“What is it?” Cranswell whispered.
“You. You reek of fear. I did tell you you shouldn’t have come, didn’t I?” A sigh, and then Ruthven came back up the steps past Varney to look him in the face. It wasn’t any nicer looking at the red-glowing eyes close-up, Cranswell thought. In fact it was really kind of horrible, and he took another instinctive step backward. “Too late to go back now,” Ruthven said. “Hold still, August.”
“What—” he said, and then shut up, because Ruthven had taken his face between cold hands and the red eyes were … pulsing somehow, their light waxing and waning, and Cranswell was first dizzy and then warm all through, the weight of fear in his chest and stomach beginning to let go.
“You are going to be quite all right,” Ruthven said firmly, somewhere a long way away. “I promised your father I’d look after you, and this whole mess is probably not exactly the best example of that, but never mind. You are going to be fine, and this will soon be over.”
“Fine,” he agreed, floating in the pale red light. “Over.”
Ruthven said something else he didn’t catch, something complicated that seemed to soar over his head, and then the pulsing slowed and stopped entirely. Cranswell let out his breath in a long sigh, feeling … really quite good about everything, as a matter of fact.
“Right,” said Ruthven, with a searching look, and then just nodded and let him go. They crept farther down the stairs, slower now, as silently as possible.
The first intimation Greta had of the Gladius Sancti’s presence was when the flaming bottle came through the bedroom window.
Fastitocalon had been right. It was only a matter of time. Even without an EKG she knew perfectly well that Halethorpe’s heart was failing; would fail whether or not she got his fever down, and so far nothing she had done had had the slightest effect on that. She could hear the telltale crackles in his chest that meant fluid was beginning to collect in his lungs; several of the burns were unmistakably infected; the extent of the corneal ulceration had markedly spread. There was just too much damage. All she could do was try to keep him comfortable and wait for the end, and try not to think about what might be happening under the city.
Greta had been trying to read a book earlier, and found her mind skating over the words without taking any of them in, and given up in favor of mentally running through the surgery she was planning for Renenutet. She’d gotten to quite a complicated stage when the splintering crash of the windowpane and bright orange billow of flame made her scream.
In the bed Halethorpe’s blind eyes opened. Greta seemed to be frozen in place, a dizzying flood of adrenaline pouring through her, for a matter of seconds; then he said something—cried out something, in Latin—and suddenly she could move again, her heart pounding, cold with thrumming shock. Everything went glass-clear and slow, as it had been once before in this man’s company.
“Go,” he rasped. Dancing ruffles of flame were beginning to climb the curtains. “Go, it’s them, it’s the end of everything, they’ll, they’ll kill you, get away, get far away—”
“Not without you!” She reached for his IV lines; it seemed as if he could see again, at least a little, because he caught her hand in his without a moment of hesitation and pushed her away. Both of them were coughing now, black smoke beginning to gather under the ceiling. The glassy clarity was beginning to splinter into bright shards of panic.
“Go,” Halethorpe said again, more strongly, more strongly than she would have thought he could speak—and somehow he sat up, curled a hand around the tubes, and yanked them free. Blood spattered. “They … will have the house surrounded,” he said, with visible effort behind each word. “Go … underground. Cellars. There are … things down there … who will shelter you.”
Greta was crying, half with shock and fear and half with the acrid smoke. He turned his horrible piebald face to her. “Go,” he said one more time as the flames leaped up, and gave her a little shove toward the doorway.
Greta went.
He was right. The house was surrounded; as she ran down the stairs, another flaming bottle, this one thrown from the back garden, smashed through a window. Ruthven’s house, she thought, nearly tripping on the stair carpet, breath sobbing in her throat. All his things. Oh God. All of everything.
Then there were voices and footsteps inside the house and Greta stopped thinking completely and scrabbled for the doorway to the cellar, half-fell inside, and slammed it shut.
A constellation of red pinpoints blinked at her, and then the light clicked on. Some of Kree-akh’s people had been sleeping; they scrambled to their feet. She stumbled down the stairs, her knees threatening to give out, and a ghoul caught and steadied her as she reached the bottom. “The house … the house is on fire,” she gasped. “There are things out there trying to get in. There’s a man upstairs who’s probably dying, or dead …”
They all spoke at once—or hissed—and then Kree-akh rattled off a rapid stream of ghoulish she couldn’t catch at all, coming over to join Greta at the foot of the stairs. He took her by the shoulders, cold, hard hands digging into her flesh. “Are you hurt?” he demanded.
“No,” she said, still dazed, glad of the support. “No, but Halethorpe—and the house, Ruthven’s house, all his things, all his books—”
“Where are the others? Are you alone?”
“They’re gone,” she said. “They’re—they’ve gone to break the thing, the rectifier, the electrical thing that makes the blue light, they know where it is now—”
“Blue light,” another ghoul hissed—younger than Kree-akh, almost certainly his son judging by the bone structure—“blue fire,” and Greta blinked at him.
“It’s a spark,” she said, “or kind of a spark, in a glass bulb. It’s in some kind of old air-raid shelter under St. Paul’s tube station. That’s not important now. The house—”