The Grotesques (43 page)

“Better let them see you,” Doer said with a nod at the few remaining journalists who had ignored the big sign warning of hazardous spray two of his men had dragged over. Their fake council uniforms had allayed any suspicions. Ella stuck her head out long enough for them to report she had not been abducted after all.

“Time to go,” Doer said as a black car approached from the far end of the street.

Adam pulled off the respirator. “The wildlife,” he began.

Doer started the engine. “My men will neutralise any spills.”

“Wait for Rob.” She stuck her head out and looked down the side of the church as she dialled him again. She spotted him swing out of the low window to avoid the vaporised acid cloud hanging over the front door.

The BMW’s engine roared as it accelerated toward them.

“We go now.” Doer burned rubber, drove over the curb and onto the grass, throwing them about the back. Adam grabbed her as she bounced toward the open doors. They slowed long enough for Rob to jump in. The car was flattening the grass before they shut the door. Ella slid open the side window and looked back as they rounded the bell tower. Roan had climbed out of the window and was overseeing the police evacuation, conveniently directing people into the path of the honking BMW.

“Where’s Genord?” she asked, sliding to the floor.

Rob pursed his lips. “The trapdoor was clean. We were about to detain him when he dived in. The diver we sent after him never made it back.”

She counted three breaths. “Is he still down there?”

Rob shook his head.

She supposed it was too much to ask for Genord to have shared the diver’s gruesome fate.

“Where to?” Doer called. He was driving down the walkway past the houses.

“The girls,” Adam said.

“I need to check on Tilly.” Ella bit her lip as she looked at Adam. “Brendan can meet us with Romain but do you mind if an underworld boss knows where you live?”

They careened off the pavement into Formby Crescent. Adam swung over so he was sitting beside her. “In present circumstances I’d go so far as to say it would make me feel safe.”

THE HOUSE WAS
utterly dark when Ella woke. The bed was empty next to her. If it had not been for the muted sound of the television, she might have panicked. Gently rolling the purring Tilly off her neck, she pulled her jeans on under Adam’s baggy tee-shirt. Then she slid the fragment of cross she had picked off Joanne Travellian’s bust into her pocket. Under the circumstances, keeping a religious relic close to her person was a sensible precaution. Sleeping with it under her pillow had certainly made for an easier night. Her little cat kept pawing at her leg, so Ella picked her up and carried her into the living room, nuzzling into the affectionate head butts. Romain was still at the living room window, his palms flat against the pane as he gazed into the drizzly night. Their attempts to settle him into the spare room had ended in distress.

“No. Dragon,” had been his only answer to their repeated requests he return the girls to human form.

It had been a long evening. News footage had shown the dragon head gargoyle, its broken mouth missing teeth, its mottled snout potted from the hydrochloric acid. It was the body beneath it, covered from head to toe, that had first sobered them. Piecing together the uninformed reports, they had surmised it was one of Doer’s men.
His ladder toppled as he took a chainsaw to the crumbling gargoyle
, the overexcited reporter had paraphrased at least three times.
A chunk of masonry fell and crushed his skull
. A blue light hovered over his body for several seconds before it darted into the church. Adam had swallowed at the speculation that the unknown species spotted by the river might have been responsible. With Romain remaining stubborn about the girls, no one had felt like celebrating.

“Tomorrow is Samhain,” she had told Adam. “Perhaps he just needs to see the day out.”

As exhausted and despondent as she, he had nodded and allowed her to lead him to bed and some much needed rest.

Sitting in the armchair, eyes glued to the images of the Port where news crews crowded for a glimpse of the grotesques, he did not look like he had got much sleep. The flickering light of the television illuminated the hands on the jarrah wall clock. Tomorrow had arrived. She sat on the sofa and let Tilly jump from her arms.

“Any sign?” she asked, trying to ignore a replayed interview which hailed Debbie Esperto as an expert on the unexplained. Her creative colleague was spouting nonsense about basilisks and Medusa.

He shook his head. She went into the kitchen and made some tea. A distant roar had Tilly dashing past her legs with enough speed to slosh some of the steaming liquid onto the floorboards. She started to reassure the cat it was only someone wheeling out their bin when the sound clicked with a foggy recollection of her dream. That noise had woken her. She eased the mugs onto the mallee root coffee table.

“Ella.” Adam was sitting forward. He pressed jittery hands onto his knees.

She turned to the television. A foolish reporter had ducked the cordon. She was talking into her mike, unaware a wooden neck was poking above the rocky bank of the canal. The muted voice of the cameraman stopped her mid-sentence. The picture zoomed into the collage of dark shadows but Ella knew the blue horror she must be facing as she turned.

“But the head,” she said, a shiver rippling down her spine.

“Look at it. It’s destroyed,” Adam said as the camera panned across the church. “I doused it.”

“Adam.”

Genord was walking out of the arched doors. The reporter approached with a request for his opinion, holding out the mike, oblivious to the gun he was raising until it was pointed at her chest. An avian shriek drowned out her pleas. The picture jolted onto the beaked grotesque. Its wings battered Genord. A shot rang out. The grotesque crashed to the grass. The footage wobbled and the ground tilted as cameraman and reporter bolted. Gunfire rapped in quick succession. The camera swung back to centre on Genord even as they continued to run. The lagging reporter fell. She never got up. A tongue of fire flared out of thin air. The camera toppled. Blood splattered across the screen. Ella found herself biting a nail as Caroline shrieked.

“Ay-et. Ay-et,” Romain said.

“I am Lord of Samhain.” Ella shuddered as Genord’s voice boomed out of the television. “The world will pay homage.”

Static burst onto the screen prior to the anchor at the studio assuming hysterical control.

“How?” Ella breathed. Overwhelmed by everything that had taken place, she started to weep. Adam came and put his arms around her. “Caroline.”

“Hurt. Hurt. Ay-et.”

“Does he mean ‘eat’ or the number?” Adam asked.

“That’s nine,” she said, adding Doer’s lackey, the drophole diver, and the journalist to the tally of victims. “We’ve lost.”

“Ay-et,” Romain insisted. He held up eight stubby fingers.

She shook her head in defeat. He jerked his hands. She bit her lip. She didn’t dare believe Rob’s man had survived but was it possible he had escaped Genord’s grasp? He had never reappeared but neither had Genord been present to capture his soul.

“Ay-et,” Romain said again. She nodded.

“What now?”

Adam took a shaky breath. “We find the real head. Before Genord claims the last sacrifice.”

It felt like minutes later that the doorbell rang, though the clock hand had swung a half hour. When Adam remained entrenched by the television hoping for a glimpse of Cecily, Ella answered the impatient pounding.

“This isn’t over,” Rob said. She looked past him to Osbourne, dour as ever.

“I don’t suppose we have a choice?”

GENORD STARED AT
the flat water of the canal. Samhain had broken too soon, thanks to the interference of the wench. He could see the phosphorescent water elementals undulating through the murky depths, those of air swirling across his skin. Not a single person in this age was blessed with the magic to observe them, let alone command their might. It made no difference. There was no one here for him to impress. No one for him to sacrifice. The meddlesome bitch had seen to that. She would suffer a thousand times over before he fed her to La Gargouille. Because Genord would not be foiled again.

He sat cross-legged upon the rocky shore and willed the dragon to emerge onto the bank in all her sapphire glory. Her head was a perfect, insubstantial clone of his original creation, crafted out of the energy of sacrifice. Her body was a flesh vessel, hungering for her spirit. He would suffer no duplicate. And so he had desisted teasing her precious spirit from her head, delayed tying her majestic mind to her new born body. Not a scrap of her spirit must diminish in turning wood to flesh.

Herein lay the dilemma. Perhaps a single feat of magic was left to him when he offered the final spirit. Else, he could not restrict the sacrifices to the sacred nine that would secure the elementals within the beast of flesh, and bind the dragon to his will.

It mattered not. With a dragon beneath him, a last sacrifice could not hope to escape. He would chance endowing his beloved with the properties of the elementals ere his control was complete. And so, dragging a finger through the water, he beckoned the water elementals to seal her scales and ruffle her gills. With a puff of breath, he coaxed the air elementals to lighten her wings. And with the strike of a match, he drew the fire elementals to light the flame in her throat.

THE POLICE VEHICLES
screeched their urgency all the way to Parliament House. It had been a while since Ella had walked up the steps between the gigantic marble columns. This visit might have braced her self-esteem had a terrifying roar not startled her into tripping in front of everyone. Adam steadied her, but the whoosh of wings battered them back. They ducked as a dragon swooped along North Terrace. Caught by the cunning glint in its eye, she froze. The dragon turned its head and belched fire. The flames reflected off the wet road, casting a red glow on its sapphire scales. Adam pushed her down and rolled as the orange tongues seared the large wooden doors. The dragon soared on and curved into the sky.

“It was real,” was the only stupid thing she could say before realising Osborne was shouting them through the charred outer doors and a security screening which made no concession to the threat.

Once through the metal detector, Osborne led them down black and white tiled corridors with ornate cornices and corbels to an office with the word Premier stencilled in gold on the door. The state’s top man himself greeted them with curt formality in the outer office. He lifted a copy of the
Informer
from his desk, laid it back down, and asked for a concise explanation of the chaos at the Port. Rob cleared his throat and looked discomfited. Adam fidgeted. Romain clutched his hair, rocked, and moaned. Ella took a deep breath. For better or worse, her understanding of events was already in print, her reputation resting at rock bottom. She told him almost everything. The Premier perched on the edge of a desk while he listened. She had a clear view of the various shades of red, white, and purple that coloured his face but she faltered only when an aide entered with photographic evidence of the dragon that preyed outside. The only detail that caught her attention was a wooden hind foot. It meant they might yet stand a chance.

“Do you intend to go to print with the threat Genord poses?” the Premier asked.

“It’s the truth.”

“You have no evidence those girls are the grotesques.”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and looked askance at Adam.

“There’s DNA evidence,” Rob said.

“Which Ms Jerome, a reporter for the
Informer
, collected,” Osborne pointed out. Her newspaper’s name dripped with contempt. For once she wanted to defend it. “Chain of custody was never maintained.”

“You do realise, if people accept those girls are the grotesques and I sanction their deaths, the next election will be the least of my worries,” the Premier said to Osborne.

“Welcome to the club,” Ella said.

“Cecily and the others, the missing women, they’re helping keep the dragon at bay . . .” Adam took a couple of deep breaths. The Premier gave the military man a nod. “. . . and looking for the head,” Adam continued when his rival for the Premier’s attention had left the room. “They’re our best chance to defeat it. You can’t let anything happen to them.”

The Premier’s noncommittal platitudes inspired little confidence. The brusque way his aide ushered them out she liked even less. And when Osborne reappeared with a group of soldiers she found herself dreading the outcome of their little chat.

“Gentlemen, Ms Jerome. This will all be over within the hour. A pilot is preparing to bomb the church and dragon as we speak. Nothing could possibly withstand the detonation. The evacuation has commenced. And that information is best leaked to the terrorist.”

“But the girls, the grotesques!” Ella cried. “You’ll kill them.”

“Then I suggest, Ms Jerome, that you find a way to return them to their natural form. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bombing to oversee.” He swept into the room, leaving the aide to usher them back to North Terrace and the waiting police cars.