Vicious Circle

Fanke was watching me closely, and he saw the moment when I stood down from the fight-or-flight precipice. “Inside,” he said again. The man behind me tapped the base of my neck with his gun barrel, and I obediently followed the man he’d called Wilkes back into the Oriflamme. I’d half-hoped that Peace might have caught something of the commotion outside and scraped together some kind of an ambush. No such luck. His head snapped around as he registered the multiple sets of footsteps. As Wilkes stepped to one side of me and the goon with the gun stepped to the other to get a clear line of sight, Peace’s gaze darted to one, then the other, then back to me. By some reflex he couldn’t control, his hand shot up to grasp hold of Abbie’s—and went right through her insubstantial form. Abbie didn’t even notice. She was staring in wordless, silent terror at the strange faces. Or maybe not so strange to her: she might be recognizing them from five nights before. She might remember Fanke as the man who’d put a knife into her heart.

“You bastard, Castor,” Peace said, his voice a dead whisper. His second thoughts were better. He reached down and scattered the deck of cards across the floor. Abbie flickered and then disappeared, her mouth open to call out to him.

“Don’t make this worse than it has to be,” I said, and before anyone could stop me I stepped forward.

My eyes hadn’t had any more time to readjust to the deeper darkness inside the Oriflamme than theirs had, but I knew roughly where Peace’s Glock was. I didn’t even have to break step: just flick my foot out a little to the left as if I were intercepting a pass inside the penalty box, and touch the toe of my shoe to the trigger guard.

I flicked the gun end-over-end through the air, and my aim was good: wasted afternoons in the old gym at Alsop’s Comprehensive School for Boys, kicking and heading a ball endlessly against the wall, brought belated and unexpected dividends.

Peace reached up, took the Glock out of the air and fired without seeming to aim. The thunder roared directly in my ear, and a body slammed against a wall just to my right. As it slid to the floor the thunder sounded again, deafening in this shell of a room with no soft surfaces to catch and filter the sound. On my left, Fanke jerked as if stung, then brought his own gun up to return fire. I knocked it out of his hands with a scything, two-fisted swipe.

Then just as things seemed to be going great, something hard and heavy and sickeningly solid slammed into the side of my head and my feet went out from under me.

I tried to get up, only to catch a second glancing blow on the back of my neck that took what was left of the fight out of me. More exchanges of thunder, and a shrill, prolonged scream that didn’t go in through my deadened ears but took a more direct route to my brain, or maybe to my soul if exorcists have one of those.

It sounded like “Daddy.” The word that Abbie had tried to say as she faded out. The world of the dead has very peculiar acoustics.

* * *

I raged against the dying of the light: flailed in the dark looking for purchase, something for my fuddled wits to cling to.

I came up slowly. Came together, rather, because it felt like my mind was creeping timidly in from front, back, and sides to coalesce as best it could in my skull, which had obviously been dented right out of shape.

I tried to stand up and was hauled up onto my knees without ceremony, even before my eyes had kicked in properly. Blearily I saw a woman’s face cross my field of vision, flick a contemptuous glance down at me, keep on going.

A moment later, as I rediscovered the miracle of depth perception, I saw Gary Coldwood heave into view. I opened my mouth to speak, closed it again with a grunt as my forehead and spine lit up with seven shades of agony. I sagged, but was held.

“There’s”—I tried again, waving a vague, ineffectual hand toward where Peace ought to be—“injured—needs a doctor.”

“You worried about the other guy, Fix?” Coldwood sounded tired and disgusted. A constable appeared beside him with a pair of handcuffs dangling in his hand, which Coldwood took with a nod. “You don’t have to be. Looks like you won. The other guy’s dead.”

Eighteen

THEY TOOK ME TO THE WHITTINGTON HOSPITAL ON HIGHgate Hill, where I could look out of the window and see the sun setting over Karl Marx’s tomb if I wanted to depress myself even more. There’s a secure wing there that the Met use for terrorists they shoot up in the course of arrest: bars on the windows, plods on the door, and all the lumpy custard you can eat.