Old-School Witch

by A. A. Albright

  Goosebumps rose on my bare arms, and I had fond thoughts of Norma’s cardigan. ‘It’s definitely chilly.’

  The lights had been shut off for the ceremony, and torches had been brought in – when I say torches, I mean the creepy kind with flames, rather than the useful kind with batteries. It was another part of the traditional ceremony. The two coffins that were arranged behind the priest were part of it, too, apparently. All in all, I was glad that Jared and I hadn’t gotten together, because if we ever tied the knot, I definitely wouldn’t fancy this sort of wedding. Although seeing as Jared was nothing like his dad, I doubted he would have forced it upon me the way Ron had with Nollaig.

  I peeked over at Dylan. He was seated next to Edward and Roarke, looking amazing in a suit. His black hair flickered in the candlelight, and I couldn’t help but think of how nice it would be to have his arms wrapped around me right now.

  Pru turned to her mother. ‘Now’s the time, you know. Getting married in this kind of ceremony makes divorcing dad pretty difficult, so …’

  Nollaig winced. ‘I can’t believe that I’ve put you in the situation where that’s the kind of thing you have to say to me. And I know you’re right, Pru, I do. I should think carefully about this. But after all these centuries, I’m just as crazy about your dad as ever. How many other couples can say that?’

  A pained expression took over Pru’s face, though she said nothing as the wedding march began. Well, it was a slightly creepy, vampire version of the wedding march. But Nollaig seemed to find it romantic, and that was the main thing.

  We walked down the aisle we’d created, through the centre of the seating. As we got closer to Ron and Greg, I saw Pru pause temporarily, a strange little breath leaving her mouth, and her hand rushing to stop it. Her lashes started to flutter, and during a dip in the music, I could hear her heart beating like a drum.

  Grace shook her head beside me. ‘When is she finally going to admit she has a thing for our Greg?’

  I would have replied, but I was too busy shivering. Had the power gone out here, too? With the lights off, it was impossible to tell, but something was wrong with the central heating, that was for sure

  ‘Vampires, friends and family,’ said the priest in a voice that creaked like old timber. ‘Let the ceremony begin.’ He nodded to Pru and Greg. ‘It is time for you to open the coffins.’

  Of course it was. I watched with the blandest expression I could muster, while Greg and Pru moved to the coffins. As they walked, the priest began to chant in a language I didn’t recognise, and Ron and Nollaig joined in at certain points.

  Greg had clearly been prepared for this moment, but I was very glad I was no longer the maid of honour. As the coffins were opened, Ron and Nollaig walked towards them, and the priest stopped chanting and said, ‘In these coffins you must lie, a reminder of the death that comes to all but our kind.’

  ‘And zombies,’ I muttered beneath my breath.

  There were steps leading up so they could get in easily, and as they arranged themselves in the coffins (Nollaig’s seemed to have been built with her dress in mind), I found myself shivering again.

  I glanced over at my mother, noting the worried expression on her face. A heavy feeling formed in my stomach. I began to sense that something was very, very wrong about this wedding. And just as that thought crossed my mind, the creepy torches flickered out, and the tavern was plunged into darkness.

  24. Eagerly Awaiting

  The torches flared to life once more, and everyone in the room gasped. Well, everyone except Ron. If anything, he cringed.

  I wasn’t sure why he was cringing, but there were many reasons I was gasping.

  Where once there had been two coffins, there were now three – the third one, in the centre of Ron’s and Nollaig’s, was firmly closed. Before it stood Catriona Eager, dressed in a very different outfit than usual. Her sandals and socks had been replaced with black, thigh-high boots. Her high-necked blouse and long skirt had become a tight, red dress that barely covered her rear.

  ‘It’s her,’ said Greg, his voice shocked. ‘How could we have been so stupid? She’s been possessed by the witch. She’s not Catriona Eager anymore.’

  She gave us all as self-satisfied smile. ‘Yes, it did take you an awfully long time to figure that one out, didn’t it? There is no Catriona Eager anymore, there is only me, the witch who possessed her. A very powerful – and now immortal – witch called Bella Foyle.’

  ‘The teacher from the yearbook photo?’ questioned Greg. ‘But you died along with most of the kids. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh dear.’ She flicked her hair and looked at him with distaste. ‘So you didn’t figure out quite everything, did you Greg? Yes, I am the schoolteacher from the yearbook photograph. And of course I’m supposed to be dead, you moron. One can’t very well come back from the dead if one hasn’t actually died.’ She rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. ‘It seems as though I shall have to carry on eagerly awaiting the moment one of you grows some brains and provides a real challenge.’

  No one laughed at her pun. I found it quite funny myself, but I was too busy staring at what was on her shoulder to laugh. There was an owl perched there, staring at me with luminous yellow eyes. I felt as though the universe was shouting a big, loud, ‘Duh!’ in my direction. Of course the ghost-owl was Bella Foyle’s familiar. I’d first seen it the day the stone was removed – the day when Bella entered Catriona’s body and turned a sweet and shy lady into a nightmare.

  As I gave Bella Foyle a slack-jawed stare, she wrinkled her nose and said, ‘What? What’s on my shoulder?’ brushing it absentmindedly.

  Universe, I take your ‘Duh!’ and raise you an ‘Aha!’ Because at that moment, it occurred to me that Bella couldn’t see her former familiar. That seemed like something I ought to file for future reference. So, instead of mentioning the owl, I shrugged and said, ‘I just think your taste in clothes was better when you were Catriona, that’s all.’

  Her eyes rounded. ‘I’m very glad I couldn’t possess your body. You’re a sarcastic little so-and-so, aren’t you?’

  Aaand the universe came back with a bigger and better, ‘Duh!’ Of course she’d tried to possess me. I’d felt ill, just before Catriona had, right at the moment Mark Moon moved the stone. I’d put it down to cheap champagne and strong coffee, but it made sense now – an attempted possession by Bella Foyle would make anyone sick to their stomach.

  I ought to point out that, from the moment of Bella’s unexpected arrival, the wedding guests had not simply stood around doing nothing. It was a tavern filled with supernaturals, after all. Witches and wizards were shooting spells; werewolves, weredogs and vampires were going on the attack. A sensible few had even attempted to dial for the Wayfarers, and to leave the tavern. But no one was getting anywhere. There was some sort of boundary around Bella Foyle, and there was something preventing us from leaving – and even from using our phones.

  I’d been making some subtle moves myself, seeing into the magic Bella had used and trying to shatter it. My grandmother had taught me ways to sing quietly, within myself, to direct my power. So far, nothing I tried was working. I concentrated on the magic of the boundary around Bella. I could see tiny cells, like the hexagonal cells in a beehive, within most forms of magic. Sometimes they took on different formations, but the basic structure was always similar.

  But this … this magic was coloured and shaped differently. It was red and round, lots of teeny-tiny concaved discs, piled on top of one another, thick and impenetrable. And the symbols within those discs were nothing like the symbols within any magic I knew. They were static, and shaped like lopsided crosses, the same symbol repeating in each and every disc. Every time I sent my magic their way, it just bounced right off.

  I kept on trying, nonetheless, the same way everyone was trying their best to fight Bella. Well, almost everyone. In a whole room full of crazy, two people were calm. The priest was one – he stood still, his hands clasped at his waist. The other was
Ron. He just sat in his coffin, staring with that same cringing expression at Bella. But then he would, wouldn’t he? If I had to bet upon it, I’d say he’d known that Catriona had been possessed by Bella for days.

  ‘Don’t bother with your silly little spells,’ Bella called out to the room. ‘They’re about as much use as your mobile phones right now. We have made each and every one of you incommunicado, as they say. And before you start to think that the Wayfarers will somehow come to your rescue, that is not going to happen. We’ve got far more power at our disposal than any of them can fight. Oh, silly me!’ She giggled loudly. ‘You must be wondering what I mean by we.’ She snapped her fingers, and two figures appeared. ‘Meet my friends,’ she said. ‘Without them, none of this would have been possible.’

  This time, no one gasped, because not a single person was surprised to see Roger and Rita Balfe.

  ‘The de Balfe’s,’ Bella said, ‘have spent many, many years working on this. They facilitated my death, and my rebirth into this fabulous new body. Catriona did not make the most of her assets.’

  Rita slash Viviana gave me a guilty look, then stared at her red-polished nails instead. Darn tootin’ she ought to feel guilty. She’d properly reeled me in with that little conversation at the Flying Club. Sure, I’d suspected that the blame was being laid at the butler’s door to cover up for the major culprits, but I’d actually believed her when she said she couldn’t stand to look at her husband. And yet here she was, by his side.

  Roger stepped forward, baring his fangs and holding a goblet of something (my money was on cola). ‘Vell, vell, vell,’ he said. ‘And you all thought I vas a mere playacting wampire. Now, you know I am a force to be reckoned vith.’

  Pru cupped a hand to her ear. ‘Vat did you say? A wampire? Vat’s a wampire? And reckoned vith? Have you got a speech impediment, Roger?’

  Roger angrily flourished his cloak. ‘I do not sound that ridiculous!’

  Rita gave him a little shrug. ‘You kind of do.’

  ‘I think it’s time to move the conversation along!’ Bella bellowed, turning to the guests. ‘I have the feeling that you might be wondering how all of this came about. So let me enlighten you. It all started in the Year of the Walrus.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ drawled Pru. ‘We all know what happened, you psycho. You wanted more power and a little bit of immortality, so you convinced the dumbest students in the school to help you out.’

  ‘Hey! We are not dumb,’ Roger protested. ‘Bella chose us because we were the best and brightest students in her school.’

  ‘No.’ Nollaig shook her head. ‘Bella chose you because you’re vampires, and the only people she ever had any time for are witches and vampires.’ She gave Bella a filthy look. ‘I remember you now. It’s all coming back. You and Ron had an affair. I didn’t care about that, mind you. He always had affairs. That’s just the sort of jerk he is. But when I heard you talking about your horrific views on the superiority of vampires and witches, I told him that if he didn’t say goodbye to you forever, I would kill you both with my own bare hands.’

  ‘And I was very taken by your passion, my darling Nollaig,’ said Ron.

  ‘Shut up, Ron!’ Nollaig shrieked.

  ‘Let’s move the story along, shall we?’ Bella looked a little irritated by Ron’s comment to Nollaig, but she soldiered on like the little psycho she was. ‘Radu, Konstantin and Viviana agreed to help me. They–’

  ‘I think you’ll find their names are Jack, Roger and Rita,’ Pru interrupted. ‘And, idiots that they clearly are, they agreed to burn the school down, sacrificing all of their classmates and teachers so you could come back to life as a more powerful and now immortal witch. We know, Bella. We know, and we’re not impressed. But there is something we’re not sure of. Did your three little idiots leave you to rot there for a few decades so they could get a break from your annoying voice? Or did they genuinely forget like the rest of us?’

  Rita raised a hand. ‘We forgot, actually,’ she said. She sounded far quieter than when she was arguing with Grace, or when she was drunk at the Flying Club, that was for sure. I was beginning to think she was so strident in public because she had to be the quiet little wife at home. ‘Jack and Roger set the fire, while I kept watch. Roger dropped his bag, and he almost burned his own fat behind running back to get it. After that, Felim Moon’s memory spell made us forget. Even the bag was forgotten about, until Jack found it in the attic. As soon as we opened up the yearbook, everything came back to us.’

  ‘We knew we couldn’t leave our dear Bella dead a moment longer,’ said Roger. ‘So we came up with a daring and ingenious plan. Radu volunteered to be the scapegoat, should it come down to it. Obviously I couldn’t, since all of my fabulous money would be needed in the future.’

  Bella gave him an indulgent smile, and waved a hand again. Felim Moon appeared beside her, looking exhausted and old. Beneath a flowing purple cardigan he wore a T-shirt that said: Wizards Do It Better.

  ‘I have that exact same T-shirt,’ said Greg, before clearing his throat. ‘Probably not important right now. Go ahead, Bella. You might as well bore us all some more, seeing as we’re quite literally a captive audience.’

  Bella shot a look of disdain in Greg’s direction, and took Felim by the arm. ‘This old wizard wasn’t quite so enthusiastic, as you’ll all have guessed. Even with some very serious threats to his grandson’s life, he tried to scupper our plans at every turn. He warned Mark not to move the stone. He even replaced the real Magic Binder ring with a fake, so that when my friends forced him to carry out the ritual that would return my power to me, it wouldn’t work.’

  Felim looked at me. ‘As soon as I saw that Ben had that yearbook, I went straight into action. I made a fake ring and planted it at my farm, and I gave the real ring to Ben. I enchanted it so he wouldn’t want to take it off. I knew I was about to be kidnapped, so my only hope was that you’d see the ring, Aisling. See its power, before these maniacs could get it back. I em … I also made sure that it would be impossible to compel Ben, as long as he was wearing the ring.’

  ‘The ring you found in the butler’s room was real, before you ask,’ said Roger. ‘But we’d used it all up by then.’ He gave me a snide, sneering smile. ‘We knew that the ring the wizard tried to palm off on us was a fake from the off. I stomped it into the ground with my own feet and made Radu get the real one off Ben’s dead hand. The ring wasn’t the only reason we killed Ben, of course. He’d changed his mind about the school, and because of this wizard’s enchantment on the ring, we couldn’t easily compel him either. We’d waited far too long for our beloved teacher’s return. Killing the busybody was our only option.’

  ‘Probably not your only option,’ I argued. ‘I mean, you could have overpowered him, taken the ring and then compelled him. But that probably doesn’t satisfy crazy blood lust quite so well, does it? And what about Marnie? Why did you kill her?’

  ‘Because we knew she was Felim’s witch friend,’ said Roger. ‘The one who had helped him perform the spell to seal Bella in. That’s why.’

  Rita shook her head. ‘No, that’s not why. We had no idea Marnie even existed until recently. Roger ordered Jack to kill Norma to get the heat off us while we figured things out. Jack needed to be arrested, to give us more time, so he left prints at the scene and made his guilt look obvious. He had no idea he’d killed Norma’s twin by mistake.’

  I looked carefully at Rita. Her voice had been shaking, and she still had that guilty look about her as she replied. But despite her nerves, she had replied. She’d told the truth, and let us all see her husband’s bluster for what it was. Maybe she wasn’t such a lost cause, after all.

  ‘Enough!’ Bella glared at Rita, and then turned to me. ‘It’s time to meet my next little helper – someone you’ll be very glad to see, Miss Smith.’

  I doubted I’d be glad to see anyone who was in league with Bella Foyle, but I was especially displeased to see her ‘next little helper,’ seeing as
it was Dylan’s ex-girlfriend, and the reason he’d become a dayturner in the first place.

  As usual, Darina Berry looked like a supermodel, with long, slim legs and chestnut hair. Around her neck was an Impervium locket – my Impervium locket, gifted to me by Dylan and stolen from my room.

  ‘That’s your locket,’ said Dylan.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t realised that he was beside me, his whole stance protective as he stared Darina down. My mother was with him too, and she reached out and gripped my hand.

  ‘I’ve been trying to break the boundary spell on the building,’ she whispered. ‘But it’s too strong for me. You or your dad might be able to, but he’s not here. Can you …’

  ‘I’m already trying,’ I whispered back. When my granny taught me how to lock people in to a property, she also taught me how to break out of such a spell. After a lot of yelling on both our parts, I’d managed to learn – but now, none of the tricks she taught me would work. ‘But that bunch of nutters have done … I don’t know what, but something. My magic’s on the fritz.’

  ‘Try singing,’ my mother suggested.

  I didn’t want to tell her that I had been singing, in the quiet way the Queen had taught me. Maybe it was time to get loud. I opened my mouth, directing my terrible voice at the magic of the boundary, but no matter how loudly (or how awfully) I sang, I made not the slightest dent.

  ‘Oh, Dylan, Dylan, Dylan.’ Darina shook her head and smirked. ‘You’d rather this narky crow than me.’

  ‘She might be narky,’ said Dylan, ‘and she might be a crow, but she’s worth a million of you. I think I always knew that you’d be at the bottom of this, somewhere.’

  Darina cocked a brow. ‘Oh really? You knew I’d be involved with bringing back a powerful and immortal witch from the ruins of a dumpy old school? We both know you’re not that smart, Dylan. Let’s face it – you’re more brawn than brains, aren’t you?’

  ‘What I still can’t figure out,’ he went on, ‘is why you’re so obsessed with vampires. You too, Bella. You’re both witches. Isn’t it about time you cut the theatrics and told us why you’re really here?’