Darker London

Josie was sitting quietly on the roof, wrapped in layers of clothing. She was healing from surgery, but slowly, and this time felt more depressed than angry. Over the last week or so, Rosa had been her rock, always there for her, but never too much. Making her laugh sometimes when she didn’t think she had it in her. Or chuckle, gently, sometimes, not really laugh. Laughing hurt her, and not just in her stomach but in her heart. Her laughter felt undeserved, and was followed each time by bitter guilt.

She’d chosen the roof of the residential ward in the middle of the night as the least likely place to run into company. The only other people up here would be residents and – for the most part – they’d get what she was going through. Josie wasn’t going to seek non-Rosa company out, but at the moment she was feeling like she wouldn’t automatically turn it away, either.

( ... )

Ko and Indigo escaped out of the house long before Imogene crunched back to life, in the cold, concealed puddle of her own blood. Indigo – a minimalist by training – packed light. She’d broken any emotional attachments she had with anything in her room when she’d broken her first neck. “You need warmer clothes than this,” Ko told her.

“Then I’ll buy warmer clothes than this,” she snapped at him, although snapping at Ko did about as much as snapping at a mountain.

( ... )

They were about half way to the hospital before Indigo realised – her brain working slow, so slow – that’s where they were heading. Ambulances went to hospital. Obviously. They’d given her some kind of injection and either that was working or all it had taken was a little more time, but her chest didn’t hurt so much, and in her limbs, the time between uncontrollable spasms was getting longer and longer.

When she sat up, the paramedic tried to ease her down again but she lashed out at him with a fierce “Get off me!” He was a quick one, used to sudden outbursts from patients, and her fingernails missed his arm by an inch.

( ... )

The past few weeks had been seriously stressful and on top of it all, she had had to hear her best friend describe some of his experiences while living on the streets of London.

Deirdre needed a palate cleanser.

She swept through the doors of RMMH, not even pausing to sign in at the front desk because 'reason for visiting: fucking something' seemed a little crass. Though the idea of the look on Peter's face when he read it was pretty amusing.

Deirdre wasn't even sure who she was looking for, though she had slept with Katia before and that was nice. She headed to the residental ward to see who was hanging around. A lot of her friends would be out looking for Amaris, but surely someone willing to throw down would be snooping around the common room.

When she entered, however, the room was empty. With a groan, she flung herself onto one of the sofas to wait.

The boredom was a killer and Josie wasn’t sleeping.

Peter was sleeping. Or at least, Peter had gone home for the night and was probably in bed with his wife by now or stressing about the world or still at Thomas’s reading Stephie old journal stories; either way, not here. Josie was also stressing about the world, but she wasn’t in bed, she was on the roof.

It was shitty weather up on the roof. But as much as Josie hated the discomfort of the cold, she wasn’t shivering. Was this, she wondered, a demon thing? Could she even get hyperthermia? Or was her skin and her muscles and her blood too removed from human to succumb to that?

( ... )

Josie struggled with staying in her hospital room. She kept waking up early to noises of people outside her room, and no matter how hard she complained Katia refused to change her rounds so that she checked on Josie last, at a reasonable hour. Her wound wasn’t getting infected, which was a bloody miracle because Josie still didn’t feel clean after the public toilet, but it was also healing so much slower than she wanted it to.

She felt angrily obsessed about how long it could take to heal – at least seven days before Katia would consider taking the stitches out. How quickly it could take, if she was not such a weak little addict. Josie’s thoughts changed from moment to moment. Heal it, or keep it. Wait, or don’t.

( ... )

Deirdre was slightly annoyed.

Her twins were with their father and therefore Deirdre had free time she was usually pretty short of. Of course that meant that Spectre was busy with his kids, Thomas wasn't answering his texts, Quinn and Flynn were totally having sex, and so Deirdre had come to the hospital expecting to visit with Peter and Stephie only to find they weren't in.

They had gone on some fieldtrip together, according to Abby. And when Deirdre suggested they get a hot drink and chill, Abby had to run to her next appointment.

It was like everyone had set out to deny her a good time. Rude.

Not entirely discouraged, Deirdre headed towards the residential wing to see if anyone was there to chat with. She always loved hanging out with Charles, and even Bentley and Joel were good for a laugh or two, on occasion.

In her early teen years, Indigo-Hope Dumire had been all about control. Imogene had drilled it into her so thoroughly that Indigo hadn’t known anything else. Life was lived on a schedule, chores were ticked off on a whiteboard, habitats were perfectly tidy. Earlier, in Indigo’s childhood, the rules took up less of her life. But that was when her father was around. That was before Indigo figured out the truth of her father – well, the multiple truths.

( ... )

All across the city, London was the city of nightmares.

In a private room in the hospital, where she'd gone because she was feeling angry and shaken, Josie woke from a dream of her hands cracking a man's neck. She lay still, staring at the window she'd left open before she went to sleep so the curtains blowing in and out of the room would remind her she wasn't trapped. The man had been one of her kidnappers, one of Astrid's kidnappers, who would have sold her if she hadn't escaped. The man had died, and maybe she'd killed several others - her memory was a little jumpy, a little sped-up and jittery. She'd gone over the memory too many times and wasn't sure what was imagination any more. She knew she didn't imagine the sensation of draining so many of them dry, the heady intoxication of souls. Even remembering it now made her feel giddy, and she splayed both hands against her face as if to hold her mind steady.

( ~ )

It was a cold, still morning, quiet and grey. Marcia's breath fogged in front of her face, and across the hospital grounds fog lay there too, waiting for the morning sun to burn it away. There was a little frost on the ground, and it hurt her bare feet, but she curled her toes in the icy grass all the same.

Her body was still drenched in heat from her wolfish excursions, her senses high, and her heart felt happy and strong. The reek of London's pollution clogged her nose though, as she took a deep breath in, and choked on it.

"I'll never get used to the smell either," said the demon boy she'd spent the night with. Not in the sense that they'd touched - at all - simply in the sense that he'd been out in the grounds when she'd come out to change, and he was here still. Marcia knew his name was Koshchiy, but it was hard not to put the word demon over his head; even at rest, as he was now, he stood with his dark wings stretched out behind him.

( ... )

“I ran into your daddy in the tower ‘bout a week ago,” Monk said, shattering the quiet she was trying to build around herself. “Said you’d run away from home.”

Rachel opened her eyes. Her situation hadn’t changed. There was no reason to believe that it would have, but the sight of him was a disappointment, though a flat, obvious one. “Um,” Rachel said, flexing her fingers. He’d tied her so her wrists faced upward, the thick rope cut across her palm. Palms up like she was meditating. It occurred to her this was odd, but she was trying very hard not to think about it.

( ... )

There were some deathless who could smell out a lie before it was spoken. Deathless who knew the feel of the fabric of truth and could see how well or how poorly it sat on any one person’s shoulders. There was at least one such deathless at this hospital of Peter Kemp’s, the one who glamoured it against anyone who would wish it harm, and Ko hoped that one day he might be convinced to join them and afford the same protection to Izmaylov, but that day was a long way off.

In any case, Josie was not one of those deathless who could ferret out a lie. She had a skeptical mind, but Ko felt that she did trust him at least in part, and he was also almost certainly confident that she didn’t suspect he’d lied to her.

( ... )

You know what you need? Stephie told herself silently, lying in bed with her eyes on the ceiling. It was not her ceiling; it was the on call room at the hospital. Being treated like a real pilot meant being available if something happened in the middle of the night. Usually, being an on call pilot was boring as fuck, but Stephie had been using her boring as fuck nights to get a little paramedic training from Matt. Tonight she’d had to stop herself dragging him into the on call room with her, just to make the rest of the night go a little faster.

She was kind of annoyed at herself for talking herself out of it, even though she didn’t really want to sleep with Matt. He was just… there. It would have been… a thing.

( ... )

Josie had years of flying alone. Years of late-night waiting for the world to sleep while she sat on the roof of the house she shared with Miles, Temple Grove, or the sleepout in the back of Peter’s house. Years of disguising herself as a shadow and sprinting upwards till she was high enough that if anyone on the ground saw her, she would just be a trick of their eyes.

The cold was part of flying, and always would be. Ko told her about flying in Russia, about how he had never heard a story of anyone losing their wings from the cold but there was no greater feeling than flying on a summer’s day. Izmaylov was far from anywhere, where it was safe to fly during the day.

( ... )

Stephie needed a win.

Stephie badly needed a win. It had been a very long time since she’d felt anything resembling victory.

She had thrown herself back into work, as soon as Astrid was home again. She climbed right back into the helicopter and put all her attention into being better, into daily practice, so that Peter could never again humiliate her by resigning her to co-pilot, to second-best, especially in front of Miles.

Stephie felt pointless because of that, and angry at herself for not being as good as she needed to be.

( ... )

The night she returned from Surrey, Jinx wanted the pair of them to go and stay at a hotel together, and Stephie wanted them all to go back to Victoria Lane so that she could gather all the people she could in one place and keep them there, a little beating heart of survivors.

But Josie couldn’t do that.

She wanted to. She wanted to wrap herself up in Jinx and hide somewhere she’d never been before, somewhere anonymous and bland that they could fill up with themselves, with words and kisses and – if Josie was going to be quiet honest with herself – tears.

( ... )

Stephie lay out the road atlas across the bedroom floor in the small inn in Clun, and Marcia weighed down the rolling edges with plain white tea cups taken from the communal kitchen.

“I’ve always wanted to go to the Green Man festival,” Marcia was saying to Nancy, as she traced a black felt down the roads they’d traveled today, marking off each unsuccessful leg of their search. She was talking to Nancy because Nancy was much more receptive of small talk than Stephie, who sat on the floor scowling at the satellite map on her laptop, making hopeful orange crosses on the paper map whenever she saw an aerial shot of a potential big house somewhere in the country, as Astrid had described.

“It would be nice,” Nancy said, with a smile toward Marcia. “It’s quaint here.”

“Quaint is good,” Stephie said, without breaking her scowl as she looked up at them. “Quaint is more likely to be hiding something. If I was going to kidnap people, I’d pick somewhere quaint and lovely. I have a good feeling about Clun.” She dropped her gaze back to the map and made another X.

( ... )

England had not been like Ko expected, although if he looked back on his thoughts about the place he couldn't have said what, exactly, he'd expected. It seemed a little naive to hope to find a place exactly like Izmaylov, but perhaps he had hoped.

He and Lucine were staying at the hospital, with suited him as much as it worried him. The institution was run by a human, a complicated, not-entirely-human, sure, but Ko was still very uneasy with the idea that Peter had any power at all over any of the deathless. That any human should have such influence.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if he was the only human involved, but he wasn't. There were so many of them. Every one of them an issue.

A few days after their arrival, which was also a few days into their search for the human auctioneers, Ko bought it up. He and Lucine were out in the hospital grounds, under a low grey sky and a faint drizzle. Even outside he felt trapped, endangered. "There are so many humans here," he said quietly in Russian to his lady. "Does it worry you?"

Ko had never been on a boat before, and he didn’t like it. The ground was not behaving like ground and no matter how accustomed his stomach was to the drops and turns of flight, he was not used to this. He gripped the railing and looked out over the sea, out toward England as they pulled out of Calais. He could have flown this distance; he and Lucine both, and it would have been better, but for Ailbhe’s vision. (He ignored the question of luggage because it ruined the fantasy of flying over a sea he'd never seen before. He'd never seen any sea before, never been totally surrounded by water.)

Despite the hypnotising constant swell of the water stretching on forever, didn’t linger on the railing long, but began to move through the ferry, searching. Lucine had taken the lower decks, either sympathetic to his stomach or (Ko suspected, but not till later) because she wanted him to find the other deathless first.

( ... )

For four days he had been driving, South and then East down a series of long and icy roads. Koshchiy traveled reasonably frequently, some months up into the Northern mountains, others West toward Moscow – though never as far as Moscow herself. Around the smaller, local towns he was known as Kolenka, from the convent in the mountains.

In the back of the jeep he carried crafts made by others in Izmaylov, preserves and cheeses. He carried letters from one village to another, letters that were not trusted to the official post for one reason or another –often just because the official post was too slow, but nearly as often it was because the people were more likely to trust a man of god than a government postal system. He carried bear skin of such a high quality no one had ever found a flaw, not a flaw of knife or bullet making, in any case. Deerskin, too, though as they headed deeper into the colder months the demand for thick fur increased.

( ... )