Illicit Magic (2 page)

My hearing spiked as I tried to zone in on the direction of that heavy footfall. I didn’t have to wait long. Another followed it; then there was the faintest sound of more footsteps falling in to join the first. It was like they had just appeared, footsteps falling from nowhere. But what shook me was that they were all beating down on the pavement exactly in time. Footsteps in London – at the tail end of rush hour as everyone packed up and jostled to get home on crammed buses, the stifling tube or, like me, walking home if the distance was close enough to allow it – was hardly unusual but the staccato
stomp, stomp, stomp
of their regimented treads made my muscles tighten in fear. It was too weird to be coincidence.

I wanted to run.

Instead I stepped up my pace. After a moment the footsteps quickened with me.

I exhaled one long breath that plumed in the air in front of me before disappearing in the wet breeze. Somewhere behind me I heard a grunt, an ugly guttural sound. I couldn’t be sure of the distance but it wasn’t nearly far enough away for my liking.

If I hadn’t been certain before, I was now. I was being followed.

Think
, I told myself.
What would some kick-ass girl do? She’d run,
I thought, surprising myself. No question about it. Kick-ass heroines got themselves killed. Practical ones ran. I was nothing if not practical.

I was nearly at the intersection of the main road. Seeing an opportunity to shake off my pursuers I banked quickly to the left, around the side of a twenty-four-hour Booze Bin with big posters in the window announcing cheap wine on a two-for-one deal for Friday nights. I stumbled past the crowd of teens huddled near the doorway, hoods pulled up to hide their pasty faces as they clinked their little bottles of illicit alco-pops. One leaned in to light a cigarette from the barely glowing embers of his friend’s and puffed a nasty little cloud of smoke in my face. I glared at him and he shrunk back.

Okay, so maybe I was passively-aggressively kick-ass but at least I could scare a teenybopper successfully.

A quick scan ahead confirmed that, other than that little group, the street was empty of people. I darted forward trying to put as much distance between the footsteps and me as I could. I hadn’t power-walked further than fifty feet before I realised that the footsteps had – and my heart sank a little – followed me. I hardly dared spare the time to look behind me as my power-walk turned into a sprint, my leather bag on its long strap banging uncomfortably against my hip as the contents slid around. For the third time today, I cursed this morning’s decision to wear a skirt, and, for good measure, threw in regret for my long leather boots that were really no match for a good pair of running shoes.

I jogged forward, not quite in a run, and another turning came up. I threw myself around the corner and as fast as I could, dashed full throttle into the nearest shaded driveway.

Pinching my nose between my gloved fingers, I stifled a sneeze as I shrank back against the overgrown hedge, quickly circling my head to assess my surroundings. I was in the garden of a Victorian house with a big bay window that had a bad case of peeling paint. The ledge, like the rest of the house, looked rotten and decayed in the shadows of the rolling dusk. The lights were off and a curtain hung limply, not quite on every hook and a little too short, to one side like it was broken and forgotten. It didn’t quite screen the shadowy room.

It must have been lovely once, before neglect had taken over, and I felt sad that it had been unloved. Being somewhat of a TV property show aficionado, I couldn’t help thinking that the add-on eighties porch sagging against the shadow of the street lamp was tantamount to housing abuse. However, I was thankful that I could conceal myself behind the thick overgrown privet. As I huddled in the right angle between the street and the nearest neighbour. I bent forward to rest my hands on my thighs and gasped air into my heaving lungs after the sudden sprint.

It was only scant seconds before I heard the footsteps nearby. They had either seen me come about the corner, or guessed that I had. My heart thumped inside my chest. So much for shaking them off.

The footsteps stopped somewhere in the street but I couldn’t gauge how far away even though I could hear them stamp a little as the air took on a glacial chill. The hedge was too dense to see out, or in, and without looking I couldn’t tell if they were looking towards my hiding place or away towards the main road. I hoped they would head that way, figuring I would probably seek a busy place and lights just like lone women were always told to do when they were afraid. Lights meant safety.
Crap. I was definitely in the wrong place.

Sharp, murmured voices passed me on the wind. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but there was the sound of confusion and dissent; then a barked order calmed them. I caught the sole word “silence” from a low voice as it hissed past me. The footsteps shuffled and stamped again but no one uttered a word. It was like they were all listening for me. I felt like a fox, terrified and cornered, knowing that the beagles were just behind me, waiting to catch my scent.

Above me I could just see the first quarter of the moon breaking in the sky, casting a dim glow over the city. My jacket was a dark padded cord, good for blending in with both the hedge and low light. My breath was catching like little puffs of cloud in the air so I pulled up my cheap, striped scarf and covered my mouth to keep the plumes from straying to where they could be seen.

Without moving the rest of my body, I strained my head towards my pursuers, the scarf tightening about my neck until I tugged it loose again. I tried to count how many footsteps I could hear as they shuffled, fanned out and regrouped.

With only my pounding heartbeat for company I waited for what seemed like eternity. I tried to count Mississippi’s to gauge the time but my mind stumbled over the count and I threw the thought away. I waited for seconds, minutes, hours for them to rush past me, or at least turn and stamp a different way, hoping miserably that they really hadn’t seen me dart into this street.

Finally I couldn’t hear a thing but the blood rushing in my ears.
Had I made it up? Was I really paranoid enough to think someone would bother following me? Probably. Possibly.
It wasn’t the first time I’d been extra cautious, but it was the first time since the news has been full of murder. I shivered and tried to shake away the icy fear.

Edging my way across the privet, the leather of my long boots brushing against each other as I sidestepped, my toes scuffed against the scrub of garden. Fronds of hedge needled my back through my winter coat as I brushed by and fresh drops of dew slid uncomfortably past my scarf and inside my collar.

With my mouth set in a firm, grim line, clamped so tightly shut I was close to grinding my teeth, I poked my head forward, mere millimetres from the hedge but enough to see a gloved hand shoot towards me and grab my coat, the fingers clawing at my shoulder to snatch a handful of material and drag me into the open. A gasp escaped me.
How had they gotten so close without me realising?
Another hand, yellowed at the fingertips and reeking of tobacco, reached for my neck.

A gruff male voice snarled, “Gotcha!”

I shrieked and my whole body went rigid as I closed my eyes tightly. The air went thick and heavy around me, the cold momentarily disappeared and the blood in my veins surged as electricity crackled through my body. For the merest second all the low light and dull sounds of the city disappeared as the power rushing through me overwhelmed and took possession of me.

With the hand at my neck and the fear pumping alongside the electricity, I thought I would die in this moment, but when I opened my eyes again I was on the other side of the street, looking at my attacker grasping at the air where a second ago my neck had been. I saw his fist punch savagely through the air where my jaw should have been. If I had still been there, he would have smashed it for sure.

I felt dizzy and willed myself not to faint. The last of the shriek ebbed in my throat as I realised that I had barely focused on the task but had ended up exactly where I thought I should be when I’d glimpsed that section of empty street. Perhaps my strange gift (I never could decide what I should call it) only worked properly when I was terrified. Moving through space wasn’t something I had even been able to control before. And right now, I wasn’t afraid to admit that I was absolutely, gut-wrenchingly, terrified.

As I stood there gaping, there was a shout and a cry of anger. A huddle of stocky beings had fanned out behind my attacker and they seemed to multiply by the second. They were searching for me, their prize, such as I apparently was. There must have been a dozen or so, broad shoulders clad in identical black wool coats, zipped to the chin like workmen. Woollen hats were drawn close over their foreheads and rested just above their eyes. I could see nothing more than thin, snarled mouths and square chins. One of them had smeared black paint across his cheeks and I couldn’t help thinking that he looked like he was at war.

I had never known such anger and it was all aimed at me.

I shouldn’t have watched them for those few seconds, shouldn’t have drunk in their darkness, because it took them a fraction less time to spot me. A cry rang out. It echoed through the gang, passing from one to another like a rallying yell until the cacophony of anger and disgust reached me.

Any woman would be afraid of a gang of men chasing her. How many times had I heard the women at work in my various temping jobs recently warning each other to “walk straight home” and “don’t take short cuts” or “don’t be afraid to knock on a door with a light on if you think you’re being followed”. They reminded each other with a vague hint of mawkish glee that horrible things could happen and weren’t they good about being proactive and warning each other? ”Don’t be afraid to spring for a taxi,” they said, “better safe than sorry, better than ending up dead, or worse”. How hollow their words sounded to me. No one seemed to ever think to suggest that maybe, just maybe, someone should be warding killers off, rather than offering advice to their potential victims.

Of course, I was afraid; my whole body was afraid, but not of a beating, or losing my wallet, or of rape – though I didn’t want any of those things to happen to me. What I was afraid of was worse because I was sure now that there could only be one thing that had drawn them to me, instead of the millions of other women in the city. The suspicion nagged at me but I didn’t have time to fully think it through as their words, like a chorus, hung in the air between us and sent a shiver down my spine. My pursuers confirmed my worst thoughts.

“The witch,” they hummed as one, spitting the words onto the wet air to float towards me. “Catch the witch! Burn the witch!
Burn her
!”

The men stepped off the pavement as one and swarmed towards me. The man who had done his best to smash my jaw didn’t move, though he was poised to spring; and it was his solid glare that frightened me the most. He was capable of unspeakable things I was sure.

The fear that had been rising in me was absolutely, utterly justified. I didn’t need to think about it. I spun on my heel and ran as fast as I could, my shoulder bag whacking me painfully on the hip in the same place it had struck before as I hurtled away from the gang. I would bruise, but it hardly seemed to matter. That was by far the lesser of the evils that threatened me now.

I would be lucky if a bruise from my bag was all I escaped with.

Now I knew them for what they were – witch hunters, murderers, my enemy – my life depended on my escape.

TWO

I was sprinting for all the world like the hounds of hell were on my tail, ruing the day I decided to buy this stupid bag.
Why couldn’t I have gotten a neat little rucksack?
Still, the bruises of my own bag’s making would surely be preferable to whatever this crazy gang had in mind, which I was sure it wouldn’t be pleasant. What could possibly be nice about a single woman being chased down by a dozen men who were drawn solely to her magic? From the second the hand grabbed for my throat, I knew for certain that I was in far more serious danger than a run-of-the-mill kidnapping.

When I opened my eyes and found myself across the street, I could hardly believe that, for once, I had actually done what I meant to do. I’d accidentally moved myself in the past by blinking one minute and then opening my eyes to find myself yards away. For a long time while growing up, I thought I was going loopy. There was the week I caught a cold when I was nineteen and every time I sneezed, I zapped – for lack of a better word – myself somewhere else, somewhere never too far, but far enough that I had to wear day clothes, including shoes, to bed for a week, house keys stuffed in my pocket, lest I sneeze, vanish and pop outside by accident.

After that episode, I certainly didn’t need any more persuasion that I was different from everyone else. Very different. If only I knew what the hell it was all about and why it was happening to me. I didn’t need to be convinced to run; I was already pounding the pavement.

“The witch,” they hummed as one behind my fleeting back. “Catch the witch! Burn the witch! Burrrrrn her!”

I was desperate to put as much space as possible between us as fast as I could. My feet thundered across the pavement in the strangely empty street. I dashed past houses, lights on, the blur of movement showing a montage of people moving past windows, serving dinner, greeting their loved ones, leaning forward to change the TV station. Normal family life that was oblivious to my pursuers and me. I wanted so badly to be inside these safe, warm homes that my heart ached as much from fear as from need.

My lungs, not yet recovered from the previous sprint, were starting to burn. I took the corner to my right, leapt into the road with barely a glance in either direction, and darted between a car and a red bus that was just pulling out. I earned myself a hoot of the horn from the driver, his angry fist shaking as I turned my back and stumbled across the gutter onto the pavement, slipping on the wet kerb. I put my hands out to stop my fall and caught my sleeve on the jagged edge of the vandalised bus shelter, its window smashed the third time in as many weeks. I wrenched my arm free and cursed as the fabric tore. I righted myself and sprinted on.