Seeing Mordue at Renner’s lighthouse made perfect sense, and yet it made no sense at all.
We drove back to Carvell with the windows down, letting the flow of crisp sea air wake us up. The adrenaline of rescuing Hafsah had long worn off, and all I could think of was resting my aching body in a warm bed. And yet Lottie’s screams from the chip shop reverberated through my skull, through the dark and dusty corners of my chest. I never wanted to hear her scream like that again. Some strange protective instinct had come over me, and for a fleeting moment, all I wanted was to hug her to my chest and keep her safe.
Absurd, of course. She was a six-foot-tall athlete; she could take care of herself. She didn’t need me.
Lottie, who sat in the front passenger seat beside me as I drove, plucked a chip from a limp newspaper wrapper and bit into it with a sensuous groan. Food always made her feel better, and so the finest delicacy Northumberland had to offer felt like a fair reward for surviving the afternoon.
‘Maybe Mordue performed the ritual too,’ she said, licking the salt from her fingertips. ‘God, what if Mordue killed Poppy? And all the original victims? It would kind of make sense. She even admitted to me she was the only one with the key.’
‘I’m not sure,’ I confessed, looking out at the caravan park we were driving past. ‘I don’t know why the very sensible dean of the university would feel the need to dabble in petty occultism. Though it would explain why she was coming to see Renner – searching for the reversal ritual as well.’
Lottie finished her final chip, scrunched up the vinegar- soaked newspaper and tossed it into the messy footwell. ‘So what do we do now? Tell the police about Mordue visiting Renner and leave it to them to investigate?’
Hafsah snorted from the back seat, clicking her fingers in time to the upbeat pop song on the radio. ‘I mean, telling them about Mordue would also involve telling them about the existence of a secret supernatural ritual that goes back hundreds of years, the fact two of us performed said ritual for no good reason, that we practically stalked a mentally ill old man and badgered him into giving us instructions for a counter ritual that may or may not exist, and that we think the dean of our university murdered a student in a fit of evil rage linked to the above, and while telling them all of this, we would have to keep a straight face. So that feels like a not great course of action.’
Lottie nodded sagely. ‘Point taken. So how about we do a little Sherlocking of our own?’ She patted the notebook and Parker fountain pen in the front pocket of her backpack.
‘Sherlock?’ I scoffed. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. You’re one hundred per cent Scooby Doo.’
She smirked at me sideways. ‘Which makes you Scooby Doo’s sidekick, does it not?’
‘Sidekick?In what world am I –’
Hafsah sighed, flinging sideways in her seat as I took a roundabout slightly too fast. ‘Would you two consider not flirting for one single second so I can concentrate?’
I gripped the steering wheel tightly and waited for Lottie to object to the accusation that we’d been flirting, but the outrage never came. She did, however, fall completely silent.
It had been weirdly intimate seeing her in Little Marmouth, a place that felt like an extension of myself; the hot sugar scent of frying donuts, the clinking of old copper pennies in the arcade, the fragrant hops of the nearby brewery mixed with the unmistakable salt tang of the North Sea. A place that was so viscerally mine, shared with her.
Heat stung at my cheeks the whole way back, and not even the frigid sea air could cool them down.
*
Lottie must have performed some kind of witchcraft of her own, because the day after our trip to the lighthouse, I found myself standing at the side of a freezing-cold hockey field, in the bare depths of November, ready to watch her play. Voluntarily. Of my own free will.
She’d come back from training the previous evening with a fiery glow in her eyes, despite the icy rain hammering at our window. Her number fourteen jersey was drenched through, and clung heavily to every long muscular line of her body. She smelled of cold, fresh air.
‘I made the first eleven!’ she exclaimed, beaming at me as she waited for my reaction. I wasn’t sure what to say, on account of not understanding the statement, but she persevered in search of praise. ‘I mean, it’s not that amazing an achievement for a first year when there are no older years here to compete against for places . . . but still. I’m starting tomorrow!’
‘Starting,’ I repeated. ‘As in, when the game starts, you will be standing on the pitch? I was operating under the assumption you did that already.’
She rolled her eyes and tossed her sodden stick bag on the floor. ‘I’ve been a sub up until now. Haven’t played more than ten minutes of any given match.’
‘Oh. Then I retract all of my historic sympathy for previous defeats.’
‘Sympathy? Alice, you said, “I’m sorry your team was not as good as the other team,” and then handed me a bottle of wine.’
‘Yes,’ I said pointedly. ‘Sympathy. And I retract it.’
She laughed, shaking her soaking-wet hair free of its high ponytail. ‘You’re unbelievable. Anyway, I’m off for a hot shower. Do you mind if I borrow a towel? I forgot to hang mine up last night, and I think it’s growing a new towel.’
For some godforsaken reason, I found myself blushing as I handed her the soft, dry towel I’d already used once. It had touched me, naked, and now it was going to touch her, naked, and why did she not realise how intimate that was? Then again, maybe I was overthinking it, as I was wont to do.
Anyway, in a fit of chaotic and unprecedented decentness, I found myself coming along to her starting match to support her. It seemed like the least I could do, since she’d been repeatedly flinging herself in harm’s way in order to save Hafsah and me from the transformations.
The sky was grey and mizzling (which is what Northumbrians called that omnipresent half-mist, half-drizzle situation). The hockey pitch was surrounded by trees, and the muddy ground was crunchy with yellow-brown sycamore seeds. There was a winter coarseness to the breeze that hadn’t been there a few days before.
Lottie was yet to spot me in the crowd, but as she and her teammates swarmed on to the pitch under the harsh white glare of the floodlights, I felt a strange prickle of awe. Playing sport was not something I’d ever particularly aspired to, but I respected the way she was willing to put herself out there like that. To be watched by hundreds of people as she ran around, sweating and shouting at her teammates to pass her the ball, the whole time risking the fact she might look like an idiot if she messed up, or might get hurt, and so many people would see her in pain and defeat. There was a bravery and a vulnerability to it I’d never considered before.
I wasn’t going soft on sports, I told myself. Just Lottie.
She played centre midfield, which even I understood meant she did most of the running around. I did not understand the physicality of how she could sprint the length of the pitch so many times and not require the aid of an oxygen tank. I felt breathless just watching her.
Just before the half-time whistle blew, the score was 1–1. One of her teammates passed her the ball and she took off up the field, weaving between the opposition’s players like they were nothing, doing fancy little dribbles and dance-like skips. It was beautiful, in a way. HardlySwan Lake, but in comparison to the brutishness of the other thugs ramming up and down the pitch, I had to admit Lottie had a certain elegance to her play. She deserved to have made the first eleven.
Then, just as she approached the D in front of the other team’s goal and poised herself to shoot, a defender lifted her stick to make a tackle.
But she lifted it too high, too fast, and she was in the wrong place, and it thudded into Lottie’s skull with a sickening jolt.
I screamed as she fell lifelessly to the ground.