Flickering Creatures | ONC 2024 Longlist | ✔︎

(2) At Dawn Doth Waver

Bella's alarm the second time that night was a twig's snap outside. She sprang awake, once more frozen on her perch as she listened for further disturbances. Lavender-grey predawn had replaced night's velvet darkness outside Bryony's living room. Titus slumbered on in the ivy pot. Bella eyed his extended paws, but their peckability fell down her list of priorities as the thump of softened footsteps told her the twig had not been a product of her imagination.

Someone was outside. It couldn't be Bryony; if she'd forgotten something, she'd have come straight to the front door rather than circling around back of the little cottage. The only things of note back there were rain barrels and gardens. Bella cursed the back wall for its absence of windows. She swooped to the nearest one and tried to get a view of the interloper. No use. In another wing-stroke, she was ducking through the crow-flap Bryony had installed over the front door when she first moved in a decade ago. She landed on the roof and crept over it to peer down on the other side.

Daphne.

The town's second witch was moving buckets of mulch quietly to one side, as if to expose a part of the house wall behind them. Unless she was gathering them for burglary. Scarcely seventeen, she stood head and shoulders above most townsfolk in Hyacinth, an impression not helped by a gangly frame whose owner had not yet mastered the use of her growing limbs. Daphne was all elbows and awkwardness. Not the first person Bella would have expected to find engaged in predawn clandestine activity at the house of her rival, but Daphne's parents made any involvement on her part instantly suspicious.

Motion beside the house caught Bella's eye just as she crouched to intercept the skulking teenager. Titus had woken up—now, of all times—and was picking his way along Bryony's stepping-stones through the cultivated meadow that wrapped around the house. With another silent curse, Bella changed course and swooped down behind the cat instead. Titus leaped skyward with a hiss that would cost him a month's dignity in any other circumstances. Bucket handles clattered behind the house. They were followed by a yelp and the sound of Daphne hitting the ground hard. Something crunched. Titus shot up the path towards it.

"You idiot!" hissed Bella, flooring him. He twisted like a greased eel and chomped her tail. Bella cuffed him over the head, took his claws to the face, and pecked him in retaliation. Hissing and chattering, they rolled together up the path and burst from the grass behind the house.

Daphne was gone. The only trace of her visit were Bryony's mulch buckets—one spilled over, as though Daphne had tripped on it—and the twinkle of broken glass in the soft groundcover around the rain barrels.

"Now look what you've done," spat Bella. "I was trying to watch her."

Titus sniffed and sat up to groom his ruffled shoulder. "Big words from the one who chose to ambush me when I was moving more silently than her purported espionage."

"I was being perfectly silent."

"Your claws on that roof are not as subtle as you appear to believe."

"Well, she's gone now. What are you going to do about it?"

Titus didn't deign to reply. Giving his silken black fur a final lick, he sauntered around Bella and approached the fallen bucket.

"What are you doing?" said Bella suspiciously.

"Investigating." Titus sent her a look of such disdain, it could curdle one of Bryony's Witch-light potions. "At least one of us actually cares why the kid was here."

While Bella spluttered for an adequate reply to that, the insufferable cat went back to sniffing the grass, stepping delicately around the shattered glassware.