Bloodrush (Scarlet Star Trilogy #1)

Chapter 6 - Seventy-Five Thousand

'She's persistent. Two weeks now, and I'm still running, still being chased. She'll have my head on a spike if it's the last thing she does. There's no going back now. Onwards.'

7th May, 1867

In the bustling core of London, to the west of its beating heart, was Jekyll Park. It was a sprawling carpet of green fields and huddled trees, stretching from the backside of Bucking Tower, all the way up to Kensing Town Gardens. In fact, Jekyll Park was so vast, that if you stood at its very centre, just to the west of the Long Water, and ignored the towering spires of Knightsbridge and Westminster-and the cloying smog-you wouldn't have a clue you were standing in the middle of the largest city on earth.

In the park's southwest corner, in the very centre of a square field of grass, sat a copse of old oak and elm. The trees were so tightly packed together that it was nigh on impossible to see the old well at its centre. A hundred years ago, a boy had drowned in it. He was one of the gardener's lads, and a sad funeral it was. The father almost tore the well to pieces, but the other gardeners had calmed him down, and planted a ring of saplings around it to keep other children from meeting a similar end.

Within seven years the wood had swallowed up the well and the darkness between the trees had become thick and impenetrable. A rumour spread that the copse was cursed. This reputation stuck. Even a century later, it still had the power to rattle teeth. Nobody ever went near the copse nowadays; not even waifs or strays slept nearby. This was a wise decision to make.

*

Dawn was starting to claw its way across the bruised sky. Jekyll Park was empty. The air was dead and silent, and not a single breath of air stirred the trees. And yet, at the foot of one infamous copse, the grass was shivering, writhing to and fro as quick feet sought a bit of rest.

It had been a long walk-a very long walk, in fact. From the misty Bodmin moors into London is not a jolly in the country by any stretch of the imagination. These faerie feet were worn sore and blistered. They were tired of flitting about and using their magic. It was time for a fire and some nectar, by their master's reckoning.

One by one the faeries reached the base of the old well, and one by one they materialised out of thin air, hooded and hollow-eyed. Thirteen altogether. The tallest one waved a hand in an upwards motion and without a word they began to ascend the crumbling face of the old well. The faeries didn't make a sound as they grabbed the old granite. Their wings didn't even twitch beneath their cloaks.

The rope was there, as they'd been promised, hanging from an arch of wood and pointing down into a deep chasm. It was completely out of faerie reach. The tall fellow, their leader it seemed, looked about for a bucket, platform or lever, but there was nothing. So, he shrugged and leapt into mid-air to catch the fine, silver rope.

'Onwards,' he hissed, and his crew followed suit.

Soon enough they were all sliding down the rope using only their bare hands. Had they paused to sniff, it might have smelled like burning rubber. For what seemed like an age they descended, hand over hand and with ankles pressed against the rope. The darkness was soft at first. The rope could still be seen as well as felt. The little coin of morning light still hovered above them. But then the darkness became absolute, and all-consuming. It lasted so long they began to wonder whether they had been cursed with blindness, but then the first outpost appeared.

Built straight into the walls of the well-shaft, the outpost glowed a greenish-blue thanks to its myriad glow-worm lanterns. It was a fuzzy sort of light, the kind that looked like you could stroke it if you tried hard enough. Dark eyes and grim faces peered out at them from between arrow slits.