The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) Read online

  “And you bought one,” she said to Novel, sounding every bit as accusing as she felt.

  Novel’s resolve stiffened again then, and the shame he’d felt began to melt from his face. His expression was of that impenetrable sort, the way it had been when Lily first met him, and to her dismay, he shared a thoughtful glance with Baptiste before he answered her.

  “You eat hamburgers,” Novel pointed out sharply, “but I daresay if I brought you a cow this moment and asked you to slit its throat, you wouldn’t oblige me.”

  Lily hardly thought a cow was a fair comparison to her best friend, but she knew that most shades felt that humans were lesser animals. If Lily herself had not grown up believing she was human, she wondered if she might have been just the same way. Before she could protest, Novel stood again and walked past her, coming to rest on one knee beside Jazzy’s wheelchair. He bowed his head of bright white hair to her, one hand placed over his heart as he began to speak again.

  “Sometimes, we feel no guilt for the crimes we can pretend not to see,” Novel said, “but I assure you, I shall never make such a purchase again. We will keep your secret here, Jazmine, and we will protect you, should the need ever arise.”

  It was noble and remorseful, but in that stiff and formal way that only Novel could manage to deliver. Lily couldn’t be angry or accusing in the face of his apology, and the tender way he took Jazzy’s hand and gave it a deft kiss shattered all her resolve. In seconds, Jazzy had gone from a quivering wreck to blushing with gratitude, and Novel’s fierce protection was an offer that Lily knew the value of all too well. If he promised to look after Jazzy, then he would die doing it if necessary. He was built that way. Lily’s hands stopped sparking, and she reached out to touch the white hairs at the nape of his neck with a tentative, apologetic tremble. When Novel leaned back, seeking more of her touch, she felt a relieved smile washing over her face.

  “It’s going to be all right, Jaz,” she added.

  “Forewarned is forearmed,” Baptiste said with a nod, and there were murmurs of agreement all around the room.

  Jazzy sat amidst the promises of her new family, and Lily found her eyes roving from her friend’s grateful face, down to the place where Lawrence still clasped Jazzy’s hand across the table. His grip was fierce, the veins pressing out along his dark, tattooed arm, and they led to a face that was just as rapt with tension. That placid, encouraging smile still sat on Lawrence’s lips, but the voodoo boy’s eyes held visible floodgates, filled to the brim with worry. Jazzy was a target now, and it would be up to Lawrence and Lily to keep her safe when they returned to the human world, at Piketon University the very next day.

  The Day From Hell

  It was a missile from the sky that really got the day going. It descended from the bleak morning clouds in a single white drop of gelatinous mess, and landed on Lily’s shoulder with a stomach-twisting squelch. She looked up, immediately seeking the culprit that had dropped such a parcel, but there wasn’t a bird for miles in the cloud-filled sky. It was a hot pink sweater that the offending white liquid now slid slowly down, as Lily grumbled loudly and fumbled for a tissue in her satchel.

  “Erm… they say it’s supposed to be lucky if a bird poos on you,” Jazzy offered, her voice stunted by the cobbles that her wheelchair was being pushed over.

  Lawrence was the one doing the pushing, and when Lily delivered an exasperated glare to them both, it was he who was trying his best not to laugh at her misfortune. Until Jazzy craned her head back and caught him, of course, after which she swatted for his arm, and he began to behave himself once more. Lily reasoned that she probably would have found it funny if the incident had happened to anyone else, but with the morning she’d been having, the missile was nothing short of irritating.

  “I already woke up late, couldn’t find my registration form, and have you seen my hair?” Lily asked. She pulled at her auburn strands, which were wayward and sticking up a little from her head. “And now a bird makes me its toilet on the way to uni. I mean, how much worse is this day going to get?”

  It was ten to nine in the morning when Lily uttered those words. Later, she would really wish that she hadn’t.

  Now, she stuffed the pink sweater into her satchel and carried her books in its place, goose-pimples rising on her pale skin in the kind of weather that reminded one that summer was most definitely over. She and Lawrence dropped Jazzy off at her new English literature class – Tower Block, ground floor – before making their way to their own history room. When they got there, it was bizarrely overcrowded. Lily had thought it was a well-known fact that hardly anybody showed up for orientation day, but by some miracle the whole contingent of Piketon’s history roster had taken up every seat in the lecture hall.

  Two seats could be spied among the rows of people, one at the very front of the hall, and one at the very back. Lily shared a glance with Lawrence, and he showed her the path towards the front-row seat with a polite sweep of his arm, but she shook her head at him. She remembered how keen he was the year before to sit at the front and absorb knowledge, and the state of her hair and pimply arms were influencing her to blend into the background, for today at least. Lily took off up the stairs between the crowded rows and shuffled her way to the last chair on the aisle, which she soon discovered had a large crack down the centre of its plastic seat.

  When she settled into the chair, it gave a deafening creak that drew all nearby eyes to stare at her for a moment. Cheeks flushing red, Lily tried to grin at her own folly until the other students looked away again. Keeping her back stiff so as not to set the chair off creaking again, Lily reached one awkward hand into her satchel, seeking out an orange to munch on whilst the lecture got started. When she found the fruit she was after, it was coated in an unmistakable sheen of white ooze that had rubbed off from the pink sweater. Her stomach did a flip, and she put the orange back in the bag with a small, sad sigh.

  Based on the fact that last year’s professor - Victoria Havers - had turned out to be a murderous shape-shifting psychopath, Lily was keen to observe her new lecturer closely when he entered the hall. He was a youngish man named Bradley Binns, whom she had seen around campus towards the end of the previous year. They had never actually met, but that one fact made Lily feel satisfied at least that he might not be a dangerous darksider in disguise. This prospect seemed even less likely as the lecture began, when it appeared that Bradley was having just as bad a day as Lily was, culminating in him kicking the projector into life after his laptop had given him a mild electric shock.

  “Now…” The young professor cleared his throat, trying again for a deep authoritative tone that he wasn’t quite able to reach. “Can anyone tell me what we’re looking at here?”

  Hands went up around the room, but Lily was fixed on the image that the projector had cast onto the wall. It was a photograph of a landscape, littered with the green and brown farming fields that so often coated the Lancashire countryside, and its foreground showed a reservoir and trees. That didn’t seem to be what Bradley wanted his class to focus on.

  “A hill, Sir,” someone said, and the professor pointed an encouraging finger at them.

  “Aha! Very good,” he answered, “but which hill, precisely?”

  Bradley seemed to chuckle to himself, as though he had made a joke that the class were not yet party to. Many suggestions were made as to the name of the hill, and Lily feared for the dire geographical knowledge that some of her classmates thought they possessed. It was a dark and tattooed hand, at the very front of the class, which eventually put everyone else to silence. Bradley asked Lawrence to speak, and Lily spied his tall, lanky form over the crowd as he sat up in his chair to give his answer.

  “That’s Pendle Hill, Professor.”

  Bradley Binns was most impressed with Lawrence, and Lily’s eyes went back to the photograph to scan the long, dark shape of the green hill in the distance. She knew that Pendle was hardly an hour’s drive from Piketon, and she reasoned that she had p
robably passed that very hill on a train sometime in the past, without even knowing that she was looking at a place where so much history had occurred.

  “Which hill?” Bradley said, giving the crowd his best grin. “Witch Hill? Do you get it now?” A few people nodded, but none laughed, and the nervous young professor carried on quickly, covering up his failed pun. “Well, yes, young man, you’re right. This is Pendle Hill, or known locally just as Pendle, and it’s where we’ll begin our exploration of the Crime and Punishment module.”

  The projection changed to the title page of an old book, and Lily read the words at the very top of the cover: The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. She could have smiled at those words, and felt the tingle of shadepower rising in her blood, if not for the two things that happened next. They happened simultaneously, and so quickly that Lily could only process them afterwards, when she suddenly found herself tumbling part-way down the stairs of the lecture hall.

  The first thing that happened was the moment when Bradley Binns clapped his hands together loudly, and said in a jovial tone:

  “Does anyone know how to kill a witch?”

  The second thing happened high in the ceiling of the lecture hall, where a glass panel in the roof should have been showing the cloudy grey sky beyond it. But, when Lily happened to glance up at the exact moment that Bradley clapped, she saw a face within the glass. It was no ordinary face, for its build was skeletal, and glowing a fine shade of blue, but its eyes were by far the worst component. They shone like rubies, wholly red with no white or pupil, and in the split second that Lily saw those eyes, she was convinced that they were looking at her, and her alone.

  This was how she came to scream, and when she jolted in her chair, the whole seat split and gave way, and suddenly she was on the ground. Her chair had been right beside the staircase, and she tumbled down a few steps before she could get control of herself, looking up with pale horror as footsteps thundered up to meet her. It was Lawrence’s concerned face that filled her vision, but Lily quickly gripped his shoulder, pulling herself up to crane over him and look to the ceiling once more. The red-eyed face in the glass panel was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.

  *

  Lily recounted what she had seen later, when she and Jazzy were reunited in the university cafeteria. They were all out of Lily’s favourite crisps when she got there, and she’d found a conspicuous ginger hair in her sandwich that seemed to match the greasy locks of one of the cooks behind the counter. Pushing her food aside, Lily was just finishing her description of the pale, blue face she’d witnessed in class, when Lawrence joined them at the table.

  “Male or female?” Jazzy asked, her dark eyes squinting carefully behind her glasses.

  Lily made a face, chewing on her lip for a moment.

  “Male, maybe?” she replied. “It was so fast… but I didn’t imagine it. I saw something looking at me from way up there.”

  Jazzy had a hot cup of tea before her – sugar, no milk – and she was in the process of unwrapping a KitKat chocolate bar to accompany it. Lawrence pulled a face as Jazzy bit off both ends of the long stick of chocolate biscuit, and proceeded to use it as a straw to suck up her tea. When the chocolate gave way and melted, half into the tea and half on Jazzy’s hand, she carried on eating and drinking as merrily as ever.

  “You keep doing that,” Lawrence said with a queasy frown. “It’s disgusting.”

  Jazzy chuckled, her dark eyes flashing at him with glee.

  “It’s my thing,” she insisted, “if you don’t like it, sit somewhere else.”

  Lily knew that Lawrence, however vile he found Jazzy’s KitKat habit, would never pass up the chance to be by her side. Lawrence always came to the cafeteria, even though he never ate its food. He only grimaced at Jazzy playfully, then opened a small, plastic lunchbox filled with treats that Lady Eva had prepared for him. Whilst his choosy fingers hovered over the various snacks, he surveyed Lily carefully and returned to the real subject at hand.

  “Do you think there was someone on the roof looking in at the lecture?” Lawrence suggested.

  “What other explanation is there?” Jazzy retorted.

  Lily leaned closer to her friends, brows arched as she whispered.

  “You tell me, Jaz. You’re the one who sees these figures all the time.”

  “They don’t have blue skin and red eyes,” Jazzy replied, “and they don’t stare at me either. They’re just… getting on with their own lives. They don’t know that I’m there.”

  Her eyes flickered up around the room, and Lily felt a cold shiver as she realised that her friend could probably see an awful lot of those of pale figures right at that moment. Lawrence took his lunchbox by the corner and held it up to Jazzy, rattling it to distract her from whatever she was looking at. She took a small, square piece of sugary baklava from the box, and Lily followed suit when she realised that the young man’s lunch was entirely made up of different desserts. The three of them chewed in thoughtful silence for a moment, before Lawrence shook his head abruptly.

  “I’m lost on this,” he admitted. “Perhaps you ought to talk to Novel about it.”

  It was just as Lily moved to reply that a flaky strand of honeyed pastry stuck to her throat. Eyes bulging with instant panic, Lily grabbed at her neck and let out a huge wheeze. When she coughed against the blockage, it only made things worse, and her eyes streamed with the sudden panic of choking. She could hear the raised voice of Jazzy, stranded in her chair and unable to help, and Lawrence was trying to slap Lily hard on the back to release the offending food from her windpipe, but none of it was useful. She was losing air, and she couldn’t gather her wits enough to conjure even the slightest breeze to fill her lungs.

  Lily felt two thin arms lock themselves around her stomach amidst her panic. Someone gave her a mighty shove in the hollow where her ribs ended and her stomach began, and in that expulsion of air, Lily felt the mouthful of dessert come away from her throat and fly from her lips. She gasped, collapsing back into her seat and gripping the table as her head spun, desperate to fill herself up with life-giving air once more. Her throat felt like someone had put a cigarette out in it, but the frantic beating of her heart told her that her choking fit was over, thanks to whoever was standing right behind her.

  “No applause please,” said a female voice, “I’m only a lifesaver.”

  “Molly?” Lily gasped, struggling to turn.

  Molly G, as she was universally known, was now a third-year student, and it was she who had turned up at just the right moment in the summer, when Jazzy’s back was broken and an ambulance needed to be called. Now, Lily stared up at the girl in amazement, taking in her sporty clothes and blonde hair neatly tied in a high pony. She was stooping to pick up a sports bottle that she must have dropped in haste, but as she reached the ground, the girl looked up again to flash Lily a bright smile.

  “That’s one hell of a Heimlich you’ve got there,” Lily rasped, holding her throat with one shaking hand. “Thanks mate.”

  “I was just on my way over to say hi, actually,” Molly replied. “I was going to make a joke about not seeing you in mortal peril for a change, but… well.”

  Her good humour put Lily’s battering heart at ease, and slowly the shock of nearly choking wore off. Molly sat down beside Jazzy, cradling her bottle of essential energy as she leaned her elbows on the table.

  “So you’re shacked up with the Monsieur, eh Lils?” Molly asked with a cheeky grin. “I noticed you and Jaz didn’t have your names down at the Wellesley dorm this year.”

  “We’re lodging at the theatre,” Jazzy answered brightly.

  Molly’s blue eyes travelled over Lawrence, who seemed more than a little cowed by her presence.

  “Circus boyfriends all round,” she observed, “you lucky things.”

  Sensing that Jazzy and Lawrence were both about to recede from the conversation, turtle-in-shell style, Lily swallowed again, and found enough strength in h
er throat to change the subject.

  “What about you?” she interjected hoarsely. “Are you still hanging with the Illustrious Minds?”

  Molly’s confident expression fell away quicker than a heartbeat. Her voice was quieter when she next spoke, and it was laced with a trepidation that unnerved Lily and set her shaking all over again. Molly leaned closer to them over the table, resting her chin on the top of her bottle.

  “You don’t know?” Molly asked, her eyes flashing between them all with sudden urgency. “You haven’t heard what they’re doing now?”

  Those Pesky Kids

  The Illustrious Minds Literary Society were still meeting on the top floor of the Tower Block, and they were holding a meeting shortly after lunch on that first day of university, but that was as much information as Molly would give away. Lily could not persuade her to come with her to see what the meeting was about, and the block’s lift was out of order, which meant that Jazzy couldn’t get to the top floor either. She and Lawrence were bound for their afternoon lectures, but Lily couldn’t resist the urge to satisfy the curiosity that Molly’s fearful look had sparked.

  She was outside the door of the room when she realised that the meeting was already in progress, though there were far fewer people in attendance than she remembered from last year. The society girls Bianca and Chelsea had graduated in the summer, and Lily could spy, through the crack in the door, that the new figure who led the little group was one she recognised. His broad shoulders and deeply tanned skin were as unmistakable as the sun-kissed locks that were smoothed back in a wave on his head. The only thing different about Michael Sampson this year was that his easy-going grin was gone.

  “Vigilance,” he said, his mouth pulled into a serious sneer. “We know now that Victoria Havers was one of them, and that means they can penetrate our campus undetected.”