by Noah Layton
‘Follow a certain path… You mean like changing their lifestyle?’
‘No – literally following a certain path. You can send somebody or something in whatever direction you want.’
Scarlett showed me the motions and the incantation, and a moment later she was stood a few yards behind me, leaning against the doorframe while I pointed my staff at the hobgoblin.
‘Rethienker,’ I said slowly and clearly. The hobgoblin’s eyelids burst open, and I took an instinctive step back. I wasn’t afraid, but after the stupid amount of trouble that it had caused me I wasn’t exactly crazy about the little bastard either.
‘Hold your ground, Tom,’ Scarlett said quietly. ‘He won’t bite… Probably…’
‘Probably?’
‘Just point your staff where you want to lead him.’
I followed her instructions, aiming my staff along a nearby trail that I was making up as I went along. The hobgoblin flashed a look at Scarlett and I passively before scampering slowly along the rafters on its spindly limbs, stopping whenever it reached the point of my aim and running its thin hands over the spot.
It was like using a laser pointer to guide a cat, just without any sign of a red dot.
For the next few minutes I guided the hobgoblin around the room until it seemed to lose interest in my half-assed efforts to keep it entertained and returned to its spot on the rafters where it dozed back to sleep.
‘I see why you guys need a High Order,’ I said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘Spells like this… I can’t imagine all of the shit you could get up to if you were allowed to use these spells without any repercussions. Same reason we have police and government. Let people do what they want and they turn into animals.’
***
When night finally fell and 10pm rolled around, I exited the house and moved into the garden, looking about myself in the still night air. In my hand I weighed up a new staff, which Lois had supplied me with earlier in the day, that could retract and slide back into itself, making it half the size of the ones I had been using previously and therefore much more easily concealed.
‘This is insane…’ I muttered to myself, taking a deep breath but finding myself laughing a little.
A few days ago I had been on my way to college… Now it was two days later, a Sunday night, a night when I should have been prepping for college the next day, but instead I was in the back yard of a witches’ coven, waiting for just one of three sexy witches to come greet me so that we could carry out what she referred to as detective work.
It was my choice to do whatever I wanted, sure – like the girls said, I could leave whenever I wanted, and there was no way I would be able to convince anybody of what I had experienced. And even if I went to the trouble of videoing something extraordinary, what would be the point? Even if I was reluctant to admit to myself that every supernatural story I had ever heard probably had some basis in reality, the world was so much more interesting with the knowledge of these hidden, amazing things… Even if half of them seemed to want me dead.
Then there were the girls – I had never met anybody like any of them, never mind living with three of them and having had the best sex of my life with one of them last night.
Just as I was beginning to get lost to daydreaming about it all, the back door opened and the silhouette of Scarlett appeared, brandishing a pair of staffs, one in each hand.
‘More fighting?’ I asked. ‘I thought that was Lois’s department.’
‘It is,’ Scarlett said, ‘but these aren’t staffs.’
Scarlett threw one to me, I catching it much more expertly in comparison to the fumble with the staff from Lois yesterday, and hearing a rustling at the base. The woodwork felt different to my touch, but there was something else – the bristles at the base.
‘Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me…’ I said in awe, examining what she had handed to me. ‘This is a broomstick.’
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ Scarlett laughed. ‘Did you like that? Because… You know, that mortal detective, and he…’
‘Yeah, I get it,’ I laughed, not at the joke but at Scarlett’s total lack of awareness. She may have been a rule-breaker and had got around a little back in college, but she had little awareness of pop-culture. ‘So how does this work?’
‘First we need to make ourselves a little more subtle.’ Reaching into her pocket, Scarlett produced two small leaves, handing one to me. ‘Place it on your tongue for a few seconds, then swallow.’
I was too pre-occupied with the prospect of actually flying to question whatever this mystery substance was – the pataglonia leaf, sure, but it was wet to the touch, having clearly been soaked in something. Trusting Scarlett, and the possibility that it wouldn’t make me vomit as she had said hours ago, I slipped the leaf between my lips, soaking in the taste of sugar and sour cream before swallowing the leaf amongst a bitter aftertaste, slapping my neck a little to force it down and wincing.
‘It’ll take a minute or so for that to kick in,’ Scarlett said. ‘In the meantime let’s give you a crash course.’
‘I hope you don’t mean literally. What even was that?’
‘You’ll see in a minute, I told you.’
‘Why don’t you just dispense with the build-up and tell me?’
‘Because it’s funnier to see your reaction than it is to spoil it now.’
‘Seriously? I’m just your play-thing, aren’t I?’
‘Pretty much,’ she laughed, ‘Pretty damned hot plaything, though… Anyway, here’s how it works. Mount the broom and take control of it, the way you would a horse or any other animal you’d ride. Brooms don’t have a mind of their own, but if you don’t tame them properly they can be a little unwieldy. Treat it as a weapon to be wielded. It’s your possession, and nothing more.’
‘Got it,’ I replied. I did as Scarlett said, swinging the broom into place before throwing one leg over it and looking over to her. ‘Y’know, I always wondered why you never see guys riding these things in old drawings and pictures… Now I think I know.’
‘Wh- Oh…’ Scarlett glanced down at my waist as I shamelessly manoeuvred myself beneath my jeans. ‘Don’t worry about it. When you sit atop the broom it’ll feel more… Natural.’
‘If you say so, but if anything gets trapped I’m setting this thing right back down.’
‘At least you’ll only feel it instead of seeing it too.’
‘What do you-’
But before I had a chance to ask my question, a startling change came over me. It wasn’t nausea, wasn’t sickness – it was a feeling of lightness. I kept a hold on the broom with one hand… At least I thought that I was, because there was no sign of my freaking hand anywhere.
Or my other hand.
Or any of me.
‘What the hell did you give me? Where… Where am I?! And where are you?!’
‘Calm down,’ Scarlett said hurriedly – her voice alone, and the broom floating in mid-air between her non-existent legs. ‘It’s an invisibility draft. It’ll only last around ten minutes… Hopefully, anyway. And don’t worry if you feel a little strange. Happens to everybody the first time they do it, much like everything that witches practice – including flying a broom. Follow me.’
The broom suddenly rose into the air before me, followed by a light laughing.
‘All right, stop showing off and tell me how to do this.’
‘Just look where you want to go,’ Scarlett’s voice said, the broom flying in circles around the garden just over my head. ‘It’s like any physical motion – you need to will yourself to do it. Think it and translate it into an action.’
Any second now I expected to slam into wakefulness on a 2pm afternoon after a night of heavy drinking with Joe – more things that I thought impossible had happened in the last few days than I could count on both hands, and yet this was the most unbelievable by far. If you asked a hundred people what superpower they would want, my money would be on that vast majority sayi
ng flying, including myself.
So when I looked up to the sky, focusing on where I wanted to go, feeling my invisible feet leave the ground, my invisible breath caught in my invisible throat, and my invisible heart felt like it skipped a motherfucking invisible beat.
‘Ho-o-ly shit…’ I said shakily, I and the broom rising up around ten feet into the night air.
‘Don’t panic,’ Scarlett said surely. ‘That’s how you die. Just hold on tight and will it to where you want to go. The best advice for starters is to use an object within range as a reference point for depth. It helps you figure out how high you want to go and where you want to go. You can use my invisible ass as a reference point for now…’
A let out a nervous, uncontrollable laugh as Scarlett’s broomstick took off from the yard and rose into the sky higher and higher. Fear struck me immediately – I had never been afraid of heights, but in my training as a warlock thus far I had confronted a lot of scary shit, and there was no way that I was going to give up now.
Within seconds we were thirty feet in the air, then fifty, the houses below turning into a moving blueprint lit by the occasional bedroom light, their stoic fronts illuminated by streetlamps in their own private worlds.
Following Scarlett at a steady pace from ten yards behind as we flew over the street and through the suburbs, I realised that I hadn’t taken a breath in half a minute.
Exhaling sharply, I suddenly lost my balance. ‘Woah!’
‘You all right?!’
‘Yeah, I’m fine… Any advice on not dying?’
‘Don’t think about what you’re doing. Will it. There should be no words in your mind.’
Fear and regretting every stupid choice in my entire life could have easily dominated my mind, like every cringe-worthy memory appears when trying to fall asleep, but for once in my life I decided to let myself go to the moment.
And then, like a thousand witches and warlocks that had come before me, I was flying.
The fact that my body was beyond light made it feel like my mind was riding on the night air, turning into nothing but a pair of eyes experiencing my hometown in a way that nobody but the witches had ever experienced before.
Following Scarlett’s broom we soared over the lights of the town, moving over bars with smokers outside and closed shopfronts, over slowly moving cars and the jagged edges of claustrophobic buildings, every single one of them completely beyond holding us down or containing us.
‘How’s it going back there?’ Scarlett asked as we moved towards the opposite side of town, the city ahead beginning to loom up enormously and spectacularly.
‘I’m doing fucking amazing…’
‘You catch on fast! Come on up here!’
‘With you? How the hell do I do that?’
‘Take control for yourself – don’t worry about following me. Remember, you’re in charge of the broom! Don’t let it lead you!’
A swelling confidence, brought on quickly by the roaring thud of my heart, quickly filled my body. My form picked up speed, hurtling ahead atop my broom as I moved to Scarlett’s side, the pair of us nothing but a pair of sticks flying through the sky.
‘This is insane…’
‘I know, right? And believe me, it never gets old.’
‘I don’t see how it ever could. Where are we headed to?’
‘Invisibility draft doesn’t have long left. We’re gonna set down in an abandoned lot in the city, then it’s just a little walk.’
‘Couldn’t we have just taken a world-window to get there?’
‘Are you seriously wishing that you didn’t get to literally fly tonight?’
We flew towards the city, the spectacular skyline looming up before us like a futuristic metropolis. Maybe the depths and the gutters were filled with things I didn’t even want to think about, just like every other city, but from a distance it was a shining image of another world beyond the reaches of, and I can’t believe that I’m saying this, mere mortals.
Instantly I reminded myself of two things; Scarlett’s advice not to think, and not sounding like a total fucking asshole.
The buildings beneath us rose taller and taller until the brightness of tenth story windows was beginning to illuminate us too much. Just as I was about to ask Scarlett what she was playing at in getting so close to such a brightly lit place, she lead us down to a more remote patch of ground behind a blacked out diner, circling down as if we were on the rungs of a spring until we were just a few feet off the ground, before touching down on the weed-ridden asphalt.
Well, Scarlett touched down lightly at least. My feet slammed into the ground and I stumbled forwards, almost faceplanting before swinging to my side and regaining my balance.
I stepped off my broom, feeling my hands shake with adrenaline while Scarlett laughed across at me, her figure slowly coming back into view as my own started to reappear too.
‘At the end there it looked like an invisible man was playing swords with a stick…’ Scarlett laughed hysterically.
‘Very funny,’ I laughed, catching my breath as our forms completely returned. Scarlett’s blue eyes looked startling in the lot, her hair windswept sharply behind her head. She retrieved a bobble from her pocket and tied her hair back, and we set off to our next destination.
Chapter Eight
Leaving the brooms propped up against a wall in the darkness of the diner’s parking lot, we headed out into the world of the living and walked the city streets, Scarlett wrapping her arm into mine and snuggling into me.
‘It’s been way too long since I’ve been with a guy…’
I laughed and shook my head. ‘You’re pretty open about that sort of thing, huh?’
‘Well, it’s like I said, when you’re told not to do it all you can think about is doing that exact thing.’
‘Lois seems to cope pretty well. And Brianna… Well, she’s half-succubus, so I guess it’s her job to be like that.’
‘Well those sorts of things can have an impact on you. We often hold onto things from our past forever. There must be something from your past that still bothers you.’
I thought for a moment as we passed bars and storefronts, past trios and duos laughing hysterically in a haze of beer and smoke, steam vents ushering up the spoils of heat in a blinding, pleasant haze.
‘There are things that I regret having done, sure,’ I started, ‘but most of all it’s the things that I regret not doing.
‘How very poetic,’ Scarlett giggled, biting the tip of her finger and squeezing my arm. ‘So tell me.’
‘All right,’ I grinned. ‘I’ve never actually told anybody this before… Well, a few years at the start of college, I went out of state for spring break. After my dad passed he had left me some money, but on the condition that I took at least one holiday to cheer myself up with some of it. He knew the end was coming, and he didn’t want to be too down… So I went with a few buddies to this bar in the Dominican Republic. We could drink, we could party, and there wasn’t exactly a lack of girls there too.’
‘I’m listening…’
‘So we’re at this bar one night, my buddies head home, and I decided to stay out for a little while longer. I’m at the bar ordering a drink, and this girl comes up to it too. She was… Classier than most of the others. Hair tied up. Black jeans. Band t-shirt, but in an elegant way, y’know? She shot me a look up and down, and I saw it out of the corner of my eye but I didn’t look back…’
‘Why not?’
‘Because… Well, she had been dancing all night on this lowered floor in the centre of the club, and she put everybody else to shame. She was out for a good time, y’know? So she looks at me, does a tequila slammer, and heads back to the dance floor. She’s got a whole corner to herself. Nobody dared go near her, out of a mix of jealousy and fear I guess, none of the girls and none of the guys, and this was spring break, so there were a lot of good-looking people around. And while I’m stood at the bar, trying to look all cool, she keeps looking over at me every
so often… Until this other guy finally musters up the courage to go over to her and starts dancing with her. They start making out, and… I left.’
Scarlett stared at me, mouth agape.
‘Again, I return to the question; why?!’
‘Because… She was dancing, and I don’t dance. Or more accurately I can’t dance.’
‘So what? Everybody was probably drunk, it’s dark in there, and if you hadn’t noticed most people are terrible at dancing anyway.’
‘I don’t know, I just… I don’t know.’
‘Well, if that’s the worst thing that’s happened to you then I envy you, man.’
‘There are much worse things, believe me. But they’re not things that I dwell on too much. I couldn’t have done anything to change them.’
‘They’re the things I think about the most… It makes me wonder why we can’t change them. It’s that kind of thing that has motivated witchcraft much of the time. I mean, why do you think people started doing dealings with devils in the first place? Bad things happen for no reason, we can’t comprehend that they wouldn’t happen for no reason, and we let our rage get the better of us by making stupid deals.’
I frowned, suddenly realising what Scarlett meant.
‘Holy shit, that’s wise.’
‘Not just a pretty face. We’re almost there.’
I had been so enthralled in the conversation with her that I hadn’t even realised the course that we were taking through town – maybe if I was I wouldn’t have agreed to it in the first place.
Every city has a red-light district, regardless of how well-to-do it seems; there are always parts, no matter how small, that even the cops don’t dare to go, even in packs.
That’s all relative, though – task a squad of cars with flashing lights and equip eight men with armor-piercing rounds and they might take up the offer, but with it just being myself and Scarlett on my arm, I would in any other circumstance have figured that maybe we were at a disadvantage.
But the people around us didn’t know who we were – a witch and a warlock, the latter role of which I was steadily beginning to adjust to. Maybe it was the leftover exhilaration from the flight to the city, but the confidence was still brewing and simmering within me.
