“Private Daniels,” said the Minion. “The Commander would like you beside him for the attack.”
Her first reaction was a terrible shockwave of fear: had Felix found out what she’d done to him, was he intending to kill her, had the plan failed? Then she came to her senses. Of course not. If he had worked it out, he wouldn’t have bothered with asking her to do anything. She would be dead by now, by proxy or sniper fire.
The thought was oddly reassuring.
She slipped with the Minion through the ranks of soldiers, resisting the urge to cover her ears against the screams of bloodthirsty rage, and eventually came to the bottom of the stage.
“You’re Daniels, then?” asked the Minion. He was watching her with an expression of contemptuous disdain.
“Yes,” she told him. “And you?”
Clearly this was insolent, because his sneer only deepened. “Anthony Slythe,” he said, “Head of Security.” She noticed his eyes seemed rather red. He turned on his heel and strode up the stage.
She followed him, bewildered.
Felix’s speech was coming to its conclusion. She stayed just below the sight line of the audience, having no desire to draw the attention of an army. Felix looked as bulky and intimidating as ever, but his eyes, too, had that slippery, post-memory serum quality, sliding quickly off anything they focused on.
“We’re ready, Lily,” he said intently to her, as the army started heading for the exits. “We’re going to take everything back.”
She could only nod.
“We won’t have to hide,” he said, still with that bright, almost-childlike earnestness. “We won’t be monsters. We’ll be gods.”
She was a spy. She was a spy for the Department, and hitting him would not do anyone any good, no matter how much she wanted to.
Asking questions would, though.
“Where are we going to start, sir?”
He smiled, and there were the shark teeth again.
“We’re going to attack the Parliament of Angels,” he said.
Rose’s first thought upon reaching the Houses of Parliament was that Regency must be much bigger than the Department had realized. It looked as though Felix had enough troops to send some ahead, to cover Parliament.
This was not the case.
Rose was marching ahead of the troops with the High Command. Felix did not speak to Rose, but she caught him watching her, as if her very presence was a comfort to him. It occurred to her that he must not have met anyone else like him in a long, long time.
Flanking Felix were Slythe, whose face looked constantly contorted in some emotion that looked oddly like grief, and the woman — Vinyara, Slythe had called her. She was tall, in her mid-fifties, blond, and sharp-faced. It was she who realized first.
“Sir,” she said, when she saw the troops. “Sir. That’s the Gospel.”
Far back in the ranks, Amelia Rodriguez realized something: the space beside her was empty.
She turned, searching the blank faces behind her. “Aaron?” she asked of nobody in particular.
No answer. She started to panic.
“Aaron?”
A slight, dark-haired figure broke from the ranks of Regency, who were currently lurking in the shadows of the darkened alleyways, and burst from between the shops of Westminster High Street toward the mob of Gospel. Rose, up front with the High Command, was the first to see him.
She recognized the figure immediately, and her heart lurched.
Of course it would be him. Of course.
Oh, for the love of the Angels.
He’s seventeen, Laura — poor Laura — had said, when they’d found that Aaron had defected to Regency. It’s teenage rebellion.
Rose had now underestimated Aaron twice.
She’d hated him, so she’d been perfectly willing to believe he was merely being idiotic, albeit murderously so. But even knowing him better than anyone else in the room, even knowing that he was Stephen Greenlow’s son, she hadn’t considered the actual bleeding obvious.
If Rose could be a double agent for the Department, why couldn’t Aaron be one for the Gospel?
Stephen Greenlow was not one to miss an opportunity. The moment he had discovered that his Demonic son could do magic, he must have realized that he had hit upon a strategic gold mine. Much as he hated all Ashkind, much as he must have hated having a Demon for a child, here was the perfect chance to infiltrate the ranks of his enemies. And when Regency had resurfaced, he had seized that chance.
A Demon spying for an anti-Ashkind activist group. Who would have thought it?
No one. It was a masterstroke.
Poor Aaron, Rose thought dispassionately. Never able to abandon your loved ones, even if they hate you; never able to fit in with your own kind, even if they accept you. Bound by love and blood and magic and terrible bad luck. A magical Demon. An impossible thing. Never fitting anywhere. Never able to tell the whole truth.
I wonder what that feels like?
“Don’t fire,” said Vinyara immediately to the sharpshooters behind them. Felix nodded, and Rose, though she was aching to shoot Aaron herself, understood why: lurking in the twilit darkness between the buildings might give them cover if the Gospel didn’t know they were there, but they couldn’t shoot Aaron without inevitably firing on the Gospel, and no prizes for guessing who would win that fight. The Gospel outnumbered them at least three to one, even without factoring magic into the equation.
“We have waited too long,” came a thin, reedy voice, floating on the early summer breeze, and Rose sighed involuntarily. Stephen Greenlow stood on his makeshift platform, shouting to the gathered crowd, and everyone there, Gifted and Leeched, was utterly quiet, almost breathless, spellbound by this man’s voice.
“Wait,” said Felix softly, and the command rippled backward through the Regency ranks. “I want to see this.”
“We asked for our rights,” said Stephen, and he didn’t need to raise his voice at all. “We asked for our true-born privileges as the kin of Angels, the possessors of souls Gifted, or once Gifted, with magic. We asked for these, and we asked for them patiently, but we have waited too long, and now we must act.”
There were canisters next to him: great, hulking, silver blocks of metal. They were attached to thick pipes that stretched over the top of the wall and down beyond, and Rose could not begin to guess what the canisters contained, but her thoughts kept returning to one fact: Stephen Greenlow’s wife Natalie worked for the Ministry of Defense.
What kind of weapons did she have access to?
Tristan stood beside his father, still bruised but looking annoyingly alive, and Aaron, shaking, clambered up onstage to stand beside his father and brother. Tristan gave him a congratulatory pat on the back and said something to him; the words were incoherent, but the tone was unmistakably relieved. Stephen did not glance at either of his sons.
Rose’s mind was clicking further onward, watching Aaron. Stephen must have valued him as a spy within Regency; it must have been one of his greatest assets. And now Aaron had blown his cover, and for what? What had it gained?
Rose’s eyes flickered between the three Greenlows. They were together. That was what had been gained. Aaron was with his brother and father now, and out of harm’s way — relatively speaking, of course — but why? Why had his safety suddenly become more important than strategy?
Rose closed her eyes and tried to think.
What exactly did Stephen think was going to happen to Regency?
“I address you now,” said Stephen, “my kindred whom they call Leeched, from whom they took half your soul. They hurt you because they were afraid of you. They thought you were unworthy of keeping the powers you were given, and they did not once seek to look inward — to see how unworthy they themselves are of being Angels, for siding against us, their own kind, for tolerating and promoting the Ashkind in our society, they who seek to destroy us.” He was snarling his words now. “They thought you were dangerous? They thought you were beasts?
”
Aaron had something metal in his hand. It was attached by a wire to one of the canisters.
“Well,” said Stephen, “let us give them reason.”
Rose realized what he was going to do an instant before it happened, and stepped forward as Aaron pressed the button. Felix and his advisers switched their gazes to her, astonished.
“Leeching Gas,” Rose said, not looking at them. There was a hissing sound growing swiftly audible above the rising voices, and it made her shudder, because she knew what it meant. “That’s Leeching Gas. They’re going to Leech the Angels.”
A shocked silence swept back through the Regency crowd — Leech the Angels? That’s impossible — followed slowly by cheering, soft but growing louder. Rose could hear them: Victory! Victory!
Rose stood there shaking. This was the destruction of the state, pure and simple, more apocalyptic than any worst-case scenario the Department had ever dreamed up. The Angels Leeched, their powers destroyed; this was anarchy, the end of the world. This would start a Second War of Angels.
No, no, no.
The Department had sent her to Regency; but it was the Gospel whom they should have been watching.
And if Rose herself had only seen —
Slythe stepped forward and addressed Felix. “What do we do now, sir? Who do we attack?”
Rose tried to pull herself out of her shock and do some quick calculations. If Regency attacked anywhere, the Department would have to deal with it, and the farther away the attack was, the fewer troops and equipment they could send, and the more people would die. There was, logically, only one place where the Department could deal with an attack using all the might and intelligence and resources at their disposal.
She stepped up to Felix. She did not drop her gaze from his, but met it, as if they were equals. His gaze still slid off hers like water, and his eyes stopped just short of properly focusing.
She smiled.
“Sir,” she said. “I think we should attack the Department building.”
He nodded. “Yes,” he whispered, staring at her as if trying to see through her. “Yes. I think we should.”
The Angels were being Leeched behind them even as they spoke; even as Regency trudged, confused, frightened and increasingly murderous, through the streets of London; even as the roads before them began to fill, slowly, with low murmurings, drifting through the windows, growing louder and louder by the minute. Word spread quickly through the darkness. The city awoke.
No one quite knew the whole truth, of course. The story fractured and grew as it raced ahead of them, by e-mail and video-chat and word of mouth, changing to accommodate several different versions of events. Demons had overrun the Houses of Parliament. Some kind of terrorist attack had destroyed the Gospel and the Angels together. A Hybrid rampaging through Westminster had infected the entire Government, turning them all into monsters . . .
Whatever strange and terrible atrocity was fixed in people’s minds, however, everyone knew the essence of the truth: the Angels in Westminster were gone. Their authority was destroyed.
Anarchy. Anarchy. Anarchy.
Or close.
The silence broke first: slowly, and then all at once. People began to filter from their homes, out into the streets, whooping and yelling. Then magic — fires and lights and explosions, in public. Shop windows shattered and gunshots riddled the air. When Regency came through the streets, it was greeted with cheers and welcomes from the Ashkind around them, and attacks — sometimes verbal, sometimes violent — from the Gifted. Soldiers on the edge of their lines began to fall, torn away in shots and scuffles. Never mind. They walked on.
Felix was smiling; Slythe and Vinyara looked wary. Rose felt utterly bewildered. Whatever world she had been trained for, it was not this one. In her world the Department was always there, the police were always there, and any breaks in law and order were small and containable. This was neither. This, she imagined, was what war must look like. And here she was, marching with the enemy, not back where she belonged, with her father and James and Nate and Laura . . .
Rose looked at Felix’s smile. Laura . . .
“Sir?”
A Regency soldier, breathless. The High Command looked at him without breaking stride.
“The Gospel are coming after us, sir. They’re right on our tail.”
“Then we move fast,” said Felix, with complete certainty. “We destroy the Department before Greenlow can attack us.”
Rose didn’t run, no, not at all. She didn’t scream or flee or cry for help, like she wanted to. Nor, for that matter, did she say anything at all, not even the obvious: what did Felix think this was, a coincidence? She did not say that Stephen, through Aaron, had known that Regency was going to make its move tonight, and that if he got to Parliament first Felix would have to go somewhere else and the Gospel would therefore get two attacks for the price of one; they might even have been able to engage Regency directly. She didn’t say that by attacking anywhere, now, they would be playing into Greenlow’s hands at best and destroying themselves against the Department at worst. She did not say any of this, because she did not know what good it would do.
She just kept moving, like he said, and stayed quiet.
And it was most likely credit to Felix’s control over his army that Regency did get to the Department first. Had everything gone to plan, that could possibly have been a key move, a turning point in this sudden conflict. But it was not.
It seemed, in that moment, that Regency was destroyed by the single sentence Felix uttered when the army found themselves, guns out and bristling for action, in the courtyard in front of the building: “It’s empty.”
“Sir. Communication for you.”
Loren stood with all twelve of the Department’s squad teams in the alleys on the other side of the river from the Gospel. They had received the alert of an attack on Parliament and had immediately evacuated all non-military personnel from the Department building before rushing to the scene of the incident, as was protocol. The military staff were currently here, skulking in the shadows and trying to work out what was going on.
The sinister hissing sound had yet to reach them.
The rest of the Department — official and otherwise — seemed to have vanished. James, Nate and Maria were gone, God knew where — home to safety, or what remained of safety, if they had any sense in them. Rose was in Regency. Laura was dead. Terrian was refusing to have anything to do with them. So when the officer handed him the walkie-talkie, he knew it could only be David.
It occurred to Loren how drastically his circumstances had changed that he was actually glad to hear that bastard’s voice.
“David! Why aren’t you here? Where are you?”
The voice that came over the line did not sound like Elmsworth’s. It was thin, hoarse, and weak. It trembled when he spoke.
“I think this might be it,” he said. Static crumbled the smaller words to dust. “I — I think it’s happening. You’re not going to see me for a long time.”
David didn’t sound like he was talking to Loren at all. “What on earth are you talking about? This is Arkwood —”
“Of course it is,” came the voice, sounding marginally stronger now that it was annoyed. “Listen to me. This is important. You forgot your basic chemistry.”
“What? Elmsworth, I don’t have time for —”
“You called Felix Callaway a catalyst because he sets off conflicts and revolutions without ever being damaged by them, but you forgot the definition of a catalyst. They don’t start reactions. They just speed them up.”
“Sir,” came a voice from behind Loren, “what’s that noise?”
There was a noise: a low, constant, strengthening hiss, distinctly originating from the Gospel crowd. This was when Loren saw the gas canisters, and two and two came together violently in his head. He swore.
“This reaction,” said David softly, “was always going to happen.”
Loren didn’t notice whe
n he disconnected. He was there, speaking, and then abruptly when Loren checked next he was gone. In fairness, Loren got distracted.
The first reason was the Gospel and what they were doing.
The second was the rising mutters from behind him. He turned, irritated, to give his orders, and saw the source: James, striding angrily toward him, brandishing a copy of the Department’s handbook for spotting criminals. Behind him, Nate and Maria, looking astonished and terrified.
“Arkwood,” said James. He looked more solemn and furious than Loren had ever seen him. “I have to tell you something about David.”
It took Regency half an hour to decide on the best course of action. Felix knew whose command the Department operated under, and was extremely wary of their base even when it appeared to be empty. He decided to attack the building in the end, but, given the risk involved, not to commit all of his troops to this attack. Six hundred were on their way back to base, and safety from the Gospel, with Slythe and Vinyara.
Halfway up the first staircase, peering upward, they realized that the fifth floor was in lockdown. Felix gave the order for twenty soldiers to stay behind and guard the stairwell entrance.
When they got to the second floor, another twenty were sent to guard that entrance, just to be sure. The remaining sixty were sent up to the third floor and beyond.
Amelia was in the second twenty. Guarding the stairwell was dull, and her thoughts were on Aaron. They stood there awkwardly, a confused huddle of half-trained Ashkind. They barely knew how to use guns. They shouldn’t be here, she thought.
They should never have been here.
“Look!”
One of her comrades was at the window, staring, astonished, at the scene before them. “London’s burning,” he said.
It was: tiny fires were erupting like sparks over the skyscrapers. Glass could be heard shattering across the city. Amelia’s division glanced at one another. What was this? It was not what they had wanted — power to the Ashkind, and peace with it. This destruction was the Gospel’s doing. Regency could not claim credit for this.
The Catalyst Page 30
