London Academy 1

by Klarissa King

  April huffed. “What Academy? What do you mean by ‘dullborn’?” She stopped and frowned at Desmond. “Who are you people?”

  Desmond stuck out his hand so fast that his arm moved in a blur of night. “Desmond,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  April eyed his hand, wrapped in a leather glove. “Is that cow skin?” She crinkled her nose and added, “I don’t touch dead flesh.”

  “April,” said Piper. Her buzz had worn off and tiredness began to creep into her foggy mind. “Can you go inside and get my coat?” Piper handed her the ticket. “I’ll wait out here.”

  April opened her mouth, as if to protest, but said nothing. She snatched the ticket, spun on her heels, and stomped back into Club Soho, mumbling something intelligible about becoming a servant all of a sudden.

  Desmond shoved his hands in his pockets and slumped against the lamppost. His indifferent mask slipped back onto his hard features.

  Piper couldn’t help but smirk at him. April had treated him the same way he’d been treating her. Piper could of course fend for herself, but her mind was a tangled ball of odd words and bizarre encounters that night.

  “Here.” Ash handed her a scrunched-up piece of paper. She turned it over in her fingers and saw the blotted scribbles inked into it. “My phone number. Call me when you make your decision.” He turned to leave, and Desmond had already stepped off the pavement onto the road. “The offer expires tomorrow at sunset.”

  With that, he trailed Desmond across the road. Cars whirled past them, but neither of them was even grazed by the speeding vehicles.

  Fabric struck Piper’s face.

  She squealed and snatched at it. Her coat. As she pulled it down, she came face-to-face with April’s stern stare.

  “Get your own jacket next time.” She squinted at the lamppost where Desmond had stood. “Where did the stalkers go?”

  Piper stared across the road at shadowed alleyway—the darkness there had swallowed the pair up seconds ago.

  “They left,” she said. She’d been sick down that alleyway once. If her memory served, it had a wheelie bin and back doors to Thai restaurants. Was Ash still down there, loitering, hiding in the shadows, she wondered.

  April stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled. A black cab skidded to a halt on the road and turned off its light.

  “Get a move on,” said April, shooing her with her jewelled hands.

  They climbed into the cab and gave their addresses. April’s house was closer, in Westminster, so they drove there first.

  In the back of the taxi, April studied Piper’s profile.

  “Are you all right?” she said when they passed Hyde Park. Her voice softened into an unfamiliar gentle tone. “You can talk to me, Pipes. I only want to help in whatever way I can.”

  “Honestly?” Her gaze stayed glued to the window, and she watched the tall trees whizz by. “I’m far from all right,” she said. “I’m confused, frightened, and I don’t know what to believe.” She wrenched her gaze from the window and met April’s kind stare. “Can you bring his information tomorrow? Your mother’s friend—I think it’s best I at least get him to look into a few things before I make any rash decisions.”

  “I’ll email mother tonight,” said April. “It’s not a phone number she leaves in her address book.”

  Piper nodded. “Be at my place at midday. Nigel is coming over for lunch, too.”

  “Wonderful,” said April. “He can bring the coffees, I’ll bring hangover food.”

  Piper’s brows shot up in alarm. “Not that sushi again. I’m all for trying new things, but squid that dances on my plate—even if it’s dead—isn’t what I consider appetising.”

  April laughed as the taxi pulled up at her house. Pearl-white terrace houses lined the left side of the street with a prime view onto private gardens.

  Unlike Piper, April lived in the whole building. But all the lights were off through the windows.

  Her mother, Sienna, wasn’t home a lot, and spent most of the year travelling through Europe for work.

  Sienna Clark was a big deal in the fashion industry, and Fred Clark was a monster business man who specialised in slicing livelihoods to smithereens.

  April enjoyed the benefits of such parents however she could. And that happened to be partying her nights away to avoid returning to her empty home, where she and her butler lived.

  After they dropped April off, it took fifteen minutes until Piper got home.

  It was quiet.

  All the lights were switched off and her mother seemed to still be in bed. Piper checked the clock on the wall. It was ticking closer to the morning; her mother would be up soon.

  She went to her room and dressed for bed. Before she dunked her clothes in the laundry chute, she pulled a piece of paper from her jacket pocket.

  It was Ash’s number.

  Piper smoothed out the wrinkles and placed it on her cream nightstand. Then, she collapsed onto her bed.

  Maybe it was the stressful night and day she’d had, or the drinks, but she didn’t have time to pull the duvet over her body before her eyelids fluttered shut and darkness swallowed her up—like it had the daywalkers in the alleyway.

  CHAPTER 10

  “I’ll pick up lattes on the way,” said Nigel.

  Piper rolled off the bed and switched the phone to her left ear. “I invited April,” she said, her voice layered in drowsiness. Minutes ago, she’d been hauled out of her deep sleep to the sound of her Nigel calling her.

  “I’ll get a soy mochaccino for her,” he said. “That should sweeten her up for a favour.”

  Piper went into the bathroom, rubbing her puffy eyes. “What favour?”

  “Back-to-school shopping spree. I still haven’t picked out most of my supplies, and I’m stuck between two satchels.”

  Piper gazed into the mirror. Grey circles encompassed her eyes and her lips were swollen from being smooshed against the pillows all night. Smears of mascara and lipstick were spread across her cheeks. Though, that wasn’t the most frightening part of her morning.

  As Nigel had said, school was just around the corner. They went back in two days. Piper thought it surreal—with everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, school seemed a distant dream from another life.

  “Have you gotten your uniform yet?” said Nigel. “After lunch, we can all go to Oxford Street and have a browse.”

  She hadn’t.

  Piper had yet to pick out any of her uniform. But the last thing she wanted to do that day was shop for clothes, whether she needed them or not.

  All she could think about was the crumpled scrap paper on her bedside table. Ash’s phone number was scribbled onto it, beckoning her from the other room.

  Piper listened to Nigel waffle on, and went downstairs.

  The more distance she put between herself and the phone number, the easier it might be to resist the temptation itching at her fingers.

  “And he still hasn’t returned my calls,” said Nigel.

  Piper zoned in and out of the conversation. She guessed he was talking about Jack.

  “I’ll see him on Monday—we’re both on the polo team—but I don’t know whether to speak to him or not. What do you think?”

  “Do what you want,” said Piper as she plodded down the staircase. The foyer was empty.

  Piper poked her head into living room before she sighed. Had she wanted Ash to appear, sitting on the armchair again? Shaking her head, she threw the thought of him out of her mind and journeyed to the kitchen.

  “I want to wring his neck,” said Nigel. “I also want to avoid litigations for assault. Decisions, decisions.”

  The kitchen was cold and bare. There was a note on the message board.

  Piper glanced at the clock—it was 9am—and slipped the note from its miniature peg. ‘I’ll be home for lunch today. We need to talk.’

  Her mother didn’t come home for lunch often. Piper knew what the talk would be about; her father. It wasn’t a
conversation she wanted to have. Not with her mother, at least.

  “I have to go,” said Piper. She tossed the note in the bin. “I’ll see you later.”

  Nigel said goodbye and she hung up. But before the call ended, Piper had already stalked out of the kitchen.

  She hiked up the stairs and charged into her bedroom. Her eyes locked on the bedside table across the room, but she hesitated, hovering at the door. Her teeth dragged over her lower lip and chewed. There was something about it—the morning, a new day and fresh start—and that number. If she contacted him, she’d be unleashing the inexplicable into her life.

  Perhaps it had already been unleashed, she pondered, and the best thing for her to do would be to acclimate.

  Unlike Nigel and his romantic options, her decision was made. Piper darted over to the table, snatched the paper, and dialled the number into her phone. Her thumb hovered over two options; call and text.

  The room stayed stagnant—she didn’t move—for seconds, but those seconds ticked by like minutes in a bank queue. She chose to text him: ‘What’s the address?’

  A growl rumbled from her belly.

  Piper licked her lips and thought of breakfast. Just as she’d decided on a bowl of porridge, her phone buzzed in her hand.

  Her movements were a blur before her eyes—the light of the screen glowed, her arm lifted the phone to her face, and she dropped down on the edge of the bed. Words spread across the screen, ‘St. Dunstan’s Hill. Ash.’

  Dunstan’s Hill, she remembered, was near the London Bridge. Being a west-ender, she didn’t travel that way often.

  She only knew it as, a couple of years before, Nigel had dragged her to an afterhours-don’t-tell-the-police party in the courtyard.

  He’d wanted to go so that he could meet up with a boy he’d been talking to from another school. But then that boy had kissed another boy, and Piper had spent her night with a wet shoulder drenched in Nigel’s tears.

  Dustan’s Hill wasn’t teeming with good memories for her.

  But, she thought, there would be cafes in Central London that she could snag a bagel from. That is, if she had a moment.

  Her hunger for food would be pushed aside as her hunger for answers was stronger.

  CHAPTER 11

  Half an hour later, Piper was marching up the crooked pavement of St Dunstan’s Hill.

  The road was windy and long, one side lined with dull industrial buildings, the other with bushes and the debris of an abandoned church.

  Piper hugged her cardigan over her black crop top—matching her shorts and gladiator sandals—and hiked up the sloped pavement.

  She checked the text again. It didn’t mention a street number. Ash, she thought, meant to meet her in the courtyard of the abandoned church. It’s where dozens of Londoners gathered, eating smashed-avocado sandwiches and sharing coffees on the stone pews.

  She ducked under a pair of overgrown trees that hung above like a pergola, and wandered onto the grounds. Tufts of weeds stuck from the concrete slabs and untamed bushes brushed against the visitors. It reminded Piper of the restaurant, if the courtyard there had been abandoned for decades.

  The church tower protruded from the ruins ahead. Its needle point seemed to touch the cloudless sky above.

  Piper lingered her gaze over the grey bell tower. It was amazing that it had survived both the London Blitz and the Great Fire of London. Was it built to be a church, she wondered, or a fortress?

  Piper walked around the cracked ground and studied the visitors. She couldn’t see Ash among them. Not even his icy sidekick, Desmond, was in sight. She didn’t like him much, but who would?

  A smile of victory tugged at her lips as she recalled April’s reception to him. While April had her flaws, she bared her claws when Piper’s foes emerged.

  A crumbling archway appeared ahead.

  Her attention was drawn to the structure. Piper was certain that it hadn’t been there before. As she approached the archway, she bypassed a basin filled with water for the birds.

  On a normal day, she would’ve stopped to admire the sky’s rulers, but her focus was fixed on the archway. Shrubs grew wild beneath it, and slabs of concrete blocked the way.

  Piper climbed over the obstacles and hiked through the shrubs. Before she could duck under the archway, a silvery blur jumped ahead.

  Piper paused, crouched under a fallen tree that was supported by the lumps of concrete. Ice travelled through her veins and froze her in place.

  The silver blur had been a fox. It looked at her from a mess of browning leaves, a few metres away. There was something about its amber eyes that unnerved her. Silence had washed over them, the chatter of the visitors gone.

  The fox emerged from the bush.

  Its front legs slinked forward and its body followed.

  Each step caused its head to bob, but its fierce stare never wavered from hers. If she scrambled back over the boulders, she thought, she might escape the fox. Its focus on her wasn’t reassuring.

  Though she couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard about a fox attacking a human. It tended to be the other way around.

  Piper blinked, astonished.

  The fox had turned its head to the left and whined. Then, it trotted down a barren path and out of sight.

  Piper had the strangest inkling that it’d wanted her to follow. Throwing caution to the wind, she clambered under the archway and stumbled onto the patch of dirt.

  It led to where the fox had gone, and where it stood, looking back at her—a limestone corridor, with sanded grey barriers, and suits of Knight armour standing like statues against every pillar.

  The Knight armours glistened beneath the rays of sunlight, and winked at her like day stars. It was the sort of corridor that belonged in a castle, not abandoned ruins in the city.

  The fox stared at her, its head twisted all the way round. The infamous scene from The Exorcist captured her mind.

  A shudder shook her body and her sandal slipped back against the path. She made to slink away, back to the courtyard, but the fox did the strangest thing. It inclined its head, and gestured down the corridor.

  Piper rubbed her eyes.

  She must’ve imagined it. Foxes didn’t gesture, they didn’t lead people to places. They hid and hunted. But when she dropped her hands from her face, the fox did it again.

  It wanted her to walk down the corridor. From the path, she couldn’t see where it led. And she suddenly thought that maybe the fox was leading her to Ash.

  It could be his trendy pet. Piper would consider a ferret to be trendy, not a fox, but then again, Nigel had a hedgehog.

  Piper stepped down the path and approached the fox.

  It waited until she was a mere metre away before it trotted down the corridor. She broke into a run to keep up with it. She stumbled over the corridor concrete, but held out her hands to balance herself.

  Once she’d steadied, she looked down the passageway. Two wooden doors loomed ahead, curved at the tips, and panelled with tangled metal slabs. The fox stood by the doors, watching her.

  Piper hadn’t known that the church had an entrance way, not since it was declared a debris heritage sight in the 1970s.

  Butterflies attacked her stomach as she treaded by the Knight statues. The slots in the helmets were dark, but she had the strangest sensation that she was being watched by their ghostly eyes. Piper stopped beside the fox and reached out for the brass doorknobs.

  She twisted them in her hands and yanked the doors open. A grunt thumped from her throat.

  The doors were heavy, and the fox dodged a hit from one. It jerked upright and dove through the gap in the doors.

  Slipping in after the fox, Piper pulled the doors shut behind her. The fox had vanished.

  CHAPTER 12

  The door opened to an outdoor castle-like corridor.

  Over the stone railing, a bright green spread of nature sprouted up from the grass. Trees grew thickly, covering the clean faces of old cottages that,
by the looks of them, had been recently painted in a range of colours—blue, green, yellow, white, and black. They looked like houses, and their residents were not much older than Piper was.

  It was a small village or a hamlet, circled by stone paths that wound from cottage to cottage, then up to where Piper stood, on the stone outdoor corridor.

  But at the end of the corridor, a set of immaculate mahogany steps greeted her. Moving indoors to an old greystone building, the stairs led upwards to a grand foyer and glossed blackwood bannisters. It didn’t match the decayed exterior of the building—ruins on the outside of the hamlet, a manor-house on the inside.

  Piper climbed the steps and looked around the foyer. The staircases, sanded and smoothed, were new, she suspected. Long portraits lined the walls, and Knight statues guarded the bottom of a wide carpeted set of stairs. It ran up to the next level.

  A pair of doors to her left were open, revealing what appeared to be an assembly hall—from the timber benches and carved podium—and to her right, with three steps leading down to it, was a solid door that remained closed. The ceiling rose above, and there were bannisters from the second level to section off passageways and the fall to the foyer.

  A burst of laughter bounced through the hall.

  Piper turned to the solid door just as it swung open. Three young girls shoved through the door, giggling between themselves. They each wore black trousers and white shirts with blue ties; school uniforms, guessed Piper. But she didn’t recognise the uniforms.

  The trio of girls pranced by her, in a very April-like fashion, and went up the main staircase. Piper watched them reach the second floor before she decided to follow them.

  Piper had wandered into a labyrinth.

  Corridors and passageways spiked off the second landing in all directions. They wound and twisted ahead, and down the bannister passages, and intertwined into spiral staircase. Each wall was lined with doors, some plain brown, others made of blackwood and slabbed with rusted metal. And they were buzzing with people.

  Boys and girls, of all ages, ran down corridors and threw spit balls at each other. Piper studied their clothes, noting that some wore the uniforms, and others wore the same outfits that Ash had been wearing each time she’d seen him; black combat trousers, belted with weapons, strapped with holsters, and a tight-fitted cordyline jumper.