Michael Novak, shaggy flaxen hair hanging in his eyes, opened the door, saying, “Jeez, Will, can’t you just use the key?” He stopped and stared at me. “Umm. Hi. Harper.”
I knew I was mussed and out of breath but the awkward effect of my phone call from LA apparently lingered, as he tucked himself back behind the door and peeked out through a narrow opening.
“Will’s not here.”
“I got that, Michael. Do you know where he is? He hasn’t been at Sotheby’s for days.” I believed Sekhmet and I’d look a fool if she’d deceived me, but I’d take the chance.
“What? No. He goes to work every day, even part-time on Saturdays.”
“Not recently. I think he’s in trouble. Please let me in.” I held out my empty hands. “I don’t mean either of you any harm. I’m just worried about Will.”
“I don’t know. ”
“Oh, come on, Michael! Call Sotheby’s and ask! If I wanted to hurt him, don’t you think I’d be the one who took him?”
“Will isn’t gone! He’s—Hey! There he is!”
I didn’t look immediately but shoved my foot into the open doorway and turned my shoulder into the opening as I glanced back down the hall. But Michael didn’t try to shove the door closed; he pulled it farther open and I found myself inside the flat, looking back out at Will Novak.
Tall, thin Will with his prematurely silver hair and small rimless glasses blinked at me. Then he smiled.
“Harper.” Something funny about his voice.
I narrowed my eyes and stared at him as he stepped into the flat.
A large dark blot wrapped in bands of energy—blue, yellow, red, and green—moved where Will should have been. It moved toward the kitchen. Michael and I followed him.
“Will,” Michael said. “What’s going on? Harper says you haven’t been going to work.”
“OK,” Will said.
“No, not OK,” Michael objected, going through the kitchen doorway after Will—if it was Will.
“Michael, I don’t think that’s Will,” I warned him.
He scowled at me over his shoulder and turned his back.
A sandwich sat on the counter by the sink, resting on a paper towel with the knife and makings piled beside it. Will trailed a hand along the counter edge, knocking the knife onto the floor. He walked past it.
“Will? Hello?” Michael said. “What’s with you lately? Are you mad at me?”
“No.”
I went into the kitchen right behind Michael, stooping to pick up the knife.
Will stopped and turned sharply around. “Harper,” he said again, but the voice was worse than before. Not angry or upset, but just wrong, like the chorus of the city’s Grey energy was funneling through his mouth. His eyes gleamed, both in the normal and the Grey, with a red glitter. He reached out and grabbed my arm—I was getting damned tired of that—and yanked me toward him, knocking Michael aside.
“Will!” Michael shouted, dismayed at his brother’s violence. “What—?”
“It’s not Will!” I shouted back as the thing occupying Will’s shape dug its fingers into my arm. It opened its mouth and let out a shriek of red and black light that struck at me like a cobra.
I slammed my other fist into the Will-thing’s chest, cutting off the magical scream and nicking its flesh with the knife. The thing rocked backward. Then it raised its other hand, clawed, toward my eyes, grimacing.
From behind us Michael yelled, “You’re crazy! Get away from him!” He lurched forward, grabbing me around the waist and hauling backward.
I dug in my heels, reversing the kitchen knife with a flip and driving it into the hand descending toward my face. The blade cut into the flesh with a damp shushing sound. The hand kept coming. I pushed on the knife and twisted. Then I yanked sideways, cutting through the fingers of its right hand. They pattered to the floor and lay twitching there as I wrenched my other arm free.
“No!” Michael screamed, jerking me back.
We fell down in a pile between the sink and the serving island. The thing that wasn’t William Novak came forward, flailing and silent, with its mouth gaping. Light in ugly colors started to pour out of its mouth, flowing toward me and Michael.
I shoved Michael backward along the slick floor and scrabbled back myself, shouting, “It’s not Will! Run, Michael!”
Michael lay where I’d pushed him, staring in horror at the un-bleeding, mutilated hand. A hand made of something dark and solid and definitely not human flesh.
Stuck between Michael and the not-Will thing, I took another swipe with the knife at the creature. It ignored the blade once again, stabbing a handful of light at me that jammed into my shoulder. I jumped back, right into Michael as he struggled to his feet, clutching the counter for support.
I stumbled and ducked, using the maneuver to scoop my purse up from the floor where it had fallen. Then I swung around fast and smacked the heavy leather bag into the creature’s face.
It stumbled back a step.
I grabbed Michael’s shoulder and hauled him all the way to his feet. “Get the hell out of here!”
Dazed, he lumbered out of the kitchen as I turned back to the monstrous thing, which was now coming forward again. My shoulder burned and I dug my fingers into the ache, not taking my eyes off the not-Will, and hooked my fingers into the energy that had lodged there like a broken blade. I yanked it out and felt it ravel away. Then the thing lurched at me.
I slashed the knife at the first thing that came toward me and saw one forearm fall away. But that didn’t slow it any more than losing the fingers had. It wasn’t losing blood, just substance, and it didn’t seem to care. The arm on the floor writhed, though the chopped fingers had stopped wriggling and were turning a chalky brick red color.
It was some kind of golem—like the thing I’d seen in White Horse Alley but full-sized—and it would keep on coming for me so long as it held together. So I’d have to take it apart and hope the smaller pieces would die off faster. I chopped at the other arm, at the neck and face. Bits fell away. I jammed the knife into its chest and ripped a hollow in the unreal flesh. Something fluttered to the ground. I stooped and swung at the legs, taking a chunk out near one knee as I scooped up the fallen object.
The thing lurched sideways and kept coming. But it was slower. I rose, threw the knife into the wreck of its face, and whirled to bolt.
Right into Michael’s chest as he stared from the hallway. I grabbed his arm and propelled him around. “Run, damn it!”
“It’s—it’s. it’s not bleeding!”
“Damn right it isn’t! It’s a golem. It doesn’t bleed! It just keeps coming until it falls down! Go!” I added, shoving him forward.
He stumbled and began running down the corridor to the stairs. I was right behind him, stuffing the stiff bit of paper I’d snatched from the kitchen floor into my pocket.
We raced down the two flights to the ground floor and burst out into the courtyard. I heard someone scream behind us and looked back to see the shambling horror that had counterfeited Will Novak pursuing us as one of the neighbors stared after it.
“It’s still coming!” Michael gasped.
“And we’re still running!”
But the golem wasn’t the only problem.
As we dashed out onto the street, hot columns of red energy erupted along the street and the ghosts of London turned to look at us. Then they screamed.
I remembered that whatever the golem saw, the man at the other end saw, too. And that man was Will. If he were under duress he’d tell whoever had him exactly what he saw. So whoever controlled the golem knew where we were right now. I forced my mind into escape mode: We’d gotten out of the flat, but we still had to lose the backup crew. Or I had to. They could have had Michael anytime, so it wasn’t him they wanted—but I wasn’t going to abandon Will’s brother to whatever force was chasing us, and not just because dumping Michael would give them another lever to use against me. I liked Michael and I wanted both Novak bro
thers safe.
As we ran down the road toward the teeming bustle of Trafalgar Square, spikes of vampiric color darted from the buildings nearby and sped toward us: cat’s-paws and demi-vampires—the daylight assistants and slaves to things like Edward. And they were coming after us.
“Who are those guys?” Michael panted.
“Villains,” I shouted, grabbing his hand and pulling him along. I kept more than half my sight tuned to the Grey, looking for holes in their net and bolting through them, twisting through their perimeter. I hauled Michael along, not sure which way to turn as I saw another group of red flares go up among the crowds below Nelson’s Column, between the fountains in the open plaza of Trafalgar Square.
I spat a curse.
“What?”
“More. In the square, around the fountains,” I panted.
“How do you know?”
“I just do!”
“C’mon,” he yelled, jerking me sideways.
We paralleled the square and dodged through a tribe of red buses, bumping through tourists to cross the next street, jinking into a wide alley and across another open courtyard. Steps. We leapt down them and flew across another wide avenue with a huge building—a columned horseshoe of white marble—on our left and another open space ahead.
“Where are we going?” I shouted.
“Horse Guards. St. James’s Park.”
“Parks aren’t good! Too open!”
“Crowds, museums on the other side. Westminster Abbey, the Tube, the bridges, lots of ways out. ”
I followed Michael’s lead and we sprinted down into Horse Guards Parade, an open, paved area between the road and another big white building on the left with some kind of soldiers’ memorial and the ponds of St. James’s Park on the right.
A large group of ghostly horsemen cantered along the road in an orderly square while a milling crowd of tourists wandered obliviously around the green. We cut across the park, through the thick stands of trees along the southern edge. Our pursuers were falling behind. But the ghosts among the trees turned to follow us with their eyes, and those that had any will at all screamed as we passed. The vampire minions shifted to follow the sound.
“They’re still coming!” I yelled, running across a bridge over a swan-dotted pond with Michael now in tow.
“Who? How?”
We dashed off the bridge, and Michael started left as I started right. The ghosts turned toward him and shouted.
I grabbed him and hauled him toward the gurgling song of the Thames. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel its rolling presence in the Grey.
“It’s you,” I panted. “They’re tracking you. You have something. on you. ”
“I’ve got nothing!”
“Keys, pocket change, bus tokens! Anything Will gave you in the past week!”
We dove out of the park, crossing a road with wide sidewalks and into a narrow defile of stairs.
“St. James’s Tube!” Michael shouted, pointing diagonally right through the buildings beside us.
We stumbled out of the stairs and down a street. I yanked Michael to a stop near a statue of Queen Anne at the intersection, our trackers momentarily behind and blinded by the buildings.
“Empty your pockets.”
Wide eyed, winded, Michael turned the pockets of his jeans inside out, letting everything fall to the pavement. In the pile was a gleaming rectangle of blue and white plastic. I kicked it with my toe.
“Get the rest. Leave that.”
“But—”
“Now!”
He snatched the keys, his wallet, and change from the ground and shoved them back in his pockets, staring at me as if I’d just confirmed I was totally insane.
“C’mon!” I ordered, pulling him around the corner and into the nearest doorway. I pressed him back and we both peered out.
The local spirits stared toward the lonely bit of plastic and screeched as if in pain. A pair of red-crowned men ran down into the intersection and stopped below Anne’s statue, stymied, looking around until one of them spotted the thing on the pavement. I would have sworn the statue glowered at him, though it didn’t move an inch.
“Bloody hell!” he yelled.
The other one had kept on scanning the area, and he spotted our peeking faces. We were much too close—I should have pulled back farther.
“There!” he shouted, pointing.
I jerked Michael out of the doorway and plunged into the street, dodging people and cars to cross the road. We ran into the first street and down the block. Then I tugged him around the corner back toward the intersection we’d just left the tracking device on.
CHAPTER 27
"We’re going the wrong way!” Michael objected. “The Tube’s to the right!”
“Hush!” I snapped.
I dragged him up a street, slowing the pace a little as a stream of red flares came toward us, and then turned away into the road we’d been last spotted on. I pulled Michael across the way and through a break between two buildings that left us in an alley lined with parked cars. I let our pace drop to a trot.
“What the hell.?” Michael panted, jogging beside me.
“They can’t track us now, so they’ll head for the Underground station—it must be obvious that’s where we were going. We’ll find another while we still have the lead. They’ll spread out soon and come looking, so we have. maybe ten minutes to get to something else,” I explained.
“We can get a bus at Westminster Abbey,” he suggested. “That’ll take us to a Tube, one direction or another.”
“Good. What was that thing?”
“That you made me leave on the street? My Oyster card—thanks a lot!”
“What’s an Oyster card?”
“Transit card—like a MetroPass in Seattle. Bus, Tube, whatever.”
I nodded and conserved my breath as we jogged on. I let Michael lead while I kept an eye out for random vampire minions who might get smart enough to head for the same place we were. I had to pull Michael aside twice to let some pass us.
“I still don’t know how you can spot them,” he whispered.
“Good eyes.”
We caught a bus on Victoria Street that eventually dropped us at Victoria Station. The place was massive, made of stone and iron, and the last stragglers of rush hour going out were meeting the crowds coming into town for the weekend. There were plenty of ghosts, but none of them turned and shrieked in alarm at us, and the only magical things I saw were slinking by quietly, neither wanting attention nor paying any to us.
I called a halt long enough to get some fast food and to clean up from our flight before we carried on.
We both slumped over cups of tea and Cornish pasties by the long-distance train platforms.
“So. I mean. what the hell?” Michael asked, staring at his food. “I don’t know what just happened. Can I go home now?”
“I think that might be a bad idea,” I replied. “They know you know something’s wrong and they’ll come looking for you—if they aren’t waiting at the flat right now.”
“Why would they do that? They aren’t after me!” he added, glaring at me.
I gave him back a hard look. “Because you’re the guy who thinks I’m a psycho ex who just murdered your brother—that’s why. And they can use that, like they used Will. I don’t leave friends behind. I won’t leave you with them any more than I’m going to leave Will with them. I think they know that.”
Michael bowed his head again, his shaggy hair hiding his face. His shoulders heaved and I wasn’t sure if he was just breathing heavily, trying to control a fit of temper or nerves, or if he was crying. After what we had just been through, he was entitled to either. I left him to it, rooting about in my pockets for the object I’d snatched from the golem.
It was a photo of me. The usual ghost-laden image, but I stared at it, barely recognizing myself with my waist-length ponytail of straight brown hair. It had been a long time since my hair had been so long. I’d sliced it off to sav
e my life in the elevator when I’d been beaten. to death. I felt strangled and I shuddered: The picture had been taken two years ago, a few minutes before I’d gone inside the building in the photo and upstairs to confront the man who killed me. I stared at the photo, trying to understand why it had been in the golem, in Will’s kitchen in London two years later. Where had it come from? What was it doing there? Could that be Alice’s connection? I was just turning that idea over when I heard Michael snuffle and blow his nose into his napkin.
I put the photo down on the table and looked up at Michael, who was swiping moisture from his face and trying to look less like he’d been crying.
I poked the photo toward him. “Is this Will’s?” I asked.
He shook his head and pushed the photo away, his mouth still a bit shaky and his eyes not meeting mine. “I don’t get it,” he rasped, a little teary but putting his man face back on. “What was that. thing?”
“Can’t say I’m an expert, but I’m guessing some kind of golem. A kind of magical automaton.”
“I know what a golem is,” he snapped. “Rabbi Loeb and the Jews of Prague and all that stuff. I do read books.”
I pressed my lips together. He wasn’t mad at me; he was just mad, and there wasn’t any point in taking it personally. At least not yet. I put the photo back into my pocket and tried to steer the conversation in a more useful direction.
“Michael. Do you know why your brother and I broke up?”
He shook his head. “Not really. He said you guys just came from different worlds. He said you had to do things he couldn’t live with. I thought he meant. like. your job was too weird for him. I still don’t get that. What’s so weird about what you do? You follow people, you look into records, you tap phones—”
“I don’t tap phones. That’s a federal crime. The rest. yeah, that’s what I do, but. umm. that different worlds thing. ”
“What?” he scoffed, leaning back in his flimsy seat and crossing his arms over his chest. “You saying you’re an alien or something?” He snorted.
I laughed, though it wasn’t my best laugh. It came out weak and shaken. “No. I’m not from outer space. I just end up working around a lot of things most people would call magic or myths. Things like that golem.” The golem was creeping me out even more now that I’d seen the photo. That was a channel. like Ezra’s ring. I tried not to go any farther in that mental direction. I’d scare Michael as much as myself if I let on what I was thinking.
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