Darke Academy 4: Lost Spirits (13 page)

He was smiling. The bastard was
smiling
.

Cassie’s heart thudded with anxiety and incomprehension. She daren’t move again, so she could only watch as he moved silently around the office: picking up books, righting lamps, replacing ornaments. When he removed the books that covered the safe she almost shrieked aloud, but all he did was replace them with other books, presumably the right ones. Then he carefully lined up the others on their original shelf.

Cassie swallowed hard, fighting to control the thrashing of her heart.

Marat was checking the room over again; adjusting the position of a table slightly, straightening a chair. Casually, he tilted a glass lampshade to a lower angle, and brushed a broken piece of porcelain into his hand and then his pocket. He smiled once more, his face a picture of satisfaction.

And then, very quietly, he left the office, and closed the door behind him.

W
hat the hell was that? Cassie crawled out from under the desk and shook her head, looking around the now-tidy office. But she didn’t really have time to fret about Marat’s odd behaviour. Because of it, there was a good chance Sir Alric wouldn’t realise for a little while that he’d been burgled, but that breathing space wouldn’t last for long. She had to get out of there, and get north as fast as possible.

The Academy was in darkness and silence as the night pressed on. Cassie wished that there were more than half of her twenty-four hours left, but it couldn’t be helped. Her heart pounded as she ran silently through the school grounds and out to the road.

There was very little traffic at first and she had to walk some distance, but as the sky lightened the roads grew rapidly busier, and she could flag down a succession of rickety
matatus
that took her north towards Mombasa, the artefacts now tucked inside Ranjit’s bloodstained backpack. From her now-solitary room, she’d grabbed a few thousand Kenyan shillings (rather a lot of them Isabella’s, she remembered guiltily), along with her passport and smartphone.

Look on the bright side, she told herself, glancing at her watch. She had as good a head start as she could possibly expect. This latest brightly coloured
matatu
was full at six in the morning, but it made pretty good speed up the coastal road – sometimes too good, she thought, glad they’d made the drivers fit seatbelts as she was thrown against hers for the umpteenth time. She still hugged the backpack tightly against her body; it might make it look more valuable and worth stealing, but let anyone try. She wasn’t letting it out of her sight or touch.

It would all be over soon. She’d have Ranjit; defeat the Svenssons; take the artefacts back to the Academy. How hard could it be?

Cassie let out a short, hysterical laugh, earning odd looks and a few comments from her fellow passengers. She was absolutely exhausted, she realised. By the time she’d changed minibus in the thronged streets of Mombasa, she had decided that, Few or not, it was really not a good idea to draw attention to herself. She curled in her seat, head against the window and huddled round the backpack, and pretended to go to sleep.

And promptly did.

When Cassie woke with a start, the sun was high and her body was sticky with sweat. Oh God, how could she have actually slept? Apart from the fact she hadn’t done so for four nights …

For a hideous instant she imagined her arms were empty, but as she stirred, pains shooting through her limbs from stiffness and immobility, she felt the backpack clutched against her, her whole body wrapped around it. A skinny guy on the other side of the
matatu
was sitting sideways, staring at the backpack with a calculating expression, but one look at Cassie’s eyes – reddened not just with sleep – and he swung round to face forward again.

Her limbs ached, and she stretched as well as she could, peering out of the window. She had to be close to Malindi now, and far north of Mombasa; wasn’t that what the message had said? Even as she reached for her phone she felt it suddenly vibrate in her pocket, and she snatched it out, peering desperately at the screen.

Ranjit Singh

Even though she knew it wasn’t really him, only his stolen property, her heart gave a lurch of sickening hope. Cassie thumbed the screen desperately to read the message.

Gedi ruins. Driver will stop
.

Cassie glared around, eyeing her fellow passengers – the potential mugger now looking downright nervous – and shading her eyes to gaze at the road and countryside beyond the rickety bus. There was no one she could detect who might be tracking her for the Svenssons, and she hated the very idea, but one of them must be. The thought that her enemy knew her movements, yet she could not see them, made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. The driver showed no sign of either watching her, or slowing the
matatu
’s hectic pace.

She sighed. Gedi ruins? Tapping open the internet browser on her phone, she scrolled down the search results.

Gedi: the ruins of a fifteenth-century Arab-African town on the Mombasa–Malindi road, ten miles south of Malindi. Founded in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century and abandoned in the early seventeenth. Archaeological fragments indicate that it had a large and prosperous population.

So far so normal, Cassie thought with a roll of her eyes. There was nothing the Few liked better, for an assignation, than a pile of old ruins. God forbid they should ever arrange a showdown in a nice clean shopping centre.

Idly she tapped a link and opened another website. There wasn’t much.

In the sixteenth century, an unexplained occurrence brought the life of Gedi to a temporary end.

Cassie frowned. Curiouser and curiouser, she thought. Unexplained occurrences were another of the Few’s favourite things …

For what felt like the hundredth time, she was jolted against her seatbelt as the
matatu
swerved to an abrupt halt. Cassie looked up sharply. The driver’s eyes met hers in his cracked rear-view mirror.

There didn’t seem any need to ask if this was her stop. Grabbing the backpack, pocketing her phone, she felt the eyes of every passenger follow her as she swung down out of the
matatu
. The driver gave her one more look, entirely expressionless.

She didn’t wave. He gunned the rickety vehicle into life and roared away in a cloud of red dust.

Cassie stared after it, her stomach like lead. She’d half-expected – half-hoped for – tourists, crowds of them; and yet why would she imagine such a thing? It wouldn’t suit the Svenssons to have people around, and besides, they’d want to unnerve her, to make her feel wholly alone. That certainly wouldn’t be such a terribly difficult thing to arrange, in this deserted site where only dust and ghosts seemed to move among the stones.

Face it, Cassie: you haven’t a clue what you’re going to do about all of this. She shut her eyes, allowing the fear and apprehension to wash over her like a gigantic wave, just for a moment.

No! No time for that. Cassie swallowed hard. Hoisting the backpack on to her shoulder, she walked silently towards the empty ticket office and beyond it into the ruins. In the empty vastness, the air felt ancient and heavy around her, thick with spirits.

Not too many of my kind, I hope, she thought with a shiver.

Cassie stepped through an arched doorway into a roofless courtyard, her heart banging her ribs. Many of the walls were worn down to their foundations by the centuries, but the outline of a town lay there like a skeleton, or perhaps a ghost. At the flap of wings she looked up, startled, and saw a dusty-looking buzzard watching her. Trees grew where people must once have lived and worked and laughed, their branches overhanging the old rooms; an eerie sensation skittered down Cassie’s spine with a frisson of familiarity.

She’d never been anywhere like this, she was sure of it, but there was something haunting the edges of her memory. Then she realised: Angkor Wat.

She hadn’t ever actually been in the Cambodian temple ruins where Jake’s sister Jessica had died. But she felt as if she had, and she was certain that the place where Keiko had discovered the Knife must have this same sense of ancient ruins only sleeping. Only sleeping, but still breathing, still living.

Cassie shook herself. There was no sign of modern life, that was for sure, but she knew it was here somewhere. They were here somewhere … and that meant he was too. The knowledge of Ranjit’s nearness gave her a surge of hope, but she couldn’t be complacent. She had to stay alert.

Still nothing moved but trees and birds and insects, and a snake that slithered quickly into the undergrowth as she walked carefully on. Where the hell were they? The sun blazed down on her unprotected head; wishing belatedly that she’d remembered to bring a hat, she stood in the shade of an archway and thumbed the screen of her phone once more. It was more to pass the time than out of genuine curiosity, but a paragraph caught her eye. She scrolled quickly back up to it.

Earthenware pots with a magical purpose have been found buried at several points throughout the ruins. A charm would be placed in the pot by the homeowner which, together with special rituals, enticed a djinn to enter them. This guardian spirit, should anyone enter the house with evil intent, would drive the thief mad.

Cassie’s throat felt suddenly very dry. No, she thought. Don’t be silly. That’s old superstition, no more. The Svenssons had doubtless brought her here knowing how unnerving the place was – and how conveniently abandoned.

All the same, she wished they’d hurry up and show their hand. The sun was beginning to dip back towards the horizon, and Few or not, she did not want to be here in the dark, with djinns and ghosts and who knew what else …

Cassie’s fingers tightened on the backpack strap.
Come on
. She was being foolish, not to mention cowardly. She couldn’t let any fear cloud her mind, or she’d never pull this off. Of course she wouldn’t simply hand the Knife and the Pendant to those two evil bitches. She’d beaten them before, and with ease; and she was more confident in her power now than she had been, even in New York when she’d given them such a thrashing. True, she had no particular plan, but she’d play it by ear. When she left this place – and she’d be more than happy when that moment came – she’d have Ranjit and the artefacts. The Svenssons, damn their icy eyes, would have nothing.

It wasn’t as if she thought for a moment that they’d hand Ranjit over. More than likely the Svenssons were planning their own double-cross, and intended to kill them both. Cassie was not going to let that happen.

She jumped as the phone in her hand vibrated again.

Ranjit Singh

Angry with herself for the leaping of her heart, Cassie tapped the message.

The Palace. Turn right. Then 40 metres
.

Cassie swallowed, assailed again by that horrible sense of being watched. But at least it was time to move and to act. She didn’t know how much longer she could have stood it, waiting in the eerie silence of the ruined town.

The shadows of the crumbling walls seemed to grow longer as she walked the last few metres and climbed ramshackle steps. Throat tight and blood pounding, she stepped through a pointed archway and made her way silently through the roofless rooms. The walls were pocked with holes where lamps must have once burned, but there were none now, of course: only the shifting low sunlight and the unnerving shadows.

At the entrance to a smaller chamber Cassie stopped, listening. Now. She was sure.

As if waiting only for her thought, the two women stepped out into the gathering twilight: Katerina and Brigitte Svensson, palely beautiful and haughty. And triumphant, thought Cassie bitterly.

And there, between them, sagging in their grip, they held the wounded Ranjit Singh.

Cassie couldn’t help sucking in a lungful of air. For an instant she felt dizzy, but she got a grip on herself fast, gripping the backpack strap so hard her fingernails dug painfully into her palms.

Ranjit wasn’t looking at her. His head drooped forward, and when Katerina seized his hair and yanked it up, Cassie wanted to be sick, and her heart choked her throat. His face was bruised and bloody, but that wasn’t the worst of it; the worst was his eyes, which had the stunned, unseeing glaze of the deeply drugged. She had to restrain herself from crying out, dropping everything and rushing over to him.

Gritting her teeth, Cassie stepped up to meet her enemies, swinging the backpack carefully down from her shoulder.

‘Give him to me,’ she growled.

‘Give us the artefacts,’ snarled Brigitte.

Immobilised by indecision, Cassie looked for the first time beyond the two women. No, she hadn’t imagined it: there was a light, glowing softly in an alcove behind them, but growing more intense as she watched. There was something about that light she didn’t like one bit. Cassie frowned, and met Katerina’s eyes.

‘Give me Ranjit. That was the deal. Wasn’t it, Tiger_ eye?’

Katerina shook her captive’s arm roughly, smirking at Cassie, her eyes red with spirit-light and fury.

‘Hah! Come on then, Scholarship. Come on and take him!’

C
assie stepped forward. Never letting her gaze leave Katerina’s face, she reached into the backpack. As she closed her fingers round the hilt of the Knife, she felt its carvings stir into life, and the old inevitable thrill ran through her veins.

‘Show me,’ hissed Katerina.

Cassie drew out the Knife and the Pendant in one hand. The light that seeped from the alcove behind the Svenssons made the artefacts gleam with a supernatural light.

Brigitte’s eyes were brilliant with greed. ‘Now hand them over.’

Cassie slipped the artefacts back into the backpack, letting go of the Pendant but keeping her fingers lightly around the Knife’s hilt in the confines of the bag. She stretched the backpack towards Katerina. As the blonde girl reached for the straps, Cassie shut her eyes once, then snapped them open. She flung the backpack aside, the Knife still clutched in her hand.

As she’d hoped, Katerina and Brigitte lunged for the backpack before they’d realised what Cassie was doing. She took her chance to leap for Ranjit as they let him fall.