Free The Midnight Carnival by Erika McGann

and she had no idea how to send it back.

8
Chasing Faeries
    The girls sat squashed on one side of Mrs Quinlan’s kitchen table, while the woman sketched in chalk on the homemade blackboard perched on the counter.
    ‘Who can tell me what this is?’ she said, pointing to the oblong outline on the board.
    ‘And do you know what else there is, Miss?’ Una said as she traced invisible shapes on the table. ‘An alligator. It’s not even stuffed or anything. A real-life alligator that goes wandering round the park. It’s deadly.’
    ‘Oi!’ Mrs Quinlan shouted, tapping furiously with her chalk.
    ‘Oh,’ Una said, looking up. ‘No, that’s nothing like an alligator.’
    The Cat Lady fired the duster so fast Una barely had timeto duck. It struck an antique carriage clock on a shelf on the wall, which toppled to the floor and smashed.
    ‘That’s dangerous!’ said Una. ‘You could’ve hit my head.’
    ‘I was aiming for your head.’
    ‘You know, Mrs Q, you couldn’t be a teacher at school. You’d never get past the Garda vetting.’
    ‘Keep talking. I’ve got plenty of stuff to throw.’
    Adie’s hand went up.
    ‘ Finally ,’ the woman sighed. ‘Yes, you.’
    ‘Mrs Quinlan, are there Hunters here?’
    Mrs Quinlan took a deep breath as the end of her chalk slid off the board with a horrible squeak.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Are there Hunters here, like there are on Hy-Breasal? Hunter witches, I mean.’
    ‘What has that got to do with the diagram on the board?’
    ‘Um, nothing. But are there Hunters though?’ Adie persisted. Grace looked up. It was the first time Adie had spoken all day, and the first time she’d looked interested in anything in ages.
    ‘From the garbled nonsense you were all spouting when you got back from that bloody island,’ Mrs Quinlan snapped, ‘I understand that Hunters hunt faeries .’
    ‘Couldn’t we learn to do that?’
    ‘We could use B-brr for practice,’ said Jenny, pointing to the little nymph as he scraped congealed butter from thetable and licked his fingers. ‘Give him a ten second head-start and then we all go after him.’
    ‘Hunters mostly used glamour,’ Rachel said, ‘to entice the faeries to them. They didn’t do much chasing.’
    ‘You’re not doing that!’ Delilah snatched B-brr to her chest and cradled him like a baby. ‘That was done to him before and… I don’t know how long they had him locked in that birdcage.’
    There were tears in her eyes, and Grace felt sorry she hadn’t stopped the conversation when it turned to B-brr.
    During the Witch Trials, trainee witches had used glamour to take on the appearance of faeries to lure B-brr from his cage. Even Rachel, excellent as she was at glamouring, had done it. Disguised as another wood nymph, she had got him to step through the open door and dance with her on a table top. After that, Rachel had been celebrated and whisked off to the Hunters’ Mansion. B-brr had been locked back inside his birdcage and dumped in the black turret.
    ‘Sorry, Delilah,’ said Grace. ‘We weren’t thinking. Of course we wouldn’t do anything like that to the little fella.’
    ‘Wouldn’t we?’
    Jenny looked genuinely surprised. Grace felt like slapping her.
    ‘No. We wouldn’t.’
    She gave the tall girl a stern look that eventually got a shrug in reply.
    A sudden crack made them all jump. Mrs Quinlan held a pointer to the left of the blackboard. On it she had drawn a crude map, with the uppermost building labelled ‘school’.
    ‘What am I pointing at?’ Her face was red and her hair more frazzled than usual.
    Grace tentatively raised her hand.
    ‘The demon well, Miss?’
    ‘Yes, the demon well. And would someone please explain to me what a demon well is?’
    Grace looked around, annoyed that all the others kept their eyes on the table. She raised her hand again.
    ‘It’s a soft spot between planes… like between worlds, where things can get through. Beings can get through. From one world to the