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Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Keep Reading
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
Jessica lazily zigzagged over the roofs of the High Street, paused above Miss Strega’s hardware shop and sniffed the air. “How odd,” she thought as she zoomed down to the pavement and hopped off her broom. “There’s no smell of a bubbling cauldron. I thought I was to start my Brewing lessons today.”
She sniffed once more – but there was nothing, not even a hint of Cold Smelly Voles – so she removed her flying helmet, helped Berkeley out of her pocket, lifted the door latch and hurried inside to find out what was going on.
To her surprise, Miss Strega was not in her usual place behind the shop counter. Instead, she was whizzing around, fast-forwarding, reversing and zooming all over the place, pulling drawers open and scribbling notes on a clipboard. “Moonrays and marrowbones!” she was muttering. “What a mess!”
“What’s a mess?” Jessica asked. “Have you lost something?”
Miss Strega swivelled around, peered over her glasses at Jessica, stuck her pencil behind her ear and swooped to the floor. “Three economy packets of owl feathers, two phials of Fairy Tears, half a Dragon’s Tooth, one Wasp Sting and eight Spider Egg Sacs. That’s all!”
“That’s all?” repeated Jessica, wondering what sort of spell Miss Strega was brewing up with that mixture.
Miss Strega waved a hand at the open drawers. “I’m talking about Brewing ingredients.”
“Brewing ingredients?”
“By the hooting of Minerva’s owl, Jess! You sound like an echo. Don’t you understand this is an emergency! I’ve run out of everything from Mystic Biscuits to Teenage Slugs. We shall have to leave on a collecting trip at once.”
“A collecting trip? Fantastic!” said Jessica who loved both travelling and shopping. “Where do we have to go?”
“The attic,” said Miss Strega.
“The attic?” Jessica’s face fell.
“You’re still echoing me, dear. Now, on your marks.” She tweaked the starter twigs on her broomstick. “Ig-Fo-Li: Ignition, Forward and Lift.”
As Miss Strega rose majestically towards the ceiling, her cat Felicity, who had been snoozing on top of a pile of Spell books, launched herself on to the back of her broom. Jessica remounted her own broomstick and followed them as they disappeared through the trapdoor into the attic.
The attic smelt of old suitcases and dusty cauldrons – and cats, of course. Felicity was Miss Strega’s number one shop cat, but there were always other cats in residence, cats on holiday or having kittens or in hiding. Jessica took one of them on her lap and sat down on a pile of moth-eaten cloaks while Miss Strega rummaged about behind a curtain of cobwebs.
“Here we are,” she said at last. “This is what we want – the Expedition Kit.” She began to haul out chests marked Samples and boxes marked Specimens, baskets of every shape and size, long-handled fishing nets and short-handled butterfly nets.
“And of course, we shall have to take the campfire cauldron.” Miss Strega turned a small cooking pot upside down and whacked it. Several cross spiders scuttled across the attic boards in search of cover. A family of bewildered sleepy mice, who had bedded down for the night, tumbled out on to the floor. Felicity and all the other cats immediately chased after them.
Once she had calmed everything down again, Miss Strega started loading her broomstick while Jessica inspected the Expedition Kit. Inside one of the boxes, she found rows and rows of glass jars and bottles, each labelled in Miss Strega’s spidery handwriting, as well as tweezers and camel-hair brushes, pin cushions and tins of rubber bands.
“The plan,” Miss Strega explained, “is to collect all the standard shop items…”
“Like Snails’ Drool and Gnats’ Spittle,” suggested Jessica, reading the labels on the bottles.
“Exactly, but we’ll scoot around looking for some new products as well…”
“…like the Conjuring Stones from Pelagia’s beach or Dr Krank’s Withershins Balls?”
Miss Strega nodded her long chin vigorously. “Absolutely! Witches World Wide like novelty as much as anyone. So, we’ll need to fly off the usual flight paths and go to the Very End of the Earth.”
“That sounds great,” agreed Jessica as she hurriedly replaced the cork on a whiffy bottle labelled Aroma of Lion’s Den. “But how on earth are we going to carry all this gear? Once these boxes and baskets are full, our broomsticks won’t be able to lift off the ground.”
“That’s where the homing brooms come in.” Miss Strega pointed at a pair of long-handled dusters leaning against the water tank and nodding their pink and grey feathered heads as they chatted. “They work rather like those racing pigeons that always know their way home,” explained Miss Strega, ignoring Jessica’s raised eyebrows. “Once we have collected enough stock, we send the brooms back with all our parcels; they’ll come and go as often as we please.”
Jessica whistled admiringly. The homing brooms turned a little pinker and bowed.
Miss Strega heaved the last of the boxes on to the back of her broom and handed Jessica a large butterfly net. “You’ll need that in a minute. Now, are we ready to fly? Are all your twig controls in working order? Have you got your flying helmet? Is your cloak clean?”
Jessica nodded, fastened the strap of her aerodynamic flying helmet under her chin and smoothed down the front of her silk Super-Duper De-Luxe Guaranteed-Invisibility-When-You-Need-It cape.
“Have you got your Spell book? Your wand? An owl feather in case you need to do some Mingling?”
Jessica nodded again, three times.
“Then, let’s take to the sky. I think we might start our journey with a moon-vault.”
Chapter Two
Jessica and Miss Strega perched on the tallest chimneypot and squinted at the sliver of banana-shaped moon. It was just visible behind a bank of damp black clouds.
“I think it’s wobbling,” Jessica said, doubtfully.
“Perhaps it isn’t a good night for vaulting.”
“Fiddlesticks. It’s not wobbling; it’s shimmering, just as I’d hoped. Nets aloft, please.”
Miss Strega flew on to the peak of the roof tiles and shuffled along it, holding her butterfly net in one outstretched arm. Jessica shuffled along behind her, wondering what on earth (or on moon) the nets were for.
When the planet Venus was lined up precisely at a right angle to the control twigs of their broomsticks, Miss Strega shouted, “Deploy your Moon-Vault twig, NOW.”
Immediately, Jessica’s plaits flew back over her shoulders and her scarf streamed out behind her back. It was like being on a rollercoaster with an invisible giant blowing into her face. Then she was off. She broke loose, shot up into the sky – and flew straight, bang, right into a cloud of sticky moondust.
“Hey!” she yelled at Miss Strega who was ducking and diving ahead of her, scooping up the dust in her net. “Hang on.”
“No, you keep up,” Miss Strega shouted back over her shoulder, “and catch as much of this dust as you can. I know it tickles but it’s very popular with fairies. They think they look cute sprinkling it around wherever they go – so dust away, Jess.”
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, cute about moondust, Jessica decided. It got everywhere, in her ears and her eyes and her socks and her hair and up her nose like summer midges in a Scottish bog. It wasn’t tickly, but it was itchy, very itchy. So Jess pulled her scarf up to her nose, closed her eyes and flailed about with her moondust net as best as she could.
When she opened her eyes again, she was already tumbling down the far side of the moon. The neon lights of an intergalactic highway lay ahead.
“The Milky Way!” she yelled, tossing her net of moondust to Miss Strega and zooming towards the Milky Way entrance.
As usual, there was a long tailback of fliers trying to get on to the Milky Way. There were turbaned viziers on flying carpets, dreamy angels on fluffy clouds and a set of flying saucers. Jessica cruised to a pause behind a white winged horse that was pawing the ground impatiently.
Miss Strega came up behind her. “There,” she said, flipping over the pages on her clipboard and putting a large tick beside Moondust. “One done, only 332 more to go. Now, what on earth is holding us up today? Not another Phoenix rising, I hope.”
“Look over there!” Jessica pointed towards the toll-bridge barrier where a large dragon with a very fat bottom had got stuck. Her scaly tail flicked nervously as she tried to reverse out, scattering scales everywhere.
Miss Strega tut-tutted. “Shame to see those going to waste, Jess. Perhaps you could zoom over and pick them up.”
Jessica twiddled with her broom twigs, took off at an unexpected angle – a sort of diagonal lift – twirled over the queue and swooped down behind the flustered dragon.
“Do you mind if I take some of your scales?” she asked, smiling her sweetest smile.
The dragon turned around, revealing a long mournful face and surprisingly bushy eyebrows. “You can have all the scales you want, Miss,” she sniffed, “and if you can Spell me out of here, I’ll tell you where you can get some Dragons’ Teeth for nothing as well. I know you witches like a good supply of those.”
“I’m only a witch-in-training,” said Jessica, stuffing as many of the dragon’s scales as she could into her saddlebag, “but I’ll see what I can do.” She took out her wand and waved it about. “This should work.
“With a wave of my wand, da-da.
A bang of my heels, bang-bang,
With a gnash of my teeth, clang-clang,
Three bats of my eyelids and a wink,
Your bottom will begin to shrink –
I think.”
The dragon’s bottom stopped thrashing around. Little by little, it began to shrink.
“Hey, steady on,” said the dragon with a loud snort. “I don’t want to be too bony. I’ve got to sleep on a lot of sharp metal objects. You don’t want to be too thin if you live in a cold cave on top of a hoard of gold, you know.”
“Right,” said Jessica, with a giggle. “That should be enough.”
With one final wriggle, the dragon was FREE. She flew off with her cheeks ablaze, snorting embarrassed plumes of smoke.
“Hang on,” shouted Jessica, “what about the Dragons’ Teeth?”
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