by Silver Nord
“For goodness sake… what does this thing do?!” Linda said, practically bouncing up and down.
“Can we use it to stop the mayor?” I asked, feeling a bud of hope begin to unfurl.
Minerva looked pained again. “I don’t see how. He’s invincible, isn’t he?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind trying anyway.”
“Come on, don’t be a spoilsport!” Linda said, unfortunately sealing the answer to my question.
“No. And don’t ask me anything more about this for your own good. The less you know, the less this gang can get out of you. Do you know who’s leading them? Do you think it might be that awful woman who trapped Jon in a loveless marriage?”
“I’m pretty sure he was married before he met you and was just using you for this,” Linda said, shaking her head.
“I’m eager to get to the bottom of that myself, but first… I need to know more about my father. Where is he now? What does his terrible invention actually do?”
I was interrupted by a fizzing, spluttering sound.
The next second, a piece of parchment materialised in a far less graceful manner to the way communications from the Witch Council usually arrived. It would appear that this message had gone several rounds with an invisible barrier on its way in.
When it came to rest on the shop counter, its edges were smoking, and the letter had at least partially combusted. “Azel’ was written on the exterior.
I flipped it open before it could burn up any further.
…regret that there has been an emergency.
Kimberly Marshall has escape…
… coming to Wormwood, and you are in grave…
Kindest regards and best wishes for your health. May all witches and magicians work together for a brighter, better future under the guidance of its glorious Witch Council!
Aleister Root
Linda looked over my shoulder and made a noise of disbelief. “Why is it always the propaganda that survives and not the important parts?”
I kept my eyes fixed on the parchment, unable to look away. Some of the words may have burned away but the meaning of the note was clear.
Kimberly Marshall had managed to free herself from her prison cell… and she was coming to Wormwood to get revenge.
8
Alien Invaders
My eyes darted towards the shadows at the edges of the clearing where the coven was meeting. I’d promised the witches that we would convene tonight to discuss solutions to the various dreadful disasters that were arising with more regularity than ever. However, I did question the wisdom of being out in Wormwood Forest when there was a madwoman on the loose.
“As I was saying, I think it’s pretty clear we need to elect a new coven leader. I for one believe that we should break with tradition and bring Mayor Starbright in. Can anyone argue that he’s not all powerful? Plus, we might get extra special treatment in the coming apocalypse,” Natalia finished, looking round expectantly.
Her usual cronies, Victoria and Aurelia, nodded their heads in agreement. The rest of the coven looked bemused.
“But he’s evil, isn’t he?” Ally questioned and received a glare for her trouble that made her retreat back into her shell.
“A little dash of evil never hurt anyone, so long as you’re on the same side. What is evil, anyway? It all depends on which side of history you’re on,” Natalia continued, shrugging her shoulders.
I brought myself back to the present moment and rolled my eyes. “I’m pretty sure no history book would represent the mayor as anything other than the bad guy. And I don’t think it’s wise that he becomes high priestess of this coven.”
“We should have a vote,” Natalia said, clearly rating her chances.
“No,” I countered, glancing over at the tree where Hemlock was currently concealed. He was supposed to be on the lookout for any Kimberly sightings, but something told me I couldn’t rely on him. He’d insisted on bringing his handheld games console with him in case he had a free moment. I strongly suspected that meant he was playing games rather than keeping watch. At least Artemis was back home, safely tucked up in bed.
I was still listening to Natalia’s barrage of complaints with one ear, and straining to hear the sounds of small explosions and electronic music with the other, when three people walked into the clearing.
They were lucky I didn’t blast them off the face of the earth.
“Hemlock!” I shouted, furious that he hadn’t warned me of their approach.
“Oh, uh… intruders! Invaders! Aliens!” Hemlock said half-heartedly, before making ‘pew, pew’ noises that I knew related to the game he was playing.
“Well, hey there! What are you all doing out here? Are you guys looking for ghosts, too?” Delia asked, stepping forwards and looking around the disgruntled circle of witches with no sign of alarm.
“No, we are not, you foolish mortal,” Aurelia said, her voice haughty and condescending.
“You look like a real vampire! Is that the role you’re playing for the tour? It’s great!” Harry said, nodding his head sincerely, before glancing anxiously at Delia to check if she was at all jealous.
I fought the urge to grin. Aurelia looked like she was sucking lemons and was casting glances down at the velour dress she’d chosen to wear tonight.
“I thought there were more ghosts to be found back in town?” I said, trying to strike up a friendly greeting.
“Yeah, we looked around, but some old creep chased us away from the graveyard, and everything else was just touristy nonsense. The forest has to be the real deal. After all - you wrote about loads of ghost stories from here! Like the headless horseman who gallops beneath the trees on clear nights,” Delia said. “Is that why you’re out here? Are you secretly a ghost hunter? I get it if you don’t want the competition.”
“No, that’s not why I’m out here. We’re…” I looked around at the motley group for inspiration. Bird watching in the middle of the night? Playing Dungeons and Dragons?
“We’re the local Women’s Institute,” Heather suggested.
I raised my eyebrows. That wasn’t bad.
“Heather was just about to tell a story about something spooky she saw recently,” I said, shooting her a pleading look. “Excuse me for a moment.”
I left the ghost hunters in the capable hands of the old witch and slunk off towards the outskirts of the clearing. “Pssst!” I said to a tree.
“What do you want? I’m about to crack Level 12!” a voice hissed back.
I kicked the tree with my foot.
“Hey! You made me lose a life to a mega-kill-bot-monster! I’ve only got one left!”
I told Hemlock in as few words as possible exactly what I’d do to him if he didn’t help me out right this second. “In any case, can’t you just press save?” I finished and was met with the all-knowing sigh of a teenager.
“No. You’ve got to reach a checkpoint. The last one I hit was miles ago! I’ve got to defeat the level boss.”
I kicked the tree again.
“I hate you!” Hemlock screamed.
I looked back into the clearing to make sure no one thought I was torturing a cat, before I confiscated the games console (after a brief struggle) and summoned up an appropriate illusion.
“Hang on, what are those?” I said, looking at the weird things attached to Hemlock’s paws.
“Thumbs!” he proudly announced before cackling like a mad genius. “The world is mine now! Nothing will keep me from the can opener and no cupboard door or plastic packet is safe.”
I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. Somehow, Hemlock had given himself opposable thumbs… and all he wanted to do was play video games and open cans of food. “I thought you had more ambition!”
He peered blearily down from the branches at me and the illusion I’d just summoned. “Don’t judge me for not being evil enough for you! I do what I want!” He jumped down onto the grass and I dumped the illusion on top of him.
“Right now,
‘what you want’ had better be to play along with this charade,” I warned him.
“I look ridiculous. No one is going to fall for this!”
I considered the lumpy-looking white sheet illusion, with holes cut out for eyes, that I’d draped over my familiar. “I don’t know… they might be really stupid. Here’s hoping,” I said before raising my voice.
“Over here! I can’t believe it! It’s the tiny ghost of Wormwood’s most beloved pet cat, Hildegaard. She haunts these woods, looking for the cake-loving witch who killed her by accidentally sitting on her. What a rare sighting!”
“Hildegaard?” Hemlock spat. “Death by being sat on by a fat witch?! You could have at least made it cool!”
The ghost hunters squinted at Hemlock in his sheet.
“Wouldn’t the cat be flat if she’d been sat on?” Toby asked.
“Uh… she was re-inflated after her death. A taxidermist did it, but he was an amateur who used too much stuffing, which is why she looks a bit lumpy,” I invented.
“You will pay for this,” Hemlock swore, before meowing an unconvincingly ghost-like wail and sauntering off into the trees.
“Hurry! She’s getting away!” I said, praying the ghost hunters were going to bite.
“Get her! If we catch a ghost cat we’ll have infallible evidence!” Harry shouted, and all three steamed after Hemlock.
I heard a far more startled yowl and watched as the white sheet stopped sauntering and fled headlong from the trampling trio.
“Good. He needed some exercise,” I said to myself before glancing down at the games console I’d confiscated. I wasn’t sure where he’d got it from or whether I wanted to know. On the small screen a tiny avatar jumped up and down in panic as a hideous monster loomed over it. I felt a shiver run up my spine. I felt a lot of empathy for the tiny avatar when it was decapitated by the monster.
“What’s the plan to stop this gang of hooligans? I saw the detective around town, Hazel. You said he couldn’t come here!” Natalia informed me, looking unimpressed.
“He managed to make it through the barrier today, I… When did you see him?” I asked, suddenly worried that he might have got stuck.
“Who cares about the police? They never did anything anyway! The actions of this group of thieves are an outrage and a challenge to our authority. We are the Wormwood Coven. If anyone’s going round bullying businesses and messing things up, it should be us!” Aurelia announced.
“We should all have the freedom to do whatever we want in our town,” Hannah said, her eyes glowing with magic for a second.
I didn’t like the way she smiled.
I made a mental note to pay the young witch a visit soon. She’d lost her mother recently, and while the coven had been there for her, I wasn’t so sure we’d been promoting the message of peace, love, and unity through magic lately.
To my alarm, the other witches seemed to murmur their agreement. It was clear that everyone was fed up with this new gang in town and they weren’t happy that I wasn’t doing anything about it.
“DCI Admiral is supposed to be questioning members of the gang about the murder of Jon Leroux. It shouldn’t be long before they’re rounded up and sent on their way. In the meantime, we should look out for one another and have each other’s backs. I suggest a phone call chain should anyone have trouble…”
My suggestion was met with yawns and - worse - people looking towards Natalia for a better idea.
“We should take the fight to them. It’s time to let them know they aren’t welcome in our town!” she said, smiling like a Cheshire cat, knowing that the coven might finally be back within her grasp. “We fight fire with fire. Who’s with me?!”
The witches cheered.
“Curse them all!” Hannah shouted, gleefully.
“We’ve got to focus on the bigger picture! There isn’t long left until the gate opens. This gang will seem like a minor inconvenience compared to what’s going to come to the town. There has to be a way to stop the mayor, but we’re going to need to work together and focus…”
Natalia moved her hand like a talking mouth whilst rolling her eyes. “You need to focus on the here and now. Our town has been invaded by a real threat - one you can actually see with your own eyes. We’re going to deal with it in the witch way. We only have your word for it that these monsters are coming anyway. I for one haven’t seen anything more than a mayor who cares about this town and has brought business to it at last. It’s not his fault that a criminal underbelly so often follows in the wake of success, but it is our duty to deal with it, not fantasise about scary monsters from our imaginations.” She pointedly looked down at the console I was holding.
“Let me assure you, it’s very real… the gods, Loki and Thor…” I began to say, but even as the words came out of my mouth I heard how ridiculous they sounded. And I very much doubted that saying ‘you had to be there’ would cut the mustard.
“Right,” Natalia said, pretending to understand in a mocking way. “Let’s go back to town and pull this gang up by its roots. There’ll be more bodies in Wormwood River by the morning if they don’t cooperate. According to Hazel, there’s no chance of the police bothering us about it. We are free to do whatever we want!”
I frowned. When I’d warned the coven about the barrier and they’d all noticed they couldn’t get out of town, I’d hoped they’d take that as proof of my story about what was coming to Wormwood. As recently as this morning the witches had been fearful of being trapped in town with the coming doom, but now they saw it as a good reason to exact mob rule.
“I can show you thin places! They’re appearing all over Wormwood and Wormwood Forest. Sometimes things poke through,” I said in a last ditch attempt to convince some of the witches that I was telling the truth.
Aurelia waved a hand. “Illusions and lies. There’s nothing dangerous lurking out here or anywhere else,” she said.
The next moment, a blast of scorching greyish-white light shot across the clearing and incinerated a tree.
“Was that an illusion?” I heard one of the witches whisper as the smell of charred wood rose into the air.
“Run!” I shouted, throwing myself to the ground when I sensed the air move in front of the next blast. In all of the arguing over petty matters of town pride I’d forgotten the reason why I’d been nervous about coming here tonight. But my attacker hadn’t.
Kimberly had arrived.
9
Shoot Em’ Up
“Hazel Salem,” the woman in white hissed as she walked into the clearing, looking more like a ghost than Hemlock had.
“I don’t suppose you feel like talking about this?” I suggested, without much hope. “I never actually pushed you into the other dimension. You shouldn’t have touched it.”
My answer came in the form of a blistering blast of magic that I only just protected myself from by pulling out a shield the second before it hit me. The shield thrummed and absorbed the blast, leaving it glowing. “Kimberly, you need help. The Council was trying to work out a way to cure you. If you let me bring you back…”
This time the magic swooped around, trying to get behind the shield. I drew a weapon to defend myself.
“Ha! A magical tennis racket!” Aurelia shouted from the edge of the clearing, before snorting with laughter.
I smacked the ball of light away with my magical tennis racket and might have sent it rather close to where Aurelia was standing.
“My hair extensions! You’ll pay for that! With cash!” she growled.
I was too busy to argue. Kimberly had thoroughly rejected my suggestion that we talked things over and shared a nice cup of tea before returning to the Witch Council. She wanted to end this right here and now… and I knew she wasn’t going to stop until one of us was dead.
I blocked another blast of magic as the mad witch got closer. I tried to steel myself for the inevitable. It was me or her… and I didn’t want to die.
For a second, a flash of inner sight revea
led how similar I was to the mayor, thinking thoughts like that. He believed that he was important and special enough that all this power could, and should, belong to him to do whatever he wanted with. What made me deserve to be the one to walk away from this?
My philosophical thoughts vanished when the next blast missed my shield and seared a burning line of pain across my shoulder. With an animalistic growl, I shot a warning blast of power back with my tennis racket. In hindsight, the defensive racket may not have been the best choice for this battle, but I was stuck with it - unless I wanted to waste valuable time trying to persuade the in-between to swap it.
Kimberly laughed as my magic passed her by. She pushed her hands together and formed a ball of energy that looked powerful enough to level the forest. All I could do was watch dumbfounded and wonder where she was getting that kind of power from. I knew she’d made a deal with a devil to improve her magical abilities prior to her being sucked into the other dimension, but this was more than I’d ever seen another witch produce before… and she was taking her sweet time with it, knowing there was nothing I could do to stop her.
It ends here then, before the gate even opens, I thought, realising that there was little I could do to defend against such remarkable power. I just wished I understood more… was it the madness that fuelled her, or had something strange happened when she’d walked through the dark dimension?
I stood, frozen like a deer in the headlights, as she raised her energy ball above her head and gave me a triumphant smile that glistened with madness. “See you in the darkness, Hazel Salem,” she said, slowly and clearly, before bringing her hands back to fling the ball my way. Somehow, I knew that even the largest tennis racket in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep it at bay.
