Fated: An Alex Verus Novel (10 page)

‘I’m here,’ I whispered, and Luna started. ‘Stay down, stay quiet.’ I shut up and an instant later I heard the door rattle. Luna heard it too, and went very still. I stood upright in the corner, just another shadow in the dark.

The handle of the door we’d entered by was rattling. There was a moment’s pause, then a flicker of sea-green light. Dust puffed into the air, and suddenly there was a hole where the handle had been. The door swung open with a creak.

The two people who stepped through wore different clothes from last night, but I still recognised them. One was Khazad, spindly and stick-thin, his movements birdlike and quick. Now that I could see his face I could see he looked vaguely Middle Eastern, his eyes darting from side to side. The second was the woman who’d been ordering him around. Unlike Khazad, she still wore her mask, and as I saw that I leant slightly forward. Khazad came down the steps and turned from left to right. He was holding something in one hand, frowning.

‘Well?’ the masked woman said after a moment. She was still above, scanning the area. I saw her eyes pass over me, but she gave no reaction. I knew she shouldn’t be able to see through my mist cloak at this range, but it wasn’t me I was worried about.

‘Wait,’ Khazad said.

‘Is she here or not?’

‘This thing’s screwing up,’ Khazad said in frustration. ‘Stupid piece of crap.’ He raised a hand, and something dark gathered in his palm.

As it did, I felt something from Luna. I glanced down and stared. The silver mist of Luna’s curse was moving. A strand of it slipped invisibly outward, reaching ten, twenty times further than normal, curving over the cars to brush against the object in Khazad’s hand. ‘Shit!’ Khazad snarled.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t fucking believe this! It’s dead!’

‘Is it,’ the woman said absently. She was still scanning from left to right, her eyes passing over where Luna and I were hidden, and I didn’t dare move.

‘Screw it,’ Khazad said angrily. He stuffed the whatever-it-was into his pocket. ‘What about a trail?’

‘Wiped.’

Khazad glanced up, his eyes narrowed. ‘Thought she was a norm?’

‘She isn’t a mage.’ The woman’s eyes traced the wall from behind her mask. ‘But there’s something …’

I held my breath. The woman’s eyes had come to rest on me, and she was staring right at where I was hidden.
Again. How does she know?
Five seconds passed, ten.

‘Well?’ Khazad demanded.

The woman looked away, and I let out a soft breath. ‘That door,’ she said, her voice suddenly sharp again. She started walking towards the door I’d left ajar, disappearing behind the pillars. I strained my ears to listen. Khazad said something I couldn’t hear, finishing with ‘—not there?’

‘We’ve got her address,’ the woman said. ‘One thing at
a time.’ The door creaked open and their footsteps receded up the stairs.

Luna started to move, but I signalled for her to stay down and she did. I counted off a full minute, looking through the futures, then walked forward, pulling the mist cloak from my shoulders. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Who were they?’ Luna asked, scrambling to her feet. She looked anxious rather than scared, which probably meant she didn’t understand what we’d just heard.

‘The man’s called Khazad. I don’t know the woman’s name. You don’t want to meet them.’

As we hurried back the way we’d came and emerged out into the street, Luna spoke up hesitantly. ‘They kept saying “she”. Did they mean—?’

‘Yes.’

Luna shut her mouth and we walked the rest of the way back in silence.

We were back in my flat, above the shop. Luna was curled up on my sofa in the same spot she’d been lying in last night, watching me. Her white hands were curled around a coffee mug. She’d been sitting listening for the last ten minutes, only speaking to ask questions.

‘So that’s how it is,’ I finished. ‘Cinder, Khazad and that woman tried for the relic last night. Now it looks like they’re going for something else instead.’

‘The cube?’

‘Cinder was looking for it yesterday, and those two are working with Cinder. Now they’re looking for you.’

Luna was quiet for a second. ‘Why?’

‘Probably traced the cube to the same place you got it. They don’t know you gave it to me or they’d have been
trying to break in here. Right now, you’re their lead. They’re not going to give up easily.’ I hesitated. ‘I’m sorry for getting you into this.’

Luna only shook her head. ‘How were they tracking me?’

‘Khazad had a focus. There are lots of ways, he was using one of the simple ones. Luna—’

‘It was my curse, wasn’t it? That was what stopped him finding me.’

I blinked. ‘You can tell?’

Luna nodded. ‘Sometimes. When there’s something I’m really afraid of. It’s like a part of me reaches out and touches it, and it’s gone.’

‘Huh.’ I sat back. I’d always thought Luna’s curse was a passive thing, but what Luna had just said made me wonder. Being able to feel it that clearly …

‘She said she had my address, didn’t she?’

I’d been reaching for the glass of water on my desk. As Luna spoke I went still, then picked up the glass and took a drink, hoping she hadn’t noticed the pause. This wasn’t something I wanted to tell her. ‘Yes.’

Luna was silent for a second. ‘The man I got the cube from doesn’t know where I live,’ she said at last. ‘He knows my number, but … Oh, of course. My name. They could have looked my address up with that.’ She shook her head and looked up. ‘Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I can’t go home, can I?’

I let out a breath. ‘No. They’ll be at your flat by now.’

‘They won’t hurt anyone else in my building, will they?’

‘It’s not your neighbours you should be worried about! These people are
dangerous
!’

Luna nodded. ‘I know.’

I put a hand to my head and sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I should
never have gotten you into this. If I’d known you’d turn up something that would get you involved in this stuff—’

‘No. This is what I want.’

I stared. ‘Luna,’ I said carefully. ‘If those three catch you, they’ll quite likely kill you. You understand that, right?’

Luna looked back at me steadily, her clear eyes looking into mine, then she dropped her gaze and traced her finger around the rim of her mug. ‘When you called me this morning, you were afraid I wasn’t going to come, weren’t you?’

‘I—’ I checked myself. ‘How did you know that?’

‘You always tell me how dangerous your world is,’ Luna said. ‘It’s like you think you need to warn me off.’ She dipped the tip of her finger into the tea and looked at it. ‘It doesn’t bother me, you know.’

‘Luna—’

Luna looked up to meet my gaze. ‘If those three are going to be chasing someone, it’s better that it should be me, isn’t it? I mean, if I was a normal girl, they’d have caught me back there.’

I stared at her.

‘So,’ Luna said at last. ‘You said you needed me to run a test? I mean, before we got distracted.’

‘I—’ I let out a breath. ‘All right.’ The cube was sitting on the coffee table in between us, looking ordinary and dull in the morning light. ‘Try picking that up.’

Luna nodded and obeyed. The cube swung between her fingers as she looked at it, then gave me a glance.

I grabbed a pencil and paper and scribbled a word, then pushed it across the coffee table, taking care to keep my distance. ‘This is a general-purpose command word. Hold up the cube and say it.’

Luna waited for me to sit back, then reached forward and picked up the paper. To my eyes the silvery mist of her curse engulfed the paper as she studied it, frowning slightly. The cube hung silent in her other hand, the silver mist sliding off it without sinking in. Imbued items have a will of their own. Until they decide to use their power, they’re nothing but blunt objects. One way to get an imbued item to obey you is to find the item’s special purpose and bring it to bear somehow. If you don’t know the item’s purpose, you’re out of luck; the item won’t obey anyone except its master.

But if you can guess who its master might be …

‘
Annath
,’ Luna said.

Light flowed from the cube and in an instant the gloomy room was lit up in red and white. The crystal surrounding the core glowed with energy and thin lines of light sprang outwards, playing over the sofa, the table, the walls. For one instant, Luna was backlit in the glow, holding the cube aloft, her eyes lifted up in wonder.

Then the light snapped out, and the room was back to normal. Luna dropped the cube and it bounced, came to rest on the sofa cushions, and sat quietly. Luna twisted around and stared down at it. There was a moment of silence.

I let out a breath. ‘Okay then.’

‘What was that?’

I got to my feet. ‘Luna, it’s going to be better if you’re somewhere very hard to find for a while. I’ll explain along the way.’

I explained along the way, and carried on explaining. Luna kept asking questions and didn’t stop, long after I expected her to go quiet. It was as though now she’d finally gotten me to open up, she wanted to learn everything she possibly could.

Learning about magic’s dark side is a major tipping point for newcomers, and the way they react tells you a lot about who they are. Some freak out completely – once they realise that messing with this stuff can get them killed, they run and never come back. Others just get a bad case of the shakes and adjust bit by bit. I’ve seen the whole range – or at least I thought I had. But Luna had been near-missed by Dark mages twice in as many days, she’d just learned that they weren’t going to stop until they found her, yet she hadn’t turned a hair. Why was she so calm?

I think it was at that point I first realised just how little I really knew about Luna. I’d always focused on her curse – how it worked, whether I could do anything to fix it. I’d never learnt what really made her tick.

‘So there are lots of those spells?’ Luna was asking. ‘Could they find me another way?’

‘Easily,’ I said. We were walking up a grassy hill, avoiding the path to keep clear of people. A pair of students were throwing a frisbee off to our left, and dogs ran across the meadow. ‘But most of the powerful ways to
track someone take time. If they’re smart they’ll stake out your flat while they put something together.’

‘Will my curse help?’

‘Chance magic needs some randomness to work with. If they get something that can find you reliably enough, there’s not much it can do.’

Up ahead, a family was laughing and tramping downhill on the path. We fell silent briefly as we waited for them to go by, letting Luna give them a wide berth. ‘I still don’t see why this thing with the cube makes a difference, though,’ Luna said once they were gone. We crossed over and headed for the woods on the other side. ‘Why does it matter whether I can use it?’

‘It’s more than that. I spent three hours last night playing with that thing and didn’t even get a flicker. You touched it and it obeyed you straightaway. Imbued items
choose
their wielder. I’m pretty sure that for anyone but you, that cube’s nothing but a piece of glass.’ I left unsaid the question of why it had picked her, mainly because I didn’t have any idea myself.

‘You said they wouldn’t know that—’

‘They
probably
don’t know that. But they obviously know more about that thing than we do. Maybe they know it’ll only bond with one person.’

‘Why does that make a difference, though?’ Luna asked. We’d entered the woods and were away now from the bulk of the crowds. The trees were just starting to come into bloom, and birds sang cheerfully from the branches. ‘I mean, either they’re hunting me because they think I’ve got the cube, or because they think I can use it. Either way …’

‘It means that no matter what happens, this isn’t going to be over quickly. One way or another, they’re
going to keep looking for you until something makes them stop.’

Luna paused and we walked a little way in silence. ‘Okay,’ she said at last. ‘So what are we doing
here
?’

The two of us were standing on Hampstead Heath, the biggest park in inner London – and the most beautiful, at least in my opinion. Regent’s Park is probably more famous, but it’s a bit too cultivated for me. The Heath’s just wild enough to be interesting. On a Saturday afternoon like today, it’s swarming with men, women, children and dogs, doing everything from eating picnics to flying kites. At first glance it’s not the place you’d expect to find anything magical but, as I said, it’s wild while still being in the city. For some people, that’s a useful combination. ‘I need some clothes for a party,’ I said. ‘You need somewhere to hide. This is the only place I know we can get both.’

Even with all the people who use the Heath, it has its secrets, and we’d come to one of them. A dried-up stream had carved a ravine out of the earth, the sides rough and uneven. An oak tree grew on the top of the bank, its roots reaching down the slope. Although we could still hear the sounds of people around us, the banks and the growing trees hid us from them. Of course, the other reason no one was here was because there wasn’t anything to see.