Skulk (16 page)

The corridor was painted in plain cream, with a couple of pictures hanging on the walls – a painting of a heather-covered mountainside, a framed photograph of him with the Queen and another of a group of young men with Seventies moustaches and regulation hair. They were gathered around a regimental banner with thistles on it. One of them had to be Blackwell, but I couldn’t spot him in the sea of gingers. The sitting room beyond was oak-panelled and warm, with a large brown leather sofa taking up most of the floor-space. There were bookshelves on most of the walls. One of them was full of medals and certificates. I was crossing the room to get a better look when Blackwell emerged from another door, carrying two mugs.

He’d made tea. I could have hugged him. Instead I sat on his sofa, sipping at the sweet, hot caffeine while I told him everything that’d happened since he’d flown away last night.

He listened and nodded, and when I’d finished he put his mug down on the coffee table beside the sofa, and said “I’m very sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“But…” he sighed and ran his hand over his eyes. “I’m not sure how much I can help you.”

I stared at him for several seconds.

“But you’ve got to,” I said. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” I added, trying to keep my voice level. “We have to help my parents. We have to stop her getting the stone, don’t we? I thought that was what we were
for
.”

“I’m sorry,” said Blackwell. He scratched his ginger beard and shook his head. “You have no idea – you don’t know what I might have done, bringing you here.”

“What have you done?”

Blackwell stood up and walked away from me. He stood in front of the bookcase with all the medals in it, then gazed out through the thick, warped glass in the small window.

“I’m giving you the stone,” I pressed. “If the Skulk can’t keep it safe then you take it, keep it in the Tower. I’m telling you, it’s at my school, in the back garden.”

He raised his hands to stop me, too late, and groaned. “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”

“You just have to dig it up,” I went on. “All I’m asking you to do is tell me how I can fix this so Victoria will turn my parents back and leave me alone.”

“Oh, Meg, I wish it was as simple as that.”

“
Simple
.” I put my mug down hard on the coffee table. The loud noise made Blackwell glance out of the window again. “How is any of this
simple
?”

“The Skulk stone is Skulk business,” Blackwell said, as if every word was being twisted out of him like a cork out of a wine bottle. “The Conspiracy cannot officially get involved in Skulk business. That’s what Chief Warder Phillips says. He believes the other weards have forgotten their purpose and let their stones get lost, but he says we can’t get involved, not even to help the others keep their stones safe. None of the Conspiracy knows that I’ve been investigating this sorcerer – this Victoria. I’d be punished for letting you bring us into this.”

“
You
brought
me
into this,” I snapped. “You’re the one who turned up at my house in the middle of the night first, remember?” I twisted the edge of the Palace hoodie between my fingers.

“I know,” Blackwell sighed.

“Also, I don’t think it’s particularly fair to compare a scrubby bit of land near Willesden Junction to the
Tower of Fricking London
when it comes to keeping things safe!”

“It’s not just the Tower. There’s something the weard can do to keep their stone safe from outsiders.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I don’t know,” said Blackwell, and I rolled my eyes dramatically at him. “I’m sorry, the Conspiracy stone’s never been out of the Tower, so the protection hasn’t been broken. I haven’t even been up to the vault since I came here.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” I shook my head, boggling at his strange leaps of logic. “If we’ve all forgotten our purpose, your duty has to be to help us remember it. What about the apprentice from your story? I can’t remember the word…”

“The leodweard,” Blackwell said.

“The metashift. Didn’t that pass down like the shift? Isn’t there still one of those out there? If the Conspiracy won’t come down out of their tower and help the rest of us, isn’t it the metashifter’s job?”

“You’re right,” he said, “It should be. I heard whispers… gossip that there was a shifter out there with the power to be any one of the weards. I heard they’d been seen with the Cluster. But I was never able to find them, and if the knowledge of the elements has been forgotten, they wouldn’t know there was anything they were supposed to do.”

I threw my hands in the air and slumped back into the sofa, wincing as my clothes rubbed across the scrapes on my back. “Well then, you have the knowledge, you have to do it, don’t you?”

Blackwell didn’t answer for a second. He looked at the medals and certificates again. I peered at them over his shoulder. There was a red military cap in there, propped up at a rakish angle against the back of the bookcase.

“You’re right,” he said, very softly. “I have to share what I know.” He turned away from the bookcase and sat back down in the chair opposite me, leaning forward. I sat up involuntarily and bent my head towards him. “I used to be military police,” he said, meeting my eyes, speaking deliberately. “I know corruption when I see it.” He shook his head. “I never expected to find it here.”

Corruption?
“How can a group of shifters be corrupt?”

“Power corrupts, doesn’t it? We’re sitting on one fifth of what may have been the greatest weapon the world has ever seen. And the elements are powerful enough by themselves – this Victoria has conjured killer fog and transformed your parents. And others, by the sound of it. We don’t know which stones she’s got, but we know it’s no more than three out of the five.”

He paused to let this sink in, and I shuddered. “But, are you saying the Conspiracy are
letting
her get the other stones? Why?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I don’t know what’s in it for them. Maybe she’s paid them off or she has some leverage with Phillips. Maybe it’s not even that simple.”

I took a long breath, putting it all together in my mind. “So, if they find out that you know there’s something going on…”

“Or if they find out I’ve been disobeying my direct orders by trying to track down the other weards’ stones,” Blackwell continued. “I don’t know what they’ll do. Removing me from my position won’t be enough. The only way to take away someone’s shift is to kill them. I don’t know yet exactly what I’m dealing with.”

“God. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here,” I said. A cold lump of sadness settled in the bottom of my stomach. “I just – I had nowhere else to go.” I looked down at my nails. They were torn. And one of them had dried blood underneath it. “My parents,” I said. My voice had gone weak, almost mousy. I sort of hated it. “I don’t even like them and now they’re... gone.” I dragged my hand across my eyes, roughly, as if I could deny the tears welling up if I wiped them away with flair.

“No, I told you that you should come. Perhaps I should have trusted you with this yesterday. Either way, you see why I cannae get the Conspiracy involved with this, not yet.”

“So what am I supposed to do now?” I demanded.

“Maybe if you go and get the stone?”

I shook my head. “Oh no, no, no, I’m not going back there by myself. I just can’t.”

“Can’t another member of the Skulk go with you?” Blackwell asked.

“I’ve only ever met them once – how can I ask them to come and maybe get killed with me? Plus I don’t know where any of them live.”

Blackwell went quiet, thoughtful, for a few seconds.

“I do,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I stepped off the bus underneath the Westway flyover, the small change from the tenner Blackwell had given me to get here jingling in the front pocket of my hoodie.

“Go to the traveller site,” he’d said, “And you should be able to sniff her out.”

I knew where that site was. Right underneath the Westway roundabout, next to the stables and the sports centre, there was a big scrap metal yard and the only genuine trailer park I’d ever seen outside American television.

I pulled the hood up over my hair and hurried down the street. The quickest way to get there would be to change into a fox and slip through behind the houses, through the apocalyptic wasteland of concrete and gravel right underneath the flyover. I followed the advice Blackwell had given me and skulked around the backs of the houses, as close to their backyards as I could get without actually breaking and entering, looking for somewhere I could take off my clothes and leave them stashed somewhere safe. I finally found a dim corner where I could be alone, with a wheelie bin to hide the clothes under. I disrobed as quickly as I could, the chill night air and the fact that I was committing indecent exposure under the Westway roundabout competing to see which could make me shiver hardest.

As a fox I took a second to sniff around the base of the bin for scraps, hoping there’d be a bone or some stale bread, maybe even a mouldy potato. But there was nothing. My stomach rumbled.

I’d sometimes stared out of the car window as we shot across the flyover and wondered what kind of people lived in the trailers down below. Did traveller families live there permanently, or was it just a passing stop on the way to some better, greener place? Once or twice I’d seen children playing, chasing a ball or taking it in turns to ride a beaten-up bicycle round and round the gravel yard between the trailers. But apart from that there were gaps in my imagination where real life people ought to have been.

I hadn’t given it all that much thought. Just written it off as something I didn’t know, and would never need to.

But now I knew.

Addie lived there.

Blackwell was right: I crossed the threshold, under the metal arch, and I could immediately pick out her scent among the smells of traffic pollution, fast food and diesel oil. It was because she was younger, I guessed, as I sniffed around the edges of the trailers, trying to figure out which one belonged to her family. I could pick up the scents of
shifter
and
growing
and
female
, all tied up with fleas and something musty and sort of like wet paper.

I tried not to think about my house – comfortable, warm, furnished in the finest mix of modern and antique, and only a little bit like a prison. I tried not to pity Addie. After all, my house had been warm and safe right up to the point Victoria walked in. Now I might never be able to go back.

I followed the scent around another trailer. It seemed to lead around to the back – maybe they had a back door? The gap between the trailer and the wall of the park was tight, though, and only got tighter as I padded down it.

Addie’s scent suddenly grew so overwhelming I had to look around to check she hadn’t appeared out of thin air. There was a line here. I could almost
see
it – a line of marked ground. This place was hers. Her territory.

I stepped around the corner, and found myself in a little den. Cardboard boxes and a plastic sheet formed the roof. There were blankets on the floor. And Addie was curled up on top of them, her head on her paws, asleep.

She didn’t even live
in
the trailers. She lived
under
them. Pity kicked in and I edged towards her, trying to make a sound loud enough to wake her, but not loud enough to startle her.

“Addie? It’s Meg. Addie?” I was close enough to touch her. I nudged the blanket a little with my nose.

One of her paws lashed out and her mouth opened in a violent hiss. I sprang away, panting, my heart hammering. She staggered to her feet, blinking hard, her eyes still full of sleep.

“Get out! Get out! I’ll rip out your throat!” Her jaws snapped viciously in the air just where my head would’ve been if I hadn’t jerked out of the way, then she dropped back into a defensive crouch, her back to the wall of cardboard and her teeth and claws bared.

“Addie, I’m sorry, it’s me, Meg, I – I’m sorry!”

Addie sniffed the air and the slits of her eyes prised fully open.

“Meg? What the hell?” She sat back on her haunches, her flanks heaving. “What are you doing here?” She sniffed the air again, looking around jumpily. “Are you alone?”

“Yes, it’s just me, I... I just came to...” I came to ask her to help me, but her eyes were glazed and panicky and I couldn’t just spring my troubles on her like this. “It’s OK. It’s just me.”

Addie panted a little more, and then seemed to relax. Her ears tipped back, sadly. “How did you find me?”

“Um. Blackwell, from the Tower – from the Conspiracy – he told me you were here.”

“You spoke to a raven? And he knew where I was?” Addie’s stance turned defensive again. “How did
he
know?”

“He’s been keeping tabs on a few of us,” I said. “He showed up at my window last night.”
God, was it only last night?
“It’s a bit complicated…”

Addie licked her paw and washed behind her ear. “I wish you hadn’t come here.” She didn’t sound angry any more. She sounded miserable.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realise. Addie, are you... homeless?”

“What about it?” Addie snapped, and I cringed back, feeling blunt and stupid.

“N-nothing, I just...” I started backing away. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe I’d be able to find someone else to help me. Hell, maybe I’d brave the school again by myself.

Addie shook her head and sat back. “Hey, look, Princess... I didn’t mean to. Y’know. Did I get you?”

“Nah. I’m fine.”

“Good. You look hungry.”

“Uh – yeah, actually.”

“What happened, did the Ritz shut for the day?”

“I... actually...” I swallowed. “Something happened to my parents. I can’t go home. Maybe ever.”

Addie’s eyes widened. She turned and rooted around behind a flap of cardboard and pulled out a small box. It had several half-chewed chicken bones in it. “Here,” she said, pushing it towards me.

“Oh, Addie.” I couldn’t help giving another glance around at the cardboard walls and roof, the crumpled blanket. On a second look I was pretty sure it had been a jumper once. There was a cheery kitten half-chewed away on one corner. “Are you sure?”