And all Blackwater Blaze could do was hide, aware of his nakedness, and hope that none of them noticed him there.
He would have hated to have to kill them all.
It would draw unnecessary attention to his presence in this world; no pack would allow hundreds of its young to be slaughtered without there being some sort of recompense. They would hunt him with whatever passed for pitchforks and burning torches in this place, looking to string him up. Surrounded by such strangenesses that gave them all of the advantages. He would be running for his life without any understanding of where he was running to, what he was running from, or just how much pain they were capable of.
It was best not to be seen.
Blackwater Blaze had stayed alive this long by adhering to one single mantra: always believe your enemy is better than you. Extending that logic into this magicless place meant any enemies he made here would be powerful enough to make the chances of his return to the Moonlands slim at best.
So he hid, and prayed his luck would hold.
After an hour his legs began to cramp. Still the girls ran and laughed and shrieked, so full of life. He could taste their vitality as they sweated it out. It was heady. Intoxicating. It made it difficult for Blaze to concentrate on the task at hand. He was starving and the thought kept niggling away at the back of his mind: surely the pack wouldn't miss one of them. Just one. There are so many. He needed to feed.
But, even as the saliva ran between his lips, he resisted.
Barely.
He would not be able to resist forever though. The longer he was stranded here in this Kingdom of the Bereft, cut off from the essence of magic that infused the Moonlands, the harder it would become. What was discomfort now would become torture later, when the moon rose and he reverted to his natural form. When it came to torture every creature had its breaking point, no matter how strong. Even one as powerful as Blackwater Blaze would break eventually.
And already the Wolfen king's Alpha could feel the urgency of time pulsing through his veins.
Crouching low, he scuttled back across the footbridge, onto the island proper, and disappeared into the thick bushes. Gathering twigs and leaves and anything else he could find to soften the ground, he made a den and settled down to wait out the pack of girls.
Their spirited play lasted an hour more, and then the school bell rang again and their larks came to an end. Blaze watched them as they trooped one by one and two by two back through the park gates and across the road to a white stone fronted building, and disappeared inside.
But it wasn't until the last of them, three girls together, a brunette, a tall gangly blonde, and an awkward fiery red head, walked out of the park gates that Blackwater Blaze came alive.
The red head tossed back her head, laughing. The sound startled the pigeons that had gathered to feast on scraps of bread beside the path. They burst into the air in a flurry of wings and feathers, cawing and complaining, which only caused the girls to laugh harder.
He came up onto his toes, sniffing at the air.
There was something about the girl in the middle…
The red head.
He watched her walk, bumping shoulders with one of the girls beside her. They had no idea they were being watched. The effect she had on him was immediate and irresistible. Her scent infused him, swelling to fill every inch of his body and ounce of his blood as he breathed her in. She was different. Wrong. She didn't belong here. He felt himself becoming dizzy, his focus on the park and its lush colours turning fuzzy as his breath became short. He felt sure he was going to fall and reached out for a tree to steady himself. The bark felt vile beneath his touch, made all the more horrible by its juxtaposition to her sweetness. His toes clenched, scratching at the dirt beneath his feet.
It took him a moment to understand what was happening to him.
There was something incredibly familiar and yet utterly different about the girl's scent. It wasn't ugly perfume masking even uglier decay as every last ounce of magic leeched out of her flesh and bones like everyone else around her.
It was different.
Sweet.
She was vital and full of life.
And in this deathless place—trapped within all these streets of rot that seemed to go on and on endlessly, where everything else smelled rank and putrid—she smelled sweet. And there could only be one reason for that. The essence of earth magic was still strong in her.
She was a creature of beauty because of it.
A bright shining beacon.
He could not help but be drawn to her.
Which was a pity, because Blackwater Blaze knew beyond a shadow of a doubt she was the one he had been sent here to kill.
He started to stand, every fibre of his being willing him to run, to pounce and tear out her throat, but he resisted. His muscles shivered with anticipation. The thrill was purely adrenal. Blackwater Blaze was the consummate hunter. This was neither the time nor the place. He had her scent now. She could not hide from him. Not here. Not when she stood out from every other soul in this place. She was his now. Dead even if she didn't know it. This was the part of the hunt he enjoyed the most, the final moments leading up to the kill.
He looked around the park, but could see no sign of her precious protectors. Targyn Fae could bluster and boast as much as she liked, if none of the meddlesome Wardens were there to save the girl's hide she was helpless. It really was as simple as that.
Blackwater Blaze breathed in her scent once more, savouring just how right it felt to him. This should be the fragrance of all the world, he thought.
And then he saw the face in the upstairs window, watching him watching the girl. It might have been a ghost, the effect of the glass made the watcher seem almost translucent.
Blaze squinted into the sun to better see.
The ghost was actually an old woman and not a ghost at all.
Even through the glass and stone of the school building she smelled so close to death that the mistake was not an unreasonable one.
Shadows moved across her face.
She scowled down at him.
Her features were wrinkled, cragged and leathery, like the bindings of the books on the shelves behind her. Each fold of skin seemed to add a decade to her already impossibly grizzled face. She had a crooked nose and pince-nez spectacles perched on top of it as she peered out of the window, her gaze following the girls back into the school building.
She scratched something on the glass with a fingernail, and the window turned to black.
He could no longer see in, but he was sure she could see out.
That was when Blackwater Blaze noticed the markings on the white stone façade of the old building. He had been wrong; the entire world was not devoid of magic. Both the black iron railings and the white granite harboured wardings—sigils of power scratched into them. It was subtle, small magic, but it was magic just the same, and it meant two things: the first, that magic, however much diluted and decayed was not dead in this world after all, and the other, much more pertinent to his current predicament, the entire building was shielded against his sort.
Once she stepped over the threshold he wouldn't be able to get to her.
Blackwater Blaze left his hiding place, scrambling down to the edge of the lake. There was no way he could possibly cross the water and all of the parkland between them before the girl made it back to the safety of the school.
He spat a curse.
Oblivious, the girl crossed the street, and like that, she was gone, disappearing through the school gates and into the building itself.
It changed nothing.
His first priority was to find clothing so that he could walk amongst the sheep, with that accomplished he would set about making his contingency plan. It was far from perfect, but that didn't matter either. He would be going home soon. Victorious.
FIVE
School Days
Last period was terminally dull, same as it always was.
But today it
was a special kind of sadistic torture to have forty-five minutes of maths after double gym, because she had somewhere else she really wanted to be.
723, Clerkenwell Rise.
The address on the ivory business card the woman who wasn't really her aunt had left her.
It was torture.
Pure unadulterated torture.
Miss Jeeps didn't seem to care though. She stood at the whiteboard scribbling down equations with that undecipherable teacher-scrawl that sloped away slightly to the right of the board the further on the equations stretched. She might have been writing down co-ordinates for Atlantis for all Ashley could tell. According to Mr Sutton, the biology teacher, the brain was divided into two halves, the right side of it was responsible for all of the logical stuff, rational thinking, processing calculations, that sort of stuff, while the left side was the creative half of the brain. She wondered if it was possible to be right-side brain dead but still function as a normal living breathing human being, because none of this made any sense. After all she could make up an entire world to paint on her bedroom wall but didn't have a clue what the square root of 64 was never mind the sum of the hypotenuse.
She fidgeted in her seat.
She gazed out of the window.
She spun her pen on the side of her finger.
And she fidgeted in her seat.
The clock above the classroom seemed to be frozen permanently at five minutes to three.
It was torture.
Pretending to be looking for an eraser, or her calculator, a pencil sharpener or anything else she could feasibly need in a maths class, Ashley kept taking the key out of her patchwork satchel and looking at it. Holding it. Feeling its weight in her hand. It was quite unlike any of the keys on her key ring. Where they were plain and functional, this one was much more ornate. The metal head had been fashioned to look like a huge four-leafed clover. There was a hint of rust around one of the leaves. Its teeth were big and chunky. She couldn't stop thinking about what it might open, picturing old-fashioned safes and lock boxes and gates to secret gardens. And the more she thought about it, the more fanciful her imaginings became until she was thinking about treasure chests filled and long lost pirate gold.
Ashley was beginning to understand why they always said curiosity killed the cat. It wasn't that the poor old moggy stuck its nose into places it wasn't supposed to go. No, no, no. It was much simpler than that. And twice as torturous. Curiosity piqued, and then agonisingly denied, the unfortunate Ashley-Cat was stuck in a class room surrounded by maths books to the left and square roots to the right, which led to a deep, deep frustration, and eventually to one dead cat. And all because the poor cat couldn't sate its burning desire to know what waited in the box in the house on Clerkenwell Rise.
It was a tragedy, obviously.
It wasn't the cat's fault they gave it a card with an address on it. It wasn't the cat's fault they had got it all excited, and then made it suffer through lessons as normal. How could it be the cat's fault it couldn't settle and had been fidgety all afternoon?
"I'm not a cat," Ashley said, not realising the teacher had said something just a moment before, and she hadn't been paying attention. There was a moment of silence. Miss Jeeps walked slowly down the middle aisle between the rows of desks. Behind her the clock on the wall mocked Ashley.
She'd been five minutes from freedom.
Beside her, Mel Harvey, her new best friend, was in the process of disowning her, disproving the fact that best friends were forever. She sighed exasperatedly and made a show of shuffling a few inches further away from Ashley, just to be sure the wrath of Miss Jeeps didn't fall on the wrong shoulders. Right up until that slip of the tongue Mel had been pretending to study the maths book intently while thumbing through gossip filled celebrity-watch webpages on her phone. "Nice one, Ash," she grumbled, slipping the phone under the textbook and really hoping Miss J. hadn't seen it.
"Would you care to repeat that, Mizz Hawthorne? I'm sure everyone would be interested in your thoughts."
Ashley made a face. She wanted the ground to open up beneath her desk and if not swallow her whole, at least offer a quick exit to the floor below so she could make a speedy getaway.
"No, Miss," she said, not looking up.
"That's not what you said, is it, Mizz Hawthorne?"
"No, Miss."
"Shall we try again?"
"I said: I'm not a cat."
The maths teacher let that little observation hang in the air for a moment, not mocking it yet. She was saving herself, Ashley knew. There was a punch-line coming and she was going to be the butt of it. It was all about comic timing. Sarcasm was the same whether you were fifteen or forty-five, but you'd had thirty years longer to hone it to barbed perfection.
"That's quite correct, you are not, in fact, a cat. I'm impressed." One of the girls across the aisle from Ashley giggled. They knew what was coming next. Miss Jeeps liked to make an example of people who talked in class. She thought she was funny. She wasn't really, but it was easier to take it than to argue. Arguing only ended in detention. "Remarkably, now that I think about it, that may well be the first correct answer you've given in this classroom. Unfortunately there are no bonus marks for not being anthropomorphically challenged, so if it's not the square root of 64, which, by the way is 8, I suggest you resist the temptation to blurt out any more of the Wisdom According to Ashley Hawthorne. One more outburst from you, Mizz Hawthorne, and I'll be requesting your presence in Heron House after school. And as much as I enjoy your company, I'd much rather waste an hour of my life in rush hour traffic trying to get home, so I'd be grateful if, for the remaining five minutes we have to spend together, you would refrain from any more revelations. Do we have a deal?"
Mortified, Ashley nodded.
Heron House was the teacher's building.
That was where they had their private offices and lounge. It was out of bounds to students, across the road from the main building and in the actual park itself, half-surrounded by the trees on one side, the curve of the boating lake on another. It pre-dated the main school building by centuries, having been built by Henry VIII as a gift for one of his beheaded wives, along with the birds the house was named after. It gave the teachers peace and quiet when they weren't in the classroom. They'd been overheard more than once referring to it as The Sanctuary.
Several of the girls around the room laughed. Not loudly, for fear of turning Miss Jeeps's attention their way. Unsurprisingly, none of them wanted to take a bullet for the new girl. But nevertheless, they laughed just loudly enough for Ashley to know they were laughing at her, and Miss Jeeps let them.
The floor adamantly refused to open up beneath her.
Mercifully, Miss Jeeps didn't make things worse.
She stalked back towards the front of the classroom and offered one final instruction, "Write this in your Prep Diary, girls. Due Monday. You are to answer the questions on pages 47 through to and including 49. Remember, follow the instructions precisely, and show your workings, they account for half of the marks, and with the pass mark being 51% it is possible to fail despite getting every question right."
Ashley kept her head down for the next five minutes, which felt like the longest five minutes of her life and not just because of the key in her satchel.
Miss Jeeps didn't look at the clock once in those five minutes, and yet with eerie prescience said, "With that, ladies, I trust you will have a pleasant evening," only for the final bell to sound as she capped the marker pen in her hand and reached for the board rubber to start cleaning away the equations there.
Everyone else sprang up almost as one, dragging their chairs back and gathering their books together like a plague of locusts swarming over the wooden desks. Every surface was stripped clean in under five seconds. Less than a minute later the classroom was empty of everyone apart from Ashley and Miss Jeeps. The teacher gathered her notes together in a neat stack.
"Haven't you got a home to go to?" Miss Jeeps asked
without looking up.
"No Miss. I mean, yes Miss, but not straight away. I need to go to Clerkenwell first."
Ashley said, starting to clear away her things.
"What on earth would possess you to go there, my dear?" The change in tone now the lesson was over was marked. It wasn't about humiliating her anymore. Ashley was old enough and wise enough in the ways of the world to understand that the Miss Jeeps who held them prisoner to the mysteries of mathematics for forty-five minutes at a time wasn't the same Miss Jeeps who existed outside of those forty-five minutes. Outside of the classroom she could be the nicest woman in the world. Inside she would always be the Iron Lady. That was just the way it was and had to be if she wanted to keep twenty-eight hormonally challenged fifteen-year-old girls in line.
"My aunt died," Ashley said.
"Oh, my dear, I am sorry to hear that. And of course that explains your lack of focus today. Completely understandable. Were you close?" She finished packing her stuff away and straightened up, smoothing out the wrinkles in her pleated skirt.
"Not really," Ashley said, "I don't remember her all that well, to be honest, apart from as crazy old Aunt Elspeth, which is just a mean way to think about someone when they're dead, isn't it? But it's the truth." She shrugged. There wasn't a lot more to say.
Miss Jeeps obviously hadn't expected that sort of frank confession and looked vaguely uncomfortable with the whole thing. She gathered herself quickly. It was all about comportment. That was the word she liked to use when telling the girls to sit up straight, shoulders back, chest out. She slung her bag over her shoulder and said, "Walk with me."
Together they left the school building by the teacher's door.
Neither one of them could have realised it at the time, but that chance decision and moment of kindness saved both of their lives.
Ten minutes later Ashley was about to board a bus towards Clerkenwell Rise, the house at number 723, and inside it, the safety deposit box her key would open, and Miss Jeeps was back in her room in Heron House.
Moonlands Page 4