Read Online A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift by Kate Griffin - Free Book Online

in my wrists. Having turned my hands this way and that, she then tossed them aside like rotten potatoes. She took hold of my face, with the same unsympathetic grip the doctor uses when examining a swelling, and turned it this way and that, scrutinised the colour of my eyes, the shape of my ears, even the condition of my teeth, smelt my breath.
     
Suddenly her fingers were at my throat, digging in, pushing my chin up as the tips of her nails drew half-moon rims of blood. We half-choked, reached instinctively to find the electric fires that always burnt inside. But her fingers went no deeper, and I held back, uncertain.
     
She hissed, her face an inch from mine, “ Sorcerer .”
     
“How’d you tell?” I asked through the pressure of her fingers on my neck.
     
“I told you – I know things. I know the smell of magics; and you don’t just dabble, you swim in it, you breathe it. An urban sorcerer, in my shop? Who are you?” When I didn’t answer, her grip tightened, sending a wave of heat into my head as the blood strained in its arteries. “I am not defenceless,” she added. “As I’m sure you can imagine.”
     
“Very much so,” I croaked. “Are you like this with everyone you meet?”
     
“Your name!”
     
“Swift,” I said, and was pleased at how easily the remembrance of it came to me. “My name is Matthew Swift.”
     
Her grip relaxed for a moment; surprise, not intent. “Matthew Swift?” she echoed flatly.
     
“That’s me. Ta-da!”
     
“You want to tell me that you’re Matthew Swift.”
     
“Is this a bad thing?”
     
“You are a dead man, Matthew Swift.”
     
“You must have customers flocking to hear your predictions.”
     
“It was a statement of fact, of history .”
     
“It pays for prophets to be cryptic, particularly in this litigious age,” I wheezed.
     
“You misunderstand,” she said gently, her breath tickling my skin. “Now, right now, as we are talking, your corpse is rotting in the earth.”
     
I shrugged weakly. “Clearly, it isn’t.”
     
“Matthew Swift,” she said, slowly, “the sorcerer called Matthew Swift, died two years ago.”
     
“Question!” I said, raising one meek hand. “Did you actually see the body?”
     
She hesitated.
     
“Well, there you go.”
     
“Nothing bleeds that much and lives.”
     
We wound our fingers carefully around hers, started unpicking them from our throat. “Then consider this. If, hypothetically, I am the same Matthew Swift who was attacked two years ago and who lay expiring in his own blood while his killer walked away, happy with the thought that no doctor nor hospital in the world could repair such a hole in the heart, such a tear in the lung, such a rip in the chest – if, say, I happen to be the kind of man who can survive that to stand here now, shouldn’t you be more concerned about threatening me?”
     
We detached her last finger from our neck, pushed her hand carefully back to her side. She stood in front of us, jingling faintly with the weight of breath she drew. Finally: “How would Swift survive?”
     
“Precariously.”
     
“It’s not possible to…”
     
“No,” I said firmly. “It isn’t. Now will you tell me what happened to Khan?”
     
Silence.
     
I smiled my most beatific smile. A kind of serenity was settled over me. I knew now, standing in that stench of incense and beneath that endless nasal drone, that things had got just about as bad as they could conceivably get. Therefore it stood to reason that things could get no worse; therefore I was finally almost calm.
     
“His throat was cut,” she said flatly, after a pause. “He saw it coming, and couldn’t stop it. That’s power – to kill a man even when he knows every detail of his own demise – that’s truly a cruel death. If you are Swift, where have you been for two years?”
     
“Around.”
     
“I deal in cryptic answers every day, Mr Swift; don’t try and distract me with my own devices.”
     
“Fair enough. I will not play with you and invent some story; I will simply not tell you where I