Witch Fire (12 page)

Anjuli in particular was suffering. She always wore baggy layers of clothes, perhaps to disguise her painfully thin frame. For the walk, she was wearing a waterproof coat, now tied round her waist, and a fleece jumper. Under her protective curtain of hair, her face had an unhealthy sheen, and her breath rasped painfully. She began to fall behind.

‘Julie,’ barked Peters, coming to a halt. ‘You’re going to get heat exhaustion. Take off that jumper.’

Anjuli shook her head.

One of the guardians, Elga, made an impatient noise. ‘Don’t be stupid, girl. You’ve got a T-shirt on underneath, haven’t you?’

‘No . . . no . . . I am fine,’ Anjuli whispered. ‘Please.’ She was swaying on her feet.

‘Aw, give her a break,’ said Glory. ‘Give us
all
a break, in fact.’ She sat defiantly down on a boulder and fanned her sweaty face. She was already fed up of alpine scenery.
Bloody countryside
, she thought.

Peters ignored her.
‘
Take off that jumper,’ he growled at Anjuli. ‘At once. You’re slowing us down, and endangering your own health.’

Slowly, reluctantly, Anjuli began to peel off her sweat-soaked jumper.

She was wearing a black T-shirt underneath. But now that her arms were bare, they could see for the first time the ugly white splotches that disfigured her right arm. Cigarette burns.

‘
There,’ said Peters.
‘
That wasn’t so hard, was it?’

But Anjuli had begun to cry, tears rolling slowly down her face as she futilely tried to cover the scars with her hands. Peters smirked. Everyone else looked at the ground.

Everyone except for Yuri, that is. He’d already stripped down to a vest; now he took off the cotton shirt he’d tied around his waist and draped it round Anjuli’s shoulders, as a kind of shawl. She clutched at it gratefully. ‘
Svoloch
,’ he spat in Peters’ direction. ‘
Sukin syn
.’

For a moment, Peters looked as if he was going to make something of it. The guards moved closer too. But Yuri stared them down. ‘We are tired,’ he growled. ‘It is time to go back.’

And so they did. As soon as they returned to the academy, Anjuli fled to her room.

Rather than go after her, Glory caught up with Yuri. The others tended to keep out of his way, but he wasn’t that different from the boys on the Rockwood Estate, and she knew how to handle them.

‘It were good what you did for Anjuli,’ she told him. ‘Peters is a pig.’

Yuri looked at her warily. ‘Pig. Yes. He knew about the marks.’

‘How’d she get them, d’you think? The Inquisition?’

‘No,’ said Yuri reluctantly. ‘It was the sister.’

‘But . . . but why?’

‘She was angry. She think a witch-sister, she will stop movie career.’

Glory wondered how Yuri knew about this . . . until the next morning, when he and Anjuli turned up to assembly hand in hand. Anjuli had tucked her hair behind her ears; in spite of the dull skin and hollow cheeks, it could be seen that her eyes were every bit as large and lustrous as her famous sister’s. Yuri’s scowl was now accessorised by a swagger.

‘Love’s young dream,’ Jenna said, curling her lip.

‘Yeah,’ said Glory. ‘And Lazovic’s worst nightmare.’

It was evident the guardians had been told to keep an extra close eye on the pair. Their classmates too were riveted. In the morning’s art class, where they were supposed to be creating ‘mood diaries’ of their emotions in swirls of coloured paint, very little painting was being done because everyone was watching Anjuli and Yuri instead. The lovebirds were mixing colours in a corner, with much whispering.

‘
The Russian is a clever snake to make the moves so quick,’ Raffi lamented. He put his hand to his heart. ‘Ah, is even more a pity the red girl is no here.’

‘Who was that?’ Lucas asked.

‘
Inglés
student, like you. Rosa. Very hot.’

‘She was unhappy to be here,’ said Mei-fen in her small, precise voice. ‘She cried. All the time.’

Glory and Lucas didn’t need to look at each other to share the jolt of recognition. They already knew about a beautiful, red-headed English witch. And now they knew Rose Merle had been at Wildings.

Chapter 12

Glory and Lucas didn’t have a chance to confer until after lunch. Sunday afternoons were free time and so the two of them booked a tennis court, on the pretext that Lucas was teaching Glory how to play.

‘We might have guessed Rose would have come here,’ Lucas said, testing Glory’s racquet strings. ‘Rich relations, high profile.’

‘
The timings fit,’ she agreed. ‘Mei says Rose left just over eight months ago. That’s about one month before her brain got fried.’

He demonstrated a few strokes: backhand, forehand, slice, lob. ‘You think there’s a connection?’

‘Anything’s possible. The American bloke who collected Rose from the clinic? He said he was her uncle, but he weren’t family, that’s for sure. Maybe he was someone from here.’ Glory batted a few balls over the net.

‘Rose isn’t our concern,’ Lucas said, as they ambled over to pick them up. ‘We can’t get sidetracked.’

‘From what? It’s not like we got anything else to go on.’

Glory glanced at a patrolling guardian, who had stopped to watch them play. She took up the position to serve. She couldn’t compete with Lucas’s years of coaching at the tennis club, but she was a quick learner. They played a short rally, then once the coast was clear, drew nearer to the net to confer.

‘OK, so I’m thinking we should take a peek at the files,’ she said.

‘Which ones?’

‘
The student ones, of course. What Lazovic’s got in his study.’

He gaped at her. Taking advantage of his distraction, she moved back and got in a sneaky kick serve. Lucas lunged, and missed. ‘
Hex
.’

‘Ooooh! Language!’

Lucas moved round to Glory’s side of the net and took her arm, under the pretext of correcting her grip on the racquet.

‘
That’s moving on from “observe and report”. That’s breaking and entering.’

‘I know. It’ll probably need witchwork too,’ she said airily.

‘If we get caught, all hell will break loose.’

‘And if we find a smoking gun, we’ll be the heroes of the hour.’ She turned to face him properly. ‘C’mon,’ she whispered coaxingly. ‘Don’t it drive you crazy, not using your fae? Mab Almighty – if I don’t get to do something soon, I’ll go
mad
.’

Lucas had to lean in close to hear her. The sun had brought out a dusting of freckles on her cheek. Underneath her collarbone, he could see what looked like a darker freckle. The pinprick mark of her Devil’s Kiss. He remembered how it waxed and waned with the fae, the inky bloom of it. Now, it seemed as if he could brush it away with just a fingertip.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the guardian was walking past again. He gave a warning cough. ‘Better show me your backhand.’

What Glory lacked in technique, she made up for in bloody-mindedness. She lunged, sliced and swiped, with whoops of triumph or howls of frustration.

Grey turrets against a blue sky, pine breeze, mountain shadow. And he, Lucas Stearne, playing tennis in a Swiss castle with a coven witch. Mab Almighty . . .

‘What’s so funny?’ Glory demanded, pausing mid-serve. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

He shook his head, unable to explain the joke, but filled with an unexpected happiness all the same. Maybe it was catching, for suddenly Glory started to laugh too.

‘Hey, guys. Wanna play doubles?’

It was Jenna, immaculate in tennis whites, her ponytail as perky as her smile. Raffi was with her, in tight red shorts, and grinning broadly. Glory and Lucas exchanged glances. But the guardian was still watching, and it would be rude not to say yes.

It turned out that Lucas and Jenna were evenly matched. Raffi was more experienced than Glory, but his smoking habit and lack of fitness meant that they were at about the same level too. They played three sets before the bell rang for afternoon tea.

This was a Sunday institution, served on the front lawn, and hosted by Principal Lazovic. It was one of several rituals designed to create the illusion that life at the academy wasn’t all that different to a holiday at a grand hotel. As the tennis players made their way over to the tea tables, Jenna came over to Glory and linked arms.

Jenna was one of those people who never seemed to break into a sweat. Her whites were still daisy-fresh, unlike Glory’s vest top and tracksuit bottoms. ‘So,’ she said.
‘
That was
fun
.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You and Lucas looked good together. On court,’ she explained. ‘I was watching you kid around.’

Glory tried to remember if they’d said or done anything that might give them away. She shrugged. ‘He’s not quite as square as he looks.’

They paused to survey the party. Lucas was offering a plate of biscuits to Mei. After two weeks in the sun, his English pallor had almost gone. Glory noticed his eyes looked even bluer, against the tan.

‘Cute too,’ Jenna observed.

‘Bit young for you, I’d’ve thought.’

‘Hey – are you calling me a cougar?’ Jenna gave her a playful slap. ‘I’m seventeen, not seventy.’ Then, confidingly,  she added, ‘Not that I’d, like, get in your
way
, or anything. If, y’know, you and him . . .’

‘I told you,’ said Glory through gritted teeth. ‘Not my type.’

The ponytail swished. ‘If you say so.’

It wasn’t just the witchwork ban that was making Glory prickly. It was the stifling atmosphere of the place. All the cream teas in the world couldn’t alter the fact that they were fenced in with wire and guarded with guns. In her blacker moods, she wondered if the whole Endor business was a scam on WICA’s part, just to get rid of them. But despite her best efforts, Lucas continued to oppose direct action. They needed to work on building relationships with the other students and staff, he said. Breaking into the principal’s office should be a last resort.

Typical Lucas, the teacher’s pet. He’d already got footage of all the students and staff on his spy-cam, and continued to email coded updates to WICA. Glory wondered what on earth he found to write about. It was even a struggle with her dad.
I’ve made friends with an American named Jenna. I’m learning how to play tennis. We went on a walk yesterday and saw an eagle
. Patrick’s reply was mostly devoted to describing how he and Rolf had cracked Level Six of
Inquisitor’s Creed
, their latest computer game obsession. Glory wondered what the censors had made of it.

Her correspondence with Troy was already petering out, though she’d tried to get Rose into her last message:
Apparently there used to be another English girl here, called Rose
. She doubted Troy was in a position to do anything with the information, even if it got past the censors. Still, she couldn’t get the girl out of her head. In their brief encounter, Rose had seemed like an apparition from a fae-tale. Hair like fire, skin like snow, eyes the colour of violets . . . A girl like that belonged in a castle like this. But Rose was now imprisoned by her own body, not by stone walls and electric fences.

Glory knew she mustn’t allow herself to get distracted. Her priority had to be the students who were actually present. So far, she was making the most progress with Raffi. When he wasn’t being a sleaze, he could be amusing company, and had a cheerful disrespect for the academy – and authority in general – that she could relate to. On the Thursday of their third week, she even had the opportunity to talk to him about Endor.

Although TV at Wildings was strictly rationed, an exception was made for the news. So when reports came in that the Chief Prosecutor of the Italian Inquisition had been assassinated, lessons were suspended to allow students to watch the news on the BBC World Service. Alessandra Giordani had been killed on her way to the trial of the head-witch of a notorious Sicilian coven. It was said she’d been hexed into slitting her own wrists, sitting tranced in an empty field as she waited to die.

Afterwards, Glory sloped off to join Raffi for a fag outside the gym. Glory was not a smoker, having had her first cigarette at the age of eight. Nate had given it to her, and then laughed when she threw up afterwards. The taste still made her nauseous. But she felt a sneaky puff now and then was appropriate for her Wildings persona. Also, she knew Lucas disliked it, and she was annoyed with Lucas at the moment.

‘Well,’ she said, lighting up next to Raffi.
‘
There’s one less inquisitor in the world, at least.’

‘Poor lady, even so. It was a wicked thing.’

‘Who’s to say it weren’t an actual suicide?’ Glory inhaled, trying not to retch. ‘Anything bad happens, it’s witches what get blamed. Journalists, politicians, police – they’re all in it together.’

‘In Cordoba, is different. There the police and the covens are often friends.’ Raffi winked at her through the smoke.