Witch Fire (9 page)

There was a short pause. Then Principal Lazovic clapped his hands together with a comical sigh of relief. ‘I think that’s
quite
enough lecturing for one evening! You’ve had a tiring journey, and it’s getting late. Perhaps you would like to have supper in your rooms? Yes? The tour and assessments can wait until tomorrow – nothing to worry about, I promise.’ He twinkled merrily at them. ‘Especially after a good night’s sleep. Everyone sleeps well at Wildings. It’s the fresh mountain air, you see.’ He got up and shook their hands again. ‘Really, we are so
very
pleased to have you!’

Lucas and Glory were collected by two of Wildings’s black-clad guardians. Before being shown to their rooms their clothes were searched. They had already handed over their passports, wallets and phones. ‘It’s for your own security,’ Glory’s guardian – a taller, thinner version of Elga – told her blandly. Glory didn’t risk looking at Lucas as he was led away. The girls’ and boys’ accommodation were in opposite wings of the castle.

Glory was taken through a succession of long empty corridors and past ranks of closed doors, with iron bells set across every threshold. Thick stone walls kept the place cool and silent. It was easy to imagine being here in winter; banks of snow heaped against walls and windows, blocking out the world. Her footfall on the plush carpet hardly made a sound. Where
was
everyone? Bed already? It was only half past nine.

‘Yours is the only room in use on this corridor,’ the guardian told her, as she pushed through a heavy set of double doors. ‘One of the maids will bring you your supper. Lights go out at ten thirty. The wake-up bell is set for seven.’

‘
Seven
?’ Glory didn’t have to fake her outrage. ‘Bleeding hell. I thought the whole point of boarding school was being able to roll straight outta bed and into class.’

The guardian pursed her lips. ‘Principal Lazovic believes that early morning is the most productive part of the day.’

Glory’s bedroom was furnished in varying shades of beige. Like in a hotel, there was a kettle with tea and coffee supplies, and a miniature set of toiletries laid out in the gleaming ensuite bathroom. There was even a vase of white flowers on the bedside table. The bars over the window were the only discordant note. Then she discovered there was no lock on either the bedroom or bathroom door.

Her suitcase was nowhere to be seen. Someone had already unpacked for her and put everything neatly away. No doubt they’d taken the opportunity to search through her belongings for signs of witchwork and other deviancies. Pinned to the noticeboard was a long list of school rules. The timetable next to it was almost as depressing.

The big white-painted desk was equipped with stationery and a laptop. Glory knew that emails had to be sent from a special Wildings account, and then only to previously approved recipients. All correspondence was checked by academy staff. But thanks to the MI6 geek-squad, Glory wasn’t without resources. Her favourite gadget was a lock-picking set: fourteen stainless-steel blades fitted into the barrel of a pen, whose pocket clip doubled as a tension tool. Then there was a tiny spy-cam disguised as a button and a bug-detecting device disguised as a lipstick. She also had a spare passport sewn into the lining of her washbag, together with a wad of Swiss francs and a debit card for a WICA-run account.

Witchwork was supposed to be a last resort. Glory frowned when she remembered the MI6 techie’s words. ‘Who needs to grub around with mud and spit and such, now that nanotechnology gets things done far better?’ He had given a cheery laugh. ‘You lot’ll be out of a job before long.’

Still, Glory had no intention of cutting off her nose to spite her face. She unscrewed the base of her ‘lipstick’ and switched on the bug detector. It was a tiny electronic scanner that swept the room for radio frequencies of the kind given off by hidden cameras and audio feeds. So far, so good.

There was a knock on the door and she put the device in her pocket in a guilty rush. A maid came in with a tray of food. ‘Please put it outside the room when you are finished,’ she said softly.

There was a chicken and rice casserole, fruit salad and a bottle of mineral water. Nothing too weird or foreign. Still, it was strange to eat in solitary silence, and Glory gulped her meal down without really tasting anything.

After taking a shower, she remembered she was supposed to leave the tray outside the door. The corridor was dark and lifeless; presumably the accommodation was designed to keep students in as solitary a confinement as possible. Back in her room, Glory pulled faces at herself in the wardrobe mirror. ‘I board, yah,’ she said aloud, making her voice rich and drawling, like Lucas’s.
‘
This
frightfly
nice little place in the country. Going private keeps the scum out of the classrooms, don’t yew know. It’s
super
fun.’

Suddenly, the room was plunged into darkness. A power cut? Groping, she stumbled towards the bed and found a switch. She thought it might connect to a night light above the headboard. Although she didn’t really expect it to work, the bulb glowed into dim life; just enough for her to check her watch. It was ten thirty. So lights out really did mean lights out!

Starlight glimmered through the window. Glory closed the shutters with a bang. Who would have thought she’d miss the sickly orange haze of a London night? In bed, the foreign darkness closed around her. She touched the Devil’s Kiss beneath her collarbone, thinking of Lucas, somewhere in the depths of the building in a room just like this. Her mind reached out for him. Fae to fae, witch to witch. But this was a castle of witches. Neither of them was special here.

Chapter 9

Lucas was woken by a harmonious rippling of strings. Alpine music was being piped into his room as a wake-up call. At least it wasn’t yodelling.

As Lazovic had promised, he’d slept deeply, but he didn’t feel refreshed by it, just slow and sluggish. He was brushing his teeth when he heard the door to his room open. It must be the maid. But when he came out of the bathroom he found a boy of about his own age, lounging in his chair and noisily chomping on a piece of toast. Lucas’s toast, presumably. A rummaged-through breakfast tray was on the floor.

‘
Hola
,’ his visitor said through a mouthful of jam. He was dark and pudgy, with a spiky quiff. But the main thing Lucas noticed were his jeans, which were very tight and a startling shade of green.

‘Hi . . . I’m Lucas.’

‘And I am Raffi.’ He belched. ‘You are
inglés
, no?’

‘
That’s right.’

‘Is cool.’ Raphael Almagro stroked above his lip, where a few straggling hairs were failing to form a moustache. He was studying Lucas with open curiosity. ‘And your family? They are government? Business? Celebrity?’

‘I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about –’

Raffi laughed. ‘Please. All that hush-hush is just for show. There are not many of the secrets at Wildings – you will see.’ He ambled over to the open window and lit a cigarette, before offering the pack to Lucas.

‘No thanks. Look, I don’t mean to be . . . but, well. Isn’t that against the rules too?’

‘
Amigo
, you need to relax. Seriously. OK, they hit you with all these rules and crap when you arrive.
Boom
! Keeps you scared and the parents happy, yes? But they don’t want to piss you off too bad. Else you might do some deviancy and get yourself expelled. Then they lose their big fat school fees.’

Raffi wandered around the room, looking at the photos Lucas had put up, and the books on the shelves. ‘Some rules you can be bending. Some you can’t. Is all compromise. This is how we do things in my country of Cordoba.’

‘Yeah. I’d heard Cordoba was quite . . . tolerant.’

‘Cordobans just want to have good times. Live and let live. No Inquisition, even. We threw it out. Ha!’ Raffi took a drag on his cigarette and his face darkened. ‘But now is not so good. There is this crazy
bastardo
running for president. He is making a lot of hot gas, lot of commotion, about witch-villains. He says these wicked witch-villains are destroying our happy society . . . on and on. So, my
papá
, he decides until this stupid man is gone is safer for me to be out of the way.’ He sighed. ‘Soon I hope to return. Cordoba is like a heaven, believe me. Great beaches, great bars, great babes. And when we are talking of babes . . . there is a girl who came with you, yes? A new girl for here?’

‘She was on the same flight as me. I don’t know her.’

‘She is hot?’

Lucas thought of Glory’s bright hair, whipped up by the wind over London’s rooftops, how her eyes were black in some lights, softening to brown in others. The snap and crackle of her. He shrugged. ‘Flashy,’ he said. ‘Bit cheap-looking.’

Raffi grinned. ‘Cheap! Ha. I like very much. That is the good thing with our trouble, you know? More girls than guys. At least, that is what I thought. I thought when I came here there would be many, many ladies. But,
amigo
, I have to say the lady situation here is not so cool. There is an American, OK, who is doing the cheerleading. She has the most –’

A bell rang. No alpine chimes this time. It was shrill and summoning. Five minutes till school assembly.

Raffi stubbed out his cigarette in a guilty rush that rather undermined his airy talk about rule-bending. ‘I must run for it now. If a guardian is collecting you – well. We are not supposed to go visiting in this time.’

‘How did you even know I was here?’ Lucas asked as Raffi opened the door. He was remembering the maze of halls and stairways that separated his room from the rest of the building.

‘I know many things in this place.’ Raffi tapped his finger solemnly on the side of his nose. ‘You stick with me, OK, and I will give you all the ropes to show.’

Lucas didn’t know what to make of this. Raphael Almagro was high on the list of Endor suspects, and it seemed odd that he had confided so much about himself so quickly. It could be a tactic to get Lucas to reveal his own secrets in turn. Or maybe Raffi was simply bored and nosy. In a place like this, any new arrival must be a big deal.

Shortly after Raffi left, the guardian who had taken Lucas to his room the night before arrived to show him the way to the assembly. His name was Ivan and, like all of the guardians, he had a military bearing and brusque manner. Still, he was polite enough. He asked Lucas if he’d slept well and didn’t mention the cigarette stink.

Assemblies took place in the castle’s former ballroom. It was a high bare room hung with mirrors, its walls lined with faded primrose silk, its floor a vast expanse of polished wood. The group of chairs arranged in front of the dais at one end was the only furniture.

Raffi had moved his seat next to Jenna White’s in an attempt to engage her in conversation. She was twirling the end of her treacle-brown ponytail with a vacant expression. Next to her was the Bollywood star’s sister. Anjuli was painfully thin and hunched, her features hidden by a curtain of lank black hair. The little Chinese girl, Mei-fen, was sitting quietly, hands folded neatly on her lap, overshadowed in every way by her neighbour, Yuri. The Russian’s tank top revealed a menacing bulge of muscles.

As the double doors swung shut behind Lucas, Raffi abruptly stopped chattering and everyone else turned and stared. Lucas gave an awkward nod of greeting and slid into one of the two remaining seats. Silence fell, but not for long. Glory came in with a crash, banging the doors behind her, high heels clattering across the floor.

She flounced into the chair next to him and he started to smile. Her hostile glare stopped him in his tracks. And the next moment, Principal Lazovic came in, followed by the matron and the other senior staff. They lined up behind the dais. Two guardians took their position by the doors.

The principal greeted everyone with his customary good humour, and announced that he was delighted to welcome two new members into ‘our little community’. Introductions over, post was distributed, followed by a run-down of the day’s schedule. The assembly finished with a short reading from Plato’s
Republic
, on the education of philosopher-kings.

The education of witches followed. But while their classmates went to their lessons, Lucas and Glory were shown into another reception room to take tests in English, maths and verbal reasoning. At the end of it was a ‘wellness questionnaire’. It was taken for granted that all Wildings’ inmates suffered from the stress of their condition, and so therapy sessions had always been part of the school curriculum. After all, nobody wants a witch in the middle of a mental breakdown.

How does your condition make you feel?

Please rank in order of relevance, with 1 being the most relevant, and 8 the least.

a) Afraid

b) Angry

c) Embarrassed

d) Disgusted

e) Depressed

f) Excited

g) Dangerous

h) Powerful

How do you think your friends would react to your condition?