The Magpie Effect - The Magpie Chronicles Book 1 (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 19

By the time I got there, Sweet Things was a smouldering ruin. Smoke belched through what was left of the windows, and the roof was gone completely: it was an open pyre to the sky through which gallon after gallon of water was being pumped by a band of frantic, luminous-yellow men. There was no mist here; the flames had seared it all away and burnt a hole straight through to the sky. It glared down at us, mockingly bright and blue.

My mother was standing on the other side of the street, in an area that was cordoned off by yellow tape. My dad stood beside her, his arms around her shoulders. Behind them, a small crowd of spectators had gathered.

"Mum!" I clutched her arm, keeling over to pant as I reached her. "What's happened?"

Vivian ignored me. There were tear trails staining her cheeks. My dad shook his head at me. Isn't it obvious?

"W-well, who did this? How did this happen?" Even though the blaze was under control, I could still feel its heat bombarding my skin. I watched as everything my mother had worked for since I'd been born turned to ash before my eyes, and there was nothing I could do about it. An unassailable sense of guilt snaked around my throat.

"We don't know, Saffy," said Martin. He sounded tired, as though he barely had the energy to speak at all anymore. "It's too early to tell. Your mum got a phone call from the fire brigade when it was already too late."

"Oh my god," I breathed.

The sign that hung outside the door hung limply, untouched except for the blackened licks of smoke. I could remember sitting on the counter when I was four years old, watching as Vivian made roses out of icing or as she carefully boxed up a cake ready for delivery. I had to sit with it on my lap in the passenger seat, carefully tilting it in order to combat Vivian's driving. If I closed my eyes, I even imagined that I could smell the vanilla, the cake mix puffing up like a sweet, crumbling flower out of the building's wreckage.

Now it was all gone.

Vivian began to sob. Small at first, but then giant, heaving things that lurched up from the base of her spine.

"Oh, mum-" I began, but Vivian cut me off with her hand.

"Don't," I thought I heard her say, and my heart throbbed as I watched her turn away. My dad offered me what I supposed was a feeble attempt at an apologetic smile, and then went to follow her.

I was left alone with the smoking ruins of my mother's life, and with the people who watched it burn as apathetically as though they were watching television. Who was responsible for this? There was only one person - or one family, I amended myself - who I could think would want to bestow such anguish on us, and she was nowhere to be-

There. Amongst the pillars of smoke that mushroomed out of the windows, sending puffs of glass out onto the pavement like crystallised phlegm, was a shadow. A shadow that moved with the same fluidity as the smoke itself, the same lightness of something that was composed entirely of air and nothingness.

My heart forgot to beat. Perhaps it was a firefighter? Impossible - all of the firefighters were standing back, hosing water onto the wreck from afar. I wanted to scream out that there was somebody inside, that the instigator was still in the building and we had to stop them, but then the realization hit like a bus.

There was nobody inside. Nobody of flesh and blood, at least. The shadow jolted back and forth like a wraith, barely visible through all the smoke, but finally, it stopped. It stepped forward, and, like an unidentifiable form stepping through a waterfall, made itself known to me.

A woman with forest-dark hair, with clothes that hung from her body in tatters. A woman of the mountains, her features stony and her eyes cutting. A woman that I'd seen before many times, a woman who's flesh I had sunk my own teeth into, whom I committed to death almost each and every night when I closed my eyes.