Demon Shade (The Demons of Oxford Book 2)

by Kara Silver

  “When they asked me for a provisional identification of the…they said the news wasn’t public,” she whispered.

  The silence boomed, deafening.

  “I don’t see why you called me?” Kennedy still didn’t sit. “Do you need me to help with the tours? Like I did yesterday, filling in?”

  Dr Rudd stood, too impatient to stay seated. Kennedy recognised the type. “Emma was involved in, well, facilitating is perhaps the word, a very important study the department is going to be the leading UK research team in.”

  “The funerary discoveries in the necropolis just excavated in Egypt.”

  “What is this?” The vice-principal now stood. “How do you know so much?”

  Kennedy decided it was time to sit. “This is Oxford?” she tried. Oh, now she remembered the Head of School’s field was connected to burial or funerary rites. Emma had mentioned something about it, when they’d met the other day. Met and argued, she thought, her heart sinking.

  “I suggest you drop the flippancy!” snapped Dr Rudd.

  “Yeah, I’m all about the rude ’tude.” With everyone looming over her, Kennedy felt cornered, although for what, about what, she didn’t know. She did know it made her want to strike out, however. “Will this affect stuff you have lined up over it? Journal articles, book proposals, research grants and so on?”

  She couldn’t make her voice heard over the clamour this produced. God, where was Aeth? She cast surreptitious glances around to be met by exhibits and displays. She took a few steps back to feel the stone wall at her back and put her hands behind her to touch it.

  “Aeth?” she whispered, turning her head to speak into the stone and trying not to move her lips. “Something’s going on. I’m not sure what, but I don’t like it. And yeah, that could be our theme song but…”

  She slithered to a halt as the main door creaked open and footsteps marched in, making everyone turn. The small group of police officers descending the couple of steps to them looked so weird in the museum, a space full of weird thing. It almost made Kennedy want to laugh. No one else was. Silence blanketed them, until the vice-principal remembered her manners.

  Underneath the cross-currents of can we help yous and the could we justs, Chris entered, behind all the other officers. He signalled to her, a finger to his lips. She understood and slid over to him, as stealthily as she could, and followed him outside.

  “What.” She didn’t make it a question because she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer

  “The girl. Emma.”

  He couldn’t look at her, standing straight and tall and official, so Kennedy grabbed his now-uniformed sleeve. “Tell me.”

  “There’s evidence on the body that you were involved in her death.”

  16

  “What?” Kennedy’s knees knocked and she half-fell back against the wall. “But that’s…” Millions of adjectives rolled around her head, tumbling, jammed, unable to shoot down the slot. “Impossible,” she settled for. “Chris?”

  He said nothing, just looked at her. It was as though they’d never kissed. Never dated. As though he’d never met her. Kennedy pressed her back into the chill of the stone wall. Her hands were against it and she made her index fingers work, the right scratching an H and an E and the left and L and a P. She didn’t know what kind of help she expected, or from where.

  “You know how cops treat our sort.” Chandy’s voice sounded in Kennedy’s skull. But that wasn’t much help, was it? Something made her lips twitch, in a parody of a smile. “So, you haven’t had breakfast?”

  “What?” Perhaps it was her nonsensical question that made Chris’s voice and posture wary.

  “So there’s time.”

  “For…?”

  “You to believe five more impossible things before it. Let’s see… I’m getting a First on all my make-up work. Wyebury City’s gonna win the Championship League. Oh, I’ve got another one. This isn’t actually happening—it’s a reality show, and everyone knows it but me. I’m the dupe who—” She couldn’t go on. Especially as that last was something she’d wondered, since coming here.

  “Kennedy, stop it.”

  “Fine.” She pulled her hands free of the wall in case they sank through. Both fingernails were broken and one bore a spot of blood. She sucked it away. Aeth hadn’t helped earlier when she’d whispered his name into stone. Now, she’d scratched an entreaty, but seemed that had done squat, guardian-wise. She wondered idly if her blood had done anything. But then, she’d bled once into stone, here at Heylel… The memory of her cutting her finger on the sword the statue of the founder bore bloomed before her. So, twice. Maybe a third time would be the charm?

  “Look, this isn’t easy for me.” Chris cocked his head at a sound from within the building. “But is there anything you want to tell me?”

  “So much.” She bent her head so any shimmer in her eyes wasn’t visible and any tear would fall to the ground unseen. Maybe that might do something? You can’t get blood from a stone; tears falling on stony ground… She fought to keep things together. Anything I want to tell him… “And none of it I know how.” Because, how to tell ignorance and fear and loneliness and guilt and shame?

  She raised her head and tipped it back into its old, familiar cocky angle. “And it’s nothing related to what you’re here for. I understand what you mean. That you believe I had something to do with the murder.”

  “I don’t…want to. Just, Kennedy… I can’t help thinking back to what happened last month. You getting involved in a case, and such a terrible, shocking, brutal one.”

  “That’s neither here nor there.”

  That had Chris taking a step back, and Kennedy caught up with how callous it must sound. “I mean, I don’t have anything to do with this. With Emma.” She said the name deliberately and tilted her head to say, now what?

  “This doesn’t look good. They’re going to bring you in for questioning, unless you have an alibi for when the murder was committed.” He paused and when she said nothing, added, “Do you?”

  “Police Constable Collier!” Kennedy wagged a finger at him. “Really? You’re going with that? That’s like, level one questioning, something in the first five minutes of any cop show!” She wanted to laugh at his expression, but settled for batting her eyelashes and fanning herself. “Why, officer, how could little ol’ me know when the crime was committed?”

  “This is not a joke!”

  “No, I believe it’s what they call it a trap.”

  “For God’s sake, I’m not trying to trap you!” He ran his hands through his hair. “I’m trying to help you. Kennedy.” He caught at her hand. “Let me help.”

  She stiffened. “How?”

  “I was at the performance. Your play. Afterwards…” He swallowed. “I wanted to take you for a drink. I could have done. We could have had a late drink together.”

  But we didn’t. She couldn’t quite believe this. “And when they question the bar staff, or watch the CCTV tapes and ta-da! No Chris and no Kennedy?” She used both hands to make a magician’s flourishes.

  “There’s no staff or cameras at my house.”

  Oh. Wow. And there it was. Her ears rang as if she’d had a blow on the head, and the weight settled like a punch to the gut. “You know what cops are like…” But Chandy’s words weren’t quite right: Kennedy wasn’t being treated like ‘them’. This was making her an ‘us’. In lots of senses. And…some of them sounded okay. After Aeth’s anger and contempt, not to mention his vanishing act, and Tristano’s one step forward, one step back and sod all after, Chris’s support and caring came as balm.

  “If I’d asked you to come back to my place, what would you have said?” Chris’s words were a whisper, tickling the edges of conscience.

  Kennedy angled her head back, looking up. For inspiration from on high? But there was none, because that corner of the roof was empty. And that, if nothing else, helped her decide what she had to do. The right thing to do? As usual, she had no idea. No map,
no compass. But she did it anyway.

  “No. No, Chris. I’ll go in to the station with you for questioning, tests, whatever. You can’t risk your job,” she continued, when he tried to interrupt. “And you know what? I’m innocent anyway. So what’s the problem?”

  She found out the problem soon enough. “My ID? My college lanyard? It’s in my bag. Here.”

  “Lorraine?” The inspector sitting across the table from her in the small room jerked his chin at the female officer standing near the door.

  “May I?” She held out a hand for Kennedy’s backpack before Kennedy could unzip it.

  “Sure. I’d say I’ve got nothing to hide, but people who say that usually do, right?” She stopped. Whatever she said sounded like nervous gabbling. Which it was, a little. Or a lot. She’d never been marched across campus by uniformed police officers before. Never been driven across the town in a police car before. But she’d been to this station before. A few times, actually, last term, trying to winkle out info on the girls who’d gone missing. And, yep, she’d been in this room before! Chris had taken her into it very briefly, to tell her something away from listening ears.

  “This was just issued. It’s brand-new.”

  Kennedy snapped her attention to the inspector. She’d already forgotten his name. Come to that, she didn’t know the name of the sergeant she’d had a run-in with last month, the one who’d told her to leave Heylel and Oxford while she still could. Huh. Beginning to regret not listening… But then, she didn’t listen much. However, she hoped Aeth was. If not listening, then reading: on her way out of the college, she’d bent and, under the pretext of doing up her shoelace, had scratched POLICE into the ground with a pebble. Much good it was doing her.

  “And, Miss Smith, it’s not really a proper student ID, either, is it?”

  “What?” Kennedy peered at the plastic badge. “No, that’s right. I remember now. This is a temporary one, and I was glad to get it because I lost my actual one. Just after I came back here. After I’d gone at the end of term, I mean. I showed it when I came back, and then I couldn’t find it the next day. But they gave me this different one anyway, as I’m working in student liaison, over the holidays.”

  Did that sound as gibberish-like to others as it did to her?

  “Where did you lose it?”

  “What kind of a question is that? If I knew where I’d lost it, it wouldn’t be lost, would it?” she snapped.

  Lorraine leaned forward. “Would you like some more water, Kennedy?”

  “No. Oh, unless it’s magic water, that makes all this vanish in a curl of smoke?” She huffed out a breath and blew her hair from her face. “Sorry. That was bratty. Where? In Heylel somewhere. As I said, I showed in when I arrived… Oh, actually, I went out the next morning. It could have been in Parks. And if on college grounds, also in the museum or the bar? I haven’t started looking and enquiring. Unless you’ll be doing that?”

  “No. We won’t. There’s no need. It’s been found.”

  “Found?” She knew by his face she wasn’t going to like what was coming.

  “Yes. Is there a reason Miss Emma Newman-Smythe would have had it? Because she was found clutching it. As if she’d grabbed it. Maybe when you and she were fighting?”

  It dropped like a bomb, as he’d intended it to. This was not level one stuff, the sort she’d mocked Chris for using.

  “I don’t know…” came her pathetic attempt to buy time.

  “When you were having a row in the foyer of the Ashmolean the other day? Did you lose it then?” He shot it all out as if from a scattergun, confusing her

  “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Kennedy sucked in a breath when she caught it all. Like they’d caught it all.

  “You weren’t friends. Not at all, right?” The inspector sat back.

  “Well, we moved in different groups, you know? Oh, we were in one group together. A tutorial group.” Her attempt to lighten the situation…didn’t. It worsened things, if that was possible.

  “What was your argument about? Miss Newman-Smythe told—”

  “Emma!” Kennedy clenched and unclenched her fists. “Her name was Emma.”

  “Told you about this high-level research she’d be doing, isn’t that right? That it was unprecedented for a first year, a young woman of her age, this wonderful chance, to be working with top scholars—”

  “It wasn’t a chance. She made it happen. Facilitated it.”

  “Yes, via her contacts. Her family. Her relatives. Godfather, I believe.” Inspector Slick made a show of flicking through his notes.

  “Her family.” Kennedy gulped, imagining Emma’s parents, even her godfather. “I’m so sorry.”

  The atmosphere in the room changed. The inspector sat forward, and the female officer tensed.

  “For…?” prompted the inspector.

  “Them!” she exploded. “Look, what do you need from me? Shouldn’t you be asking me questions about my movements at the time in question?”

  “The time?” queried the inspector, and Kennedy actually laughed.

  “I get that you’re not telling me when, in the hopes that I tell you, but, really, honestly, I’m in the dark too. Just tell me what I can do, what I can provide, or whatever?”

  It turned out to be a cheek swab, humiliating but not painful, and having her fingernails scraped out. “I won’t make any quips about a manicure,” she assured the technician who was busy sealing and labelling everything. “I bet you want to punch every person who makes those cracks.”

  After, she was left to cool her heels for a while. Kennedy filled in the time by laying her head on the table and going to sleep. She had no watch on and there was no clock in the room, so she wasn’t sure how much time had gone by.

  “At least you’re not blasting high-decibel rock music at me nonstop,” she told the mirror and whoever was behind it. “But hey, was that twenty-four hours? Because that’s all you can hold me without charging me with a crime. If not, you have to release me.”

  “And what makes you think that?”

  Kennedy spun around at the voice, that of the sergeant she’d tangled with a month or so back. Just as bristly, just as grey-haired, just as world-weary.

  “Because it’s the law? I watch a lot of cop shows.” She didn’t acknowledge having met him, just in case.

  “In that case, Miss Clever, you should know we can apply to the court to hold you for up to ninety-six hours if you're suspected of a serious crime. And murder? Doesn’t get much more serious than that, not in a cop show nor in real life.”

  “Ninety-six?” Kennedy was doing the maths in her head.

  “Four days.” He threw her a smile so tight-lipped it was more of a grimace. “And that being the case, I suggest you make yourself comfortable, Miss Kennedy Smith.”

  17

  The room seemed smaller and the ceiling lower all of a sudden, everything growing tighter. Was the air thinning? Running out? Kennedy’s throat closed. “You can’t hold me for four days,” she spat.

  “Soon as the judge okays it we can.” The sergeant eyed her. “Bet you’re wishing you’d chosen a different university. A different town. While you had the chance, eh?”

  He was evoking the conversation they’d had before. Seemed he hadn’t warmed to her any. “Yeah. The prices in this city are horrendous.” Kennedy examined the ends of her hair. “Can you believe what they charge for a simple trim here? Really, it’s no wonder I’ve started doing it myself. You can’t tell, can you? Lie if you have to.”

  The man looked startled for a moment before a reluctant grin nudged at one side of his mouth.

  “Oh, and you do know I’m innocent?” Kennedy continued. “Just thought I’d throw that out there again. Yeah yeah. I know what you’re going to say: if you’d had a pound for every suspect who said that… Can I get my bag back? Or at least a book from it? I’ve got work to do.”

  “All I’m here to offer you is tea or coffee.”

  “Hm. Caffeine vs tannin… I’ll h
ave a herbal. Got any mint? Or lemon? And you know, it must be after lunch and I haven’t eaten all day. There must be some laws about feeding prisoners.”

  “Detainee,” the man corrected. “Not prisoner. And no, I don’t think I had any orders about that—must have slipped off the list. Tut-tut.” He smirked his way out of the room.

  If I really have to, I could probably get through the wall, Kennedy thought. But that would mean exposing her ability, revealing what she was. She’d have to go on the lam. Make her way to some country with no extradition treaty with the UK. The only one she could think of off the top of her head was Brazil. Beaches, samba, caipirinha…could be worse. Did they have demons there? She’d have to learn a whole new demon language. That made her snort with laughter.

  Every so often, faces peered in the glass panel of the door, and once in a while, officers came in to check. That I’m still here? That I’m still alive? She had no idea. It was disorientating and demeaning, as no doubt it was supposed to be. When an officer came in later, her heart leapt, because she assumed it meant release. But no. Not that she wasn’t grateful for the bathroom break. She tried but failed to glimpse someone’s watch or a clock on a wall, so still didn’t know how long she’d been there. And being led back to her room after the short reprieve hit hard. Time seemed to hang even more heavily now. She tried counting to sixty, marking off a minute, then starting again, but it was too depressing. And if she were found guilty? Time in prison would pass a whole low slower.

  When the door clanged open and hit the wall, the jolt it gave her made her feel sick.

  “Out.” The sergeant jerked a thumb.

  “Court?” Kennedy asked. For all she knew, detainees had to appear before a judge to request permission to hold them for longer. She frowned. “I bet I should be wearing sub-fusc. Formals, I mean. And I’ve got some now. Can we swing by college so I can change?”

  “You’re out.” The officer wiped all expression from his face as he spoke, moving back for her to exit. “As in, out of here. Your alibi showed up. Bet you’ll be down on your knees thanking him later.” He raised his voice for that last remark and his snigger was taken up by a few other officers in the corridor. It barely registered with Kennedy.