The London Pride (11 page)

Ariel landed beneath the well-lit canopy of a tube station and put Jo back on her feet. Jo staggered and realised that somewhere in the fall she had dropped her stick. She straightened up and grimaced.

‘And where’s Tragedy?’ she said.

‘He’s back in the hotel with Wolfie.’

‘Who’s Wolfie?’ said Jo.

‘One of Tragedy’s little gang. We were trying to warn you about the lions,’ said Ariel.

‘Bit late for that,’ said Jo.

‘I know,’ said Ariel. ‘We got rather surprised by them.’

‘Thank you for catching me,’ said Jo. ‘I, er …’

‘Think nothing of it,’ said Ariel breezily, running her fingers through her hair. ‘I thought you were the boy anyway.’

‘Will,’ said Jo.

‘Yes,’ said Ariel. ‘Will. Though I should have caught you just the same if I’d known it was you, which, now I come to think of it, I did.’

She turned a smile on Jo that was evidently intended to dazzle and impress.

‘I’m grateful,’ said Jo. ‘And I’m glad you’re mended.’

‘So am I,’ said Ariel. ‘It was very painful and uncomfortable, the whole dragon thing. I can’t think why they are so stirred up.’

‘Yes,’ said Jo. ‘And now there are lions.’

‘Where?’ said Ariel, the smile sliding off her face as she looked hurriedly around the street.

‘No,’ said Jo. ‘Not here. Not now. I mean back there. You know. Everywhere. They seem to be hunting.’

‘The London Pride,’ said Ariel. ‘That’s what they are called. Every now and then all the lions get together and roam about, but they just do it for fun. I mean, they don’t normally hunt or attack things, not really, and if they do it’s just for fun. Admittedly there are some deer statues and a couple of gazelle sculptures that they will stalk if they wander close, but they’re awfully good sports about it. If they do catch them and bring them down they always drag them back to their plinths so they can be mended at midnight.’

‘Not much fun for the deer,’ said Jo.

‘I suppose not,’ said Ariel. ‘But it’s all done in good spirit; there’s no malice in it. These lions aren’t wild lions. They’re London lions. You know. Fierce but polite. Normally …’

‘But this isn’t normal,’ said Jo.

‘None of it,’ agreed Ariel. ‘And is it your fault?’

‘Why do you say that?’ said Jo.

‘Because you’re the only people not frozen and the lions seemed to be hunting you. And the dragons don’t like you …’ She looked at her with a carefully raised eyebrow. ‘No offence, but it is a tiny bit suspicious, isn’t it?’

Jo wondered why when people said no offence they always followed it with something unpleasant that was a bit offensive.

‘No, it’s not us,’ said Jo. ‘We aren’t affected by the magic because we’ve got these scarab bracelet thingies that seem to be a talisman against it.’

‘Bracelets,’ said Ariel, suddenly interested. ‘Oh, I do rather like jewellery. Show me.’

Jo held out the arm with the bracelet on it. Ariel reached out a slender gold hand.

‘May I try it on?’ she smiled.

‘No,’ said Jo, withdrawing her hand quickly. ‘If I take it off I’ll freeze like everyone else.’

‘Oh, fine,’ pouted Ariel, clearly more than a little piqued. ‘I don’t mind not trying it on. It’s a rather grubby thing; really just a pebble on a string, isn’t it? I expect if I was to wear jewellery it would look better to have something much bigger and more sparkly than that anyway.’

She began running her fingers through her hair again, suddenly preoccupied with carefully teasing it into an artfully tousled look as she looked at her reflection in the ticket-office window.

Jo’s elation at Ariel’s regeneration was beginning to subside slightly: she had forgotten how pleased with herself she always was, and how keen to share that assessment with anyone she was talking to.

‘So what was Tragedy’s good idea?’ asked Jo.

‘What?’ said Ariel, primping a curl and smiling at her reflection.

‘You said he had a good idea?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘He thought the way to get around the city without the dragons seeing you was to go underground. On the Underground. I mean, through the tunnels. Because obviously the trains aren’t working. And dragons don’t go underground – at least I’ve never heard of them doing so – so the fact they can swoop around the sky looking for you wouldn’t matter.’

Jo instinctively thought this was a bad idea. She was about to start listing the very many reasons why, beginning with the whole electrified-third-rail thing, but Ariel went on.

‘He says you want to get back to your mother, and this does seem like a good and unusual idea. He’s small but quite clever, for a boy …’

She stepped back, smoothing the material that rippled round her body as she admired her handiwork in the glass window. Jo still couldn’t quite believe how little actual fabric there was, or work out how it always managed to stay eddying round her like a skein of golden smoke, no matter in what direction she moved.

Ariel caught Jo looking at her and smiled.

‘You know, you could look perfectly nice if you did something to your hair and wore a dress,’ she said.

‘Shut up,’ hissed Jo.

‘I was only—’ began Ariel.

Jo just grabbed her and pulled her towards the escalators, ricocheting off the frozen people.

‘Mind my arm!’ screeched Ariel. ‘You’re hurt—’

‘Shhh,’ hissed Jo again.

But it was too late. The truck-sized lion she had spotted moving towards them through the windows of the red double-decker heard Ariel’s screech and bounded round the front of the bus, heading straight for them.

Will and Filax followed Tragedy quietly down the stairs. As they went, they heard other noises in the building, the sound of big creatures patrolling the floors that they tiptoed past.

Tragedy held up a hand as they moved on down from the ground floor to the basement. They paused, holding their breaths, Filax tense and ready to pounce at whatever was snuffling noisily on the other side of the fire door, but whatever it was either didn’t smell them or was unable to figure out how door handles worked, and it stayed shut. The noise moved away and they breathed again.

‘Come on,’ said Tragedy, and led the way down the last flight into the bright white light of the kitchen. It was a glaringly lit maze of efficient steel units and countertops, with a frozen cook stuck in the act of turning an omelette in a pan. He looked bored with his job.

‘Jo,’ said Will urgently. ‘We’ve got to get Jo.’

‘She’ll be fine,’ said Tragedy. ‘Ariel was out there.’

‘Zee little fraulein vent flyink off zee roof and tumbled through zee air like a rag doll,’ piped an overexcited child’s voice from the other end of the kitchen. ‘Seriously, it vas completely highwire bananas! I thought she was goink to splat like a rotten tomato on zee ground, but Ariel caught her so zee Bob iss your uncle and no spilled milk to cry over.’

The head of a small boy made of dark bronze, just like Tragedy’s, grinned round the corner. His face was more refined than the little imp’s and his cheeks a little better fed, but the smile was just as puckish. He wore an old-fashioned wig with side-curls, and a perky little bow and pigtail at the back; he had a long jacket, a bit like a pirate’s, with the ruffles of his shirt poking out of the cuffs, and more flounces tumbling over the high collar of the brocaded waistcoat he wore beneath it.

‘What?’ said Will, looking at Tragedy. ‘Who’s … ?’

There was so much adrenalin pumping through his system, swirling in with his fears for Jo and the overall rising tide of exhaustion that was threatening to drown him, that this new thing, this little boy in the wig with the flounces and the cartoony German accent was just not computing. Or at least if it
was
computing it was coming up with a big error message, and he did not know how to reboot his head and get back to normal. Maybe normal was now like the past, a place you can never go back to. The thought chilled him and he actually shivered, though that might have been the fight-or-flight surge of hormones flushing out of his system.

‘Oh, that’s Wolfie,’ said Tragedy, as if that explained everything.

‘And, er, what is he?’ said Will.

‘Well, he thinks he’s a bit Austrian. Or German. Or both. He’s not too fussy. Some of the statues say he’s a child prodigy, and some say he’s a
wunderkind,
which is why he talks funny, but I don’t really know what either of those is, truth to tell.’

‘I am a
wunderkind
!’ giggled the boy. ‘Everyone agrees. And maybe also I will be prodigy, though I don’t know vot it is either, except it sounds fun!’

‘He likes fun, does Wolfie,’ said Tragedy.

‘This isn’t fun …’ said Will, who was desperate to find Jo.

‘I know,’ said Tragedy. ‘Hang on and I’ll fill you in.’

And he quickly explained how he had been on the way back to meet Jo and Will when the animal statues had begun to step from the plinths and unpeel from the walls where they normally stood and stream towards the museum. He’d sent Selene, who he’d whistled out of the sky, to go and get them, while he went to fetch Wolfie.

‘Because we need a secret weapon,’ he added.

‘And Wolfie’s it?’ said Will, voice dripping with disbelief as he stared at the boy, who must only have been nine or ten. He didn’t look like a secret weapon.

‘Just you wait,’ said Tragedy. ‘We get into a tight corner with them animals out there in the streets, Wolfie’s going to buy you a lot more time than a couple of normal soldier-statues.’

‘He doesn’t look like a soldier,’ said Will.

‘Thank you,’ said Wolfie, and bowed.

‘You don’t have a gun. Or even a sword,’ said Will.

‘No,’ agreed Wolfie. ‘I have better.’

And he raised his hand, which had been hanging below the counter so that Will had not been able to see what it held.

‘A violin?’ he said, choking. ‘Are you serious?’

‘I am better zan serious, my friend,’ said Wolfie, winking at him. ‘I told you: I am prodigy.’

Wolfie may have been a prodigy, and Tragedy may have believed he was a secret weapon, but Will noticed they both moved very slowly and silently as they eased out of the back door of the basement and crept down the alley.

The downpour was heavier now, and the glowing blue people on the street beyond the mouth of the alley seemed to acquire a haze around them as the driving raindrops refracted their light as they hammered past. It was the kind of rain that hits the ground so hard that it bounces back up your trouser legs and soaks your ankles. Within a few steps Will was drenched. He put his hoodie up and kept his right hand on Filax’s back as they went along.

When Filax stopped, he stopped. A large silhouette of a lion slunk past on the street, backlit by the blue glow of the pedestrians.

Tragedy and Wolfie seemed to melt into the wall, and Will lowered into a crouch behind a parked scooter.

By the time the lion had moved on, Will’s hoodie was so wet and heavy that it deadened his hearing and flapped on either side of his face like a pair of blinkers, severely narrowing his field of vision, so he pushed it back and resigned himself to getting thoroughly soaked. Creeping around with blinkers on seemed a suicidal thing to do in the circumstances. He needed all his wits about him.

It took them five minutes to creep to the end of the alley.

What they saw there was dispiriting – four lions in view, and Selene, broken, lying across her plinth on the face of the hotel above the door, arms hanging lifelessly as a gold bug fluttered on her face. All her stars lay in a pile across the front doorway below, like discarded confetti. Will felt the familiar pang of guilt. Maybe she had succumbed to the bugs’ attack because he had distracted her for that crucial moment. They turned back and took a further five minutes creeping back to where they’d begun.

‘We’re a bit bottled in,’ admitted Tragedy. ‘If bleedin’ Ariel would come back she could fly us out of here. Dunno what she’s up to.’

In the near distance they heard a lion roar with a ground-trembling blast of hunter’s frenzy.

Ariel and Jo were, for an instant, paralysed with fear in the ticket hall of the Underground station. In two leaps the roaring lion filled the entrance, blotting out the view of the street like a snarling thundercloud.

To give Ariel her due, she caught up pretty fast. What had begun with Jo dragging her ended up with her grabbing Jo and flying backwards, deeper into the ticket hall.

What saved them was that the frozen people were as immovable to the lion as they were to anything else. They acted like speed bumps and traffic bollards, making the great beast slow right down and pick his way through them, his head ducked in below the canopied entrance as he pushed his way in after Jo and Ariel.

Ariel flew them over the ticket barriers and hovered, suddenly indecisive.

‘Go down!’ said Jo. ‘Follow the escalators.’

Two escalators angled downwards right in front of them.

Ariel still hovered. Jo could see her looking for another option.

‘What are you waiting for!’ she said. ‘Move!’

‘Looking for another exit!’ said Ariel, sounding flustered.

The lion was working its way over the obstacle course of frozen people. Once it got over the ticket barrier it would have a clear enough space to jump at them. It was nearly there.

‘Come ON!’ said Jo. ‘GO!’

Ariel was biting her lip, eyes going left and right.

‘Why aren’t we moving?’ said Jo.

‘I’ve never been underground,’ said Ariel.

‘Ever been eaten by a lion?’ said Jo.

Ariel still wavered. Jo tried to wrench herself free of her grasp.

‘Well, I’m going,’ she gasped. ‘I’m real, right? Not like you. I don’t get a reset at midnight if this goes wrong. Let me go!’

Ariel stared at her as if she’d been slapped. Then the lion roared, and she rolled in the air and shot like a bullet straight down the barrel of the escalator tunnel. It was a long way down, and she flew well until they were about halfway. Then she gasped, her body shuddering and sputtering, and Jo felt the power go out of her as they tumbled and hit the divider running down between the up and the down escalators. It was lucky that Ariel hit first, because she was made of metal. The barrier was smooth, shiny steel, which made it an excellent slide, but there were bumps and protuberances on it that were there especially to stop daredevils using it as one. If Jo had been underneath she would have been pretty badly banged up, given the speed at which they hit. As it was, metal slid almost frictionless on metal, which was good from the point of getting away from the lion, but bad from the point at which they ran out of escalator and went sprawling on the hard stone floor of the concourse beyond.