Everything hurt.
She’d already sweated through her clothes, every inch of her soaked and shivering on the thin mattress in her solitary cell.
Performing magic without the marks or tattoos or training came with fallout. Every muscle throbbed, her bones ached, hot like steel rods fresh from the foundry under her skin. The world around her was a blur, obscured by the fog of pain. The thin fluorescent light was too much even when she kept her eyes closed. Every sound was like a needle in her brain.
Time was as smeared as her senses. Coherent thought came in snatches.
She knew she was in solitary. It’s where she had expected to be taken. Memory filled in the blanks around her. She’d been here before. She knew the bare room, the bulbs fixed in the ceiling, the thin mattress and the bed that creaked with each movement.
She was aware that people had come to talk to her, though she couldn’t say if that had been ten minutes ago or the day before. Their words had meant nothing, but the increasingly frustrated tone had left an impression.
Somewhere out there, people were deciding what to do about her. She was a problem. A pebble rolling around the cog work, threatening to catch between the teeth – something to be extracted and broken down before it made any more trouble.
She was at their mercy, unable to defend herself, unable to explain. Any time she closed her eyes, she feared the spike of daylight to wake her, her feet off the ground, on her way to the noose. Try as she might, her mind was fixed on it, unable to concoct some plan against the faceless enemy of bureaucracy as it decided her fate.
More visits. More questions. Food. Someone rolled her onto her back, thumbed at her eyelids, letting in the blaze of the light above. She wanted to fend them off, didn’t know if she did. Shouts made her head ring, someone pushed her. But she couldn’t remember the question, couldn’t line her thoughts up with her tongue. Someone took the uneaten food away.
Two men came to examine her. She woke as they pulled her around, undid her clothing. She understood some of their words. They talked about her scars, talked about blood magic. She spoke, her words clumsy and trapped between her teeth.
When the door closed behind them, she wasn’t sure what she’d said.
They couldn’t let her hang. They couldn’t just throw her life aside. Didn’t they realise she didn’t want any of this? She’d just wanted to be left alone.
She tried to get up, to get to the door and slam her fist. Get them back in here. She had things to say. But when she opened her eyes a crack, she was still on the bed, every inch of her itching.
They were deciding her fate and she couldn’t participate, no matter how desperate she was. There was no trial, no legal proceedings. She had given up the right to such things the moment she’d performed magic. There was more that she had been meant to say – pro-magic political drivel she’d seen on TV.
Had what she’d done been enough? The thought spun around with the rest of the room. It was everywhere she looked. Had her and Marnie’s plan worked? Was she headed for Coldwater or the noose? No one would tell her. Or they had and she couldn’t remember.
She knew she was getting better when the nightmares returned alongside the dark thoughts twisting through her head.
Here she was, in clothes that had seen too many washes, drenched in sweat and stale vomit, in a small bare prison cell ranting about the rights of magic users. She was totally and utterly alone, her fate in the hand of faceless strangers, databases, paperwork. No power, no agency.
And she deserved it. She deserved all of it.
Muscles still sore, she began to pace the room, enduring the hurt. Unleashing that power at Anderson, for one golden moment it had felt like a release. She’d relished every second of the planning, the preparation and that final pay-off, hurting that loathsome bitch and, for one moment, putting one broken piece of this fucked-up world right on its arse where it belonged.
No more art classes, she supposed. Whether they sent her to Coldwater or not, she wouldn’t have to sit through another of those things.
She’d never talk to Jamison again.
The thought paused her. Anyone watching would see her freeze in the middle of the cell.
They’d sent word he was sick and all she’d done was nod. She might have made a joke even. But she’d never called him or sent him a message. She’d tried a few times, queued for the phone, picked up a pen and then she just… hadn’t.
Now she never would. She deserved that too.
She bit at her fingernails. Even cried a couple of times. Waiting was a sick pit in her stomach that swallowed time and spat it back out.
Suddenly exhausted, she collapsed back onto the bed, falling immediately into a deep sleep.
The nightmares came more vivid than ever. Michaela screaming and blaming her, covered in the blood of her family. Steph, the girl she’d betrayed, standing at her side, her fingers missing, bleeding onto her shoes. She couldn’t see Caleb, but she could hear him behind her, that familiar rasp of his breathing. The sound was stiffer now, that last broken wheeze before she’d choked the breath out of him.
Amanda woke as Steph reached out for her with the bloody stumps of her fingers, her clothes soaked through with sweat. ‘I didn’t mean to do it!’
As if waiting for their cue, they came for her.
It was still dark, the dawn only just beginning to rub the shine off the night through the slit of window.
Two men and no decorum, the lights slammed on. She was just trying to pull her blanket up over herself when the door clanged open and she was told it was time to leave.
Her hands twisted behind her back, held once again in an Abra lock, cold cuffs went around her wrists, the chill on her skin enough to rouse her. She realised that she had recovered, her mind was clear.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
Neither guard replied, each man taking an arm and carrying her down the corridor.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she demanded. She jerked her arms, but their grips only tightened, their march barely faltering from her outburst.
‘Amanda Ellis,’ one started talking, words loud to drown her out, tumbling from him like lines he’d rehearsed, ‘you are to be executed for illegal magical practices by order of…’
She began to struggle, her plimsolled feet sliding uselessly across the slick floor as she tried to kick back against it, propel them the other way. But the men were too strong, their holds too tight, their stride relentless as gravity. The talking guard didn’t falter in his monologue of state-sanctioned legal bullshit.
Her plan hadn’t worked. She had been so certain that it would, a tiny spark within her convinced that she would never die.
The struggle to escape consumed her, pushing all other thought aside. She could barely think, her muscles bunching, her body a frantic heart as it tried to escape the men. She was shouting again, screaming, desperately, ‘Magic in the UK! Magic in the UK!’ like they were the only words she knew.
But the grey corridors passed around her. They turned a corner, then two. The man had finished his pronouncement, the pair falling into a heavy silence. A steel door opened right on cue onto a small courtyard, towering walls on all sides, windows enclosed in metal muzzles.
A gallows stood in the centre.
A man stood on its raised platform, his hand holding the noose, waiting for her.
Already tired from the fighting, Amanda’s energy fled in the cold morning light. ‘Please,’ she moaned, tears and cold sweat running down her face. She couldn’t stop shaking. Her feet didn’t have the strength for the stairs and so they carried her up. ‘No. Please.’
But the men worked as though she wasn’t speaking at all. One of them began to recite some legal proclamations. They were just sounds to her and, from the monotonous way he plodded through them, to him as well.
The rope went around her neck, stiff fibres rough against her. She gasped like it was a hit of cold water. She’d failed. She’d never see her daughter again. She tried to fix Michaela in her mind, all of her children: Darren and Emily. Her husband, Simon.
The bag went over her head, her breath hot and foul over her face and now she began to shout, deep breaths causing the cloth to choke her. She could feel the trapdoor beneath her creaking under her feet.
Oh God, she didn’t want to die. She didn’t want—
A phone rang, its flat, electronic bleat cutting through the ceremony. It managed a single cycle before the receiver was snatched up.
The courtyard held its breath and Amanda sagged, her legs finally giving up, the hemp cutting into her neck.
‘She’s for Coldwater.’