The Secret Dead (London Bones Book 1) (32 page)

65

The sticky carpet smelt like blood. I licked it, and only then thought that I shouldn’t have.

A second thought made me lick the carpet again. This wasn’t blood I had spilled, but it would keep me going longer. There was no reason not to. My phone buzzed in the back pocket of my jeans. I ignored it. The blood was lovely, not as fresh as it could have been, but tasty just the same.

I became aware of sirens. Not close—in the distance but getting closer. I needed to get out of the house before the police arrived with their sniffers and their dog-catching hooks. A few more licks. Then I’d go.

Somebody’s arms reached around my waist and lifted me off the floor. I squirmed and turned and gawped.

‘Siggie?’

The first thing I noticed was the giant wings. And standing beside her, looking a little confused but definitely alive, was Ben Brannick. He was shirtless and wore only a pair of boxer shorts. His back was bare and undamaged. There was no sign that he’d ever had wings. He looked completely human.

I sniffed. There was a dead body in the room. Adam had been pulled bodily into the underworld, and Ben was in front of me. I sniffed again. It smelled like seagull. If it wasn’t Ben’s, whose was it?

I struggled to see, but Sigrid had me tight. ‘Let me go!’

She held me as fast as a human holding a kitten. Sigrid turned with me in her arms, and I saw the bed. It was Ben’s body lying there. It was still and bloody, the damage as clear as it had been before I’d left.

Two Bens—a live one and a dead one. My thoughts were heady with the scent of blood and flesh, and I knew enough to know I wasn’t thinking clearly. This hadn’t happened when Sigrid died. Something had changed.

The sirens grew closer then stopped.

Sigrid took a few steps and drew the curtain open a crack. ‘The police are here. There’s a bathroom at the back of the house. We’ll be able to get out there.’

She carried me out, and Ben followed. The cramped bathroom had the kind of olive green bath and toilet that hasn’t been sold as new in thirty years, but the window above the bath was big enough. It creaked as Sigrid pushed it open. Sometime while we’d been dead, darkness had fallen.

Sigrid climbed onto it, still holding me under one arm. How was she so strong? She wasn’t supposed to be so strong.

She jumped and stood on the air, wings flapping as if she were treading water.

Ben clambered onto the windowsill and swung his legs over. Then he jumped onto my sister, holding her tight around her neck.

So close, he smelled delicious. Sigrid elbowed me in the face and tucked my head under her elbow, away from temptation. I wasn’t going to bite him, but she must have been quite sure that I wasn’t going to bite her either because she didn’t seem to mind my mouth pushed against her side.

Dark shapes flowed below us as the police surrounded the house. None of them had learnt their lesson because no one looked up, not even when Sigrid began moving. The great white wings flapped faster and faster, and we spiralled upward into the cold night sky.

66

Sometimes the cloud ceiling is so low in the city you’re not sure if it’s smog, fog, cloud, or some depressing combination of the three. It is, however, tremendously convenient if you’re hitching a ride three hundred feet up and don’t want anyone to see you.

Street lamps sparkled in the dark below as if we were looking at the stars from the wrong side. The city appeared deceptively silent and peaceful, although down in the depths, I knew it was all street weasels and severed wings.

Far below, police cars and ambulances raced the streets. They grew smaller and smaller as we rose higher. My blood-soaked clothes froze to my skin. The sound of Sigrid’s wings made a reassuring whooshing sound as we flew over the lights and sounds of the city.

‘Where are we going?’ My sister’s body muffled the words, and I don’t know whether she heard me, but she didn’t answer either way. We progressed through the air in slow rhythmic movements; I couldn’t see Ben or feel him, but Sigrid didn’t seem to be weighed down by either of us. We weren’t in the air long, only a few minutes—so much faster than taking the tube.

Finally we landed on a balcony lined with pots of dead tomato plants, fat with blackened fruit. Curtains covered the plate-glass door in front of us. No lights were on, but the flickering of a television screen was visible through the fabric.

Sigrid let go. I stood on the cold concrete and stretched. My stomach rumbled again. I hugged my arms around my stomach and tried to ignore the pains that had begun to streak through it. Ben knocked on the balcony door. The television muted. The door opened to reveal Per in his pyjamas, cybernetic legs sticking out underneath. He looked surprised; I didn’t blame him. There was only one person he knew who could make it to a fourteenth-floor balcony, and he no longer had wings.

He looked past me at Sigrid. His eyes widened as he took in her wings and then Ben’s skinny form next to me.

‘Ben? What are you doing here?’ Per reached past me and pulled the boy inside. ‘Where are your clothes? It’s freezing. What’s going on?’

I followed them inside. The TV screen was paused on an ocean scene—an orca frozen in the middle of twisting out of the sea. Behind us Sigrid tucked her wings neatly behind her back, then followed me into the room. I closed the balcony door. I might have been dead, but I could feel the cold. It made me think of the heat of the coming furnace. I’d feel that too.

Per ran his fingers over Ben’s bare back. ‘What happened to you? How did you heal this quickly?’

Ben glanced over at Sigrid. ‘She did it.’

Per’s eyes widened at the sight of her wings, then he frowned. ‘Magic? That can reverse quicker than you think.’

‘No, Vivia brought me back from the dead.’

For the first time, Per really looked at me, rather than the ex-winged boy. ‘I didn’t know you could do that.’

‘This is the first time I’ve done it right. I think.’

I hadn’t had a chance to look Ben over carefully. He appeared healthy and healed, but something always went wrong. Even Stanley hadn’t come back just right. There’d be something wrong with Ben. I just didn’t know what it was.

For the first time, Sigrid spoke, ‘I was dead too.’

She didn’t look just healthy, she looked beautiful—like the angel she was pretending to be in the underworld. Maybe that was why she was so strong. Maybe I’d brought back an angel.

Per opened his mouth to ask me more questions, but I didn’t want to answer them. It was all too much. I was dead. My sister wasn’t. Ben wasn’t. And somehow both of them were magically healed. In addition, Per didn’t know his father was dead, and I couldn’t face being the one to tell him.

So before he managed to get anything further out, I said, ‘Can I use your bathroom?’

He pointed the way, and I walked off, horribly aware of my lighter bones and step. I took one self-consciously heavy step after another, but he didn’t seem to notice.

I followed his directions and took a door to the left. I pulled the light switch. The light and fan came on with a whirr. I closed the bathroom door. Their voices were still audible but not distinct.

The knife had left a long rip in my shirt. I lifted it to see a graze four inches long. Not worth worrying about, even if I’d been alive. It stung though.

My reflection in the mirror didn’t look great. I looked one way, then the other. Not obviously dead, but that wouldn’t last long. I wondered what Per had done with his discarded legs. It would have been a terrible waste if he’d just dumped them. It was a stupid thought. It was unlikely he still had them, or some other organically grown, ethically sourced human meat in his freezer.

The worst part was I knew I had to be missing something. I was a hag. I might not have always been very good at it, but coming back from the dead was coded into my genes. I should have a get-out-of-jail-free card. I just had no idea what it looked like.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and wiped blood off the screen. I ignored the six missed calls and glanced at the time. Four hours until cremation. I put the toilet lid down and sat on it, face in my hands.

I didn’t know what came next in the afterlife, but I had the horrible feeling I’d seen Adam’s soul dismantled in front of me. I’d never killed anyone, but suddenly the thought of true death was scarier than it had ever been before.

Someone tapped softly at the door. ‘Vivia? Can I come in?’

I was so used to my sister’s incomprehensible rambling that it sounded eerie when her words actually made sense. She opened the door before I could answer.

She didn’t look right in the living world. She was too real. Her eyes met mine. They didn’t wander all over the place. Her limbs moved normally. There was no sign of the jittery, incomprehensible creature I’d grown used to.

She sat on the edge of the bath. Her wing tips whispered along the bottom of the tub.

I had so many things I wanted to ask her. I started with, ‘Why now? If all you had to do was hold on, why didn’t you come back before?’

‘It wasn’t the right time.’

‘Seriously?
Seriously?
It wasn’t the right time? Is that the best you can give me? Do you know how hard it’s been looking after you?’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.’ Sigrid ran her fingers along the rim of the bath. They were long and thin, and not at all swollen and sausage-shaped.

‘What about your body? Do you have two now, like Ben did? How does that work? Am I still going to have to look after it?’ I threw up my hands. ‘No, forget that. It’s
your
dead living body.
You
look after it.’

She met my eyes. ‘That body’s dead. You’ve been ignoring your phone. Lorraine’s been trying to get hold of you.’

I rubbed my eyes. ‘I have no idea how I’m going to explain this.’

‘You don’t have to, Viv. You’re dead, remember?’ She said it gently, but her words punched me in the gut nonetheless.

She was right. I was dead. I didn’t have to explain anything. All I needed was to get to the crematorium in time. No more responsibilities or duties. The only duty I had was not to kill anyone. A few days ago that would have been a doddle. Now it seemed a little harder.

Since I’d been responsible for Sigrid’s death, it was only fair she take responsibility for mine. ‘Will you fly me to the crematorium?’

‘No. You don’t have to be a zombie if you don’t want to. You’re a hag.’

‘How would you know? You’re not one. Neither is Charon. Everyone seems to think it’s just a matter of willpower,’ I said bitterly. ‘If it’s so easy, you tell me how to do it.’

‘Of course I don’t know,’ Sigrid said, ‘but you won’t have been the first hag to have been bitten. One of your own kind will know.’

I thought of the only other hag in London. ‘I’m not asking Anastasia. She’d turn me in in a minute.’

Sigrid burst out laughing. ‘Viv, you’re my sister and I love you. I do. But sometimes you can be incredibly stupid. Anastasia’s the only living hag close by, but she’s not the only one. Mum might know. Or one of the aunts.’

She was right. There were hundreds of dead hags. All I needed to do was find somewhere to stash my body long enough to find an answer in the underworld.

67

I stared at the glass box. ‘No, absolutely not. It’s too flimsy. I’d be able to get out of it in seconds.’

Stanley’s moustache drooped along with his mouth. ‘It’s the only one I’ve got.’

My eyes kept flickering to my mother’s glass coffin and then to the empty one alongside it. It could be me—present and future. I dragged my eyes back to Stanley.

‘Why on earth do you have another one of these anyway?’

‘Just in case, Viv, just in case. I’ve been using it as a mini greenhouse.’

I’d thought it looked familiar. I shuddered. It was bad enough Stanley sat up there all day with my mother without knowing he had imagined me in the attic too. The only thought worse than that was the knowledge that I now thought he looked delicious. Even the cane he was using to hold his bad leg steady made it worse. He was all wobbly like sweet jelly.

There was a rustling sound. ‘Ow!’

I looked up just in time to see Sigrid’s wings catching the top of the doorframe. Another white feather drifted to the floor, exposing yet more pink cartilage on the arches of the great white angel wings.

‘You know, these things probably weren’t such a good idea,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I’m glad you haven’t gone yet. Ben wanted to say goodbye.’

Ben Brannick appeared behind her in the doorway. He stepped into the attic hesitantly.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m still sane.’

‘Oh good,’ he said. He shuffled from foot to foot. ‘I just wanted to say thank you, and I wanted to let you know you don’t need to worry about Alister calling the police on you. I told him you’re going to stay dead if you can’t find a way to fix it.’

‘Thank you. Have you seen your mother yet?’

He shook his head. ‘I spoke to her on the phone. I think she didn’t know whether to be happy or mad.’ He thought about it. ‘Mostly happy, with a bit of sad too. She wouldn’t stop crying. She said she would go with me and Obe to the police station.’

‘What are you going to tell them?’ I was genuinely curious.

‘The truth. That me and Alister found those bodies, that Alister knew it was Adam because he could smell it, but we didn’t know who to trust. I still can’t believe no one knew they were there. I know the soul magic supposedly kept people away until it started unravelling, but Auntie Jillie’s a snake too. She should have smelt them once it started coming apart. How come she couldn’t smell them when Alister could?’

I told him the same thing I told Alister. ‘I think she did. She just wanted to protect your dad.’

He flushed. ‘By killing Berry? That wasn’t fair. Berry didn’t do anything.’

‘I know,’ I said. I’d had a call from Dunne thanking me for the email and letting me know they’d found Berenice’s bones buried at Carapace. Samson had admitted hiding them to protect his sister. They’d both been arrested.

I felt my heart breaking at the thought of little Finn. He’d lost everyone. His mother, father, cousin, uncle. Only Neil was left, and I wasn’t sure how long he was going to be free. Ben had said he was going to include Adam’s claims in his police statement. I had no idea how they were going to prove it. Finn was likely destined for foster care, like his father and uncle before him, unless they could find someone else to take him in.

Cramps shot through my stomach. ‘God, I am really hungry.’

Ben took a step back.

‘Not that hungry. Not yet.’ I looked over at Stanley. ‘Promise you’ll build something a bit sturdier. Just in case I get it wrong.’

‘I will,’ he said, twisting his moustache the way he always did when he was lying.

I stepped into the glass box and laid down. It was slightly too small, and my legs had to bend at the knee. The glass felt cool through my shirt. ‘And keep the attic door locked. If you hear anything moving and I don’t respond, call the police.’

‘I will,’ Stanley said, still twirling.

‘He will,’ Sigrid said. ‘We’ll be okay. Don’t worry about us. It’s our turn to take care of you.’

Pain wracked my body, and my brain went fuzzy. If I put it off any longer, I’d lose my mind. I closed my eyes. The world spun as my body shut down and I left the world of the living.