Vanished

CHAPTER 42

As we stood at the bus stop, rain began, just pattering down, but it helped to wash the filth and the stink of vampires off us. Michael chivvied us onto the first bus that came along Rosebery and made us change to another closer to the middle of town. We collapsed into our seats as if we’d been thrown.

The bus rambled the wrong way for a while until it turned near Marble Arch. Beside the arch stood a spectral three-sided gallows from which hundreds of hanged corpses swung in the night wind, their superimposed shades so thick they seemed like a moving blackness filled with bones.

“Tyburn Tree,” Marsden muttered, not raising his head.

From there the bus trundled up past Regent’s Park toward the canal where we’d left the boat.

“Bleedin’ lucky we was. The Pharaohn don’t know I’m with you or he wouldn’t have tried the same trick twice.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What trick?” I asked.

“Butcher Norrin. When he tried to shape me, the Pharaohn had me taken up on a thievin’ charge in Clerkenwell and put in the House of Detention where Norrin could get at me.”

“He trumped up a charge just to get you into the right prison?”

“He didn’t trump up nothin’. I stole the things as I was accused of. That I done it by his leave—that wasn’t allowed to come out. It was all done proper and quick, and I were put in the very block we walked through. I thought Norrin wouldn’t be there tonight when we passed through, as he’d not been down the pit when the Fenians bombed the building in 1867 to rescue their man. But someone caught his attention,” he added, turning a bit toward Michael, who cringed.

I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. Alice must have had some way to wake him up or she couldn’t have been sure he’d come after me.”

Marsden snorted, but I could feel Michael loosen with relief.

“So. All of this, like what happened to my father, is just a replay of what the Pharaohn’s trying to do to me,” I said.

“Looks it.”

“We’ll have to break that pattern. He used Christelle against my father. Now he’s trying to use Will against me. We have to get Will back before. ”

I realized I’d already said too much when Michael frowned at me. “Before what?”

“Before they kill him,” Marsden supplied. “Be glad it’s not my decision, boy. I’d leave him to his chances. This softhearted fool means to save your brother even if it ruins her own chances of staying sane and whole. And it will. She’s worth ten of any normal fella.”

Michael growled under his breath. “Why did we save you? We should have left you there for him to. to. ”

“Rend to pieces? Drive mad? He’s had his chance to do both. My term at Clerkenwell’s when I thought I’d gone mad for certain—when I started seein’ butcher Norrin, when—” He faltered, his fingers curling over his gouged orbits, twitching. He took a long, shaking breath and went on. “I learned the trick of falling through the cracks of time there, and it saved my life, so it did. They tore it down in 1890 and I thought that was the end of bloody Norrin. He’s among the worst of the things that haunt that wretched place. He’s not even a proper ghost—he’s a wraith, a hollow remnant of an evil man filled with hate and a love of violence till he’s nearly solid with it. I’d hopes we could pass through without attracting anything’s attention so long as we went where there was so much confusion already. Should have known better. Things like Norrin don’t die. He’s not gone yet, I’d wager.”

“I saw him re-forming as we left,” I confirmed.

Marsden made a hacking sound. “Still, you did well, girl. That trick with the knife—wicked clever. How did you guess it could cut him?”

“Because it cut me.”

Michael and Marsden both turned toward me, but their expressions weren’t the same. Marsden only dropped his hands and seemed a bit surprised, but Michael looked shocked.

“Are you OK?” he whispered, choking on the question.

“I’m fine. It’s uncomfortable but shallow.”

“But. you don’t look hurt. ”

I lifted the edge of my jacket so the bloodstain on my shirt showed. “It only cut my skin, not my clothes. I’m not like you as far as ghosts go. I see them and they see me. If I can hurt them, they can hurt me—we’re part of the same fabric. That’s how I figured I could use the knife. It cut me, so I could use it to cut Norrin.”

“Could—could I have. done that?”

I shook my head, but it was Marsden who answered him.

“No, boy, y’couldn’t. Nor could I, I imagine. Just her. She’s got a bit of the same stuff in her—part magic, she is.”

“But you’re—”

“Not like that, I’m not. She can hold on to that stuff. All I can do is walk through it. You just float around the surface like everyone else that’s normal.” He turned his sightless gaze on me. “That must be why he wants you.”

I knew he meant Wygan and things were making sense in a horrible way. “I can’t do it for long,” I objected. “It’s like holding on to a live electric cable—it burns all through me. He can’t—”

“I doubt he cares about your comfort.”

“It doesn’t matter. A few seconds feels like an eternity in the electric chair! I couldn’t do much.”

“Maybe there’s more to come. ”

That was what I feared. I wasn’t so sure I was a gate, as Alice had said, as the thing that could build one. I remembered the way the bit of the vortex had clipped off under my tearing hands and spun off into its own tiny black hole. Marsden had said they weren’t made; they just happened. But maybe a Greywalker who could grab on to the power lines and tangled threads of the Grey could do something more with it, with the right nudge. And the right key. I wanted to throw my father’s puzzle out the bus window and never see it again—except that it was my dad’s and it had opened the door at the House of Detention for me. I had a feeling it was my key, not Wygan’s and not part of his plan, or he’d have taken it when Dad died.

I shook myself out of my conjectures and tuned back in to the conversation Michael and Marsden were having.

“More what? What are you talking about?” Michael demanded.

Marsden and I both shook our heads. “I can’t explain it,” I started, unable to say more. A mental block I’d never been able to fathom stopped my speaking of the living nature of the Grey. It wasn’t just power; it was a live thing, a collective of energy that almost touched sentience. And it didn’t want me to say so. Not even to Marsden. Another oddity specific to me.

Real horror took hold of me. What would happen if the magic did start to “know” and what would it do to. everything? It was no wonder the guardian beast hated the living prison Wygan had erected around the hole where my father’s ghost was captive—that was magic in the control of havoc and mayhem. I thought of that on a larger scale—whatever Wygan was up to would have to involve more of that hungry, chaotic fire—and I felt sick to the core. I had to get home. I had to stop it.

“Harper?” Michael quavered. “You all right?”

I shook off my panic, but the disquiet and desperation remained. “Fine. No,” I corrected myself. “I’m scared. But I can’t do anything if I let the fear own me.”

“You didn’t seem scared, before.”

I felt so wretched I wanted to cry, but I swallowed it, closing my eyes against the burn. “I fake sangfroid really well. Just close your eyes and think of ice cream.”

Michael let out a nervous giggle. Marsden snorted. Three injured, crazy people dreaming of dessert. Yeah, we were tough all right.