Skulk (33 page)

What’s she going to do, hit me? Yell? Shake me until I throw up? Strangle me and hide the body and tell the press I moved to Switzerland?

It wasn’t something I’d consciously named before, but the release of tension always came. It was something like a swift breath that would leave my body and take my fear with it; and something like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because performing a deadpan, snarky commentary on life requires you to pretend to be calm, and then somehow you are calm.

I waited for the calm to settle on me.

It didn’t.

Am I afraid of all those things?

Yes.

A million times yes.

I’d come a long way. But all that meant was that it was a very long way down.

Suddenly I couldn’t move. My fingers locked on the metal railing and I couldn’t uncurl them. Panic flowed up my arms into my shoulders and circled my head like a swarm of bees. My legs buckled. Red mist moved across my vision, like the cloud bank outside, shifting dizzily. London twisted beneath me.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home and crawl into the wardrobe and eat nothing but salad for the rest of my life. I cannot be here. I’m not ready. We’re going to die.

My fingers slipped from the rail, my palms trailing sweat, and I fell down.

“Meg,” Mo’s voice sounded blurred and far away.

“Are you all right, miss?”

A man in a neat black uniform with a high-vis laminated badge leaned over me, concern written across his face.

Oh God. It’s Security
.
And I’m making a scene.
A thousand volts of panic coursed through me and I sat up like Frankenstein’s monster on the slab. “I’m fine!”

I wasn’t fine, but now I was a whole different kind of not fine. Everything seemed razor-sharp and far too bright – the woman’s red coat as she turned to look at me, Roxie’s blue crocs, the guard’s badge, Mo’s wide and staring eyes.

“Now, just sit still,” the security guard said. “Take a deep breath.”

I tried, staring across the floor. Behind everyone else, the little boy’s ginger hair burned on the back of my retinas, and the tight roll of banknotes James was passing him throbbed pinkly.

“She’ll be fine,” the guard was saying to Mo. “We get a lot of fainters up here. It’s all just too much for some people. Let’s just sit quietly and face ourselves away from the view, shall we?”

Mo put his arms around me and turned me so my back was against the railing. Coincidentally, that meant I had a wonderful view over the security guard’s shoulder as the little boy ran across the room. He was clutching his mum’s red umbrella, his fiery hair still leaving smoky streaks across my vision. He smashed the umbrella into the fire alarm and there was a sound so loud I was afraid the whole building might shatter into pieces.

The guard swore and told Mo to help me up, leapt to his feet, ran to the fire exit and threw it open. Then he spotted the boy, the broken glass, and the umbrella, and his face went a violent shade of purple. He seized the boy by the arm and dragged him over to his parents, shouting something about a maximum five thousand pound fine.

I felt Mo and James take an arm each and lift me onto my feet. “It’s now or never,” James whispered in my ear. We made a run for the fire escape and Roxie pulled the door quietly shut behind us.

“Down,” he hissed. “Four floors, hurry before the guard thinks to look for us.”

I wrapped my hand in the sleeve of my hoodie so I could cling on to the banisters for dear life without my sticky palms slowing me down, and started down the stairs.

Mo paused. “Meg, are you OK? If you need to stop...”

I shook my head. “Have to keep going. Adrenaline is good. Won’t fall down again.”
I hope
.

We clattered down four flights of stairs, the fire alarm still ringing in our ears. I half-slid down with my hand clamped around the banister. Roxie held back behind me and Mo went on ahead, taking the stairs two at a time with each stride of his long legs. James leapt down whole flights with the grace of a fox and the daredevil confidence of someone who’s lived their whole life in a tower block.

We stumbled to a halt by the door to the 64th floor. The door bore a warning sign that read “PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT, DOOR ALARMED AT ALL TIMES”. James just smiled and dug in his pockets, pulling out a series of little bundles wrapped in dark grey silk. I leaned back on the wall, letting my brain catch up with my feet, while he unwrapped a couple of long silver things with wibbly-shaped ends and started sticking them in around the doorframe.

The fire alarm turned off. My breathing suddenly sounded deafening and I tried to calm myself. I could feel the same deep well of terror that I’d felt upstairs, just waiting to open up and swallow me. But maybe if I kept moving and I didn’t look down, physics would forget me. The Roadrunner theory of survival in ridiculous circumstances.

“How did you get the little boy to set off the alarm?” Mo asked James.

“Never leave the house without a hundred pounds in used bank notes sewn into the lining of your coat,” said James. “It’s amazing what holding a ton in their hands will do to people.”

“Thanks, I’ll try and remember that in future,” said Roxie, rolling her eyes. I flushed. I’d been thinking the same thing, but without the sarcasm.

James reached into another pocket and pulled out a little black box with a single LED on top. “Should take care of the alarm,” he said. Mo and I nodded as if we understood how it could possibly do any such thing, and then caught each other’s eyes, smiled, and looked away.

“How long’s that going to take?” Roxie asked.

“Two minutes, four if you keep talking to me,” James said, then held out his hand. “iPad.” I fished it out of the bag and handed it over, and he started scrolling through the security files, so fast I could barely believe he was actually reading them, but he did seem to be doing things to the lock as he read, and eventually he pushed it away, readjusted his knees on the ground, twisted his longest, wibbliest silver stick in the lock, and there was a small but satisfying
click
. “We’re in,” he said quietly, retrieving his silvery metal things, tucking them away in their silk wrappings and pulling the door open. I grinned and squeezed his shoulder.

The fire escape opened onto a short corridor, panelled with light wood and polished steel. There was a lift door right across from us, a pattern of silver flower silhouettes etched into its surface and only one button – down.

And there were voices, lots of voices, coming from somewhere inside. It was too much of a clamour to make out individual people, but it had to be the Skulk and the Horde. They were here, and some of them at least were still alive enough to complain about it.

With my heart in my throat, I leaned in, holding my hand out to keep the others on the stairs, peered around to my left and right. To the left, the corridor opened out into a light, airy space where I could see low white leather sofas and a white rug. The sitting room. To the right, the corridor turned a corner.

The voices were coming from down there.

I oriented myself by my mental picture of Dad’s plan – if the sitting room was to my left, and the Skulk and the Horde were forwards and right, they must be in the dining room.
Funny place to keep them
, I thought, until I remembered that the dining room was easily the biggest room on this floor.

I stood still as a statue and listened hard for a few minutes, but I couldn’t pick out Victoria or Fran’s voices among the general racket.

If there is a God, any god, looking down on me right now, let those bitches not be home.

I turned back to the others. “I think they’re in the dining room. There’ll probably be extra security on it,” I whispered to James. He patted his pockets and gave me a thumbs up. I handed the can of white spray paint to Mo and he nodded and shook it up, muffled in his sleeve.

The light outside was diffuse and cloudy, but still bright enough for shafts of it to cross the corridor where doors to the outside ring of rooms had been left open. We reached the turning and I peered down it, blinking in surprise.

There was no door – the corridor ended a metre or two away, opening up onto the enormous dining room. And gathered there, in the middle of the room where the dining table ought to be, were five, ten… eleven people. I couldn’t see any cell, or chains, or anything that was obviously restraining them, but they were all huddled together, standing or sitting on the wooden floor in an area about the size of a minibus. Half of them were partly naked or dressed in clothes that didn’t really fit them. Don was shirtless and hunched, but still wearing his trousers and shiny middle-aged-businessman shoes. I scanned the crowd. Yes, there was a white man in a shirt that looked like Don’s, but the buttons were stretched around his stomach.

They’d been forced to change, to be human. Some of them had been naked. They had to share their clothes.

I blinked back tears, selfishly glad I hadn’t been there to see that. I looked for Addie, but couldn’t see her.

I took a step down the corridor towards them, and then froze as I looked up and saw that the room had a balcony at one end, like a medieval minstrels’ gallery but made out of the same pale, modern wood and silver and glass as the rest of the penthouse. That must be the passage between the huge reception room and Victoria’s bedroom. Anyone on the second floor could walk into the gallery and look right down into the dining room.

“Roxie!” someone gasped, and the hubbub inside the dining room fell quiet. One of the people I didn’t recognise was looking right at us: a white woman with blonde hair who was naked but tightly wrapped in a long woollen coat. She’d spotted Roxie and thrown her hands up to her mouth. The shifters were all turning to stare at us, all of them with wide hopeful eyes and our names on their lips.

In the hush, I heard other voices echoing down from upstairs. Victoria and Fran, and a male voice that must’ve been Ryan.

I listened, holding my breath. I couldn’t quite make out words, but they seemed animated. Perhaps they were celebrating. Or perhaps Fran was trying to explain what had happened – or didn’t happen – with Blackwell, and Ryan was explaining how Roxie had got away with the Horde stone. I took a second to send up a short prayer that Victoria would be really, really angry with them.

Then they, too, stopped talking. I heard heels clicking on wood and backed up into the shadow of the corridor. Roxie, Mo and James huddled back too. We drew closer together and I snaked my fingers into Mo’s.

“Awfully quiet down there all of a sudden,” called Fran’s voice.

Roxie made frantic wheeling motions with her hands. A few of the shifters turned to their neighbours and tried to pick up their conversations where they left off, but it was stilted and false, like a crowd scene in a film where you can tell everyone’s just saying “rhubarb” to each other.

One of the men glanced over and met my eyes. He was a wiry, greying Indian man who’d stripped down to his boxers and Doc Martins. He had a big tattoo of a fox on his upper arm.

Randhir…?

He turned to Don. “
Don’t
tell me what to do!” he snapped, and he pulled one arm back and punched him right on the chin. Don went flying, sprawling into the arms of the woman behind him. Inspired, the rest of the shifters burst into chatter, taking sides, trying to calm things, restraining Don from retaliation.

Oh yeah. That’s definitely Randhir.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Randhir, you thug!” Don complained, holding his jaw. “You didn’t have to hit me!”

“You shut up,” Rand snapped. “It was your blind trust in Francesca that got us here!”

I closed my eyes and focused every part of myself on listening for the sound of footsteps upstairs. Sure enough, Fran’s shoes could be distantly heard tapping away from us. I shuddered as I opened my eyes. That was too close.

And what were we going to do now?

James snuck up to the edge of the dining room, stepping silently and hugging the wall, and looked up at the gallery. He turned back to us and gave a thumbs up, and all four of us ran across the room to the group of shifters.

“Roxie,” said the blonde woman again. I realised her voice had an American twang. “Thank God, thank God!” She held up her hands and leaned forwards on the thin air, like a mime pretending to be in an invisible box.

I held out a hand and gingerly tapped at the solid barrier in front of me. There really
was
an invisible box. That explained why they hadn’t spread out around the room…

“Are you all OK?” I asked. There was a general shrugging, a few nods and a couple of emphatic headshakes. “Where’s Addie?” I couldn’t see her – she must be behind the Horde shifters.

Roxie made her winding motion again. “Keep talking!” she hissed.

“Just keep away from yelling out things like ‘thank God’ and ‘rescue’ and we might be OK,” muttered James.

The white man who was wearing Don’s shirt gave Roxie a little salute and started talking to his neighbour, a black woman wearing a grey T-shirt and a brown cardigan wound around her waist like a skirt. He gathered the American lady into their conversation too.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “If it was a normal locked room, maybe there’d be something we could use…”

“I’m Amanda,” said the black woman quietly, while the man went on, saying something about locked room mysteries and spy thrillers. “This is Olly and Cameron. On behalf of the Horde, on behalf of everyone here, I’m so sorry we didn’t believe you.”

I nodded. “I get it. Just hold on.”

I crept around the side of the group with Mo behind me, keeping one hand on the solid surface so I could feel where the corners were and not walk headfirst into it.

“Are you from the Skulk?” said a plump man sitting near Amanda, with a skinny girl in a jumper and shorts leaning against his shoulder. She looked about my age. Her legs were curled under her awkwardly.

“Yes, but…” I did a quick count-off in my head. “You’re not Rabble. Who are you?”