“I need your help, Josh.”
“I’m done helping.”
“That’s what he said you’d say,” another voice said behind them. Alex Raines pulled up a third chair from a neighboring table and joined them. “I didn’t believe him. Not my brother.” She put a crumpled five-pound note on the table and pushed it toward Julie. He pocketed it.
“You make a lovely couple,” Josh said as the waitress delivered two delicate espresso cups, the white porcelain advertising some unpronounceable heritage for the coffee it contained. Josh pushed his toward his sister. “Knock yourself out.”
Alex didn’t need telling twice, she downed the coffee in a single swallow. “We’re going to take a walk,” she said, like a mobster making an offer her brother couldn’t refuse.
“You’re not going to change my mind,” Josh said.
22
Julie left them to go back to work. He wouldn’t say what had happened, only that he had to go in because all hell was about to break loose. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and was barely functioning. She knew him better than he knew himself. Alex kissed him and told him to be safe. He promised he would. It was a stupid lover’s promise taunting a world he couldn’t possibly control. He knew that better than anyone, but he still made it just the same.
Alex wasn’t big on romance, not in the holding-hands-walking-in-the-rain kind of romcom definition of it, anyway. She was big on simple thoughtfulness, and trying to make the day a little bit better for someone you love. So, less bunches of flowers and more aluminum trays filled with piping-hot Indian takeout after you come home from a grueling shift.
She smiled at the thought, making herself hungry.
The walk along the river took fifteen minutes.
On another day, under different circumstances, it would have been nice. Brother and sister taking a stroll down by the waterside, tourists moving all around them, dozens of languages in their ears at once so the noise lost all meaning and all that remained was the excitement of being here, now. The gray skies and shrinking puddles couldn’t dampen their enthusiasm for the city. A funfair had grown around the enormous stanchions of the London Eye. There were carousels and shooting galleries, bumper cars and duck shoots and kids having the time of their lives. The metal braces anchoring the wheel to the riverside were the size of a small terraced house, each bolt bigger than a person. The wires between the braces and the wheel itself were so thick a gaggle of schoolkids could have held hands one by one for a game of Ring a Ring o’ Roses without the last pair being able to join hands to close the circle. They were that huge. But everything was, even the hot dogs the kids ate and the giant bars of chocolate they carried away as their prizes.
Alex hadn’t seen much of her brother since their mum’s funeral.
She’d wanted to, but Josh had retreated into himself.
She’d made the mistake of giving him time, thinking that eventually he’d have to come back to her, but instead he’d disappeared into himself. He hadn’t set foot in the family home in months, spending his nights in that flat down in Rotherhithe. They’d put the place on Albion Close up for sale, but there were no buyers. The place had a reputation; after all it was the murder house.
She looked at him as they walked. He looked tired. Bone deep. His skin had a waxy tinge to it, and he needed a decent shave. There were spots of blood on his neck where the dull blade had cut him yesterday or the day before. He wasn’t taking care of himself.
“How are you?” Alex said, letting him have the room to be honest if he wanted to, or to just say he was fine and let them walk the last couple of hundred yards to the hospital in awkward silence.
“Been better,” Josh said. “Coping. Most days, anyway. Some days it’s a struggle to get to grips with complex stuff like putting my trousers on the right way around,” he tried to make light of the situation, but it was painfully obvious he was struggling. Depression was a killer, even with very real, very obvious reasons for it. Ignoring it was as dangerous as leaving cancer to metastasize whilst putting all your faith in some ancient Chinese herbal remedy. You could do it, but it wasn’t wise.
“Are you talking to anyone?”
“You,” he said.
“Funny. You know what I mean.”
“What am I supposed to tell them? You know what happened. How do you put something like that into words? How do you explain so that someone who hasn’t been through it—hasn’t seen someone live a hundred years without aging a day—can understand and not immediately think you’ve lost your mind?” She didn’t have an easy answer for that, in no small part because she hadn’t lived it, not like Josh. She’d only had to cope with the fallout, the loss, and that was hard enough. She didn’t try to offer platitudes. They were beyond that. “There’s magic in the world, Lexy. Real magic. People don’t want to believe that; they might say they do, but the reality is they want a world with boundaries that makes sense. Something they can understand. When something that doesn’t fit into their understanding of the world it doesn’t make them excited, it makes them frightened. Look at the television, the newspapers; they use fear to kill our minds and stop us thinking for ourselves. Frightened people do what they’re told. Or most of them do, at least. The others react badly…” Josh lapsed into silence, looking down at the cracks in the pavement as he walked. He placed his feet carefully, altering his stride pattern to avoid stepping on them.
As they rounded the long curve in the embankment and the hospital came into sight he tried to explain himself. “It’s different now. I don’t feel like I belong here. I don’t want to believe anymore. I don’t want to live in a world with magic. I want to go back to the days after Boone died, give the letter to Seth, and be done with it. Forget Eleanor Raines and the obsession that destroyed my family. I just want to be normal. I’d kill for one day just being myself again. I sat beside a woman and watched her slowly crumble into dust, terrified and yet somehow strong, and I never want to live through anything like that again. And now your boyfriend turns up and tells me it was for nothing? That I created new nightmares? I can’t give it room in my head.”
“I know,” she said. “I do. But—”
“Please don’t say anything after that, no but-you-have-tos.”
“You have to,” she said.
They reached the hospital.
“Just come in, see for yourself. If you really feel like you can’t do this, I can’t make you, Josh. But I can’t imagine a world in which you’ll walk away, either.”
“Maybe I’ll surprise you,” he said, following her in. “Do you remember Boone’s funeral?”
“Hard to forget,” she said.
He nodded. “You heard Seth mocking us, all of that stuff about Boone’s father being in and out of the asylum. If I try and tell people about the magic I’ve seen, about what he put me through, that’s my fate. You know that. That’s what Seth’s eulogy was all about. It wasn’t a good-bye to the last good man in London, or whatever he said; it was a warning of what would happen to me if I opened my mouth.” He was beginning to sound like one of those homeless guys who lived down by the river and claimed to have been probed by aliens because they knew The Truth, but it was hard to argue against his point.
Alex led Josh up to Emmaline’s room.
Before they went inside she told him, “Okay, Brother. You don’t have to do this, not if you don’t want to. I understand. I do. This is it, your get-out-of-jail-free card. If you want to go, just turn around and head back to the elevators. I won’t hold it against you.”
Josh started to turn around, but then offered his sister a crooked half smile. “Like I could walk away.”
“I told you I knew you,” she said, but she wasn’t smiling this time.
The old woman was alone in the room. Her eyes were closed and the television set was on providing background noise. She looked so delicate with her hair spread out across the banked-up pillows, her skin bone-china pale and waxy.
She opened her eyes, sensing
their presence.
“Hey, Emmaline, I want you to meet my brother, Josh.”
Josh drew one of the empty chairs toward the bedside, and offered a slight smile to the helpless woman. He picked up the communication board, studying the layout of the letters. The old woman blinked rapidly, trying to say something. Her eyes darted upper left, lower right, blink, blink, blink, some drawn out, others barely a flicker, so fast it was difficult to count them.
“Slow down,” Alex said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Start from the beginning. I’ve never done this before, okay?”
The woman kept on blinking. Frantic now.
Josh held up the board, trying to count out the letters.
Finally, Alex saw a pattern in them. Emmaline was spelling out the same words over and over, like before, but this time her message was more personal, or at least seemed to be: He is here. One for one. He is here. One for one. He is here.
“It’s okay, Emmaline. I get it, I’m with you,” Alex said, trying to calm the old woman down, but she wasn’t about to be soothed, and neither was Josh. Something about that six-word message on endless repeat had spooked him. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“It’s a setup, isn’t it? Julie told you what to say. Bastard.”
Alex shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Cross my heart.”
“One for one. Julie put those words into your mouth, didn’t he? That’s not what her eyes meant at all, you’re playing me.”
“Look at me, Josh. Look at me. I’m telling you the truth. He asked for my help convincing you. That’s it.”
“Then he must have told the old dear, planted the seed in her mind so she blinked it out. It’s a con. You can admit it. Right now, tell the truth, and I promise I won’t get mad.”
“I’m not lying, Josh.”
“Then how did she know to say one for one? It’s what Julie said when we were at the café. Word for word. One for one. He said we opened a doorway when we banished Seth, and this is our reward. We let something into our world from…” he bit his tongue, finally saying, “That place,” rather than naming it.
“It’s not the only time since she’s woken up that Emmaline’s said something that someone else has said,” Alex told him. “Her first words were ‘The Horned God is awake,’ which is not exactly the kind of thing you hear every day. Last night, five kids were brought into hospitals around London. They were all in a near-catatonic state, mumbling the same phrase over and over. ‘The Horned God is awake.’ Five different kids, Josh. It’s all linked. Any way you look at it, that’s not right. You said there’s magic in the world. This is it. I don’t know what its purpose is, or how it works, but this is magic. And it’s not good.”
“She’s trying to say something else; grab a pen, quick.” She started to call out the letters one after the other, spelling out the terrifyingly short message that could only ever have been meant for Joshua Raines.
“This is a trick. You’re making it up. It’s got to be.”
Alex tore the top page from the legal pad, crumpling it up into a ball, and hurled it uselessly at her brother’s back as he walked away. She didn’t need it. The three short words she’d carefully scratched out were burned into her brain.
You are his.
23
“There’s more,” George Tenaka said.
There’s more meant this nightmare went beyond Ollie Underwood, Aisha Kahn, and Musa Dajani.
Julie sat across the table from his Chief Inspector, looking down at the pile of missing persons reports Tenaka had gathered. They were all dated yesterday.
He took the one off the top.
Charlie Mann.
It took him a moment, but he recognized the kid.
Placing him took a little longer. He’d seen him recently. In the last day. He’d been on the High Street, Julie realized. He’d stood out from the crowd because he was walking away from Ollie Underwood’s corpse, not trying to get a better view. Not that he was oblivious, just that he wasn’t interested. He’d been well dressed, or as well as you expected a seventeen-year-old to dress; a cheap polyester suit that didn’t quite fit and a tie that looked like it was strangling him.
“Resident of Herla House Group Home. Safe to say he’s a troubled soul. One of two kids the home reported missing last night.”
He checked the next page, which listed Penny Grainger’s home address as Herla House.
He looked at the picture of Penny paperclipped to the upper-right corner. She was attractive. Young. Fresh-faced.
“Any chance the two of them met up to celebrate Charlie’s birthday?” Julie asked, after seeing the date of birth on her file, and checking Charlie’s. “Next year they’re both eighteen, so this is last one they get to celebrate before their little family of inconvenience scatters to the four winds. Maybe they had a good night and slept it off somewhere?”
Tenaka made a face. “Normally I’d be inclined to agree. Charlie and Penny match the descriptions of two joyriders we chased last night, but given this,” he held out a second sheet with the Crown Prosecution Service letterhead, “I’m thinking no.”
Julie skimmed the page and realized it was an ongoing investigation into historic cases of child abuse at Herla House, and linked in with the Yewtree operation. It made grim reading.
“Thirty complaints dating back to the seventies. And these are just the ones we know about. It’s not looking good.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Has very little to do with London these days.”
“Well, that changes everything. No way of getting around the fact these kids are at risk. They could be runners. Last year together before they’re cast out. Those bonds are tight. Maybe they decided to mark Charlie’s birthday with new lives for everyone.”
“That’s the Harry Potter version of the story where kids who live in cupboards under the stairs get a happy ending,” his CI said. “Since when have you known life to be happy?”
The next two papers belonged to Stephen Blackmoore and Rupert Brooke. They were two years older than the others, and didn’t fit in with any obvious pattern laid out by the other kids, although both, Julie noted, were ex-residents of Herla House. In Blackmoore’s case he had a rap sheet as long as Julie’s arm. He wasn’t a good kid. On the spectrum he’d be diametrically opposed to Charlie Mann. Rupert Brooke wasn’t as bad, but he was far from an angel with three counts of breaking and entering, one of criminal damage, and one grievous bodily harm charge that had earned him an Anti-Social Behavior Order twelve months ago. There was nothing since then. So, maybe the ASBO had done the trick and young Rupert was a reformed character. That, or he’d become better at avoiding getting caught, which was far more likely than a slap on the wrist working like some sort of magic wand.
The final names on the table were well known to Julie. Tom Summers and Danny Ash. Again, he noted the Herla House link. Both boys had served their time. They’d left eighteen months ago. Nasty pieces of work; the pair of them: poster boys for Britain First and that whole right-wing extremist crap that seemed to be gripping the nation.
Six names.
He’d come into the room expecting to hear that five kids had been reported missing; one for one, as Damiola had promised.
Six, though. Eight if you counted Musa Dajani and Jamshid Kirmani. More if you added the dead. Either Damiola was wrong, or at least one of these names didn’t belong. What was more likely? He spread the reports out across the table, arranging them in different orders, shuffling them left and right as though that made an actual difference to how they fit together. Four names stood out as different. Blackmoore, Brooke, Summers, and Ash. They didn’t fit the victim mold. They were everything that was wrong with the youth of today.
“The question is: What, if anything, have these kids got in common besides Herla House?”
“Why discount it?”
“I’m not.”
“Good, because the most obvious answer is that they’re all vulnerable, and
Herla House just highlights that,” Julie said. “It’s the thread that binds them all. My gut instinct says yes. We’re talking about kids in high-risk situations. We don’t know what happened to them in that place. But we can assume it was nothing good. Systemic abuse dating back decades. This is a mess. And it’s what links all of them. They’re linked. They have to be.”
“Find out.”
“I’m on it.”
24
“Ah, but you lot are a sight for sore eyes,” Robin breathed in deeply, savoring the slow burn of the air in his lungs for the first time in what felt like forever. He had missed this place, but even as the thought crossed his mind he realized it was different now. Wrong. Crouching, he dug his fingers into the soil, lifting up a handful of dirt to his lips. He tasted it, shaking his head in sad disbelief, and then smeared it across his face—left cheek, right cheek—breathing in what little remained of the life of the land. He should have been able to feel the echoes of the great Song of Albion in it, but there was nothing. It was just dirt. Robin scooped up another handful of soil. It should have been alive with the rich potency of earth magic. That was how he remembered these woods, as being so very, very alive. Not like that other place. He couldn’t help but glance back toward the gate, the curls of mist still rolling out through it, and shivering.
From the other side he heard the elegiac sounds of battle, steel clashing, the cries of the damned, their moans haunting the mist.
It was enough to drive a man mad.
He smiled at that.
There were worse things than madness: most of them made their home in the mist.
Robin turned his back on the gate.
Coldfall Wood Page 13