Life Stealer

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  1 Sparrow Heart

  2 Badgers and Other Beasts

  3 Flying High

  4 A Snake in the Grass

  5 The Scent of Blood

  6 Blue-Light

  7 Falling Hard

  8 Soul Tangle

  9 New-Born Life

  10 Darkest Night

  11 The Revenant

  12 Vademecum

  13 The Grotto

  14 Oakhurst Academy

  15 Mrs Stern

  16 The Village

  17 Gabriel’s House

  18 The Jackdaw on the Perch

  19 The Dead Forest

  20 Inside the Monster

  21 Grey Snow

  22 Revenge

  23 When Something Has Died

  24 Home

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sparrow Heart

  I was a bird. Tiny, grey-and-brown sparrow’s wings carried me through the air, I darted in and out among twigs and branches, and it was spring, or nearly so. The scent of life and greenness was everywhere, and the trees had tender buds for me to eat.

  Somehow I knew that I was dreaming. I knew that in real life I wasn’t a sparrow, but a girl called Clara, and I definitely didn’t have wings or a beak, nor would willow buds and insects be my breakfast of choice. Nevertheless I flew through that forest, sensing spring all around me, feeling the effort of moving my wings, my claws curling instinctively around delicate twigs whenever I landed to plunge my beak into a juicy bud or nip at a passing ant.

  Then I spotted something on the forest floor. A berry. An orange-red, only slightly shrivelled rowanberry that no one had eaten! It was a rare treat at this time of year, and my small sparrow’s tummy rumbled at the sight. Even so I didn’t dive down to snatch it up at once because the berry was right next to something else, and I couldn’t tell what it was. Only that it was different, that it didn’t belong in a living forest. Dry leaves covered it. No, they were more than just dry, they were dead. Grey husks drained of freshness, skeletons picked clean and stripped of life.

  Leaves withering and falling from the trees were nothing new. It happened every year, much to the delight of beetles, earthworms and lots of tiny, delicious, crispy bugs. This was… something else. There was no sign of insect life in the stripped leaves, nothing stirring in the deadness.

  I didn’t like it. But then again… I did love rowanberries. And this particular berry looked increasingly irresistible. Its juicy flesh cried “Yum!”, its scent practically begged me to eat it, everything about it was so crunchy and sweet, and it had been such a long time since the last of the tasty autumn berries had been picked and eaten.

  I flew down to the lowest branches. The berry was only a few wingbeats away…

  Oh, oh, oh. I wanted it so much…

  But I never got it.

  My wings stiffened. My claws contracted a couple of times, then released their grip on the branch. I tumbled and I fell, and I couldn’t unfurl my wings, I couldn’t move, couldn’t save myself, couldn’t do a thing. My sparrow’s heart pounded in my hollow chest, the blood roared through my veins, and yet… yet I couldn’t move. Something had overpowered me, something invisible yet ravenous and incredibly strong; it paralysed me, squeezing the life out of me, tearing my feathers from my wings, snapping my bones like twigs. I landed on my back in the dead leaves with a thud, and the last things I saw before my eyes cracked and popped were the upside-down sky, the grey, stripped leaves and the fiery red berry I knew I would never, ever be able to reach.

  “Clara!”

  I flailed my arms around and hit something pointed and hard. I realized I had arms rather than wings again. I teetered on wobbly spaghetti legs, and clutched frantically at anything in reach so as not to fall. My fumbling hands closed around a handful of anorak and I clung to the coats hanging on the row of pegs outside the biology classroom at Greenacres School.

  “Are you all right?” asked Oscar. “Are you ill or something? Your face looks really weird.”

  If it hadn’t been Oscar asking, I wouldn’t have said a word. But he knew practically everything there was to know. That I had an aunt who was a wildwitch, that I too was a kind of wildwitch, though not a very good one, and that ever since the day Cat had scratched my forehead and lapped up my blood with his rough, warm cat’s tongue, my life had been turned upside down.

  “I was a bird,” I burst out. “I was flying around being a bird, but then… I died.”

  Someone giggled behind me. Josefine. Well, it would be her, wouldn’t it? When it came to sheer bitchiness, she held the class record.

  “Clara thinks she’s turned herself into a bird,” she announced loudly. “I don’t think the spell worked, though. Why don’t you flap your wings so we can see?”

  I was too shattered to ignore her or hit her with a witty comeback, though I knew it would be the smart thing to do. My heart was pounding just as hard as the sparrow’s, and I found myself touching my eyelids to check that the eyeballs underneath were normal, round and intact under the soft skin, and not squashed like a berry someone had stepped on. What was that thing that had killed the sparrow?

  And why – why and how was it possible for me to be dreaming when I was wide awake? One minute I’d been outside my classroom with Oscar, the next…

  “Clara.” Oscar touched my arm. “Do you want me to go get a teacher?”

  “No. No, I’m OK. I… I was just daydreaming.”

  He could tell that it was a lie, but he didn’t say anything. It was his fault that the others had started teasing me, and this time not just about us snogging – we weren’t, just each other’s best friends – but about me being a witch. Or to be precise, because they thought that I believed I was a witch and could do all sorts of magic tricks. Oscar had told Alex from his class, and everyone knew that Alex couldn’t keep a secret any longer than he could hold his breath, so now it was all over the school. Except, of course, that no one had the faintest clue what it really meant to be a wildwitch, nor would they ever understand what a wildwitch could and couldn’t do.

  Right now, apparently, I couldn’t walk from one classroom to the next without turning into a bird. Not quite the perfect start to my day.

  “You go on,” I said to Oscar because I knew he had a music lesson coming up. “I’ll see you later.”

  He glanced over his shoulder – twice – as he walked off, but in the end he did leave. He was only too aware that we mustn’t act too weird. Not after Oscar had gone missing for two whole days because Chimera had abducted him. Oscar’s mum still believed that we’d been mixed up in some kind of fantasy role-play, and she thought being with me “undermined his grasp of reality,” as she put it. She would prefer us not to hang out too much, and she’d started sending poor Oscar to some therapist every other Wednesday.

  I leaned surreptitiously against the wall and tried to pretend that nothing had happened. Josefine was just bursting to tell more jokes at my expense and was already busy entertaining her friend Ina with stories about birds and wings and Clara’s weird ideas.

  So I tried to pretend, but really I felt both sad and scared. Sad because… because although it had just been a dream, it had felt so real. The sparrow’s heart had broken, the little bird had died. And I couldn’t help but mourn it.

  Scared, because… well, because I’ve never had a dream while standing up before. And what if? What if the dream… wasn’t a dream? What if it were real?

  CHAPTER TWO

  Badgers and Other Beasts

  Spring was on its way – not just in the forest of my dream sparrow, but also in the real world. Forsythia glowed yellow against the shower-spattered walls of the houses, and sunbeams bounced off the puddles on the
gravel paths in Jupiter Park. I was sitting on a damp bench while Oscar dutifully plodded around with Woofer, his black labrador, following Woofer’s usual peeing route. Cat was lounging on the bench next to me, watching the dog with every sign of superior contempt.

  “Cat?” I whispered.

  What?

  His answer came lazy and rather languid. Sometimes his voice inside my head sounds as if he’s spent his whole life lying on a silk cushion, lapping up cream; at other times it’s so rough and gruff you’d think he was the biggest, baddest alley cat ever to claw a rival in a dustbin fight. Today it was the silk cushion voice.

  “I think… I think I need to speak to Aunt Isa.” The sparrow had been on my mind all day. Not all the time, lots of other things had happened, lessons and lunch and breaks and chatting about normal stuff, but in-between. Any time I wasn’t specifically thinking of something else, in fact.

  Cat didn’t ask why. Instead he jumped onto my lap and sniffed my chin, my nose, my eyes and my head. Then he sat down on his wide, muscly rear end and planted his right front paw on my shoulder. Very carefully and without claws, he placed his left paw between my eyebrows, in the exact same spot where six months ago he’d given me the claw marks that had since faded into pale, practically invisible scars.

  “What are you doing?” I asked nervously.

  He made no reply. And nothing happened, not really. Nothing except me remembering what it was like to be the sparrow at the moment of its death. Which was quite enough. My whole body trembled and my hand shot up to my heart, while the other tried to protect my eyes.

  Cat hissed and bristled. He was already big, practically as big as Woofer, but when he raised his fur like that, he grew simply enormous. His golden eyes flashed.

  Come, he said.

  “Now? But…”

  Now.

  “But… Oscar. Mum. At least let me…” But you can’t argue with Cat. He doesn’t understand about being back when you promised your mum you would be, or telling people where you’re going. Or he does understand, but he just doesn’t care.

  He sprang down onto the path in a supple feline leap, and I lost sight of Oscar, the forsythia and the buildings around the park. Everything disappeared in dense fog, which meant we were already on the wildways, though I could still feel the bench underneath me.

  “Cat! No!”

  Come. Now.

  My protests were completely useless. If I’d been a proper wildwitch, I would have been able to decide if I wanted to travel the wildways and I would have been able to do it alone. But for the time being, I couldn’t even find my way to Aunt Isa’s without help, and if Cat said now, then now it was.

  It only took a moment. Although Aunt Isa lived about as far off the beaten track as it was possible to get – it took hours and hours on very poor roads if you went by car – I barely had time to write a rushed text message to Oscar before we’d arrived.

  “C lara! Clara, look! I can flyyyyyyyyyyyy!”

  A ruffled bundle of feathers flapped through the air before crashing into my shoulder.

  “Oops. Sorry,” said a breathless Nothing. “I’m… not so good… at the landing bit yet.”

  The Nothing was about the size of an owl with grey-and-brown feathers and short, stumpy wings, but she had human hands instead of talons, and a lost little girl’s face where you would expect to see a beak and predatory eyes. Chimera had made her – The Nothing called her “Mum” and that was partly true – but in Chimera’s opinion, she was a failure and so utterly useless that she didn’t deserve a name other than The Nothing. She’d spent most of her life in a cage because Chimera had got fed up with The Nothing following her around all the time. She couldn’t groom her own feathers and, because she was allergic to dust mites, she often sneezed and her eyes tended to water. Or they used to.

  “Wow, you look great!” I burst out, which was true, even though The Nothing was at that particular moment sitting on her rump in the wet grass, clumsily batting her wings to get back on an even keel.

  “You think so?” she said. “Really?”

  “Yes.” Her feathers were glossy and immaculately groomed, and the permanent trails of snots and tears that used to stain her chest had gone. “And you can fly!”

  “Yes!” She flapped her wings even harder and raised herself a short distance off the ground. “I still… get very… puffed out, but I’m… getting better.”

  Bumble came galloping across the farmyard, barking and wagging his tail and acting as if my turning up was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Aunt Isa followed, more slowly and not quite as hyper, but she gave me a warm smile.

  “Clara! What a surprise. Does your mum know you’re here?”

  “Eh… no. It was a spur of the moment thing.”

  “Has something happened?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not sure. It… it was a kind of dream. But a really weird one. And Cat thought it couldn’t wait.”

  Aunt Isa narrowed her eyes and looked at Cat.

  “Why not?” she said, and she was asking Cat. But Cat just swished his tail a couple of times and looked silent and very feline.

  Aunt Isa pressed her lips together. “Hm,” she said. “I guess that’s what you get for having a cat as your wildfriend. They go their own ways. Well, come on in. We can call your mum later.”

  There was practically no mobile coverage where Aunt Isa lived – you had to walk to the top of the hill behind the farmhouse and the barn to get a signal. Her house was sort of in a world of its own, in a valley with a meadow and a brook, nestled between wooded hills, dark with spruce, and russet and brown with bracken and leafless beeches.

  On the stone steps, there were bowls of cat food set out for hungry newly awakened hedgehogs, home-made suet and seed balls were hanging from the apple trees, and there were feeders everywhere for every imaginable kind of bird, plus no doubt a few I’d never heard of. A couple of mallards waddled around the farmyard, grubbing in the puddles, taking little notice of Bumble or Cat. Nor did they have any reason to. Bumble was too good-natured and too polite to do them any harm, and Cat regarded attacking a duck as beneath his dignity. From the barn I could hear a sleepy chiiirp from Hoot-Hoot, Aunt Isa’s owl, probably perched on one of the beams trying to get a good day’s sleep.

  I followed Aunt Isa into the hallway, hung my down jacket on the coat rack, and kicked off my boots. Then I noticed another pair, quite familiar-looking.

  “Is Kahla here?” I asked. Kahla was Aunt Isa’s wildwitch apprentice and came for lessons most days of the week.

  “Yes,” my aunt said. “But she’s busy working on an assignment, so don’t talk to her until she talks to you.”

  Kahla, it turned out, was sitting at the big worktable in the living room, wrapped in seven or eight colourful garments, as usual, with a stripy hat covering her jet-black hair even though she was indoors. Her eyes were closed, but in her hand she held a pencil, which moved jerkily across a drawing pad lying open in front of her.

  I hadn’t seen her for a long time. I guess we were friends of sorts, although we hadn’t exactly hit it off last autumn when Aunt Isa started teaching me a couple of basic wildwitch survival skills. Kahla was very advanced. She could do everything I couldn’t, and it was hard not to be jealous when everything I struggled and failed at was clearly a walk in the park to her. Nor had she tried to hide her irritation at having a newbie on the team. However, she’d come to my rescue when I really needed it, and since then things had improved.

  It felt a bit weird to walk past her without even saying hi, but I genuinely don’t think she noticed us. Apart from her hand holding the pencil, she was sitting so still she could have been a garden gnome.

  “What’s she doing?” I whispered to Aunt Isa.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” she replied. “Just don’t say her name because it might distract her. She’s Journeying. She borrows the eyes and the ears of any animal willing to act as her host.”

  “I thought you had
to…” I touched the scars on my forehead where Cat had scratched me and licked my blood so that we’d be able to communicate.

  “… I mean, that you needed blood.”

  “Blood binds. It creates a connection that can’t be severed. This is different. She’s just a guest, a stranger visiting for as long as the animal is willing to invite her in. When she leaves it, there will be no ties left over, possibly not even a memory that she was ever there.”

  I noticed how much care Aunt Isa took not to say Kahla’s name. Bumble, too, left her alone, and The Nothing flapped around her in a wide, wobbly arc before landing clumsily on one of the threadbare armchairs.

  “Pheeewww…” she said. “Flying is hard work!”

  Bumble climbed up on the sofa with familiar ease. He did have a basket, but he rarely used it. Besides, it currently had another occupant, one with a flat, black-and-white head and a broad, grey back.

  “Is that a badger?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Aunt Isa said. “She was hit by a car and broke her hip. It’s almost healed now, but she still can’t look after herself very well, and she’s due to give birth soon.”

  Most badgers looked rather squat to me, but I realized this one was rather broader than usual. She gave me a surly look and curled up, protecting her big belly. To her, I was clearly an unwelcome intruder.

  “They’re nocturnal, of course,” Aunt Isa said a tad apologetically. “They prefer peace and quiet during the day so they can sleep. But why don’t you sit down and tell me why you’re here.”

  I squeezed myself onto the sofa next to Bumble and told her about my sparrow dream. Aunt Isa listened without interrupting.

  “So what was that all about?” I asked.

  Aunt Isa glanced sideways at Kahla, who was still lost to the world.

  “It’s odd, but it sounds almost like you were Journeying too,” she said. “As if you accidentally got the sparrow to host you.”