The Glass God (41 page)

“Zhanyi,” she murmured, her voice rasping metal scraped across fresh blood, and the striga’s head twisted in hatred at the sound of her own name.

“Zhanyi, we can help. Rhys?”

“Y-y-yes, Ms Li?” As the three of them moved round each other, the druid was trying to keep himself as far from the striga as possible without, that was, necessarily putting Sharon between it and him.

“Can you get us more light?”

“I can try, Ms Li.”

Zhanyi hissed at the idea, a plated black tongue flicking from between her deformed lips. “Iiiiiiiiii,” she breathed, the sound beginning only as an exhalation struggling to be shaped. “Iiiiiiiii aaaaaammm freeee!”

“Well, now, that’s an interesting and complicated thing you said there,” murmured Sharon. As if these words were an insult, the striga leapt again, a great clawed fist lashing at the side of Sharon’s head.

The shaman vanished, then reappeared a heartbeat later to one side of Zhanyi even as the striga staggered behind the force of her own blow. “But I’m guessing you’re not really up for that discussion right now,” she added.

Zhanyi shrieked in frustration, and spun again, even as Rhys clutched his glowing potion and, wiping away snot and tears with his sleeve, started whispering words at it, urging more light to come out of the soap-smeared bottle. Again the striga lashed out at Sharon, and again the shaman vanished. Zhanyi flailed at the empty air; but now her fist connected with something hard, knocking Sharon out of the shadow walk and back into full visibility. The shaman’s ears rang from the blow, and her vision flared with static as she staggered and tried to catch her balance. Zhanyi gave a shriek of satisfaction and launched herself onto the shaman’s back, wrapping her legs round Sharon’s middle and her arms across her throat, the sheer weight of the striga pushing Sharon onto her knees. Sharon tried to vanish, and the striga vanished with her, plunging into the shadows of the spirit walk; and here, where all things were true, Sharon saw human fingers wrapping round her throat, felt human flesh pressing at her back. Zhanyi’s arm tightened around her neck, her feet dug in tighter against her ribs and the whisper in Sharon’s ears became a roaring, a screaming, and it screamed,

          domine dirige nos domine dirige nos

I looked up and there was this dragon

               I am beautiful I am wonderful I have a secret!!!

and it was insane

                              the secret is me

and it was the city

She scrabbled at Zhanyi’s flesh, and here, in the spirit walk, even though Zhanyi’s mind and eyes and voice were the striga’s, her skin was soft, and warm, and human, and it tore easily beneath Sharon’s fingers, blood running down her arms in hot bursts, spilling onto the floor. But the striga roared in rage even as the human Zhanyi sobbed in pain, and Sharon was bent double beneath the weight of the human-striga. Through the blur of suffocation and pain she looked up and there it was

congratulations!
 

There it was.

Just on the edge of perception.

The black dragon that guarded the city streets with its mad red eyes and its wings of night.

It looked at her, and she looked at it, and it really didn’t give a damn.

From elsewhere a burst of light cut through the shadows, bright enough to banish some of the twilight of the shadow walk: a brilliant, baby-shampoo golden glow. Even as Zhanyi looked up, Sharon gave a groan of effort, braced her back against the striga’s body and heaved. The two rolled, falling over each other, with the spirit walk breaking around them and shattering into reality. Zhanyi was bleeding from great claw marks on her arms, and Sharon was wounded, too, her neck on fire, and hot blood seeping from a cut above her ear. As they tumbled across each other Rhys raised his potion higher and the light grew with it, a burst of illumination filling the room to almost unbearable gloss-finish whiteness. Sharon tumbled over Zhanyi and saw the striga’s eyes begin to narrow and felt something hot beneath her fingers before she rolled away.

For a second, shaman and striga lay where they fell. Sharon looked down at her hands, still clad in dragon-silver, black claws grown from her fingers, and saw a smear of crimson. She turned her hands this way and that, and the smear was a great rupture of redness on the palms of her hands. She scrambled back instinctively, the metal sheen vanishing from her skin as she examined her body, patting herself down for cuts, tears, wounds. Every part of her ached, and as the metal skin retreated to reveal her own, a flush of sensory data and burst of hormones added to this sensation. But for all the bruises, grazes, cuts and bumps which now covered her body like rags on a wandering beggar, there was nothing to explain the blood clinging to her hands.

Then someone whimpered, “I… didn’t mean to?”

She looked round. Zhanyi, pinned like a butterfly beneath the light of Rhys’s potion, lay on the floor beside her. The striga was already vanishing into Zhanyi’s skin, driven back by the illumination. Her hair became soft again, her eyes receded to their normal size and shape, her skin regained some of its lustre – but only some. The tears across her arms were still bleeding, slow and steady, the blood spreading across the floor. What drew Sharon’s attention was the redness welling from between her ribs and seeping through her clothes like water through a dried-out sponge.

For a second she stared, unable to speak. Zhanyi let out a sudden, shuddering breath. Sharon saw blood fleck her lips with the passage of the air, then, with the inhale, a surge of blood from her torso. Then Rhys was by her side, whispering, “Shall I call an ambulance, Ms Li? Ms Li?”

Sharon didn’t answer.

Rhys fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his mobile phone, fingers shaking as he dialled. Zhanyi’s eyes flickered from Rhys, to Sharon, and then finally to the potion still clutched in Rhys’s free hand. She smiled. “Oh,” she said. “Baby… shampoo?”

“I need an ambulance right away!” As Rhys babbled down the line, Zhanyi’s head turned slowly from the potion, to Sharon, and her smile faltered.

“Did… did I… hurt you?” she whispered.

Sharon shook her head.

“Didn’t mean to,” added Zhanyi. “Didn’t mean it.”

“We need to put pressure on the wound!” exclaimed Rhys, the phone still pressed to his ear.

Sharon reached out uncertainly, and pressed her bloodied hands over where she thought the wound might be in Zhanyi’s side. Zhanyi flinched, face, eyes, contracting tight, breath rushing faster, thinner. “Didn’t mean,” she whimpered. “Tried not. Didn’t mean.”

“Please hurry!” cried Rhys into the telephone.

Sharon felt something chilly brush against her fingers where they pressed down over Zhanyi’s chest. She glanced down and saw the fingertips of Zhanyi’s hand close around hers. “There’s a temple,” the striga breathed. “The highest. The brightest. The newest. Palace fit for a god.”

Her voice faded.

Her eyes began to close.

“Rhys?” whimpered Sharon.

The druid fumbled for the striga’s pulse. Zhanyi’s eyes closed.

“Rhys?!” It was nearly a scream, a cry caught somewhere between a whisper and an explosion.

The blood, rushing up between Zhanyi’s ribs, began to slow.

Somewhere in the distance, a siren sang.

“Rhys?” A question this time, which barely made it past Sharon’s lips, and didn’t want an answer.

He put the phone to one side, and carefully pulled Sharon’s hands back from the striga’s wound. He felt for a pulse on Zhanyi’s neck. First one side, then the other. Then he checked a wrist. He bent down low and listened for breath, for the rise and fall of her chest.

The siren dirge crept closer.

“We have to go,” he whispered.

Sharon didn’t answer.

“We have to go!” he repeated, grabbing her by the arm.

Still no answer.

He pulled her bodily to her feet and through the living-room door. The front door was standing ajar. Rhys wrenched it back all the way and dragged Sharon out into the night, turning first one way, then the other, hearing the siren come closer, as she staggered behind him, into the dark.

Chapter 71

Regret Never Helped Anyone

They were guarding the rusted blade.

They weren’t quite sure why they were guarding it, but Mr Roding, when he looked at it, was afraid, and that told the others quite enough.

They waited where it had begun; in the small downstairs office by Coram’s Fields. Sally, Mr Roding, Gretel and Kevin had holed up for the night, four guards to one rusted blade. Mr Roding had laid out pillows on a couch, and somehow managed to find blankets in a cupboard in the back of another office. Sally hung suspended from the ceiling, wings folded in over her face, one eye open and staring at nothing, like a nesting duck waiting for an aggressive cat. Gretel sat hunched by the disused fireplace, while Kevin sat at Rhys’s computer, a pair of headphones pressed to his ears, watching BBC downloads by the grey-blue light of the flickering screen. Sometimes Kevin exclaimed, “Oh my God, she is totally not wearing
that
?”

Mr Roding grunted and rolled over on the couch. He’d given up trying to get Kevin not to exclaim out loud; the vampire, he was forced to conclude, didn’t even notice his own actions. The only light in the room glowed from the computer screen, but sodium streetlights each cast a glow from outside, and created conflicting versions of the window’s shape across the ceiling and floor.

Sally the banshee swayed gently from her ceiling roost. She wasn’t particularly comfortable inside confined spaces, not least as small walls tended to amplify her ear-shattering voice to the point where even she found it unbearable; but this was the office of Magicals Anonymous, one of the very few places in London where it was okay to let her wings down and stretch out those talons. It wasn’t that banshees were social creatures – far from it – but in the busy urban environment Sally had been forced to reach the same conclusion as every mage, magus and magi from Acton to West Ham: that in the city, everything changed. Especially people.

A key turned in the latch.

Sally stirred beneath her roost. Kevin, eyes still glued to the computer screen, sniffed the air unconsciously. Mr Roding rolled onto his side, head turning towards the door.

The front door opened.

Footsteps fell in the corridor outside.

In the room, no one stirred.

They were hunters, all of them, in their different ways. And sure, in recent years they may have chosen antibacterial hand wash over hot blood, and Impressionist art over raw pigeon, but there was a reason they had been asked to guard Old Man Bone’s rusted blade.

A hand fell on the door to the room, started to push it back. Gretel stirred on the floor, Kevin’s eyes darted up from the computer screen. Outside the opening door, someone hesitated. Then someone sneezed.

“Um… guys?”

Mr Roding groaned and rolled back across the couch, pressing his head into the cushions. “It’s the druid.”

The door eased back further, revealing Rhys and, just behind him, the grey-faced shape of Sharon. Gretel rose slowly to her feet, an oddly courteous gesture from the troll, and murmured, “Good evening… morning, Rhys. Good morning, Ms Li, I hope you are both well?”

Rhys smiled wanly. Sharon drifted towards her desk, and slumped into the chair without a sound. Sally eyed her from the ceiling, and didn’t move.

“No… trouble?” asked Rhys. “No evil vapours, outbreaks of plague, glass gods?”

“It was fine until you two bloody showed up,” grumbled Mr Roding from the couch.

“I’ll put the kettle on…⁠” said the druid, even as Kevin glanced up again from his screen and sniffed the air. The vampire’s face blanched.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, ripping the headphones from his head and spinning to stare at Sharon. “You’re, like… covered in blood!”

Sharon stared at Kevin for a long hard moment, not moving from her chair. Her hands were clean, washed in the bathroom of Zhanyi’s house, but traces of blood still clung to her clothes, her nails, her thoughts; and as the vampire leapt to his feet with a rising shriek of “Oh my God, and it’s striga blood, it could be, like, contaminated!” she hit him with a look so hard he almost staggered.

“Are you all right, Ms Li?” rumbled Gretel.

Sharon didn’t answer.

Kevin, never one to let a point go, hopped nervously from foot to foot. “Striga blood!” he wailed. “It doesn’t even have a measurable rhesus value! Oh, my God.” Another thought struck, more terrifying yet. “What if there’s airborne particulates? What then?” So saying, he grabbed his large shoulder bag, and started rummaging through it. Mr Roding, usually professionally disinterested in all things which weren’t several weeks into decomposition, sat up to observe as Kevin pulled out bottles of alcohol wipe, sterile pads and surgical gloves. Snapping on a blue medical mask, he offered the packet round for anyone else afraid of inhaling something untoward. Then, pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he very carefully pushed the sterile wipes towards Sharon’s desk, trying at once to keep as far from her and as close to the medicines as he could. “Babes,” he added, as she stared unseeing at the packet before her, “I know it’s gonna seem like an overreaction, but I’d totally get yourself checked out first thing tomorrow morning. These things are easier to deal with if you get them in the incubation period!”

“Tea!” Rhys’s voice was too loud and too jolly as he poured steaming water into a chipped cup. “Who’s for a cuppa?”

Amid silence, Gretel raised a giant hand.

“Marvellous!” exclaimed Rhys. “Biscuits?”

“Where’s the blade?” Sharon’s voice was as empty as the look on her face, sucking all feeling and sound into it so that, for a moment, the others wondered if she’d spoken at all.

“Your goblin mate’s got it,” murmured Mr Roding.

“Where is he?”

“He’s right… oh.” Kevin looked round the room, his gaze drifting from face to face. “Well it
smells
like he’s still here.”

Sharon sighed with exasperation and, without seeming to move, vanished.