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  Mum shook her head.

  “No. We’re going home.”

  “Milla…”

  “We’re not going back.”

  “Do you think it’s better for the children to stay here? Milla, this could take hours…”

  Mum looked around. The darkness had grown deeper and more night-like in just the ten minutes that had passed since the tree keeled over. And the temperature was dropping. I tightened my jacket around me, but could still feel that I was starting to get cold.

  “I’ve found the nearest emergency rescue service,” Oscar said proudly, waving my StarPhone. “Jasper & Son, Auto Service and Windscreens, they’re… hang on… twenty-four kilometres away. 24.6, in fact.”

  “Please could I borrow that thing?” Dad asked.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  Dad called, but could only get through to voice-mail. It wasn’t until his fourth attempt that he found a mechanic willing to pick up the phone after seven o’clock on a chilly March evening. I stood there shivering while he explained about the tree and the car and the Volvo’s windscreen.

  “What’s the name of this place?” he asked Mum when he had finished talking to the mechanic. “I mean, which forest are we in?”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “Because the mechanic said that it’s the Forestry Commission’s responsibility to move the tree. He’ll only deal with the car. And besides, he can’t get hold of a new windscreen until tomorrow morning. And he doesn’t have a courtesy car we can borrow to drive all the way back to town. Milla, the only sensible—”

  Mum looked around at us. At me, with my hands stuffed into my sleeves and my shoulders hunched right up to my ears, freezing. At Oscar, who’d started to shift his weight from foot to foot in order to restore some feeling to his toes. At Dad, who was still standing with one hand on the roof of the Volvo, looking tense and tired.

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “OK. Let’s go back to Isa. I’m sure she’ll know who to call to get that tree cleared away.”

  We’d been driving for about fifteen minutes when the accident happened, so it took quite a while to walk back. The darkness was encroaching upon us. Somewhere above us, an owl was hooting.

  “Was that Hoot-Hoot?” Oscar asked.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. His voice is… deeper. Not so shrill. I think that was a tawny owl.” Aunt Isa had taught Kahla to mimic six different owl cries, I remembered. She had taught me, too, but Kahla was better at it. When she did it, she actually sounded like an owl.

  There was rustling in the blackberry tangle by the roadside. A branch snapped loudly under the trees where the darkness was as dense and black as oil.

  “I’d completely forgotten how alive a forest is,” Dad said. “Even at night. Or rather, especially at night.”

  “Yaooooooooowwwwwwwwr.”

  It was as if the forest answered: a long, low, feline sound. I had a flashback to the cat outside the kitchen window and Hoot-Hoot who had made it go away before I’d had a proper look at it. You are too early. This is not the time.

  But was it time… now?

  A supple movement and a silent jump. A flash of moonlight in bright eyes.

  Something appeared on the road in front of us, seven or eight metres away at the most. A tall, slim cat with its mouth half open and its front paw raised, glossy, almost silver in the moonlight, though I suspect it would have been more… lion-coloured by day.

  It stood very still and stared at us. Its ears were standing straight up and they had long, furry tufts that quivered attentively.

  “A lynx!” Dad exclaimed, as if he couldn’t believe his own eyes. “It’s a lynx! Stand very still… It’ll go away in a—”

  Mum didn’t stand still. She charged towards the lynx while waving her hands in the air as if trying to shoo away a horse.

  “GOAWAY!” she shouted. “Goaway – goaway – goaway!!”

  The lynx hissed and the moonlight glinted on its fangs. Then it leapt across the road, into the bushes and the dry grass.

  I stood rooted to the spot with my mouth hanging open for several seconds. Not because of the lynx, exciting though it was. But because of Mum.

  My mum was a wildwitch.

  There could be no other explanation.

  The way she had shouted GOAWAY… it sounded completely like when I did it. The only bit of wildwitchcraft I’d ever been any good at… I’d inherited from my mum.

  “Mum!”

  She spun around. She stopped staring after the lynx and looked at me instead. I’m sure she realized that she’d given herself away. That I knew exactly what she’d done, and how she’d made the lynx disappear. But she acted as though nothing had happened.

  “A lynx,” she said. “Around here? I wonder if it could have escaped from the zoo.”

  “It’s possible,” Dad said. “Why else would it be so ready to approach people? But I don’t think trying to scare it was very wise, Milla. Threatening it like that… what if it had attacked you instead of running away?”

  “But it didn’t,” my mum said. “Come on. Let’s get back to Isa’s so we can warm up. I’ve had enough wilderness excitement for one night, thank you very much.”

  “Mum…”

  “Not now, Clara.”

  She started marching down the road. We followed. Oscar was bouncing with excitement.

  “First we drive into a tree,” he said. “And then we’re attacked by a lynx. Wow, that’s so cool!”

  “We weren’t attacked,” I protested. “It was only…”

  “Oh, don’t spoil it,” he said. “A big, super-cool, scary lynx!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Those Who Walk Blindly Through Life

  Bumble was thrilled to see us again. Aunt Isa was more apprehensive.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “A tree fell across the road,” Dad said.

  “Right in front of us,” Oscar clarified. “Isa, we drove straight into it!”

  “Goodness me. Was anyone hurt?”

  “No,” my mum said. “Isa, please let’s go inside where it’s warm.”

  Because Aunt Isa was still standing in the doorway, almost as if she were blocking it deliberately.

  She looked at my mum. Then she shrugged her shoulders in a strange well-you-asked-for-it way.

  “All right then, in you go,” she said.

  Inside the living room, The Nothing was sitting in her favourite chair with a book. On the coffee table in front of her was a pot of tea and two steaming cups, one with a straw. The Nothing had no arms, only wings, and where a bird would have had talons, she had soft fingerfeet, which could indeed grab things, but made it hard to walk. When she sat on her bottom with her short legs stretched out, she could hold the book in one fingerfoot and turn the pages with the other, but she struggled to reach her own mouth. The straw made it much easier for her to drink.

  When she spotted my dad, she dropped the book.

  “Oh, no. Oh, sorry. Oh dear, oh dear! I’m not here… I’m not here at all…” She took off on clumsy, grey-brown wings and flapped through the living room towards the kitchen, so flustered that she dropped a blob of very birdlike poo on the rug and then sneezed in sheer confusion. “Achoo. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…”

  “You can come back,” Aunt Isa said. “He’s already seen you.”

  My dad looked gobsmacked. Uprooted trees and crashed cars he could handle, and he’d even taken the lynx in his stride, but The Nothing… there was no way he could fit The Nothing into his understanding of the natural order of things.

  And no wonder. She wasn’t a bird, and she wasn’t a human being. She was what’s known as a chimera, a cross between two living creatures, not born in the usual fashion, but created through blood-art and magic. She was an experiment gone wrong, a mistake. A nothing, useless and worthless, at least if you’d asked Chimera, the only “mother” The Nothing had ever known. She couldn’t fly very well, she had no beak nor a mouth filled with sharp
shark’s teeth like her more successful sisters, just a soft and open little girl’s face in the middle of her ruffled plumage.

  But though The Nothing still had no other name than the one her so-called mother had given her, she wasn’t nothing. She kept practising, and she was getting better at doing the things she could do. She loved helping out and got very excited at every little task she accomplished because it made her feel that she was something, that people needed her. And if my dad said anything at all that might hurt her feelings, then I would… then I would…

  He didn’t say anything. He picked up his jaw and managed to close his mouth, but he still couldn’t stop staring.

  The Nothing stopped flapping around and executed a clumsy and inept landing on the coffee table, making the tea service clatter perilously.

  “Sorry,” she said again.

  “You don’t have to say sorry,” I said firmly. “If anyone should apologize then it’s us. We should never have hidden you away. I really, really wanted you to come to my birthday, and luckily there’s still time. Dad, this is The Nothing. She’s my friend.”

  “Am I?” she exclaimed joyfully. “Oh, thank you. And I’m your friend too. Again. Definitely! For ever and ever. Hello, Clara’s dad. I’m very pleased to meet you.” She couldn’t shake his hand, but she performed a surprisingly neat little bow.

  “Er… good evening,” Dad said. “I’m… I’m pleased to meet you too.”

  At that moment I wanted to give him the biggest hug in the world. I was totally aware that he had a zillion questions – where did she come from, who was she, how could she exist at all. But he didn’t ask any of them. In fact, he succeeded in directing his eyes away from what for him was an impossible creature and fixing them on Aunt Isa instead.

  “I’m sorry that we’ve come back unannounced,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like we’ll be able to drive back tonight. I’m hoping you know someone we can call to clear away the tree?”

  “I know who that is!” The Nothing chirped happily. “It’s on a piece of paper… erm, right there.” She pointed the tip of her wing at a chest of drawers. “In the little green book, second in the pile to the right.”

  “The Nothing keeps track of things around here,” Aunt Isa said. “I don’t know what I would do without her.”

  The Nothing straightened up and beamed proudly.

  “And I can read,” she said.

  Dad borrowed my StarPhone again, this time to ring “Andy the Forester”, as Aunt Isa called him. It suddenly occurred to me that so far Oscar and my dad had made much more use of the phone than I had. Don’t get me wrong, I was over the moon to have got it, but I was starting to realize that I would be more excited about showing it off to the girls at my school than actually using it. This surprised me because when I’d been desperate to get one, I’d been convinced that I’d be using it for absolutely everything. But right now it was obviously better that Dad could call “Andy the Forester” without having to go outside and climb the hill behind Aunt Isa’s house to get even a bit of a signal, like we normally had to. Instead he went to the kitchen and closed the door. Perhaps so he wouldn’t stare at The Nothing the whole time, but I think mostly because he didn’t want Mum to interfere.

  Mum was standing by the window, looking out into the darkness. She’d folded her arms across her chest and looked like she was hugging herself.

  “Was that you, Isa?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you make that tree fall over?”

  “Seriously, Milla… do you even believe that yourself?”

  Mum turned around.

  “It’s just that this suits you to a T, doesn’t it? You didn’t want us to leave. You wanted Clara to have a Tridecimal Night.”

  “Yes,” Aunt Isa said very calmly. “I did want that. Whether you like it or not, Clara is a wildwitch, and it’s hard for a wildwitch to know which path to choose if she hasn’t had a Tridecimal. Clara is almost grown up. She should be allowed to decide for herself. It’s her life we’re talking about.”

  Something ominous flashed in Mum’s eyes, and I could see that she was very, very angry.

  “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” she said. “Clara’s life. Which I take care of, and which you seem to be willing to risk.”

  “Mum…” I ventured cautiously. “Aunt Isa takes care of me too. She just does it a bit differently from you…”

  “Whatever you might think,” Aunt Isa said, “I definitely didn’t make a tree fall down several kilometres away simply to get my own way.”

  “You want me to believe it was a coincidence?”

  “Perhaps it was. Perhaps not. Sometimes the wildworld makes sure that what needs to happen, happens. Or at least, is given the chance to happen. The rest is up to us. But one thing I do know: those who walk blindly through life are no safer than those who look where they’re going. Quite the opposite.”

  They stared hard at each other for a very long time. It was as if they’d forgotten that Oscar, me and The Nothing were also in the room. Oscar looked wide-eyed from one to the other, and for once he stayed quiet. Right now I thought that my mum and my aunt resembled each other more than ever. It wasn’t about their clothes or hair – Aunt Isa still looked like a proper wildwitch with her long plaits, her lumberjack shirt and her worn green gardening trousers, while Mum was a thoroughbred city woman with her neat, short bob, classic Breton top and black skirt… chic and smart, even if her tights were now laddered. But there was an expression in her eyes, the way she was standing, a sense of… hidden forces. My mum mightn’t be as much of a wildwitch as her big sister, and she’d kept both herself and me away from wildwitchery for many years. She did not want to be a wildwitch, and still less did she want me to be one. But she couldn’t escape it. She had the power. Only she’d used it to protect me all these years – keeping me away from something that terrified her. No wonder she and I both excelled at screaming Goaway! at wild animals.

  “Mum,” I said. “If you don’t tell me what happened on your Tridecimal Night – how will I ever know if I want one?”

  My heart was beating almost as erratically as when I woke up from my nightmare last night. Aunt Isa was clearly of the opinion that a Tridecimal was massively important, and so was Mr Malkin. Right now, I didn’t know who to believe.

  Mum looked at me for a long time. Then she shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want to put you through that. It’s enough that you know it’s dangerous, so I’m saying no. I won’t let you. We’ll stay here tonight because we have to. But you’re not going anywhere, do you hear me? You won’t be stepping outside. You won’t even go near the window after midnight.”

  And it was clear she thought that was the end of the matter. I wasn’t quite so sure.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tridecimal Night

  For the second night in a row we got ready to go to bed in Aunt Isa’s house, but Mum swapped everything around. She carried my bed linen down from my room upstairs and made my bed on the sofa in the living room. Dad and Oscar slept in my room. Aunt Isa got her bedroom back, and The Nothing no longer had to sleep in the stable, but settled instead on her usual perch next to Aunt Isa’s worktable, her face tucked under her wing. She looked her most birdlike when she was asleep.

  “And where will you be sleeping?” I asked Mum.

  “Nowhere,” she said as she flopped into one of the armchairs in the living room and threw a blanket over her legs. She’d made coffee and taken her keys out of her handbag. She held them up so that I could see them. “I learnt this trick at the newspaper when I was a trainee on night shifts. I’ve no intention of going to sleep even for a second tonight, but if I do doze off, I’ll drop my keys and the sound will wake me up.”

  Aunt Isa looked at both of us, but I think she could see there was no point in any further discussion.

  “Good night, Milla. Good night, Clara.”

  “Good night, Aunt Isa.”

&n
bsp; Mum said nothing. She just pointed at me with the hand that was holding the keys.

  “Lie down.”

  I did as I was told. It felt weird lying there, trying to fall asleep, while she was sitting next to me awake. As if I were ill. Or a baby. It wasn’t even very late, it had only just gone ten o’clock, but I’d slept so little the night before that my eyelids soon began to close.

  It is time.

  Was it a thought, a voice or a dream? I don’t know. All I know is that something inside me quivered and sang, like when you pluck a guitar string.

  I opened my eyes.

  Mum was still sitting up straight in her “guard chair” with her keys in one hand. But I could see right away that she was asleep. The hand with the keys was resting in her lap and her head had lolled to one side. The coffee in front of her had stopped steaming long ago and was probably stone cold.

  Cat was standing by the door to the passage. He seemed even bigger than usual and he fixed his unblinking yellow eyes on me.

  Come.

  I have four pale scars on my forehead, one for each of Cat’s claws, where he scratched me the very first time we met. Where he scratched me – and lapped up my blood with his rough pink tongue. The scars have faded so they’re barely visible; one especially has almost disappeared, and they stopped hurting ages ago. But just at that moment, I couldn’t help touching them.

  “I don’t know if this is what I want,” I whispered.

  He made no reply. He just turned around and disappeared. I’m deliberately not saying that he went “out” because the door was still closed. But Cat has his own way of using the wildways. He can disappear in seconds without leaving anything behind but a small cloud of fog.

  It was his way of saying “suit yourself”. But I suddenly knew without it being said that if I didn’t follow him now, I’d never see him again.

  The thought seared through me. Would he really leave me unless I followed him?