Vowed (31 page)

I take the memory stick from him and slide it into my hip pocket. ‘I’ll put it on my iPod and see what I think.’

He smiles, looking pleased, and gives me a sly wink. ‘Don’t tell Miron I let you have those files. He’s very possessive over what goes in and out of the club.’

‘No one tells me what to do.’

Sharp white teeth flash at me in the hazy dark followed by a low chuckle.

‘I like you, Kit Blackhart. You have guts.’

‘Why, thank you. I try.’

The Tube ride home is hell. When I eventually exit at Camden I stagger home in a fugue state having stopped by the pizza place to get dinner as I’m pretty sure that
Kyle’s not bought anything for himself to eat.

The house is in darkness when I let myself in. I turn on the lights and eat a slice of pizza standing in the kitchen. I hear the front door open and then Kyle’s standing there looking
rough and beaten up. His lip’s been cut, his eye is swollen shut and the way he’s holding himself tells me everything must hurt.

‘What the hell?’ I rush towards him and help him sink down into a chair in the dining room.

The look he gives me is one of tired acceptance. ‘A bunch of guys waited until I left the lab with Jilly this evening. They threatened us then decided that I didn’t look scared
enough and decided to beat me up. I lost my glasses and they broke Jilly’s phone.’

‘How many of them? And is Jilly okay?’

‘There were six of them. She’s fine. She got a lucky shot in and knocked one guy out.’

‘Have you been to hospital?’

He shakes his head, wincing. ‘No. I helped Jilly move all her research to another lab in another part of the building. Then I called a taxi for her and made sure she got home safely. I
thought I’d come home and see if you were okay.’

‘Were they there to warn you off about the Glow?’

His lips form a wry smile but he shakes his head. ‘No, they were goblins – goblins wearing a glamour. They told me that if we didn’t stop investigating the children
disappearing they’d take things further.’

I swear some choice swears and Kyle tries a laugh but winces in pain.

‘Can you move?’

‘Yeah, I’m okay. My ribs hurt but they’re not broken.’

Taking him on his word, I help him upstairs. It takes some time, but I clean his face carefully and put butterfly plasters over his eyebrow. His ribs, like mine, are bruised but look far worse.
They’re not cracked either, just painful. I make him down a handful of painkillers and push him into a shower.

One thing I’ve learned really well in my time as a Blackhart is how to take care of hurts and aches and pains, but I don’t really have enough patience with it all. I make Kyle some
tea, checking that it’s not too hot before carrying it and several slices of pizza upstairs to his room. He’s sitting on the side of the bed, his shoulders rounded, and looks so tired
and young that my heart suddenly feels heavy.

‘I sent Dad a text message when I left Jilly’s place,’ Kyle says as I walk in. ‘He’s not replied yet.’

I pull up the chair that lives in front of his desk. ‘Why are they so keen to make sure we stay away from this case, Kyle? I’ve never had this much interference before.’

He tries to shake his head but winces instead ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s bigger than we think.’

‘Did I ever mention before how much I love being part of this family?’

‘Every single day.’ He wince-laughs at me when I pull a face. ‘So what did you find out today?’

‘Well, that the little girl who’s been taken is called Tia. And her house was warded against me. I couldn’t actually get into the flat to check things out for myself, then
Dante got sick at the crime scene and I had to drive him home.’

‘Wow. Your day sounds as fun as mine. Want to compare notes?’

As he settles himself into his bed, I collect my laptop, the SD card from the camera and all my notes and bring them to him. I find a map of the British Isles and some thumbtacks and bring those
too, along with his laptop.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Photos from today, first.’

He flicks through the photos, pausing at the masks. ‘You think the masks prevented you from getting in?’

‘Yes. I also think they made Dante sick.’

‘What?’

‘Remember I helped Dante See the previous time? I did it again today and I think that whatever’s in this flat, which prevented me from getting in, made him sick enough to actually
leave.’

‘Anything else about the little girl being taken?’

‘Her brother, Marvin, ran after the bad guy and saw him jump down the stairwell. Not the stairs,’ I clarify, ‘but the actual middle bit. They’re four storeys
up.’

‘Even you can’t do that.’

I roll my eyes at him. ‘I’m not superhuman, Kyle.’

‘Whatever. You do some stupid stuff I’ve not seen any other human do, outside of a Hollywood movie, and you don’t die.’

‘You’re being ridiculous. Pay attention.’ I shift uncomfortably. ‘So here’s a list of all the other kids we’ve got going missing across Scotland, England,
Wales and Ireland. I thought about it and decided we needed to see how they fit together.’ I pick up the little box of drawing pins. ‘Start reading them out.’

Twenty minutes later I stand back and look at the groups of drawing pins spread around the map of the British Isles. In the past five years, there have been clusters of children disappearing all
over the British Isles and somehow no one has thought they were suspicious. Kyle’s cursory research found around thirty-eight kids missing, all in small groups of three or four. It started
five years ago in Scotland and, if you work chronologically, a pattern emerges of kids disappearing from Inverness, Edinburgh, Glasgow and then Douglas on the Isle of Man. The pins then show kids
missing in Ireland – Dublin – then back to England. Here, we logged disappearances in Liverpool, Manchester and now Brixton in London. But the timings are all over the place so I
can’t definitely link them to any feast days, even as a long shot.

‘It’s random.’

‘But there has to be a connection of some sort.’ I think about what the female twin at the club said to me. ‘What do all of these have in common?’

Kyle squints at the wall. ‘Well, the children are all human. And they’re all under eight.’ He shrugs. ‘No one seems to care about them all that much, in the end. I mean,
no one else has linked them together.’

‘True. They are from all different races too – so it doesn’t seem racially motivated.’

‘You’re going to hate me saying this,’ he says after a few minutes of silence. ‘Do you think we should go to the police?’

‘I’d like to, trust me. But what do we have?’ I gesture to the wall. ‘We think there’s something there. We need one obvious thing to link all of them together. One
thing, that’s all.’ I jab my forefinger at the map. ‘This is frustrating.’

‘So, let’s think about this. Where were these kids all taken from?’

‘Their homes. Usually in the middle of the night.’

‘And where are their homes?’

I gesture to the wall. ‘All over Britain.’

Kyle moves his plate of now cold pizza aside and stands up. ‘No, look at the reports I pulled up, Kit. Look where the majority of these kids are all missing from. Where they
lived.’

I frown at him, uncomprehendingly. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Addresses.’ He grabs the files from me. ‘Look. The Greenwood Estate. The Lindhoff Estate. The Gate Estate.’ He shakes the folder in my face. ‘These are all kids
from estates.’

I look at him blankly and he grumbles. ‘From poorer families or families that are usually in monetary dire straits. Now do you understand?’

‘So what, people are selling their kids?’ I scowl at him. ‘That’s not something I think is possible.’

‘It happened, Kit. All the time. In less developed parts of the world in olden times. Kids were sold on for money to buy food and to feed others in a large family. I mean, there are
records. In some places like India, children are maimed so that they can go out and beg. And that’s recent. Nothing stops it from happening here either.’

‘No, I refuse to believe that we’re talking about people selling their kids. It just makes no sense to me.’ I tap my head. ‘Come on. These photos don’t show any
neglect.’ I flip through them. ‘Look. Toys. Clothes. A bedroom packed full of books, games and pictures. That’s not someone who’s going to sell their child off so they can
feed the rest of their family. Besides, I met this little girl’s brother, Marvin. He’s a bright kid, no sign of neglect. Apart from maybe a pair of hideous NHS glasses but that’s
it, really.’

‘Then what? How do we explain this?’

‘Maybe the kids have some kind of gift, something this person really wants.’

‘Do you think it’s a paedophile? I mean, you hear about it on the news. Kids being taken, being groomed.’

I inhale deeply. ‘We can’t be sure. I hope not.’

‘Maybe we should talk to the police.’

‘Will they listen to us? I don’t know. What we’ve got is a group of kids who have disappeared. They are within roughly the same age group and have vanished in pretty much the
same way over the past five years. We don’t know why they’ve disappeared. And until we do, I don’t think we’ll be able to get anyone to pay us any attention.’

‘Dad could talk to someone and make them take us seriously,’ Kyle suggests, drinking his tea and pondering the map. ‘I hurt too much to sleep. Let me see what I can find
tonight. I’ll research those families and see if anything stands out.’

‘Okay. I’ve got to have a shower. Just shout if you need anything.’

The few stairs to my tiny room at the top of the house seem to take forever. I have a necessarily long shower and I drag my papers and laptop along with me and crawl onto my bed to work through
them. I try not to think about Dante being ill and just why he’s so sick.

A part of me feels that I should be there, checking on him, making sure he’s okay. I know how badly I hallucinated when my magic settled into me and I can only imagine what it must be like
for him. But, a voice tells me, you’re not a changeling. You’re human who happens to have magic, unlike Dante. Who’s not human. But – and this is a big one, and I know Jamie
wouldn’t be impressed by this because it’s about
feelings
– I like Dante and thought we were friends. I like how he listens to me, how he argues, how he tries bossing me
around and then attempts to make up for being an idiot. I got to know him as Dante, the SDI agent who is a bit rubbish but who has a great empathy and kindness to him.

I groan and close my eyes, opening them again to focus on the papers spread around me. Torsten’s USB stick sits neatly beside my laptop and I plug it in, queuing the music up. I find my
headphones and plug myself in.

The music engulfs me in a wall of sound as I bend my will to figuring out why these kids were taken. I also access the folders Kyle had set up on the kids across the UK. I flick through their
photos and the brief newspaper articles about them. It’s not comfortable reading and I feel strangely as if I’m invading the families’ privacy by doing so. When I search the
online maps to see where they lived, like the Brixton estate, most locations look run down – in dire need of attention from the councils that run them.

As much as I hate it, I entertain the thought, for only a second, that Kyle could be right. Might whoever is ‘taking’ these kids be doing it with the help of the parents? Could it be
about money?

I grab my phone and send Kyle a text message:
Can you hack these people’s bank accounts to see if money’s been transferred to them?

You serious? You now think they could have sold their kids?
he replies super fast.

I don’t know what to think. Can you do it?

If you make me some coffee.

No.

Make me coffee, and I’ll work all night.

Dawn finds two Blackhart cousins staring blearily at heaps of bank printouts. Kyle’s room looks as if a paper mill has exploded across the breadth and width of it. I
don’t think we’ll ever be able to see the floor again, there’s that much paper strewn across it – along with coffee cups, biscuit crumbs and empty Coke cans.

Kyle stretches his arms above his head, wincing, and I let out a huge yawn.

‘I’m tired.’

‘So am I.’

We grin at each other. The all-nighter we just pulled has really paid off. We discovered that in over seventy-five per cent of the cases, the parents had money paid into their bank accounts. And
we’re not talking corner-shop change here, either. In some instances we found newspaper articles that corresponded with windfalls or lucky finds. The only drawback is that a lot of these
windfalls happened
before
the kids went missing, literally a few days before or a week or two before.

‘Are we thinking blackmail?’

‘Could be.’ I yawn again and rub my face. ‘That opens up a whole different kettle of fish. And, to be honest, I can’t think any more. I need sleep. And food.’

‘Same.’ Kyle checks his watch. ‘Sleep till ten then I’ll take you for breakfast.’

I shake my head. ‘I’m okay to have cereal, really. I’ve been bought so much food recently that if I never look at pancakes or bacon and eggs again, it will be too
soon.’

He laughs softly and nods. ‘Pass me some aspirin before you go?’

I toss him the box and go to my room. I check my phone. No calls from Dante or text messages. I send him a quick message, asking him how he’s doing. I send another one to Chem to see if I
can talk to Marvin at some stage.

I crawl into bed and fall asleep in the blink of an eye. Mercifully, there are no dreams. Or if there are, I don’t remember them.

‘Kit, get up.’

Kyle looms over me and I jerk back in fright. His face is a mess of bruises.

‘You really need to practise karate more,’ I tell him as I push up against my pillows. ‘Especially the blocking the blows to your face part. You look bad.’

‘These will go down but you’ll still be ugly,’ he quips, touching the bruise beneath his eye. ‘We forgot about Lan coming today.’