Ironheart, page 1
About the Book
Pearl Linford is stuck. Her best friend won’t talk to her. The internet thinks she is a murderer. And she’s waiting for the right moment to forgive Finn Blacklin, but it never seems to come. On top of this, Unseelie fairies have infiltrated her town, and they’ve unleashed a new horror – a bunch of wild, uncontrollable, angry supernatural hunters, who’ve made Finn number one their hit list. And you know what? That’s a lot for one seventeen-year-old girl to handle. No wonder Pearl is so full of rage all the time. A rage might be drawing the attention of some very dangerous people.
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
About the Author
Also by Jodi McAlister
When I nearly killed the old man I knew I had to find a new job.
It was awful. It ranks up there with some of my all-time most awful moments – which says a lot, considering the last few months of my life have not exactly been what you would call happy party fun times. And what makes it worse is that I knew it was coming. I knew. But no, I had to be all ‘tra-la-la, nothing is wrong, I am fine, I can deal with anything, ahahaha’.
I couldn’t deal with it.
I was sitting in the lifeguard chair at the pool when it happened. I had my maths homework on my lap, and was drumming my fingers against my textbook and thinking intently about the way the tendons move in Finn’s hands as he digs his compass point into the desks at school when I heard the old man spluttering. I looked up, and there he was, floundering in the deep end.
I scrambled down from the chair on autopilot. This wasn’t a new experience. I’d done this a bajillion times before. Old people get into trouble sometimes at the pool, and dragging them out is second nature. My maths homework fell to the ground (and landed, as I discovered later, in a puddle, because not enough stuff has gone wrong in my life lately). I took two steps towards the water, braced my legs to dive in, and –
Nothing.
I stood there frozen like an idiot for nearly a full minute before the squad swimmers in lane two saw what was happening and did my job for me. And even then, even when the old man was safe, I barely noticed. All I could see was water, and all I could feel was teeth, and – did you really just wake me with a kiss, did you really just wake me with a kiss?
‘What happened, Pearl?’ my boss asked me afterwards.
I couldn’t tell him what happened. I quit my job instead.
I can’t believe I didn’t get fired ages ago, to be honest. How did my boss completely fail to notice that since I’d been back working at the pool I’d never once gone in the water?
So now here I am, sitting in the school library at lunch, working on my résumé. It’s a gorgeous November day and everyone’s out on the oval, soaking in the warmth and ignoring those terrifying commercials about how skin cancer is going to kill us. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, bunnies and rainbows and good dreams are raining down from the perfect fluffy clouds, et cetera et cetera, so of course I’m staying inside to avoid it all.
Something’s tapping. I look down and see it’s my fingers, drumming a beat on the desk. I clench my hands into fists. If you’ve ever tried to do this when your fingers are as bruised and battered as mine currently are, you’ll know it hurts like a mofo.
But I don’t mind the pain, really. It keeps me focused, reminds me I’m still alive.
Phil walks past the library window. Her boyfriend Julian is trailing behind her, saying something, but I don’t think she’s listening. She just keeps walking.
I clench my fists tighter.
I stare determinedly at what I have on the computer screen, trying to block out everything else in the world.
Name: Pearl Linford.
Age: 17 years.
Year Twelve student and School Captain-elect at Haylesford High.
Previous employment: occasional bar singer at The Saffron Room (ongoing), lifeguard at Haylesford Leisure Centre.
I am a keen and eager young individual with a great attitude. I am a quick learner, as well as being punctual, enthusiastic, responsible and a hard worker. I have excellent organisational skills and am a strong problem-solver who is capable of working alone and in a team.
Great. Some résumé.
I recently overcame significant adversity when pursued by fairies, who thought I was their lost changeling child. Some of them wanted to kidnap me, some of them wanted to kill me, but I managed to stay alive (though it’s not like I had anything to do with it – this guy that I can’t stop having intensely sexy dreams about saved the day while I nearly got eaten like a moron). I had to quit my last job because I’m now terrified of water. I spend all my time outside school and the job I no longer have trying to recreate a piece of music I once heard a bunch of fairies playing in the woods. (It was the soundtrack to them forcing a girl to dance on hot coals, and I’m so obsessed with it that I’ve nearly broken my fingers from so much time in front of my keyboard.)
I avoid my problems rather than deal with them. I avoid people rather than deal with them. I am completely emotionally dysfunctional. I lie about everything all the time, because if I told the truth, a) you’d lock me up in a mental hospital, and b) I’d probably get you killed. Which I’ll probably do by working for you, so yes, you should absolutely employ me.
My fingers are tapping against the desk again. I sit on my hands.
And then I sigh, delete everything on the screen, sling my bag over my shoulder, and head to the music room, for another lonely lunchtime with the piano and the song I’ll never be able to capture, because I’m not magical. I’m not special. I’m terribly, horribly, awfully ordinary.
I have private music lessons with Mr Hunter after school every Monday, but today, after five minutes of listening to my latest (read: four billionth) variation on the same theme, he sends me home in disgust. ‘Don’t come back until you can demonstrate some imagination, Pearl,’ he tells me.
He doesn’t add anything like ‘oh hey, and maybe put some ice on those fingers of yours and/or see a doctor, because they’re the size of sausages’. That is what a nice person would do and Mr Hunter is not a nice person. He’s a dick.
He’s a dick, and I’ve found that weirdly comforting, because I can chalk it up to his garden-variety terrible personality. When it comes to everyone else being a dick to me, it’s a direct referendum on me as a person.
And I’m pretty sure I deserve it.
Finn and I saving Phil and Cardy from Jenny and Kel was big news. Headline news. Getting-interviewed-on-national-television-level news. They took us to Sydney in a limo to do a bunch of interviews – breakfast radio, breakfast TV, awkward-mid-morning-TV-intercut-with-infomercials, the lot.
‘I can’t lie,’ Finn murmured to me as we were being ushered down the corridor to breakfast TV interview number one. ‘If they ask us –’
‘I’ve got it,’ I said. ‘I’m not an idiot.’
‘No one said you were an idiot.’
‘Then stop reminding me every forty-five seconds about things I already know!’
‘Sorry for not wanting to screw everything up in front of the entire country!’
‘Oh, and you think I want that?’ Real mature, I know. Both of us.
But we did well. We held it together. We were about two minutes into the interview, sitting on their couch, Finn’s knee warm against mine, his forearm brushing mine just enough that it was giving me goosebumps, and it was going fine. If we were less nervous we probably would have realised that breakfast TV wasn’t ever exactly going to be hard-hitting investigative journalism. Maybe the fact that there was some poor actor stuffed in a cow costume in make-up with us would have tipped us off if we weren’t so busy annoying each other into a fever pitch of . . . something.
We were doing our best impression of plucky teens, the kind who save old people from rips at the beach. Finn was on a charm offensive. I was playing along and jumping in and answering any questions that involved us fudging the truth. I was feeling a hell of a lot more relaxed about the rest of the interviews we had to do.
And then out of the corner of my eye I saw the sign.
There was this big glass window at the back of their studio where people hung around outside and held up signs.
‘Hi Mum!’ ‘Hello from Townsville!’ That kind of thing.
This one said ‘Pearl Linford is a murderer’.
One thing that doing all those music lessons with Mr Hunter and playing in front of an audience for my whole life has taught me is how to cover when I’m shaken. I covered like a pro. Other than a brief, skip-of-the-heartbeat pause – a pause where cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck – I gave no indication that I’d seen the sign. I laughed at whatever it was the hosts had said that was supposed to be funny and gave my brightest smile when Finn and I were thanked earnestly for being such brave young people.
‘Did you see the sign?’ Finn asked me in the car on the way to our next media spot.
He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Pearl. People shouldn’t be –’
‘Can we not talk about it, please? The more we talk about it the more I’ll think about it and I can’t afford to think about it right now. I have to hold it together.’
‘Okay.’
I breathed in, out, let the fairy music into my mind instead of forcing it away – a welcome distraction for once. I started tapping out the beat on my knee, trying to visualise the musical notation, when Finn reached over and took my hand.
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to worry about some psycho with a conspiracy theory.’
I wrenched my hand away, and it felt like when you walk from the hot summer sun into the shade and it’s suddenly freezing. ‘I told you I don’t want to think about it.’
‘And how was that going for you?’
‘Just – stop, Finn. No.’
‘I only want to help, Linford.’
‘I don’t want to be helped.’
We got through our next interview without incident. And the next. They made a crack during the fourth one about how we’re on the kind of press junket that winners of The Bachelor usually go on and wouldn’t it a great story if we were actually together and I barked ‘JUST FRIENDS’ so quickly that I think it gave Finn whiplash, but it was fine. It was all fine.
Until we got to our very last interview of the day.
It was a live cross to a show filmed in Melbourne, so we were sitting alone in a room watching monitors and wearing fancy earpieces. We’d gone through our spiel. We had it down pat by then. Our presence at Miller’s Creek that night was thoroughly accidental, but we cunningly managed to sneak Phil and Cardy away while horrifying teen cannibal murderers Jenny and Kel Greene were bickering with each other. Yes, we were very lucky. No, we don’t know where Jenny and Kel are now. Yes, we hope they’re caught soon, and we have every faith our police force will bring them to justice. I said that last one, obviously, because as practised as Finn is at working around his fairy inability to lie, that one is basically unspinnable.
But then things go in another direction. ‘We have some footage here from a breakfast TV program you two were interviewed on this morning,’ the host said, and up came an image of the sign, zoomed in, the words ‘Pearl Linford is a murderer’ huge and red across the screen for everyone to see. ‘And it seems that there are a few people online who support this sentiment.’
‘That Pearl is a murderer?’ Finn said. ‘That’s bullshit.’
‘I don’t think you can say that on TV, Finn,’ I said numbly, almost on autopilot. Black dots were dancing across my vision, but it didn’t mean that I couldn’t see those words, burned into my brain.
‘Were you aware of this at all, Pearl?’ one of the hosts asked.
I shook my head.
‘Would you like to take this opportunity to say something to your detractors?’
‘You’re seriously giving this airtime?’ Finn demanded. ‘These are ridiculous accusations. Ridiculous. All you have to do is spend one second with Pearl to know that there’s no way they could be true.’
‘Shut up, Finn,’ I said. ‘I can talk. I want to talk.’
‘Go on,’ one of the hosts encouraged me.
I breathed deep, swallowed hard. ‘Marie Jessup was my friend,’ I said, picking a camera and looking down the barrel, hoping I was looking at the right one. ‘She was my friend, and what happened to her at the hands of Jenny and Kel Greene was awful. Philippa Kostakidis and James Cardigan are my friends too, some of my best friends, and there’s no way in the world that I would do anything to hurt them. I love them. Both. I hope they know that.’
I took another breath, exhaling through my nose this time. There was something hot inside me, something that felt like lava pooling in my belly, something that felt like it was going to explode. ‘And I hope,’ I said, glaring, ‘that whoever is writing these bullshit things about me dies in a fire.’
It turns out that saying you want people to die in a fire when you’ve just been accused of murder is . . . not a good idea. I realised this about two tenths of a second after the words came out of my mouth, when the hosts hastily pulled a ‘that’s all we’ve got time for, thanks kids’, and the live cross was cut.
The second the cameras were off us, I practically slid to the floor. I put my hands on my knees and bent over, breathing hard. ‘Oh God,’ I said, and my breath sounded like a sob.
‘Maybe it’ll all blow over,’ Finn said in his best comforting tone, but I recognised what that ‘maybe’ was doing in the sentence the instant it came out of his mouth.
That night, lying on my hotel bed, I couldn’t stop myself looking through my phone. I found the conspiracy theorists all right, and they were all over my homicidal outbursts. ‘Brazen killer will kill again’ one post screamed in capital letters. It was on a Facebook page called ‘Killer Girl Pearl’, with hundreds of likes.
I also had, like, fifty-five texts from my sister Disey ranging from ‘irritated’ to ‘incandescent’ threatening to sue everyone under the sun for treating me this way, and twenty-seven from my brother Shad saying the exact same thing. But considering that I could become a comic-book-style supervillain and start levelling towns and they’d still be insisting I was the greatest person in the world, having them in my corner just doesn’t . . . count.
Finn knocked four times and called me five times before I eventually let him into my room. He plucked the phone out of my hand immediately. ‘Don’t look at that, Linford.’
‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ I mumbled, but my heart wasn’t in it.
‘You’re banned. I’m banning you. No looking at what the conspiracy theorists are writing. You’ll drive yourself crazy.’
‘Do you know what they said, though?’
‘Of course I do. Do you think I went back to my room and sat around in my bathrobe and ate everything in the minibar without a care in the world? Of course I looked.’
‘They’re right, though. Our story is fuzzy. There are holes in it. Big holes.’
‘That doesn’t make you a murderer.’
‘Well, obviously I know that,’ I snapped. ‘I was there. But I just basically gave a death threat on TV. What was I thinking?’
I buried my head in my hands. He put his arms around me, pressed his lips against my forehead, and for once, I let him. ‘I’ve got you, Linford,’ he said. ‘I’ve got you.’
I’ve had those words – I’ve got you – ricocheting around my head for weeks now, and they make me feel vaguely sick every time I think of them.
He’s got me. He has my back. And he does have my back, because once the murderer thing caught on at school it didn’t let go, especially given that one of the people I supposedly saved clearly wants nothing to do with me ever again. Even though I’ve basically ostracised myself from polite society it would have been twelve times worse if he hadn’t been there yelling at every single person that said a bad word about me.
He’s got me. He’ll look after me. He’ll defend me.
He’ll do all of that, and I can’t do anything.
I can’t go into the water. I can’t write my résumé. I can’t get this song out of my head, and so I can’t write music. I can’t focus. I can’t concentrate. I can’t do anything about the fact that a bunch of people think I’m a murderer.
And if the fairies come again, I can’t defend myself.
I usually bum a ride home from Disey after my music lesson, but because it finished so early she’s not in the office when I get there. ‘You’re welcome to wait,’ the receptionist says.
Waiting. Doing nothing. Finally, an opportunity to utilise my newfound number-one talent.
I make myself a cup of tea. The warmth of it feels nice against my sore fingers, but as soon as it cools, they start tapping again. To give them something else to do, I get out my phone.
I have a message from Finn. After the whole Miller’s Creek incident, I told him we couldn’t be together because I wasn’t sure that I knew him, and it seems like he really took that to heart, because I get a message like this every day.
Hey Linford – it always begins. Not a comma after my name but a dash, always a dash. And then there’s a bunch of stuff about his life. Not his fairy life, but his regular, everyday one. His soccer team. Things his little brother Matty has said or done. School stuff, like the lowdown on the latest dramz going on in the tempestuous relationship of Cam Davidson and Annabel Young. Songs he’s been trying to teach himself on guitar. Sometimes I hope you’ll never hear me play, he’s written in this message. But sometimes I wish you would, because I bet you could help me fix all the mistakes I make. You know so much about music.
