As we ran down the road toward the teeming bustle of Trafalgar Square, spikes of vampiric color darted from the buildings nearby and sped toward us: cat’s-paws and demi-vampires—the daylight assistants and slaves to things like Edward. And they were coming after us.
“Who are those guys?” Michael panted.
“Villains,” I shouted, grabbing his hand and pulling him along. I kept more than half my sight tuned to the Grey, looking for holes in their net and bolting through them, twisting through their perimeter. I hauled Michael along, not sure which way to turn as I saw another group of red flares go up among the crowds below Nelson’s Column, between the fountains in the open plaza of Trafalgar Square.
I spat a curse.
“What?”
“More. In the square, around the fountains,” I panted.
“How do you know?”
“I just do!”
“C’mon,” he yelled, jerking me sideways.
We paralleled the square and dodged through a tribe of red buses, bumping through tourists to cross the next street, jinking into a wide alley and across another open courtyard. Steps. We leapt down them and flew across another wide avenue with a huge building—a columned horseshoe of white marble—on our left and another open space ahead.
“Where are we going?” I shouted.
“Horse Guards. St. James’s Park.”
“Parks aren’t good! Too open!”
“Crowds, museums on the other side. Westminster Abbey, the Tube, the bridges, lots of ways out. ”
I followed Michael’s lead and we sprinted down into Horse Guards Parade, an open, paved area between the road and another big white building on the left with some kind of soldiers’ memorial and the ponds of St. James’s Park on the right.
A large group of ghostly horsemen cantered along the road in an orderly square while a milling crowd of tourists wandered obliviously around the green. We cut across the park, through the thick stands of trees along the southern edge. Our pursuers were falling behind. But the ghosts among the trees turned to follow us with their eyes, and those that had any will at all screamed as we passed. The vampire minions shifted to follow the sound.
“They’re still coming!” I yelled, running across a bridge over a swan-dotted pond with Michael now in tow.
“Who? How?”
We dashed off the bridge, and Michael started left as I started right. The ghosts turned toward him and shouted.
I grabbed him and hauled him toward the gurgling song of the Thames. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel its rolling presence in the Grey.
“It’s you,” I panted. “They’re tracking you. You have something. on you. ”
“I’ve got nothing!”
“Keys, pocket change, bus tokens! Anything Will gave you in the past week!”
We dove out of the park, crossing a road with wide sidewalks and into a narrow defile of stairs.
“St. James’s Tube!” Michael shouted, pointing diagonally right through the buildings beside us.
We stumbled out of the stairs and down a street. I yanked Michael to a stop near a statue of Queen Anne at the intersection, our trackers momentarily behind and blinded by the buildings.
“Empty your pockets.”
Wide eyed, winded, Michael turned the pockets of his jeans inside out, letting everything fall to the pavement. In the pile was a gleaming rectangle of blue and white plastic. I kicked it with my toe.
“Get the rest. Leave that.”
“But—”
“Now!”
He snatched the keys, his wallet, and change from the ground and shoved them back in his pockets, staring at me as if I’d just confirmed I was totally insane.
“C’mon!” I ordered, pulling him around the corner and into the nearest doorway. I pressed him back and we both peered out.
The local spirits stared toward the lonely bit of plastic and screeched as if in pain. A pair of red-crowned men ran down into the intersection and stopped below Anne’s statue, stymied, looking around until one of them spotted the thing on the pavement. I would have sworn the statue glowered at him, though it didn’t move an inch.
“Bloody hell!” he yelled.
The other one had kept on scanning the area, and he spotted our peeking faces. We were much too close—I should have pulled back farther.
“There!” he shouted, pointing.
I jerked Michael out of the doorway and plunged into the street, dodging people and cars to cross the road. We ran into the first street and down the block. Then I tugged him around the corner back toward the intersection we’d just left the tracking device on.
CHAPTER 27
"We’re going the wrong way!” Michael objected. “The Tube’s to the right!”
“Hush!” I snapped.
I dragged him up a street, slowing the pace a little as a stream of red flares came toward us, and then turned away into the road we’d been last spotted on. I pulled Michael across the way and through a break between two buildings that left us in an alley lined with parked cars. I let our pace drop to a trot.
“What the hell.?” Michael panted, jogging beside me.
“They can’t track us now, so they’ll head for the Underground station—it must be obvious that’s where we were going. We’ll find another while we still have the lead. They’ll spread out soon and come looking, so we have. maybe ten minutes to get to something else,” I explained.
“We can get a bus at Westminster Abbey,” he suggested. “That’ll take us to a Tube, one direction or another.”
“Good. What was that thing?”
“That you made me leave on the street? My Oyster card—thanks a lot!”
“What’s an Oyster card?”
“Transit card—like a MetroPass in Seattle. Bus, Tube, whatever.”
I nodded and conserved my breath as we jogged on. I let Michael lead while I kept an eye out for random vampire minions who might get smart enough to head for the same place we were. I had to pull Michael aside twice to let some pass us.
“I still don’t know how you can spot them,” he whispered.
“Good eyes.”
We caught a bus on Victoria Street that eventually dropped us at Victoria Station. The place was massive, made of stone and iron, and the last stragglers of rush hour going out were meeting the crowds coming into town for the weekend. There were plenty of ghosts, but none of them turned and shrieked in alarm at us, and the only magical things I saw were slinking by quietly, neither wanting attention nor paying any to us.
I called a halt long enough to get some fast food and to clean up from our flight before we carried on.
We both slumped over cups of tea and Cornish pasties by the long-distance train platforms.
“So. I mean. what the hell?” Michael asked, staring at his food. “I don’t know what just happened. Can I go home now?”
“I think that might be a bad idea,” I replied. “They know you know something’s wrong and they’ll come looking for you—if they aren’t waiting at the flat right now.”
“Why would they do that? They aren’t after me!” he added, glaring at me.
I gave him back a hard look. “Because you’re the guy who thinks I’m a psycho ex who just murdered your brother—that’s why. And they can use that, like they used Will. I don’t leave friends behind. I won’t leave you with them any more than I’m going to leave Will with them. I think they know that.”
Michael bowed his head again, his shaggy hair hiding his face. His shoulders heaved and I wasn’t sure if he was just breathing heavily, trying to control a fit of temper or nerves, or if he was crying. After what we had just been through, he was entitled to either. I left him to it, rooting about in my pockets for the object I’d snatched from the golem.