The latter made me sit up with a jerk.
“Viridian? Could she have said Viridian?”
“Yes.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Shanaia said wearily. She sounded as if she didn’t think it mattered very much. “I’ve never heard about it. Or her. Or him.”
But I had. Twice.
“When I first met Chimera,” I said. “And the second time was when she put the iron collar on me and I made her go away. She said something to me: ‘Blood of Viridian.’” Yes, those had been her words. And she had glared at me as if it had something to do with me somehow.
“I’ll go heat up some soup,” Aunt Isa said, almost as if she hadn’t heard me.
“Soup?” I was baffled. How could she not think that stuff about Viridian was important?
“Shanaia needs to get something warm inside her,” she said. “And I imagine the rest of you are hungry as well?”
There it was again, the purring growl. Cat’s tail swished slowly from side to side as if he’d seen another tomcat or some potential prey. Or… did he actually have the nerve to growl at Aunt Isa?
“Cat,” I warned him. “Behave yourself.”
He stopped growling. Instead he jumped up on the armrest of the easy chair and stared Bumble down until Bumble capitulated and shifted himself to the floor. Cat curled up on my lap and sent a yellow-glared, bristly thought through my head. Mine.
“Settle down,” I said, stroking his back. “Nobody’s trying to take me away from you.”
But perhaps I spoke too soon.
“Clara.” Shanaia looked at me with a strangely intense gaze. “You have to help me. You’re the only one who can.”
“Me??”
“Yes. That’s why I sent the kestrel.”
“But… Why do you want my help?”
“To get Westmark back.”
“But I can’t do that!” The mere thought of approaching Chimera of my own free will… “What makes you think I can?”
“Because cold iron doesn’t hold you. Because the soul-stripped animals can’t hurt you. But most of all… because Chimera is afraid of you.”
“What?!” Shanaia wasn’t well, I told myself. She didn’t know what she was saying. It was possibly the most far-fetched claim I’d ever heard. Chimera would have me for breakfast – without even breaking a sweat. Her greatest difficulty would be to decide whether to eat me roasted or raw. The notion that she was in any way afraid of me… No. Impossible. Absurd. Ridiculous.
“You have to!” Shanaia said hoarsely and grabbed the hem of my skirt, which was the only part of me she could reach. “No one else can. Or wants to.”
I stared down at her white fingers clutching the coarse denim.
“You can’t be serious,” I whispered.
“Clara still has much to learn,” Aunt Isa interjected. “I believe Chimera is too dangerous for her…”
You could say that again.
“I really can’t,” I said, trying to ignore the desperate hand and Cat’s burning gaze, which for some reason was aimed at me right now. “I’m really sorry for you, for Westmark, but… no.”
Shanaia’s fingers slowly released their grip and her hand flopped onto the floor as if she no longer had the strength to lift it.
“Then there is no one,” she whispered, and closed her eyes.
Oscar sent me a strange look, reproachful, I thought. And I felt like a tiny, cowardly louse. But what choice did I have? There was absolutely nothing I could do against someone like Chimera. Nothing at all.
CHAPTER 6
Remember Viridian
Although it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, the light was still on in the flat in Mercury Street.
“Aren’t you going to come upstairs with me?” I asked Aunt Isa, trying not to sound too desperate. Only it would be so much easier if she would explain everything to my mum.
She glanced at me sideways.
“I think I’d better,” she said. “But I can’t stay long. Shanaia needs me.”
Hoot-Hoot took off from her shoulder with a silent beat of his broad wings, and disappeared into the darkness above the street lamps. The mice in Mercury Street had better watch out tonight.
Without Hoot-Hoot Aunt Isa looked a tad more normal. Still, it was probably just as well that most of our neighbours had gone to bed.
The light came on in the stairwell a split second before my fingers touched the switch. I looked up and wasn’t at all surprised to see Mum in the doorway to our flat. She has always had a way of knowing if it was me coming home. It occurred to me that she might have a kind of wildsense where I was concerned – a bit like the way an animal always knows where its young are. She didn’t say anything; she just disappeared back into the flat and left the door open so that we could follow. It wasn’t until we were all inside – including Oscar and Woofer – that she launched her attack. Not on me, at least not yet, but on her older sister.
“Who do you think you are?” she hissed through clenched teeth.
“Milla…” Aunt Isa began and made a reassuring gesture. But my mum wasn’t in a mood to be placated.
“No. Don’t you dare shush me. Just what gives you the right to march into my life – into Clara’s life – and take her as if she were yours? Without asking. Without calling me. Without… me. You simply can’t do that!”
“I did send you a text…” I piped up.
Mum shot me a single, furious glare which promised that she would get to me later. Then she turned her attention back on Aunt Isa.
“I had to lie to Clara’s dad. And Oscar’s mum. You forced me to do that.”
“I’m sorry if…”
“But that’s not the worst. The worst is…” Now she looked at me again, but with a completely different expression that struck right at my core. Not angry. Desperate. And then she seemed to lose the power of speech. No more words came out, only a tiny, strangled sound. And I could see that she was on the verge of tears.
“I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been important,” Isa said quietly. “If there had been any other way. But there wasn’t.”
“Isa helped us,” I said. “Mum, it’s OK. And we’re all safely back now.”
Oscar cleared his throat.
“Ahem… me and Woofer should probably be…”
My mum shook her head. “No. You’ll be sleeping here tonight. That’s what I’ve arranged with your mum. She doesn’t know that you… that you’ve been away. I had no idea how to explain to her that Clara’s aunt Isa is…” She ran out of words again, and this time I had a better idea of why. I, too, would struggle to explain to Oscar’s tough lawyer mum that my aunt was a wildwitch who could talk to the animals and travel the wildways so that a distance of several hundred kilometres meant hardly anything at all.
“Probably for the best,” Oscar interjected quickly.
My mum shook her head. “There’s nothing ‘best’ about it,” she said. “And you don’t have to lie to your mum to protect us. I just didn’t know how to make her believe that…”
“No,” Oscar said. “She’s not really into all that supernatural stuff. She gets really worked up about people believing in horoscopes even.”
“I have to go,” Isa said. “But Milla… the children haven’t done anything wrong. On the contrary. They acted with strength, courage and intelligence. Is that so terrible?”
My face went all red. I didn’t feel strong, courageous or intelligent. Especially not courageous, given I had just said no to helping Shanaia.
Mum looked at Aunt Isa.
“Your job was to teach her to survive,” she said. “That was all. You were not to… to expose her to danger again. Take her from me again. Turn her into… into something completely different from what she is.”
Aunt Isa shook her head. “I’m not turning her into anything,” she said. “I’m not the one who decides who Clara will be. And Milla… neither are you.”
“Go away,”
my mum said, her voice sagging with tiredness. “Go away, and leave Clara alone.”
I had been expecting a massive telling off when Aunt Isa had left. But Mum said hardly anything at all. She just fetched some extra bedlinen, so that Oscar and Woofer could sleep on the floor in my room, and she even asked if we were hungry. Oscar had a bowl of cornflakes, but I couldn’t get a thing down, though my tummy was rumbling. I hated it when Mum was sad. It ate away at me, and I would always try to make her happy again as fast as I could. But this time I didn’t know how.
I was dog-tired when my alarm clock went off the next morning. It’s an old-fashioned one, neither digital nor electric. It has to be wound up every day, and it sounds like a fire alarm when it goes off. But it has black Mickey Mouse ears, nose and eyes, and I’ve had it ever since I was little, so I don’t usually mind the fire alarm. That morning, however, I could have done without it, especially since Woofer went crazy and started barking at the alarm clock. I switched it off and turned to Woofer.
“Woofer. Be quiet!”
He lay down with a wounded expression. Oscar slept on unperturbed.
I sat up in bed and poked him with my big toe.
“Oscar,” I said. “Rise and shine.”
He just rolled over, still sound asleep. What did it take to rouse him? An anti-tank missile?
I got up slowly and made my way to the window. It had snowed while we’d been asleep – not masses, but a fine scattering of powder that made our otherwise rather dull courtyard look like a scene from a Christmas card. The washing lines wore a white ruff of hoar frost and the brown beech hedges looked like they’d been dusted with icing sugar. It was just starting to get light and the only tracks in the snow were from an animal, but I couldn’t see whether it was a dog, cat or possibly even a fox.
Then I stopped mid-yawn. And stood very still. Very, very still indeed.
The animal tracks formed a pattern. Not a very accurate one. Not as if a person had written in the snow. Even so, I had no doubt that they were letters.
REM EMBERVIR IDI AN
“Oscar!”
I grabbed him and kept shaking him until he was at least so awake that he tried to push me away, while he grumbled sleepily: “Gerrofffme!” Or something like that, anyway.
“Get up, Oscar. Look!”
I practically dragged him to the window.
“Hey!” he exclaimed with delight. “It’s been snowing!”
“Yes, but look at the tracks.”
“Cool, aren’t they? Do you think it was a fox?”
“Can’t you see what it says?”
He squinted at the tracks and frowned.
“Says? It doesn’t say anything. Clara, it was just an animal.”
He couldn’t see it. I didn’t understand how come he couldn’t, because to me it was glaringly obvious, even in the winter morning gloom, with just the glow from the street lamp to read it by.
REM EMBERVIR IDI AN
Remember Viridian.
“Gosh, I’m starving,” Oscar said.
“But can’t you see what it says?” I said again. “Remember Viridian!”
He just looked at me as if I’d lost my mind.
CHAPTER 7
Being Walked All Over
Mum said cycling in this weather was too risky, so she drove us to school in our little Kia. We made a stop outside Oscar’s block in Jupiter Street, so he could take Woofer up to the flat, change his clothes, and pick up a book he needed.
“What did your mother say?” my mum asked when he got back in the car.
“Nothing,” Oscar said. “She’d already gone to work. She says she gets much more done if she turns up before everybody else.”
“Does she do that a lot?” I asked, thinking how much I would miss it if Mum and I didn’t have our sleepy little ritual at the breakfast table. It wasn’t that we said very much to each other, but I always got a quick morning hug and a noisy, tickly, raspberry on my neck while she pottered around making coffee, setting out muesli and toasting bread rolls in our mini oven.
“No, mostly when I’m at my dad’s,” Oscar said.
Mum wasn’t the only one to take her car this morning, so it was crowded outside the school gates.
“There’s nowhere for me to park,” she said. “It’ll have to be a stop-and-hop today. Are you ready?”
“Sure, sure,” said Oscar, who was already scouting through the rear window for his friends.
Mum stopped and we hopped.
“Have a nice day,” Mum called out, and drove on the moment we had shut the car door. The car behind her was already sounding its horn. I waved, but I don’t think she saw me.
“Alex!” Oscar called out to one of his classmates. “Hey, Alex…” He ran ahead. I followed behind, plodding along at a more reluctant pace. Most of the snow in the school playground had already been trampled into a thin grey slush that spattered everything and everybody when you ran through it. Now what was my first lesson again? My brain felt like foam rubber.
Some of the boys from Year 10 were having a snowball fight. Or, more accurately, an ice-ball fight because the slush turned into grey, rocky lumps of ice when you pressed it hard enough. I stopped in my tracks. I had no wish to be caught in the crossfire.
Oscar had realized that I was lagging behind. He slapped Alex on the back of his shoulder with a wet, woollen mitten, making a loud splat.
“Be with you in a sec.”
“You off to rescue your girlfriend, then?” Alex said, looking put out.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Oscar said calmly. He was used to being teased about it. “Clara, get a move on.”
I couldn’t move. I just stood there staring at the older boys, one in particular. Martin. Martin from Year 10. Not because he was bigger than the other Year 10s, or much stronger for that matter. He was just meaner.
“Clara…”
By now Oscar had reached me. He turned to see what I was looking at. “Oh, drat,” he muttered. Even Oscar was a little scared of Martin.
The bell went, but Martin and his fellow snowball fighters ignored the shrill ringing and kept up their strafing. They were no longer aiming at each other, but at anyone who tried to get through the door to B Block. Lumps of ice crisscrossed the air and we could hear cries of pain and howling when they found their targets.
“Clara, they’re only snowballs,” Oscar said. “You’re a wildwitch. Surely you’re not scared of being hit by a measly little snowball?”
But I was.
“Come on,” he urged me. “We’ll make a run for it. If we get hit, I’m sure we’ll survive.”
He slapped me on my shoulder, less hard and loud than when he slapped Alex. Then he set off at full tilt and somehow I too managed to peel my boots off the tarmac and follow him. I narrowed my eyes so that I could see only the ground in front of me and expected at any minute to be struck by a wet, hard ball of ice.
I wasn’t. Something much worse happened.
Just as I was about to run up the steps and through the door, I slammed into something. Someone. I lost my footing and fell, arms flailing.
The pain wasn’t the problem. My puffer jacket cushioned most of the impact, but I bashed my knee against a step and when I sat up, I saw that I had ripped my leggings. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that the person I had run into was Martin.
Slowly he got to his feet. His skater trousers were wet from slush.
“What’s up, Martin,” the bravest of his friends called out. “Wet yourself, did you?”
Forced laughter erupted from the group, croaky and a little nervous. I just sat on the steps while he loomed over me; he looked huge as I stared up from below, and I couldn’t make out his face very clearly, he was so close to me that a wide stretch of black polar jacket was almost the only thing I could see, that and two broad, bare hands, wet and fiery red from squeezing snowballs together.
“Loser,” he snarled at me. “Look where you’re going.”
I
usually do. I would always give a wide berth to anything that looked like trouble. I was rarely bullied or teased, mainly because I was so good at not standing out. Before you can tease someone, you first have to notice they are there.
Except now Martin had noticed me. And then some.
He bent over me and now I could see his face, almost as red as his hands; his eyes were strangely swollen and reduced to glittering cracks in all the red. He scooped up a handful of filthy slush from the steps. I barely had time to close my own eyes before the icy mixture of gravel, salt and melting snow was rubbed into my face. Then he stepped over me and walked off, seemingly indifferent to his entourage. They followed and made a big deal out of trampling me as if I wasn’t there. One knee hit my side, a couple of them slapped me across the back of my head with wet mittens, and one boy stamped on my foot.
“Oi. Leave her alone!”
It was Oscar, of course, who earned himself a slap with a mitten in passing, but none of them stopped. The message was clear: I was someone you could walk all over, an insignificant little nobody who got what she deserved for failing to get out of the way quickly enough. Have a nice day, Mum had said. Yeah, right.
“They’re the losers,” Oscar said through clenched teeth as he helped me back on my feet. “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” I muttered. Wet, filthy and with a face that felt as if it had been scoured with wet sandpaper. But apart from that OK.
“Why didn’t you do something?” Oscar said. “Make them go away, just like the seagulls, or some other wildwitch trick. You just let them… walk all over you.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “You make it sound as if I can just magic them away. I can’t.”
“Your Aunt Isa would never have let them walk all over her,” he insisted.
Well, no. I would have liked to see them try…
“I’m not Aunt Isa.”
“No, and you never will be if you don’t stand up for yourself, Clara.”
I was starting to regret ever telling Oscar about the wildwitches. I’d just had a totally rotten start to my day and now I’d be spending most of the morning in wet and filthy clothing. And Oscar was making it sound like it was all my own fault. That hurt. Much more than my foot and my knee and my snow-scoured face.