I shuffled the puzzle again, shooting another anxious look back at Marsden and Norrin in time to see the other Greywalker collapse to the floor. Norrin wheeled toward us, grinning and letting the unearthly blade catch the firelight.

Michael and I both swore. I started to push the key at him and head back to Norrin, but he refused it. He rubbed at his shoulder and looked at his hand, unsmeared by blood or gore.

“It hurts but. I’m not really bleeding. I’ll get Marsden. You open the door,” he added, dashing across the floor to meet the savage monstrosity that approached like a stalking tiger.

Michael ran all the way to Marsden’s side, dragging Norrin’s attention to him as he went.

I slid the puzzle through its paces with frantic fingers once again and felt it click into shape, humming its satisfaction. I jammed the glowing prong into the lock of the ghostly doors and twisted. The latch squealed and resisted the strange key for a moment. Then it gave up and clicked open. I almost cried in relief.

I turned back, running for Michael and Marsden. The old man was halfway to his knees as Michael hauled him up. Norrin pounced on the boy and Michael stumbled, knocking Marsden back down.

“No, y’don’t, y’bloody bastard,” Marsden muttered, scrabbling something from the ground. He flicked it out and the white cane unfolded from his hand, giving off a strange blue luminescence that snapped through Norrin and wrenched the specter’s attention back to him.

Norrin roared and dove for Marsden as if goaded with a hot iron.

“C’mon, y’murderin’ pig. Lost your strength, have ya? Y’cut me and held me to the Grey for that white snake but y’couldn’t break me enough, not even then. But y’came fer me a man full-growed when I were prisoner here. Have to go after youngsters now, do ya? Y’always were an effin’ coward,” Marsden panted, hunching onto his knees and elbows. He took another swipe at the lunging monster, knocking the knife from the phantom’s hand. As it fell away, it glimmered for an instant in a tangle of energy strands.

I dove for it, snatching it from the enclosing mist before it dissolved back into ghost stuff. I felt it firm up in my hand, burning like a live wire and holding the menacing shape Norrin had made of it: a blade that cut into the energy shapes of the Grey and left pain and ragged edges in its wake. I rolled to my feet and dashed two steps toward Norrin as the prison’s butchering wraith raked clawed hands into Marsden’s tucked head.

Marsden stifled a scream as the hands passed through his face, dragging an illusion of gore and the memory of an eye with them. I plunged the knife into Norrin’s back, ripping downward along the nonexistent spine and feeling the mirage of human form rend into frayed wisps of fury and hate.

The shape that had been Norrin shrieked and whirled into a cloud of bloody smoke and the stink of slaughterhouses.

Only the roar of the phantom flames and the cries of the terrified prisoners remained. I flung away the cruel knife of Norrin’s energy and saw it unravel and settle back into the grid as glimmering strands of magic, but I could already see the edges of Norrin’s form knitting back into shape in the Grey world. We had half an hour at most to get the hell out of the House of Detention, and I had no idea how far we had to go.

Michael and I put our shoulders under Marsden’s arms and levered him up. His legs were wobbly and the white cane collapsed as he put weight on it.

“Damn,” he muttered. “Relyin’ on sprats and women. ”

“Shut up and say thank you,” I suggested as we lurched forward like a bad entry in a three-legged race.

Head hanging so we couldn’t see his face, Marsden mumbled an ungracious thanks.

Michael snorted, shaking a bit. “Let’s just get out of here. I’m really hating this place.”

We stumbled out the door, open only to us, through the crowd of trapped prisoners, and up into the memory of a courtyard filled with rushing jailers and shouting constables trying to douse the flames at one corner of the building with buckets of water. By the time we’d walked out the unguarded prison gate and around the corner, past phantom crowds and more bucket brigades, Marsden was able to support his own weight.

We stopped around the corner and Marsden leaned against the nearest wall. “Pray there’s no one out for a late walk,” he said. Then he pushed history aside and the world shifted with a grinding feel and a scream of friction.

Ordinary streetlights and city haze lit the urban night. No sign of flames as cars grumbled along Rosebery Avenue.

Michael threw up.

“There, boy. Y’lived through Norrin and the Fenian bombing,” Marsden mumbled, still unsteady on his feet and paler than normal—which is to say he nearly glowed in the dark.

“Eff you,” Michael gasped back, wiping his mouth on the un-tucked hem of his shirt. “I felt that thing cut me! And the place was on fire—I could smell smoke!”

“But y’couldn’t feel the heat, could ya?”

“No, but who cares? It was on fucking fire! I could see shadows running around like there were people in there running from the flames. And then that. thing cut me!”

“Did y’see him? Norrin? Did y’see that bloody monster?” Marsden asked, grinding his teeth into the words.

Michael hesitated, looking away, breathing too fast and sweating. “I. saw eyes. A shape. And I smelled something. rotting. And a flash like light off a knife blade. And. something. cut me,” he added, clutching his shoulder again.

“How is it?” I asked in as gentle a voice as I could muster with my own heart beating triple time.

Michael turned his face to mine, seeming grateful to look away from Marsden. “It hurts, but it’s not bleeding. Feels like it’s cut to the bone, though.”

“That’ll fade in a few days,” Marsden said, rubbing his hands over his face, “but I shan’t say it’ll be pleasant. Hurts like merry hell, it does.”

I glanced down at the blotched front of my shirt and jacket. The fabric wasn’t cut, but I could feel the stickiness of blood that stained my shirt from the inside. I wished I could go back to the hotel, take the longest shower in history, and fall into my expensive bed for the next twenty hours. My knees shook a little: a post-stress reaction to burning up more adrenaline than I normally expended in a month. I didn’t feel much better than Michael looked, but I didn’t have the luxury of puking.

“We have to get off the street. The vampires will still be looking for us,” I reminded them.

Michael straightened up, making a face at me. Then he glanced around the street and pointed to a bus stop nearby. “There’s a bus coming. We can take that and then change when we’re far away from here.”

CHAPTER 42

As we stood at the bus stop, rain began, just pattering down, but it helped to wash the filth and the stink of vampires off us. Michael chivvied us onto the first bus that came along Rosebery and made us change to another closer to the middle of town. We collapsed into our seats as if we’d been thrown.

The bus rambled the wrong way for a while until it turned near Marble Arch. Beside the arch stood a spectral three-sided gallows from which hundreds of hanged corpses swung in the night wind, their superimposed shades so thick they seemed like a moving blackness filled with bones.

“Tyburn Tree,” Marsden muttered, not raising his head.

From there the bus trundled up past Regent’s Park toward the canal where we’d left the boat.

“Bleedin’ lucky we was. The Pharaohn don’t know I’m with you or he wouldn’t have tried the same trick twice.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What trick?” I asked.

“Butcher Norrin. When he tried to shape me, the Pharaohn had me taken up on a thievin’ charge in Clerkenwell and put in the House of Detention where Norrin could get at me.”