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“I…” Alan Gar touched his eye patch.
“Come out of the sun, my lord.” The other man led him away, quickly lost from view.
“What…just happened?” Rose stepped away from the Mechanism to confront Hannah.
“You’re welcome.” Hannah sketched a curtsy. “I removed one of your problems. He’s trapped in that story now.”
“What story?”
“This one.” The witch put down the book she’d been carrying, leaving it on the nearest desk and walking smartly away across the huge, desk-crowded room. “It hardly matters which. As long as he’s no longer in yours.”
Rose hurried after her. “Thank you.” She was still irritated about being used as bait, but relief at being free of Gar outweighed all that.
“You’re welcome.” Hannah seemed to be making for a corridor that led from the chamber, the only visible exit. “And I now consider the debt for releasing my book from that accursed hole repaid.”
Chapter 24
Red
I stood, my hand gripping the door handle, knuckles white, listening to the hospital director threaten my mum on the other side of the door. They had Sophie, and the ransom was leading the one-eyed lunatic to Rose…
He’d said things that didn’t make sense. Like I wasn’t to lead them to her body? As if I’d take them to her grave site, even if I knew where it was…And he’d mentioned the worm, and some “Great Smith,” as if he was the boss of everything, someone who scared even him…
Mum cried out in pain, and I was through the door without any more thinking. Lefevre had my mother’s wrist in one hand and a hypodermic in the other. I slapped it to the floor before turning to confront the hospital director. “Leave her alone!”
It felt good—I won’t lie. For one glorious moment I was the hero, come to save my mother, even if she’d so often failed to save me and Sophie, even from herself.
The director, a jowly gray-haired man in a wrinkled suit, took a moment to recover from his surprise before fixing his cold, pale eyes on me with much the same expression you might expect from someone discovering they’ve stepped in dog shit. “The prodigal son returns, I assume?”
“It’s him.” Lefevre pushed the door closed behind me.
At this point my anger slackened by the small amount needed for me to realize how unlikely it was for two adults, especially with experience of psychiatric patients, to be intimidated by one fourteen-year-old.
“Fredrick!” Mum chose that moment to grab my arm. “My Freddy!”
Lefevre, having recovered the hypodermic while my back was turned, lunged to stick me with it.
“No!” Mum got in the way, shrieking.
Lefevre swore and wrestled her back into her bed. I struggled distractedly to keep the woman off my mother but needed to keep my eyes on Director Smith. The man had advanced while I looked away. He looked soft, as if he’d never worked up a sweat in his life, but the coldness of his eyes told its own dangerous story.
“Eavesdropping is a dirty habit, young man.” Smith spoke above my mother’s weakening protests. “Secrets are a currency, and when they’re stolen, they can’t be given back. It can, sadly, require a great deal of unpleasantness in order to stem the damage.” He tapped at a badge or brooch on his lapel, a silver hammer and dividers, a masonic symbol maybe?
“I didn’t hear nothing.” I hated myself for being afraid of the man, even as they were drugging my mother. I hated myself for sounding like a naughty schoolboy caught in some misdeed instead of sounding like the wronged party suffering a great misjustice. I even hated myself for the double negative.
“I think you did.” Smith’s eyes hardened. “I think that the Great Smith would agree with me that the time has come to cut our losses here. They can find Rose Penrose without you. It’s really your own fault for listening at doors—”
Something in his expression alerted me, a twitch in a cheek muscle, a reflection in his eyes, I don’t know, but I spun around just in time to catch Lefevre’s arm and stop her silencing two generations with the same trick. I twisted the syringe out of her hand and jumped back with it held between us.
“Can’t you even correct your own mistakes, woman?” Smith tugged at that lapel pin of his, and as it came away, somehow he was holding a lump hammer.
When he swung it at me, I was too surprised to move. I’m no longer entirely sure he meant to murder me, though of course at the time I was…Perhaps he didn’t imagine that I would fail to get out of the way.
I don’t know how much strength he put behind the blow, but the fact is that when you get a big chunk of iron moving at a reasonable speed, no human skull is going to do much more than slow it down a bit. Maybe a rhinoceros could have survived the impact—not sure—but a person, no way.
My head snapped back, and I dropped like a sack. Hitting the floor was nothing. I was already broken. I was a bag of glassware that had been slammed against the wall. I knew the feeling exactly—it was the same one that had filled me when I took hold of the witch’s book and pulled it from its hidey-hole.
Smith and Lefevre were talking as I sat up. She sounded terrified. Him, rattled but less bothered. More time had passed than I thought. They were discussing getting rid of me.
