Last Line (21 page)

No response. The old man’s eyes were fixed unblinkingly on the altar. “It’s all right,” Michael told him, reaching to touch his hand. “I’ll go to the other priest in a moment and get him out too. You’ll be okay.”

Wide eyes. Bulging slightly, Michael saw. A thyroid problem? The hand beneath his was clammy. “Father?”

The tongue protruding between the teeth. Michael, too hard-trained to cry out, reached and caught on instinct as the old man slumped sideways and into his lap.

The candlelight dimmed. Human-shaped shadows fell across the pew: Anzhel and the other priest, who had come down from the altar and was gazing serenely at his dead colleague. “Anzhel,” Michael whispered. “Oriel’s killed him. Get the other one out, and I’ll go after him.”

He fell silent. This was terribly familiar, wasn’t it? A church and candlelight and two men looking down on him as if he amused them.

These
two men.

Lukas Oriel, unchanged, thin and tall in his stolen priest’s robes, leaned over him. He put a knee on the pew next to Michael and stilled his escape reflex, the muscle-tearing jerk that would have carried him out of range, with a touch to his cheek. He was smiling. He examined Michael, gently turning his head to one side then the other, and Michael sat for the inspection as if his bones had turned to lead.

Oriel straightened. “Undamaged,” he said. “You’ve done well, Anzhel. Is the programming intact?”

“Almost. He responds instantly to the music cue, and if you tell him he’s chained up or bound, he is. He only resists when the other one’s there.”

“Yes. Griffin. Is that why you didn’t bring him?”

“I had to drive him off.” Anzhel made a face of rueful apology at Michael. “Believe me, it wasn’t easy. But he’s too strong when Griffin’s with him. He’s complete.”

Oriel was nodding. “Good. Yes, that’s good. We’ll need that, and Griffin, soon enough. But this is best for now. I need to know I can use the fire. Michael!”

Michael flinched. He came to attention with painful force, letting the old man tumble off his lap and crash down between the pews. What had John said to him?
I can’t stand watching you turn into a puppet
. But John was a dream from another world. Michael hadn’t met him in the days of the underground church. John didn’t exist. “Yes?”

“You came here of your free will?”

A puppet, strings being tugged from impossible distance. There had never been one on his jaw. Michael, who now remembered Lukas Oriel and every second of his torture, felt a faint, fierce satisfaction; he had never talked. He wouldn’t now.

A hand cracked hard across the side of his face. “Prisoner! I asked you a question!”

“Don’t,” Anzhel said mildly, and when Oriel turned on him, his expression savage, only shrugged. “I just mean there’s no point. I can control him physically—make him dance for you—but he won’t say much. Yes, he came freely. It was hard to stop him once he knew who he was hunting. He was amnesiac about you, but clearly he remembered something.”

“And you, Anzhel? What does he remember about you?”

“What I taught him to. It came as quite a shock. He and Griffin were fucking each other.”

Oriel emitted a rumble of laughter. “Oh, you arrived just in time. We don’t want anyone becoming as strong as that, not yet. We don’t need anyone”—he leaned back in, shoving his face close to Michael’s—“anyone becoming invincible. Now, prisoner—you, not Anzhel, unless you want me to ask the pretty lad myself—tell me about this boy you’ve brought me. Tell me about Quintus.”

Quin
. Quin belonged to the upper world, the world of Michael’s last three years. He’d dropped out of Michael’s memory along with John and all the sweet, ordinary griefs and joys belonging to that other life. Now he leaped back, burning. Michael jolted galvanically and surged upright. Anzhel made a gesture he had never been in time to see before—a circling index finger, as if pointing out a bracelet around Michael’s wrist—but somehow he evaded the thick black ropes that snaked out of the pews to restrain him. He shouldered past Anzhel and Oriel and crashed to his knees in the aisle. “Quin!”

“I’m here, Mike.”

Michael jerked his head up. The ropes found him—coiled across the aisle and pinned his hands behind his back—but from here he could see the boy, sitting calmly in a pew across the aisle. He was in his usual attitude of lax irreverence, one knee tucked under him, his elbow resting on the hymnal rail, but he was very still. “Quin. Are you all right?”

“Yes. But I just want to do what the angel tells me.”

“Oh, son. That’s not an angel. That’s…”

What? If Michael turned, what would he see? His ears were full of implanted lies. No one was sitting at the old church organ at the far end of the aisle; its keys and stops were quite still, and yet the air was reverberant with music, dear and deep to Michael as blood. If he turned, would he see Anzhel blazing light, shining from under his skin as he had the night before in the tawdry B&B, melting the walls and lifting him up on incomprehensible wings that had turned—oh God, as he had soared to climax—that had turned into John’s? He shook his head, but the music was inside it. The vision too, unbearably beautiful. “It’s okay,” he choked out. “Quin, it’s okay. Just do as he tells you for now.”

“That’s right.”

Michael gasped. He hadn’t seen Oriel move, let alone come to kneel familiarly in front of him. “What do you…what do you want of me?”

Oriel folded his hands in his lap. “Your nose is bleeding,” he observed, and Michael felt a hot splash on his jeans. “Don’t fight your programming, and it will stop. First of all, I want the boy. We’ll take it that you’ve given him to me. Now, do you know what he is?”

“I haven’t a…bloody clue what you’re talking about. He’s John’s brother, just a kid. Let him go.”

“Oh no. He’s something much better than that. I’ll tell you truthfully, Michael, that I don’t yet know myself, but it’s a great concern to all of us—isn’t it?—that he should be protected. I need him; I need you. Eventually, when you’re under better control, I need your partner too. In the meantime, the child can be a simple hostage, and that’s all you’ll remember when I send you about your business tonight, my messenger.” Oriel reached out and stroked the place he had slapped. He smiled. “My angel of the fire. Now, can you attend me?”

Silence had been Michael’s ally before. Oriel could get him to do anything but talk. Silence, apparent submission, would serve him now, long enough to work out his escape. He nodded.

“Good.” Oriel settled more comfortably on the strip of carpet that ran up the aisle. It was an attitude of storytelling, and Michael, who didn’t want to hear, tried to shrink back from him, finding behind him instantly the iron grip of Anzhel’s hands on his shoulders, holding him in place. “You know that I tried to help my people, don’t you?” Oriel asked, pushing back a strand of Michael’s hair from his eyes. “That I used my science, my gifts, to bring out the things in the earth that would avenge them? Plutonium, uranium, immortal things that would burn on forever, just as Zemelya burned. I made bombs. Warheads. I was ready. Then the balance shifted. NATO forces found my refuge, my church, my factories. They took from me almost everything I’d made, including you, and that was a shame, considering the pain that went into your creation.”

“I’m not yours.” The words came out in a whisper. Michael hadn’t meant to say them at all. But he
had
talked, hadn’t he? In the other church, in a white-tiled cell? Had found a litany of survival. “My name is Michael South. I work for MI5. They’ll come and find me. My name—”

“Oh, I remember that.” Oriel nodded and smiled, as if he’d heard again a well-loved song. “But they won’t. They didn’t, and nor will this band of hired murderers you work for now. Listen to me. It’s time for you to prove who you really are, to me and to yourself. Somewhere in this city of yours—this beautiful London, which survived a blitz—I’ve concealed a weapon. You would call it—what?—a
dirty
bomb, the nightmare the Western world didn’t hesitate to visit on others as a means of ending its arguments. It’s a small nuclear device—”

“Christ, Oriel! Where?” The effort of the question made Michael’s nose bleed harder. He wanted to wipe his face but the ropes round his wrists snapped tight.

“Where doesn’t matter. It detonates remotely. You will take the trigger mechanism, drive it into range—three miles east of here should serve—and detonate it. The explosion will take out a few blocks. The fallout, depending on where the wind blows, will turn the whole city to a desert. As it was in Dorva.”

He got up. Anzhel hoisted Michael upright too and held him there. The warmth of his chest and belly pressed against Michael’s back. His lips brushed the side of Michael’s neck, and on them Michael heard and suddenly knew the song that controlled him. “My mother,” he said. “She used to sing that.”

Oriel stopped with his hand inside the stolen priest’s jacket he wore. He looked sharply at Anzhel. “Should he remember that?”

Michael felt Anzhel shrug. He ceased singing, and a silence fell in Michael’s heart like the end of creation—or the beginning. “It doesn’t matter. He’s yours to command. Use him.”

But it did matter. Oriel was holding something out to him. Anzhel tapped him on the wrists and told him he was free, and so he was, and he reached out and took the small, heavy box without looking at it. It did matter. He was looking through the door of the Glastonbury farmhouse three decades before. His schoolbag was over his shoulder. He came into the kitchen, where his mother was waiting for him. For the first time in all his childhood’s memory, she didn’t get up smiling at the sight of him.

Men emerged from the shadows around her. They were like Easter Island statues, like the rocks of Stonehenge. Michael couldn’t see how his mother meant to stop them, but she was his goddess, and he stood faithfully, jacket trailing on the ground, while she darted in front of them, her beautiful long hair swinging. She put her slender body between him and the men.

He didn’t see what they did to her. It left no marks, and when they picked her up and carried her away, she looked only asleep. The men came to seize him.

They backed off, looking at their hands. Michael smelled charred flesh and felt sick, but it was no good. If they touched him, they would burn. He couldn’t help it. He looked up, past their wide-stretched eyes and into their brains, and made the fire start there. Then they were gone. Michael heard the scatter of gravel, the roar of an engine. He picked up his jacket and his satchel. He went through to his mother’s room and stood by the side of her bed. He was just home from school. She was asleep.

No. She’d died to save him. John would die to save him too—had shown him that a dozen times over during their time on the streets. Thirty years later, Michael entered the kitchen again, and there he was, straightening up from the fridge, smelling of fresh come and river-water, smiling like holy redemption.
John.

“Mikhaili,” Anzhel said. “It’s time for you to go to work.”

Michael nodded. He dispensed carefully with Anzhel’s support, sliding the box into his pocket. His hands were free. He put them to use, hooking out Anzhel’s gun from the belt under his jacket where he had concealed it. He took three fluid steps away, just enough to get distance, and he grabbed Quin blindly by the shoulder. “Get up. Come with me.”

“I-I can’t!”

“Can.” Michael hauled him upright by the fabric of his coat. “Get behind me. Behind!” Pain was beginning to slice through his head. Soon it would be unbearable. He had perhaps a minute in which he could act. He took aim on his demons. “You two bastards stay back.” Shielding Quin with his body, he began an unsteady track toward the door.

“Ah, Mikhaili. Don’t.” Anzhel held out a hand to him. For the first time since Michael had known him, his serene brow had a crease in it, his eyes a shadow of fear. “You’ll hurt…you’ll destroy yourself. You don’t understand.”

“I understand enough. Either you or this fucking psychopath moves, I’ll drop you cold.”

No. Not a minute. The plates of his skull tried to tear apart. The candlelight blurred, and the human shapes in front of him morphed into shimmering ghosts. He couldn’t hold them in his sights. And already they were moving—floating toward him, extending ropes of light to haul him back. “No!” he yelled, and felt behind him Quin’s wiry strength, so like his brother’s that it could have been John there, sweet and real at his back. Quin, who should have cut and run the second he had the chance, holding him tight. “Quin, go! Get out!”

“Not a fucking chance. What do I do?”

“Just…stay behind me.” The lights were merging. Anzhel and Oriel, drifting off into the candles. Jerking up his free hand to steady his grip on the gun, Michael took his first wild shot. Another and another, counting down through the clip. He didn’t know how many he had, couldn’t tell by the feel of it what Anzhel’s concealed weapon had been. Something compact—probably no more than six. He fired again, straight into one pillar of light, but it didn’t fall.

The fifth shot was no more than a convulsion of his fist on the gun. The bullet flew wide and ricocheted off metal somewhere in the dark. There was a hissing and a dull thud, like the ignition on the farmhouse cooker, the gas one he’d had installed because John was visiting regularly and liked to be cooked for.

“Mike! Mike, it’s on fire!”

Michael’s vision cleared. Now Quin was trying to drag him away. For an instant, Michael saw, in detailed tableau, Anzhel and Oriel turning to look at the rose of fire that had burst in the air. He must have nicked a gas pipe. Nearby candle flames had done the rest. The church would burn.

Not fast enough. Michael took Quin into an arm that felt like a shielding wing and shoved him out into the porch, then turned back and stood in the middle of the aisle. He loved fire. Fire came easy to him. Even now, blood streaming from his nose, his skull splitting into two, he loved it. He put out a hand toward the rose of fire and watched it bloom. He made it into a roiling sphere. Shuddering in pain and joy, he lifted it high over the altar and made it burst. He waited long enough to see Lukas Oriel’s hair and clothes ignite.