Wolfie?
Had he tried to do anything to stop this?
But at his name, Mrs. Jones’s mind became a black wall, and it felt as if Della were falling into it until she forcibly yanked her consciousness away from Mrs. Jones’s.
She rolled off the housematron while the other girls continued to hold down the cat vampire. Mrs. Jones had put a block around anything that had to do with Wolfie, and even under attack, she was refusing to let them see the one answer Della really wanted.
She struggled for breath, numb, as the urge to scream and cry welled up in her.
Do you know what could have been in store for you, little girl?
At the blackout, the other girls who had gone into Mrs. Jones’s mind had also drawn back from the old creature, and that gave the cat vampire an opening.
With a steel-on-blackboard yell, she swatted out with her claws, catching Noreen and another girl on the sides of their faces, sending them hurling across the room.
Stacy and the others bounded away from Mrs. Jones before she could get them, too, but Della was too caught by shock to join them quickly enough.
Wolfie ... ?
The thought held her in its grasp as Mrs. Jones clamped her fingers around Della’s neck, taking her and aiming toward the door as Della choked and tried to free herself.
The old vampire sped off through the tunnels, holding Della to her, but Della didn’t really feel the incredible speed or hear the Queenshill girls giving chase.
That’s because she had already decided that she wasn’t going to be another Blanche or Sharon or Briana, and she went limp in Mrs. Jones’s grasp, sliding down until she tangled with the housematron’s legs, slowing the cat vampire to a skidding, dust-blaring screech that chewed at Della’s limbs.
But she didn’t care, because before Mrs. Jones could recover, Della used her claws and teeth to tear chunks out of the cat vampire’s legs.
The old creature screamed and swatted her attacker away, but Della crashed into a wall, scrambling to her feet just in time to see the cat vampire already trying to self-heal her ripped limbs.
Della glanced at her fingers, gore-heavy claws, not having realized that she could inflict such damage on her superior.
That she would ever dare.
In the back of her mind, as she heard the other schoolgirls grinding to a halt in the tunnel, Della remembered how good it’d felt to sic the ravens on Violet, and she mind-said one last thing to Mrs. Jones.
For our friends. Her mental voice was just as mangled as Mrs. Jones’s legs. But especially for Wolfie.
As the schoolgirls jumped at Mrs. Jones, the cat vampire’s expression went ... soft. It was as if his name had shredded her far more than any claws or teeth ever could.
But like the long-living thing she was, Mrs. Jones glared at the oncoming girls, then darted toward the ceiling, and Della realized that they were just below a trapdoor that the housematron must have been targeting.
Blood so delicious in her mouth, Della sprang, too, wrapping both paws around Mrs. Jones’s neck in an attempt to pull her back down.
She thought she heard—and felt—the housematron’s throat rip as the cat vampire’s velocity punched them both aboveground, through the earth and wood and into the night, where the moon bathed a heath sprinkled with light rain.
But on the way back down, she lost her grip on Mrs. Jones.
Actually, it was as if the vampire had disappeared as Della felt a pair of hands grabbing at her ankles and yanking her into the hole until she smacked the ground.
Everything spun—the tunnel, the darkness—as Stacy loomed above Della.
“Are you mad?” she asked Della as some other vampires prepared to jump up through the door after Mrs. Jones, as well.
“Stop!” Stacy yelled.
And they did.
As Della clambered back to a stand, splinters of wood sticking out of her bare, wrinkled cat-wolf skin, Noreen said, “But she’ll get away! ”
“I think I might have got her.” Della panted, going beneath the door, looking up into the night as she tugged the splinters out of her skin. “I might’ve taken her head off at the neck.”
The other vampires began panting, excited.
Stacy stared at Della for a moment, then leaped up to the exit, bracing herself on the sides of the hole as she glanced around then gracefully fell back to the floor, staying in a crouch.
“She’s nowhere in sight, and I imagine she would’ve been, with all her injuries slowing her.”
The panting increased in rhythm and volume from every girl.
“Maybe,” Noreen said, “Della killed her and her body disappeared already.”
Several schoolgirls began gleefully applauding, but Stacy merely stared at the opening above them. It would need to be covered quickly, Della thought in a discombobulated cloud.
The older vampire shook her head. “Let’s take care of this door, and then we’ll have to decide what comes next. We don’t dare go out there for any sort of ambush from that smart old cat, if she’s still whole.”
But one of the other girls was already humming, “Ding dong the witch is dead,” as they scrambled to find materials for a new covering.
Yet, as Della helped, she realized that none of the schoolgirls had stopped to consider that if Mrs. Jones had aided in creating them, her termination would have affected their composition.
They would have lost half their powers, unless Mrs. Jones had been lying.
And, even worse, none of them except Stacy seemed to be thinking of what they were going to tell Wolfie when he returned Underground.
TWENTY-TWO
ONCE UPON AN OMISSION
IF the main Underground were a body, then the room where the custodes kneeled before a long wooden box would be the heartbeat.
The atmosphere felt like a field of electricity round Lilly, vibrating and pressurizing her flesh, muscle, blood, and bone, weakening and strengthening her at the same time. A custode never missed the Relaquory ritual, because it was here that they gained energy while giving it at the same time, joining only to separate, absorbing purpose and will.
Heads bowed, both keepers extended their bared arms over the tightly packed dirt in the box—the earth that covered everything except for a nose and mouth barely peeking out. Then the custodes sliced their arms with the curved ritual knives that had been in the Meratoliage family for over a century, when their servitude had started.
They allowed two drops of blood from each of their bodies to soak into the soil—a small token of sacrifice and worship, a symbol of their devotion.
As they remained on their knees, holding hands, they withstood the vibrations that fed them, like all custodes had in the past, their lungs heavy with the oppression, their bodies gaining power until they needed no more.
Then, rising to their feet, they left, locking the door behind them in layers of steel-clad security. Even so, the air outside the room stayed weighted and quivering as they returned to their quarters, where they tended to their knife wounds, which flared next to the other arm cuts culled from night after night of Relaquory.
Afterward, they checked the monitor room for any pressing activity, but there was only a gathering of vampire girls in the kitchens to note. So they nourished themselves with normal food, then walked to the monitor room again, where they planned to watch the Southwark cameras for any more signs of those attackers, as well as review the footage they had missed during the ritual that fueled them beyond the ordinary.
Before Relaquory, they had made plans for the night: while Nigel went on patrol, Lilly would continue to investigate older footage of Highgate. Thus far, she hadn’t found anything to indicate that the attackers who’d invaded Queenshill had been in the area lately, but she had a lot more recordings to cover.
“So you’re going to check the Queenshill rooms belowground first thing on patrol?” she asked her brother.
He nodded as they rounded a corner of the rock hall. This morning, while it w
as still dark, he had finally got his bum up to the school, using the wooded entrance in lieu of the one in Mrs. Jones’s room. There, he had found a curiosity or two, the most interesting being the blood on some tunnel “thorns” that had grown quite naturally in one part of Claudia’s sub-Underground.
The thicket wasn’t an intentional trap—Claudia had thought herself strong enough to decline any major security precautions in her belowground domain. But in Lilly’s view, the refusal was only another sign that these vampires wrongly depended upon the custodes for protection when they should have been providing more for themselves. The keepers had other important matters to attend to, yet sometime during the past century, these vampires had got more dependent than ever.
According to rumor, though, they hadn’t been the only ones to become complacent. It seemed that time had dulled the fire of purpose in many of the blood brothers who had been so voracious and loyal on the battlefield centuries ago.
Or perhaps those stories about the other Undergrounds weren’t true at all, Lilly thought. Perhaps the tales were created by wandering masters who were bored of waiting for the ages to pass and for the dragon’s armies to rise against the world.
All the same, Nigel had cleaned off those bloodied thorns in the sub-Underground, taking samples that the vampires might be able to use to identify a trespasser once the custodes handed over the blood to them. Her brother had also found a hair matching the other one that he had discovered in Mrs. Jones’s room during his initial inspection of it.
But that hadn’t been the most disturbing find. Part of the wall that used to cover Claudia’s private room, where she’d killed her girls, had been demolished. Nigel had no explanation for it, but Lilly knew.
The attackers. They had to have been there.
Lilly had asked him if he had noticed a jasmine scent at any time in the sub-Underground, but he had said no. Nonetheless, she wondered if Mihas had received her communication to beware of jasmine altogether.
“I wish,” she said, as the monitor room’s big black door came into sight, “there were cameras in Claudia’s part of the Underground. We would know for certain what happened down there.”
“She wanted to do all the watching herself, without surrendering her privacy to the modern eye, as she calls it,” Nigel said. “And no wonder, with what we know she’s been doing to her classes of girls down there. Mihas was only accepting of the cameras in his section because of what we protect here. That’s the only difference.”
He didn’t add that previous custodes had insisted upon surveillance in Mihas’s section of the Underground, whereas it hadn’t mattered so much with Claudia’s portion.
They arrived at the door’s access panel, and Lilly hopped in front of Nigel to open it.
“You’d bite my arm off to get in there first,” he said.
“There’s a lot to do.”
Like finding that dark-haired woman with the mind powers, Lilly thought, hitting the button to release the door. Discovering the woman’s whereabouts seemed even more important than most everything else for some reason, and Lilly hadn’t been able to stop thinking about cornering her again, beating her this time in any game of cat and mouse they might take up.
As the door slid to a gape and Lilly burst into the room, she and Nigel were stopped short by the red-rimmed screens that the alarm system had highlighted during their short absence.
“What now?” Nigel murmured. “They’ve been putting us through the paces lately.”
Fascinated, Lilly merely watched what was happening on the Underground cameras trained on the kitchens: the knock-down, drag-out fighting between the pack of girl vampires and ...
Was that Claudia, in full cat-vampire form, in the midst of them?
A thrill speared her. Had Della finally recalled every tale that Lilly had implanted? Had she put all the pieces together, and that’s why the girls had gathered?
She leaped toward the console, but Nigel was already reaching for the mask hanging on his belt.
“What’re you doing?” Lilly asked. Surely he wasn’t about to interfere.
“What do you think?”
Quick as a flash of panic, she was on her brother, her hand grasping his hair to wrench his neck back, her curved Relaquory blade to his throat.
He was too stunned to move—she could feel it in the way he raised his arms, pausing in retaliation.
But she wouldn’t give him the opportunity.
“Listen to me,” she said evenly, though she felt his body now tensing in readiness to disarm her. She brought the blade closer to his jugular, showing him she was serious.
And when he loosened his muscles—for the moment, at least—he seemed to cooperate, perhaps believing that she really would cut him.
Or perhaps her cold tone had persuaded him, so she continued to use it.
“We’re custodes, only connected to the Underground, not a true part of them.”
“Lilly ...”
“No—there’ll be none of this ‘you’re only a new keeper’ talk out of you.”
Rage sizzled just under her skin, because she knew what he was—a scared caretaker who’d become just as misguided as the leaders of this particular Underground. Instead of fixing his attention on the future, he’d focused on the vampires, forgetting his true purpose in being here. Lilly saw this error as having led indirectly—but just as certainly—to the needless death of Charles, since her other brother had been on patrol round the vampires’ careless burial ground.
If Mihas and Claudia had been minding the bigger picture instead of chasing their common appetites, she thought, she wouldn’t be holding a knife to her brother’s throat. She would die for the future of the community, but she wouldn’t do it for these ridiculous creatures that housed them right now.
“You truly believe,” she said, “that interference is the best policy?”
Still loose-limbed, Nigel didn’t move, and Lilly knew she needed to state her case quickly, to stay on guard against the defensive move she anticipated from him.
“Together,” she said, “Claudia and Mihas are weak and predictable. We know this because of all the vision/tales.”
Tales numbering far more than what Lilly had implanted in Della. Old tales of this particular community’s history that dated before the dragon’s command to create Undergrounds.
She added, “Based on their past, I can tell you precisely what will happen with these two if Claudia survives those little girls. Whatever she did to upset Mihas’s darlings, she’ll just think of something new to lure him back into her good graces. Then she’ll give him what he wants—in this case, the guarantee that he can keep his Underground while she continues to hold him in thrall after her blood baths. Her routine never changes. His doesn‘t, either. Mihas will, of course, take her back, but he’ll concentrate on his own desires, keeping Claudia on a hook, just as always.”
She whispered in Nigel’s ear, harsh and brooking no argument.
“We must keep the cycle from going round, don’t you see? Claudia should’ve gone her own way centuries ago, before she started clinging to Mihas, and it seems the girls are going to finally send her off.”
When Nigel spoke, Lilly could feel his throat working under the knife. He sounded like a negotiator trying to reason with her.
“We can’t allow the citizens to destroy each other.”
“Can’t we? This is a tiff that concerns only them. Where is it said that we have to interfere in their messes—unless we’re specifically asked or unless the Underground itself is threatened to a destructive degree? Where is that directive, Nigel?”
Out of the corner of her gaze, she saw Claudia now fending off the girls in a hallway. Fortunately, Lilly knew Mihas wouldn’t come to the cat vampire’s rescue anytime soon. He was galloping over the heath, having a brilliant, silly old time on his own.
But Lilly would get around to returning him to full blood brother form soon enough.
“As custodes,” she said, “we’re meant
to ensure that this sanctuary thrives, and that’s what’s going to happen without Claudia here. You know that as well as I.”
“They’re eating themselves up from the inside out, Lilly.”
“Yes, because we all destroy what makes us weak,” she said, softer now. “I recall your telling me that once, when you and Charles were playing army on the lawns, and I wished to join in. Charles was all for it, but not you. Never you.”
Unthinkingly, she pressed the knife against him until he sucked in a breath. A hint of blood wet her hand.
“You told me,” she said, as she felt him tense again, “that I would be a weak link. I would cause your deaths because I was merely a girl—one who was useless in so many ways.” She had been deemed sterile, but in those years, she hadn’t known what that had meant. “Naturally, I argued, so you took me in the house and stuffed me in the wardrobe. Do you remember that, Nigel?”
He barely made a sound, but the silence seemed to hold a hint of remorse.
“I was locked in there a long, long time,” Lilly said. “Enough time to realize that you had learned this attitude from Mum and Dad. No one but Charles, who ended up getting me out of that wardrobe, believed I would amount to much. The girl of the family. The—what did you call it? Ah, yes.” Her voice hardened. “The aberration who was not meant to go Underground like the most important of Meratoliages.”
As his muscles went even tauter—he was about to attack—she released his hair and flattened her fingers to chop him with the side of her hand at the middle of his arm, on the hollow triceps muscle. He began to sink to his knees, and she struck the other side, too, immobilizing both of his arms.
“Thank you for the lessons on pressure points,” she said as he tried to recover. “They’ve allowed me to relieve you of your command.”
To emphasize that, she bent, holding the knife with one hand and levering back her other arm to strike the lower edge of the bottom of his jaw with the heel of her palm, toward the hole in the bone, up and in toward the center of his skull.
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