“You killed him!” Dorothy shrieked.
Even though George had tried to kill him—And he’ll definitely give it another go if he’s still alive!—Warren felt bad about what had happened. He hadn’t intended to hurt George. He’d struck before he’d even known he was going to. Before he knew he could.
“He’s not dead.” Kelli came into the room as well. “George is still breathing.”
Warren had to admit that Kelli was calmer than she would normally have been. She sat on the other side of George and examined his head.
“Nothing seems broken,” Kelli announced.
Dorothy looked up at Warren. “You’re a monster! A horrid, horrid monster!”
“And you’re a twit,” Kelli replied. “Always mooning after George. Like he’d take some notice of you when he has all the other pretty little birds in hand. He shouldn’t have come in here and attacked Warren. I told him that.”
“He had to.” Dorothy brushed long hair from her face. “Don’t you see? Food and water are in scarce supply. He couldn’t just let Warren keep eating and drinking what little we had without helping us get it.”
“I didn’t eat,” Warren said. But he was hungry now. His stomach growled unhappily. He tossed the cricket bat away. “I didn’t even drink much water.”
Dorothy just held on to George’s hand.
Weary of it, not wanting to face the guilt he felt when looking at Dorothy or wanting to deal with George’s predictable anger when he came to his senses, Warren got a fresh change of clothing from his chest of drawers. He headed for the ladder.
“Where are you going?” Kelli asked.
“Out.” Warren swung onto the ladder.
Concern etched her features, pulling them tight. “You’re not ready to—”
“I think I am,” Warren snapped, then missed a rung on the ladder and fell. He dropped twelve feet to the first floor. He landed on his feet, with no more effort than if he’d stepped down from a stair step.
“Warren!” Kelli peered anxiously over the side.
Surprised, Warren looked at his legs. “I’m all right,” he whispered, but it was more to reassure himself than her. He stood there, feeling stronger than he had in days. In fact, he didn’t know when he’d felt so strong.
He went to the bathroom.
Pulling the rags of his old clothes from his body was the worst. Warren cringed when he first started, but it was less painful than he’d thought it would have been.
The clothing remnants came away in pieces, along with strips of burned flesh. He’d thought that the burn injuries would have been infected or bled. Instead, new skin looked white and wrinkled where the heaviest burns had been.
He was healing.
Disbelief washed over him. He stared at the white skin. Evidently he’d lost the pigmentation in his skin. The new growth wasn’t going to come back the same color as his original skin. That bothered him, but he figured that being dead would have been a whole lot more disagreeable.
Kelli brought in snow in buckets, then melted it on the stove. When the water was warm, she poured it into the bathtub.
If the air in London hadn’t been so laden with pollutants, the snow would have at least staved off the water problem. As it was, most people were afraid of drinking the melted snow and getting sick.
Warren luxuriated in the bathtub, noticing the care that Kelli showed toward him. George had been right. She had changed.
As he soaked, Warren saw that more of the burned flesh fell away and left the white skin beneath. A lot of debris even floated away from his left hand, leaving his fingers normal-sized again, even though they were dead-white. They were still numb, though.
He remained in the water until it started to cool. Kelli offered to bring more heated water, but by that time questions had filled Warren’s mind that he knew he needed to have answered. And there was only one place to get those answers.
He got out of the tub and got dressed.
The fire had ravaged the building where the Cabalists had taken up residence. It stood like a barren crag among the other apartment buildings. The top two stories had exploded outward, leaving jagged teeth of brick and mortar.
Warren stood in the cold winter wind in a long black duster. Black crust still clung to his burns in places, but they were islands in the white skin.
“Is this where it happened?” Kelli asked. She had followed him out of the loft, walking just behind him and never speaking.
Warren had considered telling her to stay at the loft, but he hadn’t wanted to be alone. Now, out in the open, he realized how exposed she was to predators, demonic and human.
Neither of them had a weapon.
Footsteps crunched through the snow, closing in from Warren’s right. He turned to look, hoping that he and Kelli weren’t about to be mugged for whatever food they might have on them.
Six men and women in hooded cloaks approached. The lead man was tall and thin. A single short horn protruded from his tattooed forehead.
Warren turned to face the man.
The man stopped. “I’m Malcolm,” he said in a deep, soft voice. “I’m a Seer in the Cabal.”
“I’m Warren.”
“I know who you are,” Malcolm said. “We’d been hoping you would return.”
Warren studied the man’s features, but they didn’t look familiar to him. “Were you here that night?”
The man shook his head. “No. No one who was here that night lived. We lost Jonas and Edith. They were both very important to us. But we found out you’d lived.”
“How?”
“I came here,” Malcolm said. “To find out what had happened. One of the people in the neighborhood that I talked to mentioned seeing a man who had obviously been burned in a fire. The only fire I knew of was this one.” He nodded at the building. “I have a gift for seeing
