"Taxi is already here, dear," Aunt Mindy said, motioning towards the cab that was just pulling up in the drive.
"Oh, thanks."
"Don't mention it." Aunt Mindy closed the door behind her and looked around the disheveled lounge room of the Abbots' mansion. "Kat," she shouted. "Get your skinny butt down here. Now!"
Alexandria drove as fast as she dared, the tall trees that hemmed the road bowing respectfully in her wake as she passed. Turning around a bend in the road, she slowed the car as she passed a girl walking along the side of the road in the shadows cast by the trees. She wore a long, old-fashioned black dress with black leather gloves, and held a black parasol over her head while swinging an old suitcase in her other hand. The girl looked up at Alexandria as she drove past. Their eyes met, and held for a long moment.
Alexandria watched the girl in her rear vision mirror shrinking as the distance between them grew. Any other day, when tears hadn’t streaked her face, Alexandria would have stopped and offered the girl a ride. "I'm sorry," she said apologetically as she turned the next bend and the girl in black disappeared from her sight.
Moments later, Alexandria slammed her foot on the brake. Pulling a tissue from her bag, she dried her tears, blew her nose, then turned the car around. She drove back to the spot where she had last seen the girl, but she was nowhere in sight. She turned the car around again, driving more slowly this time as she headed for home.
Clamenza sat bold upright, waking from a peaceful, revenge-filled sleep, sending an army of flesh-feasting cockroaches spilling onto the ground around her bed. She rubbed her face in her crinkled hands and cursed. "Damn them to the depths of hell," she spat, dragging her old body out of bed. She walked across the small, cave-like room and came to a standstill in front of a painting of her younger self, a young, beautiful woman with long, straight hair the colour of obsidian. A string of marble-sized rubies, a gift from a long dead prince, adorned her forehead.
"Another witch has arrived," she croaked, pulling a shawl tightly around her shoulders. A large, shiny black cockroach scurried onto her foot and she kicked it away. "Not now," she spat.
"That makes three," the painting hissed. "This is becoming a problem."
"Yes," Clamenza agreed. "Two more and the Saken Circle will be complete, and the girl will be more powerful than all her ancestors before her."
"Then I suggest you stop buggering around, or you will be trapped in that decrepit, God-awful body forever."
"And you, the painting," she mumbled, turning away and squashing a slow-moving cockroach under her foot.
Chapter 3 – The Girl In Black.
Alexandria pulled up outside Witchwood, squinting through the windshield at the roof of the house in utter disbelief. She rubbed her eyes, then looked again. Still there, so she was not having a full-blown hallucination; surely that had to be a good thing. There really was a girl sitting up on top of the roof, waving at her in a morose kind of way, and she looked exactly like the girl she'd seen walking along the side of the road.
Alexandria climbed out of the car and shielded her eyes with her hand, Bran momentarily forgotten. "What are you doing up there? Please come down," she shouted in a panicked voice.
The girl stood, her long black dress billowing around her legs. On her lapel was pinned a blood-red rose. She walked confidently down the slope of the roof with ease, not bothering to watch where she was putting her feet.
Alexandria began to relax. "Good. You are doing great."
Suddenly the girl lost her balance and she gasped. Her left foot slipped on a loose tile and she began sliding down the roof at an alarming pace. Alexandria clutched her throat, her heart bounding. "Nooooo," she shrieked.
Then just as suddenly, the girl came to an abrupt halt on the rusty guttering of the house.
Alexandria caught her breath.
Then to Alexandria's complete horror, the girl in black bent her knees, as though she were preparing to jump.
"Nooooo," Alexandria shrieked again, louder this time.
Andrew came storming through the front door, disappearing as soon as the sunlight hit him.
The girl in black smiled, then promptly jumped off the roof...
Alexandria's heart stopped beating, her hands flying up instantly, creating a mountain of white, fluffy pillows to break the girl's fall.
The girl in black dropped like a stone, landing in the centre of the pillows. On impact, an eruption of white feathers exploded into the air, then floated down to the earth like soft snowflakes, obscuring the girl.
"No, no, no, no," Alexandria repeated over and over. She ran through the plume of feathers. Kneeling down, she searched blindly with her hands, feeling for the girl but finding nothing.