the kitchen with her cousin, Brielle. “I brought us lunch!” Effie announced.
“Hey, Sadie,” Brielle smiled. “I’m going to need to check you out and make sure you haven’t given yourself a traumatic brain injury.”