Demon Shade (The Demons of Oxford Book 2)

by Kara Silver

“I know!” she yelped, to mind-Aeth. “Just as I know what geokinesis and electrokinesis are. Oh, and photokinesis. But don’t ask me how I know or how they work. Because no one wants to know how a sausage is made, right?” A large coil of heavy rope slammed through the air and into her before she could duck. “Hey!” Now she was good and mad. She held out a hand, then the other, her fingers bending back on themselves with the power of the gale, and focussed.

  She didn’t manage to evaporate the wind—she had the impression a much greater power than she possessed had set it loose—but she raised it. Literally. It raged and blustered, but higher, as if the fairground was the bottom layer in a seven-layer salad and sealed in by shrink wrap while the shredded lettuce and sliced onions stormed above.

  “Kennedy?”

  Her heart broke. It really did. Her uncle had turned and spoken, but il Dottore was carrying the body. Tristano’s body. His grandson’s body.

  “He’s really dead, then.” That tiny almost hidden spark of hope that it had been wrong, an illusion, a mistake, anything, flickered out. She swallowed. “What happened?”

  “We don’t know,” her aunt replied, her face lined and heavy.

  “But it wasn’t me!” The wild shriek came from Isabella. “I swear!”

  “Of course not.” Emilia tried to clutch her daughter, but Isa danced away. “This wasn’t caused by feeding.”

  Feed— Suddenly it all became clear. Isabella, tired and pale. Faddy about food. Then, manic and high, her face animated, beautiful—after Emma had been drained. “Why?” Kennedy grabbed at her cousin, forced her to stay still. “Why, Isabella?”

  “Because she’s a fucking demon,” came with cold fury from behind her, but Kennedy didn’t turn. “Like he was.” Chris moved then, to point at Tristan’s corpse. “Like they all are!”

  This…wasn’t exactly Chris, but what he or it was, Kennedy didn’t know. Or, she suddenly thought, who or what was using him. Because she didn’t know that either. All she could do was try to buy time, keep him as calm as possible while she figured things out.

  “Who are they, Chris?” she asked, looking at the mass of commedia players. “I know they’ve been doing this a long time.” And how. Five hundred years, maybe?

  “Clerks,” he spat.

  She knew that, knew i comessi, the name of their troupe, meant clerks.

  “And yes, they’ve been at it for a while. Checking up and reporting back.”

  “On…?”

  “The portals. How things are regulated.”

  Okay she wasn’t going to ask exactly what portals—she could guess—and how things were ‘regulated’. Oh, she could also guess what ‘things’.

  “So this isn’t the only place?” She knew what she meant. “And you go from one to another, over and over, making reports? Huh.” She shook her head. “Couldn’t they set up webcams, get a live feed? Let you retire?”

  Menace, black and brooding emanated from Chris, directed at the players.

  “Please.” Kennedy didn’t know who spoke. “Let us go.”

  “Of course,” she replied, stepping forward. She peeled off her coat and turned, pulling her sweater down to show her kinfolk her full demon mark, on all its entirety. “We’re kindred. But I’m something more.” She caught whispers of mage, as the nearest people saw her demon bone and its scarification denoting her status, her power, and passed the news back to the others. “Which means I can guarantee you safe passage. I’ll be sorry to see you go, of course.” But happy I don’t have to put an end to you. “When you’re ready?” She put her coat on. It was freezing.

  She expected the group to walk away, leave the island, get into their canal boats. Something. Anything. But they simply vanished, in twos and threes, whatever fairground equipment was left disappearing with them, each departure leaving the place emptier and bleaker. The ground, the day, grew silent and eerie. Soon it was just her aunt, uncle and cousin left, and she rushed to hug them, all three, even murderous Isabella. Because there, but the for the grace of…something, go I.

  “Come?” Giacobbe invited, holding her hand.

  She didn’t even bother shaking her head in reply, just stared while her family, as weird, unbelievable, and unfeasible as they were, popped out of her life again. Gone. And she felt lonelier than she had before she’d met them.

  “Good riddance,” snarled Chris. “Kennedy…” He stumbled a little and she almost went to help him, but stopped herself, hating herself for doing so when the old Chris, real Chris, shone in his face for a second. “I’ve helped you so much, and you don’t appreciate it? You were preparing to make a life with Tristano?”

  “So, that’s why you killed him.” The wind lowered a little as her concentration wavered. He’d said the murder weapon had been something from the museum—God knew there was enough heavy stuff there to choose from—when as far as she knew, he’d simply gone to discover the body, call it in.

  “We need to be together.” He spoke as if he were saying the sky was blue, ducks went quack.

  “We really don’t.”

  Which was when Chris attacked. He didn’t raise his hands or invoke anything, but a swirl, a vortex was suddenly there, above Kennedy’s head, circling her, getting closer. It was hard to fight, because it wanted to envelop her, to contain her, and it almost was. The second she fought it off, like shrugging out of a too-tight sweater, she fell backwards. A second later she screamed in agony and jerked hard enough to bruise her skin and shatter her bones when the first shaft of lightning or electricity powered into her. It hit her hard in the chest, stopping her heart for precious seconds.

  The next bolt hit her shoulder, spinning her around, slamming her down. “Electrokinesis?” she gasped, hoping Aeth heard. She could handle that. She could turn it back on Chris, but she still wasn’t sure Chris was being used, manipulated in some way. She couldn’t kill an innocent.

  “What can you do?” Chris mocked.

  “Funny thing? I don’t actually know,” she admitted. What she was doing at the moment was not fighting, but absorbing the electrical energy being thrown at her. She wondered if it had a name. It was like getting a huge, hard kick in the side each time, and she hoped it left her stronger in some way.

  “I suppose that’s what you’re here for.”

  “College?” Kennedy didn’t get it.

  “This city. All the places you love…”

  She didn’t really understand until, with a thump that jarred every bone, rattled every tooth, she was on top of the Radcliffe Camera, that huge domed rotunda of a library she’d yet to visit, only now lightning was poised above it, threatening to strike, to split the place in two.

  “Chris, no!” Kennedy raised both arms. Absorbing that bolt boiled the blood in her veins, had her heart speeding and her hair crackling and singeing. She clenched her teeth, because she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing her scream. She shook and shuddered, beating at any flames dancing on her body.

  “Let’s try somewhere else…”

  Kennedy got to her knees, all she could manage. She looked across the square when huge, heavy black clouds now hung around the steeple of the church, the beautiful University Church of St Mary the Virgin. She’d never been there, either, and it looked as though she might not get the opportunity now. Cracks and sparks split the cloud, miniature harbingers of what was to come. Tiny but deadly, the threat gathering. She had to stop it.

  “That church spire is said to be the best in the country,” Chris remarked.

  Rain splattered the outside of the Camera, meaning her attempt at descending was more of a fall. She slipped and slid down the onion dome, grabbing at anything she could to halt her drop, until she landed with a whump on the balcony that ran around the top of the drum. The fat, wet raindrops that whomped now smeared the columns she shinned down to the next floor, and stray, almost idle, bolts of lightning flicked at her when she descended. She had to use one hand to beat out any sparks smouldering to life on her clothes at the same tim
e she clutched and kicked for hand and footholds in the Portland stone bricks. But she made it to the ground.

  She lay for a second, her fingers bleeding and her shoulders strained. She needed to regroup, recharge, or at least suck in some breath, but she’d done it! She got to her feet, determined to sprint to the church and save that too.

  “Interesting…”

  No one had spoken that word, but she heard it. It sounded a little like Chris, or the thing that had taken over Chris, and when he was there, in front of her, both of them in the garden at the back of the church, she knew the word had come from him.

  “You can’t save them all, Kennedy Smith,” he said again in her head. “Without your powers, you can’t even save yourself. And isn’t that torment?”

  A huge blast of power, white-blue, fierce, precise struck. But it didn’t hit the church spire above. No, this crashed through her, scalding, burning, searing. It bowled her over, sending her spinning into a mad backwards roll, weak and nerveless. The ground opened up beneath her and, screaming, flailing, Kennedy fell through. It closed over her, sealing her in. Inside her tomb.

  29

  “I’m not going to die here!” Kennedy yelled, encased, unable to move. “Especially when I don’t even know where here is!”

  A grave. A tomb. And…not exactly hers. She knew that because bones lay under her, brittle, desiccated, a human skeleton, one whose limbs she broke off from its chest and pelvis as she struggled. The slab of stone above her was smooth, but she would bet there was writing on the upside, giving the details of the grave’s occupant.

  “Fine,” she said, calmer. “Stone and earth. I’ll just—” And even without trying, she knew it wouldn’t do anything. She felt drained, yeah, quite often, depleted and exhausted too. Only now she was emptied. Hollowed. Whatever powers or abilities she’d had, that she’d been developing in her work with Aeth—they were quite gone.

  “Gone like your kin, the players.” The not-quite-Chris voice was back. “You know, all the centuries they’ve been coming here with no problems, and now see what happened this year. Why do you think that was?”

  “You couldn’t have turned off the two-way mental radio?” Kennedy queried. “Or at least got some decent music on instead?”

  She got the palms of her hands to the slab and pushed. Nothing. Well, just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, seemed this tomb wasn’t either.

  “Shame about Isabella. Awful to lose control like that and kill. Now the entire troupe won’t get much of a welcome anywhere. They can’t be trusted. Why do you think Isabella stopped feeding?”

  Kennedy didn’t answer, too busy getting her knees and then her feet to the stone, trying to shove it like that. Still nothing.

  “I think she was trying to get above herself. Be one of the demons who doesn’t feed. Maybe she was trying to emulate…a mage.”

  “It wasn’t…” Kennedy choked herself off, not giving him, it, whatever, the satisfaction. But it wasn’t my fault.

  “Although, even if not needed for survival, the rush of feeding? Nothing like it, is there?”

  Dripping with sweat and her body in pain, she had to take a breather, and the words curled around her, like a plume of smoke, like the coils of a serpent, at first a whisper, barely felt, then taking hold. Because she couldn’t deny that the buzz, the rush she’d experienced from humans’ energies, their vital force, had been more than heady. The performances, the audiences’ reactions; that trendy bar, the happiness and companionship of the group—even the approval and admiration of the tour group she’d led, if she thought back. If she were honest. The warmth, the appreciation: she’d chased and ridden the high.

  And now she was brought low. What had happened? Had the church been destroyed? Was she still near the site? She couldn’t hear any screams and crashes. In fact, if she lay completely still, she could catch, what? Voices? The chink of crockery?

  “Ow!” That was the noise she made after bumping her head, attempting to sit up in excitement at realising where she was. The church had a café in its undercroft, replete with arches and long wooden tables…and a picnic area outside in the garden. In its graveyard. “Charming. I’m trapped here where people have scones and tea on top of? Hope they spread a blanket over me first.”

  “Here for eternity.”

  “You know, that sounds like a really crappy ad for perfume,” Kennedy remarked. “And why is it always cemeteries and graves and skeletons?” It had been last time she’d gone up against an enemy. Well, there were a lot of them, here. “Making me wish I’d gone to college somewhere modern. With a purpose-built campus. Mid-twentieth-century concrete and breeze blocks. No, one of those 1990s universities in London. Lots of steel and glass.”

  But no, she was here deep down in something from the thirteen-hundreds. At least it was still intact. The destruction, the storm—must have been an illusion. She kicked and thumped at the rock tomb. “Help!” she shouted as loudly as she could, until her ears rang and her throat felt ripped raw. Nothing. She switched to banging SOS on the stone with her fist, then kicking it with her foot. Still nothing. Her next idea was to whine out a high-pitched wail dogs would hear. If they allowed dogs into that café. Was it dog-friendly? What a ridiculous thing to be hinging her survival on. She almost wanted to laugh. Better that than crying.

  She wiped sweat from herself and her hand tangled in her necklace. It was stone, like her prison, and a connection to her guardian. She grasped it now and scratched AETH HELP BURIED ST MARY C.YARD.

  “And very sad about Tristano.”

  “You killed him and you’re calling it sad? You’re not right in the head.”

  “Are you? Can’t you see you’re the common element to all this? To Emma, to Isabella, to Tristano? It’s you. You kill everything you touch.”

  “Hey! I didn’t kill all those girls!” she cried, to regret being provoked a second later when images assailed her, all the faces of the dead girls her research had turned up. Their faces and their lifeless corpses. Each scholarship girl selected and used as living food stock for a year until she was drained, when her husk was discarded and the horrifying nightmare process started again.

  “You made it worse,” insisted the voice. “You’ve accelerated things. Poor Kennedy Smith, wants to save the world that she was abandoned into, and she makes it even worse.”

  “No! That’s not true!” Kennedy beat her fists and drummed her feet against the slab. But only laughter answered her, mocking, chilling peals. I’d better rest, she thought. Shut down for a bit. Relax. If I can. But it was hard, when images sprang out of the blackness and cries and screams rang around it.

  Just as she thought she’d go mad, she caught a tiny scratching noise, outside, not inside her mind. She raised a hand to just above her heart and pressed the palm to the cold stone encasing her. A warmth tingled. Aeth! She sensed him above her. “Rocky!”

  There was no answer.

  “Fine. Sorry. Aethelstan, no surname required.”

  Still nothing, but she was sure she could feel him. A letter appeared under her palm. I. It vanished and was followed by an M, which melted to give way to a P and more until she got the complete message, that the stone was impossible to penetrate, that for some reason Aeth, just like her, couldn’t break through.

  “Oh. Can…can you hear me?”

  Y. E. S formed, one by one.

  “Can you talk to me? Because if not, you’re going to get pretty tired of scratching letters to spell things out.” For eternity. This time, she didn’t know if that thought came from her or was the Chris-being talking to her telepathically. Except, her eternity wouldn’t be that long, would it? Buried alive… How long did people last? No food, no drink—ironic when she was in the garden of a café. One she’d wanted to check out. And no light, no space. No air. Panic set in, had her screaming and pounding on the stone trapping her there.

  “Kennedy. Calm down.”

  “Aeth!” He’d managed to, what, mind-meld with her? He sounded very s
trained. Whatever he’d had to do to overcome the barrier, the restraints had cost him. “Can you get me out?” she wheezed, still hiccupping after her sob-fest.

  His silence spoke volumes. D’uh. Stupid question. “Sorry. Feeling a bit…weak,” she settled on. “If you could manage to slip me down a scone and some cream? Even just a cup of tea? Two sugars.”

  The silence seemed thick and darker when the echoes of her attempt at humour died.

  “Do you have any idea how to get me out?” she self-corrected. “Couldn’t you just shout for help? I know not a lot of people can see you, but if you shout long enough, or go from person to person, someone will? And then one of those that can, well, one of them might believe you and try and, I don’t know, get a tractor or something and move this stone?”

  Each word she said made it seem less likely. Plus, this was Oxford and this was a fourteenth-century churchyard. It would take permission to excavate it. She pictured committees debating it, groups presenting arguments for and against, experts casting votes, people signing petitions… “Worth a try?”

  “I’m weak. Not manifesting fully.”

  “You’re weak?” She was the one feeling herself drain more moment by moment, whose oxygen was running out. Ah. And that would be why. Their link, bond, whatever…it was too strong. They’d been warned. Funny, she’d thought it was a plus, but now it was being used against her. Against them. A tear escaped and she pressed her palm harder into the stone, gripping her birthday present in her other hand. At least they’d be together… Wait. Together.

  “Aeth. You’re linked to the other three guardians. Can’t they help?”

  Silence.

  “Have you asked them?” She knew the answer to that. “Well bloody go and ask them! Right now.”

  She knew he’d gone when the darkness and quiet intensified. She thought she slipped into unconsciousness, because his voice, when it came, made her jump. At least she didn’t hit her head. She thought a long time had passed.

  “Blood.”

  “Okay. Actually, not. What?”