‘Yes,’ she said desperately. ‘My name is Annalise. I’m a victim as well, just like your sister. Please, I don’t want to die. I can help you. We can find a cure …’
‘I’ve already discovered a cure,’ Rowan interrupted coldly. ‘It’s the same cure my sister found.’ He stamped on her fingers until she finally let go. He watched impassively as she was swallowed in the bank of darkness and smoke.
They stared at each other across the short distance. The dragon’s eyes were familiar. Black as pitch with diamonds glittering hypnotically at their centres. It did not blink. They stood like that, frozen, for what seemed an age.
Something came out of the sky. A pale blur hit the edge of the roof of the annexe where the dragon lay with enough force to break off a large piece of masonry. The pale thing bounced towards him. It spun past him, broken and twisted. Grímnir saw that it was a woman. Her limbs were shattered, undulating like flags in a strong breeze. Her head was deformed and a red trail spilled from her shattered brainpan in a bloody arc. Even in the semi-darkness, he saw that the blood turned to vermilion ash as it was whipped away in the breeze.
The woman landed on her back not far from Grímnir. She slid down a pile of wreckage, dislodging it and pushing it along in a small tinkling, grinding avalanche. Her right arm lolled flaccid and filleted to the ground, and the back of her hand came to rest on a sigil-branded hilt, revealed by the shifting rubble.
Grímnir looked at the dragon. It had seen the sword too. Its tongue slipped out and licked around its scaled mouth. Grímnir stumbled for the sword as the dragon thrashed, fighting against its bonds. He got to the sword, ignoring the woman, and scooped it up. He felt a familiar warmth as he held the weapon. The runes sparkled, despite the gloom pressed down upon them by the apocalyptic sky.
Grímnir turned to face his enemy. The dragon was struggling to free itself, but it was wrapped up in the wreckage on its back. Grímnir took a step towards it, and it redoubled its efforts.
Its head jerked from side to side on a neck as thick as two men. Its wings curled up past its belly and legs, straining upwards, dark silhouettes against a darker sky. Its teeth snapped at cables and warped steel. Grímnir took another step. A cable snapped with a hiss and a whine. One wing pushed a girder away to the side. Yet another step. Grímnir smiled. Despite its efforts, the thing was trapped. It could not escape.
It opened its mouth wide and twisted its head to face him. Something red and wild flickered deep at the back of its throat. Grímnir tried to dodge out of the way, but his mismatched legs betrayed him and he slipped jarringly to one knee.
Grímnir had often heard Camhlaidh use a human word in times of stress. The big man had no idea what it meant, but it was short and full of brutal expression. It seemed like an appropriate time to try it out.
‘Fuck,’ Grímnir said as a searing bar of blue and white flame jetted from the dragon’s maw, engulfing him.
Somewhere, a child was crying. Rowan stopped at the bottom of the stairs and listened. A high-pitched, choking wail came from somewhere above him. It was the faint and desperate hunger cry of an infant.
How a baby could have survived was beyond Rowan. It was a miracle. ‘Don’t worry,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t worry, I’m coming!’ The crying stopped. ‘No, no – keep making a noise.’ He ran up the stairs as he shouted and turned right towards the bedrooms.
After a moment, the crying started again. There. Farther along. The baby was in one of the bedrooms. He followed the sound, all the time shouting that he was coming to save the child, knowing it could not understand him, but not caring one iota. He charged into the bedroom, looking frantically around. If he could save the child … If he could just save someone …
The noise stopped when the door slammed back into the wall. The room was exquisite and untouched by fire or smoke so far. A huge room in white. Amazingly, a bedside lamp was on. There was a king-sized bed next to the door. It backed up against a wooden bookshelf with urns and vases on top of it. Another floor to ceiling window formed the wall opposite the door, and it was shrouded in a sheer and gauzy white curtain. Pictures and sideboards … Rowan’s eyes scanned the room quickly. There was no child.
‘Come on,’ he shouted desperately. ‘Tell me where you are.’ There was a brief cough from a huge wardrobe opposite the foot of the bed, on the other side of the room from where Rowan stood. Of course. If he had been desperate to quickly hide a child, he supposed he would have done the same.
Rowan stepped forwards and slipped on the tiled floor. Recovering his balance, he looked down. There was a smear of pink-tinged slime beneath him. The monsters had been here. The baby must be blessed to have escaped.
He stepped quickly past the bed and pulled the wardrobe door open. He choked off a soothing coo and ducked a stabbing tentacle. ‘Jesus fuck!’ he shouted as he stumbled backwards. The barb at the end of the Barghest’s limb passed so close in front of his eyes, he fancied he could see the individual serrations along its glistening edge.
Rowan fell on his arse. His hands went behind him and he scrabbled backwards, pushing with his feet as he went. Panting, he came up against the end of the bed. Adrenaline surged through him and he felt light-headed.
The Barghest didn’t follow. It began to cry again. As his heart pounded down to a more normal rate, he started to notice details. The monster was badly hurt. It only had a bunch of tentacles left to it; the rest had been sheared away. The stumps quivered. Its thick barrel of a body lay on its side. Halfway along its length there was a big, sucking wound. The Barghest had made a nest of ripped-up clothes, and its round mouth chewed aimlessly at nothing. It began to cry again, those few remaining appendages weaving around it in a protective web.
Rowan climbed to his feet. He was about to turn and leave the thing to its fate when he saw something behind it, at the back of the deep wardrobe. Two boxy, bright red packages.
He stepped towards them without thinking. He needed them. The Barghest went quiet again, and its tentacles stopped weaving and came upright, facing him like hunting racer snakes.
Rowan stopped short. He pointed the gun at it but didn’t shoot. It would be useless. ‘And how am I going to finish you off, you skittery little bastard?’ he asked gently. The Barghest started crying again.
Cam lay on the floor and stared up into the sky. It was black and broken. He thought it must be the smoke from the city, but to his fading sight, everything was blurred. His leg had stopped hurting; instead, he felt a terrible cold creeping over his body.
I’m going to die, he thought to himself. I’ve lost too much blood. A human would have died three times over by now. Death. The thought should have been terrifying, but he found it strangely peaceful. Maybe this was how Mark Jones had felt when the Maiden finally let him rest. Maybe he would see his father. He hoped so. It was a shame that Manchester was burning. He did love the city, even with all its faults.
The sky began to swirl. It fell towards him, closing down his peripheral vision until there was nothing but a pinpoint of smoke, and then even that was consumed in darkness.
Even incineration couldn’t kill him. It was inconvenient, though. A third party standing nearby would have seen the white-hot flame turn the Jötnar from flesh and blood into a greasy shadow. Camulus dropped to the ground with a clang, undamaged. Flecks of ash swirled in the convection currents formed by that furnace heat.
They didn’t drift away on the wind. Instead, they came back together in organic clumps. Slowly at first, then quicker and quicker, new sinew and tattooed flesh crawled over the charred remnants. Questing matter found and bonded with its neighbours, and a puddle of meat became Grímnir.
When his vocal cords grew back, he screamed. He had been gone – his brain flashed instantaneously to nothing. With the return of consciousness came a feeling of massive displacement, the like of which he had not felt since he awakened a few days ago. Like before, he shrugged the feeling off and climbed to his feet. Why had the monster bothered? It knew it couldn
’t kill him. So why waste its energy? If anything, it had done him a service because he was whole again – he had been unmade and regenerated anew. His bones were straight and true. He felt strong and limber.
Camulus lay on the ground. Grímnir picked it up. It was hot. He was naked, but he didn’t care. His only thought was for the dragon. He turned to look for it. It was gone. Where? How? He scanned the annexe roof and saw something moving.
One of the creature’s wings was jerking spasmodically. It was shrinking, disappearing beneath the broken metallic fin. ‘No,’ Grímnir shouted. ‘You cannot escape me!’ In the moments Grímnir had taken to regenerate, the dragon had seized its opportunity. Cú Roí had been wrapped in cables and pinned under collapsed masonry. In his dragon form, he had been caught like a fish in a net. Cú Roí was changing back into his humanoid form to slither out of the trap.
Gripping Camulus with one hand, Grímnir began climbing the rubble towards the roof of the annexe. It was awkward, slow going and he knew he was taking too long. Cú Roí would not be fooled again. If he escaped now, the world would burn.
The eyeless trunk that Rowan assumed was the thing’s head pointed straight at him. The slack oval mouth opened wide. Ring after ring of tiny teeth marched backwards down its wide, slowly pulsating throat. It was hissing at him. The last thing he wanted was to get close to it: it would kill him without hesitation. It had thirteen tentacles left. He had counted them. They weaved back and forth defensively.
It was a fascinating creature. A truly awful biological weapon, but fascinating all the same. This one was badly injured but still alive. It wasn’t regenerating, not like Sam had. It wasn’t fading away, either. Rowan had no doubt it would starve before it died of anything else. If it could starve. Or it would burn.
He had only been in the bedroom for a minute, but smoke was beginning to come through the door. The marine could hear fire nearby. It was spreading quickly now – it had a hold on the apartment and no doubt, the building. If he didn’t act quickly, he’d suffocate and his body would be cremated here, his ashes to mix with those of the monster in the wardrobe. He did not relish the thought of that.
He couldn’t leave though. There would be no way down through the building now. The smoke would get him if the flames didn’t. They were trapped. Unless he could get those two red boxes discarded and forgotten behind the Barghest. They were personal rescue devices. They were, in effect, civilianised rappelling equipment: emergency evacuation equipment for high rise buildings. Rowan had come across them a few months ago when he was researching abseiling equipment. They were marketed as a must-have for anybody living or working in a tall building post-9/11. An expensive gimmick, as far as he had been concerned.
His heart had leapt when he had seen them in the wardrobe. Rowan could only imagine how they had ended up here. Probably a bad taste housewarming gift. He doubted they had been bought seriously – buildings like this were pretty much fireproof. They were compartmentalised, and the best thing to do was wait until the fire brigade turned up and put it out. Tall buildings would not collapse, and if they were going to, then you were screwed anyway.
Except, nobody had designed for a fire-breathing dragon. Or a lack of emergency services. He doubted there was a building in the world that could weather this sort of storm. A thick plume of smoke billowed through the door. A high-pitched crash indicated a superheated ornament had fractured somewhere below. It was getting warmer, too. Rowan eyed the personal rescue devices through the Barghest’s snaking limbs. They were his only chance to get out.
The Barghest started crying again. It sounded just like a baby. In a warped way, Rowan supposed it was. One of those had come out of Tabby. He shut his eyes tight and tried to push the thought away. No time for grief. He had to kill it. He pointed the gun at it but again he didn’t fire. It’d just piss it off. He had to do something.
Smoke caught at the back of his throat and he coughed. A second later, the Barghest went wild. Rowan stared as it began to thrash around frantically in its nest. Its crying became shriller and more urgent. Its tentacles thudded against the sides of the wardrobe.
The smoke. It had smelled the smoke. It knew that the fire was coming, and it was scared. Its tentacles wrapped together into a single thick limb with barbs sprouting from the end. It lashed out towards Rowan. He stumbled backwards and fell onto the bed.
It wasn’t coming for him though. It was trying to escape. The Barghest pulled itself forwards a few inches and then the tentacle whipped back, and then forwards again, like a cast fishing line. Again, the Barghest dragged itself forwards a couple of inches.
Too slow. It was going too slowly. Rowan needed it out of the way now. There was not enough room to dodge around it. There was a whomp and a crash from outside. Smoke began to flood into the room through the open door, a black roiling flow that hugged the ceiling. Rowan rolled onto his side and shot the window. It exploded outwards, and air whipped into the bedroom and carried some of the smoke away. He hoped it would buy some time.
The Barghest advanced another inch towards the door. The bed and duvet were so luxuriously soft that Rowan struggled to sit up. It gave him an idea. He scrambled off the bed and ducked out of the bedroom. Fire had taken the landing. Part of the floor had caved in. He coughed and choked, raising a useless hand to cover his mouth. He could barely see a thing, and he could feel the heat on his face. He could see the hole in the wall that led back to the roof.
He still had time, but not much. Rowan ran back to the door and peered inside. The Barghest was next to the bed. Rowan took a calming breath, which turned into a debilitating cough, and then he spun into the room with the gun in his right hand. He fired his last two bullets straight down the gullet of the creeping monster. It tried to retreat, its tentacles waving around frantically.
He threw the empty gun after it, grabbed the edge of the thick eiderdown duvet and pulled it off the bed and over the Barghest. Then he pulled the mattress onto it for good measure.
Rowan jumped on the bed and then ran past the thing on the floor. He reached into the wardrobe and grabbed the personal rescue devices, one in each hand. They were much heavier than he had expected. The duvet and mattress were bucking wildly. The Barghest was still tangled up and pinned, but its tentacles had torn through the thick material and were slamming against walls and the floor wildly. One came perilously close to Rowan as he climbed back onto the bed and shuffled past it.
The marine left the bedroom and shambled back to the hole in the wall. When he reached it, he looked back over his shoulder. The apartment was consumed in flames. The stairs down to the lower level had collapsed. Pools of fire burned everywhere, rapidly spreading towards each other. There would be no escape that way.
Something moved in the fire. Some things. As Rowan watched, a Barghest dodged out of the flames and onto a rare patch of safe tiles near an unbroken window. It saw him. Rowan knew it had seen him, even though it didn’t have any eyes. This one was not injured. It was whole.
It roared. There was an answering roar from somewhere else in the apartment. A second Barghest joined the first. Then a third and a fourth. ‘You’re having a laugh,’ Rowan said. ‘You have to be fucking kidding me!’ Whichever deity he was admonishing didn’t answer.
He turned and ran into the hole. He doubted the lack of stairs or even the fire would slow the creatures down for long.
Once again, it comes down to this. To the two of us.
‘This time you have no tricks. No sacrifices. No escape. Get out of my head.’
Cú Roí laughed. ‘As you wish,’ he said in the True Tongue. The roof of the black annexe was a wasteland of twisted steel and broken glass. Cú Roí stood naked in the middle of the destruction. Grímnir faced him, resting his weight on Camulus, which he held point down on the roof.
‘It is over. There is nowhere to run.’
‘You have said that before.’ Silence stretched out between them. Cú Roí broke it. ‘Why do you hunt me?’
�
�It is my purpose.’
‘It has not always been so. Why do you hunt me?’
‘To remove your evil from the world.’
‘Evil? What evil? I am designed to conquer. I was born to rule. Just as you are a god to these humans, so, too, am I a god to you. If the people of The Towers are insignificant to me, then these wretches are little more than dust beneath my feet. Clay to mould as I see fit. I am not evil. I simply am.’
‘You cause death and destruction wherever you go …’
‘And that is my right. My right by strength. I will reshape this world in my image, and in a hundred years, none of my people will think that I am evil. The chosen will relish the immortality and strength I grant them. The cattle will not even remember that they once had free will. They will be domesticated and bred for the tables of my children. That is not evil. That is simply progress.’
‘I will stop you.’
‘Maybe. Maybe. But what right do you have to do that?’
‘The right of strength.’
Cú Roí smiled. ‘We are not so different, are we? I ask again, why do you hunt me?’
‘Enough of this,’ Grímnir said hefting Camulus up into a two-handed grip. ‘You have nothing left, Cú Roí. Leach is not hiding in the shadows with some Barghest to distract me. You have nowhere to run. It ends here.’
‘You have no answer, do you? You have no moral authority here, zealot. You’re just another fanatic let off his leash. No, I don’t have Leach by my side. An immortal monster came out of nowhere and killed him. Mark Jones, it called itself. A monster created by your precious Maiden. She made that twisted abomination and set him on my people and yours alike. I spoke to it. I felt its hatred. How many of your kind did it kill over the millennia? More than I ever did.’
‘You cannot twist this. You are Níðhöggr – bent on murder and suffering.’
Immortals' Requiem Page 46
