Demon Bone (The Demons of Oxford Book 1)

by Kara Silver

  “Ah. So, this is more to what, appraise me generally of your state of play? Difficulties, hardships, incomprehension, miscommunication? Or will there be some triumph among the disasters?”

  “Still lost here, Professor. Do you come with subtitles?”

  Despite her warning, he raised his voice and spoke slowly, as if speaking to an idiot. “You’re here to explain you’re having…shall we say…teething troubles? To explain to me, as your Moral Tutor?”

  And he couldn’t have sounded any more bored by it if he’d tried. Then his message registered. He was her—? She’d been meaning to ferret through her info pack and find out, but… Swallowing any surprise, Kennedy nodded. “Yeah. I’m here because of that. And because you were Janey Harris’s as well. And Nia Ambro’s. And Kelly McGuire’s and Alesha Bonnet’s.” She watched to see if he’d react, but beyond narrowing his eyes slightly, he didn’t. “Although as far as I can discover, not all of them were in your subject area, so I guess the system used to be a bit different?” she pressed.

  “It’s been a fairly recent decision to restrict pastoral care to students under one’s purview, yes,” he agreed. “I don’t see that it makes any difference. Even if a tutor doesn’t directly supervise a student’s work, it’s not impossible to speak to one who does. But I fail to see what any of that has to do with anything?”

  “Not even when all those names I just mentioned, plus”—she took a punt; pulled one out at random—“Ayu Wan, are of girls who’ve gone missing? Going back ten years?”

  “I thought you were overwhelmed with simply being here, let alone trying to understand the work.”

  “You what?”

  “I didn’t realise you had time for investigative journalism too,” Berkley finished, his tone as smooth as melted chocolate. “Are you working for the Star? Our college paper? Or a more university-wide one?”

  “Neither.” Kennedy instantly cursed herself. It might have sounded better, stronger, whatever to have given the impression she was. Big it up, Kennedy… “Think a bit broader. More…wide-ranging.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “And this is what, then?”

  “Me asking you what you know about the missing girls?”

  “The fuck?”

  Kennedy was impressed. He didn’t look so languid now, not leaping to his feet, and swearing? Tut tut. She stood too.

  Berkley came around his desk, and Kennedy didn’t flinch. She’d faced bigger.

  “Are you suggesting I have these women stashed away somewhere?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. Just asking about them. And, yeah, maybe saying it’s funny they were all with you. That’s funny peculiar, not funny—”

  “Yes. I got it.” He did one of his half-turns and hair-sweeps. Kennedy was tempted to offer him a scrunchy. If she got his name in the Secret Santa, she’d wrap him up a packet. “Truth be told, I hadn’t realised how many girls I had that have ended up missing.”

  “And now that you do?”

  “Miss Smith, being here is hard. The workload is intense and the pace fast, the terms short but crammed. The teaching includes oral debate, meaning students who might be able to write a convincing essay by pulling a few all-nighters with a wealth of reference material to plunder will be tested on the spot—and found wanting. Students used to coming top in their little schools will be up against the brightest and the best here.” He raised his voice when she tried to butt in. “Up against those who have their future mapped out since before they started school. And yet we expect students to be all-rounders, to join in and have a social life. It takes a great deal of character to withstand all that. Many sink under the weight, as it were. They flounder and come aground.”

  Kennedy eyeballed him. “Cut to the chase. What are you trying to say?”

  “That, Miss Smith, it might be better to leave than struggle on against the tide which could leave you wracked on the rocks.”

  She let silence fall, just for a few seconds. Let the echoes of his words bounce and fade in the book-lined room, then took a step towards him, her head tipped back to look him in the eye. “Except for one thing. I can swim, Professor Berkley. Swim really well, actually. I’ve even got the badges to prove it. Which means, I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Except that you are.” The weirdest, slanted smile on his face, he tilted his head to one side. “That’s my tutorial group arriving. So, you’ll have to excuse me. Oh, in case that wasn’t plain enough, it means leave my office. Now.”

  His voice on the last word made her flinch a little, and she was angry he’d caught it and smirked. “See you in two days’ time, Miss Smith,” he said, opening the door and ushering four people in. “With the rest of your group.”

  She…could be said to have won that round, a little bit, right? Even if she did suppose he’d give her hell next class. And even if he had left her with more questions than answers. And pondering on them, she found herself back at the enormous stone urn thing she’d hidden behind earlier, and now stared at it, because where before its surface had been not exactly smooth but blank, it now bore her name. Kennedy, was etched into the grey surface. Smith, it said after, when she followed the letters around.

  “Erm, yes?” she replied.

  The writing wriggled into the stone surface and vanished.

  “Yeah, when you’re ready?” she enquired, from the gap between the vase and the wall.

  An arrow raised itself from the surface, still flat against it, pointing to the right. With a tut, Kennedy heaved herself free and crossed the arch to the stone urn’s twin on the other side. She saw nothing etched there, so squeezed into the niche between this pot and the wall. Training. Ten p.m. No Souls bumped itself up for a few seconds, then sank away again.

  “Note to self. Buy him a damn phone,” Kennedy muttered, struggling free of the small hidey hole, wrenching her bag behind her. “What?” she snarled at the…same boy from earlier, who was there again, watching her again, open-mouthed again. Good grief. “Kid, haven’t you got anything better to do?”

  “I…not really,” he replied, looking from one urn to the other.

  “Find something,” Kennedy advised, glaring until he skedaddled. Great. Another witness to testify in the ‘Kennedy is a weirdo’ court of public opinion.

  “You’re making me look insa—don’t do that!” were her first words to Aeth earlier, watching him emerge from a stone pillar of the gate to the cemetery, then de-merge—yep, still not right word—into it and appear on its other side. Inside the cemetery.

  “Just because you can’t.” His eyes gleamed in the half-dark.

  “I don’t want to.” Nevertheless, Kennedy gave a sly scrape of her nails down the solid stone, shuddering at the chalkboard feeling. She slapped the stone pillar in irritation, and that didn’t do anything either. Well, made her palm sting, but… “I prefer the scenic route,” she claimed, clambering over the gate.

  “Why here?” She indicated the lumps and bumps of the grave markers just visible in the thin light, denoting the place’s purpose. “Roof double booked? Well, let’s start?”

  Within seconds, she was bent over with laughter as Aeth embarked on another lecture.

  “Kennedy.” His sigh sawed the air. “Are you going to react like this whenever I say the words pedolith and pedosphere? Words I don’t see as being amusing?”

  “Carry on,” she instructed, her hands on her knees as she shook with laughter, only to stop him after half a minute. “Look, I don’t need to know all that geography.”

  “Geology,” emerged through Aeth’s gritted teeth.

  “Or that. Got it—soil is just ground stone and you want me to make, what, soil castles, without using a bucket and spade, to hone my whatever powers. Yeah, yeah. But first listen.” She pulled him to sit down, their backs against a tree, and told him what she’d found, and about speaking to Professor Berkley.

  “Kennedy—”

  “Wait. There’s more. And then he suggested I leave! The university, I mean, not ju
st his office. Although there was that too.”

  Aeth stood and looked away. “You might listen to that advice.”

  “Not again and not you too!” This was so last week she couldn’t even muster up much anger. “Because…”

  “You have a target on your head as a scholarship girl. And as a demon. No, you listen.” He grabbed her arm when she swung it in dismissal. “At that party, they were going to draw your blood and then they would have found out what you are. A demon mage. Which would be the worst thing for this college.”

  She couldn’t take all of that in. “Does everyone know this? Is that why they’re warning me away?”

  “No, they’re warning you away because you’re a scholarship female and those have gone missing. You’re at risk. You shouldn’t be wasting time on that. You need to be training. You need to drop the missing girls and focus on your powers. If you can’t do that, you should leave. Altogether.”

  “Oh, no. And I think far from going away, or going missing, that’s why I’m here. So…” Kennedy pulled her arm free, free of his warmings and negativity, and stared hard at the ground, then squinted, eyes narrowed and teeth clenched.

  “Wish I had a camera,” Aeth muttered.

  Kennedy took a deep breath and held it, straining hard, forcing herself not to stumble back as the earth sort of rippled or wafted, like a blanket being flapped onto a bed. It waved itself to her feet then heaped into a pile. As she gaped, saucer-eyed, it formed into a shape that was very familiar to her. She’d seen it on the headstones of this cemetery, for one thing, and in a display about demonology, for another. It decorated her shoulder blade, and it had marked Janey Harris’s too. The thought dropped into Kennedy’s mind as if placed there: And what about the other girls? She jumped as Aeth stirred the mound with a foot, disturbing it, and glared at him.

  He glared back. “Kennedy, whatever you’re planning—don’t.”

  19

  Don’t do it, Kennedy Smith, greeted her the next morning, etched into the arch over the quad as she walked to breakfast.

  “What’s up, Kennedy?” enquired Kirsty, stopping when Kennedy did. She glanced up, following Kennedy’s eyeline, but the exhortation carved into the stone had melted almost as soon as it had formed.

  “Nothing. Sorry, you were saying?” Kennedy didn’t want to antagonise Kirsty, or any of the small crew on her staircase who walked to breakfast together, and with her. “About the Star, the college newspaper? It’s online, right?”

  “Yeah. Andi writes for it too.” The other second year was also a friendly face. “You should come and check out the committee and…”

  And it wasn’t simply confined to the Heylel campus. The town bristled with more.

  You’re making…a mistake.

  Kennedy squealed to a stop underneath the arc of the skywalk above her, a covered bridge that joined two bits of a college on New College Lane, and that she’d been happily cycling under until the four words appearing stopped her. She was glad when the graffiti sank back in—the two cupids in the middle of the arch holding a shield were probably most put out to have had their graceful Bridge of Sighs spoiled by two words appearing to their left and two to their right.

  “So, arches are the theme for today?” Kennedy enquired to the air. “Meaning, if I go to the railway station, can I expect to see variations of don’t even think it, written on the arches there? Or are you snobby about bricks?”

  “Are you ever not doing something weird?” enquired Drew Lytton, cycling up behind her. He didn’t sound as condemnatory as most comments she heard about herself, however.

  “When I’m asleep, probably?” she tossed back.

  “Interesting…” came his assessment, as he took off.

  “I’m just saying,” Kennedy continued, again addressing an invisible Aeth, or not, “that all I have to do is avoid arches for the day. Or even not just look at them. Problem solved.”

  She averted her eyes, although the letters were long gone, and shuddered at the sight of a small hunched-up animal up on high, sort of tucked into the corner where two walls of the college building met. Oh, a bas relief, carved. A not-that-grotesque-looking grotesque. The carving chose that moment to twist its stone head to peer down at her, revealing itself to be a mad sort of cat with horns and large, psychedelic-looking concentric circle eyes. It bared sharp fangs and unfurled a long, hooked tail to scratch at the wall beneath it. Stop and think, it wrote, in uneven, unmatched letters, then lifted its head again to stare anew at her. The show was over in a few seconds and the creature of fantasy, or nightmare, motionless again.

  “You’re just bloody showing off now!” Kennedy shouted, speeding away. “And that wasn’t scary.” Although, she was suddenly aware how much public art there was in this city. Every building seemed festooned with statues in niches on its walls, or on podiums in their courtyards, or guarding either sides of their doors or gates. She tried not to catch any of their eyes, but arrived at her destination jittery. Outside the station, she stopped again. Had that carving, a flat head and shoulders in an oval, looking like something on a classy box of chocolates, been there before?

  “I know what I’m doing!” she gritted out. All she was doing was waiting, to catch Chris arriving for his shift. From what he said, he tended to arrive early so hopefully— She scrabbled for the elastic at the end of her braid and tugged it off, raking her hair free with one hand and fanning her face with the other, to cool it down. It felt hot so probably glowed red, although her fitness must be improving, with all the manic cycling and mad dashes.

  “Hi!”

  Chris looked startled, as well he might with her jumping out at him, pouncing as he swung around the corner of the building.

  “Kennedy, hello! Fancy seeing you here!”

  “Yeah, I was just…” Her hand wave could be said to encompass Christ Church College, taking up most of St Aldates’s, or perhaps Pembroke College, opposite it, along its own street. She could be on a very temporary exchange programme? “Practical. Museum?” she tried.

  “Oh, yeah?” His pleasant, open face creased into a grin.

  “I haven’t seen you in clothes before,” she commented. “I mean, out of uniform? That’s to say—”

  “Yeah, I got it.” He nodded at an elderly woman walking past, who shot them a look. “She works with us,” he explained.

  “You said you liked iced coffee,” Kennedy blurted out, her voice loud. She lowered it, turning her back on a line of fancy wiggly decorative masonry, looking like piping on a cake, in case it scrunched itself into no doubt withering words. “Can I take you for one? To say thank you?”

  “Well…” He looked at his watch.

  “Takeout? Drink it going into work? I’ll walk you back?”

  “Can’t say no to that,” Chris agreed. He stifled a snicker. “You don’t do this very much, do you? Invite men out for coffee?”

  “Not enough, according to Chandyce,” Kennedy confessed. “A friend of mine.” And great, now, she’d have imaginary Chandy in her head, providing a snarky running commentary, as well as unseen Aeth, and his missives of mean. Chandyce and Aeth should get together, she thought. Make my life a real he—Yeah, probably a good idea to avoid that word.

  They weaved through the morning crowds and turned down a smaller street. A church clock there struck, and Kennedy glanced up, trying not to react when an angel sort of draped over the top curve of the clock face leaned down and shook its head. She shook hers back, a small, tight movement, intended to covey no, she wasn’t going to acquiesce. The angel leaned a little lower and put its finger to its lips, then held both hands together in prayer and seemed to shrug, before resuming its original position.

  “Je-sus,” Kennedy muttered.

  “Is…everything okay?” Chris asked, slowing his walk and gazing up at the clock and back at her.

  “Yes! Just seen…that my watch is slow,” Kennedy improvised, pointing at the clock.

  “You’re not wearing a watch,” Chris pointed o
ut.

  “Because it’s slow.” Kennedy nodded as though that should have been obvious. “Oh, this square, yes? Actually, I haven’t seen much of the city so far. Is this square… Does it have statues or monuments?”

  “Can’t say I’ve ever noticed, but the coffee is good!” Chris indicated the kiosk. “Independent and not a chain, you know?”

  “I’m buying.” Kennedy was firm, indicating he should sit on one of the benches placed along the two building-lined sides of the pedestrian space, while she went to queue for drinks. She could spring for this—she’d been careful with money so far. She gave the small fountain in the middle of the square a wide berth. She didn’t want any ornamental goldfish or dolphins or whales or whatever it bore turning and spouting water at her or swearing at her. Or anything at all, really.

  The cobbled square was busy, people either stopping for drinks, or cutting through from one shopping-street side to another or simply taking a break, but Kennedy made it back to Chris without incident.

  “One monument.”

  “I’m sorry?” Kennedy frowned, handing him his drink.

  “Thanks very much, lass. The square seems to have one monument.” He indicated a huge stone slab set into the ground ahead. Kennedy couldn’t read what was etched on him from where she sat. “Seems some famous Tractarian gave a public sermon here about Branch Theory, in the early nineteenth century.”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. And I have to admit I have no idea what that means.”

  “Really? I was hoping you could tell me!” Chris joked. “Want to look at it?”

  “No!” She reached to prevent him standing. “Thanks,” she added, trying a smile. “Sorry. I’m a bit jumpy. Working hard.”

  “Your ‘research’.” The way he put verbal quote marks around the term had her looking at him. “I think I know what you’re up to.”

  “What? I…” Can’t think of a lie! she lamented.

  “Writing an article on the disappearances that you’re hoping to sell to a national newspaper or magazine, or even make into a TV script. That sort of thing’s in at the moment. So many of those bleak sorts of drama on telly every night.” Chris fiddled with the lid of his cup, making sure it was firmly on.