by Helen Adams
“Has anyone thought about what happens when we find Alice?” Raz asked as I was halfway down a plate of cheese and biscuits.
I’d given it thought. A lot of thought. Namely, not killing Mina, however much I’d envisioned her death. And not going back to prison, that was high on the list.
“We fight. I get Alice back.”
“I mean after that. What happens to Mina then? When we’ve… subdued her?”
I had a brief, vivid fantasy of cutting her throat. I even imagined the way that sunlight would make her blood sparkle.
“There’s a clinic or something, right?” I asked, pushing the daydream aside.
“For the splitters who survive,” Raz said, looking up from a chicken leg. “It’s…. it’s not cheap.”
“How about we discuss this later?” I asked, uneasy. I was so focussed on getting Alice back, I couldn’t imagine what might happen after. It was too much.
Lukas returned as we were polishing off the last of the food. He looked terrible; wherever he’d been, he hadn’t had a chance to change clothes or even tend to the clotted wound on his chest. His face and torso were streaked with sweat, his hair tangled and clumped, and…
“What happened to your fucking hand?” I blurted, staring at the blood-soaked rag wrapped around his fingers.
“It’s of no consequence. I found Alice.”
His words were flat, his tone strained. Something warred inside me. I needed to find Alice – the thought of her being scared, lost, confused, maybe in pain, had driven me this far – but there was also unexpected guilt. Where had he gone, who had he spoken with, that left him looking like this?
“Lukas…”
“All information has a price.” His smile was a tight grimace. “Some prices are steeper than others.”
I hesitated. If I’d known that he’d have to pay a blood price to get the information I needed, would I still have gone ahead with the duel?
Yes. The affirmation rippled through me. I’d do it again. I’d do whatever needed to be done. If I’d made Lukas suffer in the process, then so be it.
But a voice inside said that it was wrong.
“Wilhelmina Grey is still in town. She’s holding Alice at a building site.”
“New industrial units out by the ring road?” Lee suggested.
Lukas turned a cold grey look on him. Lee was taller, more solid than the vaengrjarl, but that didn’t matter – Lukas could burn him to ashes where he stood.
“Thank you,” I said, finding and holding Lukas’s eyes. “We kind of need a lift down…”
“I can do more than that. This Mina woman – even by the standards of my people she’s mad.” For a second something shifted on his face, and his hand – his bloody, rag-covered hand – twitched. “I can fight with you.”
“No!” Raz barked.
“We don’t need your help,” Lee added.
A solid green glow filled Lukas’s eyes.
“It’s not that we don’t think you’d be an asset,” I hastened to say, wishing that the others could get a lid on their fucking egos, “but we’ve got this covered.”
The glow didn’t vanish. Lukas stepped closer; the others stood in his way. I elbowed between them.
“She has magic,” Lukas cautioned. “She was Kristjan’s student.”
That made me pause. He had a point; Mina could create golems. I had no idea what else she could do – I hoped that she was a one-trick pony – but I had no way of knowing. She’d had a grimoire… and a wand.
“Three of us, one of her.” I refused to let him involve himself further. “And you’re injured.” I looked at the bloodied rag again.
The glow faded, bit by bit. His eyes returned to normal. Tiredness spread across his face.
“Fight well, Daphne.”
I tried to hide my surprise. I hadn’t expected that to be so easy. Where had he been? I peered into his face, into his eyes. He wasn’t just tired – he was exhausted.
He clicked the fingers of his uninjured hand and we vanished.
We were in the Shake – I blinked – we were back in my flat. The taufrkyn reacted with excited cheeps and chirrups, and I steadied myself against the back of the sofa. It was dark. I flicked the light switch.
My living room felt tiny with so much testosterone floating about. I thanked Lukas again – short and to the point, no need to invite another conversation – and he clicked out.
When he was gone I faced the others.
“Neither of you have to come with me,” I said. “Thanks to Lukas you didn’t have a choice about coming to the Shake, but I’m giving you a choice now.” I looked at each face in turn. “I can’t – won’t – force you. But I’d like you with me.”
Raz grabbed my shoulders in a one-armed hug and said nothing. Lee just nodded.
“Think about this hard, Lee.” I didn’t owe him a thing, but he was going to get this one warning. “You’re not as well trained as us. We can’t guarantee your safety. You could die.”
“Please.” His expression was one of pure affront. “I can handle myself. I’m not walking into this blind.”
“Alright. Your choice. I appreciate the help, but that doesn’t mean we’re buddies.”
He nodded. He knew where we stood.
“Alright. Everyone armed for bear?”
They nodded. Raz had his swords – and whatever other bladed weapons he’d concealed on himself or his duffel – and Lee had… whatever he had.
“What are you packing?”
“Ka-Bar. Glock G19.” He patted his leg, where baggy combat trousers hid a multitude of sins. “Knuckle duster.”
“Keep the knife and the knuckles, forget the gun.” My palms got itchy when he mentioned the Ka-Bar. “It won’t work against whatever shit Mina pulls.”
“Why not?”
I rubbed my forehead. “Second lesson of being a berserker – guns don’t work beyond the aura,” I told him. “You shoot a troll, it’s just going to laugh and smash your head in.”
We made a brief stop at Raz’s garage to pick up a couple of torches. When I tried the one I’d used the other night, I realised that the batteries had died.
The site was accessed through a housing estate, not too far from where I lived. I kept a sharp eye out for trouble as we approached, watching as terraced houses and maisonettes gave way to dead, flattened grass and naked patches of soil. The road was heavily stained – a mixture of chalk and earth – and pitted in places. The mark of construction traffic. Every streetlight was dark. The sky was cloudy, the moon hidden.
We idled past the site. I couldn’t see much. A metal fence reared up in the headlights as we passed. Raz parked the van further up the street, between a beat-up old Ford and a battered Nissan on blocks.
Using the second strap on our duffels so that we could wear them as backpacks, we walked up to the fence. The site was dark and silent. If there were security guards – or rather, if the poor guards were still alive – there’d be a few lights, at least. But there was nothing.
Climbing the fence was easy, at least for the fully-fledged berserkers. Raz and I scurried up like ninjas; our taufrkyn just flew over. Lee was the only hold-up. He was agile for a dewdrop, but he had a way to go before he became as fluid as us.
We dropped down to the other side. Lorl was a silent pressure on my shoulder as she landed. We switched on the torches.
Mina was here. I knew she was here. I felt her the second my feet touched the ground; her madness was a sickness, a nausea rippling through my stomach. Looking at the others I knew that they felt it, too.
“If you’re going to puke get it over with now,” I told Lee. “And get used to it. This is what a splitter feels like.”
“I’m not going to throw up.” But his lips were pressed together, and he looked pale in the torchlight.
“There’s no shame in it.” Maybe he felt that his manly pride was at stake?
“I said I’m not going to throw up!”
“Just don’t do it when you’re fight
ing.” Then I grinned. “Could be entertaining, though.”
“If you two have finished bickering…?” Raz was impatient.
“We need to check for guards,” I said. Bickering, indeed.
“You think they’re still alive?”
“I hope they’re still alive. I think Mina’s squashed their heads into the ground.”
It was so much worse than that.
When we found the security hut we discovered the guards and dogs – I was fairly sure they’d been dogs – dead, as expected. I knew before I’d even hauled aside the broken door. It was the smell. That sickly, familiar stench: - blood.
It was everywhere. Had I thought Kristjan’s house was bad? I was wrong. There wasn’t a single whole limb anywhere. Gobbets of flesh hung from the lampshade, from the backs of chairs, from the table. Blood dripped down the walls. Fur and hair clumped in random clusters, still attached to scraps of skin. Lumps of bone, gristle glistening on what might have been joints, stood in wet little puddles.
I clenched my jaws, teeth creaking, and backed away.
I couldn’t get the image of those poor guards – or what was left of them, anyway – out of my head. We fanned out, running our torches over the ground as we walked. That sense of madness, the feeling of sickness running through every part of my body, intensified as we walked. I knew we were heading in the right direction.
At this end of the site most of the buildings were complete. They were squat, square, grey structures, ugly and looming. They all had the same low-arched roof and massive sliding doors. The ground underfoot was solid earth, packed and compressed by the passage of booted feet. They hadn’t put concrete or tarmac down yet.
Lee had mentioned that this was going be an industrial estate, and now I remembered something I’d read in the paper – alongside the usual warehouses and storage depots we were going to get a gym, a supermarket and a couple of outlet stores.
We tried each door as we passed. Locked. Mina wasn’t in any of these.
The site began to change. The soil became rough, churned by the passage of machines; huge diggers, concrete pourers and other things that hulked in the torch light.
Mina’s presence was a miasma. I felt it brushing against my skin, course and rotten and slimy and sandpapery all at the same time. She was somewhere in this last section. Sweeping the torch in a wide arc I found three structures, none finished, none more than the frames of what they’d one day become.
“Feel her?” Raz murmured.
“If she was a dog she’d just piss all over the place,” I grumbled.
“Why can we feel her, though?” Lee asked in a low voice.
“When your aura matures you become sensitive to sickness in other people’s auras,” I explained. “Dewdrops – that’s what faeries call non-magical folk – are blind to pretty much everything.”
“Faeries? You’re kidding me, right?”
“You’ve seen dragons and all sorts at the Shake, but you don’t believe in faeries?”
“You’d better not be shitting me,” he grunted.
Peering through the darkness, I noticed that one of the units – the middle of the three – was occupied and glowing, and dark shapes moved inside. Mina had lit that warehouse up like a fucking Bonfire Night party. Convenient.
“So kind of her to put the lights on for us,” Raz murmured as we switched our torches off. He nudged his duffel and grabbed both of his shamshirs.
“Guess she wants us to come and play,” I added, bringing Baby out. “It would be rude not to go when she’s offered such a lovely invitation.”
“Is this a private party, or can anyone join?” Lee asked. He had the Ka-Bar – a straight knife with a curved edge – in one hand, knuckle-dusters in the other. No sign of the gun. Good.
“Finally learning to trash talk?”
“Fuck you, Daphne.”
“I believe you already did.”
EIGHTEEN
I blinked as we entered the half-built warehouse, blind as my eyes adjusted to the light. I listened hard. All I heard was shuffling feet.
Then my eyes cleared and Mina stood framed between two concrete struts. Her face was as vacant as the last time we’d met, as empty as an overturned bottle in the witch-light that she’d conjured.
My skin was crawling. A trembling Lorl plastered herself to my neck. Alice was about twenty feet away, but it was only her vibrant red hair that identified her. She looked terrified out of her mind.
I had to get her out of here.
Mina was flanked by two flesh golems, the final product of the mess in the guard’s hut. Each was around nine or ten feet tall. Thinner than a man, they had slender, spindly limbs. Their heads – yes, those were heads, though they looked more like beans – were equally thin. They were made from blood, gore, chunks of skin, scraps of hair and fur… I saw intestines floating through their slick, disgusting frames, bits of organs that I couldn’t identify, all held together by magic. They stank.
“Let Alice go,” I growled.
My stomach wanted to come up. If I was going to hurl, one of those golems was going to get a face full of vomit. It could only improve their looks.
“Hmm?” Mina hadn’t been looking at me, but now she turned the pallid absence she called a face in my direction. “Oh, hello. You’re still alive.”
“Let her go, Mina. Right now.”
Alice didn’t even seem to hear her own name. She was looking off into the distance… no, that wasn’t right, she was looking into her own head. Right now the distance between her physical and mental self must be vast.
“One, two, three.” Mina pointed to each of us in turn. “Will that fix the tear, do you think? When you die, will I be complete?”
“You’ll never be complete, don’t you understand? Your aura split. You can never get back everything you lost!”
“I’ll take the golems,” Raz whispered in my ear. “You get Alice out.”
“What’s that?” Mina asked, tilting her head to one side. “Whispers, whispers. I don’t like whispers, and neither do my new friends.”
“The flesh golems?” I asked, raising Baby. “What – I mean who – did you make them from? The guards?”
She gave a nonchalant shrug and said nothing.
Mina was beyond crazy. There was no word for what she was. The only thing that came close was monstrous.
“We’re going to cut right through your fucking circus sideshow, and then we’re going to cut through you,” I scowled.
I’d told Lukas that I wouldn’t kill her but screw it – what she’d done to make those golems… I couldn’t let that go unpunished. I wouldn’t. I was going to run her through and then take my own punishment. I’d rot in prison if it meant Alice was safe.
“Oh, well,” Mina said. “About that.” She sounded embarrassed, a kid who knows she’s about to be caught out in a lie. “You three have done such a marvellous job taking down my creations that I may have had to draft in a little help.”
“Help,” I said, flat. “What sort of help?”
Another shrug. Little Miss Nonchalant was going to get her face rearranged in a minute.
I had a bad feeling about this. We could destroy two flesh golems between us – I hoped – but this mysterious ‘help’…
“Fuck this,” I muttered. “Go get ‘em, boys.”
Raz rushed the flesh golems. I went straight for Alice while Lee ducked out of sight. Smart. Though he had combat training he was still the weakest of us, the least able, and I’d rather he took bites from the side than just charge in unprepared.
Our taufrkyn took off, wings pumping as they flapped to the roof girders. They’d be out of the way there. Now all I had to worry about was Alice. Once she was safe I could think about revenge, but getting her out was my priority.
Before I’d clocked what was happening a flesh golem thundered into me, sending me crashing into a concrete strut. Baby went flying. Seriously, I was going to put a fucking cord around that sword. I struggled to my
knees and crawled over to the blade, wincing as pain shot up my spine and my ribs throbbed. Bruised or cracked – how many times was this now?
Stickiness against my skin made me glance down. There was a huge bloody smear – not mine – along my Anthrax T-shirt. My stomach clenched and I struggled not to vomit.
Raz was having trouble even getting close enough to hit a golem. With those long arms and fingers, I wasn’t the only one who’d taken a budget flight. As I searched for Baby I saw Raz pick himself up off the floor, wincing as he felt his ribs. Then he ducked away as a golem tried to swat him again.
My fingers closed around the falchion’s hilt. The whoosh of air from behind made me roll, avoiding by inches a kick that would have popped my spine up through my skull.
Mina laughed with delight, the sound so creepy and wrong that it made me shudder. She clapped her hands.
“Wonderful! I should have tried flesh golems from the beginning. So much fun!”
“Are you just going to stand there and watch us?” I shouted, lurching to my feet. If I could piss her off – distract her – maybe I could loosen her control on the golems. But how did you piss off a lunatic?
“Oh, no. I’m going to do more than that.” She glanced at the roof, vacant eyes travelling over the distant girders.
I made another run for Alice. Wet arms slapped around my torso, hauling me back in a tight, disgusting bear hug.
The stench was… as my air went, so did my gorge. A great geyser of vomit spewed out of my mouth, hot and acid and stinking. It splattered the warehouse floor, the concrete struts, the other golem. Tears wet my eyes.
“Impressive,” Mina said. “But disgusting. Oh, disgusting, that was it! That was what I was going to do!”
My ribs were screaming. All I could smell was blood and vomit. What was Raz doing? I couldn’t see him, could only hear harsh panting as he fought the second golem. Where the hell was Lee? My shoulders slipped, despite the golem’s tight grip. Blood was a great lubricant. I was going to hurl again.
Mina raised a hand above her head, fingers splayed like a pop star, and shouted a guttural word in an unfamiliar language. I slipped a little further.