Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (26 page)

You look great but would you mind looking out the window
?

She finished up, glanced around, counted the number of doors in her flat. Less than nine. Still not a dream. So why did everything feel so unreal? She pulled the blind up a little and looked out onto the street below. People were going about their business as normal.
The street light flickered. An old woman tottered along on the other side of the road pulling a tartan bag on wheels behind her. She stopped outside the bookies, examined the odds on Arsenal winning the Premiership for a moment, and then bustled in. Opposite, a morbidly obese man trundled down the centre of the road on a mobility scooter that Alix had probably contributed to through her taxes. A trail of annoyed drivers were backed up behind him, making sure they were as close to each as reasonably possible. A black Merc broke off from the queue and parked on the double yellows outside the entrance to the flat. A group of school children were collecting piles of snow, rolling it into balls and hurling it at the cars parked on the other side.

There was no
Innsmouth, no Sin, no Necromire, or other worlds. Just here. A normal city. A normal day.

We need to be leaving now,
Azrael said.

She froze as she watched the Russian and the two masked men getting out of the black Merc
and assemble outside the flat.

Chapter 56

“Hi, this is Alix, leave a message, it’s a annoying when people ring and they don’t leave a message.”

Bleep.

Ash pocketed the phone.

“For Christ’s sake,” he mumbled.

The tower block was littered with pigeons; horrible, rat-like creatures with crazed looks in their beady eyes, bobbing and gobbling around every corner they seemed to neither move out of the way nor allow themselves to be squashed under foot. Every fourth one was missing a leg.
The whole building was wrapped in green netting to try and keep the birds out but that had apparently backfired. A few had presumably found a way in and bred a colony which now couldn’t escape. The original pigeons had long since passed away, taking the secret of the way through the netting with them.

“Not returning your calls?” asked Keera dryly.

“Concentrate on the job in hand, sergeant.” Ash was doing a poor job of hiding his concern. It had been over twelve hours since Alix had visited Innsmouth and he hadn’t heard anything from her and over twenty-four hours since Megan Laicey had disappeared. For every minute that passed, he could see a few more grains of sand slip through the hourglass.

“What number was it?” he asked.

“Thirty-nine. Third floor.”

She skipped up another flight of steps and he followed, lashing out at a pigeon on the last step which hop
ped out of reach casually. Even the rat-birds were able to evade him.

“How accurate is your source?” he asked her as they rounded the corner. The flats started at thirty. The numbers were faded, the paint on each door peeling. Fag ends and beer cans everywhere. Ash remembered his dad once telling him that during the height of apartheid, local councils in Johannesburg employed workers to call at council estates every week to replace the doors, which were regularly removed by the black residents to be used as firewood. The same thing would probably happen here if the locals had the necessary mental capacity to know how to make a fire.  

“There’s not a Russian in Bristol my girl doesn’t know,” said Keera. “She fucks them for half price. Says they’re usually quick enough to make it a good deal. I showed her the stills from the CCTV. She didn’t recognise him at first but then I mentioned the name your girlfriend said. Ned. Then she went all quiet on me, like there was a problem. So we had a chat about how her probation was coming along and how much coke she had stashed in her bra and eventually she gave me an address.”

“Is he a punter of hers?”

“No. She said she knew a girl who did a house call once and ever since the address has been black listed.”

“Prostitutes have black lists?”

“Yeah, of course. Working girls look after each other. Hell, we don’t, do we?”

“So what’s with the black list?”

“It means, no matter what the money, don’t go there. It ain’t worth it.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. But these girls don’t turn away a source of work unless there is a very freaky problem.”

Ash bit his lip. Why the Hell had he let Alix go back into
Innsmouth before checking out the Russian? He cursed himself. Part of him was desperate to just leave, get in the car and drive to Innsmouth and find her.

But Megan’s little face was looking at him in the reflection of every damn window.

Thirty-nine.

“Windows are boarded up,” he said. “Your girl got it wrong.”

“No.” Keera lifted the letterbox flap and peered inside. “No mail piled up against the door. Not one single bargain bucket chicken joint leaflet. This flat’s occupied.” Before he could object she’d hit the doorbell.

“I sometimes forget
who’s in charge of this operation,” he mused.

“God
is,” she said.

She hit the doorbell again and knocked. The chime was loud enough. Ash brushed her aside and put his eyes to the flap. He could just about make out a side table with a phone on it in the gloom. There was a strange smell coming from inside.

“Warrant,” he mumbled, reaching into his pocket for the phone.

“No time. Megan could be in there.”

“Warrant,” he said firmly.

She brought her shoulder against the door hard. The lock gave way easily and the door swung inwards, bouncing back off the wall dislodging a little plaster in the process.

“Warrant!” he said to her incredulously.

“Reasonable cause,” she replied. “After you.”

Chapter
57

They’d thrown long coats over their scrubs and removed their masks. The Russian towered above them. The car doors slammed and the group were huddled around the entrance to the block, presumably discussing some strategy. Her eyes narrowed as they lingered on the Russian’s filthy face. She could feel her body temperature rising
, heart beat increasing.

“Dirty
bastard,” she said. Then, “how did I throw him against the wall?”

Our coupling has given you a greater command over the physical world. It is called the Essence. In time, you will learn to control it but in moments of peril even a newly coupled human can call upon the Essence for help. I will explain more, but not now. Now we have to leave.

She felt her stomach lurch. They had managed to get in.

She snatched the car keys on the side of the table and her phone. There were missed calls – probably Ash – but no time for that now.

The block was a new-build, part of the on-going urban development that every city endured as the planners found new ways to cram housing in spaces that even the air was struggling to fit in. There were three ways up: two flights of stairs and one lift. The lift was already moving and she guessed her visitors were just about clever enough to work out that they each had to take one of the stairs.

Her only way was up.

She bounded up the stairs three at a time, knowing full well she’d never been higher than her own floor. What was up here? It might just stop. The building might just end. She was counting on their being some roof access and then some way to get from the roof to the ground level without having to go back into the building. Did that even happen in the real world or was it just in films that roofs had fire escapes?

Below, she could hear noises. The sound of a door being forced open. Shit.
Her
door. The Russian shouting things. Surely one of her friendly neighbours who so far she had managed to completely blank would call the police? A fire exit lead out on to a snow covered roof. She slipped on the ice, felt her knee slice open, but didn’t see the phone slip from her pocket and bury itself in the snow.

“Shit!”

She scrambled up, slammed the door to the building behind her. How long had she got before the ransacked her apartment and realised she wasn’t there? A couple of minutes, max. She scanned the roof top. Just a collection of satellite and TV aerials, junction boxes and boiler chimneys pelting out thick, white vapour.

“Jesus!” she said in despair. “This is the
fire exit
! How d’you get down to escape the bloody fire?”

Building regulations require there to be some form of escape route from an accessible roof in multiple occupation housing to the ground level. But I have found your race’s limitless capacity for ignoring your own rules to be astounding,
said Azrael.

She made her way around the edge of the building, checking for something,
anything
, that looked like a ladder or a lifeboat or a helicopter or something to get her off this bloody roof. She thought about calling for help but doubted anyone would even hear her from up here. She couldn’t jump. Rightfully, she felt that she should have died the last time she fell off a large building, or at least sustained some life threatening injury. Perhaps not a risk to be taking for a second time on the same day, even if a strange voice in her head which was probably madness had told her that she’s now got magical powers or something.

“Where the Hell is my phone?” she said, frantically searching her pockets. She must have dropped it in the snow. When she fell. She looked up, back to the door to the building, something dark set in the white powder, began to move.

The she stopped dead.

They made their way on to the roof calmly and took up positions in a spread between her and the door, the Russian in the middle. In the cold and with his mask off he looked
more skeletal than ever, his yellowy skin sucked tightly into his over sized cheek bones, thin lips and black rings for eyes. The pupils, that little reflection we all have in our eyes that sets us apart from animals, entirely absent.

“Here we are on another roof, doctor Franchot,” he said, his accent sounding rather Hollywood-Vampire travelling over the sound of the traffic below. “You startled me when we met again after I rescued you from the fire that killed professor Anwick. I had not realised that the demon
Azrael had managed to convey to you. But you must understand that the Necromire cannot save you this time. I doubt the Essence can find a way to dodge a bullet.”

She backed away slowly to the edge, her mind racing, images of failed escape plans running riot. Jumping, running, shooting. The stench of the Russian’s breath on her, his hands taking her by the neck, by the arms, dragging her back to his
lair.

“Bastard!” she shouted at him.

Alix,
we’re going to do that thing again when I tell you things that are important and you listen to me.

The man on the right of the Russian, she hadn’t paid much attention to him so far, held the gun in his hand. He raised it up, levelled it at her.

“Shoot her,” the Russian commanded, a broad smile on his face. “But don’t kill her. I have
plans
for her. Unfinished business.”

“What of the Necromire?” The man on the right, his voice less certain than the Russian’s.

“There are ways of extracting the demon without killing the Host. Now shoot her!”

Alix, there’s only so much I can do on my own. I need you to help me. I can call upon the Essence but I need you to stabilise it.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said. Overhead, a flock of birds rippled across the sky.

I cannot conjure the image because only you control the physical part of the Essence.

“I still don’t know-” but already she could feel the change happening, the veil lifting. The colours of the trees on the horizon brightened, like the world was finally coming into focus. She looked at the men in front of her. How fragile they suddenly seemed, how close. She noticed her hand was outstretched towards them and that she needed to do that, to keep her balance somehow.

Think of the image that will save you,
the Necromire whispered.

In the distance, she could hear the Russian shouting. Something like, “For God’s sake, shoot her!” But it seemed less important now, not really relevant to her. Something that would be sorted.

The image. You still need an image.

Something to save them, she thought.

The Russian took the gun, struck the man on the right around the face. He fell to the floor pathetically.

“Doctor Franchot, you will stop this now!” He shouted, raised the gun, finger wrapped around the trigger.

“I don’t know how to save us,” she said weakly, a tear forming at the edge of her eye. She felt that death was not complicated, that it was something to be deconstructed and broken down into a very simple thing. But the Russian did not mean to kill. He meant to make her his.

Remove the demon, he had said.

The demon.

The image. The image that will save us.

She heard it first to her right, the sound of something powerful, tearing through the sky, perfectly shaped to manipulate the air around it for poise and balance and then the sound of it, the sound of anger.

The eagle emerged through the white haze, talons born
, the sheer weight of the giant bird crashing into the Russian and the shock was enough to topple him easily. Those that flanked him slipped on the ice in their desperation to avoid the impact. The opening was small but just enough. Alix dashed past the chaos as the eagle circled and swooped for a second time, not meaning to discourage but meaning to tear flesh from bone, the personification of the rage that burned within
her
.

In a short time, she had
passed through the building and was into the car park, fumbling for the keys, adrenaline still cursing through her.

When she managed to get the car door open, she heard
a shot ring out.