I lay awake on the bed with Becca curled up beside me. She slept soundly while I had managed only a few short hours of restless sleep filled with nightmares of that place that I had been imprisoned.

There was so much that I couldn’t remember from that place and that was for the best, because what I did remember haunted me.

I’m not a nice person, and I can admit that. I was a witch born into one of the darker covens in England, and no coven gains any real power or wealth by playing nice. My coven had been very powerful, and very wealthy.

So it wasn’t like I was raised to be good, kind and gentle. No, my lessons had been how to best hurt an enemy or how to get what I wanted when others tried to block me. I was taught that the world was mine and the humans that inhabited it were there to serve my needs and desires.

As a young, athletic and not bad-looking man with a great deal of money and all of the toys and lavish lifestyle that came with it, I’d had no problem in indulging in any want or desire that I’d had.

Which hardly prepared me for the life of a teenage girl on a housing estate in Hull.

I sighed and pushed myself up. I scratched at my head and ran a hand through the tangled mass of blonde hair.

That would get annoying real fast. I wondered, idly, if Becca would be okay with me cutting the hair short. Doubtful, but worth asking.

I swung my legs off the side of the bed and looked back to check that Becca was still sleeping. I’d done enough talking with her before we’d settled down to sleep to last a lifetime and I needed a bit of peace and quiet to work.

Jen’s laptop took a minute to load up but it worked at least, which was a pleasant surprise. Sure, the lettering on some of the keys had faded and it whirred a bit too loud in the quiet room, but it did work.

An added bonus was that it didn’t require a password to access.

I set to work.

Her social media was all saved in her browsers bookmarks so I went through each site, learning as much as I could about the type of person she was. It didn’t take long to realise she wasn’t anything unique or special. She didn’t stand out from the other, equally vacuous, kids on her friends lists.

Endless selfies where she pulled faces or posed while holding various objects from coffee cups to what looked to be an ornamental duck wearing a kimono. There were a number of videos and I turned the sound down low before playing them, one after another.

After those, I went through her search history, ignoring the links to porn sites that pretty much every teenager looked at these days, and focusing instead on the things that interested her. Which was a great deal.

She’d bookmarked a site filled with depictions of art from the past several centuries and had a blog filled with some basic, beginner level poetry. She had music lists from half-a-dozen decades and a fairly eclectic taste in genres.

The conversations she’d had with friends online were the usual teen nonsense interspersed with some genuine insight into local and world politics and an, at times, desperate attempt to gain her friends support to do… something about the problems she saw around her.

I revised my original estimation. There was more to her than I’d suspected and the picture I was building was an engaged young woman with a variety of passions and a desire to be something more than just another girl from the estate.

The argument with her boyfriend had been because she’d applied to university in Liverpool and obtained a place. Mark, her boyfriend, had no interest in doing anything after college except perhaps smoke weed and play video games.

Hardly someone worthy of a girl with ambitions of her own.

I sighed and leaned back, tilting my head to either side to crack my neck and relieve the tension there. Despite looking, I’d found little to indicate why someone would have killed her other than her boyfriend being upset she was going to leave.

Was that enough for him to kill her? I couldn’t answer that, but it certainly moved him up my list of suspects.

Another look back to check that Becca was asleep. She had her back to me as she slept facing the wall but I could hear the steady, deep breathing that told me she was.

I could still faintly feel the pull of Hell. It wanted me back and the weaker I was, the more chance there was of it gripping me and dragging me out of Jen’s body. I needed to get stronger, fast.

Before my death I had been paranoid enough to secrete some funds in various accounts that I could log into remotely should the need arise. Sure, I’d not imagined that I would be doing it as a spirit possessing someone else but then I'd not imagined that I would fail either.

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“Fuck!”

I stared at the screen in frustration as I quickly accessed the second account. Same as the first. Empty. There was one more that I could have sworn that no one but me had known about and I quickly loaded the site and logged on.

My shoulders slumped and I rested my elbows on the desk and bowed my head until it was cradled in my hands.

Empty.

She’d got all of them. No one else would have been able to or would have even considered it.

“Fucking, Delilah.”

I raised my head and gave myself a shake. Sure, she’d taken all of the money I’d had stashed but I could easily get more money. It would just delay things a little. All I needed was my magic and that was something she’d have no need to even consider looking for.

Once again I typed on the laptops keyboard and logged into the cloud storage I’d set up years before. It took barely a moment to load and I opened the file folder there, putting in yet another password.

A moment later I slammed the laptop shut and swore loud enough to wake Becca who blinked blearily at me. “What’s going on?”

“My evil bitch of a sister,” I snapped. “That’s what’s fucking wrong. She’s not content with just killing me, she had to take apart everything I had stashed away too!”

“Stashed away? What are you talking about.”

“Money,” I said, anger roaring in my breast. “But not just that, she took my spells!”

Becca rubbed a hand over her eyes and pushed herself up fully. She buried a yawn behind her hand and squinted at me in the dim light of the streetlights that filtered in through a gap in the curtains.

“Okay, go slow. How did she take your spells?”

“I’d digitalised the coven grimoires and put them in a secure file in cloud storage,” I said, irritation lacing every word. “In case I ever needed access to them when I wasn’t home.”

“Right, I wasn’t sure you could even do that.”

“They’re just books.” I shook my head at her ignorance. “Manuals that guided the reader into how to craft and cast the spells and rituals we used.”

“And they’re gone?”

“Yes. Delilah managed to find them and wipe them from the server.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“I need my spells!” I snapped. “I’m not much bloody use in this body if I can’t cast any damn magic!”

Becca was silent for a moment as I forced myself to calm down, slowing my breathing and unclenching my fists.

“It’s only been three years, surely you can remember enough to keep you going for now?”

“No… It’s been longer.”

“How much longer? You said you died three years ago.”

I didn’t immediately answer. Anything I told her would just require ever more explanations and I had neither the time nor the patience for that. Instead I swung my legs back onto the bed and lay down, staring at the ceiling with one arm behind my head as I thought.

“Jen?”

It took me a moment to realise she was speaking to me. I’d need to get used to that name. “Yes.”

“It will be okay.” She touched me lightly on the shoulder and when my eyes flicked towards her, she was smiling. “Seriously, it will.”

“I can’t get my body back without magic. I really can’t face my family without it.”

“You still have access to the magic, it’s just the spells you need, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then find another witch.” She said it so matter of factly that I almost laughed. “There are witches that are independent aren’t there?”

“Sure,” I said and used a tone that suggested I didn’t want to discuss it further.

Not that it mattered.

“Then we’ll find one. There’s a magic shop in the city centre. We can try there.”

“Fine.”

She pursed her lips but finally seemed to grasp that I wasn’t going to contribute much to the conversation so she settled back down.

“Try and get some sleep.”

I didn’t answer. There was no point. She was ignorant about witches and how we worked. It wasn’t her fault, since she wasn’t a witch and we tended to keep our business to ourselves, but still, most supernaturals knew enough to know that going to ask another witch for help would be a disaster.

There’s a reason why covens are made up entirely of family and even then, there’s very little trust and obedience to the coven was obtained through binding rituals and the threat of what would happen to anyone who betrayed the coven.

My tenure in hell was proof that those threats were real.

If I found another witch, one not affiliated with a coven, then it was pretty much guaranteed what would happen and it wouldn’t be pretty.

Still, knowing that, I could be at least somewhat prepared and I could use Becca’s ignorance to my advantage. Enough to buy me the time I needed to get the drop on the witch.

I reached over and picked up Jen’s phone and tapped the display. The clock flashed 5:04 and I set it back down with a sigh.

It would be a couple of hours at least before we could go out and there was bugger all chance of me sleeping, so instead, I lay in the darkness and did my best to recall every spell that I could. It was a depressingly small list of them by the time I’d finished.

Most of them were the earlier stuff, the basic spells that all witches learn when they are first introduced to their power. It was beginner stuff and little real use but I had practiced them so often that I would have been surprised if I could have forgotten them.

A couple of others that I had found useful enough to use repeatedly over the years were in the mix too. An unlocking spell, which was always a useful tool for getting into places where I shouldn’t be, would be handy along with the energy sphere spell.

I held up my hand, palm out flat and focused on the space just above it. With my left hand I drew invisible symbols in the air as I whispered the words of the incantation.

A globe appeared, translucent and fragile to behold. Barely a shimmer of light to define its borders and it hovered in the air above my open palm. It was the size of an egg and when I finished the incantation, it settled gently onto my palm.

There was no weight to it but as I curled my fingers around it, I could feel it there in my hand. Satisfied that I could actually get the spell to work, I dismissed it and the sphere faded away, its energies dissipating.

A sudden weariness descended upon me and my eyes fluttered shut. Not a great sign that so simple a spell would take so much of my energy, but I had little to spare since most of what I had was being used in repairing the damage to Jen’s body and keeping me anchored to her flesh.

That was something I would need to remember because when I met the witch, I might only have one shot at killing her before she killed me.