My gods, I’d killed something. A living thing—not a ghost or a zombie, not a thing already dead and needing to be let go—but a living, thinking creature. The shock of death was bad enough, but I had never killed anything before, never ended its existence like pinching out a candle—nothing alive, at least—and I hadn’t thought I ever would. Ghosts and vampires were different—they weren’t really alive and they didn’t send out the wrenching shock of death. Jakob hadn’t been a human, but. he had been alive. He hated me and wanted me dead—it was self-defense! — but I couldn’t stop retching, knowing I’d killed him.

In a few minutes I noticed we were no longer moving. I raised my head and saw Marsden squatting on a narrow ledge nearby, holding the canoe’s mooring lines.

“Done?” he asked.

“I think so,” I choked, my throat raw from heaving up the contents of my stomach. I wanted to rinse my mouth but there was no clean water and I didn’t dare to even wipe my lips on my sleeve, soaked as it was in the disease-infested tide of Fleet Ditch.

“Y’mustn’t take it on yourself like that. He’d have done you worse, if he had the chance.”

I croaked and spat.

“Horrible as it was,” Marsden continued, his voice low and vehement, “the other one did him a favor. Killed him quick. I should have remembered as they were cannibal. If they’d got you, they’d have ripped into you as you drowned and taken pleasure in your bubbling screams. They’d have plucked out your eyes and saved ’em as treasures. Unpleasant, grudge-carrying fiends, the river spawn. Legend says they’re the bastard get of sirens and fae lords, cast out for their ugliness and hateful toward the whole world because of it. The stories say they devour children and drown sailors in the Thames for the shiny baubles they make of their bones. Right lucky you were.”

I didn’t feel lucky; I felt wretched and damned and sickened. It wasn’t logical or reasonable, but the feel of something. dying by my hand, not just falling apart, disturbed me deeply.

Marsden turned his head back and forth, as if listening for something I was missing.

“They’re gone. The other one must’ve swum away—we’re no business of his. We’d best get on. Before the vampires wake and decide to torture your friend a bit.”

For a moment I didn’t move, and Marsden growled in his throat. “C’mon, girl! You’ve more bottle than this! Get up!” He kicked my leg ungently.

“Bastard,” I muttered.

“Bloody well right. Off your jacksy, girl.”

“What?” I questioned, sitting up, stung, annoyed, and generally pissed off now. Have I mentioned that I don’t do self-pity as well as I do anger?

“I said get off your arse and do the job. You want that young man back, you’ll have to go fetch ’im and time is short.”

CHAPTER 47

I did not know where we were going. Marsden had been there with Michael while I was getting captured by Alice, and the last bend of the river into an even older bit of waterway was unknown to me. The walls of the watercourse were white here—or once had been—rather than the red brick and Portland cement of the Victorian sewers we had just left. The lichen-pocked stone glowed with some odd luminescence and the tunnel widened into a reservoir with a spiraling staircase built into its wall.

Marsden paddled us to the stair and tied off the canoe to a rusted iron ring that I suspected was meant for just that purpose. As we started up the stairs, we passed dozens of pairs of eyes that gleamed in the darkness.

“What are those?” I whispered, unable to see more than a humped shape, even in the Grey.

“Cats. Vampires don’t care for ’em much more than river spawn, but they know it keeps the fish men away. Shows we’ve found their back door.”

“Why aren’t they doing anything? We must smell just like the river spawn by now.”

“Not to the cats. We’re warm-blooded. We’ve got to move, though. It’s coming on for sunset.”

Marsden pocketed the flashlight and we crept up the stairs in the dark, relying on our senses in the Grey and the dim limning of stones by the weirdly glowing lichen to see us up the steps.

At the top a spiderweb of arched corridors stretched into the darkness below Clerkenwell. Marsden led me along one of the tunnels and I could hear the water of the Fleet gurgling in the distance. Now I knew that was the sound I’d heard when I followed the kreanou to meet Glick.

We went through a door into what turned out to be a storeroom. Marsden huffed in annoyance and started out again immediately, but I stopped when I spotted a pile of water containers in the far corner. It appeared that someone had stocked the area as a shelter sometime in the past, and it seemed likely, given the disarray of the boxes and cans, that the vampires used the goods as food and supplies for prisoners and henchmen and anyone else they needed to hide from the daylight world.

I found a few clean rags and wet them from the water containers so I could wipe off my face and hands. I rinsed the sludge from my mouth. The water tasted of old plastic, but it was a big improvement over the filth from the Fleet. I wished I had the luxury of time to look at the itching wounds on my leg where Jakob’s claws had pierced my skin, but I let that be, hoping I’d be able to do something about the infection later. Marsden shook his head in exasperation, but I noticed he used one of the rags to wipe his own face and hands before leading us again into the maze of corridors.

The hall we walked down next was thick with cold Grey fog that sparked with random shots of energy and eddied into the shapes of oblivious ghosts. I imagined it was used once in a while but not with any frequency, which was good for us; we’d be able to escape along it with little chance of being intercepted. Marsden stopped at a crossing, tilting his head to concentrate on sounds ahead.

“Four,” he muttered. “Red Guard, all humans; no Brothers or demi-guard. We’re in luck, but we’ll have to take them out fast.”

I reached into my pocket and got the puzzle out of its plastic bag—I didn’t want to fumble for it when we needed it to unlock Will’s cell. As I looked up, I saw Marsden reach under his moleskin coat and pull out two gleaming knives. He flipped one of them around and offered it to me, underhand and without turning his head back in my direction.

“No,” I whispered. I didn’t want to kill anyone else; what I’d done to Jakob was terrible and still sat like a weight, regardless of any justification.

“Don’t be daft,” he hissed back. “They’ll kill you quick as look at you—or take you prisoner again for that mad harpy, Alice, to play with. Clever as you are with your hands and feet, girl, it won’t be enough against them, and that does your man no good.”

Reluctantly, I took the knife.

“Look sharpish,” he warned as we started forward.

I kept my vision turned more toward the Grey, looking for any sign of magical traps. This time we weren’t unexpected, and I doubted that Alice and her pet sorcerer wouldn’t have beefed up the security where they could. They’d probably laid a lot of different traps to cover all the bases. The upside was, making and laying any magical traps would have worn Simeon down, which was definitely in our favor. We’d just have to be clever about looking for them and hope they’d relied on magic more than technology.

I had long ago realized that vampires didn’t really know what a Greywalker’s capabilities were; it wasn’t until I’d met Marsden that I understood that we were each different, which certainly threw a wrench into most magical plans. Magic is strongest when specific. Loose, general spells are usually weak or short-lived, according to Mara. But the vampires wouldn’t need anything powerful down here; just something strong enough to hold us or slow us down until reinforcements could arrive.