Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series (20 page)

Even the fireplace was cold. Which was odd, for the fire had been burning only a few minutes before.

T
he day before, in a large police station near Victoria where not much caused surprise any more, the senior officer on duty was asked to step into a room wherein the items of a travel bag had been laid out for his inspection.

One silver sword, extremely sharp. One silver band that under any other name might be called a crown. Some clothes. And five passports, two in the name of Sam Linnfer, two in the name of Luc Satise, one in the name of Sebastian Teufel.

A present to the law from an unidentified friend.

A few hours later and the arrest warrant for Sam Linnfer had been issued. Not until the following day would Sam himself walk boldly into the police station, and leave with all his possessions.

He had no more battles to fight that were not his own. Sam took comfort from that. In the past he’d sought company and friendship, and with these had come the responsibilities of help and caring. He’d even revelled in fighting other people’s battles, riding the bliss of faith in his friends. Faith had been a luxury often denied him, and in companionship at last he’d found some.

But now that was over. The Moondance network was all but blown, Peter and Whisperer hostages against his good behaviour. Freya was dead. Seth, son of Night, was making his way, maybe with terrible intent, into the vacuum left too long in Hell by Sam himself.

Seth, Odin, and Jehovah are all chasing after those keys. One of them murdered Freya. Oh, Light! All three of them, playing with fire!
 

Yet, in this moment of loss, without his Earthly identities to hide behind, he had a reason to feel safe. Not happy or clean, but safe. Now all his enemies could do was hurt him – he had no weaknesses that were not his own.

No weaknesses, bar one
, whispered a little voice in his mind.

There was a furious hammering on the door, combined with the buzz of a bell. Such scenes were not common in the quiet back streets of WC2. When, even so, there was no answer to his knocking, Sam moved into the middle of the street and tilted his head up to the window. ‘Annette!’ he yelled. ‘Annette, please open up!’

No answer. He rushed back to the door and rammed his hand, palm-first, against the lock with enough force to send shudders up his spine. The lock clicked, the latch seemed to turn of its own volition and the door swung open. Sam took the stairs three at a time.

The door to Annette’s flat was already open. Her servant stared accusingly down at him.

‘How did you get in?’ she demanded in her heavily accented English. ‘The mistress doesn’t want any visitors.’

‘Piss off!’ snapped Sam, shouldering past her and into the flat.

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed, trying to bar him by squeezing into successive doorways. Searching with the energy of a madman for Annette, Sam shoved by easily.

‘“Hey” has never been a word of power, and if it were you’d never gain mastery of it.’

He burst through a door which she’d given away by guarding it too hard, and heard Annette’s voice even as he saw her. She was sitting up in bed, blankets pulled high and her thinning white hair brushed around her face as though it were a mane of pure beauty, cast down to highlight her looks to a bewitched suitor.

‘Leave us,’ she murmured to the girl, eyes not straying from Sam.

At the click of the door Sam rushed to Annette’s side, searching her face, her mind, for any sign of harm, taking her ancient hands in his and laughing out loud in sheer relief. ‘I was afraid they might hurt you,’ he said. ‘I thought I might not find you after all.’

Her face became serious. In a motherly tone she said, ‘What trouble have you got yourself into now, stupid boy?’

If anything he laughed even harder. Through the mirth of relief he managed to explain, ‘I got shot, lost two battles at once and spent a week in a rubbish tip, regenerating.’

‘Ah. Playing the old games, even though you yourself are too old for them by far!’

‘I know, I know.’

‘And now the police are after you.’

Sam’s laughter abruptly faded. ‘Say again?’

‘The police, young immortal. The keepers of the peace, the bastions of justice. They came here asking questions about you, saying I was a “known associate” of Luc Satise. They have your passports, your mixed identities. They have your sword and your crown and seem to have been informed by unknown sources that you killed someone.’

His serious face matched hers perfectly, but where her eyes laughed and wept all at once, his held nothing but concern.

‘What did you tell them?’

‘Nothing. You were the nice young man who’d briefly dated my granddaughter, that was all I knew.

‘Then the other men came, asking about you. They seemed very angry. Does he have any doctors as friends; what are his favourite cities, can you give us addresses? I told them nothing, of course. I was just the harmless old lady who rambles on about nothing.’ She clenched her ancient fingers into a fist and with her free, trembling hand pulled his face towards her. ‘What have you done?’ she asked softly.

‘What else did they say?’

‘They said to tell you something, if you turned up here. To warn you that, though they had failed to kill you, they still had your friends in Kaluga. They said to tell you to keep clear.’

He said nothing.

‘Luc? Luc, I loved you. When I go to Heaven or Hell, I’ll be waiting for you. What have you done?’

He pulled away from her and headed for the door. ‘I came to be sure you were all right,’ he mumbled. ‘I was afraid they might have hurt you.’

‘We’re all young in Heaven. We’re all old in Hell. We can be old or young together. When you die. When you join me.’

Sam turned in the doorway, and motioned as if to speak. He wanted to tell her that, if she just said the word, he would die. Never once come into her life again, be as a ghost.

But he hadn’t the guts. What if he needed her again? What if something, that in reason couldn’t be predicted, forced the ghost to rise and fall like a yo-yo from the grave?

So he said nothing.

For her, he had said enough.

I was afraid they might have hurt you.
 

Annette smiled vaguely to herself, humming under her breath, and leant back against the mound of pillows as the door clicked shut. The immortal had been afraid for her life. She was content.

So now Michael had seen to it that the British police were after him. Sam was grudgingly impressed. Sure, he was master of the art of constructive hindrance. Mortal police forces were nothing that couldn’t be dealt with by twenty years in another country or just a few burnt records. But he couldn’t deny the inconvenience.

I’m being slowed down. The smart archangel can do the maths – say, a week regenerating, a day trying to get my bearings, another day trying to pick up my stuff, another day trying to find the trail again. Michael’s doing everything he can to throw me off without actually killing me.
 

Good old Michael, I suppose. I can almost – but not quite – forgive you everything.
 

The next problem was money. Sam had far preferred the days when he could wave his hands and produce the illusion of gold but, in these complicated times of machines and order, he’d found himself forced to open a bank account. And, to his shame, he had quietly tricked and coaxed his way into a fair fortune, which had been gathering interest for more years than Sam Linnfer’s birth certificate would suggest was possible.

The account would be monitored, of that he was sure. But even in these days of machines and security, there were ways.

He went first to an antique shop in one of the by-streets near Annette’s apartment. Waving away assistance from an odious young man who looked down at everyone who didn’t share his passion for prodigiously expensive Regency chairs and tables, he fell to studying a small statue. It was priced at five hundred pounds, hardly more than a foot tall and about as wide as his hand, and represented an improbably shaped woman wearing a necklace and little else. Sam studied it until his eyes ached, recalling every feature and contour, picking it up, feeling its weight, turning it over and over.

When he left the antique shop empty-handed, the assistant openly glowered at this philistine – or miser – who’d been wasting his time.

There was something strange about walking empty-handed through London – Sam, forever on the move, was used to a weight on his back. London itself had always been a safe city for him – its small side streets and sprawling suburbs had offered numberless places to hide or run. The buses and underground system were complicated enough to lose any follower in, and the inner city of old, terraced houses was plain enough for a scry, no matter how skilled, to struggle when identifying any one address.

But now he was on guard against anything and everything, sending searching looks at passers-by and pausing often outside shops to check who might have stopped with him. Scanning the sky for ravens. Probing the streets for spirits. Never finding anything.

He turned the corner into yet another narrow street. Two hundred years ago this place had been covered with horse muck and full of filthy, illiterate children. But now it contained trendy shops selling incense, and paper lamps that cast ‘authentic’ light.

Somehow, while entering this byway, he had acquired his much-missed burden.

It was not his sword nor his bag; but where, a few moments back, his hands had been empty, he now held a large object wrapped in tissue paper. Singling out an antique store that had lost all character and charm in favour of flashy window displays and over-pricing, he marched through the door and up to the counter.

‘You know anything about antiques?’ he demanded of the woman sitting there.

‘This is an antique shop, you know, and I’m in charge of it.’ She had an offended tone that Sam disliked at first hearing. He was in the mood to harbour irrational prejudice.

‘I want to sell this.’ He unrolled his bundle, revealing the same statue that, whether or not she was wise to the fact, still stood in its proud place a few minutes’ walk away.

‘We’re not a second-hand junk shop, you know!’

He had a feeling she used the term ‘you know’ a lot.

‘Two hundred pounds, lady. And that’s a good price.’ He relished the word ‘lady’. If she was going to utter infuriating add-ons, then so would he.

Reluctantly, she spared the statue a look. Then another. Finally she took it in her hands and began turning it over, studying the base, running her hands over it, her angry face softening into a slight frown.

‘Hundred and fifty, and that’s my best offer.’

‘I could get five hundred elsewhere.’

She hesitated. ‘Where did you get the statue?’

‘My mum just died.’

‘Hum.’ Condolences did not come easily to this woman. Her whole life was work, and work was the only way of convincing herself that her life was full. ‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘I know that my friend said I could get money for it.’

Again, a little ‘hum’, a pursing of her lips. ‘All right. Two hundred, and it’s robbery at that.’

Yes
, he thought.
It’s you who are robbing me. Only you’re not. If you’d been someone else, if the time had been different, I would have felt guilt. But right now guilt is a luxury that I, devoid of all things, cannot afford.

‘Cash.’

‘Are you mad?’

‘Cash, or I’ll take it to someone more cooperative.’

She hissed her annoyance but reluctantly counted out ten twenty-pound notes. He took them and made a hasty exit. Five minutes later and not only was he gone and well gone at that, but so was the statue. As though it had never been.

Sam followed his senses towards his missing weapon, as he’d followed them from Hell.

When he’d opened the Earth Portal he had focused on no particular destination, but on the song that whispered inside his head – the one that all his weapons shared. He’d let that guide him, Waywalking towards it until he felt his lungs and mind would burst. To his surprise, the song had taken him to London. And now it had led him on to a bus heading south-west through the slow traffic.

A young mother yearned for sleep while her children squirmed and giggled on the seat beside her. The conductor was arguing with a man carrying two large bags of shopping. There’s no room, sir. There’s another just a few minutes behind, sir. A boy was listening to rap, far too loud. All Sam could hear was the regular thud, thud, thud of the beat, like the heartbeat of an elephant. A couple of women in suits were talking in high, self-conscious voices, delighted by the ‘charm’ of the bus. They were workers in the city. Buses were for other people, or when there were no taxis to be had.

Sam was remembering.

There had been someone else. Before his time, but back in Heaven Sam had heard all the stories. Someone else, the pride and joy of all Time’s works.

He’d first been told the tale of Balder by a man both clever and good, who Sam would always call friend. Who’d never been twisted to anyone’s false cause, by spirits or magic alike…