Burn Mark (6 page)

‘I’ll try it,’ Nell Dawson announced. She was normally a rather quiet person, but she had just downed a glass of wine, and was tossing her hair about in what was no doubt intended to be a reckless manner. When Gideon looked her way, she blushed violently.

‘Good girl.’ He touched her cheek, and Nell blushed again. Slowly, she lowered her head in submission.

The room was very still as Gideon put the bridle on.

‘Open wide,’ he said.

Nell opened her mouth and Gideon slid the metal curb on to her tongue. Then, less gently, he pulled her arms behind her back, clamping her wrists into the manacles. She made a small muffled sound.

‘How’s it feel, Nell?’ various people asked, and she managed a lopsided shrug.

‘Haunted, I expect,’ Gideon remarked. ‘Think of all the witches it’s silenced.’

‘Careful, Nell,’ said someone. ‘You wouldn’t want to catch anything nasty.’

‘Yeah,’ said someone else. ‘Maybe she’ll come down with the fae.’

‘Oooh – any harpies in the Dawson bloodline we should know about?’

‘Is that a freckle on her arm, or the Devil’s Kiss?’

‘I always
thought
Nell had something spooky about her . . .’

‘’Ware the witch!’

Laughing, they began to pelt her with screwed-up napkins and beer bottle tops.

Lucas watched and waited. Anger had intensified the hot throb in his head.

Perhaps Gideon had been right to challenge his remark about torturers. It wasn’t always fair to judge the past according to modern sensibilities. The witch’s bridle was a defensive weapon as well as an instrument of oppression; a relic of a war that hadn’t yet been won. But the Inquisition had worked hard to become an institution that could be respected and trusted as well as feared. And for all the care of its construction, the bridle was a crude, ugly thing, which belonged to more primitive times. To make such an artefact part of a drunken party game . . . It was like ogling a pirated balefire film. It was like those men sipping gin and tonic as Bernard Tynan burned.

Meanwhile, Nell sat alone on the sofa, as the merriment and missiles rained down. Her head was bowed awkwardly under the weight of iron. Lucas saw her eyes darting about inside. She made another muffled sound, and her shoulders twitched.

‘I think she wants to get it off,’ he said, abruptly cutting into the fun.

‘I’m sure she does. But that’s not the way it works, I’m afraid,’ Gideon replied. Taking hold of the chain behind Nell’s back, he pulled her off the sofa. Caught off balance, she fell on to her knees. Gideon pushed a hank of fair hair off his forehead and moistened his lips, staring down at the muzzled girl. He gave the chain another tug. ‘
First
she has to learn her lesson.’

He’s turned on
, thought Lucas, with a shock of disgust. ‘And what lesson is that?’

Gideon smiled blandly. ‘That witchcrime doesn’t pay.’

Lucas hardened his face. He walked swiftly over to Nell and felt for the catch at the back of the bridle, releasing the cage. After a bit of fiddling, he managed to open the manacles too. Nell gulped and coughed, moisture filming her eyes.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

The next cough was more like a retch. Nell’s hands fluttered to her throat. There were red marks around her wrists. Then, ‘Sure,’ she said, over-brightly. Her voice was hoarse. ‘I’m fine.’

Nobody even looked at her. They were all watching Gideon watch Lucas.

Lucas found the bridle heavier than he’d expected. It felt colder than metal should, the iron bands biting icily into his skin. The heat in his skull flickered and faltered. He felt extraordinarily tired.

‘You look a little green, Stearne,’ Gideon observed. ‘Maybe it’s time to lighten up, hmm? Life shouldn’t be all work, no play.’

Lucas put the bridle into the other boy’s hands. ‘Trouble is, I don’t much like your games.’

It was only then he realised that Bea was there. She must have come down the stairs behind him. He wondered how much she had seen and what she had thought, but went past her regardless. He needed some air.

Lucas was immediately regretting his intervention. He’d come across as a pompous, humourless bore. And Nell was a silly little bimbo anyway, trying to suck up to Gideon like that. She didn’t need rescuing.
What’s
wrong
with me?
he thought, as he sloped moodily through the conservatory and into the garden beyond. But the question was unsettling. Of course there’s nothing wrong, he told himself quickly. It’s just one of those days. I’m getting ill and it’s making me cranky. God – if only my head would just
keep quiet
. . .

Several people, mostly Sophie’s friends, were smoking on the patio among a scattering of tea-lights. One of the boys was tunelessly strumming a guitar. Even so, the night air and relative peacefulness were a relief. The garden’s growth was luxuriant, blurry with spring. Lucas walked across the lawn to the pond and frowned down at his reflection.

Someone said his name. ‘Hello,’ Bea said, a little breathlessly.

‘Hello.’

‘I liked what you did back there,’ she told him. ‘You were right to intervene; it was getting out of hand. Though Nell should have known better. She’s got this ridiculous crush on Gideon, you see.’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

‘Oh-ho – that sounded a touch bitter.’

Bea’s smile had a mischievous slant. He liked that. Lucas approved of girls who were confident without being too assertive about it. He also liked her thin gold top, and the way the droplets of her earrings had got tangled in her hair.

He tousled up his own hair and grinned back. They sat down together on the raised stone rim of the pond.

‘I think people are generally on edge today,’ Bea remarked. ‘About witchwork, I mean. It’s because of the attack. Dad was saying that coven witches keep clear of capital offences, and so only fanatics like Endor could be responsible. He said normal witch-criminals wouldn’t risk the Burning Court. Is that right?’

‘Well, it’s true that covens keep their witches behind the scenes. They tend to do the groundwork rather than committing the actual crimes. But the . . .’ Lucas paused. Though his reflection looked as pale as ever, waves of heat had begun throbbing through his body. The sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant but he plunged a hand into the water, hoping the coolness would steady him.

‘Yes?’ Bea prompted.

‘Uh . . . the death of that cleaner was clearly a mistake. Creating a whistle-wind is one thing, controlling it quite another. That storm was meant to scare people, not kill them. That’s not Endor’s style. And Endor hasn’t been active in the UK for over twelve years.’

‘Do you ever wonder . . .’ She hesitated. ‘I know about the Oath of Service, and how inquisitors are legally bound to respect witchkind rights. But do you ever wonder how you could . . . what you would do . . . if some atrocity happened, and you found yourself face to face with the witch responsible?’

‘Like the one who killed my mother, for instance?’

Her cheeks went pink. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.’

‘It’s OK. It’s something I’ve thought about. I’m sure Dad has too. I hope I’d do the right thing. One has to bear in mind that witches . . . well, they’re subject to impulses that normal people can’t understand. There’s something primitive – unnatural – inside them.’

‘You’re saying we should make allowances?’

‘No. I’m saying we have to remember they’re not like the rest of us. If I found the witch who killed my mother, I’d want to do the right thing because it would prove I was better than him or her. Better than
them
.’

‘More humane?’

‘Or more human . . .’

A motorbike revved noisily in the road. In the glinting wrinkles of the pond, the imagined scene of his mother’s murder swam up at him. The swerve, the jump, the downwards fall – the crumpling of metal and crushing of glass. The sheet of flame.

It might have been written off as just another road accident, if it wasn’t for a witness who had seen his mother struggling at the wheel, her face frozen with horror and her movements stiff and jerky, as if not her own. Since a witch had to be in view of his or her target to hex a bane, a second onlooker would also have been present on that bend. There they would have watched and waited for the car, holding a poppet of Camilla Stearne in their hands. Somewhere in the background, this witch would have wound the shadow-strands of fae through the manikin and into its human counterpart; spooling their darkness through his mother’s blood and brain, binding her limbs to their will.

The car crash had come at the height of Endor’s campaign, after the Southampton bombings and the assassination of the Home Secretary, before the sabotage of HMS Thrace. The authorities said that the murder was intended as a warning for Ashton Stearne. But Camilla came from an old inquisitorial family as well. For Endor fanatics, that would be justification enough.

Lucas looked at Bea’s hand, resting on the stone beside his. However close they became, they would always be two different bodies, two separate souls. So how must it feel to invade another person’s consciousness, like some witches did? To tether another soul to yours and move their body to your command?
Maybe that’s why Gideon’s so enthralled by the bridle
, Lucas thought. He doesn’t just fear the power that witchkind has. He envies it.

The motorcycle revved again, matching the buzzing in his ears. Although he remembered little of last night, he dimly recognised the surge of feverish disorientation. Waves of pins and needles had begun prickling through his skin.

‘Lucas, are you OK?’ Bea was frowning in concern.

‘I’m fine – I –’

I’m going mad.

But no, no, he wasn’t. Bea could see that. Bea would make sure he was all right. Her soft touch would soothe the itch in his blood; her rosebud mouth would hush the rising din. All he needed to do was keep his focus. He smiled, and leaned towards her.

‘Lucas!’

Philly was marching across the lawn. Her make-up was smeared and her hair dishevelled, and she was clutching a bottle in one hand. ‘What’s this,’ she said belligerently, ‘what’s this I hear about you causing a scene with Gid?’

Lucas and Bea drew apart. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you,’ said Lucas curtly, over the drumming in his ears.

‘Yes, it bloody well does if you keep making an idiot of yourself in front of my friends. Gid—’

‘Gideon’s never going to look twice at you whether I’m around or not.’

There was a nasty pause.

Then, ‘You pompous
arse
,’ Philly exploded. ‘You know what your problem is? You’re so damn pleased with yourself the whole hexing time. You –’

Her voice joined the buzzing in his skull, the hissings in the shadows. Both increased to a new intensity.

‘Be quiet,’ he said, keeping his voice low, so as not to add to the uproar all around. For some reason, one of Philomena’s hairgrips was in his jacket pocket, and he grasped it savagely. He couldn’t hear himself think.

Philomena ignored him. She ignored the whispers and nudges of the group outside the conservatory. She ignored Bea’s hostile stare. Philomena’s evening had not been a success, and its assorted frustrations had now come to a head.

‘I’m warning you, if you carry on acting so superior –’

On and on. Lucas closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the dewy balm of the night garden. He envisaged scooping up its peace and pressing it against Philomena’s jabbering mouth. Tightening his grip around the hairgrip, he bent back its thin metal as he begged for silence. A curb of iron, a cloud of numbness. Be quiet, be quiet, he mouthed, like a prayer.
Quiet . . .

‘The thing is, Lucas, what you fail to appre—’ Philomena coughed. ‘You fail –’ She made a retching sound, like Nell after the bridle. ‘You –’ Her voice died to a rasp, then a whisper. Then, nothing. She blinked woozily.

One of her friends, who had been hovering near by, came and put her arm around her. ‘Come on, Phil,’ she coaxed. ‘Let’s go inside. We’ll get you some water and you’ll be absolutely fine.’

They set off towards the house, Philomena croaking in faint protest, her hand around her throat.

‘
Hex
,’ Lucas swore.

‘She’s off her face,’ Bea told him. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

Lucas was, in fact, feeling better. The pressure had lifted and heat retreated. ‘All the same, I’d better check she’s OK.’ He got up, slightly unsteadily.

‘That’s funny,’ said Bea, and pointed. ‘Look at the bells.’

The conservatory door, like all entrances to the house, had a row of boxed iron bells over the threshold, ready to sound the alarm if a witch hexing a bane approached. All three had begun to quiver.

Bea was more intrigued than worried. ‘Weird. I wonder what’s set them off? Still, it’s not as if they’re actually ringing.’

All the same, the threat of their chime was near, as close as an echo. Lucas seemed to feel the metal reverberate in time to the tingling in his head. Whatever happened, and for whatever reason, he knew he must not take a step closer to the bells. He must not pass under that threshold.