“Marsden!” I shouted, alarmed; if the ghost’s knife could draw my blood, what did it do to him? They seemed to have prior history and maybe there was a connection the wraith could use against him.
“Key,” he gasped, the sound carrying to mortal ears through the cacophony of phantom horrors.
I scowled, closing my hand in my pocket on the hard metal thing Purcell had pressed on me. But I had no chance to question as Michael grabbed my hand, forcing me to look at him.
“The key. That puzzle thing. Maybe it works here.”
My dad’s—No, my key. How many gates could it open? Was it some kind of lock pick after all? I rifled through my pockets in haste, stabbing my fingers on sharp odds and ends until the cool, bent shape of my father’s puzzle came to my grip. Casting anxious glances over my shoulder, I scrambled through the puzzle’s solution, but it didn’t click into place and glow. I tried it again, shaking, trying to breathe steadily and not give in to my own exhaustion and the fear that rose off the ghostly crowd like a stench.
I could feel the flutter of temporaclines at the door. I could have simply slipped away on one, leaving Michael and Marsden to their own devices. The boy might be safe enough without two Greywalkers nearby to warp the thin veil between the worlds into a hellish reality around him. But Marsden had brought us to the slice of horror we found ourselves in, and I wasn’t sure that my disappearance would drop Michael back into the normal. If not, he’d be helpless in the memory of the burning prison and alone with Norrin once Marsden couldn’t hold the phantasm back anymore—and he was failing fast.
I shuffled the puzzle again, shooting another anxious look back at Marsden and Norrin in time to see the other Greywalker collapse to the floor. Norrin wheeled toward us, grinning and letting the unearthly blade catch the firelight.
Michael and I both swore. I started to push the key at him and head back to Norrin, but he refused it. He rubbed at his shoulder and looked at his hand, unsmeared by blood or gore.
“It hurts but . . . I’m not really bleeding. I’ll get Marsden. You open the door,” he added, dashing across the floor to meet the savage monstrosity that approached like a stalking tiger.
Michael ran all the way to Marsden’s side, dragging Norrin’s attention to him as he went.
I slid the puzzle through its paces with frantic fingers once again and felt it click into shape, humming its satisfaction. I jammed the glowing prong into the lock of the ghostly doors and twisted. The latch squealed and resisted the strange key for a moment. Then it gave up and clicked open. I almost cried in relief.
I turned back, running for Michael and Marsden. The old man was halfway to his knees as Michael hauled him up. Norrin pounced on the boy and Michael stumbled, knocking Marsden back down.
“No, y’don’t, y’bloody bastard,” Marsden muttered, scrabbling something from the ground. He flicked it out and the white cane unfolded from his hand, giving off a strange blue luminescence that snapped through Norrin and wrenched the specter’s attention back to him.
Norrin roared and dove for Marsden as if goaded with a hot iron.
“C’mon, y’murderin’ pig. Lost your strength, have ya? Y’cut me and held me to the Grey for that white snake but y’couldn’t break me enough, not even then. But y’came fer me a man full-growed when I were prisoner here. Have to go after youngsters now, do ya? Y’always were an effin’ coward,” Marsden panted, hunching onto his knees and elbows. He took another swipe at the lunging monster, knocking the knife from the phantom’s hand. As it fell away, it glimmered for an instant in a tangle of energy strands.
I dove for it, snatching it from the enclosing mist before it dissolved back into ghost stuff. I felt it firm up in my hand, burning like a live wire and holding the menacing shape Norrin had made of it: a blade that cut into the energy shapes of the Grey and left pain and ragged edges in its wake. I rolled to my feet and dashed two steps toward Norrin as the prison’s butchering wraith raked clawed hands into Marsden’s tucked head.
Marsden stifled a scream as the hands passed through his face, dragging an illusion of gore and the memory of an eye with them. I plunged the knife into Norrin’s back, ripping downward along the nonexistent spine and feeling the mirage of human form rend into frayed wisps of fury and hate.
The shape that had been Norrin shrieked and whirled into a cloud of bloody smoke and the stink of slaughterhouses.
Only the roar of the phantom flames and the cries of the terrified prisoners remained. I flung away the cruel knife of Norrin’s energy and saw it unravel and settle back into the grid as glimmering strands of magic, but I could already see the edges of Norrin’s form knitting back into shape in the Grey world. We had half an hour at most to get the hell out of the House of Detention, and I had no idea how far we had to go.
Michael and I put our shoulders under Marsden’s arms and levered him up. His legs were wobbly and the white cane collapsed as he put weight on it.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Relyin’ on sprats and women . . .”
“Shut up and say thank you,” I suggested as we lurched forward like a bad entry in a three-legged race.
Head hanging so we couldn’t see his face, Marsden mumbled an ungracious thanks.
Michael snorted, shaking a bit. “Let’s just get out of here. I’m really hating this place.”
We stumbled out the door, open only to us, through the crowd of trapped prisoners, and up into the memory of a courtyard filled with rushing jailers and shouting constables trying to douse the flames at one corner of the building with buckets of water. By the time we’d walked out the unguarded prison gate and around the corner, past phantom crowds and more bucket brigades, Marsden was able to support his own weight.
We stopped around the corner and Marsden leaned against the nearest wall. “Pray there’s no one out for a late walk,” he said. Then he pushed history aside and the world shifted with a grinding feel and a scream of friction.
Ordinary streetlights and city haze lit the urban night. No sign of flames as cars grumbled along Rosebery Avenue.
Michael threw up.
“There, boy. Y’lived through Norrin and the Fenian bombing,” Marsden mumbled, still unsteady on his feet and paler than normal—which is to say he nearly glowed in the dark.
“Eff you,” Michael gasped back, wiping his mouth on the un-tucked hem of his shirt. “I felt that thing cut me! And the place was on fire—I could smell smoke!”
“But y’couldn’t feel the heat, could ya?”
“No, but who cares? It was on fucking fire! I could see shadows running around like there were people in there running from the flames. And then that . . . thing cut me!”
“Did y’see him? Norrin? Did y’see that bloody monster?” Marsden asked, grinding his teeth into the words.
Michael hesitated, looking away, breathing too fast and sweating. “I . . . saw eyes. A shape. And I smelled something . . . rotting. And a flash like light off a knife blade. And . . . something . . . cut me,” he added, clutching his shoulder again.
“How is it?” I asked in as gentle a voice as I could muster with my own heart beating triple time.
Michael turned his face to mine, seeming grateful to look away from Marsden. “It hurts, but it’s not bleeding. Feels like it’s cut to the bone, though.”
“That’ll fade in a few days,” Marsden said, rubbing his hands over his face, “but I shan’t say it’ll be pleasant. Hurts like merry hell, it does.”
I glanced down at the blotched front of my shirt and jacket. The fabric wasn’t cut, but I could feel the stickiness of blood that stained my shirt from the inside. I wished I could go back to the hotel, take the longest shower in history, and fall into my expensive bed for the next twenty hours. My knees shook a little: a post-stress reaction to burning up more adrenaline than I normally expended in a month. I didn’t feel much better than Michael looked, but I didn’t have the luxury of puking.
“We have to get off the street. The vampires will still be l
ooking for us,” I reminded them.
Michael straightened up, making a face at me. Then he glanced around the street and pointed to a bus stop nearby. “There’s a bus coming. We can take that and then change when we’re far away from here.”
FORTY-TWO
As we stood at the bus stop, rain began, just pattering down, but it helped to wash the filth and the stink of vampires off us. Michael chivvied us onto the first bus that came along Rosebery and made us change to another closer to the middle of town. We collapsed into our seats as if we’d been thrown.
The bus rambled the wrong way for a while until it turned near Marble Arch. Beside the arch stood a spectral three-sided gallows from which hundreds of hanged corpses swung in the night wind, their superimposed shades so thick they seemed like a moving blackness filled with bones.
“Tyburn Tree,” Marsden muttered, not raising his head.
From there the bus trundled up past Regent’s Park toward the canal where we’d left the boat.
“Bleedin’ lucky we was. The Pharaohn don’t know I’m with you or he wouldn’t have tried the same trick twice.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What trick?” I asked.
“Butcher Norrin. When he tried to shape me, the Pharaohn had me taken up on a thievin’ charge in Clerkenwell and put in the House of Detention where Norrin could get at me.”
“He trumped up a charge just to get you into the right prison?”
“He didn’t trump up nothin’. I stole the things as I was accused of. That I done it by his leave—that wasn’t allowed to come out. It was all done proper and quick, and I were put in the very block we walked through. I thought Norrin wouldn’t be there tonight when we passed through, as he’d not been down the pit when the Fenians bombed the building in 1867 to rescue their man. But someone caught his attention,” he added, turning a bit toward Michael, who cringed.
I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Alice must have had some way to wake him up or she couldn’t have been sure he’d come after me.”
Marsden snorted, but I could feel Michael loosen with relief.
“So. All of this, like what happened to my father, is just a replay of what the Pharaohn’s trying to do to me,” I said.
“Looks it.”
“We’ll have to break that pattern. He used Christelle against my father. Now he’s trying to use Will against me. We have to get Will back before . . .”
I realized I’d already said too much when Michael frowned at me. “Before what?”
“Before they kill him,” Marsden supplied. “Be glad it’s not my decision, boy. I’d leave him to his chances. This softhearted fool means to save your brother even if it ruins her own chances of staying sane and whole. And it will. She’s worth ten of any normal fella.”
Michael growled under his breath. “Why did we save you? We should have left you there for him to . . . to . . .”
“Rend to pieces? Drive mad? He’s had his chance to do both. My term at Clerkenwell’s when I thought I’d gone mad for certain—when I started seein’ butcher Norrin, when—” He faltered, his fingers curling over his gouged orbits, twitching. He took a long, shaking breath and went on. “I learned the trick of falling through the cracks of time there, and it saved my life, so it did. They tore it down in 1890 and I thought that was the end of bloody Norrin. He’s among the worst of the things that haunt that wretched place. He’s not even a proper ghost—he’s a wraith, a hollow remnant of an evil man filled with hate and a love of violence till he’s nearly solid with it. I’d hopes we could pass through without attracting anything’s attention so long as we went where there was so much confusion already. Should have known better. Things like Norrin don’t die. He’s not gone yet, I’d wager.”
“I saw him re-forming as we left,” I confirmed.
Marsden made a hacking sound. “Still, you did well, girl. That trick with the knife—wicked clever. How did you guess it could cut him?”
“Because it cut me.”
Michael and Marsden both turned toward me, but their expressions weren’t the same. Marsden only dropped his hands and seemed a bit surprised, but Michael looked shocked.
“Are you OK?” he whispered, choking on the question.
“I’m fine. It’s uncomfortable but shallow.”
“But . . . you don’t look hurt. . . .”
I lifted the edge of my jacket so the bloodstain on my shirt showed. “It only cut my skin, not my clothes. I’m not like you as far as ghosts go. I see them and they see me. If I can hurt them, they can hurt me—we’re part of the same fabric. That’s how I figured I could use the knife. It cut me, so I could use it to cut Norrin.”
“Could—could I have . . . done that?”
I shook my head, but it was Marsden who answered him.
“No, boy, y’couldn’t. Nor could I, I imagine. Just her. She’s got a bit of the same stuff in her—part magic, she is.”
“But you’re—”
“Not like that, I’m not. She can hold on to that stuff. All I can do is walk through it. You just float around the surface like everyone else that’s normal.” He turned his sightless gaze on me. “That must be why he wants you.”
I knew he meant Wygan and things were making sense in a horrible way. “I can’t do it for long,” I objected. “It’s like holding on to a live electric cable—it burns all through me. He can’t—”
“I doubt he cares about your comfort.”
“It doesn’t matter. A few seconds feels like an eternity in the electric chair! I couldn’t do much.”
“Maybe there’s more to come. . . .”
That was what I feared. I wasn’t so sure I was a gate, as Alice had said, as the thing that could build one. I remembered the way the bit of the vortex had clipped off under my tearing hands and spun off into its own tiny black hole. Marsden had said they weren’t made; they just happened. But maybe a Greywalker who could grab on to the power lines and tangled threads of the Grey could do something more with it, with the right nudge. And the right key. I wanted to throw my father’s puzzle out the bus window and never see it again—except that it was my dad’s and it had opened the door at the House of Detention for me. I had a feeling it was my key, not Wygan’s and not part of his plan, or he’d have taken it when Dad died.
I shook myself out of my conjectures and tuned back in to the conversation Michael and Marsden were having.
“More what? What are you talking about?” Michael demanded.
Marsden and I both shook our heads. “I can’t explain it,” I started, unable to say more. A mental block I’d never been able to fathom stopped my speaking of the living nature of the Grey. It wasn’t just power; it was a live thing, a collective of energy that almost touched sentience. And it didn’t want me to say so. Not even to Marsden. Another oddity specific to me . . .
Real horror took hold of me. What would happen if the magic did start to “know” and what would it do to . . . everything? It was no wonder the guardian beast hated the living prison Wygan had erected around the hole where my father’s ghost was captive—that was magic in the control of havoc and mayhem. I thought of that on a larger scale—whatever Wygan was up to would have to involve more of that hungry, chaotic fire—and I felt sick to the core. I had to get home. I had to stop it. . . .
“Harper?” Michael quavered. “You all right?”
I shook off my panic, but the disquiet and desperation remained. “Fine. No,” I corrected myself. “I’m scared. But I can’t do anything if I let the fear own me.”
“You didn’t seem scared, before.”
I felt so wretched I wanted to cry, but I swallowed it, closing my eyes against the burn. “I fake sangfroid really well. Just close your eyes and think of ice cream.”
Michael let out a nervous giggle. Marsden snorted. Three injured, crazy people dreaming of dessert. Yeah, we were tough all right. . . .
FORTY-THREE
Once back in the relative safety of the M
orning Glory, afloat on the waters of the canal where no vampire would come, we began to plan how to save Will. We knew where he was being held and it was doubtful they’d move him. Alice would want another shot at me and that was an obvious place to take it, but we’d have to make her window as small as possible, force her to come after us with minimal planning and support. We’d have to get in just before darkness when she wasn’t awake to command Simeon or any vampires who might be a lot tougher.
“What about that kreanou thing?” Michael asked. “Is that a vampire or what?”
“That, boy, is the vampire to end all vampires. It hates and it thirsts and it don’t care about pain.”
“Wonderful,” I snarked.
“What’s funny is, they normally go after the vampire what made ’em—driven to it no matter what stands between. That Alice must be controlling it through her sorcerer, Simeon. . . .” He twitched with unpleasant revelation. “She made it on purpose!”
“Made?” Michael asked.
“They’re usually mistakes. No vampire wants a kreanou coming for them,” Marsden explained. “The rage of death incarnate. Faster, meaner than any of ’em, and it bends magic—it reshapes itself.”
Michael said, “It’s a shape-shifter, like a . . . a lycanthrope?”
“Not that sort, but they can make some changes to their bodies. It don’t last long, it takes a bit o’ power, and it must hurt like merry hell, but what do they care? They need longer legs? They get taller. They need a bigger mouth? They unhinge their jaw. They don’t usually last long, so they don’t conserve their strength or care for their bodies. Remember that, girl. It’s their strength, but it’s also a weakness you can use against it.”
“And that thing’s going to be prowling around down there?” Michael asked.
“No, it won’t,” Marsden answered. “It’s still a vampire and it still sleeps during daylight. Alice will make sure of that, since she can’t exert control while she sleeps. She’s probably got that Simeon laying sleeping spells on it every morning. And that’s another reason to go after your brother in the late afternoon, before the vampires wake—during the changing of the guard, so to speak—when everyone’s a bit sleepy and off their stride. The kreanou won’t be up and about until Alice is, and Simeon will be tired; the summer daylight lasts longer than his sleep spells can, so he’ll have been up at least once while everyone else was kippin’. But the timing’s tricky, since we’ll be coming at the catacombs from the sewers where we can’t see the sun.”
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