‘Where’s Toshiko Sato?’ demanded Gwen.
‘Safe.’
‘Yeah, cos I’m really gonna believe that.’
Bilis walked towards her and Gwen found that she couldn’t take her eyes off him, couldn’t fire her gun, couldn’t move.
Her eyes flicked sideways. Ianto was the same, a statue, looking ahead, even though Bilis was parallel to him now, next to her.
‘Let me show you how safe she is,’ he purred and clicked his fingers.
Some way away, the door to number 6 opened, and Gwen could see a figure walking down the steps, almost as if in a trance.
It was Toshiko, though. Gwen knew that from her outline, the slight sashay to her steps. And she gasped as Toshiko turned towards them.
Half her face, her right, was painted white, and her eye had livid red streaks, outlined in gold, three going up, three down, like fire, or blood. And her lips were whitened, too. And there was something in the way she stood…
Gwen wanted to call out to her, but her mouth wouldn’t work. And now she couldn’t even blink.
‘It’s a trap you see,’ Bilis whispered in her ear. ‘A trap for the man you call Captain Jack Harkness, but known to me as… Well, no, that’s between us. And you, Gwen Elisabeth Cooper, you are the bait.’
He reached over and eased the gun out of her hand and held it aloft. It vanished, just as she’d seen Bilis himself do before. Then Bilis stepped right into her field of vision, obscuring both Ianto and Tosh.
His eyes were gone, replaced by a blazing white light that seemed so strong it was going to burn its way out of his skull.
‘The war between the Dark and the Light is never ending, Gwen. And I can only apologise – if there was any way I could avoid doing this, I would strive to find it. But I can’t. I’m as much a victim in this as you.’
He took her hands in his. And leaned right in to her face, his white eyes roaring with the power contained there.
‘I’m sorry. I am really very sorry.’
FOURTEEN
Ianto Jones was screaming inside. And there was nothing he could do; he couldn’t move, couldn’t seem to blink.
He was aware Bilis was close to Gwen, but couldn’t turn to see what he was doing.
Then he saw Toshiko, half her face painted white. And red.
Bilis entered his field of vision.
‘What have you done to Gwen?’ Ianto shouted internally, but his mouth, his vocal cords, possibly even his lungs, weren’t moving.
What had Bilis done? How had he done it?
Ianto’s gun just vanished. One second it was there, the next he could feel it was gone.
Feel. So he could still feel, which meant that his nerves worked, which meant that muscles worked on some basic level which meant-
‘Oh, do stop fretting,’ Bilis smiled. ‘So much noise in your head. And so many histories tell us that, in your brief Torchwood career, they always thought you were the quiet one. The one who wouldn’t say “boo” to a goose. I wonder if they ever knew you, Ianto. I wonder if Jack Harkness ever knew you.’
Ianto felt Bilis take his hands.
‘I don’t want to do this, you have to believe that. But there is a good reason. A very good reason. Good for me, anyway. You see, one man’s light is another man’s dark.’ He squeezed Ianto’s hands. ‘But for what it’s worth, I’m awfully sorry.’
As Bilis leaned in, Ianto got a glimpse of Toshiko. The white make-up seemed somehow alive, stretching right across her face. The last he saw of her, her whole face had become white: white skin, white lips; the only colour was the livid red and gold tearing from above and below her closed eyes. Her hair was moving, bunching, and, on either side of her head, hanging from the front of her hair, two cloth rollers. At the back were two long pins, forming the top of an X at the back of her head.
Then Bilis’s head blotted out Ianto’s view, and all he could see was the old man’s face obscured by a fierce light that raged across his face, leaping from his eyes.
And Ianto was screaming again.
Jack stood inside the great Victorian morgue that dominated the basement area many levels beneath the Autopsy Room. He was facing that special row of trays that contained past Torchwood members.
According to Ianto’s notes, Tray 18 was designated for Gregory Phillip Bishop, who was reported dead in late 1941. Of course there was no body in the tray, but Ianto wouldn’t have known that.
At least Jack hoped Ianto didn’t know that. If he did, it would suggest a somewhat unhealthy obsession with frozen bodies, and that was an area even Jack didn’t venture into.
‘Gotta have some standards,’ he thought wryly.
With a deep breath, Jack looked at Tray 78 (most of the Trays were deliberately non-sequential to prevent someone grave-robbing an entire Torchwood team’s past in one fell swoop).
‘Hello, Dr Brennan,’ he said quietly to the tray marked up as Matilda B Brennan. ‘It’s been a while. I wish I could speak with you, find out why you made a deal with the devil. Wonder if you knew who or what Bilis Manger was back then. And if you did, I sure as hell wish you could tell me now.’
He wrenched the tray out, knowing what he’d find in the black body bag. After all, he’d helped Rhydian clear up after the event, so he’d actually placed Tilda’s corpse in there.
The alien cryo-tech that Torchwood used to freeze the dead was something Jack had never truly understood. He doubted anyone had, least of all Charlie Gaskill’s team that had first discovered and utilised it in 1906. Nevertheless, Jack knew it was an important part of their arsenal – one day, a way might be found to bring back an operative who could help a current case. It was something, like an early death, all Torchwood staff were prepared for.
Tilda Brennan wouldn’t be brought back – being minus the top half of your head kind of ruled that out – but it wasn’t her body he wanted. It was the scorched remains of the diary he’d secreted there with her, knowing that one day the ‘Revenge for the Future’ schtick would come back and haunt him.
And here it was. In the form of the enigmatic Bilis Manger, time-hopping killer and bon vivant, charm and danger all contained in the apparently frail body of an old man.
They’d first met in 1941, and again when Bilis had released Abaddon, but Jack still had no idea who the man actually was. He seemed human enough, so he got his abilities (Jack refused to think of them as powers, that sounded like something out of a comic book) from somewhere else. Bilis worshipped Abaddon, and Jack had destroyed ‘the Great Devourer’, but there had to be more to it than that. This was no two-bit villain with one ambition in life – he was simply too good for that.
A mercenary? A man from the future, living in the past? A really, really well-disguised alien?
The solution that nagged at Jack’s conscious mind more than any other was the most disturbing. What if Bilis was a Torchwood officer, not from Cardiff (Ianto had checked, double-checked and checked forty times more) but from Glasgow? From the Institute in London? Or, God help them, from Torchwood Four. That wasn’t a pretty thought.
He’d demonstrated the ability to plant false images of the future into people’s heads. Poor Gwen had fallen for it when Bilis told her Rhys was going to die – and then killed him, knowing that Gwen would open the Rift to bring him back (which it had – but bringing Abaddon along for the ride). He knew from conversations with the others that they’d seen the people that they most missed from their pasts come back too, solid projections that Bilis had controlled and manipulated, suggesting a deep-rooted knowledge of his team. And also the ability to spy on them as, in Owen’s case, the image he’d seen had been of someone he’d lost so very recently.
So, he knew what Bilis could do, just not why and how.
