Athena considered her from the doorway. Her guarded eyes simmered as she mulled over the theory.
“Either way,” said Desmond, “we have two halfbreeds left. I doubt the curse was sent only to Kieran Wilson. There is still Thomas Roberts and…” He trailed off and looked at Piper. Ash and Athena traced his gaze to her, and they all fell silent.
Piper swallowed.
A crease furrowed her brows and her lips pressed together. She pushed herself from the wall, staggering a little before she balanced herself.
“I need to go home.” Her voice, slicked with tears, wobbled as she picked up the black dust ball. “My mum could be next.”
Desmond opened his mouth, as if to speak, but Ash shot him a warning stare. Desmond’s lips closed and his jaw clenched. Piper suspected that she knew what he was going to say. She was thinking the same thing.
‘If she’s still alive…’
CHAPTER 17
April’s fingertips neared the emerald.
But before she could touch it, there was a ragged sound. It had come from upstairs, like a groan that rippled down a cranky floorboard. April’s fingers brushed against the tissue paper as she stepped away from the buffet table.
“Pipes?” she shouted, nearing the staircase. “Pipes, are you up there?”
A rattle and crash ricocheted through the apartment. Then, a pitter-patter of footsteps ran above her head. April sighed and stared at the door above the staircase.
“Pipes, I knocked like twenty times.” She huffed. “And who leaves their doors unlocked these days? Do you want those stalkers to break in again?”
The door crashed open. Nigel was framed in the doorway, his chest heaving, his eyes wild.
April blinked before she swept her gaze over his clothes—tattered, and smeared in a ruby-red liquid—back up to his deranged face where chunks of meat dangled from his teeth.
April took a step back. The fierceness of Nigel’s wide hungry eyes startled her.
Nigel shivered as he rotated his neck and flared his nostrils. He inhaled. His chest rose. Then, he froze and gawked down at April, his lips spreading into a feral grin.
His teeth were stained with blood.
Nigel threw himself off the staircase and flew right at her.
April screamed, a shrill sound that echoed through the whole building. She scrambled backwards, turned, and raced for the front door.
April’s shoulder slammed into the door frame. Her plimsolls slid against the smooth floor as she lunged out of the apartment.
Nigel threw his head back and screeched, a sound that sent chills down her spine, a sound that resembled a thousand crows cawing.
She glanced over her shoulder and gasped. Nigel dropped to all fours and crawled after her—a fast crawl, his legs and arms moving in blurs beneath him as if her were a rabid dog.
April skidded on the landing, grabbed the railing, and swung herself onto the stairs. Her legs kicked out beneath her, scrambling down two steps at a time.
Nigel’s bloodied fingers swiped out and almost caught onto her hair. A couple of strands yanked out of her scalp and she yelped.
April grunted and jumped. She soared over the rest of the stairs, Nigel inches behind her. The landing came rushing up at her.
She crossed her arms in front of her face, shielding herself from the blow. Nigel had tackled her out of the air. Her body was thrown, and crashed onto the solid flooring with a crunch. Her phone skidded across the landing and struck the wall.
Nigel climbed on top of her as she wailed, a sound prickled with terror. Tears obscured her sight as she reached out and tried to drag herself from under his body. But his fingers hooked into her hair, held her down, and—
He bit her.
His teeth, as though they were sharp like razors, sank into her shoulder blade and tore the flesh from her body.
April screamed.
Her face pressed into the ground and her legs flailed beneath Nigel’s. Her cries gurgled as saliva dribbled from her lips. She tried to crawl forward, to reach her phone, but Nigel was too heavy.
Just as his teeth ripped into her neck, April swung her legs out from under him, twisted her body, and flipped them over. He smacked onto the ground before she staggered to her feet.
Her arm stretched around her shoulder, and her hand held the gushing wound on her back. Nigel sprung to his feet like a leopard and dove for her.
April twisted out of the way just in time, and ran up the staircase. Her ragged breaths were drowned out by Nigel’s roar. He chased her into Piper’s apartment. Before she could slam the door shut to lock him out, she was thrown off her feet.
The back of her head bounced against the solid floor, and her eyelids fluttered. Above her, she could a flash of fury in Nigel’s wild eyes, and his movements swept through her vision in a blur.
A blow of agony shot up her arm.
Nigel curled over her and bit her bicep. This time, she didn’t cry out or fight. April lay still, barely holding onto the scraps of consciousness she had left.
She wanted to fight, to scream and wrestle against him. But her muscles wouldn’t comply—her fingers wouldn’t wiggle; her legs wouldn’t flinch—and all she could do was listen as her friend ate her flesh.
CHAPTER 18
“Can’t you go any faster?” shouted Piper.
Ash spun the steering wheel and hit the accelerator. The van sped up the highway, swerving around the other cars. He shifted the gearstick and the van lurched forward. “Fast enough for you?” asked Ash.
Piper had her feet against the dashboard and smacked her hands against her knees. Her glassy eyes gazed out of the window, the bath bomb jiggling in her lap.
Athena and Ares had stayed behind with Kieran.
They had to wait for the clean-up team to arrive. Piper couldn’t wait, not for anyone or anything. On a regular day, her mother would be at work. But she’d left a note that morning—she would be home to open any cursed parcels that were delivered to their door.
Piper kicked the dashboard and shrilled a cry riddled with frustration. “Don’t you have anything faster?” she cried. “A portal or a bloody helicopter?”
Desmond, sprawled out in the backseat, spat, “Who do you think invented these vehicles? Oh, but nothing is ever good enough for dullborns, is it?”
“Des!” snapped Ash. He yanked the steering wheel and dodged a truck loaded with logs. “Now is not the time!”
Desmond swung up and rested his arm on the driver’s seat head-rest. The espresso tones of his hair were highlighted by the sunlight pouring into the van, giving each lock autumn hues. “The only reason I’m here is so we can get tortillas afterwards.”
Piper’s eyes widened and her jaw tightened. She craned her neck, glared, and said, “You have no heart. Good for you, Desmond. Now go back to sleep before I ram this bath bomb up your ars—”
“What he meant to say,” said Ash, “is that he doesn’t think anything happened to your mother. That’s why he isn’t worried about anything other than food. He’s not here, in the van with us, because he thinks we need backup. That is what he meant.”
Piper hadn’t stopped glaring at Desmond’s calm, annoying face. Her fingers itched to curl into a fist and sock him on his squared jaw. But she inhaled, and her body trembled, before she gritted out through her clenched teeth, “And you couldn’t just say that?”
Desmond slipped on a smile, one that radiated falseness. His cold eyes betrayed his pure contempt of her. “Where would the fun be in that?” he said, dropping back down onto the seat.
Piper’s nostrils flared as she twisted in her seat and glowered through the windshield. They veered off the highway and sped down a side road. But once they swerved around a corner, they hit traffic at a red-light. “What about those transporters at your Academy?” she asked, her feet tapping against the dashboard. “Can’t they get us to Notting Hill?”
“By the time they get to us, we would’ve already gotten there.”
“T
hey can’t just transport themselves here and then to my apartment?”
Ash shook his head. “Transporters can’t shift themselves through space. Only objects and, after years of training, other people.”
“But you said—” The pitch of her voice squeaked, dangerously close to breaking. “—You said that the transporters sent students away.”
“I did. And they did.”
Her toes curled, mirroring her fingers. “How did the students get out from under the city if the transporters didn’t get them out?”
Desmond answered from the backseat. “There are tunnels beneath the city. They found a way out themselves.”
The light turned green and traffic rolled ahead. “Pull over,” she snapped. “I’ll run the rest of the way.”
“That’s a long run,” said Desmond. “We’ll still get there before you.”
The cars divided into two lanes, and the emergency lane to the right was clear. “Go there!” she shouted, pointing at the free lane.
Ash checked the other cars for a way through. They were too close together. “I need a way in,” he said. He turned to look at her, one hand resting on the steering wheel, tendrils sticking up from his head. “Do it.”
Piper scowled at him. “Do what?”
“If there’s any time for your power to emerge, it’s now.” A small smile played on Ash’s lips. “How can you not have noticed?”
Tears of frustration gleamed in her narrowed eyes. “Now really isn’t the time for your cryptic bollocks.”
Ash sighed and crept along with the traffic. “That fireplace in your house—we didn’t light it. You did. The smoker at the club in Soho? It was you who almost torched the guy’s face off. I suspected that your power was fire, but I wasn’t certain until you came to the Academy. I took you to the parlour room because I’d set up candles and put kindling in the fireplace. When we went in, none of them were lit.” He paused and looked at her.
Piper had gone white, the pallor of her skin sharp against the black hair that curtained her blank face.
“When I gave you the ultimatum, the candles had flames and the fireplace had embers. It’s your power—fire.”
Piper sank back in the seat. The soles of her sandals stopped tapping against the dashboard, and her hands fell limp against her thighs.
For the past few weeks, now that she thought about it, candles had been lighting themselves in her bedroom, living room and foyer.
She’d dismissed it at the time, thinking that she’d forgotten she lit them in the first place, or that her eyes had played tricks on her. That’s what people did, wasn’t it? They rationalised strange occurrences and moved on, soon forgetting it had ever happened.
“Why now?” she whispered, looking down at her hands. “Why, after all my life, is it happening now?”
“You’re nearing your maturity,” he said. “Daywalkers come of age at eighteen. For halfbreeds, it’s when your power awakens, sometimes a few weeks before.”
Desmond added, “Sometimes halfbreeds get their magic prematurely if they experience some sort of traumatic event.” He sat up against the door. “A few years ago, in Japan, a plane lost engine power mid-air. A halfbreed was on board—he was eight years old—and he was the only one to survive the crash.”
Ash nodded. “I remember that case. His magic saved him. He had a similar power to you—one of the four elements. Though, his ability was to manipulate air. When the plane descended and ripped apart, the air pulled him out and supported him downwards.”
“A suspension in gravity,” said Desmond. “If he’d had any other ability, he would’ve died in that crash. Luckiest halfbreed there ever was.”
“And I—I can control fire?” she asked, gazing out of the windshield. Cars littered the road, blocking their way onto the emergency lane. If they could reach that lane, they could speed past all the traffic, and arrive in Notting Hill within ten minutes.
Ash hummed and tilted his head. “Not quite. You can produce it, bend it to your will, but it’s stronger than you are. Even when you’re fully trained, which will take years, fire will never be the pet to your master. It’s stronger, fiercer, wilder than you could ever be.”
“But I can use it,” she said. A determined gleam shone in her green eyes. They’d darkened to the shade of wet grass in the turn of autumn.
“You can,” said Ash. “And you’re going to use it right now.”
“How?”
“Focus on that white line.” He pointed to the painted lines that separated their lane to their neighbouring one. “Think of your mum, of what might’ve happened to her. If you have to, think about Kieran’s little sister, possessed.” Piper gave him an incredulous look. He shrugged and said, “So far, it seems to me that your powers come to the surface when your emotions are tumultuous. Use that.”
Desmond leaned forward, between the front two seats. “If you can make a trail of flames from us to that emergency lane, the other cars will part. It’ll create enough space for us to get through.”
Piper nodded, her steady stare fixed on the white line by the far lane. She swallowed, and wiggled her fingers as if it would shoot sparks of fire from the tips.
Her mind flooded with images: her mother sprawled out on the floor like that old man had been, a monster tearing her apart; her biological father force-feeding her banyon and chanting in a language she didn’t know—
“It’s not happening,” said Desmond. He tapped Ash on the shoulder and said, “Plan B.”
“Plan B,” parroted Ash.
He hit the accelerator and rammed into the car beside them. The tyres screeched on the asphalt, smoke billowed up around them, and he drove the other car into the road barriers.
A deafening melody of car horns honked over the highway. The side of the van scraped along the other car until they reached the emergency lane.
“That was easy,” said Desmond as they took off up the empty lane, car horns roaring behind them in outrage.
Piper fell back into her seat and gaped ahead. “Why didn’t we just do that to start with?”
*
“There!” shouted Piper. “The pink one!”
The dented van screeched to a stop on Lancaster Road. Ash parked behind a Prius. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been here before, remember?”
Piper didn’t hear him. She’d already jumped out of the car and ran up the porch. Ash and Desmond raced to catch up with her.
The door smacked against the wall as Piper charged through it. The bath bomb was wrapped in her coiled fingers so tightly that her knuckles had whitened.
Ash overtook her before she could run up the stairs, and directed them with his gun raised. Desmond shadowed her, and they hiked up the stairs until they reached the landing between the levels.
Piper gasped.
Droplets of blood stained the marble stairs, and a glitter-pink phone sat on the stairs, its screen cracked. Ash scooped up the phone as Desmond ran his gloved index finger over a splash of blood.
“Dullborn blood,” said Desmond, sniffing the ruby drop. “It’s cold.”
Ash inspected the phone before Piper snapped out of her shock and snatched it from his hand.
“No,” she breathed. Her voice trembled like a train speeding over bumpy tracks. “She was coming for lunch,” she said. “And Nigel.”
Ash turned to look at her, a silent question shining in his polished-silver eyes.
“This is April’s phone,” she said.
Desmond and Ash shared a brief look. Piper would have wondered what the silent communication was about, but all she could think of was what had happened to April, to her mother, and to Nigel.
Ash pushed his thumb against the safety on the gun. It clicked off. He stepped over the smears of blood, strode across the landing, and climbed the stairs. Piper stumbled behind him, her eyes washing over the pools of blood that grew the higher they climbed.
They reached the second floor. Two pizza boxes sat on the step beside Piper’s apartment. The
door was open, and light flooded from the gap. An awful sound, like a gluttonous dog chomping down on steak, came from inside. Piper shivered and swallowed back the bile that tried to crawl up her throat again.
Desmond moved around her in two strides. He and Ash, side-by-side, crept through the doorway. Piper wandered behind them, in a daze, knowing what she would find in there.
When they paused, she shoved between them, wedged herself in. On the floor of the foyer—April sprawled out on her back, her head turned to face the door, blood leaking from the corner of her lips.
Tears and red smudges ran in streaks down her face, and her eyelids quivered. Nigel curled up beside April’s still legs and chewed her soaked thigh—was exactly what Piper had feared.
Nigel snapped his head up. Skin stretched from April’s leg to his teeth. His feral stare locked onto Piper before it slewed to Ash and then Desmond.
Desmond acted first. Before Nigel could attack, he hurled a short dagger through the air. It twirled before it struck his forehead.
Nigel gurgled and scrambled to his feet. Piper screamed, her muscles shaking, and heaved the black bath bomb at Nigel. It erupted in a cloud of darkness. The dust spread throughout the apartment, even reaching the open door above the staircase.
Ash cursed and a crash came from Piper’s right. She held her arms out in front of herself and crept forward.
“Shh,” hushed Desmond. “Don’t make a sound.”
She stopped, hands out in front of her, her limbs trembling like a dry leaf in a light breeze. All she could hear were April’s ragged breaths. The image of Kieran wheezing in a bloody bathtub flashed in her mind.
Piper dropped to her knees in a slow, careful motion. Two sets of footsteps suddenly shattered the silence. Ash and Desmond sprinted through the dark cloud, and Piper heard the whoosh of a knife fly through the air.
It hit what she imagined was Nigel. A snarl echoed, but the boom of gunshot drowned it out.
“Don’t kill him!” shouted Piper. “He’s my friend—don’t hurt him!”
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