by Laura Powell
‘Charlie Morgan’s been watching you, and waiting, same as I have. Same as those witch-prickers at the Inquisition. Lucky for you, I’ve kept one step ahead of both.’ Angeline lit a cigarette, squinting at her through a cloud of smoke. ‘Now, I’ve got us a plan but there’s still some things what need putting in place. So in the meanwhile, we sit tight and we keep quiet. Business as usual.’
‘Plan? What kind of plan?’
‘All in good time.’ She patted Glory on the knee, then laughed at her stormy expression. ‘And no sulking! First things first: you sure nobody could’ve seen you messing with that cat?’
‘Positive. But . . .’
‘But what?’
‘There was . . . there was one other thing. You see – I, uh, did a bit of extra witchwork earlier. Just to test things out.’
‘Testing like how?’
Glory described her encounter with Trish. ‘It’s fine, though,’ she wound up. ‘Trish didn’t suspect a thing.’
But now she wondered if this was true. She remembered the searching look Trish had given her as the pain began to recede, and the way the woman had shrunk away from her as she went to the door. She felt another stab of shame.
‘It were only a little headache,’ she added lamely.
‘That’s not the point,’ her great-aunt snapped. ‘Mab Almighty! Don’t you know where Trish Warren is working these days? That bar in Cannonby Street: The Angel. The one managed by Felton Cobbs.’
That brought her up short. Felton was an informant for the Wednesday Coven. ‘Oh . . . OK. Still, I don’t reckon there’s any cause for her to –’
Somebody rapped on the door.
‘Piss off,’ Angeline called. ‘I’m busy.’
‘It’s for Glory,’ Nate’s voice replied sullenly. ‘Charlie M’s on the phone. He wants to see her, pronto.’
CHAPTER 8
‘Can I have a word, Dad?’
‘If it’s a quick one.’
From behind the stack of papers on his desk, Ashton Stearne gave a slightly tense smile. He was due at a colleague’s memorial service that afternoon, and so was in his ceremonial dress uniform: a military-style affair of silver-grey and scarlet, adorned with his service medals. It was what he wore in court, Lucas noted grimly.
‘I, er . . . It’s rather important.’
‘Then you’d better come in.’
Lucas closed the door behind him and advanced to the desk. He was unsure whether to sit down or remain standing. The frenzied horrors of the night had passed; at this point, he was conscious only of blankness. He felt light-headed and unreal. Everything was unreal. This moment of confession in the study was certainly too theatrical to be true. He stared stiffly ahead, like a bad actor in a worse play.
Ashton’s hands fidgeted with his pen. He saw Lucas noticing the fidgeting and put the pen down. He tried an encouraging smile. ‘Right then, old chap. Speak up. What’s this all about?’
Lucas cleared his throat and said, too quickly, ‘There’s something you need to know about me, and I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit of shock.’
His father waited, but all the other scripted, rehearsed, impossible words had died in Lucas’s throat.
‘Are you in trouble?’
He gave a half nod, half shrug.
‘Have you done something wrong?’
‘Not on purpose. The trouble – the problem – is . . . personal.’
‘A problem with your friends? Or with a girl?’
Lucas felt a wrench of comic bitterness. He almost laughed. He took a deep breath. ‘No, the problem’s me. There’s something I’ve discovered about myself, you see. A difference. It’s hard to admit to, but I need to tell you what kind . . . what kind of person I am.’
His father looked down. For the first time, his hesitancy matched his son’s. ‘Is this about . . . boys, then?’
‘Boys?’ Lucas repeated blankly. Understanding dawned. ‘No! No. God –’
‘In that case,’ said Ashton Stearne with heavy patience, ‘what exactly are you trying to say?’
Lucas waited. His father waited. The words still wouldn’t come. Dumbly, Lucas began to unbutton his shirt. He kept his head bowed, hatefully aware of the flush of shame flooding his skin. Once his shirt was loose, he turned around and tugged it down, exposing his bare shoulder blade. The small velvety blot.
He heard Ashton get up, muttering, and lean over the desk towards him. He felt the nearness of his father’s warmth on his skin, sensed the lightness of his curiosity, followed by a sudden tightening of focus. The sharp indrawn breath.
‘Is that . . . is it . . . ?’
‘Yes.’
Ashton did not touch the mark. His back was very straight and his face was very still. In the silence, Lucas straightened his shirt and redid the buttons, but awkwardly, because of the trembling of his hands.
‘How long have you known?’ his father asked eventually, as if from very far away.
‘Since last night.’
‘And have you told anyone else?’
‘No.’
‘Soon you must. You must inform the Inquisition. Within twenty-four hours, that’s the rule.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
More silence.
‘You’re very young.’
‘I know. It should be impossible. The whole thing should be impossible. It –’
His father didn’t seem to be listening. ‘You are so very young,’ he said again, quietly. He closed his eyes, and his own face grew old.
But when he opened his eyes again, his gaze was steady and his tone brisk. He put his hand on Lucas’s shoulder and gave a resolute smile.
‘I am sure you’ll deal with this very well. Admirably, in fact. There’s no point pretending this won’t change a great many things, but together we will stand firm and do whatever has to be done. Of course, you have my full support. You always will – I hope you know nothing can change that. No doubt Marisa and Philomena will be entirely supportive too.’
He did not say that everything would be fine. He did not say, I’m sorry, and, I love you, and neither did Lucas. They both knew the other wanted to, though. For the moment that would have to be enough.
The rest of the day was the loneliest of Lucas’s life. He stayed shut in his room, dazed by a bewilderment so heavy it was as if he’d been drugged. Occasionally he would be overcome by panic. His thoughts would hop and sputter manically. Then he would have to get to his feet, wrapping his arms around himself, and pace back and forth until the shaking stilled.
The house was deathly quiet. Philomena was still in bed, nursing her hangover; Marisa was at the tennis club. Ashton had left to attend the memorial service as planned. Everything else, he said with uncharacteristic vagueness, would be settled on Monday, after the weekend. He would ‘drop by the office’ on his way home.
By this, he meant that he was going to break the news to the Witchfinder General. Afterwards he would set up an appointment for Lucas to be registered.
Lucas knew the registration included a test of his witchkind abilities, but not exactly what this would involve. Inquisitorial techniques were not publicised; he had learned about them in general, not specific, terms. He would have to exchange his ID card for a new version stamped with a ‘W’. Then there was the bridling itself. The iron cuffs would remain until he left school and found a public-sector job as a practising witch. Even then, he would be monitored to ensure he only committed witchwork as part of authorised government business.
So these were his last hours of freedom. Lucas looked at his wrists, picturing the metal bands that would soon circle them. A bridled witch was like someone with a disfigurement. The civilised, polite thing to do was not to look. You always noticed, of course, but you and the witch both pretended you hadn’t. If you weren’t civilised then it was a different matter. People would spit and jeer; Lucas had seen it. There were beatings too.
When it came to his friends, he wasn’t sure what would be worse – their p
ity, or disgust. He remembered the raised eyebrow he and Tom had shared when Ollie told them about his cousin. It had seemed admirably restrained of them at the time. He tried not to think of Bea’s face, flushed and hopeful, leaning towards his by the pond.
Instead, Lucas kept returning to his single act of witchwork. Obsessively, he went over every detail of Philomena’s bane. It was like picking at a scab: revolting yet pleasurable.
He also brooded on what Ashton Stearne would be saying to his colleagues. Decisions were being made and processes set in motion that Lucas had no control over. If only, he thought, I could know what they all really think. If only I knew what’s going on behind the scenes. I need to be prepared.
But you can be, said a small treacherous voice. You have other resources now. And another inner voice, a voice Lucas didn’t even admit to hearing, whispered, it’s your last chance. There was an itch in his blood that was still unacknowledged, and unsatisfied.
As the afternoon wore on, he kept coming back to a discussion he’d heard between Ashton and a colleague about the use of the fae in surveillance operations. Maybe it was time to put his insider knowledge to the test.
At about four o’clock, Lucas heard Philly stump along the corridor and down the stairs. The front door slammed. A moment or so later, and before he could think better of it, he was making his way into his father’s study.
Lucas surveyed the room, and realised he was past the worst of his shock. Everything was easier now he had a task to work on. He assessed the challenge with the cool recklessness of someone with nothing to lose.
A witch with a scrying-bowl filled with water could see through walls and across cities. It was a building’s entrance and exit points that made it vulnerable. The bowl was usually made of glass because windows were made of glass, and this enabled the fae to work through the panes. A wooden or steel bowl would let a witch see through a wooden or steel door.
But scrying was one of the few witchworks that could be stopped with iron. (It was usually only the witch, not their work, which was blocked by the metal.) People with something to hide or protect installed iron shutters over their windows and fixed an iron panel to the centre of their doors. Ashton’s study was iron-proofed. And in any case, you couldn’t hear anything in a scrying-bowl.
Lucas had tried to listen through doors before. When his father first got involved with Marisa, he had even attempted the glass-held-to-the-wall trick. The theory went that the wall picked up the vibrations of sound in the room, and the glass helped channel them. It had not worked when Lucas was eleven. But things were different now.
Ashton’s study was next to the dining room. From the cabinet there, Lucas took out a pair of crystal wine glasses. His pulse was speeding up in anticipation, and he could feel the blot on his shoulder blade begin to warm.
A talisman was any kind of witchworked object; an amulet, by contrast, was a witchwork device made from scratch. From what Lucas could remember of the spying trick his father had described, he needed to cast his fae into the two glasses so that they became talismans to transmit and amplify sound. There were no exact rules for using the Seventh Sense and the fae often required the use of bodily substances as well as physical props. Lucas was of the popular opinion that witchwork was too makeshift, too grubby, to be considered a craft.
Here goes nothing, he thought, as he held one of the glasses at the base of its stem. He had no option but to make things up as he went along. Grimacing slightly, he ran his forefinger inside his right ear, feeling for the whorls of bone and flesh, the warm hole of the drum. After spitting on his finger, he rubbed its wet tip round the rim of the glass.
As the motion of his hand set up a wave of vibration travelling through the crystal, it began to hum, then sing. It was something he’d done in a science lesson on sound waves, back in prep school. But this time the fae in his head echoed in answer: a darker, richer note.
Even when he lifted his finger from the rim of the first glass and moved to the second, the first kept up its thin whine. For a few moments the two sang together, their crystal bowls vibrating slightly. Once silence returned, and he ventured to pick the glasses up again, they hummed at his touch. Recognising him, welcoming him.
The walls of the study were lined with books. Lucas placed one of the witchworked glasses on the empty section of a lower shelf. With a bit of luck it would be unnoticed there. He took the other glass back to the dining room, and hid it behind the curtains. As the fae subsided, his nerves shivered and hummed, as if his body was made of crystal too. He felt at peace for the first time that day.
Half an hour later, Ashton Stearne returned. When Lucas heard his father’s tread along the corridor, he quickly moved from his bed to his desk, opening up a school text book at random. Ashton entered the room to see his son apparently deep in study.
‘How was the service?’ Lucas asked, as casually as he could make it.
‘It was fine, thank you. How . . . how are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘Good.’ Ashton nodded towards the desk. ‘Business as usual, I see. Very sensible.’
‘Did it go all right at the office?’
‘Fine.’
‘What did they say? Have you spoken to Sir Ant—’
‘I said it was fine.’
Lucas looked away. ‘Right. Sorry.’
‘No need to apologise. I’ve made you an appointment for Monday, by the way. We’ll leave here at nine.’
‘I should go on my own.’
‘Oh.’ A shadow crossed his father’s face. ‘I thought . . . I thought you might like some support.’
‘Thanks,’ said Lucas awkwardly. ‘It’s just that it will be easier to keep a low profile if I’m alone. Though I suppose you’ll have to release an, er, official statement . . . ?’
‘Mm. For the moment, I’ve been asked to keep matters confidential until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.’
Lucas took this to mean it hadn’t yet been decided whether or not his father would have to resign. He was at a critical stage in the Goodwin trial; if he had to pull out now, the case might well collapse.
‘Of course, Marisa needs to be informed. It’s probably better if she explains the situation to Philomena herself.’
‘OK. Sure. And then we can talk things over properly. I mean, there’s so much to discuss. So much to sort out. I need to know how –’
‘One thing at a time, old chap.’
Marisa returned soon after her husband. From the top of the stairs, Lucas listened to the usual bustle of her arrival, and the point at which it was cut short by Ashton’s calm interjection. ‘A word, Marisa, if I may . . .’
Lucas felt surprisingly little guilt at the betrayal he was about to make. His father had made it clear that the less Lucas knew about arrangements for his new life the better. Besides, everyone knew that witchkind were deceitful to the core. He was just reverting to type.
He gave Marisa and Ashton a few moments in the study before putting his ear to the door. Not even a murmur could be heard within. Then, his mouth very dry, he shut himself in the dining room. He collected the wine glass from behind the curtain, and went to the section of wall behind which he’d placed its mate.
Would his talisman work? He reassured himself by stroking the glass, and heard the hum in the crystal answer the hum beginning in his head. His next worry was that using the glass in the dining room would set the one in the study singing. From here on, everything was guesswork.
Lucas sat on the floor, his back against the wall. Breathing deeply, he ran his fingertip inside his ear, wetted it on his tongue, and began to circle the glass’s rim. He pictured the discussion in progress on the other side of the wall and the glass on the shelf, vibrating silently in answer.
As his finger circled the glass in his hand, the fae in both called to the glass in the other room. A thread of sound stretched between the two, then looped round the crystal rim, up through his finger and into his ear. There, the voices in the study sp
oke to him.
‘Perhaps you should sit down,’ his father was saying. ‘You’ve had quite a shock.’
So Lucas had missed the moment of revelation. He found he was relieved.
There was a choking, gasping sound. When his stepmother did speak, her voice was faint. ‘Have they . . . have they asked you to resign?’
‘I’ll remain where I am until after the Goodwin trial. There’s a chance some kind of arrangement might be made. A move to a more administrative role, perhaps.’
‘Even if the Inquisition supports you, the press will be out for blood. The humiliation! After everything you’ve done for this country! I can’t bear it.’
‘You must. We have other priorities now.’
Lucas, trance-like, stroked the glass. The fae pulsed at his skin. There was another effect too. When he closed his eyes, the two voices – or rather, their separate sounds – were coloured. Marisa’s was dark red, exposing an anger that wasn’t expressed in her tearful words. Ashton’s colour was also at odds with his calm manner. A whirling, grainy black. Could it be . . . panic?
‘How could it have happened?’ Marisa asked at last.
‘There’s always a chance.’
‘But your family – it’s biologically impossible – unless Camilla’s –’
‘No. Absolutely not. I did the usual checks: her pedigree was impeccable.’
His father’s sigh reverberated through the glass. Lucas saw it as watery grey, like rain.
‘The fae isn’t simply a rogue gene. Yes, it runs in families, but that’s only part of the story. Look at the War. The Nazis purged not just Jews but whole communities of witchkind.The British Empire did the same in some of its colonies. And yet when a new, so-called ‘purified’ generation was born in these places, witchkind were still part of the mix. The fae is an aberration, but a natural one. It will always be with us.’
‘So I’m beginning to see.’ His wife’s tone was crisp, but the green of the emotion behind it was acid. ‘Very well. Where do we go from here?’