keep up this pace forever, any more than we could.
But Trevor didn’t need to know that. I’m sure he already knew we had the ability to appear out of nowhere before, and of the Red’s sudden disappearance in Hong Kong. If he thought such occurrences were normal, we’d be a lot better off…
‘Yes, well, if you’re certain you’ll be safe…’ the little man said, his voice trailing off when his words were met by my contemptuous little smile.
‘We’ll call you if we need you,’ I said drily, moving forward and motioning to my friends to follow.
We walked forward in a tight knot, following the cordon placed around Westminster, along streets that normally would have been full of tourists but were now eerily empty.
‘Hiral?’ I asked when we were out of earshot of any of Trevor’s cronies. We kept walking as we talked.
‘Here,’ the gwyllion said, letting his rotten-toothed smile appear, floating in front of us, just for a second, like that of the Cheshire cat.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’m off, just wanted to let you know that. Figure we need a set of eyes in the enemy camp.’
I felt relief wash over me. ‘Good. Because this can’t last, the random attacks.’
‘She’ll want more than random revenge soon,’ Anyan said. ‘She’ll calm down enough to make a plan.’
‘Then we’re really fucked,’ said Ryu.
The gwyllion’s voice spoke from the empty air. ‘I’ll find her people; see what they’re working on. The Red and the White were never the most practical buggers, so I imagine she’s got advisors working on something horrifyingly modern in terms of destruction.’
We all cast each other looks as we continued walking, thinking through all the doomsday scenarios possible when dealing with a supernatural creature willing to use the human world to exact vengeance.
‘Don’t miss me too much,’ was Hiral’s parting shot.
‘Good luck,’ I said. The gwyllion had become a more important, courageous ally than I’d ever imagined he would be, and I deeply regretted my first assessments of him. Even if he was smelly and unpleasant, he was loyal and fierce and incredibly skilled.
We continued walking as I addressed Caleb.
‘How’d your work on the plane go?’
Caleb’s face was pensive, as it had been since we’d disembarked at Heathrow. Considering the circumstances, a little gloom and doom was probably called for, but I was worried there was something more. The satyr had, after all, been translating the rest of Theophrastus’s poem, comparing it to the journal article he’d found and trying to figure out what the last stage of killing the Red would entail. For we couldn’t just repeat what we’d done with the White. The whole process of alchemy was about building on stages of development, so the White got one ritual (the stone’s transmutation into silver) and the Red got her own (the stone’s changing from silver to gold).
‘It’s … going,’ he said eventually. ‘I need a little more time…’
‘Is it something bad?’ I asked sharply. ‘Because if it is—’
‘I don’t know yet,’ the satyr interrupted. ‘But bad or good, I’ll let you know whatever I discover.’
There was something about Caleb’s tone that worried me, like he knew something more than he was saying, and it wasn’t going to make us happy. But I had to trust him – if he wasn’t sure what he was talking about yet, there was no point in getting worked up.
Not that I had a tendency to get worked up or anything.
So we kept walking, stretching our legs and getting a good view of the carnage. Anyan swirled a powerful glamour around us, so that the occasional teams of workers or soldiers we passed wouldn’t notice our presence and try to stop us. In general, the streets were almost entirely empty of anyone resembling a civilian, and that fact combined with the smell of smoldering ash lent the whole scene a very post-apocalyptic feel.
When we turned back to rejoin Trevor and his team, Ryu spoke up.
‘So what do we do now?’
Anyan and I both shrugged as if on cue. I gestured to him to answer.
‘Nothing we can do except wait out the Red. Try to stop her if she attacks again. Hope that Hiral discovers something we can use.’
‘What if she doesn’t make another appearance?’ Ryu asked. ‘What if she’s done venting?’
‘She won’t be,’ Iris said. ‘Not until she’s about to do something bigger. Right now she’ll wreck havoc until either we stop her or she forms a plan for some ultimate revenge.’
I gave the succubus a questioning look, and she shrugged. ‘I know