Her brand burned across her back as she enforced her will. But she felt curiously distanced from the pain, as though she could shrug it away and wish it gone. In a flash of insight, she realized that would be disastrous. What she felt in her was the conflict between self-definition and the contamination. She couldn’t afford to ignore it. She had to embrace it.
But it hurt. She heard her breath catch, the sound strange in her ears.
‘Irene?’ Kai said, his voice concerned. It was too dark to see him now.
With a racking surge, like vomit after eating spoiled food, the chaos power came jolting out of her. She tried not to think of the buffet earlier that evening (salmon, mussels, crab, soup, little prawns in sauce) and failed. It spilled from her hand, boiling off her fingers in waves of shadow that rippled in the air – and like any living thing, it looked for shelter, for something like itself.
It jumped for the window, arcing through the narrow span of air, and crackled into the glass. Irene had just enough time to wonder if she should jump away from the window, when it broke.
Not just the window.
The whole carriage came apart. First the window, splintering into shards of glass, then sections of the carriage were toppling away from each other like a badly glued model. She barely had time to feel the splinters of glass in her arm before the water came in like a hammerblow. And, surprisingly clearly in the near-darkness, she saw Kai’s face looking strangely decisive. His mouth was moving, he was saying something –
She had several seconds of thrashing panic before she realized that she could breathe.
The three of them were drifting along together at the bottom of the river, enclosed in a long continuous coil of dark water. It was a flexing shifting visible current in the river, separate from the rest of the water. It even felt cleaner. The shattered remnants of the carriage were already invisible in the shifting mud of the bottom, some distance behind them. Above, through the surface of the water, streetlamps glimmered in hazy balls of white and orange. Kai floated a few paces ahead of herself and Vale, moving at the same pace as them. He was saying something, but the river water filled her ears and she couldn’t hear him.
Vale grasped at her sleeve. He mouthed something that was probably What is going on, Miss Winters?
On the positive side, Irene reassured herself, he must be feeling more composed if he was back to calling her Miss Winters. She shrugged as obviously as she could, gesturing soothingly. It is all under control, she mouthed back.
Vale didn’t look as if he believed her, which was a shame, because she was now sure that things actually were back under control. To the extent that the three of them weren’t about to drown, at least.
No, the real problem was something else entirely. Now she was sure what Kai really was. A river-spirit might have changed himself to water to save them, and a nature-spirit of some other type might have cajoled or persuaded the river to help them, but only one sort of being would give orders to a river.
Kai was a dragon. What the hell was she supposed to do about that?
And he’d chosen to reveal himself in order to save them. Not himself: he would presumably have managed quite comfortably on his own. But them. Her and Vale. It was a commitment on Kai’s part that made her worry whether she would be able to answer it. She didn’t like commitments to other people. They could get . . . messy.
The tumbling rush of the current veered towards the far bank, and then lifted the three of them out of the water itself, rising in an arc of dark water. They were placed on the dockside, deposited as lightly as driftwood. A couple of beggars who’d been nursing their hands over a small fire just sat there, looking at the three of them numbly as the water sloshed over the pavement and ebbed back to the river again.
A curl of the river still held itself aloft, curving towards where Kai stood. It wasn’t quite like a serpent: the head had features something like a human and something like a dragon (yes, that again). There was also something of the lion, mane wet and draggled with weeds and dirt. Its eyes gleamed yellow as fog lamps, burning under heavy brows. This spirit was as polluted as the water itself, its body entwined with fragments of garbage and long streaks of filth. A heavy smell of oil and weed clung to it, wafting thickly along the dock.
Kai faced it and gave a small, precise inclination of his head. ‘Your service is acknowledged,’ he said firmly. ‘Return with my thanks and the thanks of my family.’
The river-spirit bowed its head in a long fluctuation that rippled along its body, then reared up and crashed back into the river in a spray of black water. The eyes were the last thing to vanish beneath the surface of the river, disappearing slowly rather than simply closing, visible for a long moment under the dark water.
Vale took a step forward. ‘What was that?’ he demanded, shocked. ‘What did you do? What is it that you have brought into my London, sir?’