Vervain and a Victim by Ruby Loren

Author:Ruby Loren [Loren, Ruby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

11

Secrets and Spies

“Hemlock! You could have been a pin cushion!” I shouted, angry both at him and myself for not knowing he was there.

“I…ran…” he panted. “Let’s…do…this!”

“The trial? You missed it,” I told him.

He stopped panting and looked at me. And then he looked at the golden bow and arrow, that I now didn’t know what to do with. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing much. I fought a monster with a magical pair of swords and a spear. After that, I accidentally opened up a tear in the fabric of reality that nearly let through some demonic thing from another dimension. It’s okay. I patched it back up again.”

Hemlock snorted. “Drama Queen. You don’t have to prove to me how bad your witch trial was. I’m stuck with you no matter how lame you are.”

I rolled my eyes and looked down at the golden bow. Pulling it out of nowhere had been one thing, but without using it… how did I get it to go away? I frowned and experimented with pulling the threads of magic back. Ick. That felt all kinds of awful. I dropped the bow and arrow to the ground and looked at it. Then I took a couple of steps away.

It disappeared.

“Neat illusion,” Hemlock said.

“It wasn’t…” I started to say, but then I just sighed. I could complete a witch trial and nearly destroy the world, but winning an argument with Hemlock was still an impossibility.

“I feel different, by the way. Look, my whiskers are alive with magic!”

I looked down and observed he was correct. They looked like miniature sparklers. “It goes well with the eyelashes.”

“You’re hilarious. So… what really happened? You were fine… right?” For just a second, my annoying cat looked anxious.

“Feeling guilty for not being here?” I smiled at the thought. Hemlock was the most self-centred cat-thing I’d ever met.

“No! It’s not my fault. The shadows left me behind.” He fake sobbed into his paw. “But I felt where you were, and I knew you’d probably die without me, so I ran all of the way. Most of the way.”

“Yeah… you’re really selling the heroics. Especially as you arrived after all the action had finished.” We walked through the first clearing that I’d carved out when the volley of arrows had struck. There were no sign of the arrows, which had been conjured by magic, but the trees were every bit as ruined. It was no wonder January had come to investigate just what the heck was going on in the forest.

“Was there a hurricane here?” Hemlock looked mildly interested.

“Something like that.”

He looked up at me with his green eyes. “I feel like you’re keeping something from me.”

I laughed at him. “I already told you the truth. You just didn’t believe me.” I walked a little faster, and he had to trot to keep up.

“Wait. Wait!”

I stopped walking and looked enquiringly at my hanger-on.

“Carry me?” he said, holding a limp paw up with a pitiful expression on his face.

“I thought you were all magically

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