Skulk

by Rosie Best

  KSG netball team storms London Championships

  Kensington School for Girls Ofsted 2013

  Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea private schools

  There was nothing about any attack. Nothing from the BBC, nothing from the police… nothing at all.

  “I don’t understand,” I muttered. “Someone must have found them by now. It’s the internet, this is news – people died, they were… It was…” I thrust my shaking hands into my pockets and tried not to think about red handprints on the walls. I could still feel my fur sticking and clumping together. I couldn’t fall apart now; I had to get a grip. “How can there be nothing?”

  I looked up and saw Susanne coming across the road, holding a stack of papers and looking concerned.

  “Is there anything?” I asked. “Any mention at all?”

  “Not that I could find,” she said. She handed the papers to Mo. “Let’s go home, we can look again.”

  “No. It’s not going to be there.” I tangled my fingers in my hair. “Google me. Or – no, do my mum. If one of us is missed, it’s going to be her. Sarah Elizabeth Banks.”

  Mo typed, his thumbs moving swiftly across the screen, and then hit go. I shuffled my feet while the results came up. “Sarah Elizabeth Banks, MP Kensington and Chelsea…” he raised his eyebrows at me. “Your mum’s the Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise?”

  “Does it say anything about her being missing?” I pressed.

  “I can’t see anything.”

  I let out a long breath.

  “Come on,” said Susanne quietly. “We can talk this through at home. Come on.” She put a gentle arm around my shoulder and I let her steer me away down the street.

  I sank back into the cracked brown leather sofa with another steaming mug of tea at one elbow and Susanne’s creaky old laptop balanced on top of the pile of newspapers in front of me. I’d scanned them from cover to cover and found nothing, not a single word about my school or my parents. But I still refused to believe that nobody on the entire internet had noticed anything strange about a school suddenly closing. I Googled every combination of words I could think of, I scoured Facebook and Twitter, but everything seemed normal.

  “Why so quiet?” I muttered. “Why is it so quiet?”

  Mo shifted beside me, still scouring the internet on his phone. “Look at this.”

  I leaned over. “The school website? That doesn’t say anything, I looked already.”

  “No, but that’s just it. It doesn’t say anything. If the school was closed for the day, wouldn’t it say so?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  He shook his head.

  My shoulders slumped and I stared at him. “But it has to be closed. The hall is full of… it has to be.”

  Mo met my eyes. “It looks like someone’s kept this out of the papers, right?” I nodded weakly. “Well, if it’s Victoria doing this, she can do magic. Maybe she’s got the Rabble stone and she can change how people see things, or the Skulk stone and she can… I don’t know, change the debris into something harmless. We don’t know all the kinds of magic she can do. Wouldn’t it be simpler for her to make it look like nothing happened, rather than letting people find out about it and then keeping them quiet?”

  “I hate how right you are about that,” I muttered. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  He handed it over. I clutched one of Susanne’s sofa cushions hard in one hand as I dialled the school secretary’s number with the other.

  “Hello, Kensington School for Girls?”

  “Are…?” my voice came out strained and squeaky. I swallowed, coughed and tried again. “Hi, sorry. Is the school open today?”

  “Of course,” said the secretary. “It’s a normal school day.”

  “Can I…?” my hand crept up to my mouth. I racked my brain for a way to ask if anyone was missing today that she would answer to a stranger on the phone. Did you by any chance come in to work this morning and find a bunch of bodies in the hallway?

  “Hello?” the secretary called. “Are you all right? If you’re a student calling in sick you really should have had your parents call this morning.”

  Inspiration struck. It was horrible.

  “Actually, I’m looking for Jewel Al-Naham. I have an urgent message from her brother Mark. It’s… about his house keys.”

  I forced myself to shut up before I could accidentally invent a whole, rambling, suspicious backstory.

  “I’ll take your number and have her call you at lunchtime.”

  “Actually, it’s a bit more urgent than that – it’ll only take a second but I really need to talk to her now.”

  “All right,” the secretary sighed. “I’ll fetch her. Let me put you on hold.”

  The line went dead for a second and then a blast of tinny Mozart made me hold the phone away from my ear.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I muttered, cradling the phone in front of me. “This is – I should just hang up.”

  “Jewel’s a friend of yours?” Mo asked.

  I nodded.

  “Will you regret it if you don’t talk to her?”

  I tipped my head forward, letting my hair dangle down and shield me from his earnest, surprisingly insightful face. Then I nodded again.

  We sat in silence, with the phone blasting twiddly klavichord runs at us, until it cut off and a very faint voice said, “Hello?”

  I slapped the phone back to my ear.

  “Jewel?”

  “Meg, is that you? They said Mark needed me.”

  “No, it’s me. I just, um…” I dried up. My free hand tapped out a nervy rhythm on my knee.

  “Meg, are you all right? Have you got the bug too?” Jewel sighed. “Ameera’s off today as well, and Miss Walter. I swear if you two breathed this thing all over me and I have to spend the weekend all red and puffy and vomiting…” She clicked her tongue. “D’you want me to bring over the English homework? I’d take the out, if I were you, it’s only going to be about the Henrys again. Worst. Kings. Ever.”

  I opened my mouth, and no sound came out.

  It was like listening to someone speaking another language, one you used to know, from a country where you used to live a long time ago.

  “Meg?” Jewel called. “Have you died?”

  I sucked in a breath and blinked until the tears clinging onto my eyelashes trailed off and ran down my face.

  “No. I’m here.”

  “Want me to bring round the homework?”

  “No! Nah. You’re right, I’d rather not know. Don’t come round, I’ll only infect you,” I croaked. “Have you… heard from Ameera?”

  “Nope. I expect she’s conked out in front of Jeremy Kyle or something.”

  “Yeah.” I forced a tearful grin, for whose benefit I wasn’t sure.

  I felt something warm and soft on my free hand and looked down. Mo had taken my hand in both of his. And I was glad of it – I felt earthed, like I was a ball of messed up lightning that’d been crackling wildly around the room. I glanced at him, but he was looking away, staring at the newspapers on the coffee table.

  “You should probably get some Kyle time in too,” said Jewel, her normal snarky drawl turning a bit gentler. “You seem pretty out of it.”

  “Ugh. Yeah. I – I should go.”

  “OK.”

  “Jewel…” I sucked in a deep breath and steadied myself. “Listen… if Ameera and Miss Walter have both got this I bet it’s all over the school. If I were you I’d bunk off sick right now and go and stay with your dad for a bit.”

  “Dad’s in Dubai,” Jewel said sceptically.

  “I know – but what better excuse, right? Can’t come to school, you’ll get sick, and you don’t want to stay home and get under Mark’s feet.”

  “Ha!” Jewel chuckled. “You are an evil genius. How long did it take you to cook that one up? You amazing nerd. I’ll totally email you from the plane.”

  “Gotta go,” I said. “Bargain Hunt’s on.
”

  “Love it. See you later.”

  She hung up. I dropped the phone into my lap.

  “She’s really going to get away with that? Just leaving the country for a week because there’s a bug going round?” Mo said.

  “Yeah. Jewel’s just like that. Ameera is too, they can get away with… with anything…”

  I tried to hold it in, to pull myself together. Then I pulled my hand away from Mo’s and bawled into my sleeves.

  Susanne came back a few minutes later and found me snivelling into one of her cushions with Mo looking on helplessly, and convinced me to get some sleep. I didn’t need much convincing. She made up her own bed for me. I lay and stared at the ceiling for about ten seconds, imagining Jewel getting on a plane and flying a long, long way away from here, before I slid into the best sleep I’d had in days.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Willesden Junction at midnight was chilly and damp. Marcus and Aaron were both there waiting for us by the time we arrived, and I led them around the corner to the place where Addie had showed me the hole in the fence. I stared down the hill towards where I knew the Skulk clearing had to be, but I couldn’t see anything except the dark-on-dark shadows of scrubby plants.

  One by one, the Rabble disappeared into a thicket of weeds and bushes, rustled about for a moment, and came out as butterflies.

  Aaron went first: he fluttered past my head and landed, batting his intricately blotchy brown wings gently, on the fence. Marcus came out as a huge, swallow-tailed butterfly with vivid blue and white and black patterns and long fur all over his body. Then it was Mo’s turn. He fluttered out and settled in Susanne’s hair, waving his antennae at me, his big black bug eyes seeming kind of friendly, despite the inherent strangeness of looking into the eyes of an insect. His wings were bright yellow with black spots.

  I went next, folding my clothes as neatly as I could beside the three other piles, shivering on the cold dirt for a second, and then curling into the change. I tasted a slight tang of blood as my skin rippled and shifted, but my fur was so much warmer than bare skin, my nose much more useful than my eyes in the dim light by the fence.

  Mo landed on the bottom of the fence, at about eye-height to me. He smelled a little of Susanne’s cooking – I probably did, too. She’d cooked us up a feast of chicken and spiced sweet potatoes and insisted we ate the lot before we went running around all night doing God knew what. But Mo’s scent also had a startlingly familiar chemical tang that I recognised as the smell of aerosol paint, with an undertone of something more natural – green, growing things and cool shady places.

  His legs were thin as a hair and the light fluff on his body caught the glow from the streetlamps and lit up like a halo.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  “Shall we?” said Marcus. I wouldn’t have thought butterflies would be all that expressive, but I could read the sardonic edge in the way his wings dipped. I led the way through the fence and down the slope, the Rabble flitting around my head.

  The clearing was empty.

  I raked my claws in the dirt and whined softly.

  “Do you think they’ll come?” asked Mo.

  I didn’t answer. It wasn’t the stubbornness of the Skulk I was worried about right then.

  I trotted back and forth across the clearing, sniffing for any sign of Addie or the others, but the only scent was old and faint – it must have lingered from the last time we met.

  Maybe I was wrong to send Addie off on her own. Maybe her bravado had made me overestimate her. She was only a kid. But, no, that wasn’t fair – the fog didn’t give a damn how old you were, and Susanne and Don probably thought I was just a kid.

  But if Victoria had got to the Skulk first, if she was lying in wait for Addie, if she’d found James…

  If she’s found James she has the Cluster stone already and all this is for nothing.

  Suddenly, I scented something, coming closer… petrol, expensive perfume, soap. The Skulk was here. I raised my head, desperate to catch a sight or smell of Addie.

  “Meg!” someone barked. I spun around just in time to see her bounding across the clearing before she hit me like a grinning cannonball, licking my ear. I rolled to my feet and head-butted her hard in the chest.

  “You’re alive! Thank God,” I whined. “I thought I might’ve – she might have got to them already, and you’d...”

  “What, me? Never.” Addie nipped playfully at my shoulders. I flinched as her teeth brushed one of the rat-wounds. Addie drew back. “You OK? What happened? Why’d you bring the Rabble?”

  “Yes,” said Don, stalking out of the bushes with Randhir and Francesca at his heels. “What are they doing here?” He bore down on me, and I shook my head and met his eyes. He was actually a little bigger than I remembered. “How dare you bring another pack of shifters here without my permission?”

  “They’re here to help,” I said, deciding to bypass the issue of whether he was in fact the boss of me.

  “And you’re sure we need their help?” Fran asked.

  “If you don’t want us here, we’ll go,” said Aaron, one antenna twitching irritably.

  “All I’m saying is we should try not to get hysterical about this,” said Fran.

  Addie pawed the ground. “Fran doesn’t believe me,” she snarled. “Tell her, Meg. Tell her about the school, and the blood.”

  “It’s true. Something’s happened to cover it up, but we both saw it… someone’s willing to kill us all to get hold of the stone I found.”

  “You’ve got the Skulk stone?” Don barked.

  “No, I think I’ve got the Cluster stone,” I said, calmly. “That is…” I looked around, my heart sinking, as I realised for the first time that James wasn’t with them. I looked at Addie, and she swished her brush.

  “He said he was coming,” she whispered.

  “Well, I left the Cluster stone somewhere safe,” I hope, “and I went to look for them – and found them. They were dead. Have been for a while.”

  “Well, that’s unfortunate, but I still fail to see what their failure could possibly have to do with us,” Don growled.

  “How can you be so shortsighted?” Mo snapped.

  Rand snarled agreement. “That’s cold, even for you.”

  “Randhir didn’t mean that,” said Fran.

  “Is your leader always this stupid?” Aaron said to me in an irritating fake-whisper, not even really bothering to lower his voice.

  Don raked his claws through the dirt. “How dare you come here and–”

  “She’s got my parents!” I howled. “She’s used our stone to turn them into monsters, doesn’t anyone care? I don’t even know how many people have died, but I know there will be more if we don’t try to do something. The stone we’ve got is the Cluster’s, we have to find a way to keep it safe until we can get ours back.”

  There was a second’s pause, and my fur prickled as they all turned to stare at me.

  Last time I was here, Don and Rand were bickering about their sisters. Things are a bit different now.

  “Don,” I said, crouching back submissively, “You have the longest history with the Skulk – you said your father and grandfather were shifters, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Don, sitting up straight.

  “So you must have some knowledge of the stones,” I prompted. “We have the Cluster stone. Does that mean we can hide it, like we could with our own one?”

  “I don’t think that’s the question we should be asking,” said Don.

  Something about the way he said it made me almost want to laugh. I felt like I could see right inside his head. What you mean is, you don’t know and you don’t want to admit it.

  “We have the Cluster stone,” Don mused. He squared his shoulders and bared his teeth. “And if they’re too weak to hold on to it, isn’t that our gain? The way I see it, these stones have power.” He paced up and down the clearing, looming over the Rabble for a second th
en turning to stare down the rest of the Skulk. “We can use that power, just like this sorceress. Why shouldn’t we?”

  “We don’t even know what the Cluster stone does,” I said. “What would we use it for?”

  “Well, how about fighting this woman and getting our stone back?” Randhir said. “I hate to admit it, but he’s not wrong. Maybe we shouldn’t hide this thing away if it can help us.”

  “He’s got a point,” said Aaron.

  “But would it be worth the risk?” Susanne asked. “It sounds to me as if the only way to beat Victoria for good is to make sure she can’t get any more of the stones. You may well say you can use them against her, but isn’t it better not to bring them anywhere near her?”

  “Susanne and Marcus were both there when they last hid the Rabble stone,” I said quickly. “That’s why I brought the Rabble here. They know how to do it, they can show us and we can try to put the Cluster stone out of Victoria’s reach.”

  “All you need is your stone and all six shifters,” Susanne said.

  “But we don’t have either,” said Fran, her voice dripping with reasonableness. I sighed, raking my claws along the earth in front of me. Even more than Don, I was starting to dread her weighing in.

  Don planted his paws firmly on the ground. “And we’re not likely to, with that thieving scum on the loose.”

  “Well, if you don’t want your precious stone...”

  There was a scrabbling of claws on earth as we all turned to look at James. He padded down the tunnel through the bushes, his little cloth bag hung around his neck, drooping with the weight of something inside.

  He sniffed and his ears pricked up with amusement. “Guess who’s come to save the day?”

  “Thief!” Don barked. “Traitor! Get out of here before I rip your throat out.”

  “Oh hush,” James purred, strolling past Don – at a safe distance, out of pounce range – and heading for me. “I’m a thief but I’m no traitor. I’ve brought your sapphire back. And I can tell you where the Skulk stone is, too.”

  “What?”

  “I saw it in a jewellery shop I was robbing a couple of weeks ago. Recognised it at once, of course, and I was going to steal it back and post it through Mr Olaye’s door, with my deepest and most sarcastic compliments. Unfortunately, I was interrupted.”