Chapter Seven
I'm awakened from a deep, dreamless sleep by someone trying to batter in my door. I raise my bleary head off of the pillow and glare at the white wood, as if by some magic my death glare will penetrate the portal and obliterate the offender where they stand. Unfortunately, my magical death glare does not vaporize the offending pounder, and I have to stagger to the door to regain sweet, blessed silence. I fling it open, surprising another boarder named Rory on the other side.
"Phone for you," he announces before skittering away back down the hall.
I take a look at my digital alarm clock. 8:47 a.m. Not crack of dawn early, but still far too early to be expecting coherent conversation from me on a Saturday morning. I clomp down the stairs and pick up the receiver that's resting on a side table. My voice comes out as a froggy croak when I manage to say hello.
"Amaranth?" The voice on the other end of the phone speaks in softly accented tones that I know well. It has probably been almost a year since I heard or saw Patrick's mother, but I will always recognize her melodious, slightly husky voice.
"Mrs. Bowen?" I bite back an enormous yawn. It isn't like her to be calling me out of the blue. "Is everything okay?"
When she breathes, I can hear the slight hitch in her voice. Almost like she's trying not to cry or not to give into panic. But when she speaks, she sounds mostly calm. "I was wondering if you've heard from Patrick."
I rub my eyes, trying to think. I haven't seen Patrick since that day in the park. Since I don’t go to school, I wouldn’t see him there. I'd been planning on getting in touch with him to see if he was still angry for whatever it was I’d done, but Resistance business kept getting in the way. "No, I haven't. I'm sorry." I swallow around the sudden lump in my throat, at the same time telling myself that this is nothing to get excited about. "Is he…?" I trail off, unable to give voice to the thought.
"He hasn't been home in three days." Her speech is fast, her voice pitched higher than normal. I can feel her panic transmitting over the phone lines; my own shoulder muscles are tensing like springs. "I've called all of his friends. Nobody has seen him." She pauses and her voice quavers. "Oh, Amaranth, can you please…"
I don't even let her finish. "I'm on my way." I replace the receiver and head upstairs to drag a brush through my hair and throw on the nearest thing that's clean and presentable.
I make my way over to Bloomsbury. A quick walk, a bus, and another sprint for several blocks and I'm on Patrick's street. I pass the park near Patrick's building. It's empty today, as it is most every day. It isn't wise to spend too much time outside without an activity. The Inquisition can be fickle and it’s wise not to give them an excuse to pick you up for loitering.
And then I'm standing in front of the door to Patrick's building. I don't think of it as my building, not anymore. Not since my mother died was it my building. Still, I climb steps that are as familiar to me as my own reflection and make my way to his family's flat.
I pass the door to the flat my mother and I lived in without looking at it. I don’t want to be reminded of my life before—it's part of why I rarely come to visit Pat at his house. I stop in front of his door and knock.
The door opens and I'm immediately enveloped in a hug. His mother still smells the same: jasmine and a funny burnt orange scent that I've always liked. I'm surprised at the warmth of her greeting considering I haven't seen her in over a year; Patrick and I meet outside, away from the building since he knows why I don't like coming by.
She finally pulls away, holding me at arm's length. Her dark brown eyes survey me, narrowing a little when they reach my hair. She lightly touches the strands. "Pat never told me you had cut your hair."
"It's pretty recent," I answer, trying not to be too self-conscious about it. His mum's hair is a glossy black river sliding down her back. I tuck the sides behind my ears.
She smiles, her teeth a flash of white in her café au lait face. She’s Indian and Patrick gets his coloring from her; his father was British. "It's cute. It suits you." She beckons me inside and leads me into the parlour. She offers me tea, which I refuse, then gestures for me sit down.
I settle into a side chair and come right to the point. "When was the last time you saw or heard from Pat?"
She folds her hands in her lap, eyes downcast. "Wednesday evening. He was going to meet some friends for a study group—he had a project he was working on. Something for his computer classes." She pauses, her gaze abstract, as if she were looking at something only she could see. "He said he might be late, that they had a lot to do. When I saw that he hadn't slept in his bed the next morning, I just assumed that he'd slept over at one of the boys' houses because it got too late."
She smoothes out the fabric of her trousers. I keep quiet, taking mental notes, waiting for her to continue. "But when he didn't come home on Thursday, I began to worry. I called all of his friends, went over to their houses when I couldn't reach anyone. I called the school and found out that he hadn't shown up that day." Her voice grows thick with emotion. "No one knew what had happened or where he might be."
"Did his friends tell you anything?"
She nods. "One boy said he left a little after midnight. He never made it home." Mrs. Bowen shakes her head in despair. "I contacted the police, but they were not much help. They have better things to do than chase after a runaway—that's what they said. But Patrick didn't run away." She looks at me. "Which is why I decided to call you."
I lean back and rub my hands together to work some warmth into them. "What do you think I can do?" I am afraid of what she's going to ask of me. And I won't be able to refuse her. Not after the way she and Patrick took care of me when my mother…died.
The look she gives me is as pointed as one of my blades. "Amaranth, I'm not stupid. And neither is Patrick." She smiles humorlessly at the gobsmacked look on my face. "I want you to do what you can to find him," she says, leaning forward. Her dark eyes are intense, locking onto mine with a maternal fierceness. "I don't think he's missing, at least not in the normal, human way."
I sit there in silence, trying to formulate the words and string them together in the proper order. "You think he's been possessed."
She nods, and I can see her eyes flush with tears, but nothing spills down her face. "I do. And I think that you are the only one who can find him."
I shake my head, not wanting the responsibility of all of her hopes resting on me. "I'm not sure what help I'll be, Mrs. Bowen." It's not like there's a safe and surefire way to tell whether someone is demon possessed. I can't exactly run around throwing holy water on people.
"You have a better chance than anyone else of knowing something about him. All I'm asking is that you check into his disappearance. Ask your…friends if they've seen him."
I look down at my hands, out of my depth. I want to help her, I do, but I'm not sure how. Unless I stumble across him in a series of unlikely coincidences, I will probably never see Patrick—or the demon riding around in his body. And that's assuming Pat has actually been possessed; it's still possible for bad things to happen to people that are completely not-demon related.
"You do realize his disappearance might not have anything to do with…them," I say, a touch of warning in my voice.
"I do." She leans back in her chair, resting her head against the back cushion. She closes her eyes and I catch a quick glimpse of the exhaustion she's trying to hide. I can't imagine what it must be like for her without Patrick. When his father died, Mrs. Bowen raised Pat by herself, with no family or help. I think that's why she and my mother became such fast friends. The two single mothers in the building needed to stick together.
She opens her eyes, but they stare out at nothing. "I just know it somehow—a mother's intuition perhaps—that he's in trouble." She comes out of her reverie and faces me, her eyes a force, pulling me in. "You're the only one I trust to help. I know you can't do much more than keep your eyes and ears out for him, but anything is better than sitting here, waiting and wondering
." She pauses, considering me. "Please, Amaranth."
"I'll do whatever I can." I want to make her happy, to set her mind at ease, but I can't do it. Not when I know the likelihood of finding Patrick alive and unharmed is so very, very slim. "But even if I find him, he might not be…." She holds up her hand to stop my words.
I wonder if it wouldn’t be better for her if Patrick is never found. Would I have been able to live with it, not knowing what had happened to my mother? Would it have been better than seeing the pitiable wreck that was left once the Inquisition was through with her? Which was worse: the knowing or the not knowing?
I leave her with the promise that I'll be in touch with anything I find out and that she can call me whenever she likes. And then, because I can't think of anything better to do and because I don't want to go back to the boarding house, I walk the streets. I have no direction in mind. I just wander about the city, trying to lose myself in its byways and back streets.
Eventually, I find myself standing in front of the British Museum. Patrick and I used to hate coming here on the afternoons when our mothers would drag us to keep us occupied and, ostensibly, out of trouble, but at some point it became our de facto hangout. It didn't matter that all of the really interesting manuscripts and ancient exhibits were gone, stored away in vaults or destroyed because of the information they may contain. Even the Rosetta Stone was gone. Some Egyptian demon must have been scared something could be revealed in it beyond the key to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
I remember the first time my mother took us to the British Museum. She loved it there; she always said that the United States had such a short history in comparison to England and she loved to wander through and see something from way back when. To say that Patrick and I were bored would be an understatement of the highest order, like saying the Black Plague was like having a case of the sniffles. But it was raining and Patrick and I were driving everyone mad being cooped up inside, so on went the Wellies and out we went.
The only thing Patrick was interested in seeing were swords—any kind would do, he wasn’t picky. He was bouncing around, waving his arms in what he must have thought was dazzling swordplay. He had hit me accidentally at least three times by the time we saw the front doors. When my mum asked us what we wanted to do first, he practically shouted, “Swords!” Heads swiveled in our direction and I saw my mother go a little pale. She herded us to the closest exhibit, her eyes darting around nervously.
I looked over my shoulder and caught the telltale red insignia on a museum guard’s jacket. I wasn’t quite sure what the Inquisition was at that point, but I knew that the symbol meant trouble. I looked up at my mother as she hurried away from the man. Her mouth was set into a frown, and the little wrinkle in between her eyes was making an appearance.
She took us to the Egyptian exhibit. Patrick and I skittered in her wake like leaves before we stopped in front of a collection of jewelry and gold headpieces.
“Brilliant,” I breathed, pressing close to the glass case holding heavy neck plates. “Being a pharaoh would have been amazing.”
“You think?” Patrick’s dark face appeared next to mine in the glass. “It looks like a pain to me.”
I shoved him with my shoulder. In the reflection, his coloring made him look like a talking shadow. His bright grin flashed at me.
“You think you’d want to wear all that stuff in a desert?” He shoved me back.
“At least it’s not armor.” I put my fist on my hips, ready for a fight.
“Children,” came the warning from my mother. She didn’t miss much. “We’re in a museum.”
“Yeah, Ama.” Patrick tried to sound innocent. I think he failed, but my mother smiled at him. I scowled.
“Let’s go look at the mummies,” she suggested, holding out her hands for us.
Again we followed my mother as she led us through the warren of rooms that made up the Egyptian section of the museum. She brought us up short in front of a small figure wrapped tightly in what look like moldy scraps of cloth. My mother moved to the side so she could read the placard, leaving Patrick and me alone in front of the display.
“They pulled his brain out through his nose,” Patrick said, his voice conversational.
“Ew.” I wrinkled my nose in sympathy. “That’s disgusting.” I paused. “What else did they do?”
Patrick detailed all the things the ancient priests did to ready a body for mummification. I listened, my eyes tracing the mummified body, following the path of his words with my gaze. It’s fascinating and gross all at the same time. I’m amazed he can remember all of the details of this stuff; I’ve never been anything more than an average student.
When he finally stopped, I asked, “How’d you know all that?”
“There are these things called books,” he answered, nudging me playfully. “They live in this place called a library. You can find out all kinds of things.”
“That’s so funny, I forgot to laugh.” I put all the sneer I could muster into my voice. I moved away from him, in a bit of a snit.
“Oh, don’t be like that, Ama.” He followed me, trying to chuff me out of my mood.
I sat on a bench. My lower lip must have been poking out so much people were likely to trip over it, but I didn’t care. My mum always said I was smart, if only I would apply myself, but I just couldn’t see the point. There was only one thing I was interested in researching, and I doubted they had anything in any library about what happened to my father. Sometimes I was jealous of Patrick. At least he had memories of his father and knew how he died. I had nothing.
“I was only joking.” He sat down next to me, forcing me to scoot over to give him room. “You’re smart, Ama. Just in a different way.”
“Yeah, sure.” I don’t believe it. Pat was brilliant, so gifted it hurt me sometimes to be friends with him. I wondered when he’d get tired of me.
“No, really.” He pushed against me so his shoulder is touching mine. “And you’re much better at sports than I could ever be.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Patrick may have been a genius in class, but he was horrible with anything that required coordination. He could barely jog and kick a ball at the same time and he usually wound up wrapped in his own feet and falling over.
Looking up, I saw my mother talking with a man in front of a display of painted jars. It was Ryland, but this had been well before I’d been truly initiated into the Resistance. They were talking earnestly. I had met him a few times, but only knew him as my mother’s friend. It would still be years before I knew the exact nature of their friendship.
I pulled my eyes away from the two adults talking and noticed that the guard from the other room—the one wearing the Inquisition’s symbol—had followed us into the room. His eyes roved around the room, but they kept coming back to my mother and Ryland. I felt my throat close up in fear. I didn’t like that the man had noticed my mother.
Patrick’s voice pulled me out of my fear. “That’s why we’re the perfect team. I can outsmart anybody, and you can outfight them.”
I turned to look at him. He wore his usual smile. “Always, Pat.”
He nods. “Always, Ama.”
It takes someone jostling me against one of the glass cases to break me from my remembrance. I take a quick stroll through a few of our favorite rooms. The crowds are light today, what with the day being so fine. I walk through the rooms, glancing idly at crowns and swords, at jewelry and leatherwork, and try to make sense of what I should do. What if Patrick's been taken by the Inquisition, instead of just being possessed like his mother thinks?
I stand in front of the bog man. Patrick and I used to make fun of it, laughing at the unfortunate man's position. I remember his bright laugh, his teeth a flash of lightning against his dark skin. I wonder if I'll ever hear it again. I should have called him more, stayed in closer contact. Maybe if I had, whatever happened to him wouldn't have happened.
I head back to Auntie’s townhouse and climb the st
airs. I don't feel like talking to anyone. It's early afternoon, but I'm not hungry. I slide open the window in my room and make my way to the roof. I need peace. I've had all day to think, and I still don't feel like I know my own mind. But I know I need to at least try to find Patrick.
The Iron Bells Page 6
