Only a Monster (26 page)

The ripple emanated out, too fast to avoid. Joan stumbled with the power of it. Beside her, Ruth and Aaron staggered. Tom flung a hand out for balance, but managed to keep hold of Frankie.

As if with some sixth sense, Conrad turned his head to them, unerring in the dark. He issued an instruction. Guards began to rush toward them.

“Run!” Tom said. He pointed to Trafalgar Square—crowded with tourists even this late at night. “Split up and
run
!”

Joan sprinted toward Trafalgar Square. At first she could hear the others' running footsteps, but soon she found herself alone.

In their planning, Tom had suggested a rendezvous in case they got separated: an ancient stone staircase in Wapping, once used by watermen to access the Thames.

It took Joan nearly two hours to get there. She jumped onto a bus at Trafalgar and stayed on it until she was sure that she hadn't been followed. After that, she made her way to Wapping on foot.

On the main street, she took a dark passage past the Town of Ramsgate pub to the foreshore of the Thames. She picked her way down the slippery stone stairs, trying not to fall in the dark. There wasn't much to the beach at the bottom of the stairs. It was tiny and sharp-rocked and stank of sea rot. Joan's feet crunched over sticks and pebbles and shells.

There was enough moonlight to see that the tide was out. No one else was on the beach yet. Joan squeezed her hands into fists, trying not to imagine that the others had been caught.

At the water's edge, Tower Bridge was unexpectedly close, still in its night lights. Nearby, on the water, Joan could just make out a bobbing rowboat, moored to something that looked homemade. Transport out of here, care of the Hathaways.

They'd all get on that rowboat, and Tom would take them to a Hathaway mooring for the night. They'd decide what to do after that.

Joan backed away from the shore and sat heavily on the old stone staircase.

There's something wrong about all of this
, Ruth had said at the Court.
I feel as if we've got something wrong.

Joan dropped her head into her hands. She could hear the river lapping against the bank. In. Out. In. Like breathing.
We've got something wrong
, Ruth had said. But the truth was, it
was
Joan
who'd gotten something wrong.
She'd
made the others go to the Monster Court.

She'd been so sure that she was right. She'd been so sure that the
transformatio
would be in the Royal Archive that she'd risked everyone's life. But she'd gotten it wrong. Instead of a device that would save her family, they'd found an empty prison cell. Gran had given Joan a key to the Monster Court, and Joan had wasted it.

As always, the thought of Gran brought back that terrible night. Sometimes, it felt like all Joan's memories of her family had been overridden that night. When she thought of Gran, it was always of Gran in that room, dying.

Think of something else
, she told herself. But the memory kept going. Gran's last words.
You're in very grave danger
.
Someday soon you'll come into an ability
.
A power
.

Joan remembered how she'd stood outside that wooden door. She'd slammed her hand against the lock and power had poured out of her. And after she'd touched it, the metal had been as dull as stone—as if she'd somehow returned it to ore. She thought about the dark marks on the necklace. What had she done to that lock? To that chain? Had she transmuted the metal? Was that her power—to change metal into stone?

Joan clenched and unclenched her hand, trying to feel for that strange power again. But whatever she'd done at Whitehall, she couldn't feel a spark of it now.

She wasn't sure how long she sat there before a low whistle made her jump. She turned. Tom's bulky silhouette was at the
top of the stairs. “Don't get up. I'll come to you,” he called down softly.

He jogged down the slippery stairs with the sure foot of a boatman. Frankie trotted behind him with cheerful huffs.

Tom got person-size and then Tom-size, stumbling up to Joan, all muscles and dopey good humor. “All right?” he said. “Took me a while to get here.”

“I'm fine. The others haven't arrived yet,” Joan said. “What if they've been caught?”

“I saw Aaron around Temple. Ruth too. Don't worry. They're not far behind.” Tom's battered face cut into a smile. “Here.” He unhooked a woman's handbag from his shoulder and opened it to show Joan that it was bulging with pork pies. “Stole us some breakfast.”

Joan pictured him taking time out from dodging the palace guards to snatch a purse. Then she pictured him emptying out the keys and cash to make room for something he really valued. In spite of her worry about Aaron and Ruth, she found herself wanting to laugh. Apparently, you could rely on Tom to keep things simple.

She felt in her pocket. The marzipan lions she'd taken from the palace hadn't fared well. One was missing its tail; the other was missing its head. Oh well. She offered them to him anyway. “If Ruth or Aaron brings some drinks, we'll have a proper picnic.” She patted the step and shuffled over to make room for him.

Tom grinned, but he didn't sit down as Joan had expected.
“And the other thing?” he said. “You have that too, right?”

Joan looked up at him. “I—” She hesitated. “What?” The sky was a predawn gray now. A trick of the light had put Tom's mouth in shadow, removing some of the usual slackness from his expression.

“I thought it would be in his bedding,” Tom said. “Did you find it under the desk?”

Joan stared at Tom's silly face. Except that right now, his eyes were strangely sharp. The scar across his eyebrow was a pale slash in the morning light. He looked more like a thug than ever.

She
had
found something at the Court. Something wedged into the notch under the desk. She'd forgotten about it in the rush to escape.

“I don't know what you mean,” she whispered.

“Let's not insult each other,” Tom said, almost gently. “Neither of us was going to leave that room empty-handed. And you made the first move to leave.”

Joan got to her feet slowly, careful to telegraph her movements in case he took it as an attack. Tom had seemed a gentle giant—not stupid, but slow and a little clumsy at times. Right now, though, he didn't seem so slow. And if he wasn't slow, maybe he wasn't clumsy at all.

Joan put her hand against her pocket. She could feel the thing she'd found—a square of lightweight plastic. She'd barely glanced at it before she'd pocketed it; it had been white, with no markings. She'd dismissed it as unimportant when she'd
retrieved it, but now she wondered . . .

“Whatever you think I have,” she said, “I don't.”

Tom's expression seemed so sharp now that he could have been a different person.

Joan remembered suddenly how she'd met him.
He'd
approached her. He'd called out to her at the market when he'd seen her necklace—he'd known it was a key to the Monster Court. Later, Ruth had said that he was a former Court Guard. Everyone at the market knew, she'd said. Had Tom deliberately spread information that he'd been a guard? Had he known Joan would turn to him, needing a guide inside the Court?

Tom gave her a crooked smile. “You know they used to hang pirates here?” His tone was casual, but something about the way he said it made Joan's heart thump. “They hanged Captain Kidd right there.” He nodded at the stone wall at the back of the stairs. Green algae covered two-thirds of the stone, an ominous sign of how high the Thames could climb. “This place isn't much in this time,” he said. “But it used to be like Victoria Station here. Kids running around the docks. Whelk sellers calling out their wares. ‘Whelks, whelks, penny a lot!' And the river so full of boats that we'd all be bumping up against each other.”

Tom took the last steps in a casual stride. Joan stumbled back. Water splashed. She looked down to see that the river was pooling around her feet. The tide was coming in.

“They had to hang Captain Kidd twice,” Tom said. “First time, the rope snapped and he thumped down into the mud.
The whole crowd thought he'd get a reprieve. That since the rope had snapped, he'd be spared. But he wasn't. He was hanged again, and the second time it took.” His eyes had glazed, as if in memory, but when Joan shifted her weight, they sharpened again. “And afterward, they put him on a pole and let the Thames take him three times. Three tides.”

“What do you want?” Joan said.

“What did any of us want?” he said. “To get to the Royal
Archive
.” He almost spat the word. “But he wasn't there.”

“He?” Joan felt like a complete idiot then. She'd assumed that the archive had been a room somewhere else in the palace. It hadn't occurred to her that the archive and the prisoner had been one and the same. Did that mean . . . Joan blurted: “
He's
the
transformatio
? He's the device? He's the one who can change the timeline?”

Tom made an impatient sound. “There's no device. The
transformatio
really is just a myth. There's no way to change the timeline.” He held out his hand. “But I know he left something in that room. Give it to me.”

Joan wanted to take another step back, but she couldn't. The staircase was blocked by Tom's big frame. Behind Joan, the river was rising. The water swirled around her feet, lapping at the bottom of her dress. She put her hand in her pocket and closed her finger and thumb over the plastic square. “I'm a Hunt,” she warned him. Had they ever mentioned her lack of the Hunt power in front of Tom? “If I hide it, you'll never find it.”

“You won't do that,” Tom said.

“Step back or I will.”

A male voice in the distance made them both tense. “Maybe if we'd gone through Cheapside, as I'd said, we'd have been here ages ago.”

Aaron. Joan breathed out, relieved. She'd never been so glad to hear his tetchy tone.

Then, less distantly: “Guards were all over the square mile, you idiot.” Ruth.

“It's three against one now,” Joan said to Tom. But it wasn't. Not quite yet.

“Do you even know what you found?” Tom said, low and intense. “It's a message. But you won't be able to decode it.”

“Oh, but you could, I suppose?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “The message was meant for me.”

Joan hesitated then. “For you?”

Ruth and Aaron's bickering was getting closer. In a second, they'd be upon them. Tom would glance up, and Joan would have a moment to shove him off the stairs.

Still she hesitated. What was she missing? “Why would the prisoner have left you a message? Who was he?” And why had Nick been looking for him? There was too much that Joan didn't understand.

Tom shifted on his feet, as if weighing his options.

“Don't come any closer,” Joan warned him. “I'll use the Hunt power to hide it.”

“You won't use the Hunt power,” Tom said.

“Why do you keep
saying
that?”

Aaron appeared at the top of the stairs. “Oh good, you're both here,” he called down. He started to descend.

“Because you don't have the Hunt power,” Tom said. He bent close and put his mouth to Joan's ear. “I saw what you did to that lock,” he whispered.

A chill rippled through Joan's body.
Someday soon you'll come into an ability,
Gran had said.
A power. You can trust no one with the knowledge of it.

Tom straightened just as Ruth came into view too. Then, as though Joan weren't any kind of threat at all, he turned his back on her, deliberately. “You took your time,” he called up to the others.

Joan stared at his broad back. Aaron had already begun descending the slippery stairs. “. . . guards are everywhere,” he was saying.

“Hey, just stay up there,” Joan called up to Aaron. She felt cold all over. Aaron would have more leverage if he stayed above them.
Tom's not who we thought
, she wanted to say.
Ruth was right—I got something wrong about this.

But something about the way Tom had said
the message was meant for me
gave her pause. “Just stay there,” she called up again, because Aaron was still walking down. She kicked up water to show him that the river had reached the bottom step. “Tide's coming in.”

“No, we have to go right now,” Ruth said, and now she was picking her way down too. “While there's still some darkness to hide us.”

“Guards are
everywhere
,” Aaron said.

“We can't go to the Hathaways,” Joan said. No way were they getting into a boat with Tom. No way were they going to the Hathaways, where they'd be entirely in Tom's power. But neither did Joan want to escalate this—not until she knew what was going on.

And now, finally, Aaron slowed his descent. “Your family didn't come through?” he said to Tom.

Tom shrugged. He turned back to Joan, looking at her as intently as she was watching him. Maybe wondering why she hadn't ratted him out yet. Joan was kind of wondering that too.
The message was meant for me.

“Our shoes are getting wet,” she said to Tom quietly. That wasn't quite true. The tide had only risen to Joan's step. Tom's feet were still dry.

Tom shifted his weight. He was a big man, but looming above her, he looked like a giant. If there was a scuffle, Joan knew who'd come out best. The stairs were lethally slippery with lichen. And Hathaway territory was the Thames and canals. Tom had grown up on the water.

Joan raised her voice to address Aaron. “Where can we go?”

“If not the Hathaways?” Aaron said. It was more than one question.

Tom didn't take his eyes off Joan. But to her surprise and relief, he backed up a step. “Not the Hathaways,” he agreed, answering one of them.