‘OK.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem critical, but if this is an isolation ward, and if I might be infected with something horrible, then why is that food slot left open? And why are there ventilation holes in this glass screen?’
Jesus. He was really having to work for this. ‘Positive pressure in the corridor,’ he said with as much confidence as he could muster. ‘The airflow goes into the… unit… not out. So I’m safe.’
‘Here goes,’ she said with trepidation. Holding the device above her stomach, she began to move it up her body.
Sour metal.
That was the first thing Gwen smelled as she pushed open the door of the flat. Sour, hot metal, like a garage where car parts were being welded together.
It was a smell she knew. Almost an old, familiar friend by now. The first time it had pricked her nostrils had been at three in the morning in a house in Butetown, where an elderly man had patiently used a hacksaw to cut through his left wrist, all the way to the bone and beyond. Gwen hadn’t seen the body — she’d been too junior for that, so she was just standing at the door, stopping anyone apart from the police and the coroner from going inside, but she remembered that smell, creeping down the stairs, and every time she smelled it now it put her back there, standing at the bottom of those uncarpeted stairs, listening to her colleagues trying to unstick the old man’s body from the bath. The next time had been in a squat in Ely, when a doped-up kid had whacked her in the nose with the heel of his hand as he tried to fight his way past her. The bleeding had stopped within ten minutes, leaving her lips and chin crimson and sticky, but she still had that flat, metallic taste in her mouth the next day. The times after that — too numerous to mention. The places were all different, the cause was always the same.
Gwen knew blood when she smelled it.
‘Rhys?’ she shouted, slamming the door into the wall and rushing into the hall. ‘What’s happened?’
Not even listening for an answer, she kept moving towards the living room. Rhys wasn’t there, but Lucy was crumpled on the floor, back against the sofa. Her alabaster forehead was marred by a massive bruise. By her feet, a spatter of blood marred the carpet.
‘Gwen?’ Rhys emerged from the bathroom, holding a tea towel to his cheek. The front of his T-shirt was bright red, the same colour as his neck, the same colour as the tea towel was turning where it touched him. ‘Thank Christ you’re back.’
She rushed to him and took his weight, feeling him lurch into her, supporting himself on her shoulders. ‘You need to sit down. Come on, let’s get you into the living room.’
Like competitors in some crazy three-legged race, they staggered together out of the hall. Carefully, Gwen let Rhys slip from her grasp, transferring his weight from her to the armchair, still keeping the tea towel clamped to his cheek. She stood over him, feeling like she’d come to a dead end, a junction where she wasn’t sure which way to turn.
‘I wasn’t expecting you back,’ Rhys murmured. His eyes were closed, his head resting on the back of the armchair.
‘Obviously,’ Gwen said. Her gaze clamped on Lucy, slumped on the floor a few feet away. She bent down to check the girl. Her pulse was strong in a throat that was so thin Gwen could see the throbbing of the blood in her arteries and the taut lines of the tendons distending the skin. She was unconscious, but breathing normally.
And there was blood on her lips: wet and smeared across her cheek. Gwen cautiously pulled Lucy’s lower lip downwards. Her teeth were bloodied as well, the blood outlining the gaps between them.
‘Rhys, what the hell has been going on here?’
‘We went out shopping for food, and Lucy started acting strange.’ Rhys kept his eyes closed as he spoke in a quiet, strained voice. ‘We came back, and she started coming on to me. I thought she was going to kiss me, and I tried to tell her not to, but she suddenly launched herself at me and bit my cheek. I pushed her away, but she just threw herself at me again. I pushed her away again, and she stumbled back and went arse-over-tit over the coffee table, hitting her head on the arm of the sofa as she went. I think she’s out cold. She’s still breathing, at least. I checked that before I went to sort my face out. I was just about to ring you.’
‘Let me look.’ Gwen reached out to take the tea towel. It was cold and wet. For a moment she thought that Rhys had been rinsing it under the tap in the bathroom when she arrived, but as she took it in her hand she realised it was too bulky, too cold. There was something inside: a packet of frozen peas.
Cautiously, Gwen peeled the cold tea towel from Rhys’s face. He hissed in pain, eyes clenched tight together. Strings of glutinous, clotting blood joined the towel to his face, but the damage wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. The cheek was more or less intact, but Lucy’s tooth-marks were clearly visible in Rhys’s flesh. It looked like she’d relaxed her grip when he pushed her back, rather than tearing his cheek off. He would live.
‘But why would she try and bite you?’ Gwen asked. ‘Apart from the obvious.’
‘I don’t think the obvious had anything to do with it. She was in a frenzy. The way her lips were drawn back, it was like a starving dog seeing a raw steak. I swear, Gwen, if she’d got a better grip she would have torn my cheek off and swallowed it whole, then come back for more. She would have eaten my entire face off if I hadn’t stopped her.’
With a sickening lurch, Gwen realised that if things had gone slightly differently, if Rhys’s reactions hadn’t been quite so fast or if Lucy had come at him while he wasn’t looking, Gwen might have come home to find him like that Weevil they’d discovered in the alleyway, his face all raw tissue and bloody bone.
What the hell was going on? What with that girl — Marianne — in the Hub, and now Lucy, it was beginning to look like some kind of bizarre epidemic was affecting Cardiff.
And affecting Gwen’s personal life, as well. No matter how much she tried to keep the two of them apart, Torchwood and home were blurring together.
‘We need to get you seen to,’ she said.
‘You make it sound like you’re taking me to the vet’s.’
‘I wish! I was thinking more in the realm of tetanus shots. Antibiotics. Maybe stitches.’
‘What about Lucy?’ Rhys’s eyes flickered open. ‘We can’t leave her here. She might be injured.’
‘More to the point, she might wake up and start on the main course. Don’t worry about her.’ She reached for her mobile.
‘Who are you calling? The police?’
She gazed at him, at his bloody face, at the sweat on his forehead. Her Rhys. The man she loved. The man she had almost lost because of her job. Because of the Rift, and the things that came through it.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m calling Torchwood.’
‘Bloody brilliant,’ he sighed.
As the phone rang at the other end, Gwen walked into their bedroom. Rhys would be OK for a few moments, and she might need to say something she didn’t want him to hear.
It was Jack who answered. ‘Gwen? What’s up?’
‘Rhys has been attacked.’
‘Transportation can be a cut-throat business, I hear.’
‘This is serious. The girl who attacked him tried to eat his face off.’
There was a pause at the other end of the line. Gwen didn’t know where Jack was, but she imagined him standing on a rooftop somewhere — perhaps on top of the Millennium Centre itself — gazing down at Cardiff Bay, watching the reds and blues and yellows of the city’s lights reflected from the waves. Of course, he might just have been in his office in Torchwood, sitting with his feet up on the desk.