The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) (6 page)

It looked like he was going to come even closer to see why I was convulsing.

“Stay back!” I said.

“What?”

Honestly, I have no idea which one of them said it. Could have been either. Could have been both. Alistair backed off a bit, so I achieved my immediate goal of not killing one of my friends. By this point, Jerome had crab-walked back a bit and then scrambled to his feet. He was scanning the aisles and generally looking freaked out. I had just yelled “Stay back!” pretty loudly. Anyone nearby would come and check to make sure I wasn’t being assaulted in the dark of the stacks. It’s one thing to have a girlfriend who gets startled by the automatic lights and then cuddles close to you for a kiss. It’s another thing entirely when said girlfriend curls up like a shrimp in a hot pan when
you try to kiss her, nearly nailing you in the nuts in the process. And then to have the aforementioned girlfriend scream “Stay back!”…

The moment, to put it as gently as possible, had passed.

“I’m sorry,” Jerome said, and he sounded genuinely
alarmed
, like he’d hurt me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

“No!” I said, and I forced a smile. “No. No, no. It’s fine. It’s good! It’s fine.”

Alistair folded his arms and watched me try to explain this one away.
Jerk
. Jerome was keeping toward the wall, in a stance I recognized from goalkeeping—knees slightly bent, arms at the sides and ready. I was the crazy ball that might come flying at his head.

“I…didn’t sleep much last night,” I said. “Not at all, actually.” (A massive lie. I’d slept for
thirteen hours straight
.) “So, I’m like…you know how you get? When you don’t sleep? I
really
did not mean to do that. I just heard a noise and…I’m jumpy.”

“I can see that,” he said.

“And hungry! It’s almost time for dinner.”

“I know how you are about dinner.”

“Damn straight,” I replied. “But…we’re okay?”

“Of course! I’m sorry if I—”

“You didn’t.”

“I don’t want you to think—”

“I definitely do not think,” I said. And that was the truest thing I’d said in a
long time
.

“Dinner then,” he said. “Everyone will be excited to see you.”

He relaxed a bit and moved away from the wall. Jerome took
my hand. I mean, it was a grip. A grip of relationship. A statement grip. A grip that said, “I got your back. And also we are, like, a thing.” The incident was over. We would laugh about it, if not now, then by later tonight.

“You have the whole campus,” Alistair called as we left. “The whole city. Do you really have to keep coming here to do that? Really?”

The sky was a particularly vibrant shade of purple, almost electric. The spire of the refectory stood out against it, and the stained-glass windows glowed. It had gotten pleasantly crisp out, and there were large quantities of fallen leaves all around. I could hear the clamor of dinner even from outside the building. When we pushed open the heavy wooden door, all the flyers and leaflets on the vestibule bulletin board fluttered. There was another set of doors, internal ones, with diamond-cut panes. Beyond those doors, all of Wexford…or at least…most of Wexford.

This was it, really. My grand entrance back into Wexford, and it started with the opening of a door, the smell of medium-quality ground beef and floor cleaner. Aside from those things, it really was an impressive place, housed in an old church, made of stone. The setting gave our meals a feeling of importance that my high school cafeteria couldn’t match. Maybe we were eating powdered mashed potatoes and drinking warm juice, but here it seemed like a more important activity. The tables were laid out lengthways, with benches, so I got a side view of dozens of heads as we stepped inside and I made my way past my fellow students.

And…no one really seemed to notice. I guess I’d been imagining a general turning, a hush in the room, the single
clang
of a fork being dropped onto the stone floor.

Nope. Jerome and I just walked in and proceeded to the back of the room, where the trays were. The actual food line was in a small separate room. I got my first welcome from the dinner ladies, specifically Helen, who handled the hot mains.

“Rory!” she said. “You’re back! How are you?”

“Good,” I said. “Fine. I’m…fine.”

“Oh, it’s good to see you, love.”

She was joined in a little cheer by the other dinner ladies. When we emerged, heads turned in our direction. I didn’t exactly get a round of applause, but there was a mumbled interest.

“Rory!”

That was Gaenor, from my hall. She was half standing, waving me over. She and Eloise made a space for me that I didn’t quite fit into, but I pressed butt to bench as best I could and turned my tray. Jerome sat on the other side, a few seats down. My hall mates generally swarmed. Even Charlotte poked her big red head over my shoulder just as I was shoveling a particularly drippy chunk of sausage into my mouth.

“Rory.”

I tried to get the fork away from my mouth, but I had already inserted said sausage, so all I could do was accept the weird back-shoulder hug that she gave me. It was quite a long hug too. With something like this, I would have expected a little squeeze—maybe you could count to three, and then it would be over. This hug lingered and settled in, at least ten seconds. This was no handshake hug. This was a contract. A bond. I made haste with my chewing and swallowing.

“Hey, Charlotte,” I said, shrugging loose.

Then I heard the squeal and I knew Jazza had arrived. I turned to see her tearing up the aisle toward us. Jazza always reminded me a little of a golden retriever. I mean that in a good way. Just the way her long hair (which was always bizarrely smooth and shiny) flopped joyfully as she hurried to greet me, the genuine happiness she exuded. She almost flipped me backward off the bench when she embraced me.

“You’re back!” she said. “You’re back, you’re back, you’re back…”

And I was.

5

I
WAS DEAD ASLEEP WHEN MY PHONE BUZZED. I REACHED OUT automatically and slapped it silent. Then I grabbed it and held it right in front of my face. It was 1:34, and I had one text message. It read:

Come downstairs -s

I blinked.

Stephen?
I wrote back.

The reply, a few seconds later:
Yes. Wear shoes.

I knelt on my bed and looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anyone. Just the empty square, the empty sidewalk. Empty London, all tucked in for the night. This emptiness didn’t fill me with confidence. I was in no mood for weird text messages telling me to go outside in the middle of the night, especially when I couldn’t see anyone outside the window.

This didn’t mean I wasn’t going, of course. Because, Stephen.

I got up as silently as I could, grabbed my sneakers from the foot of my bed, plucked my fleece from the hook by my door,
and crept out, closing the door quietly behind me. Jazza didn’t stir at all. Downstairs, the hall lights were on, even though no one was around. They used to be off at night. Maybe this was part of the new security plan—always look awake, always look at home, always keep the public areas lit. There was no noise from Claudia’s room as I passed by. I remembered the alarm as I stood by the front door. If I tried to get out, it would go off. Stephen was nodding at me. He held up his thumb in a thumbs-up gesture. I smiled and thumbs-upped back. Then he shook his head no and typed something into his phone.

Open the door.

I can’t open the door,
I typed.
Alarm go boom.

He shook his head again and typed another message.

Just open it.

I took a deep breath and pushed. The door opened with no fanfare, no screech and flash, no metal bars slamming down. I stepped into the cold night. A great plume of my breath fogged up in front of my face.

I was used to seeing Stephen in his police uniform, but today he was wearing a black sweater and a pair of jeans. He had a scarf thickly knotted around his neck in the way that all English people seemed to tie their scarves (a tie that eluded me no matter how I tried). And although it was very cold, he wore no coat. I think some English people think coats are for the weak.

I’d forgotten just how tall he was, and how
worried
he always looked. He had very thin and straight black eyebrows that were perpetually pushed slightly toward his nose in a worry wrinkle, like he’d just been told something mildly problematic—not terrible or tragic, just annoying and difficult to fix. He turned
this vaguely troubled gaze on me, the newest and most immediate problem.

“Hey,” I said. “You heard I was back, huh?”

My relationship with Stephen had been a strange one from the start. He wasn’t, for many reasons, the most open person. But he was here. I think I’d known he would come. My initial inclination was to grab him around his long, skinny middle and hug him until his head popped off, but Stephen was not really a hugger.

I decided to hug him anyway. He tolerated this reasonably well, though he didn’t reciprocate. I guess I expected a smile or something, but smiling also wasn’t his thing.

“Your roommate,” he replied. “Julianne. Is she asleep? Your lights have been off for a half an hour.”

Nor was conversation, really.

“You’ve been looking at my window for a half an hour?”

“That’s not an answer to my question.”

“She’s asleep,” I said. “At least, she’s quiet. She didn’t say anything when I got up.”

“Would she normally say something?”

“It’s good to see you too,” I said. “They said that’s a really good security system, but not so much, huh?”

“It is quite a good system.”

“So why didn’t it go off?”

“Disarming the alarm system of a school building isn’t exactly the trickiest thing the security services has ever had to do.”

“Security services…”

“We should move.”

“What?”

“Come on.”

“But…”

He had already slipped a businesslike arm across my back and was ushering me down the cobblestone path and around the corner. Stephen was the only person in the world I would tolerate this kind of thing from, because there was one thing I did know—if he dragged me out of bed and ushered me through the dark, there was a reason. And I would be safe.

There was a red car, and I heard the doors unlock when Stephen pointed the remote at it.

“That’s not a police car,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

“It’s an unmarked vehicle. Get in.”

“Where are we going?”

“Let me explain inside the car.”

There was a figure sitting in the front passenger seat. I recognized the head of white hair at once, and the altogether too young face that went with it. It was Mr. Thorpe, the government official who’d come to visit me in the hospital. The one who told me I was never allowed to say anything.

“What’s he—”

“It’s all right,” Stephen said, opening the back door for me. “Get inside.”

Stephen held the door open until I acquiesced.

“Aurora,” Mr. Thorpe said, turning around. “Good to see you. Sorry to pull you out in the middle of the night like this.”

“What are we doing?” I asked.

“We need to talk.”

Stephen started up the car.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Do you enjoy being back?” Thorpe asked.

Thorpe didn’t exactly seem like the kind of person who cared whether or not I was adjusting well to my circumstances, and Stephen was suddenly very focused on his driving.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I just got here. As I guess you know.”

“We do.”

“Why do I feel like my being back has something to do with you?”

“It does have something to do with us,” he said. “But I hope that you’re happy about it.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re just going to take a short ride,” Thorpe said. “Nothing to be worried about.”

Stephen looked at me through the rearview mirror and gave me a reassuring nod. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered. He turned up the heat.

The first few turns, I knew basically where we were—in the Wexford neighborhood, going south. Then we were lost in a warren of tight little streets for a few moments, reemerging near King William Street, where the old squad headquarters was, where we’d faced down the Ripper. We turned off that quickly enough and were on a road that ran along the Thames Embankment. We were definitely heading west. West was the way to central London. The black cabs got more numerous, the path along the Thames thicker with trees and impressive buildings, the lights on the opposite bank shinier. I caught sight of the London Eye, glowing brightly in the dark, then we were going right, into the very heart of London.

We pulled up into the circular drive of what I first thought was a hotel. It was a moment before I noticed the sign for the
Tube, the distinctive red circle with the blue bar across it. We were at Charing Cross station. Stephen pulled the car up right in front of the doors. Thorpe got out at once, and Stephen released me from the back.

“Come in,” Thorpe called. “This way. Come inside.”

There was a female police officer standing by one of the front doors. She pushed it open as we approached. She moved fast, like she’d been waiting for us and her most important job of the night was to open that door.

Charing Cross was a large central hub for both trains and subways. It had a large central area full of shops and ticket counters, with a glass roof crisscrossed with metal latticework. A woman in a black suit waited for us in the middle of the concourse.

“The CCTV is off?” Thorpe asked her quietly.

The woman nodded.

“Stay in the control room. No one comes down.”

I gave Stephen a what-the-hell-is-this look, and he responded with a it’s-fine-no-really-it’s-fine stare.

“We’re just going to go down to the platforms,” Thorpe said. “This way.”

He began walking toward the opening marked
UNDERGROUND
. We followed him down the steps. Gates had been opened, allowing us to proceed. Charing Cross Tube station was a somewhat grim place, with brown tiles on the floor and tiled walls done in variations of brown; the ticket machine walls were an alarming electric lime green. The escalators were shut off, so we had to walk down to the platforms, Stephen in front of me and Thorpe just behind. It was unnerving to be in a Tube station after hours. There was no body heat from the thousands
of people who usually rushed around, no sound of musicians playing or talking or laughing or trains roaring along. Every one of our footsteps on the slated metal steps was clearly audible as we descended.