Thicker Than Water

Someone hit him from behind, making him sprawl on top of me. I got a handful of his hair, levered his head up away from me and slammed my forehead into the bridge of his nose, giving him something else to think about. He jerked and went limp and I rolled him - with an awkward, one-handed heave - to the side.

I barely glimpsed my rescuer as he jumped right over me and charged on towards Matt. I saw him dive on a guy who’d got past our little Horatio-at-the-bridge last stand and was about to slit Matt’s throat from behind.

Further away, Juliet dipped and pirouetted in an elaborate ballet of carnage, inert and damaged bodies flying and falling away from her as her hands and feet wove their skein of graceful violence.

Then I returned my attention to the last few stragglers who were still trying to gut Coldwood. A half-brick to the back of the neck discouraged two of them, even in my weaker hand, and Gary took out the last man with his knee and his elbow.

We stared at each other, panting, taking a full three seconds to register the lull.

It wouldn’t last. The demon had hurled the nearest tools it could find at us. It had a thousand more lying ready to hand, and it wouldn’t take more than a moment to hurl them into the breach. It could empty the whole estate on our heads. And then what? Even if we survived, what would we do when the damned thing started to look further afield?

Juliet walked towards us, heedless of the bodies that she stepped on.

She was staring at the newcomer, who was facing Matt head-on as Matt came slowly upright. They seemed unable to look away from each other."

"I knew this guy too, I realised without surprise. It was the dead man who I’d met here on the first day, and then again on the footbridge at Love Walk. The man who’d talked in a woman’s voice and apologised as he’d tried to throw me off the bridge to my death.

I took a step towards him, and his gaze flicked momentarily to me. He nodded an acknowledgement, but his eyes narrowed as if the sight of me raised unpleasant memories.

‘I hope that makes us even,’ he said.

That voice again: trompe l’oeil for the ear. The wrong sex, the wrong age, the wrong - what? The wrong end of the map, is what. London, instead of Liverpool. Now instead of then. Drowned instead of waving.

‘I wasn’t sure what you were going to do,’ he went on. ‘If you’d tried to do an exorcism - I was going to kill you.