A Witch in Love (34 page)

I was cold. I couldn’t feel my feet; only the heat of Seth’s body against mine stopped me shuddering convulsively. And still we flew, now just inches above the waves.

Seth said nothing, but I knew that he must be able to hear the way my breath tore in my throat, feel my heart beating harder and harder. He said nothing and I loved him for it. I wasn’t sure if I could have kept silent in his place, watching the waves get closer and closer. And I knew that he must be suffering himself, the muscles of his arms must be screaming in protest from hanging on to my neck for so long.

He turned his head and I knew he was looking at the distance to the Spit, calculating if I could last. Could I? My breath sobbed in my ears and my vision was breaking into fragments of black and red. Everything hurt. My arms hurt, and my lungs hurt, and my heart felt like it was going to beat itself to death.

‘Anna, you can make it,’ Seth said urgently.

‘I can’t,’ I gasped. But I knew I had no choice.

‘You can, if I do this,’ Seth said. He drew a breath.

And then he let go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

‘
S
eth!’ I screamed as he plunged towards the dark waves. But it was too late, he hit the water with an almighty splash and disappeared.

For a moment I hung in the air, paralysed with shock. There was a roaring in my ears and my limbs felt like jelly. I watched in horror as the dark waves closed over Seth’s head, like a nightmarish replay of the events last year.

There was only one thing I could do. I took a deep breath – and plunged in after him.

For a minute there was a confusion of roaring water and crashing waves, and a tearing pain in my lungs. I felt myself tumbling over and over – and then I opened my eyes to the stinging salt water and saw Seth’s body floating in the deep, his eyes wide with shock. The roaring in my ears grew louder, the red and black fragments in front of my eyes shook apart, plunging me into a swirling darkness, and I thought,
So this is what it’s like to die
.

I didn’t die. But as I lay on the beach, choking salt-water phlegm into the sand, for a while I wished I had. At least if I was dead I wouldn’t be so cold, and so tired, and everything wouldn’t hurt so much.

But something kept dragging me back, a hand shaking me, a voice saying, ‘Anna, oh, Anna! You fool, you bloody idiot. Come on, sweetheart. Sit up, get
up
!’

I choked again, great gouts of salty foam, and the hand stroked my spine as I vomited up the meagre chunk of bread and dry cheese that had been my last meal.

‘Seth,’ I croaked, and opened my eyes. He was there. He was alive. Blue and shivering, but alive.

‘Anna, you fool,’ he said, and his voice cracked. ‘Why did you dive after me?’

‘Couldn’t … couldn’t let you die.’

‘I wasn’t going to die, you idiot. I was going to swim and let you fly the last bit alone. I knew I’d be all right; I just didn’t expect you to fall out of the sky like a dead seagull after me and have to tow you back as well.’

Great. I let my head fall back and tears leaked out to join the salty vomit.

‘I’m s-sorry … I d-didn’t …’

‘Hey, hey.’ He put an arm round me and pulled me up against his chest. I felt like a sack of potatoes in his arms. ‘It’s OK. Don’t be silly, you were fantastic. You got us out of there.’

‘You came back for me,’ I said. I put my head against his shoulder, feeling the stupid, weak tears come again, but powerless to stop them. ‘You came back.’

‘Yes,’ he said quietly. So quietly that I should have realized, even then. I should have known there was something wrong. But I was too tired, and too relieved to think straight. I just let my head rest against his shoulder and I shut my eyes as Seth gathered me up and carried me up the beach. Somewhere before we reached the land, I fell asleep.

When I woke up I was in bed, my own bed. Someone had stripped off the filthy, ripped evening dress, and it lay draped over my desk chair like a dishrag, with Seth’s jacket beside it. I was wearing a clean cotton nightshirt – and it felt amazing. I thought about weeping with gratitude. Instead I yawned.

‘Anna?’ A dark head poked round the door and Emmaline came into the room wearing an expression of worried delight. ‘You’re awake! How do you feel?’

‘Like crap.’ I stretched. ‘But kind of fantastic all the same.’

Everything hurt, everything was stiff. There were weeping sores on my wrists and ankles, stinging with dried sea-salt, but I had a goose-feather pillow under my head and that made up for a lot. Plus I could hear the thunder of bathwater in the tub and the most unbelievably mouth-watering odours were coming from downstairs. It was as close to heaven as I was likely to get – at least for the moment.

‘Oh, Anna.’ Emmaline sat on the bed and then, in a most uncharacteristic gesture, she leant over and hugged me. I felt her chest heave as she struggled to contain tears and then she straightened, wiping her eyes determinedly. ‘Well. Gosh. OK, by the way, you stink.’

‘I bet I do.’ I lifted a lock of my matted hair, stiff with seawater, blood and various other gross bodily fluids, and sniffed. ‘Urgh.’

‘There’s a bath waiting next door.’

‘I can’t wait. What day is it?’

‘Saturday. Your dad’s due back tomorrow. So don’t worry.’ She grinned. ‘You just scraped in under the wire.’

Saturday. So that whole endless nightmare had been only a week.
A week!
It seemed incredible. Impossible.

‘Honestly?’ I asked uncertainly. ‘I was only gone a week?’

‘Honestly. It felt like a lot longer to us though.’

‘You’re telling me.’ I put a hand to the sores the bridle had left on my face and then sat up painfully. ‘Owwww.’

‘I’ll put a slug of antiseptic in,’ Em said, eyeing my various cuts and scrapes and bruises. ‘Christ, they really put you through the ringer, didn’t they?’

‘Pretty much, yup.’ I ran my hand cautiously through my hair, trying to ignore the pain that the movement caused. ‘Em, what
happened
? How did Seth find me? And what was that stuff in the syringe?’

‘Well … it’s a kind of long story. Are you up to it?’

‘Yes, I think so. At least, maybe I should have a bath and some food first.’

‘Tell you what,’ Em said, ‘I’ll bring you up something to eat in the bath and I’ll tell you while you wash. Don’t worry,’ she said, seeing my face. ‘I’ll turn my back. I’ve got no desire to see your lady-bits, believe me. But the state you’re in, you look liable to sink without a trace and Mum would be pretty pissed off if we got you all the way back from the Malleus, only to let you drown in the bath.’

‘Just one thing,’ I asked before she left. ‘Have you … have you seen Caroline? Recently I mean?’

‘Yes.’ Emmaline gave me a funny look. ‘She was waiting at the bus stop this morning actually. Why?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I felt suddenly weak. Weak with relief, relief that it was all over, that I didn’t have any more blood on my hands. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

I couldn’t suppress a whimper of pain as I lowered myself into the scalding water. The mixture of antiseptic and bath foam stung every scratch and cut – and there were plenty. But once I was in, the water felt so good I wasn’t sure I ever planned to get out. When Em handed me a plate of toast and a mug of hot chocolate, there really didn’t seem much reason to move ever again.

I began to demolish the toast with wolfish bites and Em settled herself on the floor with her back against the side of the bath and prepared to tell her tale.

‘So, I expect you worked out what happened after you left – which, at first, was not a lot. We all thought you were in London, so we were pretty surprised when Mum got a call at the shop asking where you were.

‘It was your grandmother. She got worried when you didn’t turn up in London, and at first she thought you were just late, but when she couldn’t contact you or your dad she decided there must be something seriously wrong.

‘Well, Ma had no idea what was going on, but she offered to go round to your house and see if you were there. As soon as we got there we knew something had happened. We let ourselves in …’ Emmaline broke off at my questioning look and shrugged. ‘What? It’s magic, not rocket science. Locks are not a big problem. Anyway we could hear your phone beeping as we walked through the door, which was our first clue that something was wrong. Then we found your rucksack was still in your bedroom, along with your purse and your train tickets, and it looked like there’d been some kind of scuffle. There was a window broken at the back and stuff knocked over. It didn’t take much to work out the Malleus were responsible.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘Well, first of all we panicked. Ma called Abe, Sienna and Simon, and we all sat round in our kitchen with your grandmother – which was pretty uncomfortable, I can tell you. Then we panicked some more. We tried everything – spells, charms, scrying. And between us we got some answers – but they weren’t the ones we were hoping for and they weren’t pretty.

‘So we were busy crapping ourselves, metaphorically of course, and pondering the weirdness of being in an alliance with one of the senior Ealdwitan after what happened last year, when Abe realized he’d seen you
after
you were supposed to have left for London, on your way to meet Seth.’

She stopped, significantly, and I hunkered down in the bath and took a gulp of hot chocolate, refusing to be drawn on that one. The silence stretched, broken only by the drip, drip of the hot tap, and I knew Em was waiting for my account of things. But eventually she gave up and sighed.

‘So we rang Seth,’ she continued. ‘He was slightly …’ She gave me a sideways look over the edge of the bath, ‘Hmm. Well. You know.’

Yes, I knew. Too many adjectives sprang to mind.

‘And rather rude to me into the bargain,’ Em added primly. ‘But when he understood what we were going on about, he was the only one who came up with a plan. And it was a bloody good one. It just terrified the bejaysus out of all of us.

‘Basically, Seth’s argument was that he was the only person who stood a chance of getting anywhere near the Malleus without getting killed – and the only person with a cover story. His idea was that he’d offer to give evidence against you. He’d get to wherever they were hiding out, try to get in contact with you, and then chance it from there.

‘Well, the first part of the plan seemed OK – it was dangerous for Seth, no question, but he was right that he was the only person with a chance of getting close to you and getting out alive. But the second part was suicide. There was no question of chancing it – we knew they’d have drugged the magic out of you and that left one girl, probably in a pretty bad state, and one guy, alone against a whole army of nutters. No, he’d be pulverized and you’d end up being fried just the same.’

I shuddered. It had come too close to that for comfort.

‘It was your grandmother who came up with the second part of the plan. At first we didn’t think it was any better than Seth’s idea of chancing it – it wasn’t suicide, but it was pretty close to it. But the more we talked and argued, the more we realized it was the only option available.’

‘The syringe,’ I said, suddenly understanding.

‘Yes.’

‘What
was
in it?’

‘Magic,’ Em said. But her voice made the word sound closer to ‘poison’.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. Em shifted uneasily and cleared her throat.

‘Look, there’s stuff. Scary stuff, about w—’ She flinched and then spat the word out. ‘About witches. Things you don’t know. Things
I
didn’t really know – just rumours.’ She shuddered against the side of the bath and the surface of the water trembled in sympathy. ‘And it turns out it’s all true.’

‘What do you mean? Stop skirting round this – what happened? What did you do?’

‘Have you ever heard of transfusions?’

‘What, blood transfusions?’

‘No. Not blood. Magic. We’d all heard the rumours, that … well, that some witches can take the magic from one person and transfuse it into another, to give them the ability to do stuff beyond their own power.

‘It was your grandmother who first suggested it – and at first everyone said she was crazy – that it was too dangerous, that you could die.’ Em sighed, and ran her hand through her hair. ‘We all skirted around the truth, too chicken to say it, until eventually it was your grandmother who laid it on the line: we didn’t have any choice. If we didn’t do this, you were going to die anyway.

‘After that it was only a matter of finding the most compatible person. The problem was, they still don’t really understand the matching process. That’s one of the reasons it’s considered so incredibly unethical, because it’s so dangerous.’

‘Dangerous how? For who?’

‘For everyone. I don’t know how they do it, but I know it’s not like taking blood. They kind of … drain them. And because they haven’t completely worked out the compatibility issues there are a lot of deaths. The person they inject often dies. Their body rejects the stuff and shuts down. I mean, clearly you’re fine, so I think … but it was a huge, huge risk.’