“Of course.” Piper dropped to her bottom and placed her head in her hands. “It’s never in our favour, is it?” She peeked between her fingers at Ash. “All this magic stuff—it works against us.”
A sly smirk swept across his face. “Silver lining,” he said and nudged his head toward the woman on the floor. Piper dropped her hands from her face and looked over her shoulder at her. She squirmed on the floor, holding her gunshot wound, and muttered her son’s name over and over again.
Ash slapped his hands on his knees and stood. He pulled out a dart gun, strode over to the woman and pointed it at her. “Where is he?” barked Ash. “Where is the second rug?”
Piper frowned and looked away.
The scene made her stomach churn. In that moment, she knew she’d never be an interrogator for the Academy. A cry ripped through the room and Piper shut her eyes. She didn’t want to look over at them.
When she opened her eyes, she fixed her gaze on the burnt rug. Smoke still flittered up from the edges of the scorched hole, and snuck up her nostrils with the stench of singed polyester.
She crinkled her nose and reached out to touch the burn. If fire was her gift, she wondered, could she track it to the second rug? It was farfetched, she thought, but so was the world she’d been yanked into.
Piper shut her eyes and ran her fingers over the burn, dragging her hand in slow circle. She could feel it; the heat from the scorched fabric, but it didn’t scald her. It kissed against her skin in a sweet caress, as if it had found its home.
Her hand stilled. The tips of her fingers hovered over scorched threads beneath her bent knees.
Distorted images, like a video tape glitching on a television, flooded her mind. Seared into the back of her eyelids, jittering with static, played a garbled bunch of pictures.
A solid door, made of thick mahogany; a window, draped in curtains; stale and stained carpets leading through to a scruffy bedroom.
Piper reached out her hands. But her hands weren’t her own. She looked down, and on the floor of the bedroom was a rug, round and red with golden threads weaved through it. Her legs lurched forward, taking her to the window. She looked out, and down at the street—
Piper opened her eyes.
“Ash,” she said. “I saw it.” Piper scrambled to her feet. Ash looked over his shoulder at her, wiping his hands with a rag. The woman lay unconscious on the floor—a tranquiliser dart stuck out of her leg—breathing in steady motions.
Ash tossed the cloth onto the floor and approached her. “What did you see?”
“The other rug.” Ash frowned and scanned the room, as if he’d see it tucked in a corner. Piper pointed up at the door at the top of the staircase. “I think it’s up there.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t. But I touched the burn marks and I saw—I think I saw Chen. He checked a window, and it looked out onto the street. This street.”
Ash bent down and scooped up the machete.
Piper glanced at the old woman. “Did you hurt her?”
Ash followed her gaze. “That’s not my job. I just bring them in for questioning.”
“No need to bring her in anymore,” said Piper. “Chen is upstairs.”
Ash frowned, the doubt hiding behind his guarded eyes, but he nodded and trooped to the stairs. Piper followed him up to the door and watched as he turned the handle and nudged it open. Before he swung the door, Ash looked over his shoulder at her.
“Take one,” he whispered.
“Take what?”
Ash dipped his head, and looked at his waistband. “A dagger.”
Piper slipped a silver blade from the belt, and clasped it in her hand. “I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
Ash grinned. “It’s supposed to be me giving the orders.”
Piper whacked his arm. “Shut up and go.”
Ash shrugged before he dipped through the door.
Piper shadowed him into an open space apartment. Like the outside of the shop, the walls were blue, and the window frames a deep purple, bringing the image of blueberries to Piper’s mind.
Maybe it was the constant missions and drama that weekend, but her stomach forever yearned for sustenance.
Ash lifted his hand and made a few signals with his fingers. Piper watched as he pointed to the right, then the left, then back to the right. “What are you doing?” she hissed.
He huffed and leaned backwards. “Which way did you see him go?”
Piper’s jaw ticked as she dragged her gaze around the apartment. She hadn’t seen the space in her vision—if that’s what it was—as the rug was in a bedroom. Piper figured that the rug was her only connection to what Chen was doing.
Before she could point to a random door and hope for a lucky guess, a thud came from the painted-green door ahead. Ash set off. He raced across the lounge, sprung over a sofa, and kicked the door hard. It snapped open and slammed against its hinges.
Piper ran after him. It was the bedroom she’d seen. The rug was on the floor with the same damage as the one downstairs. And there, across the room, was Chen Wu, climbing out of a window.
He paused and gawked at them, one leg dangling over the window sill, the other still draped into the room.
Ash grinned and twirled the machete in his hand like a baton. There was a playfulness in his movements; a tiger toying with its prey. Ash tutted and shook his head, advancing on Chen.
“Nowhere to go, Tracer,” he said. “But I’d still like to see you jump.”
“It’s only one story,” said Piper. She clutched the blade in her hand and mirrored Ash’s movements.
Fire licked up her veins, fuelling an adrenaline rush. She inhaled through her flared nostrils and a bitter smile played on her lips. He was the one—the one who took her mother from her—and she had him in her sights.
“He could survive the fall,” she added.
Ash laughed, his hungry gaze on Chen. “You want to bet?”
“Sure,” she said. But just as she said that, Chen grunted and pushed himself from the window. He vanished, and plummeted down to the street.
Ash lunged at the window and ducked his head outside. A deep, derisive laugh rumbled up his chest before he climbed out and jumped.
Piper gasped and gripped onto the window sill. She’d expected to see Ash with a broken leg on the pavement beside a groaning Chen Wu. But Ash landed on his feet like a panther. Chen Wu, on the other hand, winced as he clutched his knee to his chest and rubbed his shin.
Ash looked up at the window. “Don’t jump! Come down the other way!”
Piper nodded. The idea of flinging herself out of a window wasn’t appealing. Ash could only do it because he’d channelled his powers into combat—and she had no such training or magic—so she turned around and ran through the apartment.
By the time she reached Ash, he was on the phone, updating Athena—Chen had been tranquilised and tied up with wire—and requesting a clean-up team.
Ash winked at Piper before he said into the phone, “We need a ride, too.” There was an angry mumble from the speaker. “We didn’t crash a car,” he groaned. “We caught a taxi to the location.” He looked around the quiet street, doused in nightfall. “Better be quick. Stray dullborns might walk by, and I’m all out of tranquilisers.”
Piper didn’t want to know what he would have to do if a human saw them and he didn’t have anything to knock them out with.
CHAPTER 10
Night had spread across the sky and guzzled up all the sunlight. Piper and Ash didn’t make it back to the Academy until midnight. They’d stayed with the clean-up team and given them a rundown of what had happened.
Even though it had been tedious, Piper had to admit that she’d felt included when Athena asked her direct questions about Chen Wu. It played on her mind as she and Ash left the dungeons—where Chen Wu and his mother were detained—and went to the mess hall.
“She likes you.” Ash nudged her on the arm. Piper looked up at him as
they crossed the foyer. “Athena,” he added. “Be careful—she might try to recruit you.”
Piper smirked and pushed through the door. It opened to a wide, cold room with metal tables and benches, and a food bar that stretched along the opposite wall.
“Would that be so bad?” she asked.
A table in the middle of the cafeteria was surrounded by a group of enforcers, eating a late dinner after a mission. The teams were overworked, Piper thought, and she wondered if it was always that way, or if it was due to the cult emerging.
Ash grabbed them each a tray from the clean stack and filled them with the scraps of food leftover: bruised apples, tubs of chocolate mousse, mince pies with hemlock garnish, and lumpy slop. Ash carried the trays to a table she chose by the wall, and sat opposite her. Piper dug into the chocolate mousse with a plastic spoon.
“Would you want to?” Ash stirred the grey slop with a fork. “Be an enforcer, I mean.”
Piper licked the lid of the mousse. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing tomorrow, let alone for the rest of my life.”
Ash scooped a lump of slop into his mouth. “You have time to figure it out. Halfbreeds are given a couple of years to train, then you can decide.”
“When do you finish your training?”
“When I turn eighteen,” he said. “It’s the same for every daywalker born into this world. We study until we’re seventeen, graduate, then train for another year in a sort of internship. Halfbreeds get a crash course.”
“Doesn’t seem very fair.” Piper dropped the licked-clean tub of mousse. “We’re at a disadvantage coming in, then we only get a couple of years to catch up on what you lot have been studying for your whole lives.”
“It’s either that, or you train until you’re in your thirties.” He shrugged and took the apple from her tray. She wasn’t going to eat it, but her eyes narrowed as he bit into the fruit. “Besides, halfbreed powers aren’t as strong as full-daywalkers’, so they don’t need over a decade to control it.”
“Why not?”
“It comes down to the amount of power in your blood. Yours is only half daywalker, so you were born with half the power.” Ash grinned, and pieces of apple stuck out from between his teeth. “It doesn’t make you any less important, though. I couldn’t have tracked the rugs through a connection in burnt fabric.”
Piper hummed. “Are you jealous?”
He shook his head and dropped the apple core to the tray. “If I wanted fire magic, I would’ve chosen it for myself.”
“Why did you choose combat?” she asked. “Of everything you could’ve done, you chose to fight. Are your parents enforcers?”
“They were.” Ash’s voice hardened, like his eyes, and his jaw clenched. “Not that it had anything to do with what I chose. I was always fast and a good fighter growing up. When you’re good at something to begin with, and you focus your magic into it, you can excel in ways that others can’t.”
Piper scoffed. “So it was about being the best?”
Ash ran his tongue over his lips, licking up the apple juices. He grunted and pushed his empty tray away from him. “I’ll walk you back to your room.” He rose from the chair. “You’ll need a good rest for tomorrow. Chen will meet with our interrogators, and we’ll hopefully get our next lead.”
Piper snatched the miniature mince pie from her tray and followed him out of the mess hall. He took her to the same room she’d showered in that day.
The modest ensuite wasn’t what she was used to—the one at her home in Notting Hill had a claw-footed bathtub, a rainfall shower, and a dressing table—but it was enough. Ash said goodbye and left. Piper suspected that she’d prodded a wound when she’d pried into his reasons for becoming an enforcer. Maybe she would’ve felt a blossoming flower of guilt within her if she hadn’t have been so tired.
Piper collapsed onto the double bed and fell into a tornado of memories. As her consciousness slipped away, the memories twisted into the gruelling sight of her mother’s body on the floor. The shrillness of her own cries echoed, not in her ears, but in her shattered heart, where they lived forever.
It lasted an eternity—the stillness of Rosemary’s face as she gazed up at the arched ceiling with lifeless eyes—and when the eternity ended, it replayed all over again like a carousal spinning round and round. It wasn’t until Nigel’s detached eyes shadowed over hers that the carousal stopped.
His head titled to the side as he caged her onto the bed and his fangs, barbed in copper wire, dripped blood onto her cheeks.
Piper blinked up at him, her limbs glued to the mattress, and tried to scream. Not even a whisper escaped her lips.
Piper turned her head to the side. She was home, in her bedroom. Her mother lay dead on the carpet, and April dangled from the light fixture above, drained of blood. Strips of her skin were gone, and when Piper looked back at Nigel, she saw the flesh stuck between Nigel’s fangs. But Nigel wasn’t there anymore, it was Ash. He grinned, not his crooked charming smile that had her stomach flipping, a horrid feral gesture that churned her insides. He lunged at her, his mouth open, teeth coming for her and—
Piper jolted awake.
The sheets, damp with sweat, were tangled around her legs and tied her to the bed. Her chest heaved as she looked around. She wasn’t home, she realised, but at the Academy.
“God,” she groaned, and fell back against the mattress. She lifted her hands to wipe the sweat from her face, but froze. Her hands were slicked in fire.
Piper flew off the bed and landed on the floor.
She grunted and kicked her legs out of the sheets before she scrambled into the attached bathroom. Flames danced over her fingers and coiled around her wrist like chains as she turned the tap on. The sink was struck with a cold stream of water and she dove her hands underneath the tap.
Her back wavered and her shoulders trembled as sobs wracked her body. Even once the last glimmer of fire was gone, Piper hunched over the sink and kept her hands beneath the icy string of water.
She washed away the horror of the dream—of her reality.
Change this to her whole arms, and she dives into the shower instead.
CHAPTER 11
“April!” It was Nigel, running down the pavement. “April, wait!”
April cursed herself for not checking the street before she got out of the taxi. She’d been avoiding Nigel, and rejecting his calls all of Sunday. But it was impossible to avoid him forever. They went to the same school, after all.
April gritted her teeth and watched the taxi whizz down the road. School kids flooded the pavement, hopping out of private cars and taxis, and some even emerged from buses, like Nigel had.
April never understood that—the pupils of Westminster Private School could afford all luxuries, yet some opted to travel by public transport. It was distasteful, and April wondered if it was a show of rebellion against their parents.
“Hey.” His weak voice whispered behind her.
April inhaled and turned around to face him.
A limited-edition designer satchel was slung over his shoulder, and he tugged at the strap as she eyed him. Nigel looked down at his shiny shoes. He stepped on a leaf—one of the first to fall at the end of summer—and listened to it crunch through the silence.
April flicked her hair to the side and crossed her arms over her chest. “Well?”
His voice was strained, like tightly strung violin wires. “I—I don’t think there’s anything I can say to make it right. Either way,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“That’s correct.” Her upturned nose crinkled as she sniffed. “However,” she added, her tone softened, “I know it wasn’t you. Not really.”
Nigel’s shoulders relaxed as he met her cold stare. “If you knew it wasn’t me, why have you been ignoring my calls and texts?”
“It was a monster,” she said. “But it’s your face it wore when it tried to eat me alive, Nigel. It’s your face I see whenever I shut my eyes.” April’s voice quivered and sh
e cleared her throat. The bus he’d come from chugged by them, and rolled down the road. It left black fog in its wake; April coughed and flicked her hand in front of her face. “Are you a pauper now, or do you enjoy carriages that reek of human waste?”
Nigel watched the bus as it turned onto a different street. “Is that really what you want to talk about, April?”
April rolled her eyes and dabbed at her cherry lipstick.
“I’d rather not talk—or even think—about that day, if you don’t mind.” She gestured to her legs, covered in thick black tights, and her arms, wrapped in the woollen sleeves of a cardigan. “I’m reminded of it every time I see myself in the mirror. I can’t wear most of my clothes anymore. The scars are everywhere. Permanent, apparently.” April added, “Well, as permanent as they can be in a world with cosmetic surgery and a trust account as loaded as mine.” Her stiff voice tried to be nonchalant.
“I want to forget about it,” he said. “Believe me, I want nothing more than to forget it happened at all, but I can’t. It’s like you said, the reminders are there. When I brush my teeth, or look at my hands…” Nigel scuffed his shoe against the concrete. “I bit you, April. I … I ate you.” April puckered her lips and averted her hazel eyes to a group of teenagers plodding by. Nigel lowered his voice and added, “I think we should go back there.”
“Where?” she asked, watching the students pour down the street. “To that madhouse?”
“They might be able to help us. Maybe help us forget. April,” he added, a glossy sheen to his eyes. “I doubt I can live with those memories.”
April tugged her cardigan closer to herself. “Do whatever you need to, Nigel. My strategy is to simply move on with life and pretend it didn’t happen. I would appreciate if you respected that.”
Nigel paled as she spun on her heels—flat shoes, he noticed, which was unlike April—and stomped down the street. He sighed and chased after her, slowing to an unhurried pace beside her. “So, uh,” he began. “How are you? You know, your life and whatnot. Is your mother back from Milan yet?”
“Paris,” she corrected. “At least, she was in Paris when I spoke to her last week. I don’t know anymore. Perhaps she’s in New York, now. She normally ends her trips there.”
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