The Book of Beasts (7 page)

A motorized hum electrified the air seconds before a double-ended light-sabre materialized in Matt's hand. He stumbled a little at first, not realizing how heavy his creation would be, but quickly adjusted, checking his stance and tightening his grip on the central handle. Dropping one shoulder, he swooped at the faceless knight on his left, plunging the end of the laser into his breastplate, then pivoted and drove the other side into a second creature approaching from the right. Each dissolved into pools of thick black ink.

Two more flew at him. Matt sidestepped the first, slipped on a slick rock, but righted himself in time to push his laser into its chest. The other end of the light-sabre missed the second completely, and Matt landed in a spreading puddle of burning ink.

‘Ow!'

The toxic mixture singed through Matt's jeans. He rolled away, his whole body shrieking with pain. The last knight's rotting face was almost upon him. Matt got to his knees, twisted round and swung his laser at its head. He missed.

It was Solon who jumped up on to the rocks to stab his sword into the last faceless knight's back and out through his chest.

The two boys leaned against each other next to the Abbot's coffin, catching their breath, watching the ink simmer and seep into the sand.

Solon stared at Matt's light-sabre in awe. ‘Is this a weapon from your time?'

‘It's from a galaxy far, far away,' said Matt, grinning.

‘Where did you learn to fight like that?' asked Carik, letting Solon plaster seaweed on to her blistering hand. It was clear that she was trying not to appear impressed.

Matt pressed the button in the centre, and the light-sabres withdrew into their respective sides of the handle. ‘Video games,' he said, scraping his drawing off the rock. With a soft hum, the weapon vanished, leaving a faint green glow floating above his hands that faded into nothing. ‘You play with an avatar on a… a special screen against other gamers. This weapon is from a game with Jedi knights.'

‘You still have knights in your time?'

Matt caught Carik and Solon exchanging glances, and sensed that they were communicating telepathically. It reminded Matt of how alone he was. He missed having Em in his head, even when she wasn't speaking to him. Her presence had been comforting.

Matt swallowed a sob. He didn't know if he could stand not having Em in his head for the rest of his life. He hoped, despite what Solon and Carik said they had seen, that somehow Em had survived. Surely if she was really dead, he would have felt
something
.

One thing Matt did know for sure. His mum and Em weren't in the Middle Ages any more.

‘What is an avatar?' asked Solon.

Matt forced his mind back to the present. ‘It's a thing that you create to fight for you in games.'

Solon's face cleared. 'Like a squire taking a knight's place at a joust?'

‘Sort of,' said Matt, deciding that to explain online gaming and the internet to two medieval teenagers centuries before the printing press and movable type would take too much energy.

The tide had come in, leaving only a narrow strip of jagged rocks, like uneven teeth, exposed beneath the hillside. The Abbot's coffin lay perilously close to the edge of the water.

‘We can't leave the coffin here,' said Solon. ‘The Abbot could be washed out to sea with the tide.'

‘Wouldn't that be honourable?' asked Carik. ‘All my people are returned to the sea in flames. It's how they journey to Valhalla.'

Solon shook his head. ‘The Abbot has a place in the crypt with the other great monks of Era Mina. He has earned that honour. We must put him somewhere safe before we seek shelter ourselves.'

Struggling against the rising wind and the dropping temperatures, the boys managed to grip each end of the coffin without either one of them falling into the bay. Stepping with great care from rock to rock, they followed Carik to the end of the cove where there was a rocky ledge high and wide enough for them to hoist the coffin to safety.

Free of their burden, the three of them picked up their pace, hugging the rock face for cover as they hurried along the narrow exposed strip of beach, heading to the other side of the island to take shelter in the old smugglers' caves.

Royal Academy
London
Present Day

‘Hunt her down, Vaughn,' Sir Charles had instructed through tight lips, his hand already on the phone to convene an emergency meeting of the European Council of Guardians. ‘Whatever it takes, find Henrietta de Court and that tapestry.'

Hunting rogue Guardians and Animare was familiar ground to Vaughn Grant. As an agent of Orion, the secret organization of Animare hunters scattered through the world, Vaughn spent much of his time on similar missions. It was how he had first met Sandie, when Sir Charles had charged him with tracking her and the twins when they had gone into hiding in the early days.

He'd done his job too well back then. Rather than betray Sandie, he had helped her survive. It was at that time Vaughn had also agreed to help Renard, his friend and mentor, by spying on Sir Charles lest he and the Council make any rash decisions about binding the twins after Sandie had fled to Scotland with them.

This mission, however, felt more serious than most. Henrietta de Court was a senior Guardian on the European Council, the remaining members of which would need at least a day to answer Sir Charles's summons and gather at the Royal Academy. But Vaughn didn't have to wait.

Glancing at his watch for the tenth time in as many minutes, Vaughn wondered if he would make it to the National Gallery of Scotland before it closed for the night. It was already 4.40 p.m., and he was still in London. He had twenty minutes left in which to do it.

It was dangerous, but not impossible.

He stared irritably at a group of schoolgirls who'd broken away from the last public tour of the day to root themselves in front of the painting Vaughn needed. Samuel Morse's
Gallery of the Louvre
was a huge canvas that stretched across most of the wall between the Royal Academy's two primary staircases. Vaughn tried to will the girls away from the art, but he was not a Guardian. Inspiriting them to move from the painting wasn't in his skill set.

Adrenaline surged through Vaughn's veins. He let it. He'd need every bit of energy for what he was about to do.

‘This is the one I wanted to tell you about,' said a curly redhead to her classmates in a loud voice.

A dark-haired girl jabbed in the direction of the painting with her pen. ‘Looks lame to me,' she said.

The redhead folded her arms. ‘You're just annoyed because Mr James put me in charge of our group for a change.'

Vaughn leaned forward, glancing down the hallway.
Come on, girls, please move.
Opening and closing his fists, he cracked his knuckles in anticipation. His stomach rumbled and a headache was starting to pound behind his temples. He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. Tapas near the Prado in Madrid yesterday? Or was that the day before?

‘The artist painted a room at the Louvre and put all his favourite pictures on its walls,' the redhead continued as the pen-wielding girl grumbled on. ‘See, there's the Mona Lisa next to the door and the—'

‘That's really not where the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre,' snapped the pen girl. ‘I've seen it.'

‘That's not the point,' said the redhead stubbornly. ‘The point is… this painting is
haunted
. My sister's friend knows one of the night guards. He's seen things.'

‘Will all patrons begin to make their way to the exits,' boomed the public address system as the girls exploded with laughter. ‘The Royal Academy of Arts will be closing promptly in fifteen minutes.'

Vaughn knew he was cutting this far too close. He'd made the journey from London to Edinburgh in nine minutes once, but his mind had been sharper then, and his imagination singularly focused. Unlike this afternoon. He'd already been travelling for close to thirty-six hours, and a lack of sleep compounded with his worry – about the twins, about Sandie, about Henrietta de Court – meant he was exhausted. An exhausted Animare could screw up, and when travelling by these means could be dangerous. Even fatal.

‘My sister's friend,' continued the redhead, raising her voice over the disbelieving laughter, ‘said that sometimes the guard can hear laughing and giggling from the painting and—'

‘What utter rubbish,' the other girl said scornfully, flouncing towards the stairs with the rest of the group.

If Vaughn arrived after the National Gallery in Edinburgh had closed, he'd have to animate something to avoid triggering the alarms or disturbing their guards, and the more he had to animate when he was feeling this drained, the riskier it was. Vaughn glanced at his watch again.

The redhead shoved her gallery map into her backpack and stomped after the others. ‘Yeah, well… the artist who painted this invented Morse Code. And that's amazing,' she shouted after them, grasping for one last tidbit before she lost her audience entirely. ‘And if it wasn't for him, well… well, we wouldn't have… have… smartphones.'

At last, they were gone. Vaughn stood, stretched, slipped on his leather jacket and pulled his messenger bag over his shoulder. Checking the hallway was completely empty, he stepped in front of Morse's painting.

The
Gallery of the Louvre
had never brought Samuel Morse the fame he'd hoped for as an artist, but it had brought him a more important kind of renown, among a certain group, at least. Morse had used his unique abilities as an Animare and a code maker to serve a greater cause. Thanks to Morse's skills, Vaughn and a small number of uniquely trained Animare were able to travel between various Guardian Councils and galleries. Because of Morse, a series of paintings around the world were linked to this painting as a kind of hub.

Vaughn slipped his sketchbook from his messenger bag and began to draw. Those girls would never know it, but the redhead was on to something about the nature of the painting. Haunted wasn't even the half of it.

First Vaughn sketched
The
Wedding Feast at Cana
, a canvas that covered the entire wall on the left side of Morse's painting. Then the Titians, the van Dycks, Raphael and Rubens – all with the kind of detail that anyone watching would have thought only possible after long hours, perhaps even days of work. For Vaughn, his copy of the painting took shape quickly, his fingers flying across the page.

Only trained Orion agents were able to travel across art in this way. At least, that's how it used to be. Sandie and the twins had done the impossible, circumventing Orion agents' training, and instead travelling through art by their own means. If the Hollow Earth Society or even the world's five Councils of Guardians discovered that the twins and Sandie not only could fade across paintings but across time as well, life as they knew it would be over.

Vaughn could not let that happen.

The light around Vaughn began to soften, bathing him in a buttery haze, its illumination suffusing every part of his body, slowly muting his physical presence while he sketched on. Sounds muffled in Vaughn's mind as if all his senses were fluid. He relaxed and let his imagination assume control.

It was at that moment it all went wrong.

A horrified scream cut through the thinning sounds of the gallery, snapping Vaughn's concentration. He hesitated, his fingers lifting off the page for only a beat, but long enough. His imagination stalled, his pulse plummeted. Every particle of his being exploded in pain. He collapsed to his knees on the floor, in agony as every nerve ending sparked and snapped and shot bolts of light through his body.

He was burning up from the inside.

He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the windows. His body looked like the negative of a photograph, a profile of light and dark against a halo of fading light, and his eyes were a fiery red. Crumpled on the floor, his body spasming against the pain, Vaughn glanced towards the stairs and saw the dark-haired girl from earlier staring in terror at his electrified silhouette.