The London Pride (10 page)

The other dragon emitted a gleeful and wheezy ‘
sheesh sheesh sheesh
’ noise as it giggled at its friend’s antics, and stamped its foot again.

Toughened glass can take a lot of punishment.

But it isn’t indestructible.

One minute there were two dragons mocking and mimicking her. Then there was a loud splintering noise.

One of the dragons went ‘Ulp … ?’

The other went ‘… Ook?’

And then the glass beneath their feet splintered and gave way, and gravity took over as they dropped straight down the light well beneath them, plunging out of sight as abruptly as if a mysterious hand had just erased them from the planet.

One hit its chin on the lip of the skylight with a surprised grunt of pain as it plummeted away, snapping its snout towards the sky and leaving a surprised puff of smoke hanging in the air, as a kind of exclamation mark.

Jo and Will’s dad was a great believer in mulligans. Mulligans are do-overs. Playing table tennis, if you messed up your first serve, you were allowed one mulligan, which meant you started again. It was a family rule. And as a soldier he had expanded this rule to life in all its unpredictability, a large and unpleasant portion of which he had seen, and tried very hard not to bring home. All he did bring home was the positive lessons this hard side of his work had taught him. ‘Work hard, play hard, rest and eat when you can, don’t worry about failing, just fail better next time – and when fate offers you a mulligan?’ he would say. ‘Grab it with both hands.’

The dragons falling through the skylight was the mulligan of mulligans and Jo grabbed it without thinking.

She spun and sprinted for the door, feet kicking spurts of rain-soaked gravel as she ran.

She leapt over the gaping skylight and caught a glimpse of the two dragons tangled together at the foot of a long and narrow light well. It hadn’t given them quite enough space to unfold their wings, but just enough to get thoroughly snarled up with each other. She landed on the other side with a sharp pain in her knee that made her stumble and gasp.

Stumbling saved her because as she bent over, something gold buzzed over her head so close that she felt the whirr of its angry wings on the exposed back of her neck. She looked back and saw, with horror, that it was one of the golden mosquitoes.

That wasn’t a real mulligan then.

Or if it was, it was the shortest one in history, more like a very dispiriting out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire-flavoured-mulligan instead.

The mosquito hummed into the rain and curved back on itself, returning to the attack.

Jo raced for the door, running badly lopsided now, the pain pounding through her knee with each step. She heard the approaching high-pitched whine behind her and spun, whiffling her cane through the raindrops, missing the mosquito entirely. It passed her, looped back up into the sky and came back for the kill.

‘Girl!’ shouted a voice from behind her. ‘Run to me!’

She snapped her head left.

Selene was hovering by the edge of the building, beckoning her.

Jo ran, hunched low, legs pounding, towards the open arms.

‘Keep running and jump!’ cried Selene, which confused Jo, but not nearly as much as the fact that as she heard the mosquito closing in on her again, Selene’s own dragonfly wings whirred and misted the raindrops as she flew straight at her.

‘Duck and then jump!’ she yelled as she overflew Jo, missing her entirely. Jo craned her neck backwards and saw the goddess of sleep bring her hands together in a mighty double swat that sandwiched the mosquito and splatted it in a satisfying shower of gold.

‘Jump!’ shouted Selene.

Jo caught the note of worry in her voice and realised she was still moving forwards, too close to the edge of the roof to stop, too powerless to make the leap across the chasm of the alley between her and the next-door building. Her legs became desperate and disjointed as despite all this her body tried to stop her, and then her foot caught the low wall and tried to brake her forward momentum—

It was too little too late, and all she did was send herself into a flailing cartwheel out beyond the end of the roof, tumbling down into the rain-filled gulf of air beyond.

Man’s Best Friend v. King of the Jungle is not even close to a fair match. Normally a dog would have no chance against a lion.

Luckily for Will, Filax was a larger-than-life sculpture of an especially fierce kind of hound, bred to defend herds of sheep and cattle against wolves and bears, whereas the lion that had crept into the hotel on the trail of Will and Jo was a half-life-size sculpture of a heraldic lion whose day job was propping up one side of a coat of arms and trying to look more decorative than the unicorn that leaned against the other side of the shield. It wasn’t quite a
wild
lion: it was more of an indoor lion, carved for artistic effect, not built for speed and ferocity.

Filax had rather enjoyed dispatching one of the golden cobras, and he had tossed the other out of harm’s way before engaging with the lion, so he was warmed up and ready for a scrap. Decorative though the lion might have been, it was still a lion, and the fight was quite evenly matched. The two animals turned into a whirling ball of marble and sandstone as they bit and slashed at each other. Filax’s advantage was that he managed to get a grip on the lion’s back, which meant that the lion’s main advantage – the cruel talons on its paws – could not get at him in any substantially disabling way. If they had been fighting face to face it would have been a shorter conflict, because a lion likes nothing more than getting a grip with its forepaws and then slashing away with its back claws in a horrible disembowelling movement. If they’d been head to head Filax would have been scooped open like the kind of soft toy whose stomach Jo used to unzip and store her pyjamas in.

As it was, Filax – fierce, wise and lucky in the way that a lot of wise people (and dogs) seem to be lucky – kept the advantage by not letting the great cat get its claws in him. The lion did manage to scratch at his side, leaving gouges in the marble, and he did at one stage get a nasty bite in on his leg, but Filax’s ferocity kept him too busy to do very much damage.

The roaring and romping up and down the corridor was the lion’s primary tactic, hoping to scrape the tenacious hound off his back onto the side walls as he passed. It wasn’t a very effective tactic, though it was a noisy one, as its main effect was to either snap off or bend all the door handles along one side of the passage.

It was one of these door handles that was the lion’s ultimate undoing, because as it reached the end of a particularly vertiginous dash down the corridor, trying to shake off the unwelcome piggyback passenger that had stapled itself to its shoulders by its teeth, it tried to stop.

Unfortunately it put its front paw down on the cylindrical metal of one of the broken door handles, which acted like the wheel of a roller skate and sent it hurtling forwards into the end wall, instead of halting it.

The lion knocked itself clean out. Filax felt it go limp between his teeth. He held on until he was sure, then let go and bounded back down the corridor to bark urgently at Will’s door.

Will, on the other side of the spyhole, took a good look. The dog was panting excitedly and its tail was wagging. He took a deep breath and opened the door. A quick look right and left revealed a corridor sprinkled with door handles like fallen apples, an unmoving golden cobra and a similarly motionless stone lion stacked up against the far end.

Filax barked and tugged at the shield Will held in his right hand.

‘OK,’ said Will. ‘I get it. Time to go.’

Filax thumped his tail and led Will to the fire-exit door.

‘Do you know where Jo is?’ he said.

Filax pawed at the door

Will pushed it open and began to head downstairs. Then he heard the noises from above, and felt the draught of the door open to the roof above him.

He heard Selene’s throaty voice shout, ‘JUMP!’

And without thinking he was pounding upwards three steps at a time.

‘Jo!’ he yelled. ‘I’m coming!’

He got to the doorway at the very moment Jo went over the edge.

It was a sight that might well have stopped his heart dead in horror, but as it happened, the edge she went over was to the right, and his eye was whipped leftwards, following the starry transit of Selene howling across the roof, fighting a swarm of hawk-sized mosquitoes and super-sized flying bugs.

‘Jo!’ he shouted, looking round the wet, empty roof.

Selene heard him and for an instant caught his eye.

‘Run!’ she cried. ‘She’s gone!’

He was about to shout another question, when he saw one of the bugs take advantage of the way he’d distracted Selene from the fight, weaving between her protective cloud of star and fastening horribly on her face. She went rigid with shock, and then began to whirl in place, faster and faster until she was invisible in the centre of a spinning vortex of stars as she tried to hurl the bug off her face and keep the other attackers at bay beyond the defensive golden cyclone of which she was now the epicentre. Every now and then a mosquito or a bug would try and get through the gilded twister, only to be hit by one of the stars with a sharp, metallic impact that sent sparks trailing after the insect as centrifugal force knocked it clear of her.

Will never got to see if she managed to get the suffocating bug mask off her mouth, because one of the mosquitoes, turning away from her, saw him and recalibrated its target. It shot straight towards his head, and without thinking he leapt backwards, pulling the door closed behind him. He would have fallen straight back down the stairs, probably breaking his neck, but luckily Filax was right behind him and absorbed the impact, acting as a safety guard.

The mosquito hit with a loud chunk, and Will saw the door bow inwards with the impact. He almost expected to see the golden stinger pierce the wood.

Then he heard Filax bark, and turned to see the dog was pointing with his nose down the stairs.

‘Oi,’ hissed a voice from below. ‘What you doing?’

He looked over the edge. Two floors down he saw Little Tragedy looking back up at him with his fingers to his lips.

‘What?’ said Will.

‘Shh,’ said Tragedy, beckoning him urgently. ‘We’re up to our unmentionables in bleedin’ lions. That cat’s got ’em all stirred up. We got to go. Wolfie’s waiting in the kitchen, keeping an eye …’

Jo had cartwheeled off the roof into the narrow canyon of air that separated it from the next-door building, grabbing fruitlessly for handholds that didn’t exist. She didn’t even have time to inhale, let alone yell out in horror at the speed with which the hard floor of the alley leapt towards her, a strip of rain-soaked concrete full of sharp-edged things like dumpsters, bicycles and scooters. She just had time to feel two things – a sucking void of sadness in the middle of her chest that she was going to be snuffed out, and to hope she would be extinguished so fast that the pain wouldn’t get to her brain before everything went black and silent forever …

She looked away from the ground and saw, for a miraculous instant, the last thing she knew she would ever see. And maybe because it was the last thing she’d ever lay eyes on, she saw it in unnaturally sharp focus, almost as if her eyes zoomed in on them – the fat raindrops beside her, falling at exactly the same speed as she was …

… and then the end came and hit her …

… and it did hurt, but the pain was more like being winded than smashed, and it was not at all terrible, and instead of black it was golden, and it wasn’t silent either.

It said:

‘Ooof! You’re heavier than you look …’

It was Ariel. The golden girl statue from the Bank of England. The one Jo had last seen melted in half by an angry dragon. Midnight had obviously worked its magic on her as it had on the Fusilier, because here she was, as whole and as fast and graceful as she had ever been, swooping in low to catch Jo and save her life. For the second time.

‘Gnaargh …’ said Jo. Meaning to say ‘thank you’ but being too shocked and winded to get it out in an unsnarled version.

‘And gnaargh to you too,’ said Ariel. ‘Now, hold on.’

Jo did as she was told. Her mind was still catching up with the good news that she wasn’t a splat on the pavement, and her lungs had just managed to fill with their first full breath after the shock of being caught. It felt wonderful. Ariel flew low to the ground, turning right at the end of the alley and heading away from the hotel.

Jo looked back over her shoulder and saw two huge bronze lions the size of elephants nosing at the front door of the hotel.

‘Will!’ she gasped, her moment of elation disappearing instantly. ‘He’s in there. Stuck in the hotel.’

‘Selene and Tragedy will get him out,’ said Ariel. ‘They’ll bring him.’

‘Bring him where?’ said Jo.

‘Here,’ said Ariel, swooping up and over a double-decker bus full of frozen blue-tinged people staring vacantly past them. Jo’s stomach lurched as if she was on a roller coaster. ‘Tragedy had a good idea …’