Afterlight (13 page)

‘There was that card,’ I responded numbly, feeling his disappointment; I felt it,
too. Eve—I couldn’t bring myself to call her
Monica
—hadn’t given us enough to go
on.

We were two streets away from The Star. I slumped down lower in my seat in case it
was a slow news day and rabid journos were still parked out front. While I was making
myself as small as possible, Jordan fished the
card out of the plastic bag and rested
it on the dashboard, re-reading it out loud.

To Carter K – for services rendered.

Always, M x

‘No good,’ he muttered as he took the narrow, concealed entrance that fed into Sancerre
Lane and the back entrance of The Star. ‘Gives us nothing.’

‘You’re telling me?’

Jordan dug around in the bag some more and retrieved the blue envelope. His expression
suddenly changed and he turned the front of it in my direction as he steered the
car slowly up the lane.

‘Carter Kelly,’ I read aloud. It was written in the same loopy hand from the inside
of the
Thank You!
card.

Eve had maybe started to write the guy’s address on the front. There was a single
vertical line under the name. But she’d never gotten any further before she’d shoved
the envelope back in the bag.

‘How many C. Kelly’s could there be in the book?’ I said wearily as we bumped down
the cobbles towards home past the usual array of locked up, spray-painted garage
doors.

‘Plenty,’ Jordan replied with a frown. ‘That’s the problem. People called Kelly aren’t
exactly thin on the ground. You’d have to call each one. And the right guy
might
not even be listed.’

‘I can start looking once I get inside,’ I murmured. ‘I’ll be fine once I get inside.
Really, I’ll take it from here. I’m used to Eve’s, um…’

‘
Methodologies
?’ Jordan cut in. ‘I still don’t know how you identified all those
people if this is the kind of
help
she gives you. You’re amazing, you know that?’

‘Like, the opposite of,’ I retorted, leaning back against my headrest.

I looked up through the window at a sudden bright break in the clouds, feeling the
faint warmth of the late afternoon sun on my face for the first time that day. I
closed my eyes momentarily.

‘It was all dumb luck, J. The usual way I operate.’

He pulled to a stop outside The Star’s fire door. I scraped myself together and undid
my seat belt. Everything hurt. To make matters worse, I had to tip my head back at
an oblique angle to stop the snot from leaking out my nose in a thin stream.

Jordan leaned back against the driver’s door, looked at me. ‘I’ll just come in, make
sure you’re okay,’ he said in a neutral voice.

Wordlessly, I popped my own door and shouldered it open, almost falling flat on my
face on the bluestone cobbles outside.

As Jordan pushed open his door, I held up one hand,
palm out, noticing with a detached,
I’m-about-to-burn-all-my-bridges-with-the-hottest-guy-in-school kind of calm, that
I was noticeably swaying from side to side like a drunk elephant. The urge to flee
was rising in me, like a scream.

‘I need a bad-ass dose of antihistamines,’ I rasped into his face across the roof
of the car, swiping at my nose with the back of my sleeve for that extra touch of
elegance. ‘What I
don’t
need, Jordan Haig,’ I added, wagging a shaky finger at him,
‘is expectation and hope. I need to get this goddamned phase of my life over with
so that my sparklyarkly future—whatever that is—can start. Now just go home, will
you?’

I squinted at my surroundings beadily, imagining a lingering scent of violets wrapping
around me in the chill air and swung my pointer finger in a semi-circle.

‘All of you.
Go home
. Trouble me no further this night.’

Having delivered possibly the last words I would ever speak in Jordan Haig’s hearing,
I swerved around the front of the car in the direction of the fire door. But Jordan
somehow got there before I did and we stared each other down. The sound of my own
blood was roaring in my ears. I had to force myself not to look away first. We were
standing so close to each other, I could see every tiny, milk-coffee coloured freckle
dappling the bridge of his excellent nose, and I’m sure it was likewise from his
POV, except my nose was red.

It was excruciating meeting his eyes but, for once, I refused to back down.

‘I am trying to tell you to go away,’ I muttered with as much dignity as I could
manage. ‘I’m trying to tell you that I don’t need your help and you aren’t reading
the signals. Damn it.’

‘Actually, I’m not angry anymore,’ Jordan replied cheerfully, as if we were having
an entirely different conversation. ‘Now? I’m kind of enjoying myself.’

Nonplussed, I watched as he banged on the steel fire door with the flat of his free
hand like that lie he’d told security was true and he had every right to see me inside.

‘You’re a funny girl, Soph,’ he said. ‘Now that you’ve got my full and undivided
attention, shut your mouth and try to look happy. Do you know how many girls would
kill
to be in your position?’

He gave me a sideways shove with one elbow. And then he grinned, just to show he
was joking. A wide, sustained, toothy grin that changed all the lines of his angular
face completely and crinkled up the skin around his grey eyes.

Something inside me flipped over, pancake-style, even though he was a lost cause.
No guy forms lascivious intentions about a girl who screams like, well, a girl and
wipes her nose on the back of her hand because she forgot to pack tissues.

So I said, gruffly, to shield myself from the sudden rush of hurt, ‘And your opinion
means so much.
Now get off me
.’

I shoved Jordan back so hard he fell off the step
we were standing on, almost dropping Monica’s plastic bag. He started laughing.

There was a muffled clank from the other side, then the heavy steel door creaked
open. Eric the dreadlocked dish pig stuck his head out cautiously, doing a triple-take
when he saw it was me standing out there. With a guy who appeared to be enjoying
my company.

‘You look like shit, Soph!’ Eric exclaimed when he’d gotten his face back under control.
‘And you’re supposed to be
inside
the, uh’—he made exaggerated talking marks with
his fingers—‘
security cordon
. Is that the boyfriend everyone’s talking about?’

I glared at Eric so fiercely that he darted aside to let us pass. Still grinning,
Jordan guided me down the back hallway past Gran’s empty office.

‘Walk faster,’ I murmured. ‘Don’t want to be seen. No mood for questions.’

But Gran caught the edge of Jordan’s lean denim-clad hip heading up the staircase
to my bedroom because Gran never misses a trick.

‘Soph?’ she called out, peering around the open double doors to the Public Bar. ‘Jordan?
Is that you?’

Through the doorway behind us, I caught the stares of at least a half-dozen interested
parties looking on from behind their beers, their eyes and ears almost hanging out
on stalks.

At the mention of Jordan’s name, Dirty Neil actually levered his permanent leer
and visible span of bum crack off his usual stool and shambled to the door with a
half-finished beer in his hand, the better to eyeball us. He took a huge pull of
his drink, giving Jordan the evil eye—which was hard, because Jordan had at least
ten centimetres on him.

Dirty Neil’s voice was surly. ‘Where d’you think you’re off to, sport? Only bedrooms
upstairs.’

‘To do some research,’ Jordan replied coolly, letting go of me and standing taller.

‘I’ll bet,’ Dirty Neil shot back, his eyes sliding down the length of my shivering,
feverish body like a greased spit ball.

I heard Jordan’s angry intake of breath and his profile went hard, the tension in
the air almost crystallising.

‘Gran?’ I pleaded, unused to the feeling of being contested territory. The fact that
it had happened twice in one day was seriously spinning me out and something in my
red-raw face made Gran turn on Dirty Neil immediately and drive him back into the
Public Bar with the back of the vinyl-covered menu she was holding in her hand.

‘Last time I looked,’ I heard her scoff, ‘she already had a grandmother and her name’s
not Neil Douglas,
Neil Douglas.
So get your nose out of Sophie’s business and back
into the business of drinking your beer. Pour you another?’

Still bristling, Jordan pushed the sleeves of his battered leather jacket right up
past his elbows, giving me a full view of the serious work he’d had done to his skin.

Up close, none of the symbols made any kind of sense. They were densely layered and
formed patterns that seemed to flow and shift into each other. Here and there I recognised
something familiar, like a flower, or a skull, or a boat in full sail, but the rest
of it was probably in a language no one alive spoke any more, or maybe ever had;
Jordan appeared to have whole phrases written on his skin in a spidery, Gothic script.
I’d never been close enough to him to see the stuff he’d had done, but some of it
looked pretty insane: fully Death Metal, I’m-a-closest-Satan-worshipper-for-real
insane.

He shot me a dark look. ‘He always treat you like that? Like you’re his personal
property?’

I turned, furious at the casual judgment in Jordan’s tone. ‘He’s an amoebic life
form compared to that Roman guy, and I can handle it.
Have
been handling it—for a
long time. I’m tougher than I look, hotshot.’

But then a wave of pain overcame me and, for a second, I had to look down. ‘If Dad
were here,’ I murmured, ‘Neil
wouldn’t dare. And he knows it.’

‘Your dad walk out on you, too?’ Jordan asked, a wealth of leashed anger in his voice.

‘No, he died,’ I mumbled, putting a hand up defensively before Jordan could get a
word out. ‘And it’s okay, now. It’s fine.’

Which was the lie it sounded like. Not trusting myself to meet Jordan’s eyes, I poked
instead at his heavily inked left arm as we mounted the stairs side-by-side. ‘So,’
I said, taking a deep breath to push down the pain, ‘what do all these
mean
then,
really?’

Jordan held up the inside of his left forearm to my scrutiny, the light from the
jukebox on the landing casting strange shadows that seemed to bring some of the tattoos
to life before he lowered his arm.

His reply was matter-of-fact. ‘They’re extracts from certain
grimoires
.’

‘Grim-what?’ I muttered as we reached the upper floor. To get to my bedroom and Gran’s,
which were right at the end of the upstairs corridor, you had to pass a number of
suites we maintained for those pub patrons too blotto to make it home at closing
time. No one was currently residing
Chez Teague
, so every door was open, each ‘suite’
looking more wincingly lurid than the last.

We’d passed a couple of rooms when Jordan jammed the plastic bag under one arm and
started pressing his fingers
into the exposed flesh of his forearms like he was cold.

‘
Grimoires
,’ he said again distractedly. ‘So-called ancient textbooks of magic that
have been widely circulating for centuries, some in Old French, some in Latin.’

‘Magic?’ I exclaimed.

‘Just protective magic,’ he muttered, ‘nothing black. We made sure. At least, Daughtry
did.’

‘Daughtry?’ I said, confused. As far as I knew, no one at Ivy Street answered to
that name.

‘He’s a friend,’ Jordan replied carefully. ‘Well, of Mum’s. Big French guy. Looks
like a Viking—wears his hair in a blond plait, with this wooden stick pushed through
it, I kid you not. And silver.’ Jordan shook his wrists so they jangled. ‘He got
me onto the silver. Actually,’ he added, ‘Daughtry kind of scares me.’

‘Because he’s, like, a magician?’ I laughed nervously. ‘Seriously?’

‘To tell you the truth,’ Jordan mused, ‘I don’t know
what
he is. He’s gone for months
at a time, then suddenly rings Mum up for a chat over a cuppa. They get on like a
house on fire. It’s weird. Met at one of those New Age fairs at the Convention Centre
where everyone does aura readings and unblocks your chakras for a fee and stuff.
He just walked up to her and got talking and they’ve been friends ever since. When
I told Daughtry how much I hated them all coming through, well, he suggested I get
these.’ Jordan
looked down at his forearms and his voice grew hesitant. ‘The tatts
and stone and silver have kind of…helped.’

‘Maybe Daughtry’s sweet on your mum?’ I said.

Jordan shot me an admonishing look. ‘That’s
sick
, Soph. He’s not much older than
we are. But, anyway, he knows things. Wacko stuff that’s off-the-map. That sharpened
stick he wears in his hair? He says it’s some kind of weapon or key.
Yeah, right,
mate
, I always tell him.
It’s a stick
. But I don’t think he’s ever been to school…’

Jordan stopped dead without warning at the doorway of an empty room we were passing
and I almost ran into the back of him.

‘We call it the
Orange Room
,’ I said apologetically, as he surveyed the room, ‘for
reasons that should be blindingly obvious.’

Everything in the room just
was
—even the balding, dip-dyed flokati rug. The centrepiece
of the whole visual nightmare was a sagging double bed with a fluffy, razor-cut orange
chenille bedspread. The bed was flanked on one side by an orange, vinyl-covered 70s
armchair and on the other by a Formica-topped bedside table that had begun life as
a hallway telephone stand. The late afternoon sunlight flooding the room made even
the dust devils seem orange.

‘We like to match,’ I muttered faintly, wondering what my life must seem like to
him. ‘Now hurry up and walk me
to my bedroom and
get the hell out of here
, Jordan,
so that my reputation as a dork who can’t get a date remains intact. You can’t be
seen with me. This is “Storkie” Teague you’re messing with. The person who’s so freakishly
tall, thin and all-round
stupid
, it defies logic. And I’m quoting here.’