by Andrew Pyper
“Where will you take him after that?”
“That’s above my pay grade.”
“But you’ll take his blood? Save lives?”
“That’s the idea.”
He’s done things like this before, perhaps a number of times. He’s stolen other men in other places. But he’s got something else in this game and she can see it even in the back of a dark car at night.
“Why is this so important to you?”
“It’s my job. I’m good at it,” he says. “And this guy, he’s like no other target I’ve encountered. He has extraordinary talents. And he’s very, very bad.”
There’s an opaque plastic divider between the backseat and where the driver sits. Lily looks for one, but doesn’t see any sliding window she could open to look up front.
“What about you?” she asks. “Has Michael seen you?”
“No. I’ll stay close the whole way so I can be there when he shows up.”
“He’ll know it’s a trap.”
“He’s the one who set the time of day and place, not us. He trusts you, right?”
“Yes.”
Lily remembers the way Michael’s expression had changed when he spoke of her mother’s betrayal. The glimpse of the thing inside him that is pure rage. Mr. Hyde. She doesn’t ever want to see him look at her that way.
The car comes to a stop and Lily’s hand is on the handle when Will reaches over to grip her by the arm. He means it as a transfer of strength from him to her, and in the moment they’re together, it works. When he lets her go her blood rushes to her fingers, tingling as if from a thousand tiny bites.
“See you on the other side,” he says before she closes the door. She wants to open it again to tell him something more, tell him everything, but the car is already pulling away and taking the corner, sleek as a shark.
27
* * *
It’s just after seven the next morning when she leaves the Savoy. The moment she’s outside London hits her with bus exhaust and the rattling of taxi engines. She can’t stop from checking her peripheral vision to see if Will is waiting for her somewhere, perhaps holding an opened newspaper or pretending to window-shop the way spies do in movies, but she can find no one doing either of these things. She worries that she’s too early, that Will and whoever else is supposed to have her back have lost her already. Even if they’re so good at this sort of thing that she’s being trailed without her seeing it, could the hunters be any better at it than Michael?
Lily reminds herself that he’s not here on the Strand but somewhere on Hampstead Heath waiting for her. She makes her way through the crowds heading to work, repeating a single phrase—He trusts you—until it gains the weight of certainty in her head.
When the street opens up onto Trafalgar Square she consults her tourist map to find the location of the Charing Cross entrance to the tube. As she takes the stairs down, the city’s smells are replaced with a combination of disinfectant and machine oil. It makes her stomach lurch.
While there’s a stop for Hampstead Heath it would require a transfer and to keep things simple she decides to get onto the Northern line to Belsize Park instead. It will mean a longer walk from the station but she would prefer to be out in the light, plainly visible, than end up entering the heath alone.
As she waits on the jammed platform she squeezes her back against the curving wall and again tries to spot Will or one of his agents. They would be big, wouldn’t they? The sort of men or women with combat expertise, muscled and wide. Yet all Lily can see are English commuters, round-shouldered and hair still wet from their showers, yawning and gazing at their phones.
Something’s wrong.
It comes all at once. The sense of misalignment in the details around her, the bluish fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, the false-sounding bits of overheard conversation. All of it presenting itself to her as the unseen things that dogs bark at.
For someone so smart, you can be so fucking stupid.
This time, both Lily and the voice inside her are in complete agreement.
She was wrong to put her life into the hands of Will, a man she doesn’t know. At least she’s confident about what Michael is. The ones who hunt him are, if anything, more of a mystery than a two-hundred-year-old man.
The train creates a damp wind preceding its appearance from out of the tunnel’s mouth. As it slows, the people around her inch closer to the doors, squeezing Lily along with them.
She holds back as much as possible so that once she’s on the train she’s close to the doors. Maybe she can slip out before her stop. Maybe she can run up to the street above, hail a taxi, and escape all this, let Michael and Will play out their game without her. It’s not her business. What’s happening now, the panicked knocking of her heart, the complicity in an operation no police or government is officially aware of—there’s no need for her to be part of any of it. She’s a woman who can keep a secret. She and Mary Shelley have this in common.
Lily is ready to slip through the doors when the lights go out.
Her fellow passengers have seen this before, judging from their sighs and muttered Bloody hells. Even when the train shudders to a stop in the tunnel midway between Tottenham Court Road and Goodge Street there’s only the slightest evidence of alarm from those around her. The gasp of a claustrophobe an arm’s length away from Lily, a woman who now looks straight above her as if struggling to find the air above the water’s surface. The single, alarmed shout of No! from a male voice at the far end of the car.
I told you something’s wrong, Lily’s voice says.
A minute passes.
The claustrophobic woman drops her head to look directly at Lily. Through the near-darkness her panic contorts her face and holds it that way, so that she could be wearing a personalized mask of horror.
Another minute.
There was a rumbling of the train’s engine underfoot that promised they could start moving again at any moment that now goes silent. The lights, the fans, the entire mechanical operation goes dead.
This is what gives permission for others to panic.
The claustrophobic woman raises her arm straight up while breaking into sobs. Seated passengers get to their feet, pressing the ones already standing, so that their fused body pitches back and forth. The man who’d called out the single No! resumes shouting it, higher and louder each time.
Lily feels herself being sucked away from the doors. Elbows and shoulders come down on her, forcing her closer to the airless floor. She’s halfway there when the screams and bellows cohere to speak the same word.
Quiet!
Enough of them do that the looping announcement coming over the speakers can be heard.
. . . to please remain calm. We are initiating evacuation procedure. Officers will soon be manually opening the doors. Please follow their instructions and form a line to exit the tunnel at the next station. . . . Attention. We ask you to please remain calm. We are initiating . . .
The struggle toward the doors resumes. Among the cries there’s a distinct voice that calls, “There’s smoke!” and another that follows with, “It’s a bomb!” There’s no smoke in the car, but the recent memory of such things lifts the frenzy to a new level.
Lily can’t remain standing any longer. The bigger men force her under until she’s a ball on the floor. She knows this is the way people die in situations like these; the first ones to go down are the first to be trampled. It’s certainly harder to breathe where she is. But at least she can see the doors when she couldn’t before. And there’s relatively more space than when she was standing, so that she manages to crawl between legs.
“A light!” someone shouts, and a second later Lily sees it. The swinging beam of a flashlight outside the car.
The ones behind push harder, so that when the doors open the first half dozen passengers are thrown forward into the dark. It’s how Lily ends up at the edge, on hands and knees, her eyes level with a man with a waxed moustache wearing a London Under
ground uniform.
“One at a time!” he shouts. “You first!”
He slides his hands under Lily’s arms and pulls her out. Sets her down and directs his flashlight forward.
“Single file,” he says. “Carry on into the next station and up the stairs. Nice and slow.”
The ones who had tumbled out of the car are on their feet now too and Lily falls in line behind them. There’s only the emergency lights in the walls every twenty yards to see by, but so long as she stays on her feet, she need only feel the back of the passenger ahead to know she’s going the right way.
Lily’s line joins the one exiting the car ahead of her, and then the one ahead of that. They shuffle around what seems a never-ending bend. The cries are only more haunting in the near-dark, echoed by the walls in a way that makes it impossible to tell if they come from behind or ahead.
Eventually the brighter oval of the Goodge Street station reveals itself, the posters on the station walls advertising skin cream and a footballer’s memoir bringing an odd comfort.
Lily wonders if Will is ahead or behind her.
She’s on the platform now, where she joins a crowd inching closer to the escalators. The passengers are calmer here, reassured by the familiarity of the fluorescent lights just as she had been.
But something’s still wrong, Lily tells herself again.
And then she sees she’s right.
There’s an explosion of movement on the platform ahead. Someone fighting to get through, coming at her. First a man and then a woman are pushed off the platform to make way, the two of them hitting the concrete hard and crumpling into heaps between the rails.
Black Parka.
He spots her at the same time she spots him.
She scans for a way out. There’s nothing she can do except push back the way she came but it’s as useless as trying to hold back an oncoming tide with your hands.
Black Parka is twenty feet away when his expression changes. He draws a pistol from inside his jacket. Aims it not at her but at something he sees behind her.
“Lily!”
She swings around to find Michael charging toward her through the tunnel. Throwing people aside, cutting a path in front of him. In the dimness she can see the flash of the blades extending past the ends of his fingers, the silver points of his teeth.
“Lily! Run!”
As Michael pulls free of the people at the front of the train he bounds along the tracks into the blue light of the station.
Darkness.
Lily is suffocating in it. The air around her stifling and thin.
Something is holding her but she gets a hand free long enough to grab at the hood covering her head before Black Parka wrenches her arm down to join the other behind her back.
He drags her behind him, the heels of her boots scraping along the platform floor.
“Michael!” she calls out.
Black Parka releases her and she falls to her knees. It takes a second to pull the hood off, but it’s still fast enough to look up and see Michael plunge a clawed hand into Black Parka’s stomach.
Michael glances down at her to make sure she’s watching, a teacher imparting an important lesson. With a pull straight up he draws the blades through the spaces between the man’s ribs all the way to his chin before extracting the claws from his neck. A motion that’s followed a full second later by a heaving disgorgement of blood.
Black Parka stares down at his gutted torso in disbelief. As if merely curious, he at first watches the parts of him that had been inside his body spill out onto his shoes. His hands reach for them, trying to pull them back in. He turns his head to Lily, his face seeming to ask how things could have come to this. As he falls he keeps his eyes on her. He’s dead by the time he collapses onto his side.
“There’s more of them,” Michael says, and picks her up with one arm.
Lily watches the crowd part as they run straight into it. With the back of his free hand Michael knocks people down, cutting others as he swings it in front of him. The slashing claw moving so fast it’s as if blurred propeller blades power them forward.
“Hold on to me,” he says.
She wraps her arms around his middle and links her fingers together, locking herself to him.
Lily becomes aware of the screaming. It comes from the passengers close enough to see what Michael is doing—what he’s just done. An impossible being doing impossible things before their eyes.
They make it to the base of the escalator. There’s more people on the stairs, and even though some of them press themselves against the railings to let them pass, the way up is a moving slope of bodies, jolting and spinning with panic. Michael chooses the escalator. Once people see the decision he’s made, several of the ones higher up start to climb over the metal median to get out of their way, rolling onto the stairs, bowling people over and sending them down to plow into other legs, an avalanche of limbs and screeching mouths.
Michael is twenty feet up when he’s hit.
Lily feels the impact against his chest, so close to her linked hands it feathers air against her fingers. A bullet. Michael barely slows, his legs pausing for the length of a hiccupped gasp before he carries on, clutching a man ahead of him by the belt and throwing him back over his shoulder. Lily watches the man tumble down the escalator, leaving strings of blood in the grooves of the steps.
“Stop!”
It’s Will. Breaking through the line of people below and aiming a gun up at them.
He wasn’t the one who shot Michael. That came from above. But Lily can see how Will lines up his aim, ready to fire. His only hesitation comes from trying to find a part of Michael’s body that won’t also strike hers.
Will starts up after them. Michael glances back and fights his way higher again.
The escalator stops. Someone must have hit the emergency button because there’s an alarm now, an old-fashioned bell of the kind that used to summon Lily back into school from hiding alone on the playgrounds of her youth.
They’re two-thirds of the way up when Michael’s hit again. Another shot to the chest, this one on the left to match the one on the right.
Lily spots the shooter, a man with the same kind of gun that Will holds, his face familiar. It’s the taxi driver who’d taken her to the Lipótmezei asylum. Not a taxi driver at all but one of the hunters. Now hunting her and Michael.
Taxi Driver fires again and finds Michael’s shoulder just under the collarbone.
He didn’t slow after the first two hits, but now he falters, listing one way and then the other, scraping Lily along the side of the escalator, nearly pulling her free. He manages to bring her up so that he holds her like a child being carried to bed.
At this angle Lily sees Michael wasn’t shot by bullets, but darts—their ends, marked red by tiny feathers, sticking out from their points of impact. She remembers Will saying that one of them would likely kill a man. But even with three in him, Michael keeps climbing. She looks into his face, his eyes rolling in their sockets, fighting to hold their focus. His lips are trembling, attempting to speak.
“Did you?” she hears him say.
She understands the words that would follow if he could summon them.
Did you tell them?
She looks away, as clear an admission as if she’d said yes. Yet he still doesn’t let her go.
Will is an arm’s length away from them now. He hasn’t shot for fear of hitting Lily, but now she’s out of the way, leaving Michael’s back exposed. There’s the briefest hesitation when he meets her eyes and sees the rage in them, the dawning realization of how this was all set up and how she hadn’t been told of it, how his goals are not what he claimed them to be, before he shoots a dart between Michael’s shoulder blades.
At the landing, Michael collapses onto Lily. She can neither move nor breathe. A second later, Will and Taxi Driver are pulling him off her.
“You okay?” Will asks her.
“Fucking liar!”
Two
other men join them. Together with Taxi Driver, they lift Michael up.
“Move!” one of them is shouting at the passengers standing in their way. “Anti-terror! Step aside! Anti-terror!”
They wear no uniforms or identification but everyone believes them. It’s why, when the real police come at them and Will’s men bring out handguns, they’re startled to see them take down two officers with shots to the forehead. Their fall is the last thing Lily sees before Will pulls a hood from his jacket and slips it over her head. The two policemen folding to their knees in unison like modern dancers, a synchronized violence that ends with them smacking their skulls on the stone floor.
Now it’s Will who carries her. She writhes and kicks and tries to scream, but her struggles feel pillowed, her voice stolen by the limited air inside the hood. Any second she expects to be shot the same way the police were. That’s what they’re going to do, here or somewhere else, she’s sure of it. This might be the last few moments of her life and what’s almost as bad as the horror of that is her inability to figure out the chain of events that brought her to this place.
There’s shrieking and new alarms to join the ringing bell and then all of it is sucked away. By the lack of an echo to their footfall Lily judges them to be in a smaller space.
Lily gets lucky. She kicks Will and her foot meets bone hard enough that he drops her.
“The fuck?” she hears Taxi Driver say.
“Hit her,” Will says.
Lily braces herself for the bullet. But there’s only the bright stab of a needle at the top of her arm.
She feels Will picking her up again. This time, when she tries to fight him, there’s only a spasm, a flailed foot. All of her loose and cold and sick.
Then there is darkness that is darker than the inside of a hood, and she remembers nothing more.
28
* * *
Don’t let anything in your head but the one thing,” her mother’s voice tells her an inch from her ear.
“What thing?”
“The thing you have to do. Because you have to be sure. And once you’re sure, don’t hesitate.”