A Witch Alone (The Winter Witch Trilogy #3) (6 page)

‘Actually no, I’m Marcus.’

‘Oh!’ Lauren was taken aback. She looked from me to Marcus, then back at me, clearly wondering what she’d said. Then she smiled. ‘Well, nice to meet you anyway. How do you know Anna?’

‘Family friend. We’ve been out for the evening and I said I’d walk Anna back.’

‘Quite the gentleman! I’d walk with you, but I’m going the other way – I’m out clubbing. Fancy coming along? Shame to be all dressed up and nowhere to go!’

‘Sorry.’ I had to force out the words. ‘I’m shattered. Maybe …’

‘Yeah, maybe another time. Gotta run anyway, we were meeting at eleven and I’m already late. Lovely to see you! And great to meet you too, Marcus! Anna, we
must
catch up – I’ll call you, yeah?’ She blew air kisses at us both and trotted off down the road.

As the sound of her heels tapped into the distance, I leaned against a wall, trying to catch my breath.

‘Anna,’ Marcus put a hand on my back, ‘are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ I managed. ‘Just – she hit a nerve. I can’t—’

‘It’s OK, no need to explain,’ Marcus said quietly. We walked in silence the rest of the way to my grandmother’s.

At the house, Marcus waited politely while I fished in my pocket for the key.

‘Well, goodbye,’ I said awkwardly.

‘Wait.’ Marcus put his hand on my arm. ‘Just a second. Listen, if there’s ever anything I can do …’ He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a pen and then looked around for something to write on. ‘Damn, where’s a receipt or something when you need it? Hang on.’ He put his hand inside his jacket and took out a beautiful linen handkerchief. Before I could protest, he’d written a number across it, in old-fashioned looping handwriting.

‘This is my mobile. If you need anything – well, there it is.’

‘Marcus …’ I took the handkerchief and bit my lip, looking down at the number. ‘I mean – thank you. But – but why? Why do you keep helping me?’

‘It’s only a mobile number,’ he said lightly, an amused smile at his lips. But then his brown eyes met mine for a moment and there was something else there – a sadness. ‘I loved your mother. She was the closest thing to a parent that I can remember.’

I wanted to say something – but no words came.

‘Well, there you go,’ Marcus said. ‘Please keep the number. If you need it.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. He bent and kissed my cheek. Then he was gone.

T
he hall clock was chiming midnight as I closed the door carefully behind me, then locked it with the unwieldy key. Wearily, I kicked off my shoes and climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the little white spare room awaited. This was ‘my’ room when I stayed – and I should have walked thankfully inside and flopped onto the narrow white bed.

Only – for some reason – I kept climbing. Up into the darkness.

The bulb had gone at the top of the stairs and, as I climbed, the shadows closed around me. By the time I reached the top floor it was almost completely dark and I had to feel for the doorknob by touch. I didn’t know what was inside. But I could guess.

I turned the knob, the door swung open, and I stepped inside my mother’s bedroom.

It was a teenager’s room, but a teenager of decades ago, frozen in time the day she’d left it.

There were fading posters on the wall: bands I’d never heard of, plays that closed decades ago, gigs in venues long since disappeared. A timetable for A-level revision was pinned over the desk, giving me a guilty twinge about my own revision, which was somewhere around the bottom of my list of priorities.

Photos were stuck around the frame of the mirror: laughing girls, groups of friends, their arms slung around each other. I looked carefully, but didn’t recognize anyone. No, that wasn’t true. There was one face I did recognize. A girl with long dark hair and smoky blue eyes, laughing at her friend. It could have been me, but it wasn’t. It was my mother.

Suddenly there were tears in my throat; hot, painful tears that lodged hard in my gullet like a sharp piece of bone. My limbs were shaky and I sat down hard on the bed. Her bed. The covers were rumpled. The last person to sleep here had been …

I lay down, very carefully, feeling as if I was disturbing a museum relic. And then I turned my face to the pillow and breathed in the smell of my mother, the scent of her hair, the ghost of her perfume.

‘Please,’ I whispered to the silent house, to her ghost, ‘help me.’

But only the night-sounds of London answered me.

When I woke up I was stiff and cold, and my mouth felt acid and hungover, though I hadn’t drunk much at dinner. I looked at my watch. 4.10 a.m. Yuck.

Something about the quiet of the house told me that my grandmother was still not home. I made my way stiffly down the stairs and sure enough the door of her bedroom was still gaping wide, the bed covers smooth and flat in the grey dawn light.

In the spare room I pulled on a jacket and scribbled a quick note.

Dear Grandmother,

I’m sorry, I had to leave unexpectedly. I hope the meeting goes/went well. Call me when you have time.

Anna x

Then I walked out into the pale, sour dawn and began the long trudge towards Victoria Station and the first train to Winter. I wanted to be out of London. I wanted home. I wanted … The answer as it came to me, surprised me.

I wanted Abe.

‘Abe!’ I yelled through the door again. Surely he wasn’t out?

He wasn’t. As I was just about to knock again, I heard a coughing shuffling sound from inside and the lock clicked. A tousled head, face crumpled on one side from the sheets, peered blearily around the door.

‘Anna – what are you doing here? I thought you were in London?’

‘I was. I had to come home. Can I come in?’

‘Sure, yeah. Sorry I’m a bit …’ He opened the door wider and looked down at himself. He was wearing stubble, a towel slung around his waist, and not much else.

I don’t know why, but I flushed red. A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth and he shrugged.

‘I wasn’t expecting guests at the crack of dawn. Wait a sec.’

‘It’s hardly dawn!’ I called down the corridor towards his retreating back. For answer, he stuck his middle finger in the air and I grinned and made my way to the kitchen. The other thing I wanted was coffee. And lots of it.

By the time Abe came back, his black hair still tousled but now damp as well, and wearing jeans and a heavy jersey, I was sipping a cup of coffee strong enough to take the enamel off my teeth.

‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you!’ He sat down at the counter beside me and poured himself a cup too.

‘Sorry for dropping in unannounced. D’you mind?’

‘Do I get much choice?’ he said. But his voice, muffled by his coffee mug, had a smile. ‘Christ, this is strong enough to strip paint.’

‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘I needed it.’

‘Hard night? Grandma bit of a partygoer is she?’

‘Yes – and no.’ I told him about my discovery at the Ealdwitan headquarters and his mouth thinned.

‘What?’ I said at last, as I finished. ‘I thought you’d be pleased? It doesn’t tell me a whole lot more, I agree, but it feels like a step closer, don’t you think?’

‘Two things: one, I don’t like you going to that place.’ I wasn’t sure if he meant my grandmother’s, the headquarters, or just London in general. Possibly all of them. ‘And two, are you short of a screw, trusting that Corax bloke? What do you know about him, apart from the fact that his dad’s a bastard?’

‘He seems OK,’ I said, and then held up my hands at the sight of Abe’s expression. ‘I know, I know. But honestly, I really don’t think he likes his father a whole lot more than I do. They seem to have some
serious
issues.’

‘Anna, I’ve got serious issues with
my
family. Doesn’t mean Jesus wants me for a sunbeam.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said crossly. ‘And you know it.’

‘Well I don’t see your logic. The guy sounds a total sack to be honest.’

‘For your information, he saved my skin. Twice.’

‘Probably to get into your—’ He broke off, seeing my face, and amended: ‘Good books. His dad clearly thinks you’ve got something he wants; maybe Marcus is just handling his end of the campaign with a bit more tact.’

‘He helped me long before he knew who I was,’ I said shortly. ‘And how am I supposed to get answers about my mother without going through the Ealdwitan?’

‘I don’t know.’ His face was troubled. ‘But she went to hell and back to try to keep you a secret from them. And now you’re throwing all that away. It seems kind of … stupid.’

‘I’m not throwing it away, because the advantage disappeared the second I left London – can’t you see that? They
knew
where I was straight away. Whatever protection my mother gave me, I lost it when I moved to Winter. They know where I am – and I’m pretty sure some of them at least know
who
I am. And I don’t. I’ve got to get that information. Otherwise I’ll never know.’

‘Know what?’

‘Who I am.’

‘Who you are? What do you mean?’ His face was confused, frustrated.

‘No, I don’t mean that. I mean – what I’m capable of. What I can do.’ I felt panic rise inside me.

‘What the hell are you on about? Surely you just do stuff and see what happens? No one ever told me what
I
was capable of. You’re a witch, not a bloody sports car. You don’t come with horsepower, nought to sixty, and instructions for how to operate the sunroof. You want to do something? Try it. See what happens.’

‘No!’ My voice was a cry, almost a shout. ‘I can’t. I can’t risk it.’

‘Anna, what are you on about?’ Abe put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. I tried to look away, but he touched my cheek, forcing me to look at him. ‘What’s the matter?’

I took a deep breath.

‘Look; Emmaline, Maya – everyone’s always assumed that whatever it was about me was something good, something desirable. But what if it’s not that?’

‘What do you mean?’ Abe’s expression was wary.

‘What if …’ Words rose in my throat, choking me. I’d never admitted these fears to anyone, never said them aloud, not even to Seth. ‘Abe, what if I’m … evil?’

His eyes widened and he opened his mouth, but I hurried on, not yet ready to let him speak.

‘Maybe I should have been … destroyed. Maybe that’s what was supposed to happen. Perhaps that’s what my mother was doing; protecting her child at a cost to everyone else. But she couldn’t cope with what she’d done, so she fled.’

For a minute Abe was silent. Then he started shaking his head, more and more vehemently.

‘No.’

‘It makes sense.’

‘No. No, no, no. You’ve no proof of any of this.’

‘I have no proof of
anything
. It’s as likely as anything else.’

‘It’s not. What the hell d’you mean,
evil
? You’re a good person.’

‘I hurt people, Abe. Even when I don’t want to.’ I thought of Seth, in pain a hundred times because of me. Because of my hands burning his flesh, because of storms I’d conjured to harm his family and wreck his home. Because of his love for me. A love that had twisted and maimed until we were both scarred by it. ‘That’s why I can’t risk it,’ I said. There was a lump in my throat. ‘I can’t just
see
what happens. What happens might be … death. Worse. So I have to know what my mother found out about me that set her running.’

Abe didn’t answer. But, still in silence, he put his arms around me. I let my forehead rest on his shoulder, hard and muscled beneath his T-shirt.

He said nothing, just sat and held me. But I felt his magic wrap around me, more tender and more urgent than Abe himself would ever let on. I remembered again the fierce, burning exhilaration I’d felt when Seth had injected me with Abe’s magic. I remembered it coursing through my veins, filling me with Abe’s power and passion for life.

There was no going back from that. I could feel his life inside me – and I knew that he could feel it too.

As I trudged up the long, rutted drive to Wicker House, I was thinking of only one thing: firing up my laptop and doing some digging. There had to be a copy of the
Codex Angelis
somewhere. The British Library. Google books.
Somewhere.

Failing that, maybe ‘The Riddle of the Epiphany’ would bring up some hits. Or perhaps Caradoc would know something.

It was a lead, anyway. At last I felt like I had something concrete to get started with.

But when I opened the front door Dad was in the hall, lacing up his walking boots and humming to himself. He looked like he’d had Prozac for breakfast.

‘Anna!’ he said as he caught sight of me. ‘You’re back early. Fancy a walk?’

I bit my lip.

‘I’d like to … but …’ I scrabbled for an excuse. ‘I should be revising.’

‘You’ve been revising too hard.’ Dad straightened up and wagged his finger at me. ‘You’re looking positively peaky – Dr Winterson prescribes a pub lunch. Come on – it’s a gorgeous day and I’ve hardly seen you all week. Give this old man a bit of company for a change. I was going to treat myself to a roast at the Cr—’ He broke off and covered his tracks awkwardly. ‘We could drive out somewhere,’ he finished, looking down at his walking boots slightly wistfully.

I sighed.

‘How about we walk to the Crown and Anchor, Dad? Then we don’t have to drive anywhere and you can have a pint with lunch.’

‘Sure?’ Dad looked uncertainly at me. ‘I don’t mind a spin down the coast if you’d prefer that.’

Yes, yes, I’d prefer that. To be honest, I’d prefer rancid chips on Brighthaven pier. The thought of sitting in Seth’s pub, with his mum waiting on us and being lovely, made me want to stick knitting needles in my eyes.

But I had to get over this. Winter was a small town. The Anchor was one of the few places that did a decent meal. And there was no point in punishing Dad and Elaine with my pain.

‘Honestly, Dad, it’s fine. I’ll enjoy the walk.’

‘Anna!’ Elaine looked up from the bar as we entered and, for a minute, her expression was complete shock. Then she recovered and came out from behind the bar smiling, kissed me on both cheeks, and showed us to a sunny table by the open window. ‘And Tom. How nice to see you both. Lovely weather, isn’t it?’