The Witching of Verity Bradshaw

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Verity Bradshaw’s eyes sprang open, seeing nothing in the darkness of her room. She turned to her left, her hand brushing against the wall. Disorientated, she turned to her right and focused on the line of light along the underside of her door. To the right of her door was a wardrobe, an invisible shape untouched by the dim glow. Memories clicked into place. Her desk sat next to the wardrobe, almost opposite her bed. Beyond that, a set of shelves and a cabinet tucked into the corner of the room, a window spanning the void between her bed and the cabinet.

Verity relaxed, her head dropping onto the pillow that had travelled four and a half thousand miles from her bedroom in Louisiana to her dorm room at Cardiff University. There was nothing to fear. It was probably a student down the hall, slamming their door. With a sigh, Verity groped along the floor until her fingers knocked her phone further under her bed. Wincing in the screen’s glare, Verity angled her phone until she could read the numbers without inducing a migraine. Three hours until her alarm. Too early to rise, too late to get a good night’s sleep. Before she could conjure a third option, a thud from the kitchen, followed by a muffled grunt, drew Verity fully from the land of slumber.

Buttoning her jeans beneath her nightie, Verity stood before her door and listened for movement in the kitchen she shared with three other students. Lowri Jenkins, a lean girl with dyed-blonde hair who towered a good three inches over Verity’s skinnier, five-and-a-half-foot frame, was already unpacking her things when Verity had arrived at the dormitory. Shamima Sharmin, the second of Verity’s flatmates, arrived while Verity was on the phone to her mother, disappearing into her room before Verity could introduce herself and leaving Verity with no idea what she looked like. The fourth resident, a German student named Brigitte Kerber, had yet to arrive.

Verity grabbed her door handle at the crack of wood against wood, her damp palm sliding over the metal, and paused. It sounded like there was only one person out there. Slowly, Verity lifted her fingers to the chain fitted to her door, hoping the other girls had done the same. Better to lose what little she had in the kitchen to a burglar than her life. The splintering of glass against tile and a short yelp, changed her mind.

The light from a mobile phone played over the glass-flecked splatter of red decorating the kitchen floor as Verity, half-crouching, stepped out of her room.

‘Who’s there?’ Verity asked as she stepped to the side, putting the small dining table in the common area between her and the kitchen, giving whoever was in the kitchen a clear path to the door and putting herself within reach of an empty fruit bowl in the middle of the table. As weapons went, it was one step up from her bare fists. At least she could throw it while she darted back to her room.

The beam of light came up, forcing Verity to squint and raise a hand to shield her eyes. ‘Verity? You nearly made me crap myself.’

Verity frowned at the slight slurring of the words that made the speaker’s Welsh accent harder to understand. ‘Lowri? What are you doing?’

Verity flicked the light switch to see that the glass on the kitchen floor was a jam jar.

‘Making a sandwich,’ Lowri said as she took a roll of kitchen paper and began mopping up the strawberry jam. ‘I thought you went out?’

‘I did.’ Verity tore off a sheet of paper and crouched next to Lowri to help clean the tiles. ‘Nine hours ago. Have you only just gotten back?’

Lowri stopped cleaning to look at the time on her phone. ‘I got back about an hour ago. Then I was sick. Now I’m hungry.’

‘And drunk.’

Lowri slumped to the kitchen floor. ‘A little. Maybe.’

Verity noticed that Lowri was still wearing the tight jean shorts and white tube top she had worn out clubbing. ‘Come on. Let’s get you into bed.’

‘Wait,’ Lowri said as Verity helped her to her feet. ‘My sandwich.’

Verity almost lost her grip on Lowri’s arm as Lowri lurched to the side and grabbed a piece of folded bread from the kitchen counter. Verity huffed as she guided Lowri to her room, fighting to keep her upright until she could drop Lowri onto her bed.

‘You’re alright,’ Lowri said through a mouthful of sandwich as Verity unbuckled her shoes. ‘Not what I expected when I first saw you.’

Verity exhaled slowly. ‘What did you expect?’

The same thing everyone in high school expected of Verity when they saw her black hair, dark eye makeup, black jeans, and lace gloves. Trouble. Not the ‘breaking windows and cussing out their elders’ kind of trouble, but the ‘evidence of the godlessness and erosion of decency in today’s youth’ kind of trouble. The look of somebody who wore their feelings for all to see instead of repressing their emotion and pretending everything was cool and normal when the world was aflame and society was broken. The look of somebody who no longer cared what you thought of them. Someone dangerous. Someone uncontrollable. Someone free.

Lowri summed it up in one word. ‘Scary.’

‘Maybe I am,’ Verity said as she pulled a blanket over Lowri. ‘Maybe I’m just getting started.’

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Verity also appears in the first Daniel Myers mystery, Destiny’s Demise - available on ebook today and free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.