‘Yeah.’
‘You think it was a mistake.’
Beth swallowed a boulder of empty air. ‘Yeah.’
‘You think — what? It’ll distract us? It’s too risky?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You think we should just be friends?’
‘Yeah.’
He stepped in close to her. The frost-cloud of his breath washed over her face. ‘You wanna do it again?’
‘Yeah…’
There was supposed to be a but somewhere on the end of that, but somehow Beth never got it out, because his lips with their rough pavement grain were already against hers, and she was tasting the heat of his tongue. Their hands rose, and they held each other’s heads as though the kiss were a promise they were holding each other to: a promise simply to be there, a promise to survive.
But they couldn’t keep that promise, could they?
Beth wound her fingers into Fil’s hair and pulled him back, hard, and he came away from her, gasping. She looked at him, r eally looked, into his wide eyes, and saw him for the trap that he was. His voice sounded in her memory: Reach is going to kill me. It was like standing above some unimaginable precipice, her toes curling over the edge. This was too much of a risk. An image flashed into her head, a floor littered with photographs. Now was the time to stop. Little detonations were filling her veins. The blood in her ears was artillery-loud. Now was the time to back away. Her head was ringing.
Now.
They fell in an awkward tangle of limbs into the chill leaves, their hands hovering uncertainly on one another’s bodies. For a fraction of a second Beth thought she wouldn’t have the nerve. Then she pushed her fingers inside his clothes and as her hoodie rode up she felt the shocking heat of his palms pressed up against her bare skin. Then he was tugging at her T-shirt and she was pushing it off over her head. And it was happening, it was happening so fast, and she was going to let it happen No, she thought, no, she was going to make it happen. She pushed into him and kissed him, determined to be bold, guiding his hands to her bra.
Unfortunately he struggled a bit with that, and she broke away after a few moments. ‘Christ’s sake, Fil, it’s a bra, not a Rubik’s cube.’
‘A what?’
‘A puzzle-’
‘Puzzle? You mean like a test? I have to pass an exam for this?’
‘It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,’ she laughed. ‘Here, let me.’ She unhooked it and then hesitated, suddenly aware of him looking at her in a way that made her shiver all over. She’d never simultaneously wanted and not wanted something anything so much as for him to look away…
Okay. In her head it sounded more like a prayer than a decision. Okay.
‘Take your jeans off, then,’ she said as she wriggled out of her own. Nerves made her voice haughty and she winced inwardly, but he didn’t seem to mind.
He didn’t look away, of course, and neither did Beth as he stripped. She studied the play of his muscles under the skin intently, and the sharp lines of his hips. It would have been rude not to.
They stepped towards each other tentatively, like new dance partners. Beth blushed as they each put cautious hands on the other’s hips, and she saw his face colour too. They broke into enormous, jaw-straining grins.
‘Wow,’ he said.
A sound came through the trees: a commotion, blowing the silence apart. She could hear shouting, and the crackle of branches broken by running feet. From overhead came the thud of churning air, stirred by heavy stone wings.
Fil dropped to a crouch, pulling Beth down with him. For a moment Beth was certain they’d been busted, and a burning tide of embarrassment went through her, halted abruptly by the chill realisation that it was much more likely they were under attack. She cocked her head, probing with her newly sharpened senses, listening for the enemy.
And then she heard Ezekiel’s voice over the beat of his wings, pealing out again and again with evangelical joy: ‘It’s the Cats! Filius, come quickly, it’s Fleet! The Cats are here!’
Fil stopped rooting through the undergrowth for his clothes long enough to turn to Beth with a sheepish little shrug, but she cut him off before he spoke.
‘Later,’ she said, vibrating with a mix of relief and aching disappointment and a kind of anticipation that made her knees feel like untied knots. ‘I know.’
Four lithe feline shapes threaded their way over the grass, following the indirect and mysterious paths that cats always do. Pavement Priests and Lampfolk and Masonry Men all stood back in awe as the four-footed legends slid through their ranks, imperiously swishing their tails.
Names were whispered, passing through the ragtag army like a breeze through rushes, names from never- quite-forgotten stories:
Cranbourn, the Herald.
Wandle, the Dream-guide.
Tyburn, they whispered fearfully, the Executioner. A black Cat bared its teeth as it passed.
Fleet…
Fleet!
Now and then one of the Cats would stop and stretch and rub itself along the inside of somebody’s leg, and that fortunate soul would immediately collapse in religious ecstasy.
Fil shoved his way through the milling crowds into the clearing where the Cats circled. Beth raced in a fraction of a second behind him, pulling her hoodie over her head, only to find she’d got it on the wrong way. She clawed the hood out of her eyes in time to see him fall to his knees.
The mangy tabby at the head of the group bounded into his scrawny arms.
‘Fleet,’ he whispered, ‘ Fleet — dear Thames, we’ve needed you.’ The tabby purred back at him, loud as a motorbike.
The other Cats, one black, one black and white, and a Persian grey with a chunk of her ear missing, rolled on the grass and chased the rippling light spilling from the Blankleit skins. The Persian sat down, put its hind leg behind its head and licked itself clean with long strokes of its bright pink tongue.
‘Um, Fil,’ Beth said, watching the infamous feline war party with growing unease, ‘aren’t they just, you know… cats?’
He didn’t answer, but an indignant voice from inside a bronze of a World-War-Two fighter pilot shouted ‘Blasphemy!’
Beth ignored him; she was following Fil’s gaze. He was looking past Fleet, past the eager soldiers, straining to see into the dark. Beth knew what he was looking for: a shimmer of vast estuary water skirts, a smile of church- spire teeth, hands that had cradled the fabled Great Fire. He was searching for some sign of the One these feline bodyguards ought to be protecting.
But as they stared together into the darkness of Battersea Park, only the darkness looked back.
CHAPTER 34
Paul Bradley stood on the dead tracks and gazed at the walls of the abandoned railway tunnel. His mouth was drier than the brick dust in the air. He’d run from picture to picture, street to street, scouring walls, phone boxes, billboards — anything that Beth might have used as her impromptu canvas. Once he had grown accustomed to her style, he could instantly spot when graffiti was hers.
He’d followed a running ostrich here, a flamenco dancer in a black hat there — there must have been hundreds of them, always half-hidden, coyly poking out from behind bushes or imprisoned behind drain-gratings. Their sheer number shocked him.
