by Rosie Best
Oh, so you’re trolling me. I stuck my tongue out at her. She gave me a panting grin, lay down on her stomach and licked her paws.
“Adeola,” Don snapped. “Someone is dead. Please be serious.”
“Oh, like you were such a fan of Ben in the first place,” Rand muttered.
“He was one of us,” Don said. “That’s all there is to it.”
“But what was he doing in a girl’s school in Kensington?” Fran frowned.
I shook my head. “I asked if he… if he had anyone I should tell, you know, that he died. He just told me to...”
I stopped.
I don’t know if it was Don’s overbearing scowl, or Fran’s wide, concerned eyes, but I decided to keep the sapphire to myself. Just a little longer. Nobody here apparently knew anything about it – nobody had said anything about any stone.
“He told me to watch out for the fog,” I said.
“What did he mean by that?” Don mused.
“He must’ve been delirious. You said he was stabbed, I certainly don’t think fog could have cut him,” Fran said, slowly, as if explaining to a small child.
“No, I saw it. When I was with James the other night. It was like... fog that was alive. I felt it pull my tail!” They all gave me blank looks, so uniform they were almost comical. “Didn’t James mention it?”
Don growled again. “James is a traitor, a liar, and a thief. And no, he didn’t mention it.”
“I… oh.” I thought of the little rattling bag he’d been carrying when we ran from the fog. But that didn’t change what I’d seen and felt...
“Well, anyway,” Fran sighed, bowing her head slightly, “if you don’t know anything more about what happened to Ben, I suppose there’s nothing we can do. Perhaps he was simply mugged, or involved in some kind of fight.”
I didn’t think so. Unless he’d been the mugger, and got hurt while stealing the giant sapphire from someone else.
I hadn’t thought of that before.
I wriggled uneasily.
“If we’re finished, Don?” Fran asked. Don sat back on his haunches, drawn up tall, and nodded once. “Then let me welcome you to the Skulk, Meg,” said Fran. She stepped forward and sniffed at my muzzle, touching her nose to mine. She smelled strongly of expensive soap, like my mum used. Rand ducked close, but didn’t actually brush against me; he stank of petrol and cigarette smoke. Addie stepped up and nudged me in the shoulder with the top of her head, affectionately, but hard enough to make me wobble.
I caught my breath. If I’d been human, my face would’ve been turning bright red. Even considering that Don was still looking at me as though I’d done something deeply suspicious, this was probably the most welcomed I’d been anywhere since I left Brownies when I was ten. I had no idea if the feeling could be read on my fox face, but I found myself shuffling my paws and turning my face away from the others.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“You are one of us now,” said Don. “And so you must live by our rules.”
Rand’s ears flew back and he growled. “Not this rubbish again.”
Don’s head snapped around and he bared his teeth at Rand. Rand looked small, skinny and scruffy next to Don, but he stood his ground.
“I’ve had enough of your tongue today, Randhir,” Don snarled.
“And I’ve had enough of your rules,” snapped Rand. He turned to me. “Don’t you listen to him, Meg. He makes them up to suit himself. Nobody ever elected you leader of us, mate.”
“The Skulk has been in my family for a hundred years.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot, because you haven’t mentioned it in ten minutes. Your father was a shifter before you, and his father before him, and his father walked fifty miles to school in the snow uphill each way and lived in a cardboard box,” Rand sneered. “It don’t make you better than us, kid.”
“Randhir,” said Fran, in a voice like grease on a squeaky door, “please, let’s not argue about this.” She glanced at me, and back at him. Her yellow eyes narrowed, the first time they’d been anything but wide and full of concern. I guessed she meant not in front of the new girl. “Don’s rules are quite sensible.”
“Don’s rules are bollocks,” Rand sniffed. “He makes them up to suit himself, but, God forbid any one of us amend them slightly...”
“Your wife’s cooperation is not crucial to the survival of the Skulk. You should never have told her,” Don barked.
“Now, Don, we’ve been over this. Rand said he was sorry,” said Fran.
“I did not.”
The three of them turned in on each other, snarling and bearing their teeth, leaving Addie and me on the outside. I backed off. They didn’t notice.
“It’s pretty crucial if you want me to keep coming to your precious meetings. She thought I was shagging around!”
“You should have thought of a better explanation.”
“Why should I not tell my wife about something like this? What harm could it do?”
“Because the more people who know, the more complicated this becomes.”
“Just because your sister couldn’t cope,” Rand snarled. “I don’t blame her, either, from what I’ve heard...”
Don’s hackles shot up and he bared his teeth at Rand. “You leave my sister out of this.”
“Please, let’s try to see each other’s point of view,” said Fran.
I turned to Addie. “Are – are they always like this?”
She looked at me with a hangdog expression, then jerked her head and slunk away to the other side of the clearing. I followed. The others didn’t stop arguing, or seem to notice we’d moved away.
“Yeah. It’s not Don’s fault,” she said. “It’s not easy to lead a bunch of foxes that don’t want to be led. I’d never leave the Skulk, but... some days I don’t blame James for refusing to show.”
I watched the three foxes – Don and Rand literally snapping at each other’s throats now, and Fran wheedling at them like they were naughty children – and my heart sank like a stone. This was the Skulk. My amazing new world. It was a selfish thief, one young girl, and three bickering adults.
I caught my breath. My eyes were wet.
It was ridiculous. I guess I didn’t realise how much I’d been hoping that I’d walk into this world and find... what? A whole new family? A ready-made group of friends to have wacky adventures with?
I felt so stupid.
“Aw, don’t feel bad,” Addie said. “It’s not always like this. New people stir Don up. Fran was the last one in before you and he was just like this. He gets hacked off with everything cause he can’t actually be God and stop people from dying, and then he takes it out on Rand because Rand doesn’t know when to shut up. But he’ll come around to you, long as you don’t get in his face and disrespect him. Believe.”
“I just... I was looking forward to finding out more about all this. I mean, why is this happening to us? Why can we do this? Why are there six of us, and not more or less?”
“Well, sorry, but even Don doesn’t know that,” Addie shrugged. “He says there’s something important about meeting in this place, but I think he’s just parroting what his dad told him.”
“This place?” I looked around at the messy, overgrown clearing. It didn’t look like anything special.
“Look,” Addie said, scratching her side against a nearby tree, “Normally Don tries to run this like a church group or something, and we hang out and talk for a bit, but... I don’t think this is going to be one of those times. You wanna slope off? We can tell them you’ve got to get home. I can walk you.”
“Yeah, I think that’d be good,” I said.
I stood back as Addie managed to slide in between the three foxes – still arguing fiercely – to let Don know we were going. He turned and looked at me and, for a second, I thought he seemed upset. Then his eyes went hard again, and he nodded.
“We’ll see you next week,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied.
We walk
ed back up the tunnel of weeds towards the road. I glanced back, but the Skulk was already lost in the tangle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As we were walking under the huge flyover roundabout, between the trailer park and the sports centre, Addie stopped.
“Are you all right on your own from here?” she said. “It’s just kind of out of my way to go any further. My den’s really nearby.”
Her den? I wondered if it was human slang, like crib, or if I’d come to call my house that when I’d been a shifter for a while.
“Oh – yes, I think so,” I said.
“Just go on down the main road and then you’re on Holland Park Avenue. Turn off at the Hilton, you can’t miss it. Or spend the night there,” she added, cheekily, “I bet five stars is like home, right, Princess?”
I laughed and snapped my teeth playfully beside her ear. I pulled back at once, afraid I’d overstepped – it’d been pure instinct. But maybe she’d be offended, or scared?
Addie panted, happily. “See you next week,” she said, and trotted away without looking back.
The journey down the main road was scarier without Addie there, knowing exactly where it was safe to walk. Cars roared past dragging hot waves of stinking air along behind them, dulling my senses. I half-felt my way along the hard shoulder, pressing myself to the metal barrier just in case.
I wasn’t unhappy, though. The Skulk may have been a bit of a disappointment, but – not to jump way ahead of myself, or anything, not to be overconfident, not to assume anything – I thought I’d made a friend.
The warm glow followed me down to the Holland Park Roundabout, up behind the Hilton, and along Holland Park Road. I decided to take the shortcut home – what was the harm, while I was still a fox? – and headed off the road between two embassies.
My pace slowed as I got closer and closer to home, and I was dawdling down a Kensington back-street, lined with little boutiques, jewellers and shoe shops, when something scuttled across my path.
The spider.
It stopped right in front of me. It was the same one. I tried not to shiver. With my fox eyes I could see it was very dark brown, its legs spindly and covered in miniscule hairs, its abdomen striped with tiny lines of a lighter brown colour. Tiny brown fangs poked out from the front of its face and eight shiny black eyes circled its head. It crouched low to the ground, its eight knees high in the air over its body. I couldn’t get much of a smell from it – there was something totally alien about its scent that made me think of fast, and very still. I guessed that just meant I’d never smelled spider before.
“Hey, Skulk girl,” it said. It was male – it wasn’t the sound of its voice that told me, more a feeling, resonating somewhere near the back of my skull. My ears twitched.
“You’ve been following me,” I growled at the spider.
The spider’s fangs chipped together, exasperation in its voice. “I needed to talk to you. I was waiting for you to change, but I couldn’t go outside when the pigeon was there and then you ran off with the other girl from the Skulk before I could get to you.” The spider’s back legs scraped the ground anxiously. “My name is Angel. I need to talk to you about the stone, the one you left in your locker.”
I blinked. “My stone? But what’s it got to do with…?” I trailed off.
Something was moving behind him. Something flowed out from under the door of the closest jewellers shop, stretching its grey tendrils across the road towards us.
“The fog...” I muttered.
“What? Where?” The spider leapt in the air and turned in a split second. “Dios! Run!”
I backed off, still staring at the fog. I felt that strange fizzing again and shook my head to clear it.
“What is it?”
Angel paused, his four closest eyes looking back at me – and that was when the fog struck out, one coiling tentacle twisting around Angel’s back leg. He screamed. The fog sucked him in, like he was caught in an undertow. His scream cut off as the fog swallowed him.
I should have run, right then, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I was about to see.
The fog formed a column in the middle of the silent street, with Angel hanging weightless in the centre of it, twitching, his eight legs clawing at the air. For a second, through a red haze of panic, I thought he might be drowning and I half-crouched to spring in after him.
Then his front and back legs splayed out, and the middle ones drew in. His body ballooned, the thorax swelling into a head and the abdomen squaring out into a torso. Hands and feet and fingers and toes burst out of the ends of his legs like flowers blooming.
I saw him change, silhouetted against the orange street light, in the grip of the fog. I barely had time to register his human form – he was young, brown-skinned, his hair a dark shadow across his skull – and then he writhed, flailed, clutched at his head.
And it burst.
A violent splash of red hung in the fog. It was like a galaxy: shards of bone, strings of skin and muscle, spiralling around a slowly-expanding cloud made of a million droplets of blood.
My back legs fell out from under me and I sprawled on the pavement. I coughed, and then slammed my jaws together: no time for vomiting.
The fog pulsated, contracted, and then relaxed. His body dropped to the ground. Blood fell like rain.
I scrambled up and ran, blindly, stumbling over my paws. My vision closed in and the buildings seemed to curl up and around me, a tunnel of brick and concrete with a roof of leaves. The shadows of trees clawed the ground as it passed underneath me. My paws thudded a drumbeat on the hard road. My bones jangled together.
I didn’t know if the fog was following me, if it was falling behind or right on my tail. I couldn’t look back.
A burst of light, a banshee screech and a blur of movement right in front of me. Pure instinct threw me to one side, my left flank coming down hard on the pavement, as the metal monster swerved and hurtled past.
Just a car. I got up, looked around. The street was full of shifting shadows and patches of light. The windows of the tall houses glowered down at me like a hundred cold, dead eyes. But I couldn’t see the fog. I paused, panting, turning round and round on the spot and peering into every gap and shadow and turning for any sight of a searching tendril. There was none.
The time for vomiting finally arrived and I threw up, messily, and for what felt like a long time.
It took me a long time to get home, even though I was just around the corner. I could hardly move an inch without stopping, trembling, to look all around me. At one point a gust of wind stirred the hairs at the end of my brush and I fell down, paralysed, convinced the fog had found me, the end had come, my head was about to be shattered like an egg. I retched and threw up again, a trickle of hot bile stinging the back of my throat, and couldn’t move for five minutes.
When I made it to my house, there was no way in on the ground floor. I had to go around to the back gate, climb up the fire escape to my window and turn back into a human, naked and shivering, to lift the frame.
After I’d climbed inside I caught my reflection in the mirror. I had a fine spray of Angel’s blood spattered across my shoulders.
I suppose I should’ve showered. I couldn’t. This wasn’t like last time. I could feel what I would do if I could bring myself to do anything at all. I walked to the door of the bathroom and just looked inside, I don’t know how long for.
I felt like a shell of frozen stone, with a hot core of molten fear boiling deep inside. I pulled on the first clothes that came to hand and sat down on my bed.
My hair stirred in the breeze from the open window, and I gave a little squeak of a yell and almost fell off the bed, clutching at my head. It was just the wind. I turned and clumsily slammed the window down.
There were running footsteps on the stairs. My door burst open and my mother stood there. She had the bunched-up sausage dress clenched in one hand, like a hawk with a limp corpse in its talons. Her face was scarlet, which made the
tiny face-lift scars around her ears stand out white and proud, and her blue-green eye shadow look ghoulish and wrong.
She hurled the dress at me. The material fluttered through the air and fell limply at my feet, but one of the earrings flew out of the folds and struck true, stinging the side of my neck. I flinched.
“Where have you been? How did you get…” her eyes flashed to the window. She sucked in a lungful of air through her teeth. “You ungrateful sack of… of…” she stalked across the room to the window and threw it open. I didn’t move, didn’t even follow her with my eyes. “This used to squeak! Why doesn’t...” She grabbed my shoulders, her fingernails digging in hard, and twisted me around. “Answer me, did you put oil on this? Have you been sneaking out? How long has this been going on?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t meet her eyes. She drew her hand back and slapped me, hard.
“How dare you run out like that? I was humiliated. Where did you go, eh? You haven’t been drinking.” She sniffed. “You smell disgusting. What did you do?”
I didn’t answer, and she slapped me again, and then again, harder. I felt her ring catch on my cheek and a dull ache settled there, like an insect burrowing in. I felt tears running boiling hot down my face. Mum was saying more things, but I didn’t hear her anymore. I felt her coil her fingers in my hair and shake me, felt the pinprick-sharp pain on my scalp, but I tuned out her words. What could she possibly be saying to me that was worth my while listening to? I focused on a shiny button on her dress, through the watery haze in front of my eyes, letting the way it glinted fill my world.
She calmed, eventually. She always does. After all, if she were to beat me black and blue, there would be questions asked. She can’t have people thinking she’s not a good mother.
After she drew away, her hands shaking, I looked up at her. I could just about make out that there were tears on her face, too.
A hot ribbon of rage curled itself around my spine. She always does this. She always makes me think I’m the one that’s done something wrong, that if she’s mad it’s because I’ve driven her there. I’m glad the window was shut, because if it had been open I might have pushed her out. I would’ve happily gone to prison. It wouldn’t have affected my plans, and I didn’t need people to love me. I didn’t have an election to win.