“It can’t be destroyed.”
“Then I’ll make it a shard again. Give it back to the past, so that it’s no longer here to…” He nodded at her hand. “Hurt you. Whatever.”
Ash looked at her hand and started rubbing again, though more gently than before.
“You’re not one of the faces?”
“No,” he said, though he wasn’t sure exactly who she meant. Maybe it was best not to know. “I’m not one of the faces. Not them.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” And she dropped the towel and sat at the small table.
“Will you tell me about it?” he asked.
“No!” The shout was sudden, its volume shocking. “I can’t tell anyone. It’s not part of me anymore.” And then, as if to contradict all she had said, she started to cry, her head lowering more with each wrenching sob until her forehead was resting on her hands.
Marty wanted to help. But he thought if he touched her, he might startle her out of whatever state she was in now, frighten her protective wall into being once again. So he left her bereft, and listened.
“I found it when no one should have. I touched it, and no one was meant to. I sent it away… not far enough, but away. And now I can’t even begin to find it again. Not me. Not like this.”
For the first time, Marty felt a chill at the idea of the Bane rather than a childlike excitement. That excitement had been nervous, true, but nervous like a kid sneaking downstairs after lights-out to watch a horror movie on TV. A thrill. Now he was genuinely scared.
“Tell me where it is,” he said, and Ash looked up at him, inspiring a shattering few seconds of déjà vu.
Tell me where it is, his mother says, looking at him with tears in her eyes, because he’s taken something of hers and now he can’t remember what he did with it. It was only some old postcard with a scrawl on the back that he couldn’t read, and a black-and-white picture on the front of people sitting at the seaside in long coats and jacket. Maybe he’d taken it into their small garden… perhaps he’d torn it up to make pellets for his elastic-band wars with his friend Gaz… but he couldn’t remember right then, and her tears drove any shred of memory deeper.
“If I tell you where it is, will it go away?”
“Yes,” Marty said. “I’ll make it.”
“But…” She started rubbing her hand again, but she’d dropped the towel and now she was just scraping her nails across her skin.
“I promise,” he said.
“Well.” And she smiled. Light seemed to fill her face, and it was obvious there had been none there for some time. Though she was his roughly his mother’s age, Ash reminded him of her now for the first time, and Marty had to bite back tears.
She beckoned him forward. He went and leant on the table, lowering his head so that her mouth was close to his ear. And she told him.
After that, going home was such a stupid thing to do.
Ash saw him to the door, and by the time she’d bid him farewell, Marty was starting to think the gun had been all in his imagination. She wasn’t a different woman exactly, but a shadow about her had lifted, as if sun had shone on her skin for the first time in years. She still opened the door cautiously and peered out like a mouse watching for a cat—The faces are still there, she said, I don’t think they’ll ever leave me alone—but as Marty passed her and stepped into the tiny front yard, she thanked him.
Leaving, he heard the door shut again behind him, and the lock clicked as she incarcerated herself once more.
Knowing what he knew, he should have returned to Lee Woodham’s house straightaway. Coming here to Otter Street, he’d been terrified of the vampires and what they had done. But leaving, he was now also scared of everything that surrounded them. Before, they had been brutal, merciless killers, and he’d have done anything he could to hold one down and give it pain before bestowing true death. But after seeing Ashleigh Richards and the effect the Bane had had upon her, he understood that there was a whole world behind these creatures. It was a world that until recently he’d have regarded as make-believe and fanciful, but now he knew it was true. They were the undead, and there was a magic to their background.
But he did not immediately retrace his steps. Something about the London light seemed different, as if everything he saw had been smeared with a light sheen of blood; a redness overlay everything, and he rubbed his eyes many times to try and clear them. He wondered whether he had caught something from Ashleigh, some madness that had taken her years before at that dig in Wiltshire.
Perhaps it was anger, or rage, or grief finally fighting its way through the walls he had erected around it, seeking release and blinding him against the obvious, terrible reality.
So he decided to see what was left of the place he had once called home. He knew that the Humains had set a fire there after the attack, trying to destroy evidence that might make authorities ask awkward questions. But ruin though it must be, perhaps it was somewhere he could regain some sense of balance and composure.
It was a quick fifteen-minute trip on the tube, but he decided to walk. The thought of going back belowground—where the sun never shone, and where shadows were kept at bay only by the persistent artificial lighting—was suddenly more terrifying than ever.
It took him almost an hour, following streets, alleys, and routes both known and unfamiliar. He searched inside himself to try and find a sense of going home, but it was curiously absent. When he finally arrived at the street, it was familiar enough, but only as somewhere he had visited many times in the past, not somewhere he had felt at home. He walked toward the remains of the house, and even from a distance, he saw the police tape marking out the small front garden and extending across the pavement. There was a police car parked a couple of houses away, and he saw the shape of someone sitting inside, cigarette smoke curling from the open window.
Marty crossed the street and sat on a garden wall. His family home was fifteen houses along on the opposite side, and from this angle he could see some of what was left. It wasn’t much. The façade still stood, but the windows on both floors had been blown out and the London brickwork scorched black with soot. The roof had half collapsed, and many slates had exploded from the heat. The houses on either side seemed to have escaped excessive damage, though they both had boarding over a couple of their windows, and he couldn’t see from here what had happened in their roof space.
The ruin was calm. Yesterday the police and crime-scene officers must have been picking over the debris, but they seemed to have found everything they were looking for.
Mum’s remains in there, he thought. Blackened parts of her. There was no way the police could have swept up—scooped up—everything of her he had seen in the hallway. The fire would have cooked and charred that, and the ash was still a part of their old home.
He looked down at his feet and took several deep breaths. And that was how he saw, across the road in front of him, the shadow of someone watching. His heart stuttered, winding him. The shadow of the terrace behind him drew a fine line along the road: rooftop, interrupted at regular intervals by chimneys. And between two chimney stacks, a mound that could only be a head.
Daylight, it’s daylight, they only come out at night. But they had their fucking slaves. And he realized then what a fool he’d been to come here. Home, however little was left of it, would be one of the first places they’d be looking for him.
Trying not to give any indication that he’d seen, Marty looked along the street again, eyes turned sideways and concentrating on the shadow. Before long it moved, only slightly but enough for him to confirm what it was. Not a bird, not a cat… a head.