Burn Mark (4 page)

‘Mummy! Since when do you watch
EastEnders
?’

‘My manicurist was telling me about it. She’s worried her daughter is taking an unhealthy interest in the fae. As a kind of teenage rebellion, you know.’

Henry laughed, but Ashton looked thoughtful. ‘In some respects,’ he said, ‘I suppose we’re all attracted to the darker, more primitive aspects of human nature; the parts that civilisation can never entirely control. The Seventh Sense can’t be rationalised by science or social theories. That’s always been part of its allure.’

‘Yes, but from the way some people talk,’ his wife replied, ‘you’d think that witchwork was the same as any other unusual skill. Like writing poetry or . . . or . . . being able to stand on one’s head. They seem to entirely disregard the
moral
dangers.’

‘It’s just as well, then,’ said Henry jovially, ‘we’ve got the Stearne boys on hand to keep witchkind in their place. Just look at them now! What a picture the three of them make, eh?’

Lucas and Ashton were sitting under one of several family portraits in the house. This was the ‘third’ Stearne Henry was referring to: Augustine Edgar Stearne, the nineteenth-century reformer responsible for modernising the Inquisition and supporting the recruitment of witch-officers within the police. The resemblance to his descendants was striking. All three had the same black hair – silvering, in Ashton’s case – springing from a peak. The same high foreheads, the same dark blue eyes and pale English skin. Furthermore, in the face of unexpected scrutiny, both father and son had unconsciously assumed the portrait’s air of calm hauteur.

‘
So
handsome,’ said Marisa fondly.

Lucas grimaced. A flash of pain had struck across his eyes. It was very peculiar: for a moment, the room seemed to warp and shiver. From the shadows, he heard a low hiss.

Chapter 4

Today
, thought Gloriana Starling Wilde,
is going to be a lucky day
. She tilted her head to the pale sunshine, enjoying the way her new gold hoops tugged comfortably at her ears. On a fine spring afternoon even a dump like Rockwood wasn’t so bad. The weeds sprouting from the cracked concrete were still young enough to have a freshness around them. The graffiti on the underpass had a splurge of new colour. The litter swirled with a jaunty air.

The East End borough of Hallam had a rough reputation for several reasons, and Rockwood Estate was the main one. The place was a maze of interconnecting walkways and ramps lined with dilapidated terraces and maisonettes, with one tower block in the centre. It was all too easy to be lead astray into a fistful of dead ends and dark corners if you didn’t keep your wits about you. For Glory, its rat-runs were as familiar as the lines on the palm of her hand. As she sauntered into the forecourt, with its shabby huddle of shops and boarded-up community centre, the boys loitering outside the bookies wolf-whistled.

Glory gave them a flash of smile. Auntie Angel might lament how the neighbourhood had changed (waves of immigrants who didn’t know or care about the Old Days and Old Ways of doing things; feral kids running riot) but the Cooper Street Coven had good working relations with the gangs on the estate. Besides, even though its muscle wasn’t what it was, Cooper Street’s connection to the Morgan family ensured respect. Nobody messed with the Morgans. Their Wednesday Coven was the biggest underworld outfit in London, and it looked after its own.

Nobody messed with Glory’s great-aunt Angeline either. Once, when Glory was six and playing in the street, two older boys with bony heads and scabbed knuckles came and snatched her dollies for a kick-about. Glory’s wails brought Auntie Angel storming from the house. She clipped the boys round the ear.

‘Hexing old hag,’ the older one spat.

‘Damn right I am. And I’ve got fae enough to melt the flesh from your bones.’ Auntie Angel’s pointed creased face and snapping eyes belonged to a witch in a fae-tale. She gave a throaty hiss. ‘You try any more of your tricks on me and mine, and I’ll rot your crotch with green maggots.’

The younger boy, who must have been about eight, started snivelling. The other one tried to stare her out, but in the end his nerve broke and they both slunk off down the road.

Later that evening, the older kid returned with his mum. Her face was as flinty as her son’s, but she was bearing a carton of cigarettes and a tin of shortbread. An offering.

‘Heard this little bastard’s been giving you grief,’ she said, pinching the boy’s arm. ‘Don’t take no mind of him. Here’s something to make it up to you anyways.’ Then she straightened her scrawny shoulders, and looked Auntie Angel in the eye. ‘Me dad still talks about the days when them sisters of yours called the shots. They got things done proper, he says. Times was better then.’

Her words gave the six-year-old Glory a tingly feeling inside. She knew that once upon a time Auntie Angel had been the big sister of the famous Starling Twins, and that was one of the things that made her special. Because Lily and Cora Starling didn’t just look as alike as two peas; they were identically powerful witches too, and their coven had as good as run the East End during the 1960s and 1970s. Glory had heard the stories of how they went to parties with film stars and had their pictures in the papers, and only did witchcrimes that helped people. But the Inquisition got Granny Cora in the end, and Great Aunt Lily died of a broken heart, and Glory’s mum Edie went and vanished three Christmases ago. Being a Starling girl was a dangerous business.

Auntie Angel patted Glory’s hair. ‘Maybe those days will come again. Fae runs thicker than blood, quicker’n water . . .’

. . . and wild as wind.

That was the final part of the proverb, but Auntie Angel had left it out. People generally did.
Fae runs wild as wind.
It was the most troublesome aspect of witchwork, not being a hundred per cent certain of which way the fae would blow. Where it would go, and to whom.

Thinking of this, Glory – fifteen now, and tough enough to take on any number of scabby skinhead boys – felt a chill creep into her day. She still dreamed of the white-tiled Burning Court, of the witch on the pyre with the locked mouth and the frozen scream. And she still said the same prayer, night after night. To God, just in case there was one, and also to Mab and Hecate, witchkind’s guardian spirits. So far none of them seemed to be listening.

Granny Cora and Great-Aunt Lily had turned witchkind at the age of thirteen. Her mum Edie had been the same. Was her time running out?

She shook her head impatiently, sending the gold hoops dancing. Candice Morgan, Lily Starling’s twenty-three-year-old granddaughter, had only got the fae last year. Auntie Angel’s arrived when she was nineteen. Most witches, she knew, had to wait until well into their twenties. She had plenty of time . . . The problem was, the younger you were when the fae developed, the stronger it tended to be.

For Glory wasn’t planning on being just
any
witch. Her fae would be her fortune, and her coven’s too.

Cooper Street, like the coven which took its name, had seen better days. A run-down Victorian terrace, it was one of the few survivors of a Blitz bombing raid that had flattened most of its neighbours. The houses behind it were modern boxes of cheap brick; in front was the murky sprawl of the Rockwood Estate. Other nineteenth-century leftovers had been snapped up by city workers on the hunt for period charm and the edgy cool of an East End postcode. Cooper Street, however, had resisted the trend towards gentrification. Peeling paintwork and grimy windows were the order of the day. Only one house, Number Six, boasted a smartly-painted door over a well-scrubbed front step – Auntie Angel’s step.

The coven owned Numbers Seven and Eight too. Doors knocked through walls and an eccentric arrangement of stairs and hatches had made the three separate, small houses into a rambling warren of one. That wasn’t to say there weren’t territorial divisions, though. The ground floor of Number Six was Auntie Angel’s lair, with Glory and her dad, Patrick, living in the top of the house. Number Eight was home to Joe Junior, the coven boss (his late father, Joe Braddock, had married Auntie Angel after his wife, Mary, died) and his son, Nate. The middle house, Number Seven, was the coven’s official HQ. The upper floors were used for storage or else as dormitories for passing cronies and contacts, while business took place in the basement. The lounge functioned as a general common room.

This was where Glory was headed. She planned on spending the rest of the afternoon doing her nails in front of the telly. However, as soon as she let herself in she knew there was no hope of having the place to herself. The hallway was blocked by a stack of microwaves, still wrapped in polythene, and a spill of shiny white trainers. Hip hop pounded through the walls.

She found Nate and two of his sidekicks, Chunk and Jacko, sprawled on the battered leather sofas around the TV. On screen, a group of semi-naked girls were writhing against the rapper in their midst. He was making gun signs with his hands, spitting out a monologue about blood and bullets, pimps and hos, as the spectators in the lounge nodded along appreciatively. Glory thought this pretty funny. The younger coven crew liked to play at being proper villains, but it was all front, as fake as the bumping and grinding of the girls in the music video.

Nate greeted Glory’s arrival with a belch. He was only a couple of years older than her and they’d grown up together, but there wasn’t much love lost between them. Nate liked to throw his weight around as the boss’s son, and resented Glory’s rival position as Auntie Angel’s pet.

‘You seen the gear we got?’ Jacko asked.

‘Could hardly miss it. Nearly broke my ankle clambering past.’

‘Nice little job, that,’ said Chunk complacently.

The way he and Jacko told it, their staged break-in at the depot (whose security guard was in coven pay) might as well have been a gold-bullion bank heist, Hollywood-style. Glory had been hearing such stories her whole life.

There’d been a time too when she would have lapped it all up, wide-eyed. But she had known for a long while that Cooper Street’s criminal activities didn’t involve much skill or daring, and hardly any witchwork. In spite of Auntie Angel’s local reputation, her fae had always been small-scale, good for scrying and elusions and minor banes, but not much else, and her involvement in coven business was in decline. She was seventy-eight, after all. And a coven’s reputation rested on its head-witch.

Thinking of this, Glory’s mood sank another notch. It sank further when she went to get a Coke from the fridge, only to find a partially-eaten kebab crusted to the top shelf, and chow-mein noodles splattered down the sides. The surrounding floor was littered with cigarette butts. Glory knew that if she didn’t clean it up, nobody else would. She slammed the fridge shut.

‘This
place
. It’s a pit,’ she said. ‘It stinks.’

‘Then go somewhere else, girlie,’ Nate advised, scratching under his T-shirt to reveal a slab of toned stomach. He worked out obsessively – the basement of Number Eight bristled with gym equipment – and was capable of a slouching, sulky sort of charm. This wasn’t something he bothered using on Glory.

Glory gave him the finger. She decided to stay for a bit, even if it was only to piss off Nate. But she couldn’t relax. Her senses were oddly heightened, too strong to be comfortable. The air was thick with beery male breath and the warm, green-brown pungency of hash. Fleetingly, she seemed to taste the pulses of music – metallic; like blades, like blood – and hear the flavour of Coke zing through her mouth. But she shook her head, and the muddle cleared.

Thuds and curses from the hall announced the arrival of Patch and Earl, two older coven members who, from the sounds of it, had come to grief among the microwaves. Patch came through the door rubbing his shin.

‘Now then,’ he said, his pock-marked face splitting into a grin, ‘you lot heard about the Wednesday’s latest? Charlie Morgan’s only been and met the PM’s missus!’

Charlie Morgan was boss of the Wednesday Coven. His brothers Frank and Vince were the financier and enforcer respectively, and his wife Kezia was head-witch. Their coven wasn’t just big and brutal, it owned legitimate businesses too, including a fashionable restaurant and several nightclubs. And now, apparently, they’d moved into the arts – the tabloid paper Patch was holding up showed Charlie’s tough, fleshy face staring out beside the Prime Minister’s wife. The setting was a VIP-studded gala for the Royal Opera House. Charlie was name-checked as an ‘entrepreneur and investor’.

Shouts of laughter followed the paper around the room. When it was passed to Glory, her arm got jogged so that she slopped her drink down her top. ‘Hexing hell! Can’t you slobs watch what you’re doing?’

‘That PMT’s getting the better of you again,’ Nate drawled.

It wasn’t, but the mood-swings felt like a more extreme version. All this week, Glory was either flying high or soaked through with gloom. Like today – irrepressibly cheerful at the sight of weeds blowing in the breeze, and now black as thunder because of a stupid splash of Coke. It was about time she got a grip.

‘Post Moron Tension sounds about right,’ she said to Nate, chucking her empty can in his direction. ‘I’m outta here.’

Glory’s quickest route home was through a sliding door on the first floor landing of Number Seven. It led to a makeshift kitchen containing a microwave, hotplate and mini-fridge. Her dad was there, heating a mug of soup. He looked startled to see her.