A Scandal in Battersea (Elemental Masters #12)(84)

“Only two of us are magicians, Sherlock,” John chided him. “But yes, I can. I don’t think it advisable, however. A light will make us exceedingly visible to anything hunting in these ruins. Those tentacles came from something, and I would rather not attract the whole beast.”

With a start, Nan glanced down at her glowing sword and, with a thought, extinguished the light. The others did the same—all but Puck, for obvious reasons. If they were going to venture into these ruins, they were going to need a beacon to guide them back to the door.

“Whatever you mean to do, do it quickly,” Puck urged. “That thing might be back at any moment, and I doubt it’s going to ask me to tea.”

“We should scout, Sahib,” Karamjit said. “But I do not believe we should separate.”

“Holmes, there is a former patient of John’s who has been having visions of this place,” Nan said in a low voice, when Sherlock looked as if he disagreed with that idea. “With my ability to read minds, I was able to share in those visions. These ruins might look empty, but they hold things that were hunting human beings in the ones I saw. I think Karamjit is right. And I think there is no doubt that whatever is here is the thing that has been behind the abductions. I believe it somehow discovered we were getting closer to finding its agent in our world and chose to act, to attempt to finish us before we discovered anything else.”

“Very well, then,” Sherlock agreed reluctantly. “We could cover twice the ground if we split up into two parties, but I will yield to your superior information. My only question to you is this—London is vast. Its counterpart is probably just as vast. Where do you propose we should look?”

Nan stared at the others, who all mirrored her indecision. And they might have stood there for some time, had they not heard a heartrending cry, and the sound of snarls coming toward them. Instinctively, the ones with weapons formed a line of protection in front of the ones who had next to nothing—which, to his chagrin, included John Watson. They hadn’t time to do more than that when the quarry burst into view, scrambling over the rubble of a completely ruined building. Human, certainly. Moved by a joint humane impulse, Nan shouted, “Over here!” at the same time as John created a light over his head.

The man was clutching his chest as he stumbled toward them, and the closer he got to them, the more it was apparent that this was a man from their world, an elderly man, gray-haired, dressed in the tattered remains of what had once been a conservative suit. He fell at their feet, exhausted and bleeding, just as his pursuers flung themselves over the top of the hill of rubble, stopped and stared at them, John’s light making their eyes reflect a hellish red.

Or perhaps their eyes were glowing a hellish red.

If one had crossed a pariah dog with a spider and covered the whole with mangy black fur, added a barbed tail, and inserted teeth that were so long they couldn’t actually close their mouths, that was something like the horrors that Nan saw all too clearly. There were ten to fifteen of them—they wove in and around each other, so it was hard to tell their exact number—and they snarled and slavered as they stared at their erstwhile victim.

“Would that I had a torch,” Selim said, as John and Mary pulled the man behind the defensive line. “I would burn those unholy things until there was nothing but ash.”

“I think we should remedy that, before we go a step further,” Sherlock said grimly. He looked about, and added, with a little more doubt, “If we can find something to burn, that is.”

He was right. There was nothing like a branch or a piece of wood anywhere around them.

As if their voices had awakened fear in the things, their heads came up and they turned tail and vanished, back over the hill of debris. So they were safe from attack. For now, anyway.

Nan was not inclined to let her guard down, and the Celtic Warrior absolutely forbade the very idea, so she, Selim, and Karamjit kept a watchful eye, weapons out, while Agansing joined the others in tending to the stranger.

“Escape . . . if you can,” he gasped, as John worked feverishly over him. “Do not tarry. This . . . place is a charnel house.”

“Who are you?” Holmes asked urgently. “How did you come here?”

“Fensworth,” the man replied faintly. “Arthur Fensworth. I . . . don’t know . . . how I came here.”

Haltingly, a few words at a time, with his voice growing weaker by the moment, Arthur Fensworth told them what little of his story there was to tell. “I fell through my own door,” he croaked. “I found myself here. At first, I thought I must have suffered a fit, and was lying in the snow, hallucinating.”

He had spent his first day wandering, and when he got desperately thirsty, drinking from water caught in little pockets in broken-down walls. He had recognized the area, being a solicitor. He had even found where the rooms of a barrister friend would have been and hid there, drinking stagnant water from a broken cistern, sleeping in the rubble inside the remains of a wardrobe. He searched the ruins for food, growing ever more desperate. Then his hunger grew too great to bear.

“And then . . . I heard the call,” he said. “It was the creature that rules this hell. I followed the call. It ended in the broken dome of St. Paul’s. There were others like me: women, children. Not many. The thing fed us, strips of meat in piles on the floor. We ate like dogs. I think . . .” He broke down then. “I think it might have been human flesh. I was hungry . . . so hungry . . .” He wept, then, meager tears etching their way through the dirt on his face, and Nan turned away, not wanting to stare at the poor old man in a moment of such terrible weakness. “Then it drove us out with its creatures. I swore not to eat again, but . . . I was so hungry . . .”