The London Pride (4 page)

‘It’s getting worse,’ said Will. ‘I think it’s my fault.’

‘Will,’ said Jo. ‘Why does everything have to be your fault! It’s like you’re totally addicted to being guilty or something. It’s not healthy. And this whole thing isn’t our fault. Everything freezing is not your fault.’

‘Not the city freezing, that’s not my fault,’ he agreed. ‘But the soldiers? Think that’s down to me. Was my fault you got taken by the dragon, so it’s my fault they had to rescue you. And because they helped me, this happened. Because of me, it got much, much worse.’

She looked at him.

‘You’re SUCH a misery guts,’ she said. ‘And you know how they say misery loves company?’

He nodded.

‘Well, sometimes company doesn’t love misery back, Will! Sometimes company thinks misery is a real pain in the—’

The chariot came to a sudden halt and they had to grab on to avoid being thrown forwards.

‘Look out!’ said Tragedy, pointing at two winged shapes dropping out of the sky in front of them. ‘Here comes trouble …’

Bast the Mighty had allowed her lion-headed hand-maidens to carry her back into the Egyptian Sculpture Gallery. The museum curators were still frozen in the fatefully unwise act of replacing the broken chunk in the black sarcophagus. It had been unwise because in doing so they’d completed the strip of picture-writing ringing the sarcophagus. Blue light had immediately swept round it, activating a charm freeing Bast from the curse that had penned her immobile inside the body of a small bronze cat, and allowing her to freeze them and the rest of the city in an instant. And although for the moment she remained stuck within the cat-shaped prison, she could now at least move around in it, controlling the body of the cat as if it were her own.

The sarcophagus was now brimful of the blue light so that it looked like a black bathtub full of fluorescent water. But the pool of blue light was not there to clean; it was there to revive. It was the source of all the power that had changed the city according to Bast’s wishes, and when she had exhausted herself with her exertions, all she needed to do was to get back in the tub and let the power recharge her.

However, she was too shaken and dishevelled to climb into the deep bath-shaped depression under her own steam, and allowed the lioness-women to gently lower her into the blue light. She curled up beneath the surface, nose to tail, and closed her eyes.

Already she could feel the magical energy soaking into her. The gold ear-and nose-rings glowed and vibrated with a thrumming noise, a sound that was suspiciously like the noise an ordinary cat makes when it is happy. It was an unnatural purring though, and at the sound of it the lionesses stepped back and exchanged looks but not words.

The resonance they were feeling quivered and pulsed through the floor and walls of the entire museum, as if it was breathing, as if it was becoming an extension of the Mighty Bast’s own body. The lionesses did not step back in fear. They stepped back in respect for a power that had been old long before the birth of the quarrymen who had hacked out the blocks of black stone from which they had been sculpted more than three thousand years ago.

The winged figures that dropped out of the sky were not dragons. Filax, running beside the chariot, stopped but did not growl at them. Instead he wagged his tail.

They were the Angels of Mercy from the war memorial next to the small St George’s plinths in the inner courtyard of the cathedral-like Prudential building across the street.

They had stopped the chariot in the middle of High Holborn, conveniently almost next to the ruined statue of the Fusilier. The Fusilier had taken wildfire right in his mouth, swallowing a fire-hose of flame that had entered his body and melted it so badly that his top half now flapped down over his back, like a frozen molten wave. It was a horrible reminder to Will of what he might be responsible for.

Things happened rather quickly. The Angels were worried that there wasn’t enough time to get the Georges back and deliver the bearskinned soldier to his plinth before midnight. Quad promised he could do it if he and Tragedy ‘travelled light and drove like the clappers’. Jo and Will would wait here until Tragedy returned. It was decided they would be safe enough under the eyes of the Angels, and that, suddenly, was that.

‘It’s all a bit confused,’ said an Angel of Mercy as they watched the chariot careen off down the street. ‘It’s not like there’s anyone planning things at all sensibly over there. I mean, I can’t think why they had that Grenadier and these Georges in the same load. They’re from entirely different ends of town. Are you all right with one George between you?’

She looked at them both and the two frozen knights on the tarmac next to them, where Tragedy had rather unceremoniously dumped them beside Filax, who sat there with his tail thumping happily. The Angel scratched his head and the thumping redoubled.

‘Yes,’ said Jo.

‘No,’ said Will. ‘No. She shouldn’t have to carry anything heavy. She’s got a bad leg.’

‘Hence the stick,’ said the Angel. ‘Sorry. I should have spotted that. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back with help; we have time.’

And she picked up one of the Georges and strode off towards the red-brick portico of the Prudential building.

‘I’m not helpless, Will,’ said Jo. ‘We could manage.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But you don’t have to.’

The other Angels came out of the arch and swooped down, lifting the George.

‘Midnight heals all,’ said one of the Angels. ‘Come on, you two. Come under cover with us. It’s going to rain.’

‘No, thanks,’ said Will. ‘We want to stay here and talk to the Fusilier after he’s healed.’

‘It’s all right,’ said one of the Angels, misunderstanding his reasons. ‘All the dead dragons have gone. There’s nothing to be frightened of in there any more.’

‘What happened to them?’ he said.

‘Some live ones came and took them,’ said the Angel.

He gaped at her in surprise.

‘Fair’s fair,’ she said. ‘They’ve got as much right as anyone to be on their plinths at midnight. Taints they may be through no choice of their own, but there’s no one so bad as shouldn’t get a second chance, is there?’

Will thought of the yowling hellcat that had attacked him, and the giant scarab. And the dragons that had ganged up and melted the Fusilier. He didn’t say anything. None of it made him instinctively feel like forgiving. Maybe you had to be an angel to think like that.

‘We’ll just stay here and wait for the Fusilier,’ he said. ‘If that’s OK with you?’

They sat on a bench on the pavement, looking across at the Fusilier.

The Angel stared at them for a beat, then nodded and flapped away.

‘Shout if you need help,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘If you keep still enough you probably won’t draw the attention of anything bad.’

Jo didn’t feel very reassured by that, somehow. Filax came and sat next to her, leaning companionably against her good leg.

‘Oi, get off,’ said Jo. ‘You great lump.’

Filax just wagged his tail. She stroked his head and didn’t push him away.

‘Jo …’ said Will.

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

Will could hear the thickness in her voice. She hated people showing her sympathy even more than she disliked the aching knee and the tortured muscles she carried around everywhere she went. It wasn’t just the muscles in her leg; her back also ached because in order to walk anything like normally she had to overcompensate and hide the limp she was stuck with, the visible sign that she loathed so much.

‘You know the nicest thing about a dog?’ said Will. ‘It’s that it’s nothing like a cat. That one in the museum’s put me off them for life.’

She knew what he meant.

They sat quietly together, which was rare. They usually argued or joked, sometimes both at once. But there were times when they both understood silence was OK without having to voice it, and this was one of those times. Being so comfortable with someone that you don’t feel every silence needs filling with pointless spraff is the true test of friendship. So they sat there for a while, listening to the entire city not moving around them.

Will’s eyes were becoming gritty with tiredness, but he kept dragging them back to stare at the ruined statue in the middle of the street, willing it to be midnight already, willing it to move again.

And then he closed them for a moment.

At least, it felt like a moment, but he snapped awake with the nasty feeling that he’d missed something.

‘You were snoring,’ said Jo.

‘I wasn’t, I didn’t …’ He cleared his throat. It felt dry. ‘I was, wasn’t I?’

‘Like a walrus,’ said Jo.

‘I didn’t mean to fall asleep,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You weren’t out long. Maybe quarter of an hour. It isn’t midnight yet.’

He looked down the road. Jo looked in the opposite direction and with the tail of her eye thought she caught something flapping by, far overhead, just for an instant casting a moon-shadow that rippled over the empty street, but then it was gone. She kept her eyes on the sky. It might have gone for now, but the glimpse she thought she’d seen had seemed more dragon-shaped than bird-like.

‘Oooh, and this must be the famous Will and Jo Show,’ said a husky woman’s voice behind them.

They turned.

They had seen more strange things in the last day than they had ever even imagined possible, but the statue floating down through the night air was in its own way the strangest thing so far. And since ‘so far’ had included dragons and giant scarabs and angels, that meant a whole new level of strange.

She was a winged woman, but not like any they had yet seen. She did not have bird’s wings, like the various angels or the Victories. Instead she had the wings of a giant dragonfly, but a dragonfly whose wings were pierced all over with star-shaped cut-outs. Her hair was long and thick, and hung unbound on either side of a strong face with heavy-lidded eyes and generous, wide lips. The folds of a flimsy dress clung to her prominent curves and looked, much as Ariel’s strips of material had been, as if it were kept on as much by the wind as anything else.

None of these things, not even the insectile wings whirring behind her, were what made her especially strange: what gave her that extra-special layer of the exotic were the other stars. She was covered with them, and not only stippled and studded with them on her skin, in her hair and all over her clothing, but also orbited by them. They hovered
around
her body but unattached to it, so that she flew through the air surrounded by a personal constellation of stars that moved with her like a force-field. The little stellar cloud shone a pale golden light that twinkled about her as she looked down at them with a lazy and amused smile.

She did not look like someone who ever hurried. She looked languorous and just a little bit theatrical.

Strange garlands trailed from each hand, reaching to her ankles, made of ribbons and masks and knotted posies of little flowers and – of course – more stars.

‘Hi,’ said Jo hesitantly. ‘And you are … ?’

‘Soho Sal, to you,’ said the woman. ‘Or Selene, Queen of the Night, if you want to be all formal, though that sounds a bit up itself, don’t it?’

Her voice was surprisingly streetwise. It wasn’t high-flown like the angels or the Victories, for example. It was low, almost masculine, and it was warm.

‘Little Tradge sent me for you. I’ve come to take you somewhere safe for the night.’

She looked at them.

‘It’s all right, kids. I’ve got a hotel all of my very own, and trust me, the way things are, no one’s going to mind you shacking up in a nice safe room. And you’ll like it. Top of the line, beds soft as powder puffs, and all in all as comfy and luxy a gaff as you’ll find anywhere in town, though I say it myself.’ And she winked. ‘Grab a hand and I’ll have you there before you know it.’

Jo exchanged a look with Will.

‘Where is Tragedy? He said he’d be back for us.’

‘He’s somewhere between here and Pall Mall where he and his little mucker Quad are delivering a burly gent in a bearskin before the clock strikes midnight and everyone turns into a permanent pumpkin,’ said Selene with a throaty laugh. ‘Which will be any minute now. He’ll be along before morning. He knows just where you’ll be.’

Will looked up at the tortured flame-splash of metal that had been the Fusilier.

‘We want to stay,’ he said. He needed to see if what he had been told was true. If it was, maybe he wouldn’t feel so guilty. ‘We want to see if he gets better at midnight.’

‘Why wouldn’t he?’ said Selene. ‘That’s the way it’s always worked. On your plinth by midnight, all the day’s sins forgiven, every naughty boy and girl who has scuffed themselves up in the dark bounces back fresh as a daisy, and no one any the wiser.’

‘Good,’ said Jo. ‘Because then we need to talk to him and get moving.’

‘Get moving where, lovey?’ said Selene.

Will was about to reply when he heard the distant sound of church bells sounding midnight.

‘Ooh la la, here we go,’ said Selene. ‘Look sharp and see if you can catch it. Most can’t.’