Quarter Square (11 page)

Sprawled across the marble floor of the Golden Temple with my head in Min’s lap, blinded by the poison, and with all my other senses dimming rapidly, I hear Tyac’s hated voice receding into the distance as the guards bustle him from the building. From above, a tear splashes on my cheek, and Min shakes with grief.

Suddenly awake on my camp bed, reliving random nightmares despite my best efforts, I knew they were real memories. While I lay there sweating, trying to get my heart rate under control, more memories arrived. I didn’t want them, but they came anyway.

Focus on the silence
.
You’re here now, and you’re safe. You’re back with Min, and you have a chance of happiness together. Focus on the safety. Focus on the silence.

I closed my eyes and breathed steadily. I recalled my first night in the theatre and my fears about the noises in the roof space and grinned. If I’d known then what I knew now, a few rats scratching about wouldn’t have worried me.

There were no noises. For the first time since I moved in, there were no rodents scuttling or pigeons cooing. There was total silence. Uneasy, I held my breath and listened, trying to detect the slightest sound. It felt as if the theatre was waiting for something.

There it was: a scrape, a rustle, a pause and another scrape somewhere high above. Then came a new sound, the quiet but easily identifiable crack of a seized window being forced open and a thick membrane of old paint layers breaking as the wooden surround parted from its frame.

Someone had opened one of the windows set high in the wall just below the roof space.

A dark shape climbed through the window, its movements smooth and fluid and powerful.

My stomach dropped into my bowels.

The monster was coming to get me.

It rocked its huge head slowly from side to side, then sprang across a ten-foot stretch of bare brick wall to the iron ladder that ran up to the roof space. It landed on all fours with its snout pointing towards the ground, and without a pause it ran down the ladder in mere seconds.

Fear paralysed me.

The monster launched itself from the ladder, sprang over the top of the partition wall and landed squarely in the middle of the room.

Galvanised by terror, shaking violently and tasting bitter stomach acid, I scrambled back on the bed as far as I could go and cowered in the corner.

The werewolf glared at me with insane intensity, its bloodshot eyes like hot lava in the gloom. Its stink filled my nostrils, a heavy mix of damp earth and raw flesh that made me gag. It was bigger than I remembered from my dreams. It filled my vision.

Its belly jerked repeatedly beneath its shaggy fur. It was laughing at me—mocking me.

I was going to die.

In a split second, it picked me up as if I were a rag doll, pinned me against the wall with a hammering force that knocked the wind out of me, and drew back one of its massive clawed paws, ready to strike.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t make a sound. I couldn’t even think. I waited for the fatal blow.

Which never came. Instead I heard Min’s beautiful voice. She stood in my open doorway and sang a song of power and enchantment.

The werewolf dropped me onto the bed and stepped back with a frustrated snarl that made me cringe.

Min continued to sing, drawing the monster’s attention. It moved like a sleepwalker, swivelling its head towards her first and its body following suit, but remaining in the same place until a new tone in her song commanded it to walk towards the partition wall.

When Min paused to take a deep breath, it paused too and turned its head back towards me. Then she sang a high note, and they continued their strange dance of enchantment. Her song forced it to leap high and grab hold of the ladder. Its ascent was ponderous, almost thoughtful, as if it was dazed.

Again, she paused for a breath as it reached the top of the ladder, and again, it paused in its retreat and glared back down at me. Min’s song came stronger than ever, forcing the monster to lift the window, climb through and disappear from view, and the window slammed closed behind it.

I tried to thank Min, but she held up a hand to silence me while continuing to sing, her voice powerful even as her body sagged under the strain.

I grabbed my bedside chair and guided her into it without interrupting her song. She leaned on me, and I placed my arm lightly around her back, giving her shoulder a squeeze of support.

Eventually she fell silent and slumped against me.

I listened carefully. It seemed as if the theatre was listening with me. I heard no normal sounds of the night and nothing to suggest the monster was returning. Then, clearly through the night air, came a long, distant howl of rage.

Min collapsed.

I caught her before she hit the floor, carried her to my bed and rushed to fetch a glass of water.

She took a couple of sips and tried to focus her glazed eyes on me.

“We must leave.”

“You can’t even walk.”

“Doesn’t matter. He knows how weak I am right now, and he’ll be back as soon as the charm wears off. We have two days maybe, three at the most. He’s killed you before when I’d weakened myself too much to stop him a second time.”

Where the hell could we hide?

“Carry me. Take me into the Wild while I recover. It’s our only chance.” She closed her eyes and held up her arms for me to lift her.

I grabbed my van keys, but Min shook her head.

“We have to run into the Wild.”

“But we were going to drive out of Plymouth and ditch the van. We agreed.”

“That was before. It’s too late now. If we stay on the outside, Tyac will use the police network to keep tabs on us while he gets over tonight. In the Wild he’ll have to track us on his own. It’ll give us a couple of days to get clear while he recovers.”

That didn’t feel right at all.

Min must have read my face. “Believe me. We have no choice, and we don’t have time to argue. You have to trust me.”

She held her arms up again for me to lift her. “Anyway, the forest is your natural home. We’ll be safer there than anywhere else.”

The forest was my natural home? That was the first I knew of it.

Tyac’s howl had woken the insiders, who were crowded together in the garden when I carried Min towards them. Will and Danny had just arrived home and were telling everybody they thought the howl had come from the far side of the harbour.

“That’s good,” Min murmured. “That means he didn’t run into the Wild. He’ll go to ground somewhere on the outside.”

Conversation ceased when the insiders noticed Min and me.

Tara rushed to us. “What happened? Are you okay?”

“Put me down somewhere, love.” Min trembled.

I laid her beside the fire and sat close. I felt totally useless and shook with anger as well as shock. Everything was wrong. I should have been able to protect her, especially after she’d saved my life, but I didn’t know what to do.

Kill Tyac
. That was the only way to stop this nightmare.
Kill the monster.

Yeah, right. I wondered where the nearest antitank missile might be found, because I doubted anything short of that would stop the bastard.

Tara held Min’s hands. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Min murmured to me, “We have to tell them. They need to know about the danger.”

She scanned the concerned faces. “A werewolf attacked us.”

Over the immediate uproar she continued to explain. “He’ll be back. We’re running into the Wild to escape him. If he comes through here, you stay away from him. It’s us he wants—Joe and me. Don’t try to stop him. He’ll kill anyone who gets in his way.”

The commotion would have been comical if it hadn’t been for the terrible situation in which we found ourselves, and the noise of complaint and astonishment continued until Andrew shouted for quiet.

“Whatever has happened,” he told us, “you can’t go into the Wild. Whatever dangers you think will find you here, they’re nothing compared to what’s out there.”

“Stay,” Big Luke said. “We’ll protect you.”

There was a chorus of agreement and encouragement.

Except Will. Throughout all the fuss he stood at the back, taking everything in, not missing a trick.

Min accepted Tara’s concerned ministrations and answered the insiders’ questions. She tried to do so without revealing too much of our story, but these people were canny, and they probed until she had no option but to tell them the whole truth.

Will watched and listened in silence, and I could see him putting the picture together. All along he’d been jealous of Min’s affection for me. From his reactions to her story and the sympathetic looks she gave him from time to time, it was obvious he was in love with her.

Now I understood his behaviour from the moment we’d met. Scared of losing his love, he’d fought to keep her the only way he knew how.

Min gave them a brief version of what she’d told me earlier, enough for them to understand our situation and the danger our continued presence in the square would bring.

There were still a few grumbles of resistance, but they were more distressed complaint than reasoned argument.

When she finished, Will and I exchanged a knowing look. It wasn’t warmth, but it was a cease-fire and maybe an understanding.

Min had recovered sufficiently to stand, although she was weak and wobbly. We were ready to leave, and everyone hugged her. A few of them even hugged me, and Linda thrust a haversack packed with food into my hands.

Will hugged Min for a long time and held on to her hand when he fronted up to me. “Keep her safe.”

“I will.”

“You’d better.” His anguish was clear to see.

I felt his gaze on our backs as we left. Poor bugger.

Everyone accompanied us to the edge of the Wild and stood in a tight group to wave goodbye as we hurried into the woods.

We couldn’t go very fast, because Min could barely walk in a straight line.

A hundred yards into the trees I had another one of those muscle jumps and stopped in my tracks.

“Don’t worry about that,” Min said. “It happens when you enter or leave the Wild.”

“I remember it from Flo’s funeral. On the way in anyway. Not on the way out.”

“You were drunk on the way out.”

I couldn’t deny that. “So where are we going?”

She squeezed my hand. “To find some friends who will help us.”

“What are they like?” I asked when we settled down to rest.

“They’re a neolithic tribe.”

“Seriously? Stone Age people?”

“Seriously. You’ve met them before. You might even remember when we get there.”

“Where is
there?
”

“They’re in the part of the Wild that roughly equates to Dartmoor, but we’re not going straight there. The most important thing is for us not to leave an easy trail for Tyac. He’ll be following us, all right, but we need to slow him down.”

I had no idea which direction we’d been travelling during our night trek and was surprised to find the ground quite hilly inside the forest. I spent most of the time making sure Min remained on her feet, and I trusted her to know where we were going.

My instincts screamed that I should be doing more than just following her lead. I should be doing something—anything—to protect her.
Kill Tyac?
Yeah, right.

“What’s the point of running to these people? Aren’t we taking danger to them instead of to the square?”

“There’s nowhere safer for us than with the Axe. Thousands of years ago a wise woman of the tribe developed a magical ward of protection that Tyac can’t break through. They pass it down from generation to generation, and they always fortify their settlements with it. If we can find them before he finds us, we’ll be safe from him as long as we stay there. And they’ll be safe too.”

She stretched out and patted the ground beside her. “We should sleep. A couple of hours, then we’ll leg it again.”

I lay down, and she snuggled into me.

I thought my eyes had only been closed for a minute when she was shaking me awake again. “Come on, love. We have to go.”

Dawn was breaking through the trees overhead, and I guessed we’d probably rested for about three hours. We creaked and groaned as we got upright and helped each other to jog on our way. We travelled through water often.

“If we ran upstream, our scent would be carried downstream,” Min panted. “We always have to go with the flow to avoid leaving a trail behind us.” She paused to catch her breath. “You know all this. I mean, you’ve known it before, and you’ll soon start to remember it.”

“Tell me what I need to know until I remember.”

“Okay. He’ll expect us to run directly away from him in a straight line. Terror does that to people who are being hunted. The only way for us to escape him is to do things he doesn’t expect.”

“That’s why we’re zigzagging so much.” I climbed from the stream and hauled her up the bank.

“Yes. Also fugitives tend to seek high ground. They feel if they can put a mountain between them and their pursuers, they’re home free. And there’s always the chance that they might see a possible escape route from the top of a mountain or a high hill. Going around a lump in the ground might take longer than going over it, but if we show up on the skyline, he’s got us.”

She veered onto a well-trodden wildlife path. “He’ll expect us to take the easiest route, so we’ll do the unexpected, even if that means doing everything the hard way. We’ll make good time on paths like this, but in an hour we’ll leave it and go through undergrowth for a mile or two in another direction.”

“How can we throw him off our scent?”

“We can’t. He’s a wolf at night. Well, he’s a man-shaped monster with the strength and speed and hunting instincts of a huge wolf. Best thing we can do is slow him down, so we can reach help before he catches up.”

“Okay, so how do we do that?”

“We’ll break our scent every time we change direction by walking backwards over our own tracks for ten minutes or climbing a tree and going sideways for a while. Then we’ll come back down in nettles, brambles, that kind of thing. It won’t stop him, but it won’t be the obvious route. We can’t do much about his tracking ability, but we’ll do everything we can to confuse him while he’s a man during the day.”

“At least he can’t climb trees when he’s a wolf.”

The look she gave me made my stomach flip. “He can?”

She nodded.

“Fucking hell. Can’t we just hide?”

“When we’re tired and hungry and hurting, that’s all we’ll want to do. The closer he gets to us, the more we’ll want to find a hole to crawl into. And he knows that.”

“But you can enchant him again, can’t you? If he catches us, you can sing him away like you did in the theatre?”

“I told you, that won’t work again so soon. I don’t know how long there has to be between enchantments for the next one to work.”

She stopped and faced me. “But you have a trick he doesn’t know.”

“What trick?” And why were we were whispering?

“Your wood magic.”

“Tell me about that. Tara said I have wood magic, but I can’t feel it. How does it work?”

“When Tara told me…I knew for sure that you were…you. Let’s take a breather and see if we can get you started.”

We slumped to the ground. I leaned against a tree trunk on one side of the trail, while she did the same on the other side and picked up two fallen twigs from the ground.

“You can do lots of stuff.” She crossed the twigs and held them in front of her like a diviner’s rod. “You could join these together as if they’d grown like that. Try.”

I picked up two twigs and held them the same way, but nothing happened. I shrugged. “How?”

“I don’t know how you do it. You just do. Let’s shut up for a while, so you can concentrate. Be quiet and see if you can find it inside yourself. It’s there.”

I did as she suggested. After several minutes nothing had happened. I didn’t even know what it would feel like when I found it. I tried to still my thoughts, calm my breathing and relax my muscles.

“Close your eyes.”

I did so and continued to focus on nothing.

“There you go.”

I stared at the twigs in my hands. They’d blended together.

“How did I do that?”

She chuckled. “I don’t know.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about doing it right then. I just cleared my mind.”

“But you picked the twigs up with the intention of joining them. That’s the closest I can come to figuring out what it is you do. We’d better get moving again.”

I practised joining twigs whenever I could, but mostly our day was taken up with an exhausting succession of climbs and descents, running along streams and struggling through tough undergrowth. I was totally lost. I simply had to trust that Min possessed some kind of homing signal that was taking us in the general direction of this tribe she relied upon so much.

“Tell me about the Axe,” I asked again when we stopped for the night. “How did you meet them?”

“They were here when we first arrived on these islands.”

“When was that?”

“Six thousand years ago.”

A raindrop splatted on a broad leaf nearby, followed by other isolated drops falling through the canopy overhead. I started to weave a sheet of grasses and flat leaves, using magic to make us a shelter.

“Why did we come here?”

“Before we came to Britain, we lived for two thousand years on the plain where the North Sea is now. You know that used to be land, joining us to mainland Europe, yes?”

“Yes.”

“We lived many lovely lives on that plain. Before that Tyac hunted us all over Europe and Asia for four thousand years after Atlantis sank. We fooled him and sent him east to Russia while we escaped south into Sumer, where we lived for a century among Atlantean descendants. Iraq now.”

She gazed into the past and smiled fondly. “The Sumerians called us Anunnaki for our magic. It meant ‘those who came from heaven.’ When Tyac tracked us there we gave him the slip again and ran northwest for months, until we came to the great river.”

I hungered for information. Without knowledge, I would never be more than his quarry. “How did we escape him that time?”

“We were in Eridu. It’s easier to live invisibly in a city. You died of old age in my arms, gazing out across the Lower Sea from our little villa.”

Behind my eyelids I glimpsed a moonlit panorama. “On a cliff.”

“On a cliff, yes.” She stroked my cheek. “And you were reborn a few months later in that same villa to my maidservant, Amalia.”

“Does that happen often? Keeping it in the family?”

“Only twice in all our time together.”

“What was she like?”

“Amalia? She was an Atlantean. Her grandparents were our dear friends, and I offered to employ her when she married Hud, an acrobat. They were only twelve. Her parents went mad.”

“I bet they did.”

“Anyway, by the time you could walk and talk, our bond was strong again. You knew things no normal child would. When you were seven years old, you remembered who we were.”

I studied the peaceful seascape in my mind’s eye.

“There was an earthquake,” Min continued. “Hundreds of people died, including Amalia and all her family, except you.”

I saw it: broken buildings smoking in the dawn light; broken bodies buried in haste; grief and shock everywhere. And something else—something terrible moving in the ruins at night.

“Tyac was there.”

She nodded. “We’d had a bad feeling as the Anunnak community grew. Before the earthquake, people were trying to re-create the Atlantean culture. They were working from oral tradition and getting most of it wrong, but it was becoming recognisable, and we knew Tyac would come to investigate sooner or later.”