Authors: Kat Richardson
“Hey, yourself. You still at my place?”
“Yeah. It’s still crazy under the streets. Crazier, even. And Edward is still missing or incognito.”
I made a face. “I hate to say that’s what I was expecting.”
“So, you’re not coming back?”
“No, I
am
coming back. Tomorrow in fact. So long as things go as planned. If not, well . . . send flowers.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“It is all of that bad. Do you remember Alice, the vampire who crashed our party at the museum two years ago?”
“I thought she was dead,” Quinton answered slowly.
“Join the club. She fooled us all. She was hooked up with Wygan and he somehow kept her going long enough to ship her here and start pulling the rug out from under Edward. Once she was in control, she lured me here under his orders and tried to make me a little more dead so I’d be a better fit for whatever Wygan has in mind. That’s what this has been about since I was a little kid, even before I was born. My dad was supposed to be the Greywalker, but he quit with a .38-caliber resignation.” I was amazed how angry I felt as I recited it. I was furious at how I’d been used, how my father had been pushed until he broke, how our friends and family had been hurt and killed and used as levers against us.
I continued, “Alice was Wygan’s cat’s-paw from the start. She got me killed the first time, too—or the second, I guess, but who’s counting—so I could be the right kind of Greywalker for Wygan’s purpose. Once I have Will back, I’m done here, because what’s going on at home is apparently just the start of Wygan’s endgame, and I’m going to stop him. At least now I know. I know what I am: I’m a tool to build some kind of gateway—but I’m not going to do it.”
“You don’t have to. Sweetheart, we could run—”
“No.
You
can run. Wygan will just keep coming after me until he gets what he wants or he gets stopped.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you, unless I’m running toward you.”
I smiled and felt warm for the first time all day. “I’ll be the one running toward you. Will you come get me from the airport?”
“Sure.”
“I may have the Novaks with me, but I’m hoping they can travel alone and attract less attention. I’ll page you with more info. Then I’ll call the condo when the plane touches down. You should be able to get to the airport by the time I’m through customs. The car keys are on the—”
“Floor. Chaos has them.”
I laughed. “She’s such a little thief.”
“She’s not a very good thief. She never tries to fence anything that’s worth a damn. Just old squeaky toys and buttons—which were mostly mine to begin with.”
We both laughed a little more, but the next breath brought back our worries and Quinton said, “You are coming back. Right?”
“I am coming back. Yes. Because the alternative is not an option. And I love you.” It was the hardest thing I’d ever said, especially after the casual blow Cary’s ghost had delivered about those words, and I waited in torment during the silence that followed.
Very quietly, Quinton responded, “I love you, too. And I will see you soon. Once I get the keys back from the ferret.”
I hung up, smiling, even though the prospect ahead was grim, and headed for my meeting with Marsden at Angel Station.
The platform was busy, and I looked through the Grey for Marsden’s slippery aura of colorless shapes rather than try to sort the crowd by eye for him. It took a bit of walking and a ride up the nearly endless escalator to find him on a bench in the intermittent sunshine that was breaking through the clouds.
A girl and her mother were sharing the bench with the blind man, who was keeping his head down, his long hair masking the disfigurement of his face, as he talked to them. The woman looked a bit wary, but the girl was smiling and holding something out to him. He took it and stroked the thing with remarkable gentleness. I got a little closer but stopped to watch, rather than interrupt the scene.
Marsden must have sensed my proximity; I saw him stiffen a bit and turn his head a little in my direction. He passed his gnarled hands over the furry little thing. “Magic, he is,” he murmured. “Just magic. I had a hob just like him once—noble fella and a fine mole catcher, too. Quick as thought, he was, and clever with it. He’ll do well with you, I think.”
Then he held the fluff ball out for the girl: It was a young sable ferret with a little bandit mask and bright eyes. The sight of it made tears sting in my eyes as I thought of Chaos living in Quinton’s pockets, and I hoped she would stay safe. “I’ve got to move along now,” Marsden continued. “Thank you, my dear, for introducing me to your Dexter. You’ll take good care of him, eh?”
“Yes, sir,” the girl replied, cuddling the little animal to her chest.
He nodded at her mother before tapping his way across the busy cement apron around the station’s mouth to where I stood.
“You’re late,” he said.
“And you are a big fake, you grumpy old man. I didn’t have you pegged for a ferret fancier.”
He snorted and began walking on, expecting me to follow. “Clever little beggars. Excellent at flushin’ moles from holes. And ghosts from buildings—they can’t resist chasing ’em. Not trying to kill ’em, mind you; they just like to rout ’em out. They’ll dance and chatter like a mad thing and drive the haunts bloody bonkers. They’ll zoom along a ley line and pounce on anything Grey as gets in their way. Fearless, they are. Charm the socks right off ya, too.”
“Yes, they do,” I replied, thinking of Chaos’s wild behavior around anything ghostly, like the first time she’d dived headfirst into the Grey to take on the guardian beast on her own. She hadn’t won that fight, but she hadn’t lost it, either. “I have a ferret at home.”
“Do you, now? P’raps your dad didn’t father as big a fool as I thought.”
I rolled my eyes. Back to the same old Marsden.
“So what are we looking for?” I asked.
“The right sort of sewer opening. Did you have any luck with the silversmith?”
“Did you know she’s some kind of machine?”
“Is she indeed? I take it she was the one.”
“She was. I found a lot of papers that should repair most of the financial damage. They might not give Edward any leverage back into St. James’s, but they should give him some options. I shipped the important ones home.”
“And what will happen to them if you do not return?”
“I have a friend who’ll deal with it.”
He nodded. “You’ve surprised me.”
“Really? How?”
“You carried through. Y’didn’t have to, y’know. Good chance this will go pear-shaped, and then what’s in it for you, eh?”
“Integrity?”
“What’s that matter to a dead woman? Which is what you had best be if this goes wrong.”
“It seems to matter to some of them. And who says I’m going to die?”
“If you misplay Alice, if you don’t win, you’ll have given them what they’re after—a chance to shape you how the Pharaohn wants. You’d be better off down that hole in the Hardy tree or splattered across the landscape like your dad.”
“You don’t know what’s best for me, Marsden. Even if we foul it up and he does make me the Greywalker he’s after, tools don’t always work they way you think they will. You can use a knife for a screwdriver, but that doesn’t mean it can’t cut you.”
He chuckled and said nothing, continuing west and south until we came to the turning of Penton Rise away from Pentonville Road. I looked around, seeing the mismatched buildings from a century of construction and renewal; the neon sign of a Travelodge hotel poked out above a lion-guarded Victorian facade in one direction and a steel-fronted car repair shop lurked in the other. The road was loud with traffic and filthy even in the middle of the day.
“Can y’feel the river yet?” he asked. “Under all this muck and steel?”
“No. Which river are we after again?”
“The Fleet. What was the grandest tributary of London before the Great Stink. Still comes to the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge, but we daren’t start there. Stretch for it. We can’t just guess at this.”
“What about you?”
“Two heads are better than one, they say. . . .”
Putting our two heads together and quartering the area like hunting dogs on a scent, we finally found the cold, blue trace of the Fleet River buried beneath the streets and buildings south of King’s Cross, just a few blocks south and west of where we’d started.
We walked south, sunk in the Grey, along the onetime banks of the Fleet until we reached Holborn Bridge, coming perilously close to the memory of the priory of St. John as it stood across the phantom stream, solitary stone among a scatter of wood-and-plaster buildings in a rolling meadow. Beyond the bridge, the river vanished in a haze of broken Grey and a sharp wall of shattered temporaclines. Reluctant to step into the normal in such a place, we retraced our steps until we could come back to the modern surface safely.
We slipped out of the Grey and stood on the street, looking around for our bearings and the nearest sewer cover. A large building rose behind a brick wall topped with razor wire just across the road from us. The other buildings nearby were a mix of very old and very new housing.
“This should be close enough for Michael’s motorbikes. Are y’certain y’know how—”
“For the last time, yes!” I snapped. They were Michael’s bikes, yet he had been less worried about possible wrecks than Marsden, but then, he would be carrying his brother and didn’t have much anxiety to spare for anything else. Marsden would be stuck with me and my riding skills, of which he was obviously in doubt.
Now we only needed to know where we were, and it would be up to Michael to bring the bikes to the right place. I walked up the road a bit, noting the utility access cover in the road near the intersection, until I found a sign screwed to the brick wall. It read PHOENIX PLACE. Another beside it identified the building as the Royal Mail sorting facility of Mount Pleasant. We were in luck; I couldn’t imagine a better place to keep monsters at bay than the staid and secure environs of the Royal Mail.
I pulled my map book out of my bag and found the location and nearest major streets. So long as Michael didn’t get picked up for loitering, it would be a pretty good spot. I called him and left the information on his voice mail—he didn’t answer and I figured he was too busy with his own arrangements to bother with the phone. I didn’t mind. He seemed to be holding up, and so long as he didn’t stop to think too hard about what we were doing, he would be fine.
Marsden and I retraced the route of the river Fleet upstream through the Grey, passing through the chilly film-flicker of its submerged history until we found a place we both recognized. We were back at St. Pancras Old Church, but this time it stood on a rise above the banks.
“Blast,” he muttered. “The stream’s subsided more than I remembered.” He didn’t turn his head to look at me. “I suppose you could make a boat. . . .”
“What? I don’t know a thing about boats and we don’t have time—”
“I meant a boat like Norrin’s knife—a Grey construct.”
“No.”
“That’s bald of you.”
“That’s not how I work. I can’t make anything. I’m only any good at tearing things apart, and even if I had the ability, we don’t have the time for me to learn. Nor would it be wise to make our approach through the Grey,” I added.
“Oh, yeah?” he challenged me, turning toward me at last.
I noticed the gouging in his flesh then. Deep in the Grey as we were, the damage he’d taken from Norrin was plain. He stood more stooped than usual, hunching over the place he’d been stabbed in the gut, and the marks around his eyes seeped glimmering tears of uncanny blood. I knew he didn’t want sympathy, so I didn’t offer any, or any indication that I saw anything amiss. My objection would have been the same regardless.
“It’s too exhausting. If we want to get in through the rivers that exist now, we need to start in them. And we’ll need everything we’ve got to fight through to Will and get out again. Pushing through the Grey the whole way and hoping the river hasn’t changed course from the temporacline we picked is too risky.”
He grunted grudging assent.
A waft of blinking energy fragments drifted through us with a touch of frost and reminded me by my discomfort that I wanted out of the Grey as soon as possible. I climbed the hill toward the stubby square tower of St. Pancras Old Church as it had been when it was the only St. Pancras church. Assuming that Marsden would follow me into the ghost-thick graveyard, I shifted back to the normal. I looked back down the now-smaller hill as Marsden showed up beside me, scanning the road for another manhole cover.
“Then we’ll have to take the boat in the same way we mean to get out—through the holes in the street. At least we shan’t have to carry the boat far,” Marsden said, “once we find one slim enough to fit through one o’ them holes.”
We found the right sewer cover in the bend below the church where the train station loomed up to arch over the street. It was only a few blocks from where we’d originally found
Morning Glory
. We walked into the street to get a general idea of how large the hole would be, and then headed off in search of a small boat for our journey along the bricked-over remains of the river Fleet.