Skulk (13 page)

CHAPTER TEN

I vaguely heard the click of the key turning in the lock, and then Gail’s bony fingers gripped my shoulder and shook me awake. I surfaced scowling.

“What?”

“Get up,” Gail said. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

“What?”

“Don’t give me ‘what’. It’s Monday. You’re going to school.”

I groaned and tried to burrow back under the covers, clutching at my head. I didn’t remember going to sleep.

“Your mother says she doesn’t care how hungover you are. She’s calling the builders to fix your window today and she doesn’t want you underfoot.”

“I’m not hungover,” I grumbled, before the second half of what she’d said hit home. I sat up, my mouth sagging into a shocked semicircle. “She’s really going through with that?”

“Up,” Gail snapped, and walked out.

I sat up, burying my hands deep in my hair. I’d rather not go anywhere within ten miles of school. In the piercing light of the morning, the whole encounter with Blackwell felt like a weird dream, whereas Angel’s death felt more real than my own skin.

I could still see the blood hanging in the air, still feel vomit and panic in the back of my throat. I could feel Hipster Dick’s hands on me, and the instinctive cringe in my spine at Don’s growl, and a hot stinging patch on the right side of my face where Mum slapped me.

Everything was so wrong.

I hadn’t really agreed to go and check on the stone with the fog still out there, had I? What the hell had I said I’d do that for?

Normally I’d stay home sick on a day like this. I’d spend it curled up in a duvet watching DVDs on my computer and sketching the awful away. I have a whole sketchbook buried at the bottom of my trunk, full of artistic interpretations of whatever was bugging me. Every other page is a portrait of my mother, each less flattering than the last.

Something told me “I feel sick” wasn’t going to cut any ice today.

I couldn’t have just
one day
to hide under the covers and feel sorry for myself?

No, of course not.

When I stomped down the front steps, I was planning to bunk off and go straight to the Tower and tell Blackwell I wasn’t going anywhere near the stone by myself. But by the time I’d got to the end of the road I’d changed my mind. The fog or its master might have tracked down my hiding place somehow. I needed to know
what
I was going to tell Blackwell, and if it was going to be “I had the Skulk stone but now it’s gone” it was better to be prepared.

Besides,
I thought,
maybe the wizard will have come in the night and razed my school to the ground. That would be worth seeing.

The tall white brick building was still standing. I walked up to the front door more slowly than I ever had in my life, even back in Year Nine when Shauna Harris was going through her I-dare-you-to-expel-me phase and my school life was so hellish I was “sick” on average three days a week.

Ameera appeared at my elbow and bounced us both through the door and up the stairs.

“
Meg
, oh my God, are you OK? I’m so sorry if me and Jewel left you on your own on Saturday night. It’s just Nick and Deshawn said we had to come and see their studio, and we did a couple of rounds of shots and frankly it’s all a bit of a blur but we had the
best time
– did you get home OK?”

“Yeah, I was fine,” I said.
Actually, I had one of the best nights of my life
, I thought
. Seems so long ago now...

Our form room didn’t look like it’d been ransacked. I went over to the window and peered out. There was no sign that anyone had been digging up the grass. I slumped against the frame and let out a long breath as Jewel jumped up to give Ameera a good-morning-hug.

I looked over at the lockers. A ghost of shock and revulsion ran through me as I remembered the spider, climbing down over the top of them just as I was putting the stone away.

He wasn’t just a spider, he was a real person, and he died because he was there that day.

At lunchtime I slipped behind the Kit Shed again and scrabbled in the dirt, my heart beating a frantic rhythm against my ribs, until my fingers brushed something cool and smooth.

“Oh my God,” I breathed. “Thank God. Hi,” I whispered to the stone, stupidly but happily, as I pulled it from its hole and wiped the dirt from its surface with my thumb. The sunlight glinted clearly on the star in its depths.

I felt that strange lightness again, just for a second.

The Hands
, I thought, turning it over and over.
What does that even mean?

Just one of the many things Blackwell hadn’t gone into last night.

I reburied the stone, deeper than before, and rearranged the weeds so that they covered the newly-turned earth. I was suddenly very glad I’d come to school. Just for once, I was a step ahead. The wizard hadn’t found the stone. I could do this. I could keep it safe. Whatever Angel’s killer was after, I could keep it from them.

It had never felt so good not to be helpless. I found myself actually looking forward to telling Blackwell all about it. I even smiled all the way through Double Politics. It was so unusual that Ameera kept asking me what was going on, in a more and more insistent voice, until finally Miss Freiboden snapped and gave her detention on the spot.

I set off for the Tower right after school, only pausing to wave goodbye to Ameera, who was staring out of the detention room on the third floor with a comically forlorn look on her face. I hopped on a bus headed towards High Street Kensington tube, clinging to the yellow rail and squeezing from side to side to let gangs of schoolkids and mothers with buggies get past me, going over and over what I’d say when I got there.

It hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but I realised that I didn’t know quite how I was going to find Blackwell once I got to the Tower. What if none of the warders had heard of Blackwell, or they knew him but they didn’t think he’d want to see me? What could I say to convince them it was important without blithering about magic stones and just crossing my fingers that I’d found one of the Conspiracy? I could pay to get in to the Tower and go straight to the ravens – and then what? Stand there asking them if they were secretly people? Maybe I should change into a fox, but if I was spotted by the human warders they wouldn’t want me anywhere near their birds...

My mobile bleeped in my pocket. I jumped. I didn’t get many texts, and the ones I did get were usually from Ameera – but they always confiscated phones at the start of detention. So who was texting me? I guessed it was going to be spam from the hairdresser’s again, but when I looked, the little blue box said:

Dad

Come home ASAP sweetheart.

My heart juddered in my chest.

Sweetheart?

Dad never called me sweetheart. Hell, Dad never texted me at all.

What was wrong? Had something happened? My mind hopped madly from theory to theory. Had Mum finally had a total breakdown? Was I in trouble? Were they splitting up? Were we skipping the country? Was Granddad dead?

The bus pulled up outside the tube with a hiss and I stepped out. I looked at the tube, and then back at my phone.

Then I kicked myself, and crossed the road to the bus stop going back the other way. I was probably a bad daughter, but I wasn’t
that
bad. The stone was safe for now. Blackwell could wait.

The back gate was open, and a sleek silver Jaguar was parked haphazardly inside, blocking in Mum and Dad’s huge black beetle-cars. I hadn’t even thought, until just then, how weird it was for them to be home at this time of day.

Dad usually stayed late at work, overseeing his firm’s latest construction project or helping to sell off the leftover office space – either that or he’d have to take the Qatari finance minister out to dinner or meet Rupert Murdoch in a strip club or whatever else CEOs did.

I sometimes wondered if he was having an affair. I hoped he was. Having Mum as my mother was bad enough, I couldn’t imagine being
married
to her.

Mum should be at work, too. She would usually rock up in time for dinner, take an hour from terrorising backbenchers to terrorise Hilde and Gail, scream at me for something so minor it made my blood boil, scream at me again for getting angry at her, and then shut herself in her study and go back to running the country.

All in all, this was looking bad for someone.

My hands started to shake as I fished my keys out of my pocket and held them up to the front door. I paused, clutching on to the handful of cool, pointy metal, focusing myself into the feeling in my hand until I calmed down a bit. Then I forced myself to slide my key into the lock carefully, turn it slowly, step deliberately into the hall.

I breathed in, and my hand flew to my face as just for a second as I smelled something tangy and strange on the back of my throat, like fizzy sweets. It felt like I needed to sneeze. But the feeling vanished in a blink.

There were voices coming from the drawing room, but they sounded... happy. I could hear Mum, Dad and another female voice I didn’t recognise. Dad chuckled. Mum said, “Of
course
.”

I followed the voices and hesitated in the doorway.

I expected a stone-faced policeman handing out sympathetic cups of tea; maybe some lady in a suit bearing tidings of our impending bankruptcy; maybe just my mother with a face like death, breathing fire.

The third person in the room was the black lady who’d worn the peacock dress to Mum’s party. They were all sitting on the white Queen Anne sofa, sipping cups of tea. It looked like perfectly ordinary tea between friends – although they were drinking it from the best china, the genuine antique china from China. Mum looked up at me, and smiled.

She smiled. Her cheeks actually wrinkled. I nearly dropped my keys.

“Er. Hi,” I said.

“Ah, hello, Margaret,” said Dad, also smiling. “This is Victoria Martin, do you remember? She bought the penthouse in the Shard.”

“Hello.”

Victoria Martin smiled at me too, over the rim of her teacup.

I stood there for a few seconds, my hand in my pocket clutching at my phone. I raised my eyebrows at my Dad, and he raised his right back.

“Do you want to join us, Margaret?” Dad asked. “We’re just having a nice chat.”

A nice chat
, with the woman who owns one of the most expensive flats in the world. I guessed it had to be Party contributions. Whatever Victoria was selling, Mum’s government would be right behind it, in exchange for a couple of million a year. No wonder she’d broken out the antique teacups.

…But why text me? Why invite me to join them?

“I got your text,” I prompted. “I was going to pop out, but I came straight home.”

“Ah. Yes, I wanted to see you, didn’t I? Come in, have a cup of tea. There’s sugar,” he added, taking the lid off the Chinese china sugar pot. I rolled my eyes.
Right, I’m allowed to have sugar. And the flying pigs, when are they getting here?

But Mum didn’t shut him down, didn’t make any snide comments or even glare at me to make sure I knew I was expected to politely decline. She was still smiling, as if she had not a care in the world. Victoria had to be offering her money beyond her wildest dreams. Campaign money? Was this Prime Minister money?

And she wanted me to join her new contributor for tea?

It occurred to me, with a nasty jolt, that this had to be some sort of scheme. Perhaps I was going to be sent abroad or pensioned off into a job at Victoria’s company, whatever it was. Perhaps this was her backup plan after failing to get Hipster Dick to seduce me into buggering off to Cambridge.

I didn’t entirely want to know what it was, but if it was something bad enough that I was going to have to run away from home I decided I’d rather just know now. I dumped my bag in the doorway, walked into the room and planted myself in a chair opposite the sofa.

“Hi,” I said to Victoria, with a tight grin.

“I have a couple of questions, actually,” said Victoria.

“Um. Oh?” I was a bit thrown off my sulk. What kind of questions would she have for me? She took a sip of tea and a bite of biscuit, clearly not in any hurry to explain.

I looked her over while she swallowed. She was looking a lot less glamorous than she had at the party, but she still carried the tell-tale signs of someone with more money at their disposal than they could possibly ever use. Her loose cream shawl was probably Spanish cashmere, draped neatly over a silky rust-coloured A-line dress – I would’ve guessed retooled vintage. She was wearing her hair pressed down flat at the front with a wide black band so it fanned out behind her ears. Her shoes were polished black Leboutins.

“You go to Kensington School for Girls, don’t you?”

“Yep,” I said, taking a biscuit, catching Mum’s eyes – still blankly calm – and taking three more.

“Wasn’t that where they found that man?”

“Yeah, last Thursday. He’d been stabbed. Or something.” I imagined just carrying on, nibbling on my biscuits between statements of fact.
I was there. His name was Ben. He was a shapeshifter. It turns out he gave me more than one thing that night... Now I’ve got to get to a raven in the Tower of London to save the world. Or something
.

“Terrible shame,” said Dad. “Gang violence, I expect.”

“In Kensington,” I deadpanned. Dad nodded and smiled at me again as if I hadn’t just cheeked him. Victoria’s eyebrow quirked up and she gave me a little smile.

“I was just wondering, you see,” Victoria said. She took another sip of her tea and set it down on the saucer with a little
chink
. “I was just wondering where you put the sapphire, Margaret.”

My hand spasmed and the biscuits crumbled between my fingers, crumbs dropping all down my trouser leg and scattering on the carpet. I half-braced myself for Mum to shout at me about the mess – and she didn’t.

“What?” I breathed.

Victoria smiled at me again. “The stone, with the star in it. The one that was in your locker. It isn’t there now. I want to know where you’ve put it, Margaret.”