Girl of Nightmares

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Thomas does okay on the flight to Toronto, but spends the first hour and a half of the London flight clutching the business end of a barf bag. He doesn’t actually throw up, but he’s definitely green. A couple of ginger ales later, though, he’s settled in, comfortable enough to try reading the Joe Hill hardback he’s brought with him.

“The words won’t hold still,” he mutters after a minute, and closes the book. He looks out the window (I let him have the window seat) at bleak darkness.

“We should try to get some sleep anyway,” I say, “so we won’t be dogging it when we land.”

“But it’ll be ten PM there. Shouldn’t we try to stay up so we can fall asleep?”

“No. Who knows how long it’ll be before we have a chance. Rest up while you can.”

“That’s the problem,” he grumbles, and punches the inadequate in-flight pillow. Poor kid. He has to have a million things on his mind, the least of which is a fear of flying. I haven’t worked up the nerve to ask whether he’s talked to Carmel, and he hasn’t mentioned it. And he hasn’t asked me much about what we’re doing going to London, which is very un-Thomas-like. It might be that this trip is a convenient escape. But he’s fully aware of the danger. The lingering handshake he exchanged with Morfran at the airport spoke volumes.

He rolls over as far as he can in the cramped coach seat. Thomas is polite to a fault, and hasn’t reclined his chair back. His neck is going to feel like a trampled pretzel when he wakes up, if he manages to sleep at all. I close my eyes and do my best to get comfortable. It’s close to impossible. I can’t stop thinking about the athame, buried inside my luggage in the belly of the plane, or at least it goddamn better be. I can’t stop thinking about Anna, and the sound of her voice, asking me to get her out. We’re traveling at over 500 miles per hour, but it’s nowhere near fast enough.

By the time we touch down at Heathrow, I’ve officially entered zombie mode. Sleep was fleeting: a half hour here, fifteen minutes there, and all of it with a kink in my neck. Thomas didn’t fare much better. Our eyes are red and scratchy and the air on the plane was so dry that we’re about ready to flake off and fall into a pair of Thomas- and Cas-colored piles of sand. Everything is surreal, the colors too bright and the floor not quite solid beneath my feet. The terminal is quiet at ten thirty at night, and that at least makes things easier. We don’t have to swim through a torrent of people.

Still, our brains are slow, and after collecting our luggage (which was a nerve-racking chore—waiting around the carousel on the balls of my feet, paranoid that the athame didn’t make it onto the connecting flight from Toronto, or that someone else would grab it before I did), we find ourselves milling around, unsure of where to go next.

“I thought you’d been here before,” Thomas says crankily.

“Yeah, when I was four,” I reply, equally crankily.

“We should just take a cab. You’ve got his address, right?”

I look around the terminal, reading the overhead signs. I’d been planning on getting travel cards and taking the Tube. Now it just seems complicated. But I don’t want to start this trip with compromise, so I haul my suitcase through the terminal, following the arrows toward the trains.

“Wasn’t so hard, was it?” I ask Thomas a half hour later, as we sit, exhausted, on the bench seat of the Tube train. He gives me an eyebrow, and I smile. After one more only mildly disconcerting line change, we get off at Highbury and Islington station and drag ourselves up to ground level.

“Anything familiar yet?” Thomas asks, peering down the street, lights illuminating the sidewalk and the shop fronts. It looks vaguely familiar, but I suspect that all of London would look vaguely familiar. I breathe in. The air is clear and cool. A second breath brings in a whiff of garbage. That seems familiar too, but probably only because it isn’t any different from other large, urban cities.

“Relax, man,” I say. “We’ll get there.” I flip my suitcase onto its side and unzip it. The minute the athame is tucked into my back pocket, my blood pumps easier. It’s like a second wind, but I’d better not dawdle; Thomas looks tired enough to kill me, hollow me out, and use me for a hammock. Luckily, I Google-mapped Gideon’s address from this station, and his house isn’t more than a mile away.

“Come on,” I say, and he groans. We walk quickly, our suitcases wobbling on the uneven pavement, passing by Indian-owned diners with neon signs and pubs with wooden doors. Four blocks down, I head right on my best guess. The roads aren’t labeled well, or maybe they are and I just can’t make them out in the dark. On the side streets, the lamps are dimmer, and the area we’re in looks nothing like Gideon’s neighborhood. Chain-link fences border us on one side, and there’s a high brick wall on the other. Beer cans and garbage litter the gutter, and everything seems damp. But maybe this is the way things always were, and I was too young to remember. Or maybe this is just how things have become since then.

“Okay, stop,” Thomas breathes. He pulls up and leans on his suitcase.

“What?”

“You’re lost.”

“I’m not lost.”

“Don’t bullshit me.” He taps his index finger to his temple. “You’re going round and round, in here.”

His smug face sets me off, and I think very loudly, This mind-reading shit is fucking annoying, and he grins.

“Be that as it may, you’re still lost.”

“I’m turned around, that’s all,” I say. But he’s right. We’ll have to find a phone, or get directions in a pub. The last pub that we passed was inviting; the doors were propped open and yellow light streamed onto our faces. Inside, people were laughing. I glance back the way we came and see one of the shadows move on its own.

“What is it?” Thomas asks.

“Nothing,” I reply, blinking. “Just tired eyes.” But my feet won’t carry me back in that direction. “Let’s keep going.”

“Okay,” Thomas says, and glances over his shoulder.

We walk on in silence and my ears are tuned behind us, editing out the grumble of our suitcase wheels. There’s nothing back there. It’s the exhaustion, playing tricks with my vision, and my nerves. Only I don’t believe that. The sound of my footsteps seems heavy and too loud, like something is using the noise to hide in. Thomas has quickened his pace to walk by my side rather than behind. His radar has been tripped too, but he might just be getting it from me. We couldn’t be in a worse place than this deserted, dark side street, lined with alleys cut between buildings and black spaces between parked cars. I wish we hadn’t stopped talking, that something would break the eerie silence that amplifies every noise. The silence is getting the better of us. There’s nothing following. There’s nothing back there.

Thomas is walking faster. The panic pulse is setting in, and given the option of fight or flight I know which way he’s leaning. But fly to where? We have no idea where we’re going. How far would we get? And how much of this is the product of a lack of sleep and an overactive imagination?

Ten feet ahead, the sidewalk disappears into a long shadow. We’ll be in the dark for at least twenty yards. I stop and glance behind me, scanning the spaces beneath parked cars and watching for movement. There isn’t any.

“You’re not wrong,” Thomas whispers. “Something’s back there. I think it’s been following us since we left the station.”

“Maybe it’s just a pickpocket,” I mutter. My whole body tenses like a coil at the sound of movement ahead of us, in the shadow. Thomas pushes into me, hearing it too. It got ahead of us somehow. Or maybe there’s more than one. I pull the athame out of my back pocket, out of its sheath, and let the streetlight shine on the blade. It’s sort of silly, but maybe it’ll scare them off. Exhausted as I am, I don’t have the energy to deal with more than one alley cat, let alone anything else.

“What do we do?” Thomas asks. Why’s he asking me? All I know is we can’t stay under the streetlight until sunrise. No choice but to go ahead, into the shadow.

When I’m shoved onto one knee I think it’s Thomas at first, until he shouts, “Watch out!” about three seconds too late. My knuckles skid against the concrete and I push myself back up. Tired eyes blink in the dark as I slide the athame back into my pocket. Whatever it was that hit me wasn’t dead, and the knife can’t be used on the living. A round object flies my way; I duck and it clatters off the building behind me.

“What is it?” Thomas asks, and then he’s knocked back, or I think he is. The street is so dark and the quarters are close. Thomas is thrown out into the lamplight, where he bounces off a parked car by the curb and reels back to hit the bricks of the wall like he’s in a pinball machine. A figure spins into my adjusting vision and plants a foot solidly against my chest. My ass hits the pavement. He strikes again and I get my arm up to defend, but all I manage is a rough shove. It’s disorienting, the way he’s moving; in fast and slow spurts. It throws off my equilibrium.

Snap out of it. It’s exhaustion; it’s not a drug. Focus and recover. When he strikes again, I duck and block, and land a shot to his head that sends him spinning.

“Get out of here,” I shout, and barely avoid a clumsy attempt at a leg sweep. For a second I think he’ll just bug out and run. Instead he stands straight and grows a foot taller. Words hit my ears, spoken in what I think is Gaelic, and the air around me presses in tight.

It’s a curse. To do what, I don’t know, but pressure builds in my ears ten times worse than on the plane.

“Thomas, what is he doing?” I shout. It’s a mistake. I shouldn’t have let the air go. My lungs are too tight to take any more in. The chant takes over everything. My eyes are burning. I can’t breathe. I can’t exhale, or inhale. Everything’s frozen. The sidewalk is pressing against my knees. I’ve fallen.

My mind screams out for Thomas, for help, but I can already hear him, whispering a chant to counteract the other. The attacker’s is all lyric and glottal stop; Thomas’s is deep and full of melody. Thomas grows gradually louder, his voice pushing over the top of the other voice until the other voice falters and gasps. My lungs let loose. The sudden rush of air to my throat and blood to my brain makes me shake.

Thomas doesn’t quit, even though the figure that attacked us is doubled over. An arm waves a feeble defense, and the sound of air being dragged into his lungs is sharp and thin.

“Stop!”

I put my hand out and Thomas pauses his chant. It wasn’t me who spoke.

“Stop, stop!” The figure cries, and waves for us to get away. “You win, right? You win.”

“Win what?” I bark. “What were you trying to do?”

The figure backs away slowly, down the sidewalk. In between the gasps for breath is what sounds like shreds of laughter. The figure backs into the streetlight, clutching his chest, and pulls down the hood of his sweatshirt.

“It’s a girl,” Thomas blurts, and I sort of elbow him. But he’s right. It’s a girl, standing in front of us in a plaid cap and looking innocent enough. She’s even smiling.

“This is the wrong street,” she says. Her accent sounds like Gideon’s, but looser and less precise. “If you’re looking for Gideon Palmer, you’d better follow me.”