The Master of Misrule (21 page)

“You never know. As Toby said, everything and anything could be important,” said Flora, getting out her keys.

The door opened before she could reach for the lock. Mina stood in the hall, hands on hips.

“Miss Flora! I try to call! Why you no answer your phone?”

“Oh … I’m sorry—I, er, my battery’s dead.” Flora came to a flustered halt in the doorway, with Cat, Toby and Blaine hovering behind.

Mina eyed them doubtfully. Apart from her scratches, Flora was as neat as ever, but then her most recent visit to
the Arcanum had not involved any physical exertion. The others were distinctly bedraggled: Toby still had bits of ivy in his hair.

“Yes, fine, Miss Flora, but why you no tell me you have friend staying over? Your parents, they phone, they ask about you, and I do not know what I am to say.”

Flora flushed. “It’s all right, Mina. I’m going to talk to them myself. Honestly, there’s nothing for you to worry about.”

Suspicion struggled with the concern and affection in Mina’s face. “But my job is for worrying about you, yes?” Then she sighed. “OK. So you do that. I know you are good girl, always. And Mr. Charlie is waiting for you now.”

“What?”

“In the study. He try to call you, too. Miss Tilly has also come visit, but she went to the shop.” Mina turned round and headed in the direction of the kitchen. “Let me know if I to get snacks for your guests.”

“Thank you!” Once Mina was gone, Flora said hurriedly, “Look … I’m awfully sorry, but I think we’d better postpone. Can we meet back at the square at, say, four o’clock? It’s only because—”

“I hope no one’s leaving on my account.” Charlie had emerged from a room to the right. He was holding a battered leather notebook.

Blaine shouldered past the others. He stood only a few inches away from Charlie, quite controlled, but with pent-up force visible in every line of his body. “What the hell are you doing with that?”

“I found it.”

“No. It was in my bag. Under my bed, in my room.”

“Yes—the bedroom Mina was tidying. She must’ve decided to give the bag a good scrubbing along with everything else. I found the book lying on the kitchen table while your bag was being disinfected or deloused or whatever.”

“Opportunist theft is still theft.” Blaine hadn’t taken his eyes off Charlie’s face.

“Stop it, Charlie. Just give him his book,” said Flora tightly. Toby and Cat exchanged glances.

With insolent casualness, Charlie held up the book and walked slowly backward into the room. Blaine advanced toward him, matching him pace for pace, until they were squaring up to each other in the center of the study. Helplessly, the others followed. In this moment of confrontation, Flora found the contrast between the two boys disconcertingly blurred. The blue polo shirt she’d lent Blaine was an ironic match for Charlie’s green one. The hardness in Charlie’s face was new, too; he looked older, more sharply focused, than she would have thought possible. He opened the book and brandished the pages so that everyone could see them.

“Devils and death’s-heads and burning towers. Not exactly the sort of material a protégé of St. Bernadine’s should be interested in, is it?”

“This has nothing to do with you,” said Blaine, his voice dangerously quiet. “You don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“I’m not the issue here. It’s Flora I care about.” All of
a sudden, the arrogance left Charlie’s voice. “I mean, for God’s sake—this thing is covered in
bloodstains
.”

Blaine paused. For the first time, he really took in his surroundings: the book-laden shelves, the desk, the filing cabinet. This room was a world of luxury away from Arthur’s study, yet the fittings were essentially the same. Charlie’s reaction to finding the notebook wasn’t all that different to his own, either. Although he was still angry, he managed to take a step back, keeping his voice level.

“The blood’s mine,” he said. “But the stuff in the book isn’t.” He pushed up his sleeve. “It was written by the man who gave me this scar. He got married to my mother. He bullied her and made her ill, and hit me. I didn’t know what any of the book meant, just that it was important to him, and so I stole it. When he pulled a knife on me, that’s when I left. I’m staying with Flora only because I have nowhere else to go.”

There was the sound of bustle in the hall. Gripped as they were by the unfolding drama, nobody had noticed the bell ring, or heard Mina go to answer it. But suddenly a pretty brunette was in the doorway, swinging a bottle of Diet Coke in a shopping bag.

“The
Lord of the Rings
Role-Playing Society!” she exclaimed, smiling at Cat. “That’s right, isn’t it? You came to see Flora in that coffee shop off the King’s Road before Christmas.”

Oblivious to the atmosphere in the room, Tilly looked from the pale, scruffy girl to the boy in the blue polo shirt to the one with bits of ivy in his hair. “It was about a game
of Orcs versus Elves, or something.…” Her eyes slid back to Blaine and she gave a self-conscious laugh. “Come on, Flo, aren’t you going to introduce us?”

Everyone else was still frozen in place.

Blaine abruptly turned to Flora. “We’ll meet later, like you said. Excuse me.” He took the book from Charlie’s unresisting hands and pushed past Tilly into the hall. The front door slammed.

“Satisfied?” Flora asked Charlie through gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry. But I had to know that you were safe.”

They stood staring at each other as Tilly looked on, bewildered, from the side.

“Right now,” Cat told her, “it seems the Orcs have the upper hand.”

C
AT AND
T
OBY MADE THEIR OWN EXIT
shortly after Blaine’s. As soon as they got outside, Cat could see that Toby was fit to burst with exclamations, and before he could launch into anything, she got in, “OK, then, so I guess we’ll meet up later. Bye.”

“What, you’re just going to go home?”

“I could do with putting my feet up. There’s something about being hunted down by bloodthirsty mutants that really takes it out of a girl.”

“There’s still lots of preparation to be done, though. Wouldn’t it be better if all four of us camped out at Flora’s? For one thing, if I tell my parents I’m staying with a friend, they won’t worry if I’m out late or gone for ages. Then we could make her place a proper team HQ. It’d be fun.”

“
Fun?
Since when is any of this remotely fun?”

“I’m just saying we should make the most—”

“For God’s sake! Give it a rest. We’re already doing as much as we can.”

“I’m not sure we—”

“It’s all right for
you
.” Cat was close to her snapping point. “
You’ve
always wanted to save the world. But Blaine and his stepdad … Flora’s sister … my parents … the Game’s mixed us up in all sorts of other bad stuff, as well as Misrule, and we’re still dealing with it. You don’t understand what it’s like for me, for any of us, because you treat everything like one big happy-go-lucky adventure.”

“But—”

“I need to go now, Toby. I’ll see you at four.”

He looked hurt, but she walked rapidly away all the same, in the opposite direction to where he’d go to catch his bus. When she turned the next corner, she found Blaine leaning against a wall, almost as if he’d been waiting for her.

Cat went and stood beside him. She didn’t say anything at first. Her reflection floated in the window of a car parked opposite. Face to face with her own wintry sharpness, Cat wished she could be someone else, just for a little while. Someone accessible and comforting, who could give a hug as easily as a smile.

Instead, she cleared her throat. “Mind if I have a look at the book?”

Blaine passed it over silently. She flicked through a few pages.

“Are you sure your stepdad’s in the Arcanum?”

“The King of Wands told me he’d got lost there, but could still get out. He said he had ‘everything to play for.’
And when you come to think of it, the Game Masters haven’t lied before.”

Cat considered this. The old kings and queens were coldhearted and calculating. However, it was true that she’d never caught them in an outright lie.

“There’s been no sign of him inside or out, so I reckon he’s still stuck in some move. I’m sure of it, in fact.”

“And—and your mum? Where is she?”

“Back home. A neighbor checks on her. After everything that happened, she finds it easier if I’m not there.” He stared down at his feet. “My stepfather had—has—quite a hold on her.”

Cat swallowed. “There’re monsters in the Arcanum,” she said finally, “monsters and darkness, and things strange enough to send you mad. But at the end of the day, none of it’s any worse than the stuff you get in the real world, or the things that real people do.”

Then she reached over and pushed up Blaine’s sleeve and, gently and deliberately, placed her hand on his arm, so that it rested on the line of puckered skin left by the knife. He tensed, and she thought he would move away. Instead, he brushed her hand with his own, light as a whisper. Their eyes met.

The ringing of her cell phone made them both start. Cat jerked away, flooded with an inexplicable guilt, as if she’d been found out at something.

“Sorry,” she said with effort. “My aunt. Won’t be anything.” She pressed the Ignore button.

Blaine had begun to cough again. “She raised you after your parents died?”

“Mmm. Bel was only nineteen when it happened.”

“And she treats you right?”

“More than right.” Cat wanted to explain how it was between them, but she had never before tried to find the words for a love that was lived in but not looked at. She and Bel came first for each other, that was all. “It makes me wonder what her life would’ve been like if she hadn’t had me to worry about. Bel’s always been restless—moving around, chopping and changing—but she’s smart enough to do anything. People start off wanting her, and end up needing her. It’s just the way she is.”

“Must be hard, having to keep the Game a secret from her.”

“Yeah. That’s what the Game does, doesn’t it? It puts up barriers, creates obsessions. Sometimes I … sometimes I think that’s the worst thing about my parents’ deaths.”

“How do you mean?”

She took a deep breath. It seemed today was going to be a day for revelations. “One or the other of them might’ve got an invitation to the Game. That’s why they were killed: someone was looking for it.”

Blaine didn’t say anything, but shifted closer to her again, so that his arm was next to hers. This time its warmth steadied her.

And so Cat told him about going into the Six of Cups, the Reign of Past Pleasure. About wandering through layers
of long-lost memory brought to new life. About being three years old again, and playing under her parents’ bed, where she found a richly colored card tucked in the slats. And how after that the memories had shifted and grown shadows, until there was no pleasure, only a gathering foreboding.…

At this point, Cat had to halt the narrative. This part was still too raw, too real, to be shared with anyone. Instead, she related the barest of facts: an unseen stranger with a stutter demanded her parents give up a card belonging to the Game; her mother told him there’d been a mistake, but he shot them nonetheless.

“I’m sorry,” Blaine said at the end. She felt his gaze on her, the weight of its seriousness. His voice was almost formal. “I’m sorry it happened, and I’m sorry you had to see it.”

She shook her head, not to deny his words but to distance herself from the truth of them.

“As you see, everything’s a mystery,” she continued, trying to sound practical rather than plaintive. “I don’t know if and how the invitation was hidden under the bed without my parents knowing, or what happened to it afterward. But if my parents knew about the card, why didn’t they hand it over? Was it just that the killer didn’t give them the chance? Or was it so important to them that they thought it worth risking their lives for?”

Not for the first time, Cat wondered what the Game could have offered her parents that they didn’t already have. They were young and in love; they had a home, a child.… Such a fulfilled family
shouldn’t
have needed anything else.

“Getting invited to the Game doesn’t mean they did anything about it. Or ever intended to,” Blaine pointed out.

“I’d like to think so.” She sighed. “Still … the Game gets a hold on people, and quickly. That’s why Misrule is so dangerous, right? People can’t resist his scratchcards, just like I couldn’t resist trying out the Arcanum.”

“D’you regret it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’d be better off—happier—still believing that my parents were killed in a car accident, but that’d be living a lie. As for the Arcanum, it’s hellish most of the time, and I should hate it, and yet …”

“It can be beautiful, too.”

“Yeah.”

“I remember one of the first times I went in,” Blaine said slowly. “It was a really cold, wet night, early in the year, and I was trying to find a shelter. Then this man started following me around, offering to help, said he knew how to take care of me. I didn’t like the look of him, so when I came across a threshold, it seemed like a good way out.”