Fray (The Ruin Saga Book 3) (29 page)

The monster sighed as though satisfied after a hearty meal. He squeezed her cheek and winked. “Don’t worry, it’s your turn next.”

He jerked his head over his shoulder, indicating the uprights behind them, which now bore the unmistakable form she dreaded in her mind’s eye.

Crosses.

James crossed the lawn towards the stately home sprawled before him. A well-maintained Victorian thing of three floors and enclosed gardens filled with flower beds and gnomes, its walls enclosed a space easily large enough for two dozen people. It stank of everything Alexander Cain. Reaching the heavy mahogany door, inset with a brass knocker the size of his fist, James stopped and waited for his entourage to catch up, buckets of sloshing liquid in their grasp. “The whole place,” he said.

Without a word they kicked the door open and surged inside, vanishing from the atrium and scattering to the far corners of the house, leaving giggles of anarchic glee in their wake. James followed, taking his time, breathing the musty air and dust, enduring the sensation of stepping back in time—the very same smell had once pervaded the homestead: the smell of old things, mildew, leather and mothballs.

The smell of home. Once.

He walked along the long corridor and entered the study. He knew what he would find, yet still it stopped him in his tracks: the sheer embodiment of everything he had once desired, fought for. A wall made entirely of books, paintings everywhere, knick-knacks and instruments of every variety spread interspersed throughout the long room, arranged in concentric circles around leather armchairs by the fire.

He walked amongst the trestle tables, running his hands over globes, astrolabes, a brass sextant, a gleaming cello, intricate works of ancient pottery, working his way inward towards the fireplace. In the grate, the remains of last night’s fire still smouldered. His mind went blank as he moved through endless layers of odour and colour and texture. This had been his destiny.

Could have been
.

Reaching the fireside, he stopped and stood in ringing silence. Somehow the crash-bangs elsewhere in the house and the accompanying cackling, along with the distant whip crack and booming of the war outside, only served to deepen the silence of this place. He closed his eyes and laid his hands upon the headrest of Alexander’s armchair.

The others came hurtling down the corridor and started knocking over tables as they sloshed the buckets every which way, splashing their contents upon bookshelves, Persian rugs, canvasses, everywhere. All the while, James stood unmoving until they had circled the entire room and moved back to the doorway.

“Go,” he said.

They left without a word, marching out and vanishing across the gardens. James waited until he could no longer see them through the gaps between the curtains, then searched his pocket for a lighter. The flame sputtered to life, and he held it there before him, staring into the undulating flame. Within it, he glimpsed the echo of a town ablaze—a town by the sea.

James sent the lighter spinning through the air, into the recesses of the room, where it clattered onto the partner’s desk. The oil caught immediately in a muted
whumf
, zipping in both directions, climbing the walls and cloaking the bookcase in flame. The heat puckered the skin on his arms and neck, but he remained there by the chair as the flames caught, watching every single canvas bubble, every book curl.

He patted the headrest of the armchair and headed for the door. He took one last keepsake: a glimpse of the mantelpiece, upon which a handful of brightly wrapped boxes lay nested atop one another, tied with intricate ribbon; all melting, ablaze.

The homestead made its preparations in heavy silence. The cries of the wounded man filtered up from the cellar on occasion as Agatha and Helen tended to his stump, but nobody spoke. They had drilled for emergencies countless times, and all knew what to do. Dried food was bundled with the water, handfuls that would serve for only a single meal. They needed the spare weight for ammunition.

James’s skin crawled. Handfuls of ants crawled under his clothes. His mind tortured him with Beth’s dead staring face, the Moon burned to cinders. The message from Mrs McKinley had been hours ago. Anything could have happened since then. His stomach churned at the thought of Malverston’s grubby hands on her skin—his mind replayed the night of the feast, before they had left the Moon: Beth dressed in a revealing slip, held close to Malverston’s chest. The mayor’s eyes fixed on James as he ran his tongue slowly up her cheek, like a slug crawling over a leaf.

James’s hands shook without pause.

Lucian appeared at his side. “Hey,” he muttered.

James felt himself return from a great distance. “What?”

Lucian glanced over his shoulder to make sure they wouldn’t be overheard. “Can you do this? I’m with you, but if you’re going to get in the way, maybe you should stay back.”

James only stared.

Lucian’s grip on him slackened. “Promise me that you won’t put the others in danger.”

“We’re all in danger, Lucian.”

“You know what I mean. We’re all ready to do what we can—I know we’d give everything if it came to that, but… I need to know that your family comes first, James.”

James opened his mouth to answer but found that he couldn’t.

Understanding filtered into Lucian’s gaze. “Okay.” He picked up a few clips, stuffed them into his bag, and turned to leave.

“Lucian.”

He paused, head arched over his shoulder.

“She is family.”

After a beat, Lucian went out, and James was alone. As soon as the door came to a close, his legs went out from under him. Collapsing against the bench, air rushed from his lungs and he clutched the wood so tight that his fingers throbbed. Groaning, his entire body shuddered in the gloom. He could have stayed there, never moved again, because he was sure that whatever happened from here on, it was moving towards somebody getting hurt.

Get up off your backside, Chadwick. Move, now.
The voice rose around him like salt vapours, rousing him by degrees until the shaking faded. “I’m coming,” he said. “Time to go.” He threw himself for the door, taking up his satchel as he went.

Outside, the others were saddling up. Alexander had swapped out his white horse for a ruddy brown mare, looking decidedly less grand than usual. Oliver and Agatha shared a mature steady mare, and the Creeks were lined along the back of their largest dark stallion. Lucian waited with his own reins in his hands. All their eyes trained on James as he emerged.

“What about…” James cleared his throat.

“I put ’im out. Gave him a mandrake infusion. He took it gladly,” Agatha said.

James pulled himself up into his saddle. “His wrist…?”

Agatha shrugged. “Either it’ll get infected or it won’t. Probably, he’s a dead man. Ain’t got the energy to care right now.”

“Fighting talk, my dear. My, my, things must be dire,” Oliver said behind her. “Shall we?” Without waiting, he turned their mare in a wide circle and proceeded at a trot towards the gate.

“Last chance to stay,” James said to Hector. He clocked the Creeks’ look of defiance and nodded. “Remember: stay far back.”

“We’ll do what we have to,” Helen said, the most mousy whisper James ever heard, so diaphanous it hurt to hear it.

Little Norman’s big eyes watched from Helen’s lap, confused and alert and afraid. He kept his gaze on James even as the stallion set off after the mare, turning his head to watch, the eternal stare of a newborn, until Hector’s body blocked his line of sight.

James watched them go. Then it was just him, Lucian, and Alex. The three brothers shared a look, side by side, yet apart for the first time in memory. James realised then that there really was no going back, even if they won today.

He pushed the thought aside. There would be time for that later. Or there wouldn’t.

He kicked his steed’s sides, and then they were moving. Once they had cleared the gate and headed down the Old World motorway, heading south-east, James looked skywards. His pigeons circled overhead in their dozens.

“They never followed you like that before,” Oliver said.

“They know,” James said.

“How? They’re jus’ birds,” Agatha said.

James said nothing. They would never understand.

Lucian’s voice rose up from the rear, sounding a touch gravelly and bitter. “This shit’s going to make me go grey.”

The ride was agony. They pushed the horses mercilessly—too hard. A two-day journey somehow vanished under their hooves, compressed into less than thirty hours. By the time they passed the open plains of Dartmoor, their mounts’ heads drooped towards the ground and their legs shivered with lactic acid build-up. Yet they pushed on, not daring to stop, never once climbing down to flex their aching legs. Every one of them endured the pain without a word.

James’s mind ran on an endless loop, replaying what he had done down in the cellar. In hindsight it seemed that he had been but a spectator, beyond control of his own body; a body that had lashed out and cleaved another human being like one idly snaps a fallen twig. That couldn’t have been him.

But he knew he had meant every inch of those cuts. In the cold bleak daylight, there was no denying that down in the cellar with the lantern light shuddering and the man’s rancid breath wafting over his face, James had wanted blood.

He shook himself free at last in the middle of a national reserve, wild and windswept like Radden Moor, the nightmare from which he had fled. Well, not quite: Dartmoor was like a sunnier, more verdant cousin of that bleak grey place, like the yin to that haunted yang. Yet it was enough to bring it all rushing back: the aberrant coldness, the feeling of undefinable
otherness
that warped reality and sent the skin crawling.

That man, Fol, with his talk of prophecy and
true destiny
and the End sweeping the land once and for all. Had all of that really happened? Had he really crawled down into a hole in the ground—literally tumbled down a man-sized rabbit hole—to reach that strange place where shadows not-quite-human had lurked, and the bracketed torches had refused to extinguish themselves?

He knew it should have felt unreal. Yet there was no denying it had happened. He might lose the only thing in this world he cared for because of that steaming pile of craziness.

Why, oh why, is life so bloody insane?
he thought, over and over, a maddening taunt in step with the horses’ limping pace. Soon it shifted to something ever more torturous, but at least gave him strength:
We’re coming. Hold on. We’re coming.

The final change in the beat of their journey came insidiously, weaving its way into the atmosphere of the exhausted convoy such that James couldn’t be sure when it had first arisen. By the time he noticed the blanket of dread laying heavy over them all—dread of inescapable pain and strife and danger—it had already cemented itself in place.

At last, Oliver spoke, clearing his throat with a croaky
harumph
. “Plan?”

“McKinley,” James said. “She’ll have done something.”

“The old woman?” said Lucian. “She’s our secret weapon?”

“Once we’re in, what do we…” Agatha sniffed. “What do we actually do? Jus’ remember, we ain’t no gunslingers.”

“Whatever we have to,” James said.

Alex’s voice rose up, low and muttering: “No. We need to take the Moon, without tearing it apart.”

They all turned to him. James tensed, teeth digging into his lip to keep himself from roaring.

“Come off it!” Lucian barked.

Alex’s voice, calm and implacable. “If we don’t, all this is for nothing.”

Tension wound up from the ether until James couldn’t keep his neck from wrenching around. “Stop talking, now.”

Alex stared back at him blankly.

James kept his gaze level until he was sure nobody would speak again. He turned back to face ahead and said, “If we have to burn the whole place to the ground to get her back, I’ll do it myself.”

Melanie shivered in the underbrush, using her mother’s old rug for a blanket. Damp and bone-cold, she didn’t dare move. The shivers had hit bad the past few times she had shifted. Staying still was better; tricking her body into thinking it was comfy.

How long had she been here? She had no idea. Everything had blurred together. When she blinked, the horizon remained burned onto her retinas, a vibrant pink line amongst momentary flashes.

Mel had returned to Mrs McKinley’s cottage, staring at the musty cramped kitchen, trying to absorb the fact that she would never return, never bustle about making dandelion tea or tell her and Beth stories of the Old World. She was gone, like somebody had come along and wiped her away and left nothing but cobwebs and cutlery behind.

Was that how it always was? One moment the person was there in front of you, and the next moment they were just… just memories?

She wouldn’t let that happen to Beth.

Big sisters were annoying, but losing one wasn’t in the cards. Mel refused to let the mayor take her away.