“I have the curse of premonition, but it’s not a bloody crystal ball, my girl,” he spat. “When and where did you converse with her?”
“Today. In front of Sotheby’s. She told me Will was missing, that the asetem were involved. That’s why I went to see Michael, which was where the Red Guard picked us up after I chopped up the golem standing in for Will.”
He stopped and tapped his chin with the handle of his cane, thinking. “She let you live. And the asetem. No, that can’t be right. It can’t. That’s how the trouble started.” He flicked the cane back up and jabbed me in the chest, shoving me back over the low parapet surrounding the sunken tomb.
I rolled aside on the grass, kicking the cane out of his hands. Then I tucked up my knees and flipped myself to my feet. Marsden was more spry than I’d have thought and hopped up onto the wall after me, his hands scrabbling like spiders for the missing cane.
“Damn you. I’m sorry to do this, but I have to.” He pounced in my direction and I danced farther back, but I moved too far, and the roaring song of London and the gasping mutters of the churchyard’s ghosts deafened me for an instant. Marsden could see me like I was spotlit and rushed forward, shoving me hard against and then through the fence in a flash of cold and a tearing of temporaclines across my back. He propelled me backward, toward the large old tree he’d pointed at earlier.
Several hundred tombstones had been arranged around Hardy’s tree in a spreading sunburst; rank after rank of grave markers, their memento mori animated into chattering skulls with gleaming golden eye sockets by the tangled and knotted threads of a thousand displaced ghosts. The shrieking of them rose in pitch as Marsden pushed me back. I whipped a look over my shoulder. Where the tree stood in the normal, the Grey showed only a howling void—a hole where the energy around it had twisted up into a vortex. The hole was more than big enough to swallow me and the sound it made was like the baying of starving hounds.
Primal fear ripped through me at the sound. I did not want to be forced into that hungry void. I knew with bone-certainty that what went in never came out. I dug my feet into the grass and ducked, toppling Marsden over my back.
Something rustled and groaned, tipping out of a crypt with the cry of stone crumbling against stone. I glanced around and saw a pair of something tall and skeletal rushing toward me from the direction of the tiny stone building of St. Pancras Old Church.
Marsden pushed me again toward the sucking void of the old tree. “Bloody hell, they’re on to us. Got to. get rid. of. you.”
The white things, looking like undead famine survivors as they finally closed the gap between us, grabbed at Marsden and me. Marsden spun around, smashing his fists into the thing that had grabbed him.
“Gi’roff, y’soulless bastard!” he yelled.
The thing’s ribs collapsed where he struck it, but it kept on struggling, trying to throw him into the vortex. The other clutched me, keeping me away from the void.
I didn’t want its help, sure that whatever it was saving me for was worse than Marsden. I struggled with it, kicking it with the heels of my boots. I felt the brittle bones beneath its stretched white skin shatter and it fell against me, not letting go its grip on my arms.
I spun and stopped short and hard, the creature slingshotting off one arm to flail wildly at me, trying to reassert its hold. I ran toward the vortex, bashing at its remaining fingers until it lost its grip and fell away. I kicked it and it tumbled into the whirling hole in the Grey, vanishing with its empty mouth agape as if it would scream if it only could. The vacuum of magic tugged at me and I fought my arm free, feeling the edges of the thing bend and flex like rubber as they clung to me. I struggled and twisted my hand loose, feeling a tiny bit of the emptiness break away and spin off into another sucking black hole the size of a pinhead. But the original hole was no smaller. Instead it had grown ragged around the edges and seemed to be reaching for more substance to swallow. I had to crawl across the tombstones, digging in with my fingers and toes against the magical tide, to get out of its pull.
Once out of the maelstrom, I turned back toward Marsden, who was having a rougher time with his monster. He tore off its remaining hand and shoved it away, battering it to pieces with his cane until it fell to the ground in a pile of grave dust.
In the shriek of the vortex, even the chorus of the city was hard to hear, so I was sure Marsden wouldn’t hear me as I crept up and snatched his cane away again. Then I used it to poke him backward toward the hole as he’d done with me.
“What the hell were those things?” I demanded, watching him slip on the tiny hole and fight the edge of the Grey whirlpool’s grasp.
“Lych wights,” he panted. “Animated corpses.”
“What did they want?”
“How the bloody hell should I know?”
I poked him again and he stumbled a little, grabbing at a fence railing near the tree to keep himself from being sucked backward.
“They’re probably the advance guard!” he shouted over the scream of the vortex. “Now we’re out in the Grey, someone can feel us moving around. Whoever sent those Red Guard after you and the lad, most like. They’d have killed us both, no doubt.”
“I don’t think so,” I snapped. “They could have just let you push me in that thing and then tossed you in, too, but they attacked you. They only tried to hold on to me.”
“They must be working for the Pharaohn-ankh-astet, then. He’d want you alive—such as you are. I can’t believe it—the asetem working with the brotherhood. ”
“What are you talking about?” I screamed against the storm of noise at the vortex’s edge.
“Egyptian vampires,” Marsden panted. “The asetem are the commoners; the Pharaohn is the king—like the word ‘pharaoh,’ y’see? He’s the one what’s after you for his own. He’s the one what tormented your father till he killed himself. That’s why I have to get rid of you. So he can’t use you, like he’s been trying to use one of us for centuries.”
“You were going to kill me!”
“I can’t bloody well kill you, you stupid git! You have a limited number of deaths—it’s like a damned reset button for our sort.”
“What? You mean like a cat’s got nine lives? Are you insane?”
“It’s true! We bounce back from death—you’ve done it! For a while afterward, you’re malleable. If I killed you, they’d rush in and grab you in limbo and reshape you for whatever he’s got in mind! It’s only a few minutes but that’s all they need here—we’re in the middle of the biggest magical well in southern England and they’re looking for you. The moment your body was shut down, they’d be on you like jackals! I was just going to put you somewhere else for a while. Someplace safe.”
“Safe? Where does that. hole lead?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then you don’t know if I would have survived it!”
“I don’t care! I only care that they couldn’t have got at you. I don’t mean it’s safe for you! I mean safe for the rest of the world. You need to stay out of the Pharaohn’s clutches and you ain’t got a lot of choices, girl. I couldn’t do it on the Tube—there weren’t nowhere to put you. I had to get you here, to the tree. But you couldn’t just fall in. No! Now they’re looking for us again—for you.”
His hair whipped in the preternatural wind around the shrieking hole of the Hardy tree. His hands were locked on the protective fence around it like the claws of some dead white bird.
“My choices are not yours to make! Why doesn’t this Pharaohn come after you? You’re a Greywalker, too.”
“I’m damaged goods. He’s tried with me already and failed. He’s sent ghosts and monsters to kill me and shape me, but he made a mistake with me he can’t unmake. I’m at my limit. Next death’s for good and all.”
“What?”
“I told you: We got a limited number of deaths. It’s more than one, but it’s not infinite. I’m at my last.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do! You will, too. It’s like. gravity. You get close enough to final mortality and it grabs on. You can feel it holding you to the earth.”