Alexander's Army Read online

  But I didn’t expect Chantelle to fire.

  And Freya was dead before I could move.

  There was no bang. Just Zap! Zap! Zap! One beam for Freya. One for each of the guardian crows.

  Freya tumbled over the bench, transforming into a crow as she dropped. I screamed and squirmed sideways as she bounced off my thigh. She thudded to the ground beside me, stretching one wing to half its span. The two crows with her were reduced to a pair of exploding feather pillows.

  “What have you done?!” I screamed at Chantelle.

  She clicked a switch and tucked the device into her waistband, pulling down her jacket to hide it. “Klimt’s orders.”

  “NO!” I yelled. I scrambled over the bench and threw myself at her.

  She quickly grabbed my arms and pinned me to the ground, one arm stretched like Freya’s wing, helpless. “Don’t make me hurt you,” she said.

  Like she wasn’t already? “Klimt said he was going to capture her! He said he was going to — agh! My arm.”

  It felt as weak as a twig in her grip.

  “She was threatening you. My orders were to act as I saw fit. I saw fit to use the ray. Now, are you going to be a good boy or do I have to dislocate your shoulder?”

  I gritted my teeth and nodded.

  She let me go and stood up, looking around for witnesses. “I was not expecting her to transform into a crow, but that is good. Easier to move her. Now you need to get back on your bike and —”

  As she turned to me again, I struck her face. A slap, not a punch, but it must have hurt.

  She took a standing count and didn’t even yelp.

  “That’s for not giving her a chance,” I said. I was almost in tears. “Next time I meet Klimt, I’ll deal with him as I see fit.”

  “You are a fool,” she said, the blood rising up to color her cheek. “And if you ever strike me again, it will take more than UNICORNE to stop me from putting you down. Pick up your bike. Go home. I need to clear this mess.”

  “No.”

  “Pardon?” she said. The French pronunciation.

  “I’m taking Freya back to her grave where she belongs. You’ll have to dislocate both my shoulders to stop me.”

  She muttered something under her breath. I thought for one moment she was going to zap me, too. Maybe that would have been a fitting way to die, me and Freya in a murder of crows on an isolated cliff top. Instead, she checked her watch, which seemed a slightly odd thing to do, then said, “All right. She is yours. But go now and do not waste time. I will tell Klimt she died like the other crows.” She picked up my bike for me. “Go.” And as I got on, she drifted back toward the road, where her bright red Vespa scooter was waiting.

  It was an awkward ride to the graveyard. Tears filmed my eyes and blurred the road ahead. Thankfully, I hardly saw another soul. It would have been awkward trying to explain why I had a dead crow stuffed inside my jacket and blood trickling from a cut to my neck.

  I found her grave as I had the week before. No headstone. One small wooden cross. Freya Ann Zielinski. The soil was dried and crusted over, covered with flowers dead in their cellophane. One or two weeds were poking through the cracks. Using a stone, I raked the grave out until I’d scooped a hollow big enough to take a crow. Then I put her in the hole, spread the soil back and patted it into place. I laid a stone on top and the best of the flowers on top of the stone. Still on my knees, I mumbled a prayer. Something to do with souls departed.

  It started to rain as I cycled home. Thunderclouds were rumbling overhead by the time I parked my bike in the garage and flipped up my collar to hide the cut on my neck.

  “Just in time,” Mom said as I came into the kitchen. She handed me a towel to dry my hair. “Your eyes are red. Is everything okay? You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “It’s just the rain,” I mumbled.

  She grabbed my arm and made me look at her. “Mich-ael? Tell me the truth.”

  I sighed and dropped the towel onto a stool. “I went to Freya’s grave.”

  “And found this?”

  A black feather had stuck to the weave of my sweater. One small part of Freya that hadn’t made it into the ground.

  “It was by the grave,” I said, taking it from her. “She liked crows. It felt right to have it.”

  Mom nodded thoughtfully. “Is that what’s been spooking you about the crows we’ve seen, that link to Freya?”

  “I guess,” I said with a limp shrug.

  “Well, maybe you can talk to Dr. K about that?”

  “Um,” I grunted. Why not indeed? We had a LOT to talk about, me and “Dr. K.”

  The rain continued to fall. It rattled in the gutters and popped in the drains. By the time I’d dragged myself to bed that night, a vast storm had risen out at sea and a scything gale was battering anything that faced northeast.

  I climbed into bed with the feather and the comic book, staring at its cover by the light of the streetlamp in the lane. Now and then, a lightning bolt punched through the rain, and the Amazing Crow Girl flickered in front of me, cruelly alive for a second or two. Who had drawn this? Who could have seen her and known what she was when she’d been so careful to conceal herself? I put the comic on the floor and slid down into bed. Just at that moment, I hated the world and everything in it, particularly Amadeus Klimt.

  Some time in the night, I didn’t know exactly when, a thunderclap shook the window and woke me. I was on my back, holding tight to the feather. The thunder rumbled again, followed by a shuddering gust of wind strong enough to nudge my window open. We lived in one of Holton’s old stone cottages, a place with low ceilings, which had all seemed to shrink as I grew older. It had “original features,” according to Mom. Most of those features didn’t work in storms. The leaded windows, for instance, and their ancient latches.

  The sky flashed blue.

  When I was a kid, Dad used to tell me that flashes like those were the engines of alien spaceships firing. He would pull me out of bed and we would stare into the night, hoping for a glimpse of a flying saucer. Nowadays, I never got up. And tonight was no exception. I was burying my head beneath my pillow, when a long, deep caark! cut through the night.

  The call of the crow.

  My blood froze.

  Shaking, I got up and went to the window.

  In the arc of the streetlight stood a silhouetted figure. A man, slim and tall. He had his head bent low, so I couldn’t see his face, his fingers stretched out taut like a scarecrow’s. His hair was soaked and parted on one side, clinging tightly to his ears and neck. He was wearing what looked like army boots and a knee-length plain white coat, the sort of thing lab technicians wore. I was looking at a man standing in the rain, wearing the garb of a scientist or doctor. The wind yanked at the window latches. And as the sky broke open a second time, the man slowly raised his head. His lips were thin and tightly drawn, but all I saw of his face was the blue-and-white flash of a lightning bolt dancing in the lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles. Behind me, I heard the clatter of paper and whipped around to see the pages of the comic book rippling. Out of nowhere, a pencil flew across the room. It crashed against the windowpane and danced on the sill as if spiked by the electrical charge outside. Terrified, I looked again for the man, only to see the streetlight explode in a shower of glass. I cried out and fell away from the window. Everything was now in total darkness.

  Breathless with panic, I banged around my desk for a flashlight. By the time I’d gotten the light pointed through the window, the stranger was gone.

  I aimed the beam into the room. The comic book was lying in the middle of the floor. I picked it up and shone the torch across it. A diagonal strip had been torn off the cover. In the white space underneath was a clumsy illustration. A wobbly pencil sketch of a figure. A strange little man with no eyes.

  A soldier.

  It looked like the work of a four-year-old. Or someone drawing with their less-used hand. The body was all wrong and didn’t meet with the head. The
limbs were simple stick-out lines. What made it look like a soldier was the helmet. I’d seen the style before in a history display at school. A half-round helmet with a short flat rim, shaped like the top half of the planet Saturn. They were worn by British soldiers in World War I. In the drawing, it was sitting on a spherical head that had no mouth or nose — or eyes.

  I wanted to call Klimt. I nearly did call Chantelle. I hated her for what she’d done to Freya, but she was my UNICORNE bodyguard and I would have been glad of her protection for once. In the end, I didn’t call either of them. For the rest of the night, until dawn broke, I sat on my bed just listening and watching. There were no more crow calls or flying pencils. I fell asleep eventually, waking groggily when Mom rapped on my door at seven a.m.

  The car arrived at precisely eight a.m. I’d said next to nothing over breakfast, certainly not about the man I’d seen. That would be for UNICORNE only. When the moment came to leave, there was the usual fuffle and bluster in the hall. Despite what Klimt had said about my not needing night clothes, Mom had packed me a small bag of toiletries and a change of underwear. “There’s some lunch in your bag as well,” she said. “Cheese and pickle sandwiches.”

  “Mom —?”

  “And I thought you might want something to read. You know how bored you get in hospitals. Take this. It was your dad’s favorite.” She thrust a copy of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea into my hand.

  “I’ve read it.”

  “Well … read it again. Oh, and I found this on the mat this morning.”

  She handed me a sealed white envelope. My name had been scribbled on the front. “Who’s that from?”

  “How should I know? I don’t have laser vision.”

  (Huh. She could have fooled me sometimes.)

  “Looks like Ryan’s writing,” she said.

  In which case it would be something idiotic. I was about to open it when Mom said, “Don’t fuss with that now. The car’s waiting. Go on. We’ll see you tonight. Be good.”

  I stuffed the envelope deep into my jacket pocket. “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  I have a feeling I’m going on a dangerous mission. This might be the last time you’ll ever see me didn’t really set the tone I was looking for. Yet how many times must Dad have wanted to say that to her? In the end, I mumbled feebly, “I love you, that’s all.”

  “Aww,” she cooed, throwing her arms wide. “My baby boy loves me.”

  “Yeah, bye,” I said, stepping out of the house before she could embarrass me with yet another hug.

  “Bye!” cried Josie, coming to the step to wave.

  Bye, I mouthed, and went out to meet whatever destiny lay before me.

  Mulrooney, as he had been in the past, was the driver. “You look tired,” he said as he eased the car smoothly onto the road. “What happened to your neck?”

  I found his eyes in the rearview mirror. I’d managed to conceal the cut from Mom, but he had seen it in less than a second.

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  That made him laugh.

  “It was Freya,” I confessed, “before Chantelle zapped her.”

  His gaze narrowed. “Does it hurt?”

  “What, getting zapped?”

  He smiled ruefully and checked his mirrors. The car accelerated up the road. After a tense few seconds, he said, “I read the report. Chantelle was just doing her duty, protecting you. I doubt whether I would have acted differently. The cut. Does it hurt?”

  I ran my fingers across it. It felt like an irritating nick, nothing more. “It itches a bit.”

  “Klimt will need to know. The lab will want to see that.”

  “The lab?” The last time I’d been in the UNICORNE facility, they had taken me to a lab where I’d seen a few white-coated scientists. Could one of them have been the man in the rain?

  “We can’t take chances,” Mulrooney continued. “The cut might be infected.”

  With slug juice? Great. “Caark,” I said, not intending to startle him but loud enough to make him punch the brake.

  He looked over his shoulder, presumably to make sure I hadn’t morphed into a killer crow.

  “Sorry.”

  “Not funny,” he replied.

  I wanted to say, Neither is witnessing a cold-blooded killing. But I didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Mulrooney. He had the chin of a boxer and the eyes of a fox; he was the kind of man who wasn’t going to break if he walked into a wall. After last night, I needed friends.

  We skirted town and drove into the countryside, closer and closer to the disused mine where the UNICORNE facility was hidden. I thought about what Mulrooney had said. Was it possible Freya could have poisoned my blood? Like a vampire passing on the undead curse? Or had she just been making an idle threat? I felt the cut again. Definitely itching. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to get it checked.

  “Has Klimt briefed you about the comic store?” Mulrooney was speaking again.

  I nodded. “He wants me to go there.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t do anything rash. There’s something not right about that place.”

  “What do you think it was that locked you out?”

  “I don’t know. But it was smart — and quick.”

  “Klimt told me Chantelle was chloroformed.”

  “Doubt it,” he said with a click of his tongue. “We couldn’t find any chemical traces or swollen capillaries in her nose. It was just made to seem that way.”

  “Would a soldier do that?”

  “A chloroform attack? Possibly. Why do you ask?”

  “Just wondered. Has Chantelle been in the army?”

  That made him laugh. “This is about her defense skills, right?”

  I shrugged and looked out the window. I didn’t want to be reminded of the ease with which she’d pinned me down; I’d really asked the question to fill in the gaps. I knew very little of Chantelle’s background, much like everyone I’d met in UNICORNE.

  “I trained her,” Mulrooney said. He pulled back a sleeve and showed me a military tattoo.

  Marine. That made sense. “How did you come to be a UNICORNE agent?”

  He pulled the sleeve down and drove on a little way, putting on a pair of shades. “I used to do this party trick in the mess. Got me into a heap of trouble.” He eased the car into a four-way junction and took a right turn toward Poolhaven. “Sometimes, when things were quiet, I’d stand a row of bullets in line on a table, then knock the first down just by thinking about it, so it took out the rest like a row of dominoes. The guys in my unit thought it was fake. They would say I’d moved the table or someone else had, or I was blowing on the bullet or wafting my hand. You name it, they always found a reason for that bullet to drop — until the day I took out the middle one of nine and rolled it clean away from the rest. That freaked them out. The next thing I knew, someone had reported it to my commanding officer. I was hauled in to explain. I said it was a joke, that I used my knee to tap the table and got lucky if I picked the right bullet to fall. He didn’t believe me. Not long after that, Klimt turned up.”

  “Your commanding officer knew about UNICORNE?”

  “I guess.”

  “So … they’re a military outfit?”

  His eyes came up to the mirror again. “Any organization at the cutting edge of human understanding is going to be of interest to the military, Michael, but all you’ll ever see is the science and research. I was transferred into a special ops unit. It turned out to be a UNICORNE cell. Now I investigate spooks, just like you. They have a name for us. They call us Talens. Humans with a gift. I move things with my mind. Chantelle glamours people. You flip your reality. Your dad read moods. There are others. Telepaths. Remote viewers. People who can do complex math at the speed of a computer. They’ve got a pretty good collection of freaks in there.”

  “Why? What do they want us for?”

  His shoulders rose. “No one knows and no one asks. They recruit you, look after you, pay you well, run
you through a series of tests now and then —”

  “Tests?”

  “Lab work. What they call neural enhancement. When you’re ready, Klimt will take you through it. They send the best of us out to investigate the UFiles — all the weird and wonderful stuff. ‘The truth is out there,’ as someone once said, but it can be hard to track down — and even harder to believe.”

  “Truth?”

  “The world moves in mysterious ways, Michael, and so does the human mind. Just do your work and try not to think about the reasons why. Being a UNICORNE agent beats getting your head blown off in a war or shoveling fries in a burger joint, right?”

  Right. But it struck me that the biggest UFile of all was UNICORNE itself. Someone had to be running it. Someone knew what their agenda was. “Last time I was here, I saw a man in a suit, in the lab, giving orders. Who is he? What does he do?”

  “He bites,” Mulrooney replied, braking to avoid an oncoming truck. He drove another fifty yards, then turned down a road that looked like a dust track, cordoned off by a set of high gates. “You’ll meet him soon enough.” He opened a compartment next to his seat, took out a badge, and held it up to the corner of the windshield. A red light blinked on a camera outside and the gates to the UNICORNE facility slid open.

  “This is a different entrance,” I said as the car descended a concrete ramp into a small underground parking garage. When Mom had driven me home from the clinic, we’d gone out through gardens and redbrick pillars. This was like the service entrance.

  “I was told to bring you in this way,” he said. He parked and we got out. He guided me toward an old-fashioned elevator, one of those with a grille you slide across the cage, and you can hear the cables straining and smell the ancient grease in the pulleys. Considering this was a secret facility, I wasn’t impressed so far.