April smiled, forcing herself to look interested despite feeling she was being pulled in two different directions. The old April, the one who had lived in Edinburgh and had only seen vampires in rubbish late night movies, the old April wanted to run. She wanted to fling the French windows open and sprint off into the night screaming. But the new April, the one who had been unwillingly plunged into a world of murder and mythology, she wanted to make the most of this; to see if she could pick up some clues or leads, anything that might help her find her father’s killer, because the new April wanted revenge, she wanted to make whoever had hurt her daddy pay. Even though the sensible, normal part of her knew that it was very likely she was being led into a trap, the grieving, hurt, broken part of her didn’t care too much. She didn’t want her throat torn out, but she knew it was a risk she had to take.
Benjamin showed her the library and the ‘lower gallery’ - a long room that served as a formal dining room - and the kitchens, which were even bigger than her grandfather’s. The stairs to the upper floor curved all along one wall, and there were twelve bedrooms. The en suite to Ben’s parents’ room was bigger than the whole downstairs of April’s house.
‘And I thought we lived in a swanky house being in Pond Square,’ said April.
‘It’s ridiculously big, isn’t it? But my father’s always bringing “important people” back here,’ he said, framing the words with finger quotation marks, ‘so we have to have the best of everything. It’s a bit like living in a museum - well, until you get in here, anyway.’
He pushed open a door and April walked in.
‘Good God!’ she said, laughing. ‘Your room, I presume?’
It was as if a whirlwind had whipped through it. Drawers hung open, spilling T-shirts and socks onto the floor, bookshelves were crammed with magazines and DVDs, and there was even a drum kit in one corner, a pair of jeans draped over one of the cymbals.
‘I like to think it counterbalances the house,’ he said. ‘The chaos here makes the order of the rest of it look so much better.’ He nodded to a door at the end of room. ‘I wouldn’t go into the bathroom, though. I can’t guarantee your safety in there.’
‘Gosh, I didn’t realise you were such a big Alix Graves fan,’ said April, pointing to the posters Blu-Tacked to the Cole and Fairfax wallpaper.
Benjamin gave a guilty smirk. ‘Well, obviously for me it’s about the music rather than his fine physique,’ he said, putting his hand over a picture of the singer wearing only leather trousers.
April giggled, pulling his hand away to examine the picture. She managed to suppress a gasp as she realised it was the same picture Caro had shown her in the library earlier that day, the one with the star tattoo.
Deep breath, April
, she said to herself.
Don’t show him how you feel.
‘Yes, he did have a fine collection of tattoos,’ she said.
‘Yes, it’s the tattoos.’ Benjamin grinned. ‘It’s definitely the tattoos I liked. Tattoos are manly.’
God, I wish he wasn’t a vampire
, thought April suddenly, then scolded herself for having the thought.
He’s the enemy, remember
! But was he? Was any of this crazy situation true? It was certainly hard to believe when confronted with such a typical teenager’s bedroom. But then she remembered the night on the Embankment, the photograph and Gabriel’s face pulled back in a snarl. She remembered the knife __
Jesus, I actually stabbed him -
and the wound disappearing. So how come she couldn’t believe it when presented with all those facts? She looked at Benjamin, so handsome and charming, lounging on his bed. It was because she didn’t
want
to believe.
A scream from the garden had April running to the window, to see Ling and Davina splashing about in the hot tub, squirting water at each other.
‘You learn not to get too excited about screams living in this house,’ said Benjamin, peering over her shoulder. ‘There’s a lot of drama.’
Perhaps it was high spirits, but Ling did seem to be sitting rather close to Davina in the hot tub, although it was hard to see exactly what was going on under the bubbles.
‘The hot tub is a tradition at our parties,’ said Benjamin in a low voice. ‘Especially at the Winter Ball. Everyone gets in at midnight.’
She realised that Ben was standing very close, could feel his breath on her neck. Okay, so
he’s a
vampire, but he is so hot, said the rebellious voice in her head.
‘You are going to come, aren’t you?’ he asked. He was so close she could feel the warmth from his body now.
If he’s
that hot, he can’t
really
be
a
vampire, can
he?
‘Yes, I ...’ she said, turning to face him.
Then there was another scream, a real scream - a long, wailing cry of grief from somewhere inside the house. With a concerned glance at April, Benjamin ran from the room and along the corridor. April followed close behind. At the top of the stairs, he stopped and bent over the banisters.
‘Mum! What is it?’ he called.
April got there just as Mrs Osbourne stepped into the hallway, a phone in her hand, her face white. She looked up at Benjamin and shook her head.
‘It’s Milo,’ she said. ‘He’s dead.’
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The whole school was in mourning. If Milo Asprey hadn’t been the most popular boy in school, he still appeared to have had a lot of friends. Certainly, if ‘Milo’s Wall’ was anything to go by, it looked like almost every Ravenwood student had been touched by his presence. The Wall was a long noticeboard just outside the refectory, usually only used for notes relating to the next meeting of the chess club or posters advertising a concert by the school band. But somehow, without any official assignment of the space required, by lunchtime on Friday, the wall had become a shrine to the boy’s memory. Pictures, cards, poems, even some elaborate and presumably time-consuming artworks had appeared, eulogising Milo’s humour, sensitivity and all-round brilliance. The school had caught on fast and announced that anything pinned up on the wall would later become part of a book of remembrance for Milo’s family. The wall also had the knock-on effect of making Layla hugely popular by proxy. Previously seen as Davina’s bitchy and cruel sidekick, her bedside vigil as Milo had fallen ill, slipped into a coma and died had transformed her into a tragic heroine with hitherto unseen depths. Even girls who had been on the receiving end of her sniping put-downs had been offering their condolences.
April had not been one of them. Leaving aside her feelings regarding Layla and her sharp nails, she was still finding Milo’s death very difficult to deal with. She had tried, time and again, to convince herself that it was pure coincidence, that Milo had caught some tropical disease just after their kiss, whatever Gabriel had claimed, but in her heart she knew it wasn’t true. She knew she was responsible. Of course, she hadn’t planned it, hadn’t known that she was anything special __ let alone a Fury - but she had caused Milo’s death nevertheless. It wasn’t murder, but it was manslaughter and April felt it deeply. She’d enjoyed their kiss and had been disappointed to be interrupted; after all, Milo had been about the only one at the party to be nice to her. And now she’d killed him. She walked around in a gloom, dragging a black cloud with her wherever she went. A casual onlooker would think that April Dunne had simply been moved by Milo’s passing, possibly feeling the tragedy more keenly because of her own recent loss, which was of course true. But April was also struggling with feelings of powerlessness. She had been moved down to London against her will, her father had been murdered and she was failing to find out who was responsible. And now, it seemed, she had another role thrust upon her, a role she had no stomach for. She felt even more isolated by Caro’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm for the ‘project’, as she insisted on calling it, not least because she thought catching William Dunne’s killer was a secondary goal, and because she had no one else but Fee to talk to - and she still wasn’t sure if she could even trust her best friend. She hadn’t heard from Gabriel since she’d thrown him out two days ago.
Par for the course
, she thought. But then April hadn’t tried to contact him either, and it wasn’t really because of their quarrel. After all, it wasn’t Gabriel’s fault she had the birthmark and, truthfully, Gabriel was probably the one person who would actually understand everything she was going through. But she still couldn’t call him.
Not that I’ve even got his number
. Maybe she was being too sensitive, maybe she was burying her head in the sand, maybe she simply didn’t want to face it; she didn’t want to be a Fury, whatever the hell that was. She fleetingly wondered if she should go to her mother or her grandfather and ask them point blank if they knew anything about it: it had crossed her mind that their whispering and bickering about her ‘heritage’ might have something to do with this Fury thing, but she had almost no expectation of getting a straight answer from either of them—
they’ve kept it to themselves so far, so why would that change now I’ve accidentally killed someone? __
and besides, what if it
wasn’t
about her being a Fury? She didn’t want to open another can of worms if she didn’t have to, and either way, April didn’t need to bear that extra weight of responsibility on her shoulders at a time when she just wanted to curl up in bed and hide from everyone and everything.
April picked up her fork and stabbed it into her muffin. ‘I hate cake,’ she said.
Caro raised her eyebrows. She had brought April out to Americano on their way home from school in an effort to cheer her up.
‘Now that’s just silly,’ she said, enthusiastically biting into her pain au chocolat. ‘Cake is one of the greatest inventions of all time.’
It made April smile despite herself. She was very lucky to have such a good friend and, she supposed, the Milo business did have its positive side. By and large, people were leaving her alone, which was infinitely preferable to having them gossip about her, plus she had been able to dodge Miss Holden and her ‘little talk’ by claiming she was too upset. April wasn’t the only one benefiting from the situation either. Davina, predictably, had also made the most of events, coming in to school wearing a classic black Chanel sleeveless dress and dark glasses which she would periodically lift to dab at her eyes with a lace handkerchief - and where Davina led, the Faces and indeed the rest of the school were sure to follow; you would have been forgiven for thinking that Ravenwood had a strict uniform code, with the emphasis on black. The one flash of colour in all this gloom was, equally predictably, provided by Caro who maintained her status as the school rebel by wearing an ‘ironic’ purple hoody.
‘I thought we were supposed to be allowing ourselves to be recruited,’ said April moodily. ‘The Faces aren’t going to want anything to do with you if you keep this up.’
April was now slowly picking her muffin apart, leaving all the blueberries in a pile on the plate.
‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Caro, pointing at her top with a fork. ‘This purple monstrosity is my ticket to the big time.’
April shook her head in confusion.
‘It’s basic psychology, m’dear. If I joined in with Milo-Fest and started going for manicures with Layla, the Suckers would smell a rat, wouldn’t they? By keeping up my outsider persona, I come across as more genuine and they’re more likely to want to draw me in.’
‘Hold up,’ said April. ‘Are we calling the vamps “Suckers” now?’
‘I thought it had a certain something.’ Caro grinned. ‘Plus if we’re overheard, we could be referring to anyone: teachers, boys, anyone.’
April nodded her approval. ‘I like it.’
‘Anyway, it’s worked,’ she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a gold envelope. ‘One ticket to the Osbourne Winter Ball, hand-delivered by Head Sucker, Davina Osbourne.’
‘No way!’ April hugged her friend excitedly. This, at least, was some good news. She had been dreading attending another posh party alone, where she would feel like an imposter, an outsider - and more than that, she would be an interloper, seeing what she could find out, what clues she could pick up, all the time putting herself in danger.
‘Oh Caro, that’s brilliant - how did you swing it?’
‘I casually dropped into conversation that I had already been offered places at Cambridge, John Hopkins and MIT. There was a slight pause while Davina went off to check that it was true, then all of a sudden she was eyeing up my jugular and discussing cocktail dresses.’
‘Well, that’s excellent work,’ said April. ‘Maybe we’re getting somewhere.’