Burn Mark (5 page)

‘No, er, school this afternoon?’

‘Teacher Training.’

‘Ah . . . again?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Hmm.’

Her father rubbed his thinning brown hair in an anxious sort of way. He knew as well as Glory did that nobody could make her go to school if she didn’t feel like it. Sharp as a knife, that one, Auntie Angel said. She don’t need any certification to prove it.

As a matter of fact, Glory was bunking off less than she used to. Her second cousins, Candice and Skye Morgan, liked to put on airs about their fancy schooling and educated ways, and though lessons might bore her stiff, she didn’t plan on being lumped together with the bimbo dropouts who hung around making eyes at Nate and Jacko and the rest.

Either way, her dad was in no position to lecture. He kept out of coven business, except for doing the accounts, and spent most of his time in his room, playing computer games in which kick-boxing inquisitors armed with fabulous gadgets had to thwart an array of witch-criminals and their evil schemes. He collected the illegal, black-market versions too, in which the witches were the good guys, but the quality of the graphics and game-play was always poor.

‘How’s it going with
Deathstar Enigma
?’ Glory asked. ‘Cracked level five yet?’

Patrick’s hands cradled the mug, thin wrists poking out of his fraying jumper. He smiled his vague, sweet smile. ‘Not yet. Tricky. But onwards and upwards, y’know.’

‘A shadow of his former self,’ that’s what people said about her dad. Never been the same since his wife walked out one Sunday morning twelve years ago. It had been a long time since Glory had thought of him as her protector, the night-time comforter who, in the end, hadn’t been able to keep the bad dreams away.

She ran a dishcloth round the soup-speckled microwave.
Nobody
in this place cleaned up after themselves. ‘Speaking of moving up in the world . . . You hear about Uncle Charlie?’

‘He’s not your uncle.’

‘OK, cousin.’

‘First cousin once removed.’

‘Whatever.’ Glory was not interested in the finer points of genealogy. ‘Well, he’s only in the paper schmoozing the PM’s wife. One of these days he’ll be taking over Downing Street himself, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Patrick’s brow creased doubtfully. ‘I hope I’m not around to see it.’

‘C’mon, Dad. I’m no fan of the Morgans’ methods – you know that. But it’s still
funny
, right? A coven boss hobnobbing with heads of state! Proves how far the likes of us can go, if we put our minds to it.’

‘“The likes of us” . . . and what does that mean? Mm?’ Her dad shuffled slowly away towards his room. ‘Careful what you wish for, Glory.’

Chapter 5

Lucas slept badly that night. Twisting around in a knot of sheets, he was oppressed by a sense of foreboding, of something he hadn’t prepared for or had left undone. Eventually, he drifted off, only to start awake a few hours later. His head was bubbling with heat, swamped on all sides by a darkness that seemed full of strange flittings and whispering. And although he should have been afraid – he had a fever, he was ill, he was hallucinating – Lucas was instead filled with a strange exhilaration. In a waking dream, he rose from the bed and reached into the vast seething dark with his arms outstretched. Whatever he was waiting for, let it come. Let it consume him –

But the next thing he knew, there was sunshine on his pillow, and music on the radio. In the light of an ordinary Saturday morning, the night’s strangeness soon seeped away.

His stepsister, Philomena, and her mother were having breakfast in the kitchen, their every mouthful droolingly scrutinised by the family Labrador, Kip. In the four years since Marisa had married his father, Lucas had never seen her appear without perfectly positioned hair and a perfectly polished face, even while in her dressing gown. Philly, meanwhile, was in her jogging kit, and picking moodily at a rice cake. ‘You look r-o-u-g-h,’ she informed him.

‘And good morning to you too.’

‘Dear me, Lucas – you
are
looking rather peaky. Are you feeling all right?’

‘Fine, thanks.’ He shook his head to clear the faint buzzing in his ears, and went to pat Kip. The dog bared his teeth and backed away, and Lucas looked at him in surprise. ‘Er . . . I just didn’t sleep that well.’

‘Well, make sure you don’t overdo it at this party at the Charltons’ tonight.’ Marisa took a delicate sip of green tea. ‘Though I suppose Philly can keep an eye on you.’

Both Lucas and Philomena stiffened. ‘God, Mummy. I’m not a babysitter. It’s bad enough that Sophie’s parents are forcing her to let Nick’s little friends tag along.’

‘Oh, but, darling, I think holding a joint birthday party is a lovely idea. So inclusive. We should think about it for when you and Luc—’

‘Is Dad around?’ Lucas interjected hastily.

‘He got called into the office half an hour ago. Another crisis with the Goodwin trial, I imagine.’

Ashton was prosecuting the case of Bradley Goodwin, a witch accused of freelancing for the Wednesday Coven. The Inquisition was pressing for the death penalty on the grounds that one of his banes had resulted in a police officer’s death. They hoped to use the threat of balefire to frighten Goodwin into cutting a deal. If he could be persuaded to inform on his former associates, the coven would be badly hit.

So far, however, the trial had been beset by problems. Evidence had been tampered with, one of the witnesses had disappeared, and another had retracted their statement. Witch trials didn’t use ordinary juries, but a tribunal of judges drawn from a pool of retired inquisitors and serving military officers, civil servants and magistrates. All of the tribunal members were under inquisitorial guard.

Marisa sighed. ‘Why these emergencies always seem to happen on the weekends, I really don’t know . . . Anyway, I suppose it’s time I got dressed.’

As soon as her mother was gone, Philomena looked at Lucas through narrowed eyes. ‘Seriously, you’d better not tag after me tonight. Gid will probably be there, and the last thing he’ll want is to be cornered by some fanboy banging on about the bloody Inquisition.’

Lucas stretched and yawned. ‘Don’t you think I’ll have better things to do than spend my time cramping your style?’

‘It hasn’t stopped you before.’

Philomena shared her mother’s expertly applied hair colour and expensive tastes, but her sturdy frame and heavy features were her father’s, the banker Rupert Carrington. She was well-groomed and fashionable enough to pass for attractive, well-connected and intimidating enough to pass for popular, but neither came naturally. It was different for Lucas. The fact that he was younger, and a boy, and therefore shouldn’t be any kind of threat, was a thorn in her side she refused to acknowledge.

At some level, Lucas was aware of this. It made him slightly more tolerant of Philomena than he would otherwise have been.

However, his tolerance had its limits.

Eyeing Philomena’s rice cake, Lucas moved towards the fridge. ‘Now, what I
really
fancy,’ he said gloatingly, ‘is a nice, fat, juicy bacon sandwich. Mmm . . .’

The real cause of Ashton Stearne’s summons to work became apparent quarter of an hour later, when Marisa called out to Philomena and Lucas to turn on the news. A witchworked storm (or ‘whistle-wind’) had been raised in the office of Helena Howell, MP – smashing windows, toppling furniture, scattering documents. Although the building should have been empty in the early hours of Saturday morning, a cleaner coming off the night shift had been struck on the head by a light fitting and killed. The motive for the attack was clear enough: Howell was introducing a controversial Private Member’s bill to limit the state benefits available to witchkind.

The three of them watched the latest report on the television in the drawing-room.

Jack Rawdon, director of WICA, was being interviewed in the studio. Would his agents be assisting the Inquisition in bringing the perpetrator to justice? the journalist asked. Rawdon’s face was solemn as he addressed the camera.

‘Crime is crime, whoever commits it. And justice is justice, whoever deals it – whether that’s a witch or an inquisitor. Both WICA and the Inquisition bring unique skills to the fight against witchcrime. The Inquisition’s commitment and expertise are justly celebrated. It is my hope that WICA’s contribution will also come to be recognised. The more work we’re enabled to do, the safer our country will be.’

Opportunistic git
, thought Lucas. He didn’t even answer the question.

The interview was followed with a recap of the story so far, and reaction from the father-in-law of the dead cleaner, who left behind two small children. ‘That poor family . . .’ Marisa murmured, pressing her hand to her heart. With her other hand, she reached for Lucas’s.

Philomena’s eyes darted to the pen and ink portrait of Camilla Stearne above the mantelpiece. It had been done the year before Lucas’s mother was killed by the witch-terrorist group Endor.

As soon as he could, Lucas politely extricated his hand from Marisa’s. He was careful not to look towards the mantelpiece either. Lucas had never especially liked the drawing; he knew his mother had been a pretty woman, but the artist had given her a dreamy wistfulness that was at odds with other accounts of someone both lively and determined. Though Lucas had only been a baby when Camilla died, he resented the portrait’s power to create a memory that was pure romance, and fateful melancholy. It was something he tried to resist, following his father’s example.

By the time Lucas arrived at the party, celebrations were well under way. He had always liked the Charltons – a loud, jolly gang – and he liked their house too. Large and rambling, the grandeur of its scale was mostly obscured by a tide of family clutter. All of the ground floor rooms were already spilling over with guests and music from competing sound systems.

He found the noise level hard to take. As the day wore on, the tension in his head had returned; a hot, heavy pulse in his skull. Though it didn’t hurt, exactly, he struggled to exchange the usual banter with his usual crowd. He wondered if Bea was here yet and how long it would take to find her in the crush. Tom was trying to tell him something, but the thrumming in his head meant he missed most of it. ‘– downstairs in the den,’ Tom repeated, beckoning. ‘Come and see.’

It was much quieter in the basement. Fairy lights twinkled cosily around the room, illuminating a sagging sofa and widescreen TV, and the layer of film posters and concert flyers that obscured the walls. Gideon was there, holding court in the centre of a group of five or six people. They were admiring something he had on display. A helmet or muzzle of some kind. It was a witch’s bridle.

As Lucas drew closer, Gideon looked up and met his eye. He smiled. ‘Come and have a look at this, Stearne. You’ll find it quite an education.’

And Lucas knew that Gideon had not forgotten the incident with the balefire film any more than he had.

As a matter of fact, Lucas had seen such contraptions before. The bridle was a kind of iron cage for the head, with a metal curb fitted to project into the mouth and hold down the tongue. On this example the curb was plain and flat, but some came studded with spikes, so as to draw blood if the wearer attempted to speak. For many years, people thought witchwork was primarily accomplished through the spelling out of words. They knew better now, but the real point of the bridle was its material. Iron constrained fae. Nowadays, iron cuffs were worn by witches who chose to renounce their fae and live ordinary lives. But in times past, the bridles were used as ready-to-wear, portable prisons.

‘This one’s an early nineteenth-century model,’ Gideon was saying, ‘and what’s unusual is the way wrist restraints have been incorporated into the design.’ He held up a chain attached to the back, which ended in a pair of handcuffs. Although the bridle was opened and shut by a simple clasp, the imprisoned witch would not be able to reach up to use it. ‘It would have been state of the art in its day. And just look at the decorative work.’ He gestured to the iron bands, which bore a patterning of birds and flowers. ‘Must’ve been made by a true craftsman.’

‘A higher class of torturer,’ Lucas agreed.

Gideon’s pale eyes were almost colourless in the dim light. ‘People did what they had to do. It was a harsher world back then.’

‘And not much has changed since,’ said one of the girls, to murmurs of agreement. ‘Look what happened today with that MP’s office.’

‘We might face the same threat,’ Lucas replied, ‘but at least we’ve got better tools.’

‘“
We’ve
got better tools?”’ Gideon drawled. ‘Funny – I didn’t know you were already an inquisitor, Stearne. Unless there’s an alternative fast-track scheme I don’t know about. Something Daddy’s running, perhaps.’

Lucas could tell from the ripples of amusement that this was one occasion when he didn’t have the room on his side. Even Tom kept quiet.

‘Now,’ Gideon continued, briskly marking the end of the exchange, ‘who’d like a go in the bridle? Any budding witches want to be my victim?’

People looked round at each other, a little uncertainly. Several girls giggled.