“My mother died in childbirth. My father remarried, but he died a few years later.”
“Is that why you ran away, your stepmother? You are a runaway, aren’t you?”
“Living with my stepmother was impossible.”
Will felt guilty for suggesting his stepmother had been cruel, even seven centuries after her death, because she’d been a kind and generous lady—his mother’s cousin, she’d kept alive in his mind the memory of the mother he’d never known. He had no doubt, too, that she would have mourned his death no less than if it had been her own child.
“I can believe it. Everyone I know whose parents divorced ended up with terrible stepmothers. Even Uncle Matt’s girlfriends are always awful. Men just seem to get it wrong every time.”
Eloise turned to see if he agreed with her, and he looked at her and smiled. “I hope I won’t be like that.”
“I’m sure you won’t,” she said confidently, facing forwards again. “You could have gone to boarding school— that would’ve got her out of your hair most of the time. Where did you go to school anyway?”
Will was actually enjoying creating this imaginary life for himself, the life of a twenty-first century teenager, albeit one with a slightly unusual background and an unspoken aristocratic lineage.
“Nowhere you would have heard of, but boarding would have been out of the question. She’d removed me from the school within six months of my father dying, because of the fees. So I came here. I knew my grandparents had lived here and I thought I might still have relatives locally, but I haven’t found anyone.”
“But you obviously have somewhere to stay.” He looked puzzled by her degree of certainty and she explained, saying, “Well, I’m guessing you have possessions so you must keep them somewhere, and you look pretty well-groomed, so …”
“Oh, I see. Yes, I’m in a squat over near the North Gate.”
She didn’t respond at first and he feared that squat was a word people no longer used, but after a lengthy pause, she said, “You must be better at this than I am. I wouldn’t even know how to go about finding a squat. As it is, if the weather turns much colder I’ll have to go back whether I want to or not.”
He wanted to be able to say that he’d help her, that she could come back and stay in his imaginary squat with him and his fellow runaways and travelers. He couldn’t say that of course, but he couldn’t help thinking she’d feel snubbed by his silence.
“Where would you go?”
“Home, I suppose, to begin with. I don’t even know if the school would take me back—I haven’t given it much thought.”
Suddenly, he saw a way out and said, “I’d have to discuss it with the other people in the squat first, but if they were okay about it, you could come and stay there.”
Eloise stopped walking and looked at him, mortified as she said, “Will, I wasn’t asking to stay at your place. Honestly. God, that must have sounded awful, and really, I’d never put someone in a position like that.”
“If it was my place alone, you wouldn’t need to—I would have offered you shelter the moment I saw you in that doorway.”
She continued to look at him, a quizzical smile spreading across her face. Finally, she said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like you. You’re like some old-fashioned knight.”
“Thank you, though it’s a while since I killed a dragon.”
She laughed and said, “The night isn’t over yet.”
Will’s instinct would have been to cut in among the old warehouses, but Eloise kept to the main road until they reached the bridge, then turned left. He supposed it was the sensible thing for her to do, to keep away from the dark and deserted corners, the exact same places in which he felt safest.
As they walked past the warehouse, which had been converted, they both looked in at the rooms that were still lit, though there was less activity visible now, just people watching television, one person walking around with a telephone.
They were alongside the second warehouse, the one clad in scaffolding, when the hairs bristled on the back of Will’s neck. He stopped walking and stared into the darkness of the footpath ahead of them. Eloise had been talking, but she also stopped after a couple of paces and looked back at him.
“What is it?”
He raised a finger to his lips. She smiled at first, but his expression convinced her that he was being serious and she came back and stood beside him. Something was wrong with the air down here.
Whispering this time, Eloise said, “What is it? You don’t think those boys have come back?”
Will didn’t know what to do. If it was what he thought, the demon presence that had attacked him in the church, he should probably leave Eloise to walk the last stretch on her own—she’d be safer away from him, safer, too, in that she wouldn’t see something she wasn’t meant to see.
But he couldn’t be sure that the demon would leave her alone if they parted. And even if he could, what would she think of him, scaring her like this and then leaving her on her own? There was nothing for it but to walk on.
Cautiously, he started to move again and his nerves settled a little. She stayed close but, still whispering, she said, “Slightly freaking me out now, Will.”
“It’s probably nothing,” he said. But he’d never known an atmosphere this strange, and now that he thought about it, the air had been unstable from the moment he’d killed Jex, and maybe before that. There was something ill at ease across the entire city, as if it had been cut loose from its moorings and was now adrift in the night.
And suddenly he was even more disturbed by the realization that he had once known an atmosphere this strange, in the weeks before the witches had burned and his sickness struck. Could it be that the same evil had returned to the city? If so, he wasn’t sure that he was ready for it.
He’d wanted to meet the person who’d done this to him for so long, and had still until a few hours ago, but now he was with the girl, the prospect set his nerves on edge. She was important to him in some way and he wanted the time and space to find out why, and to know that he wasn’t leading her into danger.
They reached the gap between the scaffold-clad building and the next. Will stopped again and looked up the dark lane between the two buildings, staring in the general direction of the warehouse that had burned. There was nothing at first, but then he sensed some movement in the distant shadows.
It appeared almost as if something was moving towards them, close to the wall, low to the ground, but he couldn’t actually see anything. It wasn’t an animal or anything solid, more like a disturbance in the air, as if the darkness was becoming liquid around some rapidly moving object.
His body tensed up violently as the realization hit home. He grabbed Eloise by the arm and shouted, “Quick!” He ran back ten paces, dragging her with him, and shouted, “Stay behind me!”
She was panicked and shouted, “Will, you’re scaring me!”
He ignored her and looked around for something to defend himself with, and more importantly, something to defend her. He was still looking when he heard a growl and turned to see a black dog had emerged from the gap and was standing on the path in front of them.
It wasn’t the dog he’d seen briefly in the church, but the other one he’d noticed sleeping by the stove, not as wiry, a shaggier coat. It didn’t advance at first, but stood snarling at them, its eyes fixed on Will.
“It’s just a dog,” said Eloise nervously. “We just need to back away slowly.”
Will kept staring, but from the corner of his eye spotted an orange-and-white traffic cone under the scaffolding—unfortunately there didn’t seem to be anything else at hand that he could use.
“Oh my God,” said Eloise, with a mixture of confusion and concern for the animal. “I think it’s on fire.”
Sure enough, smoke had started to rise up from the dog’s matted fur as if it had been caught in a fire and was still smoldering. At the same time, its shape seemed to be becoming unstable, then all at once, it sprang forwards and simultaneously burst into flames.
Eloise screamed, and maybe said something, too, though he couldn’t make out her words. The dog didn’t seem in any way slowed down or harmed by the flames, but if the plan had been to strike terror into Will, this demon had found his weakness. Fire.
He jumped urgently towards the traffic cone, picked it up with one hand, and started to turn back. He was so overcome with fear of the flames that he felt as if he was moving through molten lead, that he was too slow, that the dog would be upon him before he was able to do anything.
Even if he’d imagined his slowness, the dog had moved with terrifying speed and as he turned to face it, the animal was only meters away. It leapt towards Will and he threw the traffic cone as hard as he could. It thumped into the dog, which had managed to get close enough for him to feel the heat of the fire that engulfed it.
The dog flew backwards, maybe six meters, the fireball briefly extinguishing itself as the animal landed with a flailing crunch on the footpath. It skidded on a bit further and its shape shifted violently as it tumbled, looking for a second or two like a human form before it solidified once more into a dog.
No sooner had it regained its shape than it started running back towards him, the flames sweeping around it, then a ball of flame, hurtling along the path towards him. Without even thinking, Will reached up and tore the nearest vertical scaffolding pole from its brackets, the metal bolts shearing and flying away.
He turned, simultaneously raising the pole over his head with both hands, holding it like a lance. And this time, as the burning dog leapt towards him, he struck hard, stabbing the scaffolding pole into the heart of the flames, pinning the creature to the floor.
It writhed viciously around the pole, the fire still licking out menacingly, but Will could see it disintegrating, too, turning liquid just as the woman had in the church, almost as if the entire mass of it was being sucked back into the air.
Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the flames were extinguished and he was pressing the pole into the hard ground with no sign of the creature that had been pinned there. He kept his position, and even when he sensed it had gone, he put the pole down only reluctantly.
He turned to look at Eloise, but she was staring in silence at the place on the path where the dog had been. She stared so intently that Will had to double-check that there was no longer anything there. He didn’t know what to say to her.
The wind picked up, a gust reverberating around the warehouses. And on the back of that wind he heard a voice, an already familiar whisper, the words faint but recognizable—Death to you, William of Mercia. There was another noise, too, a creaking, but it was only when Eloise came back to herself and stared up at the building that he realized what it was.
The scaffolding. He grabbed her by the arm for the second time, but she knew what was happening now and ran without needing to be dragged. He heard the destabilized scaffolding straining against itself, creaking and wrenching, and they were still running when it collapsed and crashed explosively behind them.
They stopped to look. A cloud of dust was billowing up into the night sky. Much of the wood and metal had tumbled into the river and looked now like some strange playground. A couple of people walking across the road bridge stopped to stare in amazement.
“I don’t understand,” said Eloise. Then she looked accusingly at Will and said, “What the hell happened?”
“It must have been me—I made it unstable by pulling that pole off like that, then the wind …”
She threw her bag onto the floor and screamed, “No! I mean, what happened! That dog was on fire and it disappeared and what did you do? How did you break that pole loose? What! Happened!?”
He put his hands on her shoulders and stared into her eyes, but couldn’t quite capture her. Having to fall back on words alone, he said, “Eloise, I’ll explain everything, but right now, we have to get your other bag and we have to get out of here. The police will come.”
She shook her head, making clear that he just didn’t get it, and said, “I don’t care about the police. I don’t care about the scaffolding. I care about the monster dog that just attacked us, that spontaneously set on fire, that disappeared when you killed it.”
“I don’t think I killed it. I don’t think it was even alive. And it wasn’t attacking us, it was attacking me.”
“Oh, fine. Well, that makes me feel a lot better!” Still with a tone of accusation, she said firmly, “Who are you, Will?”
“I’ll tell you everything, but first we have to get away from here.”
Eloise shook her head again, a little too vigorously, and he realized she was still in shock, as he supposed any normal person would have been. “Why on earth would I go anywhere with you? I’ve got nothing to fear from the police.”
“It’s your choice.” He thought about it, wondering what was best for both of them. And even if she unknowingly had some part to play in whatever was now happening to him, the best thing he could do for Eloise was to leave her right there. “Actually, you should stay, but I have to go. Please forgive me—I didn’t mean for you to see any of this and I shouldn’t have let you. I’m sorry.”
She nodded sadly, even though she looked as if she hadn’t understood a word of what he’d said. He picked up her bag and handed it to her, and without saying anything, he walked away.
“Will?” He turned. “I’m safe, aren’t I? That thing, it won’t come back.”
“No, it won’t. You’re safer away from me.”
“Who are you?”
“I can’t tell you, not unless you come with me.”
She stared back at him, and he knew they didn’t have very long, that he had to get away from there quickly. But he didn’t rush her because he knew that she’d seen things she should never have witnessed, and that right now, she was making the biggest decision she would ever make.