The Neon Court (12 page)

I cut, not bothering to look at what I did, and said, “End it how?”

“She will destroy either the Court or the Tribe.”

“What … just like that?”

“Yes. Whichever side possesses her will be the side that survives. Her destiny is unclear, and her power is obscure, but make no mistake – she is the death of one or other of them. Boot or boat?”

“And … she’s a ‘chosen one’?” I echoed dully.

“You look like a boot,” he replied, laying down the little metal boot on the start square of the board. “You get one five hundred, four two hundreds, three one hundreds, two fifties, five twenties …”

“Sorry,” I interrupted as he laid out the paper game money in front of me. “What the hell does it mean, ‘chosen one’? Chosen by whom? Is she … sorceress, magician, angel, demon, devil, monster, summoned creation, kid who likes to play with fire, I mean, what the hell are we talking about here?”

“She is … simply the chosen one,” he replied, putting a pair of bright red dice down on the board between us. “She is the death of either the Court or the Tribe, and nothing anyone does can change that.”

“And you told all this to Minjae San?”

“Yes; he is a good client and I saw no reason to run away from the truth. Highest roll begins.”

“I can think of a few,” I growled, scooping up the dice and chucking them down across the board.

“Five and four!” said Mr O’Rourke judiciously, looking at my throw. “Promising start.” He picked up the dice and also rolled. Three and five. “You begin.”

I grabbed the dice with a scowl and threw them back across the board, moved my piece. The little metal boot landed on Angel, Islington.

“Are you going to buy it?” asked Mr O’Rourke when I didn’t move.

“No,” I snapped.

He shrugged. “Very well.” He rolled. His piece landed on Euston Road. He riffled through his stock of paper money and bought the card.

“So you told Minjae San, the daimyo, that there was a chosen one, who could destroy the Court or its deadliest enemy, loping about London, and what else?”

“I told him that I saw falling rain, and fire, and footsteps alone in the night.”

“That must have helped.” I rolled the dice, and my boot landed on the Electric Company.

“You buying that?” he asked.

“No.”

He smiled, and nodded. “Very interesting,” he said, and rolled. His throw took him to Marylebone Station, which he duly bought.

“So, just so I’ve got this clear in my head. You told Minjae San that there was a chosen one, he goes looking for the chosen one, he ends up dead, and … and that’s it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t really get involved in the politics.”

“No shit.” My next roll had carried me onto Bow Street.

He said, “I imagine you’re not buying that either.”

“Oh, you are good,” I snapped. “So, did your lack of interest in political affairs run to telling the Tribe about this ‘chosen one’?”

“The Tribe are not clients of mine,” he replied primly, as his next throw carried him to Free Parking. “They’re not really interested in the long-term view of things.”

“You think the Tribe killed the daimyo?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know?” I asked, rolling the dice again. My boot moved and landed on Chance.

He said earnestly, “You have to take a card.” I snatched the top card off the pack. It read, ‘You have won £10 in a beauty contest.’ He drew breath in between his teeth and said, “
Interesting
.”

“Mate, I’ve got a war about to break out between the Neon Court and the Tribe, I’ve got bodies and burning buildings and I’ve got a chosen one to deal with and, from what I can tell,
you
kicked all of that off. So help me out here, please?”

“That’s not all you have to deal with, is it?” he asked, eyes fixed on the Monopoly board.

“Dazzle me,” I growled.

He looked up, and his eyes regarded something a thousand miles away, and his breath was a hoarse rattle from somewhere deep in the back of his throat. “It’s waiting for you,” he managed. “It’s waiting for you … it’s … it’s … where’s the sun gone? Where’s the sun gone?” His eyes closed, his fingers were claws clasping the edge of the table. He was still, breathing slowly, frozen in place for a long while. Too long. I leant towards him.

“Uh … mate? Mr O’Rourke?”

Nothing.

“Mr O’Rourke?”

Something moved round the edge of his eye. It was thin and red. It dribbled down the side of his nose, lingered at the slope of his lip, then plopped onto the table. I reached out a fingertip and touched him on the shoulder.

His eyes opened, and they were bloody, whites turned blood red, blood running like tears, staring straight at me. I lurched back, nearly fell off my chair, knocking the Monopoly board aside. He wheezed, knuckles white in the arch of his hands, back shaking, voice rasping, “It’s come back from the edge of the night. It’s been waiting so long, so long, and now it will have retribution.”

“What is?” I stammered, staggering to my feet and backing away. “What’s been waiting?”

“The thing at the end of the alley. The footsteps heard in the night. The shadow beneath the street lamp. It was me, it was me,” he crooned. “I did it, I was in the eyes of the man who tore their petticoats, I was in the breath of him who broke the window, it was me, it was me who tied them down to hear them scream, it was me at the end of the alley, not your lover at all, but me, it was me …”

Blood rolled down his chin, dripped into his lap.

“Who?” I demanded, raising my hands into the beginning of a defensive ward. “Who is it? Who’s come back?”

“Too late,” he sighed, head tilting to one side. “Too late now.”

“Who is it?”

“It’s here.
Blackout.
”

And with due deference to command, the lights went out.

They went out in the house, they went out in the street.

They went out everywhere.

Run.

We wanted to run.

I didn’t. I retreated slowly, until my back was against the wall. Then I raised my fingertips and summoned the barest whisper of light.

Mr O’Rourke was slumped over his table, blood running down his face. Still breathing.

I threw my bubble of light over to the door and dropped into a squat, huddling in the corner. I reached into my pocket and fumbled
for my mobile. Outside, I thought I heard whistling, the distant tap of footsteps, the patter of rain. Nothing more – should have been more. I dialled Penny’s number. She answered instantly.

“Penny?” I whispered.

“Hey – why you whispering?”

“I may need a hand.”

“Oh yeah, now he needs help, after all that – what kind of hand?”

“Something’s after me. It was in the foot tunnel, and at the hotel. It’s here.”

“What … something?”

“No idea. No idea what it can do or is. That’s why I might need a valiant rescue. How soon can you get to Mile End?”

“Uh … dunno … forty minutes?”

“Make it faster. Take your aunt’s car. Drive like a biker if you have to, I really don’t care. I’m going to be on the move, may not be able to talk. You going to be OK with all that?”

“Guess so.”

“Cheers. Gotta go now.”

I hung up, dropped my phone into my pocket.

The patter of rain.

Swish of a car in a distant street.

Splash of water in a broken gutter.

Footsteps somewhere in the night.

I let my bubble of light spread a little, expand to push back the shadows in the corridor outside the living room. I moved over to Mr O’Rourke, felt for a pulse, found one. In the hall, I picked up my satchel, slung it back across my shoulders, turned to face the front door, let electricity simmer into my fingertips from the mains sockets, felt the water in the pipes beneath my feet, and the gas, ready to blow when I commanded. I said, “
Right
,” and opened the front door.

The street, still and silent.

The street lamps were all out, the glass burnt dull black on the inside. Nothing moved, no one stirred. I walked out into the middle of the road, throwing up my bubble of light higher and brighter above my head. Rainwater fizzled off the sphere of illumination, stuck my hair to my face, dribbled off my nose. Pools of water, ankle-deep, had grown out of the blocked gutters and spilt into the street. I sloshed through
them, too wet to care, turned three hundred and sixty degrees, looking for a sign of life.

“All right,” I called at last. “You know you’re here, I know you’re here, enough of this.”

My voice fell dull and flat on the buildings around. Cold rainwater ran down the back of my neck, made my clothes stick.

“Come on!” I shouted, voice bouncing off the darkened window panes. “Enough of this silly-bugger bollocks! Here I am and here I remain until the sun …” My voice trailed off. I thought about it a little longer. I hissed, “Oh hell.”

I heard footsteps behind me, turned, and it seemed like they turned too, moving like a child playing hide-and-seek, footsteps in the dark, just one pair of feet but they were everywhere, wherever I didn’t look. I forced myself to stand still, half closed my eyes. “Come on,” I hissed. “Come
on
.”

The footsteps stopped.

Falling rain.

Nothing else.

Not a dog barked, not a child laughed, not a window rattled, not a door slammed, not a brake screeched, not a wheel turned, not a phone rang, not a train rumbled, not a cat miaowed.

I opened my eyes.

A voice behind me said, “Help me?”

It had made no sound when it approached. We stumbled away from it, turning and raising our hands thick with fire, feet slipping and splashing in the rising water in the street. The world filled with blue-white electricity and we saw, by its light, a face, standing not more than two paces behind us, head bowed, staring at nothing.

Oda.

Psycho-bitch.

She was wearing new clothes, the wrong size, style and shape for her, teenage clothes, a puffy black jacket and too-long jeans. She carried no bag or weapon, and stood with her hands calmly in her pockets. She wore a grey T-shirt carrying on it the image of three very angry-looking men and a slogan ‘Rock Isn’t Dead – But It Will Soon Wish It Was!!’ There was a thin stain of fresh blood above the hole in her chest, no more than if she’d cut herself on a splinter, but there.

Despite the darkness, she also wore sunglasses, reflective black wraparound things that covered her eyes entirely. The air around her seemed to fizz.

“Oda?” I breathed, struggling to gain some sort of balance and decorum, the rain sparking and snapping off the electricity still wrapped round my fingertips.

She looked up, and there was a flicker on her face almost of pain, of a back bending and shoulders arching forward. She said, a voice high and strained, “Matthew?”

“Oda, you scared ten kinds of living shit out of me and if there was any shit left to scare, you’d be scaring it still. What the hell happened to you? What the hell
is
happening to you?”

“Run,” she breathed.

“What?”

“You have to run,” she repeated. “If you don’t run, we’ll kill you here.”

“Which ‘we’?”

A flicker again, something moving in her face that didn’t want to be there. “I told you to kill me,” she answered. “Why do you never listen?”

“Because I’m an emotionally crippled male?” I hazarded.

Her face darkened, her lips seemed to curl into something almost animal. “Sorcerer,” she hissed, “you have no idea. Run.”

I raised one shaking hand towards her, water dripping off my fingertips. “What’s up with your eyes, Oda? Only I’m noticing, see, a certain pattern, making certain connections. What’s with the shades? It’s night. It’s been night now for … for an unreasonably long time.”

She grinned. Not her grin. A skull grin, all lip and teeth and no feeling. “Do you begin to understand?” she asked.

“I’m … willing to make a few guesses, sure. I mean, after a while, a guy with my mystical credentials, he starts to notice things. Things like … how you’re walking and talking and have a hole through your heart. And how you’re wearing shades. And how people are dead and how you’re saying ‘we’ when you mean ‘I’ and how the sun isn’t coming up. It’s not just me going mad: it really, really isn’t coming up. And the curious thing is, no one seems to notice or care. Except, perhaps, you and me. Now, why is that?”

“You don’t understand,” she sighed. “If you did, you’d have torn them out so as not to see.”

She reached up, and pulled off her sunglasses.

Her eyes were suet pudding.

There was nothing human left in them at all. They had been pulverised from the inside out, turned to black/red garbage in their sockets, to fried black pudding held in by nothing more than friction and a prayer. But they
saw
. They looked straight at me. I stared, speechless, no sense other than sight able to report any kind of awareness. Then I felt a dull prickling in the corners of my own eyes, which grew to an itching, which grew to a pain. I flinched back instinctively, ran my fingers across my face, and came away with thin red blood. I was crying blood. I looked back up at Oda and immediately the pain grew, scarlet dribbling across my vision, blurring the edges, and a sudden burst of fire inside my nose, that quickly became the taste of salt. I turned my face away, hissed, “What are you doing?”

“I told you,” she said flatly. “I warned you. I gave you a chance to make it stop. But you wouldn’t, would you? And now it’s too late.”

I put my arm up in front of my eyes, shielding her from my view, but the blood still dribbled down my cheeks and chin.

“Oda!”

And then she was there, right in front of me, filling what little was left of my field of view. One arm came up and grabbed my raised arm by the wrist, pulling it back. The other locked around my throat and her fingers were cold and slippery in the rain and her thumb dug into my windpipe and pushed like I was made of hollow plastic. I flapped with my free arm, found her chin, tried to push her head back and away from me, but she seemed neither to notice nor care as she pulled my arm away from my eyes. I caught a glimpse of her face, and immediately the pain was back, straight through to the back of my skull, I closed my eyes and wheezed, “Stop! Please stop!”