“I suppose he’s your new bed boy.” Town placed the full bowl carefully on the table. “They don’t usually stay around when things get difficult, do they?” He took a roll of bandage and started to wind it around the wound.
Crane spat in his face. Town’s mouth tightened as he wiped the spittle away. “Don’t do that,” he said. “This isn’t my fault.”
The thing in Monk’s body came up to the table, facing Crane, as Town finished with the bandage. Its face was moving and jerking continually, lines and creases running across it, lips twitching and mumbling.
Crane pulled violently against the ropes that bound him, knowing it was no use.
Monk raised his hands in a gesture that looked entirely Chinese, entirely shamanical, and the blood in the bowl began to stir, first rippling, then bubbling. The red darkened, cloudy brown swirls appearing through it.
Crane was thrashing now, desperate, helpless, crying out with fury. It was so damned, bloody unfair, that he should die now, or worse than die, should lose his mind to this creature, without having kissed Stephen again or even held him. It was no consolation at all that he’d told the man he loved him or heard it in return. All it meant was a full, agonising knowledge of what he was going to lose.
Nine for a funeral.
The infected blood in the bowl was rising up now in a shape like a waterspout, a rotten dark brown, defying all nature, and as Crane stared at it, he felt the ghost’s invasion.
It was filthy. A choking charnel foulness, like thick wet cobweb, over his face and eyes and mouth, crawling in his ears, up his nose, through his body. He tried to scream and the tendrils dug deeper. He could hear an insane muttering in his mind, fragments of rage and fury and accusation and a horrible glee as the thing tapped into somewhere deep and wrenched. The power lit in his blood, but it was snatched greedily, dragging at his flesh and bones, nothing like what Stephen did. This was a rape. He shook his head violently because he could do nothing else, and the dead man’s soul settled to feed, pushing a film over his eyes as he stared in helpless horror at the bowl of foaming, churning blood.
The spout jerked abruptly. It straightened again, steadied, then lurched sideways once more, and streaks of red shone bright through the dirty brown. Monk, standing like a puppet with loose strings, jerked too, lifting his head. The spout began to spasm, more violently, whipping from side to side, its rhythm breaking and restabilising and breaking again. Xan’s ghost gave a terrible keening howl and dug impalpable claws into Crane’s mind, but he could feel the other pull now. It was rushing through his veins in a storm of black and white wings, and from somewhere deep inside, he welcomed it, reached out, let the birds take over.
I am the Magpie Lord, he insisted to himself, through Xan’s screams. We are the Magpie Lord. Let them fly, Stephen, fly with them, and get this monster out of my mind!
Xan’s talons dug into him with a desperate effort. Crane yelled aloud, a cry of pain and defiance that was echoed by the shrieks of birds that weren’t there, the sharp stabbing of beaks, the thunder of invisible wings beating around and through him.
The bowl exploded. Shards of earthenware went flying across the room, and the blood sprayed into a bright red cloud, in which hung, for just a fraction of a second, the image of a bird, before the spray dissipated into nothing. The creature in Crane’s body was ripped away, howling. Crane gasped for breath, head stabbing with sudden agony. Monk began to scream in earnest. And the thick wooden door burst inwards as though punched by a giant’s fist.
Stephen came in running, ducking through the splinters, Esther Gold just behind him. He threw out a hand as he ran, sending Monk tumbling backwards, and sprinted towards Crane, eyes blazing gold and black in his white face. Town cried out in rage and pulled a pistol, and an urchin boy—no, it was Jenny Saint in trousers and a cap—ran at him, up through the air, as if mounting invisible steps, and kicked him ferociously in the face. Town fell, and she landed on him hard and booted his hand, sending the gun skittering across the floor.
Janossi, Merrick and Leonora were in now. Merrick saw his master, swore with gusto and ran forward. Leonora followed, pausing to kick Town in the balls with force and accuracy. Stephen turned away from Monk, looking up at Crane, starting to speak, but Crane only had eyes for Monk’s slumped body. His old friend looked like himself once more with no alien consciousness there, and Crane gathered every scrap of strength he had left to bellow, “Rats!”
There was a fractional moment of total stillness. Then the rats came.