The bomb struck the same instant Noah was materialising on the roadway just outside Coronation Avenue. It threw her off her feet, covering her in blast dust and shards of glass. For long moments she lay completely stunned, not merely by the physical effects of the blast, but by a sense of loss so powerful it completely overwhelmed her.
All she could sense from the ruined building not thirty feet away was death. Intimate death. The death of someone she loved.
She felt a sudden, terrible iciness, and knew the paths of the Otherworld were opening up.
“No!” she screamed, and, unable to rise, began to crawl painfully through the dust and debris towards the building.
Jack had been wandering Epping Forest, Malcolm at his side. He’d been doing nothing in particular, just walking, thinking, exchanging the occasional word with Malcolm, when he, also, was hit with a wave of loss so stunning he became literally nauseated.
“Who?” said Malcolm, grasping at Jack’s arm as he bent over, dry-retching.
“Sweet Jesus…” whispered Jack.
“Who?” Malcolm snapped.
“Just about everyone,” Jack said, but there was only one name consuming him.
Grace.
Noah heard the sirens of the approaching fire engines, but she didn’t care. Her hands and arms and knees were bleeding where they had shuffled through shattered glass, but she didn’t care about that, either. She could feel Weyland and Jack coming closer, both using their power to transport themselves to the disaster, and she almost didn’t care about the fact that both men who meant so much to her would shortly be here to help. What use they, when so many were dead?
Or dying.
Grace was aware only of the weight surrounding her, and of the fact she could barely breathe. Every intake of air was a gigantic struggle, every exhalation made her head swim with agony. Her chest and abdomen hurt terribly, the air was thick with brick and concrete dust, and moving this thick, gritty air in and out of a chest which itself barely condescended to move required every ounce of will that she possessed.
Weight packed in about her. Her legs felt both warm and dead at the same time. She couldn’t move them. Her left arm was trapped under a weight (the same weight which made breathing so difficult), her right lay spread outwards from her body, white with dust.
Her face lay cushioned on a pillow of gritty sandwiches, and Grace’s first coherent thought was that she had dropped the damn sandwiches, and wasted so much valuable food.
Matilda would be cross.
Matilda?
Grace opened her mouth and croaked. She wet her lips, spat out some grit, and tried again.
“Matilda?”
“Noah!” Weyland grabbed her about the waist and lifted her into his arms.
She wailed as he did so, her bloodied arms reaching out towards the mountain of rubble, but Weyland ignored her plea and carried her some fifty or sixty feet away, to a clear area of roadway.
He didn’t need to ask where their daughter was.
“Matilda?” Grace couldn’t see a thing, but she could move her right arm very slightly, and she felt about with her hand.
She gasped—and then flinched at the pain in her chest—as two of her outstretched fingers touched flesh. “Matilda!”
There was no reply, and Grace could not tell by touch whether Matilda was alive or not. She tried to reach out with her power, but it failed her, and Grace wondered if she had been so terribly injured that all her abilities were draining away with her blood.
Oh, she suddenly thought, no wonder my legs are so warm. All my blood is escaping.
With that thought Grace gave Matilda’s face (at least, she hoped it was Matilda’s face and not a stranger’s dismembered limb) a final tap with her fingers, then she sighed, and drifted off into a welcome unconsciousness.
Jack ran to where Weyland crouched over Noah. “Is she…”
Death lay all around, and for the moment his sense of loss was so immense he couldn’t distinguish who it was had died, and who survived.
As Jack spoke to Weyland, he glanced over to the huge smoking pile of rubble that had once been a block of flats, and his stomach turned over in horror.
No, no, surely they weren’t beneath that!
“She’s alive,” Weyland said, his face and voice flat with what Jack assumed was combined hatred and pain. “She’s alive, but the others…oh, gods, all I feel is death.”
Jack stared at him in horror. “No…” he whispered. “No.”
Weyland sprang to his feet. “My daughter is under that!” he screamed in Jack’s face. “What have you done?”
“I haven’t…I…” Jack turned once more to the rubble, his mind registering dimly that several fire engines, ambulances and police cars had screeched to a halt and that emergency personnel were now scurrying over the site.
He still couldn’t think clearly. Everything overwhelmed him: Weyland’s anger and distress; his own sense that death had taken someone very important to him, and was hovering over others; Noah’s tears and faint cries; her blood-covered limbs; the massive pile of smoking rubble; the remains of Noah’s mobile canteen, blown over fifty feet away and now nothing but a twisted pile of blackened metal.
Where was Grace? No, please, gods, she wasn’t under that! Please, please, please…
“Gentlemen? Madam?” One of the firemen had come over. “Madam, how badly injured are you? Sir…you’re her husband? Good, then best get her to the ambulance over there. I—”
“My daughter is under there!” Noah cried, struggling to rise. “And my friends, my friends…”
Oh, Jack thought. That’s what I can feel. The death. Eaving’s Sisters. Were they dead? He couldn’t feel it, couldn’t isolate all the different strands of loss that had twisted about his soul to determine who was alive and who was dead.
The fireman glanced over at the rubble, and the look in his eyes made both Weyland and Noah cry out. “No!”
“Madam,” the fireman said, “sir. You can do nothing here, and, ma’am, you need those cuts looked at. We’ll get her out. We will.”
Weyland gave the man a long stare, then picked Noah up in his arms again and carried her towards one of the ambulances. Jack started towards the rubble, thinking only that if he just moved one piece, and then another, and then one more, then maybe he could reach down, and grasp Grace’s hand, and pull her out.
“You won’t, you know,” said the fireman, and Jack stopped and looked over his shoulder. “I’ve buried them very, very thoroughly.”
Jack’s head swam, and for an instant he almost fainted with horror.
The fireman now wore Catling’s face.
TWELVE
Stoke Newington, London
Sunday, 13th October 1940
“That bomb was too much,” said Catling, stepping closer to Jack. “What did you think you and Grace were doing? Did you think you would actually hurt me? Did you—”
“You wouldn’t have done this if you weren’t scared.”
“I did it because I have grown tired of your lies and procrastination. Listen to me, Jack: Grace is trapped in there. She won’t die—she can’t, because I don’t particularly want to wink out of existence just yet—but I’ve injured her quite badly. Terribly, in fact. And no one can get to her. Can you see the rubble? There are five floors of bricks atop her, Jack. It is going to take a while to dig through all of that, yes? Now, I could hurry along the process, but I’ll do it under one condition only.”
Jack could barely breathe for fury. He hadn’t been responsible for the bomb, but there was little point in arguing the matter with Catling.
“And that condition would be?” he ground out. He was aware that his fists were clenched, and only the realisation that somewhere beneath this mask of vileness a real man lived stopped him from hitting Catling with all his might.
“I want you and Noah to vow, here and now, to complete me. No more dilly-dallying trying to find a way to destroy me. Set a date, Jack. Until I get that vow Grace will remain trapped, and London will suffer more horribly than perhaps it need do under the German bombs. I’m going to make her suffer, Jack, and, while I’m at it, I’ll make London suffer. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally and spiritually as well. She’s not going to be the same girl when she comes out. If you want the girl that you love, then promise me a date of completion. Now!”
Jack found it difficult to believe he was still standing still. All he wanted to do was to wrap his fingers about Catling’s throat…
“You’ll kill her if you do that, Jack. Now, where’s that promise, then?”
Oh, gods, what had he done? For an instant Jack recalled his brash, stupid belief as Brutus that the Troy Game would be so wonderful, would make him immortal, grant him so much power.