The Wraiths of War (25 page)

There were walls surrounding me, either crumbling or unfinished. There was a roof high above, or at least the skeleton of one, through which patches of night sky could be seen. Beneath me the ground was uneven, scattered with rubble and other debris. I was on a building site, or perhaps in an old, abandoned factory or warehouse.

Still lying on the ground, I glimpsed rapid, whitish movement out of the corner of my eye. Alarmed, I twisted to my left, and saw pale, flapping shapes ascending towards the roof. Birds. Pigeons perhaps. Disturbed by my –
our?
– arrival.

Where was the Dark Man? Twisting my body again, I looked around. At first I couldn’t see him. Had he given me the slip, after all? And then, twenty metres or so away, I saw a hint of murky movement, black on black. As my vision adjusted and my perspective shifted, I realised that the black silhouette in the foreground was the Dark Man. He was struggling gingerly to his feet, clearly feeling as battered and bruised as I was. I took a breath, then scrambled upright, wincing at the pain in my knee.

As small stones tumbled from my clothes and pattered to the ground, the Dark Man turned towards me. All I could see was a hunched silhouette, but I got the distinct feeling that he was glaring at me.

I took a step towards him, rubble crunching beneath my feet. Immediately he held up his right arm, as if ordering me not to come any closer. I snorted. Fuck that. Then I realised he was holding up the heart, brandishing it like a weapon.

Feeling like a duellist compelled to defend himself, I held up my heart too. I barely had time to wonder which would be the more powerful combination – a physically fit man with an older, weaker heart or an infirm man with a younger, stronger heart – when the Dark Man unleashed a flailing bolt of energy at me.

It came like a multi-tipped whip, sizzling through the air between us. Instantly I retaliated – or the heart in my hand did. I felt a great pulse rush up through my body, gathering every shred of bile and anger and outrage en route. The heart then seemed to convulse, to both suck up the venomous distillation of energy inside me and spit it out in one instantaneous movement. It was like a screech of rage hurtling towards the Dark Man, like a heat-seeking missile. Our two expulsions of energy clashed in mid-air. Clashed and grappled, each seeming to extrude black tendrils, which wound over and around one another like opposing, or perhaps complementary, cultures blending together into one enormous mass.

My whole body started to tremble, and then shudder, my muscles aching in the way they would if I was trying to lift a boulder as big as myself, or push a truck uphill. Wondering how long I could hold back the Dark Man’s energy, I clenched my teeth, blinked away sweat that was trickling down my forehead and into my eyes, and looked across at him.

It gave me a savage satisfaction to see that he too was suffering. His twisted body was bent almost double, like a man trying to forge ahead through a hurricane. Somehow the sight of him struggling to maintain his attack reminded me again of everything he’d done, and caused my fury to boil up anew. Unclenching my teeth I yelled at him.

‘Who are you? Why the fuck are you doing this? Why are you trying to ruin my life?’

I knew the answer – or thought I did. It was because he wanted the heart. He wanted power. And I was the one standing in his way.

His head creaked up. I saw the movement, but it was still too dark to make out his features. His voice when he answered was cracked and rough, a sign that his body was already beginning to fall apart.

‘All I wanted,’ he croaked, ‘was acceptance. But all I got… was rejection… and disgust… and hatred.’

It was a surprising answer, but it didn’t make me feel any less vitriolic towards him.

‘Why was that
my
fault?’ I sneered. ‘Why was it
Lyn’s
fault, for fuck’s sake? What gave you the right to steal the heart from me, and then use it to go back and destroy the mind of the woman I loved? What kind of sick, twisted
cunt
are you? Lyn was pregnant! All she wanted was to love me and to love our child… to be a mother…’

The anger choked me up. It wadded in my throat and gut like a lump of dough infested with fire ants. It bit and burned, preventing me from ranting at him further. Instead I tried to channel my fury through the heart. At that moment all I wanted to do was crush him, tear him apart.

Then I heard the tumble and clatter of stones behind me, and the next second something flew past me, shrieking and whirling. At first I thought it was something conjured by the heart – an independent source of energy, perhaps even my rage made manifest. The notion persisted even when a slim dark figure darted in front of me, its arm raised as it faced the Dark Man. Only when its shrieks became words – ‘You bastard! You bastard!’ – did I realise it was Lyn.

At once I remembered the voice that had called my name in the square, the patter of running footsteps behind me. Lyn’s presence here could only mean she’d been close enough to me when the Dark Man and I had ‘leaped’ to hitch a lift with us. Until now she must have been lying in the rubble somewhere behind me, dazed, perhaps even unconscious. But now she’d woken up.

And she was every bit as fucking furious as I was.

In
her
upraised hand she held not another version of the heart, but a half-brick. I discovered this when she hurled it at the Dark Man, still spitting vitriol. It flew straight and true, glancing off the side of his forehead and spinning away into the shadows. The Dark Man dropped without a sound, like a boxer felled by a knockout blow. Instantly the heart energy that he’d attacked me with evaporated like smoke in a strong wind. As the Dark Man’s body hit the ground, his fist opened and the heart rolled free. I saw Lyn scoop up a chunk of rock and run towards him as if she intended to smash his brains to pulp.

For me, the sudden dissolution of the Dark Man’s heart energy was like the unexpected snapping of a rope in a tug of war. I staggered back, exhausted and momentarily disorientated, almost tripping over a pile of rubble. In fact, if Lyn hadn’t been there I might well have succumbed to my weariness and fallen flat on my arse. But seeing her standing over the Dark Man’s prone body, raising the rock above her head, somehow gave me the impetus to shoot a leg out behind me and allow me to regain my balance, to stay upright.

‘Lyn,’ I shouted, putting as much urgency into my voice as I could, ‘don’t.’

She paused, but she didn’t lower the arm that was holding the rock. She turned her head towards me, and although I couldn’t see her features clearly, the harsh stripes of light and shadow on her face and the rubble-dust in her now wild and tangled hair made her look haggard, feral.

‘Why not?’ She spat out the words. ‘He deserves it.’

‘He does,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t the way. I’ve seen him die and this isn’t how it happens.’

‘You’ve seen…’ Her arm sagged. This was clearly all getting too much for her. When she next spoke her voice sounded almost plaintive.

‘What do you mean? What’s happening, Alex? I don’t understand any of this.’

Still holding the old heart in my right hand, I held up my left in a calming gesture and approached her cautiously. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know it’s hard. But you’ve seen what the heart can do. You know it can give us the ability to travel in time.’

She stared at me. She didn’t respond, but I thought – or hoped – she was listening.

‘I’ve seen him die,’ I said softly. ‘I’ve seen the heart destroy him. But if you kill him now, everything will change – and maybe not for the better. Do you understand?’

I was close enough now to make out her features. Despite the years of suffering she’d endured that had prematurely aged her, she looked almost child-like in her confusion. Looking down at the Dark Man she said, ‘He deserves to die. For what he did to me, to
us
, he deserves it.’

‘I know,’ I said (and part of me wondered what would happen if Lyn
did
kill him now; wondered whether, in fact, things might turn out
better
), ‘and he
will
die. Just not here. Not now. It isn’t worth it, Lyn.
He
isn’t worth it. Kill him and you’ll be a murderer forever. You don’t want that, do you? A taint like that… it never leaves you.’

Still looking down at the Dark Man’s crumpled body, she said, ‘How could it be murder? He’s not even human.’

‘We don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Throw away the rock, Lyn. Throw it away and pick up the heart. That’s what will
really
hurt him.’

I watched her hesitate, wondering what I would do if she rejected my advice, what would happen.

But then she sighed once more and reluctantly dropped the rock. Stepping forward, she bent to pick up the younger heart. I half-expected it to react to her touch, but it remained inert. She straightened and stepped away from the prone figure, turning towards me.

The Dark Man groaned, stirred – and then, in a sudden burst of movement, lunged and grabbed at Lyn, his hand encircling her ankle. Her forward momentum was abruptly curtailed, his grip so strong, despite his infirmity, that she was almost yanked off her feet. As she stumbled forward, trying to maintain her balance, her head came up and she looked at me, and then, like a rugby player passing the ball while being tackled by an opponent, she lobbed the heart in my direction.

It wasn’t the first time the heart had been thrown to me. Mayla, an African prostitute who’d been one of my ‘watchers’ in Victorian London, had once flung the heart to me up a flight of stairs, eager to be rid of it. Even though on this occasion it was dark and the heart was black, I knew, as I’d known then, that I’d catch it – and I did. I shot out my arm, opened my hand, and the next second the heart was smacking snugly into my palm. I closed my fingers around it with a sense of elation. The heart –
my
heart – was at last back in my possession.

My satisfaction lasted for only a second, though. Because as soon as I closed my hand around the ‘younger’ heart, both it and its older twin erupted into life. I’m not sure entirely why it happened. I can only guess that because my body was providing a physical link between two versions of the heart it created some sort of temporal short circuit. All I know for sure is that my body was suddenly engulfed in a blistering discharge of energy. It was as if the two versions of the heart were resuming hostilities using me as their battleground. My spine snapped into an arch and my head was thrown back. All at once I couldn’t see, couldn’t scream; my every nerve ending was on fire. I felt as if I was being torn apart – or as if each version of the heart wanted to return to its own particular time stream, taking me with it. I might have been the heart’s guardian, but what the heart didn’t seem to understand was that I couldn’t be in two places at once. Dimly, through the roaring in my head, I heard Lyn screaming at me to let go of the heart.

But I couldn’t. Each version of it was fused to my hands. The next thing I was aware of was that she was with me – she must have kicked herself free of the Dark Man’s grip – and was clawing at my right hand, the one that was holding the old heart, trying to prise my fingers apart. I wanted to help her, but I couldn’t; I was paralysed. I heard a crack, and then another, and although I felt no pain I knew she was breaking my fingers to get at the heart.

Then I felt what I can only describe as a sideways
whoosh
, and suddenly the energy was draining out of me – or rather,
shooting
out of me, as if I was a water pipe that had sprung a leak. As the power flowed from me, my senses came back – and to my horror the first thing I saw was Lyn flying backwards through the air, like someone caught in a bomb blast.

It was so dark that I didn’t see her land – but I heard her. She came down with a horrible dead-weight thud and a clattering of bricks and rubble that made me flinch and cry out. I knew in that moment that if she’d saved my life by sacrificing her own I’d never forgive myself. I’d use the heart to go back and change things, and fuck the consequences.

The heart. I looked down at my left hand and saw that the younger heart –
my
heart – was still tightly clutched in it. My right hand, though, two fingers now swelling and going blue and (now that I came to think of it) hurting like
fuckery
, was empty, with the old heart nowhere in sight.

That wasn’t my concern right now, though. All I cared about was Lyn. Goading my wobbly legs into life, and trying to ignore the sickening waves of pain that were throbbing up from my broken fingers and through my arm, I lurched and stumbled over the uneven ground towards the place where I’d heard her land. All the way I was muttering, ‘Please be all right, please be all right.’ It was unbearable to think that only a short distance away, while all this was happening, our younger selves were meeting for the first time.

When I finally found her, she was so still that I thought at first she was just part of a pile of weeds and rubble. I almost walked straight past her until I noticed the paleness of her outstretched hand. She looked crumpled, one leg twisted beneath her, one arm outflung, her chin tucked into her chest.

‘Lyn,’ I said, dropping to my knees beside her, even though the right one was still aching from when I’d whacked it earlier. She was covered in dust and there was an ominous-looking dark patch on the right side of her clothing that stretched from beneath her ribs to her hip. Unable to use my right hand (I was holding it against my body like an injured pet), I slipped the heart into my jacket pocket and reached out with my left hand, tentatively touching the dark patch with my fingers. The patch was wet and sticky.
Oil
, I told myself stubbornly,
or mud.
I raised my wet fingers to my face and smelled the unmistakeable coppery tang of blood.
Fuck
. There was such a lot of it. And the dark patch on the right side of her body wasn’t all of it, by any means. There were more dark smears on her face, and yet more clotting her hair and on the rocks beneath her head.

Touching her cheek, I spoke her name again. ‘Lyn. Can you hear me?’