Which was the verbal cue, obviously, because immediately the words were out of his mouth Saddam raised his weapon—not, I now saw, the standard Uzi, but something lighter and longer-barrelled—and pulled the trigger.

The dart hit me in the midriff, and in the three seconds it took for the giant wrongness to coalesce around me I felt the drug start its sweep up my legs—though the darkness seemed to descend from the space above my head. My hands tightened around the bars, but I could feel the weakness like a rapidly escalating argument in my flesh.

“There have been, as you know, other developments,” Salvatore said—and brought his right hand out from behind his back.

Holding Lorenzo’s severed head.

“The Devil works in mysterious ways,” he said.

I sank to my knees.

“Lorenzo’s behaviour has been a crushing blow,” Salvatore said. “I’ve had my suspicions, but I have also had my faith. He was dying, of course. An inoperable brain tumour …” He shook the head slightly, as if to listen for the tumour’s rattle. “And for us there’s no greater death than the martyr’s—which is what I’d offered him. But one can never overestimate the greed for life. Apparently at any price. Do you think four hundred years of monstrosity is worth the cost of your soul? It amazes me. It truly amazes me.”

I felt my mouth opening and closing. No speech. Strength going as if a sluice gate had dropped open.

ZOË. ZOË … I’M … DON’T …

“I’m taking it as a lesson: Never relax. Never assume. Have faith, but wear the knowledge of human weakness like a burning jewel in the middle of your brow.”

The darkness had weight, now, a soft mass enfolding me. I didn’t know if I was still on my knees or had fallen to the floor. The world’s solid geometry was coming gently apart, with a kind of tranquil resignation, an uncomplaining relinquishment of the rules. Complete blackout for a moment, then I forced my eyes open again. The cell bars blurred and Salvatore’s round-toed boots with their caps of reflected light. Wulf thrashing, drowning. The weight of myself pulling me under. I’m coming for you.

I’M COMING FOR YOU.

I tried to send to Zoë, but she was too far … Too far …

Darkness again, my head completely under black water, pushed down by the drug and Salvatore’s voice.

“Lucifer deals in the currency of our own complacency,” he said. “His greatest achievement is the—”

An explosion in my head cut him off.

In the last uneclipsed segment of consciousness I thought: No, not in my head. An explosion. An explosion …

But it was no good. I was going.

I had a confused dream of gunfire and screams and movement, and a voice—not Salvatore’s—shouting: “Attack! Sir, we’re under—” before a shrill electronic alarm ripped through for a deafening moment, with one flash of blinding light—and the last of my own lights went out.

53

Walker

THE HOUSE WAS thirty miles from where we’d been ambushed. When I got there, Lucy had the Angel tied to a chair in the basement. A guy in his mid-thirties, olive-skinned, with short, thick black hair and bad acne scarring. He looked exhausted, and his jaw was swollen, but he was otherwise unharmed. What was left of the bodies of the house’s inhabitants—a retired couple in their late sixties—was in a bloody heap in bed upstairs.

“This is where you come in, I’m afraid,” Lucy said.

The last twenty-four hours had been a clusterfuck—and now we’d left a trail a moron could follow. I hadn’t even seen Talulla and Zoë fall. We were two hundred metres into the forest before I realised they weren’t with us. I’d stopped and turned, but Madeline grabbed me:

NO. THE KID. WE HAVE TO GET HIM AWAY.

She hadn’t wanted to let it out but I’d got PROBABLY DEAD ANYWAY, since she was thinking it. Lorcan got it, too. I felt it in his grip tightening around my neck.

EASY, KIDDO. SHE’LL BE ALL RIGHT. YOUR MOM’S TOUGHER THAN ALL OF US PUT TOGETHER.

And she’s leaving me.

Left me already.

A grenade detonated thirty metres away. They knew we’d broken through. They were coming. I hadn’t seen any vehicles (and even if they had them they’d be useless past the trees); they wouldn’t catch us on foot. There was no alternative: we turned back, we died. All of us.

So we ran.

The instinct was to stay under cover, but the forest petered out in less than three miles, and, in any case, stay under cover and do what when the moon set? Stroll into the nearest town naked? Again, no choice.

Twenty minutes out of the woods we hit farmland. Sheep scattered, their little hoofbeats and the fruity smell of their shit. Lights on in the farmhouse. Three dogs. Four humans. The dogs came out silently from their flap and looked at us, awaiting instruction. We didn’t need them. We did a slow circle of the buildings (two dozen bullocks in a barn huddled close together, eyes rolling), a tractor shed, a Land Rover, a VW and two quad bikes in an open garage with a corrugated tin roof. Only the house occupied. Mom, Dad, daughter, son. Sitting around the table, finishing dinner. A steel coffee pot, big yellow slab of butter. Cold cuts, wine, half a dozen cheeses, a blackberry pie. The son, maybe seventeen years old, looked pissed about something. Everything, I thought. He didn’t want this. Farm life. He wanted the city. TV had made inroads. Porn. Girls. Slow Internet that drove him nuts. I thought of Luke Skywalker saying: If there’s a bright centre to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from. The kid even looked a bit like Mark Hamill. Your mind goes to these places. You can’t help it. The daughter, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, was one of those rare kids lucky enough to be born into a world that fit her. She loved it, the big dung-scented cattle, the chickens with their weird little personalities, the dust from the straw at harvest like smoke, the thick walls and the open fires and breaking the ice in the water butt in winter. Mom and Dad loved them both—and each other. You could feel it. You could see it in the house’s slight untidiness and the girl’s ease in her skin and even in the boy’s annoyance. Even in his annoyance he admitted their love. The parents still liked fucking each other. There was humour and habit there, in the sex—but still sometimes the quickening of the old fire. They knew it was there, they knew they could rely on it, for the rest of their lives.