Killing Time, that’s what the other Templars called the misty gap between the night and dawn. How many times had she lain half sleep in bed, listening for the front door to open and the clatter of her dad’s weapons on the kitchen table? Then the prayers and the muttered discussions of killing and murder?
The chain rattled off the gears and shook Billi out of her dreamy memories. It dangled loose on the ground. She stopped by the roadside and inspected her bike.
Bugger, bugger, bugger.
It had broken. No way to fix it. She looked around. Fleet Street. Southwark was still a couple of miles on.
She’d dump the broken bike and get the night bus. Billi patted her pocket, relieved she’d remembered her purse. She really couldn’t be bothered -
Laughter drifted out of the darkness and Billi’s blood froze. It was harsh, cruel and laced with malice. It echoed between the walls and through the grey mist.
‘Welcome home, Templar.’ The voice, a woman’s, seemed to come from behind Billi’s shoulder. She spun round. There was nothing. Another laugh, just as vicious.
They glided out of the darkness, first indistinct, hazy shaped, then forming the shape of two women – the shadow-wreathed sisters she’d first seen in the hospital. They stood just within the glow of the orange street light, each moving with a predator’s patience, eyes glowing with eagerness. The one that had broken herself at the bottom of the stairwell walked clickety-click with her imperfectly healed body, her left leg and part of her hip at right angles, her face still swollen and black. The mist hung in white tendrils around her long, slim limbs: a ghostly embrace.
Instinct took over, instinct and fear. Billi ran through the side alleys off Fleet Street, her feet guiding her south without any thought, running along bare, slippery cobblestones that echoed hard with her fleeting steps. The terror overcame any pain she felt.
She looked round, just for a moment.
Nothing.
Where are they?
She turned into Pump Court and there they were. The blank glass windows looked down at her like faceless spectators, and she saw the sisters part, one move behind to stop her backtracking, the other ahead of her.
Perfect hunters, forcing the prey to them.
Billi dodged left, then immediately spun right. She dived past the ghul, and felt hard, sharp nails slash through her sleeve, but she was too hot and too frightened to feel the bloody cuts. She ran through the cloisters with its low ceiling and white-painted rows of columns. She had only one driving thought.
Sanctuary.
She saw it, suddenly looming over her. Despite the fog, despite the darkness, the pale stone building with its tall, lofty, stained-glass windows and massive black doors seemed to hold the fog and darkness at bay. Temple Church. No Hungry Dead could profane a house of God. If she could reach it she would be safe.
Billi ran across the flagstone courtyard, sprinkled with pre-dawn frost. The two ghuls screamed, and she saw a blur of movement ahead.
Billi fell down the steps to the entrance. Iron-stiff fingers dug into her shoulders, but somehow she wrenched free.
Sanctuary! She stretched out to touch the broad, arched west door, her only hope. Suddenly she was jerked backwards. One of the sisters locked her fingers round Billi’s throat, hoisted her off the ground and her head pounded with trapped blood.
‘Sanctuary,’ Billi whispered, hands straining out, fingers fully stretched, their tips so tantalizingly close.
The church doors exploded outwards, hurled apart by a hurricane. Devastating white light consumed them and the sisters let out a hellish, banshee-high scream before being swept away by the brilliant roaring wave.
Billi crashed to the ground, paralysed by the brightness. The light wiped out everything around her and it carried thousands of voices, a deafening cry of rage. She curled into a ball, eyelids squeezed tight, fists covering her face, but she could not escape the light. It burned through her eyelids, searing her retinas.
And then it was gone.
She lay there, too terrified to move. Her head echoed with the sudden absence of noise, and it was a minute or two before she dared lower her hands and, slowly, open her tear-swollen eyes.
A door creaked on one hinge. The wood was warped and its surface coated with ash. Behind her jagged splinters had embedded themselves in the wall. Of the ghuls, nothing remained except dirty black smears where they had last stood. Inside, the church walls were streaked with soot, and the flagstones cracked and polished black, as though exposed to immense heat. Thousands of tiny pieces of burning paper, torn from the hymn books, floated in the air like sprites at a ball. Glass tinkled like a shower on to the stone. Every single window had been shattered, leaving jagged glass teeth sticking out of the stone. Thin columns of smoke spiralled off the smouldering remains of the pews, each now a deformed, ash skeleton.
But within this devastated, burnt-out shell, Billi saw someone.
Standing in the centre of the choir, alone and bright in the darkness, as though glowing from within, was a man. Billi squinted, narrowing her eyes because he shone so brightly, as though a star made human. But slowly he dimmed, his energy spent, and she gasped.
He could have been Michael’s twin. The same flawless, marble-chiselled features, the same thick, sensual lips. The only difference was the eyes: they were hidden behind black glasses. The smoke coalesced around him into a suit of dull black. He walked towards her, the floor hissing as his bare feet trod the polished superheated stone.
‘Hello,’ he said.
He had shone so bright, the brightest star.
The Morning Star.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Billi.
He smiled. ‘Exactly.’
Then the Devil reached out his hand and helped Billi up.
26
Billi expected to feel pain or intense heat as he touched her. But, no, it was just a simple, lukewarm palm. Nothing special about it at all.
‘Well, SanGreal?’ He watched her. He stood in the centre of the molten holocaust and the vapours of steam and smoke ravelled around his limbs like serpents. His lips hinted at the merest smile, but the way he licked them was with an eager hunger.
Billi stepped into the centre of the round. It was the oldest part of the church, and where she’d been initiated into the Poor Fellow Soldiers of Jesus Christ, the Knights Templar. She remembered the candles, the nine empty chairs and the others, standing among the stone effigies of former and ancient patrons of the Order.
They were still there. On the floor around her were eight carved stone knights. William Marshall. Geoffrey de Mandeville. Gilbert Marshall, among others. But now their features had buckled and melted into grotesque, worm-like shapes, all nobility deformed and destroyed.
Satan drummed his long nails against a smouldering marble column.
‘You tried to come through, during the ritual. But we closed it down. How?’
He drew a circle in the air. ‘I need no trinkets to come to Earth.’ He pressed his foot on one of the effigies. The face melted like wax. ‘I am not bound to the Mirror. My kind can come and go as we please.’
‘Aren’t you trapped in Hell?’
‘What is Hell, SanGreal?’ He spread out his arms. ‘Hell is the cry of a starving infant. Hell is the begging for mercy then denied. Hell is the betrayals between man and wife.’ He pressed his hands together and the smile stretched. ‘The lies between father and child.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Hell is where the heart is.’ The Devil looked around the ruined church. ‘If God hears every prayer who hears the curses? The cries of pain? The bitter lies? We do. Eventually the torment is so great the Ether tears open and a devil enters the material world.’
‘You’re lying. If that was true the streets would be full of devils.’
‘And how do you know they are not?’