Marsden stifled a scream as the hands passed through his face, dragging an illusion of gore and the memory of an eye with them. I plunged the knife into Norrin’s back, ripping downward along the nonexistent spine and feeling the mirage of human form rend into frayed wisps of fury and hate.
The shape that had been Norrin shrieked and whirled into a cloud of bloody smoke and the stink of slaughterhouses.
Only the roar of the phantom flames and the cries of the terrified prisoners remained. I flung away the cruel knife of Norrin’s energy and saw it unravel and settle back into the grid as glimmering strands of magic, but I could already see the edges of Norrin’s form knitting back into shape in the Grey world. We had half an hour at most to get the hell out of the House of Detention, and I had no idea how far we had to go.
Michael and I put our shoulders under Marsden’s arms and levered him up. His legs were wobbly and the white cane collapsed as he put weight on it.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Relyin’ on sprats and women. ”
“Shut up and say thank you,” I suggested as we lurched forward like a bad entry in a three-legged race.
Head hanging so we couldn’t see his face, Marsden mumbled an ungracious thanks.
Michael snorted, shaking a bit. “Let’s just get out of here. I’m really hating this place.”
We stumbled out the door, open only to us, through the crowd of trapped prisoners, and up into the memory of a courtyard filled with rushing jailers and shouting constables trying to douse the flames at one corner of the building with buckets of water. By the time we’d walked out the unguarded prison gate and around the corner, past phantom crowds and more bucket brigades, Marsden was able to support his own weight.
We stopped around the corner and Marsden leaned against the nearest wall. “Pray there’s no one out for a late walk,” he said. Then he pushed history aside and the world shifted with a grinding feel and a scream of friction.
Ordinary streetlights and city haze lit the urban night. No sign of flames as cars grumbled along Rosebery Avenue.
Michael threw up.
“There, boy. Y’lived through Norrin and the Fenian bombing,” Marsden mumbled, still unsteady on his feet and paler than normal—which is to say he nearly glowed in the dark.
“Eff you,” Michael gasped back, wiping his mouth on the un-tucked hem of his shirt. “I felt that thing cut me! And the place was on fire—I could smell smoke!”
“But y’couldn’t feel the heat, could ya?”
“No, but who cares? It was on fucking fire! I could see shadows running around like there were people in there running from the flames. And then that. thing cut me!”
“Did y’see him? Norrin? Did y’see that bloody monster?” Marsden asked, grinding his teeth into the words.
Michael hesitated, looking away, breathing too fast and sweating. “I. saw eyes. A shape. And I smelled something. rotting. And a flash like light off a knife blade. And. something. cut me,” he added, clutching his shoulder again.
“How is it?” I asked in as gentle a voice as I could muster with my own heart beating triple time.
Michael turned his face to mine, seeming grateful to look away from Marsden. “It hurts, but it’s not bleeding. Feels like it’s cut to the bone, though.”
“That’ll fade in a few days,” Marsden said, rubbing his hands over his face, “but I shan’t say it’ll be pleasant. Hurts like merry hell, it does.”
I glanced down at the blotched front of my shirt and jacket. The fabric wasn’t cut, but I could feel the stickiness of blood that stained my shirt from the inside. I wished I could go back to the hotel, take the longest shower in history, and fall into my expensive bed for the next twenty hours. My knees shook a little: a post-stress reaction to burning up more adrenaline than I normally expended in a month. I didn’t feel much better than Michael looked, but I didn’t have the luxury of puking.
“We have to get off the street. The vampires will still be looking for us,” I reminded them.
Michael straightened up, making a face at me. Then he glanced around the street and pointed to a bus stop nearby. “There’s a bus coming. We can take that and then change when we’re far away from here.”
CHAPTER 42
As we stood at the bus stop, rain began, just pattering down, but it helped to wash the filth and the stink of vampires off us. Michael chivvied us onto the first bus that came along Rosebery and made us change to another closer to the middle of town. We collapsed into our seats as if we’d been thrown.
The bus rambled the wrong way for a while until it turned near Marble Arch. Beside the arch stood a spectral three-sided gallows from which hundreds of hanged corpses swung in the night wind, their superimposed shades so thick they seemed like a moving blackness filled with bones.
“Tyburn Tree,” Marsden muttered, not raising his head.
From there the bus trundled up past Regent’s Park toward the canal where we’d left the boat.
“Bleedin’ lucky we was. The Pharaohn don’t know I’m with you or he wouldn’t have tried the same trick twice.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What trick?” I asked.
“Butcher Norrin. When he tried to shape me, the Pharaohn had me taken up on a thievin’ charge in Clerkenwell and put in the House of Detention where Norrin could get at me.”
“He trumped up a charge just to get you into the right prison?”
“He didn’t trump up nothin’. I stole the things as I was accused of. That I done it by his leave—that wasn’t allowed to come out. It was all done proper and quick, and I were put in the very block we walked through. I thought Norrin wouldn’t be there tonight when we passed through, as he’d not been down the pit when the Fenians bombed the building in 1867 to rescue their man. But someone caught his attention,” he added, turning a bit toward Michael, who cringed.
I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Alice must have had some way to wake him up or she couldn’t have been sure he’d come after me.”
Marsden snorted, but I could feel Michael loosen with relief.
“So. All of this, like what happened to my father, is just a replay of what the Pharaohn’s trying to do to me,” I said.
“Looks it.”
“We’ll have to break that pattern. He used Christelle against my father. Now he’s trying to use Will against me. We have to get Will back before. ”
I realized I’d already said too much when Michael frowned at me. “Before what?”
“Before they kill him,” Marsden supplied. “Be glad it’s not my decision, boy. I’d leave him to his chances. This softhearted fool means to save your brother even if it ruins her own chances of staying sane and whole. And it will. She’s worth ten of any normal fella.”
Michael growled under his breath. “Why did we save you? We should have left you there for him to. to. ”
“Rend to pieces? Drive mad? He’s had his chance to do both. My term at Clerkenwell’s when I thought I’d gone mad for certain—when I started seein’ butcher Norrin, when—” He faltered, his fingers curling over his gouged orbits, twitching. He took a long, shaking breath and went on. “I learned the trick of falling through the cracks of time there, and it saved my life, so it did. They tore it down in 1890 and I thought that was the end of bloody Norrin. He’s among the worst of the things that haunt that wretched place. He’s not even a proper ghost—he’s a wraith, a hollow remnant of an evil man filled with hate and a love of violence till he’s nearly solid with it. I’d hopes we could pass through without attracting anything’s attention so long as we went where there was so much confusion already. Should have known better. Things like Norrin don’t die. He’s not gone yet, I’d wager.”
“I saw him re-forming as we left,” I confirmed.
Marsden made a hacking sound. “Still, you did well, girl. That trick with the knife—wicked clever. How did you guess it could cut him?”