Skulk

by Rosie Best

  “How dare you?” she moaned again, backing away. “You are grounded for life. I’m going to have that window boarded up. I’m going to… I can’t look at you.” She staggered out of the room and slammed the door.

  Let her. Let her ground me for life. Let her lock me in the wardrobe until I was thirty. Let her pull my hair until it all fell out. I didn’t care.

  I never wanted to go outside ever again. Outside, there was fog that could make my head burst open and leave my decapitated naked body spraying blood across the road. There were mad pigeons that smelled of death, and shapeshifters who would bicker over how to run their club while the world rotted all around them. It wasn’t an adventure any more. It wasn’t freedom. It was just death.

  I curled up on my bed and shut my eyes and swore, on everything I had ever held dear, on my life and on art and chips and freedom, that I would never shift again.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I didn’t sleep. I lay on my bed in my clothes, staring into the darkness until exhaustion crept up and slipped underneath my skin like a sheet of ice, but I couldn’t shut my eyes. They were raw and stinging – every so often a wave of tears swelled up and burst through, and I’d let out a strangled sob or two, and then swallow the tears again.

  Every time I tried to go to sleep there was a swish, a thud or a tiny click, and my stomach twisted itself up, pushing my thundering heart into my throat. I clamped my eyes shut and tried not to think about heart failure. I was waiting for the fog to catch up to me, just waiting for the worst – but meanwhile, the routine noises of the night were going to kill me.

  There was a rushing sound outside the window. I gritted my teeth and threw my arm over my face. I wasn’t going to look. It was the wind in the tree, out in the courtyard. I knew that. I didn’t need to check.

  I was sweating, the wetness prickling in my hair and at the base of my spine. When I shut my eyes, all I could see was Angel’s blood and bone hanging in the air. I could still taste the vomit, the corrupted taste of horror and chicken fat lingering at the back of my throat. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I hadn’t even washed his blood off my shoulders.

  Something outside rattled and scraped.

  I wasn’t going to look. I wasn’t. There was a line, and this was me drawing it – I might be shivering and sweating and planning to run and hide, I might be throwing away the best thing I’d ever had, but I wasn’t going to sit and stare all night, waiting for my death to roll up to the window.

  Taptap. Taptaptap.

  I sat up like a puppet pulled on strings. Panic blinded me for a second and I grabbed the first thing that came to hand – my pillow – and held it in front of me.

  My room shifted into focus, full of the dim orange light from the streetlamps outside.

  Taptaptap.

  There was something out there. I bit back a scream and crawled backwards up the bed. There was a patch of twitchy blackness perched outside, almost pressed right up against the glass. I could feel it watching me. It tapped on the window again.

  It wasn’t the fog. It was a bird – enormous, as big as a buzzard, with sleek black feathers that gleamed with a weird blue-orange iridescence.

  A raven.

  It tapped again, with a thick black beak longer than my fingers. I clutched the pillow to my chest, uselessly, and wiped at my eyes.

  You’ll never see a raven, Addie had said. They never come out of their Tower. And yet, here one was. It tapped once more and turned a glimmering yellow eye against the window, staring in at me.

  I went over, my knees quivering underneath me, and opened the window a tiny crack.

  A flood of questions rose in my head.

  Who are you? What do you want? Are you from the Conspiracy? Do you live in the Tower of London? How does that even work, do you fly around the White Tower all day being stared at by tourists? Why are you here now?

  No. I ran a hand into my hair. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want anything except to be left alone.

  “Go away,” I said. “Shoo. I’m not interested.”

  It opened its beak and gave a long, deep croak. Then it tilted its head. “Skuuuuuulk,” it said. “Maaaaagraaaat.”

  I stumbled back, hugging the pillow, horror rising in my throat.

  But then I remembered Year Nine English. Mr Howard had insisted that ravens could mimic speech like parrots, so it was entirely possible that the one in the Edgar Allen Poe poem had been taught to say spooky things to wind up the narrator, possibly by an angry neighbour.

  At the time we all thought he was crazy. Right now, I could’ve hugged him.

  “What, ‘nevermore’ wasn’t creepy enough?” I snapped. “I’m serious. I don’t want to talk to you. Sod off!”

  Quoth the raven: “Naooo.”

  I shut the window and threw myself down on the bed with my head under my pillow. But it was no good. The raven started tapping again, a long tattoo of annoying chipping noises. I couldn’t leave it doing that. What if Mum heard? What if it broke the window?

  “Oh God,” I sighed. “I don’t want this. I don’t want anything to do with any of this.”

  The talking raven outside my window glared in at me with its piercing yellow eyes, and I glared back with my watery red ones.

  Then I got up again and opened the window.

  The raven hopped in and fluttered over to perch on the top of my computer, its massive wings sending scraps of homework fluttering across the floor.

  “I’ll...” I coughed, cleared my sore throat. “I’ll change so we can talk properly. Wait there. And don’t look!” I slipped into the bathroom, pulled off my clothes and twisted myself into fox-form. It was almost easy now. I hesitated in the bathroom for a second and pawed at the carpet, my flanks heaving. It felt so natural. My ears twitched and I raised my head to taste the air.

  My room smelled mostly of me – my own body scent with a hefty chemical overlay of cleaning products, pencil shavings, a little make-up and sticky, sweet hairspray – but the raven’s scent was in there too. He smelled of old, wet stone and wood.

  And you’re still so new, said a mutinous voice in the back of my mind. Imagine how much better at this you could be in time. Imagine the worlds that would be open to you if you weren’t such a coward.

  But I am, the rest of me retorted. I’m a chicken and a yellowbelly, and this is the last time I’m changing for anybody.

  I padded back into my room and stared up at the raven perched on my computer screen.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “I can’t talk long. If my mother hears something…”

  I hesitated, bleakly entertained by the notion of Mum finding a fox and a raven conversing in her daughter’s empty bedroom in the middle of the night.

  The raven tipped forward, his yellow eyes glinting in the streetlight. “My name is Yeoman Warder Blackwell.” I blinked at him, surprised – his voice was softer than I’d expected. There was none of the harsh raven’s caw in it. He shuffled his talons on the edge of the computer screen and dipped his head again in a sort of salute. “I need to know what happened to you tonight.”

  I needled the carpet uneasily.

  “Margaret, I know it doesn’t seem like this right now, but I promise if you can talk it through you will feel better.”

  “Meg,” I corrected him automatically.

  “Meg, I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  “How do you even know anything happened? Were you following me?” I whined.

  I don’t care, I reminded myself. But I knew it wasn’t true.

  A boy died. He died, and I still had his blood on my fur. Another shifter’s corpse, right in front of me, and I had no idea who they were or why they’d died. Again.

  “I was following the spider,” he said. He took off, fluttered over to the window and hopped out. “Shall we continue this outside?” he said, twisting his head at an inhuman angle to look up at the roof.

  The cold breeze coming through the window stirred my fur and my ears twitched. I realised how s
tuffy and stifling my room had become. It couldn’t hurt to just step out and feel the air on my face. We were high up, so I’d probably see the fog coming.

  Of course, I wouldn’t have much chance to escape, unless I sprouted wings like Blackwell’s and flew away.

  I shook myself, twisting head to tail like a dog coming out of the sea.

  “All right, fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  I always wanted the roof of my house to be a secret, romantic getaway spot where I could sit and look out over London and sketch and not think about my mother. The reality was a bit different. The fire-escape that ran past my window ended in steps so steep they were almost a ladder, and it hadn’t been a pleasant climb, especially when my vision was blurred with furious tears. It’d been freezing cold, uncomfortable and not the least bit romantic.

  It was actually slightly easier as a fox – the steps were almost on a reasonable scale, and my brush helped me keep my balance. Blackwell circled above while I was making the climb, a black hole of a shape against the grey-orange sky.

  It was darker up on the roof, and I kept my muzzle low to my paws as I padded carefully up the sloping tiles to the flat section that ran the length of the house. I smelled traffic and the deep green scent of leaves in the trees that lined our road, pigeon shit and the faint scent of something salty and sizzling. Was one of our neighbours cooking at this time of night?

  When I got to the flat part of the roof and looked up I could just make out the yellowy urban starscape of lights that never went out in the skyscrapers beyond Hyde Park. The wind chill made my eyes water, but even as I huddled in the lee of a chimney stack I felt a little better for having the open sky over my head.

  Blackwell circled once more around the roof and then landed in front of me and folded his wings close to his body, hunching a little to shelter himself from the wind. He blinked, and I realised he had a thin set of sideways eyelids, like a lizard. “Awrite. Meg. If you’re ready, I need to ask you: when did you first see the spider?”

  “No, I want some answers first,” I said, taking a deep breath of cool air as if it was a stiff shot. “I want to know who you are and why you care about what happened to Angel.”

  Blackwell let out a soft cawwww. “Was that his name?” He shifted his wings, flapped once and settled again. “I’ve been following him for a few days. I thought he knew something that could help me.”

  “Help you do what?” I asked.

  Blackwell hesitated. He was still and silent for nearly a full minute, so long that I started to swish my brush around my paws nervously, wondering if he’d heard me. “Help me do what?” he said eventually. “That’s actually a good question, one I don’t have a very good answer to yet.” He sighed. “Stopping the fog and saving the world. That’s what I wanted Angel to help me with.”

  “Oh, really.” I gave him my best, most withering foxy glare.

  “Well, close enough.” He flapped his wings and took off, fluttering up to perch on the chimney stack. He looked all around him, over the glimmering lights of London, and fixed his gaze in the direction of the City. “Have you wondered yet what this is all about? Why you have the power to turn into a fox? Where that power comes from?”

  “Well, I… I Googled it,” I said weakly.

  Blackwell chuckled. “Ach. And how did that go for you?”

  “I gave up pretty quickly,” I admitted. In my defence, I’d barely had time to breathe since last night, let alone ponder the mysteries of the universe. Still, I felt a bit foolish for never thinking to ask Addie or Don. “Does it… does it have to come from somewhere?”

  “Shall I tell you the story as it was told to me when I was initiated?”

  Initiated? I thought of Don’s little speech about the rules. Was that all the initiation I was going to get? I felt a little jealous of Blackwell. It sounded like the Conspiracy did things properly.

  “I was told that long ago – long ago, before the Romans, before there was anything here but scattered villages and the river – a magical weapon was forged.”

  “OK, wait.” I couldn’t let him just go on like this. “Magic? You’re talking about a magic spell. Like, wizards and stuff?”

  Blackwell gave a low croak. “You’re a fox, talking to a raven about killer fog. What, exactly, makes wizards so hard to believe?” He hopped from one foot to the other. “They roamed the countryside, fighting constantly, tearing great wounds in the earth and building their towers taller and taller. The taller the towers, the more powerful and more competitive they became.”

  I followed his beady black gaze over to the skyscrapers in the City, and my ears twitched back involuntarily.

  “All-out magical war raged for years,” he went on, “Until one man decided to put an end to it. He created a weapon that brought together five points of power… five elements of the universe, if you like.”

  “If I like,” I muttered. This was all sounding a bit Lord of the Rings to me, but he had a point: how could I know what was a fairytale and what was real, anymore?

  “I know,” he said, presumably reading my expression. “It gets a wee bit worse before it gets better – will you bear with me?”

  “I haven’t got a lot of choice at this point,” I pointed out, settling down with my brush curled around me and my head on my paws.

  “Aye, in for a penny,” Blackwell acknowledged, giving a short nod. “Well, this wizard and his weapon were quite prepared to wipe out every living thing in a hundred miles. But the wizard wasn’t alone; he had an apprentice. And she had a change of heart. She took control of the weapon and turned it on the wizard. She threw down the towers and sent their warring masters away; then she tore the weapon apart. Her own power wasn’t enough to destroy it, so she hid the pieces. She set the five weards, one to guard each of the elements and keep them separate.”

  I’d decided not to interrupt again, but I couldn’t let this one go. “Weirds?”

  “We-ards, with an A – from ‘ward’. That’s us. She took five animals and borrowed their shapes, lending the weards the ability to change and blend in with both humans and animals. And the wizard’s assistant set herself as the first leodweard – the ward of the land. She was a metashifter. She could change into any one of the five shapes she’d picked, to help and advise the weards and make sure the stones were safe. Once the weards had hidden their stone, she was the only one who could see or move it.”

  A shiver ran down my back, from my ears to my tail.

  He could talk all night about weirds and wizards and towers… the magic word was stone, and he’d just said it.

  Little details flashed into my mind like fireworks going off. When I first saw the fog it was near the jewellery shops, with James, who’d had a bag that rattled suspiciously. There were jewellery shops on the street where I’d met Angel. The fog had actually come out of one, before it killed him.

  “What were the five elements? I thought there were only four – earth, water, wind, fire,” I said, examining the fur on my paws closely. If I could have crossed my fingers at this point, I would’ve been crossing them that the Skulk didn’t have something rubbish and made up like “heart”.

  “Those aren’t the elements we’re dealing with. The way the Conspiracy tell it, we guard the element of Mind in the wizard’s own tower – rebuilt a hundred times over the centuries, but essentially in the same place. The Skulk guarded the Hands. The Rabble had the Sight, the Cluster had the Shadow, and the Horde had the Spirit.”

  “How come nobody mentioned any of this to me? I was with the Skulk this evening and nobody ever said we had any kind of sacred duty.”

  Blackwell shook his head. “I wish I knew. If what the Conspiracy has told me is right, we should be helping each other remember and keep our elements safe, and instead…” He made a disappointed clicking sound with his beak. “As far as I can tell, ours is the only one that’s locked away, safe in the White Tower. They’ve been lost and forgotten, and now I believe there’s someone using at least one
of them. Exactly what for, I don’t know yet.”

  He flapped back down to stand in front of me, his feathers puffing out around his chest.

  “The fog you saw kill that poor shifter is a creation, a spell, most likely made with the power of at least one of the stones.”

  All my fur stood on end and I clawed at the rough surface of the roof, tears springing to my eyes as I remembered the fleshy thud of Angel’s body hitting the street in front of me. “But – but someone made the fog? On purpose? It ate his head.”

  “Not exactly. It consumed his mind, swallowed all his thoughts and memories. It – and its master – now knows everything he knew.”

  A shuddering chill ran down my back. My tail swished to and fro almost of its own accord – I felt like there was a buzzing insect I needed to brush away.

  Angel was on my locker when I put the sapphire away. If the fog was looking for it…

  I swallowed hard. “I first saw Angel at my school,” I said.

  Blackwell’s head twitched to the side. “When was this?”

  “On Friday. And then I saw him here, I think, earlier this evening. But I wasn’t changed so he couldn’t talk to me. And then when I was coming back from the Skulk I was walking down the road and he ran into my path. He stopped me. I was…” I felt a twist of guilt and turned my head so I wasn’t looking at Blackwell. “I was angry with him. I mean, he was stalking me, I thought. But he said he’d been waiting. He wanted to talk to me about something that I’d found.”

  I risked a look at Blackwell. His head twitched again as he realised I’d trailed to a halt.

  “Go on. It’s all right,” he said.

  “I found a giant gemstone,” I said, and Blackwell nearly fell over. He righted himself with a massive flap of his wings and gaped at me.

  “You’ve got one of the elements?”

  “Well, I – well, yes. Apparently. The Skulk shifter had it on him when he died.” Blackwell looked like he was going to speak, but then shut his beak with an audible click. He gestured with one wing for me to go on. “Angel told me he knew I had the stone and I’d left it in my locker. And then I saw the fog, and… and he was sucked in.”