We lost precious seconds as Kate fumbled with the gears, switching out of reverse. Something slammed on top of the limo. Claws tore through the roof like it was made of tissue paper. Kate floored it, taking us up to sixty, way past the local speed limit. Part of the roof ripped off the slavering jaws of the werewolf appeared through the hole. I sprang up and slammed a fist through them gap, punching the werewolf off the top of the limo and sending it crashing into someone’s prized set of garden gnomes.
And then Kate really hit the accelerator, and we were out of there.
Once we got to the edge of the town, Kate eased off. She was muttering to herself and trembling as she gripped the steering wheel, but she was keeping it together. Avebury was an hour and a half away if we kept within the speed limits and didn’t get pulled over by the police. The main thing in our favour on the last point was Section 19. By now their social media monitors would be swamped with red flags. Shutting the situation down and covering up the freakshow battle would be their top priority, which included keeping the police locked out. I half expected a phone call from Moorecroft, but it never came.
“First Aid kit, glove compartment,” Bill said.
Kate tossed a green box through the partition window without saying a word. Bill got to work bandaging up the brutal cuts across his stomach.
“I’ll be fine,” he said when he’d finished. Then he passed out.
The route to Avebury took us through some leafy residential roads and then a dual carriageway.
“Stay off the main roads,” Kate said, “Got to stay off the main roads as much as possible.”
I got the feeling she’d done something like this before. She kept to side roads and minor routes. It added another half an hour to the journey but by the time we’d passed Salisbury with no interference, I relaxed a little.
We got to Avebury shortly before midnight.
Victoria was waiting for us.
Chapter Forty Four: Midnight
“I thought we’d agreed not to involve your friends in all of this.”
“I didn’t have any choice.”
“That was foolish and dangerous.”
Victoria’s tone was irritable, as if she was talking to a wayward student she didn’t have time for right now. The two of us were sitting in a large wooden gazebo near to the mansion, a clear, star-filled sky above us. As soon as we’d arrived, I’d briefly explained the situation. Marian had been taken below for her own protection. Kate was being treated for shock and had been led away by a couple of Victoria’s men without protest. Bill was also being seen to. The mansion was on high alert, Victoria making sure that security protocols were in effect as I’d told her we might soon be under attack.
I guessed it wouldn’t take long for the MLF to catch up with us.
Now Victoria and I were sat alone and I’d brought her up to speed on everything. Who the cursed one was. What had happened at the end of the Second World War. The djinn realm being locked off, the effect that had had on magic. The demon army waiting on the other side.
Victoria had listened without comment. She’d been involved with the supernatural for her entire life, so nothing I said surprised her.
“It worked,” I said, still defending my choice of bringing Kate and Dee into all of this. Part of me was still reeling at the loss of Dee. I felt numb. My mind refused to believe he was gone. Tomorrow we’d be back in school as normal and all of this would turn out to have been one long nightmare. Dee would be playing his usual pranks, Kate and I would somehow be together, Mum would be cooking a rubbish vegan lasagne. Everything would be back to normal, with extra sunshine and bluebirds singing in the background.
“Yes,” Victoria conceded, “I suppose it did.”
I was wrapped in a blanket, but the air was still freezing. My breath left my mouth in little white puffs. I blew into my hands to warm them up. Victoria poured us some tea from an ornate silver tea-pot. She hadn’t commented on the damage done to the limo.
“And what do you think about all of this?” she asked after I’d finished telling her everything.
“What do you mean?”
Victoria smiled. Or smirked. I was too tired to tell the difference. Tired and numb and cold. Victoria was being weird. I’d become accustomed to her occasional oddness, but this felt different.
“Well,” she continued, “Scientifically you have to admit it’s fascinating. The possibility of other dimensions. The possibility that we could travel to them. I’ve spent years studying my brother’s powers, trying to analyse them, where they come from, how they function. Trying to measure the energies he manipulates to perform his magic. I’ve come as close as any human has to comprehending the very soul itself. To proving such a thing actually exists.”
I really wasn’t in the mood for a science lecture right now.
“I see,” I said, although I didn’t.
I shivered. Where was Victoria going with this?
“What do you believe in?” she asked, “In your heart?”
I frowned.
“I...well, I guess I believe in doing the right thing.”
“Is that so?”
Victoria sat back, smiled as if she was enjoying a private joke at my expense.
“Yes. I mean, that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Doing the right thing? Saving lives? Helping people?”
“Being a hero?” Victoria teased.
No, that wasn’t right. She wasn’t teasing. She was taunting me. The smile on her face, I’d been right. It wasn’t a smile. It was a smirk.
I sat up as a queasy sensation rolled into my stomach.
I’d just told Victoria about the djinn realm, but here she was discussing it as if she’d been studying it for years. The reason she hadn’t been surprised at anything I’d related to her was simple; she’d already known about it. Which led me to wonder how much else she’d already known about but had feigned ignorance of?
“Where’s Marian?”
“She’s perfectly safe, underground,” Victoria said. Her phone rang and she held up an apologetic finger. She listened to what was said on the other end.
“Good. As expected,” she replied, “Try for ten more minutes. Then move onto phase two. I want as many readings as possible.”
She put the phone down, “Where were we?”
“Magic,” I said cautiously, “And belief.”
Phase two?
“Good, I’m glad you’re paying attention. Now let me tell you what I believe in.”
“Saving people’s lives?”
“That’s never quite as simple as it sounds, though, is it?” Victoria replied, “As the three cursed ones discovered, to save lives, other lives sometimes have to be sacrificed. Like rats in medical experiments. Hundreds of millions of them are killed every year in the search for new cures.”
“But that’s different.”
“Is it? It doesn’t matter. Saving lives isn’t at the core of who I am. It’s more of a side effect, in all honesty. What I truly believe in is pushing past boundaries. Finding scientific, personal, and social frontiers to explore. In discovering our limits and then pushing beyond them until we find the next limit - and then going beyond that. That’s how we make progress. That’s how we evolve. Do you understand? Imagine the first person who ever looked up at the moon and said ‘one day, I’ll go there.’ Who do you think it was? How many centuries before that single thought was turned into an actual reality?”
The queasy feeling in my stomach was getting stronger by the second. What was ‘Phase two’? Why was Victoria smirking like someone who had won a long game? Her body language, her expressions, her tone of voice were all off. Gone was the concern and care I’d become accustomed to. In its place was something harder. Crueller.
Why did I feel like an animal which had walked into a hunter’s trap?
“Can you imagine how much modern science could do if we could truly understand and manipulate magical energy? If the barrier to the djinn realm was removed? How many lives
might be saved, including my brother’s? Would that be such a bad thing?”
Victoria’s decrepit brother. Vincent. The brother who was dying because of what had happened to magic in the meantime.
Every doubt, every reservation, every hesitation I’d ever had about Victoria came crashing into my suddenly too alert mind. I didn’t want to believe it, but the revelations and realisations were piling up hard and fast.
Major Wilson’s words came back to me like a freight train; Victoria Pryce is not to be trusted, under any circumstances.
What was the rest of it? What had he said?
She’s devious, manipulative and will do and say anything to get what she wants.
“I want to see Marian,” I stated, my tone flat.
“Very well,” Victoria replied, “But before that, you need to understand the world is complex. Sometimes doing the right thing is not as simple as it seems. And sometimes what we call ‘doing the right thing’ is merely a way to avoid overcoming our own limits.”
Victoria’s mask was slipping away second by second – because she was wilfully discarding it. She was no longer concerned with keeping up appearances. No longer concerned with the half-truths and outright lies she’d been spinning me for weeks.
I know a predator when I see one, Mum had said.
Victoria smiled at me and in that moment I knew a predator when I saw one, too.
“What have you done, Victoria?”
My voice was hoarse.
“As I already told you: I’ll do anything for my brother.”
The cold and numbness had been replaced by outright fear now. Sitting opposite Victoria, beneath the gazebo at midnight, I was overcome with a sudden sense of how alien she was to me. The dawning realisation that I’d been played by her right from the start was as sharp as the knife I’d taken to my stomach.
“Jason, I want you to stop looking so dumbstruck and think carefully about how you answer my next question. I like you, and I want you on my side. I want you by my side. Together, we could do great things. You’ve proved how resourceful you are, how focused, if a touch naive. Work with me and I’ll make sure you never want for anything.”
She reached out to brush her fingers across my hand.
“So, tell me. Will you stand beside me?”
The sickness in my stomach was so intense I wanted to throw up. I’d been played. The thought kept repeating like a tune you can’t get out of your head.
I’ve been played. I’ve been played. I’ve been played...
“I want to see Marian,” I repeated through gritted teeth.
Victoria sighed with disappointment. She sat back and waved her hand. Three of her soldiers appeared.
All three of them were armed with assault rifles.
Chapter Forty Five: A Little Murder
The five of us took the elevator in silence. There was no pretence on Victoria’s side anymore. No attempt to argue her case or to continue grooming me. She’d revealed herself and had nothing more to say.
Marian was strapped into a chair in a round, white chamber I hadn’t seen before. Five technicians were in the room with her, their faces covered with surgeons masks. Several of them had blood on their lab coats. A variety of cruel looking instruments were strewn around tables in the room. Bright lights shone down on the clinical chamber. Cameras and monitoring devices recorded every awful moment of the experiments on Marian. The chamber had been used for similar purposes before. I knew it in my bones. Scratch marks were cut into the white tiles. Dark patches stained the concrete floor.
An observation room with a three-inch thick glass window afforded a view onto the proceedings. I watched in horror as Marian’s head was forced into a bucket of water for five whole minutes. She came up gasping for air, her face bewildered. Terrified.
“What are you doing, Victoria?” I whispered.
“Testing her limits,” Victoria replied, “This is fascinating. She actually cannot be killed by conventional means.”
While we’d been above ground, Victoria’s technicians had spent the last hour exploring Marian’s curse of immortality.
“Stop this,” I shouted, “This is obscene!”
I tried to walk out of the observation room, to get Marian out of the hellhole. My path was blocked by one of the security guards, who trained his gun on me. I stepped back. I’d have to fight my way out of this somehow, but I didn’t like my odds.
“Don’t make a fuss, Jason,” Victoria said, “This will all be over soon. Unfortunately we don’t have enough time to really explore what she can survive.”
Victoria leaned over a console array, flipped a switch, spoke into a microphone.
“That’s enough. We’re moving to Phase Three now. Bring Vincent in.”
“Victoria stop whatever this is, right now.”
My voice was laced with as much menace as I could muster.
“Oh, please, Jason. Don’t try to threaten me.”
She hit another switch and a monitor flickered into life. Kate, tied to a chair in another room, somewhere in the mansion. A guard beside her.
“Try anything and your little redheaded friend will suffer. Severely.”
“Victoria, please. Stop this. This isn’t you.”
Victoria chuckled.
“You have no idea who I really am. Nevertheless, the choice is still yours. You can stand beside me, work with me. Or not. I’d prefer the former but believe me when I say I have contingency plans for the latter. Now please excuse me, I have some business to attend to. Don’t do anything foolish in the meantime.”
She left the observation room and stepped into the chamber where Marian was strapped to the chair. Vincent was wheeled into the room and the technicians who had been torturing Marian left. Beside Marian was a table with a tray on it. Something on the tray caught my eye. A familiar shape. I recognised it, but I couldn’t understand why it was there. It was like looking at someone you knew in one context, maybe in their work clothes, and then seeing them somewhere different. I focused on the object, convinced I’d made a mistake. Victoria picked it up. Ran a finger along its sharp, black edge. It was the same knife that had killed the cursed one in High Wycombe. The same knife that had put me in hospital.
“No!” I shouted.
I hit the switch that Victoria had used for the tannoy.
“Victoria, don’t!”
Victoria glanced at me through the observation window. Threw one of me one of her killer smiles.
With three heavily armed men beside me and Kate in an unknown room somewhere in the mansion, there was nothing I could do except watch as Victoria plunged the soul blade straight into Marian’s heart.
The vital signs on the medical equipment that Marian was hooked up to suddenly flatlined.
The last cursed one was dead – and it was all my fault for trusting the wrong person.
Chapter Forty Six: Uncommon People
I stood rooted to the spot as Victoria pulled the knife out of Marian’s chest. She wiped the blood off the blade with a cloth, placed it back on the tray and left the circular white room. Only Marian’s corpse and Vincent, in his wheelchair, remained.
Despite my shock, I tried to formulate a plan. I needed to find Kate and get us both out of here, as far away from this freakshow nightmare as possible. If what was coming next was what I expected, then I had a chance to break free in the ensuing chaos. Marian’s death would prompt a portal opening, maybe more.
Whether I could find Kate was another question.
I’d have to target Victoria, force her to tell me where my friend was.
And still the same phrase was on a loop in my mind: I’ve been played...
Victoria returned to the observation room, stood to one side and away from me. Any second now the fireworks were about to begin.
Sure enough, just as they had with Paul, flashes of white electricity crackled and twisted around Marian’s body. Victoria adjusted controls on the console, recording everything that was happening.
“Vincent?” she called through the tannoy.
Vincent lifted a frail hand, waving off any concerns his sister might have. Then he reached out and grasped one of the strands of energy. He held it in his palm, like an ancient, crippled god holding a wriggling bolt of lightning. The crackling strands leapt around his hand, their intensity rising as more were attracted to the one he gripped. Vincent’s arm absorbed the lightning fragments as quickly as they appeared. His whole body glowed with power. Shards of white light burst and danced all around him and inside him, blindingly brilliant.
And then it was over as suddenly as it had begun. No portal opened this time. Vincent had absorbed all the excess power.
The wrinkles from Vincent’s face had gone. His body was no longer weak and broken. He stood up, tall and strong, a man in his late thirties, rejuvenated. Filled with so much power you could see it flowing through him.
He kicked his wheelchair away with contempt.
“Is it done?” Victoria asked.
Vincent nodded, smiled. Stretched his back, cracked his fingers. Reached down to touch his toes. Stood back up again and grinned, ignoring Marian’s lifeless body beside him.
“I don’t know about you, but I am famished,” he said, “Is it too late for dinner?”
Victoria laughed with delight, clapping her hands together. Her brother had returned to her. She looked like a child whose favourite pet was lost and then found.
“Not at all,” she replied through the tannoy, “In fact I think that’s an excellent idea.”
She turned to me, her eyes shining and I glimpsed the full depth of her madness.
“Oh, Jason, stop looking so shocked. Let’s discuss all of this over a bite to eat, hm?”
*
Vincent tore into his steak like a man who had been living on bread and water for a decade, which wasn’t too far from the truth. Victoria rolled her eyes at her brother’s re-discovered, rapacious appetite. No longer forced into a strict diet, Vincent was wasting no time in sampling culinary delights he’d been denied for so long. He was glowing with the energy and power he’d absorbed as he munched through his plate of food. Victoria, on the other hand, was just glowing, delighted to have her brother restored.
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