A Hero at the End of the World (10 page)

“Relax, we have someone in the SMCA,” Archie told him, dodging as Ewan swiped at him again. “Followers of Zaubernegativum are everywhere. Bernard?” he said to whoever was on the line.

Ewan sat back down, his stomach churning.

“It’s Archibald Gardener Hobbes. I need you to transfer a call for me. I need to speak with Oliver Abrams—yes,
that
Oliver Abrams.” To Ewan, he asked, “Which department does he work in?”

“Um, the Unusuals,” Ewan replied, remembering that newspaper article he had read. Had that really only been four days ago? “Should I be worried about how easily I was convinced to help murder someone?”

“No, don’t worry about it,” Archie said dismissively. “Oh, no, Bernard, not you. Abrams is in the Department of Unusuals. I don’t know, don’t you have a department directory? What do you
mean
, you don’t use phones? My hard-earned taxes are going toward this.”

“You pay taxes?” Ewan asked, his eyebrows rising.

“Of course I don’t pay taxes, I’m rich,” Archie sniffed. “Yes, Bernard? I’m passing along the phone now.”

He held the receiver out to Ewan, who stared at it in horror. A muzak version of a Michael Bublé song blasted on the other end of the line. Ewan’s palms went damp with sweat; his lower lip began shaking. He was suddenly acutely aware of a fruit fly buzzing through the lilies in the vase at the middle of the table.

“You said you would handle it,” Ewan said.

“I lied,” Archie replied.

The phone clicked. “Agent Abrams.”

Archie shook the receiver at him. “Take it,” he hissed.

“Hello?” Oliver asked. His voice was exactly as it had been five years ago. “Hello?”

“Oliver?”

Ewan cringed at the way his voice cracked. On the other end of the phone there was a long, heavy pause, and even now he could easily picture the shocked expression on Oliver’s face, the way Oliver clenched his fists when he was pretending he was calm.

“Is this...?” Oliver finally asked, his voice husky.

Ewan swallowed thickly. “H-hi,” he said. “It’s Ewan. You all right? It’s been ages.”

“Yeah, it has been.”

There was another pause. Ewan’s heart pounded in his ears.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m calling. Well, um, I was thinking about you the other day,” he said. That was a lie—he thought about Oliver every single day of his life, from the moment he woke up to the second he dropped off into sleep. “I was thinking that we should catch up sometime.”

He expected to get not only a, “No,” but also a, “Call me again and I’m informing the police.” What he hadn’t counted on was Oliver saying, “You’re right, we should. What are you

doing this afternoon?”

“Uh, this afternoon?” repeated Ewan, voice wobbling.

He threw Archie a look and found him equally surprised, his eyes huge and his mouth hanging open; he made a strange flapping gesture with his hands that either meant he was very excited or having a heart attack.

“Yeah, I can do this afternoon,” Ewan replied. “Do you want to meet me at the café by Parliament Hill?”

“Why there?” Oliver asked, and Ewan thought he heard a trace of suspicion in his voice. “Why don’t you come to Central London? The Heath’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“Because... remember the summer holidays when your foster mum was working in Highgate and used to drop us off there every morning...? Don’t you think that it would be nice to go back...?” he babbled.

Archie squeezed his knee. It was clearly meant to be comforting, but it had the effect of causing Ewan to nearly drop the receiver.

“It
would
be nice,” Oliver said. “Meet you there at four?”

“Four o’clock,” Ewan agreed. “See you then. I—I look forward to it.”

He hung up. The dining room fell silent; even the birds outside seemed to have stopped chirping.

Emotions bubbled up inside him, one after another. He felt powerful and terrified and anxious all at once—the same feelings he’d had at age twelve when Seabrooke had broken the news to him that the Council of Augurers had determined that he was the hero in the prophecy that had predicted the end of Duff Slan. It must have been what Louise had wanted for him; she had wanted him to experience that feeling again, to remember what it was like to know who you were and what you were meant for. He could have cried.

“Oh my God,” Archie said. “I can’t believe that actually
worked
.”

Chapter 10

W
hen Oliver and Sophie were summoned to the Office of Forensic Divination, they found Doctor Barath studying her monitor as if it contained the answers to the secrets of the universe. At the sound of the door opening, she glanced up, blinking, and jumped to her feet. There were dark circles under her eyes.

“Agents,” she said, looking bewildered, “what are you doing here?” “You sent us a message saying you needed to speak with us,” Sophie replied. “It nearly took off Oliver’s head.”

“It broke my desk lamp,” Oliver said morosely. He held out the cube that the message had come in; a note had unfurled out of the two pieces like a flower.

Barath seemed to shake herself. “Ah, yes, that’s right, I did.” Her hands fluttered in the direction of her mutant computer. “I found a spell.”

Surprised, Oliver asked, “Which spell? The one Ralph the Ravager was using on his followers?”

“Not the spell, exactly. It’s not quite the one you were looking for, but it does involve human sacrifice...” She trailed off.

Lately, the spell Ralph the Ravager had been using seemed insignificant compared to the revelation that Ewan had joined forces with Louise Gardener Hobbes. Oliver, despite his experience in fighting evil, was having a difficult time wrapping his mind around what was happening. Was his real enemy Ewan Mao, his childhood best friend? Ewan Mao, the boy who hadn’t learned how to tie his shoes until they were in secondary school? It seemed ridiculous.

After their visit to the CCH, Oliver had stayed at work until the wee hours of the morning, combing through the Government’s files on Ewan. They had everything from his old school reports (terrible) to his totemic readings (weak) to his most recent CV (embarrassing), but the only thing that linked him to the Society for the Advancement for Zaubernegativum was that Gardener Hobbes’ son had been spotted at the Maos’ home by a sentry two days earlier. The report had said that Archibald Gardener Hobbes had been at the house for ninety-two minutes and had left with a bag of fruit and biscuits. Oliver hadn’t slept a wink after that.

“What is it?” Sophie asked.

“You were right about one thing: a spell
does
exist that does what you were looking for,” Barath said, and Oliver’s heart leapt into his throat. “It’s an old spell—I found it in a seventeenth-century Florentine book on black magic—an outdated distinction now, I know, but—”

“Before the next person opens a portal into another universe, Doctor,” he said a tad too sharply; out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sophie throw him a glance.

Barath cleared her throat, looking a little frazzled. “Ah, yes, terribly sorry. I’ll get to the point. Essentially, the spell is broken up into two parts, one done before the sacrifice, and one after. Once the sacrifice has been made, the person who called up this particular conjuration then projects the energy released by death onto—well, something. The notes are very vague.”

“Are you saying there’s no need to attempt going over the recharge limit because the power is never absorbed by the spellcaster?” Sophie asked.

“That’s correct; the magic is immediately merged together and expelled outwards, rather than absorbed. But it would seem it’s expelled onto a specific person or thing.”

“Like an attack?” Oliver demanded, going still.

“I’m not saying it would’ve
worked
,” replied Barath. “But for the person performing the spell, they must have thought that it was worth a shot.”

“Can you trace the provenance of the spell?” Sophie asked. “Or at least find evidence that it was cast at all?”

Barath tucked her hair behind her ear, fidgeting. “I might be able to, but I haven’t tried yet. I only discovered the spell a few hours ago.”

“I need you to get on it as soon as possible,” said Sophie, clearly unmoved by her agitation.

Oliver balked at the thought of waiting yet another day or two for Barath to find out where the spell had originated, while Gardener Hobbes was busy recruiting Oliver’s old friends and getting on with whatever it was she had planned. By the time Barath and Sophie had put together that it hadn’t been Ralph the Ravager who had conjured the spell, it could be too late.

“There’s no point,” he said firmly. He waved an arm around the room. “We’re not going to get anywhere with spells and history lessons.”

Sophie followed him out the door. “We need to connect Ralph the Ravager to—”

“We’re not going to find a connection, because it doesn’t exist,” Oliver cut in. An agent down the corridor glanced up at their argument, and Oliver glared at him until he dropped his gaze.

“If that’s true,” Sophie replied, lowering her voice, “then we should be able to track the spell straight back to Lady Gardener Hobbes.”

“Right. Yeah,” Oliver agreed, feeling calmer. He could wait a few hours so long as it got him the evidence he needed. “We’ll wait for Barath to finish locating its provenance. And then we’ll take her to the nick.”

¤

But then Ewan called him, wanting to meet for tea.

With Ewan breathing heavily on the end of the line, Oliver realized that he had been giving his former best friend the benefit of the doubt. A part of him, a big part, hadn’t wanted to believe that Ewan had done anything wrong. The Ewan Mao that he had always known was too anxious, too meek, too
nice
to be evil.

Yet there was also the Ewan that Oliver didn’t seem to know anymore, the one who had stayed away for the past five years. Ewan Mao, his and Sophie’s number one person of interest.

“I—I look forward to it,” was the last thing Ewan stammered before hanging up.

“Oh, I bet you do, my old friend,” Oliver murmured darkly. He rubbed his chin. “I bet you—”

“Are you talking to me?” Sophie asked.

Oliver sat up straight. “No, just thinking out loud,” he replied, setting the phone receiver down.

Sophie was gazing him in concern. “Are you all right? Who was on the phone?”

He stared across the desk at her, at the crease between her brows and the edge of her lip caught between her teeth. It had been difficult enough for Oliver to convince Kaur to let him take care of what he was now privately thinking of as The Ewan Situation.

“Everything’s fine,” he lied, feeling a twinge of guilt. He pushed a stack of papers to the side before deciding it had been better where he’d had it before. “It was my, erm, uncle. He wants me to meet him for a late lunch.”

Her worry turned into confusion. “I thought your entire family died in a terrible accident and you felt like you just never made the right emotional connection to any of your foster families?”

Not for the first time, Oliver wished that he’d found a way of getting out of their mandatory partner bonding sessions back when they were first paired together. They got you to cast the emotional honesty spell on yourself, to test your commitment to the Agency. It was positively barbaric.

“Oh, this uncle was...” He wracked his brain. “He was on holiday when it happened.”

That seemed to satisfy her. She went back to sorting through the pile of old case files she had stacked on her desk in her search to find a connection between Ralph the Ravager and another crime, but Oliver rocked back in his chair and stared across the office at the map on the wall. From here, everything in London appeared normal; there were no bright red lights flashing across any of the boroughs. Apart from Oliver, no one in the SMCA, maybe even in the entire Government, knew that there was an evil mastermind waiting for her chance to... to what?

He hated that he was still in the dark about what Gardener Hobbes was up to. He wasn’t used to this type of frustration, of being both so close to and so far from figuring out a puzzle. If Gardener Hobbes hadn’t conned her cult members into sacrificing themselves so she could absorb their power, then what was she doing?

And more importantly, what sinister plot had she drawn Ewan into?

“I’m taking a half-day,” he announced, throwing on his jacket.

Behind him, he heard Sophie ask, “What?
Now
?”

¤

It was hours before Oliver was due on Hampstead Heath. Without really thinking about it, he filed into the station at Westminster along with the tourists and Government employees who had dashed out to get their lunch. At Green Park, he shuffled over to the Victoria Line.

The Tube ride north was enough to drain him of his anger. Around King’s Cross, he glanced up at the map that lined the top of the carriage, and one name jumped out at him: Walthamstow Central. His heart felt like it had flipped over in his chest. It had been so long since he and Ewan had seen each other. Once more, doubt gnawed at him.

He needed to clear this up, he decided as the train headed further and further north. He needed to see Ewan.

Oliver felt calm again by the time he stepped out of the station at Walthamstow. Everything about the surrounding area was terribly, almost painfully familiar: Oliver had grown up with his foster parents in nearby Whipps Cross, and as children he and Ewan had traded off between the densely packed streets by Ewan’s home and the old, creeping forest by Oliver’s. As teenagers, though, they had spent more and more time indoors, and Oliver remembered being annoyed by the way Ewan had preferred holing up in his room over spending time with people from school.

Nowadays, Oliver lived in Islington. Compared to the posh streets of Angel, Walthamstow seemed suburban and run-down.

On autopilot, Oliver turned off the high street, past the chicken shop where he and Ewan used to spend their pocket money. His body still held the muscle memory of walking to the Mao household. By the time he got to their flat—half of one of the red and white terraced houses, theirs with a small garden in front and a box of yellow flowers on the upstairs window—he was shivering from the damp and cold.