Only a Monster(Monsters #1)(44)

‘My family still lived in Holland House in the eighties,’ Aaron said.

‘Yeah, I know,’ Ruth said with a tired half smile. ‘I was bleeding all over the shop and had to get your stupid window open again. And I knew if I passed out, your family would find me. Almost bled out before I got to the road.’

Joan pressed closer to Ruth. Ruth was sort of smiling about it, but she’d been even closer to death than Joan had realised.

‘Next thing I know,’ Ruth said, ‘I’m in hospital, and the girl in the bed next to mine is telling me to shut up.’ She swallowed. ‘I’d been babbling about the massacre. Annoying everyone in the ward. I didn’t know what I was saying.’

Ruth had woken up all alone. At least Joan and Aaron had had each other last night.

‘They wheeled me out for a scan,’ Ruth said, ‘and that’s when I saw her, walking in the direction of my room.’

‘Her?’ Aaron said.

‘A blonde woman with a long swan neck,’ Ruth said. ‘Walking down the hallway of the hospital ward like she owned it. And there were three men with her. Wearing pins with winged-lion insignia.’

Joan started to ask what that meant and then stopped when she saw that all the colour had drained from Aaron’s face.

‘When they brought me back to my room,’ Ruth said, ‘the girl in the other bed was gone. They said she must have checked herself out. But I don’t think she did.’

‘You saw Court Guards at the hospital?’ Aaron said, hushed.

‘I don’t know for sure,’ Ruth said. ‘I was all drugged up and really out of it. But afterward . . . Every time I followed rumours of survivors, I found whispers of Court Guards. And a blonde woman.’

Something creaked on the landing outside. They all jerked their heads to look at the door—as Ruth had been doing all night.

A door nearby opened and closed. A lock slid shut. Joan breathed out. She heard Aaron’s and Ruth’s breaths ease out too.

‘We should get some rest,’ Ruth said. ‘Stall owners are going to bed. Best to have our lights on and off on the same schedule as them.’

Ruth’s watch said it was nearly four a.m. Joan didn’t know what time it was according to her own body clock.

Without much discussion, they’d agreed that Joan and Ruth would share the bed. Aaron would have the sofa. Now Joan lay awake in the dark. She wasn’t tired at all. Outside the room, the building creaked and settled. Footsteps sounded occasionally on the landing. Joan listened to Ruth’s regular, reassuring breaths. Ruth was here. She was alive. Joan almost didn’t dare believe it.

‘Can’t sleep?’ Ruth whispered.

Joan shook her head and then remembered that Ruth wouldn’t be able to see her in the dark. ‘I thought you were asleep,’ she whispered back.

‘I couldn’t sleep after,’ Ruth said, soft. ‘For a long, long time. You keep seeing them, don’t you?’

Joan rolled to face her. ‘I keep walking into that room,’ she whispered. ‘Where I found you . . . All that blood leading to the sofa. You pressing down on Gran’s wound.’ She hadn’t seen the others, but her mind kept conjuring horrors. Bertie with his throat slit, all alone. Uncle Gus and Aunt Ada bleeding out.

Ruth pushed Joan’s hair from her face. ‘It’s not as fresh for me,’ she whispered, ‘but I remember how I felt.’

‘You don’t feel it now?’

‘I do. It’s just . . . different. Like a scar compared with a fresh wound.’

Joan didn’t know what to say. She felt hollowed out and so terribly lonely suddenly. For her, it had been last night. For Ruth, it had been years ago.

‘I miss them,’ Ruth whispered. ‘God. So much. I missed you.’

Joan had assumed that Ruth had found Gran, at least, in this time. Apparently not. She shifted closer so that she could hug Ruth, a little clumsily. Joan had barely even begun to miss them yet, she realised. It had only been one night for her. But there’d been so much pain in Ruth’s voice. This was the same loss, two years apart.

‘We’ll undo it,’ she whispered into Ruth’s shoulder. ‘We’ll get them back.’

‘Did that Oliver boy promise you that?’ Ruth whispered. ‘Because if he did—’

‘No. He said it couldn’t be done. Is that true?’

Ruth was silent. ‘Try to rest even if you can’t sleep,’ she said finally. ‘Close your eyes, at least.’

The evasion made Joan’s stomach twist. ‘Is it possible to save them?’ she said. ‘Is it?’

Ruth’s arms squeezed tighter for a moment and then she pushed Joan away gently. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to sleep. Just close your eyes and breathe.’

Outside, the rain had finally stopped. Joan breathed in and out. She lay awake, listening to raindrops fall from the roof in long, slow strikes.





ELEVEN




Joan jerked awake, half caught inside her childhood nightmare—the old, old one, of the prison with the cold stone floor and the guard outside with heavy shoulders like a mastiff. She lay awake, shivering with it. She could still feel the scratch of straw under her shoulders. The smell of sickness and filth seemed to linger in the air.