Page 35

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

TIL DEATH…

“ A nd so I think that makes… Three? Yes, three priests I’ve killed now. Plus the bishop. And a lot of monks.” Percy’s eyes were open, but he may as well have been talking in his sleep. He shuffled the papers Althea and Leo had brought back, searching again for anything of use while he waffled on, but it was all old news. All of what they’d stolen, he already knew a hundred times over. Most anything could be defeated with the right combination of salt, stabbing, or Latin, but not this thing.

A bead of sweat that had been gathering momentum at his temple dripped onto the page, spreading out strands of printer ink like the tentacles of a kraken. The kitten lay purring by his fingers, sated by another belly full of good meat.

“How are you feeling?”

Percy shoved the papers to the side and let his head drop against the back of the chair. “Like the Devil shat in my mouth. How are you?”

“I’m great.”

“That’s nice. How’s Joe?”

“He’s doing well. He’s worried about you. He knows you’re going to die right here in this room.”

“I’m going to have him out within the hour.” A choking cough seized Percy’s throat, his gut surging upwards, and he covered an empty retch with an unsteady hand.

Joe chuckled. “I don’t think you’ve got an hour.”

Percy dipped his forehead into his palms, and he drew long, even breaths in and out, trying to calm the nausea. The pulse of his blood ticked in his ears just as the seconds hand ticked its way around his watch, unerring, unrelenting. “You must want something. I don’t understand why you don’t just take me and go. You could get anything you want. Walk me out of here and be done with the whole mess.”

“I waited four hundred years in a dark cellar, trapped in the body of a demon, thirsting for blood, and you don’t think I can wait a little longer for you to expire?”

Percy’s quick eyes examined the thing. “That was a demon’s body?”

“That’s not the point.”

“But you’re not a demon. You’re not a demon and you want Joe, but you won’t kill me to get him. And come to think of it, you haven’t tried to kill Althea or Leo either. What’s that about?” Percy tried and failed to stifle a groan at the sharp pain in his abdomen.

The creature smiled. “That should be your intestines. They’ll start bleeding soon. Have you ever shat blood?”

“That’s a bit personal, don’t you think?”

“It’ll come out everywhere. Your eyes, your ears, your mouth. It’s going to be horrible for him to watch.”

That was true enough. Percy could feel it. He could feel his mind and his strength ebbing away. And the gripping, maddening fever. The pain that had begun to throb in every nerve.

The idea that he could get a train, or simply walk away from it, began to shadow every thought. That he could so easily leave the aching and the sickness behind.

‘Take my head…’

What if it made Joe kill Althea? Made him devour her, like he’d done to the sheep? Made Joe watch that. Maybe that’s why it was letting Percy die there. So Joe would have to live with his death. So Percy wouldn’t be able to protect her when the time came. Because it’s not as though it would want to eat him. He’d been marinating in scotch and cigarettes since he was at least fourteen. He’d taste terrible. He lit another smoke. “Your friend, Molly. I can find her.” Silence reigned for a good ten seconds, broken only by the sound of the tailor-made cigarette pulling away from Percy’s lips. “And I can kill her.”

Percy took in the small muscle at the top of Joe’s upper lip, flinching. “You see,” he went on, “when you two did whatever you did, back in Scotland, she stole the body of a very good friend of mine. And I intend to get it back. But more than that, I intend to get revenge. For all of it. So if Joe’s hungry right now, your friend Molly will be twice as hungry. That cut on his arm? She gets two.”

Joe’s smile was nervous, but spiteful. “You’ll never make it in time.”

“If I leave now, I’ll get better, isn’t that right?”

There was a gentle tapping of Joe’s naked foot.

Percy pulled the chair up, knee to knee, with the man he adored. “Take me. Run to her. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

There was a flitter of something in Joe’s eyes. Understanding? A touch of hope? But behind it, he saw fear.

Percy had two choices. Talk to the thing, reason with it, like Joe might have. Or retreat into the cocoon of savagery that had protected him since he was a small child.

Percy, as was the wont of a lifetime, chose violence.

He leaned closer, nose almost touching Joe’s, and in the most callous voice he could muster, he delivered the ultimatum. “Take me now, or I’m going to burn her all over again. I’ll make it slow. I’ll put her in the body of someone I really don’t like, and believe me, I’ll make it last. I hear they can burn, wide awake, for ten solid hours if the kindling is sparse. But you know what? I think I’ll try for twenty.”

A fire ignited in the golden eyes and Joe’s head smashed forward, splitting Percy’s eyebrow right at the scar. “Fuck!” Hot blood gushed over Percy’s eye, turning the room red, dripping down his cheek as he whirled back and away from Joe, away from the thing that had brought his hand into a fist, quickly and better aimed at the wall than at what used to be his lover.

A searing relief of pain shot through him as the wall gave way with a crack and a puff of ancient plaster, then another, then another, huge chunks falling to the floor at his feet as he smashed great gashes into the side of the room. He kicked at it, kicked more and more worthless holes, then he flung himself back on Joe, hands on the arms of his chair, taut with packing tape, close enough to see his own blood on Joe’s forehead, close enough see the bruise spreading fast there, close enough for the creature to feel his spit on Joe’s cheek when he growled, “That was it. That was your last chance. Whatever happens now, you’ll pay. You’ll pay with Molly Tulloch’s blood.”

Percy tore himself from the room, nothing but blinding, throbbing pain in his head and abdomen, offset only by the anger that overwhelmed the screaming of both. He fled downstairs, out the front door, and paced a circle in the empty street. A new lookout watched him, and he thought he might shoot him too, just for the intrusion into his own private nightmare. He set an incandescent stride up the road to avoid doing it, but it wasn’t as though he could leave. Leave Joe there, alone. Which he had already done. Even if it was only for that breath of desperately needed air. He ran back to the door and braced himself against the entrance as a new wave of sickness smacked him dead in the face.

The blues, the hideous aquas and turquoise and sapphire and every horrendous shade of blue and blue and blue. The house made him sick. Being near Joe made him sick. And he made himself sick.

He paced up the street in the same frenetic fury, then, seeing a group of children at the top of the road returning home from school, staring at the sweating, filthy, bloody corpse of a man that he was, he veered off course, into the scrapheap that used to be someone’s home, that sat forgotten and as broken down as he was, flush up against what was supposed to be a safe house.

The first rotting beam of wood he saw, he cracked a foot down upon and split the thing in two. He picked it up and smashed it into a wall, breaking it into a dozen splintered shards, but the damp thud wasn’t nearly satisfying enough. Sheets of metal were ripped up and hurled across the yard with a deafening clatter. A metal pole rolled into his boot. He grasped it, strong and defiant in his hands, and smashed it into a wall of bricks, one hundred years old and not yet fallen, until the day it met Percy. The tired concrete gave way to his anger, and the lot toppled to the ground. He smashed the pole into corrugated iron. He found an unbroken shard of an old window and obliterated it. He wrenched old piping free, broke apart every recognisable thing, smashed and pulverised and destroyed every remnant that was left of what had once been a shelter until his exhausted body was too tired to go on.

He fell against the pile of broken-down bricks, the rubble slipping under his weight, gashing into his side, yet he lay there, in the miserable grey London afternoon, the sky and the walls just as dispassionate, unfeeling and stoic as they had ever been. A mass of clouds swirled low overhead, and a filthy drop of rain made a splash of pink in the blood on his cheek.

Percy sat forward.

It was Joe, and it was Joe, and it was Joe, all in a swirl of nausea and misery and aching everything.

Joe, who had ripped him out of a lifetime of sadness.

Joe, whose gentle fingertips he could feel even now caressing the hair at his temple.

Joe, who felt like the place on the pillow where the sun had kissed it moments earlier.

Joe, who’d never asked for anything, but that one simple request. To not let him live through that horror a second time. To not let him do those things that creatures of darkness would use his body for. To spare him. One simple request, that even now, even as he knew he was about to bleed out in front of Joe’s eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to fulfil. He would have bought him the earth, murdered every person in the street, pledged himself heart and soul for all eternity, but the simple act of slitting that one precious throat…

Leo would have done it for him.

But the thought of that gargle of blood, the red bubbles of air seeping at the slit…

The light going out of Joe’s eyes forever…

Time was running out and he could feel it in every cell.

Percy picked up a broken half of a brick and hurled it at the building next door. It cracked in two with a puff of weak concrete, smashed down onto an old tin can, and sent the thing rolling, rolling, until it came to a halt right in front of Percy’s shoe.

A movement inside caught his eye. He focused on the jarring twang of a silken strand. The twang of one long pincer plucking, pulling, righting.

Percy leaned a little closer.

Plucking, twanging, long and black… and deeply repulsive.

There she was. Shiny, black, leathery, and bulbous: a black widow spider.

The sight sent a shudder down Percy’s back, but the reaction it would have drawn from Joe… He was utterly disgusted by the things. Terrified of them.

Even in the midst of dejection there was a heavier beat in Percy’s chest with the memory of Joe, last time he had been Joe, so anxious to keep Percy’s hand out of that hollow in Cleo’s tree. But there were no black widow spiders in the Shetland Isles, as far as Percy knew. Not like London, which was riddled with the loathsome black beasts, according to Joe.

Percy turned the tin upside down, and with three hard taps, he knocked the spider to the ground. He watched the thing flip itself over, then it paused on its dagger-like legs, waiting to strike as soon as its assailant should make itself known.

Percy’s hand reached a thin piece of wire towards the spider. It took a few steps back, but he pushed, and it grasped at the metal. Percy lifted it, entranced, watching it slip and curl and grasp, until it was upside down again, two small, sharp fangs, shiny and clear as day.

He wondered at the creature. The thought of those fangs piercing his skin. Of the drops of blood that would burst free at the injection site. The feeling of it. ‘Like holding a burning match to your skin for twenty straight minutes.’ Those tiny fangs and the delivery of such strong venom that it could kill a man.

It could kill Percy if he didn’t get help in time.

It could kill Joe…

Percy’s left hand searched frantically in his trousers pocket, pulling his golden cigarette case free. He clicked it open and half a dozen too-expensive cigarettes fluttered to the ground. He balanced the spider over the gleaming container, lowered it gently down, and clasped the lid closed. In a frenzy, he tore the ruins apart, searched under every cup and can and piece of old iron in the place, in every crack and crevice, turning the lot inside out until he’d collected every deadly black arachnid in that small slice of London.

Percy was halfway up the stairs before he knew what he was doing, two thoughts alone swirling around his nauseated head.

The thing felt Joe’s pain.

The thing felt Joe’s fear.

He rounded the top of the stairs, he thrust open the door, “You’re back!” came the faux-delighted lilt of Joe’s voice… But the words died on his lips.

Percy no longer looked scared, lost, or desperate.

He looked insane.

Utterly mad.

Far madder than usual, and he walked straight to Joe, took his dagger to his shirt, and ripped a slit in the cotton to halfway up his arm. “Handsome,” he said, “this is going to hurt.”

He clicked open the golden case and shook the spiders down onto Joe’s skin. Joe’s entire being reeled back on sight, as though the creature was just as horrified as Joe would have been, but before it could get a handle on what was happening, Percy’s index finger pressed down hard on the leathery curve of a spider’s back, and it slid two fangs deep into Joe’s flesh.

A cry of pain shot from Joe’s mouth, his hand squeezed into a fist, and all Percy thought about was how fast the blood would flow due to his panic, speeding the venom through every inch of his body, assailing the creature with the same sickness he’d felt since he walked in the door. He provoked another and another, a sea of black crawling over his beloved’s skin. Tears of agony streamed down Joe’s cheeks and he drew great breaths deep into his lungs.

Finding a semblance of control, the creature flung the spiders across the room where they landed with a tik-tak against the wall, only for Percy’s shoe to crush the life out of them, one after another, seeing by the pools of blood on Joe’s arm that they’d fulfilled his evil purpose.

The door burst open. “Percy!” came Leo’s shout. “Percy, you’ll be so impressed this time. I got your smack!”

Percy’s wild eyes eviscerated him with one glare. “The fuck do I want smack for? It’s antivenom I need!”

Althea’s eyes went to the growing red welts on Joe’s arm, and her voice barely made it to Percy’s ears, weak as it was. “What the fuck did you do?”

“Black widows,” he shouted, with an unnerving twitch of his bleeding eyebrow. “Maybe ten. Maybe fifteen. Who knows?”

“No…” The word slipped from Joe’s beautiful lips, with an accompanying flash of regret at the utterance.

Percy laughed, dropping to his knees between Joe’s legs. “I’m going to die? Then we’ll die here together. Today. I told him from the start that I’d drag him down with me. Then here we go. You might outlast me, but you’re not walking him out of here without me.”

“Then so be it,” the thing growled back at him, teeth clenching on its spiteful words. “He dies slow and horrible. Just like you.”

Percy could see Joe’s muscles begin to spasm beneath his skin, the venom already hard at work on its victim. A sweat broke about Joe’s brow and every extremity began to tremble.

“Leo!” Percy screamed. “The antivenom now or Joe’s death is on you!”

The drawn out and fading yell of “Fuuuuuck!” drifted down the stairs as Leo fled from the house.

But Althea didn’t budge, her voice on a knife edge of dismay. “You’ve really done it this time. You’ve killed Joe.”

“Go,” Percy ground out. “But if I’m dead when you get back, don’t give him the antivenom or you’re next. Run.”

“Percy—”

“Run!”

He heard Althea’s footsteps fade behind Leo’s. When the door slammed safely shut, he said, “That’s it. It’s done, and I’ve murdered you. There’s no coming back unless you do what I say.” For the first time in so long, Percy let his hands fall on Joe’s chest. Joe’s heart beat hard against the venom, his breath hitching beneath Percy’s gentle touch. Percy looked deep into his eyes and begged, “Take me.”

On quickening breaths, the beast rasped, “I’d rather see you dead.”

“Why?” Percy screamed, climbing to his feet. “Why are you doing this? Can’t you see I love him? Can’t you see I’ll do anything? Anything!”

“But you won’t. You’ve chosen that girl over him again and again. You haven’t offered me the boy once. You don’t know what sacrifice is. You don’t know what love is.” Joe’s gaze went to the corpse on the floor. “You give yourself readily because you have no respect for life. You don’t understand love or beauty. Because humans don’t. Because you’re just the same as all the rest of them.”

Percy glowered back at the thing. “I’m not like anyone else.”

“Oh, but you are. You’re all anger and violence, and when you don’t get what you want, you smash it all to pieces. Look what you’ve done to him. This person you claim to love. You could have let him go. But you won’t. Because you’re just as pathetic and selfish as all the rest.”

Pathetic and selfish. Percy knew it, believed it, with every inch of his soul, but he still attempted to argue, “Joe doesn’t want that.”

“And he doesn’t want to be shot full of spider venom, either. Do you think this is how he wanted to die? Here in this stinking room next to a dead stranger watching the man he loves bleed to death?”

“No, I don’t!” Percy shouted, yet all he could see was the red of Joe’s arm, swollen and bitten, the newest, blackening bruise on the ridge of Joe’s eyebrow, the blood from the cut he’d inflicted, and Joe’s bare, beautiful feet on the filthy floor, and all of him chained and taped and shaking with the deathly delivery flowing through his veins.

This was no hero’s death.

This was no lover’s death.

This was no sort of death at all.

He dropped onto the mattress, at the foot of the bed, his hands paled to an eerie white as they rested on his thighs. His fingers tingled, as though he’d fallen asleep on them. He opened and closed them, the cuts on his knuckles smarting as he stretched the wounds. “We were supposed to grow old together. Just the two of us. We were supposed to…”

He drifted off, groping through the unrelenting malady, the impending death of his body, as all the memories he had left narrowed to one thin slit of Joe. “We never did make our plans. Go home, travel Europe, open a pub. Anything. I would have done any of it.” Thinning, thinning, and blackening. “But it’s over now, isn’t it? Our beautiful dream. Or mine. My beautiful dream. My beautiful idea that someone like Joe could be for someone like me. In this life. In this world.” He smiled sadly over at the beast. “Because you’re right. It’s all stinking shit, the whole lot of it. I’ve seen more horror in my time here than… Well, I suppose you know all of that now. And you know Joe, and you do know him, because he’s in there somewhere.”

His voice faded where memories took its place. “God, he’s so beautiful. And I don’t mean his eyes and his hair and his—his touch. Christ… I’m never going to feel that again, am I?” Tears started to Percy’s eyes, and he pressed them against the palms of his hands. “He’s so sweet. He has the most beautiful soul I’ve ever seen. And I never thought someone like that could be for someone like me. Because you’re right. I’m not good enough for him. No one is. No one. This whole world… He’s too good for it, all of it.”

He looked again at Joe, but this time, he spoke only to Joe. “These last few months, this one tiny fragment of my whole life, I got to see what true beauty looks like. What love really is. And it’s every time you look at me. It’s every time you let me rest my head on your chest. It’s every time you hold me and you kiss me…” He raised a trembling finger to his temple. “Right here. I can feel it now. Your lips, right here. And they’re gone. And you’re gone… This thing…” He shook his head, closing trembling lips to control his voice. “Handsome, it’s not going to give you back to me. Not before I die. I thought I could do this. That I could destroy it, or cheat it…”

A single tear dropped from Joe’s eye, running slow and silent down his cheek, his face so quiet and still, almost as though it was Joe.

“Then it’s done.” Percy reached for his dagger, which clanged emptily against the mess of metal and meat and useless research strewn all over the bed. “I’m sorry it had to be like this, my love. And I’m sorry for all the things I did to you today. I didn’t want to let go. But I know better now.”

Legs like lead, a head swimming in black, he staggered to Joe. His thighs straddling Joe’s for stability, he placed his fingers on Joe’s cheek, palm cupping his chin, and the creature raised Joe’s face up to him. Those eyes, faithful and golden through the longest, darkest lashes, that Percy had adored since the second he first saw him. “I never meant for any of this to happen. If I could turn things back and make it that you never crossed my path…” A tear fell from Percy’s eye onto Joe’s skin, and that tear ran red with the haemorrhaging of Percy’s blood, in one long, fatal streak down his cheek, and down his neck.

“If I could change that night you came to my house… The way I fell in love with you…”

He leaned down and kissed Joe, dying lips on dying lips, deathly cold against dangerously fevered, desperately loving and lonely and forever broken, against the promise of eternity. He pressed the icy blade to Joe’s neck. “If I could change it all, I wouldn’t trade a second. Because this thing is right. I’m selfish, and I love you. I love you desperately. Obsessively. Greedily. You’re everything. And you always will be. So listen to me when I tell you, it doesn’t end here.” The blade sunk deeper, indenting Joe’s flesh, though it did not break, while Percy’s hand searched over Joe’s cheek, storing away every last sense of Joe’s living, breathing self beneath his touch. “If they take me to Hell, I’ll murder the Devil to get to you. If they send us to purgatory, I’ll find you. I’ll burn the gates of Heaven to the ground and make God my slave if I have to. I will follow you to the end of existence and back again, and I won’t ever stop. Don’t forget me. Don’t you ever forget me. There isn’t a force in this universe that could keep us apart. You go first, darling, but I’m coming right after you. Your blood, then mine, on this knife. I promise you, I’m coming for you.” His forehead dropped against Joe’s, tears of blood running fast, scalding their two faces. He touched their lips together in one last soft kiss. “Goodbye, my love. But only for a time.”

Percy pressed the dagger, Joe gasped an enormous breath of air, then screamed, “Percy, stop! Stop! Percy, it’s me!”

A trickle of blood painted Joe’s neck, reddening his collar. Percy’s hand held the vicious blade there in his skin, stalled by something in the voice—something indefinable, unfathomable— something primal. But he didn’t dare to hope. He remained, like a brutal statue, frozen in the act of murder. Void.

Almost void.

Almost empty, but for that one vibration of tenderness.

He knew the soul behind that voice.

The knife clattered to the floor. Percy threw his head against Joe’s chest, red tears bathing his shirt through and through, and heaving sobs and arms wrapped around Joe’s waist. Then Percy’s hands on either side of Joe’s face, searching desperately.

Joe, truly Joe, stared back at him, eyes wet with tears and as adoring as they’d ever been. “It’s me. Percy…”

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Percy scrambled for the dagger, slitting the electrical tape.

Joe’s arms were around him, kisses all over his hair, his temples and cheeks, anywhere he could plant one, strong arms pulling him close. “Baby, it’s okay. It’s okay now. You did it.”

Percy shook his head in the heated darkness of Joe’s embrace. “I almost slit your throat. Jesus Christ, what did I do?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. You’re so, so perfect. Percy, look at me.” Percy flinched away, but Joe brought his chin up with loving fingers. “Your eyes. We need to get you out of here.”

Like a wind-up toy, Percy acted on command, his every movement bereft of thought, the residual energy of a dying vessel. He found the key, he unlocked Joe, he unwound the chains, and Joe, shaking in every inch of his body, heart ramming a million miles an hour, gasps of breath fighting at the venom in his blood, took Percy’s exhausted weight against his body, and they two trudged down the stairs. They braced themselves against the wall, slipping, but with Joe’s red and swollen arm on the railing catching them every time. He dragged Percy out into the street and refused to let him fall onto the broken asphalt. He kept on, up and up, to the brown-green expanse of the council estate, where he finally let Percy sink into his lap, stroking his hair. “Rest here.”

A fog of all-encompassing fatigue swept over Percy. Against the heat of Joe’s body, the touch of his hands in his hair, the reassuring press of the breath in his body, Percy was ready to slip away. But he sunk his fingernails into the dirt to grope his way back up. “I need to kill it.”

Joe forced him back down. “Shhh. It’s gone. It’s not there anymore.”

“Gone? Gone where?” Percy muttered, face pushed into Joe’s knee, eyelids fluttering closed. “How do you know that?”

A small mew sounded at Joe’s hip.

Percy was up quicker than a shot. “Moxie! Thank Christ.” He scooped the kitten up, taking her to his chest, then collapsed back onto Joe. “This makes no sense. It must have gone somewhere.”

“Mew,” said the kitten. Percy pulled her up against his cheek.

“You called it Moxie?” asked Joe, more than a hint of worry in his voice.

“Leave Moxie alone. She stays with me.” As if in agreement, the kitten stretched a tiny paw across his bloody closed eye. “It’s going to be after Althea next. We need to find her and get away from here. We’ll go to Paris tonight.”

Joe let slip a small laugh. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, Percy. Or for some time. It’s gone. And it didn’t really want her anyway. It was just testing you.”

Percy rolled onto his back to look at Joe. “Do you know what it was?”

“I do. But let’s save that for another chapter because?—”

“Fuck that, Joe. What is it, what did it want, and why did it give you back?”

Their attention was snatched away to the end of the street by the fast and untrustworthy movement of an ambulance. It hit the tight corner of a brick wall, grazing the side of the van with an ear-piercing scrape. It overcorrected and smashed the railing off someone’s staircase. The accelerator propelled the thing too fast off the stairs it had mounted, and the vehicle screeched to a long and disturbing halt just past their safe house.

“Leo!” Joe shouted as soon as saw him jump out. “Althea!”

The pair bolted up the street to them, Althea just about knocking Joe over with her arms around his neck, and Leo on his knees in front of Percy.

“Are you all right?” Althea asked.

“I’ve been worse,” Joe laughed out.

“Come here.” Percy pulled Leo’s head down to his shoulder, where Leo let out a little whimper, patted away by Percy’s hand on his hair. “I’m so sorry.”

Leo, refusing to leave the desperately needed embrace, spoke into Percy’s shoulder, “I got your antivenom.”

Percy broke a tired smile. “You’re the best, Leo. I’d be lost without you. Truly. I’m really sorry.”

A sniffle sounded, but Leo hid the rest of his emotion with a gruff, “I guess we’d better inject him, then.”

“Ah, I might actually go to the hospital for that,” Joe cut in, receiving the usual scowl from Leo. “I can drive myself.”

“You’re not leaving my sight,” said Percy, wrapping his hand a little tighter around Joe’s thigh.

“No, I’m not,” Joe agreed. “You’re coming with me. Come on.”

Joe stood shakily, with Althea supporting him from under one arm. “Did you kill it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No. But it’s gone. Out of me, anyway. And not in Percy.”

“But where to?” Percy wondered, still in a muddle on the grass. The kitten gave another little mew, so he pulled it onto his shoulder, where it purred against his cheek, then set about licking the blood from his face.

“You’re planning on keeping that?” Joe asked, failing to hide an unaccustomed distaste that, had Percy had an inkling Joe felt for cats in general, would have scarpered any chance of a relationship from the start.

In a quick, defensive manoeuvre, Percy dropped the kitten into his shirt pocket and let Leo help him to his feet. He cut off Joe’s next comment by saying, as he walked towards the ambulance, “I’ll drive us to the hospital. Leo, would you mind terribly burning the house down?”

Leo’s back was erect, head held high, smile returned in full. “Not at all. I’ll make sure the body’s burned first.”

“Good lad. And could you get Cleo out?”

“Of course. I’ll bring her to you right after.”

“And then book us somewhere nice. You and Althea too.”

“Ritz or Savoy? Or—or Claridges?”

“You decide. But could you organise some cat litter or something? And I don’t know, shots or whatever it is Moxie needs?”

Joe and Althea staggered two steps behind in bewildered silence. Joe glanced over at her, managing a smile, despite feeling he was likely to drop dead any second. “Are you okay?”

Althea burst into a nervous bout of laughter. “Me? Yeah, I’m fine. No spiders or anything.”

Joe laughed, and to Althea’s delight, he soon showed he was still very much Joe. “It’s been a day though, hasn’t it? I didn’t see that much, but I know you must have been through a lot.”

She replied, “I saw my first murder, held up two sets of paramedics, stole an ambulance, bought heroin, destroyed some priceless books, and almost watched you die. Yeah, it’s definitely been a day. But not a bad one. Not entirely.”

“So… I’ll see you at whichever expensive hotel we end up at?”

She stole a quick glance over at Leo, who was nodding earnestly to Percy’s every instruction, and said, “Yeah. Yeah, I think you will.”

“I had a feeling I might.”

They embraced, then Joe climbed into the ambulance next to Percy, who hit the siren despite Joe’s protests, and drove them to the closest private hospital with his usual careless grace.