Page 76 of Tricky Girls

Maybe I had been alone in my devotion.

The last spell we ever cast hadn’t worked. Just two kids not understanding the significance of magic, probably creating a curse instead.

Afterwards we crowded into the bar off the hall, making the most of the free drinks.

Champagne makes Tilda affable apparently.

She’d shaken Tommy off, finding herself alone in a room of people she didn’t know well. She must have thought I was the safest option, seeking me out as I lounged against a wooden column with a Jack and coke.

‘I would have got done for that at my school,’ she said, nodding at the rumpled state of my white dress shirt.

‘My teachers wouldn’t have dared say shit,’ I retorted.

She nodded, so much running through her expression just then. She thinks I’m an arrogant fuck, too rich for my own good.

Yeah, maybe.

But that’s blood money and it wasn’t even mine until I turned eighteen. And even then I wanted nothing to do with it, not until Haz brought me up on my shit. She’d inherited on her eighteenth too. Just two angry, fucked up orphan kids. My cousins and aunt never counted as family, just a shitty means to an even shittier end.

I suppose Tilda never got another go either. Something that should make me happy, but right then just made me bitter.

So when they piled out the bar on their way to Vipers, I escaped to the forest.

Except I’m not alone. Haven’t been from the moment I left the bar. I can feel it in the way my neck prickles, the way a prey animal knows they’re not alone in the woods.

But this prey animal has teeth.

The first tree I sunk my fist into felt like a peculiar nirvana. The next was hell, the rest numbness.

The pain is radiating, distracting, but there’s no ignoring the exasperated voice behind me, the one that finally calls out, ‘Why do youdothat?’

Resting my forehead against the tree, I fight to catch my breath.

My prettiest demon, here to finish me off.

I look over my shoulder to watch her approach. She has her arms tight around herself, peering round at the barely lit wood.

‘Creepy as fuck out here in the dark.’

‘Go on back to the light then.’

Tilda captures my gaze, merely two metres away now. ‘Kinda prefer the dark.’

She had as a kid too. It was me who feared it. Scared until she taught me not to be.

Her eyes lower to my hands, nails clawed on the crumbly bark. Reaching out, she takes one of them, holding my bleeding knuckles to the meagre light.

I hold still waiting for her reproval. And if not that then some kind of show of concern like Elly likes to give.

‘The sight of blood makes my mouth water,’ is all she says as she drops my hand.

There’s a long moment where we don’t speak, the silence broken only by ghostly voices of other students moving through the forest. Towards the shore where I’d been heading. Tilda looks in that direction, called by the noises.

I push off the trunk and head that way too.

I can sense she’s following, canvas shoes silent on the spongy floor.

I weave this way and that, feeling that invisible chain pulling taut. Taut but never breaking. Stronger now than it had been a decade ago.

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