Witchcraft and nasty little murders

Chapter One Witchcraft

The loud clacking of the keyboard and the metal music coming from the headphones broke the silence of the cozy little apartment. Ophelia was sitting on the sofa in the living room, her feet up on the coffee table, her laptop on her lap. She heard something like a knock on the window. She pulled the headphones off her ears and turned back to see the familiar, wide white smile breaking the darkness of the night. She smiled involuntarily too, placed her laptop on the sofa, pulled her brown, thick dreadlocks from the prison of the headphones, put her reading glasses on the laptop, and reached for the cigarette packet she had left on the coffee table.

Opening the window, a boy of about fourteen smiled at her. Ophelia rolled her eyes and asked him as she took a cigarette out of the box with her tattooed hand:

"Have you sneaked out again?"

"Mum and her boyfriend had another fight," the boy shrugged as Ophelia stepped out onto the roof. The house was set up so that through the window they could just see the barren, broken-edged roof of the house next door. A long fire escape ran along the top of Ophelia's building, the same one Pablo used to walk up and down.

She sat down on one of the lone lawn chairs, next to which a grey ashtray was standing. All around them, tall tower blocks, glass palaces, skyscrapers were lined up, their ears filled with the night sounds of Gaxburn City.

Pablo also sat down on a long bench and watched eagerly as Ophelia put a cigarette in her mouth and lit it without a lighter. She snapped her fingers once, held the cigarette over the tongue of flame that appeared on her thumb and lit the end.

"This is so guay! I'll never get used to it!" the little boy enthused.

"Guay?" Ophelia raised her nicely arched eyebrows.

"Cool then," shrugged the little boy. "We'd be like Batman and Robin. You're the superhero and I'm your sidekick. We'd go around the city together and take down the bad guys."

"Pipe down, kid," she hushed him, a smile still hiding at the corner of her mouth.

"What? Don't tell me it's so unthinkable! With these powers..."

"That not many people know about..."

"And I promise to keep my mouth shut," grinned the messy, brown-haired, brown-eyed child.

"But how neat it would be!"

"You read too many comic books," she shook her head, which made her shapely, medium-sized, bell-like ear tunnels move.

"Of course! Batman is the best! The Dark Knight... you could be..."

"I'm a witch, bro," she sighed, blowing a good deal of smoke from her lungs. The smoke billowed for a moment, then took on the familiar call sign of the Dark Knight in the air, causing Pablo's eyes to widen and a broad smile to cross his face.

"So you're in?" he enthused.

"I never said that," she blew away the smoke, then looked at him, who continued to persuade her.

"Shit! With the power you have, you should do something for the others, for the community... And I could help."

"Look, kid. I'm saying this so you understand; what if I'm a fucked up Batman? What if this Batman is always late? What if he can't help the people he wants to? Whatever power you have, timing is important. If your Batman friend always saw the sh... wrong, if he found he couldn't help the people he cared about, the innocent, he'd give up too."

"Pity!" sighed Pablo, disappointed, and he too looked into the dark eyes of the city. "And one day I might have married you."

"And to what do I owe this honor?" Ophelia let out a coughing laugh. "Who said I wanted to be a wife?"