Skulk (12 page)

I needled the carpet uneasily.

“Margaret, I know it doesn’t seem like this right now, but I promise if you can talk it through you will feel better.”

“Meg,” I corrected him automatically.

“Meg, I’m sorry,” he repeated.

“How do you even know anything happened? Were you following me?” I whined.

I don’t care,
I reminded myself. But I knew it wasn’t true.

A boy died. He
died
, and I still had his blood on my fur. Another shifter’s corpse, right in front of me, and I had no idea who they were or why they’d died. Again.

“I was following the spider,” he said. He took off, fluttered over to the window and hopped out. “Shall we continue this outside?” he said, twisting his head at an inhuman angle to look up at the roof.

The cold breeze coming through the window stirred my fur and my ears twitched. I realised how stuffy and stifling my room had become. It couldn’t hurt to just step out and feel the air on my face. We were high up, so I’d probably see the fog coming.

Of course, I wouldn’t have much chance to escape, unless I sprouted wings like Blackwell’s and flew away.

I shook myself, twisting head to tail like a dog coming out of the sea.

“All right, fine,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I always wanted the roof of my house to be a secret, romantic getaway spot where I could sit and look out over London and sketch and not think about my mother. The reality was a bit different. The fire-escape that ran past my window ended in steps so steep they were almost a ladder, and it hadn’t been a pleasant climb, especially when my vision was blurred with furious tears. It’d been freezing cold, uncomfortable and not the least bit romantic.

It was actually slightly easier as a fox – the steps were almost on a reasonable scale, and my brush helped me keep my balance. Blackwell circled above while I was making the climb, a black hole of a shape against the grey-orange sky.

It was darker up on the roof, and I kept my muzzle low to my paws as I padded carefully up the sloping tiles to the flat section that ran the length of the house. I smelled traffic and the deep green scent of leaves in the trees that lined our road, pigeon shit and the faint scent of something salty and sizzling. Was one of our neighbours cooking at this time of night?

When I got to the flat part of the roof and looked up I could just make out the yellowy urban starscape of lights that never went out in the skyscrapers beyond Hyde Park. The wind chill made my eyes water, but even as I huddled in the lee of a chimney stack I felt a little better for having the open sky over my head.

Blackwell circled once more around the roof and then landed in front of me and folded his wings close to his body, hunching a little to shelter himself from the wind. He blinked, and I realised he had a thin set of sideways eyelids, like a lizard. “Awrite. Meg. If you’re ready, I need to ask you: when did you first see the spider?”

“No, I want some answers first,” I said, taking a deep breath of cool air as if it was a stiff shot. “I want to know who you are and why you care about what happened to Angel.”

Blackwell let out a soft
cawwww
. “Was that his name?” He shifted his wings, flapped once and settled again. “I’ve been following him for a few days. I thought he knew something that could help me.”

“Help you do what?” I asked.

Blackwell hesitated. He was still and silent for nearly a full minute, so long that I started to swish my brush around my paws nervously, wondering if he’d heard me. “Help me do what?” he said eventually. “That’s actually a good question, one I don’t have a very good answer to yet.” He sighed. “Stopping the fog and saving the world. That’s what I wanted Angel to help me with.”

“Oh, really.” I gave him my best, most withering foxy glare.

“Well, close enough.” He flapped his wings and took off, fluttering up to perch on the chimney stack. He looked all around him, over the glimmering lights of London, and fixed his gaze in the direction of the City. “Have you wondered yet what this is all about?
Why
you have the power to turn into a fox? Where that power comes from?”

“Well, I… I Googled it,” I said weakly.

Blackwell chuckled. “Ach. And how did that go for you?”

“I gave up pretty quickly,” I admitted. In my defence, I’d barely had time to breathe since last night, let alone ponder the mysteries of the universe. Still, I felt a bit foolish for never thinking to ask Addie or Don. “Does it… does it have to come from somewhere?”

“Shall I tell you the story as it was told to me when I was initiated?”

Initiated?
I thought of Don’s little speech about the rules. Was that all the initiation I was going to get? I felt a little jealous of Blackwell. It sounded like the Conspiracy did things properly.

“I was told that long ago –
long
ago, before the Romans, before there was anything here but scattered villages and the river – a magical weapon was forged.”

“OK,
wait
.” I couldn’t let him just go on like this. “Magic? You’re talking about a magic spell. Like,
wizards
and stuff?”

Blackwell gave a low croak. “You’re a fox, talking to a raven about killer fog. What, exactly, makes
wizards
so hard to believe?” He hopped from one foot to the other. “They roamed the countryside, fighting constantly, tearing great wounds in the earth and building their towers taller and taller. The taller the towers, the more powerful and more competitive they became.”

I followed his beady black gaze over to the skyscrapers in the City, and my ears twitched back involuntarily.

“All-out magical war raged for years,” he went on, “Until one man decided to put an end to it. He created a weapon that brought together five points of power… five elements of the universe, if you like.”

“If I like,” I muttered. This was all sounding a bit
Lord of the Rings
to me, but he had a point: how could I know what was a fairytale and what was real, anymore?

“I know,” he said, presumably reading my expression. “It gets a wee bit worse before it gets better – will you bear with me?”

“I haven’t got a lot of choice at this point,” I pointed out, settling down with my brush curled around me and my head on my paws.

“Aye, in for a penny,” Blackwell acknowledged, giving a short nod. “Well, this wizard and his weapon were quite prepared to wipe out every living thing in a hundred miles. But the wizard wasn’t alone; he had an apprentice. And she had a change of heart. She took control of the weapon and turned it on the wizard. She threw down the towers and sent their warring masters away; then she tore the weapon apart. Her own power wasn’t enough to destroy it, so she hid the pieces. She set the five weards, one to guard each of the elements and keep them separate.”

I’d decided not to interrupt again, but I couldn’t let this one go. “Weirds?”

“We-ards, with an A – from ‘ward’. That’s us. She took five animals and borrowed their shapes, lending the weards the ability to change and blend in with both humans and animals. And the wizard’s assistant set herself as the first leodweard – the ward of the land. She was a metashifter. She could change into any one of the five shapes she’d picked, to help and advise the weards and make sure the stones were safe. Once the weards had hidden their stone, she was the only one who could see or move it.”

A shiver ran down my back, from my ears to my tail.

He could talk all night about weirds and wizards and towers… the magic word was
stone
, and he’d just said it.

Little details flashed into my mind like fireworks going off. When I first saw the fog it was near the jewellery shops, with James, who’d had a bag that rattled suspiciously. There were jewellery shops on the street where I’d met Angel. The fog had actually come out of one, before it killed him.

“What were the five elements? I thought there were only four – earth, water, wind, fire,” I said, examining the fur on my paws closely. If I could have crossed my fingers at this point, I would’ve been crossing them that the Skulk didn’t have something rubbish and made up like “heart”.

“Those aren’t the elements we’re dealing with. The way the Conspiracy tell it, we guard the element of Mind in the wizard’s own tower – rebuilt a hundred times over the centuries, but essentially in the same place. The Skulk guarded the Hands. The Rabble had the Sight, the Cluster had the Shadow, and the Horde had the Spirit.”

“How come nobody mentioned any of this to me? I was with the Skulk this evening and nobody ever said we had any kind of sacred duty.”

Blackwell shook his head. “I wish I knew. If what the Conspiracy has told me is right, we should be helping each other remember and keep our elements safe, and instead…” He made a disappointed clicking sound with his beak. “As far as I can tell, ours is the only one that’s locked away, safe in the White Tower. They’ve been lost and forgotten, and now I believe there’s someone using at least one of them. Exactly what for, I don’t know yet.”

He flapped back down to stand in front of me, his feathers puffing out around his chest.

“The fog you saw kill that poor shifter is a creation, a spell, most likely made with the power of at least one of the stones.”

All my fur stood on end and I clawed at the rough surface of the roof, tears springing to my eyes as I remembered the fleshy thud of Angel’s body hitting the street in front of me. “But – but someone
made
the fog? On purpose? It
ate his head.
”

“Not exactly. It consumed his mind, swallowed all his thoughts and memories. It – and its master – now knows everything he knew.”

A shuddering chill ran down my back. My tail swished to and fro almost of its own accord – I felt like there was a buzzing insect I needed to brush away.

Angel was on my locker when I put the sapphire away. If the fog was looking for it…

I swallowed hard. “I first saw Angel at my school,” I said.

Blackwell’s head twitched to the side. “When was this?”

“On Friday. And then I saw him here, I think, earlier this evening. But I wasn’t changed so he couldn’t talk to me. And then when I was coming back from the Skulk I was walking down the road and he ran into my path. He stopped me. I was…” I felt a twist of guilt and turned my head so I wasn’t looking at Blackwell. “I was angry with him. I mean, he was stalking me, I thought. But he said he’d been waiting. He wanted to talk to me about something that I’d found.”

I risked a look at Blackwell. His head twitched again as he realised I’d trailed to a halt.

“Go on. It’s all right,” he said.

“I found a giant gemstone,” I said, and Blackwell nearly fell over. He righted himself with a massive flap of his wings and gaped at me.

“You’ve
got
one of the elements?”

“Well, I – well, yes. Apparently. The Skulk shifter had it on him when he died.” Blackwell looked like he was going to speak, but then shut his beak with an audible click. He gestured with one wing for me to go on. “Angel told me he knew I had the stone and I’d left it in my locker. And then I saw the fog, and… and he was sucked in.”

Blackwell tipped his head back and shut his eyes for a moment. “So it knows,” he said weakly. “We may already be too late. Another one lost.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. Blackwell gave me a piercing glance.

“What do you mean?”

“I put the stone in my locker on Friday, morning, but I moved it later that day. I put it–”

“
Waaaark!
” Blackwell flailed with both wings, buffeting me with cold air. “Don’t tell me! We’re all in enough trouble if I get caught in the fog as it is.” He started to pace, his head bobbing as he took each step back and forth across the roof. “If you put it somewhere else but Angel thought it was still in your locker, there’s hope that whoever’s controlling the fog won’t have found it yet.”

“What do I do with it?” I asked. “If I get it tomorrow and bring it to you, can you–”“No, don’t bring it to the Tower,” Blackwell said sharply. “It’s best if you take it straight back to the Skulk.”

“But you said the Tower was safe.” I got to my paws and stretched. “I don’t think the Skulk even know about all this; how are they supposed to protect it if the fog comes after them?”

Blackwell said “Ach,” again and shook his head. “Awrite. You go to where you left the stone tomorrow and see if it’s still there. Then come and find me at the Tower and we can talk about it. And I’ll… I’ll do my best to help you.
Don’t
bring the stone. If the fog’s master hasn’t found it yet then it’ll be safer where it is.”

My eyes narrowed as I watched his feathers rustling in the stiff breeze. Was it my imagination, or did he seem even more twitchy than before?

What aren’t you telling me?

I didn’t ask – after all, he wouldn’t have told me. But a prickling feeling of unease settled in at the back of my neck.

“Are we agreed?” Blackwell asked.

I nodded. “All right. I’ll meet you at the Tower tomorrow, after school.”

“I’ll be looking out for you.” He leapt into the air, his wings stretching out to their full span, and flapped away. I stared after him until he was just a dim shadow against the orange-black sky, then lay down and rested my head on my paws.

This was crazy. It was something beyond horrifying – it was
absurd
. Magic spells, wizards, towers and magic jewels?

I growled at my own stupidity, the sound resonating low in my chest. This wasn’t absurd at all. Angel was dead. Whatever had killed him, I had to take it seriously. I owed him that much.

I climbed back down from the roof and in through my bedroom window, then shifted back to human form and took a shower, watching as the last of Angel swirled away down the drain. Afterwards I gazed at my reflection in the mirror for a second.

I was still weak from exhaustion and shock, but my strength was starting to return, slinking back like a loyal dog that’d been shut out in the rain.

Blackwell was right – crazy as our talk had been, I felt better for it. I wasn’t sure if I could trust him or believe his fairytale, but it was better than nothing. I wouldn’t just wait here to be eaten by weather. If there was a mind behind the fog, it could be stopped. Maybe it could be reasoned with, or thrown in jail, or
something
. At the very least if I kept the Skulk stone safe, perhaps I could stop it getting worse. Maybe I could even find a way to do what the metashifter hadn’t been able to – destroy it, for good.