Page 58 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

Percy could have kissed her. He mumbled something about it having been at least two weeks since his last collapse, but she spoke over him, addressing Leo. “Are you with Percy and Joe?”

“Who me?” he said as though he were the understudy of the worst actor in a sixth-grade play. “Why, no, I was here when he collapsed, and?—”

“Thank you. I’ll take it from here.” Althea slipped her tiny self beneath Joe’s arm, and Percy let out a grunt with the extra weight he was forced to take to prevent her from being crushed when Leo stepped away.

Leo did, at least, remember the passport. “He’ll probably need that.”

The man, hesitatingly, slipped it into Joe’s pocket, and as his colleagues had already begun to disperse, he did the same. Althea yanked at Joe’s arm to get them moving again, while Leo ran off in another direction.

“You didn’t think of a wheelchair?” Percy huffed as soon as they were clear.

“You should be happy I’m here at all.” She surprised him with her angry tone, but he was far too tired to take it much to heart. “What is this? What’s going on with him?”

Percy staggered against a wall and paused there, dragging deep breaths in and out of his lungs until he felt a little recovered. He readjusted his grip on Joe and trudged on. “He’s possessed. There’s something in his body and it’s not a demon, and it’s not a ghost, and if he wakes up, we’re probably all dead.”

Althea made no reply, well aware by that time that supernatural forces, such as zombie hands, definitely did exist, but still living in the reality where normal people reside, where such a claim felt like it should have been ludicrous.

“Or maybe he won’t kill us,” Percy continued, pausing for an automatic glass door to slide open. “I don’t know what it wants, but I do know it likes to drink blood. I might need you to visit a butcher for me. Where’s Leo?”

“He said to wait there.” She tilted her head down a long tunnel, full of exhaust fumes and housing a road jammed with cars and buses. “Taxi bay fifty-three.”

“He’s got a car, hasn’t he? Because if he expects me to take my unconscious possessed boyfriend home in a fucking taxi?—”

“He got a car,” she rushed out. “A nice one, too. Not like that red one you rented, but?—”

Percy let her waffle about the car and focused on the little yellow bay numbers painted on the asphalt as he dragged Joe along. He didn’t have it in him to notice people staring, or to sidestep any smaller items of luggage that he could more easily kick onto the road. “What did you put in him, anyway?”

She stopped mid-sentence. “Leo knows. I tried to calculate with the pills, like you said, but the water didn’t look clear when I dissolved them, and I couldn't find a bottle that didn’t show the liquid, and I thought, how would you get it all into him? But I thought, what if he drinks too much, or not enough, or what if it tastes too bad, and how am I going to fix that?”

“You’re right.” Having found bay fifty-three, Percy leaned himself back against a dirty concrete pylon, settling Joe’s chest against his own. He threaded his arms beneath Joe’s, and he linked his hands behind his back, transferring the strain from his burning biceps to his wrists and forearms. “You did well.”

The heat, the humidity, the car fumes added a special irritation to the layers of anger, fear, and grief that Percy was already trying to keep under wraps. He felt a trickle of sweat that he didn’t have a spare hand to shift, tickling its way down his temple, so he closed his eyes, leaned his head back, and waited for Leo.

Interminable, that terminus. Buses, taxis, idiotic tourists with too many bags and no idea where they were going, shouting, gawping, existing. But in the black of his closed eyes, Percy saw only Joe. Covered in sheep’s blood. Beautiful, beautiful Joe. He wondered if that would be his last memory of him. All of it, the whole beautiful, romantic adventure, over and done and boiled down to that one hideous night. And it would be his fault for bringing him along. And Joe and all memory of him would be gone, and Percy would be left with only blood and death. And no Joe. Ever again.

He tightened his arms and let his head drop forward, which only made things worse, because when his lips touched Joe, it felt so much like kissing a reheated corpse. His head smacked back into the concrete and “Fuck!” he shouted.

Althea stayed still and silent, like a shrewd person does when she’s scared and trying to keep herself safe, and somewhere inside he felt like shit because he knew he was making her feel that way, but everything was too much for his regret to reach the surface.

Finally, Leo pulled up in a nondescript black hire car. Percy turned and backed himself and Joe towards the door Leo had opened for them, Leo taking Joe’s legs to help ease him in. He slammed the door shut behind them, and Percy nestled a hand in Joe’s hair, Joe’s head on his knees, and he kept his own eyes open and staring at the dark road because he didn’t want to see the blood in his mind’s eye anymore.

After a quick discussion between Leo and Althea, that Percy couldn’t hear a word of, Leo held the door for Althea to climb in, then moved around the car and took the wheel. “I’ve got you a place in Hackney,” he said. “The whole building’s derelict. It’ll just be you. It’s down the end of a lane, by an estate.”

“I don’t want anyone to hear the screams,” Percy muttered.

Althea threw a panicked look back, and not receiving even a glance from Percy, she focused on Leo. “Screams?”

Leo, pretending to be concentrating hard on driving, carried on with his report. “It’s not the kind of estate where anyone will care. The place next door looks like a hub for trafficking or drugs or something. I haven’t had a chance to check it out properly yet, but I doubt they’ll be calling the cops.”

Percy gave a tired nod and let his head fall against the window.

A moment of tense silence passed between Althea and Leo in the front, then he said, “I got a chair. A big one. It’s wooden, but it’s incredibly sturdy. And it looks comfortable too, because I thought you might want that, since it’s… him.” Leo couldn't put his finger on why he didn’t want to say Joe’s name. Something in Percy’s all-pervasive dark air. Leo had the sense that one wrong word could easily push him somewhere regrettable, so he kept talking to cover his near misstep. “I got ropes. A couple of different sizes. I got some tape, in case you need that. I got chains and padlocks, of course. But I can grab anything else you need. I’ve hired the car for a couple of days. So…”

No response from the back.

“So that’s that…” And Leo drove on through the thick silence, while Althea stared hard out the window, stomach and fingers in knots.

Traffic was bad, and it took over an hour to reach their destination, during which time Percy listened for every change of Joe’s breath, keeping a finger on his pulse for any sign of a quickening. Eventually the buildings got tighter, dirtier, and boards began appearing in windows. The yellowy bricks that define that part of London appeared in abundance, and roller doors that remained down and locked and covered in faded spray paint all the day long darkened the already grim streets.

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