by Let it be noted: there are drawbacks to radiating magick like some kind of arcane halogen heater.
It might sound like a good deal, and it certainly has its upsides (see: Zareen’s casual exorcism of a ten-strong haunting team, with a flick of her cadaverous fingers).
The downsides, though? For one, it should not be possible for other people to soak up magick like a sponge, just by touching me. It meant I wasn’t so much a magickal battery as a broken tap, spewing precious magickal resources every which way with no semblance of control. And if I wasn’t in possession of enough hangers-on to take some of the magickal overload, I’d probably burst.
That was really going to play hell with my social life.
For another thing, magick is super fun and all (see: never-ending chocolate pots, and rainbow hair), but it’s also scary as hell and dangerous beyond all reason. Give a furious and exhausted woman access to a convenient magickal reservoir, let her be possessed of terrifying necromantic powers, and top it all off by putting her in immediate danger, and… the results are not pretty.
Here’s what happened to Fenella Beaumont.
‘Shit,’ said Zareen, as Fenella rampaged in our direction, wearing the expression of a woman intent on nothing but our total destruction.
It was hard to blame her, even. We did have a regrettable way of wrecking her stuff.
‘Do you have any idea what you have just done?’ she screamed, mostly at Zareen, but her rage certainly included me. ‘Ten waymaster spirits! There probably aren’t another ten left in Britain! All that work — what we’ve expended — the rarity — my castle! Ruined!’
I listened, faintly intrigued. I’d never heard anyone literally splutter with fury before.
It occurred to me that I ought to be more worried, but I felt spacy and detached, like I existed on a different magickal plane to everyone else. Perhaps I did.
Zareen, though, was in no way detached. She squared up to Fenella, our own personal Queen of the Dead versus the woman who enslaved spirits, hauled entire castles from world to world, and had built a magickal organisation to rival every other known to man.
They ought to have been evenly matched.
They would have been, if it wasn’t for me.
‘Stop there,’ said Zareen, icy-cold, and her voice boomed and echoed, as though she spoke from the middle of a thunderstorm. Or as though she was the thunderstorm.
‘Or what?’ spat Fenella. ‘You’ve already done your worst.’ She whipped out a rose-quartz Wand, and power built around her in waves. Pressure built. Two elemental forces faced off against one another.
‘Ves,’ hissed Jay, and hands pulled at me. ‘You need to get out of here.’
I understood where he was coming from. Any bystanders to this particular fight were likely to end up smashed to smithereens, and I was already in a vulnerable state.
But, leaving Zar to face Fenella’s wrath alone was not an option. I shook my head, resisting his — and Alban’s — attempts to peel me away.
‘My worst?’ said Zareen, and smiled. ‘Not quite.’
I braced myself for an explosion of some kind, but… nothing happened.
Instead, I felt a faint woosh. A small ocean of magick poured out of me; Zareen took it, and with a tilt of her head and a blink of her coal-black eyes, she directed it with devastating force.
Fenella keeled over backwards, and lay inert as a stone.
For about five long seconds, no one spoke.
‘You’ve killed her,’ said Jay, and ran to kneel beside Fenella. He peered into her eyes, shook her, and finally checked her pulse. ‘She’s dead.’
‘She is not dead,’ said Zareen, and the thunder had yet to fade from her voice.
‘Stone dead,’ Jay said. ‘See for yourself.’
I, drained, slithered to the ground in an inelegant heap. As I released Zareen, the cadaver began to fade from her appearance. Her skin regained a little of its normal colour; flesh returned to her bones, and some of the black drained out of her eyes. She began to shake, but when she spoke again, her words emerged like steel bullets. ‘All right, she’s temporarily dead.’
‘Temporarily?’ I said, faintly. ‘What did you do to her?’
‘Soul-ripped her.’ Zareen spoke with awful casualness, and shrugged.
‘Which is what—’ I began.
Em said, ‘Her spirit is separated from her body.’ She gestured with one large hand, in a direction slightly removed from Fenella’s prone body. ‘She is, in ordinary parlance, a ghost.’
‘Zar.’ I sat up, my head spinning. ‘You can’t do that to people.’
Zareen gave a faint, huffy sigh. ‘I didn’t quite mean to. It isn’t something I can do, ordinarily.’
And so I learned that it was my fault. ‘Oh,’ I said, sagging. ‘Sorry.’
‘It isn’t something anybody can do,’ Zareen added, and now she sounded wondering and intrigued. She approached Fenella’s body, and eyed the dead woman with interest. ‘I’ll have to write an essay on it.’
‘It is in contravention of at least six magickal laws,’ Emellana pointed out.
‘Right,’ said Zar. ‘Maybe not the essay.’
‘In the meantime,’ said Jay, with emphasis. ‘What do we do about it?’
‘Do?’ Zareen echoed, blinking.
‘We can’t just leave her like this.’
Zareen shrugged. ‘It takes a lot to keep soul and body separate, if the body hasn’t actually died. She will soon find her way back. Or George will do it for her.’
‘Are you sure the body hasn’t died?’
‘I didn’t do anything to it, so I don’t see how it would’ve.’ Zareen began to sound annoyed.
And exhausted.
Me, I was losing all the good-in-a-bad-way feelings I’d had, and was coming to feel just plain bad. Like I needed to run up a mountain without stopping, and at the same time sleep for about twelve years. ‘Um,’ I said.
Nobody heard me. An argument flared up between Jay and Zareen, he (not unjustifiably) condemning her for her lack of concern over Fenella’s death, she hotly defending her conduct. Emellana, apparently appointing herself as mediator, oversaw the debate; I heard her calm voice chime in from time to time.
It was Alban who picked me up off the floor, where I’d been reclining in a most undignified posture, and steadied me on my feet. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.
‘No,’ I whispered, though his touch soothed a little. ‘I think… I think I’m going to need Addie.’
‘Right.’
‘And quickly.’
Here’s a little secret.
When I first met Adeline, quite a few years ago, she’d been hanging out in a proper Unicorn Glade situated surprisingly close to Home.
When I say “unicorn glade”, I mean that the place was hidden deep inside a tucked-away magickal Dell; it had the full complement of enchanted waters (smelling of nectar), jewel-green grasses, endless sunshine, and singing bees; and its unicorn residents numbered at least five, one of which had been Addie.
No one at Home had ever mentioned there being a Unicorn Glade on the doorstep. Even Milady had never made reference to it, despite knowing all about my friendship with Addie. To this day, I don’t know whether that’s because it is considered to be a deep, dark secret, or whether no one else actually knows about it.
Anyway, I haven’t been back since that one day I went there with the bag of chips, and came out with a new friend. I tried once, but I could not find it again.
Alban got me out of Ashdown Castle. I don’t really know how; I wasn’t entirely with it, anymore. There was rapid motion as I was swept out into the darkening evening beyond the castle’s gates, half-carried by my long-suffering friend, for I was too fascinated by the effects of my overabundant magick to remember quite how to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Every time I took a step, something happened. Flowers bloomed beneath my feet, grew toothy mouths, and tried to bite my ankles. Sparks flew up from the ground, and did their best to set fire to our clothes. I almost drowned in chocolate, when the grass under my feet abruptly turned molten and cocoa-scented, and I had to be hauled out — only to emerge with no trace of chocolate on my shoes.
It went on in this style, proving that while the effects of my peculiar state might be unpredictable and inconsistent, they were certainly going to be persistent. And inconvenient. I definitely heard Alban swearing, at one point.
‘Ves,’ he said, after a little while, and we stopped. We’d gone far enough away from Ashdown as to be out of sight. ‘The pipes? Time to summon Addie.’
‘Right.’ I dug around in my blouse, fumbling everything with trembling fingers.
Politely, Alban looked away.
‘Ha.’ I found the pipes, and held them triumphantly aloft. A stray beam of dying sunlight caught them, and they lit up like… well, like a magickal artefact of indescribable power.
‘Good,’ said Alban, and waited. When I remained where I was, gazing in frozen wonder upon the beauty of my syrinx pipes, he cleared his throat and said: ‘Go on. Play them. Play Addie’s song.’
I did that. The song got a bit more complicated than usual, as though the pipes were more or less playing themselves. ‘Wow,’ I said, when I/we had finished. ‘I’ve never been that good!’
Alban grinned. ‘You’re a mythical creature of limitless power. You’ll have to get used to that.’
‘That isn’t the idea, though, is it?’ I said, watching in fascination as the pipes morphed in my hand. ‘I’m to be drained of magic, like a wet dish cloth.’ The pipes became a conch shell in mother-of-pearl; a magickal Silver thimble; a miniature kingfisher, clad in gold; a rose the size of my fist, made of pure ruby.
In came Addie with a swoosh of her pearly-white wings, and a quadruple thud as her silvery hooves hit the turf. She dashed over to me and shoved me with her nose.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, and all but fell on her.
She shoved me again, rudely. This wasn’t concern. This was anger.
‘Fine, I’m sorry,’ I babbled. ‘I know I took you far away from home, and got you captured by nefarious evil-doers, and then kind of ignored you for a while afterwards—’
She stepped on my foot. I paused to emit a faint shriek.
‘—but it isn’t that I don’t love you,’ I gasped, my eyes watering. ‘And I don’t even have any fried potato products with me to prove it, but I swear I will make up for that, Addie.’
Carefully, Alban extended a hand and patted Addie’s silky mane. Under his touch, she calmed maybe just a fraction.
‘I need help,’ I told her. ‘Look.’ I held out my left hand to show her. I still had a hand, which was nice, only the skin and muscle and bone was gone. I had a jewelled claw of a hand instead, and if I wasn’t crazy to even imagine it (always a possibility) I might have said it was wrought out of magickal Silver. My fingernails had a most attractive Silvery sheen.
‘This kind of crap is not going to stop,’ I said to Addie. ‘I also may have helped rip a woman into two separate pieces not long ago — physical and corporeal — and though Zar swears she’ll be fine I’m not sure, Addie. I’ve become a danger, old girl, and I don’t like it.’ A tear ran down my cheek, turning to something solid on its way down, and fell into the grass in a brief flash of bright gold.
‘No one’s going to blame you, Ves,’ said Alban, reaching for me.
‘I’m blaming me,’ I retorted. ‘I may not be at fault for my present condition — it’s not like I asked for it — but I am responsible for the outcome.’
‘Okay, but still—’ said Alban.
‘And what kind of a life can I have in this state? I can’t even hug a person without turning them into a sodding hippogriff.’
Alban, unable to produce a rational response, merely raised his brows.
‘It’s happened,’ I assured him. ‘Well, kind of. At the tower Jay was growing feathers and all that, so I hugged him out of it. But we’re all backwards out here, and it isn’t that Jay isn’t magickal enough for the environment, it’s that I am far too much so, so probably the effects will be the other way around too, right?’
‘Ves,’ said Alban, gently. ‘You’re stalling.’ He looked at me with such heart-melting compassion, I could’ve cried.
Forget that. I did cry, especially when he pushed me gently in Addie’s direction. ‘She’s waiting for you,’ he said, and he was right: she’d stopped tossing her head and snorting and stood patiently waiting for me to stop procrastinating and get my act together.
‘I’m afraid,’ I said, twining my fingers through Addie’s mane.
‘It will be all right,’ said Alban.
Then I was up on Addie’s back, and with powerful beats of her wide, beautiful wings, she bore us both up into the skies.
I stared down at Alban’s big, big frame as he dwindled to dwarfish proportions beneath us, and then vanished altogether. He was waving.
‘Take me somewhere safe, Addie,’ I pleaded, and buried my face in her mane.
She took me to her Glade. We came down softly in a carpet of thick moss, cool beneath my feet in the gathering twilight. I smelled nectar and fresh grass, and heard the soothing ripple of running water somewhere near.
I calmed at once, for the magick of Addie’s Glade had a depth to it; an ancient potency which somehow soothed the runaway chaos inside me. I stamped once, flicking an ear, as the night-time sounds of the peaceful Dell seemed to jump into sharper focus.
A dulcet breeze swept back my mane, and starlight glittered off the tip of my horn.
‘Addie!’ I called, for she was trotting away from me. The sound emerged as a penetrating whicker. ‘Wait for me!’
She looked back over her shoulder, one ear pointed straight up, and whickered back. Hurry up, then.
I hurried.
