Susanna knew she needed to take charge, get him moving to the first safe house, but with his violent display in the alley and the casual aggressiveness of him – a complete contrast to You Yu’s quiet gentleness – she was wary.
“I’m not going back,” Jack said suddenly. “If that’s why you’re here, you can forget it. I’ve had enough, I’m not going back to Stirling.” He looked sideways at Susanna, belligerent. “I’m not.”
“All right,” she answered, thinking fast. “I’m coming with you, then.”
That made Jack pause. He stared at her, a half-smile lightening his features. “You serious?”
“Yeah.” Susanna licked dry lips.
He cocked his head, eyeing her. It was easy to read the hope in his eyes. “You said we were done.”
“I know but… you were right, what you said.” The raw, painful memory of Jack and Sammy’s last conversation rang in Susanna’s ears. “We can’t trust anybody else. You and me, that’s it now.”
He grinned at her, sixteen again. Happy. A twinge of remorse twisted in Susanna’s stomach.
“I don’t like it here, we should go.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, before the wrong person sees us. I’m in no fit shape for another fight.” He rubbed at his stomach, the exact spot where the knife had pierced down to his organs, though there’d be no trace of that now. “I was gonna head for Glasgow. Find a squat or something.”
“We could do that.” Susanna chewed nervously on her bottom lip. “But it’s too late to get the bus. We’ll have to walk a bit.”
“This day just keeps getting better and better.” Reaching out, he snagged Susanna’s hand and started hauling her along.
Given that he was going in the right direction, Susanna let him lead. It was obvious he was used to doing so, his stride long and sure, shoulders rolling in a pronounced swagger. She had a horrible feeling this soul was going to be a tricky one to control. He was cocky. Volatile. Too much confidence – nothing like Tristan, whose easy self-assurance was understated. Tristan. From him her thoughts naturally led to the girl who’d gone with him into the tunnel. Was that the key?
Instantly her mind rejected the idea. It was wrong, wrong, wrong. Once you were dead, you were dead. There was no going back. That’s what she’d told a hundred, a thousand souls. She didn’t even have to think about it – as soon as the soul asked (and they always asked) the answer was just there. No.
She’d never questioned it until Tristan had vanished.
Right now, there was nothing Susanna wanted more than to turn around and follow Tristan to the world of the living. Instead, she let Jack tug her deeper into the wasteland.
ELEVEN
Much sooner than anyone had anticipated, Dylan’s dad was heading to Glasgow. He had rearranged his plans to come down as soon as he could, and his imminent arival distracted Dylan from the men killed in the train tunnel.
This was her dad, and finally she was going to meet him. James’s sudden visit hadn’t pleased Joan one bit – she’d had to shuffle about her shifts at work. Dylan had tentatively suggested that Tristan could come with her instead, but Joan had shut that down straight away.
Which left Dylan in a bit of a pickle. Joan had said outright that she didn’t want Tristan at the meeting – which was happening at a coffee house in Royal Exchange Square – because it was a ‘family thing’. Dylan’s response that she considered Tristan family was met with a derisive snort and a flat-out ‘he’s not coming’. There was no way Dylan and Tristan could cope if he stayed at home. It might kill them… literally.
Dylan whined and pleaded, shouted and sulked, all to no avail. It was Tristan who saved the day. A compromise, he suggested. He’d be there, but not. Tristan was going to sit on the steps of the Gallery of Modern Art, so close it was within sight of the coffee shop, and wait.
Joan didn’t like it, Dylan could tell by the stiff way she held herself, a muscle in her cheek tensing as she clenched her jaw, but she gave in. With exceedingly bad grace.
The accessible taxi dropped them near the coffee shop. It was a bit awkward getting out, even with the wider doors of the black cab and the special ramp for her chair. The driver was at least seventy years old, and Joan was forced to admit that it was just as well that Tristan was there to help get Dylan out safely.
Dylan checked her watch as Joan paid the fare. They were early, by more than half an hour.
“Do you want to look around the shops?” Tristan asked.
Dylan shook her head. “Too nervous. Let’s… let’s stay around here, get some fresh air.”
It wasn’t a warm day, and Dylan was too jittery to stay in Royal Exchange Square – where the tight confines felt claustrophobic. Joan refused to go, saying she’d save a seat in the coffee shop, but Tristan dutifully wheeled Dylan along Queen Street for a short distance until they reached George Square. He parked her in the wide pedestrian area in the centre and for a little while they watched the traffic’s sluggish flow around the busy junction. It didn’t seem like anything was going to calm Dylan’s fluttering pulse, so she asked Tristan to take them back.
“Oh God,” she whispered as they approached the coffee shop. “He’s already there!”
She could see him, sitting in the window on a low leather couch. Joan was perched, upright and stiff, on the one opposite, a rectangular table creating a physical barrier between them – as if the cold radiating off Joan wasn’t doing the job.
Dylan couldn’t focus on that, though. Her eyes were glued to her dad, James Miller, drinking him in for the first time.
It was hard to tell, hunkered down in the sofa as he was, but he looked tall. The stretch of his arm across the back of the seat, the sprawl of his legs around the table, made her think he must be at least six foot. He had dark hair, the same as Dylan, but peppered with grey.
“Are you sure you’ll be OK on your own?” Tristan’s concerned voice floated over her shoulder. “I can still come with you.”
“Mum would be mad.”
“I don’t care what your mum thinks, I care about you.”
Dylan thought about it, beyond tempted. Joan wouldn’t want to say anything to cause a scene in front of Dylan’s dad – but they’d pay for it later.
“No,” she said. “I need to do this by myself.”
Tristan was silent for a moment. “All right,” he said at last. “Will you at least let me wheel you inside?”
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you.”
There was no way she’d manage the door by herself anyway.
Tristan started forward again, and Joan caught sight of them. A second later, Dylan’s dad turned too. He searched for the space of three frantic thumps of Dylan’s pulse, then their gazes caught. Held.
Dylan’s breath blew out in an astonished rush: “He looks like me!” They had the same green eyes and the same too-rounded nose. The same wide mouth. The same pale skin that blushed far too easily, which Dylan was doing right now. She just – she just couldn’t stop staring. That was her dad. The man who made up half of her.
As they approached the door, a pair of shoppers darted in front of her chair and broke the spell. Dylan’s dad disappeared. She frowned, blinking rapidly at the empty space, a sudden irrational terror striking her: had she imagined him? Time froze, but then it started again as the coffee shop door was flung open… and there he was.
“Dylan!” He strode towards them and crouched down beside her. The position put him level with her and his eyes drank in her face, staring at her just like she’d been staring at him. Did he see the resemblance too? She hoped so. “There you are,” he murmured. Then a broad grin. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Dylan said breathlessly, with not a clue what to say next.
Her dad let her off the hook, breaking her gaze to look up at where Tristan hovered protectively behind her. Dylan thought she saw something briefly cloud her dad’s eyes. “You must be the boyfriend.”
“I am,” Tristan confirmed. “It’s Tristan.”
> They shook hands and Dylan had the impression that her dad was doing his best to break Tristan’s fingers. If he was, Tristan didn’t let on, offering James a reserved smile in return. Dylan wondered what Joan had told her dad about Tristan – and grimaced.
“I’ll take her chair from here,” James said firmly, and he nudged Tristan out of the way to take control of her handles. “Let’s go and get better acquainted, eh?”
Her dad’s attentiveness warmed Dylan just as much as it sent butterflies fluttering again. Feeling slightly panicked, she looked over her shoulder to where Tristan watched her go.
“I’ll stay in sight,” he mouthed, pointing to the steps of the art gallery, where several students were already lounging. That made her feel slightly better as she waved goodbye. Then before she knew it, she was parked in an awkward sandwich between her dad and Joan on their leather sofas.
“All right?” Joan’s frosty demeanour had thawed – now she just looked worried. She reached out and squeezed Dylan’s hand comfortingly.
“Yeah.” Dylan had the urge to twitch her hand away – she didn’t want her dad to think she was a baby – but she forced herself not to. It would hurt Joan’s feelings. A second later, Joan let go and settled back.
“What would you like Dylan? A juice?” He huffed a quick laugh. “I know!” He stood up, a triumphant expression on his face, “Hot chocolate! Complete with whipped cream and marshmallows. I don’t know a teenage girl in the land that would say no to that.”
Dylan didn’t particularly like hot chocolate, but she found herself nodding, not wanting to disappoint him when he was clearly trying so hard.
“Sounds good.”
He disappeared towards the counter, as tall as she had thought, the top of his head easily visible above the throng of customers. Then she whipped her eyes around, searching for Tristan. She knew he had to be close; there was a tightness in her chest, but it felt more like nerves than the excruciating pain of distance.
At first she couldn’t find him, and for an instant the tightness became immeasurably worse… but then her eyes picked out his flop of sandy hair, head bent low over the tablet she’d lent him. She breathed out. He was there. Of course he was.
As if he felt her gaze on him, Tristan lifted his head, stared in her direction. It seemed unlikely that he could see her through the reflective glass at that distance, but she felt better all the same. Taking a deep breath, she turned back to Joan.
Her mum was drinking some fancy frothy coffee in a large mug. It looked expensive, and if James was buying, that’s likely why she’d picked it. Normally, Joan was a straightforward tea drinker. She had also opted for a piece of gingerbread, again unlike her, which she was delicately nibbling.
“We can leave any time you like, you know,” she said abruptly. “Just say the word.”
“All right,” Dylan replied. She didn’t bother to add that she wouldn’t want to go any time soon. She wanted to sit and talk with her dad for hours. Then again, she’d only ever had one phone call with him. She knew she might find that the time it took to drink a hot chocolate was about as long as she could keep up a conversation with this relative stranger. “He looks like me.”
“He does,” Joan agreed, her tone carefully blank.
“Does that… I mean—” She stopped, chewed on her lip. “You’ve had to look at me every day. And you don’t like him. You must have thought—”
“You can stop right there, Dylan.” Joan pinned her with her gaze. “When I look at you, I see you. End of story.”
And end of conversation. They didn’t talk again until her dad came back, placing a tall thin mug topped with a mountainous swirl of whipped cream and little chocolate shaves in front of her. “Ta da!”
“Thank you.” She managed to eke the words out through a throat that was suddenly desert dry.
“Well.” Her dad threw his big body down and leant forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “At last, here we are!”
“Yeah,” agreed Dylan. At last.
TWELVE
Four times. Susanna had already used her little mind control mojo on Jack four times. And they weren’t even at the first safe house yet. He was a thug, uneducated and unpolished, but he seemed to have the ability to fight off her hypnotic commands with startling speed. Which was unfortunate as he wasn’t the type of boy to take orders.
Especially not from a girl.
“Just trust me,” she said, trying to hide the exasperation in her voice, instinctively aware that it would only rile him further. “I know where I’m going.”
She was trying to wheedle and cajole him along, because each time she forced him to come with her – four and counting – he was throwing it off quicker and quicker. She was getting nervous that soon it wouldn’t work at all. And they had a long, long way to go.
“Sammy,” he smirked at her, “you couldn’t find your way out of a paper bag. I’m seriously supposed to trust your sense of direction?”
“I know where I’m going,” Susanna repeated. She took his hand and plastered on her most winning smile. “Come on.”
His scathing expression softened a little bit and to Susanna’s surprise he let her tug him along. It only lasted a handful of steps, though. After that, he had to take over, upping his pace so he was the one in the lead.
She was already counting the days until she could shove this particular soul across the line. And, an insidious thought crept in, if the wraiths got him earlier than that – well, she wouldn’t lose too much sleep over it.
Not that she slept.
Susanna had never purposefully failed in her role as a ferryman, in fact she couldn’t. It was coded into her every thought and action: protect the soul at all costs. Even above her own pain, her own suffering. But if souls were stupid, if they didn’t listen, her best efforts weren’t always enough.
Jack was a classic example of the type that fell victim to the wraiths’ insatiable hunger.
“So,” he said in her ear, pulling her out of her thoughts. “You want to tell me how you found me?”
“Somebody saw you get on a bus,” she said, quickly flashing back through Jack’s final memories, hunting for a cover story. “The 47. I got the same one.”
“Right.” A drawl, and Susanna sensed danger. “And how’d you know when to get off, eh?” A sharp tug on her belt loop at the end of Jack’s question.
“It was the same driver. I asked him and he remembered you, he told me where you got off.”
He hauled her to a dead stop, whirled her to face him.
“Really? That sounds bloody convenient.” He stared down at her and Susanna forgot she was looking up at a sixteen-year-old boy. Her heart started to pound in fear. It was the way he could switch from playful to predator between one breath and the next.
“How else could I have known where you were?” she asked. She added a mental push, a strong one, to make him believe her. He did nothing but stare back: no tell-tale dilating of his pupils, no relaxation in his tense stance.
“That’s the question, isn’t it,” he whispered. “Why else would you be there. It’s a long way from home, Sammy.”
A pulse started thudding in Susanna’s throat. How the hell had she gotten herself into this situation? Why – why – had she been matched with this particular soul? The powers that decided these things were usually smarter than this. Jack should have had a male ferryman. Someone it wouldn’t smart his pride to follow. Not her.
Definitely not her.
“Are you seeing someone else?” he asked her softly – but not gently. Threat underlay every word. “Are you going with some boy from round here now?”
“Don’t you trust me, Jack?” Susanna kept her face carefully blank of every emotion except hurt. She buried her fear as deep as it could go.
That did the trick. He looked down at her for one more long moment, then he smiled, and for a heartbeat she saw what must have attracted the foolish Sammy to this particular bad boy.
“’Course
I do,” he said, dropping a surprisingly tender kiss on her nose. “You’re my girl.”
Danger past, Susanna got him moving again. They were almost at the first safe house. Given that his murder had happened at night, she’d expected to see the odd wraith coasting hopefully along, looking for easy pickings. But the first miles of the wasteland were empty of the vile, scavenging creatures. She didn’t pause to wonder why that might be, or trust her luck to hold. She just wanted to find their first shelter so she could get herself together, come up with a better way to manage Jack before he got her hurt… and himself dead. Forever this time.
“You know, I’ve got a friend who lives round here,” she said.
“Who?” Instant suspicion – the heavy weight of jealousy.
“Marcy,” Susanna said, plucking the name from nowhere.
“Marcy?” Jack snorted. “You’ve got a friend called Marcy?”
“Yes. Anyway… she’s away on holiday. She lives on her own, so the place’ll be empty. We could probably squat there tonight. It’s late, and I’m getting tired.” Susanna cracked her face into a wide yawn. She felt stupid doing it, but she needed Jack to fall for her ruse. Besides, even though she didn’t get sleepy – ever – the yawn helped stretch her clenched jaw muscles.
Jack shot her an incredulous look and she was pretty sure he was going to argue – was it worth risking another push? Maybe she should just clobber him over the head? – but then he grinned wickedly. “This place have a bed?”
“Yeah…”
“Then let’s go.”
OK. That was easy. Susanna shook her head, confused, but for once Jack wasn’t fighting her so she let it go.
In Jack’s urban sprawl of wasteland, the first safe house was on the ground floor of a tall block of flats. The place had an apocalyptic feel – broken windows, boarded up doorways and smoke damage to several walls. Glass littered the building entryway, but inside the flat itself was sparse and clean.
“Your friend lives here?” Jack asked, eyes on the lobby and the lift doors that were buckled and bent as if they’d been rammed by a bull. Or maybe a herd of bulls. Susanna shut the door, turning a sugar-sweet smile on him.
Trespassers Page 8
