Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (7 page)

John Abbey brightens, and he gives me a vigorous nod. "We were ecstatic to work out a deal with her. Her designs are top notch, and we expect they'll do very well. This will be a good proving ground for her."

"Proving ground?" I remember his tone about Edinburgh before, which is admittedly not a fashion capital like Paris, but the memory still irks me. Scotland's not just a paddling pool on the way to the Olympics. Not to me.

"I expect that if her designs sell well here, they will garner her attention in New York and Paris. She's ambitious enough and has enough talent that I think our partnership could allow her to feasibly relocate somewhere she could really shine."

I turn away so Abbey can't see the unhappy frown I feel forming on my face. Much as I want Magda to be the next Coco Chanel, I don't want her to move to New York or Paris. Or even London. 

I'm saved the trouble of formulating a diplomatic response when Abbey looks at his Rolex. "Ah. If you'll excuse me, Gwen. It was lovely to see you again." He nods to the door, where a blond young man in an suit just as pristine as Abbey's has just entered the lounge, looking around. "Punctuality. I appreciate that."

"Cheers for the drink, John," I say. He gets up, leaving me to ruminate on the possibility of Magda's nascent fashion empire.

Another hour passes in dull conversation with acquaintances before I feel excusing myself won't expose me to censure. I'm two steps outside the lounge, fiddling with my umbrella, when I see it. Another shrike stencilled onto the wall of a shop closed for renovation. Its scroll bears a number. Five.

I drop a pin on my map and zoom out, juggling my umbrella and my mobile to keep the smart phone out of the rain. Four, five, and eight. They don't quite fall in a line, but four and five do. On the way home, I buy a paper map of Edinburgh. I pin it to the wall of my bedroom when I arrive back at my flat. Making little flags from Post-It notes and pushpins, I add the numbers I've found so far. They look back at me like puzzle pieces without context. 

Raiding Magda's room for sewing pins doesn't take long, and I pull red pins from her cushion and hold them between my teeth, racking my memory for incidents I've stopped whilst on my jaunts through the city. I place as many as I can. The close where Taog got his arse stomped by Britanniacs. Another where I broke a meth dealer's leg. I follow through until the map of the city is littered with red pins and the cushion is almost down to white, blue, green, and yellow remaining. The final red pin goes where I fought the pickpocket the night Seth Jones was killed.

The white pins I add for known murders. Seth. Todd MacInch from Muirhouse Parkway. I add a pin with a flag on the edge of the map for Kinnon in Falkirk, even though the map doesn't stretch that far. Green pins — green like de Fournay's eyes were — go at Hammerton, Inc., her house in Church Street, the Columbine flat where Rosamund Granger and Edmund Frost held and tortured Glyn Burns.

I don't expect any sort of pattern to emerge, and indeed, none really does. The only thing I notice is that the shrike stencils all fall within the radius where I've been seen or where I've been reported as having stopped a crime.

I'm sure now that they're a message for me. Whether a message or a trap, though, I don't know.

A knock at the door startles me.

I make my way down the stairs and open it to find Taog, looking smart in dark blue jeans and a green t-shirt, his wavy hair pulled back into a very short ponytail. He steps inside and hugs me without saying a word, pulling me against his chest and tightening his arms around my waist strongly enough to make me wonder if he somehow got into some spiked Irn Bru himself. I bury my face in his chest, unsure of what's happening. Now that I know he's working out with David, I can feel a new firmness to his muscles. He was never squishy before, but now his body feels harder, leaner. 

We stay that way for a moment that stretches out like pulled taffy. His body is warm, and mine has begun to run warmer in the past months as well, the heat between us creating a haze I can almost see. It's not a lustful heat; at least I don't think so, even though the warmth from my body seems to feed off of his. Still, when he lets me go and that pulled taffy snaps at its centre, I feel like trailing strings dangle between us.

"Are you okay?" I ask him, moving down the hall to the sofa to sit. He follows and sits next to me, inside my radius of warmth as if my aura gives him comfort. I know his closeness comforts me.

"I don't know, Gwen. I honestly don't know."

"Why didn't you tell me you were training with David?" The question comes out quietly, and he gives me a confused look.

"I thought I did." He rubs his eyes, and that fatigue is back as if just lifting his hand to his face is akin to Atlas shifting the earth on his shoulders. He lowers his arm and turns to look at me. "I'm sorry."

"There's nothing to be sorry for, Taog," I tell him. "We've all had a lot on our minds."

I know we're both thinking of Seth's funeral again. 

I am the most physically powerful human being on the planet if you combine my strength and speed and mimicry. I might not be able to pull a freight train yet, but I could yank a couple of its wheels off.

With the darkness of winter fast upon us, a natural metaphor for the sludge of depression that has blanketed our lives, I feel more impotent than I ever have before. 

There are many frightening things in this world.

I am one of them.

But there is quietness in that, a simple certainty and knowledge that for all my power, I cannot save everyone. 

The sky is painted with the lights of Edinburgh against the low-hanging clouds that obscure the stars. 

I perch on the edge of a building's roof, looking down at one window that remains lit amongst the darkened glass of their neighbours. The breeze blows mist in my face, but I don't turn my head away. Something fierce stirs within me. I look to the next building, ten yards away across a wynd. Rooftops rise around me, and my gaze goes to the Forth Road Bridge in the distance, an arc of blurred golden light in the fog. It's cold, and my skin is damp beneath the thick fabric of my Shrike outfit, but I don't mind that any more than I'm fussed by the mist on my cheeks.

I make the leap at a run. My feet leave the ledge of the roof, and air enfolds me. I soar across the gap between buildings. My lungs exult with the chill air; my hair blows back from my neck, a few strands stuck in the moisture that's clinging to my skin.

Ten yards. Fifteen. Twenty. 

Halfway across the next building, my feet touch down without the characteristic thud I'm used to. Instead I land softly and immediately trip, sprawling onto the gritty roof. I land in a puddle and scoot myself out of it straightaway. 

Heart pounding, I look back. I must have run faster than I'd thought, to get that kind of momentum. Or maybe I zoned out staring over the lights of Edinburgh and fell into some sort of hypnogogic trance, just imagining the sensation of a light landing and only waking when my arse hit the gravely mixture that's now stuck to my tutu.

I brush it away. 

Disconcerted, I make my way to the edge of the building and look out again. Still the streets are quiet and the night holds no incidents for me to stop. 

It's only when I arrive home and climb from my roof into my window that I realise I haven't looked down all night, only out and up at the buildings and sky. 

seven

I find Taog in my bed when I arrive home. Or rather, on it and not in it, because
in
implies sleep. He's wide awake when I crawl through my window, and he gives me a wry smile. 

"What?" I ask.

"I was just realising how easy it can be to get used to extraordinary things, like you climbing in and out of windows instead of using doors."

I return his smile, but my mind flits to my leap across the wynd, and whether I'm dismissing what happened out of denial or if I'm afraid to admit I want it to have been real. I can't bring myself to use the word I want to describe it with. I kick off my boots and place them by the radiator to dry.

Pulling my pyjamas from where they sit in a puddle of cotton on the floor, I start to make my way to the toilet. I stop at the door, looking over my left shoulder at Taog where he sits on my bed.

"What?" It's his turn to ask. 

I don't answer with words. Instead I quietly shut the door to my bedroom and untie my mask, laying it out on my desk. After a moment I turn away from the bed, putting my back to Taog. I reach down and unzip the right sleeve of my shirt, then the right. Magda embedded the zippers so they wouldn't show to anyone looking, and the shirt is as sturdy as anything, if rather wet. My fingers find the hem at the bottom, tugging it over my head. 

My hearing is well above average. I hear the catch in Taog's breath as clearly as I can hear my own heartbeat in my chest. My face flushes; I feel the heat in my cheeks spread out to my ears, but I keep going. My back's still to the man on my bed. I unhook my bra with one hand, let it drop to the floor, and pull my t-shirt over my head in one quick motion. I never thought I'd use my super speed to dress myself, but in this moment I'm so nervous that I'm afraid I'll jitter right back out the window in naught but my pants. I pretend I haven't just changed my shirt and drape the top half of my Shrike outfit over my desk chair, followed in a moment by the tutu and now-thicker leggings that Magda also thoughtfully made with zippers over my calves. A moment later, I'm pulling my pyjama trousers over my pants, which are ever-so-slightly damp from falling in a puddle, but I'm not quite ready to bare my skin in front of Taog.

Especially arse first.

When I turn back to him, still hearing the quickness of his breath to go along with the rise and fall of his chest, he's watching me with wide eyes and one quirked eyebrow.

Expecting him to ask me why I've just done that, I catalogue possible responses in my mind. We've been spending the night in the same bed for weeks. I don't actually need to use the toilet. It's my bedroom; I can change in it if I want. 

But he doesn't ask why. Instead, he pats the bed beside him and pulls back the duvet for me, wriggling himself under it. If he had hearing like mine, he'd be able to hear the quick flutter of my heart and maybe even the sound of blood rushing through my capillaries to ensure my face stays bright red. 

His warmth already fills the space under the duvet. He stretches one arm out, and I fold myself in the crook of it, laying one hand on his chest. 

"Find any bad blokes or birds tonight?" He asks, his voice full of false lightness. 

"Not a one." I allow my head to rest on his shoulder and meet his eyes. "What did you do tonight?"

"I got some emails sent for Gu Bràth and drafted a grant proposal. Nothing so exciting as prowling the streets for criminals."

I want to tell him about what happened tonight, but I keep my lips buttoned. 

It's warm in this bed with him. His hands don't seek my skin, nor do his lips seek mine, but I feel at once at peace and frightened out of my mind. My stomach drops when he shifts his weight, curling himself around me. 

"How do you do it?" His words sound in my ear, and his breath teases my hair.

"Do what?" 

"Make me feel like I can actually go to sleep."

"That boring, aye?"

This time the smile I see out of the corner of my eye is real. "Nothing of the sort."

We don't speak again. Normally I'd be embarrassed to admit we spend long minutes staring into each other's eyes, but when words fail, sometimes it's the communication without speaking that tells the most important stories.

And sleep, precious sleep, for once does not elude us.

It's not hard to enlist Taog in my shrike stencil search. When we wake the next morning — still curled in the same position — he points at the map on my wall.

"I meant to ask about that last night."

I explain what I've been finding, and he says he'll keep his eyes peeled for any stencils outside the ordinary. From his eagerness, I think he's happy to have a task that doesn't involve blood or funerals to keep him occupied. 

Indeed, on my lunch break at work I get a text from Taog saying he's found another. Number seven. He sends the address and a picture, and I add a pin to the map on my mobile. When I return home, he's adding the physical pins to the map on my wall — number seven and number one. 

He points to the map. "Look where I found this one. I had a hunch."

It's just outside the Gu Bràth office.

With the addition of the pins Taog's found, the dots on the map form a curve like an upside down J. 

Excitement buzzes through me. I'm not great at maths, but even I can find a pattern in this. I rustle around in my desk until I find a piece of string and loop it around the first pin outside of the Gu Bràth office. I brace it against the other pins and pull it tight, trying to follow the natural curve made by the points on the map.