Witch Fire (28 page)

There was an embarrassed pause. ‘What’s Glory to you?’ Todd asked suspiciously.

‘We met at the club last week and had started to, well, hang out. Then I heard she’d been arrested. I just wondered if you’d –’

‘
There’s rumours of a witch-hunt,’ said Candice, taking a swig from a hip flask. ‘We’ve gotta get out while we still can.’

‘You’re leaving the country?’

‘
Too right.’ Todd slung a guitar case into the boot. ‘Place is a hole anyhow. Sooner we’re outta here the better.’

Candice hunched her shoulders defensively. ‘It’s not like there’s anything
we
can do. Not if Glory’s been messing with witch-crime. She’ll drag the rest of us down with her.’ Something about Lucas’s expression gave her pause. ‘Here,’ she said, fumbling around her neck.
‘
Take it. I won’t be needing it any more.’

It was a charm, of the kind the hotel receptionist had tried to sell him.

‘I got Glory to craft it for me,’ Candice said distractedly. ‘Kept telling her she should make a business outta them. It’s the real deal – not like the rubbish they sell on the streets.’

‘Uh . . . thanks.’

She readjusted her oversized shades. Her hand shook a little. ‘We’ll be more help to her back in England. My family have connections, you know? Maybe we can send out a lawyer or whatever.’

‘C’mon, babe,’ called Todd, who was already sitting in the car. ‘Check-in closes in an hour.’

As their taxi sped off, Lucas looked at the little glass bottle in his hand. It was on a chain and looked pretty flashy: a dab of blood congealed at the base, a piece of mirrored glass, some dried fern. Glory would have only made it to please her cousin, for there was little evidence such trinkets worked. But the raw ingredients of another witch’s work could be useful – more useful than anything he might find in Casa de la Armonia’s rubbish bin. Candice’s parting gift was more precious than she knew.

Five minutes later, Raffi’s car drew up. ‘Hey,
amigo
!’ he hollered from the window, music blaring from the stereo.
‘
Time to go kick some Red Knight ass!’

Glory lost track of time in that bright, empty room. She had no idea how long she’d been waiting before Rose came through the door and abruptly removed the bridle.

‘So it’s good cop, bad cop,’ she said. The bridle had a tongue-prong to prevent speech, and her mouth was sore. ‘Why bother? You know I ain’t got nothing to say. I’ve been stitched up good and proper.’

Rose was muttering to herself; shaking her head, pacing the floor.

Glory watched her disgustedly. ‘You was right to say your mum was a nutter. But you’re a different kind of crazy. Endor got to you in Wildings, didn’t they? Made you into a proper little fanatic –’

‘SHUT UP,’ Rose shouted, and put her hands round her ears. ‘I can’t even
think
. For God’s
sake
–’ Then she slumped down on the chair. ‘I’m just . . . so . . . tired,’ she said emptily.

Glory eyed the door. There would be soldiers outside it, but if she jumped Rose now, and if the girl was carrying a weapon, then maybe –

‘I’m going to help you,’ Rose announced. ‘I have to . . . I can’t stand this any more.’ She got to her feet again, resumed her quivery pacing. ‘I’ll try . . . try to show you the way. The odds, though . . . it’s bad . . . Dangerous.’ Her head twitched. ‘Should you –
could
you – risk it?’

Glory felt that if she made any sudden movement, or said the wrong thing, then the chance would be gone. She nodded, very slowly, forcing herself to be calm.

‘I ain’t got nothing to lose.’

Raffi and Lucas aimed to get to the hacienda by early evening, as the light was fading. Every minute of delay was another minute where Glory was at the mercy of Gideon, but Lucas had to be practical. Staging a break-in in broad daylight was not an option.

They drove out of the city, past the shanty towns with children selling fruit on the side of the road, and into a grassy open landscape. As the miles slipped by, the scrubby bushes and small twisted trees began to grow denser and taller.

Finally, they came to a sprawl of evergreen forest not far from the hacienda. Raffi parked deep within the trees. If the car was found and he was questioned, he’d say he’d got lost and was waiting for a friend to come and collect him. Lucas hoped Raffi’s identity would be protection enough. Even the militia couldn’t afford to have the Chief of Police on the warpath.

For his own safety, he was wearing a personal alarm. If he got into trouble, he could send a signal to Raffi’s monitoring device. Raffi would then call for back-up. He would be scrying on Lucas too; although they knew that much of the house would be iron-proofed.

I can still fix this. I will find her and save her and make things right.

He knew very well that the odds were against him. All he had was the white-hot certainty that he would do whatever it took.

The hacienda’s grounds were enclosed by a high wall, whose top was lined with decorative yet vicious iron barbs. In the gathering darkness, Lucas prowled the perimeter, looking for an access point. He found one to the east of the property, where a tree’s lower bough, thick and solid, overhung the top of the wall. He sky-leaped on to it, and then down into the greenish-black gloom. The ground was swampy, the undergrowth matted with brambles.

Trying to be as quiet as possible, he struggled through the thicket until the main property was in view. A weed-green drive wound round to the house, whose vaulted arcades and mottled mustard-coloured walls might have been romantic in other circumstances. All the windows were shuttered, and the doors hung with rust-spotted iron bells. The paved terrace was patrolled by militiamen.

A good place for someone to disappear
, thought Lucas, lowering his binoculars.

At least it didn’t have the defences of a purpose-built prison. The caretaker had said that only the ground and first floor were in use. Lucas also knew which entrance to target: a service yard at the back of the house, where an outside set of stairs led to the former servants’ quarters. Shrinking back into the cover of the thicket, he began to work his way round. A guard was stationed in the doorway to the enclosure, but he had expected that. It helped that the man looked distracted and fidgety, his thoughts elsewhere.

Crouched behind a mass of rubbery ferns, Lucas took out one of the two coins he had been holding in his mouth and flicked it towards the soft mud by the guard’s feet. The coin had been cleaned and polished to a bright silver. The shine drew the guard’s eye and then, irresistibly, he was drawn to pick it up.
Gotcha
, thought Lucas. He took the other coin out of his mouth, slick with spit, and began to flip it from finger to finger. The tingle of fae sparked from his fingertips, turning both coins’ gleam to a dazzle, a fleck of light that danced in the guard’s eyes. The man stared at the silver in his hands, entranced.

When Lucas judged the guard’s face to have sufficiently slackened, and his eyes sufficiently dulled, he got up from his hiding place and quickly and smoothly moved past the man and through the entryway. The longer he played with the coin, the longer the guard’s trance would last, but he only needed a few minutes. It helped, of course, that he was wearing an elusion. If someone did get a glimpse of him in the dark, chances were that it would be too smeared and uncertain to make an impression.

Lucas ignored the door into the main house. There would be a guard the other side, and in any case, he wanted access to the deserted upper storey. The door at the top of the stairs was locked, but he’d been practising his lock-picking since Wildings. Just over a minute after leaving his hiding place among the ferns, Lucas was in the building. The guard, meanwhile, was blinking and shaking his head. He put the coin in his pocket, conscious of a moment’s inattention; that was all.

This part of the house was cramped and plain with a floor of rough wooden boards, as befitted servants’ quarters. Lucas peeked out of the sagging shutters, judging the distance from the window to an outhouse rearing up from a tangle of brambles and rhododendrons. It would be a long leap, but not an impossible one.

He trod very quietly, knowing there could well be militiamen in the rooms below. When he put his ear to the floor, he thought he could hear rough male laughter, and was relieved. It meant he would be able to tell if Glory had company.

He was wearing a belt containing the tools for the non-witchwork aspect of his activities. They had learned Tap code as well as Morse code back in WICA, and once he knew Glory was below him, and alone, he would tap out a signal on the bare boards to alert her to his presence. Then he would take up the floorboards and knock through the plaster to make a hole in the ceiling of her cell. As long as they found some way of concealing or getting rid of the fallen plaster, they could hide the hole with a fascination. She would be bridled, of course, but his picks should deal with that – the locks on those cuffs were never very complicated. The plan was to pull her up through the floor and then sky-leap out of the window.

First, though, he had to find out exactly where she was. The caretaker had seemed sure of where she would be held, but Lucas couldn’t leave anything to chance. When he reached the spot marked on the map, he lay down and once more listened with his ear to the floor. Silence. From inside his jacket he brought out a forked twig, sourced from a rubber tree near where Raffi had parked the car. A witch hazel was the traditional choice for blood-dowsing, but any tree would do, as long as the wood was still green with sap.

Lucas produced the charm that Candice had given him and which contained Glory’s blood. He scraped the two ends of the forked twig against the reddish-black smear, then made a small cut in the centre of his palms. He held the two ends of the forked side in each hand, with the stem pointing straight ahead. Walking slowly, holding a picture of Glory in his mind, he waited for a dip or twitch as the dowsing-rod sensed the flow of her blood. Nothing.

He retraced his steps, moving from abandoned room to room. Still nothing. Either the caretaker was wrong and Glory was being held in an entirely different part of the building or, more likely, Glory wasn’t in her cell because she had been taken away for questioning. The idea of her being frightened or in pain was choking, so that he suddenly couldn’t think, almost couldn’t breathe, and the flow of fae faltered. The effort it took to bring it back, and with it a picture of Glory – whole and unhurt – made his surroundings grow even darker and hazier, as if he was dowsing in a fog.

‘Hold it right there,’ a voice barked. ‘Hands up.’

Slowly, very slowly, Lucas turned around. A Red Knight was pointing a gun at him. Gideon was standing behind. He looked amused. ‘Really, Lucas,’ he said, ‘we must stop meeting like this.’

Lucas pressed the button on his silent alarm. Outside the hacienda, in a grove of rubber trees, the distress signal flashed its warning from Raffi’s dashboard. Raffi had been scrying too, so as to be sure to be ready for the getaway. But it was too late for him to respond or even react. A brawny arm was encircling his neck. With a gun pressed to his head, he was dragged from the car.

While Lucas was cuffed and bridled and his clothing searched, Gideon prowled restively around the room. ‘Your breaking and entering technique has got more ambitious,’ he observed. ‘Shame you didn’t spot the security camera in the yard. This place might be a little rough around the edges, but it’s not completely medieval.’

Lucas squared his shoulders. It was pointless, but he might as well go through the motions.

‘I’m here in Cordoba on a counter-witch-terrorism assignment. I have a mandate from the British Inquisition as well as WICA, and am working alongside the Cordoban police –’

‘Spare me the résumé,’ said Gideon. ‘I’m really not interested.’ But although his voice was as languid as ever, Lucas sensed he was on edge. He kept touching things: the shutters, the wall, a pile of dust sheets. His face was flushed, his eyes bright. Excited, but jittery.

‘And as a matter of fact, your timing’s good. As a representative of Her Majesty’s government, it’s only appropriate that you should witness the judicial execution of one of its citizens.’

Lucas’s mind raced. How long before back-up arrived? Could Raffi’s father scramble a helicopter? There must still be things he could do, help that would come. The alternative was unthinkable. So he swept past it. ‘You’re to be judge, jury and executioner now? That’s not multitasking – it’s megalomania.’

Gideon shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m afraid in this case justice will have to be applied retrospectively. The hag-bitch is already dead. You’re too late in that respect – she died an hour ago, while attempting to escape. But we intend to burn the body all the same.’ He laughed. ‘You always wanted to be an inquisitor, didn’t you, Stearne? Well, this way, you still get to watch a balefire.’

Chapter 29

Lucas was tugged back to consciousness by a dull pain at the back of his skull. For a moment it wasn’t so bad, because he couldn’t work out where he was and why. Then reality crashed back. He had lunged at Gideon, a rush of hate surging through his body, and then something had knocked him into darkness.