Zarina was angrier than she’d been in a long time. Her killing lust fired inside her. She bounded across the car, leapt and landed on the roof of the van.
In the front of the van, two monsters tore at each other on top of the passenger seat. Half the windscreen was gone, the door had flown off and the roof bulged upwards as though it had been pounded with a hammer. Julian pressed himself against the driver’s side door. He was only distantly aware he’d swung the van to the side again and barely registered the impact as it hit the car alongside them.
Glass had torn the left side of his face. He knew he would feel the pain of that later, didn’t think he would bleed to death in the meantime. None of it had gone into his eye and that was what mattered.
An elbow hit him. It nearly shattered his shoulder and his head cracked against the window. He blacked out for a second and when he came back he saw he was about to hit the car ahead. He wrenched the wheel sideways and ducked down.
Rob and Vivien had destroyed the passenger seat. Rob was on top and using the dashboard for leverage by thrusting his foot against it. The plastic bent, exploded and then the metal behind it screeched as it began to twist.
They fell into the back as some last part of the chair gave way. The contents of the crate sucked the strength from them as they rolled across it. The back doors burst open and they tumbled out, half-conscious.
Vivien came to, holding onto the handle of the door. Survival instinct had him riding the wind. He saw Cromwell hanging onto the back of the van, being dragged along the road. His teeth were bared in pain.
Vivien was furious. He had spent the first two of his three centuries getting very good at killing werewolves. He had never had this much trouble fighting a single werewolf, not even in his youth. He pulled himself up. Zarina appeared above him looking down and he saw her anger matched his own.
The van made a sharp left. They were off the motorway. The van sped down a slip-road, ran a red light, dodged through traffic, jumped a gutter hard enough to shake Cromwell loose and skidded to a stop on grass.
Vivien dropped to the ground. Zarina landed beside him, but when she started towards Cromwell, Vivien held up his hand. “See to the warlock.”
She hissed at him, but Vivien growled back and she ducked her head. He shut off the pain burning in his limbs and torso and warily approached Cromwell.
He didn’t stir as Vivien closed in. He might be unconscious, but Vivien knew the wretched animals could be devious on the rare occasions when they had a hint of a brain.
Cromwell’s breathing was slow and steady. Vivien moved near enough that a quick lunge could see Cromwell with his hand around Vivien’s ankle. Still he didn’t move.
He paced carefully around Cromwell until he could see the van out of the corner of his eye. He saw Zarina reach out and open the driver side door.
The nearest streetlights went out.
Zarina burst into flame. She screamed and spun about like a falling bird, but the flames burned bright and fast.
At the instant of Vivien’s distraction, Cromwell exploded into action. Vivien threw up his arms but he was too late to stop Cromwell from tearing out the side of his throat.
He collapsed as his blood poured out of him. Not the pulse and spray of arterial blood, not with his heart centuries-silent in his chest. What came out of him was a steady flow of already dying blood.
Vivien was conscious long enough to feel Cromwell start to feed.
Julian stumbled after Zarina. The ground kept tilting from side to side. From a mental tally of his injuries he knew that he’d suffered a head injury and probably had concussion. His torn cheek had started to really hurt and his shirt was red with his own blood. But when you kill a vampire, you make sure the job is done.
“Sever the head,” he heard a voice from years ago say. Bright blue eyes framed by a black metal helm were fixed on him. The mouth that spoke was splattered with blood. “Stab the heart. Burn the body. Always be sure.”
The vampire disintegrated like burning paper. Hot ash floated down around him. He came across what was left of her, a struggling humanoid shape coming apart even as it flailed. He groped at his side for a weapon that wasn’t there.
The vampire grew still. Julian took a couple of steps back from it, lost his balance and fell to the ground. He stared up at the sky and saw the stars spinning in ways they should not.
Beneath him he felt the Earth. The straight rivers of power that cross-hatched the city were distant, but the older power of the Earth was there. He had never felt it before, not in those young years before he went away and learned so much. The Earth slept beneath him and now he could hear it. It would help him if he could rouse it.
Above him, the stars were blocked by a monstrous, blurry form. It lowered itself beside him and a blood-drenched muzzle slid into focus.
“You going to live?” Rob said.
Chapter 19 – Fiona and Jessica, Thursday Night
Feedback shrieked from the speakers. “Blast!” Jessica slapped her hand on the power switch and cut the noise off.
“Oh my delicate ears,” Mr Beak said from beneath his glass wing. He was perched up on one of the loft’s rafters. “I think I need recalibrating.”
“One of the sensors must still be misaligned,” Mr Shell said from down beside the sofa.
“Must be.” Jessica scowled at the bulky, humming device on her workbench. “This is getting silly. Is this pearl round or not?”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with the pearl,” Mr Beak said. “You asked for a clairaudient pearl, I got you one. Never mind the difficulties I had tracking it down. Did I tell you about the cyclone I had to fly through? And the flock of wind snakes that tried to make me into lunch? And the burning forest I had to fly over?”
“In what way is it an inconvenience to fly over a burning forest?” Mr Shell asked.
“The air is full of smoke, you dolt. There’s some serious thermal activity over a fire for the really obvious reason.”
“The smoke is hardly a hindrance since, if you are high enough, you will not crash into anything. If you are not high enough, can you not ride the thermal updraft higher? It all sounds quite convenient to me.”
“How would you know? The only time you fly is when you fall off things.”
“Might I add that I do not believe you about the cyclone. You are far too prone to exaggeration, my dear Mr Beak.”
On Jessica’s workbench there lay a cluster of metal and plastic parts, scavenged from many different places and bolted, screwed and even welded together. Some of it had once been a microscope. Another part was the broad tube of a telescope, pointed towards central London. A radio had been disassembled and its speakers trailed wires leading to what could have been a scaled-down wagon wheel, all shining chrome. The clairaudient pearl was held fast in the middle and several crystal sensors were pressed against it.
“I need to check up on Fiona, sound or no sound,” Jessica said. “Mr Shell, I need a bearing.”
One of the hatches on his shell clicked open and a device that resembled a compass folded out. The needle was made of a black metal not naturally found on Earth. Jessica had charged it with a sample of Fiona’s aura.
“I have a physical bearing at ninety-one point three degrees,” Mr Shell said. “Her psychic bearing is at quite a different angle. Shall I attempt to determine her orientation?”
“Just a minute.” Jessica cranked a handle on her machine and the telescope tube swung around. When the dial had moved to ninety-one degrees she set her eyes against the binocular eye pieces and adjusted the focus.
“Why the drama, boss?” Mr Beak asked. “You don’t owe her anything. Any trouble she’s in, you risk bringing it down on yourself if you keep looking in on her.”
“I would not question Miss Jessica’s habit of taking in strays if I were you,” Mr Shell said. “We have both been rather fortunate in it.”
“We bring value to the team. Fiona, or whatever her name really is, brings trou
ble. Haven’t we had enough of that?”
Jessica adjusted the aetheric lens and brought Fiona into focus. She sat in a dirty room, passed out or asleep on a sagging old sofa, and her shadow was empty. A thing like a man with no hair and pronounced ridges on his face knelt on the floor in front of her, eyes closed. His chin was black with drying blood.
Jessica pushed a switch and a verity lens popped into place. She gasped.
“Mr Shell, where’s Fiona now? Her psychic bearing?”
“I believe she is in the dream known as the Ruined City,” Mr Shell said.
Jessica lifted her gaze to Mr Beak. “You can get there, right?”
“Oh bugger,” Mr Beak said. “There’s danger, isn’t there? You want me to fly into danger.”
“Go on then,” Jessica said. “Warn her she’s in trouble.”
“I am sure a traveller as accomplished as you will navigate any difficulties with skill and aplomb, Mr Beak,” Mr Shell said.
“You’re awful at sarcasm Shell, stop trying it.” Mr Beak spread his glass wings, leapt from his perch and vanished from the waking world.
Jessica put her eyes to the scope again and bit her lip. “Sometimes,” she said to Mr Shell, “my big sister doesn’t have the sense of a clever rock.”
Fiona and Margaret approached a grassy field in a half-demolished high-density residential area. They kept their distance from it though, because of the air war going on above it.
The size of a school sports field, it was abandoned and eroded. A few dead shrubs and patches of over-long grass struggled up out of the dry, sandy soil. There was a playground at one end, but the iron bars of the swings, see-saws and climbing obstacles were twisted around at odd angles and rotten with rust.
At each end of the field a man stood, holding a large sack. The man on Fiona’s left pulled wooden pigeons from his sack and threw them into the air, where they came to life and flew on hinged wings. The man on Fiona’s right took pieces of green paper folded into the shapes of birds from his bag. They too came to life when he released them.
The wooden pigeons and the origami birds battled in the air above the field. The pigeons tried to rip through the paper birds. The paper birds choked up the pigeons’ wing hinges and wrapped around their heads to cover their painted-on eyes. Paper scraps and struggling wooden pigeons littered the ground.
“Do you know what this is?” Fiona asked.
Margaret said nothing. She’d refused to answer any of Fiona’s questions since they left the Rat Court. Fiona had thought Margaret was enjoying her position of knowledgeable authority. The silence was unexpected.
“I remind you that I’m paying eighty pounds an hour for this,” Fiona said.
Margaret looked at her without blinking.
Fiona thrust her hands into her coat pockets looked down at the field. The man with the wooden pigeons had begun shouting insults. She saw he was dressed in a leather apron and old boots. The man at the other end wore a top hat and an old-fashioned business suit.
She had just about made up her mind to try the man with the wooden pigeons when she spotted a third person down below. He sat on an old wooden crate at the side of the field and he ate what might have been hot chips or popcorn from a white bag. On the assumption that he was more likely to be sane than either of the men waging aerial warfare, Fiona swooped down towards him.
But when she landed, she discovered he was a gangly man made of tin cans strung together with fishing wire.
“Hello there,” he said. His head was a single upright can with two cans on either side of it for eyes. Tin lids were stuck to the sides of these to mimic ears. She couldn’t make out what the packet in his hands contained, but they looked like pieces of metal. She wondered what he was doing with them, since he didn’t have a mouth. “Come to watch the duel?”
“I came looking for a man who makes wooden pigeons,” Fiona said.
“He’s a little busy right now, as you can see,” the tin can man said. “Want to sit with me and watch? It’s quite an entertainment they’re putting on.”
“Will they be long?”
The tin can man rattled as he shrugged.
She decided to wait, at least for a little while, and leaned against the side of the wooden crate upon which the tin can man sat. He scraped to one side to make more room for her. Margaret stood a short distance away, looking around. Her poised, alert stance was very much unlike how she had carried herself before.
Fiona tried to be unobtrusive as she studied the tin can man. He wore jeans with the bottoms rolled up and boots with soles near to falling off. She could see the bag in his tin hands better now and discovered it was filled with the ring pulls from soft drink cans. He plunked them one by one into the top of the can that made up his head. They rattled their way down into his torso, but they didn’t fall out anywhere.
At least he isn’t made of hungry rats, she thought.
The man in the suit and top hat, the one throwing origami birds, shouted and shook his fists. The man in the leather apron whooped. Fiona peered up at the air war, but it didn’t look any different to her.
Shreds of a paper birds fluttered across the field and settled near her shoes. She picked some of it up and saw it wasn’t made of plain green paper, but rather of money. She didn’t recognise the note exactly, but it was very much money of some currency or other.
“Mako loves money,” the tin can man said. “Sleeps on a bed of it, or so I hear. He folds it up into everything he needs. I wouldn’t have thought he’d weaponise it, but there you go. Not working out so well against Winston’s wooden pigeons, mind you.”
Fiona let the shredded note fall from her hand. “Why are you made of metal, if that isn’t a rude question?”
“Not rude at all,” the tin can man said. “I very much invite people to ask. Makes for a conversation starter, I find. Allows us to start talking about shapes we’ve taken, or would like to take, or have seen others take, or would never want to take ourselves. I’ve had some surprises, I don’t mind saying. Who in their right mind wants to be a street light, I ask you? You can’t move and dogs come and piss on you. But no, I met a lad who used to dream his way here as a street light. He liked the point of view, he said, which just goes to show it takes all sorts to make up any world you care to name, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Fiona said. “I notice you didn’t answer my question.”
“Didn’t I? I didn’t, now that you mention it. Well, the answer is simple enough. I made myself into tin cans because I was bored with being made of tennis balls. It was a fun enough experience and you can’t half move fast, if you let the balls in your feet roll like wheels, but a single sneeze is a disaster.”
“Mm,” Fiona said. She frowned in the direction of the man with the wooden pigeons. How many pigeons can he have in that bag anyway?
The tin can man leaned closer. “Why, I didn’t realise. Lucy?”
Fiona jolted upright. “You know me? We’ve met before?”
“Of course we have,” the tin can man said. “It’s me, Roy. Don’t you remember?”
“My memories were stolen from me.” She didn’t notice her breath misting in the air in front of her. “I’m trying to find out who I really am and who did this to me. You knew me from before? I’ve been here before?”
“A number of times,” Roy said, nodding happily. “You used to race Winston’s wooden pigeons.”
She could barely decide which question to ask first. “And this was about three years ago?” She remembered that glimpse of herself by the Thames. “Or maybe five?”
“Oh, oh no, I don’t think so,” Roy said. He dropped a pull ring into the top of his head and tapped his chin while it bounced down into his torso. “I mean, sure, time here moves differently to the waking world. I’ve been here so long I forget what the numbers are. Don’t matter any more to me, what with being dead.”
“How long then? Wait, what? You’re dead?”
“Don’t remember the education eith
er?” Roy patted her on the shoulder. “Why, this is terrible. We must find out who did this to you. Yes, I’m dead. My physical body died while I was dreaming here, so now I’m here forever. I can’t say I’m sorry. It was a drab old existence, real life. By the end I was sleepwalking my way through it anyway, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
She shot Margaret a look, thinking there was a lot Margaret hadn’t told her and probably should have. Margaret stared back at her with an unpleasant intensity and Fiona noticed her limbs had untwisted. Frost had gathered on the tufts of grass at her feet, but Fiona was too distracted by all the questions in her head to wonder about it.
“We were talking about when I’d last been here,” Fiona said.
“Oh yes, so we were. You were here with your father. He taught you the basics here. What was his name now? It was so long ago and you mostly came here by yourself. Was it Bill or Bob? It might have been Barry. Yes, I think it was Barry.”
A father, Fiona thought. A father who wasn’t a part of the sorry state of the fractured Kendall family. A lifeline by which to pull herself and her identity out of that mess.
“It was a long time ago though,” Roy said. “If you asked for a guess I’d say decades, not years.” He shrugged. “But what do I know? I don’t keep track of time any more. Why should I?
But Fiona had stopped listening. Her surroundings had finally caught her attention. All the birds in the near-dark sky, both wood and paper, had pivoted and swarmed off towards the river. The man in the leather apron and the man in the top hat were both screaming at each other, each blaming the other.
The wood and paper birds began attacking something in mid-air over the river. She couldn’t see what it was at this distance and in the poor light, but it must have been tougher than wood or paper. Though the focus of the battle shifted and swayed, it did not end. She could just hear the sound of wood striking something that rang, almost like a bell. Whatever they were after, it was putting up a fight.
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