[edited: 17/10/2017]

Hilda sighed and pressed her hands to her temples, feeling the beginning of a migraine burying itself into her head. She had been at the Central Hall all day answering questions, helping people, witnessing the damage that her own son had caused. She had certainly had better days, and it was only bound to get worse now that her head was aching painfully.

She glanced at her timepiece tiredly and saw that it was much later than she had anticipated—it was almost morning, in fact, and outside the streets were bathed in complete darkness with only a few lamps providing their lucid silver light. Rubbing her eyes, she packed up her paperwork and shrugged her handbag onto her shoulder. As much as she hated to leave so much work unfinished, she couldn't sit at her desk a moment longer.

It didn't take her very long to leave her office and she was almost at the nearest staircase when something stopped her in her tracks: the acrid smell of dark magic, stinging her nostrils and causing her eyes to water. She knew immediately that it was close, for it still tasted tangy on her tongue and seemed to consume Hilda's other senses, too, so that she could almost see the black fog that often accompanied it.

Ackmard, was her first thought. He is here.

Her hands produced a green orb instinctively, a tracking spell that would lead her straight to the source of the stench. The sickly glow floated down the corridors of the Central Hall, past the other Council member's offices and then around another corner. It was eerily quiet; she suspected that only a few of her colleagues would still be working now, if any at all. The strange atmosphere made her feel nauseous, but that might have been the smell, too.

Eventually, the green orb vanished at the end of another hallway, and Hilda crept as noiselessly as one could in high heels until she reached the corner. She had expected to see her son when she peeked her head out slowly—so much so that she had not even contemplated the idea that it might be someone else—but the black magic certainly was not his. It belonged to a female, in fact, with glossy brown curls and a petite figure that did not look capable of producing such blackness, not until Hilda saw the poisonous sparks fly out of her slender hands herself.

She recognised her instantly, though her mind could not piece together how it was possible at first. Annika, with her back towards Hilda in a small hall that was often used for ceremonies and celebrations, was the figure, with blackened hands and her usual silk dress on.

Hilda didn't believe it was her, not really, until the witch turned around ever so slightly so that her golden eyes and sharp facial features were visible. It took every instinct in her body not to gasp. Perhaps if the smell was not so unbearable that she was afraid to breathe it in, she might have. Perhaps if she was not frozen with shock, her hands clutching the wall with so much tension that her arms ached. Perhaps if she thought it might have helped her make sense of it.

But it wouldn't, of course. How could she make sense of this? Annika, who was the perfect daughter of the Principle Warlock and the perfect match for her own son, was using dark magic. Annika, the purest and most innocent of witches in Astracia, who had cried when she had accidentally stepped on a water nymph. It could not be true, but her eyes told her that it was.

The witch paused suddenly and whipped around so that Hilda had to hide herself. She squeezed her eyes shut as though it would help.

"Is anybody there?" Annika called out.

Hilda bit desperately down on her lip, relaxing ever so slightly when she heard Annika's footsteps crossing to the other side of the hall where another exit lay. As the sound of a door slamming told her that she had gone, she breathed a sigh of relief and took a few moments to process what she had just seen.

Then, cautiously, Hilda drew away from the wall and made her way out of the Central Hall, trying to convince herself that she was overtired and therefore her mind must have been playing tricks on her, knowing in her heart that it was not the truth. It seemed that even the kindest of witches were not safe from the influences of evil.

Hilda needn't have seen Annika using dark magic to know that, though. She had experienced it first-hand plenty of times.

*  *  *

It had been almost two weeks since anyone had last seen Sarah Allen in Calderdale. It had been almost three months since they had last seen Remy Morgan. To Adam, it felt like a lifetime, especially now that he had lost the only two of his friends who he could actually talk to about any of this. 

He had tried to look for Sarah, of course, after he had realised she was gone. He had helped her parents in their search. He had called her at least seventy times, knowing, of course, that she would not pick up. He had a strong suspicion that wherever Remy had gone, she would not be far behind. He also didn't doubt that the man that Sarah had told him about would be involved, and that worried him.

It was hard for him, knowing that his friends might have been in danger and there was nothing he could do about it but stick 'missing' posters to walls in an attempt to comfort their families. That was what he was about to do now; he was stood in Remy's small apartment with a mug in his hand—her mother had insisted on him staying for a cup of tea—while her youngest sibling, Vincent, ran tirelessly around his legs.

"It's so strange," Bianca, Remy's mother was saying with a distant look in her grey eyes—ones that were so much like Remy's, only they didn't seem to have the same lively twinkle in them anymore. "Sarah wouldn't just run away. It must be connected to my daughter somehow."

"Do the police still have no idea where to look for her?" Adam asked in an attempt to change the subject. He knew he couldn't tell her about the man who Sarah was afraid of, or what she had seen the day that Remy had disappeared. Even if Bianca believed him, it wouldn't help the situation much.

Bianca sighed and sipped her tea, though it must have been scalding. She didn't look as though she cared much, with bags under her eyes and her hair tied up messily. Adam couldn't imagine how she must have felt having lost a daughter with absolutely no clue as to where she had gone. He wondered if Remy knew just how much pain she had caused by getting herself into whatever trouble it was that she was in.

"No," she replied finally, her voice lifeless. "They can't find any evidence. Not an eye witness, not a CCTV recording, nothing. She's not even used her bankcard. The last person to see her was Sarah, and now she's gone, too. I think they've given up on her."

"She'll come back." He believed it. Remy was not someone who the world could get rid of so easily. He had always known that about her, even when he was angry at her, even when she was just the new sales assistant at the DVD shop and not his friend. "I know she will. Sarah, too."

Bianca gave him a sad smile, one that said she wasn't sure she believed it anymore. "It's been two and a half months. She could be anywhere now. I like to think that she's travelling the world. She always wanted to do that, didn't she?"

Adam nodded and sipped his cup of tea to avoid eye contact. He was tired of lying to her, and the last thing he wanted to hear was that she was giving up, for it meant that perhaps he would have to give up on Sarah, too. "Wherever she is, I'm sure she's alright. She's tough."

"I worry she's too tough. She sits...sat," she corrected, "on that beach every day, staring out at the sea. I used to ask her what she thought about, but she would never tell me. What if something is happening now, and she can't tell me? I was so busy with work those last few months that I barely acknowledged her. Anything could have happened, and I wouldn't have known."

Adam remembered Remy asking him if he believed in magic. That was what she had been thinking about before she went missing: magic. He had laughed it off at the time, but now he had the same regrets as her mother. If he had listened to her, perhaps he would have understood where she was now.

"It's not your fault," he said, out of both obligation and honesty. "If she wanted you to know something, she would have told you herself."

It occurred to him that they were speaking about Remy in the past tense, and he felt suddenly nauseous. It felt wrong, as though Remy was a part of a life that no longer existed and he was leaving her behind somehow. He couldn't do that to her, not when Sarah had just disappeared, too.

He was broken out of his thoughts by a sob. Vincent had stopped running and was now looking at his mother with tear-filled eyes. "Mummy, you told me that you would find Rem. Isn't she coming back?"

Bianca placed her mug down quickly and gathered the eight-year-old into her arms. Adam shuffled awkwardly, not knowing how to help; he had never been very good with kids, even when he had helped Remy to babysit her siblings once or twice.

"Of course she's coming back, darling," she said softly, and as she turned back to Adam with her face half hidden behind Vincent's shoulder, he saw that she was on the verge of tears herself. "She wouldn't leave us."

"I miss her," he sniffled, and with a sinking feeling, Adam realised that he did, too. Remy had been irritatingly sarcastic and teased him more often than not, but she had made many of his work shifts much more entertaining. He remembered how he had had a crush on her, how his heart had beat a little bit faster when she came in and hung her coat up in the staffroom, how he couldn't stop smiling for a whole week before he realised that he didn't have a chance with her.

Then he remembered Sarah; how the two had gotten so much closer because of Remy, how he had held her hand and felt her warmth every time he was with her. How it hadn't been a crush, like with Remy, because it was so much realer than that. All of that had been torn away from him, and thinking about it gave him a strange emptiness in his stomach. He knew then that he had to find them.

Shuffling awkwardly, he placed his own mug down and grabbed the posters from the countertop. "I, er, should go and see if I can get these in the shop windows. I'll see you later."

"Thank you, Adam," Bianca nodded and set Vincent down, despite the fact that he was still whimpering slightly. "You know, you're a nice boy. She was lucky to have you as a friend."

"Is," he amended with a newfound determination in his voice that surprised even himself. "Present tense. She's still out there, Miss Morgan. Sarah, too. They're still present tense."

Bianca looked at him with a dazed expression and nodded. Then, she smiled, and he knew that perhaps for the first time in a while, she had hope too.