Rebellion

Alice, bloodied and bruised and aching all over. Smoke curled from the rafters, and the floor glowed in places, the steel puckered from the heat.

Alice lay on her back in the middle of the floor, breathing the boiling air and wondering exactly how much it was going to hurt when she stood up, and then she heard feathers moving above her.

“Need a lift?” The Earthbound was hovering just above her, his wings beating lazily.

“Show-off,” she groaned, easing herself upright.

He shrugged. “Floor’s a bit... unstable, thanks to you.” He pointed at a ragged hole in the floor just to Alice’s left. Something unpleasantly liquid was bubbling around the edges.

“I’ll be honest. I don’t make a habit of accepting lifts from strange men...”

“You might want to make an exception. What with the floor about to fall apart.” He held a hand out to her, and – wincing – she took it. “Name’s Castor.”

“Nice to meet you, Castor. I’m Alice.” She allowed herself to be lifted clear, and carried across the floor. Castor gently set her down on the cooler steel of the stairs.

“I know. I was at the gate into hell.”

“I missed that bit. I was... busy.” It didn’t quite cover it, but it sounded slightly better than Actually, I was fighting with my dead mother, who was trying to kill me at the time. I won.

“It was quite a show. Maybe not as big a stunt as the one you pulled: you burned hell, didn’t you?”

“No.” Her voice was sharper than she’d meant it to sound. “No. That was Michael. All Michael.” There was a worrying creak from overhead, and Alice remembered the roof. “We need to go. It’s not safe...”

As if to prove her point, a siren sounded somewhere nearby.

Half-running, half-stumbling down the stairs with her ribs and shoulders screaming, Alice felt a tug at her shoulder and Castor pressed something into her hand as he ran past her. It was small and curved, and cold. As she reached the ground, she stopped just long enough to open her fist and peer inside. A tooth. No... a fang. One of the tattoo-snake’s fangs. It had stuck in there. She stared at it for a moment, more than a little shocked – and it was only the siren sounding directly outside the front of the warehouse that brought her back to herself. Balling her fist around the tooth again, she clambered out of the same broken window she had come in, and hurried away.

TOBY HAD HEARD the siren, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of a car or fire engine now. Not that it mattered; he was only being nosy, and could do with something to brighten up the walk home from the pub. It wasn’t like sirens were a rarity these days, anyway. Not with the riots, and everything else that seemed to be going on. He’d left his friends watching the football; he wasn’t in the mood. He must have been lousy company, because they didn’t try to persuade him to stay. They weren’t exactly great conversationalists themselves this evening, but he took the hint. Besides, an early night would do him good.

He turned up the collar of his jacket and stuck his hands in his pocket, whistling tunelessly as he walked – and then something caught his eye. He’d only seen it for a second, just as he passed the end of an alley, and when he looked again there was nothing there. But it was odd; he could have sworn, really sworn that he had just seen someone moving in the alley. And – just for a moment – it had looked like they were on fire.

Satisfied there was nothing there, that it had been a trick of the light, Toby went back to his whistling and carried on towards home.

Alice pressed herself deeper into the shadows and watched him go.

CHAPTER FIVE Broken Wings

ADRIEL DID NOT look surprised when Alice knocked on his office door. He didn’t look up at all – just gestured to the chair in front of his desk with one hand while he carried on writing with the other. It didn’t even seem to bother him that it was almost midnight and she was covered in bruises.

She pointed this out to him as she sat down.

Adriel capped his pen and set it to one side, closing his notebook and folding his hands on top of it before fixing her with a stern gaze. “And what, precisely, would you like me to say?”

“Well... nothing. I was just –”

“My dear girl, do you really think you are the only creature to walk through that door in the middle of the night? Or, indeed, the strangest?” There was a rustling sound as he sat back in his chair.

“If you put it like that, then fine.” Alice folded her arms, and winced. The pain in her ribs had decided to move right on up to the next level.

She didn’t quite know why she’d come to the funeral parlour. It wasn’t on her way home and she hadn’t exactly expected Adriel to be sympathetic. It was just that she couldn’t quite face going home to that empty room and trying to clean herself up. Now the adrenalin had faded, and the bruises were starting to ache, she just felt tired, and alone. Adriel might not be sympathetic, but at least he understood.

He may have been unimpressed by her appearance, but he was still watching her. “You would appear to have had an... active evening.”

“You could say that.” She leaned forward, ignoring the complaints from her ribs and her shoulders, and dropped the snake fang on his desk.

Looking surprised for the first time, he picked it up and turned it over in his fingers; first holding it up to the light, then – bizarrely – tapping it against one of his own teeth.

“It was in my shoulder. In. My. Shoulder. I don’t even know where to start with that.” She turned sideways in the chair, rolling her injured shoulder towards him. Two holes were clearly visible in the fabric of her jacket, and Adriel looked from the fang to Alice and back again.

“So it was you who had the run-in with Murmur. I had my suspicions. The fire, for one...” He sighed, and took a small box out of one of the drawers of his desk, dropping the tooth into it and tucking the whole thing back out of sight. “This is why I wanted you here, where I could keep an eye on you.”

“Keep an eye on me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Precisely what I said.”

“No. No, no, no. You don’t all get to treat me like I’m some barely housetrained puppy that someone’s left with you for the weekend...”

“Puppy? I’m afraid I don’t follow the analogy.”

“It’s just... it’s like... Look, it sounded really good in my head, okay?” She slumped back in the chair.

“I’m sure it did.” He stood up. “Come with me.”

“Last time I listened to an angel who said that, I...” She tailed off when she saw the look he was giving her. The whole room darkened under his glare; shadows pooled in the corners and crept along the walls.

“It was not a request, Alice.”

Of course it wasn’t.

TRYING HER HARDEST to ignore her aching... well, everything, Alice followed him out of his office and towards the steel swing doors. The lights were off, and Alice could barely make out where his black wings stopped and the dark of the hallway began... but she knew where he was going.

The mortuary.

ALICE HAD YET to venture into the embalming suite. Not that she had any particular desire to go there, of course, but for Adriel to casually saunter through the door and tell her to follow him felt... odd. Particularly when she distinctly remembered him telling her she didn’t have to go back there. She’d hoped that would be a permanent thing. Clearly not.

The lights flicked on automatically as Adriel walked in, and a shroud of cool air wrapped around them. It smelled like disinfectant: to be fair, she’d been expecting worse. The ceiling was higher than the rest of the office,