‘Yes, yes, I should have been more meticulous,’ Zakaria muttered, his righteous anger wilting in the face of Njinga’s wrath. ‘I’ll get the kids to help me check the rest of the rooms properly.’
‘K-, kids?’ William managed to rasp, between groans and gasps.
Njinga rolled her eyes melodramatically, and pierced Zakaria with an even more ferocious glare, a look that stabbed with such lance-like force into his skull that he half-stepped backwards, as if expecting a blow to be swung at his face.
‘This big ol’ dumbass,’ Njinga hissed, her glower unrelenting, ‘decided to get a couple of mortal teenagers involved in our situation. Yeah, you heard that right, William. Now, in addition to havin’ to babysit your crackhead ass, I gotta worry about takin’ care of a couple of smart-mouthed, ignorant lil’ punks too.’
‘I had no choice,’ Zakaria countered, folding his powerful arms with quiet defiance across his barrel chest. ‘To have abandoned them would have meant death for all four of them.’ He squatted down next to William to explain. ‘They witnessed the battle between you and Aboubakar and got it on video. And, more importantly, the Huntsmen troops saw the unfortunate children filming the whole thing. We all know that any mortals who become aware of the existence of our kind and the Great War are generally condemned to death by the Huntsmen … as these teenagers were.’
‘I still think it was a stupid damn idea to bring them into this,’ Njinga muttered.
‘I said, as I’ve said a hundred times now,’ Zakaria growled through anger-gritted teeth, ‘that I had no choice. I will not condemn four innocent children to death, not for any sake.’
‘There’s almost eight billion a’ ‘em,’ Njinga snarled, ‘an’ how many a’ us left? A few fuckin’ dozen? I know where my loyalty lies.’
With that she turned and stormed out, slamming the door shut behind her with enough force to rattle the walls.
‘Forgive her, my friend,’ Zakaria said, his anger fading into a calm mellowness. ‘You know how she is when her temper flares. And forgive me, for making your ribs worse. I am sorry for that, truly, I am, but I meant what I said. You are not going anywhere, not until we’ve purged your body, mind, heart and soul of all the cancerous venom that’s been poisoning you. It will be a painful process, but you know that thanks to your satyaduta blood it will, mercifully, be a far quicker journey than it would for a mortal. And as for the children, they are eager to meet you. Forget what Njinga said about them; they might be young in body and mind, but I suspect that they have old souls, all of them. They adhere to many values of which our old Council masters would greatly have approved.’
‘Are they … here? And speaking of that … where the hell … are we anyway?’
‘In mountain cabin in an old forest, in a remote part of Northern California. We drove for almost three days without rest to get here from New York, frequently changing vehicles. This is one of Lightning Bird’s many forest cabins … unfortunately, because he had not been here in years some criminals set up a meth lab here some time ago and caused a fair bit of damage. However, the children and myself have been working on making a few repairs.’
‘I … I see. Lightning Bird, where is he?’ William asked. ‘Is he still … has he been taking care of Parvati? Is she … is she safe?’
‘He has gone to move her to a safe location. Do not worry about them; they will be fine, at least for the time being. We have, for the moment, successfully thrown the Huntsmen off our trail. Just focus on getting yourself better. Remember, my old friend, while this may seem unpleasant, it is for your own good … and, as Njinga said, for a far greater good … even if the poison that has spread its rot through you has caused you to lose faith in all things.’
William had no response to this. He simply rolled over, turning away from Zakaria, and stared numbly at the wall.
‘I am sorry, William,’ Zakaria said gently. ‘But when you emerge on the other side of all this pain and suffering, you will thank me.’
The big man then left the room, closing the door softly and leaving William alone with a silently raging hurricane of memories, pain, regret and misery … and the soul-crushing anticipation of a process of withdrawal that was guaranteed to take him to the edge of hell and back.
‘I’d better strap in for the ride,’ he whispered to the empty room, as the first hints of tremors shivered in his limbs and the first stirrings of stomach-twisting nausea started to burble in his guts. ‘Aye … time to strap in for one hell of a ride.’
Then the vomiting began.
31
WILLIAM
Minutes swirled, rushing and dragging alternately, a spiral of black treacle in a whirling vat of white enamel paint of hours. Sometimes the unseen wheel spinning the gooey concoction would accelerate wildly, its momentum causing it to hurtle out of control, but other times broken bolts would drop into the machinery, jamming cogs and seizing pistons, and the whole thing would come to a cluttering halt. And when it did the purges came, furious, merciless and unrelenting.
For over a week William was a feverish mess, a knotted pretzel of writhing agony, sweat-drenched sheets, vomit, urine, bile, blood and faeces. From every orifice tainted liquids oozed, dripped, trickled, or exploded with muscle-searing, innard-churning force. Hallucinations, sometimes bold and jarringly real, other times translucent and phantasmagorical, alternately floated and stomped around the room, stampeding through his mind or howling their distant echoes through his fever dreams. Close to two
