The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(161)

Those moments in the glade that were supposed to last forever, that were supposed to be theirs to reclaim no matter how far away and apart the four of them travel: he’s robbing those. He’s scrubbing away the glowing map-lines that were supposed to lead each of them back. Selena’s and then Julia’s, he’ll go after Holly next, he’s a crow gobbling their crumb-trails and never full. The road of dots across Becca’s belly leaps with fresh pain.

Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places—

Outside the window the moon is a thin white smear behind purple-grey clouds. Becca unclenches her teeth and holds out her palms.

Save us

The clouds pulse. They bubble at the edges.

Julia broke the vow; even if she was forced to, that doesn’t matter, not to this. So did Selena, whatever she did or didn’t do with him. If she danced along the line, if she broke up with him before they went right over, this doesn’t care. None of those things change the punishment.

Forgive us. Burn this out of us turn us pure again. Get him out get us back to how we used to be

The sky simmers and thrums. The answers heave under a thin skin of cloud.

Something is required.

Whatever you want. You want blood I’ll cut myself open

The light dims, rejecting. Not that.

Becca thinks of poured wine, clay figurines, flash of a knife and scatter of feathers. She has no clue where she would get a bird, or wine actually, but if—

What tell me what

With a vast silent roar the sky bursts open, the clouds explode to fragments that dissolve before they hit the ground. Out of the white and enormous blaze it drops into her open palms:

Him.

She was thinking like a stupid little kid. Booze nicked from Mum’s wine rack, chicken blood; baby stuff, for eyelinered idiots playing witch games they don’t understand.

In old times, there were punishments for forcing a girl who had made a vow. Becca’s read about them: buried alive, flayed, clubbed to death—

Him. No other sacrifice could ever be enough, not to purify this.

Becca almost gets up and runs, back to the common room and French homework. She knows she could, if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.

Selena staring into her palmful of hair, the hunch of Julia’s shoulders when she came back in from the seething dark, the fast desperate beat of Holly’s voice. The moments, over the last few weeks, when Becca’s hated all three of them. Any day now it’ll be too late for them to find their way back, ever again.

Yes. Yes I’ll do it. Yes I’ll find a way.

The ferocity of celebration that rises to meet that, outside her and inside, almost throws her across the room. The dots across her belly drum wild rhythms.

But I don’t know who I need to

Not Chris Harper. Chris didn’t need to be kind to Becca, he didn’t do it to get something – Becca knows perfectly well that a guy like Chris isn’t after someone like her – and free kindness doesn’t go with evil. But that leaves Finn Andrew Seamus Fran?ois everyone, how can she—

It comes to her like the curve of a great smile: she doesn’t have to know who. All she has to know is where and when. And she can choose those for herself, because she’s a girl, and girls have the power to call guys running any time they want.

Becca knows how to be super-careful. Nothing is going to crack open her secret.

All the sky streams with white, great joyous cool sheets of it pouring down over her hands and her upturned face and her whole body, filling her open mouth.



On Thursday morning Becca wears her outgrown kilt again, and this time Sister Cornelius loses the head and bangs her desk with the ruler and gives the whole class a hundred lines of I will pray to the Blessed Virgin to grant me modesty. And then she sends Becca back to her room to change.

There’s no way to know what time this guy and Selena were meeting, but at least Becca knows one place where they met. Tonight in that clearing place? one text said, way back in March. Same time?

In the last place in the world where she should have brought him. For a second, zipping up her too-long new kilt, Becca’s afraid this guy must have power of his own behind him, to turn Selena into such a total lobotomised idiot. She spots a dropped scrap of paper on the carpet, launches it spinning like a moth around the light fixture to remind herself: she has power too.

The phone doesn’t feel black and hot any more; it’s turned foam-light and nimble, buttons pressing themselves almost before Becca’s thumb can find them. She redoes the text four times before she’s positive it’s OK. Can you meet tonight? 1 in the cypress clearing?

She might not get the chance to check for an answer, but it doesn’t matter: he’ll be there. Maybe Julia’s already set up a meeting for tonight – Becca doesn’t know how she contacts him – but he’ll blow Julia off, if he thinks Selena’s beckoning. It rises off his texts like heat: what he really wants is Selena.

He can’t have her.



Becca leaves soon after midnight, to give herself time to prepare. In the mirror on their wardrobe door, she looks like a burglar: dark-blue jeans and her dark-blue hoodie, and her designer black leather gloves that Mum gave her for Christmas and she’s never worn before. Her hood strings are pulled so tight that just her eyes and nose stick out. It makes her grin – You look like the world’s fattest bank robber – but the grin doesn’t show; she looks solemn, almost stern, balanced on the balls of her feet ready for battle. Around her the others breathe slow and deep as enchanted princesses in a fairy tale.