‘Psst, I tole you, that don’t work, sidhe.’ The sharp whisper made me flinch. ‘All you gonna do is give ’er nightmares.’
My heart thudding with disbelief, and the tiniest touch of hope, I looked towards the voice.
Moth-girl’s white face grinned at me. ‘We’ve come t‘rescue you,’ she whispered happily. ‘Great, innit?’
I rolled out of Rosa’s body and off the slab and crouched down next to Moth-girl, hoping that Joseph couldn’t see ghosts through stone. ‘Who’s “we”?’
‘Me, Daryl, an’ that ovver vamp I stuck wiv the knife, oh, an’ yer doctor pal.’
Anxiety spiked through me. Crap, what the hell was Grace doing here?
‘I couldn’t find that ovver vamp you wanted me to tell, y’know, the Asian-lookin’ one,’ she went on.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘He turned up anyway. What about the police? Did you tell them?’
‘Oh yeah, them’s coming too,’ she sniffed, adding, ‘well, maybe.’ The grey patchwork of her clothes fluttered with disdain. ‘That bitch-witch in charge weren’t too impressed wiv my story; ’er and yer doctor pal had a right set-to ’bout it all. So the coppers ain’t ’ere yet.’
Damn—did that mean the police would get here before the demon or not? Detective Inspector Helen Crane had to know that midnight was demon dinner time, didn’t she? Of course she did, the cynic in me agreed, but wouldn’t a delay suit her if it meant I wasn’t around to cause her any more problems?
‘Hey, don’t look like tha’,’ Moth-girl’s eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘We don’t need no bleedin’ coppers, not when we got ghosts and shades. ‘Ere, ’ave a butcher’s.’ She peeked over the top of the slab, then rose up and rested her chin on her hands, grinning.
I joined her. Scarface shuffled silently in through the doorway. A woman carrying a bunch of withered flowers ambled behind him, then another man limped in; his head wrapped in a dirty bandage. The reek of putrefying flesh filled the air, but this time it was almost welcome. Then there were more ghosts, men and women, all moving silently: a boy with a flat cap leading a small tan and white dog on a string; two dark-haired little girls, about six years old, clutching each others’ hands and skipping in their charred frilly dresses; a soldier, his khaki-coloured uniform ripped and bloodstained, using his rifle as a crutch ... they kept coming.
I watched, bemused. ‘Where did they all come from?’
‘’Mazin’, innit?’ she whispered gleefully. ‘Yer doctor pal just picked up th’Easter egg fing an’ opened it, an’ whoosh, out they all come. I told ’em to come in ’ere an’ disrup’ fings.’
I spotted the ghost knife lying at the side of Rosa’s stone altar; if I could reach Cosette before Joseph noticed—
‘C’mon, then.’ I snatched up the knife and rushed round the altar. ‘Let’s see how much disruption we—’
‘Stop.’ Joseph’s voice reverberated through me, pinning me in place. ‘Turn around and go back to the other tunnel.’ I watched hopelessly as the ghosts turned as one and started shambling away.
Joseph’s brown eyes were blinking fast above his face-mask. He held up the hypodermic in one hand and pushed back his glasses with the back of his wrist as he watched them leave. I stared at Moth-girl’s retreating back. I wanted to tell her it was a good try, that no way could she have known Joseph was a necro, or how powerful he was, but I couldn’t move. Joseph’s command to go back to the other tunnel evidently hadn’t applied to me.
He looked over at me, frowning. ‘I don’t know how you did that, Genny, but—’ He stopped and looked around. ‘Someone else is here, aren’t they?’
I stared up at him from my frozen, half-bent stance, fingers inches away from the knife. He’d asked me a question. I discovered I didn’t have to answer.
‘Tell me,’ he commanded.
‘Friends,’ my mouth blurted.
‘The police? Tell me.’
‘No.’
‘Who then—?’
A dark blur dropped from the roof as if gliding on black-leather wings and landed on the sacrificial altar, crouching in front of him. Joseph jumped, a startled, high-pitched cry issuing from his mouth. He stabbed at the black blur with his needle, embedding it in the blur’s chest. The blur shook itself, snarled and leapt at Joseph, ploughing them both into the machines—which crashed in a crescendo of noise, sparks showering upwards in bright tracer-like arcs. Amidst the chaos, the blur hunched over Joseph and buried its head in his throat and a short, pain-filled scream resounded through the tunnel. Then the scream cut off as a fountain of blood cascaded over the hunched figure, leaving only an echo in its wake.
Had the demon come early?
I launched myself towards the blur, knife still in my hand then stopped to stare down at a blood-drenched but vaguely familiar tawny head of hair. The owner was now gnawing its way through Joseph’s throat. The sounds of tearing flesh and muscle and the quick snap of bone and the metallic scent of blood made my stomach roil, and brought the snakes hissing and slithering in agitation over my skin.
‘My Daryl got ’im!’ Moth-girl fluttered to my side, punched her arm in the air and whooped, ‘My Daryl got that fucker ghost-grabber!’
Darius the lap-dancing vampire lifted his head and gave her a gore-covered grin. ‘Your plan worked great, didn’t it, Shaz?’ he said, pushing himself up on all fours and rising to his feet in an oddly inhuman move.
He unzipped his black leather coat and slipped out of it; underneath he wore just his sequinned Calvin Kleins—not even any boots. Didn’t he have any other clothes? He shook the coat, and blood and other heavier bits splattered to the concrete floor, then he shrugged it back on, zipped it back up and licked his lips. ‘Real great,’ he grinned again.
I looked down.
Joseph was lying there, his glasses askew on his mangled head, the white of his spine glistening in the bright red abstract of his neck, his legs at an odd angle. I was still puzzled by Joseph. He’d seemed ... well, nice, and strangely naïve when I’d first met him. But evil doesn’t always show its face as ugliness, or fangs, or strangeness. That would be much too easy.
And yeah, Moth-girl’s plan had worked real great! It might not have been pretty, but Joseph was gone, and I couldn’t feel anything other than satisfaction.
But now there was the rest of it to finish.
I looked over at my body, still lying on the sacrificial altar, wondering why Cosette hadn’t put in an appearance. Then I saw the reason for her absence: sticking out of my body’s chest was the handle of the soul-bonder knife, the oval amber of the dragon’s tear winking in the candlelight. Darius must’ve have attacked Joseph mid-ritual, so Cosette was trapped—
‘Genny,’ an anxious voice called from behind me, ‘is that you?’
I clutched anxiously at the ghost knife as I turned. Grace peered at me as she hurried through the archway, her pink-check jacket flapping over her blue doctor’s scrubs, her frizz of black curls flattened and tangled with cobwebs on one side, dust streaking the dark skin of her left cheek like a half-finished war stripe. She carried the open Fabergé egg in one hand and led the tearful florist’s lad with her other, her backpack slung over her shoulder. Heartfelt relief flooded into me. They were both still alive.
Bobby stalked behind Grace like some sort of übergoth warrior in his all-black Mr October outfit, his hair neatly pulled back in his trademark French plait. He carried Moth-girl’s body in his arms. ‘Hey, Sharon,’ he called, ‘are you getting back in here, or do you want me to keep carrying you around?’
Grace dropped the lad’s hand and rushed up to me—the ghost me—and flung her arm round me in a tight hug. ‘Thank the Goddess you’re okay, Genny. I’ve been so worried about you.’ The snakes flared, then settled, but she didn’t appear to notice them. She also appeared to find me very solid, and that meant it was close to midnight, when the dead could converse—and more, if they wanted—with the living.