We walked forward in a tight knot, following the cordon placed around Westminster, along streets that normally would have been full of tourists but were now eerily empty.
‘Hiral?’ I asked when we were out of earshot of any of Trevor’s cronies. We kept walking as we talked.
‘Here,’ the gwyllion said, letting his rotten-toothed smile appear, floating in front of us, just for a second, like that of the Cheshire cat.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’m off, just wanted to let you know that. Figure we need a set of eyes in the enemy camp.’
I felt relief wash over me. ‘Good. Because this can’t last, the random attacks.’
‘She’ll want more than random revenge soon,’ Anyan said. ‘She’ll calm down enough to make a plan.’
‘Then we’re really fucked,’ said Ryu.
The gwyllion’s voice spoke from the empty air. ‘I’ll find her people; see what they’re working on. The Red and the White were never the most practical buggers, so I imagine she’s got advisors working on something horrifyingly modern in terms of destruction.’
We all cast each other looks as we continued walking, thinking through all the doomsday scenarios possible when dealing with a supernatural creature willing to use the human world to exact vengeance.
‘Don’t miss me too much,’ was Hiral’s parting shot.
‘Good luck,’ I said. The gwyllion had become a more important, courageous ally than I’d ever imagined he would be, and I deeply regretted my first assessments of him. Even if he was smelly and unpleasant, he was loyal and fierce and incredibly skilled.
We continued walking as I addressed Caleb.
‘How’d your work on the plane go?’
Caleb’s face was pensive, as it had been since we’d disembarked at Heathrow. Considering the circumstances, a little gloom and doom was probably called for, but I was worried there was something more. The satyr had, after all, been translating the rest of Theophrastus’s poem, comparing it to the journal article he’d found and trying to figure out what the last stage of killing the Red would entail. For we couldn’t just repeat what we’d done with the White. The whole process of alchemy was about building on stages of development, so the White got one ritual (the stone’s transmutation into silver) and the Red got her own (the stone’s changing from silver to gold).
‘It’s … going,’ he said eventually. ‘I need a little more time…’
‘Is it something bad?’ I asked sharply. ‘Because if it is—’
‘I don’t know yet,’ the satyr interrupted. ‘But bad or good, I’ll let you know whatever I discover.’
There was something about Caleb’s tone that worried me, like he knew something more than he was saying, and it wasn’t going to make us happy. But I had to trust him – if he wasn’t sure what he was talking about yet, there was no point in getting worked up.
Not that I had a tendency to get worked up or anything.
So we kept walking, stretching our legs and getting a good view of the carnage. Anyan swirled a powerful glamour around us, so that the occasional teams of workers or soldiers we passed wouldn’t notice our presence and try to stop us. In general, the streets were almost entirely empty of anyone resembling a civilian, and that fact combined with the smell of smoldering ash lent the whole scene a very post-apocalyptic feel.
When we turned back to rejoin Trevor and his team, Ryu spoke up.
‘So what do we do now?’
Anyan and I both shrugged as if on cue. I gestured to him to answer.
‘Nothing we can do except wait out the Red. Try to stop her if she attacks again. Hope that Hiral discovers something we can use.’
‘What if she doesn’t make another appearance?’ Ryu asked. ‘What if she’s done venting?’
‘She won’t be,’ Iris said. ‘Not until she’s about to do something bigger. Right now she’ll wreck havoc until either we stop her or she forms a plan for some ultimate revenge.’
I gave the succubus a questioning look, and she shrugged. ‘I know anger,’ was all Iris said. It was enough.
‘Well, if she does lay low for a while, we can always try to find where she holes up. Take the fight to her,’ Ryu said, but he was wasting his breath.
Running toward us, as fast as his little legs could carry him, was Trevor.
‘It’s her. She’s at the London Eye.’
Anyan snapped to attention. ‘Get as many fire trucks as you can on deck and ready to roll. We need water. Jane can use the Thames, but if there’s any way you can help pump some water…’
‘There are fireboats out already. But it’s probably too far to reach the Red…’
‘All she needs is water in the air. She can handle getting it to the Red.’
I nodded at Anyan’s words, letting Trevor know the barghest was right.
Trevor nodded, calling up contacts on his cell even as we ran back to the waiting vehicles.
It was show time.
Chapter Twenty
When we arrived on the scene, we found the Red had invented a new game: throwing the London Eye around like it was a Frisbee.
‘Extreme Destruction?’ I muttered to myself, giving the new game a name.
‘What was that?’ Anyan asked, turning to me.
‘Nothing. We need a plan.’
The barghest frowned, watching the Red fly. She hadn’t seen us yet, as we’d parked in an unobtrusive place behind some low-lying buildings. I watched with curiosity as Anyan took a power stance, then moved his head right, then left, stretching his neck muscles. At the same time, he pulled power from the earth, sending it out in a tight but very strong shield in front of us.
He’s warming up, I realized. Making sure he’s ready.
When he was finished, he turned back to me. ‘Okay. I’m good.’
‘Ryu? Caleb?’ I asked. They both nodded. Iris was staying back with the car. She had her own strengths, but kick-assery was not one of them. I turned to Trevor.
‘Fire crews are in place, as are the fireboats.’
‘Tell the fire crews to stay put till we need them. Tell the fireboats to start getting that water in the air.’
Trevor spoke into his phone and immediately I felt the effect. I could feel the Thames a short distance away, but now the water was arcing up. There I caught it, holding it high in a net of my own making. I kept collecting it, keeping the swaths of water low so the Red wouldn’t see them from where she was flying. While I worked on the water, Anyan spoke to the others.
‘Somewhere around here have to be the Alfar and the supernatural rebels. We lost our main contact with them when we lost Gog and Magog, but I’ve no doubt they’ll be following the Red’s movements and planning their own counterattack. When they show, try to work with them.’
Ryu and Caleb nodded, but Ryu was looking skeptical.
‘So, do we have a plan?’ he asked.
I looked at Anyan, who shrugged. So I went ahead and made a plan.
‘The plan is to keep her busy and feel out her strength. The Red and the White were always a unit; now half of that unit is gone. We have no idea what we’re dealing with out there.’
‘Will you use the stone?’ Ryu asked.
I shook my head. ‘I think it’s best we keep it out of sight for now. Unless Caleb’s had a breakthrough with the poem?’
The satyr wouldn’t meet my eyes. ‘I think I’m close, but not quite there. It’s … complicated. I’m not sure exactly what you need to do yet.’
It was obvious that there was something up with the poem, something that Caleb didn’t want to tell us.
‘Right, then. As I said, it’s best we leave the stone out of it till we know how to use it. For now, I think our main focus is figuring out what the Red is capable of on her own. Better yet, we need to get her out of London and make her think twice about showing her ugly mug here again.’
I sort of felt like the star of a noir crime thriller when I said the last bit, but I’d found that pretending to be a real champion was a great way to end up actually being a champion. As Kevin Costner taught us, if you build it, he will come. If I acted like a hero, maybe I could be one.
‘So the plan is to just … go fight?’ Ryu didn’t look pleased.
‘It’s become an old favorite,’ Anyan replied drily.
Ryu, the planner, looked at Anyan, the seat-of-his-pants man, and they both frowned.
‘As fun as this is,’ I said, pulling the labrys from where it dwelt, ‘I have things to do. Dragons to see.’ And with that, I let the labrys unleash its mojo as I strode purposefully along the narrow street that led out to the square that had formerly housed the London Eye.
The nice thing about having a giant flaming ax with a consciousness of its own was that getting attention was pretty easy.
‘Easy, killer,’ I groaned at the labrys as it started winging random shots of power at the Red. It took the dragon a second to figure out where the shots were coming from, but it quickly caught sight of me.