Moonlands

by Steven Savile

  The ground around the Arch was soaked in ancient blood, going back to the days where it had been known as Tyburn, the executioner's mound, and even before that to the time when it had played host to druidic rites and pagan sacrifices. The early Britons who had settled on banks of the river might not have known why they were drawn to the spot, but it had always been sacred for as long as memories stretched back, and then longer still. It was one of the few places across the city where the veil between the Nightside and the Sunside was so weak that at times it was possible to slip between the realms.

  Blaze had one thing in his favour – it wasn't so much a trick as it was a boon. And he had to make use of it. It was the only chance they had. The Nightgaunt wasn't aware that its prey knew it was being hunted. It made a difference. Had the Nightgaunt known Blackwater Blaze had seen it stalking the girl it would have necessitated different tactics. It wouldn't have been able to lurk in the shadows around Marble Arch just waiting for Blaze to deliver the girl – and by extension, himself – to their executioner. Knowledge would have drawn it out, forcing the Nightgaunt to come looking for them.

  That also meant that the chance of the Nightgaunt abandoning its hiding place by the Great Moongate in favour of one of the lesser gates was slim, even if the rain washed away all of the Faelyn's fairy dust and it caught scent of the girl.

  He needed to move fast.

  Blaze could imagine Jax's plan all too easily. He felt sick to the stomach as he thought about the Occulator presenting the King Under the Moon with her head and declaring the successor dead to the rapturous cheers of the crowd. It was clever, of course. Jax was making himself the hero of the hour. The Tribes Under the Moon would worship him. Redhart Jax, the man who broke the Enemy. Redhart Jax, the man who snuffed out its last hope.

  The Occulator did nothing without a very good reason. And more often than not that reason was far from the obvious one. Breaking the Concord had more ramifications than he was seeing, Blaze knew that. It had to have. He refused to dwell on it. For now all he cared about was the fact that Jax had turned his pack into a death squad on a one-way mission.

  It was only fair that he turned it around on Jax. If the Occulator wanted to prod the fire, then he could hardly complain if it rose up and burned him, could he?

  Looking at the girl now it was no wonder that they had been able to keep her hidden so long if all it took was one simple trick to shed all traces of her heritage, and with it, everything that set her apart from the rest of this place. Her magic. Smelling her, she could have passed for one of them. It was amazing. He would remember this trick. It could come in useful.

  What it couldn't do was take away her beauty—and there was no doubt she was beautiful. He had only watched her a little, seeing the way she interacted with her pack mates, but it was obvious that there was something about her. She was more than just a girl, even if she didn't realise it. Perhaps that was what drew him to her—the need to protect her so that she might grow into the woman she was destined to be? There was nobility in that notion, Blaze reasoned. Perhaps there was salvation in it too?

  He watched her huddle under the porch, talking with the other girl, chatter chatter chatter, endlessly. All that noise made his head spin. How could they not go crazy from it? How did they have so many words inside them? He needed silence. Solitude. He needed hours away from the pack to think, stalking the hills, living, or his head would explode. But not this pair. They thrived on words and laughter.

  The girl took something from her friend.

  He had to strain to see what it was, because the streetlight was mirrored in the raindrops: an umbrella.

  But it was more than that, he realised, as the aura became more distinct. It had no place being here. It came from his homeland. Another relic. The Wardens had obviously brought it with them when they escaped. The aura was weak. Indeed, as the girl twirled it in her hand he wondered if the umbrella itself was in fact quite ordinary, but had something extraordinary hidden inside its core?

  And then, as she opened it and stepped out from the porch, using it to shelter from the rain, he knew exactly what it was. Well, well, well, he thought to himself. Yet again, a seemingly simple thing that changed everything.

  There was no doubting who she was now.

  Blaze smiled, though with his elongated snout the expression was lost. His tongue lolled between sharp teeth, and set off after her. Street by street, her scent returned as the rain slowly began to sluice away the camouflage that the fairy's dust had given the girl. He watched her as she walked. There was a tension about her body he hadn't seen before.

  He followed her, prowling in the shadows, slinking along the low walls, pressing close to the wet stone. His claws clicked on the paving slabs. His breaths came in shallow pants: huh-huh-huh.

  The Wolfen drew a few glances, but most people who saw him seemed not to see him. Blaze knew how the mind worked—it saw something out of the ordinary and made it ordinary. They saw a giant wolf, they assumed what they were really seeing was just some huge wolfhound that had slipped the leash. He didn't care as long as they stayed out of his way.

  The girl didn't head back towards the park, or her den that lay on the other side of it. She ducked her head down and walked deeper into the labyrinth of buildings, past the old hospital and the train station towards another major road. The place reeked. The gluttony of smells made him sick to his stomach. He longed to go home, just to be away from this place and its filth, just to breathe in fresh air.

  Soon, he promised himself.

  But he couldn't go home as long as the girl was out here alone. It was ironic, Jax had sent him here to kill her, and in doing so had turned Blackwater Blaze into her protector and best chance of making it through the night alive. If he hadn't been so intent on playing politics and doing away with two thorns in his paw at once, the girl would have been dead by now and Blaze would have been on the Nightside without a second thought for the wrongness of the murder he'd committed.

  He threw back his head and howled at the moon.

  The girl stopped dead in her tracks and turned.

  She looked straight at him, but didn't see him because the gloom was too deep and he was too far back for her to see any movement in the shadows. Then she raised a pair of goggles to her eyes—alethioptics—and he knew for sure that she could see him. Blaze snarled, frustrated at his own stupidity. He couldn't help her like this. Not as a wolf. Not when the last thing she had seen him do was kill a Warden.

  He receded deeper into the shadows, trying to master his form and bring the shift on.

  He gritted his teeth.

  It took every ounce of will he had to move away from his natural form and become a wolf in human clothing.

  She didn't wait for him to change.

  She ran.

  EIGHTEEN

  Traitor's Gate

  This late at night the city was a different animal, more dangerous, and filled with a sense of desperation that wasn't there during the day when it was all business suits and briefcases and people rushing to and from work or to and from department stores and boutiques. There were cities within the city. Worlds that seldom—if ever—collided. Yet here they were, crashing together violently and Ashley was caught in the middle.

  It was about survival.

  She looked back over her shoulder.

  The rain sheeted down, hitting the pavement hard and bouncing back. She splashed through the puddles. She couldn't shake the image the goggles had shown her: the Wolfen hidden in the shadows. Miss Lake's killer had found her. She had gone from the frying pan, well, the creepy thing in the park, to the fire. She wanted to go home. But she couldn't. It wasn't that easy. Going home would have brought that thing to her door and too many people had already died because of her, no matter what they had tried to say. It was all because of her. She knew it, and they knew it. She couldn't go home when these things were still out there, still after her.

  All she could do was run.

  Ashley hit t
he button for the pedestrian crossing, but ran into the road well before the green man summoned her. A silver Mercedes slewed to a stop inches from her knees.

  She didn't break her stride.

  On the other side of the road she glanced back—and even with the alethioptics she couldn't see any sign of the Wolfen following her. She wiped her fringe out of her eyes and hurried on to the next crossing, and then the next, moving closer and closer to Marble Arch and the bright lights of Oxford Street.

  There was a woman huddled up against the park railings. She sat on a piece of cardboard. She had a long dark coat on, drawn up around her legs. Her dog was curled up beside her. The woman had propped up another piece of card to keep the dog dry while she got soaked.

  Ashley kept on running until she reached the redbrick and rusted iron gates of the old Tyburn Nunnery. The windows were blacked out and a huge cross hung over the iron-banded door. It looked deserted.

  Her lungs and legs burned with exhaustion.

  Up ahead one of the streetlights flickered and went out.

  She stopped dead in the middle of the path, reaching out for the cold metal railings for support. She had run straight into the path of the faceless creature from the park. She turned to head back the way she had just come, but couldn't go that way either, not with the Wolfen waiting back there.

  She was caught between two monsters with nowhere to run.

  She looked over the road at the dark expanse of Hyde Park. There was no way she was going back in there.

  Behind her someone shouted. It took her a moment to make out what they said and that it was meant for her. One word: "Wait!"

  Every instinct deeply ingrained in her body screamed at her to run, but it felt like she had been running forever, and she didn't have the strength to keep on. When the tall, muscular boy with a crop of wild black hair matted flat to his scalp stepped out of the rain, she recognised him instantly. They'd stood face-to-face outside the gates of the school before everything had gone crazy. Mel had called him "Tall, dark and broody." There was something about him. She looked at him. His hands were at his sides, fists clenched. She looked up at his eyes. He stared at her. Really stared. His nostrils flared.

  He wasn't wearing the leather biker jacket this time. He was in a long ratty overcoat, like something a homeless person would wear, and a hoodie. It was the uniform of the streets. But there was no denying just how beautiful he was. That was the only word to describe him: beautiful. But it was the kind of beauty that made her uncomfortable in real life. She wasn't comfortable with the way it made her heart race and her body flush. She couldn't think properly when she looked at him, even when he was dressed like a bum.

  Somewhere off to the right church bells started to chime the hour. The sound of bells slowly spread out across the city as though every church was in a slightly different time zone. It took a full minute for the last bell to ring out. Nine O'clock.

  "Let me help you," he called, stepping into the traffic.

  A bright red Mini Cooper nearly ran him over.

  The boy didn't flinch.

  He walked across the road as though he owned it.

  "Are you…?" He had been there the day that Miss Lake had died. Was he one of them? One of the Wardens who watched over her? He seemed too young to have been there all of her life, watching from the side lines, but one thing the last few days had taught Ashley Hawthorne was that nothing was as it seemed. She was living in a world where she couldn't even trust her own eyes anymore. Why was it impossible to imagine that a boy could live for years without growing up? She glanced instinctively towards the park and the statute of Peter Pan. She'd already encountered Tinkerbell, hadn't she? Was the boy before her the inspiration for Peter? She half expected to see the Lost Boys swinging through the guttering and pipes of the town houses up above her. "Did Ephram send you?"

  "He knows I am here," the boy said, without actually answering her question. "We don't have much time. You are not safe here, Ashkellion. The Faelyn's masking spell is wearing off because of the rain. It's barely hiding you as it is. The Nightgaunt has your scent. When the masking is gone it will find you and it will kill you, believe me. I won't let that happen. But for me to stand a chance, I need to get you away from here."

  He took her hand.

  The touch was electric. Ashley felt a thrill sizzle through her fingers up her arm and all the way into her heart as his hand closed on hers. Her breath hitched in her throat.

  Another light, this one closer than the last, died.

  The boy pulled her towards the road, and the park.

  She resisted.

  "The Nightgaunt is coming," he said, desperately. "We can't stay here. Believe me. Even I can't fight that thing. We've got one chance, and that's to run. Now come on, we've got a lot of ground to cover."

  He led her back through the park, in the direction of her house. "I can't go home," she panted, struggling to match his easy lope. She didn't even know what to call him.

  "We are not going back to your den," he assured her. "It is not safe there. You need to trust me. I will protect you. I will lay my life down if needs be. That is all you need to know. Do what I say and you'll see your pack again. Don't, and—" he left the thought, and the threat, unfinished.

  She noticed the curious choice of words, but given the other curiosities of the night, didn't relate them to the wolf she'd seen in the shadows.

  Why should she?

  There wasn't a single working light in the park, and all of the houses and hotels and car salesrooms along Park Lane were in darkness. It was the creepiest thing she had ever seen. London was never dark. Not truly dark. There was always a light on in a window, on a street corner, on the roads. Not tonight. The cars crawled forward without their headlights lighting the way. The windows were black.

  She knew what it meant: the thing—the Nightgaunt—was shadowing their movement, matching them step for step.

  Ashley gritted her teeth and gripped his hand all the more determined to ignore the fire in her lungs and the pain in her legs.

  The darkness swept forward, outpacing them along the road.

  They left the park through the gate at Hyde Park Corner. Everywhere around them was dark, and the night was so much colder than it had been even an hour before. She was shivering as they cut across the road and around the Wellington Arch, running towards the lights of Constitution Hill.

  Ashley couldn't hear a single car.

  She pulled up long before they reached Birdcage Walk, stitch burning in her side and her lungs on fire.

  "I can't," Ashley gasped, leaning forward, bracing her hands on knees as her chest heaved, sucking in great huge mouthfuls of cold night air.

  The bells of London chimed again, an hour closer to midnight, an hour closer to the brief moment that the Moongates would be open.

  "You don't have a choice," he told her. His voice seemed fainter than it had when he'd called out for her to wait despite the fact that they were closer together now. "That light—the darkness of it going out like that—that means that the Nightgaunt has abandoned the Great Gate. It's getting nearer all the time. And it won't tire. It is relentless. Do you feel that chill? It will only get worse as he nears, leeching the strength out of your limbs and the will out of your heart until you just want to lie in the middle of the road and curl up in a ball, helplessly while it stands over you. And then it's all over. You can't fight it. It bleeds hope out of you. It drains your senses, first your sight will dim, then your hearing will go and you will be lost in a world without sound so that it doesn't have to listen to your screams. Next you will be robbed of your sense of smell and then taste, but mercifully you won't be able to feel anything as it kills you." The boy stared at her. His gaze was intense. Frightening. More so than his words. "Now, it's up to you, but if you want to live, run, girl! Run!" And with that, he grabbed Ashley's arm and dragged her on.

  She stumbled forward, feeling like a marathon runner with legs of jelly as she stumbled onto Birdcage Wa
lk.

  She looked back over her shoulder.

  The man in the morning suit was there, gliding across the paving stones and getting closer all the time. For the brief moment that he was caught in the full light of the last working streetlight she saw the featureless planes of his face. The man paused, tilting his head as though sniffing the air, and then glided towards her.

  In the darkness behind him she saw a flicker of light dart through the air.

  The sight of the faceless man spurred her into action.

  She started to run—really run, head down, arms and legs pumping furiously—and this time she didn't feel the burning pain of the stitch in her side or bite of the cold air in her lungs. She'd found her second wind. Ashley stretched her legs, letting her long stride eat the ground. At her side, the boy ran with an easy lope. His wet hair streamed out behind him as he ran. The raw power of his musculature was incredible to behold. There was so much strength in his body. He could have run all night and all day without losing his breath.

  Unfortunately, second wind or not, Ashley couldn't.

  He led her down through all of the huge buildings of Whitehall, the Treasury and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to the water. No one paid them a blind bit of notice. Why would they? They were just two kids running hand-in-hand at night.

  They clattered down a stone staircase on the Embankment, each step worn smooth by the shuffling feet of pirates, smugglers, fishermen and mudlarks over the centuries since they'd been laid. They ran along the side of the river. Gulls banked overhead. Ashley couldn't remember the last time she'd seen birds fly at night. And then she thought of the Coribrae and realised those banking birds could quite literally have been anything.