Illicit Magic (Stella Mayweather Paranormal Series #1) Read online

  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 t
he 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.

  The bus pulled out. Behind me a voice shrieked and I heard the impact of something large hitting the bus’ bumper and bouncing with a dull thud onto the road. It sounded awfully like a person but I didn’t dare falter for a second to look backwards to see if the person was all right. There hadn’t been any passengers left at the bus stop so I hoped it was the man who had stared at me with such hatred.

  I recognised my attackers for what they were. I’d seen the news, the headlines of the newspapers, and heard about the women. The thought of it made me shiver: all were found burned alive, their bodies twisted in agony long before their final moments of death. Their corpses charred and all but unrecognisable, yet bizarrely similar no matter when or where they were found. They had all been bound to wooden stakes which, laced with accelerants, had been torched.

  The newspapers were in their heyday. Nothing thrilled a paper better than a string of vile unsolved crimes; the very words “serial killer” sent them into overdrive. They quoted “official sources”, which said there was more than one suspect, possibly a gang of killers lurking to abduct women to their fiery deaths.

  No wonder the women at work were all concerned for each other. I didn’t give myself the indulgence of wondering if they were at all concerned about me. I doubted they would give a damn unless...

  I couldn’t help the feeling that I was going to be next.

  They would probably grimace at work when they heard about my death. Maybe they would pretend to have been my friends as well as co-workers, purely for the TV time. I pushed on, the fear bubbling in my stomach. Run! my brain screamed.

  As I took the next left and sprinted forwarded, racing across the road, I wished I was somewhere more public. I knew feinting right would take me into a smaller, safer residential street where I knew a shortcut across a small children’s play park that sat incongruously in a partially fenced roundabout. It would get me home quicker but it would also take me away from lights and, crucially, people. Witnesses. There was no time to think. I dashed right and ran full pelt, slowing to slip through the gates, bypassing the swings that were swaying by themselves on creaking chainlinks and slung myself forwards into an alley that divided the houses and led closer to my street.

  I couldn’t hear any footsteps behind me so I slowed just barely enough to allow me to glance over my shoulder without tripping in the poor light and landing on goodness-knows-what in the alley.

  My forehead knitted into a frown as I strained to hear any sound. No one was following me. At last I had a chance to gasp for breath and fill my lungs with air as I reined myself into a fast walk. I could easily have brushed the chase aside as a nasty coincidence or a random attack but that nagging sixth sense fizzling in my nerves warned me to continue to be wary and I kept up the steady jog that would carry me home.

  As I came out of the alley, instead of taking the pavement, I slipped through a crack in the fence into a corner garden and then proceeded through front gardens, hopping over small dividing fences until I could hang back in someone else’s drive, a few houses diagonally away from mine. The lights were off in this house and there was no car; I vaguely recalled the man who lived here worked away often, so I doubted anyone was going to step out and ask me what I was doing loitering in the shadow of their house.

  When something brushed against my leg, I nearly screamed but looking down, saw that it was just a black cat with a single white front paw that had chosen this moment as the perfect time to terrorise me. I stooped to scratch it between the ears as I kept my eyes on my front porch. From my low vantage point, I couldn’t see much, but at least it made me temporarily invisible. The cat purred and nuzzled at my wrist, twisting around my ankles and arching its back, so I scratched it there too until it got bored and stalked away through a narrow gap in the fence.

  I waited, trying to decide if my house was being observed by anyone other than me but, after a few minutes, I decided it wasn’t and that I should go inside or risk standing outside, getting soaked now that the wet air had morphed to grey drizzle. My coat was ripped and my hair started to plaster itself to my forehead and I could feel sweaty damp patches sticking to my skin. What a catch.

  “Grow some backbone,” I muttered to myself, my voice catching in the cold as I examined the sleeve sadly. I’d only owned the jacket since last autumn and had gotten it on sale for a snip. Damn. Maybe I could fix it later, sew on a new button to cover the rip or give it some kind of nifty patch. Anything so I wouldn’t have to eat into my savings to buy another coat.

  I fished the key from the inner pocket of my bag and palmed it, the jagged edge poking out from between my clenched fingers. It wasn’t much of a weapon. Perhaps I should get something else to keep about me, but I couldn’t think of anything as legal and effective as a baseball bat, only smaller. It’s all very well outlawing weapons but when you are about to be set upon by a group of beefy, potential serial killers, it’s small comfort to have a Yale key, a wing and a prayer as your only protection.

  I huffed in contempt and darted a glance to the left, then right, before jogging across the road and along the narrow, chequered tile path, made ugly with weeds in their last throes of life. I slid my key into the lock and twisted right once, closing the door quickly behind me, ensuring the Yale lock had snapped shut. Not for the first time I wished the owner would spring for a deadbolt and a more substantial door.

  Home was a very euphemistic way of describing the unremarkable terrace where I had been living for the past two years. The owner, my landlady, Mrs Kemp, had the whole ground floor. The small hallway of what had once been a family home had been portioned off so there was the door that led into her flat and then the staircase. It was now boxed in lest any tenant, God forbid, decided to spy on Mrs Kemp and upload pictures to Grannies Uncovered.

  Upstairs were two flats – one mine – that had been carved out of the former bedrooms on the first floor. A second staircase led to another flat nestled in the eaves. Mrs Kemp and her long-dead husband bought the house in the sixties, so she told me on the days when she wasn’t whining, and raised a family who now lived out of the city and barely visited. (“Good-for-nothings who won’t see a penny of my will,” was Mrs Kemp’s catchphrase. Privately, I thought they were rather sensible.)

  The old woman turned the second floor, which her arthritic legs couldn’t reach, into an income provider for her dotage. It was a cramped set-up, not particular well kept outside or in, but affordable for Zone 1 and easy to reach the tube or walk to work on the occasions that I found somewhere closeby to temp. That’s where the perks ended.

  The front door had a large, glazed panel to let in the light but even though it was sandblasted for privacy, I didn’t dare linger once I grabbed the mail that had been put on a shelf for me. I bounded up the stairs and, after stopping for a moment to examine if the lock had been tampered with – it hadn’t, used the second key to let myself through the door. It would need more than one coat of paint to disguise that it was worthless plywood. Given the lack of consideration regarding security, I was constan
tly surprised that none of the flats had been burgled. Maybe it was pure luck that the house looked like crap on the outside and repelled burglars.

  I thumped the door shut and leaned against it, bracing myself for Mrs Kemp’s bang on the ceiling – there it was, predictable as ever. Grateful to be inside my tiny flat, my heart still hammering, the awful fear still swam through every inch of my veins, though I felt a lot happier now that I was enclosed in familiar space. It might not be a castle but at least it was my home. A tear slipped down my cheek in relief and I brushed it away with the back of my hand.

  After a succession of ill-fated flat shares and grimy, overpriced bedsits with communal – and even grimier – bathrooms, having my own place at a price I could afford was something for which I was persistently grateful. It was the only reason why I hadn’t moved on. I would have to have a good long think about that, now that security might be a problem.

  I moved my head forty-five degrees to the side and let my ear press against the sheets of laminated wood. I tried not to breathe. There were no sounds from the other side of the door. Slowly, I rolled my head a little more until my eye was level with the peephole, my forehead gradually becoming indented with the peeling paint job on the thin door. The hall lamp, operated by a sensor, was still on and the hall seemed clear. The two other flat doors were shut but I couldn’t hear familiar sounds of footsteps or TVs through our thin, shared walls. My nearer neighbours were not home yet and paranoia was apparently becoming my middle name.

  I exhaled, relief replacing fear, and stumbled away from the door, dropping my shoulder bag on the floor next to the sofa, tossing my mail on the little wooden table that I salvaged from a skip one night, and made use of after cleaning it up. I shrugged my coat off and dumped it on top of the envelopes. It landed in an untidy heap and I winced again at the sight of the rip. I tossed my gloves on top and pushed my hair away from my face.