Wildwood Read online

  Dawn was breaking and the trees were grey shadows in the pale haze as I ran through the wet grass, my trainers soaking up the dew. The bag clutched to my chest felt heavy. I tried to ignore the even more uncomfortable weight within my breast. I’d betrayed Michael and it was what the bastard deserved, wasn’t it? He’d risked my life, hadn’t he, just for a threesome? But still I felt nauseous. I got to the Wood Gate and threw myself over the beams, shouting, ‘Ash! Ash!’ with the last of my breath.

  All over the wood the rooks rose in a great racket; I could only assume it was one of Ash’s alarms. But in the camp nothing stirred. The little encampment had never looked so much like an assortment of litter. I stumbled among the bivouacs and the benders, kicking each structure and calling out between gasps. Then from under a canvas lean-to Ash emerged on hands and knees, face and hair rumpled with sleep. He was wearing the jumper I’d lent him the day of the bath disaster; the soft white wool suited him better than it had me and instead of hanging like a sack it outlined his chest and shoulders. At the sight my heart did a little flip

  ‘Avril?’ He rubbed his face. ‘I was dreaming. I dreamt we were –’

  ‘I’ve got it!’ I cried, rushing up to him. The rooks were going crazy overhead.

  ‘Got what?’

  ‘The book. I stole it.’

  His hazel eyes snapped into focus. ‘The book?’

  I pulled open the zip, thrusting the bag at him. ‘There! There it is. Take it.’

  He stared into the depths, uncomprehending. Then he reached in to touch the contents. Just as I blurted, ‘Careful!’ he snatched his hand out again, recoiling as if he’d been bitten.

  ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘You stole it?’

  ‘That’s what you wanted!’

  ‘Not here.’ Horror was pulling his face tighter and tighter. ‘You can’t bring it in here.’ Grabbing my shoulder he whirled me round and started hustling me bodily back towards the gate. ‘Not inside the wood, Avril! It’s the key, for Christ’s sake. If he gets hold of it he can use it to break free.’ His words were nearly drowned under the cawing of the rooks. Only when we got back to the gate and Ash snatched the bag from my grasp and hurled it out onto the meadow beyond did the cawing begin to diminish. We both scrambled over, following the fallen rucksack.

  ‘You didn’t tell me!’ I complained, but Ash wasn’t listening. He approached the rucksack as gingerly as if it contained a viper and pulled one corner of the towel until the book edged into view. The grass around it began to blacken and visibly wither. ‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered, retreating somewhat. I was surprised it hadn’t set fire to my dirty laundry. ‘Is it radioactive?’

  ‘Not as such.’ Ash seemed to have regained some self-possession. He produced his clasp knife, squatted down and stabbed the blade hilt-deep into the earth. Then he used the tip to gently open the book and get a look at the pages within. ‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’

  ‘I used the towel.’ From what I could see it was brown handwriting on a brown page, very closely written. ‘That is the right one, is it?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ He let the cover drop and then sat back, swearing under his breath.

  ‘What are you going to do with it? You’re going to burn it, aren’t you?’

  He blinked. ‘It’s trapped to hurt if you touch it, Avril. What do you think’s going to happen if I throw it on a fire?’

  ‘Then what the hell are you going to do?’

  He chewed his lip. ‘I need to get the wards off for a start. I need somewhere quiet and safe to work.’

  ‘Well,’ I pointed out, ‘when Michael gets to the airport he’s going to notice the book’s missing from the car. That’s only going to be a couple of hours, tops.’

  Ash’s eyes were particularly green today, I noticed as he looked up at me. ‘Dismantling the wards is going to take a bit longer than that.’

  I squirmed, frustrated. ‘I’ve just committed career-suicide for you, Ash. I didn’t plan on it being the other sort too! You’ve got somewhere to take it, haven’t you? You’ve got a plan?’

  ‘Avril … I wasn’t expecting you to … just pinch the thing.’

  ‘Shit.’ I felt suddenly clammy.

  ‘Deverick’s going to come back for it.’ He spoke quietly, as if ticking off a simple mental list. ‘It can’t go into the wood. We’re not safe out here. I’m going to have to take it and go, Avril. You should … run. Get away. A long way off.’

  ‘Like I’m going to be safe on my own?’ I didn’t mean it to come out sounding as panicky as it did.

  Ash was keeping his expression closed but his breath was coming harder and faster than normal. ‘Fair point.’

  I stomped in a circle, stuffing my brains back into order. ‘Have you got a phone on you?’

  His eyes flicked to the trees, where the rooks were keeping up an ominous creaking. ‘Back at the camp.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea. I have a friend called Miranda, in London. She works for a publisher attached to the University …’

  Fifteen minutes later I gave him his phone back. ‘It’s sorted,’ I said, feeling dizzy. ‘We get the book to her and she’ll scan the lot. She can get pages posted to every academic institution on the planet with a medieval studies programme. Nobody’s going to take it seriously as a grimoire, but she reckons postgraduates would rather do anything than get on with their everyday research. They’ll start translating. And it turns out she runs this online magazine site which is where the Medieval Latin geeks hang out for fun, and she can put it up there. The book’ll be public domain in a couple of days. That’ll do it, won’t it?’

  Ash, who’d been pacing up and down, looked at me as if slightly dazed. ‘Yes. It should do. It’ll suck the book dry.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘You trust this friend of yours?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ There was something nagging faintly at the back of my head but I pushed it away. ‘She’s great. She says to meet at her place.’

  ‘Then we should go now.’

  ‘My car?’

  He gestured wryly. ‘I’m at your mercy.’

  Ash carried the rucksack as we jogged back through the grounds, and he kept a careful half-dozen paces behind me. I didn’t think he entirely trusted me even then, and I didn’t blame him: it could so easily have been a ruse of Deverick’s to lure him out into the open. When we’d piled our stuff into my car he sat with the bag between his knees and the passenger window wide open, his long fingers trailing in the slipstream as if he were Braille-reading the air. ‘Take a left,’ was his suggestion as we exited the estate. ‘The roads should be clearer that way.’

  We didn’t talk much as we travelled. Ash wasn’t exactly the chatty sort and applied himself to following our route on my road map, while I had to concentrate on driving the narrow steep-sided roads in relative safety. Once Ash snapped, ‘Brake!’ and I slewed to a crawl just before a sporty Honda came zipping over the horizon and thrust past us, scraping its paintwork on the embankment. The near-miss left me shaken. There was no way that Ash could have seen that car was coming, but I felt it was a bit foolish to question his instincts at this stage.

  After that we got onto a decent A-road and were able to head east at a proper speed. It didn’t last even an hour. Without warning the car engine cut out and I had to coast onto the verge, where I sat and cursed and twisted the ignition key fruitlessly. ‘It’s just been serviced!’ I complained.

  ‘Not the garage’s fault, unfortunately.’ Ash opened his door and peered back down the road behind us. ‘It’s Deverick. He’s had access to your car, presumably.’

  I made a gurgle of incomprehension.

  ‘He’s noticed the book’s missing.’ Clutching bag and road map, Ash sprang up the verge to look over a field gate. ‘Come on!’ he urged as I climbed out. ‘We need to get off the road right now.’

  I followed him over the gate and we yomped through a pasture, watched by perplexed cows. Through a muddy cattle-wade, under two strands of b
arbed wire, and across a wasteland of stubble beyond, I gritted my teeth and kept up with his long stride. We forced a hedge to get to the road on the other side, yet somehow despite our being dishevelled and mud-splattered and panting, the very first car Ash put his thumb out to stopped for us. The mumsy driver – and as far as I know lone middle-aged women never stop for hitchers – took us thirty miles out of her way to drop us off at the nearest railway station, chatting away to Ash all the while as if he were a ten-year-old on his first camping trip. I’m not sure she even remembered that I’d climbed into the back seat. Before she drove off she called to him, ‘Have fun, dear.’

  Ash studiously failed to catch my eye.

  It wasn’t much of a station; it didn’t even have a manned office. Ash bought us tickets from a machine, using a platinum credit card. ‘I thought you were on benefits?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘Computers are easy to fool with magic,’ he said. ‘More so even than people.’

  Electronic boards flashed up a warning of an express coming straight through. ‘The problem is that trains to London won’t stop here,’ I said. ‘This place isn’t big enough.’

  ‘Wait and see.’ He was right; the inter-city express, far too long for our platform, came in braking hard and stopped alongside. ‘Faulty signal ahead,’ Ash muttered. He went up to the carriage door and stabbed a finger at the lock, which was glowing an unco-operative red. To my amazement it switched instantly to green and the door slid open. We stalked down the centre aisle of the carriage to an empty table and chairs.

  The journey to London was uneventful. I had to reassess the inherent glamour of being a magus when Ash spent an hour of it locked in the toilet with the grimoire, ankle-deep in wet toilet paper, and I stood at his request on watch outside. He emerged looking green but satisfied, having removed enough wards from the book to at least make it possible to handle. We’d lost our seats by the time this was done, but found another vacant pair. Ash took the window seat and I, exhausted by a hectic night and our flight from the estate, sat back in mine and fell immediately asleep.

  I awoke to find that in my sleep I’d snuggled against Ash’s shoulder and had my face pressed to his coat. Worse, my hand was resting on his right thigh, high up near his hip. For a moment I was too embarrassed to move. I couldn’t see his face from my angle. I couldn’t tell if he knew I’d woken. He didn’t stir. Maybe, I thought, he was asleep too. I could feel the warmth of his thigh through the heavy cotton of his trousers, and it occurred to me that if the fabric hadn’t been there I would be resting my hand on that intricate tribal tattoo. I wanted very much to touch that jagged black outline with my fingers, explore the soft skin that belied the sharp ink angles. My mouth went dry. I wanted to trace every thornlike curve with the tip of my tongue. I wanted to lick along the division between creamy skin and black ink and find out if I could taste the difference. I wanted to sink my face into the heat of his crotch and feel him stir and swell and rise against my lips. Desire was suddenly so hungry in me that it hurt. My heart began to beat hard.

  Oh God, he knew. It didn’t show much under those baggy pants, but he was half-hard, fat and strokeable like a curled-up cat. Was it my wicked thoughts that had stirred him, I wondered, or just the fact that I was pressed against him? Or perhaps he’d dozed off too, and his cock was merely swollen with sleep?

  ‘Avril,’ he said softly, ‘we’re nearly there. Time to wake up.’

  ‘Mmm?’ I sat back, faking more sleepiness and confusion than I really felt and dabbing at his coat sleeve. ‘Oh God, did I dribble on you? Sorry.’

  ‘I’ll live,’ said he with a smile. ‘What were you dreaming about?’

  I could only hope the flush in my cheeks looked innocent. ‘What?’

  ‘You were whimpering in your sleep.’

  ‘Ah.’ I blinked. The memory had faded quickly and I had to struggle to recapture it. ‘It was just the one about the dragons.’

  ‘Dragons?’

  ‘Yes. There’s a red one and a white one, fighting. I’ve had it a few times recently.’ I wasn’t going to let slip how much the dream turned me on. Every time.

  ‘Red and white? Underground?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘It’s not your dream.’ When I frowned at him he dropped his voice, explaining, ‘It’s Merlin’s. When he was a boy he was about to be sacrificed in order to save a tower that kept falling down during construction. He had a vision just in time that revealed the cause: two dragons fighting beneath the earth.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a foreshadowing of the fall of Britain, I think – the battles between the British and the Saxons.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s the book.’ He tapped his fingers on the knapsack. ‘It gets to you.’

  I could think of another, rather more personal interpretation. Neither version really explained why the first time I’d had the dream was, as far as I could remember, in my mother’s spare bedroom the night before coming to the West Country.

  We disembarked in the echoing clamour of Paddington Station shortly before noon. ‘We need to throw Deverick off the trail,’ said Ash.

  ‘You think he’ll be following us?’

  ‘I know he’ll be trying to.’ So we headed across London by foot and by Underground, taking trains at random, switching from Circle Line to District to Northern and back, criss-crossing over our tracks, climbing to street level to shift between stations, never keeping still. We ate on the move, and Ash took the paper envelopes of our tortilla wraps and the empty cardboard coffee cups and, folding them neatly, stowed them away in the pockets of the knapsack. We didn’t talk much: a public Tube train isn’t exactly the place to discuss the in and outs of magic.

  I found the novelty of the big city stimulating at first with so many new faces and places to look at. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total country mouse. I’d been to London before for the shopping and the sightseeing. But it was a bit of a shock to find out how much I had grown accustomed to quiet and space and solitude out in the country, and just how insecure I felt under those beetling buildings, how disorientated by the flash of a million different objects displayed in the shop windows and how much the constant press of the crowds jangled on my nerves after a while. I started to feel agitated. I couldn’t handle the traffic either; Ash had to take me by the arm when we crossed the roads because my brain seemed incapable of assessing the gaps between so many moving vehicles. I felt useless and that made me angry, and the more angry I felt the less I could tolerate the stink of fumes and the babble of unfamiliar accents and languages. When we came out of yet another Tube station onto the street and I got jammed by the flow of pedestrians against the stall of an Evening Standard vendor, I lost sight of Ash temporarily and for a moment I felt a surge of real panic. I was carrying the rucksack at this point and I clutched it to my chest. ‘Shit!’ I hissed through my teeth.

  ‘Are you quite all right, my dear?’ An elderly couple had stopped, and the silver-haired man spoke with old-fashioned enunciation.

  ‘I’m … OK.’ The woman had eyes milky with cataracts, but that didn’t stop her staring at me with a strange intensity.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Then Ash was back again and his hand was on my shoulder. But he only had eyes for the couple. Nothing was said, but for a long moment they glared at each other. Then the elderly man inclined his head and Ash bowed his too, the politeness between them cold and as keen as a razor blade.

  ‘Ashton,’ said the woman before they retreated into the maw of the Underground.

  ‘Who were they?’ I asked. Ash’s grip was uncomfortably tight on my upper arm.

  ‘Some of the people whose attention Deverick doesn’t want to draw.’

  ‘Well … Could they help us?’

  His lips narrowed. ‘Only in the very resort. My enemy’s enemy is not always my friend. And there are worse people out there even than Deverick.’ Finally he turned his attention back to me. ‘Are you all right? What happened?’


  ‘Just too many people,’ I protested, shaking my head. ‘It feels like they’re climbing about inside my skull and giving me a kicking.’ I flinched as someone’s suitcase banged against my calves; the man swept on without apology. Looking thoughtful, Ash took the rucksack from me.

  ‘Let’s head across the park,’ he suggested. ‘There’s more room to breathe, and we can pick up the Piccadilly Line. We’re nearly done.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Well, how many of them would cope with being dumped in a wood on their own?’ he asked with a glance around at the press of people.

  ‘Ah. But you’re used to London, aren’t you?’ I was certain of that; he’d not bothered to consult any map as he’d led us on our winding dance.

  ‘I used to live here a few years back. It’s changed even while I’ve been away, mind you.’ He was no more forthcoming than that and I felt a twinge of disappointment. Ash kept himself a guarded secret. I knew next to nothing about him, after all these weeks: rather less about him than about Michael, in fact.

  We crossed a busy street and headed into the public park, and I felt better almost at once. It was a beautiful breezy golden afternoon, once you were out from under the shadow of those vast buildings whose neo-classical lines reminded me uncomfortably of Michael’s office. The grass was close cut and worn in places and there was litter caught among the regimented flowering shrubs, so it didn’t approach the half-tamed exuberance of the Kester Estate, but there were majestic trees here too. I felt my shoulders lose their tension as we got away from other human beings and I smiled as I admired the mottled, bulging bole of a vast plane tree. We crossed under an avenue of horse chestnuts – always among the earliest in leaf, they’re the first to turn in autumn too and their bronzed leaves were tumbling already. I grinned cheekily at Ash. ‘Catch a falling leaf to make a wish … Is that real magic?’