Leah watched as Lyra ran her left forefinger along the sleeve of her right arm. The armor obediently opened up and revealed a gleaming prosthetic arm.
“I’m not exactly sure how I survived that encounter. The next thing Iremember was waking up in a medical facility that hadn’t been overrun withwounded and dying from the demon attacks. At that point, the British military was dead in the streets. Tanks and fighters jets littered Greater London. And the Templar were shedding their life’s blood at St. Paul’s.”
Leah stared at the prosthetic arm. She’d read about them and knew they werepart of emerging technology, but she hadn’t known they were being used in thefield.
“The injury should have mustered me out of MI-6.” Lyra smiled. “If the demoninvasion hadn’t taken place, if London hadn’t become occupied territory, itwould have. Instead, since I had been close to Lord Sumerisle and the Templar, I was repaired and put back into the field.”
Repaired. The term jarred Leah’s thoughts when she contemplated how thewoman had been repaired like a piece of equipment and returned to service. But in the end, that’s all any of them were: parts of a well-oiledmachine.
They were supposed to perform like a well-oiled machine, too. She hadn’t thepast couple of days. By now Command probably knew it had been longer than that. Which was why she was where she was.
“Not many of our people believe in the Templar,” Lyra said.
“Command isn’t comfortable knowing anyone has had more information than theyhave,” Leah replied. “Especially not by a few hundred years’ worth.”
“The Templar haven’t been the only ones who knew things. We’ve had data. Wejust didn’t know how to interpret it. Like the tube you brought in with you.We’ve known about Goetia. We just didn’t know it applied to this messwe’re in now.”
Leah looked at the other woman and took a deep breath. All right, then. This is where we get down to it.
FORTY
Warren trudged through the dank expanse of the tube station in Bloomsbury. Night had fallen over the city again, and the demons hunted fearlessly. So far he had missed all of them.
Fear remained his constant companion. And the voice that haunted the back of his mind.
“I’m here,” the voice said. “Don’t be so tense. We’ve made a good plan, youand I. This time we have more control of the playing field.”
Warren wished he felt as confident as the voice sounded. Merihim had visited him earlier to make sure he was taking up the hunt for Knaarl. When he’d beensatisfied Warren was properly fearful, he’d-vanished. But Warren had gotten thefeeling that whatever the demon was working on was building to a crescendo.
Merihim’s obvious lack of interest in what Warren was doing bothered him. Forfour years he’d served the demon, not faithfully but out of self-preservation.He’d wanted to believe what he was doing mattered more than was apparent now.
“What you’re doing matters to Merihim,” the voice said. “More than you canknow at this juncture.”
“Why is it more than I can know?”
“Because certain events have yet to be played in this. If you know everything you shouldn’t, you may change the things you are going todo.”
Warren came to a full stop in the deserted tube station. Buckled cars filled with the skeletons of unfortunates who’d died during the wrecks when the systemswent offline occupied the dead tracks. More corpses that had been prey to demons occupied the empty spaces. Warren had learned to simply walk over them. Bones crunched under his combat boots.
“You can see into the future?” Warren asked.
The voice was silent for a time. “I can’t see, but I can makepredictions based on factors that I’m aware of.”
“Can you make a prediction about tonight? About what I’m getting ready todo?”
“Yes. I predict that you’ll have success if everything goes as we’veplanned.”
“You’ll forgive me if I feel somewhat underwhelmed by that announcement.”
“There are always mysteries that we cannot understand,” the voice said.
“That’s right. You didn’t exactly set out to get yourself bound, did you?”Warren wished he could have kept his mouth shut. But the words had tripped over his lips before he could stop them.
“No, I didn’t. That was an x factor at work. But so was the fact that I couldcommunicate with anyone. My captors couldn’t have counted on that.”
In the cold dark of that tunnel, Warren suddenly realized something else that he knew he should have seen. “I was an x factor too. If you could have talked toanyone else, you would have.”
The voice didn’t say anything.
“Admit it,” Warren said angrily. “You couldn’t have just talked to anyoneelse.”
“You’re right.” Instead of sounding chastised, the voice held a dangeroustone for the first time. “But we need each other to be free. Neither of us cando it alone. And I’ve already been waiting for hundreds of years. Could you waitso long?”
Some of Warren’s newfound confidence and feelings of success evaporated.Mortality was an issue. He’d already spent four years in service to Merihim. Howmany more could he spend with the demon constantly putting him on the firing line before his luck ran out?
“We need each other,” Warren said.
“Yes.”
But it remained to be seen who didn’t need who first. The thought chilledWarren as he started walking along the tube from the Holborn station toward the British Museum again.
Little more than an hour later, Warren reached the tunnel that the voice had told him would be there. The tunnel wasn’t open, however. It lay on the otherside of the concrete wall that separated it from the tube line.
When the British Museum was established in 1753, complete with the massive underground storage facilities for exhibits and items that had yet to be sorted out, the founders had also built service tunnels to them. During the intervening years, all of them had been closed, walled off in one way
