“Matthew?” His voice was weak, old, frail and dying.
And blood started running out of the cracks in my skin instead of our light, started seeping into our clothes and I was so weak, so small inside of us and we said
but I am
Sinking to our knees, pain, so much pain
from so much pain
so weak
nothing but ice left inside.
I shook my head. “Not today,” I said. “Not yet!”
a fading remnant of fire worming its way beneath our fingers. We whispered, “So bright, so bright…” our fingers scuttling after it as it disappeared into the floor, “so beautiful…”
“Matthew?”
I looked up.
Just me.
He lay in a growing pool of his own blood, awkward, on one side, head towards the window. He coughed, spittle and blood mixing around his lips. I crawled on hands and knees towards him, knelt next to him and murmured, “Sorry, Mr Bakker.”
A glimpse of a smile. “What’s there… to be sorry?” he croaked.
“It’s complicated.”
“Always is. You’re a sloppy sorcerer, Matthew Swift.”
I shrugged, and even that was agony. “Could be worse,” I replied.
His fingers closed around my wrist, and I noticed that, even though the face was Bakker’s, the nails were still long and black. “Dying,” he said. I stared down into his watery eyes. “Dying,” he added, and his nails dug deeper into my skin, long, black nails. “Something we never understood about life,” he explained and in that instant there was a pallor on his skin, more than just blood loss.
We snatched our wrist away, and threw ourself back even as his other hand reached up for our neck, nails gouging a slash just in front of our jugular vein, and his blood was still black as it came out of his skin, and his tongue licked rotten teeth and he screamed, “Want it! Want it now!” and he raised his head up on a shattered old body, ready to bite with yellow teeth, seizing my head by the hair and dragging it towards his with a strength that no one should have had, screaming, “Want it! Want to burn!”
I wound my fingers together, pressed electricity into them, drew them back, and slammed them as hard as I could into his chest. At least, I think I did it. In that moment, it was hard to tell.
The shock knocked him backwards, picking his feet up off the floor as he went, snapping his head back with a loud crack of bone on bone, and thrust him shoulders first out of the remnants of the window. I heard the screaming fade, and then stop abruptly with a splash, thirty-five floors below.
Epilogue: The Brief Act of Living
There was a hospital intensive-care ward.
Then there was a less intensive ward.
Then there was outpatients.
Then there was the street with a discharge notice, a single change of clothes, my old coat, my bag and a new pair of shoes; everything, in short, that I owned in the world.
I had no way to prove that I was alive, no home address and no money of my own. Sinclair gave me ten grand in a brown paper bag and said that the concerned citizens were grateful for my assistance.
In a way, the absence of these things seemed liberating.
I stayed with the Whites for a few weeks, in order to get my bearings. Then I stayed with a couple of friends in the countryside, who were close enough to put me up but not so close as to have realised that I was ever dead to begin with. I went walking in the hills, sploshing through mud and after a few weeks of it, despite the unfamiliarity of the place, I was beginning to understand how the countryside too could produce sorcerers, who summoned ivy instead of barbed wire.
But my heart was still in the city, and eventually I drifted back.
I took casual work in odd places here or there. My skills weren’t necessarily that useful, but I supervised a few exorcisms and blessed the odd business about to set up shop, scratching very carefully into the walls of one or two abodes,
I was leaving the swimming pool when she found me. I’d taken to making regular visits, partially because we enjoyed the act of swimming so much, but mostly because there was the promise of a hot shower afterwards, to keep me clean. It was in Highbury Fields, at that cool time of the evening on an overcast day when the sun is already below the horizon but its reflection is still bright enough to see without the street lamps’ sodium glow. I walked away from the swimming pool, turned towards my regular bus stop, and she was there, emerging without a sound from the shadows of a shrubbery, pressing the gun to the back of my head and grabbing me by the shoulder to stop me flinching from its metal.
“Bang,” she said.
“Oda,” I replied breathlessly. “We wondered.”
“Bang,” she repeated. “Two in the head, and then three to the chest. Bang bang bang. No coming back from that; no phone boxes to hand either, just to make sure. Lights out, game over, good night the sunny time and so on.”
“I didn’t think you’d be the kind of person to go on about it,” I said reproachfully. “If you’re really going to do it, then just do it.”
“You don’t seem too freaked?”
“I’m not.”
“What about them?”
“What is life, if it doesn’t end?” we said.
“That’s a really unhealthy attitude you’ve got there,” she pointed out.
“And I thought the Order was all about the spiritual things?”
Oda grunted, gently lifted her hand from my shoulder, and removed the gun from my head. She stepped back. I turned to look at her, curious. She met my gaze easily and said, “I wanted you to know. Any time, at any moment, wherever you are, whatever you do, I can do it. I can. I’m really that good.”
“I believe you.”
“Good. Think about it if you should be feeling Satanic.”
She turned, swept her bag up off the pavement, and started to walk away. “Wait!” we called out.
She stopped, turned, looked back, eyebrows raised.
“We were informed that you’d kill us anyway,” we said.
“I’m sure I will, some day. When you lose control or start sacrificing kiddies or eating rabbits’ skulls for kicks, I’ll be there. But as it is, right now…” She hesitated, half-turning her head up to the street lamp as if looking for it to click on in a moment of inspiration. Then she shook her head. “Right now, you’re still on the side of the
