Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(72)
The feeling was mutual.
The kitchen clock was showing nearly 1 a.m., but they talked for ages round the table. At some point a baby started crying and Daisy excused herself to soothe it. The child was Heir Gavar’s daughter, Dad said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to have the kid of a magical psychopath asleep in a cot upstairs.
Luke recalled his first sight of the heir, striding through the corridor of the detention centre while he and the Doc dragged Oz to freedom. He remembered hoping that his little sister’s path never crossed with Gavar’s, and almost laughed at the irony.
But once his thoughts had veered hundreds of miles north to Jackson and Millmoor, then to the club and the rioters, Luke couldn’t quite get back on track with the family reunion.
Mum noticed him zoning out and ordered everyone to bed, saying that he must be exhausted. He wasn’t, of course. The Equal at the gate – Silyen Jardine, Abi said – had seen to that. But Luke didn’t let on.
He lay awake in the darkness, trying and failing to duck the thoughts that flapped about his head. What had happened in front of the MADhouse after Kessler had coshed him? Where was the Doc? Were Renie, Asif and the others safe? Injured? Captured? What had Silyen Jardine done to him?
And the last thought before he drifted off: what would happen to him now?
Luke spent the weekend lying in, luxuriating in the soft bed and the privacy of a room all of his own, trying to adjust to his new circumstances. Mum clucked around, bringing up bowls of soup and sandwiches. Dad told him about Lord Jardine’s vintage car collection and a tricky carburettor problem he’d solved the previous week. Daisy carried in the baby to show him.
Luke wished she hadn’t. Sure, the little girl looked normal enough. Cute, even. But did she have Skill? That was a creepy thought. All that power inside something so small.
Except it seemed she didn’t, because the kid’s mother wasn’t an Equal, just a slavegirl. (And how had that happened, Luke thought darkly? Had Gavar Jardine seen something he liked and just taken it?)
‘So where is her mum?’ he asked, once the baby had been put back in its cot, out of earshot.
‘Dead,’ Daisy said flatly.
The scenario that Luke had already conjured around Libby Jardine’s origins darkened a shade further.
‘Wasn’t like that,’ said his sister. ‘Why is everyone so set against Gavar? He’s the reason you’re out of Millmoor, Luke.’
Daisy being so brilliant was the reason he was out of Millmoor, and Luke told her so before pulling her into a fierce cuddle. His little sis pummelled him for squeezing her too tightly, but he didn’t mind. He realized that for a while, in the slavetown and then in the van, he had genuinely believed he would never see his family again.
At breakfast on Monday, Jenner turned up and explained that Luke was going to be working as a groundsman. Abi walked into the kitchen while Jenner was there, but on seeing him she stopped short, turned and went back out. Which was peculiar, given that she worked with him.
So Abi’s relationship with Jenner joined Daisy’s friendship with Gavar on the long list of things Luke worried about as he laboured at his new job.
‘Groundsman’ meant that he was some sort of glorified woodcutter under the direction of a miserable old git named Albert. Albert didn’t talk much, which suited Luke just fine. The pair of them worked all over the estate, often miles away from the main house, which also suited Luke fine. It was cold and wet and tiring, and at the end of each day Luke was knackered, just as he had been in Millmoor. That was fine, too, because his body’s exhaustion was the only way of forcing his overloaded brain to shut down each night.
He’d been at Kyneston for nine days when his bag of possessions turned up at the cottage. Did that mean the Overbitch had rubber-stamped his unscheduled departure? Luke tore the bag apart searching for a note or message from the Doc or Renie. Something sewn into the lining, perhaps? Or rolled and stuffed into the handle? But there was nothing.
He looked at the bag’s pathetic contents laid out on his bed. Black socks and grey underpants, a toothbrush, a photo of himself with his classmates on the last day of term that already felt like ancient history. He had nothing to show for his half-year in the slavetown. The only things that mattered – the friendships, everything he’d done and dared, the person he’d become – had all been left behind.
‘How does the post work here?’ he asked Abi a few days later. ‘Could I get a letter to Millmoor?’
When she asked why, he said he wanted to send a ‘thank you’ to a doctor who’d patched him up after an accident.
‘Let him know that I’m doing okay.’
Abi frowned and told him she didn’t think that was a good idea, and besides, the post to Millmoor still wasn’t running.
His second week at Kyneston ended. Then a third. Weeks in which, although surrounded by his family, Luke felt lonelier than he ever had in his life.
Had Jackson and the club forgotten about him already? There’d be no shortage of angry new recruits in Millmoor, so Luke could easily be replaced. But he remembered the games they’d played together: break-ins with Jessica, keeping a lookout for Asif, dangling Renie off the roof. They’d all trusted each other with their lives. You didn’t simply forget about someone after sharing such things.
There were three possibilities, he decided. His friends had been arrested. Or they planned to contact him, but hadn’t been able to yet. Or they believed he was content at Kyneston with his family.