Then she heard a footstep, much closer than she’d have thought possible, and her mind scrabbled as she turned. She hadn’t seen anyone in the doorway she’d just passed, nobody had been coming down the steps behind her. It wasn’t possible for there to be a figure there but, impossibly, there was.
She was slammed from behind against the wall, her arms pulled roughly behind her back. There was a solid body behind her, pushing her against the damp brick. ‘Try anything and I’ll cut you, I swear to God.’ The voice was deep, male and familiar.
Her mouth went completely dry.
‘Turn around. Slowly.’
Her hands released, she rotated, as if in a dream. Nothing about this felt real anymore. The fear had pushed reality right out of the park.
It was the man from before. The one she had hurt. He was so close it was like they were embracing, but his expression was stone cold. He wasn’t lying about the knife, either; it glinted in his hand. Smaller than she expected but serrated and very sharp-looking.
‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she said. She was amazed her voice still worked, although it came out more as a dry whisper.
He smiled quickly and without humour. ‘Funny. Last time we met you almost killed me.’
She shook her head, swallowing hard. She wanted to explain that she hadn’t meant to hurt him and that she didn’t know how to do it again or even if she could.
‘We’re going for a walk,’ the man said. ‘No sudden moves, no trying to run, no screaming for help.’
It was exactly as she had thought. The attack she had imagined as she’d run away from the drunk men. ‘Please,’ she tried again.
He frowned, just for a second, before the cold mask slipped down again. He leaned closer. ‘Do you think you can play me?’
She froze. She pressed against the brick, using the wall and the effort of her will to stay upright and conscious.
‘I’ve been hunting things like you my whole life. There is nothing you can say, nothing you can do to fool me, so don’t try.’
One of his arms was braced against the wall, blocking her escape, the other held the knife. He had pale skin inked with curling black shapes, and arm muscles which bulged under his close-fitting t-shirt. With his cropped dark hair and strong jaw he looked like a squaddie from an American film. Good-looking, wide-shouldered and deadly.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. Before. I don’t know how—’ She wanted to say ‘and you attacked me with a knife’ but she didn’t think that would help. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t aware of the fact, wasn’t as if he wasn’t doing exactly the same thing right at that moment.
‘Quiet.’ One word. She could see the black stubble on his jaw, the fine lines around his eyes. He smelled of clean, male sweat and she felt her stomach flip in a completely different way. Pheromones. Astrid was always going on about those and how the right sort made her weak at the knees. Suddenly, Rose knew what she meant. She was terrified of this man, but some obscene part of her wanted him to touch her. That wasn’t a normal reaction. She was holding onto enough of her wits to recognise that fact. And she shouldn’t be thinking this much, either, she realised. She ought to be more terrified, not observing the sensations. The wildly inappropriate sensations. Somehow, that was the most frightening thing she had experienced in an already terrifying day.
This whole time, Astrid had been coaching her to notice men (or women – Astrid had been equal opportunities when it came to dragging Rose out of her virginal exile) and she hadn’t been interested. She’d felt all the raw sexual interest of a soft toy, but now, now her lust appeared to have woken up and roared. Mortal danger, that’s the ticket. I’m delirious from the fear, she thought. I’m babbling.
‘I’m babbling,’ she said out loud.
‘What?’ A noise at the top of the stairs made him look away. A muscle jumped in his cheek as his jaw clenched. Without warning, he moved away, gripping her arm to take her with him. A thought appeared, as if transmuted by the grip of his fingers on her arm: his name was Mal.
She thought about the last time he had attacked her, tried to make her mind focus. She had done something, shot some kind of energy that had made him let her go. If she had any idea of how she had done that perhaps she could do it again. Zap him.
She stumbled on the steps as she tried to keep up with his pace and tried to feel cheered that he didn’t let her fall. Surely that meant he didn’t mean to kill her? She ignored the voice that told her he was simply covering ground in the quickest possible way, getting somewhere private where he could slit her throat. ‘Mal, please,’ she said, using his name without conscious thought.
He stopped and looked at her. ‘You know me?’
She shook her head, trying to catch her breath, get some oxygen into her lungs. ‘Just your name. I don’t know how.’
‘Fuck,’ he said, running a hand over his head. ‘What are you?’
‘A girl,’ she said automatically. ‘My name is Rose MacLeod, I’m twenty years old and I live in Bruntsfield with my—’ She stopped before the lie ‘my mum and dad’ came out. She didn’t have any parents. What kind of person didn’t have parents?
‘Well, Rose MacLeod,’ Mal said, his voice surprisingly soft. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. We’re just going somewhere for a little chat. Don’t mess me around and everything will be fine.’ But his eyes flickered slightly and she knew he was lying.
The bottom of the steps were in sight now, and she wondered if she dared to try to break away from him once they were on a busy street. He wouldn’t hurt her with witnesses, surely?
As they reached the last step, a young couple turned off the street and began to climb. Rose’s heart leapt. Perhaps they could help her, call the police. They were holding hands and the woman was carrying several shopping bags. There were only seconds, Rose knew, before they would pass and her moment would have slipped away. Should she try to attract their attention subtly or just scream?
The moment was passing. Rose reached out to pull the woman’s sleeve as they hurried by, but then something unexpected happened. The woman dropped her shopping bags and lunged for Rose. And Mal threw himself between them, blocking the woman and throwing a punch into the side of the man’s head which dropped him to the ground.
‘Run,’ Mal said to Rose. He had let her go the moment he began fighting, but she hadn’t registered it immediately. He was facing the couple, who now appeared less like people and more like something else. Rose’s brain refused to fill in the ‘something else’. It wasn’t possible. It just wasn’t possible.
She stumbled down the last step. The main street with its bright sunshine and shoppers was a small step away. She heard a dull thump followed by an grunted exhalation and turned to see Mal grappling with the things that she’d thought were a human couple.
She knew this was her chance to get away, and she told her legs to stop acting like jelly and take it. Mal had hit the male thing and it dropped to the ground. He was just turning when the female thing swung an arm that no longer looked like an arm and he sprang away, his back thudding into the wall of the close.
Rose forced herself to move. She turned onto the street and began running, dodging between and around people on the pavement, stumbling and almost falling more than once. She was halfway down the road, wondering whether she dared ask a stranger for help or whether there were more of those things behind her, around her, walking past right at this moment, when a hand on her arm made her cry out.
‘This way.’ It was Mal, a bruise blooming on one cheek. He spun her around and pulled her to walk in the other direction, away from the shopping centre.
Rose was glad he wasn’t dead. It wasn’t rational, but it was true. And in her terror over the creatures and her strange relief that he was all right, she forgot to be as scared of him. ‘What were those things?’
He glanced at her. ‘You don’t know?’
She shook her head. ‘Were they going to hurt me?’
‘They were going to gut you,’ he said.
She swallowed. She didn’t want to ask the question but she couldn’t prevent it from spilling out. ‘Why did you stop them?’
His pace didn’t slow, and she was struggling to keep up. His grip on her arm was strong, almost painful. She watched his profile, his serious expression and the way he was looking around, clearly a hundred different things on his mind. He wasn’t going to answer her.
‘Have you got a death wish?’
Rose had so given up on a reply that it took a moment to pick up her place in the conversation. ‘No,’ she said, wondering if it ought to be this easy to talk to one’s kidnapper. ‘But wouldn’t it have saved you the job? I don’t understand why you’d save me just so that you can kill me yourself…’ She trailed off, horrified that she might’ve just answered her own question. He was a psychopath. He enjoyed it. The fear came back, stronger than ever, as if it had just been gathering energy in that brief hiatus. Although it hadn’t been like the fear had gone away, she’d forgotten for a moment that she ought to be scared. If she didn’t remember to concentrate, she didn’t think like a person should think.
He shook his head but didn’t answer her question. ‘Here.’ He paused at the entrance to a building. The door plaque was cheap looking and had several logos. She read ‘chiropractor’ and ‘yoga studio’ before he dragged her inside.
‘Please, let me go,’ she said as he marched her along a corridor. Just because she had accepted that she was mentally unstable and that, most likely, all of what was happening was an elaborate hallucination of some kind, that she was probably back at home with her long-suffering parents or lying in bed in an institution, didn’t mean she wasn’t going to try to stay alive. He held onto her tightly as he unlocked a door which said ‘S. Lewis. Chiropractor’ and then pushed her inside, ahead of him, locking the door behind him.
It was a plain room, filled with furniture but still managing to seem barren. There was a beech-coloured office desk with a swivel chair, and a single bed crowded against one wall with a black duffel bag sitting on the bare mattress.
‘Sit,’ Mal said, pushing her towards the swivel chair.
She did, glad to sit down before she fell. She knew that her adrenaline should still have been pumping but it had drained away. She was in terrible, life-threatening danger and she just wanted to close her eyes. To let it be over. The instinct of self preservation was there, though, however weak, and she made another appeal. ‘If you let me go, I swear I won’t go to the police. I won’t tell anybody. Please.’
‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Just stop pretending.’ He opened the duffel bag and took out a thin rope which he then used to tie her to the chair.
Rose began to cry. She couldn’t help it, the tears just sheeted down her face in a steady stream. Terror, exhaustion, misery. The appropriate reaction had finally arrived and it felt awful. She closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t have to watch the man anymore. The beautiful man who was going to kill her. Torture her? Her heart stuttered and every part of her tensed, waiting for the attack, the touch of a knife against her skin, perhaps a blow to the head.
She felt instead, something against her lips. She opened her eyes and found him close, holding a glass of water to her mouth. She drank. Her throat hurt with crying and as soon as she tasted the cool liquid she realised she was desperately thirsty.
After she’d finished the glass he put it carefully on the desk, then, moving a laptop with a dented case, sat on the edge of the desk and looked at her. His expression wasn’t hostile and his voice was gentle. ‘What are you?’
‘My name is Rose MacLeod.’
He glanced away, irritation flickering across his face.
‘I’m twenty years old,’ she said. ‘I live at 223 Bruntsfield Close. I go to Edinburgh University.’
‘What year are you in?’
‘First,’ she answered immediately. Then she hesitated. Or was it second? It couldn’t be third because that would mean she’d nearly be finished and she hadn’t been thinking about life after uni. If she’d been nearly finished her degree she’d be worrying about final exams and the dissertation and job fairs.
He was looking at her intently again. ‘You’re not sure?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Yes. First year. Definitely.’
‘What are your parents’ names?’
‘Mum and Dad.’ She didn’t want to think about her parents. Her not-real parents. Who had doctored that photograph and put it in her bedroom?
‘Their names.’
Again, there was a tiny blank before the names came to her. Then she said, ‘Rosemary and Philip. I was named after my mum.’
‘Christ,’ Mal said. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’
‘Know what?’
He shook his head. ‘You’re not human.’
She tried to laugh but no sound came out. Her throat closed up completely and the air seemed to disappear from the room. Her ears were ringing.
‘You’re a monster. A demon, probably, although I’m not sure. You don’t exactly follow the pattern.’
‘You’re insane,’ she tried to say, but her throat had closed up. It made a kind of sense, after all. She had been struggling to find an explanation and now Mal was providing one.
‘Okay.’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll have to agree to disagree.’
She closed her eyes again. ‘If you’re going to kill me could you please just do it.’
There was another pause and she could feel him looking at her. She kept her eyes closed and concentrated on breathing.
‘I’m not going to kill you,’ he said. His voice sounded tired. A little sad, perhaps.
She opened her eyes. He was looking at her with a strange expression. There was resolution there, and something else. Regret? ‘Thank you?’
‘Unless you try to kill me again.’ He smiled a little. ‘I think that’s fair.’
The smile made him look less of a thug and she felt her fear recede. She shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, I swear. I just wanted to get away.’
‘You might not have meant to do it,’ he said.
‘I didn’t,’ she said, eager to make that crystal clear.
‘But you are really strong. And the fact that you don’t know it, or don’t know how to control it, won’t make me any less dead if you use it.’
‘What do I do?’ she said, her voice a whisper. ‘I don’t want to hurt anybody.’
Again, that look of surprise. Who did he usually spend time with?
‘How did you get away from those people?’ In her last glimpse of the fight, Mal had been raining down blows, but there were two of them and they had been twisting and stretched, no longer human shaped, moving all around him in deadly tendrils.
‘They weren’t people. They were the Sluagh. And I killed them.’
‘In broad daylight?’ Like that was the strangest thing.
‘In a close.’ He smiled again, as if he was thinking the same thing. ‘And the Sluagh don’t have bodies, so no evidence left at the scene.’
‘They had bodies. I felt that woman’s arm.’ The word he had used again, ‘Sluagh’, sounded strangely familiar. She felt the tickle of a memory at the back of her mind.
He leaned down, looking deeply into her eyes. ‘Not a woman. And once they’ve been killed they burn up. They leave traces, but nothing that the human world is equipped to identify or even notice. Unlike demons, which remain corporeal after death. Annoyingly so.’
‘You keep talking about the human world. Like it’s something separate.’
‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘Not exactly. There’s just another layer that most people don’t know about. Most people never touch it, or, if they do, they aren’t aware.’
‘And where do you fit in?’
‘I’m human but I was brought up to hunt the things that aren’t.’ He slid off the desk. ‘Okay. We need to keep moving. This is a safe house but it won’t fool the Sluagh for long. They have our scent now.’
She felt the fear r
ush back. ‘I thought you killed them?’
He held up a hand and made a seesaw motion. ‘It’s complicated. If I untie you are you going to try and kill me again?’
‘I told you, I didn’t do that. I didn’t do anything.’
‘You know something? I’m starting to believe you didn’t mean to do it, but that doesn’t make you any less dangerous.’
That was it. Something released inside Rose and she laughed. ‘You’re the one with the scary knife. You’re the one who attacked me, tied me up.’
An almost-smile appeared on Mal’s face and he reached behind her to loosen the rope. She caught a blast of his scent and felt her head swim, even as she rubbed her wrists where the rope had chaffed them.
‘We could do with a disguise.’ Mal reached for her plait and Rose jerked away.
He frowned. ‘Your hair is pretty noticeable. We should cut this off.’
‘No.’ She didn’t know why, of all things, her hair felt important, but it did. Something familiar to hold onto. She realised that she was gripping the end of her plait and forced herself to stop.
‘It’ll grow back,’ he said. ‘And there isn’t time to dye it.’
She shook her head. She didn’t know why she didn’t want her hair cut, especially when it was such a lucky escape compared with having her throat slashed. She backed away. ‘I’ll wear a hat.’
‘This is serious,’ he said, but he was moving around the room now, pulling objects from drawers and studding them into his jacket pockets. He pulled a black moulded case from underneath the desk and opened it to reveal weaponry, nestled in specially-shaped foam. She identified guns and knives and a few other scary-looking things she didn’t recognise.
‘You need to look different, throw them off. It will buy us time. I mean, they get close enough and they’ll smell you, but from a distance…’
Rose felt the weight of her hair in her hand. She coiled the plait up behind her head and reached into her pocket for a hair pin.
‘No.’ He glanced at her. ‘Not up, gone.’
The Lost Girls Page 16