Ruins (12 page)

“I’m sure your parents wouldn’t mind if you opened it early.”

“They’d kill me,” Nicholas said.

“All the same. Now, shut your eyes.”

“You going to do funny things to me?”

“Take this seriously,” Isabel snapped.

Nicholas closed his eyes, feeling ridiculous.

“Now visualise the box. Every detail of it. The smooth corners. The soft material. The weight of it. Build a picture of it.”

“Yes, master,” Nicholas droned.

“Have you done it?”

Nicholas took a breath and pushed aside his self-consciousness. He tried to imagine what the box looked like. He’d had it in his hands a few moments ago. It wasn’t heavy, but it wasn’t light, either. And the velvet felt soft, almost like rabbit fur.

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“Now imagine where it is, here on the floor. Imagine it sitting before you, just as it is.”

In his mind, the box was now sitting on the carpet.

“Picture it there,” came Isabel’s voice. “Now reach out – no, not with your hands. Reach out with your insides, with your guts, and open it.”

“But–”

“Just. Do it.”

Nicholas huffed and pictured the box again. He reached for it as the cat had instructed, pushing his will on to it. He saw himself picking it up and there, where nothing had been before, was a little silver catch. He flicked it.

There came a snapping, creaking sound and a soft thud.

Nicholas opened his eyes. The box lay open on the floor.

“Did I–?” he marvelled, pulling the box nearer to inspect its contents. There was wood. And metal. And something shining cold and purple. It was some kind of apparatus, nestled in the soft cushion of the box’s interior.

“Well don’t just stare at it,” Isabel said.

Nicholas swallowed, his throat dry. Gingerly, he pulled the contraption from the box and unfolded it. Two wooden legs slotted into a flat panel that formed a base. Suspended on a silver thread was a purple disc that looked like it was made of amethyst. When it was put together, Nicholas thought it somewhat resembled a mechanical metronome; he’d seen musicians using them to keep time.

“It’s a seeing glass,” Isabel told him, as if she had known all along what was in the box. “Many Sensitives use them to begin with; it helps them to hone their skills. This is a particularly fetching specimen.”

“What does it do?” Nicholas asked.

“It helps you access what’s already there, inside you.” She blinked at the seeing glass. “You set the crystal swinging and it puts you into a trance. It relaxes you so that you can concentrate solely on seeing and sensing beyond what’s in front of you.”

“So it’s going to hypnotise me?”

“Not exactly,” Isabel said. “Let’s try it.”

Nicholas eyed the instrument unsurely. Accessing that part of himself, the part he didn’t understand, made him nervous.

But it might help him find the girl.

“Set the crystal going,” the cat instructed. “Send your thoughts out into the spirit planes. Ask the question you need answered. Ask for the whereabouts of the girl.”

Trembling slightly, Nicholas tapped the purple disc and it began to swing from side to side. He reclined against the side of the bed and shook out his arms and legs to dispel any nervous energy. He followed the crystal as it swung. Whenever the small disc reached the mid-point of its arc, it caught the light and flashed.

Swing.
Flash
. Swing.
Flash
.

Nicholas felt both heavy and light, like he was suspended in water. That familiar prickling sensation stirred deep in the pit of his stomach.

Swing.
Flash
.

Flash
. Swing.

Nicholas’s eyes began to droop.

“
The girl
,” he commanded in his head. “
Show me the girl.
”

Flash
. Swing.
Flash
. Swing.

His stomach knotted. The light in the room softened, darkened, until all he saw was the flash of the little purple disc.

Flash. Flash. Flash.

Fire. People running, screaming. A man with a cane stalks the streets. Something monstrous screeches inhumanly and tumbles from the night sky.

Nicholas heard himself panting. He tried to slow the images down, but they wouldn’t be curbed. They poured into his mind like lava and he felt himself drowning.

A red triangle sizzles. Three large objects like pods simmer in a nest of embers. Elvis Presley grins. A woman sits in a classroom and something wet slithers out of her. A silver raven pendant glimmers. Moonlight edges over the lip of a well. Malika emerges from a pool drenched in blood...

“Nicholas!”

He retched into the carpet. His mouth and nose were full of something tangy. Blood. He was only vaguely aware of somebody pawing at him.

“Deep breaths,” a voice said. “Deep breaths.”

He tried to breathe and slowly the room came back into focus. The seeing stone was still. The books seemed to crane up from the floor to see what all the fuss was about.

“There you go. Are you well?” Isabel rested her paws on his knee.

Nicholas wasn’t embarrassed anymore.

“Malika,” he choked in horror. “She was... there was blood everywhere...”

CHAPTER SEVEN

At School

A
S THE SUN ROSE OVER BURY
St Edmunds, a peach-coloured sky provided an optimistic backdrop for the neat rows of peaked roofs. The shadows slid back and dissolved and the sun’s rays trickled into widening puddles that warmed every cobble and tile. Nosily, it pushed in at windows. One high window confounded it, though. Curtains were drawn to block out the world, and the sun was forced to peek through at the edges.

The birds woke Nicholas early. He slept deeply for a few hours, exhausted by what had happened at Snelling’s house, not to mention his troubling encounter with the seeing glass. When the unfamiliar squawking roused him, though, his mind quickly began whirring again. Who had Sam seen at Snelling’s house? Who had attacked them? What did the school massacre have to do with it all, if anything?

Breakfast consisted of eggs and bacon. Sam attempted to help Aileen at the hob, but she quickly established her authority over all things food-related.

Nicholas smiled weakly as, defeated, the old man seated himself at the kitchen table. He ached from yesterday’s training and he felt sick to his stomach. The image of the dead woman in the classroom burned in his mind. Was she one of the teachers from the school massacre? And then there was Malika slithering out of a vat of blood...

“You’re going to think a hole through the table-top any second now.”

Nicholas realised Sam was speaking to him.

“How you feeling? After yesterday?” the old man asked.

“Fine,” Nicholas said. “Bit achey.” He told Sam about the vision from the seeing glass, watching the elderly man’s face cloud with concern.

“Lad, if it’s too much–”

Nicholas wasn’t having any of it. “I need to do this.” He thought back to the conversation he’d had with Reynolds – Snelling – in the back of his shop. Reynolds wanted to know what motivated Nicholas to fight. Nicholas’s answer remained the same – he had to. It was what his parents would have wanted. Now that he knew about the dark forces in the world, he couldn’t just ignore them. He had a responsibility, one that his parents had stepped up to, as had their parents before them.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the images from the seeing glass. They didn’t make sense. What did Elvis Presley have to do with tracking down the girl? And the raven pendant? He reached into his pocket and felt his own necklace there; the other gift from his parents. He carried it with him everywhere.

Isabel wasn’t any help. She’d never even heard of Elvis Presley. She said one interesting thing, though. “The triangle is sometimes used in summoning incantations.”

Summoning. He was expected to find a way to summon the Trinity... Nicholas’s head ached and he couldn’t wait to get out of the house.

“It’s all going to pot,” Aileen muttered as she poured herself a cup of tea.

“Aileen?” Sam asked.

“Safehouse in Manchester was attacked last night,” the landlady said, her usual cheeriness absent this morning. “Harvesters. And there was an incident at a hospital in Cardiff. Fifty people dead.”

“What happened to them?” Sam asked.

Aileen eyed Nicholas.

“Aileen?” Sam prompted.

“They were all turned inside out.”

Nicholas’s stomach contracted in horror and he attempted to control the anxiety that wriggled through him, but the look of concern that Sam and Aileen shared only made it wriggle harder. Things were worsening out there. Awful things were happening all over the country. What next, Europe? The rest of the world?

He couldn’t help feeling responsible. Esus had made it clear that if he didn’t find the girl and figure out how to resurrect the Trinity, they could all be doomed.

Nicholas grit his teeth. He had to find that girl.

“Last I heard, Esus was tending to the survivors in Manchester,” Aileen continued, but Nicholas was too caught up in visions of bodies ripped apart to catch anything else the landlady said.

An hour later, he, Sam and Isabel stood together scrutinising a squat, grey building. It was dry-baking in the sunlight, appearing to harden with every passing second, like a fried toad.

Royal Birch Primary School was a twenty minute walk outside the town centre. A petrol station down the road was its nearest neighbour and the school field at the back blended into rolling fields.

Nicholas remembered what the paper had said happened at the school. Seven teachers, all murdered. Ripped apart. One of them had been called Vicky; she was a Sentinel. Unease pinched his temples and he tried to shake it off. The heat was drying him out, too.

Isabel’s tail curled around his neck, and despite the suffocating warmth, Nicholas was glad she was there. He couldn’t let his nerves overwhelm him. He had to be strong for Sam. And Isabel.

He’d almost convinced himself that Diltraa’s attack on Hallow House was the end of it. He’d survived that confrontation, and the one with Snelling, and he was quite finished with the supernatural, thanks very much. If anything, though, things were snowballing. If they carried on the way they were...

“Remember what I taught you yesterday,” Sam said. Nicholas nodded and thought he caught pride twinkling at him from beneath the old man’s fedora, but he couldn’t be sure because then Sam was striding towards the school, his satchel over one shoulder.

Police tape criss-crossed the double front doors. Blue and white. Almost festive. Flowers lay in bundles, too. Dried to a crisp by the sun. The written notes were already bleached and illegible. As Nicholas scanned the flowers, an image needled into his mind.

Bodies in chairs. Blood slides across the floor. A fist clenches in agony
.

He was sensing something from inside the school. Had using the seeing glass opened something up that couldn’t be closed again?

He took a breath and focussed on Sam.

The elderly man had taken out his lock-picking kit. His hands weren’t as jittery as they had been at Snelling’s house, and it wasn’t long before they were standing in the reception hall.

“Wait,” Sam said, drawing the doors closed behind them. “After what happened here, we’re going to have to be very careful. Who knows what foul things were summoned in this place. If we disturb anything, it could prove fatal.”

“There is a foul stench,” Isabel added, her finer senses picking up what they couldn’t.

“Just give me a moment,” Sam said. He rummaged in his satchel, setting it on the front desk and retrieving a black feather, a Zippo lighter emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and a tightly-bound package of dry twigs. He removed his fedora and Nicholas watched Sam as he lit the herbs.

Dark smoke and the musty scent of cedar wafted up from the bundle. Sam took the feather and, elbows crooked, used it to waft the smoke purposefully before them. He stroked the air in one direction, then another, before finally turning and wafted it directly at Nicholas.

Nicholas coughed.

“Hey–” he began, but Isabel dug a warning claw into his shoulder and Nicholas fell silent.

When the twigs had burnt out, Sam returned the objects to his briefcase.

“What did you just do?” Nicholas asked.

“For protection.” Sam shrugged. He replaced the fedora and pushed open a pair of double doors. Nicholas followed him into a long corridor.

“You didn’t do that at Snelling’s,” he said.

“I have a bad feeling about this place.”

Nicholas was glad he had the Drujblade sheathed at his hip. Esus had used the bone dagger to kill Diltraa, which offered Nicholas some small comfort.