Jessica wriggled in close and pointed. “See? Right there under his tail.” In a circle stamped into the glass there was a raised infinity symbol, though with cog teeth all along its inner curves.
“Please don’t touch my arse with your grubby organic fingers,” Mr Beak said.
“I really wasn’t going to,” Fiona replied.
The parlour door opened and another automaton trundled in. Instead of bearing a dustpan and brush as the one in the corridor had, this one held a tray carrying a carafe of water and two glasses.
Fiona studied the automaton as Jessica poured Fiona a glass of water. On the automaton’s side, in its armpit, she saw another infinity loop with cog teeth.
“Here you go,” Jessica said. “I haven’t figured out where the water comes in from yet, but you should see the purification system they built. I bet it could clean tar out.”
Fiona ignored the implication and drank half the glass in one go. She shouldn’t have let the boys buy so many rounds.
“And see?” Jessica said, pointing as the automaton set the tray on a small table. “There’s the symbol.”
“I see it. But didn’t you tell me you found Mr Shell and Mr Beak in our house? How did they get there from here?”
“Can I stop baring my arse to the world now?” Mr Beak asked.
“Please,” Fiona replied.
Jessica snatched Fiona’s glass from her hand and refilled it. “I think Professor Shrewsbury used to live in our house.”
“The house isn’t that old, surely.” Fiona watched Mr Beak roll over and launch himself across the room. “What do your two little friends say?”
Jessica handed her the glass. It was so full water trickled down the sides. “They won’t say. They’re not allowed to. Some last instruction from Professor Shrewsbury. Figuring that out is my next project.” She sat down beside Fiona. “I keep coming back to the house. Can’t teleport into it, can’t reach the workroom where Mr Shell and Mr Beak used to be – it’s a weird house.” She stared at nothing for a few seconds, then asked, “So what did Julian say? Will he teach you magic?”
Fiona paused in the act of taking a careful sip. “Uh, yes. I mean, not exactly. He said he wants to think about it.”
Jessica’s brows slowly drew down. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Mind your language. And I don’t know.” She felt her cheeks colour.
Jessica sprang to her feet and waved her arms. “But you need help! You can’t do anything. If the monster in your shadow doesn’t protect you, you’re helpless.”
“Look up the meaning of ‘diplomatic’ while you’re at it.”
Jessica took a pair of sunglasses with pink plastic rims from where they’d rested on a coffee table. She called them her veracity lenses and said they let her see more than what was visible. She frowned at Fiona’s feet. “The monster is still in there, at least.” She pulled them off and folded them up. “What about Rob? Maybe he could change Julian’s mind.” She beamed. “Rob’s nice. I’m sure he’ll do the right thing.”
She didn’t like the helpless feeling bubbling in her gut. The monster in her shadow did protect her, but people had threatened her before who could overpower or neutralise it. And she couldn’t control it. Only twice had it done what she asked.
Maybe she could ask Rob to keep pressing Julian. She felt sure he would, but it rankled. She had hoped for a yes to her request, had told herself she was prepared for a no, but leaving her up in the air when Julian knew as well as anyone that she was in danger, that she was pursued, had left her with a bad taste in her mouth. She wondered if she could trust him.
And she hadn’t liked the way he’d overwhelmed her with his gaze in the pub. She hadn’t liked that at all.
“Do you remember that crystal skeleton you found in the tomb in Norway?” she asked.
“Ooh, yes, hang on.” Jessica raced back to the microphone in the cabinet. “Please bring my laptop to the bust room.”
Fiona held her glass of water in two hands while she brought it to her lips. She managed to slurp some water down without spilling more than a few drops.
This time it was not one of the lair’s old automatons who answered Jessica’s call, but Mr Shell, the bronze tortoise. He had unfolded small arms from hatches on his shell and held Jessica’s laptop up with them. “Good evening, Miss Fiona.”
“Hi Mr Shell.”
“Thanks.” Jessica grabbed for her laptop as though Mr Shell had tossed it into the air. It was pink with silver stars glued to it. She landed on the couch beside Fiona, set her laptop of the coffee table in front of them and powered it up.
“I took lots of pictures of the writing on the walls in the tomb,” Jessica said. “I’ve been trying to translate them.”
“You’ve been trying to translate some ancient language? Is it even related to a modern one?”
“Nope.” She clicked through several folders. “You know, there are a lot of old languages floating around. There are languages no one knows how to speak any more.”
“Tell me you didn’t come up with a program to translate it.”
Jessica opened a photo album folder. “Oh no, I thought that would take forever. I hacked into a school library computer archive instead.”
The photos in the folder showed a broad tunnel cut in straight lines through dark stone. The engravings on the walls were mostly glyphs, bearing no resemblance to any ancient language Fiona had ever seen. The photos looked exactly as if Jessica had run down the tunnel taking them as fast as she could with her phone.
“I’m sorry,” Fiona said. “You what?”
“Remember how we were outside that big tomb in the dream, and there was writing on the archway, and that guy Jacob Mandellan could read it?”
“He said he learned it at school.” Jacob had been a friend of Julian’s. Fiona remained unsure as to whether or not they would try to kill each other again. Julian had been evasive on that question too.
“Exactly. So I found out what school Jacob went to and hacked into their archives. They haven’t digitised their library, but they keep an electronic record of everyone’s class exams.”
“This is all untraceable, I hope.”
Mr Shell made a sound like an old man clearing his throat from the inside of a steel drum. “Miss Jessica is quite cautious, I can assure you.”
“And a real talent at electronic safe-cracking too,” Mr Beak said. To Fiona’s disgust, he managed a semblance of a greedy smile with his steel beak.
“Whoever the guy with the crystal skeleton was,” Jessica said, “he was a big deal. A warrior or a king or a magician or something. I’m not clear. It’s a complicated language and I haven’t got it all sorted out yet.”
“Keep digging,” Fiona said. “You’re missing something.” Perhaps a way to unlock her gift without relying on Julian. To banish the bitter helplessness she felt.
Jessica looked wounded and outraged at the same time. “What? Me?”
“When you told us all the story of finding the tomb, I thought Julian was going to faint,” Fiona said. “Right up until you said it’s the crystal skeleton of a human being.”
“It is the skeleton of a human being.”
“Maybe not.” Fiona took a longer sip of water and settled back on the couch. The first throb of an oncoming headache rippled through her skull and she closed her eyes.
She could hear Jessica tapping away at her laptop and muttering to herself for a while. In a minute, Fiona decided, she would ask to be teleported home. She’d just sit here a little longer.
Is petty revenge that exhausting? the traitorous voice in the back of her mind asked.
“Oh,” Jessica said.
“What?” Fiona opened her eyes to find Jessica regarding her with an expression of distrust.
“Diplomacy is lying.”
She sat back again. “Yes Jess, it’s what adults do instead of being reasonable like ten-year olds.”
Chapter 8 – Fiona
There was
someone behind her.
Fiona sat on the cold grass at the bottom of a well, though not a well of stone or earth. Its walls were black, darkness thickened and piled in bricks up into the night sky. High above, a circle of stars shone down, their distant light unchallenged by the city lights blocked by the wall of the well.
Sitting to her left was her friend Tamara, her gloved hand in Fiona’s. Tamara’s eyes were closed and her face was lifted towards the sky. Through the link created between them, Fiona sensed her shy nature, her fear of large groups of people – all subsumed by the wonder of the magic that ran through them, by the awe at the touch of the distant stars.
To Fiona’s right sat another girl, Cecilia. Opposite Fiona and closing the circle was Cecilia’s brother Calum. They were school friends of Tamara’s that she’d been out with a few times. All three of Fiona’s companions were absorbed in the sensation of starlight trickling down across them.
None of them was the person Fiona could feel right behind her.
She found she couldn’t move. To become part of the link with her friends, Fiona had to surrender control to them. She had a gift of magic, but she couldn’t use it. Her friends could use it for her, after a fashion, through the link. The sensation was much like they had taken hold of her wrists with their warm palms and lifted her arms up above her head.
It was not unpleasant, once she’d come to feel she could trust them. But it meant she couldn’t move. And there was someone right behind her. Someone who shouldn’t be there.
The darkness was almost complete in the well of night they’d wrought around themselves, to see the stars unobstructed. She did not have a shadow. Her one defence in the waking world, the monster that lived in her shadow, was not with her.
And as Jessica had so eloquently put it, she was helpless in the waking world without her monster.
Fiona tried to speak, but her lips and tongue remained still. She tried to tug her hands free from Tamara and Cecilia, but they wouldn’t obey her either.
The presence behind her moved. Shoes rustled on grass. The footsteps moved to her left, behind Tamara. Fiona rolled her eyes as far to the side as she could.
Nothing. No one stood behind Tamara.
But the footsteps kept moving. Onwards around the circle, around Calum’s back, where they paused again. Fiona felt herself studied. Someone was there, standing right behind Calum, looking down at her, perhaps thinking about what they were going to do next.
Yet all she saw was darkness.
The sense of a mind considering her was strong – she couldn’t believe it a figment of her imagination. It wasn’t that frightening level of focus Julian had pinned her to her chair with, but it felt like it could become so at any moment.
Now, with a basis of comparison, she realised she had received a sense of Julian’s guarded nature as he focused on her, some hint of old wounds never truly healed. From the hidden stranger regarding her she felt detached amusement, barely human. The watcher looked down on her in more ways than one.
Fiona and her friends had reached out to peer into the darkness beyond the world. They had not thought something might look back at them.
Go away, she thought. Go back.
The hidden watcher made no response. Its attention dwelled upon her, not yet hostile but in no way friendly either.
I’m warning you, she thought. I’m not someone you want to mess with. I killed a wizard.
A soft exhalation – heard in her mind. Surprise, triumph – and then the weight of a mind focusing on her, a mind far more powerful than Julian’s, a mind reaching across the black gulf between worlds to peel her open, to pin her like a frog on a dissection board, to see what she–
“Well,” Calum said, “that was a good one.”
The link dissolved. Fiona felt her invisible wrists released. She snatched her hands from Tamara and Cecilia and balled them into fists on her thighs.
The presence of the watcher vanished.
Light and sound returned as the well of night collapsed into open night. They sat on the grass on a hill in Greenwich Park. Through the trees, the lights of the Royal Observatory shone white and clean. The city stretched away into the distance, twinkling from modern towers of glass and steel and from older structures built decades and centuries earlier.
Fiona’s head spun. December air numbed her nose and cheeks. She put her hands on the grass to either side of her. The rough, physical sensation was welcome.
“That was good,” Cecilia said. “We’re getting a lot better at this.”
“I blame Fiona for that.” Tamara’s grin fell off her face and she put a hand on Fiona’s shoulder. “Fiona? Are you all right?”
She discovered she was shivering. “We weren’t alone.”
“What do you mean?” Calum asked.
“Someone was here. Down here, with us.”
She saw the fear in her voice jump to them. Tamara’s face drained of colour beneath her freckles.
Calum tried to bluster through it. “I didn’t feel anything. I’m sure you’re just imagining it.”
“No,” Fiona replied, her tone as flat as iron. “I’m not.”
Calum’s gangly frame sagged.
“You know what I need?” Tamara’s voice was too high. “A warm coffee shop with warm coffee and warmth. Who’s with me?”
“Seconded,” Cecilia said, pushing herself to her feet.
“Motion carried,” Tamara said. She held out a hand to Fiona.
She didn’t need the help to stand, but she reached for Tamara’s hand anyway.
Cecilia was good with locks. The gates of Greenwich Park were shut, but the lock sprang open when Cecilia pointed an amulet at it and murmured a few words. Fiona watched with envy.
“I have no idea who it was,” Fiona said. They left the park behind and entered well-lit streets of ground-floor shops below what Fiona supposed were apartments. The shops were a mix of cafés, pubs and souvenir places, catering to students and tourists. Few of either were about on a cold week-night.
“I’m still not convinced anyone was there,” Calum said, safely on the other side of his sister. “It could have just been an echo of one of us, maybe.”
“I believe Fiona,” Tamara said. “It’s not like we take any precautions when we have our little celestial séances. We should think about that before we try again.”
“Then let’s be quick about it,” Calum said. “I feel like we’re making real progress.”
They could have been students from the nearby university. Tamara’s hair stuck out from under her beanie in irrepressible ginger curls. Her coat-sleeves and gloves hid the jangly jewellery she wore. Cecilia was tiny while Calum was tall, his features a shade darker than her coffee-coloured ones. While Cecilia sensibly wore a beanie, Calum was bare-headed, probably for the sake of his gelled hair.
They didn’t wear witch or warlock rings. They had been average achievers at school and lacked the familial connections to get around that. Their sessions on top of the hill in Greenwich Park, they told Fiona, helped them attune to their gifts, giving them a focus similar to that which the rings granted.
“Still no luck?” Tamara asked.
“Nothing,” Fiona said. “I hope this is working for you because it’s doing nothing for me.”
They turned a corner, passing under a streetlight as they did so. Fiona’s shadow swung around her. She felt a lot better for having it there.
“Did you get around to asking Julian for help?” Tamara asked.
Fiona felt her cheeks warm. “He said he’d think about it.”
“Sounds like a no to me,” Calum said. “The old families, they don’t share their secrets with the likes of us, not even a minor old family like the Blackwoods.”
One of the many lesser oddities in Fiona’s life was what most people she met thought of the Blackwoods. They thought the Blackwoods had been around only as long as the Mandellans, who were considered the most prominent and powerful of the magician families. But Alice spoke of
them in an entirely different way.
“I’m sure Julian will come around,” Tamara said.
They chose a coffee shop without a big crowd and settled down with their drinks in its big comfy chairs. Their coats, scarves and gloves were dumped in a pile onto a spare chair. Fiona sipped her coffee and let it warm her inside, while the shop’s central heating defrosted the tips of her ears.
“Can I ask a potentially silly question?” Fiona said. “I’m sure you covered this in school. We’re reaching out and drawing power from the stars, right?”
“That’s right,” Calum said. He sat opposite her. “I’ve been logging how successful we are against the date, then comparing that to astronomy charts when I get home. I’m trying to figure out which stars we’re most compatible with.”
“There’s not a lot in it,” Cecilia said from beside Fiona.
Calum glared. “It’s a well-established theory. British witches and warlocks have been using the stars for centuries.”
“And it’s probably hard to work out too, since we’re still learning how to do this,” Tamara said. She wore three different rings from her collection: a silver one with a large pale stone and two Fiona thought were made of wood carved with magic sigils. “You don’t have a base-line to work with.”
“Every bit of data helps,” Calum mumbled. He was only ever rude to Tamara when he forgot himself. She was the reason he took so much care with his hairstyle.
“The thing is,” Fiona said, “the stars are just far-away suns. So why can’t we do the same thing with the sun?”
Before Calum could launch into full lecture mode, Cecilia jumped in. “No one knows for sure. There are lots of theories, but all anyone knows is that the sun refuses us.”
Fiona frowned. “You say that as if it’s alive.”
“Not alive,” Cecilia said. “It just feels that way when we can’t draw magic from it. Like the stars do, like the earth does if you can wake it up, which you just about never can unless you’re on a ley line.”
“One theory is that it’s a defence mechanism in us,” Calum said. “There’s so much energy coming from the sun, it would burn us up if we could open ourselves to it.”
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