Later, bringing to bear all the logic and common sense which had fled in the face of the horror in the ballroom, Arthur realized that pressing down so vigorously upon the boy’s wrists ought rightfully to have staunched the bleeding. It should have stopped the flow of blood, not the opposite. Certainly, it shouldn’t have sprayed out in the way that it did, not in those nightmarish geysers of iridescent crimson.
Dedlock ran toward the Queen. “This is monstrous, Your Majesty?” He tried to wrest the boy free, but against all logic, the woman’s grip proved too strong.
Wholeworm, Quillinane, and Killbreath merely looked on, swapping the occasional anxious glance between them, content on this occasion simply to observe.
“Silence!” barked the Queen. “You are all of you accomplice to this day.”
Dedlock’s face was purpling in rage. “I will not condone such butchery!”
The boy crumpled to the floor, scarlet pooling fast around him.
“What have you done” Dedlock said. “What have you become?”
The Queen seemed unmoved by his appeal, fired up as she was, supercharged by passion. “Hush,” she said, her voice trembling with fervor. “Leviathan is here.”
The boy sat up straight, a human jack-in-the-box in a spreading lake of blood. He made a noise when he moved. They all heard it — a sticky, fleshy popping sound, like the noise one hears on pulling the heads off shrimp.
He smiled.
“Good morning,” he said, although the voice did not sound altogether like that of a child. “Greetings to you all.”
The Queen’s left hand hovered near her mouth in a posture of girlish excitement. “Leviathan?”
The boys lips twitched upward. “I am here, Your Majesty.”
“Then everything was true?”
“All true. All quite true.”
Dedlock approached the child. “Leviathan?”
“You must be Mr. Dedlock,” said the boy. “The doubter. The cynic. Not that Dedlock is your real name. Why not tell us the name you were born with, sir? Surely it is not a thing of which to be ashamed?”
“What are you?” Dedlock asked.
“A higher being, sir. One who moves amongst the angels. One who hears the music of the spheres.”
“You’re not human?”
“I am a creature of air and starlight, Dedlock. A thing of clouds and moonbeam.”
“What is it you want? What do you want with London?”
The boy turned toward the Queen. “Shall we tell him, Your Majesty?”
She giggled. “The excellent firm of Wholeworm, Quillinane and Killbreath has drawn up our contract.”
The Scotsman stepped forward. “All above board,” he purred, his voice full of Caledonian pride for a really well-crafted legal document.
“Ma’am?” Dedlock’s voice bristled with barely suppressed fury. “Surely you cannot be ready to sign away the city to this monstrosity?”
Behind them, the boy was laughing, blood and mucus in his throat conspiring to lend the sound the quality of a struggling cistern. Raising himself to his feet, the child clip-clopped over to the monarch.