They had almost stopped too late, the sun having grown so low that they had barely discerned the barn by its silhouette. All the while, the cold had run rampant through him, and he wondered whether it would ever fade.
“Billy,” he muttered.
Silence, a few snores from Richard’s direction, somewhere out of sight.
Then tiny and soft and perfectly awake: “Yes?”
“Do you feel it too?”
Another pause. “Yes.”
He nodded, couldn’t think of anything to say.
Only a thousand questions I could never ask, he thought.
He was exhausted and every part of him ached in throbbing cycles, but sleep seemed so far away, the most abstract of ideas. Across from him he spied Robert lying on his back, the whites of his eyes glowing in the slivers of moonlight filtering down through the thatch. Norman thought he had never seen eyes so very vivid and wired, in perpetual glare as Robert’s that evening; as though the cycle of day and night itself were an insult from destiny.
“Sleep now, Billy,” he said. “You’ll need your strength.”
“For the fight?”
He smiled despite himself. “There won’t be any fighting for you. You’ll stay back, far away.”
“But Fol said—”
“What that thing said is that you’re special. There’s no doubt about that. He didn’t say anything about throwing a little girl into the middle of a war.” He worded it carefully, aware he spoke as though to an adult instead of a child—something he couldn’t help around her—but still spoke slowly, lest he mention the word bloodbath.
“I’m scared, Norm.” That sweet soft voice cleaved Norman’s flesh in the dark.
He turned over to look upon her in the darkness, knowing she probably couldn’t see him but doing it anyway. “You’ll be fine. I promise you. I’ll take care of you.” A helpless smile grew on his lips. “Me and Allie.”
“Allie?”
“Allison. I can’t wait for you to meet her. I know she’ll love you.” The smile died a slow death, petering out to nothing and leaving a hollow even deeper than before. Would Allie ever get to meet Billy?
Would any of them leave that city, even if they got there in time to warn them?
He couldn’t afford to think about it. For now, they just had to get there.
Norman rested his hands behind his head and tried to get comfortable, staring up through the thatch to the heavens. Memories of walking over the bridge came of their own accord, too easily for comfort. Were those stars the same that had flown over his head, great elemental balls of flaming plasma so close he could have reached out and touched them? Or were they something else? It was all so absurd, dreamlike and ridiculous, and yet so fresh—he could still feel an afterglow of that strange sensation of being folded through impossible angles, a tingling in his skin too similar to that of insects crawling over him.
Did any of that really happen? Could it have?
Why not? The only rationalisation that brought him any peace of mind, had been his first: the End had been all the stranger, and there was no denying that had happened.
But it’s so crazy. Now I’m supposed to have some magic power inside me, and I’m pretty sure I’m the guardian of some Supergirl who’s our only chance to stop the End from coming again.
“Norm?” Billy again, even softer, almost lost in the flutter of hay.
“Yeah?”
“What if we lose? All this goes away. Everyone.” A strained pause followed, and Norman realised Richard had stopped snoring—he could feel the others listening, their attention pressing like a physical force. Billy hissed, “I don’t want to go to that place.”
“You won’t. You won’t go there, I promise you.”
Even if I have to put us out of our misery, he thought. It was shocking, but irrevocable. If it came to it, he’d kill them both. Sweet nothing trumped eternal torture any day.
Fol’s words echoed in his head: The dead are safe from this place.
“We’ll win,” he finished.
He could just about pick out her eyes in the pitch darkness. Even as the faintest of outlines, they cut deep into him like hot knives. Eyes that expected only hurt from a world that had taken everything from her. “How can you know?”
“Because,” he whispered, sitting up.
She leaned closer, drawn by his voice.
He smiled grimly in the dark. “We’re the good guys.”
Those soft hurting eyes blinked slowly, and she lay back down.
Norman let himself savour his smile, even if he did so alone. He knew it might be his last.
“Up! All of you,” Lucian growled from a little distance away.
Hay exploded in all directions as they surged to their feet. Ignoring the icy throbbing in his toes, Norman scrabbled after Robert, who had launched himself up in a single motion and bounded out. Norman climbed through the glassless window onto the roof and perched beside Lucian, where he had been keeping watch.
“What is it?” he said.
Lucian said nothing, just pointed into the night.
Richard and Billy clambered out beside them, and together the five of them looked out over the land. The stars and the moon were bright enough to see by, a silver radiance that lent a calm serenity to a world otherwise fixing to be forever rid of the touch of man. But it wasn’t the silvery washout that caught Norman’s eye.
“There’s destiny for you,” Lucian grunted. Norman had never heard his voice sound so weak and hollow. “Ain’t she a bitch?”
Norman followed his finger to the orange glow in the distance. A glow like a swarm of fireflies lay upon the horizon, crawling south-east. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of torches.
His guts seemed to sink down through his feet, through the floor, down and down into the earth. Billy’s tiny hand squeezed his in a death grip.
The lights were ahead of them, strung out across a mile. Heading for New Canterbury.
“We’re too late,” Norman whispered.
THIRD INTERLUDE
1
The homestead looked exactly as James had left it. A part of him expected to find it a broken ruin, the roof cast off and the walls blown out. In his mind’s eye, a great battle had waged before anybody would ever have let Beth be taken away. But it seemed that not a single shot had been fired. Even the gate at the end of the path lay untouched, bolted neatly shut.
Urging his utterly depleted mount along, he yelled wordlessly before he reached the cobbled square. The others were out on the doorstep before he had come to a stop.
“Back, filth! You swore we had a deal—” Oliver Farringdon’s voice stopped in his throat, his eye pulling away from the barrel of his old hunting rifle, and dropped the weapon to his side. “James,” he breathed.
Lucian was out the door and around Oliver before James could dismount, his hair flagging out behind him and his face a picture of panic. He half-pulled James from the horse and clutched him by the shoulders, his fingers digging in so hard that James winced as he looked him up and down.
“What are you—?” James began.
Lucian bared his teeth, shook his head, then pulled him into a fierce hug. “You son of a bitch,” he muttered. “You go away for one week and everything goes down the toilet. How’s that for proof of the Chosen One? I sent so many messages. Why did it take you so long?”
James pulled him off with some difficulty and held him at arm’s length, watching him carefully. “Lucian,” he said, “where is Beth?”
Lucian’s face grew slack as the others spilled out into the square. “You didn’t get my messages?” He looked around, frowning. “Wh-where’s Alex?”
It was James’s turn to grip Lucian, shaking him. “Lucian. Where is Beth?”
Lucian swallowed heavily. “They took her,” he said. He blinked. “What happened out there? Did Alex…?”
“Tell us he’s alive,” cried Oliver.
“He’s fine,” James said. Agatha rushed forwards in a blur of maternal softness; d
espite himself, he allowed her to take him into her arms and realised how incredibly tired he was.
“Where is he?” Lucian said.
“Behind me.” He extracted himself from Agatha’s grip and made for the door, staggering a little as he went. “Tell me what happened.”
“James, you can barely stand, child!”
“I’m fine!” He paused in their midst, surrounded by their concerned and ashamed eyes, and fought off a sudden overwhelming urge to break into tears. Helen and Hector Creek hovered in the doorway, only barely restraining a wriggling Norman.
James was home, finally back from the madness up north. An instinctual part of him knew it was safe to let his guard down here, begging for sleep, to drop to the floor and slumber for a week. But he couldn’t. Not now. This was just the start.
“They took her, didn’t they?” he said. “That’s what your note said?”
“Didn’t you… didn’t you read it?” Lucian said.
“No. Alex… Alex didn’t tell me.”
“What? Why would he do such a thing?” Oliver cried.
James only stared. The others’ eyes remained blank and shocked for a moment, then something seemed to register with each of them in turn, and they lowered their gazes.
They know. We’ve all known, for a long time. He’d do anything for the mission, even if it meant the end of us all.
There was fresh pity about them now, a heady stink that pressed in on James like a pillow pressed over his mouth. Through the pall of exhaustion wrapped tight around his head like a vice, he felt something give way—something that had kept him going all the way home, but could never stand up to their terrible, terrible sadness.
Like they’ve already written her off.
Tears pooled in his eyes and his shoulders grew slack. He took a few deep breaths, on the edge of hyperventilating, and it took everything he had to fight it off and maintain control. “Tell me what happened.”
Oliver’s lips parted, but he seemed unable to go any farther. He and Agatha’s gazes drifted across the cobbles at his feet. Suddenly they both seemed so much older, wrought by shame.
Lucian grunted and stepped in front of them, a note of disgust on his face, whether for them or the very ridiculousness of the situation, James couldn’t be sure. “They came in the night, two days after you left. A few riders, unarmed.” He bade James stay quiet with a hasty wave of his hand. “We hadn’t posted guards. We were too focused on keeping an eye on the men Malverston had already sent. When they came, we had no way of knowing who else they had out there. For all we knew, we were surrounded.”
“What did they say?” James said through clenched teeth.
Little Norman had struggled free of his parents’ grasp, scrabbling out into the square and standing just behind the others, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar. Never in his life had turmoil churned the group into such chaos. The last time something like this happened, James had himself been but a boy: the day Paul, the drunken zealot, had lost his mind and tried to kill him.
The day he turned on James like a rabid dog, it had been for one thing, and one thing only: his destiny. The destiny Alex had imbued him with.
It had been Oliver to save him with his rifle, but it had been Alex who had banished Paul: a death sentence.
The signs were always there. Back then it might have seemed for the good of the family, but was it really? Hadn’t it really been to save James—not for his well-being, but to make sure he could carry on the mission?
Lucian had taken his arm as though to staunch a flood he knew was coming. “They wanted her, James. They said Malverston demanded his… his property back, and that we were to give her up, or the treaty would be nullified.”
“Why?” The word escaped James’s mouth as a bark. He had to close his mouth fast, lest the screams inside came spilling out.
“They didn’t say, but I’m not betting on it being anything good.”
“What about the ones already here?”
For the classes, he thought with disgust. They had been really about to divulge what they knew about the Old World to those slimeballs, knowing that they would use what they learned to push those beneath them even farther into the mud. Cruel men, bent on taking a world perched upon a precipice and giving it a solid push—the wrong way.
And Alex was happy to let it happen if it gave us a shot at getting rid of Malverston and getting our hands on the south-west. That’s all it was about for him; not the people, or the good we could do; it was all about the vision in his head. His legacy. I’m as much to blame for everything he’s achieved as he is himself.
That was the worst part, the gut-wrenching thing that he couldn’t get away from. No matter how hard he tried to stop this ball rolling, it would always be him who had helped to get it started.
Lucian looked crippled by a medley of hatred and nausea. “It was like they smelled blood, James. They just up and went along with them. None of them said anything, they just went.”
James stepped so close their noses almost touched, snarling: “Why didn’t you stop them?”
Lucian’s lips drew to a thin white line. He said nothing.
“What could we have done?” Oliver said. “I promise you, James, there was no way we could have known they didn’t have people out there with guns to our heads. They had us right where they wanted us. And they knew you and Alex were gone. They must have had scouts watching us the whole time… so much for diplomacy.”
James didn’t wait for him to finish, darting off around the side of the house, heading for the row of coups lined up along the back edge. As he approached, a few of his pigeons fluttered down and alighted upon the hay laid out within. He skidded to a stop and peered inside. The birds welcomed him with a few docile coos, fluttering and buffeting in the darkened innards.
He crouched down and held out an arm. “Hey,” he whispered, “it’s me. I know you’re tired, but I need you to help me out. You know what I’m talking about.”
The birds had already started emerging, some hopping onto his proffered hand, some fluttering out onto his shoulders and head, others still rising into the air to circle him in tight loops. A fetid smell wafted into his face, bringing a wave of homely calm. Devoid of panic and fatigue in that brief interval, he saw just how precipitous the way ahead was. If he didn’t get things right, he’d lose more than Beth.
“Always creeped me out, the way they do that.” Lucian spoke from a short distance away, eyeing the birds with guarded disquiet. “They always just… did what you wanted, always found you. Funny that we never guessed you were a freak. Now we’ve got proof: storming north and seeing fairies.”
James shook his head. “That was a fool’s errand, Lucian. If I hadn’t gone to Radden…”
“If you hadn’t gone, they still would have taken her. Oliver’s right: we didn’t know who else they had out there.” Humiliation flashed over Lucian’s countenance, reddening his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried.”
James’s anger fettered and died. “I know.” He took a moment to offer a smile and thought his face might shatter like a pane of glass. He turned to the birds upon his arms. “I need you to send a message. McKinley, you hear? In the Moon, like last time.” He reached into his pocket for a scrap of paper, but Lucian took a step forwards.
“James, I already did it.”
He was holding a tiny scroll out before him. “The others don’t know. They didn’t want to do anything until we knew what had happened.” He cleared his throat. “I sent a bird the morning after they left. She sent this back.”
James reached out over what seemed an age and grasped the scroll. He unravelled the message, steeling himself, then sighed with relief at what he saw:
Tell the little shit to hurry up and come get his princess. There’s a toad that needs squashing. Hurry. - A.M.
“When?” James said.
“Last night, just before sunset.”
James nodded, taking deep breaths. Relief threatened to steel into
his bones and flatten him. “She’s still alive.”
“I guess so.”
James started forwards and threw his arms over Lucian. “Thank you.”
“Uh huh. Get off me, you’re smearing bird crap over me.”
James released him and slapped him lightly on the cheek. “You’re an arse.”
“Yeah, yeah. Listen, there’s one other scrap of good news.”
“What?”
“We didn’t let all of Malverston’s goons loose.”
*
The homestead farmhouse rang hollow as though the slime that had been let through its doors had forever besmirched its walls. James followed Lucian through the kitchen, which had been full of Malverston’s wretched men the last time he had seen it; Renner, that yellow-skinned monster, and his competitors for the throne of Newquay’s Moon.
In his mind’s eye, James saw them even now, grabbing at Beth and pulling her into their laps, laughing and pinching at her, and all the while her immobile face, her jaw set and her eyes far away.
He shuddered with rage as they headed over the flagstones. Lucian stopped at the door to the cellar, and pulled it open. He smiled bitterly. “Stupid bastard drank himself half to the death the night they came. By the time the others realised what was going on and started off back to the Moon, he was dribbling under the kitchen table.” He shucked and swept an arm, indicating for James to go down. “I bet he regrets that now. If he doesn’t, he’s about to.”
James stepped into the doorway, listening to the hollow burble echoing up from the interior, and discerned a tiny noise mixed amongst the dripping of water and shift of soil: a tiny, human mewling. He stepped down into darkness, and in doing so, realised that he had his gun clutched tightly in his hands.
“No,” Lucian said behind him. “All of you stay up here. We’ll handle this.”
“Lucian, don’t be absurd…,” Oliver started.
“I say we’ll handle it,” Lucian growled, and James was more glad for him than he could have thought possible. Oliver and Agatha were at least three decades their seniors—those who knew the Old World. But that was why they didn’t understand, would never understand: what was at stake wasn’t just another small town that had survived the End; it was the whole world Lucian and James had ever known.
Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) Page 15