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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

HEATHROW

J oe’s body leaned a warm, tired shoulder against Percy’s. Percy swept a hand around Joe’s waist, and the creature touched Joe’s beautiful head to Percy’s cheek, the softness and scent of his hair easing the tight fist that Percy’s stomach had become.

No sign of Althea.

Percy wished a bomb would go off. Just detonate right there in the baggage claim and leave nothing of him or of Joe or of anything else.

It was good that there was no sign of her. But it was also very bad that there was no sign of her. No random water bottle sitting conspicuously out in the open like he’d hoped for. Just more and more people surrounding them, and Percy wondering how long he had until he’d have to risk giving Joe a concussion, or worse, if the thing tried to abscond.

The crowd shuffled, bunched, thinned, and bunched again.

Percy felt the press of something long, cool, and hard into his hand.

He made no move beyond carefully curling his fingers closed on the object. He slid it up his sleeve, moving his fingers down and down and down, recognising a plastic cylinder, tapering to a long, flimsy plastic lid.

He popped the cap.

There was an audible tap as it hit the floor.

“Did you drop something?” Joe leaned his head forward. Percy jabbed the syringe into his arm, squeezing the plunger until the chamber was empty.

The sweet head that had been on his shoulder a moment earlier snapped across fiercely. “What the fuck did you just do?”

Joe tried to fight Percy off as he hugged him tight to slow the fall, keeping his arms glued to his side, but whatever had been in the syringe was powerful, and it was now flowing through Joe’s body and brain with unnerving immediacy. “It’s all right, darling. You’ll be all right.”

Percy was on his knees, bracing Joe, whose eyes fluttered open and closed in a futile attempt to stay conscious. A shaking hand ran over Joe’s heaving chest, and Percy whispered, “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

A coat fell over Joe’s body. Percy caught the glint of a metal band being slipped onto Joe’s wrist. Leo had already climbed back to his feet to address the forming crowd by the time Percy recognised him. “Stand back! He’s epileptic or some shit.”

Percy flicked the bracelet around. Narcoleptic, it said, etched right there in shining silver next to a little caduceus.

Brilliant boy.

“Narcoleptic,” Percy corrected, loudly enough for a sizeable chunk of the crowd to hear.

“Narcoleptic!” Leo cried out in response. “Will he be okay?”

Percy was impressed, deeply, until Leo winked at him right there in front of everyone.

Ridiculous boy.

“He’ll be fine,” Percy said sharply. “Just— Could you help me take him to my car?”

“Certainly!” Leo was already pulling Joe to his feet, groaning under the weight that he really should have expected. Percy moved himself under an arm to take the majority of the heft he was used to handling, though, unconscious, laid out on his back across the floor of an airport, Joe presented more of a challenge than usual. They made it about three feet, Joe’s lead-like legs dragging on the floor behind them, when they were set upon by no less than four airport officials with a medical kit, shoving everyone out of the way, and insisting Percy and Leo lay Joe back down.

“He’s fine,” Percy grunted. “Narcoleptic. It happens a lot.”

“Does he have a medical bracelet or something?” Leo asked. “To prove that?”

Percy’s cheek twitched with irritation, but he controlled himself. “He does, actually. Would you mind lifting his sleeve just there? The left one.”

Leo wrenched it up accordingly, and Percy scanned the faces of the officials for the acceptance they soon showed. Until Leo’s display of bobbing eyebrows set at least one of them on their guard. “And how can we be sure you know this gentleman?”

“His name’s Joe Bruno,” Percy supplied. “His passport’s in his top left pocket.”

Leo had the good sense to let the man reach in and find it for himself. He eyed the passport. He eyed Joe, Percy, Leo, and the passport again.

Percy’s arm began to shake under the weight, the heat of his sweat making his grip slippery, his bag cutting into his shoulder, Cleo’s skull knocking against his thigh. His mental resources were already wildly depleted, and he wondered how far he’d get if he knocked the man to the ground right there and made a break for it.

The man turned, made to say something to one of the others, but then, “Percy!” Althea’s voice cut across the wide room. She was breathless at his side a second later. “He hasn’t passed out again, has he?”

Percy could have kissed her. He mumbled something about it having been at least two weeks since his last collapse, but she spoke over him, addressing Leo. “Are you with Percy and Joe?”

“Who me?” he said as though he were the understudy of the worst actor in a sixth-grade play. “Why, no, I was here when he collapsed, and?—”

“Thank you. I’ll take it from here.” Althea slipped her tiny self beneath Joe’s arm, and Percy let out a grunt with the extra weight he was forced to take to prevent her from being crushed when Leo stepped away.

Leo did, at least, remember the passport. “He’ll probably need that.”

The man, hesitatingly, slipped it into Joe’s pocket, and as his colleagues had already begun to disperse, he did the same. Althea yanked at Joe’s arm to get them moving again, while Leo ran off in another direction.

“You didn’t think of a wheelchair?” Percy huffed as soon as they were clear.

“You should be happy I’m here at all.” She surprised him with her angry tone, but he was far too tired to take it much to heart. “What is this? What’s going on with him?”

Percy staggered against a wall and paused there, dragging deep breaths in and out of his lungs until he felt a little recovered. He readjusted his grip on Joe and trudged on. “He’s possessed. There’s something in his body and it’s not a demon, and it’s not a ghost, and if he wakes up, we’re probably all dead.”

Althea made no reply, well aware by that time that supernatural forces, such as zombie hands, definitely did exist, but still living in the reality where normal people reside, where such a claim felt like it should have been ludicrous.

“Or maybe he won’t kill us,” Percy continued, pausing for an automatic glass door to slide open. “I don’t know what it wants, but I do know it likes to drink blood. I might need you to visit a butcher for me. Where’s Leo?”

“He said to wait there.” She tilted her head down a long tunnel, full of exhaust fumes and housing a road jammed with cars and buses. “Taxi bay fifty-three.”

“He’s got a car, hasn’t he? Because if he expects me to take my unconscious possessed boyfriend home in a fucking taxi?—”

“He got a car,” she rushed out. “A nice one, too. Not like that red one you rented, but?—”

Percy let her waffle about the car and focused on the little yellow bay numbers painted on the asphalt as he dragged Joe along. He didn’t have it in him to notice people staring, or to sidestep any smaller items of luggage that he could more easily kick onto the road. “What did you put in him, anyway?”

She stopped mid-sentence. “Leo knows. I tried to calculate with the pills, like you said, but the water didn’t look clear when I dissolved them, and I couldn't find a bottle that didn’t show the liquid, and I thought, how would you get it all into him? But I thought, what if he drinks too much, or not enough, or what if it tastes too bad, and how am I going to fix that?”

“You’re right.” Having found bay fifty-three, Percy leaned himself back against a dirty concrete pylon, settling Joe’s chest against his own. He threaded his arms beneath Joe’s, and he linked his hands behind his back, transferring the strain from his burning biceps to his wrists and forearms. “You did well.”

The heat, the humidity, the car fumes added a special irritation to the layers of anger, fear, and grief that Percy was already trying to keep under wraps. He felt a trickle of sweat that he didn’t have a spare hand to shift, tickling its way down his temple, so he closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and waited for Leo.

Interminable, that terminus. Buses, taxis, idiotic tourists with too many bags and no idea where they were going, shouting, gawping, existing. But in the black of his closed eyes, Percy saw only Joe. Covered in sheep’s blood. Beautiful, beautiful Joe. He wondered if that would be his last memory of him. All of it, the whole beautiful, romantic adventure, over and done and boiled down to that one hideous night. And it would be his fault for bringing him along. And Joe and all memory of him would be gone, and Percy would be left with only blood and death. And no Joe. Ever again.

He tightened his arms and let his head drop forward, which only made things worse, because when his lips touched Joe, it felt so much like kissing a reheated corpse. His head smacked back into the concrete and “Fuck!” he shouted.

Althea stayed still and silent, like a shrewd person does when she’s scared and trying to keep herself safe, and somewhere inside he felt like shit because he knew he was making her feel that way, but everything was too much for his regret to reach the surface.

Finally, Leo pulled up in a nondescript black hire car. Percy turned and backed himself and Joe towards the door Leo had opened for them, Leo taking Joe’s legs to help ease him in. He slammed the door shut behind them, and Percy nestled a hand in Joe’s hair, Joe’s head on his knees, and he kept his own eyes open and staring at the dark road because he didn’t want to see the blood in his mind’s eye anymore.

After a quick discussion between Leo and Althea, that Percy couldn’t hear a word of, Leo held the door for Althea to climb in, then moved around the car and took the wheel. “I’ve got you a place in Hackney,” he said. “The whole building’s derelict. It’ll just be you. It’s down the end of a lane, by an estate.”

“I don’t want anyone to hear the screams,” Percy muttered.

Althea threw a panicked look back, and not receiving even a glance from Percy, she focused on Leo. “Screams?”

Leo, pretending to be concentrating hard on driving, carried on with his report. “It’s not the kind of estate where anyone will care. The place next door looks like a hub for trafficking or drugs or something. I haven’t had a chance to check it out properly yet, but I doubt they’ll be calling the cops.”

Percy gave a tired nod and let his head fall against the window.

A moment of tense silence passed between Althea and Leo in the front, then he said, “I got a chair. A big one. It’s wooden, but it’s incredibly sturdy. And it looks comfortable too, because I thought you might want that, since it’s… him.” Leo couldn't put his finger on why he didn’t want to say Joe’s name. Something in Percy’s all-pervasive dark air. Leo had the sense that one wrong word could easily push him somewhere regrettable, so he kept talking to cover his near misstep. “I got ropes. A couple of different sizes. I got some tape, in case you need that. I got chains and padlocks, of course. But I can grab anything else you need. I’ve hired the car for a couple of days. So…”

No response from the back.

“So that’s that…” And Leo drove on through the thick silence, while Althea stared hard out the window, stomach and fingers in knots.

Traffic was bad, and it took over an hour to reach their destination, during which time Percy listened for every change of Joe’s breath, keeping a finger on his pulse for any sign of a quickening. Eventually the buildings got tighter, dirtier, and boards began appearing in windows. The yellowy bricks that define that part of London appeared in abundance, and roller doors that remained down and locked and covered in faded spray paint all the day long darkened the already grim streets.

Leo took a right into a cul-de-sac, and Percy saw at once he’d picked the perfect location. A man’s scream here would invite no more action than the locking of a deadbolt.

Crumbling, triple-level Victorian era habitations lined both sides of the street, half of them obviously abandoned, the other half in such a miserable state of disrepair that they could only have been the worst sort of squats.

Leo pulled up in front of a house at the end of the street. The right side should have had an identical building flush with its wall, but that had fallen down long ago, leaving nothing but a crumbling shell, augmented with curling wires and burned bricks, cordoned off by an ineffectual rusted metal fence.

At the top of the street was a vast expanse of questionable grass, leading to one of the widest, most densely packed council estates in England. The whole ramshackle conglomerate was covered in a sordid black mould, which also featured on the interiors of many of the windows—those that were not missing.

The house on the left of their temporary abode provoked a little more interest and a little more concern. The car they pulled up in wasn’t luxury, but it was shiny and expensive, and it drew the immediate interest of a watchman who waited on the stairs. A tall, skinny, but wiry lad who looked like he’d given up any hope of a reprieve, and therefore had little to lose by pick-pocketing this lot. Or worse.

Leo’s supposition about that house, Percy decided, was almost certainly correct. Just the fact they had a watchman in that part of London indicated something particularly nefarious. Who would they need to look out for besides other criminals? No police were going to be wandering down that block any time soon.

Percy had no reservations about dealing with him, should he have to, but it was trouble he didn’t need, so although the man’s eyes burned into him when he climbed out of the car, Percy spared him only one long glance, with something of an intimidating raise of his lip, before calling Leo out of the car to take half of Joe’s weight.

Althea then climbed out. She slammed her door, looked up at the dilapidated house, but paused as her attention was drawn to the vacant lot next door. A scruff of ginger fur had caught her eye. That and the gentle step and green eyes of a small, dirty kitten clambering over the ruins.

The watchman ran his eyes over her bright purple track pants, her fluorescent yellow parka, and muttered, “Slut.”

She instantly responded with a canned, “Go fuck yourself.”

But Leo’s eyes blazed and he very nearly dropped Joe’s feet, which he only managed to keep a hold of as some pavlovian survival instinct sparked in the back of his brain. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“Leo!” Percy’s furious tone snapped him back to his task, but his eyes barely left the scrawny redhead, who never stopped smirking back at him until the four had made their way up the uneven concrete stairs and were concealed inside. Althea slammed the door, Percy and Leo mounted the internal staircase at Leo’s direction, and the cold, grim embrace of desolation wrapped around the lot of them.

Percy and Leo kept such addresses as these on file. ‘Safe’ houses in several major cities. It was clear though, by the musty smell and the damp that penetrated their very pores as with sickened fingers of unsavoury dew, no one had lived here for a very long time

Percy pulled Joe backwards over thin and threadbare royal-blue carpet. The stairs creaked and groaned every step of the way, and some part of him wondered just how rotten the wood beneath their feet was. The Victorian staircase was long and narrow, and when he finally mounted the summit, he stumbled back in exhaustion, tearing a hole in the sagging turquoise wallpaper as Joe’s body slumped heavily onto him.

A low groan came from Joe, and, “Fuck!” hissed Percy. “Where?”

“Here.” Leo nodded to Althea, who was, understandably, far, far quieter than usual. She skirted around Joe’s feet to hold a bedroom door open. Leo grasped Joe’s legs again, and both men redoubled their efforts, dragging him into the bedroom.

The carpet was a mean aquamarine-blue, burned and bare in places that revealed scuffed floorboards beneath. The room was one broken window beset with ivy, looking down upon an overgrown courtyard of nothing more than bare bricks and dead tree branches. It was an old bed with an iron frame and a filthy sagging mattress. It was chipped blue paint, cracks in the walls, likely a lot of asbestos leaking out of the gash in the ceiling, and it was fucking miserable.

The sturdy chair Percy had told Althea to tell Leo to buy was an oversized monstrosity from the seventies, but it looked as though it had been carved out of one giant tree trunk. It was thick, lacquered yellow, and padded, also in blue, on the base and the back.

Odd, the way Percy relished that small touch of comfort for Joe, given what he was about to do to him.

The chair had a twin, and, as much as he could manage to feel it, Percy was thankful to Leo for buying a pair, so he would have a place to rest his tired bones.

Leo steadied the first seat, Percy dropped Joe into it, and Althea pulled a black duffel bag out of a dark corner, emptying the contents onto the mattress.

A wide, long, and heavy chain was wrapped around Joe’s body, across his midline twice, then looped over his shoulders, tight. This fastened him to the chair with the help of an enormous, brand-new padlock, the key of which swiftly disappeared into Percy’s pocket. Leo had chosen the simplicity of packing tape for Joe’s wrists. Around and around they wound it, then around his shins too. This being done, Percy leaned Joe’s drooping head against the back of the chair. He gave a long sigh, echoed by Leo, who, having missed the reveal before and having gone along blindly with Percy’s plans, finally asked, “So what did he do?”

“Possessed,” said Percy.

“Ah, shit,” Leo replied. “Not a demon?”

“No.”

“Because you’ve both got that warding?—”

“Correct.”

Percy remained where he was, watching Joe, and Leo tried, “Ghost?”

“No. Whatever it is, it’s not affected by salt, holy water or the Bible.”

“Fuck.” Leo blew a long, low whistle over his lips. “How about a djinn?”

An outlandish suggestion in any other conversation, perhaps, but Percy responded with, “In Scotland?”

“Maybe?”

“Mmm. Maybe. Maybe not. Think harder. Get me some books or something. Can you…” Percy began to revive a little with the discussion, remembering that the reason he’d put himself and Joe through the entire ordeal of the morning was to get the two of them to a city big enough to access all the information and supplies that might be necessary. He commenced a short pace, thinking aloud, watching his shoes alternate blue carpet and brown floorboards. “I want you two to go to a good library and find out everything you can about anything that possesses. Every type of ghoul or sprite or spirit or faerie. Anything. I need to know every weak spot every one of them has. Make me a list, then we’ll start systematic torture of the being to find out what’s inside.”

Althea, lost in a thousand visions of supernatural horror, snapped back into the room. “Sorry, what?”

“Done.” Leo had perked up twice as much as Percy in response to the latter’s business-like change of mood, and was standing a foot taller, a tentative smile replacing the frown he’d worn for the last hour.

“He’ll need something to eat,” Percy continued. “I need you to visit… a butcher. I think…” He scanned Joe. “Get me raw meat. Good cuts, though. Something nice. And get some blood, too. I don’t know how they sell it, or if they do. Just try to get some… I suppose sheep’s blood would be good to drink.”

A sick sound squelched in the back of Leo’s throat. “Just jars of sheep’s blood and good raw meat? Nothing else?”

“Pliers.”

“Of course.”

“Copper wire.”

“Obviously.”

Althea’s scared eyes drifted between the two, while Percy’s hand went to his coat pocket. “My knife. Fuck, my suitcases.”

“In the car,” Leo reported, adding a proud smile.

With no acknowledgement whatsoever of Leo’s forethought and effort remembering his belongings, Percy instructed, “Get the suitcases from the car before someone steals them. Speaking of which, you’d best put the car in lockup and use the underground. I’ll need you back here as soon as possible, so use the photocopier at the library, take notes, whatever you have to do to get every scrap of information back to me within two hours. Maximum.”

“All right.” Leo started towards the door, Althea running after him, centimetres behind. She consequently smacked into his back when he stopped suddenly to ask Percy, “What about you? Are you hungry?”

“No. Hurry. And find me a gun. Oh, and a blowtorch.”

“A blowtorch?” Turning a distinct shade of green, Leo cast a glance towards Joe’s sleeping body. “You’re going to use it? On him?”

A spark of warning flared in Percy’s tired eyes. “It’s not as though I have much of a choice, is it?”

With a sharp nod, Leo was out and on his way, Althea following.

Alone, Percy stood still and took a few long and deep breaths. Then he pulled Cleo from her bag. He checked her skull for missing teeth, bumps or scrapes. He placed her down on the mattress. She was silent. He stroked the rough shell of her scalp and asked, “Do you know what’s going on?”

A soft hiss escaped the gap between her teeth.

Percy said, “He’s tied up. He can’t hurt you.”

From the skull came a little grunt, or something as close to a grunt as a thing with no lips and no tongue and no throat can make.

Percy glanced back at Joe’s body, mute and unmoving, and he whispered, “Are you frightened of it?”

“Heeeee,” she wheezed.

“I can’t leave him right now, but I promise, you’re next in line.” Percy placed the skull at the head of the bed, out of Joe’s sight, then slumped into the chair opposite him to await the coming interview.