take up his station on her left shoulder.
Sue? Crying? That was unnerving.
‘Anyone else?’ I asked.
Pen shook her head.
‘Then I guess I’ll turn in,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to draw some more stay-nots. I’m good for that if you’ve got another piece of chalk.’
Pen snorted. ‘As if I’d trust a ward you’d written,’ Pen said. ‘I know mine work: all I know about yours is that they’d be spelled wrong. Goodnight, Fix.’
It wasn’t, particularly. I couldn’t get to sleep for a long while. The night was a furnace and the booze-craving was still churning sourly in my stomach and sending static through my nerves.
When I did sleep, it was a shallow doze punctuated with disconnected, rambling dreams. A dog scratched at a dry crumbling fence; a butcher sharpened an overlarge knife on a leather strap, accidentally slashing his own arms every so often with the tip of the unwieldy blade; an old gramophone played all by itself in a dark empty room, the horn echoing with nothing but scraping static because the song had finished.
Some time before dawn I opened my eyes, still half-adrift on the tides of sleep. What was the sound now? I wondered dully. But this was the waking world, and the intermittent scratching that had accompanied me along all the avenues of my dreams was now sounding from directly over my head.
Something was up on the roof.
My room is under the eaves, with nothing but a skin of plasterboard and another of slate between me and the outside world. Whatever it was that was moving up there, it was close enough to register on my death-sense as a synesthetic thicket of jangling, discordant notes. This wasn’t a cat out for a night on the tiles. It was one of the dead, or the undead, or the never-born.
I responded instinctively, whistling a few of those spiky notes between my teeth. I know damn well that the tin whistle I carry is just an amplifier for something inside me: I can work unplugged when I need to, and that was what I did now.
The scratching stopped. There was a single muffled thump and then a skitter of movement. I jumped out of bed, tracking it, moving with it across the room, around the chair where I’d dumped my clothes to the open window.
The dead thing got there before me. It dropped down from the roof onto the broad window ledge, man-sized and man-shaped, outlined in silhouette for the briefest of seconds before it bunched the muscles in its legs and kicked off backwards, somersaulting out of my field of vision.
In that second I’d been staring into Rafi’s face - twisted into something like agony, his mouth straining open as though he was emptying a continuous scream into some fold of the night I didn’t have access to.
4
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Pen shouted, for about the fourth or fifth time.
‘I was going to,’ I protested. ‘Seriously, Pen, I was going to. But . . . you were tired, and you were upset, and I just thought—’
‘Don’t spare my feelings, Fix!’ She stood before me, rigid with fury, her fists clenching as though she wanted to hit me. ‘Don’t ever hide things from me and think you’re sparing my feelings, because you don’t know what they bloody well are!’
It was four in the morning by the kitchen clock, and only ten or fifteen minutes after my brief encounter with Asmodeus, so we couldn’t expect the sun to come up for a couple of hours yet. The night seemed unfairly, impossibly prolonged. Its twisted events were taking on some of the flavour of those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you’re waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their mouldering fingerprints all across your day.
‘Fair enough,’ I said, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. They felt like they’d been boiled and peeled in their sockets. I leaned against the wall for some much-needed support, but I didn’t feel as though I could sit down right then, with every nerve in my body still trying to opt for
Sue? Crying? That was unnerving.
‘Anyone else?’ I asked.
Pen shook her head.
‘Then I guess I’ll turn in,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to draw some more stay-nots. I’m good for that if you’ve got another piece of chalk.’
Pen snorted. ‘As if I’d trust a ward you’d written,’ Pen said. ‘I know mine work: all I know about yours is that they’d be spelled wrong. Goodnight, Fix.’
It wasn’t, particularly. I couldn’t get to sleep for a long while. The night was a furnace and the booze-craving was still churning sourly in my stomach and sending static through my nerves.
When I did sleep, it was a shallow doze punctuated with disconnected, rambling dreams. A dog scratched at a dry crumbling fence; a butcher sharpened an overlarge knife on a leather strap, accidentally slashing his own arms every so often with the tip of the unwieldy blade; an old gramophone played all by itself in a dark empty room, the horn echoing with nothing but scraping static because the song had finished.
Some time before dawn I opened my eyes, still half-adrift on the tides of sleep. What was the sound now? I wondered dully. But this was the waking world, and the intermittent scratching that had accompanied me along all the avenues of my dreams was now sounding from directly over my head.
Something was up on the roof.
My room is under the eaves, with nothing but a skin of plasterboard and another of slate between me and the outside world. Whatever it was that was moving up there, it was close enough to register on my death-sense as a synesthetic thicket of jangling, discordant notes. This wasn’t a cat out for a night on the tiles. It was one of the dead, or the undead, or the never-born.
I responded instinctively, whistling a few of those spiky notes between my teeth. I know damn well that the tin whistle I carry is just an amplifier for something inside me: I can work unplugged when I need to, and that was what I did now.
The scratching stopped. There was a single muffled thump and then a skitter of movement. I jumped out of bed, tracking it, moving with it across the room, around the chair where I’d dumped my clothes to the open window.
The dead thing got there before me. It dropped down from the roof onto the broad window ledge, man-sized and man-shaped, outlined in silhouette for the briefest of seconds before it bunched the muscles in its legs and kicked off backwards, somersaulting out of my field of vision.
In that second I’d been staring into Rafi’s face - twisted into something like agony, his mouth straining open as though he was emptying a continuous scream into some fold of the night I didn’t have access to.
4
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Pen shouted, for about the fourth or fifth time.
‘I was going to,’ I protested. ‘Seriously, Pen, I was going to. But . . . you were tired, and you were upset, and I just thought—’
‘Don’t spare my feelings, Fix!’ She stood before me, rigid with fury, her fists clenching as though she wanted to hit me. ‘Don’t ever hide things from me and think you’re sparing my feelings, because you don’t know what they bloody well are!’
It was four in the morning by the kitchen clock, and only ten or fifteen minutes after my brief encounter with Asmodeus, so we couldn’t expect the sun to come up for a couple of hours yet. The night seemed unfairly, impossibly prolonged. Its twisted events were taking on some of the flavour of those heart-hammering nightmares that start to lose coherence even as you’re waking up from them, but that still manage to leave their mouldering fingerprints all across your day.
‘Fair enough,’ I said, rubbing my eyes with the heel of my hand. They felt like they’d been boiled and peeled in their sockets. I leaned against the wall for some much-needed support, but I didn’t feel as though I could sit down right then, with every nerve in my body still trying to opt for
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