Life Stealer

  “Are you… are you saying that it was real? Not a dream?”

  “It’s possible.”

  I felt a sudden chill in my stomach and in my heart. Small animals died all the time, I knew that. Big animals ate smaller ones, and I had to accept that part of nature, if I wanted to be a wildwitch. But this was different.

  “Aunt Isa…?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well… if it really happened, then… what do you think killed the sparrow?” Bones snapping so easily, the heart and eyes being squeezed until they burst and yet the killer was invisible to the sparrow, unseen and without sound or scent.

  “I don’t know,” Aunt Isa said. “But I think we had better find out.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Flying High

  “Lie down and relax,” Aunt Isa said. “You’re not used to this, and this way there’s a limit to how far you can fall…”

  I lay down on the floor in Aunt Isa’s living room like a good girl. Cat immediately settled on top of me, on my legs and my tummy, and sank his claws into my jumper. The message was clear: I wasn’t going anywhere without him. This suited me just fine. His wilfulness meant he wasn’t the perfect bodyguard, but he was fiercely protective of me when he did show up. And I was nowhere near as relaxed as Aunt Isa wanted me to be.

  Kahla had returned from her own Journeying. On the pad she had sketched and drawn some of the things she had seen while she had had her eyes closed: a strange landscape of deep, dark valleys and towering, golden-brown columns, which turned out to be how a pine cone looks when you’re a beetle, a wren’s eye view through a mesh of twigs and branches and huge, withered beech leaves, and a wet forest of earthworm-smelling grass as seen by a hedgehog. Aunt Isa had nodded and praised her and asked her to tell us everything she had experienced. I don’t think she did it just to check Kahla’s work, but also to encourage and reassure me. Journeying could be exciting, different, fun even… you could tell from the glow in Kahla’s eyes as she spoke. But my involuntary Journeying – if that really was what it had been – had ended with the death of the sparrow. I didn’t fancy another go. Especially not when the aim was to return to the spot where the sparrow had fallen.

  “Please try to relax,” Aunt Isa instructed me for the umpteenth time half an hour later.

  “I am relaxed,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “No, you’re not, sweetheart,” she said with a wry smile. “Here you go. Let’s see if some valerian tea might help.”

  I pulled a face. Aunt Isa’s valerian tea tended to be quite bitter, but I took the cup anyway.

  “I put in two teaspoons of dried valerian,” The Nothing piped up eagerly, “from the small blue caddy next to the camomile tea. I’m starting to know where everything is.”

  I lay down again. The valerian tea made my lips tingle, and I did actually begin to relax. Then again, it might also have been that by now I was convinced nothing was going to happen. I was prepared to accept that Kahla could zoom around pretending to be a beetle, a hedgehog or a wren, but I clearly couldn’t. At least, not deliberately. I yawned. Nope, it didn’t feel like anything was going to happen today.

  I dreamed I was on a swing. Higher and higher, wilder and wilder. The ropes burned my palms, but I didn’t care. When I leaned back and kicked out my legs to go faster, I flung back my head so that I was looking right up at a landscape of white clouds and blue, blue sky and only a little bit of the treetop I couldn’t quite get rid of.

  “Be careful!” my younger sister called out. “Don’t go so high!”

  I didn’t have a younger sister, or indeed any sisters. But I seemed to have one in the dream.

  I ignored her. I wanted to go higher, to let go of the ground, let go of the ropes and fly off. I wanted to be a bird, so that I could fly far, far away.

  When the swing was at its highest point, I jumped. The sky was so blue, the wind was in my hair; if I were ever going to fly, this was my chance.

  I flew. For one brilliantly wild, blue moment.

  Then I hit the ground so hard it felt as if every bone in my body must break.

  “Kimmie!”

  I could hear the terror in her voice, but I ignored her. I lay very still and tried hard not to breathe. I could have stood up – I’d known almost immediately that I wasn’t seriously hurt. But I continued to lie very still.

  “Kimmie. Please sit up.”

  My sister touched me, first tentatively, then more impatiently. “Kimmie!”

  I’m dead, I thought. I’m not here any more. I’m a white cloud in the blue, blue sky, and now I’m drifting away.

  I could hear sniffling.

  “You’re not really dead,” she said. “Are you?”

  Yet still I held my breath and didn’t move a muscle.

  She started to cry properly.

  “Mum!” she cried out. “Muuuuum…” Now stammering because she was running – I could hear her footsteps. And I could tell from her voice that she was panicking.

  “Wait!” I rolled onto one side. “Come back. I’m all right…”

  It took a long time to calm her down. “I thought you were dead,” she kept saying. “I thought you were dead…”

  “Clara!”

  Aunt Isa was calling me.

  “What?” I said.

  “I think you dozed off. Maybe just the one teaspoon of valerian tea next time.”

  “Did you have any dreams?” Kahla asked. “Anything about animals?”

  “No,” I said. “Just something about two girls and a swing.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Journeying.”

  “No,” I said. “So I guess it wasn’t.”

  I half sat up. I could almost feel Kahla’s eyes boring into the back of my neck. She’d been helpful today and not patronizing in the least, but somehow that only made it worse. Now I couldn’t even get mad at her – only at myself.

  Why was I such a rubbish wildwitch? If I was destined to be one, then why was it so hard? Given that it had turned my life upside down and messed with my head, upset my mum, made the other kids at school tease me – then couldn’t I at least be good at it? Like Kahla was.

  Cat got up and arched his back – still on top of me and with all four paws on my tummy. And he wasn’t a lightweight cat.

  “Get off,” I told him. “I can’t breathe.”

  He sent me a look I couldn’t decipher. Then slowly and leisurely he stepped onto the floor, one paw at a time. Not exactly instant obedience, but at least he did shift himself.

  “Are you upset?” asked The Nothing from her armchair. She was sitting with her finger-feet stretched out in front of her with a notebook in one foot and a pencil in the other, ready to write down anything exciting that might happen during my Journeying. Needless to say, the page was blank.

  “No,” I said. “Just… fed up.”

  “I’m pretty useless too,” she said and sneezed sadly. “But… I do practise.”

  It was heartbreaking. Even The Nothing was better than me because she didn’t give up – she kept on trying. I got up so suddenly that the badger growled at me from the dog basket.

  “Where are you going?” Aunt Isa asked.

  “Home.”

  She studied me for a little while.

  “Yes,” she then said. “It’s probably for the best. We don’t want your mum to get too worried. But I think you should come back tomorrow. We could have another go.”

  “Mum wouldn’t like it.”

  “No, I know. Has she told you not to visit me?”

  I shook my head. “Not in so many words.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Snake in the Grass

  “Hi, Mousie. Where have you been?”

  “With Oscar.” Would it be wise to leave it at that? Not to mention Aunt Isa? We never did get round to calling Mum and, besides, I was home now, wasn’t I? I was sorely tempted to keep quiet because I knew telling her would upset her. My mum’s worst nightmare had pretty much come true that day about six mo
nths ago when Cat came into my life. Mum had never told me about Aunt Isa, as a matter of fact, I might not even have known I had an aunt, except that we would sometimes see her exceptionally lifelike animal illustrations on cards, in books, or on mugs or napkins. That was how she earned her living – she was a highly skilled artist with the added advantage that she could persuade most animals to “sit” for her whenever she needed them to. But the other stuff – the fact that she was a wildwitch – I would probably never have known at all if it hadn’t been for Cat scratching my forehead and forcing my mum to take me to Aunt Isa’s so that I could learn enough not to be in mortal danger most of the time.

  My mum desperately wanted me to be normal. She wanted us to carry on living as we always had and for Aunt Isa, Cat and all of the wildworld to just leave us alone. Nature terrified her and she was always scared that something would happen to me.

  But we’d reached a compromise. Mostly thanks to my dad, who had convinced her that it would be foolish to ban me from visiting my own aunt. So I was allowed to visit Aunt Isa, only I had to tell Mum where I was going. No lying, no disappearing. That was the deal.

  “Erm… and then I just stopped by to visit Aunt Isa.”

  Mum looked up and forgot all about the carrot she was peeling.

  “Oh,” she said and made a real effort to pretend that she was cool with that. “And how was Isa?”

  “Great,” I said. “She’s looking after a badger. It’s going to have babies soon.”

  “Is that right? Well, that’ll be nice.”

  It was almost worse than her being mad at me. If she’d screamed and shouted, I could have reminded her of our agreement, and that would have meant I was in the right. Now she just stood there smiling, while at the same time I could see how upset she really was. Whenever she looked like that I felt all prickly and itchy on the inside and I desperately wanted it to stop and for her to be happy instead.

  “So will you be going back to help out with the badger cubs?” she asked carefully. She was trying to look relaxed, but one hand was clenched tightly on the carrot and the other around the peeler, and she hadn’t started peeling again. The tap was running, and she just stood there, her hands trembling slightly.

  “Maybe.” Scratch, itch. The horrid feeling inside me got stronger. “Or… no. I don’t think so. I don’t think the badger likes me much.”

  “Is that so,” Mum said and her smile became a little more genuine. “Then again, badgers tend to be quite bad-tempered.”

  The horridness inside me began to ease. I took a deep breath and the prickling sensation went away.

  “What’s for dinner?” I asked.

  “Lasagne,” she said. “Would you like to give me a hand?”

  I took a knife from the drawer and together we prepared the salad. Then the timer went off and I put on thick, padded oven gloves to get the lasagne out of the oven. It was boiling hot and thick bubbles rose in the cheese sauce and burst lazily like burps of gas in molten lava.

  “Mind how you go, Mousie,” Mum said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  The steam from the lasagne danced in the air in front of me. I was standing in the middle of the floor with the piping hot dish in my hands, and suddenly I couldn’t take my eyes off the steam. There was something inside it, something less transparent than the rest of it. A foggy thread, fat and grey. A stripped leaf. A sparrow’s carcass picked clean and crushed. I had no hands any more, no legs either. I slithered across the ground feeling the moist leaves against my belly, sticking out my tongue to smell better… Yes, there were a few fibres of meat on that skeleton, not many, but I was hungry, my body was still sluggish from hibernation, and even though a living mouse would have been preferable, a dead sparrow was still food.

  “No,” I whispered.

  But the grass snake didn’t listen. Hunger gnawed its belly and it was oblivious to the death zone on the forest floor.

  “Clara! Watch what you’re doing with that dish!”

  I gasped for air. The dish slipped between my fingers, it was strange suddenly to have hands again, they didn’t feel as though they were mine.

  “Clara!”

  The lasagne tipped, tumbled and fell. Cheese and hot meat sauce splashed over my tummy and legs, burning, and instantly snapping me out of my strange snakeness and back to myself.

  “Ouch…”

  “Mousie! Trousers off. Now!”

  I just stood there with the oven gloves on my outstretched hands and in the end my mum had to peel the sauce-stained trousers off me. The skin underneath was speckled and red.

  “Get into the shower and turn on the cold tap now,” my mum ordered me. “Clara, come on. Wake up!”

  She made me aim the showerhead at my legs for more than a quarter of an hour. My skin still stung and the largest of the red splodges refused to go away completely, but it eased the pain. Mum applied a burns ointment and that helped even more.

  “The lasagne…” I began.

  “Never mind about the lasagne,” Mum said gruffly.

  “But what about dinner?”

  “Are you hungry, sweetheart?”

  “Yes. A bit.” A lot, if truth be told. As if the grass snake’s end-of-winter hunger still rumbled in my tummy.

  She smiled. “Well, I guess that means you’re on the mend. We’ll order a pizza. After all, we still have the salad…”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Scent of Blood

  “So… did you turn into an actual grass snake?” Oscar asked me the next day after I’d tried to explain.

  “No,” I said. “It just felt like I did. Totally weird. No arms, no legs, just wiggling on my belly…”

  “Cool,” he said. “I’d love to have a go at that…”

  I shuddered for a moment. “No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “Especially not in… in that place, trust me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because something’s wrong there. It’s like there’s a… a death zone. And any animal that comes near it dies.”

  “So the grass snake is dead?”

  “I don’t know. I dropped the lasagne before I reached the death zone. Or… before the grass snake did.”

  “But you think it’s dead?”

  I rubbed my arm. The goose pimples refused to go away.

  “It was just like with the sparrow. Exactly like it. And Aunt Isa says it’s not just a dream.”

  The school playground was filled with screaming kids. Normally I took no notice of the mayhem, but today it somehow sounded louder than usual, the light was sharper, and the spring air seemed to affect my skin, my poor naked human skin, unprotected by fur, feathers or scales.

  “Still, I really wish I could do that… What did you call it again?”

  “Journeying.”

  “Yeah, that Journeying thing. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  I didn’t feel lucky at all and I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t see how utterly revolting it was.

  “It’s not like I decide to do it,” I said. “It… it just takes me over. I still have burns on my legs from the lasagne.”

  That seemed to get through to him.

  “Oh. Well, that’s obviously not cool. And just think what could have happened if you’d been on your bike? And a bus or something had come along. Splat!”

  I pulled a face.

  “Cut it out, will you?” I said.

  “Yeah, all right. Just saying.”

  “And I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Clara, if you don’t mind my saying so… you’re in a bit of a mood today.”

  I stopped in the middle of the playground, folded my arms across my chest and did my best to stare him down.

  “A bit of a mood?” I said.

  “Yeah. Just saying. Maybe it’s a girl thing.”

  “Fancy being turned into a grass snake?” I said. “I could always have a word with Aunt Isa.”

  He didn’t even bat an eyelid.

  “Would you?” he sounded thril
led. “That would be awesome!”

  I gave up.

  “You’re a lost cause,” I said, and headed for the bike shed.

  A bunch of kids had gathered there, some from my own class, some from Oscar’s, but rather than head home or make their way to the after-school club, they were huddled in giggling pairs or small clusters, so it didn’t take a genius to work out that they were up to something.

  I zigzagged through the crowd to the bike racks. The new, pale-blue, five-gear bicycle I’d been given for Christmas was gone. Where I’d parked it, there was now a broom. One of those old-fashioned brooms with a bunch of birch twigs tied around a stick. It looked a bit makeshift.

  “I thought you said you were in a hurry to get home?” Josefine quipped. “This should make it easier and faster…”

  The giggling was no longer muted and scattered, by now most people were laughing their heads off.

  My cheeks turned hot.

  “Yes, all right, very funny,” I said. “Ha-ha-ha. Now where’s my bike?”

  “How about a lap of honour?” It was Marcus trying to be witty. “I’ve never seen a witch fly before!”

  “Leave her alone,” Oscar said. “It’s not funny.”

  “Please may I have my bike. Now.” I tried very hard to handle the situation politely, but it wasn’t easy.

  And then I started feeling something again – a sensation in my body, a rustling of feathers, long, strong talons flexing…

  No!

  With great effort, I managed to shake it off… whatever it was. Not now. Not here. In fact, not anywhere, ever.

  At that moment, someone grabbed me from behind and lifted me up so my feet were off the ground.

  “Stop it. Put me down!”

  They didn’t. Instead other hands grabbed my flailing arms from above and pulled me even higher into the air. I felt something give in my shoulder and I wiggled madly to escape. “She just needs a leg up,” said another voice, deeper and hoarser than Marcus’s or the other boys from my year. I craned my neck, but whoever was holding my arms was sitting on the roof of the bike shed, and I couldn’t see him properly. Even so, I already knew who it was. Martin the Meanie. Martin the Meanie from Year 10.