As Saffie was thrown out onto the street by two security guards, she couldn’t shake the grin from her face, and indeed hadn’t been able to the entire time she had been escorted roughly away from the screaming guest’s bedroom and back down the stairs of the posh hotel. She was sure the guards had to have been wondering why this deranged girl looked so pleased with herself, but she didn’t care. She had completed her first Overworld errand, and had finally made some real progress towards gaining access to the counterspell.

Without a glance behind her, Saffie headed straight for the nearest Tube station that would take her back in the direction of the Mage’s Guild, and continued to get funny looks and reactions from people around her during the journey, including a disapproving series of tuts from an old man who took her vacant but very damp seat on the bus when she was getting off at Abney Park.

“Back so soon?” said Keith, as Saffie strode into the guild’s main hall.

“I completed the errand,” Saffie replied, still panting with exhaustion.

“Very well done, Saffie!” Keith rejoiced. “Although I had every confidence in you and expected nothing less. Did you find the yip-yaps to be easy to deal with?”

“A breeze,” Saffie said dryly, pulling a stray pigeon feather from her dank hair and rubbing a large graze on her left elbow.

“Well, when you’ve recovered and feel ready to undertake another errand, simply take another look at the errand board and place your finger to the one you’d like to accept. I’d recommend giving it a day or two.”

Saffie had no intention of waiting that long. Dax’s life was on the line.

“I want to go on another errand right now,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, and the Grand Mage raised his eyebrows.

After a quick visit to the potions store to replenish her mana with a Moonlight Milky (which tasted like lavender and had the added bonus of a slight boost to her magical attacks for a 24 hour duration) Saffie spent the rest of the day battling three eyed rats on the bank of the Thames in Millwall and enchanting airborne eels at Billingsgate Market. After that, she spent the remainder of her week shrinking a putrid slime that had taken over half of Hackney, melting mystical icefiends that had an unnatural resistance to heat, and undertaking a range of other smaller errands that had her chasing various hostile creatures across London.

Between the errands, Saffie spent a lot of her time at the hospital whispering her adventures to Dax. One time a nurse walked in as she was recalling how a giant wyrm had burst through the cobblestones of an alleyway and she’d slain it with a venom infused shard of crystal, which needless to say got her a very strange and concerned stare, but Saffie had almost become numb to embarrassment at this point.

By Friday evening, Saffie had completed more than half the errands available to her, and had gained access to twelve new spells. Frustratingly, Unburdened Mind wasn’t one of them, but she was determined to keep going until it was.

Saffie peered at her in-game map closely as she rode the Tube home from Peckham after a tough battle with a boar that had been enchanted with extra rage. The fight had won her something called a Rare Tracker, which she now realised was an upgrade that allowed her map to display the location of any and all rare creatures across the city. She had learned at the Mage’s Guild that the rarer a creature was, the more experience a player was rewarded for defeating it, so the upgrade was going to be an invaluable addition to the errands she was undertaking.

Saffie could have stared at the map for hours, watching little animated beasts prowl through the streets of London, but she knew she had to put it away and focus on coming up with new fake plans with Beatrix to continue to keep her parents off the scent of what she was actually doing with her days.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Somehow, Saffie had managed to convince her parents she’d spent all week with Beatrix. She had even done her own bit of photo-wizardry using an app to add herself into old pictures of the popular girls. To any normal person, the illusion would have been laughable; the lighting on Saffie was completely different to the other girls, the proportions were out, and in one of them her left hand was missing. But Holly Sparkes was the kind of person who believed their neighbour Alison’s claims of having had no cosmetic surgery, even though the woman was 66 and had less wrinkles than a fully inflated balloon, so it wasn’t completely surprising that she was fooled by Saffie’s editing efforts.

As a vague idea about seeing a movie with Beatrix in Westfield Shopping Centre began to form in Saffie’s mind, she found that it was difficult to concentrate because of a strange sensation that was making her feel uncomfortable. For a moment, she couldn’t place the sensation, until she realised that it was that of someone being too close to her.

She glanced around sharply, but the nearest passenger was a guy sitting a respectable two seats away, engrossed in his phone and completely uninterested in her. She shook her head and told herself that she must have been imagining it, but there had to be something wrong because Acorn, who had been watching the underground lights whizz by through the window on the opposite side of the carriage, suddenly ran back to her and clung to her leg, shaking.

Then someone spoke.

“Tell me…”

It had been barely more than a whisper, but it had been so close to Saffie’s ear that it had been unbearably loud. She instinctively shot up out of her seat and twisted around, but again, there was nobody there.

“Tell me where he is.”

Saffie’s skin was crawling. She had to get out of the carriage.

She started making her way hurriedly to the next one, but stopped as a swirl of violet smoke wafted in front of the adjoining door. Within seconds, the girl in purple robes appeared within the smoke, facing Saffie and blocking her way through.

Saffie had had enough. It was time to find out who this was.

“Scan!” she shouted.

Text immediately appeared to the left of the girl’s hood, but the information was like nothing else Saffie had ever seen in the game. Instead of displaying the girl’s name, age, and guild association like it should have done, the text consisted solely of what seemed to be unintelligible runes.

Before Saffie could think of an offensive spell to cast against such an unknown enemy, the girl began raising her hand in Saffie’s direction, most likely to cast the same awful spell she had done twice previously. Saffie couldn’t bare to experience that horrible sucking sensation again, so she quickly scooped Acorn up from the floor, spun around, and began sprinting through the carriages in the opposite direction, kicking the adjoining doors open as she went.

She stopped after crossing into the fifth carriage, and glanced back nervously. There was no sign of the girl. She turned back around, hoping that she’d lost her, but her stomach lurched as she realised that every passenger in the full carriage she was standing in was wearing the same purple robes. In unison, they all slowly turned to her, their eyes beginning to glow that eerie purple light. Saffie knew it had to be an illusion of some sort, but that it didn’t make it any less unnerving.

The announcer suddenly cut through Saffie’s fear.

“The next stop is… Finchley Road.”

It was one stop earlier than the one closest to her home, but she didn’t care. She just needed to get off the train.

When the doors slid open, Saffie practically dived off the Tube and sprinted for the exit barriers out of the station, knocking into several commuters on the way.

As she raced through the streets towards West Hampstead, she processed what she had heard.

Tell me where he is…

The girl had to have been talking about Dax. But why? If she was the one who had put him into his coma and stolen the Onyx from his flat, why was she still hunting him? Did she need something else from him? Had she decided she wanted to finish the job off and kill him outright?

The one thing Saffie was certain of was that the girl didn’t know which hospital Dax was in, which really complicated things. If she continued with her bedside visits, she would most likely end up leading her right to him.

With her mind wrestling with the difficult prospect of having to stay away from Dax to protect him, it took Saffie until she was just one street away from her own to realise that there was something different about the night air. It reeked of burning plastic.

She continued until she reached the turning onto her own street, and as she came into view of her home, she could do nothing but stop and stare. A giant plume of thick smoke was billowing from it, which could mean only one thing:

Her house was on fire.