loped towards her with casual malice. The whistling of its breath echoed all around, filling the alley. As she cast around for some sort of weapon she saw a Blankleit collapse, exhausted.
Something grey blurred past her. Faster than a hummingbird’s wing, Fil launched himself at the beast.
His spear stopped before he did, torn from his grasp by the same magnetism that had slowed the wolf, and he caught the lower jaw and swung up like an acrobat, landing precariously on the beast’s nose. The Scaffwolf lashed its head furiously but he windmilled his arms and somehow kept his balance.
Beth gasped and breathed again.
‘ Filius — ’ The voice was a wet hiss of air. Gutterglass sounded horrified. He tried to accrete towards his ward, the wrapping paper arm outstretched.
‘Beth!’ Fil snapped, his concentration fierce, ‘hold him there!’
Beth threw herself down hard, clawing at the rubbish. Rats hissed wildly and bit her and the beetles scurried through her hair, but she clung onto the garbage body and Gutterglass could not escape her.
‘Hold it!’ he cried, crouched down like a surfer. His head was bent over as though he was listening for something. A look of incredulous hope emerged onto his face. ‘Hold it, that’s good, lads,’ he cried. ‘Hold it now!’
The Blankleits had gathered around the sides of the wolf. They stood now, palms out, hemming it in with their force. The animal was torn between smashing them and shaking loose the boy who hung from its neck, taunting it. The spear rotated slowly in the air in front of the Scaffwolf, like bait. The animal’s breath whistled through its pipes, echoing off the narrow alley walls.
Another whistle sounded as if in answer, higher-pitched, a sound that seemed to come from inside the bricks of the buildings themselves. A heavy, churning rhythm started shaking the ground. An electric fear paralysed Beth. Don’t wolves hunt in packs?
‘Hold it!’ Fil was screaming now. ‘Hold it there!’
The whistling from the buildings grew louder, and the ground shuddered in a syncopated rhythm: Thrum- clatter-clatter.
Beth had heard that sound before. Maybe it blames you for its mauling, she thought suddenly. Maybe what it wants is payback ‘Hold it!’ Fil was hanging by one hand from the wolf’s shoulder and as it turned and snapped at him its teeth sliced the air inches from his face. His fingers slipped on the metal. He was going to fall Beth couldn’t watch; she turned her head away and gazed sightlessly into the shop window. The dead gaze of the mannequins met hers, and behind them…
Behind the glass, two tiny pinpricks of light were growing.
‘Hold it! Hold it!’
Thrum-clatter-clatter-thrum-clatter-clatter-thrum-clatter-clatter The points of light in the window swelled into headlamps and wind whipped Beth’s hair against her forehead. The whistling climbed to a shriek.
‘Hold it,’ His voice was frantic but triumphant: ‘ Hold it! ’
The shop window exploded.
Beth curled into a ball as shattered glass rained down. Hot pain flared where it lacerated her. Dead straight grooves like tracks ripped through the cobbles — but they swerved around her. Lights rushed past barely an inch from her head.
For an instant, she saw it, her Railwraith — but it looked vague, weaker than she remembered. It can’t survive away from the tracks; that’s what Fil had said. It was already dying. But she looked in through its windows and saw its ghostly passengers: sewing and chattering and texting: every face was fiercely determined.
Fil leapt, snatching his spear from the air, as the Railwraith rushed towards the wolf’s empty eyesockets.
Metal screamed for a long second, then silence.
Beth touched her ear and felt something wet. She was shivering, she realised. She rose to her knees, and fell straight back. Twisted scaffolding filled the alley, glowing red-hot and seething with smoke. A steam-whistle cry ghosted from the air.
Beth twitched her toes. They responded, so she tried to stand again, and this time she made less of a hash of it.
Fil lay were he’d been cast against a wall. His skin was livid with cuts, but he was sitting up before Beth reached him. His eyes were glazed and his nose had been snapped hard to the right. His grin was crooked. ‘Glas?’ he asked.
Beth groped for the eggshells in her hoodie pocket. They were whole. She set them down and after a second rats and worms and beetles started writhing out of the brickwork, building their master around them.
Gutterglass could barely stand. Fil had to support him. ‘My my,’ he murmured. ‘What a mess.’
His eggshell eyes fell on Beth and a little rill of shock went through her. ‘Nicely taken,’ he said, and pointed at his eyes. A grimace crossed his garbage face. ‘Filius,’ he murmured, ‘I need to talk to you alone.’ Leaning heavily on Fil, he lurched out of the lane.
The alley had been badly damaged: windows smashed, stone and brickwork clawed. At the mouth Beth could see Victor, semaphoring to the crowd of Blankleits with her torch. Their glow reached back into the cul-de-sac, and Beth could see that barely half of them had survived. The rest were dust and burn-marks on the ground.
Beth staggered in amongst the wreckage of the wolf. There was no sign of her train. Desperately she tried to think: where were the nearest train tracks? The Underground ran close by, that nexus of lines at Oxford Circus. Could her Railwraith have reached them in time? Please, she prayed inside her head, please have made it.
There was an electric sense in the air, like the ghost of an emotion, a residue the wraith had left behind it. It was a feeling of pride, of making amends. The Railwraith had swerved around her, she thought, awestruck. She hadn’t imagined it. She remembered how ashamed it had seemed when it fled from the freight train’s attack. You were its passenger, Fil had said. It hadn’t been stalking her, it had been looking out for her.
Anyone who’s crazy enough to ride one Railwraith and shout at another needs all the help she can get.
Apparently, her Railwraith had felt the same.
She felt grateful, and sick, and like she didn’t deserve it.
You think they can’t feel, and think and bloody love? His words rang round her head. There’s more lives at stake here than the ones that look like you.
A lump filled Beth’s throat and she found herself starting to cry.
‘Beth.’ Fil and Gutterglass had reappeared at the mouth of the alley. Ants still raced over Glas’ cheek, filling in gaps with scraps of matchbox, but he looked steadier now.
Fil’s scratched and burnt face scrunched up. His voice was gruff, as though he’d been shouting. ‘Beth,’ he tried again.
Gruffness didn’t suit his voice, Beth thought; he was just a teenager, like her.
He took a step forward, then looked back at Gutterglass as if for support. The rubbish man smiled grimly and motioned him forward.
‘Beth,’ Fil said, ‘you need to leave. Now.’
CHAPTER 24
Pen shivered in the tower as dawn crept into the nooks and crevices of the building site. She had been longing for sunrise, but it let her down: the daylight failed to banish her nightmare.
Below her, the machines worked on remorselessly. Immobilised as she was, only when the wind tugged the tarpaulin away could she see glimpses of a crane at the top of its arc, or a flash of yellow tape on the flank of a digger. The sources of the screams stayed mercifully out of sight.
Chatter floated up: tourists at the Cathedral. To them, this carnage would sound like any other construction work. It did to her, too. Nothing about the sounds was special; it was her hearing that had changed. She heard the cries of pain from the foundations as they were shredded, and they chilled her.
When the red faded out of the sunrise, the wire decided it was time for her to sleep. Rest, it scratched with her finger in the dust. Then it bent her at the knee and the waist and laid her flat on her back. It was rigid around her, like a wire coffin.
