Heart and Soul

A footstep.

Light but not dainty.

Accurately placed.

The aging, discoloured, floorboards didn’t groan or squeak under the occupant’s weight, in fact so far he’d been as silent as the grave and nothing more than a flickering shadow on the security feeds, but she’d known the second he’d entered the house.

She’d waited with baited breath, her nose, cold from the night air, buried deep into her blanket as she stilled herself, her breathing slowing as she listened intently for the impending intruder. She was thankful now, for the first time ever, that she’d actually heeded her Father’s words about using spell barriers. Better than any security system, the instant an uninvited had entered her spell shield, a spark of flickering light had pulled her from her sleep.

She didn’t hear the door open, nor did she hear him find his way across her room, despite the number of obstacles in his way. A toppled stack of DVD’s to the left, a few of her spell books to the right and her cat, Obilix, who still slept quietly on top of her discarded laptop in the middle of her floor.

‘Some guard cat’ she internally muttered as a prickling sensation up the back of her spine, to the base of her exposed neck, informed her that the intruder was in her room, watching her. She wasn’t sure why he was here, but judging by his entrance she’d already assumed it was for no good reason.

Her spell warning light had flickered pink, not a colour she’d known it to take on before, when she’d practiced setting up the spell as a child. Having used it every day of her life for the past 10 years, since she properly began to master her powers, she’d seen it glow green from the passing humans, yellow for a fellow wiccan or witch and purple for a mysterious man that her Father still wouldn’t confirm had even entered the building. She’d never seen it glow pink before though, even as she lay still as a statue, racking her brain and re-imagining the boring lessons she’d had to endure at the hands of her Wiccan tutor Mr Leith, she could not ever recall a pink aura.

A dark thought darted through her mind, could he be from the Underlands? A place where no good wiccan, witch or human ever went, the Underlands were rumoured in age old fairy tales to contain an abominable mixture of dead, dying or Undead foe. Considered the hell to our earth, the Underlands were out of bounds for Annika and always had been ever since she could remember.

Reminded of her pressing situation the entire room seemed to freeze as Obilix, finally aware that there was an uninvited in the room, blinked his huge, glowing eyes. Standing and stretching, he began to turn on the spot, pausing briefly to stare at a shadow to the left of her bed. That’s where he was then, this mysterious intruder. As quickly as he’d woken, Obilix settled back down and drifted back into sleep. As his eyes shut, the room let out a sigh of relief, the increased tension dropping only marginally.

The moonlight that Annika had fallen asleep watching as it basked her room in an ethereal glow, flickered into darkness just long enough for Annika to know that this was it, he was about to attack.

Summoning the power she’d inherited from both of her parents, Annika began to channel her energy into her right hand, just like Mr Leith had taught her. For a moment she wondered if he’d ever expected her to be in this kind of situation, but being that her Father was one of the most powerful Wiccan masters in the world, it was likely that this was going to come up eventually.

Unleashing a stream of fiery power, much like she had done at her school prom, when she’d accidentally burnt the gymnasium down, she tried to scorch the mysterious uninvited, but as the smoke rose and her curtains turned to cinders she knew she’d missed and that her opponent was better trained than she’d given him credit for.

A cool yet clammy hand clasped the back of her neck, another twisted in her long auburn hair, for a moment she saw nothing but ceiling as her head was yanked backwards and then she met the most chilling sight yet. His eyes dead like a shark's, his mouth twisted into a smirk of horror, Annika knew she was in trouble now.