Chapter 1

1: Beth

“That clock, Mr Matthews, says three twenty-nine,” Mike snapped, “so don’t even think about it.”

Yes, Mike was one of those teachers. And the baleful stare of thirty fifteen-year-olds told him perfectly clearly what they thought of his attitude. Still, if he didn’t get to leave until after the bell, why should this herd of wildebeest masquerading as human beings?

Henry Matthews—nicknamed, shockingly, Hooray by his classmates—fidgeted in his seat. “But Sir—”

“Don’t fidget, boy,” Mike drawled. “You look like you have piles.”

The class sniggered in a great wave. Mike kept a straight face. He liked this group—hell, he liked thisschool—but his power as a teacher was in coming off as a right miserable git. They all thought he was from the Dark Ages, and kept real skeletons in his specimen cupboard.

Alright, so he did. But not human ones.

“If I see one more book going into a bag,” Mike warned, “then you’ll all be here for another hour, going over a new dissection lesson.”

Half the class—predominantly the girls, with the exception of Carly Hennessey, who was going to make either an excellent surgeon or an excellent serial killer one day—blanched. Mike liked to dissect eyes. Pigs’ eyes. Mostly because it disgusted them the most. His record was three faints and one vomiting in the same class. He’d even beaten Amy Burke and her ‘chemical properties of a body dissolving in acid’ class this year.

“With,” Mike added, just to rub salt in the collective wound, “a pop quiz.”

They groaned as one. Someone said, “You wouldn’t.”

“I would, Miss James.”

What did he care? This summer wasn’t going to be the usual blissful break. Mike would honestly rather stay here.

The clock hands inched round. Sixty individual eyeballs, human ones, were trained on the progress. And then—

“Yes!”

The bell screeched. The chairs screeched louder. Feet stampeded for the door, and his tiny orderly universe was destroyed in one fell swoop by a terrible plague of teenagers.

“Quietly!” Mike bellowed after them, merely because it was expected of him, and then he heaved himself off his lab stool and began to gather his things.

Mike liked this school. It was just an academy on the north side of Sheffield, filled to the brim with kids who would end up in shops and driving white vans, but they were a nice enough bunch. They liked him.They thought he was funny and old-fashioned, just this fat, fusty biology teacher with the stereotypical tweed jacket and elbow patches. And it helped, teenagers being rather disgusting creatures, that Mike had a good line in dissection lessons. They liked chopping up lungs and livers, the spotty little psychopaths, even if they did draw the line at eyes.

A cough caught his ear, and Mike glanced up.

“Forgotten something, Emma?”

Emma Mayhew, one of the few in that particular herd with a decent personality between her ears, smiled shyly, and stuck out a hand. An envelope. Mike took it, raising an eyebrow questioningly.

“It’s—thanks,” she said, and tucked a thick chunk of hair behind her ear. It was growing out. “For…everything you did, this year.”

Mike softened. All right, so he wasn’t that much of a miserable git.

“Any time,” he said, and tucked the envelope into his briefcase. “I mean it, though. Summer’s started. Get out of my lab.”

The smile widened into a grin.

“Yes, sir.”

She disappeared out of the door, and Mike hefted the case off the table. His phone beeped in his pocket, just once, and he knew it was time to get going.

It was a baking hot summer. The moment he pushed through the double doors to the science block his jacket started sticking to him. The sky was a tropical blue, entirely unnatural in this part of the world, in Mike’s eyes, and the sun blazed high above the glass and concrete in which Mike spent every term. Not even three thirty-five, and the grounds were devoid of underage life.

He lifted a sweaty paw to wave to Hannah Campbell as he staggered out of the courtyard and into the teachers’ car park. There was no hanging about on the final day. The usual seat of last-minute gossip and invites for pints was being abandoned as hastily as the rest of the school. Someone bellowed, “Have a good summer!” and Mike waved without even pausing. He had managed to score the shady spot thatmorning, and so his car—a Volkswagen Passat in silver that had a hundred and ten thousand miles on the clock, and a single door all in yellow from the day Mike’s mam had opened it and a passing taxi had promptly removed it from her grasp—was blessedly cool. Mike sat in the driver’s seat, gasping like a landed fish, for a good minute before he could bring himself to start the engine.