The Neon Court (46 page)

We waited.

Nothing but the sound of falling rain.

We waited a little longer.

Footsteps.

Footsteps on stone.

We put our head on one side and now everyone was watching us, Lady Neon, Toxik, even JG, and everyone had the sense to be afraid. “Hear that?” I asked. “That’s the sound of Blackout.”

The footsteps stopped. Then started again, somewhere else, just one pair, too loud in the quiet patter of the falling rain. Getting closer.

“She does that,” I explained. “Darkness and footsteps. It’s all part of what Blackout is: the thing at the end of the alley. It’s all about fear and shame. All the things that you can get away with when the lights go out, that’s what Blackout is. The thing at the end of the alley is no more and no less than fear. Pure and absolute fear of a thing unknown. Regrettably, this unknown thing has a sister. And regrettably this sister’s name is Jabuile Ajaja.”

I watched Toxik and Lady Neon. Their eyes were now locked on JG.

“She’s coming,” I murmured. “Blackout. She’s coming right here, right now. London is closing in on itself, shutting down. We’re probably part of a very small bubble that remains. I can’t imagine she’s going to be impressed with the pastoral care on offer. Does any of this strike you as odd? That the Court and the Tribe are both told, at the same time, to go to the same place, to find the same chosen one, and this chosen one happens to be the sister of the woman who’s now going to come through the darkness and kill us all?”

Footsteps running, then stopping.

Silence.

We all craned to hear, but there was nothing.

Then again the sound: three short steps, pause, then three more, like feet finding their way.

“You’ve been used,” I said. “None of it was real. And look what unintended consequences we now have to deal with.”

Feet on stone.

A sound that might have been a woman laughing, might have been her crying, fading to distant nothing.

Then Toxik said, “Prov it.”

Lady Neon said, “It’s not just about the chosen one …”

“I can prove it. You two have bigger problems than each other.”

The edges of the shadows were growing ragged, things in them that didn’t obey the same rules as light.

“They are … they are …” Lady Neon stabbed a quivering finger towards Toxik. “They are so
ugly
!”

Toxik’s lips curled in an animal snarl.

“Look at it!” she shrieked. “How can anything good come from that?”

“We r beautiful!” roared Toxik. “We r beautiful we r beautiful we r …”

JG took a nervous step forward. Something moved in the darkness of a window, a hint of blackness out of shape caught in the light of my little spell. I began, “Wait, JG, wa …”

There was a flash of star-shaped light. A sound like a mosquito having a heart attack. I saw JG stagger and fall, slipping face first onto the tarmac. I ran forward and grabbed her, hauled her up, looking to the windows for that flash again. Lady Neon started, hiding her face with her hands, I heard the breath rush from Toxik’s lips. I felt something hot beneath my fingers. I was too familiar with the feeling of blood to mistake it for anything else. JG’s eyes were wide, her lips moving, she was trying to feel round at her back, trying to find the source of the pain. A single bullet, straight to a lung, fired from behind. She coughed, and there was blood on her breath.

Bakker said, “Matthew, get out of the firing line.”

I held her closer and whispered, “JG? Jabuile?”

“Matthew, get out!”

“Is she …” whispered Lady Neon.

“Jabuile?”

Her eyes began to close. I shook her gently. Then we shook her harder. “JG? Jabuile!”

Toxik raised his head, fixed his eyes on Lady Neon. “U did dis,” he breathed.

She shook her head. “You did.”

I watched the air steam around JG’s lips as the breath went out. I kept on watching, shaking her, pressing my fingers into her back, trying to force the blood back in. She didn’t move. The air didn’t steam. “Jabuile?”

It wasn’t me that had spoken.

I looked up.

Oda stood on the very edge of the light, eating it, the darkest thing in the night. Her hands were shaking, and from her mashed-up eyes, thin lines of blood were beginning to trickle down her face. She took a step forward, staggered, as if she was about to fall, then picked herself up and managed another, pulling her tatty clothes tighter around herself like a shroud. I eased JG to the ground, scrambled away from her, the blood washing like smoke into the puddles beneath my fingers. Oda knelt down slowly by the still body, leant right over it, covered it entirely, cradling it to herself and her to it. Her back shook, a constant tiny vibration, no more and no less, just shaking, her fingers tangling in JG’s hair. She didn’t speak, didn’t whine, didn’t moan, didn’t scream, just knelt there and shook.

Bakker said, “Too late now.”

I heard a little hard clink. I looked round. Lady Neon’s hand closed round one of the shattered glass pieces of her blade. I shook my head mutely. Toxik, seeing what Lady Neon was doing, flexed his fingers and reached out for his staff. Lady Neon rose silently, advanced towards Oda, shard glinting in my little sodium light. I shook my head desperately and she ignored me.

“No, it won’t …” I blurted.

Lady Neon caught Oda by the back of the head, yanked her up by her hair and slashed the glass smartly across the line of her throat. Blood spilt across the stones – not enough – and with peacock pride
Lady Neon let go of Oda’s head and the other woman flopped back forward, bowed over her sister.

The rain fell.

The world waited.

I saw Oda’s fingers tighten at her side. Then, without raising her head, she lifted herself up, and turned, as slow as a tidal wave, and looked Lady Neon straight in the eye. I saw blood bloom behind Lady Neon’s perfect lilac gaze, saw the glass shard fall from her fingertips.

Bakker said, “There is nothing left here for you!”

I crawled to my feet.

Toxik tried to ram his staff into the side of Oda’s head. She didn’t even look at him and the staff shattered into burning ash in his hands long before it was even close. He staggered back, clutching at his eyes, scrabbling at his eyes. I heard the beginning of a scream from Lady Neon, felt the darkness tumble in thick and hard, pushing down on my little bubble of light, snapping it out, and, as Toxik’s voice joined the wail, we turned our back, on them, on Oda, on Jabuile and, feeling through the dark with our toes and fingers, ran away.

I didn’t summon fresh light until the sounds of pain were lost far, far behind.

I crawled on hands and knees, feeling my way between parked cars, fingers needling round the edges of the pavement and into the cracks of the stones, recalling a path by nameless instinct and guesswork. I crawled until my knees bled, then I wriggled up onto my feet and staggered like a drunk man, hands out in front of me, banging into bins and slipping on litter spilt across the street until at last I staggered face-first into a hedge someone had inconsiderately left in the way, and slipped down to the ground beneath it. The darkness was universal. Not one light flickered, not one creature stirred, man or rat. I could hear no traffic. Just the sound of rain. I could see nothing and dared not call a light, in case I stood out like a lighthouse and called something a little bit more.

I remembered my mobile phone and, thumbing it on, found I had no signal. It gave off a feeble little light, and by that I saw I had staggered into an alley of small elegant houses with white walls, and potted plants beside their low doors. The light went out on my phone. I
thumbed at the buttons until it came back on and, by its grey-blue glow, staggered to the end of the alley and out onto a wider shopping street. The rainwater was already two feet deep in the muddy hole dug for perpetual building works down the side of the road. In the shop windows stood mannequins sporting clothes for him, clothes for her, their perfect, unrealistic bodies all curves and flat paint. I looked closer. There was something wrong with the mannequins’ eyes. They were bleeding.

A voice echoed off the building, loud and rich and confident.

“We’re coming for you next, sorcerer! We’re coming for you!”

It bounced between glass and brick, steel and concrete, and faded away.

I ran again, fumbling with one hand pressed into the changing shape of the walls until I reached the shuttered shape of Covent Garden Tube. The light was out in the Underground sign, the screens on the ticket machines read:

OUT OF ORDER

A single guard in a blue hat slept behind the counter. The doors stood halfway open to the lifts, the lights off inside.

I fumbled my way round the corner, down a street that usually hummed with tourists, shoppers, jugglers and children, and which was now empty, save for the odd piece of litter that tangled in the hair of a sleeping beggar lodged under a dripping bench. Even the smell of greasy pies had been washed away. At the end of the street Covent Garden Market was a dark squatting rectangle with nothing to recommend itself to the traveller except, perhaps, shelter from the rain. I staggered under its arches, down aisles where during the day they sold jewellery, hats, scarves, ornamental bits of wood with no apparent purpose, and all those pretty things that made a perfect home, a perfect home with a bit of wood in it.

There was a light shining.

Just one.

It burnt beneath a great set of neo-Greek pillars across the street, a single bright spot of yellow illumination supported by a huge antique iron cage. It fell on slippery stone slabs beneath the pillared portico.

We thought for less than a second about this, then ran through the rain towards that glow. It was a church, a grand thing in front of a space
where in summer pigeons fluttered and businesspeople ate their sandwiches on benches dedicated to fond memories of the dead. Beside this one light a gate stood unchained to the churchyard and at the west end of the building a pair of doors, set in red brick, opened easily enough into the cool dry interior. Over this entrance, another light burned.

As churches went, it was neither decadent nor overly restrained; it made it clear in its ornamentation that it could do stuff if it wanted to, but didn’t like to boast. Long pews of polished wood. The walls were adorned with names of patrons and devotees, and in two tight banks candles were burning, the wicks crooked with their own heat. A small mahogany cabinet smelling of rosemary opened up to reveal various silver dishes, an empty glass beaker, and several immaculately folded white altar cloths. I hauled a bundle of these off their shelf. Pulling off my sodden coat and shoes, I sat down by the larger bank of candles, dragged the altar cloths around myself like a blanket, and shivered.

The rain pattered on the windows.

I listened for footsteps, voices, any sign of life, heard none.

Then the creak of a leather shoe.

I looked up to see Bakker sit down on the pew beside me, hands folded between his knees, head bowed. I watched him for a while and then blurted, “You are
not
praying.”

He sighed, raised his head and said, “You know, if I had been, that would have been very rude.”

“I think we’re past good manners.”

His eyebrows contracted in mild disapproval. Then he said, “You’re getting blood on the altar cloth.”

I shivered, followed his gaze. My hands had left dirty black-red stains in the starched material.

“It’s all right,” he added. “It’s her blood, not yours.”

We felt something hot sting our eyes, the need to swallow, found it hard to breathe. I tried to speak and found the words sticking at the back of my throat.

“Crying at this time would be self-indulgent,” went on Bakker. “I have no doubt that in your own way you feel you ought to cry, out of a mixture of guilt and grief – mostly guilt, I may add – but if you could put off the event until after we have dealt with the current situation, that would be far more practical all round.”

“Dealt with what?” I managed to blurt out the words between shuddering breaths. “Dealt how? She’s … JG is dead. She’s dead and … Dees is dead and Lady Neon is dead and Toxik is dead and Penny is …”

“An unknown factor,” replied Bakker. “Good God but it is tedious having to share your consciousness, Matthew. So much ‘could be’ and ‘might be’ and ‘what if’ and ‘if I could’ and ‘but I should’ and all these empty empty sounds that make you believe yourself to be doing the right thing even as sheer necessity and the demands of the time force you to do what is in fact the needful thing. The only thing that there is to be done. I sometimes think that the only difference, to you, between what you classed as my wickedness and your goodness was that you wasted time lamenting those you’d forced to die of necessity, while I accepted that necessity has no time for grief and got on with it.”

I pulled the sheets up over my head, wrapped my arms round my knees and stuck my chin in my chest.

Bakker was silent a while. Then with a puff of frustration he exclaimed, “Hark at the ostrich! Shall I find you some sand to bury your head in?”

“Go away.”

“Yes, wallowing is so much more dignified in private, isn’t it? In public it’s called self-pity, misery and vanity. In private it’s called respect for the dead and contemplation. I do hope you’re not planning on wailing, Matthew, I can’t abide wailing.”

“Go away!”

“Can’t. You inhaled me. It wasn’t even like you argued much! Dees said ‘this seems like a good idea’ and you did it. Not because you respected Dees – and let’s face it, in the grand scheme of things, you didn’t respect her, not one inch, which was generally shallow of you – but because, I think, there was some part of your soul that wanted it. That wanted me here. I may suggest it was a masochistic part, but it’s there. The same little corner of you that wants to feel grief for Dees despite the fact that you hardly knew the woman, to grieve for the girl JG despite the fact she was a rather obnoxious pawn. I imagine you’re even managing a few shivers of guilt for the death of that tedious man Theydon. Or did you forget him? One has to prioritise when it comes
to big feelings. One can only feel big feelings for so many people, other-wise one has to feel lots and lots of little feelings for lots of little people, and then frankly you’d stop being the hero.”