As he walked, he went over and over the conversation, angry at himself for using Euan’s name. It wasn’t a new detail – Pringle had known Mal and Euan and their father for as long as Mal could remember but it still felt like a betrayal. Pringle shouldn’t think about Euan, shouldn’t hear his name spoken aloud. Euan didn’t belong to Pringle, he belonged to Mal.
Back when his dad was alive, Mal had thought the very worst thing that could happen would be losing him or Euan. When he died, Mal thought the axe had fallen, that nothing would ever hurt him as much again. He and Euan had gone all out for a few months, taking down demons in a way they never had before. It wasn’t their job, anymore, or even their mission. It was revenge and redemption, guilt and anger. Euan had always been the sensible one, had always been the one to suggest caution. His most overused phrase was ‘let’s check it out first’. But it was like a switch had been flipped. He was like one of those Viking berserkers, all flailing fists and snapping teeth.
The worst thing was that Mal had loved it. All the strictures he had chafed against were gone. The wildness he had always sensed inside himself was set free and his big brother’s restraining hand was gone from his shoulder. Side by side they hunted until their injuries forced them to rest for a while, holed up in an anonymous hotel on the motorway, almost at the English border and away from Edinburgh and the monster’s nest they had kicked.
They had been careless. Unheeding of the long-term consequences. Having been brought up to bring down these creatures, one at a time, they had no concept of how wide the organisation ran, of how the threads bound up every aspect of the city and its people. When they had healed enough to head home, Mal could only think of getting stronger. He had heard of a man who peddled ‘upgrades’ in a little room above one of the shops in the Grassmarket, and he sought him out. Euan had been against it and had refused to come along. He said it was stupidly dangerous, that Mal didn’t know what the upgrade would do to him or what it would cost. When that didn’t work, Euan had told him that using supernatural elements, rather than destroying them, was completely against everything they stood for. He delivered the final blow just as Mal was heading out of the door: ‘What would Dad say?’
Mal hadn’t bothered to reply. Their dad wasn’t saying anything ever again. What did it matter? With hindsight, he could identify that moment as the point at which he changed. The singular moment in which the good and the bad blurred a little. He passed over a tight wad of banknotes to a man who was not entirely human, in exchange for a tattoo which would improve his natural healing capability by over fifty percent, and in so doing became a little less human himself.
* * *
Rose checked her tattoo as she walked fast away from Astrid. It looked pretty much the same as the last time she had looked, meaning she hadn’t missed a chunk of time. She ran her thumb lightly over the bumps where it was healing and waited for the usual rush of comfort. Instead, she could feel her anger drain away and fear step into its place. She was utterly alone. She doubled back, looking for Astrid, dodging the people who all seemed to want to get in her way. The pavements were empty. Not empty of people but empty of Astrid. She was too frightened to double back too far. What if she bumped into the man again? He had looked in a bad way, but perhaps he could have recovered and be ready to attack her again. He could be waiting in one of the doorways or side streets right at that moment.
Walking so fast it was almost a run, she made it to the end of Princes Street, where she got into a black cab. She would go home. She would take a nap, and perhaps when she woke up all of this would have changed. After fighting against the blanket of calm which had dulled her thoughts and lulled her senses, she craved it. Maybe, if she went to sleep, she would lose some time. Skip this horrible now. Perhaps she would wake up outside the university, ready for a lecture, or in a cafe with Astrid, both of them with mugs of hot chocolate and the world reset to a safe and known thing.
Outside her house, she paid the driver and climbed out of the cab. She hesitated on the pavement for just a moment and then unlocked her front door with the Yale key and stepped inside.
The hallway looked just the same as always. Light came through the stained glass panel at the top of the front door and dappled the floor with splotches of colour. The familiarity of it was like a balm and she took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of home.
She sagged against the wall, suddenly weak. At once, she was ravenously hungry and desperate with thirst, but she went straight up the stairs to her mother’s study. There was a wild hope that she could prove that this was all insane. That she was having a hallucination. She no longer cared that she would be rushed to a psychiatric hospital, pumped full of drugs, that she would have to drop out of her course, ruin her life. This was serious. She had believed that she had travelled to Paris and back. That a man had wanted to kill her. She could still feel his hands on her skin, the kiss of the knife blade on her throat.
Now that she was back in the house, her instincts for normality had woken up. Something was telling her to stop climbing the stairs. She stopped, one foot raised to take the next step, a hand on the banister.
She knew that she always called ‘I’m home,’ and then went into the kitchen. That was the routine. That was what every part of her body wanted to do right at this moment. She was hungry. She was thirsty. She should turn around and go back down the stairs to the kitchen. She could make a cup of tea, wrap her hands around the mug, feel the comforting steam on her face as she tipped it to her lips to drink.
No. She was going to break the routine. Everything had fractured. She knew, deep in her bones, that something was very wrong and that this was her chance. Astrid had left her and she had to do something different. Was it Nietzsche who said that stupidity was doing the same thing and expecting different results? Or had that been Oprah? Was Oprah on the television anymore? She tried to remember the last thing she had watched on television, but there was nothing there. Just a blank. She tried to picture the television in the living room – everybody had a television, after all – but she couldn’t. She felt like she was flying apart. She was anxious. She was panicking. She needed help.
She took another couple of steps. The urge to call out ‘I’m home’ was almost overwhelming. She actually clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from doing it. She had the irrational feeling that if she called out in her usual way, she would simply go back down the stairs and into the kitchen and everything would regain its smooth running. That was tempting, of course, but the thought that Astrid knew an actual ghost – knew more, in fact, than she would tell Rose, and had just abandoned her – jolted her back to her mission. Change the routine. Shake things up. Get help.
The door to her mother’s study was closed. It was an ordinary interior wooden door in a light oak finish with a brass lever-style handle. There was no reason for Rose to be afraid of it, but sweat had broken out across her forehead and she felt cold all over.
She reached out, pushing down the fear and the desire to shut down, to walk away. She pictured Astrid. Astrid smiling at her with her crooked mouth. Astrid spooning the whipped cream from her hot chocolate and talking a mile a minute, making Rose feel normal and loved. She had to change the routine, had to ask for help in order to find Astrid. She pushed down on the handle before the fear could overtake her sense of purpose. The door swung open.
The room was empty.
Not in the sense that her mother wasn’t inside, sitting at her desk and frowning at her laptop screen, but completely empty.
There was no desk. No chair. No laptop. Rose blinked. She had an image of her mother’s room. There should’ve been piles of paper and books. There should’ve been a big pinboard on the wall with coloured notes and photographs.
She stepped into the room. There was a faint scent of chemical air freshener. The curtains were shut, but they were flimsy and there was a fair amount of light coming through. She could see dust motes in the air. Every detail was crisp and real and there was no r
eason to believe for one second that it was not. She dug her nails into her palms, squeezed her eyes tightly shut, and then opened them.
The room remained empty.
She went downstairs and into the kitchen. She no longer felt hungry but she forced herself to open the cupboards and look for food. There was an ancient jar of mustard on one shelf, individual salt and pepper packets which had been taken from a chain restaurant, and a single tin of sweetcorn. The smell from the cupboards was of old air.
She opened the bread bin and wasn’t surprised to find it empty. She felt as if she had broken into two pieces. One half of her could almost see the loaf of sliced wholemeal and the open packet of crumpets which usually sat in the bread bin, but the other half could see the empty space. The ancient crumbs gathered at the edges. The hint of mould. When had she last eaten something? She could picture herself taking two crumpets from the packet and then toasting them, spreading them with butter and honey. Her fingers remembered the action, the smell of the honey and the way it melted into the hot crumpet, the sensation of the plastic packet as she put it away. She hesitated, trying to focus on what was in front of her eyes, not her memory. Something wasn’t right with it, something that was so close she felt she could almost touch it.
The crumpet packet was always open. There were always five out of the six remaining. She always toasted two and folded the edge of the packet under as she put it back into the bin.
Every time.
But if she always ate two, how could there always be five left in the packet? She couldn’t recall a single time when there had been one or two or three left. Or when there had been no crumpets at all. All at once, the half of Rose which saw the full bread bin and her mother in her study and the jar of honey in the kitchen cupboard fell away. None of that had been real. She had never made food in this room. Never spoken to her parents. Never had parents. Every time she had called out ‘I’m home’ it had been to this empty house.
Chapter Twelve
Fuck. Shit. Bollocks. Astrid walked in the opposite direction to Rose. She had no choice in the matter and knew better than to try to resist. She had been given a direct order and her body would obey.
A group of men were walking behind her on the pavement and she slowed to let them pass. They were young, with tight muscles and loud voices, swaggering along the road as if they owned the world. She breathed in the pheromones and considered a brief distraction from her problems. An hour of pure physicality would clear her mind. For a moment she let her imagination go to that happy place of tangled limbs, sweat and screaming sensation.
No. She resolutely turned down another street, away from temptation. She had been enjoying the holiday spirit for too long and she had become sloppy. Somebody had blabbed about Rose and sent that boy. And she, Astrid, had to accept some blame for the situation too. She had let Rose become too aware, and now she was alone and disorientated. Maybe even in danger. Astrid felt a stab of real pain and used that to sharpen her focus. She would sort out this mess in no time and then things could get back to normal. Then she would flag down the nearest good-looking body and take it for a spin. With that cheerful thought, she turned on her heel and headed for Greyfriars. The tour folk always had the gossip.
* * *
Mal had decided to risk a trip to his flat. He kept a bag packed in his car, but he wanted to check to see if anyone was hanging about, scoping the place. His brain was spinning, trying to work out how much trouble he was in, and his ribs and head were chiming in. Not helpfully.
He checked his wards and found no sign of entry. His birds were as healthy and happy as a bunch of reanimated dead creatures could reasonably expect to be. Monty ruffled his feathers in a way which suggested he was saying ‘where the bloody hell have you been?’ and Mal stroked his soft head, drawing more comfort from the action than he liked to admit.
At least he kept good pain killers in stock. He congratulated himself on his forethought while he swallowed a handful. The headache from hell had wrapped itself tight and was squeezing his temples in time with his pulse. He also flipped through the scraps of paper, business cards and old index cards which constituted his filing system. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find. Some forgotten ally who would be able to keep an eye on Euan until Mal could finish the job for Pringle. Someone who could keep Euan safe and then help Mal to move him somewhere new. It wasn’t much of a hope, and he wasn’t surprised to confirm that his best names were dead or on the other side of the world.
He threw a few clothes into a holdall and emptied some bird seed onto the coffee table. ‘Be good, pal,’ he said to Monty, then reapplied the wards and protections, as well as re-bolting the deadlocked and reinforced front door.
He drove around the city for a while, letting his thoughts settle. He was good for nothing while he was still thinking about Euan, so he parked near the parliament building and hiked up Arthur’s Seat, passing joggers and tourists.
Euan had been their father’s golden boy. He was the one who could hit a bullseye, strip a gun in military-grade time, run for the longest without getting out of breath. Mal had never been envious, though. Being the golden boy meant even more of Dad’s attention, and Mal had quite as much of that as he could handle. Their dad was intense. That was the polite way of putting it. Bat-shit crazy was another. Total fucking heidbanger was the most accurate.
When he was very young, of course, Mal didn’t realise this. That was just his father. His life was just his life. It wasn’t until high school that he grasped that not everyone got a knife for their birthday and a weekend-long lesson in using it to kill things. When Mal was twelve and Euan fifteen, he’d taken them on a camping trip in the highlands. Mal had never seen scenery so beautiful outside of a calendar picture, and the sky when they’d sat out around the fire that first evening had been so big and star-filled that it felt like magic.
Euan had brought marshmallows from a corner shop and they threaded them onto sticks, toasting them in the fire until they were blackened and crusty on the outside and gooey sweetness in the middle. Mal had never been happier and, if pressed, he would find it hard to say he’d ever been happier since. As he went to sleep in the tent that night, Euan on one side and his dad on the other, he allowed himself to get excited about the rest of the holiday. It seemed it was a real trip. The kind of thing he’d read about. Perhaps his dad would teach them to fish in the loch or maybe they’d just climb one of the giant hills, stand on top of the world and shout at that massive sky until their voices went hoarse.
The next day, of course, it turned out that they weren’t on a special holiday after all. It was a job. Their father put up some protective charms and told Mal to stay in the tent while he took Euan to kill something horrible in the woods. Mal didn’t know what was worse; that their father had brought them on a job or that he’d left Mal behind like a spare part. When Euan had come back he’d been pumped up and full of swagger and tales, but he’d also been pale and there was a gash along his arm that Dad had stitched using his first aid kit. Euan hadn’t cried but Mal could see it had been a struggle.
Six years after that, Euan was as good as dead. The thing that had got him was just an ordinary demon. Nothing special. Nothing unusually strong or fast or clever, just one of the Sluagh. Just a routine job in a backstreet in Leith. Euan moved to the right and it went to the left and managed to get a blow past his defences. It was a lucky shot (or unlucky, from Euan’s point of view). Mal had seen Euan double over and moved closer as quickly as he could. He dispatched the demon he had been fighting and hit the one in front of Euan. It was too late, though, just a fraction. It had already landed a blow onto Euan’s temple, and the light went out of his eyes as he swayed on his feet. Mal had been experimenting with charms and they were both wearing ones which kept them upright. One of the worst things in a fight was to go down. You were vulnerable on the floor. Plus, the sight of a never-falling opponent helped psychologically. Gave you the element of surprise and an edge – something that s
aid ‘I’m human but I’m indestructible’. But something Mal hadn’t factored in was the curiosity factor. The part that marvelled at the still-standing human and wanted to know why they had their eyes closed. Euan was in a dead faint but the charm was keeping him upright. Maybe if he’d been on the floor, the demon would’ve left him alone, turned its attention to Mal. Instead, it wanted to know why the human was sleeping standing up and what, exactly, would make him fall down. The demon punched Euan a couple of times in the head. Euan still didn’t fall. He was unconscious but upright, held there by the charm Mal had traded from a guy in a bar, and as a result the demon hit him a couple more times, probably causing the damage that put him into a coma.
Of course, it might have made no difference. If he hadn’t been wearing the charm and had fallen to the floor when he fainted, the demon could’ve kicked him in the head and the result would’ve been the same. Or perhaps the demon would have kicked him in his vulnerable soft belly, ruptured something vital and watched him bleed out from the inside.
There was no way to tell and no point in playing the blame game. Or another round of ‘what if’.
Didn’t stop him doing it, though. Didn’t stop him from blaming himself. The facts remained: Euan, the smarter, stronger brother, was laid out in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Mal was way past borrowed time and he knew it.
Mal walked a little way back down the hill until he got phone reception and called Robbie. ‘You ken those girls?’
‘Aye.’ Robbie managed to sound both wary and glaikit, but at least he seemed halfway sober.
‘I think there’s a target at the infirmary. I need you to scope out the place, let me know if you see anything unusual.’
‘Any demons, like?’
Mal closed his eyes. ‘Yes, Robbie,’ he said with exaggerated patience. ‘You’re not to engage or alert them. Just call me. I’ll pay the usual rate.’
The Lost Girls Page 14