Stolen Night (16 page)

The rain picked up as the day went on. A few hours later, I sat alone at one of the long dining tables in the union where I was making yet another list.

Outside, the rain lashed against the glass roof and massive windows. In front of me, a piece of iced lemon cake sat untouched on a plate. I crossed out another theory about
Rhode and our
connection
when there was a scratch of ceramic against lino, and a drenched umbrella leaned against the table. I placed the book down gently and raised an eyebrow as Vicken
took a bite of my cake and pushed a newspaper cutting across the table. It was from the British newspaper
The Times
.

There it was: a photo of my glorious home. The great lawn was crawling with dozens of men and women. A moving company was carrying out a large bureau I recognized as being from
my bedroom. The first-floor windows were blackened, blown out. Jagged remnants of glass pointed up from the window frames. A couple of curtains hung out of the windows as though trying to
escape.

Vicken took another bite of the cake.

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked, resting my fingertips on the thin paper.

‘I told you I was going to do some nosing around. I’ve been getting
The Times
for the last few weeks. And by the way, despite my moaning and groaning about this school,
I’ve been in the library.’ He turned the piece of paper back towards himself.

‘On August thirty-first,’ he read, ‘a devastating fire engulfed the historic Hathersage mansion which dates back to the early seventeenth century. Thousands of items of extreme
rarity have been recovered from the house. No bodies have been found, and it’s believed the house, reputed by locals to be haunted, was empty when the fire occurred. The fire consumed the
entire first floor and destroyed a tapestry that once belonged to Elizabeth I.’

‘Her mother actually, Anne Boleyn. I had it restored and preserved several times,’ I said. The sinking feeling in my chest was something else. The paper said the house had been
empty. That house wasn’t empty. It was filled with my history, my past, and it had almost burned to the ground.

Vicken kept reading. ‘Local historians have uncovered rare daggers, unusual herbs and strange amulets. Some believe the items are occult in nature. Many of the objects on the upper floors
were spared, such as a four-poster bed from the 1800s, as well as anonymous portraiture also dating from the 19th century.

‘Expert David Gilford of the Occult Group of London,’ Vicken continued, ‘was most impressed by the weapons room, which contained ninja stars, countless daggers and some of the
rarest longswords he had ever seen. One had a handle made of human bone. Gilford also commented on some of the oddities found there. He was particularly struck by the apothecary equipment and by
various strange devices that looked as if they were for torture.’

‘They were,’ I agreed.

Vicken continued, ‘The house appears to have been in the same family since Elizabethan times. Strenuous efforts are being made to contact the current owners, whose identities have not been
revealed. The recovered items will be catalogued under the management of the British Museum which is coordinating the salvage operation together with English Heritage.’

Vicken lit up, his whole face brightened and he smiled.

‘Did you hear that? The
British Museum
!’

The date on the newspaper cutting was 31 August.

Today was 5 September.

Wait – 31 August? Rhode hadn’t been seen back at Wickham until 3 September, which meant he could have been at Hathersage when the fire occurred.

I swiped my books into a bag, stuffed the cutting into my pocket and stood up.

‘Where is he?’ I demanded.

Vicken didn’t respond.

‘
Where?
’ I screamed and slapped tabletop with my palm. Other students studying and eating their lunches looked over with wide eyes.

‘He’s in his dorm,’ Vicken said with a sigh.

I tossed my bag of books into Vicken’s lap and glanced at the rain pelting the windows. With an angry curl of my lip, I asked, ‘Whose side are you on?’ I swept out of the union
and into the rain.

Rhode wasn’t in his room. After banging on his door, I stepped back outside Quartz and within minutes my T-shirt was soaked from the rain and my jeans were sticking to my
thighs. I intended to walk to my dorm when I saw Rhode, clad in all black, cut across the pathway some distance away from me. He kept his face down and held a large duffel bag over his shoulder.
This was odd. I stepped off the path, attempting to conceal myself behind a statue of the school founder, Thomas Wickham, as Rhode disappeared behind the greenhouse. Where was he going?
Hadn’t we agreed that it wasn’t safe to travel alone?

I ran down the path and stopped at a large oak tree next to the greenhouse. By the time I reached the end of the building, he had entered the woods that circled the school. I caught sight of a
fresh bandage wrapped around his fingers. The white gauze stood out brightly against his black shirt and jeans. Back in our history, he had taught me how to follow someone without being seen,
predator and prey.

Perhaps he was sneaking out for a good reason. Perhaps he was going somewhere that would clue me in to where he had been the year before. He wasn’t going to tell me, no matter how many
times I asked – that was clear. Either way, he was deliberately sneaking out of school without Vicken and me – and I wanted to know why.

I wiped the rain out of my eyes and hesitated at a nagging thought: he
knows
he shouldn’t be going anywhere by himself. But he’s going anyway. As the cut on my collarbone
proved, Odette wasn’t afraid of the daylight. Granted, the morning hours were more dangerous than the afternoon, but she had shown herself well able to withstand the sun’s rays.

I took a step, watching him weave in and out of the trees, and rested a hand against the glass of the warm greenhouse. Rhode was making his way towards the stone wall that circled the perimeter
of the school. If he jumped over, I’d have no idea where he went unless I kept up and followed him.

Go, Lenah. Go!

So I did. I made sure to keep my distance as I followed. Once, he glanced back to the campus. I jumped behind the cover of a stand of three maple trees and pressed my back against the hard bark.
I was being careless, following too close. Just a few seconds. I could wait a few seconds. I bounced on my toes. What if he was outside the wall already? I peeked around the trees just as Rhode
disappeared over the wall, on to Main Street.

I climbed over, and when my boots touched Main Street I stayed in the shadow of the wall, as though somehow the shade would protect me from Rhode’s gaze. Rhode kept walking, duffel bag
swinging in his hand, past the Lovers Bay public library, past the herb shop, past the last store on Main Street before it turned into a suburban neighbourhood.

At the entrance to Lovers Bay Cemetery Rhode hesitated. I pulled back into the shadows, listening to the rain patter on the sidewalk. I waited until he walked through the entrance. He was going
into the cemetery. Why? Was this a hint? A clue to what had happened last year?

I followed behind Rhode, keeping pace just enough so I wouldn’t lose him among the granite tombstones and trees. He navigated the pathways so easily. He didn’t stop and refer to a
map. He didn’t need one. He knew exactly where he was going.

Ahead of me, I found a place to pause and regroup. There was an enormous grey stone mausoleum in the centre of the cemetery. Nearby was Rhode’s tombstone, the one I had put up the previous
year in his honour, thinking him dead. But he passed right by that. I pressed my back even harder against the cold stone of the mausoleum.

He turned at the row where Tony was buried.

I hadn’t been to Tony’s burial. I couldn’t bear to see his parents’ sorrow, knowing the part I had played in his death. But I had known the location of his grave. Of
course I had known.

Curiosity churned in my stomach. ‘Oh, go home, Lenah,’ I whispered, but I could not make myself turn around. My boots squelched in the soggy ground as I padded quickly over the
grass. I had to fall back to avoid him hearing me.

Rhode stood, his back to me, and looked down at what I assumed was Tony’s tombstone. A couple of rows behind him, I got down on to my knees and crawled forward. The earth was wet and smelt
of cut grass. I stayed close to the ground – I didn’t see any other way. If I stood, he would catch sight of me out of the corner of his eye.

I stretched my arms forward and crawled down the wet row. I peeked up to see Rhode unzip the duffel bag. Out of it he pulled his longsword. I drew shallow breaths. What he did next was very
calculated. He dragged the tip of the sword through the earth in a circle around Tony’s tombstone. As he did so, he cut into the earth so it made a deep groove in the muddy soil.

Rhode was almost done drawing a complete circle around Tony’s grave. This was no spell, at least not one I knew. Then he lifted the sword high in the air and plunged the sword into earth.
Imbibed with magic, imbibed with his intention, for whatever reason, the sword slid easily into the soaked ground. In the dark of my mind, I imagined the metal slicing through the soil, the blade
breaking the jagged clumps of earth protecting my friend and pointing at his wooden casket.

Rhode fell to his knees and wrapped one hand around the hilt of the sword, then rested his other palm flat against the tombstone. He dipped his chin to his chest and closed his eyes in a silent
meditation. Silent until he began to whisper quick words.

‘
Honi soit qui mal y pense
,’ he said, over and over like a chant.

I recognized this as the official motto of the Order of the Garter. ‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it,’ was the English translation. Rhode was performing a ceremony from back when
he was a knight. I had never seen him do anything like this before. I stayed frozen to the ground, unable to look away.

Rhode sat back on his heels and brought both his hands to his face.

Why? Why Tony’s grave?

This made no sense to me. I wanted to call out to him but I knew better. I shouldn’t interrupt him during something so sacred.

Rhode then fell forward, extending an arm so his fingers curled over the top of the wet headstone. The gauze wrapping his injured fingers was soaked through. My eyes locked on a bright red blood
spot that had seeped through the dressing. It was so bright in that grey rainstorm. He had punched the mirror, just as I’d seen in my dream.

Wait. He was speaking again. What was it? I held my breath so I could make out the words. I drew a tiny gasp, for all I could hear, all that travelled through the air to me, lying with my cheek
on the soft grass was, ‘Forgive me.’

I could not bear witness to this in secret. It was a betrayal. I stood up in the aisle behind Rhode. I needed to make a sound. Just the movement of my body was enough for him
to realize I was there.

He lifted the sword from the ground, swung it through the air and pointed it directly at me. The ferocity in his eyes stunned me. I watched the recognition pass over his face and he dropped the
sword to his side.

‘I taught you well,’ he said.

‘Lovely day for a visit to the cemetery,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Paying respects,’ he said, and squatted down, placing the sword in a leather wrapping and then back into the duffel bag.

‘To my friend?’

Rhode started walking out of the cemetery. I followed behind.

He went quickly down the soaked paths, back into the less wooded, more open part of the cemetery. We passed the mausoleum.

‘You said we shouldn’t be alone, but yet here you are,’ I said, trying to provoke him into having a conversation with me.

He stopped and looked at me. He said simply and definitively, ‘I am not without a weapon.’

‘Do you want to explain this?’ I asked, pulling the newspaper cutting from my pocket. I blinked the rain out of my eyes. ‘It’s in the bloody newspaper. The Hathersage
house burned down. Now it’s overrun with historians! It’s gone!
’
Just saying it aloud sent a stab of pain through me.

He glanced at the newspaper but did not respond.

I threw the soggy shred to the ground. ‘Enough games. Explain yourself. The date on that is August thirty-first.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ Rhode asked. The rain continued to cloud the air between us – I could barely see him.

‘Did you see it burn?’

Rhode placed the duffel bag on the ground and let the rain drench us both.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘I saw it burn.’

Sorrow laced through my chest.

‘How could you? Just let it?’

Rhode maintained his infuriating silence.

‘Fine,’ I continued. ‘So you’re not just lying to everyone else about a blasted car accident. You’re lying to me. I asked you if you were in Hathersage. You never
answered.’

‘Should I tell everyone that I was beaten within an inch of my life? That the only way out of that house was to set the place on fire?’

‘
You
set it on fire?’ I asked, horrified.

The rain pelted so hard the cold drops were actually hurting my nose and cheeks.

After a few moments he said, ‘Vampires came looking for us. I had to torch the place to kill them and burn any evidence of my survival. So I did.’

I ran my hand through my soaked hair, my fingers catching in the wet tangles.

‘Who attacked you? It was Odette, wasn’t it?’

Rhode bent over, snatched up the bag and started walking out of the cemetery again.

‘When the vampires saw me and realized I was mortal, they attacked. I ran for my life.’ Rhode, my fearless Rhode, shuddered in that horrible, drenching downpour. ‘I
didn’t think I would make it out.’