Then came a silver-white flash behind us that went up to the ceiling with a concussion that threw us forward. The roar and scream of the explosion came right behind it and my ears rang, but I could still hear a mad cackle in my head. Marsden’s cackle.
Fast footsteps pattered like a distant storm on my right and a clammy hand grasped my upper arm, wrenching me upright. I jerked my head to look at the hand’s owner.
Michael Novak yanked me toward the nearest black branch of the tunnel. “Come on!” he rasped in a low, panicky voice.
Screaming and rending sounds came from behind and the iron smell of blood mixed with the nauseating corruption of vampire curdled the air.
I didn’t look back. Whatever Marsden was doing, I didn’t want to waste the time he was buying us by watching it. I started to go with Michael, but Purcell threw himself between us onto my other arm. He stared into my eyes and clapped his hands around mine, pressing something rigid and toothed into my palms. “Edward’s vault. Tell him I am sorry.”
The kreanou shrieked its victory as Dez’s screams cut off short. Purcell shoved me after Michael before turning to run toward the carnage.
The younger Novak hauled me along, twisting my arm near to dislocation in his rush. “Run, run, run,” he chanted.
I gathered my wits, closed my fist around the hard, biting thing Purcell had entrusted to me, and sprinted with Michael through the opening and into the darkness of a passageway that plunged downward into the earth and the smell of sewers. I could hear scuffling and growls behind us but not a single cry. I hoped Purcell was made of tougher stuff than Dez and Glick had been. Never thought I’d root for the vampire. I hoped all this wasn’t in vain.
“Will?” I asked as we ran.
“Couldn’t get to him,” Michael replied, gasping the words. “Got worried. waiting for you. ”
“You know. where?”
He grunted, “Uh-huh.” Then he shut up and we charged on.
I was lost, not knowing what direction we were going or where we were in the twisting tunnels and dry, ancient sewers below Clerkenwell. I just tore along in Michael’s wake. We flashed past a silvery line on the floor and I heard a crack of thunder as another blur of white light shot up behind us, leaving a barrier of sparking magic and acrid smoke. The shape of the spell reminded me of the tangles and traps Mara had made for me once—little bits of hedge magic woven into rings of thorns and grass. It wasn’t the same but it was similar, and I assumed it was something Marsden had done to cover our escape. I didn’t really care so long as the kreanou didn’t follow us.
Michael jagged to the right and into another tunnel. A pale smear detached from the wall and hurried beside us.
“That should send ’im whimperin’ back to his mother,” Marsden crowed as he fell in with us. “Round the left—we’ll be able to hop over there.”
“Over. what?” I panted, adrenaline shortening my breath and making me stagger.
“Time. To the House of Detention when it was still standin’. There’s a way out back then.”
“No!” I objected. “That’s. where—”
“I heard the plan,” he snapped. “But we shan’t be going through the bit that bloodsucking bitch had in mind, and they can’t follow us my way. The only other way out from this end takes us through St. James’s. You don’t want that!”
“No,” I agreed.
“Then bleedin’ trust me!”
Around the next bend in the passage we came to the fragment of an ancient wall and threw ourselves over it. Marsden scrambled up first, clutched at the thickly silvered air, and wrenched.
The world jerked sideways.
We rolled to the ground and up against the wall at a new angle. Or possibly a different wall.
Marsden picked himself up and brushed dirt from his trousers and coat. He turned back to us, whispering, “Been a prison for three hundred years. Lots of bad things floatin’ about.” Then he put his finger over his lips. We followed him in silence.
CHAPTER 41
I wasn’t sure how or where we entered the prison itself. The walls just gave way to rooms and proper corridors crossed at strange intervals by low tunnels for ventilation or sewage. The cells at our end were the dankest and foulest confinement I’d ever seen outside the “hole” at Alcatraz. Most of them were empty in the time we’d tumbled into, but even in the past, the place boiled with ghosts and the gelid air stank of waste and water and human despair. The song of London’s Grey had become a dirge.
We scrambled through the labyrinth of the prison’s lowest pit, where real, solid brick vaults and ghostly doubles stood in the earth to hold up a structure soaked in the uncanny and the horrifying. Low brickwork doorways led to low-ceilinged cell blocks of whitewashed brick. Marsden motioned us forward at every turning with frantic gestures and the cocking of his head this way and that, listening.
Explosions and screams rocked the building, and we found ourselves rushing through panicking crowds of prisoners. The impression was so thick and strong, even Michael responded to their press and their terror. The memory of fire broke out behind us.
“It’s burning!” Michael yelped, his own exhaustion and fear pulling him into the verges of hysteria where the Grey flickers into the visible like campfire smoke images.
Marsden turned back to him with a furious expression. “Hush!”
The warning came too late; something had heard and filtered itself from the murk of history and the memory of smoke, flowing fast across the teeming vault of the cell block toward us as it solidified into the shape of a gaunt man. The stink intensified as he came closer—not just the stench of the prison but of corruption and bodily rot—homing in on us like a hunting hound.
“Bloody hell,” Marsden breathed. “It’s the wraith. Bloody butcher Norrin. We’re in it now.”
The wraith cut through the crowd of ghosts like a sword. It wasn’t quite like them but something more eternal and horrible with a greater solidity in its accumulated bulk of evil. So this was what Alice had been sending me to: a spirit old, solid, and wicked enough to do someone like me serious hurt. Anyone with a hint of sensitivity would feel it, whether they were touched with the Grey or not. Someone descending into it by close association with the likes of Marsden and me couldn’t help but know it was there. Michael retched in the swirling darkness beside me and stumbled back. I put myself between him and the barely corporate monster that approached.
But it wasn’t interested in me. It fixed its attention on the other Greywalker, blocking our path—unless we wanted to go through it and I certainly didn’t.
“Peter, Peter,” the wraith sang in a voice that chilled my spine. “I knew ye’d come back, y’lyin’ pig swiver. Ah, but what happened to yer pretty blue eyes, eh? I told ye I’d pluck ’em out for ye if y’didn’t care for the sight o’ me. But y’did for yerself, didn’t ye? I should punish ye for that. But ye’ve brought me some other pretties, too? Ah. That’ll keep yer lying throat uncut a while longer.”
The wraith turned burning eyes on Michael and me, picking us from the crowd of alarmed ghosts who ran from the memory of flames. An unearthly gleam danced along the fine edge of a blade in his hand. His thumb brushed lightly across the tang, and the reflection of light turned scarlet as his face stretched into something lupine and horrible.
“Keep yer distance, Norrin,” Marsden spat back at him. His lank white hair swung over his face as he turned, making shadows dance in his ravaged eye sockets. “They’re not for the likes of you.”
“No? But y’know I like a bit of fun whether ye will or no, Peter.”
The knife flashed as Norrin lashed out sideways, never shifting his gaze. I dodged back, shoving Michael away. The boy grunted and stumbled sideways, coming clear of my body. Norrin sprang at him, mouth gaping into a black chasm lined with rows of ripsaw teeth.