Witch Fire (6 page)

And that moment was followed by the instant of true horror: when she realised the drug didn’t work, that her nerves and senses hadn’t been numbed, and she was about to burn alive . . .

As always, Glory tried to fight, to thrash, to scream. As always, she couldn’t move. Not so much as a twitch of an eyelid, as the first spark leaped from the wood, and the fire swept upwards with a spit and cackle.

Through the rising smoke, she could see the audience in the observation room. This was the part of the dream that changed: the faces of the people who watched her burn. Tonight it was Lucas, standing next to Troy. Auntie Angel, arm in arm with Peggy.

As always, she tried to beg them to help. As always, they watched, patient, smiling, unconcerned, as the flames twisted towards her. At any moment, the fire was going to lick at her feet and writhe upwards through her flesh, flaying her to the bone.

Her tongue was frozen. So was the breath in her lungs. All the same, a scream, swollen, unstoppable, was bursting through her body –

Glory woke up. Her hair was damp with sweat, and she was breathing as hard as if she’d run a race. When she turned on the light, she nearly cried out for real. In the course of the nightmare, she must have been clawing at her arms, for the cuts and scratches left by yesterday’s fae-healing session had opened again, and speckled the sheets with blood.

Cursing, she clambered out of bed. Wasn’t she ever going to grow out of this thing? She was a legally registered witch. The Inquisition wasn’t going to come for her in the night; boots on the stairs, fists on the door. Yet the old nightmare showed no signs of fading.

She glanced at the photograph of her mother she kept beside the bed. They didn’t look much alike. Edie was a natural blonde, with small, delicate features, and a guarded smile.
The kind that always leaves, never looks back
, that’s how Auntie Angel had described her. The only time her mother was truly vivid for Glory was in her dreams.

As Glory was leaving for work – late, as usual – she passed Peggy on the stairs. Patrick had attended his first Residents’ Association meeting on Sunday evening, and had spent the following morning at a local computer club, teaching the oldies how to use the internet. Now he and Peggy were going to meet the construction crew who were refurbishing the children’s play area. Maybe this was why he’d been so cheerful at breakfast. The fact her dad was up at all was a novelty. In Cooper Street, he had rarely surfaced before twelve. Glory noticed that Peggy was wearing a new lipstick, and frowned.

Normally, she quite enjoyed her docklands commute. This morning, the Thames glittered in the sun, and the sleek ranks of apartment blocks and offices glittered too. But Glory walked head down, too preoccupied to notice.

WICA was not a part of the shiny new developments. It was located in a Victorian warehouse on the edge of a run-down industrial estate. Unlike the other security service HQs, its location was kept anonymous. The sign over the main entrance was for
Avalon Atlantic Plc: International Shipping
. Since Glory and Lucas were too young to be plausibly employed by a shipping company, they entered the building through the so-called ‘back door’, an underground passageway that was accessed via a computer repair shop around the corner. This was as fake as the reception for Avalon Atlantic, and was also staffed by a WICA guard.

Glory sketched a greeting to the guard and made her way to the back of the shop, where there were stairs down to the subway. Lucas arrived just as she was typing in the access code. He didn’t look as if he’d slept any better than she had. There were shadows under his eyes, and when he saw her, he seemed to hang back a little. But Glory made a point of waiting for him. As they walked along the narrow concrete passageway, she found herself confiding to him about Peggy.

‘She’s nice enough,’ she said. ‘It’s just that she’s a bit nosy for my liking. Bossy too, I bet. Those do-gooder types always are.’

‘I thought you wanted your dad to meet new people. To get out more.’

‘Yeah, but I reckon old Peg’s after more than tea and sympathy. And Dad’s so clueless he’ll be the last to catch on.’

‘Would it be so bad if Patrick met someone?’ Lucas said cautiously. ‘I mean, I wasn’t too thrilled when Dad first got together with Marisa. But after I got used to the idea, I realised that it was probably a good thing.’

‘I ain’t stupid. Or selfish neither,’ Glory retorted. ‘ ’Course I don’t want Dad to be lonely – ’specially as I’m not going to stick around home for ever. But now I know my mum might be alive, that makes stuff complicated, don’t it? Dad’s still
married
, remember.’

Lucas was silent for a while.
‘
The thing is . . . even if your mum . . . Well, if she wanted to get in touch, wouldn’t she have done so by now?’

This was something Glory often wondered about, but didn’t like to acknowledge. Her face tightened.
‘
That’s the point: I don’t
know
. I don’t know
nothing
. If she were just another unhappy housewife who ran off then OK, fair enough. Maybe it’d be time to cut our losses. But there’s more to it than that. I’m
sure
of it. Else she wouldn’t be in them Inquisition files.’

Lucas looked uncomfortable. ‘Anything’s possible,’ he said. ‘But spend too much time wondering “what if?”, and life has a way of moving on without you. Maybe your father’s tired of putting his on hold.’

Glory knew that what Lucas said was perfectly reasonable, but she still resented him for it. It was probably just as well they were going their separate ways for the first lesson of the day. They each had to learn two modern languages and in this, as in so many things, Lucas’s schooling put him ahead.

But Glory and her Spanish tutor had only just settled down to the latest vocab list when Jack Rawdon’s PA knocked on the door. Glory was requested to attend a meeting in the Dee Room.

Uh-oh. Had they found out about her coffee with Troy? Or maybe this was about her strop with the fae-healer . . . She set off to the meeting with her best Rockwood Estate strut: head high, hips swinging, don’t-mess-with-me scowl.

To her surprise, Lucas was there too. Maybe she wasn’t in trouble after all. Jack Rawdon was leaning casually against the table, his shirt sleeves rolled up, unkempt hair falling over his eyes. There was another man sitting next to him. He was stringy and balding, in an ill-fitting suit. On the conferencing screen on the wall there was a woman in the scarlet and grey ceremonial uniform of a High Inquisitor.

‘Glory,’ Rawdon said. ‘Good to see you. Let me introduce you to Commander Dorcas Hughes of the Witchcrime Directorate.’

Glory and the woman said stiff hellos.

‘. . . and Guy Carmichael,’ Rawdon continued, ‘a colleague from Six.’

Glory went to shake the MI6 officer’s hand. It was surprisingly firm for such a limp-looking man. As she sat down, Rawdon indicated the red light on the communications panel.
‘
This is a closed meeting. Your wardens will be appraised of what follows, but on a strictly need-to-know basis.’

Glory’s stomach began to flutter pleasantly. She and Lucas exchanged looks, trying not to appear too obviously excited as Rawdon tossed them a couple of shiny brochures.

‘
Welcome to Wildings Academy
,’ Lucas read aloud. ‘
Distinction, Discretion, Diligence
.’

‘It’s a school,’ said Glory, in the way other people might say ‘it’s a dead cat.’

‘A very special, very
private
school,’ said the man from Six.

Glory opened the first page. She was looking at a photograph of a narrow valley, shadowed by mountains and furred by trees. A cluster of grey towers and turrets rose up from the forest. It was a castle out of a fae-tale.

‘
Wildings Academy
,’ the introduction read, ‘
provides structure and security for young people whose needs are not met by conventional education systems, and a refuge where troubled teenagers can find shelter from the pressures of modern life
.’

‘So it’s a sin bin,’ she said.

Rawdon looked amused. ‘In a manner of speaking. But though you wouldn’t know it from the brochure, its intake is exclusively witchkind.’

‘Sounds like the place my stepmother wanted to send me to,’ said Lucas.

Glory flicked through the pages. Wildings was apparently located in eastern Switzerland, somewhere near the Italian border, but there was no address or map, just a contact email. There wasn’t any sign of the students either, in the glossy pictures of classrooms, science labs and sports facilities. The only people to feature in the brochure were a group of uniformed guards. ‘Does the Inquisition run it, then?’ she asked.

‘It doesn’t have jurisdiction,’ Commander Hughes said from the screen. Her voice was acid. ‘Switzerland does not legally recognise witches under the age of eighteen. Its own witchkind community is tiny: less than 0.05 per cent of the populace.’

‘A loophole that Wildings Academy has been able to exploit,’ Guy Carmichael put in. ‘Wealthy families can purchase a special study visa from the Swiss government to send their offspring to the school, as long as they do so before the child’s fae is officially detected and registered in their home country. Wildings’ students are high-status – the sort who’d cause professional as well as personal difficulties for their parents if their condition was known. The academy operates a
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
policy, which is why it can get away with it.’

Glory snorted. ‘I bet that kind of loophole don’t come cheap.’

‘Very true,’ said Rawdon. ‘Wildings is as expensive as it is secret and the intake is no more than ten students at any one time. You need powerful connections to even know about it.’

‘So far,’ said Commander Hughes, ‘the Swiss government has resisted external pressure to shut the place down. Discipline there is tight: any student caught discussing witchwork, let alone practising it, is instantly expelled. They work hard to maintain good relations with their neighbours – in fact, the local village of Blumenwald gets regular “grants”, i.e. bribes, from the academy. In the fifteen years it’s been operating, there have been no security breaches. Or rather, none that we know about.

‘However, our team at Intelligence Command has picked up chatter that the place has become of interest to Endor. There’s a concern the academy could have been infiltrated, either among the students or staff. Since any collection of adolescent witches is a breeding ground for trouble, the more we can find out about what goes on there, the better.’

‘So you’re going to enrol us?’ Lucas asked Rawdon.

But it was Guy Carmichael who answered. ‘It would be a straightforward search-and-report –’

‘Observation only,’ Commander Hughes said over him. ‘You will leave any follow-up action to us.’

Rawdon smiled wryly. ‘Indeed. The operation is going to be led by the Witchcrime Directorate, working in conjunction with MI6. We at WICA will be involved in a supportive capacity.’

Right. A capacity that takes all the risk and does all the work
, thought Glory. It put her back up, taking orders from the Inquisition. From the looks of it, the man from MI6 felt the same. Officially, the Inquisition had two main roles: to monitor law-abiding witches, and hunt down and punish the criminal kind. When it came to wider issues of national security, especially foreign intelligence, however, there was a feeling in the secret service that the Inquisition was going beyond its remit.

But Endor was a common enemy. Its fae-fanatics gave witchkind a bad name.

Glory fingered the gilt-trimmed pages of the prospectus. Going to boarding school wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she signed up to be a secret agent. But neither were verb tables and data analysis. Espionage in the Alps was bound to provide some sort of action, especially if she would be working undercover. Maybe she’d get to pose as somebody rich and glitzy.

Unfortunately, Rawdon’s next words ruled this out.

‘
The big advantage is that you can go more or less as yourselves. Lucas, as the son of a government advisor and ex-High-Inquisitor, would be a natural fit for Wildings in any case. And you, Glory, will go back to your roots. The story is you’ve been getting into trouble with the authorities, and so your Morgan relations have decided to get you out of the country until things blow over and they can find a suitable place for you in the coven.’

Guy Carmichael had already begun to hand out a stack of files from the box by his feet. They bulged with briefings and data reports.

‘When do we go?’ Glory asked him.

‘
The end of next week.’

Chapter 6

Lucas found the preparations for enrolling at Wildings much more straightforward than when he had infiltrated the Cooper Street Coven. His family had been told where he was going, though not why, and he would be able to have written contact with home. After a couple of weeks at the academy, he would even be allowed visitors. His would be an agent from MI6, posing as his godfather. Their meeting would allow Lucas to make a full progress report.