Chapter 6
We killed a fairy. Elena wouldn’t ever have said she’d grown up steeped in magic and superstition.
Catholicism maybe, though her family had been more about the lip service and the community than actually believing any of it.
Her grandmother, who in the stereotype would have been the bead-counting, breast-crossing rudder of morality, had been a born-again atheist who’d left Mexico for what Elena could only assume were areligious reasons.
Elena had grown up on PBS science shows, and had wanted to be a doctor since she was of an age where grown-ups asked her what she wanted to be.
She had read Twilight, but had mostly ended up wondering how vampire physiology was supposed to work.
Her favourite Halloween costume had been Jigsaw rather than Tinkerbell.
Yet she just stood there while Melissa bustled, holding onto Ross while the words We killed a fairy roiled round and round in her head.
And, she discovered, she had actually picked up a surprising amount of fairy lore from role-playing games and films and a remarkably creepy book titled The Call by an Irish writer that had led to three nights of waking from crooked dreams, no matter that it had been pitched as young adult.
Fairies were not sweet or pretty. Fairies were malicious and hateful, often hideous, always vengeful. And they’d just beaten one to death.
Now, away from the grisly attic, Ross was shaking.
Probably she was shaking too, but Ross was shaking more, and he was bigger, so her own distress was lost in his.
And she tried to remind herself that Godfrey, the ghastly split sack that was Godfrey, was a member of Ross’s family.
Someone he had, however distantly, known.
But right then she couldn’t even think of Godfrey as a person.
In the whirl of introductions, names and faces, at the start of the gathering, the old man had been a glowering shadow at the periphery, and now he was…
not even an individual. One more head of some unspeakable Enderbough hydra, along with Patrick and the other elders.
“Right.” Melissa pried the pair of them apart with grim determination.
“Enough of that. We’re getting out.” She was thrusting something into Elena’s hand: a rubber-gripped flashlight.
Ross got a penlight. Melissa herself had a thin canvas bag with string straps over her shoulder, designed for picnics and doing reluctant duty as a knapsack.
They weren’t back at the bedrooms. As Melissa pointed out, that would be exactly where everyone would expect them to go.
Any possessions there were lost. They were burned, she said, like they were spies whose identities had been compromised.
Instead she’d led them out of the attic by a different dust-heavy stairwell, through three dust-sheeted halls to a room with mould crawling up the corners, and wallpaper peeling from one wall.
One more wing Elena hadn’t even seen, and this time for the entirely understandable reason that it wasn’t fit for human habitation right now.
The ceilings were low, supported by massive, fire-blackened beams. Possibly this was a part of the original Enderby, the monastic retreat or hunting lodge or whatever the place had been.
And Melissa had been busy since being dragged back the last time they’d tried to leave.
Elena wasn’t even sure when she’d had the chance, but she’d stolen food and warm clothes and stashed them here where even the staff didn’t go.
She’d already been looking towards their next escape attempt.
And now she handed out coats, scarves, gloves.
Antiques pillaged from Enderby’s ancient wardrobes, mixed with modern garments that might have belonged to servants who’d arrived but never left.
The whip had not daunted her, only whetted her desire to be free.
Now, she tugged impatiently at Ross’s arm, and Elena saw his face twist. She could almost see his train of thought, like a rat desperately trying to escape a maze but meeting dead end after dead end.
Trying to find some scenario that could encompass what they had seen and done, and yet also allowed him to stay, to square things with his family, to face up to his father.
Some way that he could shout and rage and actually have the leverage to accomplish something.
Some way to explain what they had witnessed in a way that didn’t just end up at We killed a fairy.
And there was no way out of that maze. He had to either unsee what he had seen, or let go of what he had, because the two of them were inextricably entwined like the roots of ancient trees.
The Enderboughs and the things, the things and the Enderboughs, like the face vomiting out or devouring the face, which in its turn had another face tearing free of or chewing into it.
Without any warning something broke within her and she turned and did her own part for the overall vomiting motif, losing everything in her stomach to spatter down the wall and into one corner of the room.
Melissa waited impatiently as if it were no more than a sneezing fit.
Her eyes flitted from Elena back to Ross’s twisted indecision.
“Listen to me,” she told him flatly. “Fuck this family. And you know what? I’m almost glad it’s come to this, because I’ve been wanting to get the fuck out for years.
And now it turns out that our folks are vampires or body snatchers or some-fucking-thing, and it actually makes sense.
It’s better. Because it means that all the shit my dad put me through all these years is because he’s an actual monster. ”
“Melissa…” Ross started, but she cut him off angrily.
“When I applied for the Army, behind his back and after he’d forbidden it, he beat me hard enough to put me in hospital.
Oh, a private hospital where the doctors got paid really well to say I tripped and fell down the stairs.
He beat Mum too, when she begged him to stop.
We were in next-door rooms. Real tricky stairs at our London pad.
You’d be amazed how many people went down them over the years.
Like the maid he fucked, or that accountant who wouldn’t fiddle his taxes.
Although the police bigwigs and the cabinet ministers never did, no matter how much sherry they all put away when they came round.
Finding out he really is part of something hideous is a relief. ”
“It…” Ross’s voice was ragged. “It wasn’t like that with us. Dad, he…”
“Maybe,” Melissa said acidly, “you never actually stepped far enough away to find out where the bars were. Doesn’t mean you weren’t in a cage. Ross, tell me everything here’s fine. Tell me you didn’t see what we all saw.”
He faced her at last. He wasn’t actually leaning on Elena by then, but she felt that if she stepped away he’d fall.
“I can’t,” he said flatly. “You’re right. I just…”
“We go,” Melissa said. “We go now. Because they’re already looking. It’s not like we didn’t make enough noise up there.”
Impotent gorge rose in Elena’s throat again, but she fought the impulse back down. Ross was still vacillating, so she gave his arm a hard yank, the way she always did when decision paralysis was setting in, and he was abruptly nodding jerkily.
“Go,” he muttered. “Right.”
On their way to this forsaken room, Melissa had thrown a side door open, left it ajar where the tell-tale breeze would soon draw notice.
Not exactly the most subtle or convincing misdirection, but still plainly something she’d thought about and planned.
And Elena might be only the most perfunctory of churchgoers, but if they got out of this, then she decided she’d write to the Pope and nominate the woman for sainthood.
And also that the British military had probably missed out on a strategic genius when the family had put its foot down about Melissa’s career ambitions.
Aside from being undisturbed, the other thing this room had to recommend it was a loose window—nothing of a period with the stonework, but something more modern that would open far enough to admit a human body.
Doing so took some swearing and wrenching at rusted hinges, but after that, each of them was able to slither awkwardly out into the night: Ross, Elena, Melissa’s bag and then Melissa herself.
She pushed the window as closed as it was going to go after she’d fought her way free of it, leaving the three of them in an untended thicket of laurel bushes, the broad evergreen leaves providing more than adequate cover against casual scrutiny.
“Which way now?” Ross asked, but Melissa had a hand up, listening.
There were lights limning the dark bulk of the house.
She heard the dogs, and a harsh bark of human voices too, the words obscured in the echoes.
Ross twitched, and Elena knew he’d picked out his father’s tones there.
Then an engine, and they saw a four-by-four roll out, an old blue British model with a canvas back.
They hunched back further into the bushes as the headlamps swept them.
Melissa’s eyes were narrow, and Elena reckoned she was wondering where the garage was, and whether that was an escape tool she could have used.
For a moment the car was just loitering there, the beam of its lights blinding, engine running and driver-side—no, passenger-side—door open.
Melissa bunched, the whole plan up in the air.
Then two people strode from the house and got in.
They froze, not only because that put paid to any desperate vehicular escape, but because one of them was Will.
Caught at the fringes of illumination, he looked pale and slender and just like the boy she’d been introduced to a few days before.
Just good old Will. Except here he was with Aunt Someone-or-Other and whoever was behind the wheel, going out to hunt his cousins down to preserve the family secret.