“No!”
The scream came from somewhere other than the shadows. I looked round and saw that the shadow had moved; he now stood behind Dana, one black arm across her throat, claws pressed against-her eyelids, his eyes burning. “Stop it, sorcerer,” he muttered, and then, in a voice that wasn’t quite his, not quite, “Stop it, Matthew.”
I stayed absolutely still, while the dragon coiled back in on itself, watching with empty eyes. “You know the Magna Carta, you know the rights of the city; you may even know how to unsummon an urban dragon,” not Hunger’s voice, coming from Hunger’s mouth, “but if you push me, I
Blackjack was on his knees, throwing up water through his nose and mouth. Dana’s trailing spirals of tap water were now flooding pools splashed across the floor, her eyes shut and breath coming in little wheezes as Hunger held her close to his frozen skin. “I kept her alive for this,” he whispered. “Just like my sister. I kept her alive.”
I started forward, but his fingers pressed harder into her face, pushing the blood out of it. Hunger grinned. “Where’s Matthew’s fire now?”
“You didn’t know I’d come back!”
“But I never found a body either,” he replied. “And the angels always loved to talk to you. Come be me, they said, and be free, and you’ve always wanted to be free, Matthew. You’ve always dreamed of turning yourself into dancing blue fire and spinning across the sky, you’ve always wanted to be a rumble on the wind, a dancer in the clouds; what creature of flesh would want less? The chance to fly and be free, to forget the poor, constructed laws of humanity, the pain, the fear, the feeling, the ageing, the dying. The angels have always loved you, because you’ve loved them, you’ve always wanted their message to be real, you’ve always wanted to be fire and light and life and now that you are… you will not share. So I kept her alive, and maybe, just maybe, the sorcerer has enough control over the angels to not let her die?”
“Robert…” I began.
“I am Hunger!” he screamed. “I am not bound by the laws of flesh! I am hungry! You are so alive when you burn – I will have that life!”
The dragon’s tail twitched, scraping along the floor.
“We can’t…” we whimpered. “Please… I…”
“Which one? Which one can’t? Which one can’t bear it if she is dead?”
“We are…” we stuttered.
“… almost…” I began.
“… the same.”
“Please,” we said.
“Please…” I added.
Then Hunger grinned. “I will understand these things when I am alive again,” he said, and raised one fist of black claws towards Dana’s face.
We screamed.
The bloody cross within a cross that we had drawn on the floor at our feet caught fire. The fire was bright blue flashing sparks that wriggled and writhed by themselves.
And because we didn’t know what to do, couldn’t cope
not this
my feelings
such feelings
not this
because we couldn’t understand
this feeling
too much
–because we couldn’t
I couldn’t–
we screamed
“
And the dragon of broken and disobeyed signs was, in the end, an urban creature, summoned out of the city itself; and the city’s dragon, the lord of the city’s gates, did so very much like to lead, and be obeyed, and have its own rules that could, so rumour went, stop the king or queen entering the city, if it was felt that Londoners didn’t need them inside their walls. Hunger had told me the key himself: time, law, humility, a recognition that in the eyes of the city, we were nothing, and the dragon was the lord.
Without a moment’s hesitation, it swiped its tail in an easy gesture that took the head off Hunger where he stood, slashing it from his shoulders with a single razored edge of broken signpost.
Hunger disintegrated into nothing, black wisps of darkness crawling away into the corners of the room, where they melded into the shadows.
We looked at the dragon, it looked at us, as the blue fire of our blood gently retreated back down to dull redness. Then, without a sound, it started to melt. Scales of reflective plastic drifted off its skin, in flashes of bright white, yellow and red. The traceries of a thirty-mile-an-hour warning sign, the remnants of a school crossing notice, part of a placard welcoming you to a council estate, a shard of post office notice, a chipped blue piece of a notable’s plaque, a warning about temporary lights. They slipped off it like seeds from a dandelion as the spell that had sustained it slowly disintegrated.
Last of all, flopping to the ground with a single dull thunk, was a small rounded piece of stone that rolled towards our feet. We picked it up. Its edges were smooth and surface warm; it felt old in our hands. On one side were the words:
Domine dirig
and that was all.
“Matthew?”
I turned to look at Dana, who, without a sound, slipped to the floor in a rapidly growing circle of her own blood.
We dragged our nails into our hand to draw blood, and put all our strength and heat and warmth into it until it burned so brightly that the walls were blazing blue. We rubbed it into her wounds but she didn’t speak, didn’t stir.
We screamed for help, shook her, shouted her name, pressed the heat of our flesh into her cold skin, pressed our hands as hard as we could into the gashes in her chest and neck but the blood just seeped out around our fingers and mingled with our own until we couldn’t tell what was ours and what was hers and the burning of ours was muted in the medley.
I couldn’t
not Dana
I couldn’t
so we had to. We held her in our arms, and every joint seemed to have just broken, every limb hanging so heavy, we were amazed she had been able to lift them, even her fingers were so heavy when we tangled them in ours, and because I knew and couldn’t cope, we screamed.
We screamed until the glass that had shattered on the floor danced again with our voice, until the wires under the floor grew up like ivy through soil and tangled themselves around every railing and buried themselves in every wall, until the foundations warped and the ceiling shook, until the electricity danced around us in a tornado, until the gas pipes burnt inside their casings and the water pipes burst in geysers around our head, erupting towards the ceiling and boiling away in clouds of billowing steam. We screamed until the fire extinguishers burst, until plastic melted, until the thinnest wires started to melt and drip with their own heat, until our voice wasn’t human, but the roar of the traffic and the screech of brakes and rattle of engines and rumble of an underground
