Kitty
I’m fidgeting like crazy when I catch the bus to work late that Saturday night. Matt sits beside me and rolls his eyes. “Honestly,” he says. “Anyone would think you’ve got a crush.”
I glare daggers at him, but the bus isn’t nearly empty enough to talk out loud. Matt knows it. He sits back with a smug smile. “Oh, Talia, I can’t wait to see you again, won’t you come stay with me for the whole Christmas holiday?”
“Shut up,” I mutter through clenched teeth.
“You’re cute when you’re annoyed,” he says, cackling. “Like a cross little kitten.”
I roll my eyes and ignore him. It’s much nicer to think of Talia instead. She’s back in Oxford now, but she offered to pick me up after work when it’s over at stupid-o’clock tomorrow morning. She’s getting up early just to drive over and give me a lift home, and then she’ll be staying. Yes, Matt, for the whole holiday. Because I need all the help I can get to find a spell to bring him back.
That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.
Shivam looks flustered when he meets me at the Society entrance, his hair sticking up like he’s been running his fingers through it, pulling on it. He glares at Matt. “Oh good. He’s here.”
Our steps echo on the floor as we walk in, and it takes me a while to realise something’s off with the whole place. “Is there something big coming up?” I ask.
“Hmm?” Shivam looks back at me. “Why do you ask?”
I have no answer. Something feels off. The whole place is so new to me, though, that it might not be that obvious to him. It’s not until I reach the huge atrium that I realise what it is. It’s quiet.
I stop, my hand resting on the railing, and look down. There are no other footsteps than ours, there are no voices, nothing.
“Kitty,” Shivam calls from our doorway. “Come on, what’re you looking at?”
“Where is everyone, Shiv?”
“Probably working,” he huffs. “Come on, we’ve got a case.”
There are little hairs standing up at the back of my neck, but I let my hand fall from the railing. It feels like it crumbles slightly under my fingers, like there’s powder there to be brushed off, but I see nothing.
Matt catches my eye. “You okay?” I nod, but I can’t help glancing down at the silent atrium. “I’ll go take a look,” he says. “Anything weird happens, get yourself out. I’ll find you.”
I nod again and want so badly to hug him right now or say something. Instead, I plaster on my smile and go to work.
“Right,” Shivam says, already drawing sigils on the mirror as I shake my coat off. “Your case today is a woman called Bianca. She’s looking for her teenage daughter. You ready?”
I nod and straighten my shirt, walk up to the mirror, and start placing my own sigils within the square Shivam’s laid out. The final one, the new one I’ve learned at the Society, is always the hardest. It pulls wrong on my throat, and I wince. I need to work out a way to smooth that one out.
For the first time in days, I think of Mum. I haven’t seen her in so long, and it aches worse than any dodgy sigil. I don’t exactly wish for the old days of the pull coming whenever it wants, but I wish I’d known this would make it harder to see her. A small but growing voice whispers I might never see her again, and the thought of it is so huge and awful, I almost lose control of the magic.
The world around me takes longer to blur than it should, the glass seeming to speckle and dull for a moment before I break through to the grey place.
“Oh my God,” gasps a woman in front of me. “Oh my God, it worked.” She claps a hand over her mouth and laughs hysterically, then sobs, harsh, violent sounds that rip themselves out of her.
I reach out to pat her shoulder, a witness to her pain. I know it’s important for them to feel this, but part of me always wants to take it away.
“Are you Death?” she asks at last, straightening up and visibly pulling herself together.
I laugh. “Everyone asks that,” I admit. “No, or I don’t think so, anyway. I certainly don’t reap souls or whatever it is.”
“So what…” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. How does this work, then?”
“You think about the person you want to bring back, and hopefully, they’ll appear,” I explain, trying to get ahead of her and give her answers before she demands them. “If you’re both willing, you’ll be able to exchange places.”
She closes her eyes, a line appearing between her eyebrows as she concentrates. “And she’ll wake up, then?” she asks. “No lasting effects? Scars, that sort of thing?”
“It’ll be like you died instead of her. History changes. She’ll be the only one to remember, and me, of course.”
“How does that work?” she asks, her eyes snapping open.
I shrug, feeling a little stupid.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, shaking her head. “As long as she gets another chance, that’s all that matters.”
She closes her eyes again, and I gaze around the featureless landscape. I should be looking for this woman’s daughter, but I have to admit, it’s my mum I really want to see.
“Why isn’t it working?” she asks, frowning.
“It takes longer for some people than others,” I say. “I don’t really know why.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, isn’t there?”
“Well, it’s not like I signed up to an apprenticeship,” I snap before I can hold my tongue. “The magic just sort of happens through me,” I say more gently.
“Sorry,” she says, to her credit. “I’m…this is my only hope. It’s her only hope.”
“Maybe if you tell me a bit about her, it’ll help us to both focus on her.”
She nods. “Her name’s Eloise. She’s my daughter. I had her young. She’s just turned nineteen, and she’s such a bright girl. She’s in her first year of uni, studying biomedical sciences. I think she could have gone for medicine if she’d focused a little harder in her A levels but…” She shrugs. “You know what teenagers are like.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Uh, yeah. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how did she die?”
She’s silent for a moment, her jaw working. I can see the muscles moving under the skin. “An accident.”
Someone snorts, and Bianca spins around like she’s ready to fight for her life. A girl a bit taller than me, with cropped hair and lip rings, stands behind Bianca with her head tilted to one side.
“Eloise,” Bianca gasps. Then she frowns. “What have you done to your hair?”
Eloise runs her hand across the grade-one shave and shrugs. “I can do that here.” She marks a line back across the top of her skull with two fingers, and bright green spikes spring up behind, giving her a mohawk. She shakes her head, and it disappears just as quickly. “Cool, huh?”
“That’s awesome,” I say. “I’ve never seen anyone except my mum do stuff like that before.”
“Who are you?” she asks, frowning at me.
“Oh, I’m Kitty. I bring people back if there’s someone willing to take their place.”
She leans back slightly, turns to her mum. “Bring me back?”
Bianca’s face is flushed with victory. “Yes, you can go back, live the rest of your life. It’ll be like none of this ever happened. It’s a second chance, El.”
“I don’t want to go back.” She steps backward, looking wide-eyed between me and Bianca.
“What? But you have to. I found a way. I’m…I’m willing. Kitty says it’ll be as if you never d…never went away. I’ll take your place.”
Eloise blinks and brings her hands up like she needs to ward us off. “But I don’t want to.”
“No. No, you can’t let this mistake—”
“I killed myself, Mum!” she yells, an explosion of pain and truth. “I didn’t make a mistake. I planned this, and I thought about it, and I knew what I was doing.”
Bianca has her hands over her ears, her eyes shut tight as Eloise rages, just trying to be seen. “No, no, no, you can’t,” she says, almost childlike. I don’t know which of them to step toward, to soothe. “You have to come back, you have to.”
“Why?” Eloise snaps, and a tear breaks free, running down her cheek, dripping off her chin. “Because you said so? You can’t fix everything, Mum, some things are too broken.”
“You’re not broken,” she cries. “Don’t say that. You can get through this.”
“I tried! I tried so hard, you don’t even know. I’ve tried and tried, and I’m tired. I can’t do it anymore.”
“Then you’re a coward!” Bianca screams over sobs.
“Oh, God, no, don’t,” I beg. My hands are shaking as I reach out for her, try to stop her saying things that she may never be able to take back. She shoves me off and steps forward anyway.
“You are a coward. You’re tired? Try being a mum whose only daughter committed suicide. Try walking every day through waist-deep snow because you couldn’t save her.”
“Oh, here we go again,” Eloise says, her voice breaking even as she tries to make it sarcastic and not desperately sad. “This is not about you. You can’t save everyone.”
“It is literally my job. As a mother. This is what I’m meant to do.”
Bianca’s voice is almost a scream, and I stumble back away from the two of them, blinded with the tears. I can’t let them do this. I beg them to stop because they don’t get to fix this if they don’t fix it now.
I want my mum so bad.
There’s a pressure building around my head, like the grey mist is pushing in on me, crushing me. I can barely breathe, and at first, I think it’s a panic attack. Then it breaks.
The whole world seems to shatter, and pain blooms through my face. I hear distant shouts and spells. I think one of the voices is my mum, but I can’t see anything.
“Kitty!” Shivam’s voice is the only clear thing, and it’s so loud. I groan and try to cover my ears, and I realise I’m on the floor, surrounded by broken glass.
“What the hell?” My voice slurs.
“Fuck,” he says, but it sounds more scared than angry. “You tell me what the hell? You were doing the job, standing in front of the mirror, and then it started to vibrate and exploded right as you collapsed. What the hell did you do?”
I push myself up gingerly, wincing as the shards of glass prick my hands. Shivam huffs and comes close enough to help me up. “Jesus, Kitty, your face.”
I put my hand up to my face and catch the blood dripping from my nose. “Ugh.”
“Go clean up,” he says. “Shit. I need to call Anderson.”
He scrabbles around on his desk, and I hesitate, dizzy and stupid from the everything of it all. “Uh. I’m not allowed to go to the bathroom alone, remember?”
He looks up. I shrug. “Anderson said. He got the hump last time.”
Shivam presses his fingertips into his eyes. “Yeah. Okay. Fine. Sorry. Are you all right?”
“Sore,” I admit.
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess you would be. Jeez. You faceplanted that mirror when you fell.”
“What, I did all that with my face?” I laugh and regret it.
“I don’t know,” he admits. “What happened in there?”
“The client and her daughter had a screaming match. I think the girl was magical.”
“Maybe so, but she’s dead. Her magic shouldn’t affect the outside world.”
I hum and don’t tell him about the bond Mum put on Talia and Matt.
Shivam puts his hand just above my shoulder, guiding me out. Clearly holding my arm to lift me up was enough human contact for one day, I think wryly, but then the wall of the corridor seems to squirm, and I groan and close my eyes.
“What? What is it?” he asks. He sounds terrified.
“It’s fine. I’m not gonna puke,” I say. “My eyes have just gone wonky.”
The light in the loo is way too bright for my aching head, and I lean against the paper dispenser for a moment, though I don’t need to go. At least the walls have stopped moving in here, the room cool and blessedly alone. No ghosts screaming cruelties at each other that they’ll never take back.
Part of me wants to go back and help them. My heart breaks for both mother and daughter. Surely, Bianca will feel absolutely awful for the things that she’s said? Surely, Eloise will miss her mum and understand she wants to help?
I think of Talia. I’d say I don’t know why, but these days, my mind seems to drift toward her if given half the chance, but now I’m remembering all the little glimpses I’ve seen of her home life and her relationship with her mum. Would I want to fix them back up? Could I? I can’t imagine not loving my own mum, being anything but overjoyed to see her, but I know some parents aren’t like her.
It’s all irrelevant anyway. Something happened in there, and I don’t know what. Something violent and destructive, and it had my mum’s voice in the centre, my mum’s magic hurling me back out. I open my eyes into a squint and stand to gaze into the mirror like it holds any answers. All it shows is a blood-drenched girl with a swollen lip. I sigh and try to wash up as much as I can.
It’s a while before my face looks something approaching normal, and by then, my mind’s cleared somewhat. I must’ve been in here for ages. Shivam will have gotten bored and buggered off by now, surely. But it’s Matt I’m worrying about. I feel guilty not thinking of him before. What if he’s come back to the office to find me and both of us are gone, with blood and glass all over the floor? He’ll be terrified.
Even worse, what if he’s been affected by that explosion in the grey place?
I nick the last of the loo roll to wad up against my nose and go to unlock the door. That’s when I hear it. Low voices, barely audible without me pressed up against the wood.
“…all smashed up and bleeding like nothing I’ve ever seen, sir.”
There’s a pause, and I realise Shivam’s on the phone to Anderson. I rest my head against the door. I don’t want to interrupt and have that awkward “I was talking about you, but I’m going to have to pretend I wasn’t” moment. Anyway, the door is cool and comfortable, and I can rest my eyes here…
“Well, all due respect, sir, but she’s your fucking daughter.”
My eyes snap open.
I hear Shivam sigh through the roaring of blood in my ears. “Yeah, okay. Yes, I’ll do that.” My heart is beating so hard, my sore face throbs, and I need to get out of there. I need air and space far away from this bullshit.
On autopilot, I shove the door open and run. Shivam notices me and yells, but I don’t even look back.
The walls feel like they’re closing in on me, darkening from the stark white into a claustrophobic blood colour, the ceiling lowering. It feels like the Society itself wants to swallow me.
I shove on the doors and burst out into air so cold my lungs howl on it, but I’m free. If I can get away.
Strong arms grab me around the waist, and I scream, kick, bite, scratch.
“Kitty! Kitty, it’s me.”
“Talia,” I breathe, all the fight draining from me. I turn and cling to her. I’m safe.