Vanished (33 page)

“Water’s a bit swifter than what I’d expected, but we’ll do well enough. At least we shan’t be wadin’ in muck all the way to Clerkenwell.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered, hoping we’d get downstream before the vampires woke up. The rain had another compensation, though: The freshwater from the north was diluting the glutinous sludge the City of London poured into its ancient sewer, and the smell, while unpleasant, wasn’t overwhelming.

As I scrambled around, getting into the canoe without ending up in the water, Marsden lashed a waterproof flashlight to the front post through the mooring ring. It wasn’t much light, but it would have to do.

“Why do I have the feeling you’ve done this before?” I asked in a whisper as we paddled along the dark waters of the hidden Fleet.

“How’d y’think I ended up in the House of Detention, girl?” Marsden muttered back.

“You said the Pharaohn set you up.”

“Fer the nick, not fer the thievin’. Not like I’d never done it afore; I’d just not been caught. If you were desperate enough, you could go right up the drains in some o’ the fine houses, skinny as I am. And I were bloody desperate. I suppose I could have got a regular job as a flusher—that’s them as clears the sewers—but I was already half-mad by then and even the Board of Works wouldn’t take on a fella who sees haunts and monsters.”

“You told me you were a mole catcher.”

“So I was, but I’ve done whatever would turn a coin at times and not all of it’s been clean nor kind.”

My stomach rolled a little with the stink of the stream and at the ideas that rose with his words, so I didn’t notice the rocking of our little boat or the odd ripples on the black water until something exploded from the river.

Pale webbed hands with long, spatulate fingers sporting black spinelike claws grabbed at me as a gurgling scream of rage echoed through the tunnel: “Die!”

I slapped at the hands with my paddle, but they only moved to clutch the side of the boat and jerk downward. Then they shoved upward, spilling us out of the canoe and into the rank waters of the Fleet.

I couldn’t see in the churned-up water and I kept my mouth and eyes shut tight against the filth, thrashing to keep my head above the chest-high surface of the moving water and gasp for air. I broke the surface for a moment and, in the bobbling illumination from the canoe’s makeshift headlight, I spotted a steel ladder rung in the wall. I struggled toward it.

Marsden had climbed onto the overturned canoe, clutching his paddle. “What the hell—?”

“Don’t know,” I gasped, grabbing for the rung.

Sharp points dug into my leg and something tried to drag me below the water again. I caught a flash of needle teeth and luminous eyes as wide as saucers below the surface. I swore and kicked off the bottom harder, snatching at the rung in desperation.

“Jakob!” I shouted. A thread of horror spawned in the back of my mind: Jakob wouldn’t be on the loose in the sewer unless Purcell was truly dead. I felt a sting of remorse for the vampire who’d sacrificed himself.

“River spawn. Bloody hell!” Marsden swore, smacking at a pair of hands on impossibly long, spindly arms that reached for him from below the canoe.

There were only two of them and smaller than us, to boot, but they were quick as fish in the water and we’d only been lucky to get to the surface again at all. I didn’t doubt that they’d pull us down and hold us till we drowned in the sewage if they got a good hold of either of us. I shoved my left arm through the rung and bent my elbow to hang on. I kicked viciously into the place I’d seen the eyes while hoping to find a purchase on a submerged rung for my feet. I’d lost my paddle when the boat turned turtle, so I had no tools but a bagged cell phone and my father’s puzzle; it was a fine lock pick for Grey doors, but I doubted that was going to help this time.

Marsden was still battling the reaching hands from the back of the canoe, but he called out, “They’re fast, but they’re fragile as eggshells—go for the gills if you can or break their nasty arms, and they’ll give up soon enough! And they don’t care for light or cats!”

“I don’t see any cats down here!” I shouted back.

Jakob lunged out of the water, hissing, and slashed at my eyes. I jerked back, pulling up one foot to boot him in the face. He twitched aside and my waterlogged shoe connected with the side of his head. By blind luck, my water-heavy foot slid down his slimy skin and jammed against the gill slits beneath his jaw. The feeling of my toe sinking into the delicate structure was sickening. Repelled, I whipped away and felt the tissues rip apart like wet cardboard.

Jakob let out a terrible gurgle and blood gushed from the hole in his neck. He made one more swipe at me, his glowing eyes glaring malice, and fell back into the water, bubbling and thrashing. He was drowning and I stared in horror as he writhed.

In the bobbing, shivering light from the flashlight, I saw the other river spawn leave off snatching at Marsden to dart through the water to Jakob. But it didn’t try to help him; it sank its claws into the injured monster and held the struggling creature fast while it bit into the bleeding flesh of its neck.

In my Grey core I could feel echoes of his distress and pain. Feel the life rushing out of his body on the tide of his blood. I had never been so close to something living as it died before. Just the shock in a shadow of someone’s death hurt, but this. . . . I gagged and flung myself away from the sight, falling into the stream of filthy water as I tried not to vomit. Marsden grabbed my arm and hauled me toward the canoe.

Chest deep in the sewage and ice water of the Fleet, he flipped the canoe right way up and heaved me into it. Then he flung his paddle and himself back in and pushed us away from the bubbling, thrashing sounds of Jakob’s death. I hung my head over the side and threw up, heaving until my gut ached.

My gods, I’d killed something. A living thing—not a ghost or a zombie, not a thing already dead and needing to be let go—but a living, thinking creature. The shock of death was bad enough, but I had never killed anything before, never ended its existence like pinching out a candle—nothing alive, at least—and I hadn’t thought I ever would. Ghosts and vampires were different—they weren’t really alive and they didn’t send out the wrenching shock of death. Jakob hadn’t been a human, but . . . he had been alive. He hated me and wanted me dead—it was self-defense!—but I couldn’t stop retching, knowing I’d killed him.

In a few minutes I noticed we were no longer moving. I raised my head and saw Marsden squatting on a narrow ledge nearby, holding the canoe’s mooring lines.

“Done?” he asked.

“I think so,” I choked, my throat raw from heaving up the contents of my stomach. I wanted to rinse my mouth but there was no clean water and I didn’t dare to even wipe my lips on my sleeve, soaked as it was in the disease-infested tide of Fleet Ditch.

“Y’mustn’t take it on yourself like that. He’d have done you worse, if he had the chance.”

I croaked and spat.

“Horrible as it was,” Marsden continued, his voice low and vehement, “the other one did him a favor. Killed him quick. I should have remembered as they were cannibal. If they’d got you, they’d have ripped into you as you drowned and taken pleasure in your bubbling screams. They’d have plucked out your eyes and saved ’em as treasures. Unpleasant, grudge-carrying fiends, the river spawn. Legend says they’re the bastard get of sirens and fae lords, cast out for their ugliness and hateful toward the whole world because of it. The stories say they devour children and drown sailors in the Thames for the shiny baubles they make of their bones. Right lucky you were.”

I didn’t feel lucky; I felt wretched and damned and sickened. It wasn’t logical or reasonable, but the feel of something . . . dying by my hand, not just falling apart, disturbed me deeply.

Marsden turned his head back and forth, as if listening for something I was missing.

“They’re gone. The other one must’ve swum away—we’re no business of his. We’d best get on. Before the vampires wake and decide to torture your friend a bit.”

For a moment I didn’t move, and Marsden growled in his throat. “C’mon, girl! You’ve more bottle than this! Get up!” He kicked my leg ungently.

“Bastard,” I muttered.

“Bloody well right. Off your jacksy, girl.”

“What?” I questioned, sitting up, stung, annoyed, and generally pissed off now. Have I mentioned that I don’t do self-pity as well as I do anger?

“I said get off your arse and do the job. You want that young man back, you’ll have to go fetch ’im and time is short.”

“What are those?” I whispered, unable to see more than a humped shape, even in the Grey.

“Cats. Vampires don’t care for ’em much more than river spawn, but they know it keeps the fish men away. Shows we’ve found their back door.”

“Why aren’t they doing anything? We must smell just like the river spawn by now.”

“Not to the cats. We’re warm-blooded. We’ve got to move, though. It’s coming on for sunset.”

Marsden pocketed the flashlight and we crept up the stairs in the dark, relying on our senses in the Grey and the dim limning of stones by the weirdly glowing lichen to see us up the steps.

At the top a spiderweb of arched corridors stretched into the darkness below Clerkenwell. Marsden led me along one of the tunnels and I could hear the water of the Fleet gurgling in the distance. Now I knew that was the sound I’d heard when I followed the kreanou to meet Glick.

We went through a door into what turned out to be a storeroom. Marsden huffed in annoyance and started out again immediately, but I stopped when I spotted a pile of water containers in the far corner. It appeared that someone had stocked the area as a shelter sometime in the past, and it seemed likely, given the disarray of the boxes and cans, that the vampires used the goods as food and supplies for prisoners and henchmen and anyone else they needed to hide from the daylight world.

I found a few clean rags and wet them from the water containers so I could wipe off my face and hands. I rinsed the sludge from my mouth. The water tasted of old plastic, but it was a big improvement over the filth from the Fleet. I wished I had the luxury of time to look at the itching wounds on my leg where Jakob’s claws had pierced my skin, but I let that be, hoping I’d be able to do something about the infection later. Marsden shook his head in exasperation, but I noticed he used one of the rags to wipe his own face and hands before leading us again into the maze of corridors.

The hall we walked down next was thick with cold Grey fog that sparked with random shots of energy and eddied into the shapes of oblivious ghosts. I imagined it was used once in a while but not with any frequency, which was good for us; we’d be able to escape along it with little chance of being intercepted. Marsden stopped at a crossing, tilting his head to concentrate on sounds ahead.

“Four,” he muttered. “Red Guard, all humans; no Brothers or demi-guard. We’re in luck, but we’ll have to take them out fast.”

I reached into my pocket and got the puzzle out of its plastic bag—I didn’t want to fumble for it when we needed it to unlock Will’s cell. As I looked up, I saw Marsden reach under his moleskin coat and pull out two gleaming knives. He flipped one of them around and offered it to me, underhand and without turning his head back in my direction.

“No,” I whispered. I didn’t want to kill anyone else; what I’d done to Jakob was terrible and still sat like a weight, regardless of any justification.

“Don’t be daft,” he hissed back. “They’ll kill you quick as look at you—or take you prisoner again for that mad harpy, Alice, to play with. Clever as you are with your hands and feet, girl, it won’t be enough against them, and that does your man no good.”

Reluctantly, I took the knife.

“Look sharpish,” he warned as we started forward.

I kept my vision turned more toward the Grey, looking for any sign of magical traps. This time we weren’t unexpected, and I doubted that Alice and her pet sorcerer wouldn’t have beefed up the security where they could. They’d probably laid a lot of different traps to cover all the bases. The upside was, making and laying any magical traps would have worn Simeon down, which was definitely in our favor. We’d just have to be clever about looking for them and hope they’d relied on magic more than technology.

I had long ago realized that vampires didn’t really know what a Greywalker’s capabilities were; it wasn’t until I’d met Marsden that I understood that we were each different, which certainly threw a wrench into most magical plans. Magic is strongest when specific. Loose, general spells are usually weak or short-lived, according to Mara. But the vampires wouldn’t need anything powerful down here; just something strong enough to hold us or slow us down until reinforcements could arrive.

The first guard we came across was looking down the hall the opposite way. An ordinary-looking man, except for his blood-tainted aura and the small submachine gun—entirely illegal in England—slung high under his arm. He had his back to the wall quite a few feet away.

“Here, can you get round him through the Grey?” Marsden whispered.

I nodded. I’d look like a ghost and there would be nothing I could do to the guard while I went, but if I popped out fast enough and hit him hard enough, it should work. I only wished I could go behind him, but he’d left no room and I didn’t want to try walking through him.

I eased deeper into the Grey and the catacombs sprang up in fiery lines through the silver mist. Knots and tangles of power that looked like messy coils of barbed wire dotted the hallway—traps. I skirted the nearest one, hoping Marsden could see it, too, and glided to the other side of the guard, who looked like a red-and-yellow smear as I passed him, the gun a cold, dark block swinging by his side.

The guard stiffened and turned his head toward me as I slipped back to normal. He yanked the gun up, bracing against the sling as I punched him just below the sternum. He grunted as his breath was driven from his lungs, and Marsden pounced on him from behind, forcing him to the ground. The guard’s finger must have tightened on the trigger as he collapsed, but his body muffled the short burst of gunfire. I felt a sharp tearing sensation in my chest and head as he died, and I clamped down on a cry of shock and agony, biting my tongue.

The guard lay in a clumsy heap as a thread of blood oozed out from beneath him. A furious haze of red energy rose off the downed guard and resolved into a ghost that glared at me and spat a few vile words before the heat of his ire was sucked away into the grid. The memory shape of the dead man dissipated with the odor of rotten eggs.

Marsden picked himself up, pulling his knife from between the corpse’s ribs. “Next time, just cut his ruddy throat,” he growled, sidestepping to avoid the magical trap on the floor.

“Don’t you . . . feel them?” I asked, still aching.

“Yeah, but you learn to turn it down after a while. You’ll get used to it.”

I hoped not. I didn’t want to have cause to get used to the sensation of fresh death.

We slipped back into the Grey and stalked the next one, who was turning to see what the noise had been. Marsden slipped, jumping over time and space, to exit the Grey next to the guard. I had to run the distance through the mist, over the hot lines of the grid and around the cold bulk of stone walls toward the bright, living shape of the guard. Marsden cut the man’s throat before I could reach them, and the knife of pain and shock ripped through me again. The blood ran across the stone floor, blazing with white light that flashed away like a magician’s trick smoke.

Marsden reached through the thin barrier between normal and Grey and hauled me out. “Quicker.”

“What are you—?” I started, furious and disgusted and hurting, but he clapped a hard hand over my mouth.

“We have minutes. Only minutes. You’ll have to bear it and save your man. I’ll manage the guards.”

He nodded toward a heavy wooden door in the wall—the portal to an ancient cell. A metal observation plate hung slightly open in the door’s surface. I peeped in, checking for other humans. I could have slipped through, but I couldn’t leave with Will that way, and I was willing to bet there was no keyhole on the other side.

The room within was dark except for the shaft of dusty light that fell through the observation door. I shifted around, trying to see into the gloom without obscuring the light. “Will?” I whispered.

I could hear a shuffling noise beyond the door. I pulled back and studied the door for further traps. A blue gleam shone though the planks between the ancient bulks of wood. There was something magical on the other side. Another shock hit and I slipped painfully into the Grey, trying to get a better look at the spell in the cell.

It was a tangle, meant to hold someone or something in place for a few minutes. Just like one of Mara’s, the heart of the spell was a braided ring of thorny bramble. The whole mess was tied to the foot of the door, so anyone sneaking in or sidling to the door for a peek outside would be stuck to the door itself. Admirable ingenuity, but I cursed Simeon bin Salah nonetheless. The working zone of the spell was almost a foot wide, which would make it hard to open the door with it in place. I fell back into normal, feeling the pressure of time and the stabbing aches of the dying, wondering how I was going to get past this.

Down the hall I heard a thump and a slithering sound as another death-shock hit me. It wasn’t as bad this time—it was farther away—but it still doubled me up. I didn’t want to look, but I cast a quick glance over my shoulder. I couldn’t see any bodies on the ground but I could see stains that shone with the same bright white light and liquid red as the second guard’s blood. My stomach rolled, but I pushed my sense of horror aside. When the vampires woke, they’d smell the blood and be on us like hounds on a rabbit. And I wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the lower ranks and demi-vamps slept down here in the catacombs. I had to move faster no matter how it hurt, but I also had to be careful.

I couldn’t use tools well in the Grey—normal things became difficult to hold—so I had to do it like a normal person. I knelt down on the floor and passed the knife under the door, hooking the threads that held the tangle in place and slicing through them. I felt a tiny electric jolt as each one parted. Not sure where Will was in the room, I didn’t want to move the tangle until I had the door open.

I shuffled Dad’s puzzle until a key shape clicked into place that buzzed happily. I looked around as I put the key into the lock and saw Marsden trotting back to me.

“What’re you dawdlin’ for?” Marsden demanded. “Get ’im and get a move on!”

“There’s a spell tangle on the inside of the door. Give me your cane.”

His face creased into a scowl, but he pulled the cane out and flicked it straight. I unlocked the door, the mechanism rolling freely to my odd key. Then we both heaved on the heavy door, pulling it open to its widest.

I took the cane and probed for the tangle, not sure if the magic would be conducted by the stick or if the cane might become gripped in the trap. I felt the trap bloom and clutch the cane, which yanked away from my grip and stood upright in the middle of the doorway. But the trap was sprung, and Marsden and I rushed into the cell and stopped short.

Will cowered in the farthest corner, the watery light from the corridor barely glinting off his filthy hair. His clothes were dirty, torn, and bloodied and he’d lost his glasses. The smell in the tiny, unventilated space was worse than the sewer: blood and waste and unwashed clothes stiff with fear sweat and dirt. I took a step toward Will as Marsden turned back toward the door—the blind man standing lookout.

Will turned and scrabbled at the wall with his bandaged right hand as if he could claw his way out, muttering, “No, no . . . please, no more . . .”

“Will, it’s Harper. I’m getting you out of here,” I said, walking closer, relieved that I could see the bulk of his left hand swathed in a startling white bandage—they hadn’t cut it off. The visions I’d had in Los Angeles must have been exaggerated by Simeon’s “new techniques.” At least I hoped so, hoped that the odd shape under the bandage was indeed his own whole, living hand.

“Harper?” he questioned, peering in my direction against the light, which made me a black blot in the doorway. Then Will panicked, throwing himself against the wall and cringing into a ball, covering his face with both unwieldy hands, wrappings extending up his arms as far as I could see. The sight of those bandages almost brought me to my knees, but the worst was when he started crying. “Get away, get away! How can you do this? Just kill me and get it over with. . . . Dear God, please . . .”

I threw myself down on the icy floor beside him and grabbed his face between my hands, brushing his weakly flailing arms away. I didn’t know what they’d done to him to make him so hysterical, but it must have been awful. He battered at my arms and head without strength, trying to rear away, but stopped by the unyielding stones of the cell.

“It really is me,” I said, my voice low and calm as I could manage as I held him, willing him to look at me, to hear me and believe me. I pushed on every compulsion I could think of, on every bit of persuasion and hope. “And I really am here to save you from this place. I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m going to take you back to Michael. We’re going to get you out of here.”

“No! No! You’re that . . . witch. That . . . monster! You can’t trick me anymore. I know Harper’s not coming.”

I thought fast and talked faster. “We met at an auction at the Ing strom Shipwrights warehouse. You sold me a cabinet and a chair. We had dinner at Dan’s Beach House. I got arrested. You got mad. Do you remember that?”

Marsden hissed, “Get a move on!”

I ignored him and kept my attention on Will.