Alyzon Whitestarr (28 page)

That night when I slept, I dreamed again that I was a wolf. I woke feeling tired and out of sorts, and the only thing I could think was that the dream was my subconscious trying to deal with the input from my extended senses. In particular, from my sense of smell.

When I got downstairs that morning, Da was dressed to go out and checking his duffel bag.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Got a gig in Remington,” Da said.

“Remington?”

“I told you about it,” Da said, easing the zipper past the worn bit that always caught. “The gig with the other band.” There was no sign of the doubts he had shown days before.

“What is it?” Da asked, catching the look on my face.

“I just don’t much like Aaron Rayc,” I said lamely. I wanted to tell him to cancel the gig, but even if I had broken my promise and told Da what Gary Soloman had said, it wasn’t concrete enough to make him break a commitment.

“He’s not our kind of person,” Da said. “But that doesn’t make him a
bad person.
He’s doing me a favor funneling work my way right when we need it for your mum’s show.” He zipped his bag fully and went upstairs to say goodbye to Mum and Luke.

The phone rang and I snatched it up. “Yes?”

“Yes tae you, too,” Harrison said.

“Harrison. Hang on,” I told him, and gave Da a hug on his way out.

“See you in a couple of days,” he said.

I grabbed up the receiver, registering what Da had said with a sinking heart. “Sorry, Harrison. What is it?”

“Did you call last night?” He sounded tired and tense.

“I did, but I thought it must have been a wrong number. There was a man—”

“It was my father,” Harrison said brusquely. There was a crash in the background. “Look, I have tae go, Alyzon,” he said hastily and hung up.

I put the receiver down, wondering what had happened.

* * *

I was more than glad to see Gilly waiting for me at the school gate when the bus pulled up. She hooked her arm through mine as we came into the school, enveloping me in the lovely freshness of her sea scent. I knew she was there waiting in case Harlen had been waiting, too, but he was nowhere in sight.

At lunchtime I had booked a spot in the computer lab for the first half hour, the maximum time slot, and Gilly agreed to come with me. There was a note on the computers warning students to be careful about what they downloaded because a virus had recently infected the system, corrupting much of the school’s network of computers.

I typed Aaron Rayc’s name into a search engine. A list of entries came up, and I clicked on the first. It turned out to be a luridly overdecorated gossip site as famous for its bitchiness as for its raunchy photos. Of course, the latter set off the school’s cyber nanny and blocked the connection, so I backtracked and tried the second item on the list, a who’s-who-type monthly magazine with photos and stories of people with a pedigree.

The mention of Rayc came in an article at the top, which talked about him being at a charity ball for Hunger Relief with Dita and singer Angel Blue, who had recently won a major music industry award.

“Angel Blue?” I asked Gilly, who shrugged but made a note of the name on a scrap of paper while I clicked on the next entry. This time a longer article appeared, describing the opening of a club for billionaires. The luxury of the rooms
made the people lounging in them look unreal, and I felt slightly sick thinking of these same men and women attending balls to raise funds for starving nations. How many thousands of people could have been fed by the money squandered on decorations in each of the ballrooms, let alone the amount spent on clothes and jewels for the occasion? And how much of the money raised actually got where it was supposed to go?

Aaron Rayc was in a photograph with Dita; she was wearing daffodil-yellow silk chiffon. With them, according to the caption, were Lord and Lady Harmigan. The couple looked like an astonishingly ugly elderly father and his exquisite daughter, but they were described as recently married.

“I think she used to be some kind of radical artist, but I can’t remember her real name,” Gilly murmured, tapping on Patricia Harmigan’s glowing face.

I searched the article to be sure there was no other mention of Rayc, then clicked on the next item listed. Another magazine, another article, another charity fund-raiser, but my neck prickled because this one was at the Castledean Estate. Aaron Rayc’s name appeared as the owner of the venue, but the article focused on the guest headlining the concert program for the night, a rock star so famous that even I recognized his name, although he had died about three years before.

“Didn’t Dawed Rafael—” Gilly began.

“Commit suicide,” I said.

Gary Soloman’s words floated through my mind with chilling emphasis: “Aaron Rayc is bad news for artists.”

“Now I remember,” Gilly said. “Everyone was calling Dawed Rafael the new Bob Dylan, because he’d brought the protest song back. But then he went into leather and chains, and his songs got a lot tougher and more violent, and people said he was outrageous and he must be on drugs. I’m sure it was him that did a concert with real blood smeared over his face, and then there was that time he used a water gun to squirt red stuff at the audience and they went crazy because they thought it was blood. A girl got badly hurt in the stampede, and it wasn’t long after that—”

“He killed himself,” I said. “Write his name down.”

The next item was from a serious kind of art magazine, an interview with a man called Oliver Spike. He was a writer talking about technique and philosophy and about his underprivileged youth in the UK. I searched for a mention of Aaron Rayc and found it right at the end of the article, where Oliver Spike called him “a close personal friend.”

Gilly wrote his name down, too, then pointed at the clock.

“One more,” I muttered.

The next article was about a poet called Zarbra. There was a picture of her with Aaron and Dita Rayc, a small, plain woman with short graying hair and drab gray clothes. The article said that she was one of a number of writers to receive a coveted humanitarian award for her cycle of poems on the theme of inhumanity. The award, the article said, was the initiative of Dita Rayc, and the caption under the picture mentioned that Zarbra had won several other awards, but that this was the first with a lot of prize money. The journalist added
that Zarbra had received her prize at a ceremony at the Castledean Estate in Remington.

Castledean Estate again
, I thought.

“Oh, hi,” Gilly said with such false enthusiasm that I knew at once who was behind me. I closed the browser and turned to see Harlen Sanderson leaning in the doorway in a way that suggested he’d been there for some time. My heart pounded as I tried to remember if we had said anything important out loud.

“Sorry to hear about your house, Gilly,” Harlen said. He sounded sincere, but he smelled ghastly.

“At least no one was hurt,” Gilly said.

“Your grandmother is lucky she had insurance and money.” Harlen’s voice was pleasant, but Gilly bridled.

“Money can’t replace photographs and mementos from a lifetime.”

“I guess not,” Harlen said. He switched his gaze to me, and his smile widened to show his teeth.
Like a shark
, I thought, and wondered if it was my imagination that I could now see a cold wariness behind the warmth in his eyes. It was all I could do not to shudder, thinking of something alien, hungering to infect me. I forced a smile, but it felt thin and brittle.

“I’ve been looking for you all day, baby,” Harlen said.

I tried hard to look pleased and coy. “I’ve been around,” I said.

“So let’s arrange that date finally,” he said, then he flashed a mocking look at Gilly. “If Gilly can spare you.”

Before I could answer, the computer teacher came in and
shooed us all away, saying there had been enough problems for him without having students hanging around. He seemed unusually flustered, and even Harlen’s gleaming smile didn’t soften him. Then the bell rang.

“Catch you later,” Harlen promised, winking at me and vanishing into the stream of students.

“Not if we can help it, baby,” Gilly muttered.

We didn’t talk about Harlen as we made our way to science. Instead, I said, “Did you notice that all of the people in those articles had stopped working? Patricia Harmigan married, Dawed Rafael suicided, and have you ever heard of Zarbra or Angel Blue?”

“So what?” Gilly asked.

“It’s just …” I stopped, realizing I could say nothing clear without breaking my promise to Gary Soloman.

Gilly looked puzzled. “You think Aaron Rayc is responsible for those people not working?”

“He might have had something to do with it.”

“I don’t see how. I mean, Patricia Harmigan probably stopped because she married a rich old man, and Dawed Rafael’s suicide happened at a gig when there were thousands of people watching. That poet could still be working, for all we know. And what about that Oliver Spike guy? He’s still working. I saw his name in the paper just the other day.”

I frowned, realizing she was right. Then I shrugged. “I just have this feeling.”

Gilly gave me a long, measuring look. “I bet I’m going to hear that phrase from you a lot. But I guess I have to get used to the fact that you have more resources than the average bunny.”

* * *

At home that night it was quiet because Da was away, Serenity had gone upstairs early with a headache, and Mirandah was out with Ricki. Jesse and I had beans on toast for dinner. We had just finished when Luke wailed, and Jesse went up to fetch him.

“I think he might have a bit of a temperature,” he said, nuzzling one bright red cheek. “I’ll give him some baby aspirin, and we’ll see how he is a bit later. He’s hungry, though.”

I volunteered to feed Luke, and I was still spooning mushed vegetable into him when Jesse got a preoccupied look and said he had to go up and write something down.

“Sure,” I said, but he had already gone out. “That is one possessed brother we have,” I told Luke, who fixed me with an adoring look and spat a great gob of mush onto my hand. “Erk,” I said, laughing. I felt so safe and peaceful feeding him. It felt as if I was in another world from the one with Aaron Rayc and Harlen and Dr. Austin.

After Luke finished eating, I played with him on a mat in the living room and saw little sparks and flickers in the air around him. We were building a tower of blocks when Neil came in, saying he had knocked but no one had heard.

“Everyone’s out or in their bedrooms. And Da’s not here, but you knew that?”

He smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I just came to borrow a mike. Mine’s on the blink.”

“Have you got a gig?”

“Losing the Rope has a gig tomorrow. It’s only a little thing, and we’ve got someone to fill in for your da.” He ambled out to the shed and then came back fifteen minutes later with the mike and leads.

“Have a coffee?” I urged, pointing to a plate of his favorite cookies that I had put out. Luke was in his chair hammering on the wall with his battered rabbit.

Neil sat and made faces at him while I made coffee. “So what’s on your mind?” Neil asked when I slid a mug to him and sat down opposite.

“Did you ever meet that big rock star Dawed Rafael?”

“The Welsh guy that took a high dive? Yeah, I met him a couple of times when he was an up-and-comer, but then he moved into the stratosphere.”

“Do you know why he killed himself?”

“Common knowledge. A girl was crippled because of some crazy stunt he pulled during a show, and he couldn’t handle it. He was an idealist, see, and idealists take it pretty hard when they fall short of their own ideals.”

I frowned. “He doesn’t sound as if he was much of an idealist. Wasn’t he shooting blood at his audience and smearing it on his face in performances?”

“Shock tactics. He was political, and somewhere along the way he lost faith in the power of music and lyrics to make an impact. He said people had to be made to see the truth of the pain other people felt, no matter what it took.”

“I wonder what made him change?”

Neil shrugged. “The thing about idealists who want to change the world is that they can get pretty messed up when the world doesn’t show the slightest interest in changing. I prefer your da’s brand of idealism. He never tries to force anyone to do anything. He just quietly does the best he can and never seems to get angry when things don’t work out. He gets sad sometimes, I think. But he doesn’t savage himself and turn bitter. I’ve never thought it out before, but being around him is … well, you find yourself wanting to live up to him. Be like him.” He chuckled richly. “I tell you, you feel a right git if you lose your temper around him.”

“I know,” I laughed. “What about a singer called Angel Blue? Have you ever heard of her?”

“Angel Blue.” Neil ate another cookie absentmindedly “She’s a pop star, isn’t she?

“What about a writer called Oliver Spike?”

At that moment Mum came in, ravishing in blue draperies. “Oliver Spike. I knew him once. Hello, Neil.” She kissed him and then scooped Luke out of his chair.

We both stared at her.