by Kara Silver
“I…will? Bye.” That’s weird? She could almost see the young constable screwing up his eyes and wincing as he hung up, like Nev at Sixth Form used to when he left any message for any girl on any social media whatsoever.
Before she could attempt to puzzle it out any further, Aeth moved. She’d almost forgotten he was there, what they were doing—he merged into the old stone wall so well. She dropped her phone into her bag and raised an eyebrow at him.
“And we’re back. I have a ton of questions, not the least about any psychological problems you might have…”
He said nothing, didn’t fill the opening she’d made. “Or physical problems. Health, I mean. Like, are you repeating this year? Retaking some subjects, something like that?”
“Kennedy.” He shook his head. “You never ask the question I expect you to. And that’s a tough one to answer. But yes and no. I am repeating this year, but probably not in the way you mean.”
It must have been a shaft of light of some kind that struck him then, made him almost gleam. Yes, she knew they were underground.
Use your brain, he’d mocked. Think logically. Kennedy didn’t know quite how to do that. You were supposed to know your opponent, right? In the absence of preparation and analysis, she went with her instinct to try and do just that. “Give me your hand.”
“My—” With a slight head shake, he held it out.
Kennedy took it, examined it. Like his arm around her that time, or his hand when he’d tugged her along just now, it was heavier than she might have expected. She didn’t know what she looking at or expecting to find. His colour was slightly ashen, thick, in some way. She curled her fingers around his wrist, and it took her a few seconds to understand what was lacking. Her eyes raised to his, astonishment chasing away fear.
“Oh, you’d be expecting to feel a pulse. Of course. Fine. I can do that, I suppose. But probably not for very long.”
Her heart skidded then pounded when a beat did in fact knock against her fingertip around Aeth’s wrist, starting as she waited, slow and deep, like a probe making its way through a blocked artery, forcing it to work.
Kennedy left her hand looped around his, perhaps needing the connection, perhaps not trusting he wouldn’t skip out on her. Or vanish into a puff of smoke. Unlikely? Well, people seemed to do the strangest things around here. Which reminded her. People… Or not.
“Who are you? No. That’s not the most intelligent question, is it?” Her voice was a whisper. “What are you? And how do you know all these things that are going on?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You’re not a bloody Facebook status. Explain it.”
“Fine. Let me put it into concepts you’d understand.”
“I did warn you not to patronise me? Because the last guy who did that? It wasn’t pretty.”
He ignored her laser stare. “I’m a guardian. Of sorts.”
“A guardian?” Whatever she might have expected, with an attempt at the Guinness Book of Record’s with the world’s most super-extended Freshers’ prank, or Made in Oxford, a super-new reality TV show high on the list, this… And he looked so sincere. Kennedy added ‘psychology experiment, part of his course’ to her list of possible explanations. She’d play along. “Well, excuse me, Mr Aethelstan Whatever the hell your name is, but you’re doing a crap job of it. Is that why you have to repeat the year? To get better at it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, because people keep disappearing on your watch, Aeth?! Hello, the missing girls?”
“That’s not my affair. Not my sector. I’m a different sort of custodian.”
His choice of word resonated, enmeshed itself and him in the fibre, the fabric of the city, linking him to its historic and cultural institutions and the guardians who looked after them. Kennedy got a brief flash of the grey-waistcoat-and-tie-wearing guard she’d seen in the Ashmolean Sculpture Gallery, keeping watch over the busts on plinths, and the small, wizened man in the outfitters, guarding his wares so jealously. Kennedy rolled her shoulders, wanting to fight against things solidifying, settling into place, but knowing on some deep, instinctive level she couldn’t.
“Of?” she prompted, heaving out an exasperated sigh at his politely raised eyebrow. “Don’t do that. You’re too young to pull off camp. Of what are you a guardian?”
“Of the demon mages.”
She had to ask, didn’t she. Too much to hope that Demon Mages are a Goth-metal group he manages, trying to keep them on the straight and narrow, away from the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and… No use stalling. Kennedy bit the bullet, hoping that the rule of there being no dumb questions applied here.
“Demon mage? What does that mean?”
“It means you. You’re a demon. With powers.”
13
She’d wanted to fight earlier at what had felt like a giant shrugging under the Earth, making everything grumble and screech as it resettled the world into place. But this? This was a landslide of rocks heading for her at speed, threatening to reshape her, and loose stones pinned her feet where they stood.
“No.” She’d fought against other people’s expectations of her all her life and she refused to be buried under the debris now. Her voice was thick: dust from the powder thrown by the rock avalanche that was trying to engulf her coated her tongue. “No. I’m not. You’ve got the wrong girl. You’re wrong, I mean. Because a demon mage? What does that even mean, anyway?”
“It means you have powers and abilities—”
“Abilities? Aeth, I barely scraped through my A-Levels! I’m struggling here after just a week!” They say the truth will set you free, don’t they? So why didn’t it feel liberating to reveal that? It sounded as humiliating said aloud as she felt about it. “I’m just a scrap, like they call us. It’s an apt name.”
“Ah. Is this more self-pity? If it’s a different human emotion, please tell me. I’m not terribly good with them, but I saw this one earlier.” He turned away to straighten books on a shelf.
“You…you sanctimonious little bastard! Do you have any idea how insufferable you sound, saying things like that?” Enraged, Kennedy ruffled the books, pushing some flat.
“I’m beginning to have an inkling,” Aeth replied, his voice as dry as dust.
“And so what if it self-pity? Aren’t I allowed to have feelings? I’m not made of stone.”
Unexpectedly, Aeth laughed. “Touché.” He held a hand over his heart as if she’d wounded him.
“What?” He made no sense.
“Nothing. And have they finished, for the time being? Your ‘feelings’? Or do they require longer?”
Kennedy gave in. “God! Fine. But I meant what I said. I don’t have psychic powers or talents or whatever it is.” Would she like some? She didn’t know. It would depend which, of course, and—
“Be that as it may, you’re a demon.”
“Right. I’m a demon. A freaking demon.” I’m a demon. It had been a thing exasperated adults had said to her when she was a kid. Oh, you little demon! Kennedy, you can be such a bloody demon at times. She almost wanted to laugh. She’d gone from denial to anger to self-pity and self-mockery and amusement, and was fairly sure only the first two were real stages.
“Demon. Okay.” Maybe if she said it enough times, it’d stick. “Any specific sort of demon? I mean, are there different types? Like, say, primates, where you can be anything from a lemur to a howler monkey, up to a human?” She pointed at herself as she said the last word, her last gasp of denial.
“I’m afraid that hasn’t emerged yet, but I believe it has something to do with keeping the balance.”
“Oh for f—” Kenned smashed the flat of her hand against the wall, feeling the cool plaster under her skin for a few seconds before her hand heated it. “Aren’t demons, like, evil in themselves? So that doesn’t make sense! And if it did—which it doesn’t—how am I supposed to do that?” Hello, anger my old friend. Back again. It’s as if you never left.
Aeth regarded her, head on one side. “I’m not sure yet. That, too, will emerge as you train and work on your power.”
With every word he said, each steady glance he gave her, the weight of it settled on her more and more, like a heavy collar or cape. Yeah, right. My superhero cape. She wriggled her shoulders again and rolled her neck. None of it helped.
“Training?” Kennedy belatedly seized on that. “Yeah, no, I don’t see how I can possibly do that. I mean, the academic workload is heavy, and I have my duty hours at the museum. I really don’t have any free time.”
“You have to make time, if you plan on staying. You’re the one who wanted to come here and to stay here. You’re the one investigating the missing girls. I suggest you leave. Go home.”
If anyone else says that to me… Although she grappled for it, she couldn’t put up her usual defensive shield. “I can’t do that. I don’t exactly have a home to go back to. Well, I lived in a Home. Home with a capital H, but…” She studied her shoes, rubbed the toes of one foot into the floor. And the thought of slinking back to Wyebury, sleeping on her friend’s floor, begging for her old job back in the pub, scrabbling for retail or fast-food shifts in the town centre to make a living, or perhaps taking some vocational training course at the local higher ed place… “So, training. How would I train?”
“I can train you. Well…”
She looked up in time to catch his shrug. He looked as though he couldn’t have cared less either way, and that goaded her. “Can you or can’t you?”
“I’ll be on the roof of the museum around eleven.”
He looked about to leave, so Kennedy stepped into his path. “Wait. I’ll be working then.”
“Hardly. No one is around the museum that late.”
“And you’d know that, how?”
She didn’t get to hear his answer. The door behind her opened and someone gave a little squeal. Kennedy whipped around to see a middle-aged lab-coated woman with one hand on the door knob, the other to her chest.
“You did make me jump! I wasn’t expecting anyone to be in here!” she exclaimed. She looked from Kennedy to Aeth. “What…are you doing in here? You shouldn’t be down here.”
“Lecture. We thought.” Kennedy flashed her university card. “Got it wrong!” She made a performance of slapping her forehead with the heel of her palm. “We’d better find the class. Sorry.” Trying a smile she knew had to be strained, she sidled out, hoping the woman didn’t follow. She ran up the stairs, winded when she reached the top, trying to avoid any students she knew from the practical class now trickling out, and especially trying to slide under the radar of the professor. I don’t care if Aeth follows, she told herself.
“Eleven. The roof. Be there,” came after her as she slipped around the side of the building, to wait until everyone had crossed the forecourt and left the garden before making her way back to college.
I might possibly deign to train you, although you’re beneath me, he’d said. Well, words to that effect. Reading between the lines. She could train herself, thank you very much for nothing, Aeth. The indignation and low-level anger spurred her into going along to the first sports practice she saw scheduled for that day—and kept her going for about the first ten minutes of the cross-country club’s circuit training.
Bolting down lunch and cycling there in a hurry might not have been the best idea, she acknowledged, fighting not to curl into a ball on the floor after the series of lower body exercises.
“Good. Good going, Giles. Nice, Cheska,” praised the sinewy guy leading the training, marching along the row. “Good, erm, Kennedy. Good to have a potential new member, I mean.” This was added quickly. Did he think she’d sue him for misrepresentation or something?
“Is that it, then?” Kennedy snatched up her water bottle in both hands and squirt-sucked huge squeezes of water into her mouth.
“You did the step-ups?” He tapped his foot against the plastic step she was resting her head on. “Yes, onto core and trunk, people! Let’s see those stomach crunches!”
Kennedy managed about one for everybody’s five, she reckoned. She looked up hopefully after at the leader’s, “Let’s play some ball!” She’d played a lot of football, in the playground, in PE classes, in the garden of Holden House, in the park. Only…not with a massive ball like the one being chest-passed around the participants as they darted and dashed around the room in little groups of four.
“Sorry, we’re used to how our quad works together,” sniped a girl Kennedy thought she recognised. “But hey, seeing as it’s you, why not try and push your way into another?” Oh, yeah, Cheska, from whom Kennedy had learned about the missing girl. “But you’ll find most of us are already in the groups we want to be in.”
She turned her back, sweeping off to catch and throw the medicine ball. She seemed to be right, or at any rate, Kennedy couldn’t catch the eye of anyone holding the ball, to get them to include her. The session leader eventually came up and, widening his eyes to check if she was ready, tossed a ball to her, indicating she should lob it back after. Great. She’d got the pity partnership, from the teacher.
Then, walking on shaky legs out of the hut they used for a gym onto the playing field, she caught a snide, “Check out the latest in retro sportswear,” from behind her. Kennedy’s baggy shorts and T-shirt were a far cry from the other girls’ tight, colourful Lycra three-quarter-length pants and tiny bra tops.
“It’s old-school.” She craned her neck over her shoulder to reply to Cheska. “Literally. This is my old school gym kit.” She’d hoped that might get a laugh, at least, but nothing. With a, “You should see my beachwear. Basic black with my swimming badges still sewn on it,” she started to jog after the main group.
“This is okay!” she called cheerfully to the whipcord thin guys ambling alongside her. “I need to get into shape. Haven’t done much lately.” And I can do this. And she could, until at a whistle, the pack kicked up a gear and started running faster around the field.
“Speed session evening!” called the leader, seeing her puzzled face as he dashed past, keeping the team together.
“Speed…” Kennedy had an ominous feeling she should have read all the information on this club and its training sessions carefully. Thoroughly. Looked up the words she wasn’t familiar with. Then ran like hell—in the opposite direction.
“Continuous run at a faster than regular training pace. Helps us hold a faster pace for longer.”
“I…see,” Kennedy gasped. “And by longer…”
“Half hour or so, yep.” He grinned, high on the endorphins, presumably.
She wished she was. Or drunk. Or anything that didn’t make her feel as though she was drowning in her own sweat, which was also trying to blind her at the same time. Oh, and at the same time her lungs were seizing up on her, her heart giving out on her, and her face turning into a ball of bright-red heat. Cheska and the girl she was running with smirked, passing her easily. It only served to strengthen Kennedy’s resolve. She wouldn’t give in. Not even when new symptoms or side effects or whatever the hell they were jostled for prominence, one a minute. God, is it okay to taste blood? There must be someone with a car to rush me to the hospital, was her last coherent thought before the whistle blew and the pack slowed to a half-pace, then a jog, then a saunter.
Which was when she sank to her knees, then flopped onto all fours, and then heaved. Literally, her whole body, not just her stomach, heaving, she threw up. Tossed her lunch and what little breakfast she’d eaten.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” screeched Cheska, jumping up and down and pointing.
“That’s rank,” echoed one of the blade-slim runners, circling her with a ring of plastic cones. “Health and Safety Officer. I have to isolate the hazard.”
“Hazard’s about right.” A brown-haired girl looped her arm through Cheska’s and they strode away, leaving Kennedy panting, in a ring of bright orange cones, staring at her own vomit.
Okay, so there was training
…and training. Maybe she couldn’t go it alone. Kennedy used her T-shirt to wipe the bile from her mouth. Looked like she did need to accept any help Aeth could give her. At eleven that night, on the museum roof. She rolled onto her back on the hard ground and groaned.
14
“Kennedy? Kennedy? Hi! We meet again.”
Kennedy, struggling to push out her bike with limp-noodle arms, forced her wanting-to-loll head to look up at the guy speaking.
“Do we? Then why can’t I remember you?” Although if pushed, she just about did. Wet-sand-coloured hair mussed just-so, this season’s fashionable amount of designer stubble, subtle aftershave, expensive clothes: brown-haired first year at practical in the Ashmolean. “Friend of Bill and Keir.”
“See? You do remember!”
“Didn’t realise I’d said that out loud.” She finally yanked her bike free of the stand she’d rammed the wheel into earlier.
“First time?”
“Nah. Had the bike a few days now.” Kennedy shoved her hair down inside her shirt to keep it out of the way and brushed her long layers from her eyes. She needed a haircut, but the prices she’d seen listed at local salons… She looked up at the guffaw,
“Good one. Keir said you were hilarious. He said he’d had breakfast with you.”
Kennedy narrowed her eyes. “He sat down opposite me, yeah. It’s a free dining hall. You don’t have to sit in alphabetical or numerical order.”
“Right. I’m at Lady Matilda’s.”
Kennedy paused. “I can’t think of a witty wisecrack to that,” she admitted. “But I’m exhausted. So, pretend I did?” She swung her leg over the saddle, staring down the road. She’d found her way here, to the Kendrick College training field, and could find her way back. She was just along the Woodstock Road, then down this smaller street leading off it. So, reverse that—
“Will do. You know, the bar at college, Matty’s, is good? Have you ever been?”