Witch Fire (31 page)

Raffi and Jenna were debating whether to stage an intervention themselves or wait until Comandante Almagro and the police arrived, when the scrying-bowl showed Rose – or so it appeared – turn on Gideon. The police were now on their way to the hacienda, but Lucas, Glory and Raffi were travelling south in Agent White’s armoured jeep. Section Seven had a lead on the location of Cambion’s clinic, and Jenna had been heading there before the diversion to the hacienda.

Now and again Raffi would turn round in his seat to look at Glory and Lucas in the back, and grin at them broadly, or give the thumbs-up. They were sitting a respectable distance apart, though their hands rested casually against each other in the space in between. Whenever they caught the other’s eye they smiled, then looked away, collusive and a little shy. They were very tired. Lucas thought how good it would be to fall asleep, knowing Glory was beside him.

Her voice dragged with exhaustion as she recounted what had happened between her and Rose. ‘She were being controlled in some way. Voices in her head. And that thing with the gingerbread man – it didn’t make no sense at first, but now I’m thinking she might’ve meant a poppet.’

Jenna shook her head. ‘You can tell if a poppet’s at work. It’s that dead-eyed look people get, and the way their bodies jerk about, like they’re on strings. Rose may have been a bit schizo, but it’s clear she passed for normal most of the time.’

‘And if a witch was directing her through a poppet, they would have had to keep close by,’ Lucas pointed out. ‘You need to be within viewing distance.’

Glory bit her lip. ‘Whatever it was, she must’ve got free of it in the end. Though I think she guessed, somehow, that she weren’t going to recover.’

‘Well, I’ve had enough of guesswork,’ Jenna said shortly. ‘It’s time for solid facts. Let’s hope Cambion HQ can provide them.’ She still had her high ponytail, and a trace of pink lipgloss, but the cheerleader peppiness was long gone.

So far, there were no signs of pursuit. By now the police would have reached the hacienda, where the Red Knights must be struggling to contain the fallout from their lieutenant’s condition and the exposure of the balefire witch. Jenna said that Gideon had overstepped the mark in any case. Neither his superiors in the Red Knights nor Senator Vargas would have been happy with the extent to which he had taken matters into his own hands.
‘
The guy probably had a few screws loose even before the hexing.’

Lucas was mostly conscious of the ache at the back of his head where he’d been knocked out, and the steady warmth of Glory’s hand. He did not want to think of Gideon or his fate. A bane of that nature was too powerful for the mind and body to withstand. Gideon would not live long under such pressure. Lucas searched himself for pity and found none. It would come later, perhaps. He supposed that would be a good thing.

At last, he allowed himself to float into sleep. In the front of the car, Raffi was renewing his charm offensive on Jenna. ‘But how old are you
really
?’

‘
Too old for you,’ she said, with a flick of the ponytail. ‘And too smart besides.’

It was mid-morning before they reached their destination. The rain poured all night, turning the roads to churning red mud, the potholes to oily ponds. As the sun came up, a smudge of mountains loomed ahead, their peaks dusted with rose.

They stopped only once, at a run-down petrol station attached to an even more dilapidated motel, to use the bathroom facilities and get food. Jenna had a medical kit in the car to deal with Glory’s scrapes and bruises, but when Raffi heard of the blow Lucas had taken to his head, he asked, with uncharacteristic diffidence, if he could lay his hands on the spot. As he did so, Lucas could feel the fae flowing through, warm and faintly tingling, and the last of his headache vanished. ‘Maybe I will become super-kick-ass-spy-doctor,’ Raffi said. ‘Fighting evil and mending bones!’

At long last, the jeep jolted along a steep stony track into an Amerindian village on the outskirts of the forest. Earth paths wound round small houses of bark, mud and thatch. Most of the inhabitants were out tending to their crops, leaving behind a few elderly women chewing plantain in the sun, and toddlers scuffling among scrawny chickens. Nobody seemed particularly interested in their arrival.

Perhaps the locals were used to strange visitors. There was a tiny airstrip just outside the village, and near to that, a very different kind of construction. It was a low white house, built on sleek modern lines, and approached by a rhododendron-lined drive. The sign above the porch said
Rising Sun Health Spa & Holistic Retreat
.

The door was wide open. Jenna and Glory went in first, as they were the only ones who were armed. They found themselves in a reception as plush as any Harley Street clinic’s: high-end lifestyle magazines on the table, ornate – though wilting – flowers in a vase. There was nobody on guard, nobody on duty behind the gleaming glass desk. A chair overturned on the floor struck an oddly discordant note.

As the foursome moved through the building, they saw more signs of a hasty but efficient exit. The office had been cleared of all paperwork, and there were no computers or telephones, just a few wrenched-out cables. They found a few curls of shredded paper on the floor in the corridor, which Jenna carefully scooped up and put in an evidence bag. There was a small guest house attached to the back. Its rooms didn’t look as if they’d ever been inhabited. The surgery and consulting room drew another blank.

While the others continued to search the place, Raffi went to talk to the locals. He came back shaking his head.
‘
The receptionist and the doctor –
americano
, the lady said – left last night in a little plane.’

They had regrouped in the surgery. There was an operating table, an empty trolley full of empty trays, and some impressive-looking machinery.

‘
They must have left in a hurry if they had to leave all this behind,’ Lucas said. ‘It looks top of the range stuff.’

‘Yes,’ said Raffi.
‘
To put implant into brain. I see very good film about this. The bad scientist, he uses microchips to make army of robot-people to take over world.’

‘You don’t need science for that,’ said Jenna slowly. ‘Witchwork could do it just as well. Only with golems, not robots.’

Lucas frowned. ‘Golems? They’re just a fae-tale version of a person who’s being controlled by a poppet. I thought we ruled that out.’

‘No, golems are different. I’ve been thinking about it. OK, the fae can get into a person’s mind through a poppet, but it doesn’t have as much control over the victim’s thoughts as it does over their actions. On one level, the person is aware of what’s happening to them.

‘With a golem, now, there’s no crafting dolls to stick pins in or tie into knots. It’s about possessing the heart and mind. Creating a body without a soul.’

‘So how d’you build one of these bad boys?’ Glory asked in her most sceptical tone. She was usually only too eager to believe in the wonders of witchwork. Jenna, however, was bringing out her prickly side.

‘In the stories, a golem is created from dust and fae,’ Jenna said.
‘
The witch gives it life by inscribing sacred words on its body, or sealing them inside its mouth.’

Glory scowled. ‘Rose was a real person. As real as you and me.’

‘Well, this isn’t a fae-tale. But maybe Rose did have something sealed inside her. Maybe Cambion used modern surgical techniques to plant something in her head, something crafted with fae. Something that would suppress her own powers and bind her to those of another witch.’

‘Aha!’ Raffi exclaimed. ‘Is that why Rosa’s banes set off no bells and why she could wear the bridles?’

‘Got it in one,’ said Jenna, with a brief return of her cheerleader twinkle. ‘Iron doesn’t react to the act of witchwork, but to the source of its fae, right? So whoever was hexing the banes was doing it at a distance, too far off for the iron to sense them. Endor is creating witches who can’t be detected.’

‘And who don’t even know they’re still witches,’ Lucas said. ‘Let alone that they’re being used as some kind of . . . weapon.’

‘Rose knew she were being manipulated,’ Glory insisted.
‘
That’s why she used to get so weird and twitchy. And she managed to get free of it to help me. She must’ve used her own fae then.’

Jenna shrugged. ‘Rose told you she got some kinda virus after the surgery. Then there’s the way she died, which sounds like a brain haemorrhage. So maybe something went wrong during the operation that wasn’t ever put right.’ She gestured to the machines around them. ‘I bet half this kit is just for show, anyways.’

‘You know others that have had this procedure?’ Raffi asked.

‘Section Seven has some ideas.’ She looked at Lucas guardedly, and he guessed she didn’t want him mentioning her initial lead: Chase Randolph Parker III, the Supreme Court judge’s son. ‘Wildings was the main recruiting ground. At the moment, we believe Dr Caron was working alone there, and that the school governors hired her in good faith. The next stage is to get a warrant to shake the place down.’

‘Why use kids?’ said Raffi. ‘Why not the grown-up peoples?’

‘Because kids are much less likely to arouse suspicion,’ Lucas answered.

‘Yeah,’ said Glory. ‘And we’re s’posed to be easier to push around and all. The perfect recruits. Endor, WICA and the Inquisition – great minds think alike.’

Lucas heard the edge of bitterness in her voice.
‘
The thing about Wildings,’ he said quickly, ‘is that everyone’s so well connected. Take Rose. Stepdaughter to Godfrey Merle, one of the world’s most powerful media tycoons. Look at Mei-fen, and her family connections to China’s ruling party. Or you, Raffi – son of a Police Chief. In the normal course of things, most of us would have ended up in powerful positions ourselves, or at least moved in those circles.’

Like me
, he thought. Son of a High Inquisitor. For Endor, I’d be the perfect catch.

‘D’you know if the procedure can be reversed?’ Glory asked Jenna grudgingly.

‘Could be, if it’s just a matter of digging out the mystery implant. But it’s not like we’re going to get any answers here. Those bastards obviously knew we were on to them. They’ve even wiped the place clean of prints.’

‘Hang on.’ Lucas’s eye had been caught by a pearly glint under the operating table. It was a small button, possibly from a shirt cuff. ‘Maybe we could try scrying on this.’

Jenna wrinkled her nose. ‘It coulda been lost days ago. And a button isn’t exactly a personal item. Do you even know who you’d be scrying for?’

‘Dr Claude, at a guess. He’s the
americano
the locals told Raffi about, and who checked Rose out of the clinic back home. I know he’s probably miles away by now, but it’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

Lucas said he would go back to the jeep to fetch the glass bowl Raffi had used to keep an eye on him in the hacienda. It gave him an excuse to get some air, for being in the surgery was making him increasingly claustrophobic. He kept returning to the idea that, in different circumstances, it could have been him. A Stearne in the service of Endor.

Jenna had parked downhill from the building. Lucas was getting ready to open the boot, when his ears picked up a faint mechanical hum. An unmarked stealth helicopter suddenly whirred into view, hovering in the air like a vast shiny black beetle. Another division of the Red Knights? Or – worse – Endor? There was no time to give a warning. Before his appalled eyes, a squad of black-clad men was already dropping from the craft; spreading out to surround the clinic.

The next thing he knew, a hand was clamped on his mouth, his arms were pinned behind his back, and he was dragged into the shadow of the forest.

‘
Sssh
,’ said his captor, as he thrashed about. ‘You are safe.’ This man wasn’t in black. He was wearing a camouflage suit, with a white feather pinned to his chest. ‘La Bruja Blanca wants to see you.’

As Lucas was taken deeper into the rainforest, two more men in camouflage emerged from the trees, silent as smoke.

‘
Take me back,’ he said, still struggling furiously. ‘My friends – they need
help
–’

‘Your friends will not be harmed,’ said his original captor, pulling a hood over Lucas’s head.
‘
That helicopter is of the UCI, military division. They seek the same people you do.’

The United Council of Inquisitors . . . Lucas did not find this news hugely reassuring. They were the governing body of the world’s inquisitions, and had their own witch-hunting task force. Who had called them into Cordoba? He was in no hurry to meet the mysterious ‘White Witch’ either. From what Raffi had said, she was an elderly female version of the witch-outlaw Robin Hood.

At least he hadn’t been hit on the head again. He was on a forced march of incredible speed, a man holding him up on either side, so that in many places he skimmed the ground. His ears buzzed with the sound of the rainforest: the roars and keening of the howler monkeys mingling with a cacophony of bird calls, cricket whines and the screeching of numerous mammals. The air smelled green and mossy; its humidity meant his clothes clung damply to his skin.