Chapter 17
It was the same girl. The girl from his dreams. The girl who looked like she’d escaped from a Klimt painting and gone wandering into the Dali-esque nightmare. Her skin was paler, her face thinner and her eyes duller than they were in his dream, but it was her. He’d recognise those eyes anywhere. And from the way she was staring at him now, with her jaw hanging slack, he took a wild stab in the dark that she knew him too.
‘Cyrus?’ she said.
Her voice was hoarse. He shook his head slightly as if to say maybe?
‘Cyrus,’ she said again, louder this time, his name almost choking out of her.
And then the other two, the dark-haired guy with the flamethrower and the girl in the army-style boots, were shouting this name too while running towards him and suddenly he found himself buried under a hail of arms and hands and someone’s wet cheek was pressed against his shoulder. But the girl with the dark-brown hair and the bluer-than-blue eyes was standing apart from the others. And through the tangle of arms he was buried in, he saw her staring at him as if he was a ghost.
‘Jesus, man, what the hell are you doing here?’
It was the guy. He was gripping his shoulders and his eyes were shining brightly. Cyrus stared back at him blankly.
‘Cyrus, where have you been, man?’ he asked again, shaking him by the arms and grinning like a maniac. ‘We thought you were dead. How did you make it back?’
‘Back from where?’ he asked.
The three of them exchanged a brief look.
‘What’s with the outfit?’ the other girl, the one with the spiky short hair, asked, pulling back an inch to look at him, her expression wary.
He cleared his throat, not sure whether he should say anything about his recent escape. But these people seemed to know him and for some reason, which he couldn’t believe was just co-incidence, his instincts had brought him to this place, and these people seemed to be fighting the monsters too, so surely he could trust them?
‘I’ve been in hospital,’ he said simply.
‘Yeah, I can see that,’ the girl said, taking hold of his hand, her eyes still wide and marvelling. ‘Jesus, you’re freezing. Come on, let’s get you in the car. You can’t walk around the streets like that. You’re going to get arrested and taken to the funny farm.’
The girl with the blue eyes cleared her throat. ‘I think that might be where he’s come from,’ she said. Her voice was husky and tinged with an emotion he couldn’t quite guess – something more than sadness, greater than relief.
He turned. She was still standing on the sidewalk. The others looked to where she was pointing. He tried to crick his neck far enough to see. And there, stamped on the back of his scrub trousers in large stencilled letters, he read:
GATEWAYS MENTAL HEALTH CENTRE
The three of them looked at each other the way the doctors had looked at each other when he told them about the things with the tails.
‘Cyrus, dude, what were you doing in a mental hospital?’ the guy asked.
They were treating him as if he was dangerous now, edging away from him. The girl with the short dark hair narrowed her eyes and tipped her head in confusion. Then the other girl stepped between them all. She put her hand, the one that monster had hurt, on the guy’s arm.
‘Ash’, she said, ‘let’s forget the questions for the moment and just get out of here before more of them come.’
He stared at her, feeling grateful and something else too – something had stirred in him when he saw her put her hand on Ash’s arm. He wasn’t sure what it was. It didn’t feel like jealousy, but it certainly wasn’t happiness either, not that he was too sure he’d recognise either emotion. Ash nodded and started off towards the car, which was still parked haphazardly across the road with its doors flung open. The girl with short hair hovered by his side, shooting him nervous glances that were making him feel frustrated. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t remember who he was or who they were.
He turned back to the girl with blue eyes. ‘What happened to that thing?’ he asked, pointing to the pile of clothes on the ground. ‘Where did it go?’
The girl stared at him in silence, her lips parted slightly, and he wondered if she had heard him right. ‘It vanished,’ he added for clarity’s sake. ‘I saw it disappear right in front of my eyes. What was it? Where did it go?’
The girl swallowed nervously. ‘I think you need to get in the car,’ was all she said.
He glanced up the street. What if it was a trap? What if he wasn’t friends with these people at all? They were strangers. And a voice in his head was urging him not to trust strangers. Though, he reasoned, he wasn’t a stranger to them. They had seemed genuinely happy to see him. And there was something familiar about the way they had said his name and had thrown their arms around him. As familiar to him as the sword had felt when he took it in his hand and used it to kill that monster.
The girl was waiting. And the other girl just behind him was hopping from foot to foot. She felt her tug on his elbow. ‘Cyrus,’ she said in a soft voice, ‘come with us. We’ll explain everything on the way.’
‘The way to where?’ he asked, letting her pull him backwards towards the car, which the guy was revving.
‘To your apartment,’ she said, unable to keep the incredulous tone out of her voice.
His apartment? He had an apartment. And a name. And he knew how to wield a sword. And this girl was still looking at him as if he was a ghost but that’s because they’d thought he was dead. Which explained why no one had come looking for him or reported him missing. He was finally getting answers to some of the questions he’d had running around in his head the last few weeks. And, most importantly, he knew now he really wasn’t crazy. The doctors could stick that in their pipe and smoke it.
He gazed around the interior of the car. It felt familiar too. The girl with blue eyes was wedged into the corner of the back seat, beside him. She hadn’t stopped staring at him since they’d got in, though it felt like an invisible force field lay between them, a divide he couldn’t cross. He looked at her, feeling nervous all of a sudden. She was nursing her wounded arm, holding it against her chest as if she was a bird with a broken wing, though she hadn’t complained or said a word about it.
He felt an overwhelming urge to make it better somehow, but there was that barrier between them and a general wariness in her gaze, so he kept his distance. Were they just friends? Or were they something more? And what about the girl up front? The one with the spiky hair and the piercings? Was she with the guy?
The guy was driving in silence. There was a weird tension in the car as if they were all holding a collective breath. He stared between them, wondering if he should say something to break the ice.
‘Do you know who I am?’ the girl next to him asked before he could figure out what to say.
He frowned at her. He did know who she was. In some part of his brain he knew – he just couldn’t locate the information right now.
He shook his head. ‘I know I know you. I just don’t know who you are or why I know you. But I’ve seen you … in my dreams.’ He stopped abruptly, noting the look on her face. ‘I mean,’ he went on in a hurry, ‘I kept seeing you and some monsters, like the ones we just killed. But everything’s messed up – nothing’s clear.’
‘Do you know my name?’ she asked.
He noticed the very tip of her left ear was missing.
‘No,’ he admitted.
Up front the guy shifted gear noisily.
‘What is your name?’ he asked.
‘Evie,’ she answered.
Evie, he repeated silently. That made sense. It slotted into place, felt comfortable on the tip of his tongue as if he’d used it a lot. It felt as if another layer, gossamer thin, had floated off the top of the fog in his head.
‘And that’s Vero and Ash,’ she said, pointing to the two up front.
He nodded in greeting and tried to smile.
‘Do you know your name?’ Evie asked.
He noticed that her tone was overly genial, forced almost, like the voices the nurses had used in the hospital when they’d first brought him in.
‘I’m guessing it’s Cyrus,’ he said, giving her a half-smile. ‘And I’m guessing that those things you were fighting back there are part of the reason why I can’t remember anything. Would that be right?’
The girl’s eyes suddenly filled up with tears. ‘Something like that,’ she whispered.