Darkness Watching (Darkworld #1) (22 page)

Not if they used magic.
The thought crossed my mind unbidden, and a chill went through me. Did this have something to do with whoever had broken into my room?

“I’ll have to take it into town later. God knows how, I can’t ride it like this, and there’s no way in hell they’d let me take it on the bus…”

“I can help,” I offered. ‘We can go into town when the shops open. I don’t have any lectures ‘til afternoon today. I don’t mind.”

David smiled at me, a genuine smile this time. “Cheers, Ash. That’d be great.”

“Um, sure.” I awkwardly adjusted my position at the window, elbows propped on the sill.

“How was that Gaming Society thing, anyway? I saw you in town last night.”

“Did you?” I decided feigning ignorance was the best move. “It was pretty good, yeah. We just went to a couple of bars.”

“I saw you at the Coach and Horses. That big guy you were with looked pretty rough.”

“Howard? Yeah, he’s a real sore loser at Xbox.” That much, at least, was true.

Once again, I was lost for anything to say. I wanted to divert the conversation away from last night, and yet―

“Oh, great,” I said.

“Huh?”

I held up my arm. “What the hell’s this stuff? It’s all over my window!”

David looked puzzled. “That’s oil, isn’t it?” He stared at his bike, confusion furrowing his brow.

“Why’s it on my window?”

“Very good question.”

No one could be that good an actor, I thought, and I felt relief rush through me.
Of course it wasn’t him.

David seemed to be coming to conclusions of his own.

“I reckon it was someone in our block who trashed my bike,” he said.

“But who would do that?”

“God knows.” He looked angry once again. “I’m going to see our head of college now. Their security’s shit if they let stuff like this happen.”

His abrupt departure took me by surprise.

“I’ll see you later, okay?” I called after him, but he didn’t seem to hear.

With a sigh, I withdrew into my room. It looked like my pyjama sleeve would be permanently stained black.

I whiled away the hours until the shops opened rereading
Paradise Lost
and making a start on some of my seminar work for next week. I kept getting flashbacks to the night before, to the library, and, every so often, a random sense of claustrophobia would seize me, like I was in those tunnels again.

Eventually, I went for a walk around the woodland trail just for something to do and got back to the flat to see David’s bike was gone. Had he left without me?

I went back inside, where I found Alex and Sarah engaged in a heated discussion about
Paradise Lost
, today’s seminar’s text for discussion. I knew it backward already, of course.

“It’s not
crap
, Alex, it’s a great poem,” Sarah said.

“It’s waaaay too long,” Alex complained. “How’re we supposed to read it all by next week?”

“It’s not that bad. I did it for A-Level,” said Sarah.

“It’s a good read, once you get into it,” I said. “Have either of you two seen David?”

“Why?” Alex looked up from the hefty anthology she’d been perusing.

“We were supposed to be going into town, but it looks like he’s gone.” I joined them at the table, sitting in a vacant chair.

“You sure he’s not at a lecture?”

“His bike’s gone. We were supposed to be going to get it fixed.”

“Wait, you were going
together?”
Alex and Sarah exchanged raised eyebrows. “And you still don’t realise what’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on,” I said. “We’re just friends.” The words rang false even in my own ears. Maybe it was time to be honest. “Well, he hasn’t said otherwise, anyway. I’ve not seen any hints.”

“Maybe you keep missing them.” Alex made no attempt to hide her smirk.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve never had a boyfriend before, all right? No guy’s ever so much as looked at me. So I probably wouldn’t recognise the signs even if they were there.”

“They are,” said Alex confidently. “But the most important thing is to get a definite answer. Don’t let him mess with your head.”

“I won’t.” Perhaps she was right; perhaps I did need to get an answer from him… but I had enough to think about already.

I wondered who’d taken David’s bike. Could it really have been someone in our flat? If someone had broken the locks using magic, then it couldn’t have been anyone I knew; they’d all been at the library last night. Was there a rogue sorcerer at our university―or was there something Claudia and the others weren’t telling me?

never had a chance to ask David about his strange behaviour because I didn’t see him at all over the next few days. I didn’t see Claudia or any of the others, either, even though I kept an eye out for Leo in English lectures. Maybe he, like so many other first-years, didn’t bother coming into early morning lectures. I could sympathise with that.

I was having trouble sleeping again. Even though nothing odd had happened since Claudia had helped me put up the shield in my room, I kept thinking I heard someone outside during the night. Every time I closed my eyes, harpies dove at my face, demons appeared out of rips in the universe, and I sank into snowdrifts, paralysed, whilst giant shapeless monsters bore down on me. So much had happened in such a short space of time that moving away from home seemed insignificant by comparison.

I spent most of my time hanging out with Alex and Sarah: staying up too late chatting, going to more Literature Society meetings, and making new friends. I kept up with all my reading, wrote a plan for my first essay, and got involved with the student magazine, contributing some articles and book reviews I’d written. Next term, I thought I’d try for an editorial position.

Meanwhile, Pete was spurned by Danielle no fewer than seven times in a five-day period―as we inferred from his drunken shouting outside the building―and managed to get himself fired from his job by
accidentally
flashing some members of the Cheerleading Club.

“Real charmer, that one,” said Alex.

Terrence continued to annoy everyone in the building by playing opera music at full blast, usually after coming back from visiting the mysterious
lab
at night. He never failed to give the rest of us dirty looks if we happened to be sitting in the corridor chatting when he came out his room. Alex made a point of talking loudly about him when she knew he could probably hear us through the door.

“I just don’t
get
that guy,” she said. “How did we wind up living with the weirdos? The Lit-Soc guys upstairs, Jake and Rex, they’re nice, normal guys, but we had to get stuck in the nutters’ flat.”

“David’s not a nutter,” I said.

“He’s a grumpy bastard. Did you hear him ranting about his bike?”

“No,” I said. “Well, I haven’t seen him all week anyway. He never seems to be around.”

He’d also stopped showing at the Literature Society, preferring, I assumed, to hang out with the other politics students instead. This was understandable, but I still missed talking to him.

Cara and I Skyped every few days, just to keep up to date. I couldn’t help imagining her face if I told her about the library and the harpies.
Guess I really am living a horror movie,
I thought wryly
. My life’s really tipped over into the land of crazy, now.

Alex tried to talk me into signing up for the hike at the weekend, but I’d made the excuse that my parents were coming to visit on Saturday. I hadn’t seen them for ages, so this was easy to arrange.

“We’ve missed you, Ash,” said Mum, hugging me as I opened the door to the flat.

Dad joined her. “You’ve settled in okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.

There didn’t seem to be much I could say. So much had happened in the last few weeks, yet there was so little of it I could actually tell them.

Yeah, in my first few weeks of uni, I broke into a library and got attacked by harpies. Just your typical Fresher’s experience.

I related some amusing stories from Freshers’ week instead, whilst giving them a tour of Blackstone. Still, part of me couldn’t help but wonder.
Can they feel this place is different?
After what Claudia told me about the Darkworld connection being hereditary, I’d been wondering. If I’d inherited it from distant relatives, why did neither of my parents have it? I’d seen no evidence last year that they’d had the slightest inkling there was something more sinister than exams on my mind.

“Dad,” I said, as we sat down to a late lunch at a pub in Blackstone, “does Aunt Eve still have our family tree?”

“I think so,” said Dad. “Why?”

“I was just wondering. We were talking about our Victorian ancestors in last week’s English seminar.”

“Well, we haven’t heard from her in a while,” said Mum. “When was the last time she phoned? Last Christmas?”

“Must have been.” Dad frowned. “Come to think of it, she was asking about it then. Said it was missing. Don’t you remember?”

“Vaguely,” said Mum. “She said a few things went missing when she moved, didn’t she?”

“Doesn’t surprise me. Her house was bursting with old junk. Still is; she never managed to sell it.”

Although I often forgot about my token crazy relative, I remembered Aunt Eve’s peculiarities. Distant and reserved, she never showed up to family gatherings and had once said she’d stay living in her little Windermere cottage until she died. She’d surprised to all of us when she’d packed up and moved to Canada five years ago, without so much as a warning. She still sent money every Christmas and on my birthday. The amethyst pendant was the only material thing she’d given me.