“Oracles.”
“Our friends here.” He gestured to the last dead being before toeing him over the edge, followed by the barrow. “Let’s go.”
He drew Ilsa to her feet and took her by the elbow.
“No,” she growled, looking over her shoulder at the dark fish market where Martha still lay. Fowler didn’t answer her protest; he just lifted her over his shoulder and ran.
She was lucky not to vomit again. Between his inhuman speed and the abrupt halting every time he needed to look or listen, her innards couldn’t keep up with him. By the time he dropped her unceremoniously on some wet slabs, she was bewildered, terrified and giddy beyond belief. The man wasn’t even short of breath.
“You ain’t of this world,” she said. The truth of it chimed through her, rousing equal parts horror and excitement.
“No,” he said. “But then, my lady, neither are you.”
His words were a brief flash of ringing clarity; a moment of calm in perfect chaos, like the eye of a storm. The feeling dissipated when Fowler hushed her and drew his blade again. Fearing there were more Oracles – as he’d called them – nearby, Ilsa struggled onto her knees and forced her vision to right itself.
They had come at least a mile from the fish market. There was no one else in sight, but directly above them loomed the twin turrets of Westminster Abbey, and across the wide intersection were more buildings, some with lamps burning within. Ilsa didn’t know what those buildings were, but surely if she could scream, someone would hear her.
“What would you achieve?” said Fowler, as if he had read her mind; perhaps that was another of his talents. Before she was fully on her feet, he had scooped her up again, and then they were in a tiny quadrangle. Shadowy cloisters surrounded them on all sides, and the abbey above blocked what little starlight penetrated the smog and the cloud cover beyond. With his long knife in one hand, Fowler withdrew the lamp he had claimed.
It was a luminescent stone, a little like a quartz crystal she had once seen in an occult shop. There was no flame, and no gas or oil to be seen. It surely hadn’t been glowing in his pocket, but in his hand, it shone from within with a bright white light – enough to reveal a fountain in the centre of the quadrangle.
“Tell me where you’re taking me,” she demanded.
“Home.” He raised the stone higher and shone it about the cloisters to be sure they were alone, then he approached the fountain and sank a gloved hand into the shallow water. “Your people tell me you have alpha blood, and you’re in danger here. A lot of it, I would wager, if the rumours are true.”
Not a word of his explanation made sense, but the word home played on a yearning deep inside her.
“And the way to this place is in this courtyard?”
He was circling the fountain, and when his hand met with something concealed beneath the surface, he glanced up at her and almost smiled. There was a trembling, groaning sound of metal and stone shifting as he turned some sort of wheel beneath the surface, and Ilsa stepped back, out of the way of the passage opening in the ground beneath her. The head of the fountain itself was revolving as the slabs around it fell away like dominoes to become a spiral staircase leading down into the earth. When Fowler had completed a full revolution of the fountain, he was stood on the topmost step.
So, it was true. The devil’s earthly realm was real, and here underneath Westminster Abbey was its gate. Ilsa heard a sound from the gaping, black entry – the hiss of a draft, or was it the whispering of a demon or ghoul? She didn’t want to find out. “I won’t go down there.”
Her captor’s jaw set, and he let out a slow breath. It was the only sign that she was trying his patience. When he spoke, his voice was patient and calm. “The portal only appears to lead down.”
Still, Ilsa shook her head. With three slow strides, he came to stand in front of her, and took her bound wrists in his hands.
“I will be met with questions if I turn up in your quarter with a Changeling as a prisoner, so I need to untie you. When I do, I would appreciate it if you would not make me manhandle you down that staircase.”
“Them things what killed Martha, and this evil magic you’ve tied me with, and you.” She was struggling to maintain some dignity amidst her fear. “P’raps I don’t want to go home if where I belong’s the devil’s realm.”
Fowler let out a breath that might have been a chuckle. “My lady, if I told you where we were going was a pleasant, safe place – a home to be proud of – I would be lying. But it is not the devil’s realm. We call it the Witherward, and this, the Otherworld. And there are far worse horrors this side of the coin, believe me.” As he spoke, he unwound the strange cords from her wrists until she was unhampered. The second they fell away, her power answered, swelling alongside a relief so intense that for a moment nothing else mattered. She tested her magic, turning her hair red, then fair, then dark again, the curls bunched in a shaking fist before her face so she could be sure; she could cheat the universe again.
When she could breathe she looked up to find Fowler had retreated to the staircase. She was free to make a break for it if she chose; he was far enough away that she could be out of his reach in time, high above the cloisters.
But he hadn’t harmed her. In fact, he had saved her life. And
