He looks so in awe of his own plans that I can’t help but catch some of his enthusiasm.
“Is that what Sophia wants to do?” I ask.
Cray nods. “She wants us to have a good life, the kind of life we could have if anyone out there had given us a chance.”
“What happened to her then? Why’d she run away?”
Cray shrugs. “Just what always happens.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs and hops down from the windowsill holding up his hand to help me down.
“Come on, you’ve got more lessons today and I’m meant to be teaching you the basics of making conjuring powder.”
“Hard core,” I muttered, dusting off my skirt, “when do I stop getting lessons then? When will I be, you know, qualified?”
He shrugs. “When Sophia thinks you’re ready. If you are, you get to be a full on grunt, like me, and then you’ll have free reign. Within the rules of the coven.”
I feel a jab of excitement, despite myself. Now that I know Cray was telling the truth, that magic is real, I’m ready to learn how to do everything that can be done. Maybe I could use that power to fix the broken up parts of my life. I missed my Mum and even my Dad but every time I thought of them, I remembered what Mum had said to me on the phone, and felt a sting of anger.
I would make it OK again, or I’d make them sorry.
*
That afternoon Cray takes me aside to teach me how to grind up the special crossroad dirt with loadstone (the stone equivalent of a magnet – to draw things towards you) with tiny bits of bone that he said had come from the dead dog whose spirit brought forth the fae (corgis being the preferred mode of transport for fairies – obviously).
This last part really squicks me out, but Cray assures me that the dog had been well and truly killed by the car that had hit it and they’d just recycled its remains into spell ingredients. The bones are clean anyway and kept locked in a big metal toolbox in Sophia’s room with all the other special magical ingredients.
Cray lets me keep a little bag of the conjuring powder I make and tells me that a witch needs a few special tools to work magic and the conjuring powder is my first.
“We’re all going to help you find the rest,” he tells me, as he clears away the pestle and mortar we’d used to grind up the powder.
“What are they?” I ask, still trying to write down the method for making the conjuring powder.
“Well, there’s the ceremonial knife, for directing energy, the cauldron for making potions and holding sacrificial fires, and a chalice, for holding offerings.”
“Potions? Seriously?” I raise my eyebrows, “and offerings to what?”
“To the Gods.” Cray says smartly, “that’s where our power comes from, the ancient Gods that people used to worship, before Christianity came along and made all of them into the one ‘devil’.”
“So you worship the devil?”
Cray shakes his head with a smile. “You’re going to ask a lot of questions, aren’t you?”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s great. I like that.” He takes my hand gently in his own, and I look up at him. The light of the two candles on the table next to us winks off of his nose stud. His eyes are amused, bright, and his choppy fringe hangs into them, silky and fine. Comparatively I feel really grungy.
Cray leans forwards and kisses me, his lips soft against mine.
“Come for a walk with me,” he says.
He takes me out of the house, to where the trees are shrouded in shadow and the road is a sliver of black ribbon, strung with the headlights of a handful of cars. We walk together through the silent village and along the long, dark road towards the campus where the library and the theatre are still lit up like massive stone lanterns. There’s stained glass in some of the windows and it glows blue and green in the light.
“This way,” Cray says, taking me past the lit up buildings, and onto the grass behind the largest one, a Georgian mansion that’s right in the middle of the campus. Behind it there’s a short slope of grass that leads down to huge oak trees, tufts of fern and long grass. Shimmering below and reflecting nothing save for the darkness and the first few pinprick stars, is a lake.
For a moment my breath catches in my throat. It’s such a beautiful, unexpected sight; the expanse of water under the dark blue sky. I can make out birds moving on the silky water and hear their lonely cries.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Cray says, voice hushed, like we’re in church. “I like coming out here, just to watch it. Sometimes I stay here for hours.”
Across the lake on the dark, wooded, slope there’s a small building of bone coloured stone.
“That’s where people used to take tea, when this place was still a manor house,” Cray tells me, “want to go and look?”
I nod, and he takes my hand, leading me surely through the shadows and down a steep gravel path and over a tiny bridge that crosses the lake at its thinnest point. I feel a million miles from Michaela, who only ever looked at the river if she was meeting people under the bridge in town, to drink and smoke.
Cray takes me up to the little stone building; it has a cool but dry flag floor and a tall ceiling in which pigeons rustle about as they roost. Cray and I sit down and look out over the lake, up at where the university buildings loom. I feel like I’m on the edge of the world.
“You can kiss me, if you like,” I find myself saying.
Cray rests his hand on the floor on one side of me, so I can feel his arm across my back.
“So, you still want me to?” he asks, “I thought...maybe with the initiation...you might be worried.”
“I’m not worried.” I say, “I’m...” I huff a laugh and grin, “I’m a fricking witch. That’s weird, right? Kissing someone I met at the bus station is kind of normal next to tha-”
I break off as Cray kisses me. Around us the night is almost silent, save for the shrieks of far off night birds. I reach up and tangle my fingers in his soft hair, feeling him press against me.
We creep back into Waywood house just as the sky is turning grey in anticipation of dawn. We slept a little down at the lake, me wrapped in Cray’s jacket and sitting with my back to his chest. We’d also talked, and he’d told me about how stifling his house had been, how his parents had controlled every second of his time, even deciding which musical instruments he was going to take lessons in and which books he read.
I told him about my parents and how I missed them, but I also hated them for being so cruel to me. I told them about Tasha, and how she’d turned me away from her house when I was desperate for somewhere to stay, how I hadn’t had a single friend before Chloe and Tasha palled up with me.
When we part, on the landing outside our respective rooms, Cray kisses me one more time and puts a cold, round thing into my hand. I look at it and recognise the stone that he’d changed into a coin to get me to trust him.
“’Night Stone,” he says
“’Night Cray,” I whisper back.
*
They work me hard over the next few days. I’m forever trailing someone, learning something new. For my second lesson, Nara shows me how to glamour myself and other objects to look like other things. That was what Cray had done with the stone that first night. All glamours last for seven hours (seven being the number of the Fae, who gave these tricks to the witches in the first place, at least, that’s what Nara tells me).
“You have to pull your power over yourself, or over the object you want to change,” she explains, demonstrating with several items. I watch, totally breathless, as she makes a lamp with a broken shade turn into a small vase of flowers, a book shift into a gold plate.
“That’s amazing,” I say, touching the cold metal of the plate. It feels completely real.
Nara blushes. “I’m the best at this stuff, it’s my specialty,” she admits.
“Do something else,” I say eagerly.
Nara gives in to me and did a few more tricks. She chan
ges her headscarf into long black hair, then blue curls and then bright green. When I think she has nothing left to show me, she sprouts daisies, peeping through her hair like she’s a shrub. I laugh and she laughs with me.
“Is it easier, changing your scarf like that?”
“My hijab? No, it’s actually harder.”
“Oh. So-”
“So why do I wear it?”
“Well, obviously because you want to,” I’ve actually been wondering, “but can you still be Muslim if you’re a witch?”
“A lot of people out there practice both. I don’t really, not anymore,” Nara shifts the glamour away and straightens her hijab. “But we work by raising power, sometimes people raise it by fasting or drumming, chanting or calling it up from the earth. I get my power from covering my hair. I always did it before I left home, and it gives me strength.”
I’m a bit stunned, she’s so sure of herself. I wish I had that. “Why did you leave home?”
“Well, my Dad moved to London to find a job, he’s a HR manager, but he got made redundant in Bath,” she sounds like she’s told this story too many times already. I wonder how many new recruits have asked her the same thing.
“He and my Mum aren’t together anymore, she lives in France. So my brother, Taai was looking after me and my sister. He didn’t like my boyfriend and we had a lot of fights about it.”
“So you moved out?”
“I moved in with my boyfriend and he had so many arguments with his parents because they couldn’t afford to have me living there. Even though I chipped in a bit. Anyway, we broke up because…” she looks at her hands, “I’m not really interested in sex. He was, so, anyway, after we broke up his parents got fed up with me and told me to go back to my brother, but I couldn’t face it so I tried looking for my Dad.”
“Did you not find him?” I ask, my mind still partially blown by the fact that Nara isn’t interested in sex. I mean, I’m a girl and I still think about it all the time. I know tons of girls at school who are the same, or that pretend they don’t like sex but do it all the time anyway. Girls who talk about it, girls that don’t, girls that prefer girls, or boys, or both, or who’ve been with the same person forever. I suppose it makes sense that there are people who aren’t interested at all.
“You’re thinking about the sex thing,” Nara makes a face, “everyone does when I tell them.”
“I was just, you know, working it out.”
She shrugs. “It’s fine. Anyway, I called my Dad but his mobile number wasn’t in use anymore. I hadn’t been to school for a bit and they got on to my brother about it and my sister, Eva, kept texting me about how annoyed he was. They didn’t have a number or an address for Dad either. I didn’t want to go home so I was hanging around the bus station and Campion found me.”
“Do you still want to find your Dad?” I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to know where their parents were, especially if they just disappeared.
Nara shakes her head. “I keep up with my email at the library; Eva messaged me and said they were pretty sure my Dad had just met someone new and started over with them. Taai was so paranoid about Eva running away like me that he won’t let her date. Now she doesn’t like me.”
“Shit….sorry.”
“It’s alright. People here get me better than they did,” she says, digging around in a box of bits and pieces, she holds up a steel nail “Let’s see you turn this into a pencil.”
It takes me four hours to get the hang of it, but eventually I manage to make a pencil (even if it still looks shiny and silver).
After that I can’t stop, I’m too excited.
I shut myself away in the witches’ bedroom and take out my bundle of wet clothes. There’s a sock right at the top of the heap, stripy and pink with a hole in the toe. I lay it on the floor and look at it, focusing my energy, feeling a kind of pins and needles tickle in my fingers. Just like with the nail I wrap that energy around the object, trying to visualize it clean and new. I close my eyes, the better to see the sock as I wish it to be, then risk a peek. It looks as though it’s in soft focus, a drawing of a sock by a cack-handed child. Creasing my brow, I focus harder. The edges sharpen, it loses the 2D look of a picture, and, as I sit back, shaking a little, the sock is once more as perfect as it was the day I bought it.
I pick it up, then drop it in disgust. It might look new and fresh, but it’s still wet and mildew scented. Clearly the look of something is the easiest part to change, the scent and feel is beyond me.
For the moment.
I practice on that sock until I feel ridiculous. First I summon the memory of soft cotton sliding over my cold toes, then the smell of mum’s laundry powder, the sound the fabric made if you stretched it out and twanged it. I was nearly busting a blood vessel in my forehead by the time I’d made the sock smell and feel new as well as looking it.
Excited, I trip downstairs to show Nara, but she’s nowhere to be found. Cray however, is sitting on the sofa, playing with his cards.
“Hey, what’s the sock for?” he asks.
“I glamoured it.”
“I can see that.”
“How?”
He grins. “Not too hard to see through a beginner’s glamour, if you know how. Don’t worry, it’d fool anyone who wasn’t looking for it.”
I glare. “I worked all afternoon on this.”
“Sorry. Let’s have a feel then.”
I pass him the sock and he looks surprised, rubbing the clean, soft cotton between his fingers.
“It feels new.”
“I made it new. Smell it – that’s exactly the smell of the fabric softener my mum uses.”
He sniffs the sock hesitantly and looks like a total mug while doing so.
“Nara didn’t say she was teaching you that.”
“I worked it out. It’s just like picturing the look of it, only with the smell as well.”
He looks at me like he’s not sure if he should be proud of me or not. I blush.
“For someone who didn’t believe in magic a few days ago, you’re taking to it fast.”
“Fast? That took me four hours.”
He grins. “Want to try something else?”
“Like...”
“Like I’m pretty sure that between the two of us we can have you doing proper glamours by the end of the week – glamours that could fool Sofia even.”
I stretch and sit down on the sofa next to him. “Another time. I’ve had it for today.” I nudge him, “teach me that instead.”
“Patience?”
“Yeah. I think I’m going to need it.”
He rolls his eyes at me but sweeps the cards back into a deck and starts to shuffle them. He smells like brand new leather and incense smoke, I wonder if I could glamour that smell onto something – if I could make my wet and mildewed clothes smell like that, or like Prada perfume or anything I wanted.
“Cray?”
“Mmmhmm?”
“Are you glamoured?”
He turns to me with a crease between his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have a glamour on, right now?”
“No.”
“Oh, OK.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Just...” I feel my face flame, “you smell nice, for someone who lives in a squat. And you, and everyone else here, have nice clothes and stuff, even though you don’t have any money.”
He shrugs. “We get them the way we get everything else.”
“Were you glamoured when we met?”
I watch as he avoids my gaze, smiling shyly. “Just a bit.”
“What did you change?”
“My nose.”
“What?” I laugh, “why?”
“I don’t like it much,” he cups a hand over it, right where the middle part is crooked, “and I had a spot right on it. I saw you and I didn’t want to sit down with this massive bubo on my face, so I just...covered it.”
On impulse I leap forward and give him a squ
eeze. “It’s a nice nose. Besides, I looked like a drowned rat, remember?”
He puts his arms round me and my heart jumps a little. “I remember. You looked like a proper little witch, all windswept and gothy.”
“Shut up,” I hiss, embarrassed.
“It’s true. I knew right then that you were going to fit right in here. And that I liked you.”
“Ugh. Young sodding love, at it again.”
We both twist round and glare at Ilex, who’s leaning in the doorway.
“Jealous?” Cray asks.
“Hardly,” Ilex makes a show of rolling his eyes, “just got back and thought you might like to see what we got hold of it town.”
“Maybe later,” Cray says.
“I’ll leave you to sicken each other with affection then.”
“Please do,” I say.
Ilex leaves and a few seconds later we hear him in the kitchen with Chronicle, talking loudly about how she should probably steal some condoms next time she goes to Sainsbury’s.
I am blushing all over. Cray kisses the top of my head.
“Don’t listen to him, he’s just bitter because he’s all alone and you’re the first newbie in months. He was hoping for someone to get off with.”
“Eww.”
“Yeah, I never said he was a gentleman,” Cray shifts away from me and lines up his cards, “so, Patience?”
*
Patience turns out to be exactly what I need.
No one will teach me anything new until I have the basics of glamouring objects down to a fine art. My trick with the sock took me four hours; I need to be able to produce better results in less time.
So I practice; alone and with the others, mostly Nara the mistress of all things glamour. Nails into pencils, twigs into pens, blades of grass into hair grips. After a few days I can make these small changes in less than sixty seconds.
I practice with my old wet clothes until I can make them into clean, new clothes in any colour or fabric I want, but that takes time. Five minutes is the fastest I can glamour my outfit, but it means my two sets of clothes can become something new every day – clean and fresh and comfortable.
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