“Try me.”
“We need it to fight a dead god.”
The laughter this time was all-consuming. It filled the darkness. It rang like tinnitus in his ears. “You’re right,” Seth said finally, “I don’t believe you.”
Julie tried to think of a way to explain it that didn’t drop Josh in the shit. He opted for the bare minimum in terms of detail. “This enchantment, it’s a two-way street,” he said. “When the magician made Glass Town for you and Eleanor, two creatures from there, traded places with you, hiding out in our world. We need that bone to fight them before they become too strong for us to banish him.”
Seth thought about it for a moment, and in that moment Julie saw a flicker of light and shadows melded around the gangster’s chiseled face. Those rage-filled eyes started at him. “And I should care why, exactly?”
“We lose, the door back for you is closed forever,” he lied.
“The bad news is that I haven’t taken a shit since I ended up here. It’s still inside me. Now you can wait for nature to take its course, but frankly it could be another six months in ‘real time’ before I crap my cuz’s little finger out, and somehow I don’t think you’ve got the luxury of waiting six months. So, if you want it, you get me out of here. That is assuming you have a way out?”
Julie said nothing.
“Oh, wonderful; the bastards just tossed you in here with me, didn’t they? You guys are the least organized heroes the world has ever seen. You don’t have a clue, do you?”
“The door’s open,” he said, hoping it was true.
“And do you even know where the door is?”
“I know enough,” he lied.
Julie’s grip tightened on the leather-wrapped grip of the ancient sword.
Seth said, “You do realize that this conversation has lasted a good few hours back there. More. They’re going to start thinking you failed soon. Time isn’t your friend, Julius. So, here’s a compromise I can live with: you let me piggyback your way out of this place, I’ll give you your precious bone, but you have to help me with something before we go, because I’ve got no intention of going back there and dying in a couple of days as time catches up with me. Remember, I know how this place works. I know better than anyone. So, this is what you’re going to do: we’re going to take advantage of this trick Josh pulled, leaving part of himself here,” Seth held out his left hand. “A finger’s enough, you follow?” Julie nodded. He had no idea if the gangster could see him. “Good, then that’s settled. You’ll help me leave a little piece of me in here before we go, and you won’t tell anyone.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To save my precious cousin,” Seth said flatly. “What? You’re surprised? Come on, Julie. Think. You’re here. You wouldn’t be if you weren’t desperate. Believe me, there’s no way Joshua would risk opening the prison door, not for anything, which means he’s out of the equation. Doesn’t take a genius. So, you want his finger, you give me what I want, and I want my freedom.”
“Give me your hand,” Julie said.
“I don’t fucking think so. Just a finger.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“About as far as I can throw you.” Even so, Seth Lockwood took two steps forward and seemed to shimmer out of the darkness, becoming more substantial; the subtle shades of shadow picked out by some unseen light source. No, not unseen, he realized looking down at the blade in his hand. The runes along Freagarthach’s blade glowed an eerie blue. “A finger,” he repeated.
“Like I said, you’re not in a position to bargain. I could just gut you like a fish.”
“You could, but you won’t.”
“Won’t I?”
“Not when you don’t know the way back to the mirror. I do. You could find it, sure, but it’d take you time. And time in this place is past one hundredfold back there. It’s the one thing you don’t have. So, like I said, you’re not going to do anything stupid—”
Before Seth could finish his rationale, Julie lashed out, swinging the greatsword in a wild arc that would have taken Seth’s head from his shoulders if he hadn’t ducked and thrown his hands up to protect his face. As it was, the wickedly sharp blade bit into skin and bone, paring the muscle and parting the joint as it cleaved through, taking Seth’s right hand off at the wrist.
The gangster’s screams were unbearable.
Julie wiped the blood from the blade on his jeans.
“Show me the way to go home,” he said, echoing the old music hall song.
“You cunt, you absolute cunt,” Seth gasped, the bloody stump of his wrist clamped between his legs as it pulsed out his life. He wasn’t handling the pain well.
“You’ll want someone to look at that, it’s a nasty cut,” Julie said. “Chop-chop. Time waits for no man and all that.”
Seth didn’t say a word. He tried to pull his shirt over his head, and wadded it up over the stump. It filled quickly with blood. Gritting his teeth, the gangster wrestled with his belt, working it free of its loops with his one good hand and used it to fashion a makeshift tourniquet. With one end of the belt clenched between his teeth, Seth cinched it so tight the leather bit deep into his skin, cutting off his circulation.
“All good,” Julie said. “Think of it as an incentive for you to get me out of here. You get what you want and I got to hurt you just a bit for what you did to my partner. That’s what we call a win where I come from. Now, let’s get out of here so you can shit that finger out and I never have to see you again. Complain, even once, and I’ll ram the sword through your belly and fish about in your intestines for the bone. I’m really not in the mood to play nice anymore. Like you said, I don’t have the time. And now neither do you.”
Seth was forced to lean on him as they walked together in the dark, making their way back toward the rippling skin of the mirror and the tear that would lead them back into Damiola’s mausoleum.
56
Mel Banks was an island of tranquility in a Situation Room of utter chaos.
But that calmness was a lie.
Beneath it simmered a wellspring of rage.
She stared down at the phone in her hand, not quite believing that after days of radio silence Ellie and Julie had finally turned up, and then had the temerity to hang up on her when she demanded an explanation as to where the hell they’d been for the last few days. She put the phone back in the cradle. There was a half-eaten protein bar on her desk beside a cold cup of coffee. It wasn’t much in the way of breakfast, and less in the way of lunch. The cup left a ring of brown on a Post-it note as she lifted it to swallow another mouthful, forgetting how vile the cold machine coffee actually tasted. Within the brown ring, the name Emmaline Barnes was written in her tight scrawl.
She wasn’t sure how the old woman’s disappearance fit in with everything else, but the fact that Julie Gennaro’s girlfriend, Alex Raines, was on her primary care team, and Alex was missing, right along with Ellie and Julie, meant she was almost certainly part of the puzzle even if right now Mel wasn’t seeing an Emmaline Barnes–shaped space in the jigsaw of crime all around the room. But just because you didn’t see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Tenaka drew a bright red line through one of the names on the board.
Another dead lead.
And it wasn’t as though they didn’t have enough crap to contend with right now without wasting time chasing shadows. The world was going to hell, and seemingly a quite literal one at that.
The gaffer was pulling his hair out.
Social media was going crazy. The latest reports had the numbers up around fifty thousand teenagers on the streets last night, tearing the place up. The numbers were amplified beyond reason. Media hubs buzzed with the impossible forest that had sprung up in place of the pedestrianized shopping zone. It was all portents and end-of-the-world preachers, the kind of stuff that drove her crazy. She was practical. If something happened—even something as utterly out there as a forest growing by hundreds of acres ove
rnight—there had to be a rational reason for it. Some bizarre prank by a TV station maybe? Again, just like the Emmaline Barnes link, just because she couldn’t see it, didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
The reality was that fifty thousand kids could do—and had done—a lot of damage.
Tenaka had been forced to draft in support from neighboring constabularies, and had riot police manning the barricades, trying to break the tidal flow of violence as it surged relentlessly on through the boroughs. She’d never forget the sight of people staring down from the highest windows of a burning tower block and realizing that they had no chance and choosing to jump rather than burn.
She’d been caught up in it as well, trying to make what should have been a routine bust on the Rothery that ended up as a reenactment of the Alamo because Granny Underwood came looking for justice for Ollie.
London blazed; it didn’t just burn.
And they had no way of controlling it. It was all they could do to go out night after night and try to minimize the hell playing out on their streets, but confronted by the casualties they were taking, it became increasingly difficult to strap on the riot gear and go out into the streets.
Last night alone, a dozen landmarks of the city burned to the ground; photos of St. Paul’s dome crumbling, as the fire took down Wren’s most iconic creation, showed the violence at its most heartbreaking. It wasn’t just the beautiful buildings, either, the bedsits of Paddington and cheap tourist hotels of Bayswater burned just as well. The destruction hadn’t reached the shops of Oxford Street and Regent Street yet, but it was only a matter of time before either the fire, the youthful rioters, or the impossible trees won the race to tear up those famous streets.
Mel Banks had made another note when St. Paul’s had burned. It said simply Oranges and Lemons. What it meant was less simple, and she wondered if there was a clue to what was going on in the old nursery rhyme. The churches had all burned in the first two nights of rioting: St. Clement, St. Martin, St. Sepulchre, Shoreditch, Stepney and Bow from the newer version of the rhyme, St. Margaret’s, St. Giles, St. Peter’s and Aldgate, Whitechapel, St. Helen’s, St. Anne’s, and St. John’s from the oldest version of it. Fifteen churches in the city had burned to the ground, all fifteen of them made famous by a nursery rhyme that itself was about child sacrifice.
The boards behind her had changed a lot over the last couple of days, reflecting the violence. The faces of the lost and missing switching places with the suspects, the suspects moving into the ranks of the lost and missing, and new evidence was going up all the time. It was a constant battle out there and making sense of it was proving near impossible. Most of it consisted of sightings of Jamshid Kirmani, Danny Ash, and Tom Summers, who, if all the reports coming in to the crime room were to be believed, were everywhere at once and responsible for most of the crimes of the last week. They had photographs of Danny Ash conducting the rioters, right up at the front of a sea of rats like some mad Pied Piper.
She crossed the room to the incident boards, looking at two of the very familiar faces up there: Julie and Ellie, both of them listed as missing since Julie had taken the call in this very room and said he was off to rendezvous with Ellie. Radio triangulation had pinpointed their meet at the old Ravenshill Cemetery, but when Tenaka sent a crew up to scour the place, they turned up nothing, and local CCTV footage recovered from a street camera up the road from the cemetery gates showed the pair of them leaving shortly after. Following their digital footprint proved impossible as in both of their cases it simply ceased to be. It converged on the old wood not far from the station, and then disappeared. Her biggest fear—and one she’d been reluctant to vocalize—was that the reason for that was that they were buried under so much rock and dirt that the satellite could no longer pick up the signal. They’d gone days with nothing while the riots gathered momentum and aggression, and it became more and more obvious they weren’t coming back. And then suddenly both of their phones came online, triggering a series of alerts back in the Situation Room. They’d woken up a couple of miles north of where they’d disappeared, in the weird old fake world of the movie studio.
She took their pictures down and carried them back to her desk.
Tenaka saw what she was doing, and for a second the look of dread on his face mirrored her own conviction that they were dead—a conviction that had only been laid to rest by Ellie hanging up on her a moment ago. “They’re okay,” she said. “Both of them. Taylor just called in.”
“Where the fuck have they been?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, she wasn’t saying.”
“Not good enough. They can’t simply up and disappear like that. Jesus Christ, we’ve wasted time and money trying to track them down. I don’t even want to think about how much manpower we’ve diverted into looking for them that could have been put to better use. Like looking for, oh I don’t know, how about the fucking killers!”
She stared him down. “No need to shout at me, boss. I’m not the one who fucked off in the middle of an investigation. I’m the mug who got left behind to pick up the pieces.” She knew she was taking her frustrations—and relief—over her friends out on Tenaka, but someone needed to bear the brunt of her anger and he just happened to be in the right place at the right time, making him more than worthy of a bit of verbal. He was a big boy. He could handle it.
He looked like he was about to bite back, but instead threw up his arms in frustration and turned his back on her.
He went over to the bank of people mapping out social media reports in real time on an interactive map.
“Boss,” one of them said, calling him over.
“What is it, Mullins?”
“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to record this one.”
“Try me?”
“It’s about one of the kids, the lock-ins. Bethany Laws. She’s woken up.”
“How? That’s not possible. Unless someone’s royally fucked up, the girls are all dead,” Tenaka said, looking back at the incident board where the Sleepers all had the word Deceased recorded beside their names.
“She was in a drawer in the morgue,” the constable said, “when the coroner heard frantic banging and screams from inside.”
“You’re taking the piss, right, sunshine? Tell me you’re taking the piss. I can’t take much more of this shit.”
“That’s not all of it, gaffer. There’s some seriously weird shit going on out there.”
“I don’t want to know, Mullins,” Tenaka said, but of course he did.
“I’m seeing loads of weird reports about the wildlife, sir.”
“Weird in what way?”
“Well first there’s a lot of photos being shared on Instagram and across Twitter with what look like streets filled with rats,” he tilted the screen so Tenaka could see what he meant. Tenaka scratched a fingernail in the valley between eye and nose, not really wanting to see what was on the screen. “Then there’s reports of dogs converging on the Rothery, sir.”
“Strays?” he asked.
“We’re talking hundreds of them, sir, so I don’t think so,” and again he offered photographic evidence. This time he scrolled through half a dozen poorly framed photos showing packs of dogs running wild. There must have been fifty or sixty of them in those few photos alone. In the last one, the animals appeared to be prowling in a circle around a fallen animal of some description; it was difficult to tell from this angle. “The chatter is rife. Loads of people reporting that their pets ran away this morning. Dogs slipped their leashes; cats disappeared over rooftops and fences. I’ve got no idea what it means, but tracking the sightings, it looks like there’s a pattern to it all. They are making a beeline for the Rothery,” he said.
“We’ll make a proper copper of you yet, Nathan,” Mel Banks told the young constable.
“Thanks, ma’am,” he grinned.
She wasn’t sure what it meant, if anything, but combined with the attacks on the churches, those migrating animals felt as though there
was something fundamental happening here, almost like the city was casting off the shackles of Christianity and returning to much older ways. She couldn’t help but smile at the notion of animals forming the heart of a new faith. Or old faith.
“Sir?” another voice called from the back of the room.
“Do I want to know?”
“Kate Jenkins and Annie Cho,” he said.
“What about them?”
“Both names just came up as alerts,” the officer explained.
Tenaka crossed the room to where she was working feverishly at the keyboard to clarify exactly what was coming through the wire.
“If you’re about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me, do me a favor, don’t. Just don’t.”
The young officer shrugged. It was a particularly eloquent gesture, all things considered.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Seriously? What the fuck is wrong with me? I died didn’t I? Somehow. And just didn’t realize it. Now I’m in Hell and I’m being tormented for eternity by unsolvable cases with fucking miracles there just to fuck with my head. Fuck my life.”
“Maybe it’s some sort of poison, sir, like that blowfish that mimics the symptoms of death for days, slowing the heart down so much it’s barely perceptible?” Mel offered helpfully.
“It’s better than the alternative,” Tenaka said as the phone on Mel Banks’s desk rang again.
Everyone turned toward it as one.
No one said a word as she answered.
She listened. She nodded.
Tenaka couldn’t take his eyes off her.
She nodded again.
Said, “Yes.”
She pointed at the board, at Kirmani’s photograph. This was it. A credible sighting of Jamshid Kirmani. “We’ve got him,” she mouthed. Tenaka moved excitedly toward her, as if he couldn’t wait for her to relay the message. She hung up the phone. “Kirmani is in the Rothery,” she told him. “And he isn’t alone. He’s with Ash and Summers.”
“Then what are we waiting for, let’s bring them in.”
“There’s no rush,” Mel told him.
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