She rubbed at her hair until it stuck up in thick, pink-streaked tufts. She eyed herself in the mirror that hung on the plain white walls of her cell-like room.
‘Hey there, trouble,’ she murmured, scrunching her nose and her emerald-green eyes at her reflection. ‘How’s banishment looking today?’
In the darkest moments of her childhood, Em had thought the Council of Guardians were right to enforce the First Rule preventing Animare and Guardians from having kids. Particularly when her dad turned out to be such a monster. Now she was older, she knew the First Rule was archaic and heartless and rooted in fear. If she hadn’t broken Zach Butler’s heart and torn a black hole in his soul, they might have had kids some day. Councils be damned.
Em liked to think of Orion as MI5 for the supernatural. The organization had kept her and her twin brother Matt busy watching out for their kind for a while now, and the work was rewarding. But still, banishment was banishment. Even if Orion preferred the word ‘reassignment’.
Em peered out of the tiny tower window at the giant, freaky slime monster circling the sky above the Highlands. It was a hell of a way to start the day.
The tower shook violently, knocking her easel over. The half-finished portrait of Zach fell face down on her bed and the paint pots she’d left open spilled on to the rug. She scrambled off the narrow bunk, ignoring the spill and lunging for the portrait. The rug already looked like a Jackson Pollock reject.
The taste in her mouth was getting worse, like she’d been sick during the night. Em gulped from the tap at the tiny porcelain sink in the corner. It didn’t help. Pulling a bulky Aran-knit cardigan over her green T-shirt and yoga pants, she rushed down the narrow spiral stairs two at a time, and crashed out into the chill.
Directly into Matt, who was already outside. Taller than his sister, Matt was in skinny jeans, a vintage red Sex Pistols T-shirt and his ever-present Ray-Bans. He grabbed Em’s shoulders before she fell backwards.
‘What did you just dream about?’ he demanded.
‘Me?’ protested Em, glancing at the neon lights swirling around the church and its courtyard as if a million invisible hands were waving green sparklers in the air. ‘Why must you always blame me for the crazy stuff? Just because you and Zach had to kill a sexy Viking once in the kitchen, you’ve never let me forget it.’
‘What about the professor from Hogwarts who almost stabbed Zach? Or Storm who almost flooded the backyard?’
‘OK,’ admitted Em. ‘Maybe two or three times in my childhood I lost control of my animations and dreams and brought something interesting to the table. But not this time. I swear this has nothing to do with me.’
The swirling green light dipped towards them, and without thinking Em thrust her hand into it. Almost at once she gasped and whipped her hand out.
‘It feels like it’s sobbing,’ she said, the intense emotion still running through her.
‘Smart,’ Matt said sarcastically. ‘That thing could have taken your hand off. Maybe we could draw a container and trap it?’
‘Maybe you should do your crocodile eyelid thing.’
‘I do not have crocodile eyes,’ said Matt with dignity. ‘I have historical visions.’
‘Historical vision, croc vision, whatever,’ said Em. ‘Try rewinding.’
Matt took off his shades. His eyes were always seductive and stunning, weirdly mesmerizing and darkly troubling all at once, a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colours and light: the consequence of time-travel gone wrong when he was much younger.
‘There’s too much light. I can’t,’ he said, and dropped his shades back on to his nose. Crouching and using the charcoal crayon he always kept to hand, he started sketching a cage on the flagged stones under their feet. But before he could finish it, Em wiped it away with the toe of her boot and pointed out over the village tucked into the valley beneath them.
‘It’s reached all the way to the castle ruins,’ she said. ‘No way a cage is going to cover that distance.’
‘What about washing it out of the sky?’
He started to draw a hose. Em scuffed the ground again.
‘Now you’re just being ridiculous,’ she said.
Matt shrugged. ‘Well, we’d better think of something before more than just a few folks in the village see it.’
11.
TAKE THAT, MOZART
Moments later, Rémy sprinted out of the tower, almost tripping over Matt.
‘What the hell is that?’ he panted, staring at the light stretching out over the countryside. ‘Not something good, I’m guessing. Is it yours, Em?’
Em glared.
‘It’s usually Animare who cause this sort of stuff,’ Rémy pointed out.
Em prodded him in the chest. ‘Just because you’ve been dancing with us cheek to cheek for a while doesn’t mean you understand everything about Animare.’
‘Woah,’ Rémy said. ‘Only looking for an explanation.’
‘I could say the same thing about your T-shirt. Did you get dressed in the dark?’
Rémy looked down at himself. His faded hometown Chicago Bulls T-shirt was on backwards.
‘Take that, Mozart,’ Matt said.
Rémy had always heard the world in riffs and melodies, in chords and notes, and sometimes in screams and howls. But it wasn’t until his mother’s murder that he’d appreciated the full extent of his reality-altering abilities. His imagination came with a streaming soundtrack.
Things had got better since joining Orion, but the creatures who’d killed his mother were hunting him now. He still missed her, hearing her voice in his head like background music.
‘We’d better find out fast what’s causing this spectre before someone higher up our food chain decides it is my fault and comes looking for us,’ said Em.
Rémy scanned their surroundings. The church was older than America itself, with its two wooden doors, its arched windows and heavy old blockwork. He studied the light spiralling up from the tower. Listened. And heard a piccolo playing a jaunty jig with a creepy, calming tone.
‘This is going to sound crazy,’ he said, rubbing his brown eyes, ‘but I think the light is playing music. And it’s giving me a headache.’
‘I’ve heard crazier,’ said Matt, his Ray-Bans reflecting the eerie green light.
Em darted towards the great double doors that led into the nave, parting a way through the ribbons of dipping, darting light. Rémy ran to cut her off, planting himself in front of the doors.
‘I don’t think we should go inside,’ he said. The pain was making him squint, and he struggled to put the sensation into words. ‘It sounds as if the church is breathing.’
‘That can’t be good,’ said Matt, twisting his thick curly hair into a knot at his neck.
Em pulled her cardigan tighter. ‘So what do you suggest we do? You know what this kind of light means.’
‘What?’ asked Rémy, shading his eyes from the swirling spectre.
‘Something powerful has animated inside the church.’
Matt slid his shades up on to his head. His eyes were on fire, brighter than Rémy had seen before.
‘A little warning, Matt,’ he said with a wince. ‘Your eyes are a marching band full-tilt in my head.’
‘We’re the only ones in the compound right now who can animate.’ Em paused. ‘We are, right?’
‘As far as I know,’ said Matt.
The phantasm pulsed brighter, taunting them, swooping over the church roof above them. Em reached for the bronze door handle on the double doors leading into the nave. The handle was shaped like a flying stag: a peryton.
‘I’m going in,’ she said.
Rémy put his hand on top of Em’s. A shock of electricity coursed through him, and he pulled away.
‘There’s something going on here that we don’t understand,’ said Matt, noticing Rémy’s reaction. ‘I think we should draw something first. A weapon, maybe.’
‘Like what?’ said Em, rubbing her hand. ‘We don’t kn
ow what we’re up against.’
Almost without realizing, Rémy pulled his harmonica from his pocket, wiping it on his thigh. ‘You might make things worse,’ he said.
‘Thanks for the pep talk,’ said Matt. ‘Wait here.’
He hitched up his jeans and clambered on to a window ledge above them, his fingers feeling for fissures in the ancient stone, his toes digging into two deep crevices.
‘Matt.’ Em hissed as her brother scrambled up and over the guttering, which creaked beneath his weight. ‘Have you lost your mind? I could’ve animated a ladder.’
Ignoring his sister, Matt climbed up the roof towards a skylight and was quickly lost inside the swirling green apparition.
Rémy stood on tiptoes and cupped his hands against the light, pressing his face against the small leaded-glass windowpane.
‘Anything?’ Em asked.
Rémy shook his head. Then without warning he collapsed to his knees, covering his ears with his hands. ‘Aaargh!’ he gasped. ‘Can you hear that? Man, that hurts.’
‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Em, kneeling next to him, ‘but I can taste liquorice. Rémy, your ear’s bleeding.’ Using her cardigan sleeve, she dabbed the blood. ‘What did you hear?’
Rémy grimaced. ‘A piccolo, or maybe a flute at its highest dogs-only pitch.’
Matt shimmied off the roof and dropped in front of them. ‘I hate to break up the party,’ he said. ‘But there’s a dead guy on the altar.’
12.
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
Inside the church the apparition had draped itself over everything. The priceless art on the walls, the statues in their alcoves, the computers, desks and shelves of books, all were washed in the strange green light.
Orion’s secret HQ was more like a sanctuary for lost or forgotten art than a church: a museum to the sacred and the profane, paintings and sculptures piled high or propped up against one another. Here a modern sculpture of an anvil removed from a museum in Russia because it stirred observers to violence, there a set of Leonardo da Vinci sketches from the estate of an Animare who had recently died. The church was also an art-gallery-slash-supernatural-transit-station where Orion agents travelled from place to place via paintings from artists like Titian and Turner, Van Gogh and Velasquez, Kollwitz and Cassatt. Banksy too. All were secret Animare, men and women like Matt and Em that Orion had been formed to protect.
Rémy, Matt and Em peered anxiously down the aisle.
‘It’s like we’re in that final scene from The Silence of the Lambs,’ said Em at last. ‘You know, in the cellar?’
‘Yeah,’ said Rémy with a shiver. ‘The night-vision goggles.’
‘Helloooo, precious,’ Matt whispered in Em’s ear, making his sister scream.
‘You’re a dick,’ snapped Em when she had recovered.
Matt’s eyes were an advantage in the dark. He confidently led the way deeper into the sanctuary, while Em and Rémy collided with work tables and freestanding pews before their eyes adjusted and they could see the outline of the body splayed on the simple stone altar. Here, the spectre was at its most frenetic, rising from the body like a tornado, before spreading out across the ceiling in rushing waves of light.
Matt checked for a pulse. ‘Definitely dead.’ He crouched and looked more closely, then rocked back on his heels. ‘Aw, Em. It’s Gibson.’
Em grew even paler in the dim light.
‘Who’s Gibson?’ Rémy asked.
‘One of Orion’s oldest agents.’ Em sounded choked. ‘He’d just retired. His arthritis was bad and he had a heart condition. He was active in the Second World War, can you believe that?’
Rémy studied the figure on the altar. Gibson was wearing pyjamas, blue-and-white striped ones buttoned to the top, and a navy dressing gown with big pockets. His face looked pale and peaceful. His lips were not yet blue.
Matt cleared his throat. ‘He doesn’t look like he’s been injured or attacked.’
‘We have to call Vaughn,’ said Em, tears filling her eyes. ‘He’ll tell the people who need to know.’
‘We can’t,’ said Matt. ‘He’s at the meeting.’
‘We’ll have to call Mum, then,’ Em said. ‘Or Grandpa, or Simon.’
‘They’re all at the meeting, Em.’
‘What meeting?’ Rémy asked, trying to keep up.
‘The annual world conference for all the Councils of Guardians,’ Matt explained. ‘They hang out and discuss Animare like us and Gibson here, moaning about the trouble we cause with our artsy, reality-altering habits. Then they create more bloody rules.’
Rémy waved at the paintings on the walls. ‘So why don’t we just go find them? You guys can fade us into these pictures and take us anywhere in the world.’
‘We don’t know where they gather,’ Matt confessed. ‘They do these things on a need-to-know basis.’
‘And we definitely do not need to know,’ said Em resentfully.
The air in the room fizzed with static. The lights above Gibson’s body were pulsing more quickly and brighter than before.
Em shivered. ‘Do you feel that?’
‘I feel it,’ Matt said.
Matt reached into the pocket of Gibson’s dressing gown, placing sweets, a small tube of heartburn pills, a monogrammed hanky and the stubs of four charcoal grey pencils on to the slabs of stone. As he rolled Gibson on to his side, a Moleskine notebook opened at a page full of sketches trapped awkwardly in his hand. Matt carefully extracted the notebook from the agent’s gnarly fingers and handed it to Em, who stared at the pages.
‘His last sketch is of the Constable portal over there.’ She nodded to one of the shadowy paintings in a nearby alcove. ‘He must have faded here from the National Gallery in Edinburgh.’
‘What if he was having a heart attack,’ said Matt, ‘and faded here just to be safe?’
‘Safe from what?’ asked Rémy, a bit anxiously.
‘A death animation.’ Em fetched a throw from a nearby couch and gently covered Gibson’s body with it. ‘When a powerful Animare dies, if he’s painting or drawing or creating in any way at the moment of his death, his imagination can animate spontaneously.’
‘Good to know,’ said Rémy, his eyes wide.
Matt waved his hand in the shifting green air. ‘It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it can go crazy. Gibson must have left a pretty powerful death animation to produce a massive residual of light like this.’
There was a fierce kick of piercing music that made Rémy catch his breath and reach for his iPod. He turned the control wheel to a playlist of static, and shoved the buds into his ears.
‘Whatever this dude created when he died,’ Rémy said, screwing up his face, ‘it comes with its own soundtrack. And it’s getting stronger.’
13.
A CHILDREN’S PARADE
The strange exodus of children from Kentigern began right after sun-up. The light was much less visible as clouds drifted across the morning sky.
Mabel and Ben Lambert were the first to leave, followed by the Denby children. The five were soon seven, and then quickly eight, as more children spewed from houses and headed barefoot towards the main road, skipping past the pitch where the primary school football team was about to begin an early practice. The parade crossed the pitch at the moment the coach had her back to the path, arranging orange cones for a practice drill. When she turned round again, the three boys and two girls, led by her main striker Tommy Scanlon, had joined the end of the snaking line.
The coach blew her whistle. ‘Ye wee buggers! Get back here now!’
The children kept marching, following Mabel and Ben along the path. The coach blew her whistle again. More children were joining them, three darting from the big houses tucked into the hillside, then two more from the flat above the newsagent’s.
The coach grabbed her phone from her backpack and dialled 999.
‘The weans!’ she said urgently. ‘Something’s happening to them. It’s like they’ve been hyp
notized!’
‘Have you been drinking, miss?’
Dropping her phone, the coach sprinted along the grass. The children were either going to turn on to the normally busy A14, or up towards the treacherous ruins of St Mungo’s Castle. The coach prayed they would take the A14.
A wild-eyed woman joined her. The coach recognized her from the school playground: Collyn Lambert.
‘Mabel!’ shouted Collyn. ‘You and your brother need to stop this nonsense right now!’
But Mabel and Ben were oblivious. They, and the rest of the children, seemed to be focusing on something just beyond their field of vision.
‘Mabel!’ screamed Collyn piteously. ‘Please. Where are you going?’
Bill Preston, the local constable, swerved his Ford Fiesta to a stop on the pavement, lights flashing, sirens screaming. Not even wee emergency-vehicle-obsessed Ben Lambert turned his head as the parade swept round the police car.
Collyn went into full panic mode and launched herself at her children’s legs, but a strange energy field surrounding her children snapped her wrists back and her face crunched up against it as if she’d hit a wall. She howled as she face-planted on the stony road.
Mabel, Ben and the other children climbed over her prostrate body and marched on.
14.
ONWARDS TO THE CASTLE
Collyn Lambert leaped to her feet, ignoring the bumps and scratches from the children. She was a runner and in minutes managed to sprint well ahead of the children. She stood at the bottom of the steep path up to the castle, turning her eyes to the swirling light whose thin tails stretched all the way back to the old church.
The apparition looked familiar. Collyn’s heart jolted and her adrenaline surged.
The children were making their way purposefully along the road to the car park and the entrance to the castle. Collyn snapped herself out of paralysis.
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