Life Stealer

  “Not when you’re poorly,” she said, and I decided not to mention that several hours in our little Kia made me carsick and that that was definitely worse than the wildways. Though to be fair, the wildways were dangerous. They could kill you if you lost your way, but Cat never did.

  Aunt Isa was out. Bumble, too, was gone, and the badger snarled at us from the dog basket – she still hadn’t given birth.

  “Isa will be back shortly,” The Nothing said. “She is just giving Kahla a lesson somewhere in the woods. Would you like a cup of tea in the meantime? I can almost make it myself now, I just need someone to help me lift the kettle.”

  “No, thank you,” said Mum without looking at The Nothing. “I’d better get back.”

  Then she gave me a hug, blew a raspberry on my neck and drove off.

  “I don’t think your mum likes me,” The Nothing said sadly.

  “Why not?”

  “She didn’t even want to look at me.”

  It was true. Mum had been busy looking in every other direction as if it hurt her eyes to look at the little girl’s face in the midst of all the birdness.

  “My mum doesn’t like witchery and the wild-world,” I said. “I think it scares her. Or rather she’s scared that something might happen to me. And you are… very wildwitchy.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “People can tell from looking at you that you were made by a wildwitch. Or… someone who was once a wildwitch.”

  The Nothing furrowed her feathery eyebrows.

  “Is that bad?” she wanted to know.

  “No, it’s just… unusual.”

  “Unusual.” She tasted the word. “So I’m… unusual.”

  “Yes. And that’s good,” I declared firmly, because otherwise she would have worried about that, too, and decided that it was another bad thing.

  She smiled so that I could see almost all her tiny, white teeth. They were a little sharper than human teeth, and I was reminded of the flock of shark-mouthed, flying sisters she was supposed to have become part of; that is, if she hadn’t been a “failure”.

  “Please would you help me with the kettle?” she said.

  And when Aunt Isa and Kahla came home a little later with a very muddy and happy Bumble at their heels, an excited Nothing flew to meet them.

  “I made tea, I made tea, I made tea…” she chanted.

  “How wonderful,” Aunt Isa said. “Clara! How nice to see you.”

  “Mum drove me,” I said.

  Aunt Isa raised an eyebrow. “Did she now? That was very kind of her.” It was more than kind, it was borderline heroic, and Aunt Isa knew it. “Has she left already?”

  “She wanted to get home before it got dark.”

  “Of course, it’s a long journey by car.”

  “Come drink your tea while it’s hot,” The Nothing said. “I made it myself! I took the tea caddy from the shelf, then I found the spoon, then I opened the caddy, then I took the strainer, then I measured out the tea with a spoon – a spoon for each cup and one for the pot – and then… Clara helped me with the boiling water.”

  “Thank you so much,” Aunt Isa said. Kahla rolled her eyes, but fortunately The Nothing didn’t notice. “I do love coming home to a nice cup of tea. But Clara – you look a bit under the weather. What’s wrong?”

  “I fell off the roof of the bike shed.” I would prefer to tell her the rest once Kahla had gone home. I didn’t know why. Possibly because I still didn’t like revealing what a rubbish wildwitch I was. Kahla would never have dropped Martin. Kahla had that Journeying stuff totally nailed.

  “Brrr, it’s so cold,” Kahla said, looking as if she wanted to hug the stove. “Isn’t it ever spring here?”

  The sun was shining. Aunt Isa’s small garden was full of snowdrops and celandines, and the whitethorn down by the brook were in flower. The Nothing looked confused.

  “I thought it was spring?” she said.

  “And so it is,” Aunt Isa said. “But it’s probably still not warm enough for Kahla.”

  Kahla’s dad, Master Millaconda, came to fetch her half an hour later. Kahla ran to meet him; not just because she was excited to see him, I thought, but also because she was dying to go home and be warm.

  “Right,” Aunt Isa said. “So what happened?” She could tell that there was more to the story than me getting a bit bruised and battered. I told her about the lasagne and the grass snake, and about Martin and the flying.

  “The nurse said it takes a lot to break a shoulder blade,” I said. “He thought Martin must have fallen from something a lot higher than a bike shed. And Martin smelled like a squirrel.”

  “And you could smell that even after you came back from your Journeying?”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t just something Cat could smell?”

  “No, I could smell it too.”

  “Let me take a look at you.”

  I was sitting right in front of her, she couldn’t avoid seeing me, but she meant with her wildsense. She took my hands, closed her eyes and started humming a wildsong; it was a bit like being X-rayed all over again, only in a witchy sort of way.

  Suddenly she let go of me, so abruptly that my hands flopped onto my lap with a soft bump. Her eyes flew open and if it hadn’t been impossible – I mean, we’re talking about Aunt Isa here – then I would have said that she almost looked… scared.

  “There is something…” she said. “Something inside you, all tangled up with something else. I would call it a soul tangle. A large knot of life cords and… and…”

  “And what?”

  “Death. No, more than just natural death. Deadness. It’s all wrong.”

  The Nothing looked frightened.

  “Is Clara all wrong too?” she asked.

  Aunt Isa didn’t reply immediately.

  “Clara is Clara,” she said at length. “And we very much want that to continue. But we had better get Mrs Pommerans to take a look at you.”

  “Why?” I asked. Mrs Pommerans was nice, an older wildwitch who had backed me when I had to convince the Raven Mothers that I’d told them the truth about Chimera. But I had greater faith in Aunt Isa.

  “She’s better than me at this sort of thing,” Aunt Isa said. “Are you tired? Would you like to rest or should we get going right away? You can ride Star if you like.”

  “Let’s get it over and done with,” I said darkly.

  The Nothing looked disappointed.

  “Does that mean you won’t want any more tea?” she asked.

  Mrs Pommerans lived in an apple orchard, not far from Aunt Isa’s house – that is, when you went by the wildways. It took us only a few minutes.

  The apple trees were already in blossom, and it felt warmer here than back at Aunt Isa’s, or back home in Mercury Street for that matter. There were daffodils in the grass among the dark trunks of the apple trees, some of them had opened and were nodding their fine yellow heads in the gentle breeze.

  “How come it’s so warm here?” I wanted to know. “We haven’t travelled that far, have we?”

  “I have a hunch that Mrs Pommerans cheats a little,” Aunt Isa said. “But don’t tell anyone. The Raven Mothers disapprove strongly of anyone tinkering with the weather, and it can very easily go wrong.” She raised her voice. “Hello? Agatha, are you in?”

  Mrs Pommerans appeared behind a picket fence. She’d been planting spinach in her vegetable garden, we discovered. Her green trousers had muddy knees, and her floral print gardening gloves were black with potting compost.

  “Oh, hello, Isa. And Clara. How nice to see you again, dear.”

  “How lovely and mild it is here,” Aunt Isa exclaimed with a twinkle in her eyes. “You must be very lucky with the weather.”

  “Yes,” Mrs Pommerans said innocently. “We’re so sheltered from the winds…”

  Aunt Isa grew serious again.

  “Agatha, I hope you can help us. Clara has run into some… Journeying difficulties. And something’s no
t right.”

  “I see.” Mrs Pommerans studied me calmly, as she dusted soil off her knees. “Then we’d better take a look at her… but please first tie up Star, I seem to remember that she has an unfortunate taste for apple blossoms.”

  I slipped down from Star’s warm back, and we tied her to the picket fence that surrounded the vegetable garden. It might have been all in my mind, but I’m sure she looked a little put out. I patted her neck.

  “You’ll get an extra helping of hay when we get home,” I promised.

  Mrs Pommerans’s house was at the heart of the orchard, half-timbered and under a slightly too moss-grown thatched roof. The door was apple green, and so were the curtains and the carpets, as it turned out when we went inside.

  “You sit yourself down there,” Mrs Pommerans said, pointing to a high-backed chair upholstered with green velvet. “And let me have a look at you…”

  She did exactly what Aunt Isa had done, except that her wildsong was slower and somehow milder. Her weather-worn hands were warm, I started yawning and was afraid that I might nod off if she went on for much longer. My whole body was humming and buzzing, but not in an unpleasant way, just… drowsily.

  “Oh dear, what a mess,” Mrs Pommerans said at length. “It’s impossible to see which way’s up in that dog’s breakfast of a soul tangle.”

  Aunt Isa shook her head.

  “No, I couldn’t find a solution either. And there are more than just life cords, there are also… death threads.”

  Death threads… That didn’t sound good at all.

  Mrs Pommerans bent down, stuck her hand under the sofa and pulled out a basket. It was filled with balls of yarn and knitting needles. She held up an unfinished piece of knitting – it looked like it was going to be a jumper. The yarn was – no surprise there – apple green, but with yellow stripes.

  “I believe Isa has told you about life cords,” she said. “You know what they are?”

  I nodded. All living things had a cord that connected them to the rest of the world. If it was cut, you died. Normally it was invisible, but you could feel it. And a skilled wildwitch could see it with her wildsense.

  “There tends to be a pattern. An order in the way we’re connected to the world and to each other,” Mrs Pommerans said, adjusting her spectacles slightly. “Take this piece of knitting. It looks dense and fine, and you may think it’s made up of several pieces of string, but in fact it’s all one and the same.” She held up the yarn between the knitting and the ball. “But when I look at you now, there’s something else. You look more like this…”

  At the bottom of the basket there was a tangled mess of yarn in many different colours: white, yellow, dark green, apple green, pink.

  “You try untangling that,” she said, handing me the basket. “It’s good practice. Meanwhile I’ll do some thinking.”

  She sat down in a green rocking chair by the window from where she could see the apple trees. She started rocking back and forth while she hummed to herself and began knitting almost as if we weren’t there.

  I frowned and looked at Aunt Isa. I’d expected more.

  “Get on with it,” she said softly, pointing to the tangled yarn. “She has her reasons…”

  I picked up the end of the dark-green yarn and tried following it through the “dog’s breakfast”. If that was how I looked on the inside, no wonder I had a headache…

  It was hard. Hard to concentrate as I sat here, and I grew increasingly sleepy. And it was fiddly to disentangle the yarn without tightening the knots even more. At the same time, my hands seemed to grow cold and numb. My head flopped forwards and I sat up with a jerk. Yawned. Tried again. Tried the pale-green yarn. Perhaps that would be easier…

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  There was a faint hum around me. I was cold, not just my hands, but all over, even though the room was warm. My eyelids were incredibly heavy and I could no longer tell the threads of yarn apart.

  “We haven’t had any conscious response from him yet, Mrs Winter,” someone said. “And to be honest – there are areas of his brain where we can detect no normal function. I think we need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that there may be damage, but it’s hard to assess the extent as long as he remains in a coma.”

  The skeleton of the little sparrow was lying among the stripped, dead leaves. The dried-out hide of the grass snake was falling apart, scale by scale. On the forest floor, in the middle of the death zone, the dust stirred, it moved and began to form a pattern.

  Beep. Beep. Beep.

  My wings grew tired. My talons could barely hold onto the branch. My head slumped heavily onto my chest.

  I was hungry. I was hunger itself. Not just hungry after a lean winter, it was much, much more than that. I was so starved that I could swallow up the whole world. Come… Come here, little bird, little grass snake. Come here, little squirrel.

  Come to me. Mummy is hungry…

  “Clara.” It was Mrs Pommerans. Her face was very close to mine, her hands grabbing my shoulders. “Clara, that’s enough now.”

  “I’m hungry…” I whimpered, and didn’t quite recognize my own voice. “I’m starving.”

  “I’ll give you some food in a moment,” Mrs Pommerans said. “But right now… I think you’d better let go of the yarn.”

  I looked down. The tangled yarn hadn’t grown any less tangled, quite the opposite. But something else had happened. The yarn had turned cobweb grey, and my icy fingers were covered in grey dust.

  I made a strangled little sound and tried to toss aside the yarn, but it stuck to my crooked, cold, grey fingers, and Aunt Isa had to help free me.

  “Here,” Mrs Pommerans said. “Eat this…”

  I was barely aware of what I was stuffing into my mouth. Only slowly did I begin to taste apple, sweetness, a crisp crust – it was apple pie, and eventually it started to sate some of the terrible, hungry emptiness inside me.

  “What’s happening?” I said. “What is happening to me?”

  Mrs Pommerans examined the tangled, dusty grey yarn carefully.

  “A sparrow,” she said. “A grass snake. A boy. A hawk. A squirrel. And… something else. Something that’s dead, but still hungry.” She looked up. “The sparrow and the grass snake are dead. The hawk, the squirrel and the boy are alive. We can’t just cut you loose, or they’ll die too.”

  “Then what?” I pressed her. “How do we make it… stop?”

  “I need more time to think about that…” Mrs Pommerans said.

  They weren’t the words I wanted to hear. I wanted her to say: “Here’s a cup of magic herbal tea. Drink it and everything will be all right,” or words to that effect. But she didn’t. She just looked as if we had handed her a mess she had no idea how to clean up.

  CHAPTER NINE

  New-Born Life

  It had been some time since I last slept in Aunt Isa’s attic room, now “my” room, at least when I was visiting. It was snug and cosy with a round window in the end wall, a sloping ceiling and a rag rug in front of the bed. In my absence, a couple of cardboard boxes had found their way into a corner, but that didn’t really matter; pretty much all of Aunt Isa’s house looked like that.

  “Does anything live in those?” I asked and pointed.

  Aunt Isa smiled. “No,” she said, “they are just bits and bobs for my painting and a little extra birdseed. How’s your head?”

  “OK.” And it was, despite the trip to Mrs Pommerans’s house and back. “But… I’m still a bit hungry…”

  “Still? You must have hit a growth spurt. How about a sandwich?”

  “Yes, please.”

  One sandwich turned into three and I had to clean my teeth again, and when I came back upstairs, Bumble had made himself comfortable on my bed.

  “Move it!” I said.

  And he did – just enough so that I could crawl under the duvet next to him. I could have made him get down on the floor, but it was nice and reassuring to fall asleep with a warm, heavy dog
as my radiator.

  I woke because my stomach was screaming with hunger. Or no – not my stomach. It still felt bloated after all those sandwiches. However, something inside me cried out for food, and although I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep, it didn’t work.

  Moonlight was streaming through the round window, and next to me Bumble was snoring his gigantic, rumbling dog snore. I eased my left arm free of the duvet to check my watch. It was three o’clock in the morning. There was absolutely no good reason for me to be wanting to eat a horse.

  “Go back to sleep,” I whispered to myself. “Forget about food.”

  Food. Foodfoodfoodfoodfood. Now!

  I gave in. With bare legs and in stockinged feet the attic room was quite chilly, as were the stairs, but the kitchen downstairs was warmer. I had already taken the bread from the bread bin when I became aware of another scent. The fresh, red, wet smell of blood and new-born baby animals.

  I put down the bread and sniffed the air again. There could be no doubt.

  In the living room the badger mum was half-lying, half-sitting in the basket, licking five tiny, glistening, dark bundles. My belly rumbled. New life. Fresh, new-born life… Not tired and half-starved after winter, but covered in birth fat, juicy and full of –

  No. What?? I…

  The badger raised her head and sniffed the air. Then she twisted violently and scrambled to her feet, although her hip was not yet fully healed. She growled deep in her throat and snarled so the moonlight reflected blue and white in her teeth.

  “Easy now,” I whispered, as softly as I could. “I would never hurt your babies…”

  Life. Brand new life…

  My earlier appetite was nothing compared to the wave of black hunger welling up inside me now. I wanted those cubs. I wanted to swallow them, crunch them, devour them. I wanted to drink their blood, drain their juices and their life, I wanted to suck the marrow out of their tender bones, I wanted—

  No, I did not.

  I most definitely did not want that sort of hunger.