The City's Son (3 page)

‘… as though it was
it
that was hunting
you
?’ Glas asks, and I look up sharply.

Because that’s exactly what it was like.

Gutterglass’ voice is very quiet. All of the rats and worms and ants that animate him go still and for a moment he looks dead. ‘Filius,’ he says softly. And he doesn’t sound confused any more. He sounds very, very frightened. ‘Did anyone see you hunting that wraith?’

‘What? No. Why?’

‘Filius—’

‘No one
saw
me, Glas, I was just hunting. I was—’ Then I falter, because that isn’t quite true: somebody
did
see. A sick feeling swells in my stomach as I realise what he’s asking.

‘It went through St Paul’s,’ I whisper.

‘The Railwraith entered Reach’s domain,’ Glas says.

I nod as I feel the cold seep through me, like my bones are blistering with ice.

‘… and emerged on the other side,’ he continues, his voice grim, ‘loose from the rails, more angry and more powerful than it had any rightful way of being, and coming after
you
.’ I can hear the strain of forced calm on his borrowed vocal chords. ‘Filius,’ Glas says, ‘there’s an ugly possibility here you need to face up to.’ He sinks down until his shells are level with my eyes. ‘What if that wraith didn’t “
get loose
”? What if it was set free—?’

The question hangs in the air unfinished. I complete it in my head:
What if it was set free by Reach?

Across the river, the boom and clang of construction drifts from the St Paul’s sites. His cranes grasp at the Cathedral like it’s an orb of office.

Reach
: the Crane King. My mother’s greatest enemy. His claws have been part of my nightmares for as long as I’ve been dreaming.

He
could
do it. It dawns on me now, as it must have done on Glas, that Reach is an electric expert. His cranes and diggers, his pneumatic weaponry, they’re all powered by
it – so he could have found a way to channel that power into a wraith, to set it, frenzied and burning, on my tail: an opportunistic attack.

‘What if it’s finally happening, Filius?’ Gutterglass whispers, half to himself. ‘What if Reach is coming for you?’

I grip my spear so tightly it feels like the skin on my knuckles could split

‘We have to get you home –
now
,’ Glas says. He’s wheeling himself round and round in circles, suddenly all urgency. ‘I need you back at the landfill where it’s safe, until I can find out what’s going on. If this is Reach, he won’t stop with a Railwraith.

‘Soon there will be wolves and – Lady save us,’ he murmurs fervently, ‘
wire
.’ He begins rolling towards the edge of the bridge, yanking me by the arm, and I have to drag my feet in the sand to wrench myself free.

What if Reach is coming for you?

… Reach is coming …

The mantra goes around and around in my head, dizzying me, but it makes no sense: why
now
? I’ve been here for sixteen years without my mother’s protection. What’s he been waiting for?

But the longer I think about it, the more horribly easy it gets to believe. Reach has been the monster in every fairy-tale I’ve ever been told. My mother hated him, and Glas hates him, and I
hate
him too. I can feel that hatred clotting around my heart.

Reach is coming …
and deep down, I always knew he would.

‘Filius?’ Glas beckons impatiently. ‘We need to move.’

I straighten up, wincing at a fresh wave of pain from my burns, and shake my head.

Glas arches a dust-drawn eyebrow. ‘This is no time to be stubborn, Filius. In case you’ve forgotten, that wraith is still out there. It almost killed you last night.’

‘So imagine what it’ll do to the rest of the city,’ I say slowly. In my mind’s eye I’m seeing the blackened corpse of the boy from last night, multiplied: one for every gutter. That impossibly powerful wraith is wild and indiscriminate and
free.

What if Reach is coming for you?

The thought is too big; I can’t grasp it. But if I let fear freeze me, then tonight it’ll be me, lying charred by the roadside. Reach is still a ‘what-if’, the wraith’s a certainty: the immediate threat. I seize on it, almost gratefully. I can focus on
that
.

‘I have to finish the hunt.’

At the front of the class Mr Krafte was rambling on about
The Lady of Shalott
, but Beth wasn’t listening. As she doodled, a punked-up warrior princess emerged from under her pencil, blowing a mirror into fragments with her bazooka. Out of the window, she could see the tarpaulin the staff had draped over last night’s work. The portrait had still been uncovered when she and Pen had arrived, other students had been crowded around it, whooping with laughter and snapping it with their phones.

Beth had felt a hot rush of victory and squeezed Pen’s hand. Pen had squeezed back nervously.

‘It’s okay,’ Beth had said, ‘there’s no proof it was us.’ They’d even buried their backpacks and paint-stained hoodies under a tree near the railway, in case of a locker search.

‘We’re safe. I’ll find you at the end of the day,’ she’d promised, before letting Pen go.

‘Miss Bradley!’ Mr Krafte’s voice jarred her out her reverie and her pencil snapped.

‘Yes, boss?’ She looked up warily.

The old English teacher eyed her with mild perturbation as he folded a piece of paper between his fingers. His face was as dark and wrinkled as the skin on old gravy. ‘Go to Mrs Gorecastle’s office, please. She’d like a word.’

A muttered ‘ooooh’ went round the classroom and Beth’s throat tightened, but she shrugged, trying to look unflustered. She spent a few seconds folding the warrior princess drawing into a paper plane, and sent it on a kamikaze nosedive into the bin before she got up.

Okay, Beth: here goes. Time to put on your innocent face.
She glanced at her reflection in the window and sighed. If she’d been holding up a board with a date and time of arrest on it she couldn’t have looked guiltier. She grimaced and swung out into the hall.

The door to the headmistress’ office had a little round window in it and Beth glanced through it as she approached—

—and stopped cold.

She could see three figures behind the wired glass: the headmistress, Gorecastle herself, gaunt and dressed all in black, Dr Salt, who, frankly, looked better flat on the tarmac, rotting flesh and all …

… and a tall, slim girl standing in the corner, worrying at her headscarf.

Fury boiled up through Beth, along with an urge to get in there, to stand between Pen and the teachers, to shield her.

Pen’s disciplinary record’s spotless – what the hell?
she thought. But then she saw the mud-splotched backpack on Gorecastle’s desk and the dented spraycans arranged next to it and her indignation withered inside her. Beth suddenly felt very vulnerable, and very cold.

The headmistress opened the door and pursed her thin lips. ‘Ah, Miss Bradley. Do join us.’

Beth pushed past her to the desk, grabbed the backpack and swung it onto her shoulder. She glowered at the headmistress, her face burning. There was nothing to do now but own it.

‘So,’ the headmistress said. ‘Do you have anything to say for yourself?’

Beth stayed silent, but inside her head a stunned voice was repeating one impossible phrase:
Pen gave you up. Pen gave you up.

Pen …

‘This is very serious, Elizabeth,’ the headmistress was saying. ‘You will be suspended while we investigate this matter, and that may well lead to expulsion. It is only Dr Salt’s personal request that stops me involving the police further. You should be very grateful to him, frankly. Do you have anything to say?’

Beth kept her mouth shut and stared dead ahead. She’d show the traitor in the corner how it was done.

‘Very well, then,’ Gorecastle said. ‘I have some telephone calls to make. Julian, a word?’

Dr Salt escorted her from the room.

Beth couldn’t make herself look at Pen. Maybe if she didn’t look, it would somehow become someone else who’d betrayed her. She felt intensely, painfully weary and she dropped herself into Gorecastle’s office chair. A sudden wave of anger went through her and she kicked the desk so hard it screeched back over the floorboards.

Pen looked at her incredulously. ‘B, you’re mental—’

‘How much more trouble do you think I can get in,
Parva
?’ Beth snapped. She chewed out the syllables of Pen’s real name; the first time she’d called her that in three years of friendship.

Pen gulped, and something glittered on her cheek: a tear.

Pen’s crying.
Instinctively Beth reached up to hug her, and then dropped her arms. They felt so useless by her sides.

‘Beth, I’m—’

‘
Don’t
say it,’ Beth snarled. ‘If you tell me you’re sorry, Parva Khan, I swear I will kill you dead. Just …
just
—’ There was only one question, branded on her mind. ‘
Why?
’

‘He said he’d—’ Pen’s voice went scratchy. She tried again. ‘He said he’d—’

‘
What!
’ Beth demanded. ‘
What
did he say?’

But Pen didn’t finish; instead she huddled into herself and pulled her scarf around her.

‘You made it worse, B,’ she said miserably. ‘You made everything worse.’

Beth gazed into her best friend’s face and for the first time in years she couldn’t make sense of it. Pen’s eyes were
like slammed doors. A spidery feeling of wrongness crept into Beth’s throat. ‘Pen,’ she whispered, ‘Pen, what does that even
mean
? What happened?
Pen?
’

Pen hugged herself in silence, and Beth realised that for the first time in years, she couldn’t read her. It was a shattering thought.
I don’t understand, Pen.

And if she didn’t understand Pen, she didn’t understand anything at all.

Gorecastle returned a few moments later. ‘Parva,’ she said, ‘thank you for your help. You can go back to class.’

As Pen bundled herself from the office the headmistress eyed Beth. ‘Get up,’ she ordered coldly, and as Beth rose slowly from the chair behind the desk, never breaking eye contact, she sighed. ‘Children like you, Elizabeth,’ she said wearily, ‘
children
like you—

‘Perhaps I should just have just let the police have you.’ She picked up a form. ‘I have left a message for your father; you will wait here for him to pick you up. I shall take the opportunity to discuss this matter with him.’

Beth’s heart, which had been hammering at a million beats a second, suddenly slowed and a sick feeling welled up in her. She started to stuff her spray-paints back into her backpack. ‘We’ll be waiting a while then,’ she whispered.

They finally let Beth out at three o’clock. Her dad hadn’t called. She walked to the park and spent hours pacing, chewing at the cuticle on her right thumb and squinting at the sky until the last of the colour drained from it. She knew she’d have to face him eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier.

At last, trying to ignore the clenching in her stomach, she forced herself to head for home.

The hallway was dark and she kicked over a mountain of junk mail on her way towards the sitting room door. Her hand was trembling a little when she set it on the doorknob; she hadn’t been inside that room for weeks now. She fought down the urge to run back out into the street.

‘Just try,’ she hissed to herself as she turned the handle.

The sitting room was buried in photographs; they were tacked over every inch of wall space and strewn loose over the carpet like wreckage from a plane crash. Every chair but one was covered in more piles.

A thickset, balding man occupied the remaining chair.
He was reading a paperback book; Beth could just make out the title,
The Iron Condor Mystery
, on the faded spine. He didn’t look up as Beth approached.

Beth’s lungs felt suddenly airless. She’d run this conversation over and over on her way home, trying to make it sound like something they could talk about rationally, but now—?

She looked down at the bald spot on top of her dad’s head and the crumbs scattered on his shirt like an invitation to the birds. All her preparations felt useless. In the end she just blurted out, ‘I’ve been kicked out.’

He turned a page; his eyes narrowed slightly as they followed the print.

The squeezing in the pit of Beth’s stomach grew tighter. ‘Dad, are you listening? Dad, please. I really need you to focus. Social Services could come around, and the police, maybe. Look, I— Dad, I fucked up, seriously. Dad I need hel—’

She broke off as he looked up at her.

One night, three years and some change before, it had been Beth’s mum reading
The Iron Condor Mystery.
She’d loved old Cold War spy novels, the safely sinister world of Fedoras and secret codes and briefcase-bombs. That night she’d set down the dog-eared paperback with a little regretful sigh, having not quite reached the bit she’d been looking forward to, but happy in the knowledge that it would be waiting for her tomorrow. She kissed her husband gently, turned over and haemhorrhaged while she slept.

Beth’s dad had woken with his arm curled around his wife. She’d been waxy and cold and her limbs were too heavy when he’d tried to move them.

It had been the morning of Beth’s thirteenth birthday.

Ever since that night he’d slept in his chair – Beth knew he was afraid of the bedroom, though she doubted he would ever admit that. Ever since that night he’d read and reread that same book with an almost frantic intensity, until it was all but disintegrating in his hands.

And ever since that night, he’d
looked
at her like this, with the same desolate, pleading exhaustion in his face.

‘It’s fine,’ Beth stuttered, furious with herself for caving in so easily. ‘I’ll – I’ll find some way to— I’ll sort it.’

He didn’t respond. She realised she couldn’t remember when he had last spoken to her,
real
words …