CHAPTER EIGHT
Airborne

Everybody wants to fly. At some stage in their lives, everyone looks up in the sky and sees the seeming effortlessness of a bird in the gulf of air overhead and thinks: I wish, just one time, that could be me.

Nobody wants to fly like George was flying. He was upside down, back arched, staring at the ground below, winded by the sledgehammer blow between his shoulder blades, gagging soundlessly for a breath that just wouldn’t come.

All he could do was reach a despairing hand back toward the rapidly diminishing figure of Edie as she spun the wrong way on the crowded pavement, trying to see where he’d gone. She was turning like a leaf caught in the whirlpool of a fast-moving stream, looking everywhere but the right way, which was up.

And then, just as his vision started to spot and dim through lack of oxygen, he found a breath and took a deep whooping lungful of air, then another, and yelled— at the very moment the gargoyle crested a building, and Edie was lost to his sight.

“Edie!”

He shouted his throat raw in one ragged word that tore out of him like the death of hope, but his yell was lost in the greater noise of the city below.

Above him he heard the gargoyle hiss in disapproval, and felt its grip on his leg tighten. In a couple of thunderous wing flaps, they had cleared the next block of buildings and were flying across the Thames.

George looked at the water below, then he looked up just in time to see the stone creature taking a quick glance down at him. In the microsecond that they were face-to-face, he recognized the snarling cat head. He gaped in disbelief.

“Spout?!”

There was no doubt in his mind. This was the gargoyle he’d called Spout, the gargoyle who had tried to kill him at the Monument—the gargoyle he had seen shot to smithereens by the Gunner. The taint that was definitely dead.

“But you’re dead!”

The gargoyle hissed, and George turned and saw the brick face of the industrial chimney above the Tate Modern building coming closer and closer. Though he was sure that Spout meant to dash him against it, he just stared, without even the energy to put out a futile hand to ward off the inevitable. But at the last instant, Spout twisted in the air and jerked the talon at the end of one wing over the lip of the chimney and brought them to a sudden halt.

George hung there, nose to the brickwork, head throbbing with blood, just filling his lungs and wondering whether his heart was going to actually pound its way out of his chest, as it was trying to.