by Mara Webb
The figure took a step into the room. I could barely make out the silhouette now, it blended into the dark room too seamlessly. Another step forward. They were looking for us. Maybe they knew that we were witches and suspected we had just disappeared using our magic. I had never done that, but Jen must have. Why didn’t she bust us out of here? I couldn’t even turn to face her and try to gauge her expression. I heard a third step; they were walking into the room. Maybe we could sneak out of this open door, but how could we ever be quiet enough to move undetected? A fourth step. We had to take a chance.
I slowly reached back and grabbed Jen’s hand and tugged at it to let her know we were moving. The figure was still inspecting the room in front of them, they didn’t see the movement behind. I crept out of the room as silently as I could with Jen following behind me. It was working. Just then, the laptop bag Jen was carrying got caught on the chair inside Joseph’s office and dragged it loudly a few inches across the carpet.
The brief shot of sound through the air was followed by the rapid turning of shoes on the carpet. The figure spun round to face in our direction. I pulled Jen quickly to force her into a run, we had to get out of here and I wasn’t sure what would happen if we used magic. The main room was dark, and I felt the collision of my legs against furniture over and over as we tried to weave our way to the stairs, crouching low to prevent our heads being an easy target for attack.
It was like a nightmare I frequently had as a child, I was being chased but no matter how fast I would run, the chaser would only ever walk yet would keep up with me. The outline of our pursuer was harder to see now, what little light penetrated the room only allowed me to see a few feet in front of me and even then, I couldn’t see well. The glowing fire exit sign above the door for the stairwell called to us like the north star. Whoever was chasing us must know that we needed to get over there, we would be followed instantly.
We paused behind a desk, curled low to the ground and tried to tame our breathing. The sound of the air rattling into my lungs sounded almost deafening, I worried it would expose our position. It was silent all around us now, wherever they were, they were standing still waiting for us to make a noise or move enough to catch their eye. Jen pulled my face close to hers to whisper.
“It might be a security apparition. Automated magic to protect this office. They won’t cause harm; they just escort you off the premises. I’ve seen them before,” she said in a hushed tone. Before I had time to respond, she stood straight upright and began to speak loudly.
“We apologize for our intrusion, we will leave quietly,” she said, her arms raised above her head as if surrendering. Should I stand too? I didn’t have the time to think.
I heard a word spoken quickly and saw a blast of green light. Jennifer screamed. She dropped to the ground beside me and as I grabbed her I could feel a liquid on the palms of my hands, I looked at them and in the faint glimmer of the streetlamp fighting its way through a nearby window, I saw that it was blood. I grabbed her tight with two hands and felt the hairs on my arms stand tall. The light was then blocked out by a figure looming over us both.
11
I closed my eyes as a sudden white light flooded the room. I braced for the impact of something that never came. Jennifer writhed about in agony in my arms and I felt the harshness of the white light morph into a softer yellow. I opened my eyes and realized that we were now in the center of my lounge. The office carpet tiles under my knees had been replaced by the softness of the carpet at number thirteen Charm Close. I wasn’t sure what had caused the white light, but the golden glow from the lamp next to the couch was now illuminating the extent of Jen’s injury. My magic had brought us here, I had used a transportation spell in a panic, and it paid off.
“Jen. We’re safe now. Jen…what should I do?” I asked. She was in no position to answer. Blood had saturated her shirt and coat and was pooling onto the ground beneath her, I had never seen a wound like this.
But… I had!
This was the same type of injury that Joseph had been covered in. This is what Sophia had identified as being caused by ‘really dark magic’, whatever that meant. “Quin!” I shouted as loudly as I could.
He ran into the room, followed by the six other cats. The tone of my voice had clearly indicated that I needed help, as I was lucky enough to have seven familiars there was a good chance that collectively they could do something useful. They stopped in the doorway of the lounge to assess what they were looking at, Quin spoke first.
“Delphi,” he said. “Take the others upstairs to the closet mirror. Explain to Edith you need to cast a fortification spell. Go now.” The six of them turned and thundered up the stairs while Quin leaped across the room to my right-hand side. He looked up at my face and then back to Jennifer. There was so much blood. This had been the image I had seen in my premonitions, my blood covered hands and a feeling of terror.
After a few silent moments of thought, Quin closed his eyes. A flash of white light flooded the room, just as it had at the office. I recoiled from the brightness that left green and yellow halos in my eyes, blinking to restore my sight quickly to interpret the figure now standing in the room with us. It was Amber, the head of the council.
She looked around, her body poised defensively as if ready to pounce, she saw us and dropped to her knees beside Jennifer.
“What happened? Nora? Nora!” Amber was looking at me searchingly and I had nothing to say. I didn’t know what had happened, I just knew that if Jen lost much more blood that not even magic could save her.
“Amber, you have strong healing magic. Do what you can, I will assist you,” Quin said. “Nora, take this laptop and store it somewhere safe. We need to be prepared for the inevitable intruder seeking what you have taken. It is clearly valuable enough to attempt to kill in order to keep it.”
Quin knew what was in the bag. He was taking control because I wasn’t capable of thinking straight. Amber took a deep breath and began to chant something indecipherable; I didn’t recognize the language. Her eyes became brighter and brighter until they shone like small flashlights. She placed her hands above the gaping wound on Jennifer’s shoulder. Quin was purring loud enough for me to hear as I stood and took several steps towards the hallway with the laptop bag under my arm.
Blood was dripping from my hands as I climbed the stairs. The crimson polka dots followed my every step and chased me into my bedroom, as I looked left and right for a safe hiding place the droplets formed a small puddle at my feet. A door opened on the bedroom wall; it had never opened before. As far as I had known there was one door in and out of this room, a door frame appeared in the middle of a blank wall and the open door revealed a set of shelves.
The enchanted house had provided me with a safe hiding place, it was such a secret place that I hadn’t had any awareness of its existence until now. I placed the laptop bag down onto one of the shelves and took a step back, watching as the door slammed shut and disappeared. I ran the fingertips of my left hand across the painted plaster where the door had just been. It was seamless and smooth with no indication that it had ever been anything other than a flat wall.
Delphi walked into the room behind me and meowed gently to let me know she was there without frightening me.
“The house is fortified. No one can enter or leave for about ten hours. After that we can either try the spell again or be ready to fight. What would you like us to do now, Nora?” she asked.
I turned to face her and saw blood on her paws, she must have walked through the trail of scarlet I had left along the hallway leading into the bedroom.
“I don’t know what to do. We went to retrieve anything that Joseph Hawk had been working on and to see if we could figure out what he had been planning to tell Jen. He was looking into the missing people in Sucré, Cody and the others. Someone else was there at the newspaper offices, they must have been trying to get hold of the same stuff but for a different reason. We have to look through what we took and make some sen
se of it.”
I was aware that the blood on my hands was no longer dripping, the absence of the thud onto the bedroom floor drew my attention back to the present and I ran downstairs to Jen.
On the floor of the lounge the scene was similar to the one I had left before I went upstairs. Amber was still emitting beams of light from her eyes and Quin was still purring softly beside her, enhancing her magic with his own. Jennifer seemed to at least be in slightly less discomfort now as the healing magic took effect. The open wound on her shoulder looked slightly smaller and was now bleeding like a lazy faucet instead of a gushing river.
I was trapped in the house, we all were. Anything I planned to use to work out what had happened to Joseph, to Jen, to Cody, would have to be in the house with me already. Would the laptop tell me enough? My premonition had come to me to warn me of something, was there a way for me to control it so that I could know what would happen to us once the fortification spell ran out?
Quin moved away from Jennifer and Amber. As he walked towards me, the other familiars replaced him. They were now helping with the healing spell and the light in Ambers eyes grew brighter, the wound shrunk faster now. Quin nudged me just below the knees and gestured towards the kitchen, I ambled in the direction he guided me. He jumped up onto the kitchen counter beside the sink and pushed at the faucet until warm water ran from the head. Palms facing upwards I lifted my hands under the stream, it reminded me of a criminal offering themselves up for arrest, awaiting handcuffs that never came.
“What do we need to do, Nora? What is coming for us?” Quin asked. My mind tuned back into the room and I turned to him, then to my hands. The blood was in the small creases of my skin, the folds of my fingers and under my nails. I used my elbow to press down on the soap dispenser next to the sink and deposit a small amount of the vanilla scented substance onto my hands. I pressed them together as if in prayer, then rubbed them around each other until the suds formed and washed away the crimson staining.
“I need a minute,” I said. I had explained it all to Delphi briefly, but now I found myself lost in the chaos of the last hour. Flashbulb memories of the office and running through the dark, the sound of an attack spell being launched our way, blood everywhere, the white light. I hadn’t even thought about how my magic had brought us here; it was an ability I didn’t know I had but that had saved us. We would surely both have been killed if we had stayed there. Once the water was running clear I turned the faucet off and dried my hands. There wasn’t time for deep, reflective contemplation. I needed to get to work.
“Right,” I said. “We have Joseph Hawk’s laptop, some documents from his desk and some voice memo’s that he recorded on a handkerchief. Don’t ask. He had something to tell Jen, we must assume it’s about the missing people, and then he was killed.
“I would guess that whatever he found out got him murdered and based on his injuries and what just happened to us in that office, we bumped into his murderer tonight. They were looking through his office too, so we have what they want. They will come for us. We have to figure this all out tonight.”
Quin looked at me patiently before realizing I had finished with my monologue.
“We just need to solve a murder, an attempted murder and multiple kidnappings from a laptop and a few scraps of potentially irrelevant paper that you stole from a dead guy’s desk? Cool. I’m going to need a snack then.”
I smiled and grabbed a box of ‘tantalizing turkey’ flavor cat treats from the cupboard beneath the sink. I didn’t dare rattle the box in any way, the sound would distract the cats in the other room, and I couldn’t risk breaking their focus when they were helping with the healing spell.
“We tell no one,” I whispered to Quin. He knew as well as I did that if they found out he had been eating the treats without them there would be hell to pay. We hurried up the stairs together and into my bedroom to grab the stolen items, somehow, from the secret closet in my wall. As we stood, framed by the bedroom doorway, I saw that the items we needed were now placed on top of my desk. The house had put them there for us.
With a wave of my hand the papers on the desk flew up into the air and separated, landing carefully down onto the floor in a circle so that they could be easily viewed from a central point.
“Hawk had a voice message about emails,” I recounted to Quin. “I can’t remember exactly what he said but it was something along the lines of having a theory that someone else agreed with, I think. The papers are related to that too, hopefully.”
I flipped open the laptop and was quickly made aware of one obvious flaw in the haphazard plan that Jen and I had thrown together.
The laptop needed a password.
12
“Oh, come on! Can I catch a break today, what now?” I said, gazing at the lock screen. My only plan for sorting out this huge mess had fallen at the first hurdle. Of course, there was a password on it, why would I ever be so naive to think that I would just open up a stranger’s computer and work my way through his private files with ease. Quin, who had been standing in the center of the ring of papers, jumped up onto the desk and nudged the laptop with his paw so that the screen was facing him directly.
“Eh, it’s an Intention lock, no sweat,” he said. He nudged the laptop back towards me and primed himself to jump back down before I put a hand against his chest to keep him in place.
“Hold up cowboy, what’s an intention lock? How do I get in?”
I didn’t know if Quin had somehow confused me for an expert hacker, as I got locked out of my own laptop at least once a month.
“Say out loud exactly why you need to log in to this device. Have you not seen these before?” he asked. I shook my head. “Well it’s a simple charm that allows guest users on a computer, it establishes what you will need access to on your behalf based on the reasons why you need to use this computer. So, the owner will have access to all of it, some people will only get access to the music folder with the pre-loaded violin solo that comes with this model. Tell it what you need!”
He jumped down and got back to reading the papers on the ground. I hadn’t asked how he knew about this charm; I would just take his word for it for now. It would just be added to my growing list of ‘Quin mysteries’ to follow up on at a later date. I looked at the time on my watch, the silver framed face indicated that the fortification spell had been up for almost forty minutes already. The ten hours of protection would be over before I knew it, I had to work faster.
“I need to access the files and emails on this computer to solve Joseph Hawk’s murder…and…I guess see if he knows where all the missing people are, anything else that’s relevant would be great too. Yeah, so please can I log in?” I didn’t know how to do this properly, there was no manual with this thing. The computer whirred and made a long ‘hmm’ sound as if it was thinking. A little red light next to a central, front-facing camera blinked on as my face was assessed by the machine.
The screen went completely black, the darkness framing a spinning wheel in the middle.
Log in successful. We were in.
A number of windows were open, the top one was a word document that appeared to be the beginnings of an article, another exposé. This one was about the animal fair that would be arriving in Sucré this month and the secret scandal that ‘it was time the public were aware of’, I read through the three-page document a few times in disbelief.
It seemed that Joseph had been investigating the show for months, following them around during the pre-tour season and then to the first few performances of the year. He had been undercover trying to seek out information about the animals in the show, particularly about the treatment of these animals behind closed doors. An ‘unnamed source’ had provided a tip to The Sucré Sun that there was concerning animal abuse going on. Joseph had worn a pinhole camera and captured some of the violence going on at the training ranch where the show was based for nine months of the year.
In the article he had written small notes to himself to
indicate where certain stills from the video would be inserted into the article. Thankfully, the images weren’t there. He had written the captions for the intended photographs though; they were graphic and upsetting.
I thought back to the argument that I had heard played back on his recording handkerchief. He had mentioned ‘losing status’ to the organizer. In the article, Joseph made multiple references to the ‘cruelty free’ status of the fair, how it was a huge selling point for the customers and that ‘since animals have been banned from most circuses, it was a marketing dream to have the approval of animal rights organizations in this way.’
Was Joseph trying to blackmail them? Surely if he was just concerned with animal safety, he would just publish the article, he wouldn’t waste time trying to negotiate with the people running the show. What was he trying to bargain for? A bribe? Did he want payment to keep quiet? That didn’t seem like something he would do, but how well did I know him? He was famous around Sucré for tackling corruption, it would be a huge risk to take as it would destroy his reputation to kill a story for a bit of cash.
“Nora,” Quin said. “These newspaper clippings are about missing people from other towns, some of them are miles from here. I don’t see any link between them, he has just highlighted the dates in each one.”
I thought again about what I had heard him say on one of the voice recordings, he was interested in the dates specifically. But why? I minimized the window with the article draft on the computer and looked at the next document that was open. It was a spreadsheet that was half completed. Not all of the columns had titles which meant that I would have to try to figure out the significance of the information I was looking at. It reminded me of a catchphrase my high school science teacher used to have, “A graph without axis labels is GARBAGE.” She was right.
