by K. C. Finn
“Go on,” Lori said. “Lead the way.”
Running, and why it is necessary
“Marax?” Lori said.
“Marax.” Allardyce nodded.
“What kind of a name is that?”
They were walking down the lane that led to the river, the same lane Lori had walked in her sleep on the night she’d plunged straight in. The rain had eased off into a mild drizzle, but Lori’s long hair was soaked enough to drip down her back, keeping her blissfully cool. Allardyce looked decidedly less comfortable in the downpour. He fidgeted with his dark suit, pulling at its muddy, damp shoulders every so often. Once in a while, Lori glanced side-wards to find him nursing his jaw where the bottle had clocked him. He smiled when she caught him looking, but his hand moved quickly away from the sore spot each time.
“A name you’ll want to remember come Saturation Day,” Allardyce replied.
“Male or female?” Lori asked.
Allardyce cocked his head from side to side. His cheeks puffed as he let out a breath.
“Could we start with something easier?” he said.
“Fine,” Lori answered. She veered to skip over a deep, dark puddle. “Demon or human?”
“That’s not easier,” Allardyce cut back.
Lori gave a little sigh. For all that he’d promised answers, Allardyce wasn’t clear when he gave them. She swung her arms by her side, looking down the long familiar path to the footbridge. The dense growth of plants and bushes were beginning to thin out ready for winter. Through the gaps to her left, Lori could make out the large, flat plains that separated her little patch of the world from the city of Chester.
“How are we getting to Marax?” she tried.
“Ah, now that one’s easy.” Allardyce smiled. “There’s a boat docked by the cycle path, a little way down from the bridge. Once we’re past the few houses there, we’ll get in. Go down the river into the city.”
Something hit Lori’s foot with a thud. She stumbled a little, steadying herself, and looked down at the offending rock in the mud. Allardyce had paused a pace ahead of her. She shook out her foot, hissing.
“You got a light or something?” she asked.
Even as Allardyce shook his head, she remembered the phone in her pocket. Lori retrieved it to switch on the torch beam. There was another notification: a text from Kasabian.
KASABIAN: Sleep tight xxx
Lori hung back a pace, fingers hovering over the screen as she walked. She wanted to text him back, but what could she possibly say? ‘Out with relative stranger for midnight boat ride to meet…’ It wasn’t even worth trying to explain until she had more answers. Lori lifted the torchlight and caught up to Allardyce. She opened her mouth to try another question, but as the first syllable left her lips, a ringtone blared from his top pocket. It was an old metal song from the eighties, like the ones her father liked to listen to. Allardyce cut it short, raising his phone sharply.
“Yes, I’m on my way with-”
He stopped. Lori could just about hear a voice at the other end, though she had no idea what it was saying. It spoke with sudden stunts. Allardyce stopped, the phone pressed hard to his ear, his face contorted.
“Here?” he asked, his pitch a little higher than usual. Lori lit him up with her torch, watching the shadowed crevices of his face twitch with anguish. Allardyce looked up and all around him, sighing. “Yeah we’re almost at Saltney Ferry bridge. I can-” There was more stunted speech from the mobile. “All right. All right.”
He hung up, looking straight up into the beam of Lori’s phone. She saw the white circles reflected in his eyes for a moment, his dark lips spot-lit as he spoke.
“Put that out. We’re not alone.”
It took a moment for the dark world of Ferry Lane to come back into view once the phone’s light was out. Allardyce cut double the pace to get down to the end of the lane, Lori striding behind him with a sudden thrum in her chest. When Allardyce put his phone back, he reached deeper inside his suit jacket and pulled out a long, slim cylinder that was wider at one end than the other. As her eyes readjusted, Lori made out the shape of a torch.
“I thought you said you didn’t have a light,” she puffed, holding her chest.
“It doesn’t do what you think it does,” he snapped, not looking back. “Be quiet. Listen hard, Lori. Look ahead. I could use your instincts on this.”
“It would help if you’d tell me what I’m looking for,” she said.
They had reached the end of the lane, where a few houses were dotted around the pedestrian bridge. Their little windows were black, reflecting the vague strains of moonlight cutting through the clouds. The sky was slow to clear from the drizzle. Lori and Allardyce walked slowly towards the bridge. She watched him from the corner of her eye, gripping the torch like it was a loaded gun. His body moved stiffly, arms tight in the wet jacket. His eyes reflected the moonlight, wide and shifting. They stopped at the foot of the bridge, and Lori let loose a long, low breath. Her heartbeat was the only sound in the world.
The rustling was quiet at first. Lori heard it from somewhere to the right, on the other side of the quiet river. It was high tide, the black water glittering as she took the few steps up onto the start of the bridge. She wound her way between two metal barriers intended to slow down cyclists. Allardyce followed. She heard the swish of his jacket brushing against the metal, but didn’t look back. Her heart hummed louder, and the rustling grew. She raised a hand slowly, pointing out into the darkness.
“Where?” Allardyce asked. He was so quiet she could hardly even call it a whisper, but the world had fallen so still that the words were clear as day. “Can you see it?”
“Not yet.”
But she knew something was coming. Inside her tracksuit, the hairs on her arms were standing on end. Heat rose in her body, a strange anger piling onto her raging heart. She wanted to hit something, anything, to get the fire out of her system. She clenched her fists hard, eyes scanning the dark trees on the other side of the river.
“There!”
It burst from the leaves, sending a tree branch flying into the river. Amid the splash, six mighty limbs bounded towards the bridge, four-fingered hands reaching out in the dark. It was double the size of Lori, gripping the bridge and swinging onto it with a heavy slam. A light went on in the house nearest the river. Lori and Allardyce both glanced to it for a moment, but in that second the creature raced another few feet towards them. When Lori looked back, she saw the horns on its head.
Her heart felt like it had stopped, the world in slow motion for those precious next seconds. She took in the shape of these horns, their thick, curly shape. Spiralling back on the top of the creature’s head. Its front limbs were human in appearance, though the hands were missing thumbs. The other four legs had two-toed hooves. As her heartbeat hammered suddenly in her head again, Lori’s mind clicked into action. This was a demon, but not the Cervinae. This was another kind of beast altogether.
Allardyce leaped forward, the torch raised with both hands in front of his face. The beast on the bridge skidded to a halt, its face turning away. With a sudden grunt that sounded something like ‘no’, Allardyce aimed the torch like a pistol. Lori heard a sharp click. A burst of sudden purple light filled the bridge, making her eyes water. It was a weird kind of light, like the kind of black-lights they’d had at her school prom, casting its violet shadow over the black world of trees and water. The light lingered a few seconds after the first flash, though Lori wasn’t sure if it was inside her eyes or out on the bridge. Whatever the case, it certainly did what it was supposed to for the demon.
The six-legged beast gave a guttural cry, rocketing off the bridge and onto the cycle path to its left. Lori saw a shadowed figure in the lit-up window, but she didn’t have time to wonder if the locals had seen the creature or the violet flash. Allardyce was off and running. Lori followed quickly, dashing down the little lane that led out to the riverside path. The demon was out of sight already, but she co
uld hear its pained cries ahead.
“Did I hit it?” Allardyce shouted back. “Lori, did I get it in the eyes?”
“I don’t think so!” Lori replied. Why was he asking her? Couldn’t he tell from the flash, like she could?
“Shit!” Allardyce cried.
He doubled his pace. Lori’s body ached like she’d been thrown into a furnace. She hadn’t pelted this way since she’d run for the bus when Kasabian had told her to bolt from the college. Then, she’d barely made it two hundred metres without dying of oxygen deprivation. Here, she was keeping Allardyce’s pace. Young, fit Allardyce, tall and lean. Lori drove herself harder, her body coursing with heat. Her weight pounded against her bones, but it didn’t slow her down or stop her. The energy was coming from somewhere else now, somewhere deep within.
There was a sudden shout behind, and Lori glanced back to see three human-shaped figures running over the bridge. She pushed harder at the wild energy burning inside her, coming level with Allardyce. When he glanced at her, she saw something flash in his eyes.
“We’re being followed!” Lori shouted. Her voice sounded strained and low, not like her own at all.
“They’re with me,” Allardyce panted. He didn’t look back.
As the cycle path gave way to the huge, flat fields, Lori saw the creature come into view again. It was staggering now, not so far ahead of them. Maybe Allardyce had got near to its eyes after all. The hulking beast swayed from side to side as it ran on into the grass, heavy hooves thumping and kicking up huge clods of earth. Lori felt something whacking against her hand as she ran, solid and cool. She glanced down, then back at Allardyce’s face. His teeth were gritted, furious breaths pushing through the pearly barrier.
He grimaced. “Take it.”
He was pushing the torch into Lori’s damp grip. She clutched it hard, another flame of energy igniting in her muscles. She was heavy in all the wrong places. There was no swell of fat at her belly or her buttocks hitting her bones. The tops of her legs carried her weight, and her chest was solid as rock. When she pushed even harder to overtake Allardyce, her body obeyed. She took the torch like a baton, pelting on towards the now-slowing beast. There was fear in her mind, but her body was pure power.
“Hey!” she called, and once again the low rumble of her voice surprised her. It was like someone else was echoing out into that field, shouting for the demon ahead of her to take notice.
It did. The curving horns began to swivel, the demon’s lined face coming back into view. Lori raised the torch with one hand, eyes sharp. She clicked. The violet flash blasted from the cylinder, hitting the field the way the sky lights up around a bolt of lightning. It did more than sting her eyes this time. She heard the creature’s anguished cry as she let loose one of her own, a sudden searing heat burning in her gaze. For a moment, she could see nothing at all, then the blurred world slowly came back into view.
The energy that had kept her racing on died. She felt it leave like a hoist that had been holding her up, dropping her suddenly like a sack of spuds into the mud. Ahead, the beast was still yowling and wailing, but it all seemed far away. Lori fell to her knees, clutching her aching heart as she sank into the wet mud around her. One hand still held the torch, and as Lori looked down at it, she balked. Her hand was black. Even as she watched it, the skin turned slowly from black back to her usual paleness. The colour drained away like the ebb of the tide, receding up her sleeve.
“Four minutes before the blindness wears off!”
It wasn’t Allardyce who had given the command, but he chimed in quickly with a reply.
“Give me a chain and the harness, quickly!”
The figures who had joined them at the bridge were approaching the felled creature. Lori rubbed at her stinging eyes, trying to make them work again. Allardyce and another man were slinging chains and all sorts of contraptions around the huge beast. They had some kind of white sling over its head, muffling its cries. As Lori’s eyes filled with water again, she saw two shapes right in front of her. She squinted. Gloves. Thick, woolly gloves.
“Come on,” said a voice she knew. “Up you get, Big Girl.”
It took her a moment to place the sharp, sarky tone. Her eyes found a dark face with a reddish tinge to it, and a head that bore two small stumps where horns were growing. The eyes that shone her way gave a blink, and Lori saw the eyelids move sideways.
“Owe?” she breathed.
The face grinned.
“Thanks for that,” Owe said brightly. “You were shit-hot amazing.”
Owe’s gloved hands helped Lori to her feet. She staggered a little, pulling her feet out of the deep, sticky mud. She walked a few paces, stopping at the sight of a man before her. He wasn’t helping with the creature’s restraint, but holding his chest and gasping in a few rasping breaths. In the moonlight, his silver suit glittered. Lori knew his thin frame. The freak at the Door to Nowhere. He was the creep with the ugly smile, the one she’d run from once she’d realised that Kasabian was safe. The man who had promised she would need him soon enough.
He turned, his thin-lips pulling back into that foul smile when he laid eyes on Lori. Her stomach heaved, and a second later her throat was hot with the threat of vomit. It came vaulting up suddenly, and she managed to turn her head not to get it all over Owe. Lori spewed into the grass, emptying her exhausted body. Her throat burned, sour and warm. She coughed out the last few chunks with a grimace, holding her knees with her hands. When she looked up, the silver-suited man had stepped a little closer.
“Compose yourself, Miss Blake,” he began, “we’ll need that strength of yours to get this beast to Gregory’s boat.”
Lori scoffed, her throat aching. The man offered her a white handkerchief, stark against the emerging moonlight. She snatched it from his grip, straightening up.
“What will you do with it, Sir?” Owe asked.
Lori saw her face beaming up at the man. She was wearing her huge overcoat again, but her horns were on full display. The man’s ugly smile flashed Owe’s way, widening.
“We’ll send it back where it came from, as I promised you,” he said.
His eyes glittered back to Lori. She frowned at the tremble in her empty stomach, clutching it hard.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Marax,” the man replied simply. “But if you like, you can me Your Salvation.”
Gates, and where they lead
The boat docked near the city’s southern gate, where the Roman wall gave way to the bridge that led to Granddad’s house. It was gone four in the morning by the time they’d hulked the bagged beast down the river, and Lori was relieved to see two people waiting by the weir with a large, wheeled cart. Until she looked into a pale, smiling face that she knew. Lori looked over his skinny frame, which was clothed – for once – in black. Addy caught her eye, but didn’t hold the gaze, his small smile fading. Lori’s teeth teemed and she ran her tongue over them. She pressed the tips of her fingers hard into her palm.
“Addison,” Marax called, climbing from the boat’s pilot seat. “Hold that steady whilst the ladies cajole our friend here into position.”
The creature burbled in its bag. The speedboat was pretty big, but even so Lori and Owe were crammed in at the back behind the demon. Lori was on the dockside, and able to keep glaring in Addy’s direction. He flashed her another look, eyes lingering longer this time. So that’s why he hadn’t been at his van when she called there. What was he doing here, with demons and… whatever Marax was? Marax clearly knew him pretty well. Her lips burst with questions, opening and closing. But with Allardyce, Owe and Marax around, not to mention the few other cronies who were helping to lug the bagged demon from the boat onto the cart, there wasn’t a chance to get Addy alone.
“Are we sending him back right away, Sir?” Addy asked.
Lori gave the bag a shove from her end, the last push needed to get it fully out of the boat. Her arms burned with the strain, and she let out a groan.
&n
bsp; “Not yet, my boy,” Marax answered.
He came to Lori’s side, giving the bag a hard slap. Nothing happened. Marax leaned closer to the bag, where Lori imagined the creature’s shoulders might have been. She saw Marax’s thin lips whisper against it. Even though she was close enough to hear the strange sounds he made, she couldn’t understand a word that Marax said to the bag. The demon within grunted, moving a little in the encouraged direction. Marax’s gaze slid sideways onto Lori. Up close, his eyes gleamed with something silver, like a filter over the real colour. Human or demon? Allardyce’s non-answer came racing to Lori’s mind.
Lori leaned close, speaking low. “What are you?”
Marax raised a thin brow, his smile curling. “Hosted.”
He gave the beast another slap as Addy pulled at the bag from the other end. There was one more collective heave, which Lori hung back from, and the beast was loaded. She sighed, then gasped in a deep clutch of the night air. There was a faint blue glow in the sky, the first flashes of sunlight in the far horizon. Little navy ripples appearing in the black river water. Marax clapped his hands together, making Lori jump.
“Right… Just up the hill with it now.”
Lori glanced beyond the thin man, able to make out a cobblestone path between the buildings ahead. It veered upwards sharply, disappearing into the darkness.
“Whose bright idea was it to build a gate on a hill?” Allardyce asked.
He was clutching his chest, mouth pulled down at the corners. Owe and Addy had taken positions at the cart’s handles, ready to drag it backwards, and Marax’s few other employees had their hands flush against the bottom rim to push. Allardyce looked at Lori, and she saw the heavy flicker of his eyelids. She skewed one side of her mouth.
“Go with it.” Allardyce moved towards her. He nodded in the direction of the cart. “You’ll want to see what Marax does with this thing.”