“I haven’t done anything to Rose,” Loren replied.
She could see that his casual use of Rose’s name threw David. Only people who knew her called her by that name. Which clashed with his current theory: that Loren was, against all the laws of magic and biology, controlling Rose’s will.
Anything but the truth.
Okay. So they were making progress.
“Dad,” Rose said, fighting to keep her voice low and steady, “put down the gun, please.”
That was a mistake. As if David Elmsworth would ever put down a gun. Instead, he switched his focus on to Rose, aimed at her, his eyes flickering back to Loren.
Loren almost growled.
“I would have thought that was beyond even you,” he said softly. “Your own daught —”
David snapped toward him and fired as soon as he started speaking, but Loren dived as soon as his hand moved and with a jerk of his head the gun flew out of David’s hand. Rose caught it reflexively, reloaded and fired into the air.
David and Loren stared at her.
“Thank you,” Rose said, with the closest thing to calm that she could summon, which was probably numb shock. “Can we be civil and stop trying to kill each other now?”
Loren glanced at David tightly. “Rose, what are you doing? They’ll be coming.”
“Yes, they will,” Rose said, clicking the safety back on, “which gives us about five minutes to get this straight. Dad, you are not going to kill this man. You are not going to kill him because to do that you’re going to have to kill me first, and we both know you would never do that.”
David was staring at her.
“Oh, Rose,” he whispered, “what has he done to you?”
Rose opened her mouth to speak, to try, somehow, to explain — and all of her words left her suddenly and she stood there, helpless under her father’s gaze, floundering.
“Dad, I . . .”
Loren took over before Rose could say something terrible. She could only be grateful.
“I cornered your daughter nearly four months ago at her school, shortly after I escaped from your cells,” he said curtly. Rose followed his eyes. He was tracking David’s every movement, waiting to see how he would react, whether David would try to kill him again. So far, nothing. “I presented her with an ultimatum. Either she would help me, or I would tell the rest of the Department — anonymously, of course — that the both of you have been concealing your Hybrid status from the authorities for going on fifteen years. She agreed. Specifically, if my powers of understanding have not left me yet, she agreed in order to protect you.”
Rose had seen this before. She could see the Loren Arkwood of Room Fourteen emerging in his manner again: polite, menacing, eloquent, ruthless. This was the Arkwood who had terrified her.
She could only assume that his return was not a good sign.
David’s voice was terrifying in its emptiness. “We knew you had an accomplice.”
“Yes. That was Rose.”
David did not so much as glance at her.
“Four months . . .” he said quietly. “She was meeting you for four months?”
Loren nodded. David, to their astonishment, started to laugh. It was a very bitter laugh. Rose had no idea what mode he was defaulting to.
“Well, I suppose it was me who taught her how to lie,” he said. “And she didn’t try to kill you? Not even once?”
In any other set of circumstances, Rose would have resented being talked about as if she wasn’t standing three feet away from him. As it was, she merely felt that she was being spared.
“I don’t doubt that she wanted to,” said Loren calmly. “But killing is hard on a first-timer.”
David was staring into the air now, but his gaze was not at all vacant: it was sharp and focused, and his eyes moved quickly as if he were looking at an intricate painting. Fitting all the pieces together. The stuff of nightmares.
“So she knew . . . what, all the way from Argent?”
Loren shook his head. “The Regency bomb attack.”
David went motionless. “You told her about Regency.”
“Of course I did. She deserves to know.”
“How much?”
“Almost everything.”
Now his rage was blistering. “It wasn’t your history to teach her, Arkwood —”
“You had no right to withhold that kind of information from her. They’re coming for you, David, Felix is coming back for you and if he’s targeting you he’ll target her.”
“Don’t you dare lecture me on how to raise my child.”
“Oh, I think I have every right to talk to you on parenting technique,” said Loren, in the coldest voice Rose had ever heard, “seeing as you saw fit to advance my niece’s upbringing by depriving her of her mother.”
David switched his gaze back to Rose with alarming suddenness. There was something new in his eyes: a wariness, almost, a hostility.
“So you’ve been lying to me all this time?” he asked.
Definitely hostility.
“I lied to protect you!” Rose cried desperately. “I couldn’t face — they’d kill you, I knew that — you would have lied to me, you have lied to me, I know —”
She swallowed. His expression had not changed, but now she could identify something else in his face. Not hostility, not quite. Astonishment. Utter shock. And, could that be . . . pride?
“You complete bastard,” he said with no change in tone at all. Rose had to double-check that he was speaking to Loren. “You would blackmail a child?”
Loren’s expression hardened.
“My sister is dead on your orders,” he said. “My niece has been held in your cells for nearly half a year, and you spent two months torturing me. Don’t you dare talk to me about morality.”
There was a silence again. Rose wished someone would speak, and immediately regretted it when they did.
“Rose,” David said softly, silence trailing behind his words like water, “why, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you would have arrested him,” Rose said, her voice breaking, “and if he was caught, he would talk. Dad, you know I couldn’t let him talk, you know that!”
She had not meant to shout: the words echoed through the alleyway with piercing volume. In the distance, Rose could hear sirens approaching.
“And we have his sister’s kid,” she continued, now painfully aware that she was fighting a losing battle. “So I couldn’t abandon him. I couldn’t let him die, Dad. I can’t kill someone in cold blood.”
There was a long silence. The sirens were closer now.
“Okay, Elmsworth,” said Loren tightly. “If you want to kill me I would be grateful if you would hurry up with it. If not, now would be a good time to let us go.”
“Us?”
“Yes. For Rose’s sake, not for mine. If I appear to let her go now it will look suspicious. If she stays with me, it will still look like I have her hostage.”
“You’ve forced my daughter to work against me for four months, and now you want to take her from me.”
“If I don’t,” said Loren, his voice corrupting into fire, “she will end up in one of your cells.”
The sirens had stopped moving now. David fixed his gaze on Loren, who met it unflinchingly.
“If you let anything happen to her,” David told him, “I will never rest until I find you and, I promise you, your death will be long and slow and very painful.”
Loren considered this. “Fair enough,” he said. “You have my word that she won’t be hurt.”
“I don’t care about your word, Arkwood. I want your self-preservation to hold you to this one.”
Loren smiled grimly, and nodded. David looked at Rose. The shadow of the monster had not quite left his eyes.
“Rose,” he said flatly, “stay safe.”
“I will. I love you.”
He looked at her for a moment, and turned. Over his shoulder, he yelled, “They’re not here! Look down the alley
ways!” Then, slowly, he looked back at Loren and Rose.
“Run,” he told them.
Rose did not move. “Dad —”
“Run,” he growled. “Oh, and Arkwood?”
Loren turned, eyebrows raised.
“I didn’t give the order for Rayna to die,” David said. “I would never have allowed it to happen if I had known.”
Loren searched his face for some sign of a lie, found none, and nodded.
“Now run,” David said. “I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”
He gave Rose one last searching look, turned, and walked away. Rose watched him go. Loren tugged at her arm.
“Rose,” he said. “We need to run. Now.”
She did not reply. For a moment, she considered not replying to anything ever again.
“Yes,” she murmured, finally. “Yes, I suppose we do.”
They ran for half an hour without looking back, taking random turns every few minutes to try to get the Department off their scent. Then they kept moving on and off until nightfall, when they were physically unable to continue. The running hurt, but Rose was glad of that. It meant she did not have time to think about how much she had just lost.
In the end, Loren collapsed against a wall in a dank side street, and Rose sat down in a corner with her face in her hands, trying to breathe. She had no idea where they were going to go; it seemed that they had no hiding places left. Luckily, Loren seemed to have planned for an eventuality roughly akin to this one. He had stationed small packages of non-perishable food and makeshift sleeping bags in inconspicuous hiding places within a five-mile radius of the flat. There were two sleeping bags. Rose eyed the second suspiciously.
“You knew I would be with you,” she said.
He nodded, gasping for breath.
“How?”
Loren worked a water flask free of the fabric and took a gulp from it.
“I doubted you would be able to hide me indefinitely,” he said. “And when you were found out, you’d have to run. You may not have noticed it yet, but I am dangerous company.”
Rose did not waste her breath replying.
There was a silence. Loren’s face looked very gaunt in the unflattering, ghostly illumination of the streetlights. Night was falling. Her father would be in the Department headquarters, pretending to try to find her. Nate would still be reeling from the news that she had been conscripted. And James — Rose cut herself off there. No point. No point to any of this.
She watched Loren as he sank down onto the ground. They were in an arch below the Tube line, a few minutes’ walk from the Thames. Rose could hear the soft, gentle swash of the river behind the squeals of cars, which echoed eerily under the bridge.
“So what are we going to do now? Just wait for the Department to find us?”
He was silent for a while before he answered.
“We’ll sleep here tonight,” he said, “and tomorrow we’ll try to come up with a plan. You go to sleep, you need it.”
She said, “No, I . . . I can’t.” She swallowed. “I’ll stay awake.”
Despite the hours of running, she was not at all tired. And then there was the problem of seeing her father’s face every time she closed her eyes.
You’re strong enough for this, she told herself. You can take this.
She didn’t believe herself for a moment.
“I have questions,” she said.
“I may not have answers.”
She hesitated. “How can your niece do magic?”
“We don’t know.” Something unreadable passed over his face. “I don’t know.”
“But if she’s a Demon —”
“If you say it’s impossible, Rose, I will actually kill you.”
“It’s supposed to be.”
“I am fully aware that it’s supposed to be. But some Demons, some really powerful Demons, can do magic. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but they do.”
“But the laws of magic they taught us at school —”
“Are wrong,” he said flatly. “You know full well how uncomfortable the Government is with unwanted truths. And we are the collateral damage of that discomfort. Next question.”
Quiet.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said slowly.
“Oh, not again. You know how bad that is for you.”
She glared at him. “I’ve been thinking — Dad always told me people became Hybrids because of an error when their souls fused, but . . . they said something, during his inspection, about how he never let me take a blood test, and I thought . . . is it in the blood? Is being a Hybrid something to do with my blood? I mean . . .”
She trailed off, but he looked astonished.
“Well, yes,” he said blankly. “Obviously.”
“What do you mean obviously?”
He had something of David’s stillness about him for a moment, the utter motionless brought on by indecision. Then he turned to her. He looked very serious, and the sunset was slowly darkening the edges of his face.
“How far do you trust me, Rose?”
“As far as your own self-preservation will take you, and no further.” As he started to look hurt, she backtracked. “All right, sorry. Are you going to tell me my father has lied to me again?”
“Does it really surprise you by now?”
“You’re asking me to trust you over him.”
“No, I’m asking you to trust the weight of the evidence over him.”
She leaned back against the bricks. She had betrayed her father, and that was painful, but more painful still — if untainted by the burden of guilt — was the idea that he had betrayed and lied to her. And she could believe that. She could. Those years of his life at Regency he had never confided in her; the way those notes had broken him, the frightened, savage animal they had awoken in him; and, worst of all, the furious, indignant way he had reacted on finding out how much she knew. As if he had a right to control what she knew about him, when he knew her so completely.
She sighed. Immediately, Loren took the opportunity.
“How do you think he knew where the bomb attack in Croydon was going to be?”
She closed her eyes. “You’re about to tell me he planned the attacks, aren’t you?”
“Yep. Fifteen years ago, all those buildings were Gifted army bases. Felix asked him to work out a schedule of attacks that would cripple the enemy’s supply routes, but David left before it could be used. Someone must have found it and used it. That’s why it hurt him so much. They’re using his own plans against him.”
“Please stop, Loren.”
“But it’s all true.”
She buried her face in her hands.
“All right,” she said. “Hit me about the Hybrids.”
He gave her the ghost of a smile. “Being a Hybrid is in the blood. It changes DNA. If you get attacked by a Hybrid and you survive, the venom gets into your bloodstream, and it changes you. You become one. That’s how it spreads.”
Rose went cold. “Spreads?”
“Oh, yes. The paranoia about Hybrids today — you know, the ‘they walk among us’ kind of thing — was caused by a point about eighteen months into the War where there had been so many Hybrid attacks that almost every street had one living on it. It was an epidemic. Obviously if you were a Hybrid, you couldn’t stay around your family and friends, so you joined an army, and that was around the time that we started developing weapons like the Leeching Gas.”
“Leeching Gas stops Hybrid transformations?”
“Hypothetically, it should. It’s designed to destroy magic.”
Rose looked at him. “But before my Test, I asked Dad whether, if I was Leeched, I would still be a — a Hybrid.”
I am a Hybrid.
She had said it, and still there was no hatred in his face. When had that stopped being miraculous?
“And what did he tell you then?” he asked.
She had thought he had said yes — yes, you will still be a Hybrid; it will make no
difference. But what he had actually said was “Suffice it to say that it wouldn’t be beneficial to anyone if you failed.”
“I don’t know what he said. He didn’t really answer.”
Loren shrugged. “The Leeching Gas was designed as a weapon. It doesn’t just take magic from you. It does something to your second soul, your Gifted one. It damages it. I can understand why he wouldn’t want that happening to you.”
“So are you saying I was attacked when I was a baby?”
He hesitated. Rose could see something else — another truth? — flicker across his eyes. “Most likely, yes. It’s astonishing you survived without any significant scarring, but we had magical healing even back then, so it’s possible.”
Rose looked up at the underside of the bridge.
“I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “Who would have healed me? Who would have wasted magic saving my life, and then left me out in the rain to die?”
“I don’t know,” Loren said. “Perhaps you have a guardian Angel out there somewhere.”
She looked at him. He appeared not to be joking.
“Good for me,” she said darkly.
Loren smiled.
“You need to get some sleep, now. For all we know this is the last time we’ll get to sleep at all.”
“Ten more minutes.”
He looked at her, half amused, half annoyed.
“All right, then.”
Silence for a few seconds.
“Loren?”
“Yes?”
“What does war do to people?” He looked at her again. “I mean, I know what it does to them from the outside. I know what soldiers look like. But what does it . . . what does it do to you, to make you like that? What changes?”
He leaned back against the wall, considering.
“You know how they say that if the whole of the history of the universe was a mountain, say, as tall as Everest, then a single human life would be the width of a snowflake?”
“Yeah?”
“War makes you understand that,” he said. “If you’ve seen the way human life . . . vanishes . . . and how little it seems to matter, how the world keeps going, keeps moving . . . You always think the sky must go black and the wind fall silent and everyone in the world lay down their arms and break with grief, but they never do. You understand, slowly, that they never will. And you can’t forget that knowledge. After you’re a soldier, you are afraid, constantly, in the back of your mind. And you have to be. You can’t live without fear, because without fear there can be no courage, and courage, after war, is all you have. So you have to keep finding new fear to overcome. If you have none, you must create it.”
The Catalyst Page 18
