“It was the apprentice, we know,” said Ilsa.
Within his limited range of motion, Hardwick shook his head. “No. Cogna wanted him. He did not want Cogna.”
Eliot’s and Ilsa’s eyes met, and each saw their confusion mirrored.
“What’d he tell you to do at the temple?” said Ilsa.
“Find the crypt,” choked Hardwick. “He needed to know if it was true what he heard. That there’s a crypt under the temple.”
“Is there? A crypt?” said Eliot. Hardwick hesitated, so with a flash Eliot slashed the blade across his cheek. The crimson blood was especially chilling against the pale sheen of his skin. The Oracle howled.
“Yes! There’s a crypt, yes! The alpha went to break in and found Cogna instead. Whatever the alpha wants, it isn’t there.”
Ilsa wanted to ask what Gedeon had been after, where he was, anything, but their time was up. On the footbridge above them, quick footfalls were approaching. She spun; men and women, all in capes of various shades of pink, were looking down on them like spectators around an arena.
The cloaks had them surrounded. It was a good job they could grow wings.
Eliot shoved Hardwick away from him. His eyes swept the cloaks above despairingly, but he spared a glare for Ilsa. “Too late for diplomacy now. Think small,” was all he said before turning into a sparrow.
Ilsa followed suit, but couldn’t help questioning the wisdom of Eliot’s words; fast, not small, was usually her first rule of escape.
But she quickly learned why small was better, when the first missile came at them. It was a dustbin lid, lifted psychokinetically from the street below and used to herd them in the direction of another missile; a basket of mushrooms stolen from a cart. On all sides, whatever objects their hunters could find filled the air and manoeuvred to trap them, and only their diminutive size allowed them to evade capture. They moved erratically, around buildings, over and under bridges, back on themselves, until the Psi had lost sight of them amidst their own enchanted jumble. Ilsa hung on Eliot’s tail, determined not to find herself alone down here.
A horn sounded, then another. A cacophony of brass notes sang out, alerting more cloaks to their presence. Before they were out of range of the first wave of Psi missiles, more magenta capes flashed below and a wall of nets rose above them, fine enough to catch even a sparrow. Ilsa beat her wings in a frenzy, straining for a gap, but there was nowhere to escape to but below, where the cloaks waited with restraints that looked alarmingly like the ones Cadell Fowler had used to stopper her power.
If Ilsa could only fight in one form, it wasn’t going to be a sparrow. As the small, walled-in square below got near, she commanded her muscles to change again, and she hit the ground on the four massive paws of a giant snow leopard. Eliot changed too, becoming his favourite panther. They were surrounded on three sides by magenta-clad Psi, a wall at their backs. Ilsa’s hackles raised. They could shred a dozen cloaks each, but they would still be in their territory, surrounded.
They had broken the Principles by using their magic outside the Changeling quarter, but they had only shifted. They hadn’t hurt or threatened any Psi. Hardwick had used his magic too. A Whisperer could do so without ever being detected. Ilsa’s righteous anger burst out of her in the form of a snarl. She flexed her claws, daring the Psi to come closer or ensnare her with their ropes. What would they do to them once they were captured? If they were slaughtered, would the others ever find Gedeon?
But before anyone could move, birdsong sounded above them, and the Psi gaped as a third bird swooped low above the square.
In the chaos of one chase and then another, Ilsa had forgotten their tail. He had been trained in stealth by the very best, had stuck close to their heels, paws and wings, and it seemed he was shadowing them still.
The bird was a nightingale – then a macaw, then a swan, then not a bird at all but something in the fox family, its gangly limbs flailing in thin air as it fell to earth.
Fyfe landed in an inelegant human heap with a defeated sigh, but when he pulled himself up it was with a slow, methodical motion, like someone trying not to provoke a growling bulldog. He half-turned towards them, locked eyes with Ilsa, and brushed back his coat to reveal a sort of toolbelt, loaded with coloured pellets.
Dampeners. They were getting out of here after all.
Ilsa snagged Eliot’s attention with a soft growl. She couldn’t tell him to do as she did, but he understood all the same, and followed suit when she turned back into a sparrow.
“Now!” yelled Fyfe, as he launched a pellet in either hand and plunged the Psi into a magenta fog.
Above the roofs of the square, nets were still waiting to enclose on them, but as three birds took flight, they began to sag in place like roses wilting in a vase, before fainting out of the air. Footsteps chased them and horns sang out their direction, but no enchanted obstacles rose from the magenta smoke. As they darted back towards the safety of a Camden-bound staircase, the snares of more cloaks came to greet them. But each time they did, Fyfe crash-landed on a rooftop, briefly became human, and launched another handful of pellets. The soldiers were unharmed, but robbed of their powers. Ilsa laughed – it came out in a gleeful chirrup – to think she’d once thought of Fyfe as a golden retriever. For all his boyish gawkiness, his sweet humility, and atrocious shifting,
