Witchcraft Read online

  A chorus of, “Aye!” rippled flatly through the mini-bus.

  What is he wearing? Fox’s internal asked. She slid her eyes to the driver’s rear view mirror, which offered her a view of Jeremiah. He was sat on the single seat at the very back, one leg up so his foot rested on the seat and his knee leaned against the window. Fox couldn’t say why his body posture irritated her but it did. He had his earphones on and was making a show of looking out of the window, but she caught him glancing towards the front of the bus several times.

  He was wearing a thick white cotton shirt, the first two buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up (Ridiculous at this time of year!) and it was tucked into a pair of neat fitting black jeans. But that wasn’t what made his dress stand out amongst the blue denims and hoodies of the other boys, it was the thin black trouser braces. On any other boy in the village, they would have made him look like the local scarecrow, but somehow, on Jeremiah, they looked… Fox refused to finish the sentence. Jeremiah’s light brown hair was tousled so it looked beguilingly like he had just got out of bed, although Fox suspected it was a highly polished look. No one could look that chilled and cool without a lot of work. In reality, the out of bed look just looked a mess; more like the dragged through a hedge look. She should know, she’d perfected it over the years.

  She had the feeling he knew she was looking at him and he had closed his eyes in order to give her free reign to absorb the details. She didn’t need to see his eyes to know what colour they were; she could conjure up the image of them from the first moment they had met. They were grey and blue, like tidal waters. Stop being so bloody romantic her internal mocked. More like the colour of drain water. Fox smiled in reply and pressed her lips together to stifle the giggle that threatened to escape.

  Bunny and her friends were unusually quiet, meaning they were undoubtedly whispering about Jeremiah. Fox could just see the effect he was going to have on Thornvale’s lower sixth girls. It had been bad enough when the trainee art teacher had arrived, all dark and handsome. Jeez, it had been like a form of weird hysteria. Mind, he had been kind of hot, Fox admitted. High praise from Fox, who was often left underwhelmed by the male species. It wasn’t that she didn’t like boys, it’s just she didn’t really see the point of wasting her time dating when she had too many other things to do.

  “Are you okay?” Swan asked, with her usual sense of emotional awareness. “You seem a little…”

  Fox shot her a challenging look but Swan was not so easily warned off.

  “…pre-occupied.” She punctuated her statement with the slightest turn of her head towards Jeremiah.

  “I’m fine, I just feel a little…” she began to reply but she didn’t finish her sentence. Something was happening inside her head; something violent and terrible. There were flashing lights, like torches in dark fields. Someone was crying but it sounded more like an animal than a human. The heavy feeling of loss and fear washed over her and she thought she might be sick. The white light of the torch flashed onto something pink and twisted on the ground; it was a child’s doll, the face of which had been smashed in with the tread of a heavy boot.

  Fox tipped her head between her knees with the hope of relieving some of the pressure building in the bridge between her eyes. Involuntarily, she let out a small groan. Swan reached out her hand and placed it onto the small of Fox’s back. Cool calm spread over her. The feeling of dark violence was replaced by the sensation of light. The sickness faded. Fox knew Swan was breaking an unwritten rule between the sisters and was using her magic on her. Rather than being angry, Fox felt relief. Whatever darkness had come at her, she had been unprepared and it had nearly dragged her under. It took her a moment to realise Swan was whispering close into her ear,

  “Just try and relax. Find your breath and breathe. Ssh. Ssh!”

  Bunny came scrambling up over the seat. “Hey, what’s up with her?” she asked, directing her question at Swan.

  “Nothing, she’s just dropped her iPod.” Swan almost choked on the lie. She hated lies, even white ones, which made her slightly socially awkward.

  Fox could feel Bunny’s eyes boring into her back and she knew she didn’t buy it. She was rescued from further interrogation by Smithdon throwing open the mini-bus doors. “Alright you rabble, get lost!” he said cheerfully.

  Fox stumbled out and gasped in the cold air before righting herself on her feet. She tucked her hair behind her ears in an attempt to tame it and threw her backpack over her shoulder purposefully. Her sixth sense informed her Jeremiah was watching her and the thought made her skin creep with goosebumps. She wasn’t entirely sure if the sensation was unpleasant or not. Swan sidled up to her and leaned in conspiratorially.

  “What happened?”

  “I really don’t know,” Fox replied, biting down on her lip and furrowing her brows. “It was like someone was flashing photographs in front of my eyes, but then it felt as if I was actually there, too. I think I was… dreaming.” She shook her head. “But I don’t dream.”

  “Sounds more like visions to me.” Bunny had sprung out of nowhere. “That is so cool; you could be a Saw! Wait until mum hears about this!” Bunny’s boundless energy never failed to surprise (or slightly irritate) her sisters.

  “A Saw?” Fox asked.

  Bunny adopted an overly dramatic voice and swept her hand across the sky. “A woman who sees visions of the future.”

  “Great!” Fox huffed. “So now I’m a bloody clairvoyant.”

  “Got to go, we’ve got some information gathering to do,” Bunny said, nodding her head in the direction of Evie, who was already fawning all over Jeremiah. He stood in the middle of the pretty, giggly welcoming committee, flashing his dazzling white teeth in a look of charmed amusement that irritated Fox immensely. Fox rolled her eyes and sighed. Isn’t he just loving it!

  As Bunny skipped over towards them, Jeremiah looked in her direction and clocked sight of Fox watching them. Damn it, now he probably thinks you fancy him!

  Swan was talking to her, but she’d missed the first part of the conversation having been distracted by Idiot-Boy. “Clairvoyance is a great gift, Fox. Only the most powerful of our kind possess it.”

  “I don’t want to be powerful,” Fox snapped. “I quite like being a little bit gifted without all the craziness that goes with it. Look at Bunny; her gifts have made her totally daft. All those years of being able to get into mischief and never get caught have sent her wild. Imagine what they will be like when they finally come in properly.”

  Swan nudged Fox’s elbow and smiled before teasing, “My, my, we have got the grumps on this morning, haven’t we?”

  They set off in the direction of the sixth-form block. Swan was in Year Twelve, just one year above her, even so, once inside college, they barely saw one another. Swan moved in a very small, secretive circle of friends and Fox had no idea where they hung out, and neither it seemed, did anybody else. She didn’t even really know who Swan’s friends were apart from Fred, who was possibly more than just a friend, and Dottie, her close girlfriend since nursery school. Swan had always found her Witch inheritance difficult to manage in the “normal” world and Fox suspected the reason her friends were so few and so close were because they knew the truth about her. If that was the case, she was lucky. Fox wasn’t close enough to anybody to drop that bombshell into their laps. Even Will, who she was sure had kind of guessed, was hardly someone she could properly share her secret with. If ever there was a least likely couple, it had to be her and Will. He was all sun-tussled hair and sporty, and she was… what? A cliché of the girl who will take off her specs to reveal a true Miss World beauty? She snorted a laugh at the thought. No, not quite. She didn’t wear glasses and despite not bothering with bronzer or gloss or any other alien face-paint product, she knew she was quite pretty – just not the Will-would-be-interested kind of pretty.

  The closest Fox came to having friends was that she spent her breaks and lunches with Carmen, Dave, and Stewart. They made a funny
group, having been thrown together through the fact they didn’t fit into any other of their year-group tribes. Carmen was a Traveller, which meant an immediate rejection by any of the Heargton village children, as their parents had been trying to evict the ‘gypsies’ from the common-land for the last eight years. Dave was a reject on grounds he was obese, which was tantamount to being a criminal offence at their school. Of course, it wasn’t helped by the fact Dave also had Star Wars obsession, believed in alien communication, and had been able to recite the periodic table at the age of seven. Stewart was a reject on grounds that he was too scrawny (yes, there were exacting standards at Thornvale) and that he had to wear glasses, which looked like the bottom of jam jars. And Fox? Well, she was just Fox. A ‘tomboy’ who’d always preferred climbing trees to the social popularity ladder. There wasn’t anything obvious about Fox on the outside that made her a bit of a loner, but the other children had always intuitively kept their distance, as if able to sense the power running through her blood.

  When she had been younger, she’d been foolish enough to think it was a good thing to show everybody how clever you were. Her hand was always first up and invariably with the correct answer, which although endearing when you’re in primary school, by the time she started secondary being able to answer every question correctly was tiresome for both her fellow students and her teachers. Over time, she’d learned it was best to keep quiet; to hide the fact you knew the answer, and your disbelief that nobody else appeared to. It wasn’t until she was eight, she understood not everybody had a photographic memory. Sometimes, she wished she could swap her gift with Bunny’s. But no! And now there’s the possibility that I’m a bloody clairvoyant! she thought angrily. Every Witch knew clairvoyance was a curse. It was bad enough she could recall everything she’d ever experienced, but now there was the chance she’d recall everything yet to happen! No more surprises.

  She was pulled from her grumps bythe hard physical contact with somebody. “Whoa, steady, Foxy!” Will said.

  She blustered with embarrassment. “Sorry, miles away. I’m really sorry.”

  “Hey, no worries, no harm done!” He punctuated his sentence with a wink, causing Fox to smile, despite her bad mood.

  Will ran his hand through his hair, which had the strange ability to change colour completely depending on where the light fell. Today, it reminded Fox of the colour of pheasant feathers; burned chestnut, flecked with black. His green eyes twinkled. She could see what the other girls saw in him; he was certainly handsome, but he wasn’t for her.

  “I’m glad you bumped into me, I’ve been meaning to hunt you down.” He laughed, amused by his own pun. Fox shot him a quizzical look. “Yes, I think you may have…” he paused whilst he fished around in his pocket, jiggling himself up and down in order to get his hand between the layers of fitted dark denim. “Here! I think this might belong to you.”

  He held up the small silver pentagram on a long broken chain. Fox had noticed it missing but assumed she had lost it somewhere in the garden.

  “It must have fallen off when I gave you a lift the other night,” he said.

  Fox felt the uncomfortable heat of embarrassment. She had never displayed the pentagram openly, letting it nestle down under her clothing, close to her heart. She suddenly felt protective. “What makes you think it’s mine? Surely you’ve had loads of ladies in your car over the weekend,” she said teasingly in an attempt to be evasive. She really didn’t want Will to know. But why?

  “Of course,” he said, emitting a short laugh, “but I’ve only given a lift to one Witch!”

  Fox snatched it out of his hands. “It’s a pagan sign for Mother Nature not…”

  Fox’s defense was cut short by an attack of sound and light. It was so intense, it caused her to reach out and grab Will’s arm for fear she was about to buckle to the floor. He held her fast. It felt hard to breathe, as if she had been running, chased down. It was night and she was in the woods, running towards the hill. A crack of lightening slit open the sky. Her ears were full with the sound of a crying child, and she knew intuitively, it was connected to the broken doll.

  “Fox! Fox, can you hear me?” Will’s concerned voice travelled through the vision and brought her back.

  “What’s happened?” Carmen asked as she bent down to try and see Fox’s face. She pulled back Fox’s hair and saw how pale and clammy she was.

  “Shall I go and get someone?” Will asked. He was out of his depth and awkward.

  “Nah, it’s probably just her monthlies,” Carmen replied squeezing Fox’s hand reassuringly; Carmen rarely demonstrated social grace. Will felt his awkwardness spike.

  “I’m fine. Really,” Fox managed to croak. “I just need some air.”

  “Come on then,” Carmen said, taking charge and pulling Fox down the corridor towards the door. “Watch out, will you!” she snapped at some poor unfortunate who happened to be walking innocently down the corridor.

  Once outside, the cold spring air hit Fox in the face like a slap. She ran her hand through her straggly mop and took in a deep breath.

  “That weren’t your monthlies, was it? There’s somethink up with you!”

  “Some thing, Carmen. How many times do I have to tell you that?” Fox said snappily.

  Carmen shook her head and pouted. “Don’t deflect, Fox. I might not speak as posh as you, but I’m not half as stupid as you think. Something is going on, and I reckon I know what it is. Your third eye is opening.”

  Well trust a bloody Gypsy! Fox stared hard at her and swallowed. Maybe it is time to trust someone.

  3

  The rest of Fox’s day was taken up with classes and time in the I.C.T. suite manipulating photographic images for her Art portfolio. She escaped more attacks from the visions, but she wasn’t able to completely forget the strange events of the morning, and Carmen’s words rattled around her head all afternoon. “Your third eye is opening.” Fox knew exactly what the third eye was; there was no need for a trip to Wikipedia for that one, although that didn’t stop Carmen from going on at length about, “gateways of consciousness.” Fox had had little choice but to let her rattle on about the various members of her family who had also been blessed with the gift, as she was hardly going to turn around and inform her that there were other members of her own coven who had, “the gift.”

  Carmen had left college after lunch without any real explanation. She did this a lot; the social convention of eight ‘til four didn’t really apply to, “her kind.” Although Fox and Carmen had been friends throughout secondary school, their friendship didn’t really extend beyond the school gates. Fox had never been one for play-dates, either hosting them or attending; not that Carmen had ever invited her over. The camp didn’t invite outsiders. Fox had carried, like a lot of people, a developed set of assumptions about Carmen and her Traveller family, many of which had been challenged over the years of getting to know her. It was a shame others hadn’t made the same effort. Carmen was clever, but having not attended primary school, she had big holes in the basic curriculum, which made others were quick to make the, costly, mistake that she wasn’t very bright.

  Unlike the representation of Travellers on the reality TV shows, Carmen’s father did not sleep on a mattress stuffed full of fifty pound notes, and it was painfully clear to everybody that Carmen came from a very poor background. Throughout her secondary school years, she had worn stout black army surplus boots, the same pair from Year Seven to Eleven, the only difference being the amount of newspaper stuffing in the toe. Her school woolen stockings had been made up more of darning thread than actual wool. Fox had never seen her wear a coat, even in the winters when it had snowed. But, despite Carmen’s obvious poverty, and her slight lack of personal hygiene, she was jaw-droppingly beautiful, and she knew it, wearing it like a magic talisman.

  Her thick, black curly hair always smelled of rose talc, the means by which she cleaned it, and it was threaded with shells and beads, in the same way as her father’s. Her eye
s were dark pools, which pulled you into their vortex, and were lined with heavy khol. Carmen dressed her face in the same way others dressed their bodies. She wore a silver ring in her nose, much to the establishment’s disapproval, and a small scattering of tattoo stars danced around her eyebrow. Carmen didn’t have a large wardrobe, and her clothes were often a mishmash rainbow effect, which Fox always thought cool. But she also knew they hid the stark reality of living with no electricity or water supplies, and with an overly romantic father who would happily have the world returned to the bronze age.

  Fox had only spoken with him once, although she had seen him around the village often; he was hard to miss at six-foot-eight and dressed like a Viking. Carmen had assured her that despite his fierce appearance, he was the gentlest man you could meet. It was whilst she was musing on Carmen’s life that Fox heard the familiar voice of Will behind her. She jumped, turning to see not only Will but also Jeremiah.

  “Feeling any better?” Jeremiah asked.

  Fox mumbled something.

  “Good job I was there or else you’d have fallen flat on your face, hey?” Will teased.

  Jeremiah looked confused, he had no memory of Will being anywhere near Fox that morning.

  Will finally got around to telling her what they were doing. “I’m giving Jay the tour. He’s taking History, too, so we’ll be hanging out together a lot.”

  Great! she thought sarcastically. Fox managed to control the sarcasm of her inner voice and pull together the slightly more sincere response of, “Excellent! What else are you taking?” whilst thinking, please don’t let there be any more of my subjects.

  “French and Literature.”

  “Same as me then,” she said, turning back to the computer screen in order to avoid Jeremiah seeing the roll of her eyes.

  Fox tried to ignore them as Will showed Jeremiah around the room, pointing out the location of various supplies and other random, useless stuff. At last, Will had exhausted the excitement (and cupboards) of the I.C.T. suite and they headed towards the door. Just when she thought she was about to be left in peace, Will was back by her side.