Strangeness and Charm

by Mike Shevdon

  "More than I want to hear."

  "She bears some of the responsibility for this Niall. I think she knows that."

  "You'd have to pull her teeth out to get her to admit it."

  "Look at it this way, it solved one problem. You don't have to tell Katherine why Alex can't go back to living at home with her. She's chosen for herself, and there's nothing Katherine can do about that, any more than you."

  "What if she gets hurt? Where will she sleep? What will she do for money?"

  "Let her figure it out, Niall. She knows how to find you. All you have to do is make it clear that if she does come back, it's on her terms, and that you'll accept that."

  "Her terms? What does that mean?"

  "It means not locking her up in your ivory tower until you can find a suitable man to palm her off on."

  "I haven't… there's no way…"

  "The West Wing, then. Have you allowed her out? Has she been able to buy clothes, meet people?"

  "She's hardly been in a state to be allowed to…"

  "Allowed. That's an interesting word, Niall. Well, she no longer needs your permission or seeks it. She's taken responsibility for herself, and actually it's time. Now you have to trust her."

  "That's harder than you think."

  She looked down at our son who had eaten his fill and then flopped asleep in her arms. "Oh, when this little one wants to fledge and fly I expect to be biting my nails at the edge of the nest just like any parent, but it doesn't change what has to happen. They can't stay in the nest forever. That's just nature."

  "Yeah, well let's just hope it isn't red in tooth and claw."

  Alex sat on the steps outside a red-brick apartment block. The steps were stained with green algae, but she had a blister on her heel and she didn't care. She delved into her bag looking for a plaster or something to cushion her foot, but of course, there was nothing. She had make-up which she wasn't wearing, a hair clip that fell out, but nothing useful like a plaster.

  She looked up and down the street. Away from the main streets where the chain stores made easy pickings, there were little corner shops with eagle-eyed shopkeepers who kept everything behind the counter, and long walks between them. She needed to head back to the high street where she could get what she needed. What she really needed, though, was somewhere to stay.

  It was all very well being free to go where you wanted but if you had nowhere to go back to it wore thin pretty quick. Her feet were sore, the weather had broken and there was the threat of rain. Her thin cardie was no longer the comfort it had been. She needed shelter, and food, and a warm bed, and central heating, and chocolate.

  Momentarily she thought about going home, but there was nothing there for her now. She had no clothes, no stuff, no room even. And her dad would be furious with her after she warded him out this morning. It would take him days to calm down. If she went back now she would be grounded for months. She couldn't even go to Kayleigh's. She had no friends now, there just wasn't anyone she could talk to, except maybe Tate.

  Initially him calling her Miss all the time had annoyed her, but now she kinda liked it. He always treated her respectfully and asked her what she wanted to do. He offered advice, but didn't get all antsy if she didn't follow it. And he was huge. She caught herself wondering if he was that big all over, and found herself blushing. No, she didn't think of him like that. He was a friend, that was all.

  She pushed her hands through her unruly hair – she couldn't go to Tate anyway. He was a Warder, just like Dad, and he would have to tell Dad where she was, and then there would be hell to pay. That wasn't going to work.

  She stood and brushed at the green marks on her skirt, making them worse rather than better. She needed a change of clothes as well. She sniffed at her armpit and wished again that she'd made use of the shower in the hotel before running out like a scared cat. What was the matter with her? She'd had the situation under control, so why run? She shook her head at her own folly.

  There were people she knew, though, weren't there? There were the other people like her, the ones from Porton Down. She wasn't the only one who had escaped, and she had an idea where one or two of them might have gone. Maybe she needed to be with her own kind, people who'd understand what she was going though?

  Hoisting the bag back onto her shoulder, she headed back towards an area where there were sandwich shops and a high street chemist – somewhere she could get something for her feet. Then she would take a trip and see what she could find.

  "Is this what Alex did when I tried to speak to her?" I was sitting on the fence overlooking the fields which rolled away from us.

  "No. What she did, I think, was to ward where she was staying against you," said Blackbird. "A warding can apply to a place, or an object, or a person. Warding a place is simple and effective. You exclude anyone's magic but your own. In its finer form it can be used to clean and protect a place, a home perhaps, so that malicious magic cannot intrude, but even then it has limitations. Anything brought into that space which is tainted with another's power will disrupt the warding and release the magic. That's how you know that someone has crossed your warding – you'll feel the release and know it's been broken."

  "So she pushed me out."

  "There's no point in brooding on it, Niall. You invaded her privacy and she reacted. Instead of expressing your concern and asking if she was safe, you started making demands. It was not, perhaps, the best way to re-establish relations with your daughter."

  "You always take her side."

  "I take no side but my own, but I know Alex is precious to you and I'm trying to help. You need to stop thinking of her as a little girl."

  "That was pretty cool, what she did, though, wasn't it?" I smiled.

  "Crude but effective. She excluded you and prevented you from re-entering. Maybe she's more capable than you think, and she's certainly better at learning and not getting distracted by side-issues when someone is trying to teach them something."

  "Sorry, where were we?"

  "You were extending your awareness outwards and telling me what you feel."

  I closed my eyes. Here beneath the trees the shade was welcome, but the rustling of the leaves and the smell of the grass was a constant distraction from what I was supposed to be looking for.

  "It's just trees and grass," I told her.

  "Is it? Or is that what you're supposed to think?"

  I let myself sink deeper into the sense of the place, hearing the buzzing of bumble bees, the far-off coo of a wood pigeon and the faint rumble of distant traffic. "It's peaceful."

  "How peaceful?"

  Now that she mentioned it, there was something. "There's a kind of dampening, a dullness spread around us. Is that what I'm looking for?"

  "What can you tell me about it?"

  "It's heavy, like a wool blanket but not warm like that, just heavy. Now that I can see it it's over everything. It's huge."

  "Every day the Warders renew these boundaries." Blackbird said quietly. "Every day they reassert their magic over this ground. What you're sensing is the repeated warding of this place, layer upon layer, until it's so thick that it can no longer be broken, simply endured. It's one of the things I don't like about being here. It's smothering."

  "Why didn't I sense it before?"

  "Here at the edge it's easier to detect. You can feel the density of it change as it fades out towards the edges. Within the grounds of the house it's pervasive. It invades every space and seeps into every crack. There is nowhere not steeped in it. Like background noise that never ceases, after a while you don't notice it. I do though. It's like a constant niggle at the edge of my senses, a lingering doubt that things aren't as they should be."

  "You could have said something."

  "It doesn't seem to bother you, and as you pointed out it's all very convenient having everyone on call, with all the facilities to hand."

  "But I get to go out and leave for a while. I get some relief from it," I said.

 
"Indeed."

  "Couldn't you set up your own warding, just in our rooms? You could exclude the Warder's magic and have a little island of peace."

  "A bubble inside a bubble? Somewhat unstable, don't you think? I'm not sure that would even be possible. Besides I can't see Garvin allowing any area over which he has no control anywhere near the courts. He is responsible for security when all's said and done."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't realise."

  "It presents us with an opportunity, though. I want you to establish your own warding, right here at the edge of the courts where it's weaker. You will need to push their warding back to establish your own."

  "How?"

  "Do you remember when we were sitting outside the Church of St Clement's Dane in London and I was showing you how to establish your glamour?"

  "I guess. I could feel the way your magic concealed us, as it spread across the area around the statue."

  "Think of extending threads of magic outward, like a spider spinning a web. Push it out a little, connect it together, then push it out a little more. Keep extending the boundary."

  "That's not how a spider builds a web," I pointed out.

  "I know that. I'm just drawing an analogy. Think instead then of how wasps build a nest. They start small and then build onto it in spirals, shoring it up as you go."

  "I don't even know what it is I'm shoring up."

  "It's like territory, like putting your stamp on it, as if you were claiming it."

  I tried to imagine myself claiming the area around the fence. Nothing happened. "It's not working."

  "OK, forget that. Come down here and lie down." She hopped off the fence and smoothed her skirts before sitting on the grass.

  I stepped down and sat down with her and then lay back onto the grass so that my head was near to where she was sitting.

  "Look up in the tree and allow your eyes to defocus – better still close them, not tightly, but so that the sunlight filters through your eyelids. Imagine the tree is still there."

  "It is still there."

  She tweaked my nose.

  "Ow!"

  "Shut up and listen. The tree is above you, extending its branches out into the air, leaning up into the sunlight. Let your magic extend around your body, let it relax into the earth, so that it seeps into the soil, down among the roots and worms. Let it follow the roots of the tree, in your mind, in your imagination, up through the trunk, out along the branches, onto the twigs."

  "It feels light and warm."

  "Follow the light out along the twigs into the leaves. Feel the sunlight in the leaves, feeding the tree, bathe in the sunlight at the tips of the leaves."

  "This is really very restful. You're not going to be offended if I fall asleep are you?"

  She ignored me. "Leave a sense of yourself, a presence there at the leaves, but now float from the leaves into the air, following the shifting breeze, drifting with the wind."

  "Is this how a seed feels when it falls? Oh, hang on, there's something here. It feels like a fungus or a fuzzy mould."

  "You've reached the edge of the warding. Send a root of your own into it. Explore it with your senses" she suggested.

  "It tastes sour, not like the tree."

  "It's very old, layer upon layer. But like all layers it has weaknesses. Explore the cracks. Push your way into it. Find the fault lines and wheedle your way into them."

  I could feel the weight of the warding ahead of me. Somehow it left the taste of decay in my mouth, along with the smell of the forest floor and something beneath that – a bitter sourness that crept onto the tongue, making my mouth flood with saliva.

  "What do you think you're doing?"

  It was Fionh's voice and I opened my eyes, squinting up against the light. She was standing next to the fence we had been sitting on. I blinked, glancing at Blackbird.

  "I asked you what you thought you were doing," she repeated.

  "Blackbird was showing me how wardings work," I explained.

  Fionh raised an eyebrow at Blackbird.

  "It seemed a good way of demonstrating how a place can be warded over time," she said.

  "You know better than to interfere with the wardings of the courts," said Fionh. "And getting Niall to do it in your place will not help you."

  "I don't think I know what you mean," said Blackbird.

  "I think you do." She looked down at me. "Don't do that again. There are things in the wardings which you do not want to encounter. They're there for a reason, and not to be meddled with."

  "Sorry, I had no idea it was so sensitive," I said.

  "No. You didn't. But she did." She looked from me to Blackbird. "You're supposed to be teaching him."

  "Oh, I think that lesson was an excellent demonstration, Fionh. Thank you for your assistance."

  Fionh's mouth hardened, but she turned and walked away with whatever was on her tongue unsaid.

  ELEVEN

  Alex was beginning to think she had come to the wrong place. The estate looked abandoned – surely no one lived here? Cracked windows looked down on her, and rubble had been heaped into random piles.

  Had she remembered correctly? Some of her memories of her imprisonment were distorted by drugs and the regime she had been put through. She knew not to trust her sense of time, but there were other things. At times her dreams and reality seemed to merge and she wasn't sure she could differentiate between one and another.

  The memories that stuck, though, were ones of other inmates. Meetings like that were brief, and often at least one of them would be spaced out on something. She'd been taken by surprise the first time, lying on a trolley and doped up with muscle relaxant. A face had appeared in her vision.

  "I'm Donna," she said. "I like movies and romantic stories. Quick, tell me about yourself, something, anything!" She had shaken Alex's shoulders.

  "I'm Lexie." Slurring her words, she sounded drunk, but she didn't feel drunk. "Where are we?"

  "It doesn't matter. Tell me something about yourself, something normal, something you'd tell a friend."

  "There's the cool guy at school," she slurred. "He's called Jamie… he's got a really nice arse."

  "That's good Lexie. Now we're friends. They can't break you if you're with friends. We're all in this together. Find someone else. Do the same with them. We can beat them together."

  The door opened and a woman entered. "What are you doing?"

  "She was mumbling something. I think she was trying to talk to me," said Donna.

  "Don't worry about her, Donna. Come along. It's time for your assessment."

  Lexie watched as Donna was led away, but the memory stayed.

  She'd done the same with others, forming connections, however brief. She could remember all of them, every name, every face.

  It was funny, she couldn't remember the staff – except for Watkins.

  The bloody severed head of Doctor Watkins was in front of her. The shock travelled up her arm as she chopped the heavy blade down on his open-eyed skull, splitting the bone and sending fragments of gunk splattering outwards, sticking to her arms, her face. Blood and slime slicked her hands. Tugging free the blade, lifting it again, her breathing loud, heart thumping. The exhalation as she chopped down, "Heeuagh!" The swish and crunch as the blade glanced off the skull, slicing off an ear.

  She shook her head, pushing the memory away, staggering momentarily at the disorienting vision. She couldn't afford to lose focus like that. She deliberately slowed her breathing, unclenching her fist with the other hand, massaging the spasmed muscles. It was over. She'd had her revenge. He was dead.

  A train gave an electric whine as it ran along the bankedup tracks behind the estate. The normality of the sound helped to steady her. She'd seen Gina in a corridor; a two-second conversation. They'd exchanged addresses. When Gina told her it was an industrial estate, Alex questioned her, but there was no time. They'd been separated and she'd not seen her again.

  And here it was, except it wasn't here any more.
No one had done anything industrial here for quite a while. The buildings were derelict, some of them half demolished, others cracked and vandalised, sprayed with tags and slogans. She navigated through the piles of broken bricks and half-burned timber and came to the building she was looking for.

  She turned around slowly, looking for signs of life. A siren wailed distantly, seagulls flapped their lazy way across the overcast sky. What a dump. Had Gina come back here? Is this what she found? Except this wasn't recent, so maybe she was here after all. She looked up at the green slime running down the walls under the broken gutters, the way the rubble had sunk and settled, the big patches of nettles and bramble – all this happened ages ago.