Ashley closed the door behind her.
The librarian locked it. The heavy tumbler clunked into place as the key turned. She motioned for Ashley to follow her into the stacks of old dusty musty books. Only when they were surrounded on all sides by huge hardbacks did she speak again. "Yes, I know Elspeth. Quite well as a matter of fact. Has she been in contact?"
Ashley didn't know quite what to say to that. She'd never had to break the news of a death to anyone before, but the fact Miss Lake kept using the present tense when she talked about Aunt Elspeth meant she didn't know. "Not really," she said.
Ashley fumbled with the buckle on her satchel, and rather than explain about Aunt Elspeth, handed Miss Lake the letter she had found.
The old woman took it from her, skim-reading until she came to the line in the second paragraph where Aunt Elspeth had written "if you are reading this then I am almost certainly dead." She looked at Ashley over the top of her spectacles. "Is she?"
Ashley nodded.
"Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear." Miss Lake said, shaking her head, obviously shaken. "This is bad news. Terrible. How did it happen?"
"I don't know," Ashley admitted. She'd never thought to ask. Did that make her a bad person? "She said you'd be able to answer my questions?"
"Yes, of course. And I am quite sure you have a million of them, dear. That is only to be expected," she tore the top sheet from the school-headed notepad on her desk and started to write an apology for the study hall teacher. She signed it and handed Ashley the excuse. Then Miss Lake walked over to the window. She stopped, reaching out for the wooden sill to steady herself. She had obviously seen something down there, and whatever it was she didn't like it.
Miss Lake drew something on the glass with her finger, then turned back to face Ashley.
"Honestly I'm not sure what questions to ask," Ashley admitted. It was true. So much had happened to her in such a short space of time, and none of it made any sense. She was left with the distinct impression that her life wasn't her own.
That is not who you are. The words of the book came back to her.
"Then perhaps I can help you with those, as well. But not here. Alas, there's a junior school class visit in a few minutes. This is definitely the kind of conversation that demands privacy and time. Come to Heron House after school. My office is upstairs. Then we can talk there properly. It is protected." Ashley wondered what she meant by that. "I cannot begin to tell you how much it grieves me that you have been dragged into this so soon, child, but Elspeth is right, you are not alone. Everything will be all right. I promise."
Ashley nodded, more confused than ever.
She put the letter back in her satchel, buckled it up, and armed with her excuse went back to class.
Lessons seemed to drag on even more than usual that afternoon, but finally the end of school bell rang.
This time Ashley was the first one out of her chair, muttering a hurried apology to Mrs Braithwaite as the chemistry teacher admonished her for running. She was the first one down the grand staircase and the first one out of the gates.
She forgot to look both ways as she ran across the road into the park, nearly getting herself squashed by a black cab.
It was already beginning to get dark and it was only just after four o'clock.
On the outside Heron House was a miniature version of the school itself, only surrounded by trees instead of the road. It could easily have been a royal manor house in a past life; it had that same sense of regal calm about it. Ivy crawled up its façade, seeming to worm its way into every crevice and crack in the stonework. The windows were leaded, the glass streaked with imperfections. Someone had told her the glass in those windows was hundreds of years old, and the bubbles in it meant that it had been handmade. She liked that.
Ashley rushed up the long and winding path to Heron House.
The main door was open.
She stared at the plants climbing up the side of the brickwork. They smothered the life out of the stones. She really didn't like the way they seemed to be growing across the windows.
Ashley scuffed the dirt off her shoes before she went inside.
There was a peculiar smell inside.
She didn't know what it was, but it was unpleasant.
Ashley paused beneath the huge stone arch that encased the big wooden door. The sign on the door said: Faculty. No Students Allowed.
Inside, the foyer was dizzyingly big. The windows were like eyes in a grinning skull, and the great doors two tombstone-teeth in a gaping smile. It set Ashley's imagination into overdrive. Looking outside from in here even the driveway looked like one long coiled tongue, and she was in the mouth. It was as though the house was waiting to eat her. "Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum," Ashley muttered, feeling stupid. Sometimes that was the curse of an overactive imagination.
It was a curious mix of old and new inside.
Heron House had been deserted for years before the school bought it. It still felt deserted now.
Ashley called out, "Hello? Miss Lake?" as she walked further inside.
It was dark.
She hadn't expected that.
Surely there should be some teachers about?
Maybe they're all still back in the school?
And then a second thought occurred to her: what's the speed of dark? She laughed out loud at the way her mind worked sometimes. She couldn't help herself. There is a speed of light, and a speed of sound, so surely there's a speed of dark?
"You're weird, Ash," she said, shaking her head.
She found a light switch and turned it on, flooding the interior with light.
The inside of the old manor was like something out of Downton Abbey or Upstairs Downstairs. It was almost as though she'd stepped through a time warp as she'd entered Heron House. Everything was so old, so fusty, and so layered with grime and dust and time it positively oozed antique.
The secretary's hatch by the door was closed.
Ashley walked down a never-ending corridor that opened out into a huge six-sided room in the very heart of the house. It was an atrium, with panelled walls and a stone tiled floor. There were dozens of indoor plants that had been placed strategically for decoration. That was where the old ended and the new began. There was a huge spiral metal staircase that coiled up through the middle of the room, rising to the second, third and fourth floors above her. Metal gangways led off the spiral stair like spokes from a giant wheel. Standing there in the heart of it, Heron House felt deserted. And that was just wrong. There should have been teachers about by now.
Ashley felt deeply uncomfortable. "Miss Lake?" She called out again, wincing at how loud her voice sounded in the vast empty space.
When it died away there wasn't a single sound to be heard.
Miss Lake had said her office was upstairs, but she hadn't said where upstairs.
With nowhere else to go but up, Ashley climbed the metal stairs.
Her footsteps clanged eerily on the metal walkway as she explored the first floor. She found a door marked: Staff Room. She listened at the door, expecting to hear teachers talking. Silence. It was really starting to get to her now.
On the second spoke Ashley found the Headmaster's office, but still no teachers.
The librarian's room was on the top floor.
It was the very last room she went to.
At the top, Ashley leaned over the railing and looked all the way down the dizzying drop to the ground below. From up here it looked as though strange patterns, spirals and swirls, had been laid out in the stone tiles using silver and gold wire. They looked beautiful, but she had no idea what they were meant to signify. Actually, they looked a little bit like some sort of magical symbol, not really a pentagram, but similar enough for her to wonder if that was what Miss Lake had meant by protected?
Miss Lake's name was engraved on a shiny brass plaque: 'Marissa Lake HEAD LIBRARIAN'.
She could see that there was a light on through the frosted glass.
Ashley knocked on the
door and went inside.
Miss Lake was pressed up against her huge mahogany desk, her face white where it was being starved of blood.
A huge monstrous animal—that was all she could think—fed on the old woman.
She moaned, trying ineffectually to fend it off.
The beast's back was arched, and huge claws gouged into her throat. There was blood. Too much of it. Too much for Miss Lake to possibly survive. Ashley saw snapping, snarling teeth and heard rasping bestial grunts as the librarian struggled desperately for her life. Her painted fingernails broke off as she tried to pull the claws away long enough for her to breathe.
In the space between heartbeats Ashley took it all in.
The wolf—her mind screamed: how can there even be a wolf inside Heron House? There aren't any wolves in London—was feasting on the librarian, gnawing and chewing and tearing at her.
Ashley couldn't move until the old woman had stopped struggling.
She was spellbound by the horror unfolding before her.
But she wanted to run.
Desperately.
She wanted to turn and run far, far away.
Down the stairs.
Out of the building.
Just run and keep on running down the winding tongue of a pathway and out through the park, across the road and all the way back through the streets to her house on Curzon Street.
But she couldn't.
Her legs wouldn't move. She was frozen in place, trapped there by the absolute horror of what was happening.
And then Miss Lake lifted her head slowly.
It rolled slackly on her neck. Blood pulsed out of a hole that shouldn't have been there.
She staggered.
One of the new floorboards creaked under her weight.
Miss Lake opened her eyes and saw Ashley standing in the doorway.
It took the woman a heartbeat to recognise her.
She seemed to collapse inside herself, broken, even as the wolf's huge teeth sank into her throat and tore it out she gurgled: "RUN!"'
One word.
It was the last thing she ever said.
It was enough to make her killer look around, straight at Ashley.
Ashley stared at the monstrous wolf, seeing it rise, blood dripping from its fangs.
She didn't hesitate.
She ran for her life.
ELEVEN
The Dead House
Marissa du Lac lay in the dead house.
They had another name for it on the Sunside, but it would always be a dead house to Ephram Wanderer.
He didn't understand how it could have happened.
Heron House was protected. It was one of the few havens they had established in the city. He had put some of those protections in place himself, and they had come at considerable cost. Magic was not painless in this place. They were so cut off from the source of the earth's power it hurt them to try and tap into it.
They couldn't have failed.
It was impossible.
And yet, obviously, they had. The proof of that lay on the slab in the other room. Marissa du Lac was dead.
Again, he amended, opening the door. It wasn't the first time she'd died, but it was the last time she would. That was two of them in less than a fortnight: Marissa du Lac and Elspeth Grimm. It had gone beyond tragedy now. Ephram had lived a long time and one lesson his many years had taught him was that there was no such thing as coincidence, meaningful or otherwise. Someone was hunting them. That was the only thing that made any sense.
He needed to summon a conclave, to talk to Targyn, Guerin and the others, but first he needed answers.
It was cold down here. It was the kind of cold that wormed its way beneath your skin and into your blood and then took over your body. Ephram shivered. This was the coldest part of the city, he was sure, and not just because it was underground. This was where they brought the dead before they went on to their final resting place.
The orderlies had been the first to leave, after they had brought the body down here for preparation, then two police officers had come and gone, leaving the mortician alone with her.
He could hide from one man.
He could bend the light around his body. It didn't make him invisible, not really, it meant that instead of seeing through him as they would if he were invisible, they'd see around him. His shadow would still give him away, though, if the man looked down. But that was unlikely. Most people were not aware of the world around them. They lost touch with it. That was why his little trick worked so well. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred the coroner would think he had caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye, but that something was elusive and he'd let it go because he wouldn't be able to focus on it no matter how hard he tried. But, if he was sensitive, he would feel Ephram's presence and shiver, thinking someone somewhere had just walked over his grave.
Ephram closed the door behind him, leaving the land of the living behind.
The coroner didn't look up.
He was working on Marissa's body.
He positioned a huge armature, focusing the light very directly on the body, then fired off a series of shots from the built-in camera capturing her at different angles, cataloguing her wounds. When he developed the photographs he'd be in for a surprise, because the light trick didn't work on the camera lens. He would see Ephram standing at the other end of the table with his hand on the dead woman's temples. That wouldn't be the only surprise, of course. When he opened Marissa's body he would see her curious arrangement of lungs that allowed her, in her true form, to breathe under water. Marissa de Lac was a Mere. But Ephram would be long gone by then so it didn't matter.
Every culture treated death differently, in some it was feared, in others it was embraced, in a few it was even considered to be the great imposter. They all had their own death rituals and different ways of coping. Death, or more precisely, the fear of it, was why he was here on the Sunside in the first place. Not for the first time, he longed to be able to go home to the Kingdoms Under the Moon. He felt lost here. But Tanaquill's heir needed him. He had made his choice, he was loyal to the Fae Queen, even if that made him an enemy of the Kingdoms…It was the right choice. He knew it was. But that didn't make it an easy one.
There were three tables on the other side of a glass wall. Two of the three were empty. Marissa du Lac –or what was left of her– lay on the third. It wasn't pretty. She'd been cleaned up but there was only so much washing the blood away could do to distance her body from her murder.
He really didn't want to do this.
The clock was ticking. He couldn't slow it down. His friend had been dead for hours now and with death came the inevitable undoing of everything she had been. The clarity of her memories deteriorated by the minute. He didn't know how long they'd be readable, never mind reliable. As it was, he would be lucky if he could find her attacker in the swirl of fractured images because her death had been so traumatic.
That always made things more difficult.
Life, every last precious second of it, flashed before your eyes in those last seconds, the dumping of every memory to clear itself for the journey on to wherever it went next.
Ephram Wanderer had a gift, though at times like this it felt more like a curse.
The coroner didn't look up as Ephram laid his hand on her temple. He closed his eyes and opened himself to the flood of Marissa du Lac's memories.
They came to him in a flood.
She remembered fragments of her life but all of the broken edges overlapped, meaning even memories he recognised were wrong and couldn't be trusted because they had bled into others. Now, in this moment, she was in the Shard of the Subluna, the heart of the King's castle. The tapestries had been torn down and were burning. The King's guards fought the flames valiantly, but even with their legendary strength there was little the Alpha and his Wolfen brethren could do to defeat the fire now it had its teeth in the ancient fortress.
Ephram would never forget
this place, even though it was long gone.
She wasn't alone. Ephram was with her. So were the others: Elspeth, the Grimm; Targyn, the Fae; Grigorii, the sallow-faced Kith. Grigorii had the bloodlust on him, turning his eyes to fiery red as he raised his hands. He looked more monstrous than all of their foes combined. Not for the first time she was glad the Kith was on their side; Beside Grigorii was Mad Molokai, driven that way by his ghostly twin Malik. Malik, who had never been born but lived inside Molokai as a distinct personality; there was Guerin, the bear and Hobb the brawler. Ratko, the king's jester, a dwarven hunchback, and Posie, Paget and Prue, the wyrd sisters. And last of all, Rain.
They were the Wardens.
They were gathered protectively around Marisa du Lac—Marissa Lake—the Mere. She cradled a child protectively in her arms. A baby girl. Tanaquill's daughter. The queen had been dead less than an hour. Her last words had been to charge them with her child's safety because she did not trust her husband—the child's father. Ephram shuddered at the memory. This was the moment that in doing his queen's bidding he became a traitor.
It was also the moment he wove his most potent spell; a single lie he had prayed would hold for sixteen years. Because as they slipped through the weakness he had forced open and into the Sunside, it seemed to everyone watching that they were consumed by the flames.
When he died, no doubt, it would be the strongest of his own memories. It was the day they gave up their lives for a child.
The thought pushed him ever so slightly out of her mind, giving Ephram more distance from the memories. He was able to differentiate his own thoughts from her memories as the memory bled into another, and at first he thought it was completely unrelated, but by the end of the memory he wasn't so sure.
He had expected to see the beautiful, frail, tragic queen on her deathbed begging them to protect her daughter from her husband, but instead the memories took him back before that day, to another sickbed. The king lay deathly still. He was sick and showed no signs of recovery. The Fae Queen stood at his side while monks with their compresses and compacts and the physicians with their leeches and knives came to bleed him. The old man was surely dying. Feverish beads of sweat clung to his pale face. His skin was slack, like it didn't fit him anymore. He was a shadow of himself. Tanaquill wiped his brow. She looked as though her world were coming to an end there and then as she rested her hand on her belly. He wouldn't last to see his own daughter's birth.
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