Red Cap

With a past that haunts her and a forbidden place calling, she can’t resist the pull. In the forgotten ruins of an Anglo-Scottish tower, she’ll come face to face with the creature of legend—and with herself.

-1-

“Not long now, sweetie, just sit tight,” you assured me.

Why, Mum? Why did we have to go to Gran’s that afternoon?

I’d protested the whole day. Refusing to put on underwear. Throwing a fit about shoes. I squirmed in my car seat and you kept telling me off, gently, your voice never quite capable of sounding harsh. Daddy didn’t say a word. And Daddy was never speechless.

“Maybe we should pull over, Rob, she’s clearly not comfortable,” you pleaded.

Daddy muttered something low and strange, like he’d swallowed his voice. I started banging my fists on my knees and howling nonsense.

Restless—that was always the word they used for me. Even now, I can’t sit still. Can’t stay in one place too long.

The sleet turned to hail, hammering the windscreen like slingshot pebbles from the sky. I screamed louder. It was like being trapped inside a drum—the centre of an orchestra crashing all around me. I remember it. That moment. The first time I felt the lava inside me rumble—boiling up from my stomach into my chest. Something primal. A force that didn’t belong inside a small child’s body.

Then you turned your head and met my eyes. Just a glance. But it calmed the magma. Your grey gaze melted the rage. You smiled, kissed the air toward me, and for a moment I felt okay. Safe.

Then the world tipped.

A violent jolt. You slammed into the window—I think—but I couldn’t hear anything over the storm. Daddy’s hands flew across the steering wheel. Leaves. Branches. Green everywhere, clawing at my window. Then the sound of a horn, cutting through the hail like a blade.

Light. So much light.

And noise. More than I’d ever heard before.

I screamed.

Lava exploded out of me—my scream so powerful it shattered something. And just like that, the noise stopped. The cold rushed in, and the world went quiet.

Tiny white stones of hail dropped on my face. I blinked. Still strapped in my seat. I saw our car, wrecked. Another vehicle, crushed. A tree collapsed over both. The horn still sang—long and wailing. You and Daddy weren’t moving.

I tried to undo my seatbelt, but it wouldn’t release. I was stuck. Alone. The punishment for saving myself too soon.

I don’t remember anything after that.

-2-

Gran says I was never quite right after the crash. But she never says it with kindness.

She doesn’t understand me, not really. She just keeps the doors locked and her chin up high.

We live in a cottage where the wind screams through the gaps in the windows and the past lives in the walls. Gran keeps things tidy. Silent. Controlled.

And I keep my secret.

I can zap. That’s what I call it. Like teleportation. If I picture somewhere in my head—somewhere I’ve actually seen—I can go there. Instantly. It started after the crash. Maybe something in me shattered open.

Gran knows. She caught me once, appearing in the garden when I’d been locked in my room. She said it was dangerous. Said it had to be hidden. That people would think I was wrong.

She told me stories when I was little. Horrible tales about monsters on the borderlands. Red Cap, she said. A creature who bathed in blood and broke bones with rocks. The kind of stories meant to scare a child from wandering.

They worked. For a while.

-3-

But secrets don’t stay secrets forever. Not in a school full of sharp tongues and bored minds.

I don’t even remember what set me off. A boy tugged my blazer. A teacher shouted too loud. Something cracked open and the lava boiled up again.

I panicked. The classroom vanished. I zapped.

Somewhere in my subconscious—a place I must’ve seen once but never entered—I appeared on the edge of the Anglo-Scottish border.

The one place I’d been told never to go.

-4-

I could feel you, Mum, in the wind there. The air was thick with something ancient. I wandered along mossy stones and down slick hillsides, pushing through thistle and damp grass until I saw it: the ruins of a castle, hunched like a secret on the horizon.

My phone buzzed in my pocket—Gran. Dozens of missed calls. A text: Where the hell are you?

I ignored it.

She never let me be myself. Never let me use the only part of me that felt extraordinary. She’d made me think my magic was something to be ashamed of.

I kept walking. My shoes were soaked, my legs aching. The wind bit at my cheeks and I couldn’t feel my ears. The castle was crumbling, overgrown—walls sunken with time. It felt safe. Forgotten.

I zapped to the top of the path to save my aching feet. The ruins loomed above me. The tower called.

-5-

Inside the stone tower, everything smelled of earth and damp. A curling staircase rose into shadow. I couldn’t zap higher—I’d never seen the top. So I climbed. One hand on the wall.

Each step a question mark.

And then I heard it.

Chewing. Wet, grotesque. Someone—or something—eating.

I froze.

Turned to flee.

A voice called out, low and rough: “Who’s there?”

I zapped. Down to the courtyard. Heart in my throat.

I ducked behind a crumbling wall and waited. I should’ve left. Should’ve disappeared. But curiosity rooted me there.

A figure stepped through the archway.

Small. Hunched. Grumpy expression. A long white beard that swept his chest like a tangled net.

He reached into his coat. Pulled out a scarlet hat.

My heart stopped.

Red Cap.

You told me stories, Mum. Said he’d kill trespassers with stones. Soak his cap in their blood.

I believed you.

But I also knew: I didn’t run from the crash. I didn’t run from my grief. I wouldn’t run from this.

Even if it was him.

To be continued...