Sleeping Angel
A Ravenwood Mystery
Mia James
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2012 by Mia James
All rights reserved
Including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form
Eleven Books 2014
Originally published in Great Britain by Orion Publishing
About the author
Mia James is the pseudonym of the bestselling author Tasmina Perry and her journalist husband John Perry. Between them they have sold over a million books. They live in London. Sleeping Angel is the third book in the acclaimed Ravenwood series.
Follow the blog on http://miajamesbooks.blogspot.co.uk/
Or Twitter @miajamesbooks
Books by Mia James
THE RAVENWOOD MYSTERIES
By Midnight
Darkness Falls
Sleeping Angel
Contents
About the author
Books by Mia James
Contents
Praise for Mia James
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Praise for Mia James
'A lethal world of murders, vampires and terrifying secrets…destined to take a large bite out of Stephanie Meyer's monopoly of the teenage vampire scene' - Daily Record
‘Forget about Edward and Bella, Gabriel and April are the top couple now’ - Chicklish
‘The whole book is dripping in Gothic horror’ - My Favourite Books
‘The plot is fast and furious…lots of twists, lots of action, and some great dialogue’ - Bookbag
‘Intense, explosive, gripping. Mia James has shown that the Brits can compete with the US vampire scene. April might be the UK’s equivalent of Buffy’ - Serendipity Reviews
‘An awesome series’ – Overflowing Library
‘I love the setting for these books. Highgate Cemetery in London is so spooky and creepy and wonderfully atmospheric’ – A Dream of Books
‘A sophisticated series’ – The Telegraph
Prologue
Highgate Cemetery, North London, Six months ago
There was blood on his hands. Black and warm, it ran down his fingers and onto the path. He held them up, the stained skin catching the moonlight, mesmerised. But whose blood? Whose? And how had it got there?
Behind him, there was a snap and he dropped, his body tensed for fight or flight, ears alert. He could hear the rain beating on the leaves above him, hear as it condensed into drops and then fell, fat and ripe onto his soaked back. He could hear the scratch of an animal – Fox? Badger? – in the bush far to his left. And he could hear the wind from the east. The cars rushing up Highgate Hill. His own heart.
And something else.
He moved back into the shadows, allowing the darkness of the cemetery to envelop him like an embrace. This was his home, the one place he felt whole, freed from the frowns and the glances – and the hunger. For a while at least.
He looked down at his hands again. Too dark, but he could feel the scratches, deep welts, as if something had dragged its claws down them. And there was a swelling pain in his knee, his jeans were torn, caked in mud and leaves.
Have I been fighting?
‘Think, dammit,’ he said, pressing fingers against his temples. If he stayed very still, pictures came to him: there was a man, a man with dark eyes, as if a child had scrawled them on, with drawings on his arms and chest, a star on his shoulder. And a beautiful girl with shining yellow hair. And there was music – loud, loud music that made his ears hurt.
But that was a long time ago – wasn’t it? Or only yesterday.
And then the pictures were gone, popped like a soap bubble, because suddenly his eyes were open, his senses tingling. Something was coming.
He began to run uphill, his sure feet following the old wall. Up to his left, through the stooping trees he saw the old black gate. Crouching again, he crept forward, his breath sending little clouds into the air. Ahead of him was an overgrown path and – there! – lying in the centre was a dark shape. A body. Human, still moving. Still alive.
‘Isabelle?’ he whispered. Isabelle? The name had just come to him, appeared in his head like a subtitle. But I don’t know anyone called Isabelle. Do I?
His nostrils flared; there was something else here. Blood, a lot more blood. And something bad. Not a Bleeder, masking their scent with those sickly artificial flowers, but something like him. One who smelled of death.
He tensed again as there was a screech, like a cry of pain – then another. Foxes? Rats? He couldn’t tell. His senses were dulling, the darkness seemed to be growing around him, soaking up the light like fog.
‘Hello? Is anyone there?’ said a voice and he could see the figure framed against an open gate, backlit by the hissing streetlight. A girl: he could smell that much. But not just any girl – it was her.
Oh God, he thought, it’s coming. The thing. The thing with the eyes.
He jumped to his feet and ran towards her, effortlessly lifting the girl from her feet. Up and out onto the road.
‘Go, quickly!’ he hissed.
The dark-haired girl looked up, the moon catching her face.
She’s beautiful, he thought. Beautiful and ...
‘Get out of here!’ he cried. ‘GO!’
Then he turned back to the darkness. And it swallowed him whole.
Chapter One
It was a bright day as April stepped off the train. The sun was pushing through the paper white cloud but it did nothing to raise the temperature. Late spring in England, she thought. Isn’t it supposed to be sunshine and roses by now? Her breath puffed in front of her and she shivered as she followed the signs off the platform and down through the black iron gates into the cemetery.
April’s best friend Fiona had been very excited when she had heard that Miss Holden was being buried at Brookwood. ‘It’s the biggest cemetery in Europe. It’s like a city of death!’ she had enthused.
‘And that’s supposed to be a good thing?’
The last thing April wanted in her life was more death – there had been plenty of that over the past few months. And she certainly wasn’t in the mood to get excited about going to the funeral of her teacher.
‘Come on April, it’ll be fascinating,’ said Fiona. ‘Brookwood was built to deal with London’s population boom in the nineteenth century. There were so many burials every day, the cemetery had their own train station in London.’
April had actually b
een pleased to find that the spookily-named “Necropolis Station” at Waterloo was long gone – bombed in the war, the man in the ticket booth had told her – but Brookwood still had its own station out in the leafy Surrey countryside.
But beyond that the cemetery was a disappointment. Fee’s description had made April think it would be one of those grand old Victorian cemeteries like Highgate, with ornate gates and tombs, but April thought it looked more like a neglected farm. Just a load of empty fields and rusting signs reading “No photography”.
April walked along a gravel path towards the cemetery chapel, past a huge rusting conveyor belt machine, its long neck pointing up towards the sky.
Perhaps I’ve been spoilt by Highgate, she thought. Highgate Cemetery was crammed with beautiful statues of angels and pillars and tombs, all of it magnificently overgrown and wilfully spooky. But then Highgate was not only full of bodies – Highgate was full of vampires.
It had sounded such a sleepy place when her dad had described where they were moving from Edinburgh the previous autumn. She could still remember driving into the little north London village for the first time, and despairing at how boring it looked. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
But back then, April had thought that horror movies were stupid, just a load of people running around in rubber masks, spraying fake blood everywhere. But now she knew those “masks” could be real, and that the monsters inside were real-life vicious killers.
Well, not all of them, thought April. Not Gabriel.
Her heart gave a little leap as she thought of her boyfriend: his dark eyes, the upturn at the corner of his mouth when he smiled at her. And the way he had looked that night Miss Holden had been killed, standing on the roof of Mr Sheldon’s burning house, surrounded by flames as he’d taken her hand and jumped off the edge. He’d looked so ... vulnerable, but still sexy. Was that possible?
April snorted to herself. Anything was possible these days. Her school – the elite Ravenwood school on Highgate Hill – was riddled with vampires. It was a front for a giant global blood-sucking conspiracy and – oh yeah – it turned out that April herself was a “Fury”, some sort of ass-kicking vamp-slayer whose blood was just about the only thing that could make the undead dead again.
Reaching a fork in the path, April looked around nervously. She didn’t want to find herself wandering into some grisly cul-de-sac, surrounded by unfamiliar graves; she had enough of the familiar kind to worry about. She turned at footsteps behind her.
‘You looking for the funeral? Annabel Holden?’ asked a man in a long black overcoat.
‘Uncle Peter!’ cried April, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Heavens, April,’ said the man, obviously startled. ‘I didn’t recognise you from behind. Have you just come in on the London train too?’
He took off his glasses and ran a hand through his white hair; he looked flustered, distracted.
‘Yes, just arrived,’ said April, ‘Are you okay?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the man, rubbing at his lenses with the end of his tie. ‘Just a little ... I’m really not looking forward to this funeral, if I’m honest.’
Tell me about it, thought April. She herself wasn’t exactly keen to face Miss Holden’s relatives, not when she was so weighed down with guilt. But at least now she had a friendly face beside her. Peter Noble was a newspaper editor who’d been close to her father and – now she thought about it – one of the few nice people she had met at his funeral only a few months ago. Has daddy only been dead six months? It felt a lifetime since she had found him lying there in a pool of his own blood.
‘Do you know where the funeral is?’ she asked. ‘I’m a bit lost.’
Peter forced a smile. ‘Easily done here. This place is about five miles end to end – but it’s this way, I think.’
He led her down the left-hand fork, past the overgrown graves, an awkward silence accompanying them. How could you make small talk on the way to the funeral of a woman who had been tortured and killed by a half-crazed vampire?
‘Do you know why there are so few graves here?’ said April, looking at the open fields on either side of the narrow path. ‘I thought it would be packed.’
‘Well, it is packed, actually,’ said Peter. ‘There are something like a hundred and fifty thousand people buried here. If you look, you can see lots of indentations – those are the graves. If you stripped the soil off, you’d see all of the bones and skulls still there.’
April shivered and looked down at her feet – was she walking over some poor soul right now? She should be less easily disturbed; she had been visiting her father’s grave in Highgate Cemetery for months. However, in Highgate April always felt that William Dunne was the only man buried on that high hill.
‘But why don’t they have headstones?’
Peter shrugged. ‘They have been removed.’
‘Removed?’
He nodded. ‘When you’re buried, you’re really only renting the space. When your time runs out, they make way for someone else. It’s a business like any other.’
‘Eww, so they’re all getting buried on top of one another?’
‘An unpleasant thought, I know, but it’s always been that way. Even when we lived in villages, where everyone would be buried in the little churchyard, there eventually wasn’t room for individual plots.’
‘How do you know so much about it?’
‘You get to my age, April, you spend a lot of time at funerals.’
April nodded. She had already been to too many herself. They walked in silence until finally they turned a corner and saw the squat redbrick chapel at the end of the path, surrounded by people dressed in black. April hesitated. She didn’t want to go down there.
‘So, why are you here, Uncle Peter?’ she said, desperate to delay walking into that church, seeing all the accusing stares. ‘I mean, I didn’t know you knew her.’
‘I knew her father actually. They were from around these parts; that’s why she’s being buried out here. Annabel became my go-to woman whenever I was writing anything about history. She knew so much. It’s a sad loss.’
April looked towards the chapel. ‘Yes, it is.’
Peter put his hand on her arm. ‘I imagine this is pretty hard for you. You don’t have to go in, you know.’
‘Oh, I do. I mean, I didn’t really see eye to eye with Miss Holden a lot of the time, but she was nice to me. Well, as nice as she could be.’
Peter chuckled. ‘She could be a little abrupt, that’s true. You find that with academics; they’re used to dealing with names and dates and places, things written in books. Living people tend to be more of a challenge for them.’
‘But she tried to help me, that’s the thing. She stuck her neck out when she knew it would get her into trouble. And now ...’ And now April wanted only to turn around and run, get on the train and never look back.
‘Are you worried people are going to stare at you?’ asked Peter gently.
‘No, I’m worried they’re all going to blame me.’
Peter put his hand on her arm. ‘Listen, April, as far as I heard, Annabel Holden was murdered by a deranged student who then set fire to himself with a big can of petrol. How could that have anything to do with you?’
April looked away. He was being nice, of course, just trying to make her feel better. But Peter hadn’t been there. He hadn’t seen Benjamin’s face that night, that horrific moment when he had become infected with the Fury virus – the virus in April’s blood.
‘But I was there, Peter ...’
‘But nothing, April. You can’t carry on blaming yourself because some crazy boy chose to literally drag you into his insane little world. It’s a tragedy Annabel was killed and she will be sorely missed by all the people in that church, but really, it’s not your fault. You could no more have changed this than you could change the weather.’
She nodded and walked slowly towards the chapel, taking Peter’s arm. It was kind of him, but Uncle Peter was a
newspaper editor, used to dealing with the facts of normal life. How could he understand what had happened in that house, how Mr Sheldon, her headmaster at Ravenwood school, had ordered her death, how she herself had killed Benjamin Osbourne, one of her ‘Sucker’ classmates and most of all, how could he know how Gabriel had almost given up his life – again – to save her.
‘Which ones are her family?’ whispered April as they squeezed into a pew at the back.
‘Front on the right,’ said Peter, patting her hand. ‘You don’t need to worry, I don’t think they have any idea who you are.’
That was hardly any comfort to April. She knew who she was – what she had done. Trying to focus on something – anything – else, she looked along the walls of the chapel: names recording notable people of the parish fallen in the 1914–18 War, the “Great War”, “The War To End All Wars”.
That didn’t really pan out too well, did it? thought April, then felt bad for being so flippant about it. All those people listed up there – there were so many of them – had given their lives fighting to protect their country. Terribly sad in itself, worse was the idea that each of them, cut down by bullets or shells or gas, had left so many who loved them behind: mothers, fathers, sisters, sweethearts. What if she died? Would Caro and Fiona and Gabriel come to her funeral? Would “April Dunne” ever be written up on a wall along with a record of her gallantry and sacrifice? How could it – no one knew about her struggle. Did it even matter, anyway, after you were dead?
April forced herself to look down the aisle towards Miss Holden’s coffin. One thing was certain: there had already been too many violent deaths. From Alix Graves, the singer who had died the night April had arrived in Highgate, and Isabelle Davis, that young girl whose body she had almost stumbled over, to her father, his throat torn out, bleeding to death in her arms. And that had only been the beginning. Milo, Layla, Marcus – crazy Marcus who had tried to kill her twice – then Miss Holden.