Vicious Circle

I had plenty of time, as we drove on at breakneck speed through the gathering dark, to figure it out. There’d never been any fire, of course. Just a lot of smoke grenades that the loup-garous had chucked out of the ambulance’s doors as they’d crashed through the large picture windows that fronted the A&E block. The chemical smell was a cocktail of formaldehyde, carbon monoxide, and maybe launch gases if they’d actually fired the fucking things from a mortar.

It figured, of course. The Anathemata wouldn’t do anything so indiscriminate as to set fire to a hospital—but the judicious application of panic was well within their remit. If anyone actually died in the resulting stampede, I’m sure Gwillam would fill in the appropriate form and a mass would be said. One thing you can’t fault about Catholics is their organizational skills.

But of course these were ex-Catholics: they’d been outlawed as an organization and excommunicated as individuals. What did that make them? The papacy’s equivalent of the Mission Impossible team, maybe. Fanatics, certainly; so convinced they were fighting the good fight that they’d ignored their own leaders’ orders to stop.

That made what I was doing here more dangerous, and more uncertain. Fanatics are unpredictable, zigging when you think they’re going to zag; they don’t connect to the world at the same angle as the rest of us do, and you have to bear that in mind when you try to reason with them. Better yet, cut your losses and don’t bother to try.

I’d only called Gwillam because I was out of other options, and because I didn’t know Basquiat well enough to trust her yet. Maybe she’d have enough sense to see the truth when it reared up and smacked her in the face, but maybe not. In any case, I wasn’t going to bet Pen’s life on it, or Abbie’s soul. Or my own arse, for that matter. A smart cop is still a cop, with all that that implies.

We slowed down, abruptly, then speeded up again. That process was repeated several times over the next few minutes: even with the siren, and the emergency lights presumably flashing to beat the band, we could only push so far against the press of London traffic. At one point, as we were crawling along in some jam we couldn’t shift with our borrowed moral authority, Zucker suddenly tensed and Po emitted a sound that was halfway between a snarled curse and a cat’s yowl. I knew what that meant, and it gave me a rough indicator of how far we’d come. It also left me a little awestruck at how much punishment the two loup-garous were prepared to take in the line of duty. We were crossing the river. They had to be in agony: running water is like an intravenous acid bath to the were-kin, and they took it in their stride.

Well, not quite in their stride: I noticed that Po’s claws were gouging into the plastic anti-slip slats on the floor, reducing them to ribboned ruin. His head was bowed, his breath coming in quick, barking grunts. Zucker was leaning against the gurney, his eyes clenched shut, a sheen of sweat on his pale face.

This would have been a good time to launch a daring escape, but the guy who’d introduced himself as Sallis was just as aware of that as I was. He jabbed the gun in between my shoulder blades and held it there until Zucker got his groove back. Like it or not, I was along for the whole ride.

A few moments later we dipped very sharply, with a harsh shudder as the suspension didn’t quite manage to take the strain, bumped over a series of badly fitted steel grids that shrieked under our wheels like a cageful of rats, and rolled to a halt. Zucker threw the doors open. He stepped down first, and the solid thud as his feet hit the ground outside had a strange echo to it. The darkness was impenetrable. Po gathered himself up and rolled out into the night with eerie, silent grace, then swiveled to stare back in at me. Sallis waved the gun, indicating that it was my turn next.

I climbed down from the back of the ambulance, and looked around. I still didn’t have enough night vision to see what kind of somewhere I was standing in, but again there was that echo, from somewhere close at hand. Every scrape of foot on concrete, every pop and twang from the ambulance’s engine, cooling rapidly in the night chill, had its attentive twin rushing out of the dark to join it.

A rectangle of grimy yellow light opened in front of us, and with its help I saw what I’d already guessed: we were inside, in a sepulchral space that was enormous in extent but as low-ceilinged as a church vault. White lines on the ground, parallel and evenly spaced, gave the game away still further; not a church, but an underground car park. “Get him inside,” said a cold voice, which was so dead and flat that it scarcely stirred the echoes at all. A hand—Sallis’s, presumably—gripped my shoulder from behind and I was pushed brusquely forward, Zucker and Po falling in on either side of me.