Chapter 6 The First Test

6

The First Test

THE DOOR WAS locked, of course.

Luckily this was a spell she did have in her arsenal, having used it frequently when she still lived at Bonnie's house. It had been worth committing to magic to avoid knocking in the middle of the night every time she forgot her keys. Belle flicked a finger of Ostium Resigno stars towards the heavy bolt. It opened with a click followed by the flurry of a brown mouse scurrying into the musty darkness that breathed out of the passageway.

Belle let out a loud laugh of sheer disbelief.

She dropped her bag to the ground and tugged at the bundle stuffed inside. Rushing to straighten out her cloak, she batted at the creases before throwing it over her shoulders and fastening the silver clasp at her collarbones. Although not exactly a frequent choice from her wardrobe, Belle had a soft spot for the coven attire. The fabric billowed around her right to the floor, black at first glance but revealing rich tones of plum, amethyst and violet when it caught the warm light of the lamp-post. It wasn't until the cloak was admired more closely that it revealed the best part—delicate, exquisite embroidery of constellations. Stars, moons, planetary alignments and zodiac signs, all in fine lucid threads like spider-silk woven into the fabric. Each witch's cloak was uniquely personal to them, the pattern designed to their own birth chart: the way the night looked the moment they arrived into this world, the plotting of the sky that the universe had crafted to welcome a witch's first breath. Even when Belle had been somewhat mortified by all things magical in the early years, she had known the cloak was something to behold.

Belle pulled out the crumpled hat to match, which was scrunched underneath a water bottle and a notepad. While she had always loved the cloak, the hat could get straight in the bin. No one looked good in that thing. Although the coven had voted to give their classic hat a much-needed refresh a couple of decades ago, shrinking the towering height and banning all unbecoming cliché cobweb detail, it still sat tall in the classic point. The wide brim flopped down as she popped it from inside out, shoved it haphazardly onto her head and blew her fringe out of the way. It looked ridiculous. Belle hastily snatched up the rest of her things, steeled her nerves and rushed inside.

She found herself in a pitch-black corridor, save for a smattering of burning torches pinned to the walls. They lit the way in pools of meagre light and heat, just enough to vaguely make out a long stretch ahead. Enough to see a corridor slope downwards and disappear into an unwelcoming nothing. It smelled hot and dark, like scorched earth at night.

"Well, this seems like a wonderful idea."

Taking a step forward into obscurity, Belle jumped what felt like ten feet into the air as the door slammed behind her. With it went the last trace of daylight. The outline of the outside world faded to nothing, as though it had never been there at all. She was alone.

Squinting to make out anything at all, she attempted to yank one of the flaming torches from the wall before quickly realising that a Lux Vegrandis spell to turn her finger to torchlight was a slightly more refined option. She felt her way along the walls, following the path that uncoiled like a hibernating snake underneath London.

It had only been a few metres of careful treading when the whole corridor shuddered suddenly and violently. It seemed as though the floor would give out beneath her, that the tunnel would collapse entirely, debris and dust crumbling onto her shoulders. Belle cried out and clung to the wall. An earthquake in an underground witch's tunnel felt like an unfortunate way to go but was about what she deserved.

It took a moment for her wits to register that the tremors came from a tube train rumbling past just on the other side of the stone walls. She gathered herself and walked on.

With a growing feeling that this was probably the end of it all, Belle eventually came to an abrupt stop with a hard, painful smack against both knees. The small light from her finger extinguished in an instant, and she found that it couldn't be reignited, forces bigger than her now blocking her meagre magic. She thought her eyes were tricking her, still adjusting in the swallowing darkness, but a firm stone wall gradually formed into view a foot or so ahead, shutting off the way, like the shadows themselves had turned solid. A dead end. She must have missed a turning, a hidden corner or an entry in the walls, and walked straight past the door that took her to the courtroom. She sighed and spun to turn back.

The winding corridor was gone. It had been silently closing up behind her as she walked. The once stretching, endless space now pressed up close, the solid stone only six feet away. Her heart skipped double, rebounding off her ribcage.

She was trapped. A sole torch was giving out watery light that barely lit her own hand in front of her. She swallowed over and over again. A firm stone lodged itself thickly in her throat. Don ' t panic.

She gazed around again, noting every possible inch of the space but finding only an echo of her own unsteady breathing. A spell was required, that much was obvious, but the possibilities were too many to know where to even begin.

"If anyone is listening, if I get out of here, I promise that I will never try and improve myself ever again."

She took a moment to steady her breath, to push away the claustrophobia stroking at the back of her neck with spindly cold fingers. Desperate for stability, she leaned against the wall in front to steel herself. She flinched. The contact of her skin against the stone sent static energy through her, unpleasantly shocking like brushing an electric fence. With a hiss of pain, Belle could only stare with dreadful realisation as the stones began to crumble to a fine dusty powder at her touch. And once they'd started, they didn't stop.

Sand began to gather at her feet, slowly but definitely pooling. It was piling up as the wall disintegrated. Some kind of chain reaction from her touch.

"This cannot be happening. Why? Why are you doing this? Please stop, stop, stop."

She tried to shove the rapidly multiplying sand back into place, scooping it feverishly from the floor into the holes of the wall. But as quickly as the stones crumbled at her feet, they refilled and rebuilt themselves, leaving the dust to pile higher around her toes. A horrifying thought of quicksand crossed her mind. Trapped, inside her own personal hourglass.

"I cannot die in here. Mum will kill me," she spat, trying to clear the flying grains of sand from her lips.

She was struggling to loosen her feet now, but the tip of her boot hit against something solid with a dull thud. The top of a glass bottle bobbed up through the sand. A flicker of frenzied relief and hope flooded her heart as she noticed a small scroll inside. She grabbed at the bottle. Real-life buried treasure. It had to be the right spell. An answer or instructions. Some kind, any kind, of help. She frantically uncorked the bottle with her teeth, shook the contents out into her hand and unfurled the scrap. The sand tightened just below her knees. She couldn't read the words fast enough as they glowed like fine embers against the paper.

No soul shall pass untrue in purpose.

This wall unmoved for those superfluous.

Key nor hammer break illusion.

Transfigurate this path's conclusion.

While time's relentless sand does flow,

Face those fears that you well know.

Pragmatic, shrewd, courageous, bold,

Remain of mind for fate foretold.

She rushed to say the words aloud and fired a desperate finger at the wall, anticipating the flurry of sparks to follow that would end the unfolding nightmare.

Nothing. The feeling of magic that she knew so well stayed dormant. There was no rush. No warmth—other than the rising real panic making beads of sweat form damply at her temples. It wasn't even a spell.

"You have got to be kidding me. A riddle? A fun little brainteaser? Now?"

Belle yelled in between gritty mouthfuls of sand, kicking out to try and loosen her legs under the vast, thick weight. She stared at the piece of paper, willing her brain to work it out. But every thought spluttered and stalled the same moment it began. Spells only worked with full understanding of what was being cast, full comprehension of cause and effect. She had to know what she was casting before any kind of magic could successfully happen. She tried to centre her mind, line by line.

There couldn't be another hidden door involved if a key wouldn't work. Nor could she smash anything down—frustrating, because destroying the place sounded particularly appealing. Break illusion… So it wasn't real? Good to know. The wall was a glamour, a false reality, however realistic it might look or feel in the moment. But that didn't help much, either, while her very real claustrophobia insisted on believing otherwise.

Transfigurate this path ' s conclusion . Transfiguring was somewhat in her arsenal, the basics at least. Usually turning a soggy forgotten bag of salad into a fresh one or a pair of old jeans into a one-size-bigger pair of jeans, but still. The same principle surely applied when it came to transfiguring stone walls into something else. Anything else.

That cold tapping finger of panic was back again and now felt all the more real.

In the pitch black, a parched whisper reached her ears. "I knew you'd amount to nothing."

It didn't just speak. It reached inside her skull, breathing at the bone.

"Everything I sacrificed for you."

She recognised it. "Mum?"

It was Bonnie's voice, but stretched out to a different, painful octave. It sounded low and tortured, choked with tears and thick, opaque revulsion. Speaking everything that Belle could ever fear, had ever feared.

Face those fears that you well know.

"I loved you so much when you were small. You were so special, so clever and so beautiful."

Belle's hands flew to cover her mouth, disguising an appalled disbelieving sob.

"You were gifted. And now look at you. Never daring to try. Nothing special, tumbling behind everybody else. A burden to everyone. In my nightmares, I couldn't have imagined facing such a disappointment. So much promise and potential, wasted over and over. I'm ashamed of you."

"It's not real. This is not real," Belle murmured on repeat, hands against her ears, headache thrumming.

"You are no daughter of mine."

Remain of mind.

It didn't even matter anymore, the sand. She couldn't focus on the rising pressure of it clinging to her skin and cementing around her. The voice stole her from the physical. Bonnie sneered a vicious, howling laugh that morphed into a piercing, ear-shattering scream.

And then it changed.

"How could you lie to me?"

Belle's eyes snapped open wildly.

"Ari?"

"And for all this time. Do you hate me that much? Do you not trust me?"

"Ariadne…What is happening?" Belle yelled.

"How could you do this to me? Keeping such a giant, ugly secret from me. We're supposed to be friends. Best friends. It's us."

She knew it wasn't Ariadne. It couldn't be. It had to be a trick, a spell. She knew that voice laced with so much poison and hatred did not, could not, ever belong to her best person. The girl she'd grown alongside, from seed to tree, two intertwining branches blooming in parallel through decades of shared seasons.

This Ariadne was not hers. It spoke with a knife edge, a monster that echoed deepest, darkest thoughts Belle never dared to dwell on, if only to protect herself.

But on it went, the furious hatred.

"You never think of anybody but yourself. You never cared about me, not really. You think you're special with this…whatever it is. This magic. But you can't even control it. You don't share it, you shut it away, so what's even the point? You don't know what you're doing, about anything, ever. You're such a mess ."

Tears flowed uncontrollably, wetting and warming Belle's burning cheeks.

"You're strange, you're selfish. A burden. And you chose all of this over me."

"I never would, never, ever, Ari. I would always choose you."

Remain of mind. Remain of mind. It ' s not real.

"You're unlovable."

"I know this isn't real. You're not real!"

Then came magic.

Pure, unhindered magic. Flooding from her fingertips so that the space filled with light, so suddenly bright it was blinding against her eyelids. It cascaded around her, billowing satin, the warm arm of a friend swooping in to hold her up.

Candescence rushed through her veins, the warmth like a bathtub filling, rising, flooding then overflowing. Golden sparks flew in ribbons of sunshine. And slowly but definitely surely, the solid stone in front of her began to liquidate. It melted. For a moment Belle thought that her tears were playing tricks on her vision. But the sandstone rippled in shades of dove and fawn and ivory around her, turning to watery reflects. The solid wall became a rolling waterfall in front of her.

A thunderclap boomed against the waterfall, shuddering every part of her body as a lightning bolt struck in brilliance. It sent a mighty soaking tidal wave through the tiny space on a gust of bullish wind. The force of water knocked her to the floor and washed the tower of sand away. With it went the waterfall. In its place, a grand floor-to-ceiling velvet curtain the colour of dark silver adorned with bronze rope tassels hung in front of Belle.

She slumped against the solid wall still behind her and gulped down the clean, fresh air in greedy mouthfuls. Shoving her wet hair out of her face, she untangled herself from the swell of velvet and reached out on hands and knees to move the heavy curtain aside. Whatever waited on the other side was welcome, because it couldn't be worse than the hell that she'd just fought her way through.

She furiously wiped away the tears clinging to her eyelashes. She had saved herself, remained of mind. Just about. She had found the way.

For fate foretold. This was Hecate House.