Katharine Corr - The Witch’s Tears

‘Um …’ Merry’s throat was dry; she took a sip from her bottle of water. Ruby tilted her head, her curiosity nudging at Merry insistently. ‘Well … Yeah. I guess. I mean, it would never have worked.’ She knew Ruby was about to ask why, so she rushed the words out. ‘I think he was still in love with someone else. Someone from his past.’ With Meredith. My ancestor from fifteen hundred years before I was born . Two witches from the same family, in love with the same boy.

‘Really? What a loser,’ Ruby commented, satisfied. ‘I’d want to seriously injure anyone who messed me about like that. Hope you dumped him from a great height.’

Merry stared at her friend.

You have no idea what he meant to me. And no idea what we had to do to him—

She caught her breath and shrugged, trying to look unconcerned even as her heart ached. ‘It was months ago. I’m fine with it now.’

There was a surge of sympathy from Flo; she knew a little of the truth about Jack, about how Merry had felt about him. But Merry could tell Ruby didn’t believe her. Not one little bit. A hint of panic began to swirl in the pit of her stomach.

Ruby nodded.

‘Good. So you can begin dating again. Prove to him that you’ve moved on. And I know exactly the guy for you – he’s completely lush.’

Ruby started swiping through the photos on her phone, looking for a shot of Mr Lush, talking about how amazing he was. But Merry couldn’t take any of it in. How could she move on from a boy she’d been so desperate to save that she’d been willing to let him die? It felt impossible.

Guilt mingled with the panic.

I really wish I hadn’t told Leo last night that he needed to move on.

It was time to change the subject. But her mind was blank.

Luckily, Flo came to the rescue.

‘Ooh – speaking of lush, I spent most of last weekend binge-watching Poldark . Have you seen it, Ruby? Aidan Turner is so hot.’

Merry’s hands unclenched as Ruby and Flo began a long discussion on whether people really used to work down mines with no shirts on. For now, at least, she was off the hook.

A few hours later they were on the train back home. Flo started texting a guy she’d met at a party a couple of weeks ago, while Ruby put her headphones on and seemed to fall asleep. Merry’s phone had died, so she looked around for something to read and located a discarded newspaper a few seats down.

The headlines seemed to be the usual mix of regular news, human-interest items and celebrity gossip. A politician had been caught doing something dodgy, some poor guy had been murdered for his collection of antique knives, and yet another Hollywood couple had split up. Nothing interesting enough to make her read the rest of the article. Until a picture of a woman caught her eye. The woman looked like she was in her early thirties, and she was going for a seventies hippy vibe: multicoloured peasant blouse, flared jeans, fringed suede bag. She was smiling flirtatiously over her shoulder. For some reason, her face seemed familiar, though Merry was certain that she didn’t know her. She looked at the headline next to the photo:

Birchover death: police believe Ellie Mills’s body lay undetected for days

Merry read a bit more of the story and grimaced. Ellie Mills . The name didn’t ring any bells. And where could she possibly have seen her before? After a while she gave up trying to figure it out and stared through the window instead. She watched the landscape streaking past, until her eyelids grew heavy.

MERRY WASN’T SURPRISED to be back at the lake again. Somehow, it seemed … inevitable. Whatever path she chose, she kept ending up in the same place. But today it looked different. The water wasn’t sparkling, or reflecting the cloudless sky above. Instead, the lake lurked within its hollow: shrunken, dark, stinking of rotten vegetation. As she got closer to the edge, she saw that it was choked with algae, and she thought, This place is dying …

Finding a clear spot, she knelt on the bank, staring down into the water. She could see him there, gazing up at her, his blond hair floating about his head.

‘Jack?’

He stretched out his arms towards her, struggling to reach her. Instinctively she leant forward – forward – until her face was almost touching the surface of the lake, until—

Terror suffocated her. Scrambling backwards, she froze the surface of the lake, trapping Jack underneath. But she could still hear him, beating on the underside of the ice, screaming her name over and over …

‘Hey, Merry?’ She sat up with a jerk. Ruby was shaking her shoulder; the train was just pulling into Tillingham. ‘You OK? You were muttering something in your sleep.’

‘Uh … no, I’m fine. Just tired.’

Flo was staring at her, frowning. Merry shook her head fractionally; she didn’t want to start discussing her strange dreams in front of Ruby.

Merry stumbled off the train after the others. Flo said goodbye to them there as she lived on the other side of town and was getting a bus home. Merry got into Ruby’s car and turned the air conditioning on to full, trying to blow away the cobwebs of sleep still clinging to her brain.

Thankfully, Ruby seemed happy enough listening to the radio as she drove.

Merry was supposed to meet Leo at Gran’s house for dinner, so Ruby dropped her off there. Gran was in the kitchen, and despite the heat outside, the house was pleasantly cool.

‘Hey, Gran.’ Merry kissed her grandmother on the cheek. ‘That smells good. Where’s Leo?’

‘I made a chicken pie. And he’s not coming. He called and said he’s not feeling well.’ Gran gave Merry a searching glance, but Merry didn’t offer any explanation. She was hardly going to tell Gran that she’d been misusing her magic to spy on her brother.

‘Can I do anything?’

‘No. Go and relax.’

Merry wandered into the living room, spent a few minutes playing with Tybalt – Gran’s tortoiseshell moggie – then began browsing her grandmother’s bulging bookshelves: fiction, political memoirs, history, lots of knowledge books and wisdom books. And in a separate bookcase, Gran’s journey books. Merry opened the doors and ran her fingers along the spines. Gran favoured brightly-coloured, cloth-bound notebooks, though the bindings of the earliest books were faded now. As her nails bumped across the rainbow fabric, Merry remembered the photo of Ellie Mills, and that strange feeling of familiarity. And then she remembered an evening at Gran’s house a couple of months ago when Gran had asked her to copy out a spell from one of the journey books.

Ten minutes later Merry was sitting on the floor, a jumbled pile of discarded notebooks by her feet, one open upon her knees. Here was the spell: a charm Gran had developed for getting rid of acne. And on the opposite page was a photograph. Gran, with a group of six or seven other women of different ages, all standing a little awkwardly among four large, irregular-shaped rocks. A younger Gran – it had obviously been taken quite a few years ago. The camerawork was a bit wonky, but Gran had helpfully written the names of the women underneath the picture. And at the edge of the group – her hair bright pink in this photo – stood Ellie Mills.

Merry took the journey book into the kitchen. Gran was laying the table.

‘Gran, who’s this?’

Gran glanced at the photo.

‘Oh, it was taken at a convention in Derbyshire, held by a local coven. We went on a day trip to visit a nearby stone circle. About ten years ago, I think.’