Dark Embers

by R. L. Giddings

  He stopped and looked directly Carlotta. “You’re not going to like what comes next.”

  Carlotta said, “Oh, for God’s sake, Dougie! We can do without your theatrics.”

  He sat forward on his chair. He didn’t look happy. “On Tuesday night, in the presence of the pack’s solicitors, your father was declared officially dead.”

  Suddenly, Carlotta was on her feet. “You can’t be serious! I can’t believe you just told me that!”

  I stood and tried to calm her but she was furious.

  Dougie wasn’t quite finished. “I’m here to offer any help you might need on behalf of the Anderson clan. You’ll be receiving a letter in the next few days. It’s to inform you that, as tenants of the estate, you have thirty days to vacate the property. After which time, if you’re still here, you will be evicted.”

  Carlotta pushed past me and, for a second, I thought she was going to hit him despite the disparity in size. Somehow she managed to contain herself.

  “Get out!”

  “I’m going,” he stood up, wiping his mouth with a napkin. “Just know that this was none of my doing. It was the pack who wanted to go through the lawyers. I just thought you should know what was happening.”

  I said, “I appreciate that but I’m not sure that she does. I think you should leave.”

  I tried to take Carlotta’s arm but she pulled away from me.

  Dougie said, “It doesn’t have to end like this. There is a way that all this can be avoided.”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like your father.”

  “No, honestly. There is a way for you to stay on the estate. With your father gone there’s still a place for you here.”

  Carlotta straightened. She closed her eyes and then, when she re-opened them, she looked at him with undisguised contempt.

  “What? You want me to stay on as a cleaner?”

  “No. I was suggesting that you might want to get married.”

  She gave a cold, bloodless laugh.

  “This must have been quite a meeting. And, may I ask, did any potential suitors present themselves on the night?”

  “Just the one.”

  “And who was that?”

  “Well, that would be me.”

  *

  After Dougie left we both had an unspoken desire to be left on our own but we also knew that if we stayed in the dining room one of the girls would come in to ask us how the meeting had gone and we weren’t up to dealing with that right then. So, instead, we went to the only place we could go where we knew we wouldn’t be disturbed. We went to the squash courts.

  Whenever we visited we refrained from turning on any lights. We didn’t want to disturb Silas any more than we had to. Although most of the windows had been blacked-out there was enough light streaming through the cracks for us to navigate our way around. It was deathly silent inside. The only noise was the sound of Silas’s breathing.

  I was a regular visitor. Morning and evening, I would oversee the two girls who had been tasked with mucking out Silas’s stall for that day. The girls were invariably nervous and so tended to rush things. That could be dangerous so I was careful to double-check everything. It was neither possible nor advisable to clean his court in the dark so the three of us went about our work wearing head torches.

  I had yet to miss a session. I couldn’t afford not to. The process was so potentially dangerous that I had initially resisted any help. But Helena and Carlotta had put an end to that. They could see that I was slowly pushing myself to the brink of exhaustion. And one slip-up would be all that it would take.

  The strange thing about the whole ‘cleaning’ process was that I rarely interacted with Silas. My attention had to be on the girls. I couldn’t afford to drop my guard when others were around him. Things were different whenever Carlotta came to help. Over the last few months we had become extremely close, partly because of our strength of feelings towards Silas. Although we both loved him in our various ways, we were both realists. We knew that we were on borrowed time. Unless we could find a way to turn him back into his human form then he would be lost to us. His feral side was becoming more noticeable with each passing day. The situation couldn’t continue indefinitely.

  We’d only need to slip-up once and then the decision would be taken away from us. We’d have to have him destroyed.

  His health was fading. We never acknowledged the fact but it was true. We said that we didn’t put the lights on because we didn’t want to startle him but the truth was more complex. We didn’t want to turn the lights on because we didn’t want to see how bedraggled and care-worn he had become. He had lost weight, of that there was no doubt, but something had changed over the last few weeks in the reaction of the other girls. Initially they had dreaded the duty and had been terrified just to be in his presence. They had worked with their eyes averted, their heads down, desperate to complete their chores so that they could escape out into the light.

  But, of late, their demeanour had softened towards him. He barely touched his food anymore and that was the problem. He wasn’t just losing weight, he was also losing his vitality. It was almost as if he had made the conscious decision not to go on. And the girls saw that too. Where once they had looked at him with unbridled fear, now it was a fear tinged with pity.

  “We’re going to have to tell Helena about Dougie’s visit,” Carlotta was sitting beside me on one of the bleacher seats.

  “I know.”

  Having established her School for Witches in the grounds of the manor, Helena had recently embarked on a major fund raising tour. She wasn’t due back for another couple of weeks.

  “I should have checked the documentation myself,” Carlotta said bitterly. “When mother signed the estate over to Helena, the lawyers should have realised that something was amiss: that we didn’t actually own it.”

  “Perhaps there’s something we can do to challenge this. Get the lawyers to delay them.”

  “That’s probably all they’d be able to do. Along with charging us a fortune.”

  I sat forward in my seat. “You have to fight it though. You can’t just let the pack kick you out of your own home.”

  Carlotta let her head drop. In the half-light she looked thoroughly beaten. I’d never seen her like that before. Normally, she was the positive one.

  “It’s weird. It’s as if I’ve been expecting this all my life. Fearing that something would happen that would jeopardise everything. I mean: look at us,” she indicated Silas’ dark shape skulking at the back of his prison. “The Laing family. Look at what we’ve become. The odd thing is that, now that it’s happened, I can’t say that I’m at all surprised.”

  I leaned across and squeezed her arm. I didn’t know what else to do.

  We both stiffened when we heard the creak of the door being opened behind us. We turned to see Kosi dressed in jeans and a polo neck. Every time I saw her she seemed so much older than her thirteen years. She was taller, yes, but it was natural poise which would set her apart as she developed into womanhood.

  “What is it?” I asked, suddenly fearful. “Has something happened?”

  She held out my phone. I must have left it in the dining room.

  “It kept ringing,” she said. “I thought it must be important so I answered it. Did I do the right thing?”

  “Yes,” I laughed in exasperation. “Who was it?”

  “It was Millie. She wants you to ring her back straightaway. She says it’s urgent.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The whole street had been cordoned off. A sinister looking police van was parked on the pavement facing in our direction. A single police-officer stood in front of the van, his automatic weapon slung at chest height. As I followed Millie under the yellow and black police tape he switched to a side-on position while speaking into his head-set.

  I said, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “We’re all in shock,” Millie said. “We just need to be cautious. Make sure that we don’t o
ver-react.”

  “How have you managed to keep a lid on all this? When I came down on the train there was nothing on social media.”

  “Gas explosion. We’re trying to keep it simple considering we’re only five minutes from Whitehall. Don’t want to give the news agencies anything to get excited about.”

  The officer with the gun moved to the edge of the pavement, inclining his weapon towards us. A second officer, similarly armed, appeared out of an alleyway.

  “I’m going to have to see some I.D.,” the first officer said.

  I stayed where I was while Millie took the documents from her bag and went over to show them to him. All the time she was doing her best glamour work. I concentrated on the second officer as I casually sang the words of the Misremembering Song. He was more susceptible than most. Just looked straight through me, no acknowledgment at all. His recollection of the event would be patchy at best - if he remembered anything at all.

  “C’mon,” Millie said and I had to hurry to catch her up.

  My first thought was that we had gone up the wrong turning. This couldn’t be the same road that I used to take to The Bear Garden. Everything looked so different. So much lighter and airier. The walled gardens opposite hadn’t changed but normally at this time of day they were draped in shadows but today they were picked out by the sun giving them a completely different aspect.

  The whole of the bear Garden was in ruins.

  “Oh my God! I just didn’t realise.”

  There was the sound of a helicopter overhead. Press or police? It was impossible to tell.

  I crossed over to the far side of the road in order to get a better perspective - to take it all in. A huge pile of rubble dominated the sight and, if you looked carefully, you could pick out the individual floors. Or at least what had been floors before the whole thing came crashing down on itself. Figures in dark overalls were moving through the wreckage. A section at the rear of the building, the 1950s section as it was known, was still standing with rows of offices going up to the fourth floor now exposed to the elements. Everywhere you looked there was some bizarre detail. In one room, a large desk was hanging over the precipice, two of its four legs entirely unsupported. Higher up, there was a filing cabinet with a raven perched on top of it. A woman’s dress, still on its hanger, fluttered in the breeze.

  The sight of the dress suddenly brought it all home to me.

  “How many?”

  “By the last count, eighty seven but that number’s set to rise.”

  “But you said on the phone…”

  “That was five hours ago. I tell you, this is getting worse by the minute. The only blessing is that it happened at night. If it had happened during the day, when the place was full …” her voice trailed off.

  I went over and hugged her.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Millie didn’t hug me back. She felt brittle.

  “Angry. With myself. With them. If I’d been able to work it out sooner…”

  “Strikes me that without your quick thinking we’d be looking at two separate bomb sites, not just one.”

  “We should have confiscated their clothes. He had the explosives in his collar!”

  “That’s nonsense and you know it. This is the Sidhe we’re dealing with. Potential royalty. Policy is that we should extend them every courtesy.”

  “Then the policy’s wrong.”

  I surveyed the carnage around me. “That would seem to be the case.”

  I couldn’t quite take it all in. We were looking at a vast area. I hadn’t realised that the place had been so damned big. The main search activity seemed to be centred on a raised section towards the back which stood ten metres off the ground. The top section consisted of reinforced concrete which had split into several sections. The rescue workers had set up a hoist and were lowering a cable down through the central section. The lack of heavy machinery made the scene seem all the more forlorn.

  A small knot of men stood around at ground level appearing to coordinate the rescue efforts.

  “Who’s that?” I pointed towards a thick-set figure in a red jump-suit.

  Millie strained to see. “Oh, that. That’s MacMillan. He’s representing the Inner Council.

  “Really?” The members of the council weren’t renowned for their practical skills. They largely consisted of academics.

  The Inner Council is a huge multinational operation with centres right across the globe. It oversees and regulates the activities of a wide range of practitioners. Whilst the Bear Garden is charged with enforcing the laws set by the Council, it is the Council itself which sets them and this is where its true power lies. In the last ten years though the Council has taken something of a back seat when it came to exercising its considerable powers. Now it looked as if all that was about to change.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “Taking charge, by the looks of things.”

  “Speaking of which: what’s happening with Kinsella?”

  Millie closed her eyes as if the very effort of remembering was just too much for her. “Not sure what to say. They dug him out about six this morning. He was alive but unresponsive. Burns across his upper body. One of his lungs had collapsed. Multiple leg fractures, one of them is a compound fracture which they’re saying is particularly serious. They’re working on him now but it doesn’t look good. Even if he does survive, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to save his legs. I know, it’s awful. Awful.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Not your fault.”

  She wanted to say more but had to stop as tears filled her eyes.

  “What about you,” I said. “You can’t have had any sleep at all.”

  “No, I’m fine. And I had to see this for myself.”

  We took another ten minutes wandering around trying to take it all in. I was just too distracted to make any sense of it. I kept picturing Kinsella hurt or badly burned. One recurring image was of him buried under tons of debris. How bad must his injuries have been if Millie was talking so matter-of-factly about him losing his legs?

  I wanted to know what had happened. How had the explosives been utilised? Had they been carrying them in their collars as this man had done? I supposed that I was going to have to wait a long time before we got any answers to that, if we got them at all. Everything would have been recorded on the cameras but I suspected that the servers which stored the information had been located inside the building. Somewhere under all that rubble.

  Perhaps we’d never know exactly what had happened.

  Especially if Kinsella…

  A cloud of dust whipped across the site, carried by a hot gust of wind. There was an awful lot of dust in the air and my eyes were soon streaming. After about ten minutes of this we started to make our way back to the road. I could hardly see by this point and it took me a moment to realise that someone had joined us. A tall, good looking man in his twenties. He was wearing a dark blue suit.

  “This is Edwin,” Millie said.

  I was still rubbing the dust from my eyes. “Oh, hi. Bronte.”

  When he offered me his hand, I had to wipe my fingers on my skirt before accepting. He had a cool, dry handshake.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said with a wry smile

  I didn’t know how to respond to that.

  “Edwin’s part of SORCA. They’re the team investigating the blast.”

  “Blasts,” Edwin corrected. “There were two.”

  “They were both members of the Sidhe, is that right?”

  Edwin looked at Millie who shrugged. “She needs to know.”

  SOCRA was an intelligence gathering body. Their operatives weren’t renowned for sharing their knowledge with anyone.

  “Three members of the Sidhe were arrested last night in a co-ordinated operation. We believe that they were part of a group which has been targeting members of the magical community.”

  Millie said, “There have been three incidents in the last mont
h of individuals being snatched off the streets. We tend to find them later. Looks like they’ve been tortured for information before being killed.”

  “How did you link it to the Sidhe?”

  “Ritualistic cuts on the bodies,” Edwin said. “The Sidhe like their knives.”

  We moved away from the blast-site and started walking back the way we’d come. My eyes still felt gritty. I’d need to wash them out as soon as I got the opportunity.

  “You said there were three members of the Sidhe arrested. What about the others? I mean, aren’t there usually five of them?”

  Edwin frowned. “That’s right. They’re very big on the pentagon. Unfortunately, we lost them. We’d had them under surveillance but, when we moved in, two of them were missing. I’d like to say we’re closing in on them but, so far, nothing. They seem to have disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

  I didn’t pursue the issue. Someone had messed up big time. The assumption had to be that they had access to explosives which were, at the very least, on a par with that of their kinsmen. They posed a very real threat and would continue to do so until they were eventually caught.

  Even without explosives they were going to be difficult to capture. They’re incredibly hard to kill, super-fast and amazingly strong. Overall, a very formidable opponent. They were impossible to take down one-on-one, normally requiring an entire assault team but even then you had to approach the situation with a fair amount of guile if you hoped to have any chance of prevailing.

  There were two things working in our favour. Culturally, they’re very different from us. The Sidhe are fixated on games of chance and gambling in all its iterations. As a result, they are prone to taking enormous risks. That’s why their favourite way of getting around London is by going over the roof-tops, they love the adrenaline rush. The one other thing working to our advantage was that the longer they remained in our world, the weaker they would become. I wasn’t sure how long the process took but, eventually, their strength would leave them, making them much easier to deal with.