‘He was following you.’ She gave Crowther a surly stare for emphasis.
‘I’m trying to help,’ Church protested. ‘There are people after Jack.’
The boy came over to study Church. He had a strong, honest face with a touch of innocence. Church wondered how he would be able to tell the boy that he carried a force for destruction inside him. ‘My name’s Jack, too.’
‘Is that supposed to create a bond or something?’ the girl sneered.
‘Mahalia,’ the boy cautioned. ‘Why would anyone want to come after me?’ he asked Church. ‘I just want a quiet life. I’m no trouble to anyone.’
‘Frankly,’ Crowther said, ‘we’ve found that the best way to survive is not to trust anyone.’
A deep, low moan rose up somewhere nearby, slowly becoming a chilling howl. It sounded like a word, but all Church heard was the ‘oooo’ that ended it. They all fell silent, unnerved.
‘Was that an animal?’ Mahalia said, spooked.
From the bottom of the stairs came the sound of the front door being thrown open. Tombstone’s voice drifted up: ‘That kid definitely said he came in here.’
‘Okay, Jude Law!’ Nelson called. ‘This is Detective Nelson! Get your ass out where I can see you!’
‘Cops!’ Mahalia said. ‘He led them here!’
‘They’re after me, not you!’ Church said.
‘It looks like we need to find a new home,’ Crowther said. ‘Let’s try to get out of here with a little more alacrity, shall we?’
Crowther disappeared back into the room, but Jack waited for Mahalia to catch up with him; Church noted the tenderness of the boy’s expression when he looked at her.
As Church made to get up to follow, Mahalia planted her boot forcefully in his gut, then ran with Jack after Crowther. Gasping, Church managed to scramble into the room as the detectives thundered up the stairs.
The apartment was clean and orderly, but empty. In the final room, a ragged hole in the wall gave way to a crawl space and a ladder to the floor below. Church followed the sound of disappearing footsteps down and through two other apartments to a makeshift hatch that gave access to a large, dark industrial space, which appeared to be an old warehouse. It was a maze of vast, echoing rooms and low-ceilinged corridors with peeling, lime-washed walls.
Distorted echoes made it almost impossible to tell who was pursuer and who pursued. As someone approached, Church slipped into a space behind a heavy door that had been jammed open. It was Oakes, talking quietly on his mobile phone.
‘I’ve lost him for now,’ he said. ‘It’s only a matter of time. Kill the other two — we can’t risk any contact with the Key. And get someone to dump that sword in the river.’
He pocketed the phone and moved cautiously down the corridor, gun drawn. Church’s heart pounded. He had to get back to help Shavi and Tom, but that would mean losing whatever tenuous lead he had on Jack. In a city of nearly twenty-two million people, what chance would he have of finding the boy again? There was no choice. He had to trust Shavi and Tom to look after themselves.
For the next ten minutes he roamed the labyrinthine area, hiding whenever the echoes of voices or footsteps drew closer, but the exit proved elusive. Either the building was bigger than he thought, or whatever force was at play in the city was attempting to keep him trapped.
The animalistic howling rose up again, unmistakable but so low it could have been the wind blowing through an empty room. It was in the building with him.
As he rounded a corner into another long corridor, he was stunned to see Ruth at the far end, her head bowed as she worked the lock of a door. She got it open and peeked inside the room, excited by what she saw there. Was it Jack? he wondered.
Church couldn’t risk calling out to her, but as she prepared to enter the room, she glanced round and saw him. Her smile lit up her face. She beckoned to him eagerly and then went through the door.
Church raced to catch up. The door had closed behind her. His fingers were already on the handle when a shiver of doubt ran through him. Instinctively, he felt something was wrong. Why hadn’t Ruth waited for him, or left the door open?
He removed his fingers from the handle and listened. All was silent on the other side of the door. He shivered. It could have been his imagination, but he had the impression that something was waiting for him, listening for the moment when he would open the door. A chill ran through him.
Telling himself he was foolish, he gripped the handle again and began to turn it, but this time warnings shrieked in his head. He paused again, and in that instant he heard a barely audible sound on the other side, little more than an exhalation, but it filled him with unaccountable dread. As he released the handle and ran, he could feel on his back the weight of that door and whatever lay behind it.
Finally he came to a large echoing space where water dripped from a broken pipe high up in the shadows. As he made his way across it, the smell of fresh blood reached him. In an area illuminated by a shaft of streetlight coming through a dirty window lay Oakes. His stomach had been torn open, the pool of blood around him looking like a sea. Not all of him was there.
The brutality of the scene held Church in its gravity. He wasn’t aware of the approach until the gun was placed at his head.
‘Jesus H. Christ.’ Tombstone couldn’t tear his gaze from Oakes’s body.
Nelson bumped the gun barrel against Church’s temple. ‘You saw who did this?’
‘No,’ Church replied. ‘But you’ve got to get back to the precinct. Someone’s going to try to kill my friends. I heard Oakes order it-’
‘Shut up and lie down on the floor.’
8
‘Stand up. You’re coming with me.’ The policeman at the door of Shavi’s holding cell was not the guard who had been watching him for the last four hours. This one reminded him of an older Brad Pitt, good-looking in his youth but now starting to turn to fat from too long at a desk.
‘Is this more questioning? I have told you all I can.’
‘Shut up.’
He escorted Shavi past the interview room where he had spent an unpleasant twenty minutes with the detectives earlier that night, but when he bypassed the main detectives’ room and entered a deserted stairwell that took them two storeys below street level, Shavi’s unease grew. At that time of night, they encountered no other people.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Shavi pressed.
His guard didn’t answer. Eventually they came to a small room cluttered with filing cabinets, where Tom was slumped in a chair, dried blood around a bruised cut on his forehead. The policeman locked the door behind them before taking out a gun that was not police issue. He proceeded to fit it with a silencer.
‘If you haven’t guessed by now, he’s one of the spider people,’ Tom said.
Shavi glanced around for a weapon.
‘Don’t bother,’ Tom said, ‘unless you want to give him a lethal paper cut.’ He added ruefully, ‘I never thought you would be the Brother of Dragons to die.’
‘You know we will lose one of our own?’
‘I’ve known for a long time that one of you will go very soon. It was just a flash … more an impression … a blue flame being extinguished.’ He shrugged. ‘No point making a meal of it. It wouldn’t have helped matters to have everyone worrying about their mortality.’
‘It must be difficult for you to continue with that knowledge … with all the other knowledge of future suffering you must have.’
‘It’s not been a holiday in the sun. Not that I’ll have to worry about it any more now.’ Tom appeared almost to be welcoming his impending death.
The policeman levelled his gun at Shavi. ‘On your knees.’
