The officer dumps me in the back of his squad car.
I twist in the seat, searching for Bryan out of the back window but I can’t see him. Other police cars arrive. Pulsing red light stains the field beyond the window.
I don’t know how much time passes before the officer opens the front door, settles into the driver’s seat. “Okay,” he says at last. “Okay, you don’t say anything for a while. Got it?” I can only see a slice of his forehead in the rear-view mirror, a mottled and sweaty brow. I drop my gaze away from his reflection.
It takes him several minutes to edge through the disorder. We pass two ambulances and a pair of fatigued paramedics who are shuffling a covered stretcher into the back of one of them. There weren’t that many of us out there, I think, but now maybe there are fewer. I cough up mucus into the sleeve. The gouge marks in my wrist leave a line of blood on my cheek. “Hey,” he calls from the front. “Are you hurt?”
I shake my head, fighting back tears.
“Fucking hell,” he mutters, turning and staring at me with big, hound dog eyes. And then: “You kids, just. Shite…”
The squad car crosses Magdalen Bridge and below us the river glimmers. I don’t know where he’s taking me. Am I under arrest for breaking curfew? Wouldn’t he have to tell me? Maybe he doesn’t.
I slump against the window, feeling relief, maybe. There are no choices to make here. That should scare me—but it doesn’t. I replay the scene in my mind: the creature tumbling against the roof of the chapel. It was a nymph—it had to be! I’d felt a connection with it. Then Martin grabbing my wrist. And Bryan, hurling himself at the officer. I know how he felt, that little flame burning inside like a pilot light, ready to explode.
We drive silently through the city centre, passing the spires of St. Mary the Virgin, then the massive iron gates of the examination halls. We turn down St. Aldate’s and head south. Is the station this way? As we cross the Thames, the squad car starts to slow. I don’t know this area, which is deserted and rundown. Paper flyers stick to the light posts and doorways, slicked down by spring rains and pulped into unreadability. No one has bothered to put up new ones.
The officer stops the car, gets out, and then opens the door to the back. “Prepared to behave?”
All the fight has gone out of me, replaced by a dull ache in my temples. “Yeah.”
“Good.” He closes the door again, locking it, and heads down the street. The cuffs on my wrists chafe. Nothing to do but wait, and wonder if Bryan is bleeding out on a stretcher somewhere. I think about him pressed against me in the dirt.
Please don’t let him be dead. A prayer whispered into the night. I can still see the image of the officer’s boot coming down on him again and again. Please let Bryan Taite be alive. Please don’t let him leave me. Please.
The officer is back. He stares at me through the window as he struggles to fit the key into the lock while keeping a hold on two take-away boxes.
A draft of cool air bursts in when he manages it. I have to shuffle over, twisting with my bound hands so he can slide in next to me.
“I’m Police Constable Trefethen.” He’s calmer now, the gruffness smoothed out of his voice. He balances the two grease-laden boxes on his knee, fishes through his pockets for another set of smaller keys to release the cuffs. Watches me warily once he’s done it.
“Hungry?”
I nod. He tears the lid off and hands one of the boxes of fish and chips to me. “Thanks,” I manage.
Eating is more important than talking. My body is calorie starved, amped up with adrenaline.
“Thought you might need that. Thought your parents might appreciate you coming back sober.”
“You aren’t going to take me in?”
He picks at one of the chips thoughtfully, as if he is surprised by it, by its existence, here in this car. “No,” he says. “I’ll take you home. Just this once.”
“Why?”
He shifts on the seat. The firearm at his side seems like an uncomfortable weight, one he isn’t used to. As if he doesn’t like it very much. But he doesn’t answer me.
“What happened to my friends?”
“The JR if they’re hurt. Some of them may go to lock-up while they cool off. We can’t hold them forever. Not enough space, but overnight, maybe. The Colleges will be after us if it’s any more than that.”
He stares at me and I realize from the glazed look that he’s in shock. “You’re young, aren’t you?” he asks. “Young for the Colleges, I mean. For—what happened out there.” Disgust in his voice now. “We never wanted to hurt any of you, but what were we to do? That thing in the sky…and then all of you lot, it was like you all went mad. Never seen anything like it, not here. You’re supposed to be the best and brightest but you were damn near trying to rip us apart.”
“We didn’t mean it.” He just blinks his eyes in disbelief. I wipe my lips on the back of my hand, return his stare. “You shot it down.”
“Rubber bullets,” he spits. “All this civil unrest, the curfew, now they’ve issued us with fucking riot gear. We’d just heard about a gathering of you lot. Drunken kids, you know. But then it was—”
“It was a kid.”
He stares at me in disbelief. “That was no child.”
“It was,” I insist. “Or it was, once.”
He cradles his head in his hand, pressing his palm against his forehead. “Bloody hell.” His hand spasms into a fist. “Bloody fucking monsters now. It wears a man out, watching this. The dead should stay dead.”
“They aren’t dead,” I try to tell him but he doesn’t seem to hear me.
“I lost me own. My boy was thirteen. I was teaching him football. Jesus fucking Christ. It was bad enough when he passed. It’s no wonder they burn the lot of them up. Imagine looking up and seeing your own? It’s wrong.”
“We just don’t understand it properly.”
“What’s there to understand, girl? This is madness. You all went mad out there, but I don’t know if I blame you. Maybe the whole world has gone mad. Rotten at its core.” Remembering where he is, who I am, a note of pleading creeps into his voice. “You weren’t doing anything, were you? You were just scared. Can’t lock you up for being scared, can I? So I’ll bring you back to your mum and dad, safe and sound. Food in your stomach. And you’re damn well going to mind what you do with yourself, understand? Sit tight, wait it out. Forget whatever you saw tonight.”
Welcome to the monster club, Bryan said.
Trefethen takes the soggy boxes once we’re finished eating, exits the car and deposits them in a trash can on the street, then settles into the front seat again.
“You know you’re wrong,” I tell him. He raises his eyebrows. “You’re wrong about what’s happening.”
“You think what you want, girl,” he says, his expression thickening from disbelief to a dull anger. “But this won’t be the last of it. If there’s more of those things out there, by god, it won’t just be rubber bullets they give us. Just you wait.”