“You don’t seem particularly surprised.”
“I knew you had to believe something like this.”
“You don’t seem particularly surprised that Dana’s dead.” He didn’t answer. “Why did you keep her alive?”
He thought about it a long while, then said, “I doubt you’d really care for the reasoning. And it really is worth staying alive, however you can.”
I saw it coming a second before it happened, a flick of his wrist. I raised the gun, swinging it up instinctively towards his head, but he’d already opened his fingers. The wall of twisted air slammed into me and picked me off my feet, knocking me back and wrenching my wrist as I skidded across the floor. The barrel of the gun smoked and burnt red-hot. I threw it aside and crawled back onto my feet, spinning my fingers through the air to catch a fistful of the magic of that place, dragging the reflected orange light in the clouds around me like a fluffy blanket to ward off the cold, until my skin burnt with its dull gleam. Bakker hadn’t moved from his chair, hadn’t stood; his back was half-turned to me. But as I watched and prepared a spell, he reached over and slipped out from his skin the needles carrying blood and other fluids, put them to one side and, very carefully, stood up. His legs buckled, but he caught himself on the handles of the chair, and rose nonetheless. He steadied himself and turned to look at us, standing on his own two feet, unsupported; and his face was white, his eyes empty, his teeth rotten, he trailed darkness as he moved, and he cast no shadow.
“There you are,” we said.
Hunger/Bakker grinned. “And we are so
“No, really?”
He opened his mouth and the darkness poured out like he had swallowed a bellyful of black, breeding locusts. It buzzed on the air and filled the room, expanding into every corner to block out the moonlight Its touch was ice on our skin, but we drew our neon blanket tighter around us and half-closed our eyes, letting the bite of it settle down on us like a winter’s wind after leaving the confines of a warm house. We couldn’t see anything other than our own hands, lit in neon; the windows, the walls and even the floor were obscured by the almost liquid dark that swirled around us as we drew our hands through the air.
We heard, very faintly, an electric crackle. Unwilling to trust to chance, we threw up our hands to catch the bolt of mains-powered lightning that lashed out of the darkness in a burst of blinding white fire, snatching it into our fingers and spinning it towards the floor before it had more than a chance to singe our sleeves. Beneath us, the floor itself started to spout barbed wire that crawled up around our ankles. We ignited a gas pipe overhead and spilled the roiling liquid fire around our feet until the wires melted and withered away, before batting out blobs of smelly flame into the darkness all around where, to one side, briefly, they illuminated a flash of white skin before it was eaten up again by the dark.
He spat a billow of hot ashes at our face; we burst the pipes under our feet to smother it in backwards-falling rain. He shattered a window, letting in a dragging blast of wind that pulled and clawed at us both, then sent the jagged glass flying towards us. We spun the wind from the smashed window into a tornado around us, calm at the centre, that snatched each shard of glass and reduced it in a second to sand; he pulled the steel skeleton of the building up from beneath our feet, jagged rods lashing at us from the floor we stood on; but we simply jumped aside, weaving our way through them as they danced. He pulled the wires down from the ceiling cavity and wound them round our wrists and throat, choking us and dragging us off our feet in their snare; we pumped electricity through them until they melted and burnt through, dropping us back down onto our knees in the whirling darkness.
We felt him prepare another spell, sensed the tug of his magic in the air, and this time we struck instead. We put the warmth of our skin into the sodium-coloured neon light that blanketed us, then the touch of our breath, then the beating of our heart, so that in each second it grew brighter, and brighter. It burnt into the dark like a Mediterranean sun, it boiled off our skin like a corona, it made our hair stand on end, it scalded the floor and blackened the ceiling, and we put more and more and more into it, filled it with ourself until the flames started to turn blue and our feet no longer touched the ground and we opened our arms like the angel, ready to embrace any enemy who came towards them, and opened our mouth to let out the buzzing blue locusts in our belly, the flaring blue sparks that danced like living light, let them roll across our tongue in a glittering icy sea that gnawed into the darkness and congregated in dizzying hordes, like the lights that magicians had once called will-o’-the-wisps, and we blazed
because we could, we let our skin turn white with the ice of it, let our bones shiver, let our feet drift up off the floor and the eddy of our own breath spin us round, let the blue electric fire shatter every last window, and blast holes in the roof that lashed up towards the moonlight, let it burrow deep black burns in the floor and melt the walls; we let it consume every last vestige of warmth and anger and pain and fear inside me
inside us, we let it eat up every feeling inside us
and through the burning we saw the shadow staggering, struggling to stay upright as the fire ate at his flesh, burnt his hair, dissolved the darkness of his coat, ate at his fingers, his nose, until black blood ran across him and until even that blood started to bubble and burn, steam and boil on his skin and he screamed and screamed and
was for a moment
as he screamed
just a frail old
His knees buckled.
His legs gave way.
His blood was bright red, his shadow a tiny pinprick under him.
And we were laughing.
because we were so bright and so powerful and no one could control us because we were
I was
unstoppable, untameable, so alive that we could burn for ever, light and life and fire and
laughing at his screaming
our skin cracking and the blue light blazing through underneath it
through our mouth and eyes and under our nails
because
I was
we were
blue light pouring out under our clothes, bursting out of us with every breath and we couldn’t inhale there was so much of it
because I was…
because
we am
so much power… we were light, we were fire, we were life, we were the slithering underground wind, we were dancing heaven, we were blazing blue fire and
we were the angels!
…
Then he said my name.
And we were surprised to realise that I could still remember it. And we screamed and kicked and struggled as I forced us to breathe in, we screamed and punched and tore at our own skin, trying to pull the light out of us so that we would dissolve our flesh and be nothing but a blazing comet in the sky as I made us close our eyes against the blue blanket across our vision, we punched and bit and tore as I dragged our arms back down and clenched our fingers into fists and we screamed
