Skulk (11 page)

I blinked. “My stone? But what’s it got to do with…?” I trailed off.

Something was moving behind him. Something flowed out from under the door of the closest jewellers shop, stretching its grey tendrils across the road towards us.

“The fog...” I muttered.

“
What
? Where?” The spider leapt in the air and turned in a split second. “
Dios!
Run!”

I backed off, still staring at the fog. I felt that strange fizzing again and shook my head to clear it.

“What
is
it?”

Angel paused, his four closest eyes looking back at me – and that was when the fog struck out, one coiling tentacle twisting around Angel’s back leg. He screamed. The fog sucked him in, like he was caught in an undertow. His scream cut off as the fog swallowed him.

I should have run, right then, but I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I was about to see.

The fog formed a column in the middle of the silent street, with Angel hanging weightless in the centre of it, twitching, his eight legs clawing at the air. For a second, through a red haze of panic, I thought he might be drowning and I half-crouched to spring in after him.

Then his front and back legs splayed out, and the middle ones drew in. His body ballooned, the thorax swelling into a head and the abdomen squaring out into a torso. Hands and feet and fingers and toes burst out of the ends of his legs like flowers blooming.

I saw him change, silhouetted against the orange street light, in the grip of the fog. I barely had time to register his human form – he was young, brown-skinned, his hair a dark shadow across his skull – and then he writhed, flailed, clutched at his head.

And it burst.

A violent splash of red hung in the fog. It was like a galaxy: shards of bone, strings of skin and muscle, spiralling around a slowly-expanding cloud made of a million droplets of blood.

My back legs fell out from under me and I sprawled on the pavement. I coughed, and then slammed my jaws together: no time for vomiting.

The fog pulsated, contracted, and then relaxed. His body dropped to the ground. Blood fell like rain.

I scrambled up and ran, blindly, stumbling over my paws. My vision closed in and the buildings seemed to curl up and around me, a tunnel of brick and concrete with a roof of leaves. The shadows of trees clawed the ground as it passed underneath me. My paws thudded a drumbeat on the hard road. My bones jangled together.

I didn’t know if the fog was following me, if it was falling behind or right on my tail. I couldn’t look back.

A burst of light, a banshee screech and a blur of movement right in front of me. Pure instinct threw me to one side, my left flank coming down hard on the pavement, as the metal monster swerved and hurtled past.

Just a car. I got up, looked around. The street was full of shifting shadows and patches of light. The windows of the tall houses glowered down at me like a hundred cold, dead eyes. But I couldn’t see the fog. I paused, panting, turning round and round on the spot and peering into every gap and shadow and turning for any sight of a searching tendril. There was none.

The time for vomiting finally arrived and I threw up, messily, and for what felt like a long time.

It took me a long time to get home, even though I was just around the corner. I could hardly move an inch without stopping, trembling, to look all around me. At one point a gust of wind stirred the hairs at the end of my brush and I fell down, paralysed, convinced the fog had found me, the end had come, my head was about to be shattered like an egg. I retched and threw up again, a trickle of hot bile stinging the back of my throat, and couldn’t move for five minutes.

When I made it to my house, there was no way in on the ground floor. I had to go around to the back gate, climb up the fire escape to my window and turn back into a human, naked and shivering, to lift the frame.

After I’d climbed inside I caught my reflection in the mirror. I had a fine spray of Angel’s blood spattered across my shoulders.

I suppose I should’ve showered. I couldn’t. This wasn’t like last time. I could
feel
what I would do if I could bring myself to do anything at all. I walked to the door of the bathroom and just looked inside, I don’t know how long for.

I felt like a shell of frozen stone, with a hot core of molten fear boiling deep inside. I pulled on the first clothes that came to hand and sat down on my bed.

My hair stirred in the breeze from the open window, and I gave a little squeak of a yell and almost fell off the bed, clutching at my head. It was just the wind. I turned and clumsily slammed the window down.

There were running footsteps on the stairs. My door burst open and my mother stood there. She had the bunched-up sausage dress clenched in one hand, like a hawk with a limp corpse in its talons. Her face was scarlet, which made the tiny face-lift scars around her ears stand out white and proud, and her blue-green eye shadow look ghoulish and wrong.

She hurled the dress at me. The material fluttered through the air and fell limply at my feet, but one of the earrings flew out of the folds and struck true, stinging the side of my neck. I flinched.

“Where have you been? How did you get…” her eyes flashed to the window. She sucked in a lungful of air through her teeth. “You ungrateful sack of… of…” she stalked across the room to the window and threw it open. I didn’t move, didn’t even follow her with my eyes. “This used to squeak! Why doesn’t...” She grabbed my shoulders, her fingernails digging in hard, and twisted me around. “Answer me, did you put oil on this? Have you been sneaking out? How long has this been going on?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t meet her eyes. She drew her hand back and slapped me, hard.

“
How dare you
run out like that? I was
humiliated
. Where did you go, eh? You haven’t been drinking.” She sniffed. “You smell disgusting. What did you do?”

I didn’t answer, and she slapped me again, and then again, harder. I felt her ring catch on my cheek and a dull ache settled there, like an insect burrowing in. I felt tears running boiling hot down my face. Mum was saying more things, but I didn’t hear her anymore. I felt her coil her fingers in my hair and shake me, felt the pinprick-sharp pain on my scalp, but I tuned out her words. What could she possibly be saying to me that was worth my while listening to? I focused on a shiny button on her dress, through the watery haze in front of my eyes, letting the way it glinted fill my world.

She calmed, eventually. She always does. After all, if she were to beat me black and blue, there would be questions asked. She can’t have people thinking she’s not a good mother.

After she drew away, her hands shaking, I looked up at her. I could just about make out that there were tears on her face, too.

A hot ribbon of rage curled itself around my spine. She always does this. She always makes me think I’m the one that’s done something wrong, that if she’s mad it’s because I’ve driven her there. I’m glad the window was shut, because if it had been open I might have pushed her out. I would’ve happily gone to prison. It wouldn’t have affected my plans, and I didn’t need people to love me. I didn’t have an election to win.

“How dare you?” she moaned again, backing away. “You are grounded for
life
. I’m going to have that window boarded up. I’m going to… I can’t look at you.” She staggered out of the room and slammed the door.

Let her. Let her ground me for life. Let her lock me in the wardrobe until I was thirty. Let her pull my hair until it all fell out. I didn’t care.

I never wanted to go outside ever again. Outside, there was fog that could make my head burst open and leave my decapitated naked body spraying blood across the road. There were mad pigeons that smelled of death, and shapeshifters who would bicker over how to run their club while the world rotted all around them. It wasn’t an adventure any more. It wasn’t freedom. It was just death.

I curled up on my bed and shut my eyes and swore, on everything I had ever held dear, on my life and on art and chips and freedom, that I would never shift again.

CHAPTER NINE

I didn’t sleep. I lay on my bed in my clothes, staring into the darkness until exhaustion crept up and slipped underneath my skin like a sheet of ice, but I couldn’t shut my eyes. They were raw and stinging – every so often a wave of tears swelled up and burst through, and I’d let out a strangled sob or two, and then swallow the tears again.

Every time I tried to go to sleep there was a swish, a thud or a tiny click, and my stomach twisted itself up, pushing my thundering heart into my throat. I clamped my eyes shut and tried not to think about heart failure. I was waiting for the fog to catch up to me, just waiting for the worst – but meanwhile, the routine noises of the night were going to kill me.

There was a rushing sound outside the window. I gritted my teeth and threw my arm over my face. I wasn’t going to look. It was the wind in the tree, out in the courtyard. I knew that. I didn’t need to check.

I was sweating, the wetness prickling in my hair and at the base of my spine. When I shut my eyes, all I could see was Angel’s blood and bone hanging in the air. I could still taste the vomit, the corrupted taste of horror and chicken fat lingering at the back of my throat. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I hadn’t even washed his blood off my shoulders.

Something outside rattled and scraped.

I wasn’t going to look. I wasn’t. There was a line, and this was me drawing it – I might be shivering and sweating and planning to run and hide, I might be throwing away the best thing I’d ever had, but I wasn’t going to sit and stare all night, waiting for my death to roll up to the window.

Taptap. Taptaptap.

I sat up like a puppet pulled on strings. Panic blinded me for a second and I grabbed the first thing that came to hand – my pillow – and held it in front of me.

My room shifted into focus, full of the dim orange light from the streetlamps outside.

Taptaptap.

There
was
something out there. I bit back a scream and crawled backwards up the bed. There was a patch of twitchy blackness perched outside, almost pressed right up against the glass. I could feel it watching me. It tapped on the window again.

It wasn’t the fog. It was a bird – enormous, as big as a buzzard, with sleek black feathers that gleamed with a weird blue-orange iridescence.

A raven.

It tapped again, with a thick black beak longer than my fingers. I clutched the pillow to my chest, uselessly, and wiped at my eyes.

You’ll never see a raven
, Addie had said.
They never come out of their Tower
. And yet, here one was. It tapped once more and turned a glimmering yellow eye against the window, staring in at me.

I went over, my knees quivering underneath me, and opened the window a tiny crack.

A flood of questions rose in my head.

Who are you? What do you want? Are you from the Conspiracy? Do you live in the Tower of London? How does that even work, do you fly around the White Tower all day being stared at by tourists? Why are you here now?

No
. I ran a hand into my hair. I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want anything except to be left alone.

“Go away,” I said. “Shoo. I’m not interested.”

It opened its beak and gave a long, deep croak. Then it tilted its head. “Skuuuuuulk,” it said. “Maaaaagraaaat.”

I stumbled back, hugging the pillow, horror rising in my throat.

But then I remembered Year Nine English. Mr Howard had insisted that ravens could mimic speech like parrots, so it was entirely possible that the one in the Edgar Allen Poe poem had been taught to say spooky things to wind up the narrator, possibly by an angry neighbour.

At the time we all thought he was crazy. Right now, I could’ve hugged him.

“What, ‘nevermore’ wasn’t creepy enough?” I snapped. “I’m serious. I don’t want to talk to you. Sod off!”

Quoth the raven: “Naooo.”

I shut the window and threw myself down on the bed with my head under my pillow. But it was no good. The raven started tapping again, a long tattoo of annoying chipping noises. I couldn’t leave it doing that. What if Mum heard? What if it broke the window?

“Oh God,” I sighed. “I don’t want this. I don’t want anything to do with any of this.”

The talking raven outside my window glared in at me with its piercing yellow eyes, and I glared back with my watery red ones.

Then I got up again and opened the window.

The raven hopped in and fluttered over to perch on the top of my computer, its massive wings sending scraps of homework fluttering across the floor.

“I’ll...” I coughed, cleared my sore throat. “I’ll change so we can talk properly. Wait there. And don’t look!” I slipped into the bathroom, pulled off my clothes and twisted myself into fox-form. It was almost easy now. I hesitated in the bathroom for a second and pawed at the carpet, my flanks heaving. It felt so natural. My ears twitched and I raised my head to taste the air.

My room smelled mostly of me – my own body scent with a hefty chemical overlay of cleaning products, pencil shavings, a little make-up and sticky, sweet hairspray – but the raven’s scent was in there too. He smelled of old, wet stone and wood.

And you’re still so new,
said a mutinous voice in the back of my mind.
Imagine how much better at this you could be in time. Imagine the worlds that would be open to you if you weren’t such a coward.

But I am
, the rest of me retorted.
I’m a chicken and a yellowbelly, and this is the last time I’m changing for anybody.

I padded back into my room and stared up at the raven perched on my computer screen.

“What do you want?” I asked. “I can’t talk long. If my mother hears something…”

I hesitated, bleakly entertained by the notion of Mum finding a fox and a raven conversing in her daughter’s empty bedroom in the middle of the night.

The raven tipped forward, his yellow eyes glinting in the streetlight. “My name is Yeoman Warder Blackwell.” I blinked at him, surprised – his voice was softer than I’d expected. There was none of the harsh raven’s caw in it. He shuffled his talons on the edge of the computer screen and dipped his head again in a sort of salute. “I need to know what happened to you tonight.”