by Amy Casey
But then through Rocky’s elation, I heard it again.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. Held my breath.
“Walkies?” Rocky said. “Time for walkies?”
I patted his head with my shaking hand. Then I stood up, crept over towards the door that led down towards my stairs.
And this time, when I heard it, there was no doubt.
The creaking.
The footsteps.
Somebody was in my flat.
And they were walking up my stairs.
Heading right towards me.
Chapter 18
There was only one logical way a person could react when they heard an unknown intruder in their home, gently creeping their way up the stairs.
Ring the police.
But I wasn’t an ordinary person. If we haven’t established that already then you should probably look away right now because I don’t think this is going to be the story for you.
Outside, the light of the sun had hidden behind clouds. But it was still daylight. And that was the scary thing about this. When you pictured being broken into or something, you imagined it to happen at night, without fail. Burglars broke in at night. That was how the cliche went, right?
But maybe it was a cliche that had become too popular. Maybe the night was too obvious now.
Whatever the case, there was somebody coming up my bloody stairs and I had to do something—fast.
As I stood there, heart racing, mouth turning dry, I listened to those footsteps and my mind spun with the possibilities, the options. Rocky began to growl. Beatrice looked nonchalantly over at the door. I knew what Rocky was like, though. All they’d have to do was bring him food or mention the word “walk”, and he’d be their best mate. Really did see the best in people, bless his naive soul.
The footsteps got closer to the door. And as they did, I started to wonder whether perhaps I’d got this wrong. Maybe I’d left my front door unlocked. Maybe it was just Mary or Annabelle. Maybe it was even one of my new witchy relatives.
Or maybe it was someone else entirely…
I remembered the way Herbert Young had glared down at me from his high window as I’d left his office. I’d seen that look in his eyes, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it other than uncomfortable.
What if that look really was a threatening one after all?
What if he was so keen to make sure whatever his secret was stayed secret that he was willing to silence me in order to do so?
I heard the footsteps stop, right outside the door.
I heard the handle begin to twist.
And here I was.
Here I was, frozen solid in the middle of my living room, not doing a thing about it.
The door opened and I went rigid with fear.
The first thing I noticed confirmed my fears.
Whoever was in my house, they were masked. Well, not masked exactly. More one of those socks over their head. I couldn’t see their face, but judging by their physique, they were male. They were dressed all in black.
And they were holding something that made me want to puke.
A crowbar.
I saw Rocky take a few steps back. Heard him still growling, as he backed away, cowering under the table.
Beatrice kept on looking at this man like he wasn’t a big deal.
But there was something else weird about this whole situation. Something… I didn’t quite understand.
The man hadn’t looked at me yet.
I thought about saying something. Thought about telling this goon to piss off.
But then I became aware of a feeling that’d taken over me.
A feeling that I’d been ignorant to just moments before, but one that was definitely there, no doubt about it.
I looked down at my arms.
Invisibility.
I wasn’t sure how I’d managed to cast it so unconsciously, especially when I’d been feeling, well, magically weak lately. All I knew was that I was invisible, so that meant that this guy couldn’t see me. It must’ve been the fear. My emotions taking a hold. My magic becoming a part of my reactions. I knew what Dad would say about that. You’re getting too deeply involved in your magic, Stella. You’re letting it become you.
Well sorry, Dad. But if it wasn’t for my magic merging with my reactions, I might not be alive right now.
I kept as still as I could as this man walked around my house. His footsteps creaked against the floor. I could hear his breathing. Smell the sweat on his body.
And with every step he took, I became more aware that at any moment, my invisibility could collapse. That it could crumble and leave me very exposed indeed.
He ignored Rocky and Beatrice and walked over towards my kitchen, being careful not to touch anything other than with his crowbar—even though he was wearing gloves. Then he moved on to the bedroom, took a good look around there.
And as I stood there and watched, I thought about my options. I’d managed to cast my invisibility spell totally reactionary. So what if I could find the strength to paralyse this intruder, too? What if I could pin him down, use that spare truth serum on him to find out what he was hiding?
But the longer I stood there, the more my fear began to grow. The fear that I didn’t have what it took to take this man on. The fear that my magic was unpredictable, so I had to be careful of my every move.
I felt this fear and then I found myself looking at the ajar door.
I didn’t want to leave this place. I didn’t want to leave this man in here with my pets. But I had to get help. I had to get the police.
Because make no mistake about it. As far as I was concerned, this was Andy Carter’s killer.
And they’d kill again to keep things quiet.
I kept totally still, totally quiet, as this man kept on searching my house. He scanned my mail. He looked at my laptop.
And slowly as I could, I reached into my pocket for my phone.
When I found it wasn’t there, my stomach sank completely.
I must’ve put it down. I mustn’t have picked it up. Which meant I had to move. I had to find it. I had to…
When I saw where it was, my stomach sank even more.
My phone was on the dining table that this man was perched at, looking at my laptop.
It was right beside him.
And I had no doubt he’d be onto it soon if I didn’t get it.
And if I didn’t let him see me getting it.
I moved slowly across my lounge. I did all I could to avoid the creaky floorboards, to try and remember exactly where they were so I didn’t—
A creak.
A creak underfoot.
I held my breath. Heart racing.
The man was still looking at my laptop.
I steadied my breathing some more. Composed myself. Because this was my house, and when I was fulfilling my potential, I was stronger than this man. I could deal with this man.
I just had to keep on going.
I just had to believe in myself.
I walked further to the other side of the room. I was just feet from the table now. One false move and it was over. My invisibility would be breached. The man would spot me. And God knows what would happen then.
I looked at my phone. It was so close. And yet I couldn’t just grab it. The man would see it floating, and he’d know right then that something was wrong—very wrong.
I had to wait for him to look away.
I had to wait for him to move.
I had to...
I saw it, then.
The man looked at my phone, then away.
Then he did a double take, looked at my phone again.
And I realised not long after why he was looking at it.
My keys were beside it.
My purse was beside it.
My keys, my purse, and my phone.
He knew I was in here.
He knew I was hiding somewhere.
He stood up, then. “Right,” he said. “I know you’re in here somewhere. So
this is how it’s going to be.”
He walked over to the other side of the room. Past Rocky. Over to Beatrice.
He picked Beatrice up. Held the crowbar to her head.
And when he lifted her, I swore I saw her frown.
“Come out,” he said. “Or the cat gets it.”
I felt the invisibility slip away almost as instinctively as it had formed.
And as it did, I saw the man’s eyes through the holes of that fabric meet mine.
“Hello, Stella,” he said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
He pulled back his crowbar and stepped towards me.
Chapter 19
I watched the intruder walk towards me, crowbar in hand, and I might’ve just peed myself a little.
Come on. Forgive me. You’d do the same if you were in my shoes.
Or underwear.
The glow of the setting sun shone from the window behind, illuminating the intruder, making them seem an even more foreboding presence. Rocky was hiding underneath the table, and Beatrice had hopped out of the man’s hands and joined him now too. It would’ve been cute, seeing them together, united like this. If it wasn’t under such terrifying circumstances.
Sometimes it took a bad situation to bring people—or, well, animals—together.
I don’t know whether animals coming together like humans do is a thing. Maybe I’d watched a few too many Disney movies when I was younger. But bear with me, okay?
The intruder walked closer and closer towards me. I could smell sweat, and I knew it was probably my own. My heart raced. My body was totally tensed, totally entranced by fear. I was getting flashbacks, which didn’t help. Flashbacks to last year when I’d stood in that strange dark place, Krissy Palmer’s killer standing over me. I felt like I was back there. Only then I’d had the faith in my abilities to fall back on. Then, I’d had my magic.
Right now, even though I’d managed to cast that invisibility spell almost instinctively, I felt totally exposed. Totally trapped.
“You shouldn’t have sniffed around,” the man’s voice said. “You should’ve just done what everyone else has done and behaved. But no. You had to go digging, didn’t you? About time you realised a few home truths. The biggest home truth is that you put yourself in this situation.”
I felt my nervousness bringing my chatty side out—a weird side effect, especially in seemingly life and death situations. “Geez. You talk a lot for—for someone who wants to kill me, don’t you?”
The man stopped. Behind his face mask, I saw what looked like a smile. “Kill you? Oh, I hope I won’t have to kill you. I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. I’m hoping we’ll be able to have a nice conversation here. One where we’re both very clear about…”
What happened next was totally unexpected.
Beatrice jumped out from under the table.
She started biting the man’s ankle. Scratching at him, meowing like a feral cat.
The man looked down, bewilderment and fear in his eyes. “What the hell?”
I wished I could answer him. I was just as bemused myself.
But Beatrice didn’t give up. Far from it. Instead, she moved up the man’s leg, teeth sinking into his dark jeans. And the further up his leg she got, the closer she got towards his crown jewels.
“Get this thing off me!” he shouted, growing gradually more mad and frenzied.
He kicked out then, and Beatrice went flying across the room.
I looked over at her. Checked to see she was okay.
She seemed fine. A little mad, but fine.
She looked at me.
“Thanks, Beatrice,” I muttered. “Really. I didn’t know how much you cared.”
Then she grumbled and wandered off into the kitchen.
I looked down at Rocky then. His eyes were gazing out from under the table in amazement, like he was just as surprised as I was about Beatrice’s mad reaction.
He glanced at the man.
Then at me.
“I’ll wait here,” he said. “Just in case.”
I felt my stomach sink. “Sure, Rocky. Sure.”
“Jesus,” the man said. I realised then he was tending to his wounds. “I mean, I heard you were mad. Heard you were weird. But appearing out of thin air. Having a crazy cat. And now… now chatting to your dog like it’s normal. I made a mistake coming here. And I made a mistake thinking I could just talk you around.”
He pulled back his crowbar.
I lifted my hand in turn. “You’re bleeding,” I said.
He stood there, a little taken aback by what I’d said. “Yeah? And?”
“And if you kill me, or even attack me, your DNA will be all over this place.”
He stood still. Stopped dead like he was only just coming to terms and getting to grips with what I’d just said.
“So I… I don’t think that’d be a very good idea, do you?”
He stayed still. Like he was considering things, mulling things over.
And then he shrugged. “I know people. People who can do a great job of cleaning the evidence. You went sniffing around Pedro Pinto’s place when he got done in, didn’t you? The same people who cleared out his place… yeah, they’re on side.”
I tried to get my head around what this man was saying, and how I’d never understood how empty and minimalist the bulk of Pedro’s place was a year ago when I’d gone to look in there.
But I couldn’t afford to mull it over really because this nutter was flying at me with his crowbar once again.
I tumbled to my right. The crowbar slammed into my floor. I felt bad for Doris who lived downstairs, always watching TV. She was pretty noise sensitive, so the smacking of a crowbar on her ceiling was really going to get me in big trouble.
I rolled over, tried to get back to my feet. Now more than ever, the urgency to get out of here built up inside me. I didn’t care where I went. I didn’t care how I got there. I just knew I needed to get away from here. Fast.
But the man wasn’t stopping.
He was towering over me now.
Towering over me, just as Krissy Palmer’s killer had towered over me a year ago.
He looked me in the eye and for a split second, I thought I saw something like guilt.
“I’m sorry for this, Stella,” he said. “Truly, I am. But you did this. You did this.”
The crowbar came flying down.
I gripped my eyes tightly shut.
And then I felt it.
Chapter 20
No. I didn’t feel the bludgeoning of a crowbar. My brains didn’t splatter around the room, although I’d be lying if I said I didn’t imagine that outcome in those brief moments that my life flashed before me.
No, this isn’t that kind of story. Instead, something else happened. Something more befitting—and remarkably less violent, thank the Lord.
The crowbar didn’t hit me at all.
That’s what I felt.
The lack of a crowbar hitting me.
Sorry if that’s disappointing to you in some way. If it is, you might want to get yourself checked out because that’s just wrong.
But I felt a lack of a crowbar hitting me.
And I felt something else, too.
The same feeling I’d encountered when this intruder had walked in through my door.
The reactionary throes of magic tightening their arms around me.
I turned. Looked up at the intruder. Part of me thought maybe I was just imagining things. Maybe he was toying with me right now, and the crowbar was going to hit me after all.
But no.
I saw something remarkable.
The intruder was trying to swing the crowbar at me. I could see quite clearly that he was tensing his arm, trying to make a hit.
But the crowbar wasn’t budging.
It was stuck in the air. Like it was being held by something.
And I knew exactly what that “something” was.
I started to stand up, growing more and more confident. I stepp
ed over to the intruder, the powers coursing through my body now. I knew how to invoke them. I knew they sparked up in times of dire need.
But right now I felt like I had control of them again.
Right now, I felt like I did a year ago. Empowered. Strong. Far, far stronger than I had been in the year since.
So I looked at the intruder and then I looked at the crowbar, his hand stuck to it like superglue was doused all over it.
Then I looked back at him.
“Oops,” I said.
He didn’t seem to hear me. Didn’t seem to understand. Not at first.
But then I heard the snap of his arm and boy did he feel that.
He cried out. Screamed, as he dangled there, crowbar still in hand.
I saw Rocky gazing at me, amazed, and I reached into my pocket for the truth serum.
“One thing you should know about me,” I said. “Something you won’t remember for much longer, admittedly.”
I went to lift the mask from his face. He struggled, tried to resist—but to no avail.
I looked him right in his agonised eyes just before lifting the mask. “You should be careful who you choose to mess with.”
I lifted the mask.
And when I saw who it was, I had a combination of reactions.
Disbelief.
But also excitement.
“Stephen Hankinson,” I said. “What a pleasant surprise.”
Stephen didn’t look as clean cut as he did in any of those media shots with Herbert Young. He looked sweaty, his dark hair planted on his forehead. His cheeks were totally pale. “Please,” he said. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t mean for things to get this far.”
I opened the lid of the truth serum. “Oh, I don’t know what to believe, Stephen. But what I do know is that you’ll be telling the truth soon. Very soon.”
“What? What is that. What—”
I doused the truth serum across his face and waited for it to kick in.
I stood there, listening to his moans. I wanted to feel bad about what I was doing; wanted to believe this was barbaric, and that it wasn’t me.
But then Stephen had threatened Beatrice. And he’d tried to kill me.
For that, I found any kind of sympathy pretty damn difficult.
