Vanished g-4

by Kat Richardson

  We stumbled out the door, open only to us, through the crowd of trapped prisoners, and up into the memory of a courtyard filled with rushing jailers and shouting constables trying to douse the flames at one corner of the building with buckets of water. By the time we’d walked out the unguarded prison gate and around the corner, past phantom crowds and more bucket brigades, Marsden was able to support his own weight.

  We stopped around the corner and Marsden leaned against the nearest wall. “Pray there’s no one out for a late walk,” he said. Then he pushed history aside and the world shifted with a grinding feel and a scream of friction.

  Ordinary streetlights and city haze lit the urban night. No sign of flames as cars grumbled along Rosebery Avenue.

  Michael threw up.

  “There, boy. Y’lived through Norrin and the Fenian bombing,” Marsden mumbled, still unsteady on his feet and paler than normal—which is to say he nearly glowed in the dark.

  “Eff you,” Michael gasped back, wiping his mouth on the un-tucked hem of his shirt. “I felt that thing cut me! And the place was on fire—I could smell smoke!”

  “But y’couldn’t feel the heat, could ya?”

  “No, but who cares? It was on fucking fire! I could see shadows running around like there were people in there running from the flames. And then that. thing cut me!”

  “Did y’see him? Norrin? Did y’see that bloody monster?” Marsden asked, grinding his teeth into the words.

  Michael hesitated, looking away, breathing too fast and sweating. “I. saw eyes. A shape. And I smelled something. rotting. And a flash like light off a knife blade. And. something. cut me,” he added, clutching his shoulder again.

  “How is it?” I asked in as gentle a voice as I could muster with my own heart beating triple time.

  Michael turned his face to mine, seeming grateful to look away from Marsden. “It hurts, but it’s not bleeding. Feels like it’s cut to the bone, though.”

  “That’ll fade in a few days,” Marsden said, rubbing his hands over his face, “but I shan’t say it’ll be pleasant. Hurts like merry hell, it does.”

  I glanced down at the blotched front of my shirt and jacket. The fabric wasn’t cut, but I could feel the stickiness of blood that stained my shirt from the inside. I wished I could go back to the hotel, take the longest shower in history, and fall into my expensive bed for the next twenty hours. My knees shook a little: a post-stress reaction to burning up more adrenaline than I normally expended in a month. I didn’t feel much better than Michael looked, but I didn’t have the luxury of puking.

  “We have to get off the street. The vampires will still be looking for us,” I reminded them.

  Michael straightened up, making a face at me. Then he glanced around the street and pointed to a bus stop nearby. “There’s a bus coming. We can take that and then change when we’re far away from here.”

  CHAPTER 42

  As we stood at the bus stop, rain began, just pattering down, but it helped to wash the filth and the stink of vampires off us. Michael chivvied us onto the first bus that came along Rosebery and made us change to another closer to the middle of town. We collapsed into our seats as if we’d been thrown.

  The bus rambled the wrong way for a while until it turned near Marble Arch. Beside the arch stood a spectral three-sided gallows from which hundreds of hanged corpses swung in the night wind, their superimposed shades so thick they seemed like a moving blackness filled with bones.

  “Tyburn Tree,” Marsden muttered, not raising his head.

  From there the bus trundled up past Regent’s Park toward the canal where we’d left the boat.

  “Bleedin’ lucky we was. The Pharaohn don’t know I’m with you or he wouldn’t have tried the same trick twice.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. What trick?” I asked.

  “Butcher Norrin. When he tried to shape me, the Pharaohn had me taken up on a thievin’ charge in Clerkenwell and put in the House of Detention where Norrin could get at me.”

  “He trumped up a charge just to get you into the right prison?”

  “He didn’t trump up nothin’. I stole the things as I was accused of. That I done it by his leave—that wasn’t allowed to come out. It was all done proper and quick, and I were put in the very block we walked through. I thought Norrin wouldn’t be there tonight when we passed through, as he’d not been down the pit when the Fenians bombed the building in 1867 to rescue their man. But someone caught his attention,” he added, turning a bit toward Michael, who cringed.

  I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Alice must have had some way to wake him up or she couldn’t have been sure he’d come after me.”

  Marsden snorted, but I could feel Michael loosen with relief.

  “So. All of this, like what happened to my father, is just a replay of what the Pharaohn’s trying to do to me,” I said.

  “Looks it.”

  “We’ll have to break that pattern. He used Christelle against my father. Now he’s trying to use Will against me. We have to get Will back before. ”

  I realized I’d already said too much when Michael frowned at me. “Before what?”

  “Before they kill him,” Marsden supplied. “Be glad it’s not my decision, boy. I’d leave him to his chances. This softhearted fool means to save your brother even if it ruins her own chances of staying sane and whole. And it will. She’s worth ten of any normal fella.”

  Michael growled under his breath. “Why did we save you? We should have left you there for him to. to. ”

  “Rend to pieces? Drive mad? He’s had his chance to do both. My term at Clerkenwell’s when I thought I’d gone mad for certain—when I started seein’ butcher Norrin, when—” He faltered, his fingers curling over his gouged orbits, twitching. He took a long, shaking breath and went on. “I learned the trick of falling through the cracks of time there, and it saved my life, so it did. They tore it down in 1890 and I thought that was the end of bloody Norrin. He’s among the worst of the things that haunt that wretched place. He’s not even a proper ghost—he’s a wraith, a hollow remnant of an evil man filled with hate and a love of violence till he’s nearly solid with it. I’d hopes we could pass through without attracting anything’s attention so long as we went where there was so much confusion already. Should have known better. Things like Norrin don’t die. He’s not gone yet, I’d wager.”

  “I saw him re-forming as we left,” I confirmed.

  Marsden made a hacking sound. “Still, you did well, girl. That trick with the knife—wicked clever. How did you guess it could cut him?”

  “Because it cut me.”

  Michael and Marsden both turned toward me, but their expressions weren’t the same. Marsden only dropped his hands and seemed a bit surprised, but Michael looked shocked.

  “Are you OK?” he whispered, choking on the question.

  “I’m fine. It’s uncomfortable but shallow.”

  “But. you don’t look hurt. ”

  I lifted the edge of my jacket so the bloodstain on my shirt showed. “It only cut my skin, not my clothes. I’m not like you as far as ghosts go. I see them and they see me. If I can hurt them, they can hurt me—we’re part of the same fabric. That’s how I figured I could use the knife. It cut me, so I could use it to cut Norrin.”

  “Could—could I have. done that?”

  I shook my head, but it was Marsden who answered him.

  “No, boy, y’couldn’t. Nor could I, I imagine. Just her. She’s got a bit of the same stuff in her—part magic, she is.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Not like that, I’m not. She can hold on to that stuff. All I can do is walk through it. You just float around the surface like everyone else that’s normal.” He turned his sightless gaze on me. “That must be why he wants you.”

  I knew he meant Wygan and things were making sense in a horrible way. “I can’t do it for long,” I objected. “It’s like holding on to a live electric cable—
it burns all through me. He can’t—”

  “I doubt he cares about your comfort.”

  “It doesn’t matter. A few seconds feels like an eternity in the electric chair! I couldn’t do much.”

  “Maybe there’s more to come. ”

  That was what I feared. I wasn’t so sure I was a gate, as Alice had said, as the thing that could build one. I remembered the way the bit of the vortex had clipped off under my tearing hands and spun off into its own tiny black hole. Marsden had said they weren’t made; they just happened. But maybe a Greywalker who could grab on to the power lines and tangled threads of the Grey could do something more with it, with the right nudge. And the right key. I wanted to throw my father’s puzzle out the bus window and never see it again—except that it was my dad’s and it had opened the door at the House of Detention for me. I had a feeling it was my key, not Wygan’s and not part of his plan, or he’d have taken it when Dad died.

  I shook myself out of my conjectures and tuned back in to the conversation Michael and Marsden were having.

  “More what? What are you talking about?” Michael demanded.

  Marsden and I both shook our heads. “I can’t explain it,” I started, unable to say more. A mental block I’d never been able to fathom stopped my speaking of the living nature of the Grey. It wasn’t just power; it was a live thing, a collective of energy that almost touched sentience. And it didn’t want me to say so. Not even to Marsden. Another oddity specific to me.

  Real horror took hold of me. What would happen if the magic did start to “know” and what would it do to. everything? It was no wonder the guardian beast hated the living prison Wygan had erected around the hole where my father’s ghost was captive—that was magic in the control of havoc and mayhem. I thought of that on a larger scale—whatever Wygan was up to would have to involve more of that hungry, chaotic fire—and I felt sick to the core. I had to get home. I had to stop it.

  “Harper?” Michael quavered. “You all right?”

  I shook off my panic, but the disquiet and desperation remained. “Fine. No,” I corrected myself. “I’m scared. But I can’t do anything if I let the fear own me.”

  “You didn’t seem scared, before.”

  I felt so wretched I wanted to cry, but I swallowed it, closing my eyes against the burn. “I fake sangfroid really well. Just close your eyes and think of ice cream.”

  Michael let out a nervous giggle. Marsden snorted. Three injured, crazy people dreaming of dessert. Yeah, we were tough all right.

  CHAPTER 43

  Once back in the relative safety of the Morning Glory, afloat on the waters of the canal where no vampire would come, we began to plan how to save Will. We knew where he was being held and it was doubtful they’d move him. Alice would want another shot at me and that was an obvious place to take it, but we’d have to make her window as small as possible, force her to come after us with minimal planning and support. We’d have to get in just before darkness when she wasn’t awake to command Simeon or any vampires who might be a lot tougher.

  “What about that kreanou thing?” Michael asked. “Is that a vampire or what?”

  “That, boy, is the vampire to end all vampires. It hates and it thirsts and it don’t care about pain.”

  “Wonderful,” I snarked.

  “What’s funny is, they normally go after the vampire what made ’em—driven to it no matter what stands between. That Alice must be controlling it through her sorcerer, Simeon. ” He twitched with unpleasant revelation. “She made it on purpose!”

  “Made?” Michael asked.

  “They’re usually mistakes. No vampire wants a kreanou coming for them,” Marsden explained. “The rage of death incarnate. Faster, meaner than any of ’em, and it bends magic—it reshapes itself.”

  Michael said, “It’s a shape-shifter, like a. a lycanthrope?”

  “Not that sort, but they can make some changes to their bodies. It don’t last long, it takes a bit o’ power, and it must hurt like merry hell, but what do they care? They need longer legs? They get taller. They need a bigger mouth? They unhinge their jaw. They don’t usually last long, so they don’t conserve their strength or care for their bodies. Remember that, girl. It’s their strength, but it’s also a weakness you can use against it.”

  “And that thing’s going to be prowling around down there?” Michael asked.

  “No, it won’t,” Marsden answered. “It’s still a vampire and it still sleeps during daylight. Alice will make sure of that, since she can’t exert control while she sleeps. She’s probably got that Simeon laying sleeping spells on it every morning. And that’s another reason to go after your brother in the late afternoon, before the vampires wake—during the changing of the guard, so to speak—when everyone’s a bit sleepy and off their stride. The kreanou won’t be up and about until Alice is, and Simeon will be tired; the summer daylight lasts longer than his sleep spells can, so he’ll have been up at least once while everyone else was kippin’. But the timing’s tricky, since we’ll be coming at the catacombs from the sewers where we can’t see the sun.”

  “Marsden. ” I asked, “how do you kill it? I thought I knew how to kill a vampire, but. Alice is up and walking. ”

  “The kreanou’s easy so long as you keep away from him—he’ll do himself in once he’s had the prey he’s after. Let him get at Alice or Simeon and he’ll burn out on his own—he’s tied to their power. If we can break their control, he’ll take out the nearest one and we take the other. The sorcerer’s powerful, but he’s still just a man at heart and she’s not as tough as you think. Stakes just hold ’em down. Decapitation works wonders. As does fire.”

  “But she survived both of those before.”

  “In special circumstances. The Pharaohn chopped her up while she was immersed in blood. Then he put her into jars full of blood—and probably just the right kind. Everything lived, though plainly she’s madder than a March hare. But if she’d not had the blood or if he’d just cut her head off and left it, she’d have died for good. Once they bleed out, that’s the end of ’em. Or burn ’em up till there’s nowt but ash, or leave ’em for the sun to finish off if you’ve a vicious streak to ya. That’ll turn the trick, though you’ll have the devil’s time getting it done. Panic makes ’em stronger and they’re fly ones to begin with. But you chop her up until the blood’s all gone and she won’t be getting back up. You get her head off and put it where she can’t stop the bleeding. That’ll do the trick.”

  “How am I supposed to take her head off? It’s not like a pumpkin on a stick—”

  “She’s still healin’. Wounds are weak spots. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy—it’s not—but that’s your only chance.”

  Did I say it wasn’t a great plan? It was a desperate plan, but it was what we had right now and we didn’t have time to wait and hope for better opportunities. I sighed. “We’re going to need supplies,” I said. “Some kind of. protective clothes against the water—”

  “A boat would be better,” Marsden said.

  “How?” I asked. “It’s also a lot bigger.”

  “You’ll be glad of it once we’re down there. In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s started to rain. And it’s been raining in the north for a few days. All that water’ll be running downhill toward the Thames fast as a flood. We could try with waders and Wellies, but I doubt we’d make it far before we was bowled over like a leaf in the gutter. What we need’s one o’ them little boats like a coracle or them Eskimo things.”

  “A kayak?”

  “Yeah. ”

  “And the bikes—”

  Marsden interrupted me. He looked nervous, though I wouldn’t have thought it possible. “You sure about them things?”

  “Yes,” I snapped back. “The traffic’s too thick to make it in a car and we’re too slow on foot. It’ll have to be the motorcycles. The Red Brothers have transportation, but a bike’s small and nimble and we should be able to get a lead. We don’t want to lose them
; we just want to stay ahead of them.”

  “You really know how to ride one o’ them things?”

  “For the gods’ sakes! Yes!” Not in quite a while, but I wasn’t going to tell doubting Marsden that. “Michael, can you get two of the motorcycles to the meeting point in time?” I asked. “It’ll be somewhere near Farringdon Tube, probably on the west side of the road.”

  “Yeah. I’ll have to shuttle them, but it’s not too bad a trip. They’ll be there. We’ll need some kind of safety straps, in case. ” He swallowed hard, worried. “In case Will can’t hold on.”

  I nodded.

  We made a list of the things we’d need and where Michael and Marsden thought we could find them. Clothing was on the top.

  I’d left the hotel in my business suit two days earlier and had only the contents of my purse, some paperwork, a passport, and TPM’s credit card with me. Since then I’d escaped from the Red Guard, scrambled through abandoned Underground stations, hidden out on a boat, been captured and led toward certain death, evaded vampires by scuttling through temporaclines, and fought a vicious ghost in the ruins of an old prison. I looked a bit rough to go out on business. And I imagined Will would look even worse when we got to him. It’s much easier to evade pursuit if you don’t look like you’re running away. Even once we were clear of the immediate threat in Clerkenwell, we’d have to get Will on a plane for home or into a doctor’s, depending on his condition when we found him. We could fake a lot, but four-day-old clothes that had been worn hard would stand out.

  There was also the matter of Edward’s stolen property. I might not be able to reclaim his control in London, but I could salvage as much as possible and give Edward options to fight back against Wygan once Alice was out of the picture. Right now, Edward was in a corner—wherever he actually was.

  Wygan would pull the plug on Alice as soon as he knew she’d lost me. I had no doubt the nasty piece of work I’d met in that Clerkenwell club would lose no time telling him, but I didn’t intend to let Alice survive long enough to be a problem for Wygan or his white-skinned kin. And I thought I knew right where to lure her to make sure she didn’t come back from this death.