Read on below for an extract from Chapter 1 of Kate Griffin’s The Neon Court.
Chapter 1
I thought I could hear footsteps in the darkness behind me.
But when I looked again, they were gone.
I was in the middle of a sentence. I was saying, “. . . ‘dragon’ is probably too biologically specific a way to look at the . . .”
Then someone grabbed me by the throat with the fist of God, and held me steady, while the universe turned on its head.
There was a hole in the world and no fingers left to scrabble.
I fell into it.
It was my phone ringing in my pocket that woke me.
I fumbled for it and thumbed it on, held it to my ear without raising my head, just in case stillness was the only thing keeping my head attached to my body. My throat was dry. I guessed it had something to do with all the smoke. I said, “Yeah?”
Penny, my apprentice, was on the other end. She sounded too cool, too calm, and therefore afraid. “You vanished.”
“Uh?”
“Like . . . hello poof whoops bye bye.”
“Uh-huh?”
“You dead?”
“That supposed to be funny?”
I rolled onto my back, every rib in my chest pressing against skin like they had been vacuum-packed into place. Something wet and sticky moved underneath me, made the sound of velcro tearing. My fingers brushed it. It smelt of salt and iron. It had the thickness of thin honey. She said, “So what the fuck happened?”
I licked my lips. They tasted of charcoal. “Summoned,” I wheezed. Why was it so much work breathing in here? “Some bastard summoned. Me. Summoned me.”
The smoke was getting thick now, grey-black, tumbling in under the crack beneath the door. Through it I could half see the walls, cracked and grey, the only colour on them from scrawled messages in cheap spray paint,
ANARKST 4EVR
JG WOZ ERE
NO GOD GAMES ALLOWED
help
WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU
I said, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up before my apprentice could start swearing.
My eyes burnt. The room was too hot, the light behind the smoke too bright. Somewhere outside the broken window it was raining, thick pattering on the still London night. I crawled onto my hands and knees, ears ringing. Something warm dribbled into the hollow of my ear, pooled there, then continued its journey down the side of my neck. I felt my head, found blood drying in my hair, and a lump. I looked down at the floor and at the same sticky stuff on my fingertips. Against my skin it had appeared almost black, but in the dull sodium light that reflected off the belly of the night-time clouds, and the glare of the unknown something on the other side of the smoke-tumbling door, it was undeniably crimson.
Undeniably blood.
But not my blood.
That at least was a pleasant discovery, though it came with the snag that it was not my blood because nothing bled that much and lived. It had saturated the thin carpet, splattered across the gutted tattered remains of a couch, smeared its paw marks over the paint-scrawled wall behind a low gas stove and a graveyard of broken beer bottles. It was fresh, and only felt cool because its surroundings were so rapidly growing hot.
Someone had been finger painting on the floor with this blood. They’d painted a pair of crosses. One was smaller than the other, nestling in the top left-hand quadrant of its big brother’s shape. Look at it with a knowing eye, and you might consider it to be a sword, not a cross, although when your tool was blood and your surface was carpet, the distinction was academic. What it was, and what there could be no doubt that it was, was the ancient emblem of the City of London and, by no coincidence at all, the symbol once carved by a mad bastard, with a dying breath, into the palm of my right hand – the mark of the Midnight Mayor.
I made it to the window, pulled myself up by my elbows, broken glass cracking underneath the sleeves of my anorak, looked out, looked down. A half-moon was lost on the edge of rain clouds turned sodium orange by reflected street light from the terraced roads below. A line of hills cut off the horizon, their tops tree-crowned and unevenly sliced by the carving of motorway planners. The falling rain blurred everything: the neat straight lines of buildings that peeked up between Chinese takeaways and bus stations; the pale yellow worm of a mainline train arching towards a floodlit station; the darker stretch of a public heath on a low hill around which tiny firefly cars bustled; the reflection of TV lights played behind curtained windows; big square council estates with bright blue and red buttresses as if the vibrancy of colour could disguise the ugliness of what they supported. But no distinctive landmarks other than to say that this was anonymous surburbia, not my part of town. But still my city.
I looked down. Down was a long way away. Paving stones shimmered black with rain-pocked water, like a disturbance on the dark side of the moon. A play area of rusting swings and crooked see-saws. A little patch of mud sprouting tufts of grass for dogs to run about on; a bicycle rack that no one had trusted enough to chain their bicycle to. A line of garages, every door slathered with graffiti ranging from would-be art to the usual signatures of kids out for a thrill. A single blue van, pulling away up the narrow street leading from a courtyard below and out of my line of sight. The glow of fire where there should only have been fluorescent white floodlights, and somewhere, not very far at all, the sounds of alarms starting to wail and flames eating at the door.
Smoke tumbled past my head, excited by the prospect of open air beyond the smashed-up window. I pulled my scarf over my mouth and my bag across my back. I fumbled in my pocket for the phone, my bloody fingers slipping over the keys, got as far as dialling the first two nines, and a hand closed around my ankle.
We jumped instinctively, kicking ourself free and snatching power from the mains ready to hurl at our unseen enemy, our hair standing on end, our heart beating like the engine of a car about to blow. I looked down, expecting death, pain, an end, a stop, a terror, something nameless that I had not had the wit to imagine until now, and saw the hand. Skin on top dark, deep-roasted cocoa; pink underneath. Soaked in its own blood, too much, too fresh. Arm, covered in a long black sleeve. Head. Wearing a headscarf of white and green that was half knocked off, revealing the long-ago-burnt scalp. Face. Round, smart, angry, lips curled, eyes tight with pain, a tracery of scars down the left side like a map of shifting desert sands. I knew that face. I’d regretted seeing it many times before, and tonight was heading for the clincher.
I wheezed, eyes running and carbon on my tongue,
“Oda?”
Oda – assassin, murderer, fanatic, holy woman or insane psychopath, pick one – looked us in the eye and whispered through her cracking lips, the smoke curling around her breath as she spoke, “Help me”