Witch - By Fiona Horne Page 0,26

to all this trouble for me. I’m sure this spell is perfect, and I totally trust you.’ I fixed an innocent smile on my face. ‘Which is why I’m asking you to get the soil from his footprint. I’ll get the hair.’

‘Vania, he’s a senior. I can’t follow him around – he’ll beat me up!’

‘I don’t think he’d go that far. And he spat on me, remember? Please help me?’

‘All right, all right,’ Dean said.

A rush of goosebumps came over me.

‘Awesome! You rock, Dean. Let’s not tell the others. Brenda told me it’s fine to do stuff like this but that talking about spells is like planting a seed and then digging it up to see how it’s growing. We have to keep this on the down-low for now,’ I said. I felt a brief pang of guilt for lying to a friend but ruthlessly squashed it. This would teach Matt to be a nicer person, so it was for the greater good, wasn’t it?

The following afternoon I was waiting for Dean at the cliffs above the beach after school. There was going to be a full moon later, and The Sixth Sense and Us said this was when spell casting worked best.

Dean hurried towards me, a plastic bag clutched to his chest.

‘What’s up, Dean?’ I called out. I could see him sweating profusely from twenty feet away.

‘I just had to run for my life,’ he spluttered. ‘I hope sand’s okay – I couldn’t get dirt. I followed him to the beach; they’re surfing. I had to run through a group of his friends to make sure I got the right footprint. They called me gay and chased me back to the car park. One of them tripped me over, but I got away.’ He held out a grazed elbow.

I suddenly felt terrible. What was I doing? I didn’t even really know how to do this spell, and I’d put my friend at risk of being made into mincemeat by a bunch of morons. But this ball was rolling now, and there was no way to push it back up the hill.

‘Ouch, sorry,’ I said. ‘At least you got away, though. And if it makes you feel better, I had a horror experience getting Matt’s hair, too.’

‘What did you do?’ Dean sat down next to me on the rocks, wiping his forehead with an arm of the jumper he’d tied around his waist.

‘I grabbed his hair gel from his gym bag. He was on the field playing football and I snuck into the locker room. His coach caught me and nearly ripped my arm out of its socket. He said I was trying to steal stuff. I told him I was looking for my brother and he eventually let me go.’

‘You don’t have a brother.’

‘I know! I only got three hairs out of the gel, but it’s better than nothing.’ I dug my hand into my pocket and took out the tissue in which I’d wrapped the precious hairs.

‘What do we do now?’ Dean looked over his shoulder nervously, no doubt expecting a pack of surfing hyenas to come running up the path at any second.

‘Well, I checked the moon chart and it’s supposed to rise at exactly 5.55 p.m. So I guess when it does I’ll cut my hand and put everything we’ve collected in the bag.’

I pulled out a steak knife and a drawstring silk pouch that had once contained a bottle of Britney Spears Curious perfume – a birthday gift from my mother that I’d quickly disposed of. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her it wasn’t my style; that I’d have preferred a perfume called Smart, but no one made one. I had a feeling that what I was doing now wasn’t that smart anyway.

‘Are you going to disinfect the knife?’ Dean asked. He looked queasy.

That hadn’t occurred to me. ‘Let’s get a fire going,’ I said, walking towards a pile of dried-out branches under the scrubby bushes hugging the crest of the cliff. I knew I could disinfect the metal in that.

Half an hour later Dean and I had a cosy circle of flames crackling away. It was mellow and peaceful and we sat in silence, gazing at the grey waves that curled and foamed, breaking gently on the sand below. Eventually the sun set in glorious swirls of pink and orange before sizzling away to a glowing red band stretched taut across the horizon.

When the moon began to rise from behind a craggy