Illicit Magic (11 page)

“And if the Brotherhood weren’t bent on killing us all, you’d probably still be fine,” replied Marc. “We can’t send you back out there to be picked off by one of them.”

“So, it’s a case of do what you say or die?”

“Not what I say,” Marc emphasised and I wondered if his was quite a lowly role. Certainly Étoile seemed to have been spoken to with more reverence than he, which struck me as odd since he was the prodigal son. “What the council says. Look, Stella, I know it might suck right now but honestly, it’s the best decision they could have made. The place we’re going to is pretty good; there are others of your kind there. You’ll learn how to defend yourself and when you can do that, well, maybe things will be safer for you. It’s not forever.”

I slumped against the door frame, the box in both my hands, and sighed. “You’ve no idea how difficult it is to be taken away from everything you know.”

“And was that everything so great? From the little Étoile told me, it didn’t sound like you were having such a great time.”
Ouch.
I wondered if Étoile had been watching me for any longer than that day, my last day of feeling relatively normal. I wondered what she said. I hoped she hadn’t mentioned the squalid state of my flat, especially not to people who were rich beyond my wildest imaginings. Looking around, I was seriously going to have to pinch myself. I felt like Oliver Twist in Buckingham Palace.

“No, but it was my life, my decisions.” I struggled to tell Marc what I was feeling about being wrenched away but I could tell it was no use. My immediate future had been decided by a bunch of people I didn’t know. Plus, as Marc had already implied,
where else could I go?
Like he said, I might be killed, and after the attempt in London, strike that, two attempts now, my immediate future was looking dire.
Being a transatlantic attempted murder victim really didn’t have any romantic ring to it
, I thought and shivered.

“Don’t look so glum. Étoile will be there. And so will I.” Marc flashed me a smile filled with perfect, white teeth.

“At least I’ll know someone,” I muttered.

“There you are, looking on the bright side already.” Marc knocked me playfully on the shoulder with his fist and I couldn’t resist smiling back at him.

“It could be worse.”

“So much worse,” he agreed.

“Good job I didn’t unpack.”

“See? It’s like it was meant to be. We’ll leave early tomorrow, hope you get some rest. Don’t worry; the wards will hold for tonight.”

“Thanks. And Marc?”

“Yes?”

“I do appreciate what you guys have done for me. Saving me from the crazies in London, making sure my head didn’t land in a wall here, you know, minus the rest of me.” I shrugged like I was saying, small things, no biggie!

“No problem.” Marc’s face was inches from mine and getting closer as we whispered in the hallway. I couldn’t help thinking how lovely he looked with the shaggy blonde hair and his piercing blue eyes. He was the kind of guy who would never have looked twice at me at home, yet here we were, on the interesting side of weird, having a conversation as though we were friends. Marc brushed a lock of my hair behind my ear. When I didn’t push him away but instead, rested my cheek in the warmth of his palm, Marc dipped his head and brushed his lips across mine, and for an instant, I wondered what the hell was going on, before pressing my lips back against his. His arms circled me and the kiss deepened but I didn’t know whether it was eddies of desire or the fear and adrenaline of still being alive that whirled in the pit of my stomach. I pressed against him and was abruptly aware of the card box I held, digging into my middle.

Drat and double drat.

We pulled apart slowly, and after a pause, where the floor seemed massively interesting to us both, Marc tipped my chin upwards with his hand and kissed me again, a delicate light kiss this time.

“Good night,” he said, his voice breathless.

“Good night, Marc.” It was all I could do to turn the handle, fall through the doorway and push it closed, leaning my back against the door as if I couldn’t possibly stand by myself.

The box was still clasped in one hand, so I set it on the bed as I contorted my arms behind my back to get the zip undone. I wriggled out of the dress and hung it back in the closet. I thought I had worn it for less than two hours and it was thankfully blood free.
Perhaps they could still dry clean and return it,
I thought for a moment, before shaking my head, deciding that
the Bartholomews were most certainly not those sort of people.
I wondered if I would ever have to consider the likelihood of getting my outfit blood-spattered in the future. I smiled to myself as I imagined asking a sales assistant for something blood repellent and in black. That would make shopping awkward.

I shuffled off the heels and lined them up on the closet floor where I found them, pulling on the t-shirt I had worn earlier. Out of instinct, I stayed away from the window, even though the curtains were already drawn.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed, the covers pulled over my knees and curiosity currently closer to killing me than magical flying bombs, I pried off the lid of the box Steven had given me.

The box seemed to contain papers mostly. I rifled through them. Papers and envelopes and a small cloth pouch. I dropped them all back in before starting at the top more slowly. The first documents I lifted were birth certificates. My mother’s, my father’s, mine. They named me Estrella Isadore. It had been so long since I’d heard my full name that I had almost forgotten my mother’s name was my middle one.

Here was their marriage certificate too. They had married in New York. I hadn’t known that and I wondered about them living in the city I had arrived in only a few hours ago. I traced my finger across the names that I recognised and then set them aside. It had never occurred to me that my parents were not both English. I just hadn’t known them long enough to know anything of significance. Most of what I knew about them was second hand.

Death certificates, but English this time and issued in England. “Unknown” was the unsatisfying cause of death verdict. Their bodies hadn’t been found but after five years they had been declared dead, said a one-page report stapled at the back of my father’s certificate. I put them on top of the other papers. There was a small photo album covered in a mid-blue fabric that felt like suede. I opened it. The first image was a man and woman together, holding hands and smiling. Jonathon and Isadore was written underneath on a white labelin a neat print.

My parents.

I so rarely heard their names that I had forgotten them as people with actual identities. With a twinge again, I thought of my mother’s name melded with my own. The next few images were of the same couple, sometimes one or the other, sometimes both of them, the occasional snap of them with a group of people I didn’t recognise, but some faces were repeated. Several times, another couple appeared. On the tenth page was my parent’s wedding picture. The couple I had noted before were pictured with them. My mother was in a lace wedding dress that pooled at her feet and my father was laughing. The other man looked directly at the camera with a broad smile; the woman on his arm was gazing at my parents. Her face didn’t carry any expression.

I put the picture on the pile I already looked through. The next few pages seemed to be a honeymoon on a coast somewhere rugged. Gradually, the pictures showed the woman pregnant, the man hugging her, smiling at her, not the camera, and then a baby who grew into a toddler as I turned the pages. I was looking at my parents and me. It was like nipping into some other family’s photo pages. I didn’t feel overwhelmed with emotion, just a little surge of joy looking at this happy besotted couple.

Abruptly, the photo album stopped, leaving a number of blank pages. There were some scraps of paper shoved into the back page and I tweezed them out with my forefinger and thumb. Cinema stubs, a tube ticket, concert tickets. Little snippets of their lives. I wondered which one of them liked David Bowie and who had wanted to see “St Elmo’s Fire” twice? I went through the album once more, then set it aside on top of the birth certificates.

Some other bits of paper that didn’t seem particularly important. A deed to a property,
a house
I thought, without knowing why and some bank and solicitor letters saying that there was no longer a mortgage and it was owned outright. I mentally filed the address away. I would ask someone later. Some bank books, partially used and a will from the same solicitors, signed by my parents. I scanned it. They had left everything to me, as any parent would. I recognised Steven’s name as executor. There was an envelope addressed to me in a neat hand that I set aside to read later.

A few more pieces of official looking paper then a little velvet pouch. I pried the string apart and tipped the contents into my hand. A brilliantly coloured bird of paradise brooch,
made from enamel
, I thought, and a few other pieces of costume jewellery. I turned them over in my hands. I recognised some of the pieces from the photo album. My mother had worn the brooch on her wedding day, a bright spray against her simple white dress and again in my first birthday picture. They weren’t costly pieces, but they were my mother’s and I had never had anything of hers before. I slipped them back into the pouch. There wasn’t much else so I carefully slotted everything back into the box and put the lid on top, kicking back the covers so that I could scramble out of bed and put the box on the dressing table.

After so much emotional deprivation, it was like my brain had gone into emotional overload and I wasn’t sure where I should file all this new information in my mind. Sleeping on it would probably be a very good idea. I switched off the lamp on the side table and crawled back into bed, pulling the coverlet up to my neck and curling up like a baby. After a moment, I got up again and retrieved the box and set it on the nightstand next to me, at the same level as my eye line, now my head was on the pillow.

It was when I was on the periphery of sleep, at that halfway house between wakefulness and slumber, that the feeling that had been niggling at me finally developed into a fully formed idea and forced me back into awake mode.

Why hadn’t anyone else realised?

The Brotherhood could never have attacked us tonight
. Even my brain, rudimentary with the knowledge of magic, was turning cogs fast enough to realise that something was amiss.
The air was too thick with the magic of attack as well as defence. Only something magical could have so stealthily crept up on this committee of powerful witches and attacked us so bluntly without warning. Us,
I thought,
hmmm.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I whispered to the ceiling as I rolled onto my back. Why would the Brotherhood, who hates witches – us, me – use magic? They were old school. They were snatch, grab and burn, not spells and unearthly powers. They had proven that in the way they killed.

There had to be something or someone else. Someone else who wanted to maim and destroy this collective.

The gnawing feeling had changed. Now that I had my finger on the problem, I could only feel fear that I’d been seconds away from being killed tonight. Two attempts in as many days but perhaps not the same attackers
. Did someone here want me dead too? And if so, who the hell was it if it wasn’t the Brotherhood?
My brain swam with ideas. I didn’t feel any safer with the idea that I might have two foes.

I was wide awake now and I pulled my knees up so my arms were round them.

It should have been the excitement of Marc’s stolen kiss that kept me half awake until dawn, but it wasn’t, though that was a welcome distraction. Instead, there was the persistent niggle that something wasn’t right.

I was glad my brain was forcing me to stay awake and think because in the early hours of the morning someone turned my door handle, pushed my door open an inch and paused. No one spoke and I was too scared to ask as I scrambled for a pillow and hurled it at the door. After it shut with a thud, I threw back the covers and took the few paces to the door as fast as I could. I turned the lock and dashed back into bed quicker than someone could say, “There’s a monster under there.”

I didn’t dare doze again. Instead, I waited, hunched upright in bed with my arms clasped around my knees, shivering, until the first dawn broke.

FIVE

When I woke up in the morning, after a fitful couple of hours, someone had already pulled back the curtains to let the first streaks of sunlight sweep across my face. There was a tray on the dresser with cereal, a little jug of milk and a glass of orange juice. I looked for the blue box and saw that it was still on the nightstand exactly where I left it.

It disturbed me a little that whoever had come in, like the night before when I showered, had been quiet enough so as not to wake me and that I never even knew they were there. The bedroom door opening in the night flashed through my mind and I shuddered.
Had that person come back too?
I couldn’t be sure.

I reached for my wristwatch on the nightstand and checked the time. Someone had been close enough to me to adjust the hands and it read six thirty, a time I’d never been fond of, no matter where I was. Except today I wasn’t struggling from sleep in order to trudge to work. I was in bed in a luxurious apartment thousands of miles from home and, as far as I knew, had nothing even remotely familiar on my day’s agenda. It wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.

It took all my energy to slide out from the warm covers and stumble into the bathroom to use the toilet, shower and brush my teeth. Ten minutes later, I was dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and v-neck sweater in the palest lilac which was the best I could do for travelling clothes without knowing where I was travelling to or how.
Was Étoile planning on zapping us somewhere?

I flittered around in the centre of the room for a moment or two, wondering if I was supposed to tell someone that I was awake. Then my eyes caught the breakfast tray again; my stomach gave a little grumble and I sat down to eat. I spooned a mouthful of cereal and brought it up to my lips just as a knock on the door interrupted my solitude. I called, “Come in.”