She wanted to tell him no, to forget it, that she wasn’t leaving him, but she was a handicap to him and she knew it. The stupid crutch, her pathetic leg. She wasn’t fighting fit, and even if she had been, she’d no experience fighting wraiths. Hating it, but knowing Tristan was right, she started to hobble away.
It was agony, leaving Tristan. But if she saw he was in trouble she’d lose the will to flee – and likely fall flat on her face again.
She fell anyway.
Her bad leg crumpled – this time with a hideous flare of pain – and she sank down, slamming onto her hip then clocking her head on a dislodged sleeper. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move; not even to look at Tristan and the wraith. All she could do was lie there, trying to gather her scattered thoughts.
“Tristan!” She tried to scream it, but nothing came out. “Tristan!”
“Dylan, go!” He sounded breathless, afraid. That gave her the impetus to galvanise her stunned brain, marshal her battered body. She wriggled onto her side and heaved herself up. But what she saw made her heart stop.
Tristan was fighting the wraith – with nothing but his bare hands. He had one clenched in the ragged black wisps of the wraith’s body, and with his other he was trying to rip and tear at its face. The wraith was twisting this way and that within his grip, slashing teeth searching for purchase. Talons curved forward from beneath its body, hacking at Tristan’s arm and chest. The light blue jumper he wore was already torn and Dylan could see blood blooming down his sleeve.
The only consolation she had was that he’d obviously kept some of his abilities from his experience in the wasteland. He could grip them, unlike her when she was on the other side.
Suddenly the creature jerked backwards, freeing itself from Tristan’s iron grip. It plummeted again, but lunged to evade Tristan’s hand and dive right at Dylan! She had time to draw one startled gasp and lift a hand to protect her face.
Evil, venomous eyes fixed their sights on her…
And crashed to the ground just short of their target, Tristan’s broad hand crushing down on its skull. He held it there, though the thing thrashed and scrabbled frantically to get free. Adjusting his grip slightly, Tristan put his full weight onto the thing and there was a sharp crack. The wraith slumped down, unmoving. It didn’t so much as twitch when Tristan lifted his hand away.
“Shit!” Dylan found her voice at last.
She reached out to touch it – a black mass, edges blurred, shape still indefinable – but Tristan slapped her hand away.
“Don’t touch it!”
“It’s dead, isn’t it?”
“It was already dead,” he reminded her. “I don’t know what it is now. It was never meant to be here.” He snorted. “Like me.”
“It’s smoking,” Dylan pointed out.
The feathery, wispy outline of the wraith seemed to be evaporating into the air, in thin tendrils of acrid smoke. Grabbing a twig, Dylan poked at it, and it exploded in a ball of noxious black gas.
“Don’t breathe it in!” Tristan warned even as Dylan jerked herself out of range. She forced herself not to take a breath until the dark fumes had dissipated.
“God!” Dylan waved at the air, even though it was clear once more. “Did you know it was going to do that?”
“No.” Tristan shook his head, blinking rapidly. He looked at her, but didn’t seem able to focus. For the first time Dylan realised his eyes were glassy, his skin pale and waxy.
“Tristan?” She reached for him, just able to catch him as he slumped to an awkward sitting position. “Are you all right?”
Awkwardly, she got him to lie down, urging him over a bit so he wasn’t lying on the spot where the wraith had been. In the dim light, she could make out deep scratches that ran down his throat, with two on his chest where his jumper had been ripped open. His face, apart from its pallid complexion, seemed untouched. What concerned her was the growing red stain on his sleeve. Grabbing his jumper at the neckline, Dylan pulled at it until it split down the seam.
When she pushed the fabric free of Tristan’s shoulder, blood surged freely down his side and onto the ground. She blotted it with her own sleeve and caught a glimpse of mangled muscle and sinew beneath, and something off-white that looked suspiciously like bone.
“No,” she breathed. Not knowing what else to do, she put her sleeve-covered hand back over the wound and pushed down, hard.
You’re not in the wasteland any more, an insidious little voice whispered inside her head. You’re in the real world, and in the real world, people die.
Pressing down still, Dylan stared down at his pallid face, features slackened, and fought panic. Tristan was so still and lifeless beneath her, he could be dead. The thought made nausea rise up her throat. No, she couldn’t lose Tristan. Not now, not after everything that had happened. She just couldn’t.
“Tristan!” she sobbed. “Tristan! Please be all right. Please. I need you!”
Fumbling on the floor of the tunnel with her free hand, she found her smart phone still shining its torch. It was low on battery and there was no signal, but when she rang 999 anyway, it somehow managed to connect.
“Emergency. Which service do you require?”
“Ambulance,” Dylan blurted. “I need an ambulance!”
SEVENTEEN
“This is it,” Susanna turned a corner and swept her hand out. “This is the street where you died.”
Jack stared down the road, a jumble of high rise flats and short rows of terraced houses. There were no gardens to speak of, no trees to line the road. Just ugly concrete and rusting vehicles. A lot of the buildings had their windows boarded up, any empty walls tagged with graffiti. It was a miserable place, made even more so by the darkness that shrouded it. In the last hour, the mid-morning light had steadily dimmed until the sky above them was as dark as it had been the moment he’d died.
“I should never have come here,” Jack scuffed his worn trainer against the kerb. “It was stupid, wandering around on my own.”
“Why did you?” Jack hadn’t shared much about himself – and what he had shared Susanna hadn’t particularly liked, so she hadn’t asked too many questions.
Jack shrugged. “Didn’t have enough money to go any further.”
“Why did you leave if you couldn’t afford the trip?” Susanna had seen enough of his memories to know he’d planned to go to Glasgow, lose himself in the city.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked, suddenly defensive.
He did that a lot. Sometimes all she had to do was look in his direction, and he’d get defensive.
Defensive, angry. Aggressive. Was it really any wonder that he’d ended up stabbed to death in an empty alleyway at just sixteen?
“I had to get away,” he said suddenly. “My stepdad was… And my mum. She’s useless. She never stands up to him. I’d had enough.”
Susanna clamped her lips shut and just nodded. No need for Jack to know that she’d seen him cowering in his room while he listened to his stepdad laying in to his mum – whether she stood up to him or not.
He took a deep breath, rocked back on his heels with his hands stuffed firmly in his pockets. It struck Susanna suddenly that he was nervous. Frightened, even. The attack must have been agony, and then there was the trauma of lying helpless in an alley while his blood slowly leeched out of him. Still, he faced his fear the same way he’d faced everything else in his too-short life: with a scowl.
“Let’s get on with it.”
As they traversed the long street, the edges of the wasteland began to blur into reality. Nothing about the scenery changed – Jack’s wasteland had been designed to exactly mirror his place of death, at least at first – but signs of life began to materialise. Traffic appeared on the road, people emerged from doorways and walked down the pavement.
They didn’t touch or look at Susanna and Jack – they couldn’t. But several days in the wasteland had accustomed Jack to silence, to emptiness. And his small encounter with
the wraiths had obviously affected him. He gave each person they passed a wide berth and flinched at every car noise. Then he caught himself doing it, and worse, realised Susanna had too. For the final few hundred metres, he deliberately walked in a straight line, not deviating for anyone. He stormed right through a couple of young girls, one of whom shivered.
At last, they came to the alleyway.
Jack stood and stared at the place he’d died. His jaw was clenched, as were his fists. Susanna stood just behind him, looking over his shoulder, seeing what he saw.
A body. Without the air of violent energy about him, it didn’t really look like Jack, but it was. He lay curled up, one arm reaching out, the other pressed to his gut. Near his hip, his jacket lay abandoned where it had fallen from his grip. On the ground beneath him, blood spread out in a wide pool, and more of it was splattered up the brick wall to his left. Litter lay strewn across the cracked concrete around his body.
It was a sad final place to lie. He made a tragic figure splayed there amongst the rubbish.
“How do I do this?” Jack asked, his throat tight, the words coming out scratchily.
That was the question, wasn’t it? Susanna had no idea. She stood there, thinking fast, then panicking when Jack turned on her. “Well?”
“You need… you need to reconnect with your body. I think, I think you need to climb back in.”
“Climb back in?” He raised his eyebrows at her in disbelief. “It isn’t a hatchback!”
“You know what I mean,” Susanna frowned at him. Another idea occurred to her. “When you do it, try to think about how much you want to go back.”
“Wish myself alive, you mean?”
“Well, yeah.”
He snorted. “This is ridiculous.”
Defensive herself – because she really didn’t know what she was doing – Susanna glowered at him. “I can always take you back across the wasteland if you’d rather stay dead.”
“No.” He shook his head at once, something like panic on his face. It was the first time she’d seen real fear in his eyes. He was good at hiding his emotions. Well, emotions other than anger – he had no problem displaying that one. “No, I’ll do it. All right, then.”
With his usual lack of hesitation, he approached the body – his body – and started to crouch down. One hand reached out, ready to link around his own cold, dead fingers.
“Wait!” Susanna’s frantic yelp made him snatch it back. “You’ve got to take me with you.”
She held out her own hand and Jack stared at her.
“Otherwise it won’t work!” she added hastily, in case he didn’t believe her.
He grabbed it, squeezing hard. So hard it hurt. Susanna didn’t protest – at least she knew he wasn’t planning to let go.
“Let’s go,” he said, and without warning he toppled forward into his own corpse.
Susanna felt the jerk on her hand as he dropped towards the ground, then a much harder pull coming from the very centre of her. It gripped her hard and yanked. She looked down, convinced her organs were being ripped from her body, a cruel punishment for daring to defy nature. She saw nothing, blinded suddenly by pain. Deafening pain. Taking over every nerve and making them scream.
She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t think.
She couldn’t stand another second of it.
Then, just as quickly, it was over. Susanna found herself on her hands and knees, palms pressed into the rapidly cooling puddle of Jack’s blood. Shaking her head to clear the remnants of pain, she blinked and looked around her.
The alley.
Jack!
She reached for him, planting her palms on his chest. Warm beneath her touch – and moving. His breaths were laboured, slightly ragged, but he was breathing.
“Jack!” She shook him gently by the shoulders. “Jack, can you hear me?”
It was like a replay of their first moment together, only this time he still clung to life. This time he had a chance.
Susanna lifted his t-shirt to look at the wound and breathed a sigh of relief. It was seeping blood, but only a steady trickle rather than the gush she expected. She rolled up the bottom of his t-shirt and pressed firmly against the gash – and he exploded into consciousness.
“Get off me!”
Just like in the wasteland, he launched himself upwards and pressed her up against the wall. His eyes were dazed, a frown of utter confusion pasted across his forehead. He squeezed the hand that gripped her, trapping her breath in her lungs.
“Jack!” she croaked. “It’s me. It’s Susanna.”
He narrowed his eyes, thinking, searching his mind. The moment recognition flashed in his eyes, he let go of her and immediately crumpled to the floor. He started gasping, grabbing at his side.
Susanna leaned over him, her hand at his stomach. “Jack, we made it!” she said. “Stay with me. Stay awake.”
“Oh my God!” The voice came from over Susanna’s shoulder. It was high-pitched and female. Susanna turned and saw a girl, still in her school uniform, a satchel over her shoulder. Her eyes, surrounded by heavy make-up, were wide and shocked. “Do you need help?”
“Yes!” Susanna said, feeling a rush of relief. Jack’s injury was far too serious for her to deal with herself. “Get us an ambulance.”
“No.” Though she thought he’d slipped away again, the hand that wrapped around Susanna’s arm was firm in its grip. “No ambulance.”
“Jack!” Susanna turned back to him. “You need medical help.”
“No!” he ground out, shifting to glare at the girl.
“You call an ambulance and you’re for it!”
She paled and dropped the phone down to her side.
“Get out of here!”
“Wait!” Susanna called after her, but she was already running away, school bag bouncing against her shoulder. Susanna rounded on Jack. “Why did you do that? You’re really injured, you need medical help.” A pause. “Do you want to die again?”
“Just listen to me, will you?” Jack continued his efforts to get up. “Stupid cow. Do you know who comes along if you call for an ambulance?”
“Paramedics?” Susanna said, confused.
“The pigs!” Jack groaned as he shifted his weight. “Are you really this stupid? The police! Look, just get me up.”
Wrong-footed by her incomplete knowledge of how things worked in the real world, Susanna did what he said, bracing his arm at the elbow and hoisting him to his feet. He cried out in pain, then turned the air blue with a string of bad language.
“Jack, that’s really serious.” Susanna pointed at the wound he was covering with one hand, his body hunched over to ease the pull on his muscles. “You need to get it dealt with.”
“Can’t trust the police. I’ll patch it up at home.” Jack ignored Susanna’s dubious look. “Just get me out of here.”
That hadn’t been their agreement. The deal they’d made was that Susanna would help get Jack back into his body – alive – and then they’d both be free. Their bargain was over, but Susanna couldn’t escape her feeling of obligation – her instinct as a ferryman – to keep him from harm.
Plus, now that she was here, Susanna had no idea where to go, what to do. How to find Tristan. She didn’t like Jack, didn’t trust him – was even a little afraid of him – but right now, he was all she knew.
And he knew this world a lot better than she did.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll help you.”
Following his snarled orders, Susanna flagged a taxi and gently lowered him in, hoping it was still too dark for the cabbie to see the blood on their clothes and hands.
“What’s wrong with him?” the driver snapped. “He’s not going to puke, is he?”
“He won’t be sick,” Susanna reassured him, patting Jack’s arm sympathetically, making him wince at the movement. “I promise.”
“Aye, right. Where to?” the cabbie asked, although he still sounded unhappy.
S
usanna looked expectantly at Jack. She had thousands of memories in her head, knew all about his life, but she had no clue where he wanted to go.
“Stirling,” Jack muttered. “Vincent Street.”
The cabbie pulled away from the kerb without further comment. Susanna stared out of the window, watching as the street sped by. She was in a car. The boy sitting slumped beside her was real, the man in the front seat, hands firm on the steering wheel, was real. She was in the real world.
The real world.
It was unfathomable. Astonishing. Amazing. But all of it meant nothing if she couldn’t find a way to get to Tristan. She didn’t know how to find him, where to start even. But…
But if she closed her eyes, concentrated with her whole being, she could feel him.
He was here. He was close.
And she’d find him.
EIGHTEEN
This was how Tristan must have felt. Dylan sat in a hard, plastic chair in A&E, alone and frightened, and realised that Tristan had been in this position just weeks ago.
It was horrible.
Dylan had been allowed to ride in the ambulance with him, but once they arrived at the hospital the two paramedics had whisked him away. She followed as best she could – stupid crutch! – but they wouldn’t let her go beyond the expansive waiting room, crowded with people. That hurt, but not in the way she’d come to expect. It hurt because she was scared – she hadn’t seen his eyes open since they’d strapped him to the stretcher and wheeled him into the emergency vehicle.
And now… now she didn’t feel that tightness of breath, the nausea. The echo of pain in her leg. She couldn’t see him, she didn’t know where he was, what was happening to him, and she felt nothing – except a sick terror.
It’s because he’s unconscious, she told herself. When he comes round, you’ll feel like hell – and you’ll be grateful for it.
There was nothing to do but take a seat… and wait. A receptionist came and took Tristan’s – very scant – details. A nurse came and asked if Dylan needed to be examined, but even though her leg was throbbing furiously, she refused. She didn’t want to be trapped on a bed somewhere when Tristan finally woke up.
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