Skulk (32 page)

“It’s the fog.”

“
Bollocks,
” Mo breathed.

We watched it swirl up against the glass for a few seconds. I thought I could see the currents within it, tiny particles of – of whatever the fog was actually made from. I was pretty sure it wasn’t water.

“Get downstairs,” I whispered, half-dragging Mo towards the door. I had to fight to tear my eyes away from the window. Then a burst of blue sky appeared in one corner, and my heart hammered in my chest. The fog was on the move. We had to go.

We slammed out of the study and rattled down the stairs, and I tore open the door. Grey mist filled my vision and I tried to leap back, but my feet got underneath me and I fell, my elbows banging down hard on the tiled floor. I tried to lash out with one foot and slam the door on the fog, but it bounced back from the doorframe as if it’d hit a pocket of compressed air.

“Meg!” Mo had his hands under my arms and dragged me to my feet. The fog rolled in, faster than I’d ever seen. It poured after us as we staggered down the corridor, towards the kitchen, swirling and roiling more violently. A smoky tendril shot out like the tongue of a lizard and caught a curl of my hair. I screamed and clutched at it. My scalp stung like hell as I tugged, but I managed to snatch it back and Mo pulled me through the kitchen door and slammed it behind us.

“That won’t hold it,” I gasped. Fog was already filtering under the door. “And it’s worse than it was.”

“
What
?”

“It’s faster, stronger. She’s got the Skulk stone; it’s making the fog more solid.” I grabbed Mo’s hand and ran to the back door as the floor filled up with mist.

“We can’t run forever,” Mo muttered, as he turned to throw back the bolts and reached for the key hanging by the door. It leapt out of his fingers and clattered on the floor.

“I dunno, running forever sounds good to me.” I seized the closest objects from the kitchen counter and started to chuck them into the approaching mist, while he scrambled for the key. Knives clanged and stuck in the floor and then twisted like they were made of plastic; salt and pepper grinders exploded and sprayed their contents into the fog where they were caught up, spiralling through the currents like streams of asteroids through space.

Mo jammed the key into the back door. The fog was almost on us. I swiped my backpack at it, just trying to buy us a few precious seconds more. The fog parted to avoid it and the backpack went
clank-clonk
as it hit the floor and the spray-cans rattled.

Wait.

I tore the backpack open, reached in, tugged out one of the cans, rattled, aimed and fired. The black cloud of atomised paint exploded out of the can, hit the roiling carpet of fog, and spread out at once, filling the entire cloud. It stained the translucent grey mist a deep and glistening blue-black.

The fog stopped moving towards us. It twitched. It pulsated and contracted, drew itself up into a writhing column and twisted around itself like a sponge wringing out. Flashes of light sparked from inside it like distant lightning.

“What the…?” Mo gasped. I backed up against him, pressing my back to his chest, and he put his arms around my shoulders.

The fog jerked again, and then once more, and the paint boiled inside it, and then the whole cloud burst, like a bubble, and was gone. Black paint rained down on the kitchen floor, and there was silence.

“You killed it,” Mo whispered.

I blinked, barely wanting to acknowledge it in case he was wrong, scanning the spattered paint for any sign that it might twitch back into life. But there was none.

“Meg,” Mo cried, and threw his arms around me and gave me a big, breath-stealing hug. “You killed it!” He spun me around and lifted me off the floor. Joy seared through me and I squealed and waved my feet in the air and laughed as I hugged him back.

He eventually put me down, and I staggered back, grinning stupidly.

I hadn’t really wanted to let go of him. But that was a thought I could give some time to later – if there was a later.

My boots were spattered with drops of black paint. I glanced back at the kitchen, and another laugh bubbled through me. “Bloody hell,” I sniggered. It looked like a gothic Jackson Pollock, only messier. The words “my mother’s going to kill me” rose in the back of my throat and I fought them back, turning away. Maybe she was. But it wasn’t going to be over the state of the kitchen.

“Come on,” I said, turning the key in the back door and holstering the paint can in the front pocket of my hoodie. “We’ve got to get to Bow.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

James was alive, and he was well up for breaking into the Shard.

We’d stashed our clothes under one of the broken-down cars outside his lockup and I’d nosed my way in through the fox door with the iPad in my mouth. I’d almost had my face clawed off.

“Oh, it’s you. Well, I’m glad you’re alive,” he said coolly, as soon as I’d yelped my surrender. He sat back and let me and Mo clamber into his cave of wonders. “Are the others all right? Where’s Addie?”

“We think Victoria’s taken them,” I said. “Fran’s betrayed us. She’s got most of the Horde, too.”

James’ silky veneer cracked right down the middle. “You said you’d look after her!” he barked. “I’m going to kill that woman. If she hurts Addie I’m going to feed her her own skull.”

“We’re going to get her back,” I said. “We’ll get them all back – but we’ve got to get into the Shard.” I explained about my dad, and James’ ears pricked up when I mentioned the plans.

“Is there a .vtf file?” he asked. “Have you got the lift layout in there?”

“I – I dunno.” I opened the iPad and put in the code with my nose.

James scanned through the plans, and then double-tapped with one paw, zooming in on a side-on elevation of the lifts and staircases around Victoria’s apartment.

“See here? This lift is public, it takes people up to the View, which is two floors up from Victoria’s Penthouse. So all we have to do is go all the way up and then come down the fire exit stairs and break in through the fire escape on the right level.”

“How do we do that?” Mo said.

James sat back and scratched behind one ear with his back paw. We waited. James didn’t say anything. He scanned through the plans some more, and then blew out a snuff of air through his nose.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

James lowered his head. “I’m going to have to go in human.”

“Well – yeah,” Mo said. “Even if you could do the doors as a fox you’d have to be human to come up with us in the lift, right?”

I shuffled my paws. “You don’t like being human?” I guessed. “Like Addie?” My ears went back and I hunched down. “But we really, really need you.”

James gave me a sharp look, one foxy eyebrow twitching. “No, I’m with you. I’m just… I’ll meet you in a second.”

Mo and I had changed and were waiting outside the lock-up when there was a long, interrupted creak of hinges that hadn’t opened in a while, and part of the wall opened.

The man who came out of the lock-up looked pretty much like Wayne Rooney’s less attractive cousin. He was shorter than I was, maybe twenty-five, wearing jeans and a knockoff Adidas hoodie. He walked over to us, his shoulders hunched, his hands plunged into his pockets, with the iPad tucked under one arm.

He came up to me and Mo, and his lips twitched into a smirk. It was the first thing about him that seemed at all familiar. “I know, darlings, believe me.” His voice made me blink. He had the vocabulary of Oscar Wilde and the accent of the Artful Dodger. “Sometimes I think I was swapped at birth. I was meant to be a fairy and instead I turned out a goblin.”

“Hey,” I managed. I wanted to tell him to stop it, not to talk about himself like that. But I tripped over the fact that actually he sort of
did
look like a goblin. “I didn’t say anything,” I pointed out.

“Yes, love, you did. Just not out loud. I’ll have to ask you to keep it a bit quiet. I’ve got a persona to keep up. Can’t have the other jewel thieves knowing the great James Farringdon is actually Ma Docherty’s youngest from down Tower Hamlets. That’d never do.”

Nobody who’d looked up at the London skyline in the last couple of years should be able to forget that the Shard is mostly made of concrete. For months its blocky central tower had loomed over the city, like a giant chimney stack with cranes and trucks buzzing around it night and day. But as soon as the glass had gone on and been polished up to a diamond shine, it was hard to remember the clumsy construction phase. Now it was all razor-sharp glass planes, edges not quite meeting in a cluster of points that caught and scattered the sunlight.

I glanced up at the giant LED board on the side of one of the neighbouring buildings as we came out of London Bridge station. It said it was Wednesday, 13.24. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d known what day it was. Right now Jewel and Ameera would be sitting together in the square, eating chips and comparing notes on the weekend, or Facebooking in companionable silence.

Except...

My stomach turned over and I felt sick with guilt that for even a split second I could have forgotten. They wouldn’t be there. Ameera was gone, and I hoped Jewel was on the far side of the world by now.

What had Victoria done with the bodies? What had she told Ameera’s family?

There would still be
Aspects of International Relations
today, and
Eastern Europe in the 19th Century
. The other students would be pushing and shoving on the stairs, Facebooking, bullying, laughing.

And all the friends and families of those people Victoria had murdered would never know how their loved ones died or who was responsible.

But I knew.

My fingers tightened around the can of paint in my pocket, cool and solid and powerful.

The sparkling glass-walled public entrance to the Shard was full of people. Roxie met us in the lobby, waving four tickets.

“I bought enough for all of us,” she said. “In case you found him.” I grinned at her gratefully and James gave her a little half-wave, half-salute.

“Listen,” I whispered to the three of them, as we walked over to the queue for the lift. “I don’t want to even see Victoria if we can help it. I want to get the shifters out and take back the stones. I want to be the one with the power if I have to face her.”

James nodded. “Sensible,” he said. “And if we do run into Mistress Crazypants?”

We probably die
, I thought.

Mo stuck his hands in his pockets. “Then we do what we can,” he said.

I nodded.
That’s good enough. It has to be.

There were plenty of people swarming around the lifts to the office floors and the hotel reception, but the queue for the lift to the View was empty. My spirits rose as we filed along the rope line, and then sank back into my boots when I spotted the security guard at the little table right in front of the lift.

He waved for me to open my bag. I dragged my lips into a smile, though I could practically feel my heart thudding against my teeth.

The paint can isn’t an offensive weapon, unless you’re a patch of evil fog – or unless you’re my mother and it offends you right in your sensibilities. But I bet it would be enough to get me banned from the ultra-pristine View. I could feel a sheen of sweat prickling over the back of my neck as I pulled open the bag and the guard glanced inside.

The iPad was nestled on top of my clothes, between the cups of my spare bra. It wasn’t even a pretty bra, it was a tatty old comfortable thing with a stain on one of the straps. The guard drew back with a nod, not meeting my eyes. I zipped the bag up quickly and let the blush flood my face, savouring the delicious embarrassment, because it was better than letting him see how relieved I was.

The lift arrived and the three of us stepped in, but before the doors could close we were joined by a boy, about twelve with red hair and freckles. I thought of Blackwell, and clenched my fists.

The boy’s mother and father slipped in after him. The woman was holding the man’s waist and looking deep into his eyes. The little boy was holding his mum’s handbag and looking grumpy. As the lift shot up into space I caught sight of James in the mirrored surface of the opposite wall. For just a second he looked down at the boy and a slight smile crossed his face. Then he met my eyes and looked away, impassively.

I didn’t know what he had to smile about. I would’ve thought the fewer people up there with us, the better.

The doors swished open and the couple almost ran out through the dim corridor and into the sunshine. They dragged the boy straight to the edge of the room.

“Oh, Stuart,” the woman gasped. “Look!”

She wasn’t wrong. I heard Mo’s breathing shorten as we walked over to the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass that were all that stood between us and the clouds. It’s almost impossible not to feel something at the sight of London spread out in front of you from such a ridiculous height. It wasn’t a stunningly clear day, and the view came and went, patches of sudden visibility in the misty air drawing the eye to a stretch of river or a church tower or a grimy industrial estate.

“You OK?” I asked Mo.

“I’m not scared of heights,” he said. “But this is – this is something else.” He turned to me, and there was a slightly crazed smile lighting up his sleep-deprived face. “And you?”

“
I’m
not scared of heights,” I echoed, gazing out over the grey ribbon of the Thames. Then my focus shifted and I caught my reflection in the glass.

What am I afraid of? Being crushed to death because I didn’t see the fog coming? Being pecked to death by the creatures that used to be my parents? Finding out there’s no way to save them? Finding out that the Horde and the Skulk are already dead? Letting this woman destroy my world without ever finding out why? Failing to live up to the responsibility that nobody ever actually gave me? Leading two of my new favourite people to their deaths because for some reason they keep listening to me?

I listed them off, fear upon absurd fear, waiting for the sense of release that always came when I faced up to the absolute worst that could happen.