Vicious Circle

I stood up, stepped over the gun, and walked across to him. I squatted down beside him, on the opposite side of the blanket from Abbie, who continued to stare at us both in silence. I felt her solemn, calm attention like a physical pressure on the back of my neck, the light touch of cold fingertips.

Peace stared up into my face, which must have looked a bit sinister lit from below by a single candle.

* * *

“You’ve got a bit of a reputation yourself,” he said, letting his head fall back onto the rolled up jacket he was using as a pillow. “Let’s see if you can live up to it.” This close up, his face looked a lot paler and a lot more strained; or maybe he was just done with pretending now. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead and cheek that gleamed dully in the candlelight.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“What you said. The were-fucks caught up with me again a couple of miles further on—pardon my French, Abbie. I got one of them with a knife: clever little gadget I bought in Algiers, with a chasing of silver up the blade. He won’t be doing any ballroom dancing for a while. But I had to get in close to do it, and he—” Peace gestured at his ruined face.

“Is that the worst of it?” I asked.

“No,” he muttered. “This is the worst of it. Look away, Abbie.”

The ghost of Abbie Torrington shook her head, but it was a protest rather than a refusal. She turned her back on us, her movements once again unaccompanied by the slightest sound. As soon as she was facing the wall, Peace pulled the blanket aside. It was hard, at first, to make out what I was looking at: it looked for a moment like a seventies tank top with a complicated pattern on it. Then I realized that it was his bare flesh; not so bare as all that, though, because his torso was rucked and rutted with half-healed cuts and flaking scabs. The predominant color was furious red, but there was yellow in there, too: some of the wounds had gone massively septic.

“Christ!” I muttered involuntarily.

“Yeah, by all means say a blessing over it. Might even help.”

That was wishful thinking, though. Religious nostrums do have some degree of power over demons and the undead, but only when they’re wielded by someone who actually believes in them. A prayer from me would be about as much use as one of those little stamps with Jesus on them that they used to give out at Sunday school: the royal mail doesn’t accept them, so the message never gets delivered.

“You don’t need a blessing,” I told Peace. “You need a doctor.”

Peace twisted his head away from me to stare at his daughter’s ghost. “Abbie,” he growled sternly, “don’t you be trying to take a peek—it’s not a game we’re playing here.”

Then he looked back at me. “No doctors,” he said vehemently, trying to sit up and not quite managing it. “You don’t know who you’re up against. Any 999 call gets logged—any call to a GP surgery likewise. Even if you could get someone to come out here and ask no questions, he’d still get to know about it and he’d be down on me before you could fill the fucking prescription.” There was a brief pause, and then he added as he let his head back down heavily onto the rolled-up jacket “Pardon my French, Abbie.”

He pulled the blanket back up to cover the horrific landscape of his wounds. “You can turn round again now, sweetheart,” he muttered, but Abbie seemed not to have heard. Her insubstantial figure, barely edged in the darkness, remained staring away from us into the corner of the room where the shadows were deepest. I didn’t want to speculate about what she was seeing there.

I thought about my own infection. That had come from a single cut, and it had laid me out like ten quid’s worth of loose change in a sock. It was a miracle that Peace was still conscious at all. It also occurred to me to wonder how it was that the loup-garous hadn’t been able to follow his scent the way they’d followed mine. Maybe the faint smell of incense had something to do with that, but I was willing to bet that Peace had ways of blindsiding them just as he’d done to me. He was a foxy bastard, no doubt about it, but now he had his leg in the trap and his options were running out.

“Peace,” I said, “you’re right about the call-logging, but take it from me that this is going to get worse, not better. I think you’ll most likely die if you won’t let anyone treat you.”

He absorbed that in silence, thinking it through.

“Carla,” he muttered at last. “Go and see Carla. Get me some more speed. I’ll ride the bastard out.” He closed his eyes, and for a moment it looked as though he was sinking into a doze, but then he bared his teeth in a grimace, letting out a long, ragged breath. “No,” he said, “I won’t, will I?” The eyes snapped open again, fixed me with a fierce glare. “I can’t die, Castor. I can’t. If I die, then they’ll . . .” He hesitated, his gaze flicking to Abbie and then back to me. “I can’t leave her alone.”