The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) (18 page)

“But if it’s hurting her,” Lily protested.

Novel held her closer, and shook his head.

“You heard the voice,” he soothed, his voice soft and low. “It was warning us about an enemy that walks within our walls. It… it was trying to help us.”

“Like the white light,” Lily added quickly. “This could be the same spirit that saved you at the show?”

Novel stared straight ahead, his face blank with the nothingness of being lost in one’s own world of thoughts.

“I think it is,” he breathed.

“So there’s another enemy,” Lily surmised, “one we’re overlooking.”

She shivered again, sparing tender looks between her sleeping friend, and her boyfriend, lost to secret, fearful thoughts.

“Well, that’s just my bloody luck, isn’t it?” she added with a sigh.

Surveillance

“So the Romanian family were prosecuted for desecration of the grave,” Bradley Binns explained, “but the local community of the village didn’t persecute them for digging up their grandfather. In fact, they repeated the incident as a whole village several days later, and drove a stake through the old man’s heart to be sure he wasn’t going to rise again.”

The young lecturer gave a chuckle, and clicked his projector remote to show the next slide. It was an image of the open grave he was discussing, with the prone figure of a corpse laying in it, and the aforementioned stake sticking out of his back. Lily put her hand over her mouth, leaning close to Lawrence so as not to be heard when she whispered.

“I swear, if I have to see another dead body on PowerPoint…” she murmured. “This guy is obsessed with them.”

Lawrence gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.

“I didn’t think a crime and punishment module would be so morbid,” he concurred, “I thought we’d do more about the legal side, Victorian courts of law, you know?”

“I know,” Lily replied. “All year it’s been witch hunts, bogeymen and folklore.”

The voodoo boy frowned just at the moment when Bradley’s eyes travelled in his and Lily’s direction. Lily did her best to perk up and look interested, since she had chosen to sit in the front row for a change and try to feed off of Lawrence’s discipline and concentration. Even the usually-studious boy seemed disinterested in that particular topic, though, and he let his frustration show even when Bradley quirked a brow in his direction.

“Something wrong, Mr Seward?” the professor asked.

“I’d like to know why the Romanian police were wasting their time patrolling graveyards in 1890, arresting grief-stricken families,” Lawrence said. “Why weren’t they doing something useful, like catching serial killers, instead of hunting these imaginary vampires?”

Bradley sucked at his cheeks, puffing out his chest – which was covered in a hideous Argyle wool creation to combat the chilly weather – and put his hands on his hips in an attempt at authority.

“Some cultures take the supernatural much more literally and seriously than we do here in England, Mr Seward,” he chided. “Try not to be so cynical. I think it’s fascinating to believe that curses, witchcraft and the like are real, tangible things for these people.”

“Oh, do you?” Lawrence snapped back. “Well, bully for you, Sir.”

And with that, the lanky boy was up on his tattooed feet. Lily wasn't the only one in the lecture hall to be shocked by Lawrence’s behaviour, for he was usually thoughtful, quiet and polite to everyone who knew him. But Lily did think she had a good idea of what had turned his mood so sour. Since that awful, terrifying morning on Christmas Day, Jazzy had had five attacks of her sudden, weakening sickness. Though they had all vanished within twenty-four hours of emerging, they were definitely worsening every time, and Lawrence was feeling the horror of them more than anyone else.

“I’m sorry,” Lily stammered in Lawrence’s wake, “I’ll see if I can get him back.”

Bradley just nodded, looking down with an expression that smacked of both shame and irritation.

There were only twenty minutes left of the Modern History lecture, and by the time Lily found Lawrence, she was pretty sure it would all be over. His long legs had taken him all the way to the Tower Block, where Jazzy would have been studying if she hadn’t been feeling too weak to attend her classes that day. Lily found the boy standing on a mound of frosty grass, looking straight across at the block, into the window where Jazzy should have been sitting, looking back at him.

“I love her,” Lawrence said, still staring straight ahead. “I know you know that already. But I
love
her, Lily, and she’s suffering at home right now, and I’m here and I can’t do anything about her pain, even when I’m right beside her.”

Lawrence clenched his dark fists, and Lily rushed to prize his fingers apart before he dug his nails through to break the skin of his palms.

“It helps when you’re beside her,” she told him, “even if you can’t cure her, I know Jazzy feels better when you’re there.”

Lawrence nodded, and he let Lily force his fingers apart. He splayed his huge hands and ran them up through his short, black hair, closing his eyes to the stark winter day on campus. Lily heard the familiar shudder of breathing, like he was on the verge of an explosion of angry tears, and she tugged at his sleeve sharply.

“Let’s go home and see her,” Lily urged, “and sod the rest of classes for today. We’ll go back and get your stuff from Binns’s lecture hall, and you can buy Jazz a KitKat from the café.”

Lawrence broke into a smile, his eyes a little watery as he opened them again.

“No,” he groaned softly, “because she’ll do that horrible thing where she uses it as a straw and melts it in her cup of tea.”

“And you’ll complain about it,” Lily assured him, “and she’ll laugh at you, and we’ll all be all right again.”

After a moment of deep breathing to suck up his feelings, the voodoo boy agreed. He seemed relieved when he and Lily reached the lecture hall and found it empty, perhaps a little embarrassed by his outburst at Bradley earlier. The professor had left the still-broken door of the hall ajar, and Lily spotted Lawrence’s bag and books piled neatly on the front desk, ready for collection. As Lawrence moved to clear his things away, Lily realised that Bradley mustn’t have stepped out for long. His winter overcoat was slung over a chair beside the desk, and his laptop was still connected to the projector. It was also open, unlocked, and ready for use.

“Wait,” Lily said. Lawrence paused where he’d been about to turn for the exit. “Watch the door a minute,” Lily asked him, “I want to see something.”

She had never gotten to ask those questions about Bradley’s ancestor, the one that Jazzy was certain she’d seen wandering the Imaginique at night. With Novel’s certainty that there was a protective ghost somewhere in the old theatre, Lily’s curiosity was piqued anew, and the open laptop was too much of a temptation to resist. Lily rounded the desk, and began to tap away at the touchpad and keys.

“What are you doing?” Lawrence whispered. “That’s private.”

“I just want to see if I can find that picture of the girl he used on our assignment,” Lily shot back. “It’ll just take a sec.”

She skimmed through various files in Bradley’s documents folder, looking everywhere from
Assignments
to
Resources
, but finding nothing of interest. A brief search of his pictures folder only told her that Bradley hadn’t saved any personal snaps to the machine, and she was almost ready to give up when she spotted one file that had been separated to the desktop. It was entitled
Research
, which seemed innocent enough, yet Lily felt a twinge in her stomach that compelled her to stare at that simple little word. Forrester had told her to follow her instincts, and now was as good a time as any to take that advice.

One double-click later, Lily found herself staring at a folder within the folder, and this one tied her stomach in a knot when she read its title:

Lemarick Novel

“Come and see this,” Lily insisted.

There was such seriousness in her tone that Lawrence didn’t even protest. His dark brows shot up his face when he too beheld Novel’s name on the folder, and when Lily gave the touchpad a tap to open it up, they both gasped. There were hundreds of documents within the folder, each dated at various times throughout history. The earliest was labelled
Sighting – 1788
, and Lily could see by the properties that many of the files had been written by different authors at different times. As she scrolled down, the authorship often changed, until the author’s name started to read
B. Binns
consistently. Bradley’s documents were all labelled the same way, and all dated for the current academic year.

“Open that one,” Lawrence said, pointing, “that’s when he came to the show on the solstice.”

Lily obeyed, and she and Lawrence scanned the words of the report with interest.

“‘The subject seemed visibly shaken by the presence of the white spirit in the theatre,’” Lily read, her brow furrowed in confusion.

“Subject,” Lawrence repeated slowly, his eyes speeding on down the page. “He’s studying Monsieur Novel, but what for?”

“Look at this,” Lily said, pointing sharply. “This bit here says ‘The subject shows irrevocable signs of his guilt’.”

“Guilt?” Lawrence asked. “What does Novel have to be guilty about?”

Bradley’s written words were cold and formal as he condemned Novel, and Lily felt as though she was reading the writings of a man very different from the nervy knitwear fan who had introduced himself as her new professor some months ago. He wrote, with no small hint of irony, about crime and punishment, and it was clear from his report that he knew everything there was to know about Novel’s supernatural abilities. Bradley Binns had been pretending to be ignorant for months, but as soon as Lily read the word
shadeborn
in his files, she knew exactly where the true guilt lay.

“He’s a shadehunter!” she exclaimed hoarsely. “Don’t you see? He’s a hunter, and he’s after Novel for some perceived crime.”

This, Lily felt certain, was what Jazzy’s sleep possession was all about. The voice had come to warn Lily and Novel that there was a traitor in their midst, someone who appeared to be a friend, and someone they had totally overlooked as a possible enemy. Lily closed all the files quickly, and she and Lawrence rushed from the lecture hall to get home and report what they had found, but not before Lawrence could vent his hesitance at the cafeteria vending machines.

“Are we being too hasty here?” he asked in a low tone. “We could be jumping to conclusions left, right and centre. Maybe Bradley really is just an obsessive nut about supernatural people?”

“Then why study Novel, and not the rest of us?” Lily challenged. She shook her head resolutely. “No, this is Victoria Havers all over again. We’ve ratted out a spy posing as an ordinary human, and we’re going to be ready when he strikes. I don’t want to see Novel put out of action again. I’m going to be the one to save
him
this time.”

Blood and Footfalls

It was the dead of night when Lily awoke to the sound of footsteps. She had an early lecture with the new enemy, Bradley Binns, and wanted to be alert for it, but her watch told her that she’d barely been asleep for an hour when the noise woke her. She sat up in the four poster bed, arms wrapped around her body against the evening chill, and listened. Novel was not beside her, but she knew her boyfriend’s catlike steps were impossible to hear at night. Whoever was walking around now had a serious clomp to their gait.

Swiftly and silently, Lily lifted herself from her bed on a fluttering wave of air and gravity, hovering past the bed’s curtains and out towards the closed wooden door. The footsteps sounded as though they were coming up the stairs right beside the bedroom, thumping haughtily as they passed it by. Lily pressed her ear hard against the cold old timber of the door, and she distinctly heard a low, gruff huff of breath from the person on the other side. The footfalls carried on upwards, either into the attic space or onto the roof, and Lily eased the door open gently when they’d passed by.

“Lily! Come quick!”

With all the talk of ghosts, intruders and footsteps, Lily jumped out of her skin at the voice from nowhere. She was coming to recognise Gerstein’s low tone and thick accent though, and by the time her heart had stopped hammering, she had found the simulacra in the wall. He was inhabiting a portrait of a Russian ballerina, which belonged to Zita Bosko, and the stick-thin lady in the tutu was waving frantically at Lily from inside the frame.

“Come on! Come on! No time to lose!” Gerstein urged wildly.

“What is it?” Lily asked, already half-floating, half-running down the first set of stairs.

Gerstein followed her through posters and paintings, and Lily only saw flashes of his face as he appeared and disappeared between them. His voice, though, was clear as day, and unchanging in its panic when he exclaimed.

“It’s Jazzy. I think she may be dying.”

Lily felt the crushing weight of ill fortune as it gripped her mind and soul. Her body rushed on, lips unable to speak when other residents of the theatre came to ask why she was running, and all she could do was focus her mind into a desperate loop of defiant prayers.

Please, no. Please, no. Anything but Jazzy. Please, no.

But Gerstein was right, and Lily knew it by the bloodstains all over her best friend’s bed. Jazzy lay still, almost as though she was simply sleeping, and the blood had seeped into an inkblot about the size of an open umbrella, creeping out around her on the mattress. It was coming from her top half, somewhere visible above the bed’s cosy purple duvet, which would now be ruined forever, whether Jazzy lived to use it again or not.

Those other members of the troupe who’d been disturbed by Lily’s mad dash were not far behind her, and no sooner than Dharma Khan was in the room, she let out a piercing scream. The scream of the siren was no mere outpouring of shock, for it rang like a deafening alarm, shaking Lily’s head until she felt the blood rushing into her veins, priming her for action. Other footfalls were crashing all over the building at the siren’s warning, but Lily couldn’t think of anything but Jazzy as she rushed to the girl’s side.

The siren scream had woken her up. Jazzy’s eyes fluttered and rolled back in her head, unfocused and hazy from her loss of blood. When Lily knelt beside her, she felt the dampness of the red ooze on the carpet soaking into her knees, but she reached into the bloody mess beside her friend’s curly black hair and pulled it aside. The wound was on Jazzy’s neck, and it formed a small, circular puncture. Blood continued to pour from the wound as Lily gaped at it, helpless, and the voices behind her grew ever-louder and more intense.

“Where’s Novel?” Lawrence was shouting.

“He didn’t hear me?” Dharma retorted. “He always hears me!”

“Find him Dharma!” Zita screeched. “Cry again, out there! Don’t stop until we have him!”

Jazzy’s weary head turned towards the noise, and Lily reached out to grab her hand. Everything she’d ever known about First Aid scrambled through her mind in a huge mess of words and diagrams, and Lily’s whole body shook with tears as she realised her lack of knowledge. The bleeding was too profuse to be stemmed, and Jazzy was losing more and more blood by the minute. Novel wasn’t coming, that much was clear from the screams and shouts in the doorway, and that meant the only person capable of saving Jazzy’s life was missing in action. All Jazzy had was her useless best friend, gripped by fear, who had gotten her into all this trouble in the first place.

That was the moment that Lily felt Jazzy’s pulse thrumming against her fingertips. It was a clear rhythm, and faster’s than Lily own, beating out the time for each new spurt of blood to escape from Jazzy’s dying body. Lily thought about that blood, how it flowed and gushed like a torrent or a stream, and she felt a stir of power in her own shuddering veins as one clear thought came to her mind. Her mother had always told her that blood was thicker than water, a quaint old saying that had turned out to have very little meaning in the case of Tamara Coltrane.

Now, Lily took the phrase on with a whole new perspective as she raised her hands, palms flat but shaking where they hovered over Jazzy’s neck and chest.

“Hang on, Jaz,” Lily said, her voice trembling, but resolute. “Just you cling to that last scrap of life for a second longer, all right?”

Jazzy’s eyelids fluttered, and Lily took that as a sign to begin. Her concentration came much more easily than she would have imagined, perhaps fuelled by the desperation not to see that deathly pallor overcome her best friend’s face for good. Lily focused on the blood, feeling it swish and gush at the very place where it was leaving Jazzy’s neck, and with a focus so deep that it tightened the muscles of her heart, Lily made it stop.

Jazzy had still lost too much blood, and Lily knew that forcing what little she had left back into its usual flow wasn’t enough to save her. Holding one hand to sustain the re-routing of the blood in Jazzy’s veins, Lily curled the fingers of the other like she was pulling a thick-rooted plant from the ground. Inches below her outstretched fingers, the blood from the bed and carpet began to rise and re-form itself in the air. The troupe behind her gasped, but Lily never broke her focus once as the blood became a swirling ball of crimson liquid in her grip.

“Now for the tricky part,” Lily whispered, her own chest weak and shivering from the strain of her magic. “Precision, Coltrane. Precision.”

Novel had told her that her focus and technique was getting better, and Lily was relieved to find that he was right. The ball of blood became a thick strand, coiling like a length of rope in the air. Then, at Lily’s willed command, it began to thin itself out, lessening to a dark, shadowy line of life-giving liquid. The blood slithered like a snake through the tense air of the bedroom, until it found the open wound that Lily had stemmed, but not yet closed. The blood-string wound its way back into Jazzy’s body, and Lily felt the rush of life as it returned to join the natural thrumming of her best friend’s pulse.

“Impossible,” said a voice behind Lily, and she knew its hoarse, fearful quality well.

“Well, you weren’t here Novel,” she answered in a breathy whisper, “I had to do something.”

She felt the illusionist’s hands on her shoulders, and they were frozen as though he’d been outside for quite some time. He whispered close to Lily’s ear, tension showing in every fingertip where he held her.

“Can you sustain the blood flow, whilst we seal her wound?” he asked. “Jeronomie has a potion to cauterize the vein.”

“I’ll keep her alive until I die trying,” Lily answered, her teeth gritting with the strain. “Get Jeronomie here quick.”

“Already present, Ma’am,” the potioneer replied.

Novel’s touch was gone and Jeronomie stepped into the space between Lily and Jazzy. She held a vial of some bluish-green powder, and loaded it onto the tips of her rough fingers with swift grace. When the potioneer coated Jazzy’s puncture wound with the powdery stuff, Lily felt a surge of heat emanate from behind her. Novel was sending a fine, thin line of fire towards the coloured powder, and it sizzled where the shademagic burned it. Lily felt a change in her hands, which pulsed a little less with their own magic, and she found that Jazzy’s blood felt as though it no longer needed re-routing through her system.

“We’re gonna have to watch her for signs of complications,” Jeronomie surmised.

“I’ll do it,” said Lawrence at once.

The lanky boy overstepped the others at the scene, coming to sit at the foot of Jazzy’s bed at once. He was shaking all over, with broad, shining tear-tracks down his dark face. In the midnight shadows of Jazzy’s room, Lily let go of the last of her magic and tumbled backwards to the floor. Novel tried to pick her up but she shook off his grip, staring up at Jazzy’s ceiling for a moment as she caught her breath. There, a poster of a Marvel superhero stared down at Lily, and she saw Gerstein’s presence force the hero to smile a wide, relieved grin.

“I’ve seen a lot of new things in my time,” Gerstein confessed, “but I’ve never seen a shade control blood.”

“Thank the stars she discovered that she could,” Zita whispered with a sniffle.

“Remarkable,” boomed a new voice, which belonged to Poppa Seward, “absolutely remarkable.”

Lily didn’t hear much of their praise. She was looking to her side from where she lay on the floor, at three particular sets of feet. Novel and Jeronomie were both kneeling at Jazzy’s side now to inspect their work on her wound, and Lily saw Novel’s sharp-tipped shoes, with fine leather soles that never seemed to touch the ground. She also saw that Jeronomie was only wearing socks, which seemed strange, since she was fully dressed otherwise, including her long brown cloak and golden locket. The locket, shaped like a playing card spade, was reflecting light from the corridor, which shone onto the third pair of feet that interested Lily.

Big black boots stood far off to the left of the scene. Lily wouldn’t have known their owner was present if she hadn’t seen them, for he hadn’t breathed a word since entering the room. It was possible, Lily realised, that he hadn’t breathed
at all
since entering the room. As Lily clambered back to her feet, she turned to see the man the boots belonged to. He was fully dressed too, resplendent in his dark waistcoat and elegant jacket, and his face was a picture of cold sincerity as he watched the goings-on. Baptiste Du Nord stood silently, observing everything, and keeping every last thought to himself behind his dark, gleaming eyes.

And then, the bloodshade licked his lips.

It happened quickly, so sharp that Lily might have missed it if she hadn’t been watching him, but it was enough to send Lily’s dizzy mind reeling with thoughts again. She looked at the blood on her hands and knees, and the remnants of the drying stains that still adorned the room. Baptiste was a feeder, a being who lived on blood with magical properties, and he was watching Jazzy come back to life with the most unreadable expression Lily had ever seen him wear. Then, his eyes flickered to hers, as if he’d known she was watching him, and they widened a little in surprise. Lily felt a fury rising in her chest, her arm lifting shakily to point the finger of blame straight at the MC’s look of shock.

“It was you,” she said. “You did this to her.”

Baptiste’s dark brows rose in horror, and though he looked innocent, Lily could not forget that memory of months ago, when she had seen the monster in him, and the blood all over his lips. She looked him over again, wondering if there was any way she could be wrong, but her eyes travelled back to those huge black boots on his feet. Lily had heard the lone, thumping footsteps, travelling from the lower floor right up to the roof. Someone had walked away from Jazzy’s bleeding just before Gerstein had been able to make his warning, and that someone had made a lot of noise doing it.

“Could you live on her blood, Baptiste?” Lily demanded. “Would it sustain you? Would the blood of someone with Second Sight help you to live?”

“I didn’t-” Baptiste insisted, his head shaking to and fro repeatedly. “I would never… I went to the roof to find Novel.”

“And someone had locked me out up there,” Novel added swiftly. The illusionist was on his feet, and he took Lily by one elbow as he grabbed Baptiste by the other. “We shan’t have this conversation here. Let Jazmine rest now.”

Under Novel’s guiding hand, Lily found herself and the bloodshade being led to the kitchen. When they were inside with all doors closed, it was Lily that Novel turned to as he delivered his look of astonishment.

“Are you insane?” he challenged. “Baptiste has no
reason
to feed on Jazmine. He has… well, he has me for that.”

Lily felt an indignant rage bubble in her chest. She folded her arms and sniffed, looking across at the bloodshade, who still wore that foolish, dumbstruck expression.

“Ninety years with the same food might get a little boring now and then,” she supposed.

That was when Baptiste’s eyes narrowed, and his stupor fell away. He looked at Novel, then back to Lily, and bared his too-sharp teeth in a wry grin.

“That’s not what this is about, I think,” the bloodshade began. “You’ve been looking for an excuse to accuse me for many months now.”

Novel rolled his eyes, but the other two hardly noticed it. Lily rose in the air on the crest of her own irritated magic, squaring up to Baptiste with a bitter hatred gleaming in her gaze. She wondered how he dared accuse her of anything, when he was the one known for drinking other people’s blood, and she was the one who’d just found a talent for saving them from the very same fate.