Solace & Grief (18 page)

She stopped when they came to what looked at first to be a way out of the hall, an alcove exit blocked at night by green metal security bars. Lodged to the right-hand side of the nook, and leading seemingly into the wall, was an open corridor.

‘There?’ asked Solace, but Laine shook her head, turning instead to an old, dark door to the left, so unobtrusive that nobody else had noticed it. Walking over, she saw that there was no handle on the outside, only a circular silver lock. When she pressed on the door itself, nothing gave.

‘It must be locked,’ she muttered. ‘Can anyone open it?’

‘We could force it, maybe,’ Manx suggested.

‘Wait,’ said Electra. The others stared, watching her bow her head and concentrate. Eerily, she began to glow. A golden light suffused her skin, auric and fey; sweat beaded her forehead. With a sudden gasp, she tottered forwards, pulling something from her pocket and slumping to her knees before anyone could catch her.

‘Here,’ she said faintly. ‘A lost thing.’ She held up a key – large, bronze and old-fashioned, tainted by the pale, frog-moss green of oxidised metal. Ignoring Paige's awe and Evan's confusion, Manx gently lifted the key from Electra's hand and helped her stand. Straightening, he walked to the door and ran a hand down the wood.

‘Look.’ He pointed. Beneath the new, silver lock was an older keyhole, almost invisible in the darkness. With a creaky
click
, Manx inserted the key and turned. For a moment it still seemed it wouldn't work, but then the door opened inwards. A sharp, narrow staircase confronted them, winding steeply away and up to the right.

‘Come on,’ said Laine, her hand already on the banister.

Everyone followed.

The stairs spiralled upwards for three floors. They passed other offices, but Laine kept going. At the top of the third flight was a small landing, and above that, a fourth, shorter set of steps leading to a glass security door.

‘Here,’ she said, finally. ‘Although I don't think there'll be too many lost keys to this one.’

Not waiting for an invitation, Solace stepped up to the glass. There was a metal handle, but the swipe-slot on the wall belied any thought that it might just open of its own accord. She tried anyway for the sake of it. Nothing happened. She sighed. She'd never put her physical strength to such a use before, except when experimenting. Still, there was nothing else for it. Squaring her shoulders, she pushed down hard on the handle. There was a squeak, followed by a groan, and then a tortured
snnnnk
sound as the locking mechanism broke. The glass door opened. Solace froze, suddenly worried that an alarm would go off.

Silence.

‘Must be a pretty cheap security system,’ Evan remarked. ‘Incidentally, is anyone else freak-out impressed by the fact that Solace can apparently snap metal?’

‘
Later
, Evan,’ Jess menaced.

Down the narrow, darkened hallway, Laine turned left. Almost immediately they were confronted by another glass door; being internal, however, this one opened easily. Behind it was a very thin walkway, made so by the bulge and protrusion of a doorway belonging to – or so it first seemed – a cupboard. A closer look revealed a small metal plate in the middle of the door, which read:

‘Bingo,’ whispered Paige, reaching for the handle. Jess grabbed her wrist.

‘Wait. The last time we saw his office, we came in through a different door – through a different
building
.’

‘So?’

‘So
maybe
the door is booby-trapped, that's what!’ Paige snorted. ‘And you only thought of this
now
?’ A pause.

‘Well, yes.’

Evan rolled his eyes impatiently. ‘It's a university, guys, not a Mayan temple! Lukin might be nuts, but he's hardly going to electrocute his students.’ And to prove this point, he leaned forward and tapped the wood.

Nothing happened.

Jess glared at him. Evan grinned.

‘After you,’ he said, bowing to Solace.

Baring her teeth, Solace walked up and twisted the handle – fiercely, as though she could wrench it open in one quick turn. Rather than opening the door, however, this only had the effect of breaking the knob off in her hand. Irritated, she let it drop.

‘Maybe we could kick it?’ Electra suggested. ‘I mean –
you
could kick it.’

‘Really?’ asked Solace, surprised. ‘I thought people only did that in movies.’

‘Okay, firstly?’ Laine pointed out, ‘we're not really “people” so much as – you know. A different
kind
of people. And second of all, who cares? Bust in the damn door!’

Nodding, Solace stood back. There wasn't room for a run-up; instead, she turned side-on, and in one swift movement, kicked, trying her best to aim for the lock and the broken-off root of the handle. There was a splintering, cracking sound. The door bulged in a little. Solace kicked it again, harder.

A louder, thudding crack. The lock tore away from the frame as the door swung very slightly open, revealing a centimetre-wide scrap of darkness.

‘Now
that
,’ said Evan admiringly, ‘was
awesome
.’

‘Right,’ said Solace, straightening her shoulders and shaking out the sleeves of her leather jacket with pride.

She pushed the door. It moved inwards with comic slowness, as though passing through some foreign substance thicker than air. Light began to replace the darkness around the edge of the wood, eventually revealing –

‘That's
not
an office,’ breathed Jess.

As Solace stepped tentatively into the room, the others crowded in after her. Manx gently pulled the door closed behind them – as closed, that is, as a broken door can be. Like everyone else, Solace found herself craning her head upwards in amazement.

‘Cracks in reality?’ asked Laine. Her voice echoed in the sudden, silent space. ‘More like cracks in…’ the sentence tapered away.

‘I've never been in an octagon before,’ said Electra, almost offhandedly.

Manx chuckled; the echoes bounced back and around them, as though the room had its own sense of humour.

Awed, they wandered forward, necks craned upwards, hands drifting over the walls. Solace paused in the middle of the floor, trying to drink it all in.

In place of Lukin's office was a marble… room. Somehow, there didn't seem to be an appropriate word for it.
Antechamber
sounded too small;
hall
didn't quite cover the fact that, as Electra had observed, the place had eight sides, or that the roof soared high overhead into a circle of vaulted stone. Warm yellow light suffused the walls, bringing out a pale rose blush in the otherwise creamy marble; seemingly, it emanated from a series of eight glass globes mounted on each of the eight walls, although they contained neither fire nor bulb that anyone could see.

And then there were the doors: one for each wall, including the one through which they'd entered, all made of dark-polished wood, smooth and blank except for identical round brass handles. In the middle of the floor, a circular pattern had been laid out in the marble – a spiral, Solace realised, delineated by a pale blue tinge in the stone. Where the blue and pink met was a delicate bleeding of purple, as if the colour were painted on and had seeped into invisible joins in the masonry. Which was, of course, impossible – but as with many other things, Solace was beginning to see that this often didn't matter quite so much as it ought.

‘Maybe we should go –’ Paige began, but no sooner were the words spoken than a curious clicking sound caused them all to turn.

It was a good seven seconds before Evan realised what had happened. ‘The door,’ he gulped. ‘It's closed or fixed itself or something. It's’ – He gestured helplessly. ‘They all look the same now. I'm not even certain which one it was.’

‘What's wrong with guessing?’ Electra asked nervously.

When nobody answered, Jess hugged herself. ‘Here's a better question: where are we really? And where do all these doors lead to?’

‘O
kay,’ said Solace, somewhat uneasily. ‘We just try a door.’

With slight hesitation, she walked to the nearest door and grasped the handle. It turned with an oily silence that set her on edge – for good reason. No sooner had the door departed from the frame than the emergent space began to glow with rushing, white-blue light, filling the chamber with a hungry, deafening roar. Solace felt herself being sucked forward; behind her, the others panicked and scrambled. Angry with fright, she grabbed the handle and yanked the door shut, hard.

Silence.

‘What the hell was that?’ exclaimed Harper.

‘Do I
look
like I know?’

‘Try another one,’ Jess urged, a little shakily. ‘We need to find a way out.’

Solace nodded, trying to appear calmer than she felt. Turning in a circle, she sought out the most likely candidate for their initial entrance. She turned the handle a fraction. A hair-crack appeared between door and frame, emitting a light that glowed like a supernova and screamed like a boiling kettle. Solace slammed the door shut, kicked the wood fiercely and then leaned her back on it.

She looked at the others. No one spoke.

‘Are we
trapped
?’ asked Paige, more than a little disbelievingly.

Evan gulped. ‘Maybe.’

Solace felt her heart speed up. ‘
No
.’

So suddenly that Harper jumped, she strode purposefully to the next door along and yanked it open. A roar of ice-coloured wind confronted her. She banged it shut, moved on to the next – and the next, and the next, the whole way around the room, even to the two she'd already opened, not stopping until all eight possibilities for escape were well and truly exhausted. Defeated, she walked slowly back to the centre of the room and sank, cross-legged, onto the heart of the spiral design. Behind her, the others were silent.

Think. Think. Think
. Solace tilted her head down and closed her eyes, sinking her hands deep into her jacket pockets.

Her fingers brushed something cold.

The key to Starveldt.

Sighing, she pulled it out and jangled it in her hand.

Evan, who was watching her, looked puzzled. ‘What's that?’

‘Exactly what it looks like. The key from my mother's book.’

‘Could it get us out of here?’

Solace smiled wryly. ‘Well, it's not like any of the doors have keyholes’

‘Yes they do,’ Paige interrupted.

‘They don't. I looked when we came in.’

Solace frowned.

‘I don't care how they were when we came in – when we came
in
, one of those doors was broken, which isn't exactly the best precedent in the known universe for stability! Look!’

Paige flung out her arm and pointed, agitated beyond further words.

Solace looked. There
were
keyholes.

‘Right,’ she said, slowly. A thrum of thoughts began to burn her brain. Mostly these consisted of jumbled images of Sharpsoft, Starveldt and her mother's book; behind all of this, however, lurked two very important words.

‘
What if
, ‘ she murmured. Standing, she walked to the nearest door, reached out, paused, and fitted the key in the lock.

The world turned green. There was a faint smell of garlic. Solace sneezed and blinked.

She was standing on a patch of cobblestones. Beyond and around it, everything else was darkness. The only light danced around her, seemingly without source, a dim, full-bodied halo that left her eerily shadowless.

‘Who bears the key to Starveldt?’

The question was spoken softly, but with strength. The Voice, deep and velvet, was disembodied, but recent events had conspired to dull any novelty in the phenomenon for Solace. Similarly, this was not her first inexplicable transportation to a strange and mystic place, and so, rather than reacting with reverent awe, she gave an exasperated snort.

‘Oh, great. Now what? Are you going to steal my blood, too, or just talk a whole lot of cryptic nonsense? Because I'm really
not
in the mood.’

There was a pause.

‘I'm sorry?’ said the Voice. It sounded confused, albeit in a somewhat genteel and dignified manner, like an elderly gentleman who has just been caught with the last of the cooking sherry.

‘Look,’ said Solace, her patience wearing thin. ‘Frankly, I've had just about enough of this. I wouldn't have even used the damn key except that we were trapped, and I'm still trying to figure out how
that
happened in the first place.’

‘Who bears the key to Starveldt?’ Insistent, but a little puzzled. It was
exasperating
.

‘I do, all right? Me. Solace. The daughter of Aaron and Morgause Eleuthera, who is, surprisingly enough, uninterested in exchanging niceties with an ethereal presence! I suppose my body's passed out in the real world while we're having this little talk, has it? People standing over me, wondering if I've gone nuts again, that sort of thing?
Lovely
.’

‘Time has stopped for your body. When we are finished, the moment you left will be the moment of your return.’ The Voice hummed, a sound not unlike that of a computer processor crunching through an instruction. ‘You have spoken the truth.’

‘Right! Fine! Whatever! Can I go now?’

‘Where would you have me send you?’

‘Send me?’ Solace bit back an angry retort just in time to think the offer through. A note of curiosity entered her tone. ‘You mean, send me once I'm back in the real world? You can choose what will be on the other side of the door?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked, warily.

‘A guardian.’

‘And why do you care who has the key?’

‘If you do not know, then I cannot tell you.’

Solace ground her teeth. ‘Fine, then. Look. Someone took Glide, and I want to know who and where they are. Can you help with that?’

A pause. More humming. ‘The one you call Glide was not taken.’

Keep calm
, she told herself.
Don't let it get to you
. Something about the Voice and the blank place was setting her on edge in much the same manner that opening the doors had, an oily chill like liquefied bacon grease sliding down her spine.

‘Yes. He. Was,’ she gritted out.

‘Glide was not taken.’

‘
Then where the hell is he
?’

‘Elsewhere,’ the Voice said maddeningly. Solace forced herself to speak slowly.

‘Elsewhere. Fine. Non-specific, but fine – just send us there, okay? Through the door? That's
all
of us, right, to wherever Glide is. Right? Thanks
ever
so much.’

The Voice hummed again.

‘That is not an advisable decision.’

‘
Really
?’ A more offensive rejoinder was choked back. ‘And what, exactly, do you recommend instead?’

‘Go home. You are needed. Events have been set in motion.’

‘Like
what
?’

‘Well, to begin with,’ the Voice said, slowly, ‘your house is on fire.’

The warehouse was burning.

Sirens scorched air already clogged with soot and smoke. Fire fighters shouted as gouts of flame burst from an upstairs window. Red light, eerie and alien, glowed behind doors and windows on the lower floor. A blast of heat that
boomed
and shattered shook them all; the skylight had collapsed. Dimly, Solace was aware of Electra sobbing, of Manx and Evan struggling to hold back Harper as he twisted, strained and shouted himself hoarse. Paige had sat down – fallen – and was staring blankly ahead, tears making twisted snail-trails through the ash that smeared her face. Everything seemed both too loud and muted all at once, as if different sounds had become somehow more significant than others. Startled, she flinched as Laine walked past her. The Goth girl stopped, but didn't look back, leaning into a searing wind that haloed her with tiny sparks of fire. Without being consciously aware of it, Solace found that she, too, was moving forwards. Someone grabbed her wrist, hard enough to leave white marks in the pressure-dent shape of fingers, but they were easily shaken off. Silently, she stood beside Laine. They watched the warehouse burn.

Time passed; nobody was sure how much. Once the worst of the blaze was controlled and cowed, some policemen came over and asked them if they lived there, what details could they give, where had they been and for how long, had anyone been inside (
of course there was
, Solace thought fiercely,
why else do you think we grieve
?), what might have started the fire. It was Jess who answered, abruptly and with a rasp. Then someone told them to stay put. They were offered blankets; nobody accepted. It wasn't until three blackened bodies were carried out on stretchers that the full impact of what had happened hit Solace. She swayed; Laine held her up. The two of them trembled. Harper had stopped fighting and was weeping instead – the gulping, rusty, uncertain tears of a man unused to them.

More time passed.

The officials had left. One of the ambulance officers had told them what they already knew – that Phoebe, Tryst and Claire were dead – before saying he was sorry. Solace had smiled blankly at him and given a quick shake of her head; it was too much for the man, and he turned away in case she started crying.

‘We should go. Somewhere,’ Jess croaked.

Solace nodded.

‘Our place,’ said Evan.

‘And that's
it
? We just pack up and move on?’

The speaker was Paige. All eyes turned to her. ‘No,’ said Manx, quietly. ‘That's not it. We just can't do anything now.’

‘Wrong. We can find out who did this, and kill them.’

‘Who?’ asked Jess, confused. ‘What makes you think –’

‘
They didn't get out
!’ Paige yelled. Her face went white. She bit her lip before continuing, pointing at the wreckage of the warehouse. ‘You want to tell me some random fire just started right under their noses and yet somehow, not a single one of them got out?’ She laughed, but the sound cracked. ‘Bullshit!’

‘We still don't know who it was,’ Manx argued wearily. ‘You can't just wander off into the night and expect to find the right person.’

‘You –’ Paige started, taking a step forwards, but Laine cut her off.

‘Paige!’ she barked. ‘Stop it.’

‘Why should I?’

‘I don't know! We're filthy and tired and wrecked. We need
sleep
. This isn't helping anyone, least of all you.’

Paige hugged herself and stepped backwards, shaking her head. ‘You're useless,’ she spat. ‘Useless, hopeless – fine!’ And before anyone could stop her, she turned and ran off. Evan made to go after her, but Harper held him back, a shake of his head the only explanation possible.

‘Maybe it was normal people,’ Electra whispered. ‘Maybe they found out what we are.’

‘It wasn't normal people,’ Manx said quickly, flashing Solace a worried look.

‘You don't know that,’ Electra countered.

‘No, I just think – look, nobody knows us, okay? Nobody could've seen anything.’

‘What if this has something to do with Glide?’ Jess asked, tentatively.

Silence.

‘If it does,’ said Solace, ‘we need to know. And if it was the faceless man –’ she stopped, unable to finish the sentence. Had all this happened because of
her
? The Vampire Cynic said no, but standing there by the wreckage and smouldering ash, it was a difficult thought to keep hold of.

‘We need to rest,’ she said instead. Her voice was weary and rough. ‘Whatever else we should do, we need to rest first. Let's just go, okay? Your place?’ She looked imploringly at Evan, who nodded. His eyes were red-rimmed, streaked with ash.

‘This way,’ he said, hollowly.

They followed.