Liv sighed. ‘Anyway, when Gethan and Sam have stopped their squabbling, we should get on with planning. I think I’ve found a foolproof way to get us in.’
‘You think? What happens if we get caught?’ I asked. I was beginning to feel decidedly nervous about this whole endeavour.
‘That’s why I’ll be with you,’ said Liv reassuringly. ‘I’m the most experienced Wiccan here.’
‘Could Gethan not come with me?’ I asked. ‘He can probably do more if things turn nasty.’
Liv looked annoyed that I wanted someone else with me, but I didn’t care. She hadn’t managed to be civil to me until she had discovered that I might have links to an out-of-bounds temple. I still didn’t know why she was so eager to get me to go to this place. I’d feel much better with Gethan beside me than I would with her. I trusted him. Her? Not so much.
‘No can do, I’m afraid.’ Gethan traced a pentagram in the air. ‘I’m afraid that most temples don’t look kindly on dark elves. They’ll probably have a protective pentagram engraved on the door to keep my kind out.’
‘Dark elves? You guys do know that you’re crazy right?’ said Sam.
‘Is there a spell in your book that can help us?’ Liv asked, ignoring him.
I took the book out of the box and leafed through the pages. Mei leaned over and held her phone above the book, the light of the screen illuminating the words.
‘I can’t see anything’, I said flicking furiously through the pages.
‘There’s a checkpoint ahead’, the driver shouted from the front of the van. ‘What do I do?’
‘Just show them your papers,’ Liv shouted back. ‘Tell them you’re bringing salt to grit the roads or something.’
Liv threw blankets over the rest of us.
‘You seriously think that this is going to work?’ Mei asked. ‘Blankets?’
‘It’s worth a try. He has a fake ID, so we should be ok.’
I tried hard not to remember the man who’d been unceremoniously bundled out of the train and taken away for having false paperwork. But the guys had managed to get into a Rationalist area with it, so maybe it would all be fine.
As we pulled up to the checkpoint my heart was beating hard in my chest. What would happen to us if we were found out? Mercifully, luck was with us and the soldiers waved us through after a brief look at the driver’s identification card. We continued to drive westwards.
‘Why do we have to find this out tonight?’ I asked. ‘I mean, wouldn’t another night have done?’
‘The Daughters of Morrigan had to abandon the temple when the area was closed down,’ Aradia said. ‘They’re viewed as a particularly dangerous Pagan group by Rationalists.’
‘They’re hard to track down, because most of them wouldn’t advertise the fact that they are who they are,’ said Liv. ‘I have a hunch that they’ll come back to the temple tonight because it’s their feast day. If you don’t take a chance tonight and ask them about your locket, you may have to wait another year.’
‘And why are you so interested in helping me?’ I asked bitterly. ‘You never wanted to even talk to me before!’
‘That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘I just warned you that getting involved with Pagan guys is kind of risky for Rationalists. But I see you already have a boyfriend, so my advice was unnecessary. My bad.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘We’ve come as far as I can take you,’ the driver shouted from the front of the van. ‘You need to get out now.
We all clambered out of the back of the van. The driver leaned out of the window and addressed Liv. ‘I’ll wait for you outside the underground station at Mulberry.’
‘Great, I’ll see you then,’ she said crisply. Then she addressed the rest of us, ‘Right. On we go.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The streets surrounding Darkfield weren’t deserted but they were eerily quiet. There were bars still open at this late hour, but there was no music or voices coming from them. There was a dark, melancholy feeling about the whole place. We walked past one street that led into the heart of the out-of-bounds area. It was guarded by armed soldiers, and I felt my blood run cold. Were we seriously going to do this? The logical part of my brain was telling me that this was a stupid thing to be doing, but my gut was urging me on.
We circled Darkfield but, unsurprisingly perhaps, every entrance was guarded by soldiers, all of them looking tough and hardcore.
‘We can’t get in!’ I said to Liv. ‘It’s impossible.
Liv sighed. ‘Did you really think that the plan was to just waltz right past the guards and into Darkfield? No. I have a better idea. Follow me.’
We followed her to the nearest underground station and walked down the steps. It was almost completely deserted and the next train wasn’t coming for another twenty minutes. Liv took some cloth out of her bag and threw it over a CCTV camera that on the corner of the platform.
‘You really have thought this through,’ Gethan said in admiration. She just smiled, before walking over to the edge of the platform and jumping down onto the track.
‘Ok guys, jump down,’ she called up.
‘Are you insane?’ Sam hissed. ‘You’re going to get yourself killed!’
For the first time that night, Sam and I were in complete agreement. Just what exactly was she doing?
‘The train that runs along here runs through the station in Darkfield, it just doesn’t stop there anymore. We have eighteen minutes before the next train comes,’ she said pointing at the clock. ‘We have plenty of time to get to the station and pull ourselves onto the platform before the train comes. So what are you guys waiting for? Come on!’
Gethan and Aradia jumped down after her, leaving Mei, Sam and I standing on the platform.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Sam said to me in a low urgent voice. ‘You don’t need to do this. Rupert told you that Pagans were dangerous, and now you have the proof. We can just get a train, go back to your house and pretend that none of this ever happened.’
What he was saying made sense. I allowed the words to wash over me, and I was convinced that he was right. We should just go. I turned around to tell Liv that I’d changed my mind, that this was all a little too much for me, but as I did so I saw Mei jump down onto the track.
‘You’re going to go with them?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Yeah, it’s an adventure,’ she replied. ‘We have seventeen minutes to get there – it’s right there on the screen. It took us less than five minutes to walk from the edge of Darkfield to here, we have plenty of time.’
‘Yeah,’ Aradia said. ‘We have plenty of time, but we need to get going now.’
I looked at the faces of my friends, and caught Gethan’s eye. He gave me a tight smile. He knew I was scared. I’d never done anything like this before, but I needed to find out about the locket, so I pretended a confidence I didn’t feel and jumped down onto the track. I looked back up at Sam.
‘You can stay here if you want,’ I said to Sam.
He gave an angry grunt and jumped down after me.
‘I’d only worry about what else they’d talk you into if I wasn’t around,’ he said grimly.
We walked into the tunnel which grew pitch black after a few metres.
‘Liv, if this was your great plan, why did you not think to bring a torch?’ Gethan said. We kept tripping over tracks as the tunnel began to bend to the left, and the gravel toward the sides of the tunnel was uneven underfoot.
‘Sorry, if I didn’t think of every single detail, ok?’ she grumbled. ‘You’d think you’d be commending me for my wonderful plan instead of focusing on every little thing that I got wrong.’
‘Maybe if we walked in a line with a hand against the tunnel wall we’d trip less,’ I suggested.
‘Ah, no,’ said Mei, ‘There could be rats, or beetles or anything on the walls. I do not want to put my hand on something like that.’
‘Just a question, but are we com
pletely sure that we’re walking in the right direction,’ Sam asked nervously. ‘I mean, how do we know this is the right way?’
‘If we see a bright light coming in our direction than we are definitely going the wrong way,’ Aradia said. There was a nervous burst of laughter from the group, but I couldn’t hear Sam’s laugh among them.
We were all joking like that on our way through the tunnel, probably because we were all so scared that laughter was a way to get the nervous energy out. Whatever the reason, it was a relief when we finally came to a part of the tunnel where the dark didn’t seem quite so dense. Liv created a small orb of white light between her hands, much to the amazement of Sam amd Mei. I don’t think they’d ever seen anything like it before. The orb illuminated the tunnel, confirming that we were in a station with the lights turned out. The name of the station was affixed to the tiled wall behind the platform: Darkfield.
There was a collective sigh of relief – we’d made it and we hadn’t been knocked over by a train. We walked over to a workman’s ladder that was attached to the wall and climbed up onto the platform.
‘I’m going to have to dispel the orb in case someone sees the light and discovers us,’ said Liv. ‘Take note of where the stairs are.’
We needn’t have worried about how we were going to see. As we walked up the steps to the entrance onto the road, light from the streetlamps trickled down. The fact that the streets were still illuminated seemed strange, but that wasn’t the most unsettling thing about Darkfield. Walking out onto the street we saw that the whole place was deserted. There were no sounds, no cars, no people walking by. The only sound to be heard was the hum of the street lighting. We all stood there looking around at the ghost town we had found ourselves in. Weeds poked through the pavement, and a tree lay splintered in the middle of the road. It must have fallen down in the middle of a storm and never been cleared away. Why would it have been? It wasn’t necessary. Nobody used this road after all.
‘Quick, follow me,’ Liv hissed. ‘We need to get out of here. We’re far too visible.’
We went with her over to the edge of the road, and stood in the shadows, as close to the buildings as we could. We were standing beside an old greengrocer’s which had just been abandoned as it was, and the rancid smell was coming out of the store.
‘Where do we go from here?’ I asked.
‘Into the heart of the area is my best guess,’ said Aradia. ‘In Roman towns the temples were always situated in the centre of things, in a square or on one of its main roads. Pagans here try to do the same thing.’
‘We must be close to it then,’ Gethan supplied. ‘I mean, they usually put the underground stations in fairly central places too, right? It’s just a question of working out which way to go.’
‘What direction did we come from?’ asked Aradia.
‘I think we walked from the east, so I think that we need to go up that street there,’ I said, pointing to a wide street with weeds growing out of cracks in the asphalt. ‘Well, that’s my best guess anyway.’
‘I think you’re right,’ Liv said, agreeing with me for the first time I could remember. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
We crept from the shadows as scared as mice and ran across the street to the safety of the shadows of the buildings. Slowly we began to walk down the road. Furniture from an outdoor cafe lay in a heap on the pavement, and we picked our way around the mess, eerily fascinated by the scene.
‘Wait,’ Gethan hissed. ‘I think I hear something.’
Sure enough, we could hear heavy footfalls and a bellowing laugh in the distance. We ran into an alleyway and hid behind a large dumpster. The conversation was getting nearer.
‘This has got to be the most boring job ever,’ I heard a female voice say.
‘Hey, it beats doing checkpoint duty, or breaking up fights in the neutral area,’ a male voice answered. ‘All you’ve got to do here is man the entrances and walk around every hour or so to make sure that nothing has changed inside. It’s an easy gig.’
‘But you don’t join the army just to have an easy gig, do you?’ the woman answered tetchily. ‘I’m hoping to get stationed in Northport soon. That’s where all the real trouble is, I could actually do some good there, not just keep a ghost town empty.’
‘This isn’t just a ghost town though,’ the soldier replied. ‘We’re keeping a lot of Pagan monuments out of Pagan hands. And that stops them performing their rituals or rites, or whatever they’re called.’
‘And what difference would that make if they did perform their rituals?’ the female asked. ‘Magic doesn’t exist, so what harm would it be to have Pagans here?’
‘They think that it works,’ the man answered gruffly. ‘You and I know that this area is no more powerful than any other, but, if they believe that the centre of their magic comes from Darkfield, then by stopping them accessing it we make them think that they’ve lost their power. A couple of very influential cults operated out of this area, and we effectively wiped them out by getting rid of their perceived place of power.’
‘They gave up that easily? If the area is so important to them, why did they give up so easily?’ the woman asked in a confused voice.
‘Oh, they didn’t. Lots of them tried to sneak in to visit their temples, but because of the bomb anyone who tried to sneak in was severely punished. Repeat offenders, like some of the Daughters of Morrigan, were imprisoned.’
A feeling of dread passed over me. I knew that things wouldn’t be great if I was caught in Darkfield, but I didn’t realise it would be that serious. Could I really end up in jail? Was this all worth it? And weren’t the Daughters of Morrigan the very people I was meant to be linked to.
A beam of torchlight illuminated the alley, and I could see the faces of the others in its reflected light. Their faces were, I imagined, mirror images of my own, frozen in fear.
The light disappeared and the voices of the soldiers got further and further away. After a few moments of silence I exhaled. I hadn’t realised until then that I’d been holding my breath.
‘Ok, let’s go,’ Liv ordered.
We made our way onto the road, and again took up our position in the darkest shadows beside the buildings, and continued to walk in the direction we had been heading earlier. Eventually, we came to a wide open plaza. We continued to hug the shadows. The corners of the buildings on one side were black and damaged. That must be where the bomb must have gone off. The plaza was eerily quiet, and dominated by a large fountain that was probably once been imposing but had been diminished by the water power being switched off. It was old, dirty and rusty. A bookshop called Dark Literature had no glass in its store front, except for small shards that clung to the frame. The blast from the bomb had obviously caused a great deal of damage to the place. Rationalists had to have planted the bomb though, didn’t they? What reason would Pagans have to blow up their own area?
‘There it is,’ Liv hissed in my direction. ‘Look!’
She pointed across the square at a small church-like structure sandwiched between two much larger buildings. Getting there would involve crossing the square, and that meant going out in the open.
‘We could walk around the edges of the square until we get to the front of the temple,’ Sam said, in his first helpful suggestion of the night.
‘Good idea,’ Liv approved. ‘Off we go.’
God, I hated her. I couldn’t deal with her being nice to me, which wasn’t a nice thing to admit. The locket was exciting for me. It had chosen me and it was the first time that I’d really felt special and important, and having Liv here made me feel like she was hijacking it. Appropriating it. And while Aradia and Gethan seemed to think that Liv was selfless enough to help from no other motivation than kindness, I wasn’t convinced. I remembered the look on her face when she warned me to leave Gethan alone at the gig. I’d done nothing to make her change her opinion of me. Perhaps the fact that I seemed to have some connection with the Pagan world had made her mellow somewhat. Plu
s, with my boyfriend here she probably thought that I wouldn’t be making any moves on Gethan. A dart of shame went through me at the memory of the night before. I’d never thought that I’d be the type of person to cheat on her boyfriend. It didn’t feel good.
When we came up to the temple, I saw that it was carved from dark stone. There were two heavy oak doors up a small flight of steps, and engraved into each door was a crest, showing a bird surrounded by a swirl of lines. It matched the image that was engraved on my locket exactly. Underneath the crests, near to the ground were engraved two pentagrams.
‘I was right,’ said Gethan. ‘Protective pentagrams. Looks like I’m staying outside.’
‘So what’s the plan now?’ Mei asked as we shivered in the cold night air. ‘Do we go inside, or wait out here?’
‘I’ll stay out here and keep watch, if you want,’ Gethan offered. ‘I mean, I’ll be out here anyway.’
‘Ok, well the rest of us should go inside then,’ Liv said. ‘It makes more sense. That way we’ll all be hidden, except Gethan. And I’m not really worried about you,’ she practically purred at Gethan. ‘I know you’ll be ok.’
‘Can we get on with this,’ I interrupted hotly. ‘Sam has a plane to catch in the morning, and I’d like to wrap this up as soon as possible.’
Liv smirked at me, she knew the real reason that I wanted to speed things up. ‘Alrighty then, let’s do it.’
She walked up the steps to the door and pushed it open. She walked in without hesitation. The rest of us followed her into the temple, which was musty, cold, dark....and deserted. There was nobody here after all that. Disappointment struck me hard. Despite my feelings about Liv, I had really believed that there might be someone here tonight who could tell me what was going on, even if it was just a fluke that I was the one who had found the box. But this was crushing. The wall at the far end of the table was dominated by a large window, clear and criss-crossed with lead. Moonlight streamed in through it providing a silver glow which illuminated everything. There were pews arranged around the edges of the room, carved from dark wood. In the centre of the room there was a large chalk circle on the ground. The four cardinal points of the circle were marked with coloured candles and offerings, just like the circle that Aradia had called up in the mountains. I was still looking around when I heard a large squealing sound. I looked around. Liv was bolting the heavy oak doors closed from behind.
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