The spray tickled the back of my neck as I ran towards the door, and a razor-sharp shard of metal nearly took my ear off as it spun past. In the doorway I heard screaming, and a familiar voice shouting, “Shoot, shoot, dammit!” San Khay, a friend of Bakker’s even when I’d been one too. I’d never met him until now but, even back then, back before all the things for which I couldn’t find a name, his star had been rising.
One of them got enough paint out of their eyes to find a trigger, but not enough to aim well. I dove through the bedroom door and slammed it shut, one hand already in my satchel for another can of paint. As the crowd of attackers in the other room got control of themselves again, I drew a ward across the door, big and exaggerated, stretching it over the walls in long strokes that eventually described a crude key. A foot slammed into the door, which shook, but didn’t open. I murmured gentle words into my ward and backed away. Someone opened fire, the noise at this proximity almost painful, shocking to our senses, but the door didn’t splinter, didn’t move, didn’t open. That wouldn’t last long, but it was good enough. I crawled across the room, past a neatly made double bed to where a window stood open, a metal staircase visible below. I half-fell onto the cold stair, damp from the evening drizzle, and saw below the struggling shapes of the motorbiker and the woman, hauling Sinclair down towards the ground.
I scurried after them, and caught up as they managed to drag the gasping Sinclair into a small passage at ground level.
“The men?” the motorbiker asked me, with a strong grasp of the relevant.
“They’ll get through eventually.”
Sinclair’s face was white and slick. “He needs a hospital,” I muttered.
“You think?” snapped the motorbiker.
“Do you have a vehicle?”
“My bike.”
“Can you get him on it?”
“Shit, you think he’s in a fit state? You’re a fucking sorcerer, do something!”
“It’s not that simple! To repair something like this you need equipment, preparation…”
“Sorcerers can’t heal,” said the woman. It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice was low and cold, almost dispassionate. “It’s not part of their magic.”
“I can fucking heal when I have the fucking equipment!” I retorted. “But no, if you’re asking, we’re not exactly into bringing people back from death or even the bloody edge!”
“Great,” the motorbiker hissed. “You’re just so grand, aren’t you?”
“We can keep him alive,” we snarled. “Our blood can hold him for a little; if you can get him to a place to heal.”
Perhaps even the motorbiker sensed our intent – certainly he was not foolish enough to question us. I pulled out the Swiss Army knife from my satchel, the cool metal slipping in my bloody fingers. My hand was shaking; I didn’t know what I was doing, nor if it would work. And if it didn’t, then…
We steadied our hand, forcing ourselves to be still. We took a long, slow breath, every nerve on edge, and tried to calm our heart from its thundering in our ears. We searched, and levered out the hinged knife we needed from within the casing. Then, careful not to cause ourselves more than a shallow injury, we drew the blade across the palm of our left hand. We could feel the disgust and horror in the woman, even though her expression stayed cold, and see the surprise in the man’s face. For a moment, the pain was a shocking relief, a distraction that removed the ringing in our ears, the burning in our eyes and the shaking in our limbs, and focused us entirely on the blood pooling in our cupped hand.
At first the blood was not appropriate: dark, almost black in the poor light. Just crude human fluids; ugly, temperatureless. We waited. After a few seconds, the change began. A bright worm of blue light rose to the surface of the blood welling between our fingers, then dipped down again, like an animal breaking from the sea for air. A moment later, another shimmer of blue flashed like a static spark between two lightning rods across the surface of our blood; then another. I tried to hold back nausea as, emerging like blue maggots, the colour spread throughout the blood in my hand, a bright glow of sparks that rose up to the surface, shimmering and twisting, so bright it cast shadows across our faces, pushing back the darkness in its electric-blue glow. It wasn’t just in the blood in my hand; as the writhing blueness spread, I could feel it running up inside my veins, saw my skin turning white and blue as the redness drained from it, a pallor running from my wrist up my arms, that seemed to turn my blood to ice, shuddering through my flesh like frozen electricity, rattling off my bones and making my head buzz with…
…
…
I closed my eyes as the blueness rose in front of my vision, burning away the darkness and covering the world with its sapphire glow. But even behind my eyelids the blueness burnt and, God help me, we loved it, revelled in it, raised our fingers and felt the electricity flash between them like every nerve carried a hundred volts, like every organ was bubbling acid feeding a spark plug inside my heart that, with every pump, set our skin on fire. In all my life I had never felt so alive, so inhuman.
We moved automatically through the fear, performing our function. We pulled back the jacket of the injured man, peeled away the remnants of his waistcoat around the worst of his injuries and tipped some of our burning blue blood onto his flesh. Where it touched, the flesh crisped, and at every drop the man jerked and moaned like he was being burnt with pincers. We poured a few drops into each of his wounds and pulled open his shirt over his heart. We waited for his breathing to become steadier, and said, “You will need to hold him.”
“What are you doing?” demanded the woman.
“We will keep him alive, as long as we can without harming ourself,” we said. “Our fire in his flesh.”
We poured the blood over his heart. He screamed, but the man obeyed our command and held him down as we rubbed the blood into his chest, the liquid dividing into worms of blue light, each one brighter than a diamond at noonday, which wriggled across his skin for a moment and then started burrowing, digging down into his flesh, a dozen, more, of our sparks burrowing into his skin, his nervous system. Where they had entered his flesh, they left tiny, pale burn marks, and we were not sure if those would heal. However, he slowly relaxed as the last of our blood dug itself into his skin, and his breathing became more natural. Across his skin and in the palm of our hand, the smears of blood still visible gently faded back to their original dark red; carefully we tore the end off our shirt sleeve to bind around our hand and prevent further bleeding.
“Now,” I said breathlessly, fighting the spinning in my head and sickness in my belly, “he’ll live long enough to reach a hospital. Can you get him there?”
The motorbiker smiled. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I think so.”
His bike was parked in the street outside; and the street outside was deafening. Every car alarm wailed, every light was on in every house, and in those where they weren’t on, burglar alarms were blaring out their distress into the night. I could hear sirens in the streets around, police cars getting closer, and one or two braver souls further from the gunfire, who perhaps hadn’t worked out its context, had even opened their front doors and were peering into the street. The bike was big, with huge silver pipes and gears sprawling out of it like the tubes of some demented church organ, and with a giant leather seat and wide handlebars. We slung Sinclair across the front and the motorbiker climbed up behind him, reaching his huge arms across the other man’s mercifully unconscious form, hands just resting on the handlebars, a grin on his face. “I’ll be at UCH, find me,” he said. “Before they do.”
With that, he kicked the stand out from under the bike, and started the engine with a thick, heavy fart of fumes and a roar of the engine like the mournful wail of a dinosaur.
Left behind in the middle of the road, the woman said, “This is too easy.”
“Oh, you just had to go and say it,” I muttered, slinging my satchel into a better position.
“If they were determined to kill us, I’m sure they could have done it in a more efficient manner,” she replied primly.
“You’re jumping in there with question number two on the list.”
“And question one?”
“How the hell did they find us in the first place?”
Her eyes roamed quickly across the street. “Where’s the warlock? The seer woman?”
“I have no idea; let’s start walking.” With my least bloody hand I turned her briskly away from the house. She
