‘They’re not soldiers,’ she says eventually. ‘But they have been trained. It’s a dangerous world out there and nobody’s doing anything about it.’
My ears are playing tricks on me. It sounds like she thinks she’s running some sort of military operation. One served by murderous headcases. What exactly is going on around here?
‘So you’ve trained them to kill,’ I spit.
Was that a flinch? Or just a shiver because of the wind shushing through the trees? She stares at me for a long moment, and it seems like she’s ready to spit some words back at me, but then she traipses towards the woods and it’s only my curiosity that makes me go after her. The air smells of fresh rain and wet soil and the world keeps somersaulting so that I’m having trouble distinguishing between fact and fucked-up.
Celene stops and sits on a log. I stand a few feet away, not sure what to do with myself.
‘I wasn’t prepared for the way you’d look at me.’
Her voice verges on a whisper and an icy shock travels through me. How do I look at her? Like she’s the worst person I ever met? Like it’s painful to stare into her face and imagine what it was like for her victims. Hers was the last face they ever saw.
Get used to it.
‘I’m guessing you know all about me,’ she continues, snapping leaves off a nearby plant and raising them to her nose. ‘What I did when I was younger.’
‘It was good bedtime reading.’
‘I’m sure you think I’m a monster.’
She talks so matter-of-factly it throws me off.
‘You care what I think?’ I ask.
‘You’re the only person I ever cared about. When you were born, I thought you were dead. I ran. I wasn’t exactly in my right mind back then. When I found out you’d survived, I tried to find you, but you were gone. I thought maybe it was for the best. Who needs a mother like me?’ She meets my gaze. ‘Now I can’t help wondering if I was wrong.’
I’m dumbstruck. Did she really search for me? She can’t have looked hard; I never left London. With all her contacts and skills as a killer it should’ve been easy for her to track me down.
No. Celene Cross lies. Just like her daughter. Just like everybody who ever had anything to hide.
‘Tell me about yourself,’ she says.
‘Like you give a shit.’ She doesn’t care. She just wants more intel. More things to use against me for when she finally strikes. If I tell her anything, it’ll come back to get me in ways I can’t even imagine.
‘I know I haven’t been around,’ she says.
‘No kidding.’
‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I want to know you. Everything.’
I want to yell at her, but then for some reason I’m talking. I don’t know why. Am I flattered that she wants to hear about my life? Is it nice that somebody cares?
No. I want her to know what it’s been like. What she did when she abandoned me. What she turned me into. I tell her about the foster homes and the idiots pretending to be my parents. I miss out Frances and George because just thinking about them makes my throat close up. I tell her about shadowing for Julian and how I spend most of the money I earn on rent and food and comic books.
‘But you already know that; you went to see Julian. You scared the crap out of him.’
‘I don’t like him.’
I’m not sure, but I think the corner of her lip has curled up a little.
‘You were looking for me again,’ I say. ‘Why?’
She crumples the leaves and lifts them again, closing her eyes. I can’t tell if she’s toying with me. I’m not buying this Mother Earth crap for a second.
‘Our last target was a man named Cyril Berry,’ she says. ‘This was about a month ago. He was a small-time crook using immigrants as slaves. He had ambition, though, which we discovered when we interrogated him. He was romancing a new power in London, trying to climb the ladder. He gave up Reverend Mara within minutes and blabbed about his obsession with finding the Crook Spear in another few. He was pathetic.’
Her eyes flash and I see disgust, maybe even hatred. It stuns me how quickly those emotions flicker across her face and then vanish, replaced with ghostly indifference.
In the swimming soup of my mind, a stray thought bobs to the surface. A few weeks ago, I read an article in the paper about a London mobster, Bob ‘The Razor’ Stanley, who was eaten by his dog. There were reports of a hit squad van being seen around that time.
‘You’ve been taking out gangsters,’ I say. ‘Bob Stanley. Is that what you’ve got going on here? You’re getting revenge on all the guys who crossed you in the past.’
‘Revenge? No.’ Celene merely stares back at me, her face as grey as her hair.
‘What, then?’
Saving the world. When I said that, everything about her had changed.
‘You can’t seriously be trying to save the world,’ I probe. It doesn’t make any sense. It goes against everything I know. Why would a self-confessed killer suddenly decide she’s a superhero?
‘I did a lot of things I regret,’ murmurs Celene. ‘A lot I wish I could change, but I can’t. This… it helps. In some small way, it helps.’
She’s messing with me. Maybe it’s the drugs she gave me last night, or the concussion from Mara’s car flipping, but she’s so convincing I almost find myself believing it. I want to believe it. Because if she’s no longer a monster, maybe I’m not either.
But she’s lying. I think of the Dead Room and all the articles about the havoc she wreaked in the nineties. The blood. The way everybody who’s ever got near me has died. And the fact that she and Mara are two sides of the same coin. Vicious. Manipulative. Crazy.
‘You worked for Mara,’ I say.
Celene nods, her hair getting in her eyes. ‘He was small fry in the nineties, but he’s grown.’
‘You killed his dad and you took the Crook Spear.’
‘You missed your call from the FBI,’ Celene says. Is that pride in there? It turns my stomach.
‘Why’d you kill him?’ I demand.
‘I had my reasons.’
Hello vague. ‘And where’s the Crook Spear?’
‘I hid it where nobody would find it. Tell me about growing up. Where did you live?’
Nice try. ‘Wherever I was sent. The spear–’
‘You didn’t have it easy.’
‘Who does? Look, Mara thinks I have the spear, and he wants to recruit me or something, he has some crazy idea that killing runs in the family. And he has Bolt.’
‘Bolt?’
‘My friend. Sort of.’ She doesn’t need to know he used to be a cop. I’ve got a feeling that would only push him to the bottom of her list of priorities. ‘I need to help him – and stop Mara.’
‘You can’t stop him. Leave it to us. He’s next on our list. Last, actually.’
‘What are you planning on doing? What did you do with Cyril Berry?’
‘He’s in jail.’
‘You mean you didn’t–’ I put a finger to my temple.
Celene looks at the ground. ‘I don’t do that any more.’
I think about being in the upturned car with Mara and holding the shard to his throat. My chest starts to burn. George would be alive if it wasn’t for Mara, and Mara would be dead if it wasn’t for Celene.
‘You should’ve let me kill Mara when I had the chance,’ I growl.
She peers at her hands. ‘I couldn’t let you do that.’
‘I have just as much right to want him dead as you do. More, actually. His lackey killed George and he’s taken Bolt and he locked me up–’
‘You’re no killer, Rumer.’
Except I am. I’ve been killing ever since I was a little kid, thanks to her.
‘You made me one.’ I’m trembling.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You want to know what it was like for me growing up? Imagine everybody you ever got close to dying.’
Her expression is blank.
‘You did something to me. I read about it. Dominic Waters or whatever his name is, he sold his story to some magazine.’
Celene doesn’t say anything. She seems confused. ‘Dominic?’
‘I know all about the curse. What you did when I was born.’
‘Did? Rumer, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I want to scream or hit her. Something to get her to stop lying. ‘You did this to me. You made it so everybody dies.’
She’s on her feet, taking a step towards me, but I step back and hug my ribs, hating that I’m trembling but I can’t make it stop.
Celene’s gaze is heavy on me and her mouth droops at the corners, like she’s only just realising how much she fucked everything up.
‘I told you about Dominic,’ she says. ‘Christ, I wish he hadn’t snuck into the house. Whatever he said to you, you can’t believe any of it. It was the rambling of a maniac. You saw him. He was drunk and he knows… knew… he wasn’t supposed to drink on his medication.’
‘The story in the magazine,’ I say, and my voice is trembling now, too. ‘The Divine Order and all that bullshit. You belonged to a fucking cult and you did this to me.’
Celene shakes her head slowly and I can’t escape her eyes. I’ve stared into them for so long, the ones stuck to the Dead Room wall, but now they are staring back and seeing me, and the pity in them makes me want to tear out my hair.
‘I was naive back then,’ she says softly. ‘I joined the Order and they had strange customs. It’s true, I wanted to escape that life, and Dominic… Well, he had his ways. He helped me give birth and his methods were unconventional, but there’s no such thing as a curse, not a real one.’
She’s still lying. Saving her own skin because, for some reason, she wants a relationship with me now. She knows that wouldn’t be possible if she admitted what she did. Does she know what Dominic told me? That if I kill her the curse goes away?
I’m sick of lies. It’s getting harder to distinguish them from the truth. And what is ‘truth’ anyway? Something printed in a newspaper? Or on a website? Or is it looking into somebody’s eyes and seeing their pain and not turning away from it?
Celene reaches a hand towards me.
‘You’re not cursed, Rumer.’
She makes it sound like I’m being ridiculous. A melodramatic teenager. Everything in the Dead Room tells me otherwise. She’s the one who belonged to a devil-worshipping cult.
‘Come on,’ she says, ‘let’s get back inside.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I shower and I can’t believe how good it feels. My clothes had practically grown into my skin and I had to pick them off like a scab. I’ve not washed since the pit and the water massages my skin the way a lover might, soothing the tender knots in my shoulders, not that I know much about lovers beyond what’s in the movies.
The broken tooth’s still throbbing, though. Every once in a while it stabs at my gum, the pain sharp as a scorpion’s stinger, and I’m sick of it. Sick of being a broken thing trapped in a broken world.
Pushing my face into the water, I dig my fingers into my mouth, feel out the cracked tooth. Just touching it makes it angry, like I’ve disturbed a rattlesnake, but I ignore the shooting pain and twist, attempting to unscrew it from my gum.
A coppery tang floods my mouth and the pain multiplies like a virus, firing through my jaw and into my throat. I wrench harder, not making a sound, feeling the water on my face, imagining it dissolving the pain and, just when I start seeing black spots, something crunches, clicks and the needling shard is out.
Choking blood, I spit, inspecting the near-black thing in my fingers, and sigh with relief.
It’s been rotting in my head for days. I turn the tooth before me, washing it clean. A piece of me that’s not a piece of me any more. If only it was as easy to dig out everything else rotting inside me.
‘So long, sucker.’
I drop it and it rattles down the drain.
When I look in the mirror, I look more like my old self. The one who quietly works shadowing people and doesn’t know anything about Crook Spears or mobsters. I’m even paler than usual, though, and I know Celene’s right. I need to eat. My hands quiver as I attempt to claw stubborn knots out of my hair.
For the first time I let myself really think about where I am.
With her.
In detective novels, this is what they call a ‘golden opportunity’. A chance to see for myself what she’s really like. I’ve only ever read about Celene. Had her described to me by newspapers that weren’t exactly tripping over themselves to write flattering things. Not that her life lends itself to flattery.
Will I see the killer in her? Or is it buried under years of denial and indifference?
Celene’s left fresh clothes on a bench. A purple T-shirt with the emblem of some ancient rock band. Black jeans. Scuffed boots somebody would pay a fortune for in a retro sweat shop. I eye my discarded clothes and, though I’d rather die than wear anything of Celene’s, the thought of struggling back into that crusty scab makes me itch all over.
Fine. Let’s do this.
Celene’s standing in the hall when I emerge from the bathroom. I can’t help jumping. She really is like a ghost. Both here and not here, silent and unknowable. If she notices my reaction, she doesn’t say anything.
‘Come here,’ she says, walking down the landing and stopping at a door at the end. Clutching my old clothes to my belly, I join her. She pushes the door open and doesn’t move. Warily, I peek around the frame, expecting to find a cell with chains or something worse that my mind can’t think of quickly enough before I see it’s a bedroom.
Nothing fancy. White walls stencilled with purple patterns. A paper night light rests in one corner, turning shadows over and over so that the room seems to breathe. Pillows are piled up on the bed and the rug looks like it was stitched together with bits of old fabric.
‘I always thought you’d like purple,’ Celene says, and I realise what I’m looking at. What she’s made.
My own room.
My heart pulses a beat I don’t recognise and my palms grow clammy.
‘You can go in. If you want.’
The spider in my mind whispers it might be a trap, but for once I don’t care. I’m walking on cotton wool as I go and stand in the centre of the room – my room – letting the night light’s shadows wash over me. I can’t feel the floor, only a strange sensation of falling and being lifted up, like I’m being gently stretched.
The only room I’ve ever had, one that really felt like mine, is nothing like this. How did she know? If she’d crawled into my head she couldn’t have known that this is perfect, because I don’t know what perfect is either. Definitely not my grotty flat above the newsagents. Not the bars and seedy hotels I’ve shadowed people in. Not the Dead Room. Not even Frances’ house, which was only mine for a while and then suddenly wasn’t.
‘I wanted you to have somewhere.’ Celene’s still at the door.
My cheeks are burning and I think she sees something in my expression because hers changes.
‘I’ll be downstairs,’ she says, and then she’s gone.
How can something feel right and wrong at the same time? This isn’t home. It’s the house of a maniac playing mother. This is why Celene’s dangerous. It must be how she earned her reputation as a ghost. She charmed her way into the homes of her victims, then snapped her jaws. She did it in the nineties and she’s doing it now.
Except her expression is imprinted on my eyelids. The same tangle of emotions tentacling through my skull. When I think about the way she looked at me just now as I stood in the room she’s made for me, all I see is hope.
What does she hope for?
Carefully, I place the bundle of my clothes at the foot of the bed, peering around again, knowing the room means something to her.
I hate myself for knowing it means something to me, too.
A sizzle of cooking food comes up the stairs
and, begrudgingly, I leave the room.
‘I’m glad the clothes fit,’ Celene says as I enter the kitchen. She hands me a plate of scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. I’m no idiot. I know it could be laced with something, but I can’t remember the last time I ate and my stomach seizes control of my hand. I manage to resist for about five seconds, then I’m at the table, ravenously shovelling forkfuls into my mouth, not caring. At least I’ll die with a full belly.
I don’t even notice Celene watching me until I’ve swallowed the last mouthful. She stands to the side of the kitchen, her arms crossed.
‘When’s the last time you ate?’
‘No idea,’ I say.
‘That’s not good.’
‘When can we get out of here?’ I ask. ‘Bolt’s still–’
‘Bolt’s dead.’
She doesn’t sugar-coat it. I admire and hate her for it.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘If Mara has him, he’s dead.’
‘He won’t kill him. He knows how much–’
I stop. How much he means to me. I hadn’t realised that until I almost said it. Bolt’s the closest thing I’ve had to a friend since Troll. When I went to him for help, he didn’t hesitate, telling me everything he knew about Reverend Mara and rescuing me when his hounds pelted me with bullets.
And when Mara torched his place, he didn’t yell at me, which he had every right to. There was no simmering resentment. He was there for me, fighting off assassins and stopping me from demolishing Ellis’ skull, and all I cared about was saving my own skin.
Not any more.
‘I have to try.’
‘You’ll die in the process.’
‘Sounds like a fair trade,’ I say.
‘It’s not. You’re safe here–’
‘According to you.’
Her jaw hardens into a line. I wonder what she’s like angry. Really angry; when her blood boils and her vision swims. Does she get violent? Would she hit me? Or worse? Her nails are digging into her arms and I imagine the whistling kettle in Peng’s kitchen, wondering if she’s ready to erupt.
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