Page 78 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

That was true enough. Percy could feel it. He could feel his mind and his strength ebbing away. And the gripping, maddening fever. The pain that had begun to throb in every nerve.

The idea that he could get a train, or simply walk away from it, began to shadow every thought. That he could so easily leave the aching and the sickness behind.

‘Take my head…’

What if it made Joe kill Althea? Made him devour her, like he’d done to the sheep? Made Joe watch that. Maybe that’s why it was letting Percy die there. So Joe would have to live with his death. So Percy wouldn’t be able to protect her when the time came. Because it’s not as though it would want to eat him. He’d been marinating in scotch and cigarettes since he was at least fourteen. He’d taste terrible. He lit another smoke. “Your friend, Molly. I can find her.” Silence reigned for a good ten seconds, broken only by the sound of the tailor-made cigarette pulling away from Percy’s lips. “And I can kill her.”

Percy took in the small muscle at the top of Joe’s upper lip, flinching. “You see,” he went on, “when you two did whatever you did, back in Scotland, she stole the body of a very good friend of mine. And I intend to get it back. But more than that, I intend to get revenge. For all of it. So if Joe’s hungry right now, your friend Molly will be twice as hungry. That cut on his arm? She gets two.”

Joe’s smile was nervous, but spiteful. “You’ll never make it in time.”

“If I leave now, I’ll get better, isn’t that right?”

There was a gentle tapping of Joe’s naked foot.

Percy pulled the chair up, knee to knee, with the man he adored. “Take me. Run to her. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

There was a flitter of something in Joe’s eyes. Understanding? A touch of hope? But behind it, he saw fear.

Percy had two choices. Talk to the thing, reason with it, like Joe might have. Or retreat into the cocoon of savagery that had protected him since he was a small child.

Percy, as was the wont of a lifetime, chose violence.

He leaned closer, nose almost touching Joe’s, and in the most callous voice he could muster, he delivered the ultimatum. “Take me now, or I’m going to burn her all over again. I’ll make it slow. I’ll put her in the body of someone I really don’t like, and believe me, I’ll make it last. I hear they can burn, wide awake, for ten solid hours if the kindling is sparse. But you know what? I think I’ll try for twenty.”

A fire ignited in the golden eyes and Joe’s head smashed forward, splitting Percy’s eyebrow right at the scar. “Fuck!” Hot blood gushed over Percy’s eye, turning the room red, dripping down his cheek as he whirled back and away from Joe, away from the thing that had brought his hand into a fist, quickly and better aimed at the wall than at what used to be his lover.

A searing relief of pain shot through him as the wall gave way with a crack and a puff of ancient plaster, then another, then another, huge chunks falling to the floor at his feet as he smashed great gashes into the side of the room. He kicked at it, kicked more and more worthless holes, then he flung himself back on Joe, hands on the arms of his chair, taut with packing tape, close enough to see his own blood on Joe’s forehead, close enough see the bruise spreading fast there, close enough for the creature to feel his spit on Joe’s cheek when he growled, “That was it. That was your last chance. Whatever happens now, you’ll pay. You’ll pay with Molly Tulloch’s blood.”

Percy tore himself from the room, nothing but blinding, throbbing pain in his head and abdomen, offset only by the anger that overwhelmed the screaming of both. He fled downstairs, out the front door, and paced a circle in the empty street. A new lookout watched him, and he thought he might shoot him too, just for the intrusion into his own private nightmare. He set an incandescent stride up the road to avoid doing it, but it wasn’t as though he could leave. Leave Joe there, alone. Which he had already done. Even if it was only for thatbreath of desperately needed air. He ran back to the door and braced himself against the entrance as a new wave of sickness smacked him dead in the face.

The blues, the hideous aquas and turquoise and sapphire and every horrendous shade of blue and blue and blue. The house made him sick. Being near Joe made him sick. And he made himself sick.

He paced up the street in the same frenetic fury, then, seeing a group of children at the top of the road returning home from school, staring at the sweating, filthy, bloody corpse of a man that he was, he veered off course, into the scrapheap that used to be someone’s home, that sat forgotten and as broken down as he was, flush up against what was supposed to be a safe house.

The first rotting beam of wood he saw, he cracked a foot down upon and split the thing in two. He picked it up and smashed it into a wall, breaking it into a dozen splintered shards, but the damp thud wasn’t nearly satisfying enough. Sheets of metal were ripped up and hurled across the yard with a deafening clatter. A metal pole rolled into his boot. He grasped it, strong and defiant in his hands, and smashed it into a wall of bricks, one hundred years old and not yet fallen, until the day it met Percy. The tired concrete gave way to his anger, and the lot toppled to the ground. He smashed the pole into corrugated iron. He found an unbroken shard of an old window and obliterated it. He wrenched old piping free, broke apart every recognisable thing, smashed and pulverised and destroyed every remnant that was left of what had once been a shelter until his exhausted body was too tired to go on.

He fell against the pile of broken-down bricks, the rubble slipping under his weight, gashing into his side, yet he lay there, in the miserable grey London afternoon, the sky and the walls just as dispassionate, unfeeling and stoic as they had ever been.A mass of clouds swirled low overhead, and a filthy drop of rain made a splash of pink in the blood on his cheek.

Percy sat forward.

It was Joe, and it was Joe, and it was Joe, all in a swirl of nausea and misery and aching everything.

Joe, who had ripped him out of a lifetime of sadness.

Joe, whose gentle fingertips he could feel even now caressing the hair at his temple.

Joe, who felt like the place on the pillow where the sun had kissed it moments earlier.

Joe, who’d never asked for anything, but that one simple request. To not let him live through that horror a second time. To not let him do those things that creatures of darkness would use his body for. To spare him. One simple request, that even now, even as he knew he was about to bleed out in front of Joe’s eyes, he couldn’t bring himself to fulfil. He would have bought him the earth, murdered every person in the street, pledged himself heart and soul for all eternity, but the simple act of slitting that one precious throat…

Leo would have done it for him.

But the thought of that gargle of blood, the red bubbles of air seeping at the slit…

The light going out of Joe’s eyes forever…

Time was running out and he could feel it in every cell.

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