The Cold Kiss of Death

Chapter Thirty-One

‘Come on, Mum, time to get you sorted,’ Joseph said. He walked over to my limp body and picked it up, grunting with effort as he lifted it—being a necro obviously didn’t give him any perks in the physical world. He laid my body gently on the sacrificial altar and started cutting away the remnants of the orange dress. ‘You don’t want to be still in spirit form when the demon turns up, do you?’

‘Of course not,’ she said. She smiled up at him as she climbed up on the altar and sat herself down so she was half in and half out of my body. ‘Although the demon should be happy enough with the sidhe’s soul.’

‘Glad someone’s going to be happy,’ I muttered.

Joseph rummaged inside his black bag, laying things out on the trolley next to his machines. I briefly wondered if he’d had some sort of practise run, playing around with my soul and my body while I’d been out of it after the explosion at the bakery, when he’d supposedly been taking care of me. I shoved that deeply disturbing thought away. It was more important to figure out how to get my own body back before Cosette took up residence in it. Then I had to stop the demon gobbling up all the other ghosts, never mind the virgin sacrifice—because something told me that just because the sorcerer directing operations had changed, the treats on offer for the demon’s Hallowe’en visit hadn’t.

And now Malik’s and Tavish’s heroic rescue attempt had ended in disaster, Cosette probably intended adding them to her bag of demon treats too. I banged my head back against the stone altar in frustration and anger. With friends like Joseph, Malik really didn’t need any enemies.

‘So if I’m to be a demon snack,’ I raised my voice, waving at the unconscious bodies, ‘what’s going to happen to the two of them?’

‘Um.’ Cosette considered Tavish. ‘The soul-taster is a problem; he’s not dead, so I’m not sure the demon will take him, but we’ll see. But as for the vampire, he’s going to come in useful for Joseph here, much as Rosa was for you these last three years.’ She smiled up at him as he inserted a shunt into my body’s arm. I really wanted to wipe that saccharine look off her little girl’s face. Later, I promised myself.

‘Now I’ve perfected the Body Transference spell,’ she went on, ‘it seems wasteful not to use it again, doesn’t it, Son?’

‘Yes.’ He glanced over at me, then inserted a hypodermic needle into a clear glass vial and filled the syringe. ‘I understand it can be an interesting experience.’

So Joseph was going to walk around in Malik’s body, just as I had in Rosa’s. My heart lurched: I might have done the same thing myself, but it was unwittingly, and I’d never had Rosa do anything I wouldn’t have done myself. Somehow I didn’t think Joseph would take the same care of Malik’s body. Not that Rosa had taken that much care of her own body, if her memories were anything to go by. I looked up at her a little speculatively. Was there any way I could use her to get out of this? Cosette had said it wasn’t possible earlier, but she had her own agenda, and it wasn’t like sorcerers were known for telling the truth. I looked at my two captors, but they were deep in discussion about whatever evil nastiness they were planning now.

Slowly I got up, relieved that Joseph’s ‘sit down’ command must’ve negated his earlier ‘don’t move’ one. Holding my breath, trying not to catch his attention, I climbed onto the stone altar, wincing as my hands and knees sank inside Rosa’s body. I lay down, positioning myself so I merged inside her.

Nothing.

I stared up at the brick-arched ceiling, fists clenched like Rosa’s, willing it to work.

Still nothing happened. Damn. I’d really needed Cosette to be wrong on this one. Maybe if I concentrated, tried to think like Rosa, I could spark her into life. I closed my eyes and imagined Joseph tied up in chains. It was a great image; it fed my anger and frustration, but nothing else. Joseph was pleasant-looking—even if his intentions were anything but—but he wasn’t exactly eye-candy. Maybe what Rosa needed was for me to think of someone more—

‘Psst, I tole you, that don’t work, sidhe.’ The sharp whisper made me flinch. ‘All you gonna do is give ’er nightmares.’

My heart thudding with disbelief, and the tiniest touch of hope, I looked towards the voice.

Moth-girl’s white face grinned at me. ‘We’ve come t‘rescue you,’ she whispered happily. ‘Great, innit?’

I rolled out of Rosa’s body and off the slab and crouched down next to Moth-girl, hoping that Joseph couldn’t see ghosts through stone. ‘Who’s “we”?’

‘Me, Daryl, an’ that ovver vamp I stuck wiv the knife, oh, an’ yer doctor pal.’

Anxiety spiked through me. Crap, what the hell was Grace doing here?

‘I couldn’t find that ovver vamp you wanted me to tell, y’know, the Asian-lookin’ one,’ she went on.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘He turned up anyway. What about the police? Did you tell them?’

‘Oh yeah, them’s coming too,’ she sniffed, adding, ‘well, maybe.’ The grey patchwork of her clothes fluttered with disdain. ‘That bitch-witch in charge weren’t too impressed wiv my story; ’er and yer doctor pal had a right set-to ’bout it all. So the coppers ain’t ’ere yet.’

Damn—did that mean the police would get here before the demon or not? Detective Inspector Helen Crane had to know that midnight was demon dinner time, didn’t she? Of course she did, the cynic in me agreed, but wouldn’t a delay suit her if it meant I wasn’t around to cause her any more problems?

‘Hey, don’t look like tha’,’ Moth-girl’s eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘We don’t need no bleedin’ coppers, not when we got ghosts and shades. ‘Ere, ’ave a butcher’s.’ She peeked over the top of the slab, then rose up and rested her chin on her hands, grinning.

I joined her. Scarface shuffled silently in through the doorway. A woman carrying a bunch of withered flowers ambled behind him, then another man limped in; his head wrapped in a dirty bandage. The reek of putrefying flesh filled the air, but this time it was almost welcome. Then there were more ghosts, men and women, all moving silently: a boy with a flat cap leading a small tan and white dog on a string; two dark-haired little girls, about six years old, clutching each others’ hands and skipping in their charred frilly dresses; a soldier, his khaki-coloured uniform ripped and bloodstained, using his rifle as a crutch ... they kept coming.

I watched, bemused. ‘Where did they all come from?’

‘’Mazin’, innit?’ she whispered gleefully. ‘Yer doctor pal just picked up th’Easter egg fing an’ opened it, an’ whoosh, out they all come. I told ’em to come in ’ere an’ disrup’ fings.’

I spotted the ghost knife lying at the side of Rosa’s stone altar; if I could reach Cosette before Joseph noticed—

‘C’mon, then.’ I snatched up the knife and rushed round the altar. ‘Let’s see how much disruption we—’

‘Stop.’ Joseph’s voice reverberated through me, pinning me in place. ‘Turn around and go back to the other tunnel.’ I watched hopelessly as the ghosts turned as one and started shambling away.

Joseph’s brown eyes were blinking fast above his face-mask. He held up the hypodermic in one hand and pushed back his glasses with the back of his wrist as he watched them leave. I stared at Moth-girl’s retreating back. I wanted to tell her it was a good try, that no way could she have known Joseph was a necro, or how powerful he was, but I couldn’t move. Joseph’s command to go back to the other tunnel evidently hadn’t applied to me.

He looked over at me, frowning. ‘I don’t know how you did that, Genny, but—’ He stopped and looked around. ‘Someone else is here, aren’t they?’

I stared up at him from my frozen, half-bent stance, fingers inches away from the knife. He’d asked me a question. I discovered I didn’t have to answer.

‘Tell me,’ he commanded.

‘Friends,’ my mouth blurted.

‘The police? Tell me.’

‘No.’

‘Who then—?’

A dark blur dropped from the roof as if gliding on black-leather wings and landed on the sacrificial altar, crouching in front of him. Joseph jumped, a startled, high-pitched cry issuing from his mouth. He stabbed at the black blur with his needle, embedding it in the blur’s chest. The blur shook itself, snarled and leapt at Joseph, ploughing them both into the machines—which crashed in a crescendo of noise, sparks showering upwards in bright tracer-like arcs. Amidst the chaos, the blur hunched over Joseph and buried its head in his throat and a short, pain-filled scream resounded through the tunnel. Then the scream cut off as a fountain of blood cascaded over the hunched figure, leaving only an echo in its wake.

Had the demon come early?

I launched myself towards the blur, knife still in my hand then stopped to stare down at a blood-drenched but vaguely familiar tawny head of hair. The owner was now gnawing its way through Joseph’s throat. The sounds of tearing flesh and muscle and the quick snap of bone and the metallic scent of blood made my stomach roil, and brought the snakes hissing and slithering in agitation over my skin.

‘My Daryl got ’im!’ Moth-girl fluttered to my side, punched her arm in the air and whooped, ‘My Daryl got that fucker ghost-grabber!’

Darius the lap-dancing vampire lifted his head and gave her a gore-covered grin. ‘Your plan worked great, didn’t it, Shaz?’ he said, pushing himself up on all fours and rising to his feet in an oddly inhuman move.

He unzipped his black leather coat and slipped out of it; underneath he wore just his sequinned Calvin Kleins—not even any boots. Didn’t he have any other clothes? He shook the coat, and blood and other heavier bits splattered to the concrete floor, then he shrugged it back on, zipped it back up and licked his lips. ‘Real great,’ he grinned again.

I looked down.

Joseph was lying there, his glasses askew on his mangled head, the white of his spine glistening in the bright red abstract of his neck, his legs at an odd angle. I was still puzzled by Joseph. He’d seemed ... well, nice, and strangely naïve when I’d first met him. But evil doesn’t always show its face as ugliness, or fangs, or strangeness. That would be much too easy.

And yeah, Moth-girl’s plan had worked real great! It might not have been pretty, but Joseph was gone, and I couldn’t feel anything other than satisfaction.

But now there was the rest of it to finish.

I looked over at my body, still lying on the sacrificial altar, wondering why Cosette hadn’t put in an appearance. Then I saw the reason for her absence: sticking out of my body’s chest was the handle of the soul-bonder knife, the oval amber of the dragon’s tear winking in the candlelight. Darius must’ve have attacked Joseph mid-ritual, so Cosette was trapped—

‘Genny,’ an anxious voice called from behind me, ‘is that you?’

I clutched anxiously at the ghost knife as I turned. Grace peered at me as she hurried through the archway, her pink-check jacket flapping over her blue doctor’s scrubs, her frizz of black curls flattened and tangled with cobwebs on one side, dust streaking the dark skin of her left cheek like a half-finished war stripe. She carried the open Fabergé egg in one hand and led the tearful florist’s lad with her other, her backpack slung over her shoulder. Heartfelt relief flooded into me. They were both still alive.

Bobby stalked behind Grace like some sort of übergoth warrior in his all-black Mr October outfit, his hair neatly pulled back in his trademark French plait. He carried Moth-girl’s body in his arms. ‘Hey, Sharon,’ he called, ‘are you getting back in here, or do you want me to keep carrying you around?’

Grace dropped the lad’s hand and rushed up to me—the ghost me—and flung her arm round me in a tight hug. ‘Thank the Goddess you’re okay, Genny. I’ve been so worried about you.’ The snakes flared, then settled, but she didn’t appear to notice them. She also appeared to find me very solid, and that meant it was close to midnight, when the dead could converse—and more, if they wanted—with the living.

I hugged her back just as hard, keeping the ghost knife safely pressed to my thigh, breathing in her comforting floral perfume with its faint underlay of antiseptic. ‘Thanks for coming to the rescue, Grace,’ I murmured, totally inadequately, ‘and I’m fine now—but what on earth happened to you?’

She trembled slightly, then sniffed and gave a nervous laugh. ‘That Souler chap, Neil, jumped out at me when I went to help the lad here. Stupid really, I should’ve checked for someone guarding him first.’ She gave another hiccoughing laugh and hitched up her backpack. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for this action-rescue business. Although I did bring spells.’ She pulled away and looked back at Bobby, a slightly scared expression on her face. ‘But Bobby took care of him.’

Bobby had laid Moth-girl’s body down on a clear patch of floor and was now staring at Rosa where she lay on her stone slab.

‘Took care of him, how?’ I asked, frowning.

‘Oh, he didn’t bite him.’ Grace blinked, her pupils nearly eclipsing the dark brown of her irises. ‘He just threw him against the wall.’ She did that hiccoughing laugh-thing again and I realised she was suffering from mild shock ... but then, treating victims in a nice bright clinic like HOPE, even the violent ones, took a different type of courage to venturing underground with a couple of vamps and a sometimes ghost girl. ‘He’s dead—broken neck. I checked,’ Grace added with another blink.

Good riddance, he’d certainly got what was coming to him. But Grace didn’t need to hear that right now. I hugged her again and murmured, ‘Hey, it’s okay, you’re doing brilliantly, and the lad’s safe now, thanks to you.’ I looked at the boy in question, who was standing there shivering, hunched over—

Then a thought hit me like a sucker-punch to my stomach.

Grace had broken the circle to get the florist’s boy and the Fabergé egg out.

And that meant there would be no magic to contain the demon when it turned up. And without even the tenuous boundaries of a graveyard to hold it, it would be free to roam anywhere! And it would be free to take anyone—not just the dead!

I had to get everyone out.

And I had to get the circle closed again.

‘You need to get out of here, Grace,’ I cried, letting her go, ‘and take the lad with you. MOVE! Now!’

A rumble shivered the ground.

Grace froze, her eyes wide with shock and fright.

I pushed urgently at her, yelling, ‘You need to get out, all of you, get out now—!’

The rumble came again; this time dust and bits of brick fell from the ceiling and muted explosions like a hundred-gun salute reverberated through the tunnel.

‘What the bleedin’ ’ell is that?’ Moth-girl squealed.

‘Fireworks,’ Bobby shouted, looking warily up at the arched roof. ‘The trolls are having one of their Hallowe’en parties up on London Bridge.’

‘Run,’ I shouted again. ‘It’s midnight.’