Vanished

CHAPTER 28

We started to come up at Temple Station, but the crowds in the lobby had an unpleasant smell and aura to them. Before we’d reached the upper level, I turned around and pulled Michael along behind me, back to the train platforms.

“What’s going on?” he asked, bewildered but following without a struggle.

“More bad guys. I recognized a face or two. We’ll go on to the next station and walk back.”

The next train gusted into the platform and a familiar figure in a long dark coat and white trousers stepped off, carrying a white cane held out in front of himself. It was Marsden, the unpleasant and uncanny man I’d met in Farringdon Station. He seemed to have an affection for dramatic entrances on Underground platforms.

Marsden turned his head back and forth as if scenting for me. Then he headed directly for us and hooked his arms through each of ours, turning us around.

“C’mon, you two. Not safe above.”

“I had figured that out on my own,” I said.

“Who’s this guy?” Michael asked.

“That’s a good question,” I replied as we stepped aboard the next train into the platform.

Rush hour had faded to a thick trickle and we found some seats at the far end of a car. Michael stared at the blind man and his strange outfit for a moment, making a crooked face. Then he leaned in closer.

“They’re little pelts!” Michael exclaimed, pointing at the uneven texture of Marsden’s coat.

“Moleskins,” Marsden replied, spreading his coattails out. “They little gentlemen in velvet weren’t in need of ’em any longer. Not once I’d done with ’em.” He grinned, showing crooked yellow teeth that seemed unusually pointed, and his odd, colorless aura flashed and moved like a kaleidoscope of clear glass. He turned his attention to me. “I’d a feeling I’d find you at that platform, and there you were with a bloody great lot of Red Guard upstairs.”

“Soviets?” Michael questioned.

“Vampires’ servants,” Marsden corrected.

Michael quirked his eyebrows and twisted his face in incredulous disbelief. “Get away.”

“God’s truth, boy.” Marsden fixed his eyeless gaze on me. “Do I lie?”

I didn’t want to admit it in front of Michael, but I said, “No.” The crowd that had tried to herd us in Trafalgar hadn’t wasted much time once they realized they’d lost us but had come straight to my hotel and the nearest Underground station. I had no doubt they’d be stationed all around the block and probably at each Tube station nearby. They knew where I was staying. As did Marsden, it seemed.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked.

“As I said, I had a feeling. I always heed those impressions. I imagine you’re much the same, aren’t ya?”

Michael was watching us both with a wary expression.

“I don’t take hunches for granted, no.”

“Your instincts are fine-tuned to the mysterious. Your father wasn’t so good at that.”

Now I was glaring at Marsden with suspicion. “You knew my father?”

“Not in person, but we had some enemies in common. Those same as were lying in wait upstairs at Temple. Not that lot specifically, but the same cut of crypt robbers.”

The speakers in the car blared with the news we were approaching the next station. I stood up. “My father was a paranoid who thought things were watching him. He thought his receptionist was a monster. And right now my instincts aren’t urging me to believe that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

I beckoned to Michael and started for the doors. I didn’t like speaking so harshly of my dad, but I didn’t trust this creepy man and his coincidental appearances. He had been watching my hotel and now there were others staking it out who didn’t have my best interests or Michael’s in mind. I may have tripped up and been careless shaking off watchers and tails, but I thought it more likely someone else had tipped them off.

As we stepped off, Marsden’s whisper carried to my ears. “Your father did you no favors in blowing his brains out and making you the Greywalker in the family. Nor did he do any favors for the rest of us, the bleedin’ coward. May he rot in whatever damned hole he’s been locked in.”

Michael looked at me with wide eyes as I stopped and spun back toward the train car. Had he heard that?

The doors hissed closed and the train hummed before it swept away, leaving us on the platform with the fast-dissipating crowd.

“Second thoughts?” came Marsden’s voice from a shadowed corner.

“This is seriously wigging me out,” Michael muttered to me.

“Just stick with me,” I replied.

Marsden was lurking in his corner, gleams of ghostly white the only sign of him in the darkness. “You and me, we’re the same ruddy thing,” he hissed, furious. “Should have been your dad’s job, but he bunked it and that left you. That monster what’s been stalking one of us for his own all these years, he’s coming for you now. I can see his marks on you—and yes, I see. Clear as you do in this half-a-place.” He stepped forward into a slice of light that silvered his face as if it were made of ice. He folded his cane and tucked it into a pocket of his long moleskin coat. Then he closed the distance between us, growing misty and indistinct as he did.

Implications and connections rushed together in my head. His shattered aura, his almost ghostly appearance on my phone camera, “. one of us,” “same ruddy thing. ” Marsden was a Greywalker.

Michael jerked beside me and I put my hand on his arm to stop him bolting. “You’ve seen worse today. Don’t let him scare you.” Immersed in the Grey as he was, Marsden was no physical threat to us so long as we stayed on the corporeal side of the line.

“Your father thought he’d gone mad—as do we all at first. I gouged me own eyes out, thinking it was them what made me see things that couldn’t be. But it’s not these eyes,” he added, jabbing a phantom finger at my face, “that sees this place. It’s another set entirely, and I didn’t stop seeing monsters, no more shall you, girl. At least you’re not runnin’, but you’re trailing your coat and you don’t even know what manner of thing may be stalking you or what it means to do. You are in enemy territory. It called you here, it forced you, it dangled bait. And you came. Now what will you do? Pitch yourself into its arms?”

He stepped through me, giving a bitter laugh and sending bone-deep cold through my body. My chest ached, and I choked on some frozen terror that exploded through me and then passed as quickly as Marsden stepped away.

“You are a babe in the woods.”

I would not give him the satisfaction of fear or even anger. I turned with deliberate care to face Marsden’s new position. Michael shook beside me and I held his arm in a tight grip at my side. I hoped it reassured him, but more than that, I couldn’t risk him running.

“Do you practice to be such an asshole? Or does it come naturally?” I sneered.

Michael giggled without sounding hysterical. Good: I was defusing the situation. He’d had more than enough freak show for one day.

“Marsden, you want to talk to me, do it like a human.”

The man firmed up, sliding back out of the Grey. “Are you ready to listen, then?”

I nodded. “After I put this kid somewhere safe.”

“Hey!” Michael objected, squirming in my grasp. “I’m eighteen!”

“Old enough to drink doesn’t make you adult, boy,” Marsden said.

Michael bridled in my grip. “Don’t argue,” I advised. “This is not the time to split hairs.” He grumbled under his breath but stopped wriggling, and I let go of his arm. “Where can we go?”

Marsden shrugged. “It’s not me they’re after and I doubt you’d feel safe enough in my abode. You’re not entirely sure about me, are you?”

“You got that right.”

“Where are we?” Michael asked, looking around. No more trains or passengers had come through since we’d stepped onto the platform, which seemed a little odd until I looked around.

The platform hadn’t been in use in ages. The only lights were safety lights in the tunnel and an occasional gleam from something above us. I could hear trains nearby, but when one did finally rush though, it didn’t even slow. The station had an arched roof and sides that were tiled in soft greens and brown. The signs were all tiled in place, too, but they’d faded badly with time. It looked like something from a WWII movie, and the ghosts in it were dressed in the clothing of the early twentieth century, ignoring us without a care.

“Oh, wow,” Michael started, answering his own question, “it’s a ghost station.”

“A what?” I asked, startled.

“An abandoned station on the Underground. I’ve heard of them. How—?”

“You’re in the company of two people for whom the paranormal is the normal, and you can ask a cloth-eared question like that?” Marsden hooted.

“Back off him, Marsden,” I started, but Michael closed with the older man and glared at him.

“Step off, sunshine. I thought I saw my brother hacked to pieces today. Then I found out he was a golem. Then I got chased by creep azoids, and now you want to rag me for being a little freaked? Well, bugger you!”

Marsden gave him a feral grin. “You’ll do,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. “Now, where can we go from here? I doubt there’s going to be another train stopping for us.”