The Wolves of London (35 page)

Clover and I barely spoke as we took the DLR back into central London. She hadn’t yet mentioned my running out on her earlier. Maybe she would later, or maybe she thought I’d redeemed myself by rescuing her from McCallum.

No, not McCallum, I reminded myself. McCallum was dead. The thing that had used Clover as bait and tried to take the heart from us had been something new, something different, something that had the ability to
look
like McCallum – or, based on what I’d seen, anything else for that matter. A shape-shifter. An entity that could divide its body up and create an entire army of creatures out of its own… what? Flesh? Was such a thing composed of flesh? Or was it made of some other substance altogether?

I wondered how badly – if at all – I had wounded the thing by destroying some of its…
creations
with heart-energy. And again I wondered how Frank was coping, whether he was still alive.

I put my head back and closed my eyes. It had been a long night. Betrayed by Benny (was
he
still alive?), trapped by the Surgeon and his minions, rescued by Frank, lured into another trap by the shape-shifting thing… Was this really going to be my life from now on? I wondered whether the Surgeon and the shape-shifter were on the same side, whether they were both Wolves of London. The shape-shifter in the guise of McCallum had used a cane topped with a silver wolf’s-head. A joke? Or an indication of his status? The fact that the cane hadn’t been a cane at all, but part of the stuff of the shape-shifter suggested that here was a monster with a wicked sense of humour. But what did I know? As usual the questions far outnumbered the answers.

We changed trains at Bank, descending on to the Central Line platform, from where we’d catch the tube to Oxford Circus, and then get the Bakerloo Line to Paddington. Although all I wanted was my bed, I knew that once Clover and I got back to the hotel our best option would be to pack up our few belongings and leave. Perhaps the next hotel would be no safer than this one, perhaps the Wolves had so many fingers in so many pies that they could track our movements every minute of every day, but at least I’d feel superficially safer in a different hotel. Trudging down the steps to the platform at Bank I once again scrutinised every face. I knew that any one of these people could be a potential threat, and that knowledge depressed me. Would I ever feel safe, or be able to trust anyone, ever again?

It was late, nearly midnight, and the platform was filled with late-night revellers. A bunch of girls in short skirts and deeley boppers were screeching like banshees; a tall, skinny man wearing a brown suit and glasses was spitting invective at a pretty black girl, who was stroking his chest and urging him to calm down. I took Clover’s arm and steered her away from the main throng, towards the end of the platform, where it was quieter. From the black arch of the tunnel came the distant squeal of metal and a smell like scorched dust. I glanced at the digital information board and saw that a train to Ealing Broadway would be along in two minutes.

Despite my previous conviction that the heart would always protect me, and that as long as it was in my possession I was invincible, I felt nervous, wary. Whenever the heart was dormant was when the doubts started to creep back in. Maybe it
would
protect me, but what was it doing to my body in the meantime? And was it
really
protecting me or simply using me, drawing on my energy, my life essence, to protect itself? Perhaps, when it had used me up, reduced me to a husk, it would move on, seek another host? Perhaps it was nothing but a parasite, intent only on self-preservation?

Beside me Clover coughed. I glanced at her. I was about to ask her if she was all right when I realised that our surroundings had gone a little hazy. I wondered whether the lights in the station were dimming, and then realised that a yellowish fog had crept on to the platform. Where had it come from? The tunnel? But even as I became aware of the fog, it grew thicker.

Clover coughed again. And suddenly I was coughing too, as the acrid-smelling mist caught in my throat. I wafted at it, but it became even darker and denser, obliterating my view of the other passengers further along the platform. It stifled the sound of their chatter, isolating Clover and me as it coiled around us. I bent double, spluttering, my eyes stinging. In my head I was thinking,
Another attack! Pull yourself together!
But it was easier said than done.

Within seconds we were completely enshrouded by swirling, pus-yellow fog. No, not fog, I suddenly thought. Smog. Back in London’s industrial past the combination of smoke from coke-based fuels and factories belching out pollution had meant the city was often coated in blankets of smog so thick and pungent they became known as pea-soupers. They were a thing of the past now, so how come Clover and I were currently stuck in the middle of one? Unless this was something different – a chemical attack perhaps, like the one on the Tokyo subway back in the nineties.

I touched the heart in my pocket, willing it to throw a protective bubble around us or something, but it was cold, unresponsive. Holding my breath, I zipped up the hoodie under my jacket all the way to the top and pulled the front of the collar over my nose and mouth, holding it in place with one hand. It helped a bit, enough to allow me to breathe without choking my guts out. I blinked my streaming eyes, then reached for Clover’s hand in the murk. Behind her hazy form was a dark shadow, a shape. I thought it was the wall, or… something jutting
from
the wall. But then the shadow loomed towards us, became more defined, and I realised it was a man.

My first thought, that it was a fellow passenger, was quickly dispelled as the man came into blurry focus. Dressed in a long grey coat, checked waistcoat, knotted neckerchief and a bowler hat that looked as if it had been trampled underfoot then punched back into shape, he was not just dirty or grubby, but
filthy
. His hair jabbed from beneath the rim of his hat like matted, mud-clogged straw, and dirt was ingrained into the many creases and scars of his lumpy, pustule-pocked face. One of his eyes was milky and bloodshot, and between his thick, chapped lips I saw a mouthful of teeth so black and rotten it looked as though shards of coal had been embedded in his gums.

I took in these details in a split second, and then my attention was diverted to the hand he was raising towards me. It was as filthy as his face, smeared with dirt, black grime clogging his fingernails. However it was not the hand itself that concerned me, but the tarnished, jagged-bladed knife jutting from it. The man grinned, revealing even more of his blackened teeth, and then before I could react, he stepped smartly up behind Clover and slashed the blade savagely across her throat.

Her eyes and mouth gaped in horrified disbelief as every molecule in my body clenched in a sick, freezing spasm of shock. I saw the flesh of her throat part in a ragged tear and blood
gushed
out of her, the arterial spray so violent that it hit my chest like a hot, fierce punch. Her eyes rolled up and her head lolled backwards, and suddenly she was
all
blood – her entire front, her hands, were red with it. I was covered in it too, and so was the floor. It splashed against my boots and spread out in all directions, creeping and growing like something alive.

As Clover’s body went limp and her feet began to kick and jitter, the man laughed, wrapped an arm around her waist and dragged her into the smog. Her jerking heels scraped through the blood, briefly forming white runnels in it, which were quickly filled as the edges oozed back together like the lips of a healing wound.

It was only now – far too late – that shock loosened its grip on me. Desperately hoping there was still time to save Clover, whilst knowing in my heart that there wasn’t, I croaked, ‘Hey!’ and sprang forward. Though the cut-throat and his victim were receding rapidly into the murk, I could still discern them as a dark, diminishing blur. As I plunged forward in pursuit, however,
another
shape loomed out of the smog to my left. I was so surprised that I skidded on Clover’s blood and my right foot shot from under me. Caught off-balance, I snatched no more than a glimpse of yet another filthy man – this one taller and thinner, and dressed in a long, ragged blue coat that looked vaguely military – before he stepped forward, exuding a rancid, pig-like stench, and shoved me hard in the chest.

This time
both
feet shot from under me and I crashed on to my back with enough impact to knock the breath from my body. For a moment the pain was so excruciating I felt sure I’d broken my neck or spine, and could only lie there, my mouth open in soundless agony. My brain was raging at me to move, to shake off the pain and leap up in pursuit of Clover’s attacker, but it was another five or ten seconds before I was finally able to rise, groaning, up on to an elbow and then, slowly and painfully, to my feet.

Yellow smog still hung heavily around me, like wet sheets on a washing line. Stifling a cough, I tried to swipe it aside in an effort to see more clearly, but it was no use; there was neither sight nor sound of the two men. I stumbled in the direction that Clover’s attacker had disappeared, still stunned by what I had seen, my mind refusing to relinquish the belief that she was not yet beyond saving. After only a few steps, however, I encountered the tiled wall of the tube station, and at the same time the smog started to disperse. Within moments I could see the dark shapes of people standing further down the platform, their collective stance and rising chatter suggesting they were oblivious to what had occurred.

It wasn’t only despair that surged through me this time, but also rage. ‘
No!
’ I screamed, scrabbling in my pocket and pulling out the heart. I glared at it, clenching it so tightly that my knuckles turned white. ‘
Fucking save her!
’

The heart simply sat there, stubborn and smug. ‘
Save her! Fucking save her!
’ I yelled again, half-aware of heads turning in my direction, of a few nervous giggles, of a partly amused ‘You all right there, mate?’

Drawing back my arm, I smashed the heart against the wall, half-hoping it would drill clean through into whatever dimension the cut-throat had dragged Clover. Aside from the jarring impact that shuddered along the bone all the way up to my elbow, however, all that happened was that I dented the tile. Grimly I drew back my aching arm and smashed the heart against the wall again. And then again. And again.

It was the fifth impact that did it. No sooner had the heart connected with the now chipped and cracked wall than the cold black stone in my hand seemed to detonate, engulfing me in a blaze of blinding white light. I had once seen a TV documentary in which a war photographer had described the experience of stepping on a land mine. It had sounded something like this: an almost out-of-body experience of light and heat and weightlessness. I was vaguely aware of my head snapping back, my spine bending like a bow, my limbs going rigid. I opened my eyes and mouth wide as heart-energy poured out of me.

And then I was floating. Spinning. Falling.

I was not aware of losing consciousness, but the sudden transition from tumbling through space to bone-jarring pain was like falling out of bed after a dream about flying. For the second time in minutes I found myself on my back, though this time I was staring up into a night sky pin-pricked with stars. The ground beneath me was hard and bumpy (cobblestones?) and wet; icy liquid was oozing through my clothes and spreading across the flinching skin of my back and buttocks. And there was an awful smell. A stench. Raw sewage and something else. Something rank, animalistic.

My gorge rose yet again and I sat up, swallowing, willing my stomach to settle. No such luck, and for so long that I began to think it might never stop, I retched helplessly, my empty stomach attempting to turn itself inside out as it tried to expel contents that had already been expelled earlier that evening.

By the time my stomach had stopped convulsing I felt utterly wretched – weak, dizzy, my flesh tingling and sensitive to the touch, my innards full of a rough, raw soreness, as if they had been scoured.

I wondered if I was bleeding internally; wondered if my pounding brain was about to haemorrhage. There was no doubt that using the heart was fucking me up, that it was taking a gruelling physical toll.

When the ability to focus returned to my hot, smarting eyes I looked down at my hands. Were they a little more twisted than before? Were the knuckles swollen? Certainly they ached around the joints. I thought of Barnaby McCallum, the heart’s previous owner. True, he was an old man, but had the heart contributed to the near-deformity of his twisted bones, his emaciated state? When had he acquired the heart, I wondered. When had he started using it? If only latterly, then I might well be putting myself at serious risk of an early death. Perhaps by using it so frequently – albeit largely unwittingly – in the few days since it had been in my possession, I had already dangerously exceeded my tolerance level.

With these worrying thoughts circulating in my mind, I looked around, taking in my surroundings. I appeared to be in a yard of some kind, surrounded on three sides by blackened walls of crumbling brick inset with filthy, narrow windows. Many of the windows were broken or simply unglazed; only a few were framed by grubby strips of colourless cloth that served as curtains.

I might have thought the buildings were abandoned, even condemned, if it wasn’t for the candlelight flickering in some of the windows. This, at least, provided me with a modicum of murky illumination.

As my senses returned fully, I realised not only that I
was
lying on wet cobblestones, but also that the cobblestones were covered in filth. Scattered about were clumps of muddy straw, gnawed bones and other bits of unrecognisable organic matter – some of it rank with decomposition.

There was shit too, both animal – horse, dog – and what looked suspiciously like human. And among all this shit and rubbish was rustling, twitching movement. I peered at a particularly active mass of shadow and saw a fat-bellied rat, and then a second, dart from one patch of darkness to another. The thought of one of the creatures scuttling across to check
me
out was all the encouragement I needed to scramble to my feet. It was only as I winced at the sick, bone-deep pain in my back and put my right hand down to take some of the weight that I realised I still had the heart – cold and unresponsive again now – clutched in it. I dropped it back into the inside pocket of my blood and filth-smeared jacket, and then, groaning with effort, I stood up.