We're being watched all the time, she thought. It was a chilling idea. But it didn't matter. Andrew was somewhere ahead of her, always ahead. Soon, she hoped, she would find him. And then this part of her journey would be over.
What came next would depend on who or what Andrew had become.
“I never thought I'd see you scared,” Lucy-Anne said. Dawn was breaking across the rooftops to the east, and Hampstead Heath was close. Their journey had been slow but uninterrupted, a mummified corpse sat in the seat behind her, and a dozen rooks perched around the car, swaying in time with its movement and occasionally calling out for no apparent reason. It was a surreal journey, and she needed it broken.
“What, you think I'm some sort of super human?”
“Don't you?”
Rook smiled. It was the first time she'd seen him smiling since dusk the previous evening, and it looked good on him.
“I feel…” He sighed, and a rook hopped down from his shoulder onto his knee. It pecked at a fly buzzing the window, its beak striking the glass with a musical tink!
“Feel what?”
“Different. I feel different.”
“You are different.”
“And abandoned. Do you have any idea what it's like? Can you even think about how it felt after Doomsday, when London was filled with dead people and I was left…alone. We survived for a time, me and my brother. We thought there'd be rescue attempts. But then they took him, and I was alone, and I knew that was it. So yeah, I'm different. I've moved on. London's the whole world now, but that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get scared. Doesn't everyone?”
“Everyone human, yeah. Dunno about the Superiors.” She glanced sidelong at him when she said this, but she already knew what he thought about them. He was as much Superior as he was Irregular. Rook was one of the few who was completely his own person. His only allegiance was to his birds.
And now perhaps to her as well.
“Slow down,” he said. “Need to find out where we are.”
She slowed the car at a road junction but left it running, and Rook opened his window. The rooks in the car with them took flight immediately, flitting through the window and spiralling up above the car. Lucy-Anne leaned over the steering wheel and looked up, but they were quickly lost to dawn's glare.
“So what else have you heard about the north?” she asked. “Those weird gargoyle people. And snake people. I've seen nothing like them before.”
“Just that it's where the monsters came.” A bird fluttered through the window and landed on his shoulder, and moments later he glanced at Lucy-Anne. “Hampstead Heath's half a mile from here.”
“Half a mile.” If that Sara woman was right…if Andrew was still alive, and not changed like those other weird things…if Rook was telling her the truth.
“Maybe we should walk from here,” he said.
“Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. A distance was growing around her. She frowned and ground a knuckle into her thigh to wake herself up.
“Or perhaps a rest.” Rook's voice was farther away now.
“No time,” she said. “No time to…” But her eyelids drooped, and she could not remember the last time she'd had a good sleep. The release of stress now that she'd stopped driving the car allowed her weariness to the fore.
“Don't worry,” she heard him say, and his hand was warm on her arm. “I'll look after you.” His voice, so distant; his words, such a comfort.
She was already dreaming as she fell asleep, and the woman was waiting for her.
She feels Andrew close by but can't find him. His presence is overwhelming, as though he has just spoken to her or given her a playful pinch on the arm, like he used to when they were kids. She turns a full circle and expects to see him at any moment, but nothing around her is normal.
A dream.