The Empty Grave (Lockwood & Co. #5)(77)

I stamped a warning on the kitchen floor. At the same moment someone – Lockwood, I guessed – called out sharply from downstairs. Holly and I moved away from the windows, closer to the table. We stood side by side, facing in opposite directions. Our swords were out. We gripped each other’s hand.

It was very silent.

Silence … That was the worst of it. You hardly dared to breathe. I stared at the garden door. We had the internal doors propped open, so you could see another lantern flickering down the hall; that was the only movement – the tiny wisp of reddish light. In the whole of 35 Portland Row there was not a sound. Holly’s hand was damp in mine.

A little scuffle on the garden steps. Holly made a small noise in her throat.

From downstairs came the crash of broken glass.

I glanced at Holly to see if she had heard it—

And there was a terrific bang. The room shook; I saw bright white light shine for an instant at the edges of the boards hammered into the garden door. The light of the magnesium explosion faded. Lockwood’s tripwire had done its job. There was a thump on the wall as something collided with it, and the sound of a man howling.

Holly was grasping my hand hard. ‘Lucy …!’

I scowled at the wall. ‘No, Hol. No, it’s good. Maybe it’ll put them off.’

It didn’t. Glass broke behind us; beyond the boards, the kitchen window smashed.

‘Guard the door, Holly,’ I said.

I moved to the window and stabbed my rapier out through the nearest spy-hole. I was rewarded by a gasp of pain and then a crunch of broken shrubbery as someone dropped from the window into the bushes below.

From downstairs came a frantic whistling – Lockwood’s alarm signal. Holly and I looked at each other across the kitchen.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll hold on here.’

‘I won’t be long …’ I was already careering down the spiral staircase, boots clattering, feeling the temperature drop with every step. I reached the bottom. My skin tingled; my teeth ached with sudden cold. Strips of greenish fog lapped against my boots.

Ghost-fog …

From the arch on the left, from the rear of the house, I heard the ringing of steel, psychic concussions, and a screaming voice that didn’t come from a living throat. I plunged through, saw Lockwood and Kipps retreating from a massive, faintly glowing form. Its outline was rounded, knobbly and ill-defined. There was a broad, low-slung node that might have been a head, the suggestion of sloped shoulders, gristly protrusions instead of arms – and nothing else. The rest was a shapeless, glowing mass. It hung just above the floor, palpitating slightly, drifting towards us. As Lockwood struck through it with his rapier, the plasm parted around the wound and just as swiftly re-formed.

‘Hi, Luce.’ Lockwood glanced back at me with frankly unnecessary calm. ‘Thanks for coming down. You see we’ve got a Limbless. They bust a hole in the door, threw its Source in. It rolled away somewhere in the laundry room. Can you find it? Quill and I have our hands full.’

‘Could blast it with a flare,’ I said. I was already moving to the side, looking for an opportunity to dart past the apparition. Never get near a Limbless, lest it suck you in.

‘We will if necessary, but I don’t like the idea of all that plasm flying around in such an enclosed space. Take a look, will you? Just don’t tread on the floorboards by the door.’

I darted forward, ducking through a wall of cold, out into the laundry area at the back of the basement. Fragments of broken wood lay scattered about, and our barricade was already partly dismantled. Beyond it, dark forms worked feverishly to break their way inside.

I threw a flare to dissuade them, and by its silvery light scrabbled on the floor among the wood and debris and the odd sock and pair of leggings left there from our washing. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a Source. White smoke plumed above me. The barricade was smouldering with white tongues of fire, and someone with an axe was attacking it in a frenzy.

‘How’s it going, Luce?’ Lockwood’s call wasn’t quite as nonchalant now. From the Limbless came a horrid gurgling sigh; from Kipps, a cry of fear.

I didn’t answer. I had my torch on, gripped between my teeth. I’d opened a pouch in my belt, held my fingers ready to grasp one of the silver nets that lay folded within. Where was that stupid Source? The axe was making short work of the door. I knelt close to the floor tiles, craning my neck to look down the side of the washing machine, among the lint and buttons …

There! A roughly circular fragment of bone – a piece of neck vertebra, most likely, wedged almost beneath the machine. As I reached for it, the last remnants of the barricade splintered. Magnesium smoke swirled, and a short but powerful-looking man clambered through. It had been a while since I’d last seen Julius Winkman. He’d worn a new blue suit for his sentencing, and I’d been high up in the courtroom gallery. Today he wore black and carried a length of metal piping, and I was lying on the floor with my arm under a washing machine. Times change. We knew each other, even so.

Jail hadn’t made him any less muscular. His arms were still knotted like ship ropes, his chest and neck as massive as those of a horse. His lips drew back in a grimace as he saw me. He stepped into the room and put his weight on one of the loose floorboards Lockwood and Kipps had rigged up. His boot went down, the board swung up; it slammed into his face, sending him crashing backwards into the men behind him.