As the loose squares and rectangles of the different animal groups settled into their positions in the front yard of the museum, like a series of regiments drawn up in parade review, the dragon felt something tickling his ankles.
He looked down and saw a stream of cats. Not stone cats or metal cats, but real cats – fat ones, thin ones, sleek ones and moth-eaten ones; tabbies and gingers, black cats and tortoiseshell, white ones and blue ones; some ridiculously fluffy like burst cushions, some dangerously sinuous and svelte. Bast the Mighty had released the real cats of London from the spell binding all living things, and had called them to form the feline squadron of what was, the dragon could now see, an army.
All the animals, real or sculptures, came in different shapes and sizes, but two things united them: they all looked out at the world with blue frost-fire blazing from their eyes. And every pair of those eyes was pointed at the front door of the museum, waiting for it to open.
There was a long-held breath of anticipation, and then the tall double doors slammed back to reveal a standing wall of blue light, through which stepped the lion-women. They formed an honour guard on each side of the door, and then Bast rode out between them on the back of the giant stone scarab, like a general standing on a tank. The scarab’s thin insect legs skittered over the stone paving beneath the heavily armoured body as it walked to the edge of the steps, where it stopped and looked down on the massed ranks laid out beneath it.
A ripple of noise ran through the crowded masses – a mixture of growls and purrs and low whinnies and quiet hissing. It was a strange noise, submissive and hungry.
Bast sat back on her haunches and raised one paw.
Something dropped heavily out of the sky and landed on her wrist. Horus the hawk folded his wings and added the unblinking blue disc of his eye to the cat’s, looking out at the mass below.
I AM BAST. YOU ARE MINE. WE ARE MIGHTY!
The animals roared and shrieked and bellowed their approval. The dragons banged their shields on the ground, adding a clashing percussion to the cacophony. The dragon whose shield had been stolen went through the motions of banging his shield along with the other ones, but took care not to actually bang the replacement shield too hard. He had a feeling that if he did, he’d be holding a mangled mess of broken plywood, and that, in front of everyone, would make him look irredeemably stupid. And as we have already noted, stupid is a colour that dragons do not like.
THIS CITY MUST BE MINE. YOU WILL HELP ME. YOU WILL BE REWARDED. BUT FIRST YOU MUST FIND ME THE CHILDREN.
Bast looked around the yard.
TWO CHILDREN OF FLESH RESIST MY MAGIC. TWO UNFROZEN CHILDREN WHO STILL MOVE. FIND THEM. BRING THEM TO ME. THEN THE CITY WILL BE MINE. AND YOU SHALL BE REWARDED.
It might be that he was distracted, worrying about looking silly because he just had a flimsy wooden ‘GOLF SALE’ sign instead of a proper metal shield, but the dragon wasn’t quite concentrating enough on being mesmerised by Bast’s magic. He looked at the other dragons. Their eyes blazed blue and they were nodding and yacketing their fangs in approval. They all looked like him, not least because they had all been made in the same mould that had made him. But now, for the first time, he felt different. He felt lesser, because he had a pretend shield that probably wasn’t fooling anyone, and it felt odd because though he was used to a voice in his head telling him what to do, it was the wrong voice. None of the other dragons seemed to mind this. So he decided he was broken, and that the boy had broken him, and so however hard all the others looked for the boy, he would be the one to find him and get his shield back and then bring what was left of the boy back here to prove his worth to the cat as soon as was dragonly possible.
So when Bast launched Horus back into the sky and roared:
GO, MY MIGHTY MINIONS! FIND THE CHILDREN WHO DARE DEFY US!
the dragon didn’t move.
Every other animal burst into action and noise, and the ordered ranks erupted into a wild maelstrom of multi-specied mayhem, as if each statue or cat had decided to head off to all points of the compass at once. The dragon stayed very still. Thinking, then realising something, then trying very hard not to be seen to smirk at the secret knowledge he realised he alone had. And then, as the crowd thinned out as the creatures spread away into the surrounding streets, hoping to find the trail of the children more by luck and force of numbers, he stretched his stubby wings and rose carefully into the night sky.
What he had been thinking about was what he had observed just before he’d attacked Will and Jo the first time: they had been very interested in something. They had been prodding and poking at it and trying to move it. When he had attacked, they had tried to defend it as much as themselves.
And so while all the other animals went on the hunt in one direction, with no clear plan, the dragon went in the opposite direction. Because what the children had been so concerned with was a person. And all the people apart from them were frozen. If that person they had been so interested in was still there, there was every chance that wherever they were now, they would return to her. The dragon knew about needing things: they had fussed with the woman and her things as if they really needed something, just like the dragon really needed his shield back. All he had to do was find the frozen woman and take her. He would bring her to Bast and be rewarded. Then he would join the rest of the dragons in the hunt for the boy, and for the shield itself.
11
Death-By-Chocolate
Jo was quite sure that with Selene and Filax on guard, there was no need for both of them to take turns doing the same job. And she could sense that her brain needed rest, as if the simple act of taking in every impossible and unfamiliar thing that had happened to them since the world stopped had physically exhausted it, like a muscle that had unexpectedly been called upon to run a marathon. She felt a dull ache at the base of her skull, and her eyes were scratchy with tiredness.
She closed them and tried to sleep. She focused on relaxing, and when that didn’t work she focused on listening to any sounds she could discern in the great unmoving metropolis beyond the curtained windows. All she could hear was Will very nearly snoring, and Filax breathing.
The city was silent.
There is a thing that happens when you are really tired that fools your brain into thinking you are hungry. Sapped of energy, and unable for whatever reason to replenish her batteries with proper sleep, Jo began to feel distinctly peckish. The chocolate she had eaten from the minibar had flooded her with a fast sugar-hit that had spiked her system, and now her body wanted more as she began to plummet down the steep slope on the other side.
She rolled quietly off the bed, shushed Filax, who turned an inquisitive eye on her, and opened the minibar. If she had been hungry for hard alcohol, champagne or macadamia nuts she would have been fine. She could have made out like a bandit, in fact. But she didn’t. What she wanted, what the feeling-hungry-but-really-just-tired trickster in her skull was telling her she REALLY needed, was chocolate.
And the good news was that she knew exactly where to feed that need.
Death-By-Chocolate. One almost cartoony slice of cake sitting on a room-service tray just down the passage around the corner, by the lifts. She’d seen it going in, and now she wished she had paused to pick it up as they had passed.
Still, it was not far away, and would not take a moment to get it.
If she was not going to be able to get to sleep, there was no point in sitting awake and listening to her stomach rumble. It was greedy, yes, but after the day she’d had, she deserved a little something. Even as she had the thought she felt a tiny pang of sadness, small but sharp: her mother used to say the same thing every night about her glass of wine. She only ever had one at a time, and some nights she had none, but when she was tired, or when their dad had been out of the country with the army for a while, she’d wait until seven and then pour herself a glass of wine.
‘Seven o’clock,’ she’d say with a wink at the children. ‘Been a long day. Tim
e for a little something, I think.’ And then she would get herself the single glass of wine, and sit with them as they had their evening meal. They would chink glasses, red wine for her, white milk for Jo (to help her broken bones heal) and clear water for Will. Then their mother would take a sip, lean back and let the knots begin to unwind. A little something, she would say, really hits the spot sometimes. Jo was thinking that that gleaming dark slice of chocolatey sinfulness down the corridor was just going to waste, and could so easily, so very pleasantly, be a little something for herself.
What harm could it do?
She held a hand up to Filax, whose ears pricked.
‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Stay here. I’ll be right back.’
Jo picked up her stick, took a glossy magazine from the table by the sofa and slid quietly out of the door. She looked carefully right and left, and saw there was no one there. The passage was dimly lit with tastefully concealed downlighters paced at one metre intervals. Maybe it was the lack of outside windows, but the whole space was somehow dampened and muted, as if the passage existed under water. She folded the magazine and wedged it under the door, keeping it open. She didn’t want it to swing back behind her and shut her out.
She walked carefully down the thick carpet, which muffled her footsteps, and stopped at the corner. Just because this was perfectly safe and only going to take a couple of seconds didn’t mean she was going to take anything for granted. She stood next to a door marked FIRE EXIT ONLY and poked her head round the angle in the corridor, expecting to see that delicious slice of Death-By-Chocolate waiting for her, only a few steps away – and instead saw it was gone.
Or if not entirely gone, at least half gone.
Or half eaten.
Or, in fact, half eaten and disappearing before her eyes, still being eaten by a very hungry – and very gold – metal rat.
The rat stopped eating and lifted its head to look at her. It didn’t look frightened. It looked … interested.
It was, she realised, one of the animals she had seen earlier on the front of the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. There had been rats and fleas and ticks and …
The hissing noise from behind her reminded her what else there had been.
Cobras. She turned.
Midway down the hall, between her and the open door to their room, were two cobras. One slowly serpentining across the plush carpet towards her. The other turning to head for the bedroom.
‘Will!’ she shouted. ‘Look out!’
And then things began to happen very fast, as things do when everything decides to go wrong all at once.
The cobra heading towards her stopped and rose on its tail, hood flaring in a menacing golden billow that framed its gaping mouth and the venomous fangs within.
The other cobra got low to the ground and accelerated into the bedroom, heading for Will like a bolt of molten lighting.
There was an enraged chittering from behind Jo, and the scrabble of claws on crockery as the rat leapt across the room-service tray and launched itself at her face.
She spun and flailed her stick at it, acting on instinct. She wasn’t looking or aiming because there was no time to do either. She just struck out blindly. There were a hundred reasons why she should have missed, not least of which was that she was very bad at rounders, but this was the one time everything lined up perfectly. She felt the impact before she heard the thwack of stick on metal, and as the concussion passed from the stick into her hand and on up her arm, she saw the rat squawking as it twirled backwards through the air, paws spreadeagled and long whippy tail flailing like a broken helicopter.
She turned to defend herself from the cobra.
As it reared back to lunge at her, the doorway behind it suddenly filled with a big, fast-moving slab of hound-shaped marble that had the other cobra clamped between its teeth, shaking it like a terrier shakes a rat.
The cobra facing Jo struck towards her, and would have sunk its fangs in her had Filax not trapped its tail beneath one heavy paw that slammed down on it like a sledgehammer.
The cobra reached full stretch, so that it was a perfectly straight line, like a gold javelin pointed right at her face, its tail clamped and anchored to the floor by the dog at the other end.
Jo saw the teeth, and the angry eyes that seemed to hang in the air an inch from the end of her nose for the longest moment – and then she swore the snake made an ‘Gulp!’ noise as Filax scooted his paw backwards, shovelling the cobra so fiercely that it went flying away in the air behind him, twenty feet down the hall.
‘Good—’ began Jo, meaning to add, ‘dog’.
She never got the time. Filax bounded forwards and barged her through the fire exit. She tumbled back and caught her hip painfully against the steps behind her, bringing tears to her eyes.
Scrambling to her feet, unable to think why the dog had done this – or even if he had meant to do it – she went to the door. She was about to open it when she heard the reason.
A lion roared.
Filax barked.
And then there was the shrowling, growling, snarling maelstrom-sound of two big animals fighting for their lives.
She saw a blur of stone lion and marble dog pinwheel past the small square of safety glass in the fire door. The lion was trying to get at the dog’s throat, and Filax was trying to shake it off. The lion clawed and snarled, and Filax spun and snapped, and then he hurled the lion off, trying to get at its throat instead. The lion shrowled in fury, and hooked at the dog with all four claw-tipped paws. Again the positions changed as the dog yelped and threw him off, as the attacker turned to defender and back again, with no let-up from either of them.
The fight threw them back and forth across the corridor outside, banging and crashing into the door with such force that it screeched on its hinges and Jo knew it would burst open at the next blow.
And so, with a final shout of ‘Will! Get out of there!’, she ran for the roof, hoping the fire door at the top would not be locked. Otherwise she was running into a dead end. And she had the nasty thought that if it was locked and things went badly with Filax, she might rather abruptly and unpleasantly find out exactly why it was they called it that.
12
False dawn
Will did not snap awake when Jo first yelled his name. He was buried beneath a mountainous slag heap of sleep that pressed down on him like the weight of the world. Instead he clawed himself back to consciousness, tunnelling upwards with a disoriented and rising panic, his mind jumbled, unsure whether he was dreaming or drowning: had he heard Jo shout or … was it in his imagination? He could so easily let go of the thought and just sink back down into the nice welcoming fug of sleep on this very comfortable bed if he had just imagined her voice …
The barking and roaring in the passage outside ripped him out of the blurry depths and unceremoniously dropped him hard onto the sharp edge of reality.
The room door was open.
Jo was gone.
Filax was fighting something in the passage with a lot of bumping and thumping and snarling.
Will stopped in his tracks, halfway off the bed, paralysed.
He had to do something. His mind knew this. But his muscles didn’t seem to be getting the message. Or maybe they were waiting for more detailed instructions.
He heard himself shouting.
‘JO?’
So at least his voice was working. He tried to hear a reply through the noise outside.
‘JO!’ he shouted. ‘Where are you?’
Filax and something fiercely muscled and made of stone windmilled past the open door.
Clearly someone was issuing orders to his muscles without him knowing it. Maybe there was an autopilot that took over in moments of crisis, a sub-routine that clicked into self-preservation mode when the conscious mind jammed. Whatever the reason, he found he had jumped off the bed and slammed the door shut.
Jo was gone. The thought had his gut churning in horror. He hoped she was hiding somewhere safe.
He couldn’t think why she might have left the room, or how something could have taken her from it without waking him.
For a brief moment he felt he should not have left the dog outside to fight alone, but the feeling didn’t last long: he knew he was no match for a lion, and would just get in the way. There was the banging noise on the walls and floor as the fight came barrelling back down the hall and past the door. He jammed his eye to the peephole and saw Filax had the lion by the scruff of its neck and was definitely holding his own. Luckily it was a Filax-sized lion, not a disturbingly huge one like the giant beasts that sat at the bottom of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square.
Filax fighting one of those colossal creatures would have been like a chihuahua challenging an elephant.
Will suddenly thought to check the bathroom, his heart leaping with hope, moving fast, wondering if Jo was perhaps frozen in her own fug of terror within the marble space. His heart fell with a lurch as he saw she wasn’t.
He had to find another way out, so he could start looking for her, but he was trapped in the room. He had noticed there was a flat roof one floor below the window, and he thought that if he could get the window open he might be able to hang from the window ledge and drop safely onto it, making his escape down a drainpipe. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was better than no plan. Except for the fact the windows probably didn’t open. Maybe he could throw something through them, like a chair. Or maybe hitting it with the dragon shield would do the trick.
He pulled the curtains.
At first he thought it was morning, and he was seeing bright golden sunlight dappled through the leafy branches of a tree moving in the breeze.
Then his eyes focused properly.
There was no breeze. It wasn’t quite morning. It was the flat, cold light of a drizzly pre-dawn. And the gold light was not coming from the sun, or anything as warm and comforting.
It was coming from the cold gilded metal of the skittering things pressed against the window, the giant bugs and ticks and mosquitoes from the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the partners of the snakes and the rats. They were pressed against the glass, just like moths trying to get into a well-lit room at night.
The London Pride Page 6