Thicker Than Water — читать онлайн бесплатно полностью

After that, even though they moved like sleepwalkers, he was fighting for his life. The narrowness of the walkway worked in our favour, but there were so many of them: and a single lucky thrust might be all it took. Coldwood ducked and punched, spun and kicked, used every dirty trick they teach in cop school. I dropped the whistle and joined him, humming the exorcism tune between dry lips as I fought.

For a packed and frantic minute I held my own: then an actual knife rather than a glass one, thrown through a gap between the nearest attackers, caught me in the left shoulder, close to the throat. It must have been wickedly sharp: the thick cloth of my paletot would have kept a dull blade from penetrating too deep. Or perhaps the demon’s magic worked like a blessing on knives and caltrops. In any case it went in hilt-deep, and I screamed with the shock and the pain.

I threw another punch, right-handed, but being aÓed,the southpaw I threw it without any real conviction. The plukey teenager I was facing took it squarely on the chin and then rushed me, his clutching fingers closing around my throat as he raised his jagged-edged shank to plunge it into my face.

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.’ There was a knife in his hand - a heavy, brutal thing, double-edged, that looked as though you could use it to gut and skin rhinoceroses. He held it up by way of illustration. ‘I would have had to, Fix. I’d already made up my mind. I know what you are. What you can do. You told me all about it a long time ago. But - you didn’t try to hurt him. You talked to him.’

His gaze Óe="" yowent to Matt again. Slowly and hesitantly, his hand came out as though to touch Matt’s cheek, but he stopped short and then withdrew it again.

‘It didn’t work,’ Matt said. ‘He won’t answer me. But perhaps if we both try—?’

The pale man drew in a breath. Or at least, his chest worked as though he was trying to draw in a breath. There was no accompanying sound, and for a moment he seemed unable to speak. His fists clenched, and his face twisted into something like a grimace. It took me a while to realise that he was trying to cry, as well as to breathe. Zombies can’t do either.

Finally he nodded. But at the same time he turned to me.

‘Alone,’ he said. ‘The two of us. Fix, you can’t be in on this. You, especially, can’t be in on this.’

I threw up my hands, palms out. ‘I’m good,’ I said, the raggedness of my voice betraying me. I was anything but good. I was exhausted and hurting.