Potions and Pageants Read online

“But… But we’re not going on this mechanical contraption!” he said anxiously. “These wheels go too fast. So fast. They’re always trying to run me over!”

  He looked so alarmed that she had to hold onto his arm firmly to stop him from going running back into the park.

  “It’s the quickest way to get home,” she told him. “Don’t worry, Mr Bramble. I’m an excellent driver.”

  She cajoled Mr Bramble to climb hesitantly into the driver’s seat and firmly shut his door, then went around to the driver’s side.

  “There’ll be a bit of traffic,” she told him in a soothing voice. “But you’ll be safe inside here with me.”

  Mr Bramble distrusted traffic even worse than Jeeves. He intensely disliked living in a city. Had the bottom of Gwendolyn Prince’s huge garden not been such a wild and wonderful wilderness, Mr Bramble certainly would not have chosen to live in London.

  The knowledge that Percy had bought herself a car while he had been absent seemed to bring Mr Bramble back to himself a little.

  “You should not be driving, Persephone Prince!” he admonished tremulously. “Your mother will turn me out of house and home if you come to harm. Until your mother sends a new nanny, I have to make sure that you stay safe.”

  His rough little hands were clenched into nervous fists on his lap. His lip trembled as he remembered once again how Percy had fired Nanny Nora.

  The mention of the nanny situation annoyed Percy so much that she was unable to stay silent.

  “Mother is not sending a new nanny!” she said firmly. “I’m far too old for all of that. And anyway, as far as mother is concerned, I already have a nanny. Because I never fired my current one, did I Mr Bramble?” She gave him a stern look.

  He looked despairing.

  “You’re asking for trouble, Persephone Prince,” said Mr Bramble.

  He had no idea her fateful his words would be. Ten minutes later, as Percy was navigating a particularly busy crossroads, a little white bunny rabbit hopped in front of her car.

  Percy was too busy keeping an eye on the cars in front of her to notice, but Mr Bramble — who had a very close affinity with nature — noticed the rabbit right away, and let out a piercing shriek of panic.

  At his yelling, and the frantic stabbing of his stubby little finger, Percy noticed the rabbit a moment before she was about to run over it, and yanked the steering wheel aside just in time.

  And crashed.

  The very moment she crashed, it hit Percy that she was in big, big trouble.

  But for the moment it mattered little because her airbag had deployed, boofing her so hard in the face she felt her brains had been scrambled, and there was a horrible pain in her neck and chest, and she momentarily blacked out.

  When she came back to consciousness she was most relieved to find Mr Bramble calling for her, “Persephone. You wake up right this moment! Oh, my little Persephone Prince, don’t be gone! Oh, what is your mother going to say?”

  With a gasp of shock and horror, Percy sat bolt upright in the driver seat of her car, and patted her head to make sure it was still attached.

  Then she patted little Mr Bramble on the top of his curly haired head to soothe his cries of alarm.

  “I’m quite all right, Bramble,” she said in a croaky voice, “Thank gosh you’re okay. Are you okay?”

  She looked at him enquiringly and was immensely relieved to see the little heg looked his usual round-faced self, not a spot of blood or a bruise marring his stout little body. She was particularly reassured by the look of dawning horror in his beetle-black eyes – which had no whites at all – as he contemplated the possible repercussions of this car crash.

  Percy let out a peal of laughter. She could not help it. “Hells bells, what a pickle!”

  “It’s not funny, Persephone Prince. We’re in for it now! Where is your thingum? Your lexxicity thingum? You call Nanny Nora at once!” he urged.

  But Percy was too busy counting her lucky stars, and being glad she had not vanished up into the great big beyond, to pay attention. Plus, she was having a very difficult time attempting to stagger out of the car.

  She threw her shoulder against her car door to try and open it, but the thing was crumpled and mangled, so she was forced to climb into the back seat, where she landed in an untidy sprawl. She lay there for a moment gathering her breath before exiting via the rear of the car.

  When she had succeeded, she began to wish she had not. Because now she could see that she had not crashed into a wall as she had hoped, but into another car, which was a mangled mess a short distance away.

  In alarm she ran over to it, and saw that the car she had crashed into contained none other than Nanette Gooding. Do-gooder Nanette Gooding, who Percy had once known very well indeed, but who Percy had not seen in five years.

  Percy groaned. Her first thought was, of all of the people in all of the great wide universe, why did I have to crash into Nanette Gooding?

  Her second thought was, almighty heckeries! Nan isn’t moving!

  Nan’s mother, Mrs Gooding, was in the driver’s seat of that car, shaking the unconscious body of her daughter, and screaming, “Nan! My darling! Sweetie! Wake up!”

  Nan’s airbag had failed to deploy, and a trickle of blood was sliding down her forehead. So when she sat up all of a sudden, her eyes as wide and round as saucers, Percy screamed.

  So did Mrs Gooding. “Baby! You’re alive!”

  Nan took a great big gasp of air and stared at her mother as if she had never seen her before in all of her life. She took a look around the car and out of the window and groaned as if everything she was seeing was an absolute horror. And then her eyes focused on Percy and they filled with rage.

  “Percy Prince, you… You DEMONLING! You have ruined my life!”

  Percy stumbled closer to Nan’s open window, and bending over until her face was inches from Nan, she whispered, “Oh shut up, Cherub! You’re perfectly alright.”

  She did not mention how very immensely relieved she was at this fact, because this would have been a far too soppy thing to say out loud.

  “I am not alright!” shouted Nan. “And don’t call me Cherub!”

  The two girls stared at each other. Percy was five years taller and ganglier than she had been when Nan had last seen her, but her wild hair was as oddly green as ever. She was still as terribly, wonderfully Percy-like as ever.

  Nan had changed. Her face might have been as big-eyed and cherubic as it had ever been, but her once bouncy riot of golden curls were now tame and neat, and so was the rest of her.

  The moment of astonishment and shock of being so near death and finding themselves alive began to fade away. Both girls saw it in each other’s eyes. What was left was an odd and uncomfortable moment.

  Many years ago, when they had been much smaller, Percy and Nan had been the best of friends. Two little toddlers who had giggled and held hands and got into all sorts of trouble and fondly called each other Demonling and Cherub.

  But then they had grown up and discovered that though they were both the daughters of witches, that only one of them had the magic she was supposed to have and the other did not. And things had changed.

  At a loss for anything to say, Percy spotted a lurid black and rainbow colored poster on Nan’s lap. She had seen it before.

  “You’re going to that Ice Cream Hut Charity Quiz thing,” Percy said.

  “Not anymore,” Nan said. “You’ve ruined it. You can never do anything right, can you?”

  The moment the words came out of Nan’s mouth, her cheeks turned pink and a look of regret came into her eyes, for Nan Gooding was not the sort of person to say mean things.

  But it was too late. Percy felt a stab of hurt, and took a step back.

  “Sorry about your car, Mrs Gooding,” she said stiffly to Nan’s mother.

  Now that it had been established that the occupants of both of the cars involved in the crash were largely fine, the two teenage girls were bundled into the ambulances
which had just arrived and carried off to hospital. There, doctors deemed that their injuries were surprisingly minor for such an alarming accident and both girls were allowed to return home.

  Late in the evening Persephone Prince trudged back into her grand mansion of a home, accompanied by the now tottering wreck that was Mr Bramble, who had suffered through a grilling by first the nurses and doctors and then by two Humble policemen.

  Mr Bramble scurried as fast as possible through the house and into the gardens, where he vanished into the depths of the thorny bramble patch.

  The policemen had been very suspicious of Percy with her green hair and unrepentant manner, and had blamed her oddities on Mr Bramble in his frayed brown robes. They had looked like they wanted to lock someone away, and they were thinking that someone might need to be Mr Bramble, who had been the only adult in the car at fault.

  An escape had been made when Percy had feigned a fit of convulsions and then dragged Mr Bramble away from behind the curtained bed that the nurses had put her in.

  An exhausted Percy now made her way to her kitchen, where poltergeist Jeeves was waiting with a pot of hot tea, a steaming lasagna, and a sympathetic look of epic proportions on his face.

  Percy sat down and stared at her lasagna.

  “Apple pie,” she mumbled.

  But Jeeves knew his business well, and was already dishing up a huge portion of apple pie and custard. He swept through the garden door after Mr Bramble, intent on feeding the traumatized little heg.

  He came back some minutes later and complained when he saw Percy had not taken a single bite of her lasagna.

  Now that she’d had a moment to just sit and be quiet, Percy felt very odd indeed. In fact, she was beginning to feel not like herself at all.

  The relief at having brought Mr Bramble safely home was overshadowed by a queasy feeling in her stomach and a sense of impending doom.

  It felt like something momentous and terrible was rushing towards her like a great tidal wave.

  She felt terrible about seeing Nan again like that after all these years. She had not thought this was how their reunion would go. She’d had grand ideas of somehow becoming fabulous, maybe even suddenly developing magic as wonderful as Nan’s in the interval, but this had never happened.

  And it wasn’t the anticlimax of still being the same old Percy which was making her feel so awful. It was something else.

  A very odd memory was beginning to take shape in her head. A memory of a time before she had even been born. A memory that surely could not be real.

  She got shakily to her feet and said to the still fussing Jeeves, “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll go to bed.” And promptly passed out.

  2. Demonling & Cherub

  Sixteen Years Ago

  It was a dark night in Hell when two teenage girls known as Demonling and Cherub were up to a spot of mischief.

  Well, it was really Demonling who was up to the mischief. Cherub was lying face down on the floor, her hands wrapped firmly around Demonling’s left ankle as she wailed, “Please Demonling, don’t do it. Your Mother wouldn’t like it.”

  Whatever Demonling had been about to do would be lost to the annals of time, and afterwards even Demonling would not be able to remember what it had been.

  All she would remember was that she had been about to sneak out of the window of her bedroom, and into the big wide night of Hell that was calling her, to do something particularly dastardly, or so she hoped.

  But she never got the chance, because at that very moment her Mother, a fallen angel and unhappy resident of Hell, stormed into Demonling’s bedroom, and snapped, “Enough is enough. I will not have you living under your father’s roof for a moment longer!”

  “Mother!” squeaked Demonling, slamming her window shut and pretending that she had only been looking out of it to get a spot of fresh, hot hellish air.

  Mother was not fooled. “Time for you to go to a decent place and learn how to be a decent being,” she said. “I should have known when your father named you Demonling — the gall of that man, giving a child such an atrocious name — that he would want you to turn out like him, and I will not have it!”

  “That’s what you get for marrying a demon,” said Cherub sniffily, but very, very quietly so that Mother would not hear her.

  But Mother heard everything.

  “And you, cherub!” said Mother. “Your only job was to keep Demonling out of trouble, which you have never managed to do. What have you to say for yourself?”

  Cherub hung her head. “But she is a Lord of Hell’s daughter. It’s impossible to keep her out of trouble. I told you that you should have sent her to a different place. Hell is no place to raise a child.”

  “You’re about to get your wish,” said Mother. “I have it on good authority that two new little lives are about to be born into the mortal realm. As this is the one chance I may ever get to give Demonling a fresh new start in a better place, I mean to take it.”

  “But Mother!” said Demonling, “I don’t want to go to the mortal realm. It’ll be boring. What will I do there?”

  “Learn to be good,” said Mother.

  “Good is mediocre. I don’t want to be mediocre!”

  “Of course you do,” Mother insisted, clapping her hands together in anticipation. “Better that than a devilish genius like your father. Heaven knows I’ve done my best for you, but it will never be good enough here.”

  “But not the mortal realm!” Demonling protested.

  “It’s a perfectly adequate place. It has everything you need to learn to do right by people. And prove that you are your Mother’s daughter, not your father’s. And when you’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of people, then maybe, finally, you’ll find your way home.”

  “Home?” said Demonling scathingly. “Where is that supposed to be? Heaven? You never managed to find your way back there!”

  “And maybe I never shall,” said Mother sadly. “But I have higher hopes for you, and this is the only way.”

  She flourished her slender hand, and just like that the Hell that Demonling and Cherub had been standing in, the only home they had ever known, began to fade out of existence.

  When Demonling awoke on the other side, the life she had known before was only a twinkle in her brand new baby eyes.

  For a while anyway.

  3. An Unexpected Awakening

  Percy awoke to find herself on her kitchen floor, with Jeeves floating above her, his nose pressed to her nose, staring down at her with a comically concerned expression

  “Waah!” she said, and tried to shove him away.

  Her hands of course went right through him, feeling like they had been plunged into buckets of ice, but it achieved her aim because he moved away from her with a haughty sniff.

  “I was only waiting for you to wake up,” he said mournfully. “Should I call Mr Bramble? The poor fellow looked done in. I thought I had better wait to see what was what first.”

  “No, don’t call him!” she said.

  She had sat up too quickly. It was a mistake. A horribly fuzzy, swishy-swashy feeling was inside her head, as if her brain had turned to water and was slopping around in her skull.

  “Demonling,” she groaned.

  “What?” said Jeeves, still looking at her suspiciously.

  She shook her head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”

  But it wasn’t nothing. Something had woken up inside her head. Something that was alive and intense and every bit a real a person as she was. In fact, something that was who she was.

  For a moment her body felt entirely unfamiliar and heavy, as if it should have been something else, but then the feeling settled and her body felt like hers again, only achy from the car crash.

  The crash had woken something up inside her that had not been meant to be awakened. She did not know quite what to make of it.

  But she knew who would. The one person who always knew everything.

  “Cherub,” she said quietly.
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  Suddenly, more than anything in the world, she wanted Cherub.

  * * *

  At that very moment Nanette Gooding was having a similar experience to Percy.

  She had left the hospital and was now back in the cozy London townhouse that she and her parents called home. She was in her pink wallpapered bedroom, perched up against the heaps of cushions on her bouncy bed.

  She was staring at the mood board propped up on her desk that she had been working on for weeks. On it was stuck the dozens of pictures and articles she had carefully cut out from magazines, along with colored sticky notes of all her ideas.

  It was for the charity fashion show that Nan was organizing at school, which had somehow morphed into a beauty pageant. The main contenders, all forceful girls, had insisted that their fellow students would take far more interest in crowning someone Miss Humble High than they would in bidding for clothing creations that would never fit the average student body anyway.

  Nan had allowed herself to be persuaded despite her better judgement, and now it was far too late to be having doubts.

  After all, the only thing that mattered was raising the money she had pledged for the hurricane relief fund. And the other thing that mattered was raising more money than whatever Octavia Smythe-Smith was raising at this very moment at her Ice Cream Party Quiz Night.

  The hurricane relief charity drive had all been Nan’s idea. She had seen video footage of the devastation caused by a recent hurricane half way across the world and decided she would do something to help. She knew it was not right to be bitter that Octavia Smythe-Smith had muscled in and tried to take over all of her efforts, but she was.

  First Octavia had made a bid to takeover managing Nan’s beauty pageant. When that had failed, Octavia had organized the ice cream party instead. She had invited all the cool kids and even somehow managed to get somebody to donate an all-inclusive exotic holiday deal as the top prize in her raffle.

  This sucked because a secret voice inside Nan’s head kept telling her that pretty, popular, cool, half vampire Octavia might have done a better job than her in running the beauty pageant.