This was his chance to take something belonging to the necromancer. Would there be watchers in the street? Probably. But with any luck he wouldn’t be there long enough that they’d see him. ‘Penny, I have to go somewhere now,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be right back. A few minutes at most. You’re to lock the doors and stay right here, in the house.’ His red eyes glowed. This is my place! Only let them dare to … to … and . . .’
‘Let who dare?’ she whispered. ‘E-Branch? Let them dare to what, Harry?’
‘A few minutes,’ he growled. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’
6
Countdown to Hell
There were watchers.
Harry chose to exit from the Möbius Continuum at the same point as the last time he’d been there, in the shadow of the wall across the alley from Pound’s place. And one of the watchers was right there!
Even in the moment he stepped from the Continuum into the ‘real’, physical world, Harry heard the plain-clothes man’s gasp and knew someone was there in the shadows with him; knew, too, that even now this unknown someone would be reaching for his gun. One big difference between them was that Harry could see perfectly well in the dark. Another was that his adversary was only a man.
Reacting in a lightning-fast movement, Harry reached out to slap the man’s weapon out of his hand . . . and saw what kind of a ‘gun’ it was which the other had produced from under his coat. A crossbow! He knocked it away anyway, sent it clattering on the cobbles, and held the esper by his throat against the wall.
The man was terrified. A prognosticator – a reader of future times – he had known that Harry would come here. That had been as far as he could see; but he’d also known that his own life-thread went on beyond this point. Which had seemed to mean that if there was trouble, Harry would be on the receiving end.
The Necroscope read these things right out of the esper’s gibbering mind, and his voice was a clotted gurgle as he told him: ‘Reading the future’s a dangerous game. So you’re going to live, are you? Well, maybe. But what as? A man – or a vampire?’ He tilted his head a little on one side and smiled at the other through eyes burning like coals under a bellows’ blast, and in the next moment stopped smiling and showed him his teeth.
The esper saw the gape – the impossible gape – of Harry’s jaws, and gagged as the vampire’s steel fingers tightened on his windpipe. In his mind he was screaming, Oh, Jesus! I’m dead — dead!
‘You could be,’ Harry told him. ‘You could oh so easily be. It rather depends on how well we get on. Now tell me: who killed Darcy Clarke?’
The man, short and sturdy, balding and narrow-eyed, used both hands to try to loosen Harry’s grip on his throat. It was useless. Turning purple, still he managed to shake his head, refusing to answer the Necroscope’s question with anything but a gurgle. But Harry read it in his mind anyway.
Paxton! That vicious, slimy . . .
At that Harry’s fury filled him to bursting. It would be so easy to just tighten his grip until this staggering shit’s Adam’s apple turned to mush in his hand . . . but that would be to punish him for what someone else had done. Also, it would be to pander to the monster raging inside him.
Instead he tossed the man away from him, took a deep breath and breathed a vampire mist. By the time the esper was able to prop himself on one elbow against the wall, choking and massaging his throat, the mist lay over the alley like a shroud and Harry had disappeared into it –
– Or rather through it, and through the Möbius Continuum into Johnny Pound’s flat.
He knew he didn’t have a lot of time; it depended how many men the Branch had up here – they could be coming through the main door of the building right now. And they’d be equipped with all the right gear, too. A crossbow is a hellishly ugly weapon, but a flamethrower is far worse!