seem so absurd. Not least because at that moment she noticed something. A knife was absent from the knife block next to the toaster. The slot where one of the large carvers was normally sheathed gaped empty.
She drew Ramsay's attention to this.
He looked a question at her: you're sure?
'Don't think we used it tonight,' she whispered. 'It should be there.'
'But not for definite?' he whispered back.
'If it's not there, I don't know where else it would be.'
'Shit.' He rolled his eyes. 'OK, there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for all this. That was a wrong number and Zaina's gone up to her room to get a book or something and the knife's been mislaid and you and I are making a big deal outta nothing.'
The fearful note in his voice undermined everything he said.
'Why hasn't she answered me then?' Sam said.
'I'm trying not to think about that. Come on.'
They headed up the stairs single file, stealthy. The guest room, which Mahmoud was using, lay directly above the kitchen. It used to be Sam's bedroom when she was a girl, and still visible on the door were the shapes of eight wooden letters that had spelled out her name, bright white against the surrounding age-yellowed paintwork. She kept meaning to sand the door down and repaint it, get rid of the ghost name. She had repapered the walls of the guest room itself to cover up the greasy Blu-Tack residue which marked where posters of Take That and the Spice Girls — and, later, Jarvis Cocker and Blur — used to hang. The door had been next on her to-do list, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to erase every last trace of her childhood from the house.
Now the door stood slightly ajar and the white letter silhouettes seemed to be calling to her, beckoning her in. The light inside the guest room was not on. Yet she knew Mahmoud was there. She could sense her, a waiting presence in the dark.
Ramsay rapped carefully with one knuckle, just above the second A of SAMANTHA.
'Zaina? You OK? Sam and I were wondering if there's a problem of some kind. Who was that on the phone? Was it, maybe, Aphrodite?'
Please not, Sam said to herself, but she had been thinking exactly the same thing. Aphrodite had called and had spoken to Mahmoud in her special way, her influential way, and had ordered her to do something — something that involved a carving knife.
'Zaina, we're going to come in,' said Ramsay. 'Nice and gentle. This is me and Sam. Your friends.'
'Titans,' came Mahmoud's voice from the dark. The word rose and fell, eerily neutral, neither quite interrogative nor statement.
'Yeah, Titans. Like you. So is it OK? Us coming in?'
No answer.
Ramsay eased the door inwards, a hinge squeaking softly. He and Sam peered into the darkness, trying to make out as much detail as they could by the twilight glow coming in through the uncurtained window. Bed, wardrobe, dresser, chair, fireplace, radiator — but nothing of Mahmoud.
'Zaina, if Aphrodite's been speaking with you, whatever she's said to you I want you to ignore. It's lies, all of it. You have to remember, Sam and me, we're the good guys, and so are you. We're on the same side. We — '
Sam glimpsed the glint of the blade an instant before it came jabbing through the gap between the door's hinges. She yelled out a warning, but not in time. The knife slashed down Ramsay's arm, raking it from shoulder to elbow. Ramsay recoiled with a shout, colliding with Sam and sending them both asprawl on the landing carpet. He rolled off her, clutching his arm in pain. Sam leapt to her feet.
Mahmoud came out from behind the door and stood framed in the doorway, bloodied carver in her hand. Her eyes were unnaturally wide and staring. Her smile was likewise unnaturally broad. She looked lost and dazed and at the same time serenely happy.
'Oh Sam,' she said, shaking her head slowly from side to side. 'I cut your man. I penetrated him. Just like he penetrates you, when you let him. Doesn't like it, though, does he? Being penetrated. Look at him.'
Ramsay was struggling to get up but he was in shock, grey-faced, gasping. Blood gushed from a deep, foot- long wound in his arm, soaking the carpet.
'Zaina, put the knife down,' Sam said. 'It's not you doing this, it's Aphrodite. You have to fight it. She's told you to attack us, kill us, but you know you don't really want to. Deep in your heart you know.'
'My heart?' echoed Mahmoud. 'Yes, Aphrodite is in my heart. She loves me, I love her, and I'd do anything for her. You don't know much about love, do you, Sam? You've got a man to fuck, and that's great. Everybody needs a good fucking. Me especially. I haven't had a good fucking in ages, and to be honest I'm jealous of you, you with your big stud there. Wish I'd been able to get him to fuck me. But love? You don't do love, do you, duck? It's not in your vocabulary any more. You've forgotten what it means. You've shut yourself off from it, ever since you lost that other fella of yours, that Ade. Let me open you up to love again, Sam.' She reaffirmed her grip on the knife handle. 'Let me open up your heart.'
She ran at Sam with the carver held out at chest height. Sam stepped smartly to one side, as she'd been taught in her training at Hendon. Avoiding the impetus of the blow, she parried at the same time, shoving Mahmoud's arm aside. Mahmoud's momentum carried her forward, but she quickly wheeled and came back. Sam knew she ought to use one of the more vicious control techniques she knew to bring Mahmoud down, but couldn't bring herself to. This was her friend. In the event, all she could do was catch Mahmoud's wrist double-handed, just preventing the knife from plunging into her. The two of them slammed against the landing's wooden balustrade. Mahmoud bore down hard on Sam, forcing her to bend backwards, away from the knifepoint, which quivered over her sternum.
The balustrade was old, an original feature of the house from the late Victorian era. Sam's parents used to caution her often about putting too much weight on it, in case it broke.
Now, with too much weight being put on the balustrade, her parents' prediction came true. Several of the spindles snapped free from their sockets, the handrail cracked in two and gave way, and Sam and Mahmoud plummeted through onto the stairs. Sam took the brunt of the impact with her shoulders, then together she and Mahmoud, with the carver still between them, slither-rolled down to the foot of the flight. Mahmoud tumbled free at the bottom, spreadeagled across the parquet floor. The knife remained in her clutches.
Sam lay upended, stunned, her neck and shoulders in spasm, and though she kept telling herself to get up, get going, because the danger was far from over, her body felt numb and unresponsive and stubbornly refused to move. She looked up, and there was Ramsay peering out over the lip of the landing through the broken balustrade, face tight and pain-wracked.
'Sam…' he groaned. Then, with sudden, bug-eyed urgency: 'Sam!'
Mahmoud appeared, looming over her, the knife poised above her throat.
Sam had no idea how she managed it, but somehow, through some panicked miracle, she found herself scrabbling up the stairs feet first, on all fours, on her back, faster than she would have ever thought possible, like some sort of human crab. Mahmoud came charging up after her, but Ramsay intercepted, reaching out from the landing and seizing her knife hand with his one good arm. She twisted out of his grasp easily, but the delay gave Sam just enough time to reach the top of the flight and right herself and turn.
Mahmoud aimed a couple of ferocious stabs at Ramsay's face, which he barely succeeded in evading. Next moment, Sam hurled herself down the stairs in a headlong lunge, slamming into Mahmoud. The two women staggered all the way to the bottom and crashed together onto the hall floor. This time it was Mahmoud who, being underneath Sam, got the worst of it. The impact jarred the knife from her hand and sent it skidding under the small round table near the front door on which Sam left her house keys and her unopened post.
Sam straddled Mahmoud, pinning her wrists to the parquet.
'Zaina! Listen to me! Snap out of it!'
'This is kinky, isn't it?' Mahmoud's wheedling tone was accompanied by a leery grin. 'I always suspected you'd be an on-top kind of woman. But girl on girl? Isn't that more Therese's thing?'
'Shut up. This isn't you. This isn't the Zaina Mahmoud I know. Aphrodite's turned you into a… a thing. A perverted thing. You have to remember who you are.'
'Such a beautiful voice, the goddess has,' Mahmoud crooned. 'When you hear it — hear it properly — you can't help but listen. It's still in my head, and my heart. She loves us, us Titans. Loves us so much. But we can't carry on. We can't carry on hurting the Olympians. She can't let us. Zeus doesn't want it, and she is his aunt after
