The Potioneer (Shadeborn Book 3) Page 5

  “Just let me in,” she pleaded, “let me know what the problem is. We can face it together this time.”

  Novel nodded, but his next words were not what Lily had hoped for.

  “Give me until the end of this month,” he said gently. “If I can’t find the solution, I’ll tell you everything, I promise.”

  “A promise is no good to me,” Lily answered, tears finally choking her throat as she bit them back. “You can either be a man who keep secrets, or a man I can trust. Not both, Novel. Never both.”

  And she left him standing there in the darkening, empty attic. As Lily strode away, it was her turn to feel the bite of guilty lightning when it sparked against her palms.

  The Wandering Girl

  Novel’s four-poster bed was usually empty at night, for the illusionist kept strange hours, and liked to absorb starlight on the Imaginique’s roof around midnight. It was at this strike of twelve that Lily settled between the soft black sheets of the bed, and reached a pale hand out to draw the crimson curtains all around her. After a few weeks of returning to the term-time lecture schedule, the shattered student had finally given up on making every night a late one. Tomorrow, Lily’s history lecture with Bradley Binns was set for nine a.m. sharp, and she was determined that she wouldn’t fall asleep in this one.

  It felt lonely to lie there without the familiar weight of the body that ought to be beside her, and Lily turned on her side to face the curtained veil she had drawn, so she didn’t have to look at the space where Novel usually lay. If things kept up the way they were with university, there was a very real possibility that he and Lily may end up sharing the bed in shifts rather than together, and if he didn’t keep his promise to her at the end of October, then Lily had to admit it was probably for the best. A heaviness shifted in her chest at that sad realisation, sitting somewhere between her heart and her throat as she wrestled with her comfort, and the thoughts that were already threatening to keep her awake.

  Somewhere, in a fanciful part of her mind, Lily had assumed that being Kindred Souls – the shadeborn equivalent of soul mates – automatically meant that the course of true love would run smooth for her and Novel. Now, in the great anti-climax that had settled since he’d saved Lily from the brink of death, she was starting to wonder if the whole soul mate thing was purely about the magic. As much as she was drawn to Novel’s bright eyes, his sharp-angled features and the mastery he possessed when he performed, he was difficult to live with, even at the best of times. She loved him – of that she was certain – but loving someone, and being with them, so totally with them, were two very different things.

  “You look troubled.”

  The voice that spoke was reluctant, and a little hoarse, but it still made Lily leap half out of her skin. The silken sheets fluttered away as she jolted, eyes wide open and looking for the source of the words. When she remembered that she had closed the crimson curtains of the bed all around her, panic set in, freezing her in place where she lay on her side. Her lips ran dry in seconds, and she had to move them to and fro a little before they ceased trembling enough for her to ask the empty air before her.

  “Is someone there?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” the voice replied, sounding deeper, and a little bolder.

  Lily reached towards the curtains, but the voice grew louder still.

  “Ah, I wouldn’t do that,” it suggested, “I might lose my place here.”

  Slowly, realisation sank in, and Lily knew the voice and its owner. She let her eyes rove over the dark, shadowed folds of the crimson curtain before her, until she found a place where the velvety material had crumpled into a kind of knot. Here, two deep shadows sat side by side, with one dark crease of fabric spread beneath them in a long, dragging shape. The combination of the shadows looked something like the face from Scream, until the two shadowed eyes blinked, and the crease below them broke into a smile.

  “I’m sorry, Gerstein,” Lily said, honing in on the shadows, “I forget that you can do this.”

  “Anything that forms a face,” the simulacra replied with another folded smile. “Forgive me. I’m not spying on you, my dear. I did come to pass a message, but you looked so terribly forlorn.”

  “What’s the message?” Lily interjected, keen not to return to the subject of her sadness.

  Gerstein’s illusionary features became tense with worry for a moment, his voice dropping to that low, uncertain tone once more.

  “It’s concerning your friend, Miss Dama,” the apparition began. “I thought you might like to know that she’s out of her wheelchair… it appears she’s making an attempt to climb the stairs.”

  Lily’s first thought was of Jazzy as she used to be, and in her mind she saw the short Indian girl padding up the Imaginique’s winding staircases in her striped Where’s Wally socks. The vision passed swiftly, though, as Lily saw reality for what it was. Jazzy had a severed spine, and if she was clambering, using only her upper body to climb the daunting mountain of steps before her, then she was in some kind of trouble.

  “Thank you,” Lily said swiftly, and she scooted downwards to shoot from the end of the bed, so as not to disturb Gerstein from his station in the curtains.

  As her bare feet slapped the floorboards towards the door, she heard the watchman call after her: “Meet you down there.”

  The simulacra travelled through the walls at a much faster pace than Lily’s exhausted frame would allow, and she spotted him settled into a theatre poster as she approached the lowest staircase of the Imaginique. This was the place where the stairs connected to the corridor of the grand foyer, and Gerstein had taken on the guise of a hand-drawn skeleton on the poster, about halfway up the stairs. He pointed hurriedly downwards with one spindly finger and there, in the darkness, Lily beheld her friend.

  Jazzy’s eyes flashed at her, two deep black pools that glistened with tears borne of frustration. Her legs hung limply behind her where the girl had made it halfway up the stairs, and she strained to push her top half up the next step, one hand reaching wildly for Lily’s assistance. Lily rushed to Jazzy’s side and hoisted, her gravity magic racing out in that graceful way that she only possessed when she was casting by accident, and soon the two girls were perched on the centremost step of the stairs, with Gerstein in the poster right above their heads.

  “Look,” Jazzy gasped, clutching at the v-neck of her Ghostbusters pyjamas.

  Lily was still holding fast to her friend’s arm, but Jazzy fought her way from her grip to point back up the stairs, into the empty blackness of the first floor landing from which Lily had descended. Jazzy’s fingers trembled as she found her breath, her deep eyes pooling with dampness once more in a pained effort to speak.

  “They don’t notice me, ever, but… She led me out here. I had to follow. Don’t you see her?”

  Lily watched Jazzy’s fearful face as she spoke these words, but when she glanced to where her friend pointed, Lily saw only the darkness of the landing beyond. There were lights under a few doors on the corridor, and somewhere on the ground floor below them, the kitchen was filled with the chatter of the theatre’s most nocturnal souls. When she glanced up to the poster where the skeleton simulacra stood, Gerstein was looking down at them both from within the frame. His bony shoulders gave a shrug.

  “Don’t ask me,” he said, “I can only see the living.”

  Jazzy shook her head, her neck drooping weakly as she lost the remainder of her strength.

  “She’s not…” The girl stumbled over her words, tiny teeth biting on her lip for a moment in thought. “She’s more than a memory, Lily. She’s important.”

  Lily looked again to the empty space where Jazzy had pointed, and a cool shiver trickled against her spine within her thin nightclothes. Even though there was life in the people and creatures all around them in the theatre, they were still just two frightened girls in the dark. When Jazzy looked up again to the ghost’s last location, she shook her head of wayward curls and gave a pitiful li
ttle laugh.

  “She’s gone,” she whispered. “She must have realised that I can’t follow her. Stupid legs.”

  This last was whispered sharply, and almost lost in the deafening noise as Jazzy took her fists and thumped them hard against her limp thighs. She did it twice more before Lily could catch her wrists to stop her.

  “Quit that,” Lily whispered, “you’ll give yourself bruises.”

  “What does it matter?” Jazzy asked. “It’s not like I can feel them.”

  Lily’s heart sank with a selfish thud. She was worrying about boyfriends, true love and magic, whilst Jazzy was haunted and struggling in the darkness alone. Lily stood up straight and forced every drop of her power to focus, lifting Jazzy so that she floated level with her. The magic seemed to ease the strain from her best friend’s face, and Lily walked them both down the stairs, back towards the prop store that had been transformed into Jazzy’s bedroom.

  “Come on,” Lily prompted, “I’ll make you a cuppa. Sugar, no milk. Just how you like it.”

  “I thought you had a lecture in the morning?” Jazzy asked in a small, weak-sounding voice.

  Lily smiled forlornly and shook her head.

  “Something tells me tonight wasn’t made for sleeping,” she mused. “Besides, I think I’d better hear everything about this ghost girl you saw.”

  Vivid History

  Between Jazzy’s ghost girl and the blue-faced apparition she had seen in the lecture hall ceiling, Lily felt more haunted with every minute she spent under the tutelage of Bradley Binns. In the few weeks that had passed since the start of term, Binns had covered the whole gambit of witch trials worldwide, and now that the first reading week of the year was on the horizon, Lily knew that an assignment would be in order. The inevitable question flashed up on Binns’s projector in the third week of October, where bold black print proclaimed the words:

  According to the various historical sources you have explored, determine what you perceive to be humanity’s central beliefs about witchcraft, and how it should be dealt with.

  Beside the essay question was an image of a young woman, and Lily started for a moment as she gazed upon the thin, almost triangular jaw of the female. Her memory flashed towards the midnight conversation she’d had after picking Jazzy up from the stairs, and the words that had tumbled from her friend’s lips in a manic jumble of recollection:

  “She was small, and sort of dainty, but she could have been our age. She had big black eyes, like bloodhound’s eyes, you know? And dark hair plaited down like Wednesday Addams.”

  The image of the witch that Bradley had used to illustrate his assignment was passed around on a paper handout, and when Lily took it in again, Jazzy’s description sent a shiver through her. The girl on the paper definitely had that same classic horror movie vibe that Jazzy had described, and Lily had to reason with herself quite forcefully that the picture she was looking at was probably just the first hit from Google Images that her new professor had stumbled upon. Not trusting her own likelihood to make a spectacle of herself, as she had on day one of classes, Lily stayed in her seat and let the tremble in her legs abate. The hall slowly emptied of students, eager to get to lunch, and soon Lily saw only one figure left on the periphery of her vision.

  “You don’t look pleased with the assignment,” Bradley Binns mused, his voice echoing across the now-empty hall.

  Lily spared the lecturer a glance. He stood with hands on hips, knuckles resting against the grey wool of his godawful tank vest. Lily opened her mouth, but could think of no suitable reply.

  “I’d have thought it was right up your street,” he continued, flailing a hand emphatically, “sociology and history combined.”

  Nodding slowly, Lily got to her feet and crumpled the essay paper into the front pocket of her satchel. As she descended the stairs towards the young professor, she was careful and very deliberate in keeping her eyes away from the glass panes reflecting down upon her, lest she suddenly see something in the ceiling that would add yet more worry to her day. She was ready to leave the hall swiftly, some glib comment resting on her tongue to assure the new professor that she’d give the assignment her best shot, but the curiosity in Bradley’s hazel eyes gave her pause.

  “The girl in that picture,” Lily said, her hand hovering over the space where she’d stuffed the page into her bag. “Who is she?”

  “An old relative of mine,” the young scholar answered. There were dimples in his cheeks as he pulled his lips back to smile, but the expression looked stiff to Lily. “She was tried as a Pendle witch, back in 1612.”

  The professor’s particular interest in witches was starting to make sense. Lily let go of a genuine smile that was gathering in the corner of her mouth.

  “Did they find her guilty?” she asked.

  Bradley Binns nodded, strands of brown hair flopping towards his face. He leaned a little closer to Lily, looking at her from under his brows as he spoke.

  “She got away. It’s not well-documented, but it’s true. The Lancaster Assizes didn’t like to admit it when their witches managed to escape.”

  A brow quirked on Lily’s forehead, her interest piqued, but another voice cut across the empty hall to break the conversation.

  “That’s a shame,” a snarky, male tone declared. “You see, if we’d ferreted all the witches out long ago, we wouldn’t have such a problem now.”

  “Michael,” Lily droned, turning with a frown to see the cocky figure before her. “Why don’t you peddle your crazy somewhere else? The professor and I were having a discussion about real history.”

  Michael Sampson strode into the room with the kind of swagger you could only be born with. It seemed to Lily that no matter how many times he’d been freaked out of his mind over what she and the others at the Theatre Imaginique could do, Michael always found a way to bounce back. Now, he shook his head at Lily, and gave her an up-and-down look that he might not have dared to try if they had been alone in the lecture hall together.

  “Sorry to spoil your fun,” Michael said, with a look that suggested anything but apology, “I just came to drop off a delivery for Mr Binns here.”

  From the pocket of his jeans, Michael produced a small slip of paper that horrified and amused Lily all at once. It was a gilded, hand-written ticket to the October show of the Theatre Imaginique, and Bradley Binns took it from the Michael’s hand with interest. His bright eyes studied the details of the show, then flickered to meet Lily’s gaze for the briefest of moments. There was something bashfully childlike in the hesitance of his glance.

  “Erm, thank you,” Bradley said, turning abruptly to Michael and giving him a little nod. “I’m always keen to see the local culture. Didn’t get around to seeing this show last year.”

  “Be sure to look out for Lily’s boyfriend,” Michael added with a shameless sneer. “He’s the one that looks like a corpse.”

  It seemed that Bradley didn’t know whether to laugh at that or not, and he made a polite half-chuckle as he gathered his briefcase and remaining papers from his desk. Lily ignored his nervy gestures, her eyes solely focused on Michael with a flare that might have set him on fire if she’d let it. Even through his cocky facade, Michael seemed to sense that an outburst was on its way, and he was already backing out of the lecture hall by the heels of his sneakers as he added:

  “I know I’ll be front-row-centre this time.”

  By the time Lily stormed towards the outer corridor, the little git had run away.

  Stage Fright

  Standing next to Baptiste Du Nord didn’t exactly inspire Lily to smile, but she kept her lips fixed in the most welcoming expression she could manage. Baptiste was charming as ever with the patrons when they entered the grand foyer of the Imaginique for that night’s performance, but now that Lily sensed what truly lay beneath his elegant exterior, every word the bloodshade spoke seemed to ooze with hidden meanings. Lily had offered to play the role of usherette for the evening, and every time Baptiste took a
golden ticket from a customer with his long-nailed hands, it became Lily’s job to direct them through the massive double doors, suggesting where best they ought to sit.

  “Aha,” Baptiste proclaimed, his tone dripping with interest, “it seems we have a new face. Welcome, Monsieur. Might I know the pleasure of your name?”

  Lily turned, hiding a grimace, just as the slightly stuttering voice of the newbie replied.

  “Oh, well… It’s er… It’s Bradley, actually.”

  And Lily might have welcomed the young professor herself, had she not been so struck by the bright flush of pink that had raced to his cheeks. He was looking up at Baptiste in all his finery, as if the elegant MC were the only figure in the crowded foyer, and Bradley’s shy little grin was only exacerbated by the way his hands fumbled over the golden ticket as he tried to hand it over. It struck Lily that this was exactly how Jazzy had behaved the first time she’d ever met Baptiste, when she’d remarked on his gorgeous dark looks and sparkling eyes. The MC’s eyes were certainly sparkling as he gently plucked the ticket from Bradley’s nervous grip.

  “Bradley,” Baptiste said, as if he was tasting the word. His faded French accent rolled the ‘r’ a little too much, and the MC gave a grin. “Forgive me, Monsieur. Your name’s a little difficult to get my tongue around.”

  The professor gave that nervous half-chuckle, like he had when Michael had made his cutting joke about Novel, but this time he was all smiles as he nodded his thanks to Baptiste. Lily watched him step her way, his head half-turned back to the striking figure, who had already set the charm offensive on the next victim in line. When Bradley’s gaze finally did find Lily’s, his eyes widened momentarily, then the pink flush returned to his cheeks. One hand instinctively shot to rub at the back of his neck, and Lily had a moment to register that he was wearing another stellar piece of ugly knitwear before he began to speak.