by Laura Powell
‘He’s a maniac, Auntie! A witch-lynching loon –’
‘He’s an excitable young lout who needs a cause. People like that change loyalties quick as others change their underwear.’ Angeline pursed her lips. ‘Now, I reckon this Radley rendezvous will be more trouble than it’s worth. But wild goose chase or no, you’d best play along with it. Harry needs to believe he’s the one calling the shots.’
‘Right,’ said Glory wearily.
Angeline gave her a consoling pat. ‘We’ll soon be rid of him,’ she said. ‘Him and Charlie both. In the meantime, grit your teeth, and remember you’re a Starling.’
The Radley building was part of a strip of decaying offices and warehouses in the outer reaches of Hallam. With the extension of the City East train line, the area had become a prime site for redevelopment. A local firm had made an early bid to knock down the existing complex and replace it with an upmarket apartment block. Unfortunately for them, the Wednesday Coven had seen its potential too. The coven had bribed members of the construction crew to sabotage the work, and leaned on investors to cut the funding. When the original owner went bust, the coven was able to snap up the site at a knock-down price. They were now leading the development scheme.
Glory arrived just after one. The vacant lot across the road from the Radley was an unofficial dumping-ground, and she found a good surveillance spot among the piles of rubbish and rusting fridges.
As yet, the new phase of building hadn’t begun. The ground floor was little more than an empty shell. The metal beams of the unfinished upper storeys stretched skywards like the fingers of a monstrous skeleton. The ramp down to the basement looked as if it led to a bottomless pit. Even in daylight the place was menacing. Little traffic passed this way, and even fewer pedestrians.
It was hard to think of a more isolated spot for a rendezvous. Whoever Charlie was meeting must be a trusted source as well as an important one; someone who could demand an out-of-hours meeting in an out-of-the-way place, without the usual coven defences.
At least there were no iron bells on an abandoned building site. The only security was a man with a dog. Since there was nothing worth stealing, Charlie must have posted them here ahead of his meeting. They’d be checking for trespassers – junkies looking for a place to shoot up, tramps for somewhere to doss in . . . or snoops looking for trouble. The guard had a bulge in his jacket that Glory was pretty sure was a gun, and the Alsatian was almost as mean-looking as its owner. Although she didn’t know his name, she recognised him as one of Charlie’s senior henchmen.
When she arrived, the guard and dog were just finishing a patrol. The guard stood on the threshold, and unleashed the animal so that it could sniff around. Afterwards, it trotted out of the building, and snuffled about for a few minutes longer, before cocking its leg over a pile of sand heaped by the road. Its master called for it impatiently. Duties done, he retreated to a trailer parked in the forecourt. The dog was chained up nearby.
Glory weighed up the options. She and Harry would need to get past the guard to position themselves inside the building ahead of Charlie’s arrival. The main entrance was just a hole in the wall, but the meeting would no doubt take place in the basement, away from the gaze of a scrying-bowl. The dog was the biggest problem. Unable to reveal her fae, her own contribution was limited to supplying the raw material for Harry’s witchwork. Luckily, she had a good idea of what to use.
She retreated to the back of the vacant lot, and took a roundabout route to emerge a few hundred metres down the road from the Radley. The dog watched with ears pricked, as she approached its territory. She was dressed like a jogger and wearing the wig from the diamond heist tied back in a ponytail, as well as a baseball cap to hide her face. Pretending to retie a shoelace, she knelt down by the sand heap at the edge of the road and used a stick to scoop out a urine-soaked clump. The dog let out a low growl but Glory paid no attention as she poked the wet sand into an empty crisp packet. Anticipating Harry’s reaction, she grinned. Dog-piss was a lot better than the alternative.
Harry did indeed turn up his aristocratic nose at her offering. However, once they got down to the practicalities of the stake-out he put his squeamishness aside. He was certain Charlie was meeting one of the tribunal members from the Goodwin trial. Glory, who knew the Wednesday Coven relied on all kinds of corrupt officials and informers, wasn’t quite so convinced. Even so, whatever got discussed was sure to be incriminating.
Since evidence obtained by witchwork wasn’t admissible in court, Harry was going to film events with a tiny spy-cam disguised as a button. He hadn’t risked smuggling any gadgets into the coven and so had arranged to collect the camera from a WICA drop.
This didn’t mean there was no call for witchwork. The dog would be dealt with once they were on site, so Harry started with their elusions. Glory was interested to see that he used a map instead of a compass as the base for his amulets, tearing out a random page from an A to Z of London, then using a mix of ink and spit to draw along the road markings in a crazy maze.
To further protect them once they were inside the Radley, Harry assembled the materials for a shroud: a pocket mirror, black felt, and two little totems to represent himself and Glory. For these, he used a sliver of each of their thumbnails, wound in a strip of cloth torn from their pillows. Glory donated hers reluctantly. It was a big step, handing over a piece of yourself for another witch’s work. But they were partners. She had to trust him.
Glory was increasingly tempted to ask Harry how he’d been recruited to WICA, and what kind of training he’d had. She also wanted to know what had put the grey in his hair, whether he’d left school yet, what other operations he’d been involved in . . . But all these questions were too personal. It wouldn’t be good policy to feel like she knew him or to wonder if, in different circumstances, they might have been friends. Still, it was a shame that WICA had got to him so early. Whatever Auntie Angel might think, Harry Whoever-He-Was had the makings of a fine coven witch.
By six, their plans were in place. Harry went out to collect the spy-cam, as well as a few supplies. Luckily, Nate had bumped into some mates at the racetrack, and was off boozing somewhere. Angeline was at the bingo. Since they wouldn’t have to leave until eight, Glory thought she might as well get some rest.
She lay on her bed and tried to relax. No chance. Although she was nervous about tonight’s expedition, she was excited too, and impatience made her restless. Her thoughts whirled and fizzed. In search of distraction, she turned to the stack of magazines that Patch had nicked from the hairdresser’s. They were a couple of months out of date, but better than nothing.
Glory liked to read about celebrity gossip and her favourite TV shows. These magazines were a different kind of glossy, showcasing clothes she couldn’t afford, parties she wouldn’t be let into, and people she’d never heard of. The Tatler even had a ‘social diary’ at the back, filled with snapshots of posh people at cocktail parties and polo matches. Some of them were Glory’s age.
Like the two pretty girls, Miss Beatrice Allen and Miss Davina Henderson-Holt, posing arm in arm with Harry Jukes.
Except he wasn’t called Harry, of course. Glory had already seen the face behind the glamour; now she read the name behind the alias. Mr Lucas Stearne.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Stearne. The name was almost as familiar as her own. Everyone knew about the Stearne family, but witchkind knew them the best. Or worst – ever since Bloody John, sidekick to Matthew Hopkins, had marched forward to take his place in history. Hopkins, the first Witchfinder General, had been an enthusiastic amateur. John Stearne, however, made witch-hunting into a profession. When Oliver Cromwell made him Witchfinder General after Hopkins’ death, Stearne had persuaded parliament to formally establish the English Inquisition and enshrine it in law.
From then on, all Stearnes had been the same: hunting witches, imprisoning witches, torturing witches. Burning witches. Through every generation, right up to the reign of Ashton
Stearne, king of the Inquisitorial Court, Chief Prosecutor of the Goodwin trial. And his son . . .
His son and heir.
Lucas. Harry Whoever.
Lucas Hexing Stearne.
Lucas Stearne was in her own home, plotting the destruction of another coven. And she was helping him.
A bitter nausea rose in her throat. Glory had found ways to resist the shame of collaboration, to reason it away. But to ally herself with a Stearne took her treachery to a whole new level. It didn’t occur to her that Lucas might be just a distant relative of the Chief Prosecutor. The resemblance to his father was too strong. In fact, she wondered how she could have failed to spot it before. Her cheeks flamed with humiliation. How quickly she’d let down her guard, allowed herself to imagine that maybe they weren’t so different after all.
What a gullible fool he must think her!
She let out a little moan. Then she began to pace up and down the room, arms wrapped around her chest, trying to think.
So a High Inquisitor’s son had turned witchkind . . . that must’ve set the cat among the pigeons. And yet it clearly hadn’t done Daddy any harm. The man was still there in court, still lording it over witchkind. Well, the Inquisition had many nasty little secrets. They must have decided to turn this latest one to their advantage. Lucas was the ultimate weapon: half inquisitor, half witch.
She bitterly regretted not telling Auntie Angel about undoing the glamour. If Angeline had seen the boy’s true face, she might have made the Stearne connection from the first. They could have planned a new strategy together, found some way to turn it to their advantage. Maybe they still could. But not now. There was no time.
Harry’s – Lucas’s – motives were clearer than ever. Where, though, should Glory’s loyalties lie? Charlie Morgan, in partnership with his brothers, had murdered her mother. Yet Lucas’s family had been murdering her kind for centuries . . .
Someone knocked at the door. Lucas Stearne was standing there smiling, his eyes treacherous and blue.
‘Are you ready?’
CHAPTER 24
Something was up with Glory. Her attitude towards Lucas had definitely relaxed over the last couple of days, to the point at which they could share a joke as well as plot a strategy. But now she’d retreated into her former hostility. Hunched and pale, she barely spoke to him on the way to the Radley. When he nudged her at the bus stop, she recoiled as if she had been struck.
Perhaps Glory was more frightened of her Uncle Charlie than she let on. Or maybe she was suffering from delayed shock, after her face-off with Striker. But Glory wasn’t the nervous type. Most likely she was just having one of those inexplicable strops that girls went in for sometimes. Philomena was expert at them.
It was annoying, because Lucas already had more than enough on his mind. He was filled with jittery anticipation of who he might see tonight and what he might learn. But there was something else bothering him. On his way to collect the spy-cam from the drop – a DVD rental store – he’d called Zoey from a payphone. She was alarmed about his stake-out plans, and tried to get him to meet with her first, to discuss contingency measures and back-up, even though both of them knew there wasn’t time.
Lucas finished the conversation by mentioning his suspicions of Angeline. Her activities in Cooper Street made a mockery of the poor-little-old-lady act she’d put on for the Inquisition.
‘It’s not a concern,’ Zoey told him crisply. ‘She’s a proven source. Her relationship with the Inquisition goes back twenty-eight years.’
What kind of relationship was it? But either Zoey didn’t know or she wouldn’t tell him.
Lucas wondered if Glory knew the extent of her great-aunt’s informing. He’d got the impression that Glory, like himself, thought Angeline’s collaboration was a recent development. He couldn’t ask her, though, even if she’d been in a better mood.
The Radley was on the edge of a busy if run-down neighbourhood, but on a Sunday night the place felt like a ghost town. Hulks of empty warehouses and abandoned offices loomed on every side. Glory and Lucas, dressed in dark clothing, elusion amulets worn next to their skin, made their way through the shadows to the rubbish dump across the road.
The glow from a street lamp was enough to see the guard pacing up and down on the Radley’s forecourt, Alsatian at his side. Although the dog was in some ways the bigger threat, animals were easier targets for witchwork than humans.
Lucas settled down behind a rusting fridge. Keeping his target in view, he took out a wad of brown modelling clay and set about crafting a poppet. Since natural materials responded to the Seventh Sense better than synthetics, he blended some earth into the clay, as well as a good sprinkle of the urine-soaked sand, kneading his fae deep into the mix.
Soon he had a little model dog in the palm of his hand. He breathed on the miniature head with its pinched-out ears and snout, the dimples for eyes, then ran his thumb down its muddy back. The real dog pricked up its ears and whined a little.
Suddenly, the air was ripe with rich stinks. Lucas felt new and agonising appetites tug him in all directions. Every hair on his body seemed to be standing on end. The sensation didn’t last for more than a few seconds, but left him shaken. He mustn’t get too close: he needed to guide the animal’s thoughts, not enter its mind.
It was hard to concentrate with Glory so close by. Although his animal senses were already fading, the scent of her flesh and breath had been tantalisingly strong. He forced his mind back to the task, stroking the poppet gently from head to tail, as he nudged a warning into its living counterpart’s brain. Something dangerous, something exciting. Somewhere else . . . around the corner . . . far back . . .
The dog raised its head. It whimpered, then growled. Lucas growled himself, soft and low. He continued to nudge the animal: pushing its attention away from the entranceway, round the back of the building. Soon it was straining at the leash. Muttering, the guard followed his dog’s lead. His hand was inside his jacket, resting on the gun. The pair turned the corner and went out of sight.
Still holding the poppet, Lucas darted across the road and into the Radley. Glory followed him. Her torch, its light partly dimmed by her sleeve, revealed a soaring bare space interspersed with steel pillars set in concrete. Their destination, however, was the dank basement below. Wooden planks had been laid to make a crude floor cover, littered with coils of wire, boards and chunks of rubble. A sheet of rusting iron was propped over the doorway.
There was a workman’s bench close to a wall and they crouched behind it, pulling down some plastic sacking over their heads. It was a very makeshift sort of hiding place, and without witchwork they would have been dangerously exposed. As it was, there was precious little time to assemble the shroud. Lucas put the two totems – his and Glory’s thumbnails, wrapped in scraps of their pillowcases – on the pocket mirror. He breathed on the glass, fogging it over, then wrapped it in black felt before the mist could clear. Finally, he scattered it with grit and wood-shavings from the floor. A fog to lose them, blackness to hide them, earth to cover them . . . Even when crafted with fae as strong as his, a shroud wasn’t very reliable. They couldn’t move away from where it had been placed on the ground and it wouldn’t make them invisible, just hard to notice. Used with the dog-poppet, however, they should have enough witchwork to keep them safe.
Moments later, the sentry and his Alsatian arrived and a searchlight’s powerful beam swept across the interior. As the dog started snuffling about, Lucas pressed his thumb down on the poppet’s pinched-up ears. ‘Hear no evil,’ he whispered, before squashing down the clay snout, the dimpled eyes. ‘Smell no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.’ The poppet’s head was a shapeless lump of mud. The real animal’s mind was also muddy and formless; its senses functioning, but slowed. Lucas was its master now.
The guard came further in, shining his light into the corners. After two or three anxious minutes, he satisfied himself that all was well. He went back up the ramp. But before Lucas and Glory
could get their breaths back, voices were heard, and Charlie Morgan himself tramped down.
He came alone, and carried a hurricane lamp that he set down on an upturned crate. His stocky bulk was swathed in a camel-hair coat, from which he took out what Lucas expected to be a cigar, but was in fact a nicotine inhaler. He sucked on it irritably. He looked at his watch, also irritably. Ten past nine. Whoever he was meeting was late.
Lucas switched on the tiny pin on the button-camera, and shifted fractionally to get a better view. Glory tensed up in response to his movement.
A moment later, the iron sheet over the entrance was scraped back. High heels click-clacked over the rough floor. A woman. Ruth Mackenzie. It must be. Tribunal member, civil servant and –
It wasn’t Ruth. This woman was smaller and slimmer. She was wearing a full-brimmed hat, pulled low, a dark coat with the collar turned up, and a scarf. When Charlie saw her, he picked up the lamp and held it in front of him, squinting suspiciously.
His visitor opened her coat and loosened the silk scarf. Lucas caught his breath. The lamp shone on an ugly iron collar that encircled her neck. Lady Serena Merle.
‘Don’t worry, Charlie.’ The little-girl voice wasn’t as breathy as Lucas remembered. ‘I’m still trussed up like a dog on a leash.’
Tonight there was nothing glassy about her eyes, or vacant in her smile. She looked tired, though. Her face was thin and strained. ‘Long time no see.’
‘Indeed. How’s Rose?’
‘About the same, thank you. No worse.’
‘That’s good to hear.’ He nodded. ‘All right. We both know this isn’t a social call. What have you got for me?’
‘Trouble,’ she said bleakly. ‘The worst kind. It’s about the witchcrimes. They – they’re not what people think. You see . . . I found out . . . well, my – my husband’s behind them. And other people at the Inquisition.’
