Page of Tricks, page 11
Higson left him before his father, whose desk was a void, and whose gray eyes were miles above him.
The tears came again, and Quentin didn’t understand why.
“Because you didn’t feel the planar shift.” Father’s voice boomed like that of an uncaring god.
“I don’t understand!”
“I know what Father did to you,” Freddy said.
Quentin spun to face him, but while he felt small, Freddy was all grown up.
They weren’t in Father’s office any more. The dark had returned, punctured only by candlelight.
“You think you fell off horses, tripped down stairs, got run over, or whatever other rubbish excuses you’ve given over the years, but haven’t you ever stopped to wonder why all of your scars are in straight fucking lines, Icky? Not once?”
Dread clawed its way up Quentin’s spine, and he drew his hands up to his chest, but they touched bare skin and came away wet.
He didn’t want to look down.
But his eyes couldn’t resist.
The blood was bright and red and glistening in the flickering light.
He convulsed. Bile burned his throat and he spat it out, but the sight of so much of his own blood made him feel faint, and his gut churned like a whirlpool. He swallowed air as the fear rose, and warmth trickled down his legs.
The blood trickled, oozed, leaving him like it knew he would die soon.
“Jesus Christ, Icky,” Freddy raged. “Aren’t you the least bit angry?”
Something hit him, stung him, like the bite of a viper, and he screamed, but he couldn’t move away from it, couldn’t even squirm. His body was confined somehow, as though he were submerged and the water pinned him in place. His arms spread apart, his legs straightened, despite his desperate attempt to curl into a ball.
It hit him again.
Blood sprang from his chest in an arc and sprayed through the air. It was beautiful.
He screamed.
“Sanguis meus sanguinem tuum est.” Father’s voice echoed around him. “Vox mea vocem tuam est.”
Tears trickled down his cheeks and he kept on screaming, but he didn’t make a sound. As though the screams were only in his head, and his father couldn’t hear them.
His body became a prison. Time and again the viper struck. Beyond Quentin’s screams there was breathing, and the sharp snap of sound that accompanied every sting.
And his father’s words, terse and loud, saying the same thing every few minutes.
“Sacrificium offerimus.”
He was somewhere else. He left his body behind so that it could suffer without him. This way was safe. He would be protected. And when he woke up again, some time in the future, all this would be dealt with. He would go on with his life and leave this behind.
“Poenam damus.”
“Father beat you, Icky.” Freddy’s stood in front of him, his features lit by fury. “He took a crop to you as part of a ritual, and that ritual lasted thirteen years. He beat you until your skin broke and you bled. He beat you until you blacked out, shut down to protect yourself. He beat you until you were broken; he hit you so hard that your blood was on him, Icky. And then, when he was done beating you, he raped you.”
“Parete, numina!” Father sounded resigned. No matter how often he said the words, they came out like a tedious chore.
Like this was nothing personal.
Like he knew it by heart, and had repeated it thousands of times through the years.
“He raped you,” Frederick said. His voice was raw, and his face twisted in indignation. “All to give you the power to use magic, just like he can. Just as grandfather did to him. Are you listening to me, Icky?”
Hands fell on Quentin’s shoulders and pushed him to the cold, wet floor. The stench of his own blood was in his nostrils and on his tongue, metallic and salty, pervading his thoughts until all was red.
He was a child.
He was a teenager.
He was an adult.
He was nothing.
Hands slipped through the blood on his back and squeezed his backside. They pressed and probed and invaded where they shouldn’t.
“Thirteen years!” Frederick yelled. “Jesus Christ, Icky, aren’t you the least bit angry?”
The screams that woke him were his own, his throat ragged, his body stiff as a board. Sleep clung to him as he struggled to escape it, and only by fighting his way out of the bed and through the whirlwind could he escape.
There was a thumping sound, heard in between screams, like a jackhammer far away.
“Lord Banbury! Are you all right?”
He tried to form words, but couldn’t work out what words he even wanted to use, so instead his incoherent screech just sounded the same as the one that came before it. The maelstrom followed him, the racket almost as loud as he was, as fragments of furniture thumped into walls and doors on their circuit of the room.
“Lord Banbury, I’m entering the room!”
“No!” he screamed, but as he managed to squeeze his thoughts into a single syllable, they lost other things they were hanging on to.
The lock in the door clicked.
Quentin struggled to focus.
Someone was about to invade his personal space.
Without his permission.
The bed splintered as he flung it at the door.
The concentration it took allowed yet more of his nightmare to slip through the cracks in his mind.
It was a nightmare.
Just a dream.
Get hold of yourself!
He sagged slowly against the wall, and his pajamas stuck to his skin. To the blood.
He jerked his head up and eyed his hands in the darkness, but they were white. There wasn’t a speck on him.
It was sweat.
Just sweat.
The room stank of alcohol. Small bottles from the minibar were smashed across the walls.
Jesus Christ, he needed a drink.
Quentin curled up and wrapped his arms around his knees. He couldn’t even pin down a point at which his attempt to meditate and recover memories had turned to sleep, to dreams, to terror. He’d lain down on the bed and closed his eyes, and then the next thing he knew, he was on the floor in a hotel room he had utterly destroyed.
Father will find out.
Like a bucket of ice water tossed over him in a heatwave, the realization that he’d done the one thing he desperately wanted to avoid hit him, and the shock blasted the last of the cobwebs away.
He’d destroyed an entire room.
In his sleep.
Quentin struggled for control, for composure, and chunks of wood, clumps of feathers, javelins of plastic all fell to the carpet.
Something heavy thudded into the door, and the twisted bed frame creaked in protest as it was shoved aside.
He had all of two seconds to work out what the hell to say to hotel staff who likely had received several phone calls from rooms all around Quentin’s to complain of the noise, and no excuse seemed good enough, and the more he fished for one, the further away he chased the disjointed fragments of his dream.
Wasn’t there something important in there?
“You can’t trust me!”
He swallowed tightly and pushed himself to his feet, because there was no damn way he could allow hotel employees to find him cowering in a corner. Instead he wiped tears from his face and fell back on years of training.
“Lord Banbury! Are you all right?” The door was shoved again. This time it opened wide enough for the security guard to enter, and his eyes widened at the mess.
Which was, frankly, a deplorable response.
Quentin raised his head high and quirked an eyebrow. “Yes. I’m afraid I’d like to check out. Would you give me a moment, please?” He gestured down to his pajamas.
The guard stared at him, sniffed the booze-laden air, and then pursed his lips.
“Ten minutes,” he said evenly.
Quentin waved a hand to dismiss him, then set about picking apart the room to try and find anything recoverable from his luggage.
What an unmitigated bloody disaster.
18
Quentin
He knew what they thought of him.
Drunk.
Spoiled.
It didn’t matter. It worked to his advantage when it came to leaving the hotel, as he was able to wave a hand and insist that they send the bill to his father. He might as well add insult to injury while he was being politely evicted onto the street.
Quentin had been quite fortunate in finding enough clothes intact from which to form a single outfit. Any toiletries still in the bathroom had survived well enough, but that was about the size of it. He abandoned them all, as his small suitcase was as ruined as the rest of the room. His phone was a mangled wreck, but he’d pocketed it in case it could be salvaged in some way.
At least the rain had finally stopped.
Quentin descended the steps of the Dorchester and maintained the charade of being a calm, collected individual. God alone knew how long it would take for Father to hear of this.
He thought he heard Frederick’s voice. Just for a second. He sounded angry, and seemed to think Quentin should be angry too, but when Quentin checked over his shoulder there was no one there.
But he did feel angry.
He couldn’t pin down why. Was it down to ruining his own chances of remaining undetected, or had the nightmare troubled him so much that even though the dream had faded, the emotions remained? Regardless, he felt as though there were something churning at his insides now that hadn’t been there yesterday.
Perhaps, if he ignored it, it would go away.
His more immediate concern was that he was in the middle of Mayfair at two o’clock in the morning with nothing but the clothes on his back. London was not a city famed for the all-night availability of, well, much of anything other than bars and clubs, so if he wished to replace those clothes or his phone at any juncture, he would need to wait for morning.
More sleep was out of the question. He could not systematically wreck every hotel across town in his quest for a night’s shut-eye. No.
He needed information. If he was to track Frederick down, stop him, and rescue Laurence, he had to find out more about what Freddy was capable of.
Which meant speaking with the one person alive who might know.
Satisfied with his line of reasoning, he stepped back toward the hotel and waved down a taxi, robbing the doorman of something that could have entertained the poor fellow for all of ten seconds at this time of night. As he slipped into the back seat of the black cab and pulled his seatbelt on, he looked at the driver in the rear-view mirror.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked.
“Will you go as far as Royal Tunbridge Wells?” It was best to ask up front, lest the fellow be due to clock off any time soon.
The driver nodded. “Fare up front.”
Quentin dug out his wallet and slid one of his cards free. “Not a problem,” he murmured. “Dovecote Manor, if you would be so kind.”
He’d arrive far too early for good manners, but ultimately that was not his problem.
It took a little over ninety minutes to reach the gates of the manor, according to the cabbie’s clock, and when the taxi stopped, Quentin leaned forward.
“This will be perfectly sufficient, thank you.”
The driver lifted his eyebrows. “You want me to just drop you here?”
Quentin nodded. “This is ideal.”
“Your money, mate.”
Quentin said nothing to that, simply exited the cab and shut the door. There was no point explaining the problem further, that if they attempted to use the intercom to have the staff open the gate for the taxi, they would have no success.
No. Quentin was persona non grata among his peers, and had been since the funeral. There wasn’t a castle, manor, or stately home across the country that would open its gates for him, given the choice.
He straightened his cuffs and meandered toward the intercom, then feigned thumbing the button and made an idle show of awaiting a response as he kept tabs on the taxi out of the corner of his eye. The driver was taking his sweet time pulling away, likely curious about his passenger’s request to be abandoned in the middle of nowhere, so Quentin leaned in and did his best to appear as though he were speaking.
Finally the taxi peeled away. Quentin waited until the car was off in the distance, then stepped back from the gates and eyed them speculatively.
They were well over twenty feet tall, made from wrought iron, and anchored in brick columns themselves easily fifteen feet high. The center of the gates bore the Dovecote family crest, parts of it picked out in gilt on the black ironwork, but it was too dark to see the gold fully. At the top of the curved gates, the iron stuck up in spikes which, while hardly sharp, could doubtless do some damage if one were to fall on them.
The trick, then, was to avoid doing so.
With one final glance back to ensure the taxi was long gone, he ran at the gates, then leaped up them, utilizing a combination of ironwork and telekinesis to make short work of the climb. He vaulted the spikes with ease, then softened his landing with another quick, subtle application of his gifts, but rolled into a breakfall out of habit.
Gravel grated beneath him as he sprang to his feet, and he launched immediately into a sprint toward the house. The approach was a mile long, curving through landscaped hillside and over a small weir, and if there were any security cameras on him, he preferred not to spend the next twenty minutes dawdling along slowly enough for the police to arrive.
The house came into view as he cleared a small copse of trees on the cusp of a hill, and he shot across the bridge over the weir, the sound of water masking his footsteps only briefly. Gravel had long been used on approaches such as this to make it impossible for intruders to sneak up undetected, so he didn’t even try.
Dovecote Manor was everything that Castle Cavendish was not. Neoclassical, dark-brick, rectangular, and self-contained, it occupied four stories rather than two, which Quentin imagined had caused quite a stir when the house was built three centuries ago.
The primary façade faced north, and Quentin debated skirting around to try and find a staff entrance or perhaps something else less aggressive, but the fact of the matter was that his appearance would be most unwelcome no matter which door he used.
He was the black sheep, after all. The one who had turned Mother’s funeral into a circus.
He sighed and stopped at the front door. It, too, was not ostentatious. Merely a single large door of white-painted wood that weakly reflected the feeble moonlight. It was blank.
There was no need to antagonize the household more than he already would, so he raised a hand and tugged on the doorbell, pulling the knotted ironwork several times. There was no sound from his action, but that was to be anticipated. It would be a poor piece of engineering if it disturbed the residents while alerting the staff.
Quentin glanced at his left as he waited and evaluated the sky. The first hints of pink and orange touched the edges of clouds toward the horizon, and there was no way around the fact that he was here absurdly early, but what choice did he have?
Metal scraped against wood, and he turned back toward the door as one lock after the next turned, as though if they took long enough the visitor would go away.
The door swung inward, and light spilled onto the doorstep. Quentin dipped his head in readiness and turned side-on so that he could reach out and place a hand against the door to prevent it slamming in his face.
The doorman who greeted him looked disheveled, his hair slicked back in a hurry and sticking out at the tips. His livery was crisp, but without jacket. The poor fellow had to have rushed out of bed so fast he hadn’t even had time to grab his glasses, if the way he peered at Quentin was anything to go by.
Quentin put a foot over the threshold.
The older man blinked quickly, and his features drained of all color. “Lord Banbury,” he stammered. “This is an unexpected pleasure.” Pleasure could not have sounded more like horror if it had tried. “Forgive me. We were not anticipating a visit at this hour.”
“No,” Quentin answered coolly. “I imagine that you were not.” He brought his other foot inside, then breezed around the doorman, blinking to try and help his eyes adjust to the light. “I can only apologize for that.”
The footman didn’t close the door. A sure sign that he didn’t want Quentin to stay.
“Perhaps if you could return at a more reasonable hour, my lord,” he began.
Quentin raised his hand abruptly and cut him off.
“Very well, my lord. How may we be of service?”
Quentin turned to face him at last, and squared his shoulders. Then he spoke with absolute authority, his words unwavering, the anger in his heart clipping his voice. “I am here to speak with my grandfather, and I will not be refused.”
19
Quentin
Quentin followed the doorman through the manor’s darkened rooms. In true seventeenth century style, the only corridor on this level was for the use of the staff. Occupants and visitors passed through a daisy-chain of drawing rooms, sitting rooms, dining rooms and other rooms to reach their destination. It was an excellent way to show off one’s status and wealth to guests.
It was also an excellent way to waste time.
Quentin eyed the back of his guide’s head as they continued to plod through the maze of interlocking chambers. “You appear to believe that I do not have intimate knowledge of this house,” he finally said.
The doorman glanced over his shoulder. “Forgive me, Lord Banbury. The Red Drawing Room is undergoing renovation, and we must circumvent it.”
Quentin glanced idly toward the ceiling, then back over his own shoulder. “I very much doubt that,” he mused. “I’ve recently been living with renovation in progress. You would have more dust-proofing down, have removed some of the soft furnishings, protected the hallway floors. The smells of plaster and paint carry quite well, yet are undetectable throughout the house. Now will you stop walking me around in bloody circles, or must I go rouse Grandfather myself?”
