The Key

64

Newark, New Jersey

Liv woke gently from sleep.

Outside she could hear the low-level hiss and rumble of traffic on the street. Light filtered softly through the curtains showing it was still day, although she had no idea what time it was. She might have been asleep for a few minutes, a few hours or even a few days. She blinked and peered around the plain hotel room. Her laptop was where she’d left it, folded down and switched off; her jacket was draped over the back of the chair; the Gideon Bible lay open on the bed where it had slipped from her hand — nothing was out of place, yet something was different. It took her a long few moments to realize what it was. For the first time in weeks she hadn’t had the nightmare. She had woken up, gently and unterrified, like any normal person. There was no whispering in her ears, no vision of T-shaped crosses or things terrible and unseen moving in the darkness.

All was quiet.

All was calm.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, feeling the tension in her shoulders melt away. She felt relaxed — at peace.

Then a loud knock split the silence like a gunshot.

Liv sat bolt upright in bed and stared at the door, running through the short list of people who knew she was here: Gabriel; Ski; Dr Anata. No one else.

The chances were it was Ski, checking up on her, but she was reluctant to call out and confirm her presence in the room until she knew who was there.

Another knock made her jump, loud and emphatic, still no identifying voice. Even room service would have announced themselves by now.

She slipped quietly from the bed, wrapping the discarded bathrobe round her as she ran through her options. There was nowhere to hide in the tiny room, nothing she could see that could be used as a weapon. Her room was a trap — one way in, one way out.

Slipping round the edge of the bed and keeping as far away from the door as possible, she scooped up Ski’s cell phone from the desk and quickly copied the number of the main switchboard from the hotel stationery into it. If whoever was out there tried to get into her room she would lock herself in the bathroom and call for security, scream rape — anything to get them running. She started moving, then a voice called out that stopped her dead.

‘Liv?’

‘Gabriel?’ She had spoken his name without thinking and, in the silence that followed, instantly regretted it.

Whoever was out there had only said one word and it had been muffled by the thick hotel door. Was it Gabriel? It couldn’t be, she had not long spoken to him in Ruin, half a day’s journey away. Unless

… maybe she’d slept longer than she’d thought; she’d certainly been tired enough.

‘Liv?’

The voice again — so like him.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said, realizing there was no point in further caution. ‘How come you got here so fast?’

‘I came on the first flight. You must have been sleeping all day.’

It was him. Liv felt a flush of heat on her skin and lunged for the door, opening it without a second thought.

Another blast of heat hit her from the corridor, hotter even than the air in her room.

Gabriel was standing a little way back from the door, his arms by his sides, looking slightly awkward. He was exactly as she remembered, his white skin made whiter by his black clothes and hair, the cold blueness of his eyes the only point of colour in the windowless corridor. She looked into his face and smiled — but he did not return it. A single tear ran down his cheek, as though the blue ice of his eye was melting in the heat.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

Then the whole corridor erupted in flame.

Liv was knocked backwards by the blast. She landed on the bed and covered her face with her arms. Through the roar of the flames the whispering filled her head like a warning. When she tried to look at the place where Gabriel had been, the heat and the brightness forced her eyes shut. She stood up and tried to get closer to the door, covering her face with the sleeve of her bathrobe, hoping that Gabriel might somehow have survived the furnace.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the fire vanished, and instead of a hotel corridor a desert landscape was now framed by the open door. It was flat and featureless and made up of night-time shadows and the soft glow of moonlight. Liv drifted towards it, drawn by its strangeness.

She reached the door and saw it — the beast — the source of the inferno. It squatted on the sand; a huge lizard thing made of spines and plate and fire. Its red eyes were staring straight at her, while its spear-like tail quivered and curled towards the night sky where a full moon shone.

The beast took a breath, sucking in the flame and smoke that circled its mouth, closing its red eyes as it savoured her scent. Then something flew through the night, striking her in the middle of the chest and skewering both flesh and spirit. She tried to scream but no sound came out. She could feel her blood coursing down her skin like a memory of her time in the Citadel. It felt almost cool against the heat of the desert night. Then the thing lifted her up, raising her towards its mouth on the spike of its tail. She could smell death on its breath and saw a mark on its neck — a cross in the shape of an inverted T. Then it let out a shriek so shrill that it ripped through her head, and fire poured from its mouth to consume her.