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  Watcher’s Web

  Return of the Aghyrians Book 1

  Patty Jansen

  Capricornica Publications

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  From: Trader’s Honour

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  More By This Author

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  pattyjansen.com

  1

  WHEREVER JESSICA went, people watched her. Like those two teenage boys leaning on the fence, Akubra hats pulled down to shade their eyes. One of them dangled a cigarette in careless fingers; the other swigged beer from a stubby. Neither was watching her now, but she hadn’t missed their gawking, nor their voices barely elevated over the noise of bellowing cattle, shouts and truck engines.

  Wow! See that really tall one?

  Bloody hell, yeah.

  How’d you reckon she kisses a guy? On her knees?

  They laughed and, when she came closer, faced the yard to watch the cattle as if they had said nothing.

  Jessica walked past them to the gate, glaring at their straw-covered backs. Well, I bloody heard you. She was used to it, anyway.

  It hadn’t been the worst thing people said about her. They hadn’t said the words ugly, or creepy, or freak, but she was used to hearing those words, too.

  They went into a little hard spot inside her where she scrunched up the hurt and forgot it. She might look like a freak, but when she helped John Braithwaite and his mates from the Rivervale Stud Farm at a cattle show and Angus went into one of his fits, they still needed her to get him into the truck without spooking him. No one else could do that. No one knew how she did it, and no one should ever know. Because no one was crazy enough to get into a pen with a stroppy bull, right?

  Well, we’ll see about that.

  She grasped the top of the gate with both hands, stepped onto the middle bar and swung her foot over. Jumped. Landed in sun-baked mud churned with cloven hoof prints and cow pats.

  At least when Angus looked at her he didn’t hide his dislike. He rolled a beady eye and blew a gust of hay-scented air from his nostrils. He stiffened, all fifteen-hundred-odd kilograms of Brahman bull-flesh of him. Then lowered his head, horns poised.

  Someone yelled, “Watch it!”

  No, he wasn’t going to charge. He’d charge at the boys, he’d even charge at his well-heeled owner, but never at her. Call her arrogant, but she knew that; and how she knew it would remain a secret, too, thank you very much.

  She stopped a few paces inside the pen and crossed her arms over her chest. Well, bugger that. She had a bloody audience. About twenty people, mostly men, sitting on the fence, with cynical hey-look-at-this-mate expressions plastered on their faces.

  Beef cattle farmers, their lackeys and other hangers-on, those clowns who had partied in the pavilion last night, those who owned the bulls that had occupied the pens next to Angus’. All their animals were already in the trucks, ready to be taken home from the Pymberton show. None of them with a “best of show” ribbon, like Angus, and none with a diva mentality.

  It looked like the boys had been trying to get Angus to move for a while. The gate on the opposite side of the pen was open, the ramp in place. Brendan held the door to the truck, ready to slam it. Everything about his expression said, rather you than me. The coward.

  “Come on, Angus, in you go.”

  Men sniggered, including the two teenage boys. The one with the cigarette flicked ash into the pen and said something about a whip.

  Now who was more stupid? Them or the bull? You did not frighten such a prize animal if you could help it. He might bolt and injure himself. An unsightly gash would take him off the show circuit for months. Sheesh!

  Jessica reached through the fence into the bucket she had dumped there. Her hand came away black and sticky with molasses. Angus loved it.

  She inched closer, holding out her hand Come on, look me in the eye, if you dare.

  Angus blew out another snort, as if he knew what was coming. Backed into the fence. Met her eyes.

  Jessica exhaled. Her breath seeped from her in tendrils of sparkle-filled mist, which sought out Angus’ fur and crept over his grey-mottled back, a bit like glitter-glue, but alive.

  Jessica lunged for the rope that dangled from Angus’ collar. She couldn’t quite reach it, and while Angus backed further away from her, scraping along the fence, he planted his hoof on the end of the rope, squashing it neatly in a fresh pile of dung. Just her luck.

  A bit closer.

  She pulled the mist tighter around him, so his coat sparkled and glittered with lights. His outline became fuzzy. She didn’t know what to call it, and had learned not to talk about it to anyone. It wasn’t that she could communicate with him, but she could tell him what to do. Sort of. In a weird way she couldn’t explain in words. The mist soaked up emotions, as far as bulls have emotions, and dampened them, and she could override them with her own. If it worked.

  Her audience had stopped talking. Anyone who watched always did that, even though they couldn’t see the mist and didn’t realise it influenced them, although not as much as it affected the animal. That was just as well, because she was making an idiot of herself. Angus was being bloody stubborn, his head still lowered, trampling the rope further into the shit. Something must have spooked him badly. Maybe it was the yapping from the dog pavilion. Well, she and Angus seemed to have something in common—she didn’t like lap dogs either.

  But he was going to get into that bloody truck, preferably before she missed her flight back to Sydney. All kinds of hell would break loose if she wasn’t at the school basketball team meeting that night.

  Jessica focused on Angus’ beady eye and let out another deep breath. More sparkling vapour flowed. Pinpricks of light soaked into Angus’ mottled fur. Angus relaxed, stuck out his head to nuzzle her molasses-covered hand.

  But then . . .

  The threads solidified and the mist spun into tightly-coiled cords, which wove into a formation like a spider’s web.

  What the hell. . . ?

  She froze, staring at the writhing construction. It looked like someone had cast a living net over the bull, one made of sparkling mist that yanked and stretched of its own volition, or . . . as if something pulled at the other end. There were shadows in a nebulous space over Angus’ back, and a male voice, just outside the edge of hearing, calling out to someone. The web vibrated and strained.

  A tug of war between herself and . . . Who was pulling the other end?

  In her panic, she broke loose from the construction. The shadows at the other end of the web faded. The strands dissolved into mist once more.

  A wet nose touched her palm and Angus’ rasping tongue curled around her wrist. The molasses was clean licked-off, but he probably liked the salt o
f her sweat, because her arms glistened with it. She hoped no one noticed.

  Her legs still trembling, Jessica pulled the rope and inched towards the gate. Angus followed her meekly, up the ramp, into the truck, where one of the boys was ready to tie him up.

  The onlookers applauded.

  Jessica leaned against the truck, forcing herself to grin at her audience.

  “Can anyone give me a lift to the airport?”

  2

  THE UTE CAME to a screeching halt, scattering gravel and dust in a cloud that wafted past the open windows.

  Brendan grinned. “There you are, Jess.”

  Across the fence, beyond a section of desiccated grass, the tarmac spread out; a grey expanse of asphalt with white painted lines. On it waited a single-engine plane. A man in blue uniform sat on the folded-out stairs.

  “Is that it?” asked Brendan.

  Jessica glanced at the dashboard clock. Ten minutes late, if the thing could be trusted. “Bloody hell, I hope so.”

  She grabbed her bag and opened the car door, stepping into the dust and late afternoon heat. “Thanks for the lift.”

  “No worries.” He tipped his hand to the rim of his hat. A broad grin split his face, and his eyes betrayed that he still held hope for the date he’d asked her on a few weeks back. As far as John Braithwaite’s farm hands went, Brendan wasn’t that bad, but after that business with Luke, she wasn’t getting involved with any of them again.

  She slammed the door and ran. The man in the blue uniform—the pilot, she now realised—pushed himself off the steps.

  She called out, still running, “Is this Westways flight 265 for Sydney?”

  “Sure. You’re Jessica Moore?”

  “Yes.” She stopped, panting. They’d waited for her. How . . . good of them; how . . . totally embarrassing. Stupid bloody bull.

  Jessica handed her bag to the pilot, took off her hat and clambered up the stairs.

  A man in a grey suit looked up from his computer, his expression vacant. What would he be seeing? An exceedingly tall girl with lanky black hair, in a dusty shirt and jeans, smelling of cattle shit. Wonderful.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He grimaced and went back to his machine. OK, so he was annoyed. Missed a meeting, an important deadline. I bloody said I was sorry.

  He looked up again, meeting her eyes. A slight frown.

  The other passenger paid her no attention. Also a man, perhaps in his forties, he wore faded jeans and a black leather jacket that had seen better days. He had tied his greying blond hair in a ponytail, the end of which disappeared under the collar of his jacket. He looked, for all she could think, like an ageing hippie escaped from a commune up the north coast somewhere. One of those with no pesticides, no poisons and no bloody crops either. He held a book on his lap and didn’t even look up when Jessica excused herself to squeeze between the seats. She slid sideways into the back, bumping her head on the ceiling. Her phone beeped in her pocket.

  She pulled it out. The screen displayed a message, please return my call when you can, from an unknown number.

  The businessman glared over his shoulder.

  Yeah, yeah, I’m turning it off.

  She pressed the off button down and the screen went blank. Her mind churned. Who could that be? The only people she knew who would write in full sentences were her parents and John Braithwaite. Their numbers she knew off by heart, especially her mother’s, because she sent messages every day to check on her well-being. Sending their shy, weird, traumatised and vulnerable daughter off to boarding school in the city hadn’t been easy on her mother, but after the events at Pymberton High when Jessica was fourteen, there had been little alternative.

  Jessica stared at the blank screen, pushing down memories of receiving vile messages she used to receive daily at that time. Apparently some people in town bought phones just so that they could harass her anonymously.

  She shivered.

  That crap wasn’t about to start again, was it? Nothing had happened for over three years.

  She settled on the back seat, wriggled to find the seat belt while the pilot slammed shut the luggage compartment and climbed into the cabin, pulling up the stairs behind him.

  A few flicks on the instrument panel and the propeller rattled into life.

  Bloody noisy, it was. It was only that John Braithwaite paid for her ticket, because otherwise she preferred the train.

  But she had made it.

  Stupid bull. Stupid . . . whatever had happened.

  That should teach her not to play with this strange ability anymore. Every time she thought she understood it, some shit like this happened.

  The pilot threw off the brakes and the plane jolted into action. He had put on headphones and was talking to air traffic control, his voice barely audible over the rattling propeller. Outside the window, wing flaps moved up and down and back into their normal position. Jessica knew the motions; she had been through this before. She still didn’t like it.

  The plane turned onto the runway and gathered speed. Engine noise exploded; a weight settled on her chest. The rumbling of the wheels stopped and the plane rose sharply until the cockpit window showed only merciless blue sky.

  Jessica looked to her right. Down there was the main road, the Henderson orange farm and the place of those city folk who’d come to town a few years back to breed emus. A bunch of the silly birds clustered around a feed trough. She’d heard the owners were doing quite well. In the distance, farmland merged into wooded hills which, further still, ended abruptly in the cliffs of the western Blue Mountains, tinged orange in the afternoon sun.

  The sight gave her a shiver of excitement. She might live in the middle of the city, but she had no doubt about where she belonged. I love a sunburnt country, so the poem by Dorothea Mackellar described the bush. Well, she wasn’t much of a poet, but that was her world, all right. No stress, no nosy idiots, and space to get away from it all when life became too complicated. For her, it meant space to let the sparking mist flow from her and let it whip at the trees and tear bushes bare without anyone noticing. Things had become better since she figured out that she needed to do this every few days, because the tension built up inside her, especially in hot weather or if she’d spent a lot of time in the sun.

  The memory of the incident with Angus still chilled her. There had never been other people in the mist, or voices.

  She wiped the sweat from her upper lip.

  No need to worry. Nothing had happened, right?

  Jessica took a book from her bag and opened it on her knees. Sunlight slanted in through the window, spilling across pages of Japanese text. Of course she didn’t need Japanese for Vet Science, but she liked languages and she was good at them. She squinted through her eyelashes, letting the patterns of the text draw themselves before her, as if floating in the air above the page. Then she hesitated. If she used the mist for seeing the patterns in the text, would the web form again and would there be someone else at the other end?

  She gazed out the window, feeling uneasy.

  A puff of smoke from a bushfire rose in the distance. From up here, the landscape looked grey, washed out, parched. A road sliced through paddocks directly below her, and on it a tiny white car moved. A mother collecting kids from school, a farmer going into town, a sales rep travelling to his next assignment.

  Without warning the familiar landscape melted before her eyes.

  She saw rolling hills covered in rainforest. Mist hung in the valleys, with wispy clouds reaching over the ridge tops. Ahead, the hills fell to a floodplain with reeds and small pockets of trees. Sparkles of light reflected off a huge stretch of water. At the horizon was the grey silhouette of an island, its outline jagged, square and stair-like, as if covered by buildings. The evening sky was deep green above, fading to yellow and orange at the horizon.

  Bloody hell, what was that?

  Jessica clawed at the armrest of her seat, heart thudding.

  The hippie flipped a page in h
is book. The businessman’s head drooped.

  She looked out the window. Brown paddocks, white specks: grazing sheep. Nothing strange, just the dull greyness of the Australian bush.

  It was so stuffy in this cramped cabin. Jessica turned her face into the flow of cool air from the air-conditioning vent.

  God, now she was getting worried. She’d dealt with all that shit when she was younger. Her parents had traipsed off with her to countless doctors and other professionals, yet the only thing they’d found out was that no one knew what it was, and the only thing she could do was to learn to live with it. Up until now, she’d thought she was doing well, but obviously she had thought wrong. Damn it, damn it.

  Something tickled the skin at her elbow. She lifted her arm to look for the culprit—a tiny spider or some such—but found nothing.

  Feeling sick, she leaned back in her seat, but as soon as her elbow touched the armrest, a shock went through her. She sat up with a jolt and placed her hand on the window—a current went through it and the panel underneath it, and . . . Now tendrils of mist spread from the floor and the walls of the plane.

  The two male passengers sat reading and sleeping, and the pilot stared ahead, moving his head in a rhythm as if singing to himself.

  The tickling spread from her hands to her back and her legs, everywhere her body touched the plane.

  This was ridiculous. Fool or not, something was going on here.

  She called out, “Excuse me.” Her voice was hoarse and didn’t rise over the noise of the engine.

  Now the very air tickled, as if it was alive with static electricity. Jessica reached for her seatbelt, ready to push herself up and tap the pilot on the shoulder.

  There was a flash, turning the world into a seething mass of white. Jessica couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe.

  The plane lurched and shuddered.

  She must have been knocked out, because the next thing she knew her eyes had gone funny and everything looked blurred in rainbow colours.