CHAPTER EIGHT

 

Tomas felt Anya watching him as Belle sewed his hand to his wrist with precise, neat little stitches. The end of the girl's tongue poked between her teeth as she worked, a tiny pink point like a pimple in the whiteness. They'd booked two sleeper carriages for the four of them, but were crammed into just one of them now, a musty, leather-smelling space that jammed Belle's elbow against Morgan's stomach as she stitched, while Tomas bent his head to sit on the lower bed and Anya perched cross-legged on the top bunk above them.

Every stitch hurt as it went in, joining a deeper ache that somehow spread from his arm out towards his fingers, the vanguard of the feeling that returned to them as Belle sewed. He'd sneaked into the morgue after Raphael escaped and did what he had to do to ensure his wounds healed. It troubled Tomas how easy he now found it to accept what he'd become. His lifeless body didn't feel like the inert weight it once had, vibrating with the rhythmic rattling of the train lines beneath them. He felt another note sounding inside him too, a buzzing tension which hadn't dissipated since they'd left Budapest three hours ago.

He would have liked to take a plane, fly straight back to London and ask all the questions that had been curdling in his mind since he'd first seen Nicholson's name on that book. But Anya had said no airport would let him through security looking the way he did, and she was right. Besides, Raphael was still out there. The airport was probably being watched. Instead, this train would take them overnight to Berlin, where Anya's colleagues in the BND had promised to share their files on Karamov and Raphael.

"You should be dead," Anya said suddenly. There was a flat, shell-shocked tone to her voice. "I knew. I mean, I'd been told. But to see it..."

"Join the club," Morgan said. They'd bandaged the flesh wound in his side, but he still looked unwell, a grey tinge to his brown skin.

If Morgan had been hoping to focus Anya's attention on Tomas, he'd made a tactical error. She turned to look at Morgan, eyes blazing. "You've got some explaining to do."

Morgan's full mouth turned down, and though his eyes remained blank Tomas could guess what was going on behind them. Thinking up excuses.

Before Morgan could try one of them, Tomas said, "You hoped Raphael would be able to translate the book for you."

After a moment, Morgan nodded.

Anya frowned. "Or, alternatively, Morgan was working for him all along."

"Don't be absurd!" Tomas snapped. "People don't generally leave their associates to freeze to death in locked morgues. Even Raphael wouldn't do that - or at least not while Morgan still had the book he wanted."

"I'd never even heard of Raphael before I read about him in your file," Morgan said. "And yeah, I wanted to know what the book said."

"Why did you care?" That was Belle, speaking with a slight lisp as she bit through the end of the thread.

Tomas pulled his sleeve down before Anya could see the way his flesh was already beginning to knit together around the tiny black stitches.

Morgan's fingers played around his mouth, as if he wanted to filter his words before they came out. "Because I don't know why the hell I was sent on this mission. And I don't know why..." He looked at Tomas, then away. "Either the world's gone crazy, or I have. This book is the only thing we've got that might have an explanation in it, and you wanted to just give it away."

"I want to know what Nicholson's book was doing in Karamov's hands, too," Tomas said. "And what it's got to do with the Ragnarok artefacts."

"How very democratic the Hermetic Division must be," Anya said. "All its agents questioning their orders all the time." The sun was setting outside the train window, a blood-red glow on the horizon that accentuated the scarlet of her hair and brought a blush of life to her pale cheeks. "You had a mission, and you fucked it up. Both of you. If you want to side with him, Tomas, that's fine, but don't expect me to carry on working with either of you."

"Please don't argue," Belle said. Her small face looked pinched and tired. "When you get angry I can feel him inside me, smiling and enjoying it. I think it makes him stronger. What's done is done - can't we leave it behind?"

"Leave behind the fact that Morgan nearly lost us the book? I don't think so. You need to give it to me, then we can all be sure it's safe." She reached an imperious hand to Morgan from her perch on the narrow bunk.

"I didn't give it to Raphael, did I? And I'm sure as hell not giving it to you."

Anya's reaching hand clenched into a fist. "How can we possibly trust you after what you did?"

"Don't trust me! I don't trust you. I don't trust anybody. Nobody's said a straight word to me since I started on this fucking mission!"

Anya frowned and cast a disapproving glance from Morgan to Belle. Morgan clamped his mouth shut, but his expression remained mulish.

Tomas sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Let Morgan keep it. We can talk about this tomorrow morning when we've all had some sleep."

 

There wasn't as much to do on a train as Morgan had imagined when he'd watched Murder on the Orient Express one Sunday afternoon and thought that travelling this way must be pretty glamorous. The other passengers seemed disappointingly ordinary, a succession of smartly dressed businessmen and one big, blond-haired family with a collection of children so similar they looked like a set of Russian dolls.

Whenever Morgan leaned against the wall to watch them pass, the rectangular lump of his father's book dug into his back. It made him feel itchy and uncomfortable when he remembered how Tomas had defended him earlier. He tried to convince himself that he hadn't actually lied to his partner, but he knew he hadn't told him the whole truth either.

Morgan's stomach gurgled, loud enough for a passing guard to stifle a smile, and he realised he was starving. When had he last eaten, anyway?

The dining car was in the centre of the train, sparkling with glass and polished silver, exactly the kind of place he'd imagined as a child. But they'd stopped serving long ago, and the attendants looked round when Morgan stepped in, faces hardening in disapproval at his blood-stained t-shirt and army boots. He took a moment to stare them down, then backed out and away.

In another carriage there was a small canteen and he bought himself a ham roll and, after a moment's thought, a cheese sandwich for Tomas. After that there wasn't much else to do but head back to the sleeper cabin they were sharing.

It was dark when he pushed open the door, with only the pale light of the moon to illuminate the outlines of the bed and the small washbasin tucked against one wall. There was the humped shape of a body on the bottom bunk, and Morgan assumed Tomas must have drifted off to sleep already. But when he switched on the overhead light, he found the other man's eyes looking straight at him.

Morgan jerked back, breath catching in his throat. "Shit!"

"I don't need to sleep any more," Tomas said. "Not since..."

"Right. I brought you a sandwich, if you want to eat."

Tomas smiled crookedly. "I don't do that either."

Morgan ate both sandwiches in silence, spreading crumbs over the rectangle of old red carpet. When he'd finished, he wiped his mouth clean with his sleeve, then splashed water on his face from the cold tap.

"What haven't you told us?" Tomas said when Morgan turned back to face him.

Morgan stared at him. "About what?"

"I don't know, Morgan - whatever it was you didn't want to say in front of Anya and Belle."

Morgan took a deep breath, then let it out again. "Raphael brought one of the corpses to life, while I was locked in the morgue. Used it to speak to me."

Tomas nodded calmly.

Morgan perched on the end of the bed, beside the messy outline of Tomas's feet. "So that's normal then, is it? That's just run of the mill. Nothing to get too excited about."

Tomas studied him a moment, and seemed to decide there was a genuine question buried in there. "In a way. There's only one real source of magic. We all end up using it in the end."

"Death, you mean?"

"Life. Everything, every molecule on Earth, used to be part of something living once. The secret is finding a way to remind it. That's the source of all magic, 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.'"

"You know quoting poetry doesn't make it any less of a heap of shit, right?"

Tomas laughed. "That's all I know. I was just an operative, Morgan. I used the tools they gave me and I found the things they wanted. I left the philosophy to people higher up the food chain."

"People like Nicholson?"

"Yes. Nicholson ran the Hermetic Division. I was his first recruit - his only recruit for two years." He smiled a little, looking for once like he was lost in a pleasant memory. "We'd travel the world together, chasing rumours - a werewolf in Greece, the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia. Most of them turned out to be nonsense, of course. The people at MI6 talked about shutting us down all the time, but we discovered just enough to keep them interested. And then Nicholson found out about the Ragnarok artefacts, and suddenly everything changed."

There was a long silence, Tomas staring blankly at the sagging mattress above him. Finally, he said, "They're supposed to be unspeakably powerful. Powerful enough to end the world. It was researching the artefacts that taught Nicholson how to conquer death, to bring someone back from the other side. And once the government knew about that, we got all the funding and all the agents we wanted." Tomas shrugged, as if it was no big deal.

"Raphael said he knew Nicholson," Morgan blurted, startled into confession by Tomas's honesty. "He said they used to be friends."

"Did he? Yes, I suppose that's possible. A contact gone bad - it would explain how he knew about the book."

But not, Morgan thought, how Raphael knew Nicholson was his father. For a second he thought about saying this to Tomas, then the other man carried on talking and the moment was lost.

"Nicholson trusted too much," Tomas said. "He wanted to believe anything was possible, and he listened to anyone who told him it was."

"But bringing people back to life - that is possible?"

"Oh yes," Tomas said bitterly, "that turned out to be a walk in the park."

Morgan looked at Tomas, and wondered how it felt to know you were dead. Was he glad they'd brought him back? He didn't seem it. "How did it happen?" he asked. "To you, I mean?"

"How did I die?"

Morgan nodded.

Tomas's expression twisted into outright pain. "I was buried alive."

"Jesus! That's... Fuck, that is not good."

"You don't have to feel sorry for me. It was my choice. It was part of the ritual to turn me into what I am. They put me in the ground while I was still breathing, and I let it happen. Of course, they were supposed to bring me back in three days, not twenty years."

"Giles told me I emit mortality," Morgan said, a non sequitur. Or maybe not.

"And do you?"

"Everyone around me dies, I know that."

"Your former partners," Tomas said, and at Morgan's frown, "They did tell me a little about you before they assigned us to work together."

"So do you think it's possible? Is it my fault they died?"

Tomas shook his head. "I don't know. There is such a thing as plain bad luck."

Morgan swallowed painfully. "But it wasn't just them. When I was twelve I got sent on a summer camp. Troubled kids, countryside, teach them the real meaning of life, some shit like that. It was me and Leon, my best mate, and late one night we were pissing around, climbing trees in the dark. We'd nicked some beer from the local offie, and we were fighting. You know, just having a laugh. I didn't mean to push him that hard, but one second he was sitting on the branch next to me. And then..."

Tomas's eyes glittered in the moonlight. "Were there other deaths?"

Morgan nodded, but his throat closed tight over the next words. He stood up, filled with a sudden restless energy that the small cabin left him no room to pace off. He peered in the mirror instead, at the dim shape of his reflection.

My sister, he wanted to say. And as if the unsaid words had summoned her, he saw a shape coalesce in the glass, her face floating above his right shoulder. If he turned around, he'd be looking right at her.

He was halfway through doing just that when the window burst inward in a shower of razor-sharp glass.

For a split second he thought it was an optical illusion, a fragment of the night that had fallen in with the shards of window. By the time it had resolved itself into a figure, swathed in black, it was already past him. And it was only as the door slammed behind it that Morgan registered the feeling of the figure's hand, light-fingered at the waistband of his trousers.

When Morgan fumbled there himself, he found nothing. The book was gone.