“Well, yeah, but . . .” Variam frowned. “You know what their issue is with Anne, right?”
“Honestly?” I said. “No. Yeah, I know there’s the whole ex-Dark thing, but it always seemed like a pretty lousy reason. You only have to spend a few minutes around Anne to figure out she’s not like that.”
Variam stared at me, then shook his head. “You really are strange, you know that?”
“What?”
“Half the time you act like you know everything, then you say stuff like this.”
“I don’t know everything, I’ve told you that enough times by now. What are you getting at?”
“The Light mages don’t like Anne,” Variam said, “because she comes across as incredibly creepy.”
I blinked. Whatever I’d been expecting Variam to say, it hadn’t been that. “What?”
“Creepy. As in weird and disturbing. The Light apprentices think she’s creepy, the non-Light apprentices think she’s creepy, even the teachers think she’s creepy. Literally everyone sees it except you. Dunno why.”
“She’s not creepy.”
“She acts like she can see under everyone’s skin, she doesn’t blink or sleep or breathe except when she wants to, and she’s got this way of looking at people like she’s thinking how difficult it’d be to stop their heart.”
“Well . . . I guess.” I didn’t really see what Variam was getting at. “But she’s a life mage.”
“Okay, first,” Variam said, “life mages creep people out already. Second, the way Anne comes across, she looks like she might have done the heart-stopping thing a few times already.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Argh.” Variam covered his eyes. “I don’t even know how to explain this. I mean, it’s good, we haven’t exactly got many friends, I’m not complaining or anything. I just don’t get how you’re the one mage who can’t see how this would freak anyone out.”
“Well, it’s not like she’s going to do anything to hurt us.”
Variam was silent. I frowned. “What?”
“Nothing.”
I shook my head. “So how are we going to get Anne somewhere safer?”
“We can’t,” Variam said. “She said no and she meant it, so unless you’re planning to knock her out and carry her off somewhere, you might as well give up.”
I thought about it for a second.
Variam scowled at me. “I was kidding.”
“Yeah,” I said, abandoning the plan. I could probably pull it off, but Anne would kill me when she woke up. Well, she wouldn’t kill me, but it wouldn’t exactly improve our relationship and . . .
. . . and that was quite possibly the most stupid plan I’d ever come up with in my entire life. Why was I even thinking about this? If I’d gotten to the point where I was considering something this crazy, it was time to give up.
“Look, this isn’t anything new,” Variam said seriously. “I’ve got a couple of new ideas to bounce off her tomorrow, and if she doesn’t answer I’ll keep calling till she does. It’s not like this is our first fight.” He paused. “But thanks for trying. Back when things were bad, you and Luna were about the only people who cared enough to help. I haven’t forgotten that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay. I’ll leave it to you.”
The teas had grown cold on the table, and we left them there when we got up to leave. Variam returned to Arachne’s lair to gate back to Scotland, and I caught a bus home.
I had another nightmare that night.
It started as they always did, with me being chased. I kept moving, trying to put enough turnings between me and my pursuer, but every time I stopped I could hear him coming closer. Finally I stopped running and waited around a corner to ambush him. He came around into my reach and I caught him, forcing him to the ground and breaking his neck.
There were more people in the next room. All were sitting and they didn’t seem to have noticed me. I went to the first and tried to wrestle him down, but it was taking too long so I had to go back and get a knife and start stabbing him instead. I kept it up until he stopped moving and went on to the next. He took longer, and the one after that took longer still. I kept stabbing his torso but there was so much resistance that the blade was hardly going in and the wounds weren’t bleeding. The man I was stabbing didn’t fight back, and no one else in the room seemed to even notice.
The next one was a woman, and as I moved in she looked up at me. My arms were sticky and my movements were tired and slow. Something made me stop and turn around, and as I did I saw bodies lying behind me. Some of them were still moving and with a thrill of horror I realised there weren’t just two or three, there were dozens. I turned back to the woman, trying to say something to justify myself, but the words died on my lips. She didn’t scream or run or try to defend herself; she just sat there looking at me. The knife was still in my hands and I could see the target area at her neck. I stepped forward, and as I did I realised that this was a dream, had to be a dream, and I tried desperately to wake up and escape. I caught the woman’s hair with my left hand, forcing her head back and exposing her throat, while the knife came across to—
—I came awake, breathing hard. I felt sick and wanted to throw up and I clawed open the window next to my bed. Cold air rushed in and I knelt up on the bed, leaning out into the night, taking deep breaths in and out. Gradually the nausea faded and I reached for my bedside table, fumbling for my phone. I needed to call Anne. I knocked my clock off the table, along with my keys, two different one-shots, and a scattering of coins before my fingers found my phone and activated it, casting a faint bluish light over my bedroom. The clock on the screen said 02:49.
I’d opened my Contacts list and scrolled down to W for Anne Walker before my thoughts caught up with what I was doing. What was I going to say? “Hi, I had a bad dream and I wanted to—” . . . what? Why did I want to call her? Now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember why.
I stared down at the Call button and just out of habit looked to see what would happen if I pressed it. Anne wasn’t going to pick up, which quite frankly was exactly what you’d expect.
I put the phone down and leant back out the window, breathing in the fresh air. The dream had shaken me, partly for what it had been but more for the memories it had pulled up. Last year I’d had a nightmare in which I’d been seeing through Rachel’s eyes. Nightmares aren’t anything new for me, but this one had been vivid and horrible, and what I’d seen had been enough to terrify me. I’d seen Richard return, step back through a gate and into our world.
I hadn’t slept well for a month. Every night there’d been the fear hovering at the back of my mind that it had been real, that it was going to start all over again. But as week after week went by and nothing happened, the fear began to recede, and slowly I was able to convince myself that it had just been a dream. If only the damn rumours would stop.
The sky had grown overcast again and the orange glow of the London streetlights reflected off the bottom of the clouds. I stayed there for a good twenty minutes, looking out over the Camden night and listening to the distant traffic and the rumble of trains. When the nausea was gone and I felt calm again, I closed the window and pulled the covers up. It took me a long time to get back to sleep.
Chapter 3
When I woke up the next morning it was raining. It wasn’t a passing shower but a steady drumbeat of water, the kind of rain that settles in, puts its feet up, and makes it clear that it’s not going to leave. Water poured from the gutters above and spattered on the street, and cars rolled slowly through the sheets of falling raindrops, their wipers flicking back and forth. The clouds were heavy and grey with a look of permanency to them, and I was probably going to have to leave the lights on all day.