Broken (23 page)

And this brought them here, hours later, to the maze where they’d lured Wolfie after he’d awakened in a bid to once again steer his thoughts from Mrs. Jones. They normally kept any shiftless, easily missed boy they stole from above for playtime in this maze, where chains, shackles, and an array of blade toys hung from the walls while the aroma of blood and sweat lined the darkness. Tonight, the room belonged to Wolfie.

As the schoolgirls finished shackling him, he seemed to go along with their game, though Della knew that, at any moment, he might begin missing Mrs. Jones again.

So fickle.

“Now that darkness is here,” he said, “I should really go back up top to roam for her.”

Stacy and Della exchanged glances as they donned gloves and went to another area to drag out a coil of silver chains they’d set there earlier. They and the other Southwark survivors were still healing and growing out their locks of hair, so they had left the enticing of Wolfie up to Polly and the few others who had remained unscathed.

Hence, the unburned girls pushed Wolfie against the maze wall, tearing at his clothes while Della and Stacy drew on their lightning-quick speed, then wrapped the links around his bared skin.

As they stepped back and stripped off their gloves, he asked, “What’s this?”

He writhed under the silver. They had known he was sensitive to it, since they had inherited the trait from him and not Mrs. Jones.

A poison, Della thought. A comeuppance. Now they would see how well he ordered them about to find his mistress.

But, just as Wolfie seemed to realize what they had done to him,
it
happened.

A blast of agony, a clawing into the very core of Della.

All the Queenshill girls hit the floor as one, moaning, screaming, rolling round as if to keep in what was coming out.

Della had felt pain such as this only once in her experience—when she had exchanged blood with Wolfie and the cat. Her body had seized up then, too, her innards seemingly pulled and tied as her composition altered, her blood thrusting through her and breaking every inner barrier.

Hurt . . . as if half of her was being ripped out.

And then . . .

Then it finished.

Della lay still, peering round. The other girls were just now gaining their bearings, as well.

There was something . . . different. Was it the quality of her sight? The smells of the old blood and fear-sweat from the boys the recruits had brought down here for fun earlier?

Had it all changed in a way she couldn’t begin to describe?

Della looked up to where Wolfie gazed at them, his mouth twisted in . . .

Disgust?

Putting a hand to her face as she sat up, Della ran her fingertips over her cheek.

The same, she thought. But . . . not the same.

Then, as Wolfie’s head lowered, he let out a groan, straining against his chains.

“Gone,” he said. “All gone.”

That was when Della knew.

One of the other Queenshill girls said it aloud. “Mrs. Jones . . . dead?”

As if wishing to test the theory, Stacy, who was just to the left of Della, shifted into her vampire form, letting out whimpers of fright as she did so.

When she finished, Della tried not to cringe from her classmate, for Stacy was a smaller version of Wolfie as a vampire—hairy, with pointed ears, canine teeth with two longer fangs in a long snout, hunched and beastly in the skirt and blouse made ragged from her . . . change.

Then Stacy glanced about the room at her classmates while she touched her own face, horror shaping her mouth.

Wolfie was weeping now, on his knees. He was seeing reflections of an unadulterated him, and it didn’t seem as if he could withstand the lack of Mrs. Jones in the girls.

Though their old forms had been hideous, this somehow seemed worse to Della.

She couldn’t take her gaze off of Stacy. No trace of femininity. No cat.

“Look at her,” Della found herself saying to Wolfie as he kept hiding his gaze. “
Can’t
you look at her?”

He didn’t raise his face, instead wallowing in his grief for Mrs. Jones. The murderer.

Della’s body seemed to explode as she changed into her new vampire-wolf form and leaped just in front of him, reaching out her clawed hand to force him to look at her new bearing.

He reared back from her ugly snout and hairy body—the unfamiliar shape of a different vampire.

“Look!” Della said. “This is what you made us! You had to know there was a chance we would grow into something else one day, didn’t you? No matter how much you wanted us to stay the same, we didn’t.”

Behind her, the other Queenshill girls crept closer. Della could hear them mutating into their vampire forms, as well. Even Polly, who had hated Della for what she had done to Violet, was here, backing her up.

In the glassy reflection of Wolfie’s eyes, Della could have sworn that she saw the awful visages of her classmates warped and looming as they bared their teeth.

She could withstand no more from him, so she asked the one question she had never wished to have answered.

“You knew,” she said to him, her wolf voice mangled. “You knew everything about what Mrs. Jones was doing to us.”

“No—” he began.

Della swiped at his chest, drawing blood. Then, terrified, she held up her paw.

The smell of his blood filtered into her, the wetness running down her clawed nails and into her numbing fingertips. Even though he was tinged with silver poison, her stomach growled.

She thought she heard the same keening sound of hunger from her schoolmates, too.

Wolfie finally looked at her, and he clearly realized that there was nowhere left to go but to the truth.

“Yes,” he said. “I knew about Mrs. Jones.”

Suddenly, all the girls were on Wolfie, ripping at him as he howled. Yet he didn’t struggle. Not even as they began sucking at his wounds, drawing blood because he had taught them never to be appeased.

Della also drank of him as he groaned. She was too famished— always so starved—to turn the tainted blood aside, so she drank and drank and drank until . . .

She broke away, the blood like bile to her, and not only because of the silver.

But she seemed to be the only one who tasted the wrongness of it as she sought a corner, cowering there whilst the other girls continued to ravish Wolfie, who seemed to enjoy every suck and scratch.

The blood . . . It felt like the food Della used to shove down during her human days, when she would be so upset that cakes and biscuits and ice cream would be the only comforting fillers. And like that food, it felt as if it didn’t belong.

Just as she used to do, she brought it back up.

When she was done, she panted on the floor, watching the other girls—soulless, monstrous beasts—feast on Wolfie.

Our souls,
she thought.
He took everything, including those
.

And the only way to retrieve those souls would be through his death now that the cat was slain. But when she thought of the concept of humanity, she wasn’t certain she understood it anymore.

Yet . . . couldn’t she return to it?

As some recruits entered the room, wearing their new vampire-wolf forms as they whined and begged at Wolfie’s feet to tell them what had happened, Della wiped his blood from her mouth. She felt sluggish, numbed, from the blood that still traced silver in her.

Her fingers stilled near her lips when she saw Wolfie grip one schoolgirl, then another, tossing them to the ground in ecstasy as they all began to tussle in rougher play than she’d ever seen.

Rips, scratches, blood . . .

But, the silver.
He
didn’t seem so addled by it.

Della gaped. It hadn’t been enough to put the element on his skin, had it? They should have stabbed him with it so that it was more a part of him. He was a master vampire, after all, and the only thing they had done was to poison themselves by drinking from his slightly affected blood.

With a mighty howl, he busted up and away from his girls, furiously breaking out of his chains, sending the silver links flying.

It was a birth of sorts, a release from his progeny now that they didn’t appeal anymore, wasn’t it?

He stood there, taking in great, hollow breaths, bathed in his own blood, his clothes in strips, his long hair covering most of his golden-eyed face as the girls scuttled away from the return of their commander.

Della held her place in her own corner, for she’d been reborn, too.

MY
soldier,
Lilly thought as she watched a live feed of Mihas and the girls on a telly screen in the monitor room. The terror of the battlefield had returned, and it’d be brilliant if he stayed this time.

It seemed as if he just might, too, with him standing so resplendent in blood and ripped clothing, his arms outstretched while he let back his head and howled.

The girls had confronted him with the truth about Mrs. Jones, and he had handled it as a master vampire should, rising above the trouble, seizing final control now that he couldn’t hide his sins any longer. Best of all, there would be no need for Lilly to use the tuner on the lower vampires now since he had them truly under control.

Unless . . .

She leaned closer to the screen, seeing if the girls would rebel against his show of aggression.

When none of the female soldiers made a move to do so, Lilly reclined, smiling.

She had done it—restructured the Underground as it needed to be. From this moment on, the dragon would have his army with a stronger commander, and this Underground would no doubt flourish. All it had taken in trade was Claudia’s banishment and death, which was obvious since the girls were no longer catlike. Dawn and her group had clearly helped Lilly in their own way by terminating the co-master.

Behind her, Nigel entered the room. He and Lilly were running tardy for Relaquory. She had delayed the ritual to see to Mihas’s latest complication, but there was no need for further surveillance now that matters had come to a satisfactory point.

She was just accessing stored computer messages before leaving when she came upon this:

She stared at the log entry from the Hall. The
custode
s intercepted relevant updates from the family properties aboveground, but there were rarely any significant messages until now.

Menlo Hall. She remembered the place well—an ominous house she had visited only on occasion because her family resided on a different, more welcoming estate outside Oxford. However, her father often retreated to the Hall, honing his resentment at not being “fit enough” to be a
custode
, as she’d discovered after her own activation. Perhaps wandering the estate enabled his vitriol.

But what she recalled best about the Hall was being told to keep away from the west wing during her younger days. After she’d been called to
custode
duty, she’d discovered the reason for the rule, when she’d been ushered to the library and given free rein to absorb all the knowledge housed in it.

Menlo Hall. Camera problems.

Bloody hell.

From just over her shoulder, where Nigel had been reading, too, he muttered, “They were there.”

Bloody, bloody hell. Had Claudia let the location slip while the hunters questioned her? How else would they have tracked it down?

Chances had been next to nil they ever would have. . . .

Turning their attention to the vampire
they
held captive, Lilly and Nigel highlighted the monitor screen that surveyed the far tunnel with its silver cage. The “mean vampire” ’s ghostly guards had still been strong after Nigel had left them, but Lilly had been studying spirit warding techniques on the computer, and they were ready to employ those after they finished with Relaquory.

“Nigel,” Lilly said, “perhaps you should inform Mihas that we might be receiving company soon.” The progress these hunters were making was unsettling, to say the least. If they had found Menlo Hall, they might have found more.

This group was good. Very, very good, and for the first time in this Underground’s history, Mihas would have to earn his keep, to actively protect and serve right along with the
custode
s in the name of the dragon. Lilly chafed under the interference.

In any case, it was time to see if her faith in Mihas would pay out.

She readied the spirit defense items that she had already gathered—mint, iron swords, salt, and a printout of incantations to memorize. Lilly wasn’t certain how she or Nigel would fare with the last item since black arts weren’t a
custode
’s forte; that talent was more for breeders whose abilities would be increased tenfold once the dragon had risen. Nowadays, they were no more than fledgling witches whose power had decreased era by era.
Custode
s were the ones who had access to the benefits of Relaquory, and they were the ones with whom main responsibility rested.

Meanwhile, Nigel went to Mihas. On the monitor, Lilly watched how the master vampire seemed to feed off the news of oncoming attackers as Nigel whispered to him, then disappeared into the darkness again.

Mihas ordered his girl soldiers to their feet, and they obeyed, although Lilly noted that the Queenshill students—the vampires who had, for all intents and purposes, been schooled as officers—were unsteady in their balance. But that was because they had taken Mihas’s slightly silver-poisoned blood, the fools. Lilly could have told them silver would have more effect on them than it would on the master vampire.

When Nigel returned, she finally went with him to the adjacent room, where she had healed herself earlier. They needed Relaquory perhaps now more than ever.