Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“Well, actually no, not a constable,” Twil said, her throat bobbing with an uncomfortable swallow. “If she was a regular old bobby she’d be in uniform, right?”

I stared at her, lost for words, and also just plain lost in incredulous disbelief. “Twil, what does that mean? Lozzie said police woman, quite clearly,” I pointed at Lozzie, who dutifully nodded. “Did I imagine that? Am I hallucinating from stress? Please, please tell me that woman in there is a cultist, or at least a random member of the public. Please.”

“Uh, no. Kim, what did she say, at the door?”

I turned to Kimberly – she cringed away at the look on my face, but for once I couldn’t soften my expression. “ … well?”

“She … she introduced herself as ‘detective sergeant’,” Kimberly all but squeaked, her voice still raw from Zheng’s hand squeezing her throat earlier.

For a moment I refused to believe my ears, staring, blinking, but not seeing. Kimberly bit her lip and lowered her head as I glanced between her and Twil. “ … and did she volunteer this information before, or after you decided to tie her up?”

Twil pulled a teeth-gritting grimace, ducking her head and hunching her shoulders like a flinching hound; pained, sheepish, embarrassed, and mortified all at once. Normally I found her mannerisms endearing, almost kind of sweet; in her best moments I very much understood what Evelyn saw in Twil, but right now I felt myself ready to explode in her face. I bit my lips to control myself.

“Before!” Lozzie chirped with a smile. “I was listening in.”

“It’s not like we had a choice.” Twil spread her hands. “Our scrub job around the door is pretty bad, and hell, it stinks of blood, right? Even you lot can smell it, can’t you? It reeks in here.”

“A little,” I managed.

“Rancid,” Zheng grunted.

“She was asking questions about ‘the noise’ last night, but then also about who owns the house and all this other shit. I couldn’t keep up with it, I’ve never had to deal with coppers before. Then she tried to walk into the kitchen, and there’s fucking bodies in there, Heather. She saw them, and she … well, she didn’t freak out, not until I had to hold her down.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. “Assault as well. Wonderful.”

“I had to!”

“She talked really fast, but it was all surface, no depth,” Lozzie added, almost to herself. “She was really good at talking. I didn’t like her, she wasn’t genuine.”

“At least she’s by herself,” Kimberly said.

“And that makes it better how, exactly?” I snapped at her. I didn’t mean to, and she didn’t deserve that. Kimberly flinched, her hands jerking up to shield herself from my anger. Zheng let out an approving chuckle. I hissed a tut at myself through my teeth, but I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to care right now, let alone apologise.

“That’s why I didn’t answer the door right away when you knocked,” Twil said. “Thought it might be another one. Or, you know, a follow up.”

“Twil. Twil, you are absolutely sure she’s what she says she is? You’re certain?”

“Uh, yeah. Here,” she pulled a compact card wallet from one of her coat pockets and held it up, black leather with a Sharrowford Police crest on the front. “Her badge is real. Warrant card? Whatever you call it.”

I let out a shaking breath. “Great. Great.”

“I’m really sorry, I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault,” Kimberly whined.

“Nah, it’s fine, fuck, I should have run her off somehow,” Twil said. “I dunno what the hell to do with her, she’ll call the police. Uh, I mean, she is the police, but like the rest of the police. You know what I mean.”

“ACAB!” Lozzie half-laughed.

“I don’t like police either,” Kimberly said. “But we can’t do this. We can’t. We’re going to get in so much trouble.”

“We’re already in-”

“Please, just show her we’re-”

“I could take her Out! Show her- oh no, wait-”

“Police meat tastes as good as any other, shaman. Ten minutes alone, then burn the clothing-”

I tuned them out, the growing argument between Twil and Kimberly, Lozzie’s inappropriate laughter and Zheng’s disgusting suggestions. A high-pitched ringing sound echoed in my ears. My breath tightened in my chest. A tremor took my hands.

A panic attack lurked on the edge of my consciousness.

“Heather?”

No Raine would catch me if I fell. No time for warm tender recovery and a cup of tea. Yes, I was surrounded by friends and allies – yes, more than one of them carrying their own flavour of risk, but friends and allies all the same – but without Raine, and teetering on the edge of an abyss.

If the police got involved, it was all over.

Obstruction by the normal, sane world of human activity and institutions, day jobs and the scientific method, would destroy any hope we had. Evelyn did not need a hospital, she needed a mage. Raine didn’t need a missing persons report, she needed me.

“Heatheeer? Woo?” Lozzie waved a hand in front of my face. I met her eyes but didn’t really make contact. She squeezed my shoulders in a hug, gentle and careful with my bruised stomach. My own arms responded on automatic until she let go again and she turned away to reply to something from Twil, as the argument spiralled onward.

The police were already involved. It was too late.

The police detective bound at wrist and ankle in the disused sitting room, gagged with an old tea-towel from our kitchen – I struggled to hold onto the important fact that she was a person, the fleeting impression of a few scraps of pinned-back blonde hair, a dark suit, piercing eyes. A person, a human being, like me.

But she was also the first exploratory feeler of a bureaucratic leviathan every bit as inhuman as anything from Outside.

What do I do? Imitate Raine? She’d know what to do, with her confidence and her lightning-fast plans, her voice never leaving room for doubt, always pulling me back up to my feet when I felt lost. I wasn’t Raine, I couldn’t be like her. I couldn’t even be like Evelyn. I was me, little Heather, and what could I do?

Ah.

The dark glimmering of a solution presented itself, like a poisonous flower unfolding in the back of my mind.

“No, absolutely not,” I murmured.

But I would do anything to save Raine. All the problems in the way must be excised. Which meant I had to work hard now, to avoid becoming a monster by the time I saw her again.

Panic fell away, replaced with a cold, shaking focus like a icicle grown inside my chest. I shed the filthy blanket from my shoulders, straightened up, and filled my lungs.

“Everyone shut up! Stop talking,” I yelled, then added, almost as an afterthought, “please.”

It worked. Four pairs of eyes – flinching, surprised, amused, and hurt in turn – all looked at me as I took another breath and gathered my thoughts.

“ … Heather?” Twil ventured. I raised a finger and made a face.

“That means stay quiet,” Zheng rumbled for me. “The shaman is thinking.”

“It goes for you too,” I hissed at her, then turned to Lozzie, “I’m sorry Lozzie, it’s fine. I love you, I’m not angry with you.”

Lozzie nodded and blinked, biting her bottom lip, like a child caught in adults’ crossfire.

I filed away that ‘I love you’ for later, a burst of truth in the heat of the moment; I did love Lozzie, like a little sister I’d never had, but this wasn’t the time to think about the million questions I had for her. This was the time for practical solutions.

“How long?” I said, my voice quiet but my tone steady, not through effort of will but sheer necessity. “How long’s the police detective been tied up in there?”

“Uh.” Twil’s eyes went up and left, thinking. “’Bout an hour, bit more?”

“And you did confiscate her mobile phone, any pocketknives, and, I don’t know, pagers? Bent paper clips? Lipstick?” I waved my raised finger at Twil when she frowned with incredulity. “No, I know what you’re going to say, and no. Assume for a moment that we’re dealing with a master detective, the protagonist of her own bloody television program. Is there any way she can escape?”

“I don’t think so. I emptied her pockets, and she’s tied up with gardening wire. I couldn’t find anything else so I, you know, used my elbow grease, bent it round.” Twil rummaged in her jacket pockets again and produced an expensive-looking smart-phone. “This was hers.”

“Is it switched off?”

“Uh … ”

“Switch it off, then wipe your fingerprints off it,” I said. “Are there any other problems I don’t know about? No more surprises, from any of you. If you tell me now, you have amnesty from being shouted at later.”

“Stack knocked on the door round about dawn,” Twil said – to her credit, without hesitation.

I stared at her for a second, not certain if I believed my ears. “ … Amy Stack? The ex-cult assassin Amy Stack?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. The bald bitch.”

“Right. Okay. What … what did she want? Did you take her head off, by any chance? Please, that would be wonderful.”

“Nah.” Twil shrugged. “I mean, I would have, but by the time I got to the door she’d backed up all the way to the garden gate, like she knew it was risky. She wanted to talk, I think, but I chased her off, and she had a car parked nearby, so … ” Twil pulled another guilty grimace. “I didn’t want to leave Evelyn alone here, ‘case it was a trap.”

“Good. Good thinking,” I forced myself to say, to compliment Twil, to keep her head above water. “It’s a pity you didn’t get her, but you did the right thing. Thank you, Twil.”

Of course she didn’t give chase, not after the object lesson of last night, after she left the house. Twil must be feeling terrible guilt, feeling responsible.

“I’ve … ” Kimberly started, then stopped and looked down when I paid attention to her. “It doesn’t matter, but I was supposed to be at work four hours ago. Probably lost my job for real this time. Like I said, it doesn’t really matter, compared to … everything else.”

“It does matter,” I managed. “I’m sorry, Kim. We’ll do something about that. Just, not right now.”

Lozzie raised her hand up high, elbow straight.

“Yes, Lozzie?”

“I put Tenny into her cocoon.”

“ … you … what?”

“That’s what you called her, right? It’s a real cute name! With the tentacles and the black goo? When I made her she was supposed to pupate on her own after she’d grown up a bit, but she didn’t and I don’t know why, but I found her out in your garden this morning and just gave her a little nudge along, and poof! She’s up in the tree in the garden, she’ll be fine, it’s not really a problem but I thought I better tell you in case you wonder where she is. Or if you look out there. It’s kinda cute!”

Lozzie smiled a very Lozzie smile.

“Yeah,” Twil said, looking askance at her. “She just ran out there and waved her arms in the air for a bit.”

“ … okay, I’ll … thank you,” I said. “We’ll … later.”

Clink agreed Praem, from where Twil had left her bottle on the floor.

Cocoon? Pupate? Was Tenny going to turn into a pneuma-somatic butterfly with a twenty-foot wingspan? I put that firmly to one side for now. Bizarre, but not a crisis. Not yet, at least.

“Alright, my turn,” I said. “The cult isn’t dead, obviously, Alexander Lilburne did some last—ditch deal, and he’s dead but now they’re worshipping the Eye. None of you really know what that means-”

“I do!” Lozzie raised her hand.

“Yes, except Lozzie, because she saved me from it this morning. The fake version of her is dead, by the way, she killed it.”

“Wham bam,” Lozzie whispered. Zheng cocked an interested eyebrow.

“And Glasswick tower looks like the inside of an intestine because it thinks it’s Alexander’s body. According to Zheng here.” I gestured politely over my shoulder.

“Cool,” Twil grunted, eyeing the zombie again.

“And here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “First, Kimberly.”

“M-me?”

“Yes, you. You’ve been trying to wake Evelyn but it’s not working, is that correct?”

“I- yes. I’m sorry. I only know the things I was taught. I-if I had time with her books, maybe-”

“See that bottle? That’s Praem, the cultists tore her out of her body, which is also right next to you.”

Clink, went Praem.

Kimberly’s eyes went wide and she turned her head slowly, as if expecting to see an actual corpse lying next to her, then froze for a second at the sight of the twisted wooden mannequin laid out on the boxes.

“You used to put Outsiders into bodies for the Sharrowford Cult,” I said. “Can you still do it?”

“I-I- in theory.” She frowned, swallowed, looking very uncertain. “I’m not sure, I-”

“Can you put Praem back into her body for me? Without, I don’t know, losing her somehow?”

Kimberly stared at the bottle for a second, her brow creasing in a frown that turned from confused to thoughtful and then much darker. She chewed on her lip. “Maybe. I’m not sure. We used … you know what we used, not wood.” She cringed, voice shaking a little on that last word. “Heather, I- I don’t know … I can’t … I don’t know if I can face doing that again.”

Behind me, Zheng rumbled, purring like a disturbed tiger.

“Please try.” I pulled out the big guns, a real Raine-ism. “Kim, you’re the only one of us who can do this, none of us know how this works and Evelyn is in a coma. We need all the protection we can get right now, and that includes Praem.”

Kimberly’s eyes went downward, a hollow space revealed behind them, and for a moment I thought she was going to break, but then she nodded, once, twice, a third time more firm. “Alright,” she whispered.

“Good. Take the bottle into the workshop. Keep it off the floor though, Praem needs all the comfort she can get.”

Kimberly gathered the bottle up in her arms, frowning down at the wisp of oily smoke inside.

I turned to Zheng. “Do you need to … rest?”

“Hmmmm?” Zheng rumbled.

“We walked for three hours, Zheng. I’m ready to collapse. Are you?”

She shrugged, but it meant no. It meant don’t be so stupid, you weak little monkey, I could walk for thirty hours if I so wished.

“Good then. Would you please carry Praem’s bones for Kimberly? Lay them on the sofa in the workshop, it’s the room to the left of the kitchen.”

To Kimberly’s credit she moved pretty sharpish once she realised she was about to have Zheng bringing up her rear. She scurried through into the kitchen as if the hounds of hell were on her heels, but she needn’t have bothered. Zheng didn’t move and stared at me instead, an eyebrow raised, darkly amused.

“Shaman.”

“You don’t have to help, but if you’re not going to, then keep out of the way. Go raid the fridge or something, but don’t you dare slow me down.”

Zheng broke into a big shark-toothed grin, dangerous and approving, the first since I’d peeled her fist out of Kimberly’s mouth. She bristled with implied challenge for a moment, then strode past me, scooped up Praem’s wooden bones, and followed Kimberly.

“And don’t threaten her again!” I called. “And come back here, I need you for something else as well! Now, Twil.”

“Yeah?” Twil blinked at me, a bit lost in all this sudden decisiveness.

“Just before she got taken, Raine was using her mobile phone. Is it still here?”

“Oh, yeah actually.” Twil nodded. My knees went weak with relief but I tried not to show it. The moment I let myself feel normal, I knew I was going to collapse. I had to keep moving forward. Don’t stop. “Her phone was on the floor. I think I put it in the kitchen?”

“Good, I’m going to need that. But first, you’re going out into the street to find that detective’s car.”

Twil’s eyes went wide. “Oh, shi-”

“Yes, exactly. She’s a plainclothes detective so the car will be unmarked, which means you’re the only one who can identify it.” I tapped my nose. “Can you sniff it out?”

“Yeah, shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Cover Barnslow Drive and every street within a five-ten minute walk. Find that car, but don’t touch it. I’ll have to deal with it myself if-” I bit down. If the worst comes to the worst. “Find the car.”

“Right, got you, no problem.” She nodded and gave me a thumbs up, trying to be reassuring, then jerked her head at the closed door to the disused sitting room. “What we gonna do about her then? What’s the plan?”

“What is the plan indeed,” I sighed. “That’s the question.”

“Eh?”

“I’m getting there. Believe it or not, other things have more pressing time limits. The police officer you assaulted and kidnapped is not the top priority here.”

“She’s … not?” Twil blinked at me.

“She’ll keep.”

“I … guess … she will?”

Zheng appeared through the kitchen doorway again, ducking her gigantic frame with one hand on top of the door, thankfully free of any fresh blood. “Zheng, you’re going to watch our captive.”

She straightened up. “Sounds familiar.”

“Please. Go in there, watch her, make sure she’s not escaping or cutting her bonds or something, but for the love of God, please do not make things worse for me by eating bits of her.”

“Uhhhhhhh,” Twil let out a noise like a printer error. “Heather, are you sure?”

“Zheng is the only one I can spare right now, but more importantly she’s by far the most intimidating thing within a hundred miles. That is a message we need to send.”

“Flattery gets you everywhere, shaman.” Zheng purred in approval, like a tiger getting belly scratches.

As the towering zombie strode toward the old sitting room door and opened it on the shadowed interior, an evil voice whispered to me from the darkness in the rear of my skull. If Zheng did eat the detective, the decision would not be mine to make, my hands would clean. Had my subconscious chosen Zheng for this, to shield me from consequence? Zheng pushed the door wide, and I caught a glimpse of the detective’s trouser legs, slender ankles tied with green gardening wire.

“Zheng.”

“Shaman?” Zheng turned before going inside, one hand on the lintel as she ducked.

“I mean it. Don’t eat her.”

The detective made a muffled cough of surprise through the makeshift gag. Couldn’t blame her, really.

Zheng paused for a moment too long, those dark eyes boring into mine with all the slow perception of a jungle cat. Could demons read minds? In the past I’d often gotten the sense that Praem understood more than she let on. Zheng nodded slowly, straightened up inside the room, and closed the door behind her.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to regain the sense of fleeting clarity I’d had moments before.

All this confident order-giving was an act. Fake it until you make it, pretend to know what you’re doing, and convince everyone else to believe. Ignore my racing heart and sweaty palms and churning guts. Doubt would crush me in an instant if I let it in.

I bet Raine didn’t feel like this all the time. I couldn’t fill these boots.

“Heather?” Twil said.

“Yes, I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine.”

“I don’t think you are,” Lozzie said in a small voice. I made myself smile for her.

“And you. Lozzie, you … ” I said – and almost choked up. Lozzie, with her healthy face and silly-cute rabbit poncho, almost broke me. The truth slipped out, or as much of it as I could bear right now. “Promise me you won’t leave again. Not before we have a chance to actually sit down and talk, properly. Please. I can’t deal with it if you vanish again. I’ll go to pieces.”

Lozzie did a double-blink, very theatrical, and pulled a sort of teasing smile with her eyes rolled upward. “Promise-promise.”

“Good. Twil, get moving. Lozzie, help me up the stairs and into the bathroom. I think I can spare five minutes to wipe my face and sit on the toilet.”

==

“Are you sure about this?” Twil asked.

“Sure? No, I’m sure of exceptionally little right now. Moreso than usual.” I sighed down at Raine’s mobile phone in my hands, at the contact listed as ‘Fliss – land line only’.

Raine had typed those words, along with every other contact in her list. Random shops in Sharrowford, takeaway joints we’d eaten from, Evelyn, Twil, a mechanic’s shop on the other side of the city, the university dentist, the student union bar, a number labelled ‘not home’, another with the name of one of her exes – all things I’d scrolled past while clenching my heart, to find the mysterious Felicity.

“Then it’s a risk, right?” Twil said. “Last thing we need is more risks, come on.”

“Everything’s a risk. Leaving her like this is a risk.” I nodded at Evelyn, unconscious on her bed.

“Living’s a risk,” Lozzie said, nodding sagely.

“True that,” Twil murmured.

Evelyn looked as if she was asleep, her face a little waxy as she suffered through troubled dreams behind unquiet eyelids. Her breathing came steady and slow, but she wouldn’t wake up.

In a touching gesture that I refrained from commenting on, Twil had not merely carried Evelyn up to her bedroom and laid her out. She’d cleared a space on Evelyn’s plushly overstuffed bed, and tucked Evee under two layers of warm blankets. She’d wiped Evee’s face and placed her prosthetic leg nearby, perhaps on the optimistic off-chance that Evelyn would wake when none of us were there to watch over her.

We were invaders in this haven of comfort, watched by Evelyn’s jury of plush animals and the judgemental faces of her anime figurines. Twil perched on the bed with her furrowed concern, Lozzie lounged against the far wall biting her lip, and I sat in the desk chair, in all my rotten glory.

Twil had followed the detective’s scent right to her car – an old BMW parked two streets away – and in the ten minutes she’d taken doing that, I’d managed to clean myself up enough to feel approximately human. Lozzie had helped me hobble upstairs to the bathroom, where I’d gulped down pints of cold water, wiped the worst of the dried blood from my face, and ran my bleeding foot under the hot tap in the bathtub, wincing as I’d scrubbed it clean to ward off infection.

I’d replaced my stinking pajamas with Raine’s dirty clothes instead, an oversized black band tshirt and plaid pajama bottoms, plucked from the floor of our bedroom. Wrapped myself in her scent like a suit of armour. Socks too, over the hastily applied bandage around my savaged sole.

Between the blood and the fear-sweat and the Wonderland ash, I probably reeked like an abattoir fire, but I didn’t care right now.

Evelyn was on a time limit, one perhaps more pressing than Raine’s. None of us had any medical training, any knowledge about what to do with a person in a coma. If she stayed like this for much longer she’d need an IV drip for hydration, she’d need to be turned to prevent bedsores, and I could only imagine what being bed-bound would do to the already acute pain problems in her back and hips. We had to wake her, fast.

“We need a mage,” I said, and realised I was trying to convince myself.

“We’ve got Kim,” Twil said from the corner of her mouth.

“A real one. Apologies to those absent.”

“Yeah, I know, okay? Kim’s tried stuff, nothing works. Who the hell is this Felicity woman, anyway?”

“I don’t rightly know. Back before Christmas, we were trying to figure out where Tenny came from – that’s the spirit that’s been following me around. Turned out Lozzie sent it,” I nodded toward the culprit, who lit up with a little satisfied smile. “But before we knew that, Evelyn called around people she used to know, from her childhood, or teenage years, I think. Mages. One of them was Felicity. It was a … weird phone call.”

I suppressed a shudder at the memory of that strange voice which had answered first, that whisper of sulphur across the humming phone lines, but I didn’t mention it out loud.

“Scary?” Lozzie said, all the same. “Was she scary?”

“Not really,” I lied.

“I don’t give a shit about scary, can we trust her?” Twil asked.

“Evelyn had some choice words for her,” I admitted. “I got the impression she didn’t like Felicity very much, but Raine seemed to think it would be safe to ask her for help. Safe for Evee, I mean. I trust Raine’s judgement, often more than I trust my own.”

My thumb hesitated over the call button. There was still time to turn back, to admit we did have another option, one I’d already thought of last night. Last night, with Raine still at my side.

Hyperdimensional mathematics could wake Evelyn. Hyperdimensional mathematics could do anything. In theory.

But I could also fail, and pass out, for hours on end. I knew I was fragile right now, I felt it in my bones and the hollow in my chest, the floaty sensation in my skin, like it was too big for me. Any use of brainmath might put me over the edge – and I had no other way to find Raine. I had one shot at that, and spending it on Evelyn might cost me everything.

Silently, in the guilt-wracked privacy of my own mind, I apologised to her. I told her I cared, as much as I did for Raine.

But I still made the choice.

I pressed the call button and put the phone to my ear, listening to it ring. Twil shifted to the end of the bed and leaned in close. Lozzie tilted her head, only half-interested, her eyes elsewhere.

The phone rang and rang and rang. Echoes in the darkness. On and on, my heart tightening in my chest, hoping I got Felicity first and not that other voice.

Click.

A moment of silence stretched out, as if the line had connected to an abyss, a marine trench of lightless pressure.

Something inhaled as if waking up.

“Tannerbaum house,” a woman’s voice answered in a clumsy half-mumble.

“Hello, good morning. Is this … ” I stumbled. I’d only ever heard Felicity once before, her voice on speaker-phone and fighting against Evelyn’s contempt. “Am I … we don’t … we don’t know each other, but am I speaking to Felicity? I’m sorry, it’s rude of me, but I don’t know your surname.”

“Yes? Yes, this is Felicity speaking,” came the hesitant half-mumble once more. “Nobody … nobody uses this number. Who are you?”

“My name is Heather. Heather Morell. I’m not a mage but I’m in the know, and I’m a friend of Evelyn Saye.”

“Oh.”

So much in that little sound. Deadened surprise. Old pain, the kind of ache that never really heals. Loss, of a sort I knew. Felicity, whoever she was, had reacted to Evelyn’s name with an echo of how I might react to Maisie’s.

“Hello? Miss? … Heather? Hello?” Felicity asked into my shocked pause.

Twil caught my eyes, boggling at why I wasn’t answering. I wet my lips and gathered myself.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m Evee’s friend, maybe her best friend. Listen, she’s been hurt, magically, and I’m led to understand that you might be able to help. Might be willing.”

“Evee’s been hurt? How? What happened?” Felicity asked, her voice urgent but still blurred by the mumble, as if she couldn’t open her mouth properly. I’d assumed the phone call had woken her, but now I wondered at some other, darker cause. “Where’s Raine, why isn’t she calling me instead?”

“Raine is indisposed at the moment.”

“Who- no, who are you? This is a trick. Who are you?”

“I’m Raine’s girlfriend, alright?” I snapped at her. “I’m not trying to con you. Evelyn’s in a coma, and she won’t wake up. The cause is too complex to explain. Magic. Can you help, or not?”

A long pause, a thinking pause, during which Felicity swallowed then burped gently. “I’m sorry. I have … I have to be paranoid.”

“Yes,” I sighed. “I’m familiar with the mage lifestyle.”

“Of course I can help Evee, I’d do anything for her,” Felicity said. I heard her stand up on the other side of the phone, and caught a hint of falling rain on thin windowpanes. A scuffle of paper and pens, the scrape of a chair on a stone floor. “But … well … do you know … I don’t know where she lives now. I don’t think she wants me to. Which is … I’ll need an address.”

“Sharrowford. Do you know the city?”

“I’ve never been there, but it’s a few hours drive at most, if I leave now. Which I will … Heather? Hello?”

“Before I give you the address, there’s something else first.”

“ … yes?”

“Evelyn, when she called you a few months ago, she described you to me as a ‘sociopathic pederast demonophile’.”

Twil’s eyebrows well near left her forehead. She gaped at me. Lozzie put her hand over her scandalised smirk.

“ … oh,” Felicity said. Hollow, hurt, old pain.

“I don’t care what you are,” I said. Twil was mouthing an outraged ‘What?!’ at me, but I carried on. “I’m just letting you know that I don’t entirely trust you. I want my friend to be safe and well again, and I don’t care what you are or what you did in the past, as long as you’re coming here to help Evee. Raine seemed to think you’re okay. If you’re not-”

A sigh on the other end of the phone. “None of those things are true.”

“If you’re not,” I repeated. “If you’re a threat, I’ll get rid of you. I’ve killed mages before.”

“ … what? I thought you said you were-”

“I’m not a mage, no. I’m much worse. And I have to be paranoid too, for Evee as well.”

A swallow from the other end of the phone. “I understand. I suppose I deserved that, didn’t I?”

“She’s told me nothing about you, Felicity. I don’t know who you are.”

A sad puff of laughter. “Doing what I never could, huh? Standing up to something like me. She’s lucky to have you, Heather.”

“I hope so. Here.” I gave her the full address for number 12 Barnslow Drive, postcode and all, and heard her scratching to write it down as I rattled it off.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can, look for me in three or four hours, I think. I drive an old range rover, so don’t blow it up when I get there, or whatever it is you do.”

“I won’t. Thank you. Please be fast.”

“Try my best.”

The moment she hung up I let out a huge breath and started shaking all over, hiccuped twice and felt bile threaten to escape my throat. Fake confidence shed from me all at once like melted skin. I sniffed hard and hugged myself, dropping the phone onto Evee’s little laptop desk with a clatter. Lozzie was suddenly on me, squeezing me hard.

“Ah, ow, ow, bruises,” I said, and she eased off just enough. I hiccuped again.

“Bloody hell, Heather,” Twil said. “Where’d you get all that from?”

“I can be kind of scary, when I want,” I managed, resisting the urge to curl up and hide.

“Yeah. Nice. Good job, yeah.” She nodded along, believing we were going to be alright. I’d made her believe.

“You’re not scary, durr,” Lozzie said. “You’re Heather.”

“I still don’t like the sound of that woman,” Twil said. “If she smells wrong, she’s not going anywhere near Evee. And she’s definitely not being alone with her.”

I nodded in mute agreement, no emotional energy left for argument. “That’s one down.”

“One?”

“One of many problems.”

“And a bitch ain’t one,” Lozzie said in a sing-song voice. Despite the situation, despite herself, despite everything, Twil burst out laughing. Lozzie laughed back and they descended into a moment of shared giggle fit as I stared on in bewilderment.

“ … I’m sorry, what?”

“It’s a rap song,” Twil said, sniffing to control herself. “I got ninety-nine problems but a bitch ain’t one? Kinda famous? Come on, Heather, you must know that one.”

I shook my head. “No, actually. Sorry.”

Twil shrugged. “Right you are then, boss girl. What’s next?” Twil hopped up from the bed, cast one last glance back at Evelyn’s sleeping form, and looked to me – looked to me for directions. For orders. For confidence.

“Boss girl needs to eat,” Lozzie said.

I held myself back from the answer I wanted to give. Next should be Raine, the great unknown. To whom anything could be happening. But that wasn’t sensible, that wasn’t smart, I couldn’t burn myself out before we were ready, before we were safe, before my effort might mean success.

I drew myself up and clenched down on the shaking. Time enough for that later.

“Next we deal with the old bill.”

==

The officer’s name was Nicole Webb, and she lived up admirably to my mental image of a lady police detective.

Short and compact, hair up in a tight blonde bun, in her mid-to-late-thirties but trim from half-marathons, martial arts, and a sensible diet. No jewelry, and minimal makeup on a tightly alert face. Her legs were drawn up as best she could with her ankles bound, the gardening wire biting into the fabric of her suit trousers, her back against the sofa’s footrest. Intelligent, watchful eyes looked up at me the moment I opened the door on the shadowed room.

She was angry and scared, projecting the anger to hide the fear. Hiding it well, yes, but I was somewhat of an expert on fear. Not surprising, after an hour alone in a room with Zheng.

We’d gotten her name from her police badge, which I now held before me like a talisman, the key to her mind.

“Shaman,” Zheng rumbled at me, arms crossed, radiating boredom. “Is there meat in your fridge?”

“Uh, yes, Zheng, I think there’s some chicken,” I replied without taking my eyes off the detective. “I’m sorry for making you stand here all this time.”

“You don’t make me do anything,” Zheng grunted, and ducked through the door, stomping off toward the kitchen before I had a chance to stop her. Twil and Lozzie both hopped out of her path, then gathered at the door again.

“Would hardly be fair for me to sit in a chair,” I said, and gently levered myself down to the floor. I got halfway there before I remembered my stomach, and rather spoilt the effect as I winced and straightened back up, then had to awkwardly sit down with far too much use of my hands. “Ahh, ow. Ow, okay. Okay, sitting. There we are, here on the same level.”

The detective and I stared at each other, until finally her eyes left me and took in Twil and Lozzie hovering in the doorway. The anger in her eyes melted away, replaced with a tentative curious frown. She’d probably been expecting a man to come in here and shoot her twice in the back of the head, but instead she got a dishevelled college student and two teenage girls. Her frown went through a most interesting transformation; she didn’t know how to play this situation. She didn’t know what we were.

Her brow was sticky with dried sweat. Another sigh escaped me.

“Um … Twil? Can you get this gag out of her mouth? Why is she gagged, anyway? Why was that necessary?”

“So she couldn’t scream for help? Seemed pretty obvious to me,” Twil ventured, then grimaced when I gave her an unimpressed glare. She crossed the room and undid the knotted tea-towel serving as a gag, and revealed the rest of Nicole’s face: a small, neat mouth and a very mobile jaw, which Nicole instantly worked up and down to relieve the stiffness.

She watched me, and watched Twil, and even watched Lozzie still lurking in the doorway, as she wet her lips and took several deep breaths. Finally, she seemed to settle on me.

“Alright, I’ll go first then,” she said. “You obviously want to talk to me, or you wouldn’t have removed that gag. What do you wanna talk about?”

My heart hammered in my chest. Why was this, of all things, so nerve-wracking? I’d faced down a flesh-eating monster this morning, and almost been eaten by a building. This should be nothing.

“What’s your name?” she carried on. “Mine’s Nico-”

“Nicole, yes, I know,” I almost snapped. “Nicole Webb, detective sergeant, Derbyshire Constabulary.”

She smiled a little. “You got that off my badge, didn’t you?”

It was how she used her voice, soft and measured, gentle and coaxing. She was rigid with tension, but doing an incredible job of controlling her breathing, of playing the part she thought would get her out of here. She made me feel every bit what I actually was – an ill and exhausted young woman, not a supernatural mastermind.

“We did, yes,” I managed, trying to stick to the script. “My name is Heather Morell, and I do have a question for you, yes.”

“Ask away, please,” she said quickly, before I could continue. I knew exactly what she was doing, building rapport. She caught my pause and carried through again. “I’m all all ears, Heather, please.”

“Are you a real police detective, or … ” I trailed off, my heart hammering like a deer trying to batter itself to pieces against a fence. “Oh hell, I can’t do this,” I spat.

“Heather?” The detective spoke very quickly now. “Can’t do what? What are you being forced to do here? Talk to me, please, I can help-”

“Heather?” Twil hissed. “The- we need to-”

“Wrong end of the stick,” Lozzie chirped from the doorway, then let out a flighty little sigh.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “She doesn’t have the slightest clue what she’s walked into, and Zheng hasn’t made the impact I hoped.”

“What have I walked into?” Nicole asked. “Please, help me understand, and I can help you. Your big friend didn’t say a word to me, no, but she sure is big. She coming back too?” Nicole lowered her voice. “Or are you sort of glad she’s not listening in right now?”

I shook my head, at a loss, trying not to face the inevitable even as I said it. “I do not have time to deal with you. I just don’t. We can’t do this, I don’t know how.”

Nicole’s front finally cracked – just a little. She frowned, and that was real, an unrehearsed, unglossed, genuine quirk of confusion. “Heather, yes?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“Are you in charge here?”

I blinked at her, paused, my mouth open like an idiot. “ … yes. Yes, I suppose I am. Right now, I am the closest thing this bunch has to a leader, yes.”

“You’re all a bit young for this sort of thing, aren’t you?” Nicole tried another smile, wet her lips. “Any of you a day over twenty?”

“I am, in fact. A couple of weeks ago,” I said.

“Hey, Heather, happy birthday!” Lozzie lit up behind me. “I had mine too. We should do a double party when this is all over.”

“’This sort of thing’?” Twil echoed, frowning.

“Covering up a double murder. Striking a deal with a detective,” Nicole said, oddly casual, though the tension in her eyes gave her away. “I assume that is what you’re trying to do?”

I sighed and put my face in my hand. “Nobody here’s committed murder. Not today.”

Nicole puffed out a long breath and pulled a if-you-say-so sort of face. “I did see two bodies. Hiding a body is a lot of work, you know, and ninety-nine percent of the time it’s not successful, pieces get found, forensics turns stuff up. Is one of you covering for a relative? A father? An uncle? Some sort of fight gone wrong? Look, all three of you girls are in trouble, I’m not going to lie, but I can help you. You feel like you’re trapped, like you’ve got no choice, but that’s not true, you-”

“What do you think Zheng was?” I asked.

“ … she’s a professional, isn’t she?” Nicole’s voice dropped to a hushed whisper, her face into a serious frown. “She’s watching you three, while you wait for a real clean-up crew? Or she was involved, she killed those two men? If that’s right, you need to untie me right now and-”

“She’s a demon,” I said. “And my friend.”

“Ahhh fuckin’ ‘ell.” Twil grimaced.

Nicole paused for a lot longer than she needed to, then nodded slowly. “Alright, we’ll go with that. So … is she … uh-”

“The bodies you saw were killed by a servitor – that’s a kind of spirit, which you can’t see – put here by the grandmother of the owner of this house, who is currently upstairs in a coma, because we’re having a crisis.” The words tumbled out of me, as I tried to avoid what I had to do. My voice shook, the plan all coming apart. “Multiple crises, in fact. And that is why I do not have time to deal with you. I need to find my partner, who has been kidnapped by actual evil cultists who worship an alien god outside of our reality. Are you following me so far?”

Lozzie caught the upset in my voice and made a noise like she wanted to hug me, but she hung back. Nicole was doing a very bad job of concealing her conclusion that she was surrounded by not just murderers and criminals, but mad ones.

“Right,” she said. “Right. Okay. This … ‘servitor’, uh, where is it? Does it look like a person? Is it here now?”

“Oh come on!” Lozzie demanded of her. “Use your noggin, think! Think!”

“What did you think happened to you when Twil overpowered you earlier?” I asked. “Was that normal?”

“ … that was just … bad luck. Props to you, by the way,” she nodded to Twil. “Twil, is it? Had me bang to rights with that armlock.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“She’s a werewolf,” I said.

“Heather,” Twil whined, then almost grinned to herself. She loved it really, the showing off.

“Fuzzy,” Lozzie said with a cheeky grin, then darted behind the door-frame to escape Twil’s little growl.

“A … werewolf?” Nicole’s eyebrows went up. “Okay.”

“No, not okay. It’s not okay, because you need to accept it, and I don’t know how to make you do that. And what about Zheng? You think she’s tall? She’s nearly seven feet, can’t you see that isn’t normal? People don’t get that tall, not built like her.”

“What are you trying to tell me here? I’ve stumbled into a bad urban fantasy novel?” Nicole smiled as she spoke, but she failed to keep the incredulity out of her voice. Now she thought I was just messing with her. I wished I was.

“Pffffffft,” Lozzie blew a raspberry from the doorway. “No imagination. She’s never gonna get it.”

“We have to make her get it. We have to show her,” I said, my voice tight and shaking with the racing of my heart. “Or I have to kill her.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

In a minor miracle of grip strength, I’d managed to hang onto the filthy blanket during our rapid descent from Glasswick tower. Which was lucky, because a January morning in Sharrowford was no place to be out of doors dressed in only one’s pajamas.

“We should uh … we should … ” I mumbled. “We should … yes … ”

Bloodstream still awash with the receding floodwaters from a tidal wave of adrenaline, I attempted to get to my feet, and discovered my bruises.

“Ah!” I winced. “Ahh, oh God, okay. Ow. Ow, my stomach.” I bit my bottom lip and squeezed my eyes shut. Our landing had tenderised my abdominal muscles. How was it possible to be this bruised without breaking any bones? I sat very still, breathing very gently.

“Best I could do,” Zheng rumbled. She still grinned with success, but had her head tilted to one side, as if listening to a distant sound on the air.

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’m alive. That’s what counts. That counts.”

Ting, agreed Praem, the lead weight jumping inside her bottle. I felt a bizarre urge to press my face against the glass.

I spent a good minute figuring out how to stand up without using my stomach muscles or dropping Praem’s bottle. In the end I had to put her down, turn over and use my hands to lever myself off the ground, then tucked Praem back into the crook of my arm underneath the blanket around my shoulders.

“How am I not concussed?” I said, blinking hard at my own left hand. “Am I concussed? I should absolutely have a concussion.”

Clink-clink. Praem didn’t think so.

“I paid the meat price,” Zheng purred. She didn’t bother to look at me.

Her meaning failed to penetrate my adrenaline-addled brain. I touched the back of my neck as if expecting to find protruding bone, gingerly rotated my head on my shoulders, swallowed and blinked and searched for damage. “Shouldn’t I have whiplash? That was like a car crash.”

“I am smarter than a seatbelt.”

I nodded automatically. As the adrenaline drained away, my teeth threatened to chatter. “We should go, we should really go. We can’t stay here.”

“Should,” Zheng echoed.

“That boy might alert somebody. Parents, police, I don’t know. And Sarika could be on her way, she said she was coming here. We’ll need to keep out of sight, both of us. How do we do that? We can hardly take the bus.” I spoke more to myself than Zheng, trying to marshal my thoughts and reboot my brain after the fall. “If somebody spotted us falling … well, we’ll make the strange and unexplained news. I don’t know how we’re going to get home without being seen, I … what, what is it?”

Zheng had turned her shark-toothed grin on me as I rambled on.

“Zheng? We really should go, we need to leave before-”

“Should and could. Different things.”

“ … I’m sorry?”

“Seven fractures.” Zheng tapped her left thigh, then her right. “Four fractures.” Her finger rose to the wide swell of her hips inside her jeans, to her pelvis. “Two fractures. One in my spine as well. Structural. I take a step, I fall down.”

“Oh.” Suddenly the cracking sounds I’d heard earlier made sense. Iron and rock she may seem, but even demon-altered corpse-born flesh and blood was still only flesh and blood. “Oh Zheng, I’m sorry. You- for me. Thank you. I-”

“I’m fixing it.”

“Fixing? … oh, yes. You can do that, can’t you? Like when I … ” I trailed off, wincing in slow motion, gratitude and guilt mixed into a heady cocktail by the rush of still being alive. “I never apologised for severing your arm before. So, I’m sorry. And thank you. Thank you, Zheng, I … thank you. I still can’t believe you jumped out of a building.”

Zheng shrugged, rattling Praem’s wooden body on her shoulder.

“How long will healing take?” I asked. “Sarika might be on her way here. And, well, people might see us.” I glanced around at the thin barrier of old bushes and partially dismantled security fence, the twin concrete cliffs of Gleaston and Glasswick towers looming over us. Nobody had chanced by yet, but it was only a matter of time. “You look like you stepped out of a Greek myth. Plus we’ve got quite a bit of … red, on us.”

“Fifteen minutes, give or take. Bones need time.” Zheng shrugged again. “Don’t run off alone.”

“Believe you me, I am not going anywhere.”

I tugged the blanket tighter around my shoulders and adjusted Praem’s bottle. The road beyond the secluded patch of scrub ground was deserted for now, the gap between the towers hostile with graffiti and broken bottles, but it would only take one passer-by to glance down here at the wrong moment, one stay-at-home mum in Gleaston tower to look out of her bathroom window, and we’d be the subject of a very bizarre phone call to the police. Headly council estate might be numb to vandalism and pretty drug crime, but I doubt they’d shrug off the sight of a seven-foot-tall monster covered in dried blood and concrete dust, accompanying a shell-shocked college girl in her pajamas.

But despite what I’d said, I didn’t care.

Perhaps it was the adrenaline, or the joy of not being dead, or the sheer madness of surviving a twenty-five story fall, but for once in my life I simply couldn’t bring myself to give a damn.

I filled my lungs with frigid air, and didn’t care how much it made me shiver. I was alive and I was free, and my bruises would heal.

My only witness – other than Zheng, her eyes tilted to the sky, her attention focused inward – was the omnipresent spirit-life, the pneuma-somatic background noise to my life. From where we stood on that half-hidden patch of scrub ground I could already see a dozen different spirits; a blob of tentacles and orange suckers climbed Gleaston tower, a clump of creatures all stalk and eye picked their way across distant rooftops, a Roc-sized bird of black fire hovered low over the city to the east – and a pair of hound-ghoul things snuffled down the nearby road, barely thirty feet away.

An idea struck me, one I would never have dared fifteen minutes ago. That was the old Heather, who had not yet survived death with her eyes wide open.

Well, eyes screwed shut in terror. Still counted.

“Zheng, I-”

“You feel invincible,” Zheng said before I could finish. She lowered her eyes to meet mine. “Maybe you are.”

“I … how did you know that?”

“Go out in a storm.” Zheng’s voice dropped low and quiet, a tiger-purr in the night. “Naked and alone, and climb to the highest point you can find. The trees shake, the rocks shiver. But you shout back at the thunder and the lightning, defy the Gods to kill you. Maybe they do, maybe you die. But if you live, you’re invincible. That’s how your kind do it. The old way.” She took a deep breath and her grin broke the spell. “Or it’s just how you monkeys get when you cheat death. Endorphins.”

“Yes, probably that second one.” I took a deep breath as well. “I’m going to … it’s hard to explain, I’m going to take a risk. Please trust me for a moment.”

Zheng shrugged. Couldn’t help but notice she kept her legs and hips and spine rock steady as she moved.

The two spirits nosing at the road hadn’t moved too far along yet. I wet my lips, wrapped myself in false courage, and opened my mouth.

“You,” I said in a level voice, far too quiet to carry from our hiding place.

One of the spirits looked up at me. Goat-like eyes in a pale lupine face. Its companion stopped too, and they stared at me like a pair of wolves examining a baited trap.

“Come here,” I said. “Or don’t. Your choice.”

A hesitating first step turned into a trot, and the pair of spirits edged up toward the patch of scrub ground, pacing back and forth.

Supremely ugly, a unnatural combination of wolf and ape, leathery hands instead of paws and scraggly fur like old man’s hair sprouting in clumps on their rubbery skin. Big loose jaws full of blunt teeth worked silently on empty air. Eyes too large and too far apart kept sliding over at Zheng, unwilling to venture within her range. That’s right, I’d seen her pick Tenny up by the throat once before, hadn’t I? And Praem had wrestled that spirit at the Saye estate. Demons could touch them, hurt them, and they knew it.

“You know who I am, or what I am.” I raised my voice slightly and reminded myself I’d done this before; I’d spoken to spirits, I’d pressed them for information, I’d even commanded them – briefly. This was unlikely to work, but I had nothing to lose by trying. “I have a task for you.”

Pacing, back and forth, back and forth. No indication they cared.

“There’s a magician approaching this tower, a mage, understand? She’ll be here soon, and she might go up inside the tower. Follow her when she emerges again, follow her home. Then come back to me, and show me where she hides.”

Both spirits stopped, sat on their haunches, staring at me. A demand, a refusal? This wasn’t working.

“In return … I … ” I what? I couldn’t think of anything.

Before I could get out another word, both spirits leapt up and ran off with a skidding and skittering of feet, nipping at each others’ faces and hides. I puffed out a long sigh. A failure. I’d think of something else. I had to.

Zheng was watching me with quiet fascination.

“I thought it was worth a go,” I said. “I can see … uh, spirits, it’s-”

“Of course you can see them, shaman.”

That word again. She’d called me that over and over since I’d freed her, but now she imbued the word with that awful reverence once more, a dark intensity in her eyes.

I sighed to cover my discomfort. “I do hope we didn’t scar that boy too badly. Not to be rude, Zheng, but you’re the sort of thing that causes recurring nightmares.”

Or wet dreams, if one was like me, but I didn’t say that part out loud.

“Thank you.” Zheng grinned in savage delight, back to normal. She rolled her neck and one shoulder, then twisted her torso and hips sideways in a slow motion that produced a machine-gun sound of every spinal vertebrae popping in sequence. She coughed, flexed her thighs, bent a knee, went up on tiptoes, produced more popping noises as her joints realigned. She coughed again.

“Almost there?”

“Mm. Minute,” she grunted, coughed a third time, then opened her jaw wide and fished a chunk of concrete out the back of her throat. “Huh.”

Zheng didn’t strike me as remotely in need of what we mere mortals thought of as dignity, but I averted my gaze all the same. I looked up at Glasswick tower, at the vertical dungeon we’d escaped, and tried to spot the window we’d jumped from. Couldn’t see it from all the way down here, not at this angle.

“Did you know that would work?” I muttered. Zheng grunted an interrogative, busy rotating her ankles. “Jumping that far, I mean?”

“Fallen further before,” she rumbled.

“Carrying a person?”

“Three goats.” She broke into a grin, enjoying the look on my face. “Off a cliff. They lived too.”

“Goats. Glad to know I’m in good company.”

Clink-clink-clink went Praem. Three times? Was that laughter? I frowned at the oily smoke in the bottle.

“They were good goats,” Zheng said. “Good meat.”

“I’m certain they were, but I better not be.”

Clink, went Praem.

“Yes, thank you,” I sighed, and stared up at the tower again.

The corruption, the tentacles, the imprint of Alexander Lilburne’s mind – none of it was visible from the ground. Nobody knew it was there, except for me and my friends, and a bunch of cultists dedicated to my worst enemy.

 Zheng took several steps, rolled her torso around in an arc from her hips and drew herself up to her full height, swapping Praem’s wooden body from one shoulder to the other. She stretched, a tiger preparing to sun itself. “Ahhhhh. Much better.”

“I’ll be back for you,” I whispered to the tower, hugged Praem’s jar, and turned to Zheng with a question on my lips.

“Shaman.”

“Zheng. Are you … ” I cursed my hesitation. Zheng was a demon and a monster, but I couldn’t think of a better way to phrase the question. “Are you certain you’re coming with me?”

“My legs work again. Bones,” she grunted amused disapproval.

“No, I mean are you comfortable coming home with me?”

“Mmmmm?” she purred, watching me carefully.

“The house – my home – it belongs to Evelyn. She’s my best friend, I love her, but she’s a mage. I understand if you’d rather not go there. You don’t owe me anything. I’m pretty sure I can get home on my own if I have to. If this is where we part ways.” 

Zheng shrugged. “I’m still here, shaman.”

==

Walking all the way home took almost three hours.

Zheng and I stuck to less-used roads, back alleys, side streets, with much stopping and starting, on a circuitous route to avoid the city centre, the shops, the homeless camps under the motorway, anywhere with people. Peering around corners, listening for footsteps, lurking in back alleys; a painstaking trek through the concrete jungle, all the way to the other side of Sharrowford.

My fears were proved justified a couple of weeks later. A grainy picture of Zheng and I surfaced on the internet, snapped from the window of a passing car with a shaking phone camera, along the motorway embankment near one of the clusters of tents. Nothing visible to recognise me by, only the back of my head atop a shapeless lump of blanket – but Zheng was clearly far too tall. Supernatural sighting or trick of perspective? Photoshop or clever stunt? Luckily enough, the responses to the photograph descended into jokes about giant Yorkshire-men escaped from the moors. I’m certain some amateur paranormal researcher has glanced at my awful matted hair and hunched shoulders, and wondered about some obscure species of Northern English gremlin.

My unshod feet plagued me, sore and hobbling after the first hour, one sock-less soft sole bleeding by the third, so Zheng picked me up and carried me. Princess style. Twice. An experience my body didn’t forget in a hurry.

She carried me until I could walk again, and I didn’t reject the help, despite the quasi-sexual discomfort and Praem’s fleshless wooden bones bumping alongside me.

Raine needed all the help I could get. From any quarter, any monster.

By the time number 12 Barnslow Drive finally hove into view I was back on my own two feet, ready to drop, dehydrated, and shivering with cold.

Home, this cracked and weathered redbrick leviathan, roof tiles patched with tarpaulin. wreathed in shrivelled ivy for the winter, squinted at me from dark windows and made my heart soar.

I hurried the final stretch, feet stinging, bruised abdomen complaining, and pushed through the garden gate with an unbidden smile on my lips. Praem didn’t say anything from within her bottle, and perhaps it was only my imagination, but I swore I felt her respond as well. This was the place she’d come into our reality. Her home too.

“This one?” Zheng purred from behind. In my moment of relief, I missed the warning note in her voice.

“Yes,” I sighed. “Yes, we’re home.”

And not a thing out of place. I stopped on the garden path and bit my bottom lip.

Front door intact and sturdy, not smashed in as I’d half-expected. Raine’s battered old car still squatted next to the pavement a few feet down the road, where she’d last left it parked. No lights showed around the cracks in curtains, all was dark and quiet under the brooding winter sky. The inside of the house sometimes felt like a cocoon or a womb, sealed and guarded from the city beyond.

“Question is,” I murmured. “Who exactly is at home?”

Click, agreed Praem.

I finally tore my eyes from the house to glance back at Zheng, and realised she hadn’t crossed the threshold of the front gate. Spirit-life lurked in the street behind her, at a respectful distance. All the way here the pneuma-somatic wildlife had given us a wide berth, as if Zheng was one of their natural predators. One of them – barred from the Saye house as they were?

“Zheng, you can come inside, can’t you? I didn’t think to mention, the property’s warded. I actually don’t know what that means, but … can you?”

“Signs won’t stop flesh,” she rumbled, and stepped through the invisible barrier, stalking up alongside me like a panther, without once wavering from her staring contest with the house. She watched the building with a slow, wary regard, tilting her head one way then the other, as if getting a good view through each separate eyeball.

No dark amusement, no face-splitting grin. Not amused.

“What’s wrong?” My words emerged as a whisper. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Zheng, what’s wrong? You’re spooking me. Do you see somebody?”

Slowly, she shook her head. “I see this place. Not so different to the tower we ran from.”

I sighed and resisted an urge to roll my eyes. “I did tell you it’s an old magician’s house. Everyone’s so upset by it – you, Twil, the Brinkwood people. Why weren’t the cult scared? None of this would have happened.”

“Because they’re fools,” Zheng purred, gaze still locked onto the house.

“Zheng, I’ve known you for one morning, and this is the second time you’ve wanted to fight a building. Unless you’re secretly intending to murder Evelyn or steal her books, I don’t think the guards will pay you any attention, and the house won’t care. It’s not a haunted house, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The shark-grin returned to Zheng’s face, directed down at me. “Afraid? Perhaps you should be afraid of this house, shaman.”

“Well, I’m not. It’s home, it’s treated me well, and it’s where my friends live. Speaking of which, Zheng, you … I don’t mean to imply- and I do want to just get indoors already, but-”

“Spit it out.”

“You won’t get violent with anybody, will you?”

“Anybody?” Zheng purred.

“Any of my friends. You know what I mean.”

“And if the house bites?”

I huffed, curling my freezing toes against the pathway flagstones. “Bite back.”

And without further ado, I marched up the path and knocked on the front door.

Luckily for my remaining credibility, Zheng decided to join me, a tower of muscle at my shoulder ready to threaten, kill, or eat anybody who wasn’t supposed to be here. If she’d hung back, well, I would’ve had to retreat and try again. Maybe go around the back, find Tenny. I’d check on her as soon as I could.

Nobody answered my knock. The house echoed with a long pause through which dark things crept in silence. I rattled the handle and knocked again.

“It’s me!” I called out. “I don’t have my key, for obvious reasons.”

My mind backed up a step and I looked at the door properly – and my heart crawled into my throat. Number 12 Barnslow Drive had indeed been broken into, quite expertly. The keyhole showed a scuffed ring of fresh metal amid the decades of old scratches, and the thick wood had been dented slightly, about level with my head; the lock been forced, a shoulder rammed against the door? After Twil had run out into the night, had Raine closed the bolts? I didn’t recall. If only we’d locked it properly, if only-

A rapid patter of feet sounded suddenly from inside the house. I jumped, my heart leapt, and my stomach dropped. Somebody – something – bumped into the door, turned the lock and rammed back the bolts with a clatter.

“Oh.” I backed up, right into Zheng. She put a hand on my shoulder and put herself in front of me, just as the door flew open.

Sharp amber eyes in an angelic face, wide and blinking in surprise.

“Twil!” I half-shouted her name in a shudder of relief. Suddenly my knees felt weak and rubbery.

Twil didn’t hear me, not from behind seven feet of zombie muscle; I scurried around Zheng to hug my friend, not even thinking, but then things got tiresomely predictable.

Twil catapulted herself backward from Zheng in a feat of canine gymnastic shock. I flinched and swallowed a yelp. She landed already bristling with fur and claw and the elongating snout wrapping itself around her human face, growling deep and loud through clenched teeth – not a warning, a war cry.

“Twil! Twil, it’s me, it’s fine, it’s me!” I blurted out as I hurried over the threshold. Praem agreed with a clink from inside her bottle. Wolfish eyes caught me and Twil’s entire body jerked as she aborted a forward charge.

“Heather?” she growled through a snout of ghostly wolf-flesh.

“Yes! Yes it’s me, I’m here, and I’m- well, I’m not okay, but I’m unhurt- wait, no, that’s not accurate. I am hurt.” I almost laughed at the absurdity of the moment, an edge of hysteria in my voice. My strength was draining with relief, my body knew I was home. This warm dark cavern of old wood and familiar scents, of our shoes by the door and the unique way the light through the curtains dusted the front room with plush shadows. A wall of warm air washed over me, the heating still turned up against the cold outdoors.

And under it all, the faint iron scent of blood tainted the air. Blood, and cleaning chemicals.

Zheng had to duck to follow me through the doorway, then straightened back up to her full height. Twil’s eyes flicked between me, the giant zombie, the huge glowing bottle in my arms, and the twisted wooden mannequin over Zheng’s shoulder. Much more of that and she’d make herself dizzy.

“Twil, it’s okay,” I almost laughed again. “It’s okay, we’re all friends here.”

“Yeah right, sure, fuck,” Twil managed.

Like a huge jungle cat squaring off against a rival, Zheng showed all her teeth, and grinned at Twil. “Laangren?” she purred.

“And you can knock that off!” I snapped at Zheng, emboldened by finally being home. “And please, shut the door before somebody sees us. Please?”

Zheng closed the door without removing her eyes from Twil. My werewolf friend growled back as Zheng’s grin widened again.

“Please, both of you, please,” I repeated, exasperated. “I am exhausted, we are in a crisis, please.”

“Heather?” Twil asked through gritted teeth. “You’ve gotta be joking.”

“I freed her,” I rushed to explain. “Zheng, I mean, I freed her. She’s on our side – my side, sort of. Zheng, this is Twil, please-”

“We’ve met,” Zheng rumbled. “Never got to have a proper fight, did we, skinchanger?”

Twil reacted like a startled hound, blinking and shaking her head. “Hey what, you talk proper now?”

“I have a mouth, I must use it.”

“She saved my life this morning,” I said to Twil. “Yes, she is extremely dangerous, but not to us. I think.”

“Your trusted are mine, shaman,” Zheng purred, but her grin stayed fixed on Twil. “But don’t you want to feel it too, laangren? I haven’t had a good fight, a real fight, in decades. We’ll both walk away, no real skin in the game, just the sheer joy of it.”

Twil blinked at her. “ … later. Maybe. Fuck’s sake.”

Zheng grumbled like a tiger having a dream, but finally allowed her shark’s grin to simmer down to a dark smolder. She shrugged, and Praem’s wooden body rattled on her shoulder. “I’m up for a round with you anytime, skinchanger.”

“Not indoors you’re not.” I tutted.

A ripple of change passed through Twil’s transformed musculature. Her wolf-flesh melted away, wisps curling and vanishing into nothing as she tilted her chin up at Zheng, all human again. “Beat you last time, didn’t I? What, you want a rematch between my foot and your face?”

“No,” Zheng corrected her. “You ran away.”

Twil frowned, not quite following. “Fuck it, whatever. Who cares.”

That should have alerted me to how dire the situation was – Twil refusing to rise to the bait. Instead, she stepped forward and pulled me into a fierce hug.

“Ah! Ah, careful,” I winced as Praem’s bottle was squished against my abdomen. Sometimes Twil didn’t know her own strength. “Stomach, stomach’s very bruised. Ow.”

“Sorry. Sorry, Heather. S’just, you know, shit’s so fucked up. Welcome home, yeah?”

“Yes,” I managed. “Thank you.”

A wave of emotion welled up in my chest, but I swallowed it down. My body said rest, you’re home, everything’s going to be alright; I told it no, we still had miles to go.

Twil pulled back to look at my face. “God, fuck this morning. I’m real glad you’re okay, Heather.”

“’Okay’ is a relative term, but I am alive. Thank Zheng.”

Twil glanced up at the zombie, frowning hard. Zheng shrugged and stepped away from us to prop up Praem’s altered wooden mannequin on some of the many boxes of junk Evelyn kept stacked in the front room. Better than dumping Praem’s body on the floor, I suppose, but it still hurt to see.

“The hell is that?” Twil asked.

“Luggage,” Zheng purred.

“Praem’s body.”

Twil gaped at me.

“Oh, oh, don’t worry,” I hurried, and held up the bottle. “She’s in here, this is her, for the moment. Say hi.”

“Um … hi, Praem?”

Clink, went Praem.

“I think we can put her back together,” I said.

Twil nodded, frowning, quite lost indeed. “The hell happened, Heather, where were you?”

“Bad places, then the ground. Long story. Twil, where’s everybody else? I’m worried sick, I think they took Raine, at least that’s … that’s what they … ” The look on her face made it obvious. “She’s not here, is she?”

Twil winced and shook her head. “Hoped she was with you.”

“The cultists kidnapped her. I think.”

“Shit!” Twil swore through her teeth. “Last night, I got back here as fast as I could, I really did, I promise, but you and her were both gone already! I’m sorry. Evee won’t wake up. Kimberly, she- I think she was hiding somewhere, under a table or some shit, and-”

“Kim’s okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Twil nodded. “Scared, you know? But yeah. We put Evee upstairs in her bedroom, and Kim’s been doing stuff, you know. Magic? Trying to get Evee to wake up. I called my mum too, but she says none of them can come into town right now, not with this going on. My folks are in full panic mode, I’m supposed to be at home, but sod them. Evee won’t wake up. Heather, I can’t wake her up.”

I looked at Twil – really looked at Twil, and realised she was closer to the edge than I. Face puffy with lack of sleep and panic, eyes wild, still in the same clothes she’d been wearing when she’d torn out into the dark last night. Her easy exterior was cracking. Nothing to chase, nothing to punch, a faint shaking in her chest and face. She didn’t know what to do.

I did.

“We’re going to wake Evelyn up, and I’m going to find Raine,” I said, and surprised myself with the conviction in my voice.

In truth I had no idea if we could do either of those things, but if we wanted a ghost of a chance then Twil had to believe, because I might need her, so my job was to make her believe.

“ … yeah,” Twil mouthed.

“Twil. We will. We absolutely will. I will do anything. Understand?”

Clink, agreed Praem.

“Yeah. Yeah, we will, we can do this.” She nodded, going along with me. “Right. We can … oh!” Her face suddenly lit up. “You can make things vanish! Right?”

“I … I can, yes?”

“Oh, fuck me. Lifesaver.” Twil let out a huge sigh of relief. “Heather, you are a lifesaver. I didn’t know what to do with the corpses!”

“The … ” I blinked, rewound, replayed that word. “I’m sorry, Twil, the what?”

“The corpses,” she gestured at the floor – and the wall behind me, and the door-frame. And the inside of the door. In all the excitement I had failed to notice the wood was slightly damp, and still stained faintly in a way recent scrubbing had failed to completely eliminate. The whole area was punctuated by several patches of damage that looked like impact craters from railway spikes. I reconstructed the scene in my head: blood on the floorboards, blood up the walls, blood up the door.

My eyes travelled upward, and I flinched. One of Evelyn’s spider-servitors still hung over the doorway, in an ambush position, so well-concealed I hadn’t seen it when I’d stepped inside.

The Eye Cult had paid a high price for invading my home.

“Thank you,” I said to it. “Next time, don’t let anyone take Raine, please.”

“ … is it … it’s not one of the invisible spiders, is it?” Twil whispered, as if it might hear her.

“Yes. It is,” I sighed.

“Ugh. Well, yeah then, I guess that must have been it. When I got here, there were these two dead guys on the floor. Huge mess. Put them both in the kitchen, but uh-”

Twil wasn’t exactly a master of misdirection, or of concealing her emotions. Her eyes flicked to the closed door to the disused sitting room.

I followed her gaze. “I thought you said you put them in the kitchen?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah I did. They’re both still there, you know, getting cold and stiff. It’s just, um, there’s- it’s a been a bit of a complex morning and we’ve got, um … ” Her eyes wandered over my shoulder, frowning at Zheng.

I sighed. “We can discuss this in front of Zheng. She’s on my side, and yes, she’s also a violent cannibalistic demon-”

“Cannibal implies the same species,” Zheng purred, almost as if distracted. “I’m no monkey.”

“-but she saved my life twice this morning, and I think she wants to help.”

“Uh, no.” Twil pointed. “I mean, what the fuck’s she doing now?”

“I can hear you, laangren,” Zheng rumbled.

“What? She … oh.”

Our friendly neighbourhood flesh-eating demon had also noticed the Spider-servitor, and was now locked in a staring contest. The spider’s head of crystalline eyes rotated to return Zheng’s look, both of them frozen in the moment of eye contact. Two supernatural beasties vying for who was bigger and scarier.

“It’s fine,” I said with a sigh. “She and the spider are squaring off, just like you did too. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t care. It’s okay, Zheng, I … I think.”

“I have eaten spider many times,” Zheng purred.

“Not one of those, I’d wager,” I said.

“A first time for every kind of meat.”

“I’m extra glad I can’t see any of this,” Twil said, hands up in surrender.

I stared at Zheng for a moment, trying to figure out if she was serious. The last thing we needed was a demon getting into a death match with what was left of our security system.

“Look, Heather,” Twil was saying. “It’s just, we’ve got a situation to deal with. Uh, a really … delicate situation, and maybe like, she should go somewhere else for a bit?”

Caught between a territorial zombie and Twil sounding worryingly un-Twil like, I frowned at the latter in confusion. “Delicate situation? What are you talking about?”

Her eyes slid to the sitting room door again. She winced and struggled over a word or two. I was about to tell her to get on with it, I’m too tired, I need to sit, I need to wash my sore feet, I need to eat, and we need to save our friends – when a cry of delight split the air. My name.

“Heather!”

My name, from the most unexpected source.

Thundering down the stairs in a clatter of bare feet, flying the distance between us in a twirl of plaid skirt and pink poncho, throwing herself at me in an uninhibited tackle-hug, here came Lozzie.

I almost couldn’t believe my eyes – and barely remained standing when she hit me, that flying hug not just for show. She wrapped her arms around my shoulders, squeezed all the air out of me, and nuzzled her face into my neck. Pulling back, laughing, making me laugh back at her in surprised delight, wheezing from the bruises in my stomach but not caring. I almost dropped Praem’s bottle, but Twil reached in and took it from me, like sticking her hands between a pair of wrestling ferrets.

“You’re here! You’re here! You came back!” Lozzie laughed at me.

“You too,” I croaked, speechless, smiling all over. “Ow.”

“Mmm!” She made a sound like a small excited animal, and hugged me tight. I went ‘ow!’ again but I didn’t care.

“Yeah,” Twil added. “And your spooky friend is here too. Turned up outta nowhere.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked Twil over Lozzie’s shoulder, hugging her hard as I could stand.

“Other things on my mind.”

Lozzie pulled back again, half-dancing on her bare feet. God, she looked so healthy, her elfin face glowing, well-fed and clean – though still pale and mushroom-like, as if her skin had seen no sun in months. Which made sense if she’d been Outside, beyond the reach of terrestrial light. Where’d she gotten the clothes? The plaid skirt was so her, and the pink poncho had a cute little hood with floppy rabbit ears. Her hair was everywhere as she raked back wisps out of it out of her face. She smelled of foreign bath soap and medical moisturiser, mango and Vaseline. And underneath it all, the lingering taint of Wonderland ash.

“I have so many things I need to ask you,” I said, overwhelmed by emotion.

“Heather, Heather, where did you go? Why did you go?” She laughed, bewildered with me. “I was getting you out.”

“Somebody – something grabbed me. Pulled us apart! Lozzie, I wouldn’t leave, not … not when … I thought you were gone.”

“Ahhhh,” she sighed, nodding and smiling. “Same thing. I can’t leave! Have you tried? I can’t get back Out, it’s so weird.”

“You … you tried to leave again?” An unexpected barb of pain twisted in my chest.

“To find you! You were supposed to be here!”

I swallowed and focused. “Hands on your ankles? Dead hands?”

“Yeah! You too?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Weird, huh?” Lozzie smiled at me, a bouncing, happy sort of smile, and hugged me again.

“Ahh, ow. Lozzie, I’m sore, I’m so sore.” She’d come back to me. She was healthy and whole and safe. I laughed, and realised I was crying too. “You got me from Wonderland. You got me. Thank you, Lozzie. Lozzie.” The tears came on full now, I couldn’t stop them, and my voice emerged as a whine. “Lozzie, I’ve lost Raine. They took her somewhere. I can’t- I-”

“No!” Lozzie pulled back, her face set in a serious little frown. “They can’t do that! I’ll help! You love her, this is important! We’ll get her back, I have an idea already!”

“You- you do? Of course you do.” I took a shuddering breath, sniffed, and managed to stop the tears. Lozzie nodded and helped wipe my face. I had to focus. Lozzie likely did not have any ideas that made sense in this reality, but her sheer blinding enthusiasm helped hold me up.

“Little … little Lauren,” Zheng purred, almost a whisper, and we both looked up.

Zheng wore an expression I hadn’t thought her capable of, a lost fragile wonder, her staring contest with the spider forgotten. One huge hand reached out and brushed the top of Lozzie’s head, the gentlest gesture I’d seen Zheng make.

“Oh!” Lozzie lit up again. “You’re awake! Hi, Zheng.” She gave the zombie a little wave. “How’s it feel?”

“This is … I spoke to you, little Lauren, in dreams,” Zheng purred, the stone of her voice softened and blurred. She blinked heavily. Can demons cry? “You gifted me with dreams where I was free.”

“Uh huh, yeah, it was fun!” Lozzie wriggled out of my arms – leaving me more than a little unsteady on my unsupported legs – and threw a hug at Zheng, as unafraid and uninhibited as she had been with me, utterly unintimidated by this rippling giant of barely suppressed violence. Zheng looked as surprised as I felt. Lozzie danced away again, panting and red in the face with excitement. “Did you get her out, Heather? How did you do that?”

“Um, I just removed some of her tattoos. It was … well, it wasn’t easy, it made me pass out. But it was simple enough.”

Lozzie tilted her head back and forth quickly, as if this feat was beyond her imagining. “Wow, cool. Heather, you’re so clever! I could never figure it out.”

“Little Lauren, little … ” Zheng grinned again. “Hahhh. I remember now. My little mooncalf.”

“Mooncalf?” Lozzie pulled a face, stuck out her tongue and pulled down on one lower eyelid. “Ruuuuude.”

Zheng rumbled a low laugh – then froze.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” a tiny voice came from the kitchen doorway. Kimberly, one shuffled step into the room, staring at Zheng with poorly concealed horror, then at me with an uncertain smile. “Heather, hi. I’m- I’m glad you’re alright. I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, Kim,” I said, trying to sound soft. “I’m glad you’re okay too, you-”

Zheng moved like a foxhound after the scent of blood. She pounced past me in a blur of uncoiling muscle made of quicksilver and lightning. I flinched and gasped, Lozzie let out a little ‘oop’ and hopped backward, Twil growled like a startled dog – and Kimberly wasn’t fast enough to scream. Zheng picked her up by the throat and slammed her against the back wall, knocking all the breath out of her lungs.

“Little wizard,” Zheng hissed through a shark-toothed grin.

“Aw fuck,” Twil shouted, first off the mark – but she had no idea what was happening.

Legs kicking, eyes wide in naked terror, Kimberly opened her mouth to scream. Zheng’s other hand whipped out like a snake and darted forward into the opening, fist jamming Kimberly’s jaw wide open.

“Zheng, no!”

Luckily for Kimberly’s tongue, I got there first, one hand on Zheng’s arm. I knew that all the strength in my body wouldn’t be enough to stop the demon’s little finger, but the tone in my voice worked better than any physical restraint. Not a shrill cry, not a scream of panic. A command. A command given to a freed slave.

Slowly, her hand still ready to rip Kimberly’s tongue out at the root, Zheng turned her flesh-eating toothy grin on me.

She radiated cold malice. She thought Kimberly was a threat, but I’d offended her, in probably the single way anyone could.

“Zheng.”

“ … shaman,” she rumbled through her teeth.

“Kimberly is my friend.” Keeping my voice steady was impossible. I let it quiver. I was terrified, why pretend otherwise? I glanced at Kimberly, pinned to the wall and staring back at me, panting through her nose. She moaned a muted scream around Zheng’s fist, her feet scrabbling at the wall for purchase. In the corner of my eye I saw Twil circling to Zheng’s other side, half-transformed, ready to take her up on that offer of a rematch. “Twil, don’t,” I said out loud. “Zheng, Kimberly is mine. Understand?”

“I recall this one, skulking and worming, filling her grey meat with secrets. Making more like me.”

“What she did in the past does not matter. Or what she was forced to do. Now, she’s mine. And free, like you.”

Zheng let out a growl, a nasty one, like a mountain disagreeing with me. I hiccuped.

“And,” I added, shaking all over. I hiccuped again. “You said that removing your tattoos guaranteed no wizard can bind you with words. I heard you say that. Was that a lie? Is Kimberly dangerous to you? I don’t think she is. She’s helped me. She’s with me. Are you with me?”

Zheng grimaced. She turned a hateful gaze on Kimberly, made the poor woman squeeze her eyes shut, still fighting to breathe.

“Don’t hurt Flowsie, she’s harmless,” Lozzie said. Her little blonde head appeared over Zheng’s arm, peering up at Kimberly. “She’s kind of boring, and stiff, but she’s harmless. Sweet if you catch her alone.”

Zheng looked down at Lozzie and the awful toothy grin died in an instant, as if it couldn’t touch her little mooncalf. The fury in Zheng’s frame dropped away. She levelled a mere nasty look at Kimberly instead, and her huge tongue slowly inched out of her mouth to brush Kimberly’s cringing cheek, before whipping back again.

“Woah shit what,” Twil muttered.

“One betraying twitch from you, wizard,” Zheng purred in Kimberly’s face, and clacked her teeth together. Kimberly tried to nod – difficult with a fist in your mouth – and Zheng dropped her to the floor and stepped back.

“Back further, you big fuck,” Twil growled. Zheng grumbled, but amazingly enough she did as she was asked.

Hacking and coughing, wheezing for breath, shaking and crying, Kimberly flinched as I went to my knees and put my arms around her. “I’m so sorry, Kim. I’m sorry. I didn’t … I didn’t think … I didn’t think, that’s it. I’m sorry.”

“I hate magic so much,” Kimberly whined.

“Good,” Zheng purred.

“You shut the fuck up,” Twil snapped at her.

“Yes, Zheng,” I added quickly. “Please just … just leave it alone.”

Zheng grumbled and refused to look at anybody.

“It’s okay, Flowsie, I don’t hate you.” Lozzie patted Kimberly on the head too, but I suspect that didn’t help. Twil, still eyeing Zheng like an unexploded bomb, fetched Kim a glass of water, which went down without obstruction and was quickly followed by another. It took us a while to get the poor woman back to her feet, by which time Zheng had retreated to the other side of the room, brooding like a moody teenager.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be here,” Kimberly kept saying. “I keep screwing everything up, I-I can’t-”

“You don’t screw everything up, and that wasn’t your fault,” I said.

“It was,” Kimberly hiccuped. “I deserved it. The zombie’s right, I did so many terrible things. And now I’ve screwed up everything here too. We can’t wake miss Saye up, and I hid when you needed help. And it’s my fault that we’ve got … ” She trailed off at a look from Twil. I glanced between them.

“She thinks the police woman’s her fault,” Lozzie said. “Typical Flowsie.”

“ … police?” I echoed, going cold inside. “Oh no, what is this? Twil?”

“Oops!” Lozzie bit her lips. “We’re not talking about that?”

“I was, like, getting there. Okay?” said Twil.

“I’m so sorry, it’s all my fault,” Kimberly repeated. “I shouldn’t have opened the front door in the first place.”

“Twil?” I demanded.

Her eyes slid to the closed door of the disused sitting room.

With terrible inevitability and a growing sense of unreality, I stepped over to the door, turned the handle, and opened it on the curtained and shadowed room inside.

I’m not certain exactly how long I stared. It felt both too long and too short at the same time. Mortified, my mind racing at a million miles an hour, yet unable to process the implications of what lay in front of me. A pair of solidly stoic eyes stared back at me, neither accusing nor pleading, but quite afraid.

I closed the door, paused, then turned the handle and opened it again, hoping that something different might be inside. Nope, still the same. I closed the door a second time. Straighted up, took a breath, let it out slowly.

“Heather-” Twil started.

“Please, Twil.” I raised a finger. “Please, please tell me that is not a real police constable we have bound and gagged in there?”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

“It’s alright, Praem, I’ve … I’ve got you. It’s going to be alright, you’ll be alright.”

Meaningless reassurances, spoken to a near invisible wisp of oily-rainbow smoke trapped inside a glass bottle.

Tink, went Praem’s lead weight against the glass. One for yes.

One for yes Heather, I trust you, you’ll save me, you’ll get me out of here, won’t you? One for I’m helpless and tiny and vulnerable, my strength stolen and my flesh banished. One for please, don’t leave me here.

A veil of red descended inside me, along with a shaking that had nothing to do with the cold, my jaw tight and my breath coming fast and hot. I turned to the cultist – Jacob, still hunched on the floor with his hands bound.

“How do I put my friend back in her body?” I hissed through clenched teeth.

“I don’t know, I’m not trained. It’s not my … ” He trailed off when he saw the anger boiling behind my eyes. If the bottle in my hands hadn’t contained Praem’s soul, I would have smashed it across his head. I bit my lips and swallowed too hard, struggling to find an outlet for this awful rage.

I felt rather than saw Zheng’s grin, the shark-toothed smile in my peripheral vision.

She reached down and took the end of Jacob’s rope, dragged the cultist to his feet, and pulled him close. One of her hands encircled the top of his head to hold him immobile.

“Looks like the shaman is angry,” she hissed in the man’s ear. “Dangerous when she’s angry, a large bite for such a small jaw.”

Her huge tongue slid out of her mouth in silent threat, a wet pink tentacle that made my heart squeeze. Jacob cringed away, his eyes pleading with me for relief.

“And you can stop with the theatrics,” I snapped, too angry to care about Zheng’s sadistic needs. The tongue whipped back inside her mouth and slowly she turned to regard me. I ignored her, thrusting Praem’s bottle at the cultist. “Did you have anything – anything at all – to do with this … this violation? Did you?”

A tiny part of my mind, trying to calculate and analyse even now, noted that the lead weight inside didn’t swing as I moved the bottle. External force was cancelled out, only Praem’s spirit could affect the line and the attached weight.

“No! No, I don’t know how to!” He pleaded. “Really, I can’t- it was-”

“Did he?” I asked the bottle – asked Praem.

Clink-click. Two for no.

“Lucky you,” Zheng growled into his face and he squeezed his eyes shut.

“Praem, can you … I’ll get you out, I promise. I promise,” I told the bottle.

Tink, the little lead weight jumped. The oil-on-smoke wisp curled about itself, impossible false colours shifting and turning, glowing faint as a daylight moon.

“Can you … you can hear me, yes? You can hear everything I say to you?”

Tink.

“What about other people, you can hear them? Things happening beyond the … the bottle?”

Tink.

“Can you see?” I waved a hand in front of the glass.

No response. The lead weight didn’t move.

“When they were up, they were up,” Zheng growled in a slow, sing-song voice. “And when they were down, they were down. And when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down.”

I boggled at her.

“Halfway up.” She pointed a finger at the bottle. “Meat-senses aren’t the same.”

“Yes, thank you so much for the metaphor. Do you know how to put Praem back in her body?”

Zheng shrugged, a performance of disinterest.

“T-there should be-” Jacob started. “There should be a way, to get it out, I mean. Marcus was saying things like- uh- telling her she’d be free if she answered- h-he was asking her questions about you- t-the Saye girl, all sorts. Really, real talk, he was interrogating her, offering her a way out. H-he would know, Marcus would know. It’s him you want.”

Zheng let out a growl of laughter.

“Marcus put her in this bottle?” I asked, and he nodded. “Praem?” I asked her.

Clink.

And Marcus had died a violent and painful death. Why didn’t that make me feel any better?

Because Praem was still trapped in the bottle.

I swore, worse than I’d ever swore before, a short train of vile words borrowed mostly from Evelyn, culminating in a choice scatological paradox. In a way I was glad only the demons were here to witness that.

“I … I know where he lives,” Jacob hurried on. “I think. Or Sarika might. If you make him show you how-”

“He’s dead,” I said.

“ … o-oh.”

“I ate him,” Zheng purred, a nasty grin spreading across her mouth.

“I-I … I don’t- here!” Jacob blurted out. “You should call Sarika! Take my mobile, it’s in my back pocket, her number is on there. She and Marcus, they both know how to do things like that.”

Zheng hitched an eyebrow, turned our captive around with a shove, and extracted a mobile phone from the back pocket of his jeans. He babbled something inane about how we could keep it.

“Thank you, Zheng.” I held out one hand – but Zheng held onto the phone. She watched my eyes with the slow judgement of a predatory reptile. At any other time that look would have reduced me to pudding, but my indignant rage ran too deep and too hot right now to be quenched by even a seven-foot tall Amazonian goddess. “ … what now?” I snapped.

“You need allies, yes, but this one comes at a high cost,” she purred. Her eyes indicated the bottle in my arms.

I squinted at her like she was an idiot. “Praem is my friend, not an ‘ally’. You can eat me before I’d leave her behind. Really. Kill me then.”

Zheng growled, exasperated or unimpressed or merely thinking, it was hard to tell. “What can she do that I can’t?”

Clink-clink. Tink, went the lead weight inside Praem’s bottle. Tink-tink. Practically a tantrum.

“We absolutely do not have time for a- a- demonic territorial pissing contest,” I said. “Please, Zheng, give me the phone.”

“Time, exactly,” Zheng growled. “You make this phone call, and Sarika – I shit on her name – will move against you. She’s sharper than her predecessor. Less mad.”

“ … and?”

“Do you have a plan, little shaman?”

I shook my head, bewildered. “For what? Talking to Sarika?”

Zheng shrugged, sullen and watchful.

I opened my mouth to say no, of course I didn’t have a bloody plan. To tell the giant zombie that a plan didn’t matter. Hot anger and inner cold and intense worry ate at my mind. I had to get Praem back into her body, or out of here; I had to find Raine, get home and make sure my friends were safe. A plan? Sod plans! I was ready to scream threats down the phone at Sarika until she gave me what I wanted. The only answer was act.

Zheng hadn’t been allowed to make plans of her own for a very long time indeed. A slave, always forced into other people’s designs. Watching monsters like Alexander Lilburne stumble and crash, good intentions leading to hell and worse. All her former masters were dead. Now she was free, she could choose to have none.

She was also correct: I was exhausted, worn out, and now blind with anger.

Her approval was a tightrope.

“All right,” I said – and left.

I left Zheng and the sad, defeated cultist together by the radiator, the last thing either of them expected me to do.

Cradling Praem’s bottle gently in my arms, I padded back over to the beach chairs and settled the bottle in one of them, so it couldn’t be knocked over by accident. I had no idea what smashing the glass or popping the cork might do, and I didn’t want to take that risk yet. I regained the filthy but warm blankets, pulled them around my shoulders, and shuffled over to the tote box full of bottled water and emergency cereal bars.

Not the most appetising, but I took two, and another bottle of water to wash it all down. Then I got myself settled in a chair, folded my legs to keep my feet warm, and commenced eating.

Zheng levelled a slow stare at me. Jacob seemed confused too, slack-jawed.

“What?” I said after a swallow, and held up one of the cereal bars. “Peanut and chocolate, not bad but not terrible. Would you like one?”

“What are you doing, shaman?” Zheng purred.

“Getting more protein, like you suggested. One can’t make a good plan on an empty stomach.”

Zheng snorted a laugh. “Monkeys.”

“This monkey needs to eat.” I drank some water to drown the embers of my indignant rage. It sort of worked. Sitting still and going through the mechanical process of putting food in my mouth did drain away the hottest thoughts, give me a moment to pause and think, begin to scrape together the scraps of the plan Zheng demanded.

I was in charge here, I was in control, this was my responsibility. At least that’s what I told myself to stop anger decaying into panic.

Zheng dropped Jacob’s rope, and in lieu of tying him back to the curtain rail, she gave him a horrible silent grin instead, one that left no question as to what would happen if he dared try to escape. Even all the way on the other side of the room, I flinched as well, and the cultist cowered against the wall, curling up tighter.

Zheng grabbed a cereal bar from the box. With a dubious look on her face she peeled the wrapper, gave it an experimental sniff, and wrinkled her nose.

“Not to your taste?” I asked.

“No,” she growled. She did pour a bottle of water down her throat, though not before crushing the cap with a twist of her hand.

“Don’t suppose you have any painkillers up here? Paracetamol, anything at all?”

Jacob took a moment to realise I was speaking to him. He blinked several times and tentatively shook his head. I tutted and sighed. No longer cushioned by either sleep or anger, a splitting headache was brewing inside my skull, the product of dehydration or brainmath or stress, who knew? I settled for drinking more water. Zheng wiped her mouth and squatted down on her haunches to watch me – which almost rendered me unable to eat. Like being observed by a hungry six-hundred pound tiger.

“Before I freed you,” I said to her. “You said you’d ‘be mine’, in the ‘old way’. What does that mean?”

I’d expected a grin and a glib comment, perhaps a laugh. Instead, Zheng shrugged, and a subtle discomfort crossed her features, a twitch or a tic akin to a suppressed wince at the pain from an old wound. “Means I’m still here.”

I nodded, let it drop. “Fair enough. Thank you.”

She grunted.

“So what about you, do you have a plan?” I repeated her own question. “To get downstairs, past the ‘corruption’, as you called it?”

Zheng looked over at the lead-grey sky visible through the dirty glass in the room’s windows. Sharrowford lay below, hidden by the wall. “Jump out the window?”

Clink-clink, Praem disagreed.

“Right, I’ll take that as a no then.” I sighed, took a deep breath, and drew myself up. “But you know more about that than I do. You work on that part, getting us downstairs.” Zheng raised an eyebrow. My turn to shrug. “I can’t do everything on my own now, can I?”

“Mmhmm,” she grunted agreement, and her brow furrowed in thought.

“I have three problems,” I continued, letting it all flow out, the real plan assembling itself at high-speed in the back of my head. “One, getting out of here. Two, putting Praem back in her body. Three, finding Raine – my lover – and possibly Lozzie too, though the more I think about it the more I doubt she’s anywhere near right now. One is your job. Two and three, well, I need to get home, find Evee, the others, but while we’re here we have two options. Option one, we could force him,” I nodded toward Jacob, “to call Sarika for us, lure her back here, but he could spoil the whole thing with a single word.”

“If he wants his heart eaten.”

“Or,” I corrected her gently. “They might have a code phrase to use in emergencies, which means we wouldn’t even know.”

“Mmmmm. Clever.”

“I’m going to go with option two, which is more work and quite difficult, but may yield better results.”

“Which is?”

“A series of threats and lies.” I held out my hand for the phone again, and to my surprise it wasn’t shaking. “Don’t say a word while I call. Don’t let them know you’re free. That could be useful later.”

Zheng grinned in approval. She handed me the phone, and I did a pretty successful job of concealing my anxiety. I felt almost like Raine, competent and clever and quick, decisive and devious and – well, no, not dashing. In my best moments I can almost manage cute, at the right angle and in the wrong light, but I will never be dashing. I hoped she would be proud of me, proud of this plan, proud of how strong I was trying to be. I hoped with all my heart I’d get to tell her about this.

Sarika’s number wasn’t hard to find among the two-dozen Jacob had in his contacts list. He stayed silent and Zheng stayed squatting before me, as I placed the call.

Sarika picked up on the third ring.

“What is it?”

That same voice, thin and tight with bone-deep exhaustion.

“Jacob?”

“He’s alive,” I answered. “For now.”

A long pause, stretching out the seconds. I think she was trying to spook me, get me to break first and offer information by accident, but I harnessed my cold anger and my cold toes, lost myself in the numb sensations inside my body.

Eventually, Sarika let out a big sigh down the phone. “Got free in the end, did you?”

“I’m going to find you. If you touch one hair on Raine’s head, I’ll do far worse than kill you.”

“Raine? That’s her name? She wouldn’t tell me that. Thank you for that one, makes my job easier.”

I mock-hesitated as I shot Zheng a tiny, wavering smile of triumph. Sarika had taken my bait. They did have Raine, no question about that now. They knew of Evelyn, Kimberly had once been one of them, and they’d never be able to hold Twil – but Raine? She’d give them nothing, not even her name.

“Let me speak to her.” I didn’t have to work hard to make myself sound nervous.

“Or what? You don’t have any leverage.”

“My leverage is that when I find you, I’ll only kill you, instead of sending you to the Eye. The best thing you can do right now is let my friend go. Drive her back to the house and let her go, and then there’s a small chance that you can get out of Sharrowford before I and Saye find you. Twil – that’s the Brinkwood werewolf to you – I know she’ll be after you already, and I doubt you want her to catch you.”

I heard Sarika cover the mouthpiece on her end, muffle a question beyond earshot. She came back to the phone and spoke quickly.

“How’d you get past Zheng?”

“Sent her Outside. If she’s not dead she will be soon. Marcus too.”

“Fuck you,” Sarika snarled. Zheng grinned like a skull, laughing through silent teeth. “God fucking damn you, Morell. You don’t understand anything. You think I put that monster up there to just threaten you, is that it?”

This time I didn’t have to fake the hesitation. I glanced at Zheng, and wondered what that grin really meant.

“What … what do you mean?” I said.

“You think Zheng’s going to stay outside, with Lauren Lilburne running about? She’ll be back here within hours, and that girl will be holding the leash. Trying to! Do you understand what that fucking means? Do you know what that thing is or what it’s capable of? Of course you don’t. Alexander could barely control Zheng, his little sister certainly can’t. That thing gets free, you and I are the least of each others problems in this city.”

Zheng winked at me. I stared back and shivered, and not in the good way.

“You’re bluffing.” I held my voice tight and steady. “You wouldn’t- wouldn’t put Zheng in a room with me and not expect me to get rid of her.”

“I expected you knew better than that. That was the whole point! She was mutually assured destruction!”

“I’m not a mage.”

“Evidently,” Sarika spat. “Thank you for the heads-up. Fuck this.”

The plan was running through my fingers. Had to think on my feet, think past the headache and the fear and the suspicion about Zheng. What would Raine say? A bombastic threat, probably. What would Evelyn do? Get angry and call these people filth. What would I do? What should I do?

Lie. I was good at lying. I’d lied to myself for ten whole years.

“Let my friend go,” I all but stammered. “And I’ll bring Zheng back from Outside and deliver her to you.”

A thinking silence, stinging sharp. Zheng’s grin twisted with sadistic mirth. She mouthed a phrase at me, one that contained the words ‘eat’ ‘skin’ and Sarika’s name. I nodded.

Sarika finally spoke again. “You’d have to provide first. Get us the zombie, then I’ll think about letting your friend go. But what happens after that?”

“We go our separate ways.”

“You know I can’t do that, Heather. The Eye wants you. How about you give yourself up in exchange for your friend? You care so much, and I can’t back down without my … ” She paused, pain in her breath. “You, of all people, you understand this, don’t you? It wants you, every time I close my eyes. Same for all of us. I can’t tell it no. I can’t even tell it to fuck off. Stay where you are, we’ll loop back to pick you up, we’re not far. In exchange we’ll let your friend go, I promise. We’ll bring her with us, and we’ll let her go right in front of you.”

“No. The zombie for Raine, that’s what you get. Or you say no and I send you all to meet the Eye instead.”

Sarika sighed. “Alright, alright, but this ‘Raine’ girl is our insurance now. You come after us before we get Zheng, and we’ll hurt her, got it?”

“You-” I almost snapped out the words ‘you started it’, reduced us to the level of a playground fight. “I know where you are, and I know how to find you.”

“Try me, bitch. Zheng wasn’t the only zombie we’ve still got.”

We were both bluffing now, playing both ends; why threaten me with zombies if they would hurt Raine? I tried to think through the bluster, to predict the Eye Cult’s real next move.

“Okay, deal, as long as you don’t hurt her,” I said, heart thumping, playing this out as far as I could. “But listen, I’m going to need help.”

I heard the sneer in Sarika’s voice. “From-”

“Not from you. Don’t be stupid. Praem, I’ve found her … ” I swallowed a throat full of bile, and tried not to look at the warped-wood mannequin splayed out on the floor, tried not to think of that as Praem’s bones. “The bottle. How do I get her out, put her back in her body?”

Tink went the lead weight in Praem’s jar. I smiled at it, then recalled she probably couldn’t see my face.

Silence on the line.

“Sarika?” I prompted.

“Your zombie? Just smash the bottle, that should work.”

“ … smash the bottle?” I repeated. Zheng bared her shark’s teeth and shook her head. Tink-tink went Praem, two for no.

“Yes, smash the bottle near the vessel she arrived in,” Sarika repeated. It didn’t take a master of deception to know not to trust her. She rushed her words and spoke them flat. A bad lie.

A naked lie. Which meant the fake deal was already so much rubbish.

Zheng held her hand out for the phone. She whispered at me, silk rustling through fire. “You’ve lost, shaman. My turn.”

I hesitated, a mistake; Zheng surged up from her squatting position, a mountain of muscle in motion, and plucked the phone from my grasp. Her other hand gently gripped my head for a moment – a warning love-bite from a war-hound – then let me go. She stood tall and lifted the phone to her ear.

“Sarika,” she purred. “Sarikaaaaa. Guess who?”

Then she laughed, long and low, bowel-quaking and chest-constricting. When she lowered the phone again, the line was dead.

“Zheng!” I almost screamed at her. “I’d- she’ll- I’d gotten her to agree! To not … not hurt … ” I trailed off at Zheng’s raised eyebrow, and forced down a shuddering breath. Impressive how much this inhuman zombie could communicate with mere expression. “She was lying,” I said. “Of course.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Yes, yes she was lying, yes,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as agree with Zheng. “She would still hurt Raine if she needed to, she knew the deal meant nothing. Now she knows you’re free, she’ll be more cautious, she’ll be afraid.”

“Shitting herself,” Zheng growled with obvious pleasure, and dropped the phone back into my lap.

“Yes. Good … good move. Yes. She might think if she hurts Raine, I’ll let you eat her. Or something along those lines.”

“You think that’s why I did it? I just wanted to make her scream.”

Zheng grinned, wide and mocking.

I stared at the zombie for a second, trying to figure out if that was sarcasm, or something much darker. Had Sarika been telling the truth about Zheng? What exactly was this demon-possessed corpse capable of, that had made Sarika so worried? Could I trust Zheng?

Trust, maybe not, but I didn’t have a lot of choice right now, no other friends and no support, and even if I wanted to go it alone from here, I doubt very much I could have made Zheng leave.

She must have caught the incredulous curiosity on my face, because she grunted and pointed at the phone. “Why not call your friends now?”

“I can’t.” I sighed and let the phone flop against my leg. “I’m terrible at memorising numbers. I can’t even remember Raine’s number, not off the top of my head. I could call my mother at home, I guess, I still remember my home’s landline number. But that’s not going to help.”

“Sarika’s clever, you know?” the cultist said.

I turned to look at Jacob, surprised he’d spoken up. Zheng just growled, but to my surprise he kept talking, still rubbing his throat where he’d almost strangled himself earlier, sparing Zheng only a flicker of attention before he focused on me again.

“She’s kept us alive, since the … since … ” He tapped the side of his head with one blunt paw of a hand. “She’s kept us together, given us something to work towards. Stopped us from killing ourselves. Most of us. Look, I don’t have anything against you, I don’t even really care, but I can’t … I can’t live with this in my head.”

“A solution to that can be provided,” Zheng rumbled. She didn’t bother to look at him.

“The Eye,” I said.

“If that’s what you call it.” Jacob nodded.

A terrible notion wormed into my mind, a suspicion I hadn’t the time or energy to consider until now. “You dream about it, yes? That’s correct?”

He nodded, half-shrugged.

“Does it … ” The words caught in my throat. “Does it teach you things? Mathematics?”

“What?” He blinked at me. “No, no nothing like that. It just … it wants things. It doesn’t speak, it doesn’t do anything, it- it- it just is. It is, all the time, behind the- the-” He groped and gestured helplessly at the air, face contorting with the effort of expressing the ineffable. Behind the fabric of reality.

Whatever deal Alexander Lilburne had struck with the Eye, he’d given it a pipeline to these peoples’ minds – but it wasn’t using them in the same way it had spent a decade tormenting me.

Why? Why not hand them the same tools it had given to me? Why not take one of them to Wonderland instead?

“Stop. Stop,” I said. “I know what you mean. Look, here.”

Not sure why I was doing it, I rolled back my left sleeve to expose the thick black lines of the Fractal. Raine and I had last refreshed it a week ago, a shared ritual I relished every time. I held it up to show the cultist, proud of the ink on my skin. Zheng frowned and tilted her head at it too.

“This keeps the Eye out of my nightmares. Do you have a pen?”

The cultist’s face lit up with fragile hope, frowning, uncertain as he realised what I meant. He cast around for something to write with, settled on a black marker pen discarded near the magic circle at the back of the room. Still tied to the radiator, eyes asking permission, he reached out with a foot and hooked the pen toward himself.

“Make sure to get the angles correct,” I said, as he furiously scribbled the Fractal on his arm. “Memorise it, write it down, I don’t know.”

When he was finished he gripped his arm tight, staring at the design, then at me. “Will- will it-”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Good luck, I guess. You probably deserve to die, but … maybe you don’t deserve the Eye. That’s all. And don’t thank me, ever.”

“Monkeys,” Zheng grumbled.

“Sarika said she had more zombies. Is that true?”

“I-I’ve never seen them,” Jacob said.

“Yes,” Zheng purred. “Nothing as old as me. Leftovers from the castle, a few months old at most. Closer to her,” she nodded at Praem’s jar.

Clink-clink went Praem’s disagreement.

“Okay. Okay.” I stood up, shed all but one of the blankets as a final defence to keep out the cold, and scooped up Praem’s bottle. After a moment’s thought I wrapped it in a blanket too, in a sort of protective sling.

Briefly I considered trying to put her back into her body myself; hyperdimensional mathematics could do anything – in theory. In practice, I was capable of performing the magical equivalent of tying a sharp rock to the end of a stick. Returning Praem to her physical vessel would be more like restarting a nuclear reactor.

“I have to get her home,” I said to Zheng. “To Evee, to … to Evee. She’ll know what to do. I can’t carry all of her.” I allowed myself a lingering glance at the grotesque and beautiful sight of Praem’s altered wooden bones. “I’m not strong enough, but you are.”

Zheng raised an eyebrow, watching me.

“She’s my friend, Zheng,” I said. “You claim to know how humans work, you’ve got to understand that. I am not leaving her behind. Please, help me carry her.”

“What’s it worth to you, shaman?” she purred.

I played the card, the trump card which might mean nothing. “ … are you with me or not?”

Zheng shrugged, bent down, and lifted the limp wooden doll over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry.

“Right, getting home means getting out of here,” I said. “Do you have a plan yet?”

Zheng grinned a dark and ugly grin. “We walk. Down.”

==

Zheng took the lead into the dark bowels of Glasswick tower. I crept along in her wake, clutching Praem.

Thankfully for life, limb, and my threadbare dignity, Zheng hadn’t insisted on killing – or eating parts of – our captive cultist. We’d left poor Jacob tied to the radiator for his comrades to find, head between his knees, staring in silence at the jagged Fractal he’d scrawled on his arm.

This was not the time to examine my feelings, trapped at the top of a magically corrupted tower block with only a murderous cannibalistic demon for help, still covered in my own dried blood and desperately worried about Raine, but as I followed Zheng into the concrete gloom I couldn’t stop thinking about these cultists, about what they might not deserve.

Marcus had been a true fanatic, potentially very dangerous, and I was glad he was dead. But Jacob? Even if he had been part of the homeless-killing zombie-making operation, having the Eye screaming at you in your dreams was worse than any punishment I could think of. No torture would compare.

I’d made the threat several times this bleak morning: could I actually send any of these cultists to meet the Eye? Was my heart that hardened?

Alexander, I could have done it to him. Sarika – no, this wasn’t the same.

But what if they hurt Raine?

I wanted to feel anger like before, clean hot razor focus, but I’d drowned that heat in order to think and plan clearly. All I had now was the sodden dregs of fear, scared of losing Raine. Revenge meant nothing if she was-

No, that train of thought would paralyse me, and Raine needed me moving forward. I pushed the toxic idea down, bottled it up, and focused on the problem at hand: getting out.

The old stripped flat the cult had been using as a guard room was situated right next to the top-floor entrance to the stairwell, a tube of echoing concrete draped with shadows. Shafts of winter sunlight probed through the windows on one side of the stairs, but left pools of deep darkness stretching off on the opposite side, into the forbidding unknown of the residential corridors.

Two floors down from the top of Glasswick tower, on a mid-way landing before the next set of stairs, Zheng stopped.

I almost blundered into her back in the gloom. Praem’s wooden body, held over Zheng’s shoulder, stared at me with an accusing blank face.

“What is it?” I hissed, peering past the zombie. “Oh.”

“Mm.”

We’d reached the edge of the corruption.

Frozen ridges of concrete muscle pushed up through the floor of the next landing, as if emerging from wet tar. Structures like tendons jutted from corners, vanishing back into the building at sickening angles. Scales and bone spars and protrusions like teeth dotted the walls, all cast in concrete. The windows above the next flight of stairs looked puckered and rounded, the metal frames half swallowed by metastasised concrete growth.

“Alright,” I said, trying to tear my eyes away from the sight. Praem’s transmitted vision through Evelyn’s remote viewing setup had not done this place justice. It made my skin crawl. “Alright, what’s your pla-”

“Shhhhh,” Zheng hushed me. She reached into her coat pocket.

Before we’d left the flat-repurposed-as-guard-room, I’d taken several cereal bars from the stash in the tote, just in case. Zheng had filled her coat pockets too – with anything and everything. Pens, bits of paper, all the ritual detritus around the magic circle, discarded wrappers, a small paperback book. She’d even torn up pieces of one of the blankets and shoved those in her pockets too. When I’d asked why, and she’d explained the first step of the plan, I’d wished I hadn’t said anything.

Now she extracted one item from her magpie-collection – an old shoe – and threw it underarm, down the stairs.

Tap-tap-tap it went, then rolled to a stop amid the warped concrete below us. Zheng watched it like a hawk, eyes fixed, every muscle held in perfect stillness. She didn’t even breathe, and I wasn’t certain she needed to.

Thirty seconds went by, perhaps, and she finally grunted. I let go of a breath I hadn’t been aware of holding.

“You follow, shaman?” she purred.

“Yes. Yes,” I nodded. “So it’s … ‘asleep’ for now? Or it would have reacted?”

“No idea. Maybe it only sees souls. Maybe it’s a trap. Clever enough to let your demon get up here before it did for her. Or maybe she shouldn’t have gone around pulling heads off.” Zheng broke into a grin. “Don’t blame her though.”

Ting went the lead weight in Praem’s bottle.

“Like a Venus fly trap,” I muttered, and hugged Praem’s bottle to my chest. In a way it was comforting to know that the cultists hadn’t taken Praem out – the building itself had, letting her get deep enough that she’d be unable to escape. Or, at least, that was Zheng’s theory. “What is it, exactly?”

Zheng shrugged. “An echo in matter. Thinks it’s him.”

“Alexander?” Disgust twisted inside my chest.

“Just processes, no mind. We stay silent, we tread softly, it’ll take longer to react.”

“Is there a plan B, if … if we’re noticed?”

“When.” Zheng grinned a nasty grin. “Not if. No plan B. The lower down we get the better plan A will work.”

I sighed, couldn’t help myself. “Zheng. Zheng, what is plan A?”

Her grin widened. “We both live, that’s plan A. More I tell you, more scared you’ll get, and my part gets harder. Come on, shaman. And touch nothing.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” I hissed, rolled my eyes, and scurried along behind Zheng as she descended the stairs.

Creeping down the corrupted concrete stairwell was a singularly disgusting and unreal experience, with my heart in my throat and my every extremity tingling with adrenaline despite the cold.

Surrounded by biological shapes cast in looming, bulging concrete, pitted and cracked like concrete should be, but shaped by the hand of a mad giant sculptor. Nausea took me at the sight of gigantic muscle and tendon emerging from the walls in frozen curves, and at the feeling of rough uneven surfaces beneath my one sockless foot. Microbes inside a corpse, we trod across empty blood vessels down an architectural trachea.

The windows on one side of the stairwell made it worse. Far below lay Sharrowford, normal and dingy on a overcast morning. The sun was up behind the clouds and the city moved on as normal, oblivious to what had taken root in Glasswick tower.

Zheng walked with the silence of a stalking cat; how could somebody so big move so quietly?

I felt like a blundering elephant by comparison, my padding footfalls and shaking breath echoing up and down the cylinder of warped concrete.

Two, three, four floors further down, we must have been nearing the hollow floors which cradled Alexander’s headless corpse, when Zheng stopped and tilted her head, like a dog listening for a distant sound.

“What is it?” I breathed in the barest whisper.

She stayed like that for a few seconds, then grunted softly and gestured for me to follow again. We made it another four steps down the stairs before a groan filled the air.

A groan like layers of concrete sliding over each other. Like a building taking a deep breath.

Zheng froze, statue-still. I froze too, but shaking all over, clutching Praem’s bottle tight under the blanket. With an effort of will, I kept my lips closed, and made not a sound.

Silence didn’t save us.

Invisible at first, mere bumps on the concrete walls indistinguishable from the rough and knobbly surface, then growing, pushing out, extruding and extending, with thick bases and flared ends. From walls, ceiling, and floor, tentacles of shiny wet concrete felt their way into the throat-like cavern of the stairwell.

Neither very thick nor very long, about three feet in length and as wide around as my arm. In retrospect there weren’t very many of them, but I defy anybody to stay calm when a building sprouts cilia with which to digest the people inside it.

I did, to my credit, successfully resist the urge to scream. I bit down on my lips.

Ducking, squeezing, making myself small, trying to hold my breath in silence as the tentacles probed and tasted the air – it worked. For once in my life, being tiny and scrawny helped me survive, because the tentacles couldn’t see. They groped blind. I crammed myself as tiny I could get, heart hammering, holding on tight to Praem’s vulnerable, breakable jar, untouched.

Zheng wasn’t so lucky. Too big, too unwieldy. She gritted her teeth in naked frustration, seven foot of muscle too large to hide amid the reaching feelers. She dodged and twisted, tried to step between them, and failed.

I stared, helplessly, too scared to even whisper, as one of the tentacles caught her arm.

A brush, the merest touch on her coat’s sleeve, and the slick-wet tentacle shot forward to wrap around her arm. Every other tentacle went berserk, straining toward her, whipping for her face and feet. In a second three more had her, then six, then ten, then a dozen. In moments they had both of her legs, her throat, her ribcage.

Zheng fought like a titan, pulling and ripping, digging in her heels, roaring like a goaded lion. She dropped Praem’s wooden body to the floor with a clatter but the tentacles ignored it, ignored me as I put a hand to my mouth, ignored everything but constricting the giant zombie woman like a dozen pythons.

She pulled tentacles apart with sheer force, tore handfuls of concrete out of the floor as they dragged her along it, toward the wall.

The wall slopped open like a mouth. Toothless and wet, gaping and dark, from floor to ceiling.

“Zheng!” I couldn’t stop myself now. Luckily the tentacles were too focused on the difficulty of reeling her in. “What- what do I do!?”

“Stay still!” she shouted.

“What about- what was plan A?”

“This!” she managed to roar – and then tentacles of concrete closed over her mouth and covered her eyes, and heaved her into the obscene wall-mouth.

The wall closed like poured concrete, slurping and slapping and then going still, as if the mouth had never been there.

Glasswick tower swallowed Zheng whole.

Silence fell, broken only by my racing heartbeat. The concrete tentacles calmed, but didn’t retract. Their purpose now fulfilled, they waved lazily in the air.

Hand to my mouth, tears on my cheeks, I clenched my jaw and forced myself not to panic. A single mistake, a single misstep, a single sound could end my life. I hugged Praem’s jar close to my chest as if to hide her.

‘Zheng?’ I mouthed in silence. The nearest tentacle twitched ever so slightly, and I quashed the urge to speak.

No Zheng.

Between the spot I stood and the next landing, two dozen tentacles dotted the floor and walls. More waved in the gloomy stairwell below.

No choice, no way back. I had to protect Praem, and I had to get out of here; her body was unrecoverable now. Even well and whole I couldn’t have dragged all that wood down Glasswick tower without making a sound.

I took the first careful step, threading my way between the tentacles, cringing and shaking, a sob held tight in my throat. The urge to run was almost unbearable.

The air I displaced betrayed my presence. The nearby tentacles twitched toward me, exploring and groping. A scream clawed up in my throat.

A scream echoed by a roar.

Zheng burst out of the wall.

In a shower of concrete and dust, seven feet of avenging god exploded through rock and rebar like it was paper. Bleeding thick red from a score of cuts, covered in fragments of concrete, her coat and tshirt torn, she slammed back into the stairwell like a tank shell. She spat a mouthful of crushed concrete and a savage grin tore across her face.

Blinking, coughing, half-blinded by rock dust, I saw the tentacles react with panic, rushing to close the hole in the wall, whipping and lashing over the gap like a wound.

In one swift motion, Zheng scooped Praem’s wooden body off the floor and hauled it over her shoulder, then took two steps forward past me and kicked the glass out of the nearest widow, her boot sweeping the shards aside and smashing the frame open to the cold air.

“What-” was all I had time to say before she swept me up too. Over her shoulder in a fireman’s carry, one arm pinning my rump.

“No, no! Zheng, no!” I screamed as I figured out what she was about to do.

Zheng laughed, loud and exuberant and utterly bonkers. The tentacles were writhing back toward us, snaking for Zheng’s ankles and my face as she climbed through the window. She braced herself against the slim foothold of the exterior windowsill, as the clean air ruffled my hair and whipped out her trench coat. I twisted, half to look and half in an animal-instinct attempt to wriggle out of her grip. My head whirled at the view below. So very far below. A wave of vertigo sent my stomach flopping end-over-end and turned my legs to jelly.

“Plan A was always jump, shaman!” Zheng roared.

And jump she did.

==

Falling out of a high-rise tower block is a rare experience, but then so is having your toenails pulled out, or being attacked by a polar bear. Placing little value in this terminal lesson, I decided to close my eyes and forgo the once-in-a-lifetime sight of the earth rushing toward me from twenty five stories up.

Well, no, that’s a lie. I didn’t decide to close my eyes. I screwed them shut because falling out of a building is terrifying.

Clinging to Zheng with one arm and clutching Praem’s soul-bottle with the other, with the wind whipping past my ears – and whipping Zheng’s coat into my face; with Praem’s wooden bones rattling, and out of breath with which to scream, that fall took a lifetime. An adrenaline junkie’s dream, to be certain, but not one of mine. Free fall was not fun or exciting, because I was convinced that I had put my life in the hands of a homicidal, suicidal demon, and I was about to die.

Over the sound of Zheng’s mad laughter, my brain groped in panic for a relevant equation.

Later – much later, weeks later, with the terror safely behind me – I actually sat down and calculated how long that fall took. About 5 seconds, give or take the effect of Zheng’s coat on wind resistance, and how much Praem weighed without her pneuma-somatic flesh.

Five seconds.

Not enough time to dredge for hyperdimensional mathematics when I didn’t even know what I was looking for.

Hitting the ground knocked the wind out of me, forced a gut-deep ‘oof’ from my lungs, and bruised my stomach muscles for days afterward. A loud crack, a softer crunch, a moment of shock and sudden stillness.

Shaking all over, clutching both Zheng’s flesh and Praem’s bottle in a death-grip, I found that I was still alive. Still held over Zheng’s shoulder, her arm an iron-hard restraint over my hindquarters.

With no little difficulty I got my eyes open. I must have said something akin to ‘put me down’ because Zheng dutifully planted me back on my feet.

Of course I fell over onto my arse right away, because my legs muscles now consisted entirely of custard.

I did, however, not drop Praem’s bottle. Panting, dizzy, apparently with nothing broken, I couldn’t get any words out. Luckily I’d had my head at the right angle when we’d landed, or whiplash would have broken my spine.

Zheng straightened up. I heard several distinct cracking, crunching sounds from her legs. She’d stopped laughing, but wore a triumphant grin. Her feet had made a sort of dent in the ground, embedded into the compacted dirt by several inches.

She’d absorbed the impact.

I just shook my head at her.

We’d come down on the rear side of Glasswick tower, in a bit of scrub-ground that had once been a common green area, now a mass of weed trying to climb the graffiti-caked concrete, inside an old metal security fence that was supposed to block access to the lowest level of residential windows. Some old raggedy bushes and a electrical junction box hid us from the little-used, run-down road along the rear of Headly council estate.

Out of the tower. Mercifully, beautifully free, under the open skies of Sharrowford.

With company.

A young boy in a school uniform and coat, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, with russet hair and freckles and a face upon which puberty was not being kind, had been busy spray-painting one of those ghastly graffiti tags on the wall.

His eyes like saucers, mouth hanging open as if we’d fallen out of the sky. Which, to be fair, we had. We were also both covered in blood, carrying a stripped wooden mannequin and a huge faintly glowing bottle. And Zheng was seven feet tall, can’t forget that.

The spray can he’d been using dropped out of his hand, and a wad of chewing gum fell out of his mouth.

I swallowed, coughed, made sure my voice worked, and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” I asked.

“I’m … I’m bunking off,” he managed.

“That’s not good. You’ll get in trouble. Stay in school, yes?”

“Boo,” Zheng rumbled.

He nodded once, backed up several paces, and ran away.

Sensible lad.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Content Warnings

Attempted suicide

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Zheng’s question made perfect sense, both rational and reasonable – why had this trembling scrap of humanity decided to set her free?

My brain, held in a death grip by fight-or-flight response, cowering and cringing beneath a seven-foot tall monster leering over me with a mouthful of bloodstained razor-sharp teeth, squeaked an answer through my closing throat.

“Personal space, please.”

Zheng tilted her face-splitting grin and leaned closer. She sniffed me – fear-sweat, dried blood, and the lingering ash taint of Wonderland.

“Scared?” she purred, as a tiger would.

My head jerked in a nod. “I … I n-need you to straighten up, or … personal space.”

Zheng placed one huge hand on top of my head. “Hmm,” she rumbled.

How did I stay standing? How did I, tiny weak Heather, not collapse to the floor and curl up in a ball?

Because Wonderland had acted as a paradoxical inoculant.

Zheng was terrifying, yes, but her terror was all reassuringly bodily and terrestrial. She moved with the barely-veiled violence of a predatory cat at rest, but like a living being should do, not the awful click-clack ratcheting of the Lozzie-thing. Big – very, very big – and dangerous and scary, but not an affront to my senses or an invasive dismantling of my consciousness.

With every passing second my lizard-brain arousal liked Zheng more and more, and that probably helped too, loathe to admit it though I was. If we’d met under any other circumstances she’d have easily reduced me to a stuttering, blushing mess.

I closed my eyes, felt my fingers twitch, and took my mind to the edge of the equation to send her Outside.

She let go of my head.

“Personal space. Room to breathe. That enough for you, little wizard?” Her voice was like granite wrapped in silk. I opened my eyes and found her still far too close. She’d straightened up and eased back, kept only one hand against the concrete wall.

I took a shuddering breath and felt a sudden deep appreciation for still having all my vulnerable extremities attached.

“Still scared?” Zheng purred.

Somehow, from the God-forsaken black pit in my soul, born of a death-wish or sheer exasperation, or perhaps with fear blotted out by my worry for Raine, I managed to level a capital-L look at Zheng.

She laughed, a low-throated chuckle of real amusement.

“Of course I’m scared,” I managed. “You’re huge.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“And you’re not what I expected.”

“Hmmmm? Expected something more like your little demon? Barely awake, an idiot and half-mute? I’ve been here a long time, you monkeys have rubbed off on me.”

A long time? I almost asked her age. Was that a rude question, when speaking to a demon from Outside?

Still clutching the reflective space-blanket Marcus had thrown me a few minutes ago, trying not to think about the poor man’s cooling corpse several feet away, and also trying to ignore the overwhelming urge to inch away from Zheng, I did my best to see through the crimson gore on her face and read her as a person, as I did with Praem.

Sharp-edged intelligent eyes, a wide and mobile mouth, and that thatch of greasy dark hair sticking out in all directions.

She didn’t make it easy, almost like she was showing off. As I watched, Zheng looked away and unhinged her jaw, working it from side to side as if the muscles were sore from disuse. She swallowed, grunted, and ran her tongue over her bloody teeth – a tongue easily twelve inches long, tapered to a point, a wet red tentacle of muscle.

The tongue retracted back into her mouth, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief.

“Praem. You mean Praem,” I said. “And she’s not an idiot.”

Zheng’s awful grin widened again. She made a head-tilt radiate more threat than a entire room of professional thugs. “What does it matter what I call your pet demon?”

“Because-” I swallowed. My mouth was so dry. “Because it’s her name. I gave it to her. And she’s not my pet, she’s my friend.”

Zheng made a ‘hmm’ noise that sounded like a tiger turning over in its sleep.

“Don’t … don’t you have a name? Zheng? T-they’ve been calling you-”

“Zheng is a name. And we’re both mangling it.” Her grin faded to sullen boredom. “No ‘zz’. More like ‘jyung’, quicker.”

Her pronunciation sounded vaguely Chinese to my ears, though the amount of spoken Chinese I’d heard in my life amounted to almost nothing. Zheng did look somewhat East Asian, but in a way I couldn’t place. Her skin, light chocolate with a hint of red, gave me few clues. Not Chinese, I’d thought, but then again China is a very big place.

“Then I apologise,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to say your name wrong. I-”

“Doesn’t matter. Call me whatever you want.” She grinned again. “Could teach you my real name, but I’d have to break your jaw in three places and split your tongue, or you’d mangle that too.”

“Of course,” I sighed, unable to control my exasperation. “Of course your true name would collapse my windpipe or blow out my eardrums or something. Obviously.”

“Smart monkey,” she purred.

“You are a demon, yes? The same as Praem?”

She shrugged, a huge gesture from her. “I’m not from here.”

“Clearly. Zheng, then?” I did my best to say it right.

“Mm. Can you answer me now, wizard? Have I satisfied your little monkey brain that I’m not going to eat you too? Is your heart pumping a few paces slower?”

“ … yes, yes, no,” I almost squeaked. “In that order.”

That extracted another grin from Zheng. She liked it when I shot back, and that gave me a few more scraps of courage to work with, to keep me on my feet, to keep up with her.

“Why free me?” she rumbled. The grin grew across her face once more, toothy and bloody.

I allowed my eyes to flicker toward the door, the now-unlocked door, the key presumably still in Marcus’ pocket. I tried very hard not to look at his ruined corpse on the floor with its burst-melon skull. “Aren’t you worried they might … come back? You … we … ”

Zheng stared at me, grin fixed like the smile on a skull.

“Zheng?”

“No.”

“ … no?”

“No, as in you and I are doing this right now, little wizard.” She leaned in close again, slow this time, a snake hypnotising a quivering mouse. I tried very hard not to be that mouse, to keep my spine upright and my knees straight. “You freed me, and we’re in trouble, you and I. Deep in enemy territory, both woefully friendless. I need to know why, so I can choose between picking you up and carrying you out of here, or crushing your skull against the wall behind you.”

A lump in my throat. My limbs turned to water. I couldn’t control the shaking.

“A-alright, I- b-because you were guarding me. And I need to get out of here. That’s why.”

The grin widened. “No, that’s not the real reason,” she purred. “I’ve seen what you do, little wizard. You-”

“Heather,” I squeaked.

“Hmm?” A tilt of the head.

“That’s- that’s my name. Heather. Not ‘little wizard’. I’m not even really a mage.”

Perhaps I was merely buying time for the moment I would brainmath her into oblivion, but I told myself that if she knew my name, she might be less inclined to murder me.

Zheng tilted her head the other way, thoughtful. “Exactly. I’ve seen what you do, watched how you killed the old chief of this pathetic milk-blooded rabble. I’ve been gagged for years, but nobody’s been able to blind me for decades. I remember you, Heather, and I think you could have dumped this body” – she tapped her own chest, bloody fingertips sticky against the crimson-stained tshirt – “anywhere you liked. Exploded my head. Taken my arms and legs off, left me to roll around like a turd. But you didn’t. Why take the risk?”

“I … I don’t know … I-”

Twitch my fingers, get ready to reach out and grab her. All I needed was a second. Oh, this was such a terrible mistake. Why was she demanding an answer to this question? This was more like it, wasn’t it? A classical demon wrapping the summoner in riddles, toying with me like a cat with crippled prey.

“Not good enough,” she purred.

“I freed you to … to free myself!” I blurted. “Because I’m trying to escape, a-and I thought maybe you would want … ”

“Naive, or stupid? Not stupid, no. Naive? Maybe. Why did you free me, little wizard? Dig deep, and speak truth. I can’t defang you, your magic works differently, but I can shatter your brainbox faster than you can touch me with that little hand.”

My eyes went wide. Zheng made her point – she grabbed my wrist just to show me just how unafraid she really was. She held me like a gentle vice, iron-strong but without squeezing.

“The things you were saying to me mere minutes ago, Heather. Those assumptions. I liked those. I liked those very much. Were they lies?”

I could have executed the equation right then, with her skin touching mine; despite all her threats I knew I could unweave the fabric of reality at the speed of thought.

She was bluffing.

Terror peeled back. A seed of doubt sprouted.

The shark-toothed grinning, the lazy intimidation, the riddle-like question she’d accept no rational answer to – was this her survival strategy?

She knew I could obliterate her with a thought, send her Outside and strand her in some alien dimension, even if that’s where she was originally from. So the only way for her to live through the next few minutes, after murdering – perhaps justifiably – one of her former slave-drivers, after giving into her hunger for meat right in front of me, was for her to intentionally trigger all the animal fears in my soft mammal brain, remind me that I was small, keep me guessing, make me think she was totally unafraid – all while skirting the line at which I’d resort to self-defence.

She was trying to forge an understanding. And doing an awful job of it.

“Oh, dammit,” I swore softly, right in her face, shivering all over. “If you’re going to kill me, at least I’m going to die warm.” I huffed and shook off her hand – luckily, she let me go. I would have been rather out of face if she’d decided to hang on. I tugged the space-blanket around my shoulders and pulled it tight, hugging myself against the interior cold.

Zheng did this thing with her eyebrows, a quizzical kink so deep it would have been comical if she wasn’t covered in blood.

“I freed you … ” I started, then made myself meet her eyes and stand up straight. All my body rebelled, but it was either this or murder her. “I freed you instead of getting rid of you, because you were a slave. Nothing that can think for itself should be a slave.”

The grin returned, a wall of teeth. “I’m no djin, no friendly genie,” she rumbled. “Freeing me doesn’t win you infinite wishes.”

I glared at her as best I could, a mouse staring down a tiger, as I wriggled one arm free and pointed at the door. My hand shook. “Then go. Go wherever you want, do whatever you want. I have things to do.”

Zheng shook her head. “No wizard would ever say that to me. I’m the greatest prize this side of the Volga.”

“And I barely even know where that is. I’m serious.” I waggled my finger at the door. “Go. Go on. Leave. I won’t stop you.”

Zheng’s grin faded to nothing. She clacked her teeth together, still shaking her head. Her breathing turned rough and urgent, halfway between confusion and desire. She squinted at me, incredulity and wonder around her eyes.

“I’ve been a slave for a very long time,” she purred. “The leash, sometimes short, sometimes long, often muzzled, but never withdrawn. Until now. Any other wizard would want me.”

“I already told you. I’m not even really a mage.”

Zheng nodded slowly, regarding me with a strange fascination in her eyes. Her silk-and-stone voice dropped to barely a breath, to caress an ancient reverence.

“Shaman, then,” she said.

Shaman; that word meant something important to her. If she’d been human, she would have shivered, her arms covered in goosebumps. I got the shivers instead, and they had nothing to do with how cold it was in that room.

I stared back, eyes wide at the awful, hungry way she looked at me.

“Z-Zheng, I’m not-”

“Prove it,” she grunted. She yanked up the hem of her bloodied tshirt in one fist, to bare her tattoo-covered washboard abdomen and heavy breasts. It was like being flashed by an Olympian Goddess, she was big in every sense of the word. I swear, my eyeballs almost popped out of my face. “Take it all.”

“ … I … uh.” It took an effort of will to close my gaping mouth, to look up at her eyes again. “I … what?”

“The binding. Take it all,” she said between clenched teeth.

“ … your tattoos?” I swallowed and tried to see past Zheng’s impressive physique, tried to ignore the boobs shoved in my face.

The mass of semi-faded, layered tattoos on Zheng’s torso really did cover every square inch of her dusken skin. One could spend hours unravelling and cataloguing even a single hand-span. I saw Chinese or Japanese in there, and stranger writing-systems which while not alien, were so foreign in time as to be utterly unknown today. My parents had taken me to museums when I was younger – Maisie and I, when we were little girls – and the artwork on Zheng’s flesh reminded me dimly of the relics of a lost antiquity, seen under the harsh electric lights of the modern age, robbed of all their context and culture.

Zheng was a work of art in more than one sense.

I shook my head, lost for words. “It’s beautiful, I-I can’t destroy -”

She leaned in close, fast enough to make me flinch. “It is a chain,” she growled. “You freed me, shaman. Either you want me free or not, or was that talk about slavery so much flapping meat?”

I focused on the tattoos again. Wet my lips. Trying to think. I’d been right about Zheng, despite everything. Despite the gruesome cannibalism and the ugly threats, I’d been right. ‘Zombie’ was a fancy mage word for slave. How could I blame her for asking this?

“Zheng, Zheng I can’t.” I raised a hand to stall her snap-toothed rebuke. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m freezing cold. I’m dehydrated, I’ve been through an ordeal, and if I push myself too far, I could pass out and die.”

“I will catch you,” she purred, softly. “I will look after you. I know this place, this tower. They have rooms up here, their usual mess, but there’s a heater, emergency supplies. Food. And you won’t get out of this building intact, little monkey, not without help. Not past the corruption downstairs.”

I cast about for some way to explain myself. “But we need to get out of here first, we-”

“No.” She edged even closer, almost pressing herself to me. “Not later. Now. You remove this, all of this, because as long as this remains I can be re-bound with the right spells, the chains laid again, and I cannot trust you or yours yet, little shaman. I want to believe you, but I would sooner take my chances crushing your skull and slipping into obscurity. I will live under rocks and eat rat-meat, naked and free, rather than risk it again.” She bared her teeth. “Finish cutting my chains.”

“I can’t!” I shouted back in her face. Couldn’t believe myself, not courageous but desperate. “I have to rescue my friend – my lover. You heard what they were saying, the- the- them! The Eye cultists! She might be here right now, and they’re going to hurt her. I have to help her now, not in an hour after I pass out.” A spark of thought snagged in the back of my mind. “And Lozzie too, don’t you remember her? She liked you, she said you were her friend. She might be here too.”

“Lozzie … ” Zheng rocked back, blinking, dropping the hem of her tshirt as a strange confusion came over her features. She looked away, at nothing. “Lauren, little Lauren. Yes … I … I dreamed of her. I was free in my dreams.” Zheng’s attention whipped back to me. “Is she here too?”

“I don’t know!”

“Then trust me, damn you, you hooting ape. Unchain me and I will find her, and your lover too. I will kill in your name. We’ll have a deal, I’ll be yours, in the old way, not in this false flesh.” She grabbed a handful of her own skin.

I ran my eyes over her imposing frame, over the tattoos beneath her flimsy tshirt, over her muscles and what she represented.

I couldn’t find Raine by myself. Zheng was our best chance.

“Alright, okay. What is the minimum amount I can remove to make it safe? Safe for you, I mean?”

Zheng bared her teeth in a growl, a sound to make the bowels quake and the knees weak. She yanked up her tshirt again, craning her neck to look down at herself – then she exploded with frustration. She shrugged her trench coat from her shoulders, dumped it on the floor, and then ripped the tshirt off over her head in the most impressive act of disrobing I’d ever seen.

I’d like to say I found nothing sexual about Zheng’s nudity in that moment, but that would be a lie.

Stripped from the waist-up, she twisted and turned and lifted her arms to examine her skin, flexing the chords of toned muscle beneath. Quite a sight.

“Here, this spiral here,” she circled a portion of her belly with a fingertip, then traced upward and across. “To here, under my armpit, and here, below, that needs to go too. The shoulder blade, this stuff, and this, and these.”

I stared at her, trying to follow all the twists and turns she mapped out across her own flesh.

“This one as well, this is the root, this has to come out. And-”

“Wait, wait, stop,” I held up a hand. “Slow down, I need to … I’m going to have to do this in one go. I need a mental picture. Turn around again, let me start from behind.”

Zheng grunted her acquiescence and twisted to show me her back. The part I hadn’t said out loud was that her back was easier on my libido, less distracting. My eyes traced the patterns she’d indicated, and my hand wandered up, throat dry with anticipation. Could I really do this? It would be far more complex than selecting only the ink under my hand.

Gingerly, I touched Zheng’s muscled back, and began to nod as I linked the various structures together in my mind. Her skin felt hot, as if her body temperature ran several degrees above human.

“Alright. Turn back around. Show me again, slower, and trace some connections too. I don’t think I can do multiple places at once unless they’re part of the same … pattern. Object. Thing.”

Zheng nodded. She turned around and I tried not to marvel at her breasts. “Here, this spiral is the root,” she pointed. “And here, and here, then up here. And here, then here. That is the minimum. After that, any wizard wants to bind me, they’ll have to find a way to pin me down and write their name on my flesh. Can do you this for me, little shaman?”

Already half-rummaging through the necessary equation in the black abyss of my mind, I nodded, distracted by the technical questions of the task. “I think … I … how do I know you’ll really help me afterward? That you won’t just leave?”

“You don’t. I’m a demon.” She grinned. Combined with her top-half nudity, the effect was a little too heady for me. “You have to trust me, monkey.”

I made myself frown at her, made myself look like what she thought I was. This wasn’t my life on the line – who cared about me, what happened to me? At least if I died of exposure in this concrete room, I’d never see the Eye again. This was about Raine, this was about my friends.

Zheng’s grin died. I’d made my point.

“You’re Lozzie’s friend,” she purred. “You killed my former master, and freed me. I owe you, in the old way, the real way. Finish freeing me, and I’ll repay the debt.”

A tiny and intensely rational part of my mind screamed that Zheng was a demon, an Outsider walking around in an ancient corpse, that her expressions and words were mere imitations of human communication. She’d follow her own unfathomable ends as soon as she’d gotten what she wanted. Perhaps she was lying to me, perhaps every part of this was a trick toward some incomprehensible end. She was alien. She wasn’t supposed to be here.

Praem was a demon. I trusted Praem, I stuck up for her, and she’d come through for me.

Before I could second-guess myself, I pressed my hand against Zheng’s abdomen, just above the waistline of her jeans, and stared at her tattoos.

“Should I do anything?” she rumbled.

“Stay still,” I hissed. “And quiet. And … and if I go, catch me before my head hits the concrete.”

“Mm.”

Hyperdimensional mathematics with my eyes wide open, trying to describe the delicate tracery of Zheng’s tattoos in mathematical terminology, to excise specific chunks of ink, was infinitely more difficult than I’d imagined. To remove what lay under the shape of my own palm was one thing, but the math required here made my eyeballs ache and an ice-pick headache tingle at the back of my skull before I’d even begun.

I needed a better way to define Zheng’s chains.

I closed my eyes. Chains, bindings, ropes around her soul – that’s what I was really removing. The ink needled under her skin was only outward representation. I dug with my mind, tried to define and see Zheng in mathematical representation, the same way I had done during my ill-fated attempt to track the Lozzie-thing in Kimberly’s flat.

The ink itself, old and faded, in a hundred languages; Zheng’s skin, hot and supple; thick muscle and iron bone, cords of sinew and tendon, appropriated from her vessel and adjusted in a million-million inhuman ways too deeply biological for me to understand, filled with new structures and cells and impossible additions.

Deeper, much deeper, past matter and blood, I found Zheng.

A writhing shard of starlight, in chains.

The whole picture, every layer described in hyperdimensional mathematics, held still in my mind. In that final instant before execution I felt hot crimson dripping from my nose and across my lips.

I really needed to start taking iron supplements.

“You’re ble-” Zheng said.

Out.

==

Warm temptation lulled me back to the edge of sleep, but I found only shark-toothed grins and terrifying giants waiting there.

I struggled up through layers of unconsciousness and jerked awake, gasping for air and scrubbing at my own eyes.

“Welcome back to meat-world,” Zheng’s voice greeted me.

“Where-” I croaked, pulling myself into a sitting position as my feet found the floor. I’d been curled up in a low chair of some kind, wrapped and warm, loose canvas cradling my weight – a beach chair? A jumble of shapes and colours faded back into focus through my blurry vision. More plain concrete walls, but not the same room as before. “I don’t rememb- … I need water.”

A shape detached itself from the corner, rising and unfolding, and Zheng walked over to me. Rough but gentle hands took mine and pressed an open bottle of water into my weak, shaking grip. I didn’t care if it was stale, drugged, or actually a bottle of lighter fluid, I put it to my lips and drank like my life depended on it. Which, to be honest, it probably did.

Coughing, spluttering, my vision returning, I looked up – and up, and up – and met Zheng’s eyes. Blue. She’d washed the blood off her face while I’d been out.

“I feel like death,” I groaned.

“You’ll live,” she purred. “Seen plenty of you monkeys die, and you’re not there yet.”

Zheng looked like a wheat field after a UFO visit – her tattoos were covered in crop circles. She’d donned her blood-stained tshirt again and draped the trench coat back over her shoulders, but that couldn’t conceal the transformation I’d wrought on her body-art. Wide circles of blank untouched flesh now punctuated the black mass of ink, each circle connected by at least one clear line of unblemished skin.

Whatever I’d achieved with brainmath at the end there, it had erased almost all the spirals from Zheng’s tattoos.

She grinned, the same unnerving shark-toothed grin as before. “Thank you, little shaman.”

“You’re welcome, I think?” What on earth does one say to a newly liberated giant zombie animated by a spirit from outside reality? I cast about the room instead, squinting through a real monster of a headache and trying to figure out where I was now. “Sick of passing out and waking up in other places,” I muttered.

I tipped a little of the bottled water into my cupped hand and splashed it on my face, rubbing the corners of my eyes, before I downed the rest to wash the taste of blood and bile out of my mouth.

Zheng had wrapped me in a pair of filthy blankets, apparently warm enough to stop me from freezing. A hissing gas-powered space heater poured warmth into the concrete room, rubber hose plugged into a free-standing cannister, like some sprawling industrial spider dredged up from a nightmare of the 1970s. Well done, Zheng.

“Where … ” I gestured vaguely.

“One of their lairs,” Zheng purred. “Top floor. You passed out, easy to carry though. You weigh nothing, shaman. Need to eat more protein.”

One of the cult’s lairs – the Eye Cult now, I suppose – and it looked the part as well. Another stripped concrete flat in Glasswick tower, whether the same unit or a nearby one I couldn’t tell. Once a sitting room, perhaps. Light entered through two filthy windows in the longest wall.

The room was full of supplies and equipment: a first-aid box, a plastic tote full of bottled water and cereal bars, a couple of crowbars against a wall, binoculars on one windowsill, rolls of tarpaulin, a tin of paint, and a dozen other innocuous everyday items, though I did wonder at the expensive fishing rod propped up in a corner. A magic circle had been inscribed onto the floor at the far end of the space, in black paint, surrounded by a few odds and ends – a bundle of feathers, a small knife, a single leather glove. An empty glass bottle stood in the middle of the circle. Whatever magic had been performed there, it wasn’t active anymore.

Another two beach chairs stood near the one Zheng had placed me in. Along with the space-heater and a small stack of paperback books, they gave the distinct impression of a sort of watchtower or guard room.

Zheng had caught one of the guards.

A thin young man with a face like a seagull, wearing jeans and a zipped-up athletic hoodie, had been roped to the room’s radiator much like I had, but with far more medieval sadism. A rope ran from each of his wrists to loop down under his groin, then up around his neck from behind, then to the radiator pipe and up to an old rusted curtain rail. The arrangement forced him to stand on tiptoes if he wanted to keep breathing. A dark blotch of urine had stained the front of his trousers. Terrified eyes met mine.

“Help me,” he whined, tears on his cheeks. Appealing to a fellow human being. “Please!”

“ … are you one of them?”

He stared, half-shaking his head, not understanding my question.

“He is. I remember him well enough,” Zheng grunted. “Jacob something. Unimportant.”

“She- she’s going to eat me!” Jacob pleaded.

“Will you?” I asked Zheng.

“Be a waste if I didn’t.” She shrugged, and turned a nasty grin on the bound man. “Still full after the first course, but I’ve got room.”

Jacob closed his eyes in mortal resignation, trying not to weep. I looked away, didn’t have the bandwidth for this right now. I was painfully aware I’d made an unspoken pact with something cruel and violent, which liked me for reasons I didn’t entirely understand yet.

My eyes alighted on a bundle of discarded clothes and a coat on the floor nearby, wrapped around strangely curved and spiked pieces of polished wood, lying as if dragged there. I blinked, couldn’t quite make the connection, a sick feeling in my stomach.

“You want the bad news or the good news first?” Zheng rumbled.

“What?” I blinked up at her, my jumbled thoughts all lining up suddenly. “Raine! Did you find-”

Zheng shook her head. “Bad news. She’s not here. Neither’s little Lozzie.”

A wrenching emptiness settled in my chest. “What? No, they said … ”

“Top two floors.” Zheng squatted down in front of me, lowering her incredible height so I didn’t have to crane my neck. She looked almost apologetic. “Been right down to the line where the corruption starts, but no further. I don’t have safe passage through that anymore. You’ve seen that place?”

I nodded urgently. “I-I know what you mean.”

“Good news: he was the only thing here,” she nodded toward the bound man. “Sarika and her sad hound must have left, gone downstairs, gone home. Doubt they’d keep any prizes below the line, besides the dead master’s corpse itself.”

“No, no they must have her somewhere else, you … you know all their safe houses, all the places they use, don’t you? You know where she might be? You know how they think, you-”

Zheng pulled a shrug with her face. “Less than I know you, shaman. Furniture doesn’t get the need-to-know.”

“You mean you don’t know anywhere they might be?” I started to shove the filthy blankets off me, wanted to stand up, felt so drained and weak, but had to do something. Had to find Raine, get back to Evelyn, call Twil. Something, anything.

“Not doors I’d knock on without knowing what’s behind them,” she rumbled. “But yes, three ‘safe houses’ I can think of, maybe, perhaps, if we’re very lucky.”

“Where? Zheng, tell me, where?”

The grin crested her features again. “Why don’t we find out for certain?”

“ … what?”

She stood up without explaining herself, and met the eyes of the terrified man tied to the radiator.

“No, please!” Jacob blurted out before either of us asked him anything. “I don’t know anything! I don’t know- I don’t- I don’t- I-”

His pleading dissolved into babbling as Zheng did what I suspect she’d first been designed for. The grin spread on her face as she opened her jaw, wider and wider, taking each step toward him with slow purpose. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, inch after obscene inch, fat and thick and wet, extending far below her chin. The man cringed, closing his eyes and trying to press himself back from her without choking himself on the rope around his neck.

“Zheng!” I snapped. The tongue whipped back into her mouth, and she turned to regard me, oddly neutral. I had the sudden and unmistakable feeling of getting between a dog and its food. “What are you doing?”

“You want to know where your lover is?” she asked.

“Yes, of course I do, but … don’t … ”

“Do you have a better suggestion?” She took the final step toward the terrified man, and grasped his chin in one huge meaty fist, ignoring me once more. “First I will take one of your eyes,” she hissed. “Then a hand. Which do you use to wipe your arse, worm?”

Zheng only did her thing for a few seconds, but it made my stomach turn and my blood run cold. She slid up close to the shaking, cowering cultist, her hot breath in his face, hissing something between her teeth about how he had to open his eyes, an obscenity I will not repeat here because I don’t wish to think about it ever again. Her teeth in his face, her frame radiating animal threat and lust and hunger all at once – she was going to eat him. She wanted to eat him, every cell in her body screamed it out loud. He was crying, panting, babbling denials, when her tongue extended again, a rough tentacle crawling up the side of his face, daring him to close his eyelids.

“Actually,” I managed to say out loud. “Yes.”

She stopped. The tongue whipped back into her head again. She didn’t look at me. “Yes?”

“Yes, I have a better suggestion,” I said. My voice shook, but I got the words out. Zheng tilted her head one way, then the other, a low hiss of frustration in her throat. “I’m not- I’m not telling you what to do, but I’m going to politely request that you not eat parts of that man. Please.”

Zheng sighed, shrugged, and let him go.

The cultist – Jacob – looked at me like I was an angel. I glared back. “I’m not saving you from her,” I said, only half a lie. “I’ve got an ultimatum.”

“Anything, anything- I- they just pay me!” he said. “I’m hired to watch the room, I-”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

Zheng grinned.

“But it doesn’t matter,” I continued. “I assume you’re not a mage, at least, or Zheng would have pulled your head off by now.”

“Mmhmm,” the zombie grunted.

“Well, believe it or not, I’m worse than her. I can do a lot worse than kill you or torture you.” I managed to get to my feet, hugging one of the blankets around my shoulders. I felt wobbly and ill, a hollow pain inside my chest, bones fragile as fine porcelain. “Do you know who I am? Tell me the truth, or I’ll … I’ll … or Zheng will eat one of your eyeballs.”

Had to swallow, to keep the bile down.

He glanced at Zheng, then back at me, feet adjusting to keep the rope from closing his windpipe, and nodded once.

“Then you know what I can do,” I said. “I will send you to meet your new God, the Eye, whatever you people call it now. I will send you there, and you will not come back, unless you tell me what I want to know.”

A horrible realisation dawned on his face. Zheng had terrified him, but the prospect of meeting his God sent claws of soul-horror raking across his beaten mind. His face went grey and his jaw went slack.

“I don’t-” he choked out.

“Don’t is not the word I want to hear,” I managed. Deep down in the back of my mind I felt like a monster, like something hatching from a misshapen shell, but I would do anything to find Raine.

“I don’t know!” he almost screamed. “I don’t know where they took the other girl, I swear! I swear, oh God, please no, no, I swear, I-”

“You must know, or you’re going to meet your God.”

His eyes darted back and forth, sweat on his brow, shaking all over.

Then he tried to kill himself.

He did a little hop on one foot and kicked his own legs out from under him; the rope snapped taught with his weight, and almost snapped his neck. Luckily for all of us, Zheng had seen this coming. She moved like greased lightning, and hit about as hard, grabbing the ropes that ran from the cultist’s wrists and under his groin in the split-second before his entire body weight slammed through his spine.

Instead of breaking his neck he jerked and writhed, choking for air, squealing like a stuck pig. Zheng reached up and unhooked the top rope from the curtain rail, and poor Jacob crashed to the floor in a sobbing, retching heap.

I stared, numb, lost for a moment, trying and failing to convince myself he had deserved that. My threat had made a man want to die.

“So eager to leave this mortal coil, monkey?” Zheng rumbled down at him, grabbing a handful of his hair. “At least let me do it for you.”

“Alright,” I snapped out, before Zheng could pick him up and eat his fingers. “Alright, I believe you, you don’t know where Raine is.”

The cultist nodded, clutching at his bruised throat, trying to squeeze himself away from Zheng. His eyes found me like a drowning man clutching for a piece of driftwood.

“But you’re going to tell me every place your cult has, every place she might be. Addresses, details, any-”

He didn’t take much convincing. I suspect he was broken long before Zheng tied him to that curtain rail. As he babbled out a trio of targets – a place on the riverfront, an old pub out west I’d never heard of, a suburban address he swore was Sarika’s – he broke down slowly, all energy fleeing his body until Zheng finally let go of his hair and he curled up on himself like a wounded insect. He slowed, words deadened, eyes drained of vitality.

“That’s all? Just those three places?”

He nodded. “Those are the only- only ones I know. I know they took another girl, I don’t know who, I never saw. If I had, I would … I … I-I never agreed with … with … ”

He trailed off at the look on my face. “Whatever you have to tell yourself,” I said quietly. “You’re not worth killing.”

“She’s not going to kill you,” Zheng corrected me. The man flinched, but that was all. The horror of the Eye had drained the life from him. He’d given up. Zheng tutted, unimpressed with the lack of reaction.

“What about Praem? Where is she?” I asked.

Tink. A clink of metal on glass, a fragment of gravel on a window, too faint to notice beyond the subconscious.

“Who? What?” The cultist blinked at me.

“The zombie. Who came here last night? Sarika told me you people captured her too, unless that was another bluff. She’s my friend, where is she?”

Blink blink. Incomprehension. “Last night? Oh, you- you mean that.”

He nodded past me at the floor, and for a moment I thought he was being funny or we’d pushed him so far he’d lost his mind. He was nodding at the bundle of clothes and polished wood.

A sick pressure mounted in my chest. I took a shaking step toward what resolved itself as a splayed figure, wrapped in a pair of ugly cargo trousers and a big puffy coat. The boots. I recognised the boots, I’d seen them so many times before. Another step and I fell to my knees, shaking my head. Reached out with one hand, but stopped, confused. To touch would be only further desecration.

“Shaman?” Zheng purred.

“It’s her,” I managed.

A wooden mannequin, ball-jointed, of the kind only found in the most expensive and exclusive boutiques or the workshops of fashion designers. Evelyn had spared no expense in making Praem, but the wood had been warped by the effects of Praem’s inhabitation. Little spars and anchor-spikes jutted from the limbs, threads like a nervous system or frozen blood vessels lay just below the surface, and many of the joints had been added to with sheaths of wooden sinew or strange adjustments to their ranges of motion. The head was a blank oval, the wood grain twisted in impossible ways.

I shouldn’t be seeing this. It was like looking at a friend’s bones.

“Praem?” I whispered.

Tink.

Only in the silence of impending grief did I hear the little clink of metal on glass. I cast about with sudden wild hope. “Praem? Pra-”

Clink. Clink clink.

“Ahhh,” Zheng purred, and pointed at the magic circle, at the empty bottle standing within. “Found her.”

Careless of the danger, stupid and rash, I scrambled over to the magic circle on freezing feet and scooped the bottle up in shaking hands. A cork filled the neck, trapping a piece of fishing line so it dangled down inside the glass enclosure. A bead of lead, like a fishing weight, hung at the end of the line.

Inside the glass, I could see the faintest suggestion of a rainbow discolouration shifting and curling, like oil on water transmuted into the slimmest wisp of smoke.

“It’s-” Jacob spoke up. I stared at him with too much anger and steel, made him flinch and cringe; right then I wanted to murder him. I wanted to get my hands on the person responsible for this and slap them.

“This is an obscenity,” I hissed at him.

Zheng snorted mean-spirited laughter. “Got herself corked.”

I whirled on her and, without meaning to, vented cold anger at the target she’d presented. “Don’t you dare laugh. You were like this, an hour ago! You were as good as in a bottle!”

She blinked once, and lowered her head to me in acknowledgement.

“It- it’s one tap for yes, two for no,” Jacob stammered out, nodding at the bottle. I turned back to it, shaking my head in denial.

“Praem?” I whispered.

The piece of lead jumped, as if caught in a breeze, and clinked against the side of the bottle.

Tink.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Handcuffed to a radiator in an empty concrete room, in only my pajamas and underwear, dried blood crusted around my nostrils and eye sockets and the edges of my scalp, aching and cold and missing a sock, with only a terminally taciturn seven-foot tall zombie for company.

Still an improvement over Wonderland.

I stared back at Zheng, met those empty, dead-fish zombie eyes, but she didn’t move. Apparently my regained consciousness didn’t warrant a response.

“Hi, Zheng,” I croaked, then cleared my throat. So dry. “Don’t suppose you’d know what I’m doing here?”

She said nothing. What had I expected?

Reluctantly, I tore my eyes away from the huge zombie, and inventoried my various aches and pains. I probed my face, my tender hairline, my sore nose, rubbed flakes of dried blood away from my eyelids until I could blink freely without too much stinging. To my surprise I’d sustained only a couple of external bruises – probably acquired fighting the Lozzie-thing, as well as a nasty livid purple mark on my wrist from where she’d grabbed and held me.

Internally was a different matter, fragile and tender.

My soul, my sense of self, the coherency of electrical impulses in my brain, whatever you wish to call it – that felt bruised and bloodied. That was why my heart ached, why I felt so cold inside, brutalised by the Eye’s rummaging. My connection to my own body was thin and torn, and slow to repair.

I tucked my knees in closer to my chest, shivering, desperate for some warmth.

“Shouldn’t you … I don’t know, go fetch whoever’s in charge of you now?” I asked Zheng.

She stared back at me, eyes empty, face devoid of expression. No body language, like a shop dummy or a sculpture. Her statue-like inhumanity seemed worse than before, but I wasn’t in a state to catalogue exactly how. If her eyes hadn’t moved to meet mine, I’d have assumed she wasn’t in there anymore.

I sighed and tutted at her, and glanced around the room.

Shouldn’t I be terrified? Panicking? Pulling on the handcuff, sobbing and shivering? Crying out for somebody to come help me? That was what young women tied up in cellars did in television and movies. This was supposed to be everyone’s worst nightmare; kidnapped, restrained, by parties unknown. An empty concrete room, even. How cliche.

I’d just survived my worst nightmare, for the second time in my life. A sort of numb euphoria still cushioned my mind. What could be worse than the Eye? This was nothing.

Mostly I felt irritated, cold, and thirsty.

Real fear – for my friends – tickled the back of my consciousness, but I crushed that down under the practicalities of the moment.

I examined the handcuff. Shiny, new, with a rigid black plastic midsection, the metal cuff itself cinched tight around my thin wrist. I tried to squish my thumb down and wriggle free, but couldn’t squeeze through. No getting out without the key.

“Feel like coming over here and crushing the mechanism in here for me?” I rattled the cuff as I asked Zheng. “No? Didn’t think so. May I get up, then? Yes or no? Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

She didn’t blink at all. Spoil-sport. I began to ease myself to my feet. Zheng’s eyes tracked me.

“I’m going to look out of the window, figure out where I am. Shouldn’t you be trying to stop me? … alright then, don’t say I didn’t ask permission.”

Uncurling made my teeth chatter. So cold in here, inside this bag of wet meat I was dragging around as an excuse for a body. The handcuffs limited my range of motion, but I managed to slide them up the radiator pipe, stand up straight, and look out of the window.

Up – dawn. Grey skies. The North in winter.

Down, and a touch of vertigo clutched at my legs. Sharrowford spread out below like a concrete-and-brick skid mark, caught in the vulnerable process of waking itself up, shaking off the shadows and cobwebs. Streetlights flickered off and cars passed in the distance.

Below us, so very far below us, lay Headly council estate.

“Oh, great,” I sighed.

If I craned my neck to the right and pressed my face close to the filthy glass, I could see the corner of the other high-rise tower. I didn’t need to guess which one I was in, or how high up I was. Intact glass, beyond range of the concrete-warping effect of Alexander’s corpse, in a stripped flat.

Glasswick tower, top floor.

I tried the window, but they’d thought of that – the catch was closed and locked, with a key. If I found something heavy to smash the glass, I could wave my arms and shout to attract some attention, but why bother?

Time to leave.

“Well, um, nice seeing you again, I suppose?” I said to Zheng, then took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

The bravado wasn’t entirely false. Whoever had handcuffed me here had no idea what I was capable of. Physical restraint couldn’t hold me, not in this reality.

I’d have lost my nerve if I’d stopped to think about the risks. I felt more fragile and paper-thin than any other time before; I could be about to collapse and pass out in some Outside place, choke to death on my own vomit, or perhaps my body would finally give up. The alternative was to sit here, thinking about what might have happened to Evelyn and Raine. Unable to help. Far away, and alone.

No. Much better to Slip, to take the risk, than wait in this empty room for whoever – or whatever – had imprisoned me.

Considering where I was, I could make an educated guess.

Familiar by now, almost deceptively smooth, the first pieces of the equation slipped into place. Pain spiked in the back of my head. I grit my teeth, tried to hold my breathing steady, focused on the rest of the hyperdimensional mathematics that would get me out of here and my wrist out of these handcuffs. Another piece slid into place, white-hot metal burning a passage through my brain.

Dead hands found my ankles. Held on tight.

Held me here.

I gasped out loud, opened my eyes, and dropped the equation – on purpose this time, carefully, though it still stung like star-fire and made me curl up around my stomach, wincing and wheezing pained breath through my teeth. I blinked down at my feet, but no skeletal hands clutched my actual flesh. Where had that sensation come from?

“That wasn’t … you? Was it?” I asked Zheng, but she didn’t look like she’d moved in weeks.

Shaking, confused, with real panic rising up my throat, I tried again.

I got further that second time. Pushed right up to the edge, stomach heaving on nothing but bile – and the feeling of bony, dessicated hands wrapped themselves around my ankles, held on tight, clawing at the periphery of my soul.

Crumpling to the floor, hacking and coughing flecks of blood onto the bare concrete, exhausted by the effort of failed brainmath, I whined in horrified frustration. The calm and lack of fear slipped through my fingers. I scratched and scrubbed furiously at my ankles, trying to wipe away the memory of that awful grasping.

“Get off me, get off me!” I hissed. “Let me go!”

I couldn’t Slip.

==

My captors came to check on me ten minutes later. Felt like eternity.

Turned out the reason I’d been so unafraid was the assumption I was able to Slip away, use brainmath, get out of here. As soon as I couldn’t, it all came crashing down.

Nothing to do except think, huddled against the wall, going around and around inside my own head, faster and faster. I needed to get out of these handcuffs and break the window, but with what? How? Could I get past Zheng? Hit her with a wrecking ball of force again, like I did before? I’d pass out afterward, and then I’d end up right back where I started, unless I took the top off the entire building.

Nobody was coming to rescue me. Raine had been knocked out, maybe worse. Vulnerable. Acid burned in my throat – Raine, made vulnerable.

Chest tight, shivering in the cold. Evelyn too, in a magical coma, alone and unprotected, except for Kimberly, and she’d run away. Didn’t blame her. How long ago had those strange men been hammering on our front door? An hour? Two? I needed to get out of here, they could be anywhere, anything could be happening. The Eye could be coming back for me.

What about Lozzie? Why wasn’t she appearing to help me? Was she trapped here too? Nearby, tied up like this, unable to Slip out because of dead hands grabbing at her feet? Was she scared too?

The radiator was bolted to an exterior-facing wall, so I couldn’t hammer on the concrete. The best I could manage was to stretch out a leg and thump my heel on the floor.

“Lozzie!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, throat hoarse and raw. They should have gagged me. “Lozzie?”

Dust and echoes.

I wanted to cry, but I was alone, no heroic Raine coming to rescue me, no friend about to appear around the corner to help. Alone. I did cry, a tiny bit. I’m not ashamed to admit so.

No, not like in films or television at all. Sometimes there’s no way out, unless you cheat.

I focused on Zheng, and started thinking like a mage.

Last I’d seen the giant zombie woman was in the Cult’s ridiculous castle, in the last moments before I’d killed Alexander Lilburne. She looked as if she’d been treated to at least a perfunctory wash since then.

Clean boots, new denim trousers, greasy black hair sticking up in all directions from a pale scalp. Her trench coat was mercifully free of blood – but was still missing the left sleeve where I’d knocked her arm off, the reattached limb still exposed. The arm looked much healthier, her shoulder no longer a mass of pulped tissue, now all clean, lean, toned muscle.

Unlike every previous time we’d met, her trench coat hung open. She wore a thin white tshirt beneath, and obviously no bra.

Also unlike every previous time, I finally witnessed the true extent of Zheng’s tattoos.

I’d seen the tattoos on her left arm before, in those terrified moments when she’d confronted Lozzie and I in the cult’s castle, but I’d had neither time nor presence of mind to examine them.

Now I had nothing but time and fear, and Zheng stood there, unmoving, the white tshirt doing little to conceal either modesty, muscle, or body-art.

The looping, winding, spiralling black of the tattoos covered her entire muscled torso. Emerging from below the waistline of her jeans, reaching the rough terminus of her wrists, scrawled on her heavy breasts and washboard stomach, crawling up her throat and across her bold collarbone, in a design so complex it stung the eye not with magic but with sheer visual confusion. A thick mass of infinitely tiny text, in dozens of languages, formed into symbols, whorls, loops – but mostly spirals, so many spirals, etched into the skin over corded muscle.

All of it was faded, some more, some less, some almost to nothing – from different times, different ages, inscribed in different hands, some on top of older designs, some interlocking with them. Zheng’s skin carried a multi-generational work of art.

Among the faded, blurred tattoos, one unmistakable addition stood out, bold and clear.

On her exposed left forearm, the one I’d injured, a half-complete spiral shape interlocked with a much older part of the design. The ink looked fresh.

“That’s new,” I said to Zheng, meeting her eyes again. “And you didn’t do that yourself, did you?”

A mad and dangerous idea took root in my mind, based on too many assumptions. I wet my lips, weighed my courage. Better than sitting here. If I could only reach her.

Then, I realised I was an idiot.

“The cuff,” I said out loud, and sighed in sudden relief. “I’m so stupid. Heather, you’re so stupid.”

Heart fluttering with nervous tension, I grabbed the rigid middle of the handcuffs with my free hand. If I couldn’t go Outside, then these could – and the glass in the window could, too.

A key rattled in the door, interrupting my small nervous victory.

Jerking to my feet, heart in my throat, I rose as best I could to meet whatever had come for me – Alexander’s walking, headless corpse, or the Lozzie-thing with a hole in its chest, or robed cultists with knives and chanting. I kept my hand on the cuffs, but internally I began to prepare, painfully and with some reluctance, for a very different kind of brainmath. Whatever they wanted, whatever came through that door, I was going to fight.

The last thing I expected to step into that barren concrete room was three very ordinary looking people. A woman, and two men.

The woman was the leader, I think. She stepped inside first, with a pause at the threshold and a curious raised eyebrow at me.

“You gonna to try to kill me?” she asked.

“ … I don’t know,” I managed. “Should I?”

She shrugged and strode into the middle of the room, but stayed well beyond my reach, ignoring Zheng and watching my eyes. Short and trim, severe in the face from too much shouting in her life, perhaps in her late twenties or early thirties, with a long shock of black hair and the fine-boned, classically pretty features of a British Indian or Pakistani. Long grey coat, high leather boots, and exhausted. She looked as if she hadn’t truly rested in several days, kept on her feet with a cocktail of determination and spite.

I recognised her. This was the woman who’d been outside number 12 Barnslow drive, directing the men.

The two who followed her into the room, however, had not been at the house. The first was exceptionally clean-cut and very young, perhaps no older than me, not a hair out of place on his blonde head, in a crisp white shirt and a plastic smile. He had a large notebook open over one arm and a pencil ready in the other hand, and went straight to Zheng, peering down at her exposed arm and making ‘hmm’ noises.

The second man looked like a teenage drug-dealer or pothead who’d aged badly into his twenties. He squinted at me from under scraggly twists of hair escaping from his beanie hat, and played with an unlit cigarette held in grubby fingers. For some reason, he made me think of a badger.

Neither of them looked like capable muscle. The woman scared me much more than either of them.

She sighed and cast about the room. “Well, she’s still here.”

“Mm. You owe me twenty quid,” the badger man said.

“Later,” she grunted.

They watched me for a second, in silence, though the clean-cut man was absorbed in taking notes as he examined Zheng’s tattoos. Their looks felt nothing like the pressure of Alexander Lilburne’s infinite self-satisfaction. His gaze had been like a snake waiting for a twitch. This lot looked more like they weren’t sure how to proceed.

As a second turned into two, then three, then five, I realised the look was no act – they genuinely had no idea what to do with me. If they were hoping I’d say something, they didn’t know what.

“Would you leave the zombie alone?” The woman hissed at the clean-cut man. “For five fucking seconds?”

He ignored her and lifted Zheng’s wrist, to examine the new tattoo up close. Zheng didn’t even glance down at him.

“I’m speaking to you, Marcus,” the woman snapped. “For fuck’s sake.”

“The new sigil is taking properly,” Marcus murmured. “Despite the constant changes in her binding. This is good, this is good news.”

“This is also not the time,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

“This is important work, you know that.”

“Uh, maybe we shouldn’t use names in front of … ” The badger-like man nodded toward me.

“What fucking difference does it make?” the woman asked him. He shrugged.

“Who … ” Had to swallow, my throat was so dry. “Who are you people?”

The clean-cut man – Marcus – turned away from Zheng and pointed his plastic smile at me, before the woman could answer.

“We are the favoured and the blessed,” he said, his voice floaty and not-quite-here. The voice of a missionary, or of drugs crossing the blood-brain barrier.

“We’re what’s left,” the woman answered – measured, quiet, and filled with hate.

“Left of … left of what?” I swallowed again, playing for time, for information. I couldn’t make myself confident here, but I could make myself seem oblivious.

“Don’t be obtuse,” the woman said.

“The Brotherhood of the New Sun.” The badger man snorted an empty laugh.

I glanced between the three of them, but there was no joke in their eyes. The woman sighed and shrugged.

“Just … just you three?” I asked.

“I’m not completely stupid, I’m not going to tell you that,” the woman said, then narrowed her eyes and smiled in a thin, dark way, voice turning sarcastic and mocking. “No, in fact, there’s dozens of us, hundreds even. All of us exist purely to torment you, because you’re the centre of the Goddamn universe.”

“Hey, Sarry … ” the badger-man muttered, half reaching for her shoulder, and then thought better of it. She ignored him.

Undignified, dressed in my pajamas and ugly with my own blood on my face, I tried to turn vulnerability into the only form of strength I could grasp. I pulled on my right wrist, let the handcuffs clink against the radiator.

“I’m the one cuffed to a wall.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You are. So why the hell are you still here?”

“She’s run out of juice,” the badger man said. “Too tuckered out, eh?”

“That,” the clean-cut young man raised his pencil. “Should not be possible. That never happened with the younger Lilburne. She was irrepressible. Something else is keeping our guest here. Reluctance, perhaps? Maybe she’s seen the light.”

“Maybe,” the woman drawled. She sounded unconvinced. “She looks pretty tired to me. You feeling tired, Heather?”

I blinked at her. Too many things to take in at once, struggling to hold onto every scrap. Every piece of information could be valuable, could get me out.

They didn’t know why I couldn’t Slip. They didn’t know about the dead hands.

“I’m thirsty,” I said, instead. “And how do you know my name?”

“We all knew your stupid name. Alexander wanted you on the team, so we all had to fucking know about it.”

“Then you appear to have me at a disadvantage,” I said, raising my chin.

I don’t know how I put so much haughty weight into that sentence. Half an impression of Evelyn, half stolen confidence from their petty infighting. I couldn’t see a way out, yet, but I knew there must be one. These people were tired and bitter and not what I’d expected.

“Why not, hey?” the woman said. “Why not pretend we’re all regular fucking human beings? I’m Sarika, and this is Nate. Marcus you heard earlier.”

“Call me Badger,” Nate said. “Not that we’ll know each other for long.” I blinked at him, not quite believing my ears. “Yeah, you were thinking it weren’t you?”

“I … yes.”

“This is our chance,” Marcus said, eyes shining with zeal. “This is our opportunity, to prove ourselves, to Him. She can’t leave, or she’s unwilling to go, and the construct – well, the construct is missing. So we send her, ourselves. We send her back to Him.”

“Mm,” Sarika grunted, staring at me. “Sounds good.”

“We must. We must do it!”

“Alright. We will. Hold onto your pants,” she grunted.

“What?” I asked, stomach sinking, but I didn’t really have to ask. A cold shiver ran down my spine and into my blood. “Send me where? You … you people work for the Eye now, don’t you?”

“ … ‘Eye’?” Sarika raised an eyebrow. “That’s what you call it?”

“Makes sense.” Badger shrugged.

“He has a name and His glory should not be diminished by our fragility,” Marcus said, raising his head and closing his eyes.

Then he spoke the Eye’s true name.

A not-sound with no business issuing from a human throat. My eyes stung and my ears popped as a static crackle passed through the frigid air. I assume the temperature dropped, as it had months ago when Evelyn had spoken the Eye’s name to make a point, but the bare concrete room was already too cold to notice. Sarika jerked and winced, gritting her teeth. Badger grunted and screwed his eyes up.

Zheng blinked.

Marcus raised his voice, a little blood on his lips. “We speak His name and embody His will and-”

Sarika grabbed a handful of Marcus’ collar and got up in his face, bearing her teeth. “If you do that again without warning me first, you little shit, I will have her,” – she jabbed a finger at Zheng – “split you from your cock to your throat, and feed you your own steaming guts. You’ll die with a mouthful of your own shit. Do I make myself clear?”

“She’ll do it, man. You know she will,” Badger said.

“I will not apologise for my devotion,” Marcus said through his plastic smile.

Sarika let go and pushed him away – then gestured at Zheng.

My heart leapt into my throat. For one terrible moment I thought their leader was about to make good on her gruesome threat. Zheng came to life all at once, whirling into motion, one hand grabbing Marcus by the shoulder and shoving him at the wall. He bounced off – but Zheng stopped at a click of Sarika’s fingers.

“Want me to keep going?” Sarika snapped.

Marcus straightened his shirt and turned his plastic smile back on. He tilted his head down in the smallest gesture of submission. Sarika sighed, and Zheng returned to her waiting pose, eyes locked back on mine again. Badger took a deep breath and swallowed.

“Right, now that’s over, we don’t want her to die in the meantime,” Sarika muttered. “You said you’re thirsty?”

“Yes,” I answered after a moment. “Very much so.”

“Here.” She dug around in her coat pockets and pulled out a plastic bottle. She tossed it to me, and of course I couldn’t catch it with one hand cuffed to the wall. I crouched to fetch it off the floor.

Half empty. Seal on the cap already broken. I met Sarika’s eyes.

“ … what?” she huffed. “You think it’s drugged? We don’t need to fucking drug you, we can have Zheng drag you wherever we want. Drink it or not. I’m beyond caring.”

I didn’t touch the water, but I placed the bottle on the windowsill.

“So you people do work for the Eye? I don’t understand, how?”

“’Work’ is perhaps a little too optimistic,” Sarika sneered.

“What’s to understand?” Badger said with a shrug. “We’re here, and none of us are getting out.”

“We serve Him now, as we always should have,” Marcus added.

Great. The Eye, my childhood nightmare, my twin’s jailer, and the ultimate foe of everything good in my life, now had a real-life doomsday cult in Sharrowford. I could connect the dots even if I didn’t know the details – Alexander had found out about Maisie and my past, somehow encountered knowledge about the Eye. And now his former followers had decided to worship the thing as a God.

I’m certain Evelyn could have told about a worse possible outcome, but right then I couldn’t see one.

“How did I get here?” I asked.

“A wonderful question,” Sarika said. “One we were hoping you could answer, in fact.”

“ … what?”

“We found you on the floor in front of Alexander’s body. That’s what.”

“Where’s the construct?” Badger asked me.

“Mm, yes, that too. We know it came for you,” Sarika added. They were getting into the swing of this now, back and forth, hitting me with questions – but only because I’d given them the opening, ceded control of the tempo. Marcus may have been a loon, lost to the Eye, but these two had at least some brains cells to share between them. “In fact, I’m pretty certain it got you. Got there before I did, and spirited you away. So how the fuck’d you get free from it?”

“It should be coming for her right now,” Badger muttered. “Should be here already.”

“Yeah, and it’s not.” Sarika shivered. “Thank fuck.”

“It is otherwise occupied,” Marcus said, nodding to himself. “It is His creature and His ways are not our ways.”

“You mean the thing that looks like Lozzie?” I asked.

Sarika tried to laugh, but it didn’t take an expert on body language to read the shudder in her face. “Yeah, the thing that looks like Lauren Lilburne. The construct.”

“It’s dead,” I said – and relished the looks on their faces.

“A lie,” Marcus said.

I didn’t respond, though more because I wasn’t actually certain it was dead than any calculated intimidation tactic. He frowned at me.

“She ain’t lying,” Badger clicked his tongue. “It’d be here if it was still walking about. They must have killed it before it took her.”

“Killed it after it took me. The Eye can’t hold me,” I almost spat at them. “Sending me back would be pointless, because I’ll just escape again.”

“Okay, that’s obviously nonsense,” Sarika said, sighing. “If it had you, you wouldn’t be here. I’ll accept you killed the construct, or your friend with the gun did, but there’s no way you escaped the … the ‘Eye’.”

“Him,” Marcus corrected.

“You think it has a fucking gender? Really?” She shook her head.

“The Eye can’t hold me, and you can’t hold me.” I managed to sound much more confident than I really felt, shivering cold and restrained in front of these people. “I could kill all of you with my mind, right now, and there’s nothing you could do to stop me.”

Except that I’d pass out for hours and freeze to death on the floor. I didn’t say that part out loud.

“Oh yeah? Just like you and your friends did to Alexander?” Sarika’s voice twisted with disgust – and a strange touch of sorrow, a catch in the back of her throat. “Did to my friends? You gonna kill me too, now, huh? Go on. Bitch.”

“We should be thanking her,” Marcus said. “For acting as the catalyst of our revelation. Without her actions, rash and destructive as they may be, we would never have found Him.”

My turn to frown at this fanatic – what did he mean, my actions?

“She doesn’t know,” Badger said with a sad chuckle.

Sarika blinked at me. “You really have no idea, do you? You don’t think about the consequences of your actions, people like you never do. You just do violence, and then swan away. I hate your type, I really do.”

I stared at her. Couldn’t quite process the words. She was outraged – at me?

“What do you think happened, hmm? After you and your friends killed Alexander? Killed the best visionary I’ve ever known? Cut off our fucking head? My … ” She paused, pressed her lips together.

“You found a bigger monster to follow?” I tasted bile in my throat.

Sarika regarded me for a moment, bitter and silent, then spoke. “He didn’t die right away. Lingered maybe three or four hours, I don’t remember exactly. I don’t remember much of that night very well. Zheng brought him back here, he was just … limp meat … and he … ”

“He gave us a God,” Marcus said, his eyelids fluttering half-closed

“He made a deal. A shitty one, with this ‘Eye’,” Sarika continued, gritting her teeth. “With the Magnus Vigilator. It was supposed to save his body, put him back together, but I don’t think that thing understood the meaning of human biology well enough. In return he gave it raw material. His memories of his sister, I assume, to form an avatar, a puppet, a … I don’t know how it works, alright? I don’t care. Something that can move back and forth between our reality and the Beyond, the way the real Lauren had done. An abomination, no? All that’s left of him, all I’ve got left of him, and it’s a walking nightmare.”

She couldn’t keep the emotion out of her voice. I wasn’t certain what Alexander Lilburne had been to her, but it had been more than a follow-messiah relationship.

I think I was talking to the ex-lover of the man I’d killed.

Oh dear.

“You forget the most important aspect of our ascension,” Marcus said, his plastic smile tinted with smugness.

Sarika sighed heavily, bringing her emotions under control. She displayed remarkable restraint in not thumping Marcus across the face. “Yes. Yes, how could I possibly forget? He gave it another bargaining chip too, to spice the deal. Us.”

“A God is no God if it is not deserving of worship,” Marcus said. Badger cleared his throat, lowered his eyes.

“You?” I blinked at her, not quite getting it.

“We’ve all … communed with it now, we all dream about it. That was the deal.” Sarika said. “It’s in my head, when I close my eyes. It’s in all our fucking heads, girl, and in a way that’s your fault. Yours and Alexander’s, and I can’t throttle him.”

“It is a blessing,” Marcus admonished her. “The vistas of thought that open before the human mind, if one is but willing to accept, are beyond words.”

“Sure is that,” Sarika grunted. “This thing Alexander found, when looking into you, Heather. Your background. It wants you, and I am fucking well going to find a way to give it what it wants. Nothing personal, understand?”

I almost – almost – didn’t blame her.

“You don’t have to listen to it,” I said, but my voice shook too much to sound convincing. “I’m going to … to defeat it.”

Sarika started laughing.

“Why not just park her back in front of Alex’s corpse, like we all had to?” Badger asked. “Let it in her head?”

“You want to risk touching her?” Sarika shook her head, laughter dying.

“Ehhh.” Badger shrugged. “She’s out of juice.”

I raised my chin, stood as tall as I could, and tried to stop shivering. “I can still send you Outside – Beyond, whatever you call it – if you let me touch you. You want to meet your God, in person? I can send you there.”

Marcus’s eyes flashed with a split-second of interest, but the other two merely stared at me, thinking.

“Come on, we need to hit the books, find a way to send her back,” Sarika said eventually. “And Marcus, you need to go pray again, figure out if there’s something He wants done with her. There’s got to be a way. Make another construct, I don’t know.”

“What if we get her to go willingly?” Badger muttered.

“Hmm?”

“What?” I said.

Badger wet his lips, swallowed, and played his hand.

“We’ve got your friends. All’o them,” he said, nodding. “We could hurt them, cut bits off’o them, until you just … poof, go back to the … ‘Eye’. And then we’re all free, and your mates go free too. Or we can hurt ‘em. That’s a promise.”

A sudden weight on my chest. Sick and blinking through a flush of heat in my face. They had hit the house, Raine and Evelyn had both been unconscious, and I doubted very much that Kim could have put up much of a fight. I tried to focus on the tone of the man’s voice, to read his expression.

“You’re bluffing.” I shook my head.

“No I’m not,” he replied, too quickly.

“We picked up Evelyn Saye, and her bodyguard, and the Brinkwood werewolf,” Sarika said. “We were following the construct, got brave, got lucky. You’ve got nobody left.”

Relief pulsed through my chest. A tiny, borderline hysterical smile curled on my lips. “You couldn’t hold Twil,” I hissed. “That’s a bluff. And you missed somebody else. How’d you get past the invisible spiders? How many people did they kill?”

That struck a nerve. Badger frowned and grit his teeth – perhaps Evelyn’s Spider-servitors had hurt one of his friends.

“Alright, we have one of them,” Sarika admitted with a sigh and a side-eyes glare at Badger. “You think you can do that, Nate? Torture some fucking kid? Cut off a finger?”

Badger shrugged. “Yeah. You know? Yeah.”

“No,” I said, clinging on. “No. Who, who have you got? You’re lying. That’s a lie, it-”

Sarika tilted her head, slowly. She had me now, and she knew so.

“Who?” I almost screamed at her.

“I wouldn’t tell her if I was you. This is working,” Marcus announced. Sarika sighed and ran a hand over her face.

“Torture it is then,” she grunted. “We’ll let you stew a bit, have a think if you wanna save your friend. We’ll be back with a finger, or an ear, or … fuck knows. Come on you two, out.”

They turned to leave.

“Wait!” I said, scrabbling for a handhold, for anything. If they’d broken into the house and had time to take only one person, I knew exactly who they had, and I did anything to deny that reality. “It’s Praem, isn’t it? You’ve got Praem. She was here, she came to the tower. You can’t hurt her, she’s not even human, she’s made of wood.”

Sarika squinted at me. “Praem?”

“She means the zombie we found,” Badger grunted.

“Oh, that thing. Yeah, we’ve got her too.” Sarika smirked. “Don’t worry, she won’t be mounting a rescue anytime soon. She’s in a bottle. Corked.”

My world shrunk, walls closing in, head throbbing with more than simple pain. Sarika was last out, and I stared at her as she left.

“Try to keep warm, yeah?” she said. “Don’t freeze to death up here.” She closed the door, turned the key, and locked me in.

They had Raine. I knew, in my bones, they had kidnapped Raine.

My Raine, my beautiful Raine, handcuffed to a radiator pipe like this? What would she be doing – planning a way out? She’d have a plan, of course she would, she was probably already free, right? There was no way she’d let them hurt her, I could barely imagine it. She’d fight like a cornered fox, she’d find a way, she’d break free.

Wouldn’t she? She was only human, and perhaps she was as cold and drained as I was. Unarmed. Alone.

In the dark watches of the night, in my most private, isolated moments, I’d feared a time like this would come – ever since Raine had slid into my life over the top of a bathroom stall, and made the choice to help me, defend me, become part of me. Feared that if the certainty of her confidence was ever taken away, I’d crumble to nothing. I was a half-person pretending to be real, an emotional dependent, a weakling. So afraid that without her, I’d relapse into retreat and reclusion, give up, give in.

Shaking all over, eyes wet with tears, I did the opposite.

As soon as the door was locked and I heard the cultist trio’s footsteps vanish, I didn’t even think. I grabbed the rigid centre of the handcuffs with my free hand, grit my teeth and tensed to stop myself vomiting, and jammed the familiar old equation into place so fast that my eyeballs hurt.

Out.

The handcuffs vanished.

Reeling, spitting blood, doubling up with pain as my stomach spasmed and my head pounded like an explosion, I clung onto consciousness – and my stomach acid – with pure force of will. Forcing myself to breathe, breathe, in and out, I straightened up, made my legs take my weight.

Zheng stared back at me. Seven feet of statue-still zombie muscle.

“I think it’s time we test some assumptions,” I said, voice shaking.

It wasn’t courage. I’m not a courageous person, I refuse to believe so. I simply lacked any other options. Sit in this room and wait for those awful people to return, with a magic circle or Raine’s severed index finger? Smash the window and shout and wait for Zheng to stop me? Try to Slip Outside again, and leave Raine – or somebody else, if I’d gotten it wrong – behind?

Those weren’t options. Easier to stop breathing than pick one of those, no matter how much this new plan terrified me. Not courage. Blind and unthinking, the only choice.

“Assumption one – you didn’t attack me. That night. And you … a-and you … dammit, Heather.” I swallowed, sniffed, forced steel into my voice as I spoke to the towering zombie. “And you stood by when I killed Alexander.”

I took a step toward Zheng, and she didn’t move.

That awful night when the Sharrowford Cult had mounted its last attempt to kidnap me, the night I’d knocked Zheng’s arm off, broken the integrity of her tattoos, she’d gone berserk. She’d killed two of the Cult, eviscerated them, left their corpses behind as she’d careened off into the labyrinth.

But she hadn’t attacked me.

That night, I’d regained consciousness underneath one of Evelyn’s Spider-servitors, and I’d assumed that it had protected me from Zheng. Perhaps, but perhaps not. She’d also not attacked us when we’d stumbled across her in the labyrinth. And, in those final moments in Alexander’s throne room, she’d seen what Lozzie and I were doing. She hadn’t stopped us.

“Assumption two.” My eyes flickered down to the new tattoo on her forearm, black spiral half-complete. “That’s how they control you.”

Another step toward Zheng. Her eyes tracked me.

A major assumption, that. One of Evelyn’s theories, not my deduction. Please, Evee, please be safe, please be well. I hope Twil found you in time.

Another step. God, but Zheng was so tall. An animal part of me quivered, told me to back away, out of her arm’s reach. But I stepped closer, almost close enough to touch her.

“Assumption three. You hate these people,” I hissed. “And if I’m right, you deserve this.”

I lunged for the door.

A very poor lunge, on exhausted, shaking legs and slippery feet, at the wrong angle and without enough reach. I wouldn’t have touched the door handle even if Zheng hadn’t decided to move. She didn’t so much grab me as catch me around the middle to stop me falling on my face. One huge hand whipped out like the jaws of a snake, hauling me up and back.

Quick as I could, flailing and missing once, twice, heart in my throat – third time lucky! I wrapped a hand around Zheng’s exposed left forearm. Directly over the new tattoo.

Out.

No time to plan the equation, to minimise the pain. I’d never attempted such physical finesse before, such delicate mathematical selection of what I was touching. Not skin or muscle or bone, and certainly not the whole of her, clothes and all.

Only the ink, under my palm.

The effort almost blacked me out. A second of oblivion as I reeled away from Zheng, a second of sagging and choking, as I spat a string of bile onto the floor, gritting my teeth and holding on and holding on and-

An intake of breath, sharp, surprised, deep. Not mine.

Blinking through the darkening edges of my vision, I braced myself against the radiator to avoid a rapid meeting with the floor, as I boggled at what I’d done.

Zheng exhaled, and life blossomed on her face. She blinked three times, eyes wide. Her gaze lowered as she lifted her arm, to examine the small palm-shaped blank spot where I’d erased a section of her tattoos. I’d removed the new one entirely. Good aim. Cleaner than severing her whole limb, at least.

She flexed her arms, rolled her shoulders, let out a grunt.

I’d expected a change akin to Praem’s growth over the last few months, but simply accelerated – a few subtleties of expression, a little more willingness to communicate, the power of independent decision making – but this wave of physical awakening surprised me. With every second that passed, Zheng looked more like an actual human being rather than a demon possessing a corpse.

She lifted her eyes, no longer dead and empty, but alive and alert, expressive even. The colourless pallor in her skin was flushed away with those first few hungry breaths, returning what I assumed had once been her natural colouration, a dusky light red-chocolate.

She made eye contact with me.

And grinned.

My stomach contracted, my entrails tried to climb up through my chest cavity, and all the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

Wide, wider, baring row upon row of teeth suddenly much, much sharper than they had been a few moments ago. A shark’s grin.

Zheng took another deep breath, relishing the taste of the air. She grinned at me, and spoke.

“Yaagaad ve? Yaagaad, jijig shidten?”

Voice like granite, deep but unmistakably feminine, the question filled with confused wonder.

“I don’t-” I squeaked. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”

Her grin twisted. She flexed her jaw wide, clicking and grinding, limbering up, and tried again.

“Why?” she repeated, in perfectly accented English, as if this seven-foot monster had lived in the North of England her whole life. “Why, little wizard?”

The key in the door interrupted my frantic grasping for an answer. A click, and the door eased open. A face peered inside – Marcus, the fanatic, returned for some private reason.

Zheng didn’t bother to turn and look at him, still staring at me, still grinning like a shark. He glanced at her from behind. He didn’t see the transformation.

My heart, hammering in my chest. He must have seen the fear on my face, but misread the reason.

“Still here? Good. Perhaps we can convince you yet,” Marcus purred as he stepped into the room, carefully shutting the door behind him. He carried an emergency space blanket over one arm, the kind that you might find in a first aid box or survival kit. He stepped past Zheng, favouring me with his plastic smile.

He didn’t see the way she turned her head to fix the grin on him.

“Here, for you. Catch,” he said, and tossed me the blanket.

I caught it awkwardly in my left hand, trying to hide that I had freed my right.

“I don’t want you to die of hypothermia. Malice is not our purpose here, death is not our purpose. You must return to your benefactor, and for that, well, you need to stay warm. I can get you some fresh clothes, too, and … oh, you’ve defeated my handcuffs. Ahhhh. Yes, yes, I think we can indeed convince you to go back of your own accord, can’t we? Zheng, hold her wrists still, please, I must do an experiment.”

Zheng exhaled, warm breath through her shark’s teeth.

“Zheng?”

Marcus looked over his shoulder. Saw the grin. His eyes went wide.

“Ret-”, he managed. Half a word of Latin, I suspect.

Zheng moved so fast it confused my eyes, her limbs whirring like animated quicksilver. One hand grabbed his head. The other shot forward into his mouth, breaking several teeth. A jerk and a twist, a choking cry of pain from Marcus, and a scrap of wet pink flesh dropped to the floor from the zombie’s fingers.

She’d ripped his tongue out.

“No more chains from you, wizard,” she growled at him.

“Oh my God, oh-” I clamped a hand over my own mouth.

She picked him up by the head, blood streaming from his face. No time to look away, no comprehension of what she was doing. Zheng spun her whole body, one clean arc, and slammed his skull into the concrete wall. Once was all it took. Like a burst melon. The most awful sound.

I must have squeezed my eyes shut – and crammed myself as far back against the wall as I could – because I remember the sounds that followed, not the sights. Zheng’s breathing, huge and rough and urgent. A ripping of fabric, then of meat. A pop, a crack – was that bone? Then a sound like peeling.

“Unngghhh. Meat.”

Zheng grunted, through a very full mouth.

Shaking, horrified, I opened my eyes to the sight of her eating the dead man’s leg.

She’d ripped his trousers open and had somehow torn his leg off at the knee, then peeled part of the skin away to reveal the bloody muscle beneath. As I watched in abject horror, she crammed another handful of torn flesh into her mouth.

She chewed and swallowed, blood down her face and throat and tshirt and pooling around the man’s shattered skull.

“S’been so long since meat.” She almost purred, like a huge sated tiger.

Then she remembered I was there.

For a split-second I considered throwing myself out of the window. No, I reminded myself – then I would die for certain, whereas Zheng was still a gamble. A gamble with human flesh in her teeth.

No, no, she’d killed Marcus, not me. Stand fast, Heather. Don’t show too much fear. She’d looked at me and asked a question. If she wanted me dead, I would be dead.

None of that mattered when this blood-splattered giant stood up, grinning like a demon from hell, towering over me.

I actually cowered. It’s a very specific sensation. I was caught between trying to make myself as small as possible, and trying to prepare to zap her to another dimension when she got too close.

She dropped the severed leg and stepped toward me, eyes fixed on mine, turning her head one way and then the other, as if not quite sure what to make of me – or waiting for me to scream and mess myself in terror, a response not entirely off the table. The grin split her face, wider and wider. She came close enough to touch, muscles moving under her bloodied tshirt, breasts hanging downward as she loomed overhead.

She slammed both hands into the concrete on either side of my head.

Deep down in my lizard brain, an animal part of me sat up and paid attention – the same part that had paid attention when Raine had first pulled out a nightstick and called it ‘insurance’, the part that had shivered in arousal when I’d watched Raine beat a monster to death, the part I tried so often to ignore, that found violence attractive.

Oh no. Oh no no no no, not this, not this, I told it, not now. This was not Raine. This zombie had just eaten human flesh, right in front of my eyes. She was seven feet tall and terrifying. She was exceptionally dangerous and I had made a terrible miscalculation.

That part of my mind quite liked Zheng.

I told it no. Absolutely not. Not now. Down.

“Why, little wizard?” Zheng purred down at me, eyes wide with savage amusement above her bloody grin. “Why take the risk?”

“What … ” I swallowed, trying not to panic, trying to prepare the brainmath to make her go elsewhere, permanently. “What risk?”

“Freeing me.”

Previous Chapter Next Chapter