Katie moves in front of us. Her body blocks out the church so it looks like she’s on fire, like she’s some terrifying demon. She shows us the white of her palms and fixes Thorn with that look. ‘You don’t have to do this. Please, for me, let her go.’
I hear his voice, filled with anger and hate. ‘She betrayed us, Katherine. She told the Gems about the raid on the Meat House, they ambushed us at the Coliseum. She led them right to us – she must have worn some sort of tracking device. They killed dozens of us, captured the rest.’
Katie’s voice remains measured yet firm, her hair merging into the red of the flames. ‘Violet would never betray the Imps.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I know Violet.’ Her gaze clicks somewhere else for a moment, and I see the slightest of cracks in her calm demeanour. ‘I had a lot of time to think about the things you told me when we were in the cell together,’ she says, changing tack.
He pushes the gun into my skin. ‘What things?
‘The things you told me about Ruth.’
‘You leave her out of this, Katherine’
But Katie continues in her gentle manner. ‘At first I thought I reminded you of her.’
‘You do.’
‘Yes, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? The clue’s in the timing – she hanged nearly twenty years ago.’
He doesn’t reply, but the tremor of the pistol makes me think he may be crying.
‘You lost more than just Ruth that day, didn’t you, Thorn?’ Again, her focus slips to a point just behind him, like she’s watching . . . waiting.
‘Stop it,’ Thorn says. ‘Just stop it, Katherine, I warn you.’
She takes a step forward. ‘You lost something – someone – just as important.’ She’s dragging out her words, buying time.
The nose of the gun rocks against my skull. My breath grows increasingly shallow, my vision increasingly hazy, and I find looking at Katie too hard, the flames burning my eyes. I let my gaze slip to Ash – his wonderful, irregular face – and I just wait for the peace and calm of nothingness. But something behind those winter eyes doesn’t meet my expectation. They don’t look scared or sad or angry. They look full of hope. Excitement.
Katie takes a step towards us. ‘But the real clue was the way you looked at me,’ she says.
I force myself to look at her again. She looks so empowered, so in control, and I realize that the whole time I was at the manor, trying desperately to keep us safe, to send us home, she was back in that ochre room doing exactly the same thing. Buttering up the enemy, gathering information, looking for chinks in the armour. She takes another step forward so that she blocks out the flames entirely and I see only the smoke, gushing into the sky.
She smiles a soft, kind smile. ‘Because you don’t look at me like a lover. You never did. You’ve always looked at me like a father.’ She takes one final step, closing the gap between us, and reaches a steady hand out towards Thorn. ‘Ruth was pregnant when she died, wasn’t she?’
But he never gets to answer. I hear a strangled scream. Something hot and wet and metallic-tasting sprays into my mouth. The gun falls away from my temple. I turn to see it bouncing off the tarmac. Then, I see Thorn. Both hands clasped to his throat, blood spurting between his fingers and streaming down his forearms. He collapses to his knees and stares at me, blinking in slow motion. I imagine I can hear the moist click as his upper lids finally connect with his lower rims – a pair of camera lenses shutting. Finally, he falls on to his side, blood pooling around my knees.
He doesn’t blink again.
Saskia stands in his place, bloodstained knife in her hands. And I finally understand that Katie was keeping him talking so Saskia could creep up on him. I inhale a huge lungful of air; a strange, shaky noise escaping into the night.
Saskia raises an eyebrow. ‘Sweet Jesus, he’s a big bastard. I almost needed a ladder to reach that throat.’ But the frantic rise and fall of her chest belies her nonchalant tone.
Katie falls on me, squeezing my body against hers. ‘Are you OK, Vi? God, I thought he was going to kill you.’
‘Yeah,’ I manage to squeak.
Ash and Matthew help me up. Ash kisses my forehead and wraps his arms around me, his eyes wet with tears of relief. ‘I was sure you were a goner.’
I wipe my mouth and my hand comes away scarlet.
Saskia cleans her knife and sticks it back in her belt. ‘Gem blood, Imp blood – it all tastes the same.’
I notice I can pick out every one of her features. The strong line of her nose, the sapphire of her eyes, the texture of her port wine stain, slightly rippled like crepe paper. Which means only one thing – the searchlights of the Gem helicopters are approaching. Thorn’s cost us precious time. We need to hurry.
We look to the sky to see an army of helicopters arriving. Small, dark smudges fall towards us – a sheet of explosives that penetrate the blaze of the church and lift more stone and debris our way. A blast to my left sends chunks of paving battering into my ribs. Another blast and the Humvee bursts into flames. We slide to a halt and watch as our escape route disappears beneath a blanket of fire.
I can hear only the crackle and pop of the blaze, the whir of the helicopters – no explosions, no flying tarmac. At first I think my eardrums must have ruptured, but when I look to the sky, I see the bombs have stopped falling.
A series of cables spiral towards the ground.
‘Move, move!’ Matthew shouts.
We don’t wait to see the spiders falling downwards, nor do we wait for the shower of bullets to nip at our heels. We just turn and sprint – as fast as our damaged bodies will allow – into the winding side streets of the metropolis.
We run through the city, bending through alleys, squeezing our bodies through narrow passageways. The footsteps of the Gems and the thrash of the helicopter blades grow dull and tired, unable to navigate the city like the Imps. Perhaps we will make it to the river in time for my friends – all four of them – to reach safety.
‘Thanks for saving me.’ I struggle to breathe and talk.
‘I was hardly going to let him shoot you.’
‘How did you know Saskia would slit his throat?’ I ask her.
‘She flashed her knife at me and I just knew. Thorn stabbed her once, he told me, and I’m guessing Saskia isn’t the forgiving type.’
I smile, because it’s more than that – Thorn isn’t the only one with parental urges. And Saskia and Matthew’s loyalty plants a warm glow in my chest.
We wriggle under a makeshift roof; a piece of corrugated iron slung low between two pillars of rock. The mud oozes between my fingers and slips beneath my knees.
‘So what’s happening now?’ Katie asks, emerging into the open air and scanning the skies for helicopters. ‘Is it the river bit?’
‘Yeah.’ The others are far enough ahead not to hear, so I brief her as we run. ‘Willow and Rose tried to escape across the river in a rowing boat, and that’s what you’re going to do, you and the others. You can hide in No-man’s-land until I hang tomorrow. It should be safe there.’
‘Didn’t Willow and Rose get captured on the river?’ She stumbles on a mound of broken concrete.