I stuffed Dead Girls into my bag and stood. I had the hollowed-out feeling that follows a long acid trip, a sense that my singed neurons were slowly regenerating. I was ready for a drink, maybe even an early dinner. I checked the burner to see if Quinn had texted me. Nothing. Trying not to panic, I popped three ibuprofen and stepped out from beneath the trees.
The sun hung just above the horizon, turning the hazy air rose pink. I zipped up my leather jacket, started to walk. The park was nearly deserted, though I saw a few stragglers carrying protest signs under their arms. I wondered if Lyla and Gryffin had been arrested. I couldn’t imagine they’d found Tindra or Tommy, though I’d have no way of knowing if they had.
I felt a pang, thinking of Tindra as she cradled her fierce-looking dog as though it was a stuffed animal. It was a good-sized Staffordshire terrier, well trained and capable of bringing down someone my size. Who could have killed it, and how? Poisoning didn’t make sense—Tindra would never have let it eat something unfamiliar.
And, despite what Lyla believed, the dog didn’t look like it had been poisoned. When I was ten, a friend’s dog, a bad-tempered bullmastiff who’d once killed a German shepherd by snapping its neck, had been killed—rat poison in a chunk of meat. I’d been with my friend when she discovered the writhing mastiff in the woods. The dog had snapped at her viciously and mindlessly as a snake—an agonizing death.
Yet in the video Tommy had texted to his sister, Bunny appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Surely if the dog had been shot or stabbed, Tommy would have noticed and texted that to Lyla. So yeah, maybe poison.
But how do you poison a big, well-trained attack dog walking beside its owner in a large, crowded park? Where was the dog’s corpse now?
And where was Tindra?
My thoughts outran my steps as I stared distractedly at the ground, kicking at gravel. I hoped I’d find an exit from the park soon. I had no clue how to get back to the Underground. When I looked up, the rosy haze had darkened to bloodred fog: a toxic magic hour, the few passersby ghostly shapes that flickered in and out of sight.
I kept walking. After a short while, I saw three boys crouched around something on the gravel. A fourth boy stood above them, poking the object with a stick. I drew closer, and he glanced at me. His friends scrambled to their feet.
“It was just here,” one said.
A small dead bird lay on the path. It looked like a sparrow, tiny legs straight as matchsticks, claws curled as though grasping an invisible perch. There was a tiny depression in its breast.
“It’s the fog,” explained the boy with the stick. “Makes ’em sick.” He tossed the stick into the shadows, and he and his friends hurried off.
I stared down at the little corpse, then used the steel toe of my boot to nudge the sparrow onto its side, so that it gazed at me with one poppy-seed eye.
I resumed walking. The greasy haze made my face feel as though it had been smeared with Vaseline. Two women in park uniforms ignored me as they passed, speaking loudly into their mobiles. When the fog swallowed them, I paused beside an overflowing trash bin.
Something glinted amid the foil wrappers and takeaway containers on the ground. I bent to see a dart with a red feather at one end, like a tiny powder puff. Straightening, I prodded it with my boot. I’d seen something like this before.
I shook my head: I needed to stay focused. Tindra, dead dog, dead bird, the book, the app, Quinn, a drink…the only one of these things that mattered to me now was Quinn.
And a drink. And maybe another bump. I reached into my pocket for the crank, and froze.
Two white guys in red Svarlight hoodies were headed toward me on the path, hands in their pockets. I shoved the bag of crank back in my pocket and called out to them.
“Hey, are they still around?”
They halted. Young, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, their cheeks raw with windburn. The older of the two regarded me cautiously. “Who?”
I pointed at his sweatshirt. “Svarlight.”
“Oh, yeah.” His companion gestured at some benches a short distance away. “You’ll just catch them, they’re getting ready to go home.”
“Thanks,” I said, and they left.
I stared at a heavyset gray-haired woman perched on one bench, spooning food from a takeaway container. If I hadn’t looked up, I would have walked right past her. Above her dangled a limp plastic banner, held aloft by two plastic rods. It was emblazoned with a scarlet oak leaf and lightning bolt. A large tote bag at her feet displayed the same logo. A few feet away, three young men stood talking to a burly middle-aged white guy with a long, braided salt-and-pepper beard. He wore dark work pants, work boots, a fleece-lined black denim jacket.
The wind tugged the jacket open, revealing a Svarlight T-shirt. One of the young men wore the same T-shirt. Another sported a Defenders of Albion knit cap. The third, dressed in a plain white windbreaker, waved a CD at the bearded man.
“Been looking for this for weeks! What happened to the download?”
The bearded man shrugged. As I approached he gave me a nod, turning to resume his conversation.
“That was only up there for a week,” he explained. He sounded Swedish. “Read the small print. Are you on the mailing list? We send out a list of new downloads every Sunday night. Freya tweets them, too. When she remembers.”
“You’re lucky I remember your dinner,” the woman on the bench called. She looked at the young man and added, “There’s two songs on that CD weren’t on the download. That’s your reward for buying it.”
Like the bearded man, she sounded Swedish. The others all seemed to be Brits. They nodded amiably as I joined them.
“A lot quieter now,” the Defender of Albion said, smiling.
I glanced at the woman’s tote bag, trying to discern its contents.
“Come take a look if you want,” the woman, Freya, said.
She finished whatever was in the takeaway box, dabbed her chin with a paper napkin, then hauled the tote onto the bench, scooting over to make room for me. “Sit,” she urged.
I did. Her long hair was more silver than gray and loosely braided, her face sun weathered and deeply lined. Her blue eyes were so pale they almost looked white, making her appear blind. Her loose cotton dress hung almost to her ankles. She had big hands, the knuckles swollen from work or arthritis. No rings. No coat, only a popcorn-knit wool sweater that looked handmade. For an instant I met those eerie pale eyes and saw a glint of fear, or maybe just exhaustion.
“Help yourself.”
She pointed at the tote and stood, yawning, then walked over to the bearded man, leaving me alone on the bench.