Morgan's hand brushed against the cold metal of the gun just as the other man's weapon swung towards him. Morgan's line of sight led straight up the barrel and he knew the shot would take him right between the eyes. He shut them, not wanting to see it coming.
A second of silence later he flicked them open again, and there was Tomas, arms around the assassin's chest. Morgan saw the fabric of the man's black mask shift as his mouth opened beneath it in a scream that was soundless because Tomas was squeezing all the air out of him.
Tomas's face was pale and impassive, no flush of anger or exertion.
Morgan's fingers finally closed around the gun and he raised it to finish off the man Tomas held imprisoned. His line was true, straight to the assassin's head - until the man beneath him gave one final, unexpected shudder. As Morgan's finger tightened on the trigger, his arm jerked sideways and the bullet he'd meant for his enemy found Tomas's heart instead.
Horrified, Morgan waited for Tomas's body to crumple and fall, for the spurt of blood that was always darker than you imagined. But there was only the smallest stain around the bullet hole in Tomas's t-shirt, black in the moonlight. And Tomas was still standing, his arms squeezing tighter and tighter.
The man he held let out a horrible, gurgling gasp as the gore rose up in his throat to spill red and brown through the material of his mask. The hands that had been clawing uselessly at Tomas's arms splayed in a spasm of pain and then slackened for good. And still Tomas kept on squeezing, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he himself was mortally wounded.
"Let him go, man," Morgan gasped. "It's over."
It was. Tomas must have taken down their final attacker while Morgan was grappling with his. Morgan could see the man's body tossed ten feet away, one arm half torn from the socket of his shoulder, and his neck twisted so far round it looked like his head had been put on back to front.
Tomas nodded and let the body in his arms drop. It slumped to the ground and Morgan suddenly smelt the acid of piss. The man must have lost control of his bladder when he knew he was dying.
Then Tomas turned to one side, and Morgan glimpsed the exit wound in his back, as large as a fist. Inside he could see meaty muscle and the white of bone beneath it.
Tomas noticed Morgan staring. His hands drifted up, probing around the lethal hole in his chest.
Except it wasn't lethal, was it? Because Tomas was still standing.
"We need a hospital. I think you're in shock," Morgan said.
Tomas's lashes flicked downwards a moment, as if he was about to pass out, but then he looked back at Morgan and Morgan realised he'd simply been deciding what to say. "I'm absolutely fine."
Morgan laughed in a way that he knew was near hysterical. "You're a long fucking way from being fine."
Tomas glanced down at the man he'd just killed, and Morgan saw a look pass across his face that he couldn't read but didn't like. "You're right," he whispered. When he looked back at Morgan his expression was suddenly savage. "Turn around," he snarled.
Morgan shook his head. "We need to search the bodies. Quick, and then get out of here. Anyone could have heard those shots."
"In a minute." Tomas raised his hands and Morgan saw that they were shaking. "Turn around.
Now
. And don't look back until I tell you."
Morgan didn't understand what was happening. Was Tomas's wound finally catching up with him? Would he turn back to find his partner dead, before the mission had really begun?
"Turn. Around." Tomas said, his voice as chilly and brittle as ice. Morgan caught the look in his eyes and spun round as fast as he could, turning his back on the murderous expression there.
He stared into the distance, through the narrow gap between the warehouses, willing his eyes to penetrate the darkness. There could be more of them out there, a mop-up crew in case the first team failed. The local police could be on their way, and the last thing he and Tomas were supposed to do was get noticed. They needed to get out of there. But he didn't move and didn't look round. There was a sound behind him, very quiet but so familiar he had to exert an effort of will not to notice how much it sounded like somebody eating.
Morgan felt cold, nothing like the usual drained aftershock of battle. He watched his bullet going into Tomas, over and over in his mind, as if replaying the scene enough times might give it a different ending. He attempted explanations that could make any sense of it. Tomas could have been wearing a Kevlar vest. He could have been in league with their attackers - their guns might have been loaded with blanks.
Very clearly, another tape replayed in Morgan's head. He heard Giles saying that they were going to find him a partner even
he
couldn't kill.
"You can turn round now," Tomas said.
Morgan hesitated.
"Come over here. You were right, we need to search them and get out."
Morgan heard Tomas fumbling behind him, still unable to make himself turn back. "Morgan - look at this," Tomas said sharply.
Finally, Morgan turned round. And it was - fine. Tomas was leaning over one of the corpses and had stripped the black cloth from his face. Even in the darkness, Morgan could see that the features weren't European.
"Japanese, I think," Tomas said. "No ID though."
Morgan nodded and walked to another of the bodies, reflexively turning his head away from the one Tomas was crouched over. He didn't want to examine the new wounds on it, the dark stain which spread beneath its legs and arms, even though Tomas had squeezed the man to death and there shouldn't have been any cuts at all.
He looked down at the body in front of him instead. The black cloth was wound round several times and tied off under the chin. He had to lift the head gently by its hair to pull the cloth off. It felt uncomfortably intimate and he was glad this was one of the men Tomas had killed and not the one whose skull Morgan had cracked open.
This man was Japanese too, his hair spiky and dark, the remnants of hair gel still in it. Morgan wondered why he'd bother when he was going out dressed like some kind of ninja assassin. But maybe he'd meant to go to a bar afterwards, pull some birds. Morgan looked at the man's face, a little too round and snub-nosed to be handsome, and had the sudden uncomfortable knowledge that this wasn't just a dead body, it was a dead
person
.
He shivered and looked away as he searched the man's clothes - ordinary black jeans, a plain dark t-shirt - but he wasn't carrying any papers or cards. "Nothing," he told Tomas.
"They knew we were coming," Tomas said.
Morgan couldn't stop staring at the dark marks around his lips. There was a second of silence, then Tomas seemed to realise what Morgan was looking at. He scrubbed a quick hand over his mouth and the marks were gone.
"Yeah, but how did they know which cab we were going to get?" Morgan said after a moment.
"I'm guessing they didn't. They probably bribed all the cabbies in the rank, or offered a reward for whoever brought us to them."
"They've got money to spend, then?"
Tomas nodded.
"But Karamov's Russian, right? And these guys... aren't."
Tomas shrugged - then tilted his head suddenly, at a noise on the humid breeze.
A second later Morgan heard it too. Sirens. "Shit. We've got to get out of here." He looked longingly at the gun he'd picked up, but Giles had been pretty clear: no weapons. He wiped the muzzle and the grip with his t-shirt to clean off any prints, then dropped it next to the hand of the guy he'd killed. With any luck, the authorities might think this lot had taken care of each other.
Tomas pulled Morgan to his feet as soon as he'd finished and they both ran away from the approaching wail of the police cars, into the deep darkness between two of the warehouses.
The place was a warren, filled with collapsed brick walls and abrupt drops into water-filled trenches. There was broken glass everywhere. Tomas took the lead, running without any apparent effort. Morgan couldn't even hear him breathing hard. And Tomas shouldn't have been able to run at all, but Morgan was trying not to think about that.
They fled for about ten minutes, until they could no longer hear the sound of sirens and the warehouse district had begun to merge into a more residential area. Ahead, Morgan could see a pavement with streetlights along it. Their orange glow pierced the darkness where he and Tomas were hiding. It caught bright highlights in Tomas's fair hair, and Tomas would have just run straight out into it, but Morgan grabbed his arm.
Tomas turned to face him, frowning. He tried to pull himself free but Morgan wouldn't release him.
"You can't just walk down the street looking like that."
"Looking like what?"
Morgan lifted his hand to point at the hole in Tomas's chest, the gaping exit wound in his back. His fingers froze in mid air.
There were two holes in Tomas's t-shirt, a small one in front and a larger one behind. But the skin underneath was completely unblemished. Morgan snapped his eyes up to meet Tomas's and there was a second when it looked like the other man might say something. Then he just shrugged and walked into the light.
The hotel stood on the banks of the Danube, floodlit yellow. The lights reflected in the water beside them, broken up and blurred. Tomas paused a moment on the bridge to look at the building, a little too ornate and pretty to be entirely dignified.
Morgan was looking at Tomas rather than the hotel, but he didn't say anything. He hadn't spoken at all on the long walk back from Pest, except to suggest that they get a cab and then nod when Tomas told him it wasn't safe. Tomas knew he was going to have to give Morgan an explanation some time, but he was glad it wasn't now.
Karamov was supposed to be staying in this hotel. When they'd got themselves settled in and slept they'd have to try and find him. There was no point doing it now. Sneaking around worked better in daylight, when even shiftiness seemed honest. Everyone looked at everyone else askance after midnight.
The receptionist behind the grand entrance desk smiled at Tomas when he told her they had a room booked under the name of "Jones". A porter, slightly sheepish in a stiff uniform, led them up to what was probably - if Tomas knew Giles - the cheapest room in the hotel.
He went into the bathroom with his rucksack to get ready for bed. When he was naked he ran his fingers over the place where the bullet had gone in, and where there was now smooth skin. There was no sign of damage, but it
had
hurt - worse than he could have imagined. And he'd thought that it wouldn't hurt at all. That had been the point of dying, hadn't it? Not to feel anything any more.
And as for the way he'd healed himself... They hadn't told him about that. Maybe they hadn't known. But when he'd looked down at the body of the man he'd killed, blank eyes staring up at stars he couldn't see, Tomas knew what he needed to do. His mouth had flooded with saliva and an impulse stronger than disgust or conscience dropped him to his knees beside the corpse.
Human teeth weren't meant for ripping raw meat from the bone. It had taken Tomas two tentative tries before the skin broke and gave him access to the flesh beneath. Steak tartare he'd told himself and shut his eyes so he wouldn't have to see what he was doing.
He closed his eyes now and tried not to remember the rich coppery taste of raw meat in his mouth and, much worse than that, how delicious he'd found it.
He wanted more. The vague uneasiness he'd been feeling since he came back had a name now. It was hunger.
He pulled a clean t-shirt on over his boxers, brushed his teeth to clean the taste of blood out of his mouth, and went back to the other room. Morgan was already asleep, in his clothes on top of the covers. Tomas thought about waking him up and making him get changed, then decided that he wasn't the man's mother.
He flipped off the light switch and climbed into bed, staring up at the ceiling for a moment before shutting his eyes. He knew he didn't need sleep, but he
wanted
it. There was too much going on in his head.
Sleep wouldn't come, though. Morgan's wide eyes when he'd seen the healed wounds on Tomas's chest and thigh brought back older memories - the first time Tomas himself had glimpsed the occluded world.
It had been 1975, he'd only been a few years older than Morgan was now, and
Space Oddity
had been at number one. He remembered that, because he'd been watching Bowie on
Top of the Pops
when the call came to report to headquarters.
He'd been pissed off as he climbed the steps leading to the drab Edwardian mansion where his section chief was based. He'd only just got back from three months in Poland, and it had been a tough job - the extraction of a defector who, when Tomas finally found him, decided he wasn't that keen on defecting after all. Tomas had been lucky to make it out in one piece, and he'd been looking forward to some down-time. Was owed it, in fact.
His expression must have given away how he was feeling, because his old boss, Davenport, grimaced when he walked in the room. "Sorry," the old man said, scratching at the greying beard he insisted on growing, even though it only came through in scrubby, diseased-looking patches.
Tomas shrugged, unwilling to be mollified quite yet.
"Wouldn't have called you, only Nicholson here was rather keen to meet."
Nicholson had only been about thirty then, face unlined and toothy smile charming beneath his shock of wiry ginger hair. "I'm pleased to meet you, Tomas," he said. He had a faint Welsh accent which made it sound like a question.
"Listen," Tomas said, "I've only been back here three days -"
Nicholson held up a hand. "It's okay, we're not sending you straight into the field again."
"Really?"
"Honestly. You're being reassigned. The Hermetic Division."
"Never heard of it."
Nicholson smiled. "No wonder. We only thought up the name yesterday. Do you like it?"
"It's very...Crowleyan," Tomas said.
Nicholson's smile widened. "Precisely. Which is why you are our first recruit."