Walking Shadow (The Darkworld Series Book 2) (3 page)

He saw me move away and gave me a wounded look, all puppy-dog eyes. “Sorry if I’m freaking you out. I’m not good at this. Um, I’ll see you around? I’ll be at the editorial meeting on Monday? I signed up for the student paper, when I saw your name on the list.”

“Oh… kay.” Definitely borderline-stalker behaviour. “And you knew my name… how?”

“From our course’s Facebook group, of course! I sent you a friend request.” He beamed at me.

I didn’t have the heart to wipe the hopeful expression from his face. “Um, maybe, yeah. See you around.”

You handled that well,
said a sarcastic voice in my head. I ignored it. There
was
no way to handle that situation without plunging it deeper into awkwardness.

Alex gave him an evil look when we emerged from the alleyway. I could tell she’d been prepared to intervene.

“What did he want with you?” she asked, as soon as he was out of earshot.

“He wanted to ask me out. Even though we’ve never spoken before. It was the most embarrassing thing ever.”

“Seriously? Man, you’re popular lately.”

“Because one guy asked me out?” I said, steering them in the direction of the rest of the group. William Shakespeare led the bar crawl, accompanied by Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Raleigh, and T.S. Eliot. As I’d expected, Rex Golding, Alex’s not-so-secret admirer, showed up dressed as Aragorn from the Lord of the Rings. At least, unlike the Role-Playing Society members, he hadn’t challenged anyone to a duel. Even I thought that was a bit much.

“What about your little friend from GameSoc?”

“He’s not little, and he’s just a
friend.”
In fairness, the only time Alex had seen Leo was when he’d been standing near Howard, who would make any person of average height look like a dwarf. But there wasn’t anything between us, anyway. He’d said I looked
pretty
at the winter dance before Christmas, but he’d been drunk at the time, and I didn’t exactly put much faith in things people said when inebriated. Another reason to avoid Conrad like the plague.

And now here he was, in Blackstone Cemetery at midnight. It was absurd.

He looked at me now, eyes widening. “Ash?”

“Um,” I said. “Hi, Conrad.” There was no point in pretending. I was a terrible liar.

“You two know each other?” said Berenice, looking from him to me with a calculating expression I didn’t like at all.

“Um, I know Ash, from our course. I’m Conrad, by the way. The vampire.”

I felt a bizarre urge to laugh. I couldn’t imagine anyone
less
vampire-like. How many vampires were short, chubby, and blond? More to the point, he looked so timid that the idea of him attacking anyone was incongruous. He trembled all over, and he moved closer to us, giving the nearest row of graves a wide berth as though expecting their inhabitants to rise from the ground and attack him.

Berenice sniggered openly. “The
vampire
,” she said, tossing her hair imperiously. “And you have something to say to us?”

Conrad gaped at her, as if he’d momentarily lost the ability to speak. I’d have felt sorry for him under normal circumstances. Berenice wasn’t known for her kindness to strangers. Or to anyone, really, apart from Howard.

“Well?” she said.

Conrad stuttered, “Um… I… er… well, I don’t want to be annoying, but could you help me? Other vampires are being killed, and I… I think I might be next.” His voice rose an octave.

“How do you know?” said Howard, sitting up and swinging his legs over the tomb he sat on. Like the others, he now gave the vampire his full attention.

“Well. Um, the last vampire to die was a student, right?”

“Yeah,” said Cyrus. “Will Reynolds. He was a third year, on my course. Do you know who might have killed him?”

Conrad hesitated. “Um. I’m not sure. I just thought, since students were dying, that I might be next and I panicked. I saw Ash with you guys and I figured you might be able to help me…” He trailed off.

“Well, you thought wrong,” said Berenice. “We won’t be your bodyguards. Whatever’s happening to your sort isn’t our problem.”

“Berenice!” said Cyrus. He turned to Conrad. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” said Conrad. “I wouldn’t ask, only I’m desperate. Do any of you have an idea about who’s killing people?”

“We thought
you
might,” said Leo. “Even the Venantium are clueless.”

“Look, we’re disturbed by this, too,” said Cyrus, “but there’s no proof yet that it’s only vampires who are the targets. Any of us is a potential victim.”

“Thanks for the reassurance!” said Berenice. “I’d rather not risk my chances by associating with a walking target, thanks.”

“Then don’t,” said Leo. “Take your selfish ass elsewhere.”

No one could pull off the wounded expression quite like Berenice. Everyone either rolled their eyes or shook their head at her, except Howard, who looked Conrad up and down suspiciously.

“Prove it,” he said. “Prove you’re a vampire. How do we know this isn’t a joke?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” said Conrad. He looked white-faced and desperate.

“We’ve met some pretty good actors,” said Howard, eyes narrowed.

“Are you wearing a shield?” said Claudia, squinting at him. “Damn shadows make it hard to see.”

“Um, yeah. My dad taught me how to do it, I…”

“He’s telling the truth,” said Claudia. “He’s not a threat, or a spy.”

“It’s true,” said Leo, nodding.
Are they seeing something I’m not?
I stared at him, too. He stood half in shadow, white hair gleaming in the moonlight.
They must mean a shield like the one they put on me
, I thought, and made a mental note to ask how they could see one on other people. The whole point of a shield was to make a magic-user inconspicuous.

“Okay,” Howard relented. “But we can’t act as his bodyguards.”

“I… I’m not asking you to. I just… would you let me know if you find anything out about the killer? I don’t… I don’t wanna die.”

“Oh,
Jesus
,” said Berenice, rolling her eyes.

“Okay, we’ll let you know,” said Claudia. Even she sounded as though she wanted to get as far away from Conrad as possible.

“Thanks,” said Conrad, gratefully.

The silence hinted at an end to the meeting, but he continued to hover nearby. It didn’t escape my attention that he kept furtively glancing at me.

“Well,” said Berenice, “I for one don’t want to spend any more time in this damned graveyard. You coming, Howard?”

Howard pushed himself off the tomb. “Sure,” he said.

As the two of them left, hopping over the low stone wall, Cyrus said, “I have to get back to mine. Might get some work on my dissertation done.”

“What, at this time?” said Claudia.

“I only have a week left to get five thousand words done,” he said.

“How’d you manage that?” said Claudia, raising her eyebrows.

“Changed my topic at the last minute. I know, I know.”

“Serves you right for being a psychology major.”

“Yeah, whatever. See you later, bro.” He high-fived Leo, leapt over the cemetery wall, and disappeared into the alleyway.

“Suppose we ought to go, too,” said Claudia.

“How about a quick stop at the Coach and Horses?” said Leo.

Claudia sighed. “I would, but I actually have to go to my seminar tomorrow, or my tutor will skin me alive. Missed too many already.”

To my relief, Conrad didn’t follow us back to campus. I felt him watching me as we left, though.
A vampire stalker. Just when I thought life couldn’t get any weirder.

The wind was freezing cold, so we walked back to campus swiftly. Our breath fogged the air in front of us, and the frost-hardened ground cracked beneath our feet. We conjured lights to see our way through the forest, and it crossed my mind that we probably should have taken the bus, even though it was a ten-minute journey which never seemed worth paying full bus fare for.

Now the forest seemed an impenetrable wall of darkness, the thick bare-branched trees forming a stern line on the edge of the road.

“Lights,” said Leo, and conjured one in the palm of his hand. It gleamed, a round white orb that lit up a circular area around him. Claudia and I did the same, and, lights in hand, we attempted to find the path. The stream had frozen mid-flow, its water spectre-white against the gloom of the surroundings. Every shadow looked uncomfortably like a dark space.

This was definitely a bad idea.
Especially given that there was apparently a murderer around.

Well, neither of the actual murders had taken place anywhere near campus, but two student deaths had caused a campus-wide rumour-fest that lurked beneath the usual gossip and talk between lectures. One had been a girl who’d lived in Preston, the other a guy in York. Two places that had no connection, two people who didn’t know each other, and the only thing they had in common was they went to this university, and they’d both died from blood loss after having their throats cut with a sharp weapon.

I rarely paid attention to the news, but this gave me the chills before I’d even found out they’d been magic-users. And vampires. Thinking about it, it proved the Venantium couldn’t hush
everything
up, though they’d be hard-pressed to make the world forget a story that had been on the national news for the past month. From what I knew of memory adjusting―and, to be honest, I wished I didn’t―you had to be near the person whose memory you wanted to erase.

“What did you do to Conrad earlier?” I said to Claudia. “How could you tell he wasn’t lying?”

“My parents used to work for the Venantium,” she said. “Part of their job was identifying whether people were potential threats. They taught me how to read whether someone’s a user of hostile magic. He’s safe.”

“Okay,” I said. “I was confused. You seemed to know it just by looking at him. I thought you couldn’t see shields, isn’t that the point of them?”

“It’s because we knew he was a magic-user already,” said Leo. “My guardian taught me how to see shields, but even most
venators
don’t know how until they enter formal training.”

“You have to be trained to work for them?”

“Well, yeah. Which section you work in dictates how much, but they run some pretty thorough tests on you.”

“Sounds fun,” I said.

“You know, I did consider working for them, for a bit,” said Claudia. “My parents taught me a few things, like how to see and make shields, but I think they expected me to join.”

“Really?” I said.

“The way my parents described them made it sound like what they do makes a real difference. I’m not saying I believed that―well, not wanting to be like my parents was one of the reasons I refused to join―but if you don’t know what
we
know about them, then they sound… like protectors, I guess. Protecting the world from demonic threats.”

“That’s what you told me,” I said. “But you also said they threaten people themselves.”

“Like Howard, yeah,” said Leo. “He did kind of provoke them, but blocking his magic like that was totally out of order. As for what they did to
his
parents…” He shook his head.

I remembered Claudia telling me Howard’s parents had been arrested when he was a child for breaking the Venantium’s rule against experimenting with magic. He hadn’t seen them since, and had his own magic temporarily blocked for trying to break into their Headquarters to find them. In some ways they sounded like crazy dictators determined to keep all magic-users in line.

But I could sort of see why a lot of people, upon learning about their connection to the Darkworld, would want to use it for a good purpose. The Venantium maintained the Barrier, who kept the demons at bay. Their name meant
hunters
in Latin, because that was what they used to do: hunt demons. Now, however, they were apparently paranoid about unregistered magic-users.

“Yeah,” said Claudia. “They’re mental. I mean, most of the
venators
are just ordinary like us, but I swear the higher-ups are on some kind of crazy power trip. Constantly looking out for unregistereds causing trouble. They’ve got harpies flying around in broad daylight when they know sometimes non-magic-users can see them. And they keep tailing people. It’s driving Berenice nuts. They followed her back from Satan’s Pit the other night. Unfortunately for them, the only dirt they got was the lovely sight of her giving Howard a hand job in an alleyway.”

“I really didn’t need to know that!” I said.

“Neither did I,” said Claudia. “I know, it’s a scarring image. Anyway, she’s really pissed off. Her dad’s a lecturer here―Dr Payne, how appropriate―she doesn’t want him to think she’s experimenting with evil magic.”

“Or that she’s giving people hand jobs in public places, I imagine,” I said. “So her dad’s a lecturer, even though he’s a magic-user?”

I’d never really thought about whether magic-users could have normal careers. As much as I didn’t know what I wanted to do after university, I’d realised when I was at home that I should probably start to look at my options.

“Course,” said Leo. “You could even be a stripper if you wanted to.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I was thinking of going into research, actually… I’ll probably do a Masters. Maybe a PhD. Not sure I want to be a lecturer though.”

“You want to be known as Dr Temple?”

“Yeah, I realise that sounds more like an Egyptologist than an English lecturer,” I said. “So do you have any ideas? About what to do with your life?”

“Oh, the usual. World domination. Make a deal with the devil and get into trouble for boxing the Pope’s ears and making people sprout antlers.”

“Right,” I said. “Like Doctor Faustus. I don’t think you want to end up dismembered, though.”

“If you want to use your powers for good, you could set up as a freelancer like Madame Persephone,” said Claudia. “I haven’t ruled that out.”

“Hm,” I said, biting my lip.

I hadn’t seen the fortune-teller since that night in the Lakes, the night when I’d nearly died. Knowing she was really my Aunt Eve, and not really my aunt at that, made me clueless about how I was supposed to act around her. And besides, she’d lied to me. I still didn’t know her real identity. She guarded herself well.