Ravensborough (17 page)

I threaded my way slowly through the mass of bodies towards the table where they were sitting. Aradia smiled in greeting when she saw me while Gethan managed to procure an extra stool from somewhere. Liv was looking at me with a guarded expression in her eyes. What on earth was her problem?

‘I’ll go get you a drink,’ said Gethan. ‘What are you having?’

‘Just a lemonade, thanks.’ He headed off to the bar.

‘When is David on?’ I asked Aradia.

‘What?’ she asked. She couldn’t hear me over the loud background noise. I repeated the question, this time shouting it near her ear.

‘They’re on third,’ she answered. ‘I know I’m kind of biased, but they are really good. You’ll see.’

It was a pity that the same couldn’t be said for the first band on the bill. They were a heavy metal band, mainly covering Metallica and Lacuna Coil songs. They played the songs jarringly, their chords were clunky and the three guitarists weren’t playing in sync. It was a relief when they finished their twenty minute set and left the stage. The only cheering came from a group of girls to the left of the stage.

‘Just goes to show, you need more than good looks to be in a band’, I observed as Gethan handed me a drink.

‘Less talk about good looking guys if you don’t mind, you’ll give me a complex,’ Gethan joked.

‘Oh I don’t think you need to worry on that score,’ said Liv, giving him a smouldering look. It was like being out with a more annoying version of Cat. Then I realised why I found her more annoying: she was so much better at flirting than Cat was. With her corn coloured curls and perfect figure, Liv was alluring, Gethan would need to not have a pulse not to be interested. Much as I disliked her, even I could see that. Despite the fact that Gethan was getting an awful lot of admiring looks, Liv was probably the most attractive woman in the room. Cat was so clumsy in her attempts to flirt that she wasn’t much of a threat. Liv, on the other hand, was. Also, Cat would not in a million years look at any Pagan, let alone the one that I had a crush on.

But none of it mattered anyway, did it? I had a boyfriend and Gethan was free to flirt with whoever he chose.

The next band was better than the previous act, but that wasn’t saying much. Liv and Aradia got up to go to the bathroom. I didn’t follow them. They were probably going to talk about whether Liv’s chances with Gethan. I’d had many of the same types of conversation with Lindsay, but I just wasn’t up to it tonight. Besides, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to put the right expression on my face.

‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ Gethan asked over the music.

I nodded. ‘What about you?’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing amazing so far. But there’s a good few bands left to play, and hopefully the music will improve.’

I had long since abandoned my heavy jacket. The atmosphere in the basement was hot and stuffy. I found it a little stifling, but Gethan was still wearing his long sleeved hoodie. He had to be uncomfortable.

‘Are you not too hot in that?’ I asked.

He pointed to his ear, indicating that he couldn’t hear what I was saying.

I leaned closer and repeated the question. Again he shook his head.

I moved closer to him and said close to his ear, ‘are you not too hot in your hoodie?’

He grinned at me sexily. ‘Why? Do you want me to take it off?’

Our eyes met and there was a crackle of attraction between us so strong I was surprised it couldn’t be seen across the room. We leaned slightly closely together. I was aware of how hard my heart was beating, and how easy it would be to kiss him right now. I was dimly aware that the band had stopped playing, and the extra heat of Gethan’s body near to mine.

He put a hand out and took my locket in his hand, his hand brushing the bare skin of my collarbone. He examined it delicately.

‘Aradia told me about this,’ he said. ‘I guess this means that we’re now on an even playing field.’

‘What?’ I asked.

He gave me another one of his intense stares. ‘It means you’re one of us now.’

‘Cool, it’s almost time for David’s band to play!’ Aradia said as she swung back up onto her stool, breaking the spell. She didn’t seem to notice what she’d just walked in on. Liv on the other hand was looking at me darkly. Any doubts I had that she didn’t like me evaporated in that second. She sat down beside him, gave a coquettish smile and began to monopolise all his attention.

I was still kind of shaken but was glad to be distracted by David waving at me from the stage. His band played a mix of their own songs mixed with a couple of old sixties and seventies songs that they’d tweaked to have a sharp rock edge. Aradia was right. They were really good. After they completed their set they got a large cheer from the crowd.

David and his bandmates came down to us afterwards and sat with us for the remainder of the gig. We had a really good time. I found I could enjoy myself if I blocked out Liv’s flirting with Gethan. The music reverberated around the club, pumping so hard through the amps that I could feel the vibrations in my chest.

Aradia and I had a really good time with David, who was surprisingly witty. I thought that he had a bit of a thing for Aradia. He got a goofy smile on his face every time she spoke, and seemed to find everything she said absolutely fascinating. Aradia was harder to read. She seemed to like him, but probably just as a friend. Or perhaps she was just playing it cool.

After the last band played, the overhead lights were switched on. The basement room ceased to be cool and atmospheric and instead just looked like a large dingy room. David and his friends went over to pack their instruments in their van. Gethan was giving them a hand and Aradia was talking to a friend from school. Which left Liv and I standing awkwardly together in the middle of the room.

‘David’s brand were pretty cool, weren’t they?’ I asked, trying to make conversation.

She looked at me with a hard expression in her eyes. ‘It won’t work, you know,’ she said, her voice hard and cold.

‘What won’t work?’ I asked, confused.

‘You, trying to steal Gethan away from me. It won’t work, you’re not his type. And even if you were, darling, Rationalists and Pagans don’t mix.’

‘Excuse me,’ I said angrily. ‘What I do and who I see is none of your business. And besides, I have no plan of trying to
steal him away from you
. I have a boyfriend back in Ireland.’

‘Well, it certainly didn’t look like you were thinking about him earlier,’ Liv said acidly. ‘Aradia and I went away for two minutes and when we come back you’re practically sitting on his lap.’ She stared at me, her jaw clenched in anger. I was trying to think up a snappy retort when all of a sudden her face relaxed. She looked more surprised than anything else. She spoke to me again, this time in a surprised almost awestruck tone.

‘Where did you get that locket?’

The change in direction shocked me for a second. I didn’t want to tell her anything about the locket. Possibly because she was a bitch of epic proportions.

‘My mother gave it to me,’ I lied. I didn’t offer any more information. I wasn’t a great liar, so when I did have to tell them I kept them as simple as possible. Something in Liv’s expression told me that I hadn’t fully convinced her, but Aradia came back before she said anything else.

The three of them walked me to the underground station where we could get our respective trains home. Gethan and Liv walked a little way in front of me and Aradia. I whispered to Aradia about how I had lied to Liv, and asked her to keep the true origin of the locket secret. She looked at me like I was crazy.

‘Why didn’t you just tell her the truth?’ she asked, puzzled.

I didn’t want to tell her about the standoff between us back in the Grey Wolf. It would mean having to admit to her that I had a crush on Gethan, and that was a complicated enough story. Especially as it seemed like Aradia was trying to set him up with Liv. So I just shrugged.

‘I don’t know. My intuition was telling me not too.’

‘I didn’t know Rationalists had intuition,’ Aradia teased.

‘Then you learn something new every day,’ I said with a grin.

I was lucky that I managed to get the last underground train back to Chesterfield. The train pulled in at Eden station and soldiers climbed on board. A female recorded voice told the passengers that this was the last neutral stop on this line, and to present our identification cards to the soldiers if we wanted to journey any further. I quickly made sure that my locket was completely hidden by my jacket and scarf, and rummaged in my bag for my identification. I presented it to the soldier who came by and answered the few questions that had quickly become part of life for me here in Avalonia.

A soldier questioned the man next to me while looking intently at his identification. The soldier pulled a torch from his pocket and shone it on the card. He made a gesture in the air and another soldier came along and examined the card carefully.

‘Sir, this identification is a forgery,’ the second soldier said finally. ‘You’re going to have to come with us.’

‘No, it’s not, honestly, there must be some mistake!’ the man protested. The soldiers didn’t listen, but dragged him out of the carriage and onto the platform. He struggled to break free of the soldier’s grip, but they held him tight. Everyone on the train was silent, and the only sound was the man screaming at the top of his voice about his rights and justice. A second later the door shut. The female announcer came on the loudspeaker, her clipped refined voice contrasting sharply with the passionate cries from the man who could still be heard shouting that he was innocent on the station platform.

‘This train will stop at Halifax, Starling-bird, Pinewood, Highfield, Roxborough, Bessborough, Chesterfield...’

The train moved away from the platform and I stared at the man until I lost him in the coal black of the tunnel.

The next morning, when I dressed for school, I fastened the locket around my neck. The silver glinted in the light of my bedroom lamp. I quickly put my shirt on over it and buttoned it up right to the neck. I wasn’t sure whether or not it was possible for a piece of jewellery to keep me safe

School passed without incident. The one awkward thing was that I had to be really vague about what I had done during the midterm. I had to give them the censured version, omitting all details about the box, its contents, and the fact that maybe something supernatural might be trying to harm me. Oh, and the fact that I liked a guy who wasn’t my boyfriend, was able to practice good and bad magic, and said that he was an elf.

Luckily, my friends, especially Cat, were eager to fill me in on everything that I’d missed over midterm. While I’d been kneeling in the dirt, getting calluses on my hand from digging, my friends had been out having fun. Cat seemed to have gotten over the whole unrequited love thing for Ben, and instead had fallen head over heels for a guy called Alistair who worked with her brother at a bar in Bessborough. All I had to do was nod at the right places and brush off the occasional joke about people who elect to spend precious time off kneeling in dirt, and I found that I could operate fairly well on auto-pilot. Only Mei looked at me occasionally with a concerned look in her eye.

When classes had finished I put my books in my bag gratefully. The day had passed in a blur as I’d waited for the end of school.

I tightened my scarf around my neck as I walked away from my school. A couple of blocks down the road, I noticed a familiar white jeep parked at the kerb. Gethan.

What was he doing in a Rationalist part of town?

I walked over to the car and he opened the passenger door. ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I’m a Rationalist, you’re a Pagan. Things will be so much easier if you stick to your own side.’

He rolled his eyes at my reference to his earlier warning. ‘Just get in the car.’

‘But is it safe?’ I asked sarcastically making my eyes big and round. He gave me a withering look and told me to get into the car before someone saw us.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, we’re not having an affair.’ As soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished I could take them back. A hot colour rose over my face. I got in quickly and slammed the door behind me. Gethan was looking great as usual in jeans and a long sleeved navy shirt.

‘I thought you told me that I shouldn’t be friends with you. And now you’re seeking me out?’ I asked, eager to change the subject.

‘It’s like I told you last night,’ he said, pulling out into the traffic. You’re one of us now. Whether you want to be involved with Pagans or not makes no difference now. It’s out of your hands.’

We drove through the suburbs until we eventually reached the shores of Lady’s Lake. The trees surrounding it were almost entirely bare now, their stark arms stretched towards the grey sky. In their branches perched a lot of ravens.

‘Do the tourist board do something to make sure that ravens keep reproducing at a faster rate? There seem to be more of them than there are people.’

‘Really?’ Gethan looked at me quizzically. ‘Most people think that this city is misnamed, because there are so few of them around.’

‘If this is a few, I’d hate to see what they call a lot.’

Both of us got out of the car. I still needed my heavy coat, but it wasn’t as cold as it usually was. It looked like I was getting acclimatised at long last.

We walked down to the edge of the lake. We weren’t talking but the silence seemed natural, not strained. Gethan sat down on a rock and gestured for me to sit down beside him. The natural curve of the rock made us slip towards each other, so that the entire length of my thigh was pressed against his. We sat there for a few minutes looking out at the lake. I still didn’t know what this was all about, but I didn’t care. This was nice.

‘Can I see the locket?’ Gethan asked, looking at me softly.

I pulled the chain out from under my shirt and showed it to him. He peered at it intently examining the front of it. After a few seconds I flipped it over so that he could read the words engraved on the back.

‘Do you mind if I put that thing through its paces?’ he asked. ‘I want to see how effective it is at repelling dark magic.’