Life Stealer

  “Oh yes, of course she is. Girls, walk the animals for five minutes, then return them to pasture. That’s enough riding for today. And then it’s straight to Egg-layer Psychology and Care of the Young, do I make myself clear? No hanging about the boys’ wing!”

  “Egg-layer Psychology?” I whispered to Kahla. “What on earth is that?”

  Apparently I didn’t whisper it quietly enough because Mrs Stern raised an eyebrow and replied: “Why, child. Hasn’t Isa taught you anything? There’s a world of difference between the personality of a mammal, where suckling creates a bond between the offspring and its mother, and the psychology of, for example, snakes and lizards that are hatched and never see their parents. Quite frankly, that sort of thing should be elementary knowledge for all wildwitches!”

  “I’m not… erm, that’s to say… I haven’t been a wildwitch very long,” I stammered. “Don’t blame Aunt Isa!”

  There was something about that woman that made me stutter and go bright red straight away. Perhaps it was her cool grey gaze, or possibly her posture and demeanour – stern was about right! Or maybe it was because I knew that she was a headmistress and so I felt as though I’d been sent to the principal’s office. Coming across as both ignorant and stupid was horrible.

  “It’s about two girls at your school,” I said quickly. “Kimmie and Pavola.”

  Something happened when I mentioned the names. The stern Mrs Stern suddenly looked a touch less certain. She no longer appeared to have a broomstick for a spine.

  “We have no students by those names,” she said. “Not now.”

  Like me, Kahla picked up on the implication.

  “But… you did?” she said. “Once?”

  “Let’s go inside,” Mrs Stern said, “and discuss the matter.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Mrs Stern

  “Here they are,” the headmistress said, pointing to a faded photograph in-between lots of other pictures on the wall. “Kimmie and Pavola. They were friends right from Kimmie’s first day until… well, until it went wrong with Kimmie.”

  Kahla and I leaned forwards at the same time to get a better look and nearly banged our heads together. There they were indeed, in a line-up of boarding-school girls in grey pinafores and white shirts, looking pretty much like all the others. Pavola was possibly prettier than most, Kimmie a little more angular. She was a skinny girl with sharp features and ordinary, wavy-brown hair.

  “What went wrong?” Kahla said. “With Kimmie, I mean?”

  The headmistress heaved a sigh.

  “I don’t suppose she ever quite settled in,” she said. “She was highly able in some subjects, totally indifferent to others. I had to remind her again and again that there were certain obligations attached to her time here. She’d won a scholarship in a competition and so paid nothing to be here, the condition being that she would ‘distinguish herself by diligence and hard work and serve as an example to others’. Unfortunately her behaviour wasn’t always exemplary; she hated being corrected, and took great offence when I did so. She and I weren’t exactly on the best of terms. And then… well, then it went very wrong. I guess it was… let me think, it was the summer poor Sniff died, so it must have been… Kimmie must have been fifteen years old. Another year and she could have left here with Oakhurst Academy’s diploma, but it was not to be.”

  “Sniff?” Kahla said. “Who was Sniff?”

  I hadn’t told them that part of the dream, so maybe Kahla thought Sniff was another student. I, however, remembered only too clearly Kimmie’s hatred of the little dog with its keen sense of smell. I wish it would choke on one of its stupid bones.

  “My little dachshund,” the headmistress said. “A dear friend… so sad.”

  “What happened to it?” I asked.

  “He went missing,” the headmistress said, and we could see that even now, after so many years, thinking about it still hurt. “We didn’t find him until a week later, or rather, what was left of him. It must’ve been a fox or something. Poor little Sniff.”

  It was still bad, but I was relieved to hear that the dog hadn’t choked on one of its bones.

  “Was he your wildfriend?” Kahla asked.

  “No, not… not exactly. Here at Oakhurst Academy we don’t believe that students should attach themselves to a wildfriend until their own character is fully formed, but it’s a rule which some students find it hard to adhere to, especially those who’ve already found a wildfriend before they come here. That’s why very few teachers keep their own wildfriend about. We don’t wish to… provoke.”

  I thought about Cat and felt a surge of panic. Without Cat… I wouldn’t know what to do without Cat.

  “Why can’t you have wildfriends here?” I asked.

  “Like I said… we think it’s best for the students’ characters to develop without such strong influence from a random animal.”

  A random animal! I shook my head in disbelief, I couldn’t help myself. And this was supposed to be a school for wildwitches?! No wonder Shanaia had done a runner.

  “So what went wrong with Kimmie?” Kahla said pointedly, to remind me and the headmistress of the real reason for our visit.

  “They were only minor infractions to begin with. Food would disappear from the kitchen, and when we arranged for a guard, Kimmie was caught red-handed. Then she started bullying some of the other students into giving her their food or sweets they’d bought with their own money. She would steal fruit from the orchard, and once we even caught her having stolen, killed and plucked one of the laying hens. She was roasting it over an open fire in the forest when Sniff found her. When we asked her why she did it, she offered nothing but vague excuses, and when we pressed her, she simply said that she was hungry. But I assure you we feed our students properly here. We even got a doctor to examine her to find out what was wrong, but she was as fit as a fiddle, albeit a little underweight for her age.”

  My spine had started tingling, as had my tummy. Find out who the hungry one is, Mrs Pommerans had said. It seemed that Kimmie was hungrier than most people. And it had all started the day Pavola had shown her the cave at Westmark.

  I leaned towards the picture again and studied Pavola’s facial features. Didn’t she remind me of someone?

  “Was Pavola from Westmark?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the headmistress said. “What happened later was a tragedy. She and her husband lost their lives on the wildways. So terrible. And she was such a talented wildwitch.”

  “Did they have any children?” I asked, even though I was fairly sure I already knew the answer.

  “A daughter,” she said. “Shanaia Westmark. She attended this school very briefly.”

  Very briefly indeed, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud.

  “Kimmie? Where was she from?”

  “Some village near Forest Dale. Now what was the name of it? Swinstead or something like that.”

  “Linstead,” I automatically corrected her, without knowing how.

  “Yes, that’s right, Linstead. Not very far from here. Well, in the end we had to expel her. It couldn’t go on. I don’t know what happened to her, but I suppose she went back home. Unsurprisingly, she has never shown up for school reunions.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Village

  Linstead was only seven or eight kilometres from Oakhurst Academy. The headmistress offered to lend us two of the school’s riding moose, but we settled for two bicycles instead. Star and the riding-school horses back home were one thing, but I seriously doubted that I was a natural-born moose-rider.

  “It’s Chimera,” Kahla said the moment we cycled out through the school gate. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “How’s that possible?” I objected. “Surely a revenant has to be dead and, as far as I know, Chimera isn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Strictly speaking, I couldn’t be. I didn’t know what had happened to Chimera in the weeks that had passed since I stripped her of her wings
and chased her away from Westmark.

  “What words did you use to make her go away?” Kahla asked.

  “Nothing special. I just told her to vanish. To go away for good.” A cold thought crept under my skin. “Would that be enough to kill someone?”

  Kahla pondered it. “Only if that was what you meant,” she said. “Did you want her to… disappear from the surface of the earth?”

  “I don’t think so. I… just wanted her gone from my life. For her to leave me alone and go back to wherever she came from.”

  “But you didn’t want her dead?”

  “No!” I said. “Cross my heart!”

  “It’s just that there are so many coincidences…” Kahla sighed. “I mean, the girl’s name is Kimmie. She knows about the cave at Westmark. And wasn’t there something about her nails?”

  “She liked having very long nails.”

  “There you go. Chimera’s talons were at least ten centimetres long…”

  “Yes, all right.”

  “So why don’t we go back to Aunt Isa and tell her that?”

  “Because she’s busy keeping Cat alive.” Not for all the world would I interrupt Aunt Isa’s vital wildsong, and what if she decided that finding Chimera was more important? Nothing was more important than for Cat to live. Nothing. “And your dad. Your dad said Cat can’t carry on.”

  “Carry on with what?”

  “With…” How could I explain what Cat did? “Standing between me and… all that dead and hungry stuff in the soul tangle.”

  Kahla looked at me pensively.

  “Is that what he’s doing?”

  “Yes. But it’s costing him all his strength. Kahla, it’s urgent!”

  “But if it’s that urgent, Clara… why are we on our way to some village where Chimera might have lived a million years ago?”

  “Because it’s important. Because…”

  Because I’d felt a jolt of recognition when the headmistress mentioned the village. Because I’d known that it was called Linstead, and not Swinstead. Because I felt a tightness in my chest and a prickling behind my eyes at the very mention of the name. It had to be the place. I couldn’t say exactly what we would be doing there, or why it was so important, only that it was.

  Linstead appeared between meadow valleys and forested hills, and I recognized it. I’d never been there before, and yet I knew that Mrs Galli and her flock of geese lived in the little red cottage, and that at least four generations of the Barde family had lived on the farm a little further ahead.

  “What is it?” Kahla wanted to know.

  I’d stopped. I didn’t think I could stay upright on the bike for much longer.

  “Let’s just walk,” I said.

  An old woman sat reading on a bench set against the whitewashed farmhouse wall, making the most of the sunshine. Every now and then she made a note in the margin with a stubby pencil.

  “Mrs Barde?” I said, because I was fairly certain that it was her.

  “Yes?” she squinted against the sunlight. “What can I do for you, girls?”

  “We just wanted to know… that is, we…” I stumbled over the words, but Kahla didn’t hesitate.

  “We’re here to find out what happened to a girl called Kimmie,” she said. “We were told by Oakhurst Academy that she came from here.”

  Mrs Barde snapped shut her book. It was called “The Kitchen Herb Garden”, I noticed.

  “Why do you want to know?” she said. And she wasn’t looking at Kahla, but at me.

  “It’s terribly important,” I stammered. “Something… something disastrous might happen unless… unless we can stop it in time.”

  “Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” Mrs Barde said dryly. “Disasters have always piled up in Kimmie’s wake. Come inside and have a glass of squash. Are you students at Oakhurst Academy?”

  “No,” Kahla said. “I study with Clara’s aunt.”

  “I see,” was all Mrs Barde said, and she asked no further questions. “Follow me. It’s this way.”

  She brought us inside the main building’s big kitchen, and fetched a jug of squash from the fridge.

  “It’s mostly blackcurrant,” she said. “Last year’s raspberries were a bit of a disappointment.”

  I don’t know if I’d expected paraffin lamps and a woodstove, like at Aunt Isa’s – perhaps I had. But here there was a fridge and a chest freezer, and a battered radio was crackling on the kitchen table because someone had turned down the volume without switching it off completely. There was checked oilcloth on the table and geraniums and white net curtains in the windows. Faded family photographs dotted with fly stains were attached to the fridge door with colourful magnets.

  “My children flew the coop long ago,” said Mrs Barde when she noticed me looking at them. “They can’t be bothered with country life. So now it’s just my husband and me. For as long as that may be.”

  “Kimmie?” Kahla reminded her. “We were talking about Kimmie.”

  “Worried I might witter on about my children and grandchildren, are you?” Mrs Barde said with a twinkle in her eye. “Relax, child. I’ll stick to the matter in hand. Kimmie. Yes.” She sighed – almost like the headmistress had done. “Well, she was a clever girl. Won that scholarship, got a place at Oakhurst and everything.”

  “We know,” Kahla said impatiently. “But they threw her out, and then what happened?”

  “Not much. She came home. She refused to go back to school, or maybe her dad thought enough was enough. So I guess she helped out at home and… well, nobody wanted to pry.”

  “Into what?” Kahla asked.

  “We all knew that he was a hard man. Hard on his girls, too. They didn’t have much, barely scraping by; he made his living selling firewood and doing odd jobs for people, fixing windows, building garages, that kind of thing. Sometimes he sold pheasants and game.”

  “The girls,” I said. “There was more than one?” I knew the answer the moment I asked the question. Yes. There had been two of them. There were two sisters in that house. And they had had a swing…

  “Kimmie had a sister,” Mrs Barde said. “Maira. She was a few years younger. Then that awful thing happened: Maira disappeared. There was a snowstorm, a vicious blizzard, couldn’t see a hand in front of your face; what the girls were doing outside in that weather, no one could understand. But when we found her three days later, she was as cold and stiff as an icicle, frozen to death, poor thing. Less than a week later Kimmie was gone, too. And we never found her.”

  “She… just disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  Kahla shifted uneasily. I didn’t know if she was thinking what I was thinking, but I guessed she was. There was a dead girl in the story now. Was she the revenant?

  “We had a police investigation and everything,” Mrs Barde said. “But no charges were ever brought. Her father said she’d run away. And maybe she had. Who could blame her?”

  “Why?”

  “Like I said. He was hard on those girls. And… well, I reckon she had few friends in the village. She was a bit strange even before she went to Oakhurst Academy, and lots of people thought she was stuck up. When she came back in disgrace, as it were, people were only too ready to mock her. And then there was the petty thieving.”

  “She stole things?”

  “Let me put it this way – no one put cakes on the windowsill to cool when she was nearby. And several of us lost chickens. Something that doesn’t exactly make you popular around here…”

  I sipped my squash. I didn’t really know if I wanted to hear more. If Kimmie really was Chimera, then… I’d never really thought about Chimera having parents and a childhood just like everybody else. I mean, the first time I saw her she had giant wings and was covered in feathers. Back then it had been easier to imagine her hatching from an egg.

  “What about her dad? And… she must have had a mum as well?”

  “Oh, they still live in their cottage. But we don’t see a lot of them these days.” r />
  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Gabriel’s House

  My head hurt. It felt as if the sun were boring into my eye sockets, right into my brain. The squash Mrs Barde had given us sloshed around in my tummy and gave me a strange jellyfish sensation, as if I were a sack of water with floppy arms and legs that just wanted to be carried along by the current.

  “We need to stop for a minute,” I said to Kahla.

  “But we must be so close,” she protested. “Is it urgent or isn’t it? Make up your mind.”

  “If we don’t, I’m going to throw up.”

  She got off her bike reluctantly. She’d actually unwound one of her scarves and tied it around her waist, but showed no other signs of feeling the heat of the sun.

  We’d stopped on a road that was nothing but two cart tracks. There was forest on both sides of the road, a mixture of tall, dark pines, slender birches and something I thought was alder shrub. The forest floor glowed green with moss and gave softly under my feet, but this only added to the discomfort – as if I weren’t on firm ground.

  Suddenly I felt incredibly dizzy. I clung to the handlebars with both hands, but it was no use because the bicycle fell over and I fell with it.

  “Clara!”

  The darkness of the pines wavered and spun above me, and I was vaguely aware of a pedal digging into my side and Kahla saying something a very long way away.

  I’m tired of this, I thought. Tired of being jerked back and forth, in and out of my body as if it weren’t my own, but just some random human suit I’d been handed at birth. I waited to see what would happen this time – who would I be stuffed into now? A bird, an animal, a human being? Kimmie once more?

  None of the above.

  I was lying on the forest floor, I could smell earth and resin, and I was still me. Still exhausted, still with a pounding headache, but I was me. And then I heard a familiar voice inside me whisper: Mine. Keep your paws off her!