‘I wish – I wish I was able to help you.’
‘Don’t worry. Leo will sort it out somehow.’
She stared back towards the trees, willing Leo to get to the pub in time, willing him to come up with a plan.
‘Um … what were we talking about? Before?’
‘You were going to tell me your plans for the future. What you want your life to be.’
Merry let out a shout of laughter. She couldn’t help it: it was all so – ridiculous.
‘Not this.’ She waved her hands around, indicating the lake, the darkness, the whole insane situation. ‘I don’t want this.’
‘I understand. It would have been better if Meredith and her sisters had killed me.’ Jack drew out the long, angular knife he wore at his waist and stabbed it into the ground next to him. ‘Better still if I had never been born.’
‘Don’t say that, Jack. I don’t mean—’ Merry bit her lip, unsure of what exactly she did mean. ‘It’s not just this – this nightmare that we’re going through now, anyway. Even before that, my life was going nowhere. I barely scraped through my last set of exams. And now …’ She glanced at Jack. ‘You don’t really understand most of what I’m saying, do you?’
Jack took Merry’s hand, turned it over and began tracing patterns on her palm with the tip of one finger. That was new, she reflected, as her blood tingled just under her skin; their fingers had brushed against each other many times, Jack had once swept a stray strand of hair away from her face, but – apart from the night he broke into her room – he had never touched her so openly before.
‘I understand you are frightened. You have no hope for the future. I have little hope or desire to survive what is to come. But you are a good person, Merry. God willing, you will survive, and you will find your path.’
Merry could feel the calluses on Jack’s hands, the legacy of years of manual work. He was such an odd mixture of child and adult. Jack could barely read and write, but Merry knew he had far more practical skills than Leo. And he seemed so … transparent. Most people, Merry thought, really needed to come with a label, the sort they put on toys and cigarettes. Ones like: ‘Warning: borrows money and never pays it back, may seriously damage your bank account.’ Or: ‘Only after one thing: not suitable for under-sixteens, beware of small parts’. But Jack seemed to be completely straightforward; there was no act, no angle.
She made a decision: she would tell him the truth.
‘I’m not. I’m not a good person, Jack. Not really. You know I told you I don’t do much magic, that I haven’t been properly trained?’ Jack nodded. ‘Well, the training bit is true.’ Merry picked up a nearby pebble and threw it into the lake. ‘But for some reason, that doesn’t seem to have mattered. Not long after I passed the test Gran gave me, I found there was some stuff I just seemed to know how to do. I’ve no idea why. But I’ve not – I’ve not used it to help people. I’ve just helped myself.’
‘There is no shame in wishing to make a better life for yourself.’
‘But I don’t mean working hard to get a better job, or something like that. I’m popular at school – well, not so much recently, but I was – and I liked being that way. Sometimes, I used magic to … nudge people’s reaction to me in the right direction.’ Merry lay back on the blanket and looked up at the stars. This would be easier if she couldn’t see Jack’s face. ‘Apart from Leo, I’ve only had two really close friends in my life: Ruby, and a boy called Alex. And I’ve used magic to control both of them.’
‘What did you do?’ Jack’s voice wasn’t shocked, or critical – yet. It would be once she told him.
Merry took a deep breath.
‘I’ve kept Ruby to myself. Any time she seemed to be getting too friendly with another girl, I used magic to stop it. I don’t know if you know much about girls, but sometimes we can get a bit … cliquey. Bitchy.’ She remembered her encounter with Esther Perkins a few weeks back. ‘Some people in town talk about our family, spread nasty rumours about the witchcraft. No one knows anything for sure, the coven are too careful, but … I didn’t want to end up being the one on the outside. I didn’t want Ruby to end up liking someone else better than me. And I always thought she would, if I didn’t use magic to stop her.’
Merry paused, squinting up at the distant glimmer of the Milky Way, and wondered why she felt that way. Not that it mattered. Because she was right: she’d lifted her spells, and Ruby was already drifting away. ‘I haven’t done Ruby any permanent damage, I hope, but I’ve … messed with her head. Alex—’
She swallowed. She didn’t want to say any more, not really, but the words seemed to be burning their way out of her, unstoppable as a lava flow. ‘Alex, he said he was in love with me. I definitely wasn’t in love with him, but I did love him following me around and – and worshipping me. So I kept him dangling, and every time another girl showed interest in him I used magic to drive her away, and every time he began to like another girl I used magic to make her laugh at him. To make her treat him like he was some kind of – pathetic loser.’ Merry dug her nails into her palms as hard as she could. ‘Well, let’s just say that I got a bit carried away. I couldn’t control what I was doing. The spells I cast were too dark, they had too many side effects that I hadn’t anticipated. Alex started to hallucinate. He became … paranoid, I guess. He decided that everyone hated him. Even his family. I did my best to reverse the damage I’d done, to undo the spells, but it was too late. So one night, he jumped off a bridge. He almost drowned. I went in after him, managed to pull him to safety, but it was all my fault he was in there in the first place.’
The words dried up. Merry rubbed her eyes, forcing back the tears. She had no right to cry. Really, if Jack managed to kill her one of these nights, it would be no more than she deserved.
‘What happened to this boy?’
‘His parents took him away from school. I did talk to him, try to explain, but … it didn’t go so well. That was about seven months ago now; I haven’t had any contact with him since. And I tried to stop using magic, I really did. That’s why my last exams went so badly; I’d used magic before, to help me remember stuff. I’ve forgotten how to study without it. Then, recently, I couldn’t make any spells work, and the power just started discharging from my fingertips, destroying things – I even injured Leo a few weeks back, I—’ She stopped, took a couple of long, slow breaths. ‘It’s a bit better, since I started training with Gran. But I’m scared, Jack. Never mind what I have to do: I’m more scared of what I might become.’
There was silence, for a while. Eventually Merry couldn’t bear it any longer. She sat up; Jack, sitting next to her, was frowning down at the ground.
‘Please, say something. Tell me how wicked I am. Tell me I’m going to end up in hell. You won’t be saying anything I haven’t already said to myself.’
‘How can I say such things to you, Merry? How can I judge you, knowing what I am? What I have done?’ He pulled his dagger back out of the grass and ran one finger gently along the edge. His hands were trembling. ‘Do you know how many people I have killed?’
‘But that’s not the same. You can’t help what you’ve done.’
Jack shook his head.
‘Someone … someone clever once told me something about magic. She said there’s more than one kind of magic in this world. There’s wild magic and tamed magic. There’s magic of the elements: of root and stone, of river and wind. There’s the magic of light: of sun or moon or star, of fire or candle. And then there is the dark magic, that of the shadow realm. But apart from that last, magic in itself isn’t good or bad. It is only made so by the person using it.’ He moved closer to her, and there was such warmth and understanding and certainty in his eyes that she had to look away. It was almost as if he knew her – knew what was deep down