Greywalker - Vanished Part 20

"Used to be the holding jail-where they kept prisoners until they could send 'em to another place. Or hang 'em. Miserable, it was. It's a ruin now. Breeds ghosts like a battlefield. Most of 'em nasty." I tried to see into the darkness that descended as we went farther into the tunnels, but the ghost light was uneven and I kept catching glimmers of white and reflections of forgotten illumination that caught in my eye like dust. Things moved in the distance and sounds echoed and rattled strangely. The last of the candlelight from the chamber beneath the priory had long faded, when I saw something flicker down a connecting tunnel like a distant mirror in the sun.

Then came a silver-white flash behind us that went up to the ceiling with a concussion that threw us forward. The roar and scream of the explosion came right behind it and my ears rang, but I could still hear a mad cackle in my head. Marsden's cackle.

Fast footsteps pattered like a distant storm on my right and a clammy hand grasped my upper arm, wrenching me upright. I jerked my head to look at the hand's owner.

Michael Novak yanked me toward the nearest black branch of the tunnel. "Come on!" he rasped in a low, panicky voice.

Screaming and rending sounds came from behind and the iron smell of blood mixed with the nauseating corruption of vampire curdled the air.

I didn't look back. Whatever Marsden was doing, I didn't want to waste the time he was buying us by watching it. I started to go with Michael, but Purcell threw himself between us onto my other arm. He stared into my eyes and clapped his hands around mine, pressing something rigid and toothed into my palms. "Edward's vault. Tell him I am sorry."

The kreanou shrieked its victory as Dez's screams cut off short. Purcell shoved me after Michael before turning to run toward the carnage.

The younger Novak hauled me along, twisting my arm near to dislocation in his rush. "Run, run, run," he chanted.

I gathered my wits, closed my fist around the hard, biting thing Purcell had entrusted to me, and sprinted with Michael through the opening and into the darkness of a pa.s.sageway that plunged downward into the earth and the smell of sewers. I could hear scuffling and growls behind us but not a single cry. I hoped Purcell was made of tougher stuff than Dez and Glick had been. Never thought I'd root for the vampire . . . I hoped all this wasn't in vain.

"Will?" I asked as we ran.

"Couldn't get to him," Michael replied, gasping the words. "Got worried . . . waiting for you . . ." "You know . . . where?"

He grunted, "Uh-huh." Then he shut up and we charged on.

I was lost, not knowing what direction we were going or where we were in the twisting tunnels and dry, ancient sewers below Clerkenwell. I just tore along in Michael's wake. We flashed past a silvery line on the floor and I heard a crack of thunder as another blur of white light shot up behind us, leaving a barrier of sparking magic and acrid smoke. The shape of the spell reminded me of the tangles and traps Mara had made for me once-little bits of hedge magic woven into rings of thorns and gra.s.s. It wasn't the same but it was similar, and I a.s.sumed it was something Marsden had done to cover our escape. I didn't really care so long as the kreanou didn't follow us.

Michael jagged to the right and into another tunnel. A pale smear detached from the wall and hurried beside us.

"That should send 'im whimperin' back to his mother," Marsden crowed as he fell in with us. "Round the left-we'll be able to hop over there."

"Over . . . what?" I panted, adrenaline shortening my breath and making me stagger. "Time. To the House of Detention when it was still standin'. There's a way out back then." "No!" I objected. "That's . . . where-"

"I heard the plan," he snapped. "But we shan't be going through the bit that bloodsucking b.i.t.c.h had in mind, and they can't follow us my way. The only other way out from this end takes us through St. James's. You don't want that!"

"No," I agreed.

"Then bleedin' trust me!"

Around the next bend in the pa.s.sage we came to the fragment of an ancient wall and threw ourselves over it. Marsden scrambled up first, clutched at the thickly silvered air, and wrenched. . . . The world jerked sideways.

We rolled to the ground and up against the wall at a new angle. Or possibly a different wall. Marsden picked himself up and brushed dirt from his trousers and coat. He turned back to us, whispering, "Been a prison for three hundred years. Lots of bad things floatin' about." Then he put his finger over his lips. We followed him in silence.

FORTY-ONE.

I wasn't sure how or where we entered the prison itself. The walls just gave way to rooms and proper corridors crossed at strange intervals by low tunnels for ventilation or sewage. The cells at our end were the dankest and foulest confinement I'd ever seen outside the "hole" at Alcatraz. Most of them were empty in the time we'd tumbled into, but even in the past, the place boiled with ghosts and the gelid air stank of waste and water and human despair. The song of London's Grey had become a dirge. We scrambled through the labyrinth of the prison's lowest pit, where real, solid brick vaults and ghostly doubles stood in the earth to hold up a structure soaked in the uncanny and the horrifying. Low brickwork doorways led to low-ceilinged cell blocks of whitewashed brick. Marsden motioned us forward at every turning with frantic gestures and the c.o.c.king of his head this way and that, listening. Explosions and screams rocked the building, and we found ourselves rus.h.i.+ng through panicking crowds of prisoners. The impression was so thick and strong, even Michael responded to their press and their terror. The memory of fire broke out behind us.

"It's burning!" Michael yelped, his own exhaustion and fear pulling him into the verges of hysteria where the Grey flickers into the visible like campfire smoke images.

Marsden turned back to him with a furious expression. "Hus.h.!.+"

The warning came too late; something had heard and filtered itself from the murk of history and the memory of smoke, flowing fast across the teeming vault of the cell block toward us as it solidified into the shape of a gaunt man. The stink intensified as he came closer-not just the stench of the prison but of corruption and bodily rot-homing in on us like a hunting hound.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," Marsden breathed. "It's the wraith. b.l.o.o.d.y butcher Norrin. We're in it now." The wraith cut through the crowd of ghosts like a sword. It wasn't quite like them but something more eternal and horrible with a greater solidity in its acc.u.mulated bulk of evil. So this was what Alice had been sending me to: a spirit old, solid, and wicked enough to do someone like me serious hurt. Anyone with a hint of sensitivity would feel it, whether they were touched with the Grey or not. Someone descending into it by close a.s.sociation with the likes of Marsden and me couldn't help but know it was there. Michael retched in the swirling darkness beside me and stumbled back. I put myself between him and the barely corporate monster that approached.

But it wasn't interested in me. It fixed its attention on the other Greywalker, blocking our path-unless we wanted to go through it and I certainly didn't.

"Peter, Peter," the wraith sang in a voice that chilled my spine. "I knew ye'd come back, y'lyin' pig swiver. Ah, but what happened to yer pretty blue eyes, eh? I told ye I'd pluck 'em out for ye if y'didn't care for the sight o' me. But y'did for yerself, didn't ye? I should punish ye for that. But ye've brought me some other pretties, too? Ah. That'll keep yer lying throat uncut a while longer."

The wraith turned burning eyes on Michael and me, picking us from the crowd of alarmed ghosts who ran from the memory of flames. An unearthly gleam danced along the fine edge of a blade in his hand. His thumb brushed lightly across the tang, and the reflection of light turned scarlet as his face stretched into something lupine and horrible.

"Keep yer distance, Norrin," Marsden spat back at him. His lank white hair swung over his face as he turned, making shadows dance in his ravaged eye sockets. "They're not for the likes of you." "No? But y'know I like a bit of fun whether ye will or no, Peter."

The knife flashed as Norrin lashed out sideways, never s.h.i.+fting his gaze. I dodged back, shoving Michael away. The boy grunted and stumbled sideways, coming clear of my body. Norrin sprang at him, mouth gaping into a black chasm lined with rows of ripsaw teeth.

Michael rolled.

The blade glinted red and rang a quivering crystal note on the fire-lit mist of the Grey for a moment, slicing through the fabric of magic like a razor as the unearthly Norrin snapped and howled. The keen edge nicked through Michael's sleeve near the shoulder. Michael gasped and clapped his other hand over the shoulder. His eyes were wide with shock.

Marsden and I both jumped for the wraith as the phantoms of panicked prisoners rushed through us with the feel of an ice storm. Norrin twisted in our grasp, slippery and lithe as an oiled snake. Looking deeper into the Grey, I saw him as a hollow frame of bright energy lines without the usual tangled core of a soul. He was difficult to hook my fingers into as his apparent surface sparked and fizzed like an overloaded electrical circuit.

I glanced at Marsden as we struggled to hold the thing, but he didn't seem to have any better grip on it than I did. Norrin swore and stabbed at us with his knife, his face oozing into the shapes of eldritch beasts and monsters.

The eerie blade bit in like the real thing. I could feel blood running down my chest where the eldritch knife had sliced me. It really was a ghost that could kill me! Or at least enough to make whatever tweaking and shaping Wygan had in mind possible. That chilled me, but I dug in and tried to get my fingers into the weave of the wraith's energy shape, which resisted like callused flesh.

Marsden wrapped his arms around the writhing form and squeezed. The ghost shape compressed a little and Norrin shouted, "I'll have yer liver, y'b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" as he fought to escape.

"We can't break it. You'll have to run. Go on!" Marsden urged me. "Get to the door and get out. Take the boy!"

I let go of Norrin and turned back to haul Michael to his feet. He came along, dazed and stumble-footed as I dashed for the nearest door that looked to lead out. But the door was locked and the terrified prisoners who had escaped their cells-or never been confined at all-swarmed around it, clawing at it frantically. The heavy iron-bound portal wouldn't yield to me, either.

I looked back over my shoulder toward Marsden.

The other Greywalker doubled over and twitched as Norrin drove a blow into his gut. "Marsden!" I shouted, alarmed; if the ghost's knife could draw my blood, what did it do to him? They seemed to have prior history and maybe there was a connection the wraith could use against him. "Key," he gasped, the sound carrying to mortal ears through the cacophony of phantom horrors. I scowled, closing my hand in my pocket on the hard metal thing Purcell had pressed on me. But I had no chance to question as Michael grabbed my hand, forcing me to look at him.

"The key. That puzzle thing. Maybe it works here."

My dad's-No, my key. How many gates could it open? Was it some kind of lock pick after all? I rifled through my pockets in haste, stabbing my fingers on sharp odds and ends until the cool, bent shape of my father's puzzle came to my grip. Casting anxious glances over my shoulder, I scrambled through the puzzle's solution, but it didn't click into place and glow. I tried it again, shaking, trying to breathe steadily and not give in to my own exhaustion and the fear that rose off the ghostly crowd like a stench. I could feel the flutter of temporaclines at the door. I could have simply slipped away on one, leaving Michael and Marsden to their own devices. The boy might be safe enough without two Greywalkers nearby to warp the thin veil between the worlds into a h.e.l.lish reality around him. But Marsden had brought us to the slice of horror we found ourselves in, and I wasn't sure that my disappearance would drop Michael back into the normal. If not, he'd be helpless in the memory of the burning prison and alone with Norrin once Marsden couldn't hold the phantasm back anymore-and he was failing fast. I shuffled the puzzle again, shooting another anxious look back at Marsden and Norrin in time to see the other Greywalker collapse to the floor. Norrin wheeled toward us, grinning and letting the unearthly blade catch the firelight.

Michael and I both swore. I started to push the key at him and head back to Norrin, but he refused it. He rubbed at his shoulder and looked at his hand, unsmeared by blood or gore.

"It hurts but . . . I'm not really bleeding. I'll get Marsden. You open the door," he added, das.h.i.+ng across the floor to meet the savage monstrosity that approached like a stalking tiger.

Michael ran all the way to Marsden's side, dragging Norrin's attention to him as he went. I slid the puzzle through its paces with frantic fingers once again and felt it click into shape, humming its satisfaction. I jammed the glowing p.r.o.ng into the lock of the ghostly doors and twisted. The latch squealed and resisted the strange key for a moment. Then it gave up and clicked open. I almost cried in relief.

I turned back, running for Michael and Marsden. The old man was halfway to his knees as Michael hauled him up. Norrin pounced on the boy and Michael stumbled, knocking Marsden back down. "No, y'don't, y'b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Marsden muttered, scrabbling something from the ground. He flicked it out and the white cane unfolded from his hand, giving off a strange blue luminescence that snapped through Norrin and wrenched the specter's attention back to him.

Norrin roared and dove for Marsden as if goaded with a hot iron.

"C'mon, y'murderin' pig. Lost your strength, have ya? Y'cut me and held me to the Grey for that white snake but y'couldn't break me enough, not even then. But y'came fer me a man full-growed when I were prisoner here. Have to go after youngsters now, do ya? Y'always were an effin' coward," Marsden panted, hunching onto his knees and elbows. He took another swipe at the lunging monster, knocking the knife from the phantom's hand. As it fell away, it glimmered for an instant in a tangle of energy strands. I dove for it, s.n.a.t.c.hing it from the enclosing mist before it dissolved back into ghost stuff. I felt it firm up in my hand, burning like a live wire and holding the menacing shape Norrin had made of it: a blade that cut into the energy shapes of the Grey and left pain and ragged edges in its wake. I rolled to my feet and dashed two steps toward Norrin as the prison's butchering wraith raked clawed hands into Marsden's tucked head.

Marsden stifled a scream as the hands pa.s.sed through his face, dragging an illusion of gore and the memory of an eye with them. I plunged the knife into Norrin's back, ripping downward along the nonexistent spine and feeling the mirage of human form rend into frayed wisps of fury and hate. The shape that had been Norrin shrieked and whirled into a cloud of b.l.o.o.d.y smoke and the stink of slaughterhouses.

Only the roar of the phantom flames and the cries of the terrified prisoners remained. I flung away the cruel knife of Norrin's energy and saw it unravel and settle back into the grid as glimmering strands of magic, but I could already see the edges of Norrin's form knitting back into shape in the Grey world. We had half an hour at most to get the h.e.l.l out of the House of Detention, and I had no idea how far we had to go.

Michael and I put our shoulders under Marsden's arms and levered him up. His legs were wobbly and the white cane collapsed as he put weight on it.

"d.a.m.n," he muttered. "Relyin' on sprats and women . . ."

"Shut up and say thank you," I suggested as we lurched forward like a bad entry in a three-legged race. Head hanging so we couldn't see his face, Marsden mumbled an ungracious thanks.

Michael snorted, shaking a bit. "Let's just get out of here. I'm really hating this place." We stumbled out the door, open only to us, through the crowd of trapped prisoners, and up into the memory of a courtyard filled with rus.h.i.+ng jailers and shouting constables trying to douse the flames at one corner of the building with buckets of water. By the time we'd walked out the unguarded prison gate and around the corner, past phantom crowds and more bucket brigades, Marsden was able to support his own weight.

We stopped around the corner and Marsden leaned against the nearest wall. "Pray there's no one out for a late walk," he said. Then he pushed history aside and the world s.h.i.+fted with a grinding feel and a scream of friction.

Ordinary streetlights and city haze lit the urban night. No sign of flames as cars grumbled along Rosebery Avenue.

Michael threw up.

"There, boy. Y'lived through Norrin and the Fenian bombing," Marsden mumbled, still unsteady on his feet and paler than normal-which is to say he nearly glowed in the dark.

"Eff you," Michael gasped back, wiping his mouth on the un-tucked hem of his s.h.i.+rt. "I felt that thing cut me! And the place was on fire-I could smell smoke!"

"But y'couldn't feel the heat, could ya?"

"No, but who cares? It was on f.u.c.king fire! I could see shadows running around like there were people in there running from the flames. And then that . . . thing cut me!"

"Did y'see him? Norrin? Did y'see that b.l.o.o.d.y monster?" Marsden asked, grinding his teeth into the words.

Michael hesitated, looking away, breathing too fast and sweating. "I . . . saw eyes. A shape. And I smelled something . . . rotting. And a flash like light off a knife blade. And . . . something . . . cut me," he added, clutching his shoulder again.

"How is it?" I asked in as gentle a voice as I could muster with my own heart beating triple time. Michael turned his face to mine, seeming grateful to look away from Marsden. "It hurts, but it's not bleeding. Feels like it's cut to the bone, though."

"That'll fade in a few days," Marsden said, rubbing his hands over his face, "but I shan't say it'll be pleasant. Hurts like merry h.e.l.l, it does."

I glanced down at the blotched front of my s.h.i.+rt and jacket. The fabric wasn't cut, but I could feel the stickiness of blood that stained my s.h.i.+rt from the inside. I wished I could go back to the hotel, take the longest shower in history, and fall into my expensive bed for the next twenty hours. My knees shook a little: a post-stress reaction to burning up more adrenaline than I normally expended in a month. I didn't feel much better than Michael looked, but I didn't have the luxury of puking.

"We have to get off the street. The vampires will still be looking for us," I reminded them. Michael straightened up, making a face at me. Then he glanced around the street and pointed to a bus stop nearby. "There's a bus coming. We can take that and then change when we're far away from here."

FORTY-TWO.

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 ca.n.a.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt 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. . . ."