CHAPTER 51

I hadn’t found the strength to let the wings fold back in by the time Doyle’s car arrived, and somewhere in the wait I had stopped trying.

He was out of the driver’s seat before it had fully stopped moving, Gwen and Vaughn close behind him, and all three of them froze at once at the sight of the wrecked street, the three of us still standing in the middle of it.

It was a street where people lived. That fact kept arriving late, all night, in pieces.

A row of parked cars had been folded around whatever hit them, and somebody’s front window was gone with the curtains still moving in it. Further down, a burglar alarm had been going for twenty minutes. Nobody had come out to see about it. Nobody on this road was going to open a door tonight for anything.

Lisa was sitting on a low garden wall with her hands loose in her lap, which she had never once done in front of anybody. Nox was standing exactly where he had stopped moving, and hadn’t sheathed anything.

“What happened here…” Doyle started, and then his eyes found the wings, and the question died somewhere before it finished forming.

“Long night,” I said. “I’ll explain. Not right now.”

“He has been saying that for about forty minutes,” Nox said, without moving. “To us as well. In case anyone was hoping we had a version.”

“You’ve had them the whole time.” Lisa hadn’t stood up off the wall. Her voice came out flat, which meant she was working something out and didn’t want help. “In the tundra. In the Chilterns. All of it.”

“Yes.”

“Right.” She nodded once at the tarmac. “I’m going to be furious about that later, when I’ve got the room.”

Gwen hadn’t said anything at all. She’d stopped a full car length back, looking at the wings the way nobody else in the street was looking at them. Not afraid of them. She looked like a woman checking a face against a photograph she’d been carrying for ten years.

“Gwen?” Vaughn reached for her arm. “You alright?”

Gwen stepped past her without appearing to hear the question.

“Where did you get those?” Her voice had gone somewhere quiet. “The wings. Where.”

“They’re mine. That’s the short version. The long one needs a night’s sleep first.”

She came closer instead of leaving it there. Doyle started to say something and thought better of it.

“When I was eleven years old, I fell into a gate.” She said it to the street as much as to me. “A dead one, everyone thought. Out past my grandmother’s village, behind a fence nobody maintained.”

Noah.

Nothing else. Azazel had gone very still.

“There was something living in it. Wings like yours, folded down the back like yours.” Gwen’s eyes hadn’t left them. “It should have killed me. Every rule I’ve ever learned about gates says it should have killed me. It carried me to the entrance instead. It waited until I stopped crying to put me down.”

Ask her what colour.

His need arrived through me before I’d decided anything about it.

“The feathers,” I said. “What colour were they?”

“Black.” She almost smiled at the question, and it was the most unguarded thing I had ever seen her do. “Black like yours. I went back the next week to check I hadn’t invented her.”

Her. I filed the word. Beside me, Nox and Lisa had both gone carefully still, the way you go still around something that isn’t yours to interrupt.

“I went back for six years. In and out of a gate the whole world had forgotten, to sit with something the whole world would have sent an army after.” Gwen said it evenly, like reading out a bank statement.

“Gwen.” Vaughn had gone quiet, which is what people do when they’re recalculating somebody in front of them. “You sat in front of an oversight panel and told them you had no unlogged gate contact.”

“I did.”

“You lied to a panel.”

“I was eleven the first time and seventeen the last time, and by the time anyone thought to ask me, she had been gone for nine years and there was nothing left to protect except the lie.” She still hadn’t looked away from the wings. “Write it up if you want. I’ve wanted somebody to know for ten years and I’m past minding what it costs.”

Vaughn didn’t write anything.

“She taught me to hold a sword properly. She was appalled by how Russia teaches children to hold swords.”

Zariel.

He said the name the way you set down something breakable.

Ask about the wrists. If it is her, she will have spent a summer on the wrists. She spent one on mine, and she never once let me win the argument about it.

“The stance she taught you,” I said. “Did she start with the wrists?”

Gwen went as still as the water in the locks.

“A whole summer on the wrists,” she said. “How did you know that?”

I didn’t answer her. The answer wasn’t mine to give, and she watched me not give it, and put the fact somewhere behind her eyes for later.

Lisa did stand up off the wall then. She had spent six years reading a dead woman’s handwriting and she knew exactly what it looked like when somebody found a second copy. She didn’t say anything either. She just came and stood nearer to Gwen than she needed to, which from Lisa was a whole sentence.

“Then one day I climbed the fence and the gate was gone,” she said. “The ground where it had stood was torn up, like something had been dragged across it fighting the whole way. There were black feathers in the frost. And a ring pressed into the earth, scorched all the way round. Too clean to be anything except made.”

I had seen rings like that before, in a memory that wasn’t mine, over a country that no longer exists. I kept my face still and said nothing about it.

“I’ve spent my whole adult life looking for a winged monster.” She said the word without flinching at it. “Everyone who ever heard me say so assumed I meant to kill it. I let them assume. It was simpler than the truth.”

She stopped an arm’s length away. “Tonight I felt the pull I have been following since the Chilterns stand up and walk out of a collapsed street. And it was wearing your wings. So I am asking. Was it you?”

“No.” The truth, plain, because she had earned nothing less. “It wasn’t me. That’s the only part of tonight I can give you whole.”

She took the answer the way she took everything, without letting it move her face. Her hands gave her away. They had closed at her sides on nothing.

“Then she’s still unaccounted for,” Gwen said. “That’s more than I had yesterday.”

I knew her.

Nothing else, for a long moment. From Azazel, silence was louder than anything he could have said.

She waited until the crying stopped. She did that with everyone. I complained about it as a boy, loudly, and she outlasted every complaint I had. She started on the wrists because everything is downstream of the wrists. I have said that sentence to you in a white room. I said it in her voice and did not notice.

The burglar alarm two doors down finally gave up on itself.

She is alive.

He turned the sentence over somewhere behind my ribs, examining it like a document that might be forged.

I have not had a new true thing in fifteen years. I do not have anywhere to put this one.

“You don’t have to put it anywhere tonight.”

Do not be kind at me. I am not equipped for it and you know that.

A pause that went on far too long for him.

If your bossy one holds a sword the way I suspect she holds a sword, I want to see it. Tomorrow. Not tonight. Tonight I am going to be quiet for a while, and you are not going to make anything of it.

I didn’t.

I stood in a wrecked street holding two things that belonged to other people: what Gwen had given me, which she didn’t know she had given to him; and what I had taken out of a vision three days ago and never said aloud, which was where the scorched ring came from, and who had been standing inside it, and what the last thing she did with her arms had been.

One seal apart from each other, and I kept both where they lived.

Doyle looked from Gwen to me and visibly decided the debrief could survive until morning.

“Car,” he said. “All of you. Whatever else tonight is, it’s finished being a street.”

Vaughn was already on her phone, arranging the version of this that would go into a file. Containment cordon, structural survey, a reason for the road to be closed that made no reference to anything that had actually happened on it.

Somewhere behind us a door finally opened. A man in a dressing gown looked at his car, and then at the five of us, and then went back inside without saying a word to anybody, which I understood completely.

Nobody had the energy left to turn the night into an explanation. We let it stay exactly the size it was.

Gwen was the last one to get in the car, and the last one to stop watching the wings, and she didn’t ask me a single further question, which cost her more than any of the ones she had asked.