CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hunter’s Moon

Edie fell into the mirror behind her. She felt the surface bend and pop as delicately as a soap bubble, and then she was falling into a fire. As she fell, someone grabbed at her ankle but wasn’t able to hold it, and she hit the ground with a thunderous crash, like the gates of Hell blowing open.

She fell on her back and rolled, so that the first things she saw were her legs in the air above her, and beyond them, the dark sky and the bright disk of a full moon staring down at her, the pale night sun of a hunter’s moon, framed for an instant between two familiar scuffed boots.

She felt the sharp dig of a broken brick in her back, and lost contact with anything familiar as she flinched and squirmed to her feet, just in time to see long, white fingers of light sweep across the sky, cutting it into jagged segments. And then she was conscious of the hungry crack and pop of a fire very close to her.

She realized that the crash she had heard was not her landing on the ground; it was the sudden continual hell storm of noise that shook the world around her, the world she had fallen into: it was the sound of a world blowing itself apart. There were deep explosions and crashes and screams. And behind the screams was the low moaning sound of a siren rising and falling; behind that, there was a rhythmic throbbing engine rumble from the sky itself. There was the sharper counterpoint of antiaircraft fire from a hidden battery nearby, and others farther off. Mixed in all of this were urgent shouts and jangling ambulance bells and more screams and huge earthshaking thuds that she could feel through the soles of her boots.

Unwilling to look around at the source of all this horrifying sound until she had to, Edie looked at her feet and saw they were on the step of a shop. There were fragments of brick and glass all around her. She looked to her side and saw a mirror on the doorpost. She saw her face staring back at her, a white smear of shock side lit by flames. Before she could see if there was a matching mirror on the other side of the door, there was a huge thump that knocked her to her knees as the ground kicked and buckled beneath her. When she looked up, stunned by the violence of the invisible blow, halfway back onto her feet, she saw something that stopped her from moving at all. She remained there, one knee on the ground, eyes wide, mouth open, staring at the infernal vision towering over the other end of the street.

It was a firestorm. Out of the very center of the flames rose the familiar dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, wreathed in conflagration and black smoke—but untouched. It was a vision of the end of the world. But from the heat on her face and the twinging pain in her shoulder where she’d rolled onto the half brick, Edie knew this was no vision. She wasn’t glinting this.

This was real.

When she glinted, the past came in jagged slices, and she had no choice about what she could see. She never ended up with brick dust in her mouth. This wasn’t glinting; this was being.

“Hey you, girly, get off the bloody street, get down the shelter!”

A voice shrieked at her from the other side of the road. She turned to see a middle-aged man in a suit, with a canvas bag over one shoulder and a tin hat like the Gunner’s, except the Gunner’s didn’t have a white W painted on the front. He was waving at her angrily, thin mustache bristling like a furious hairy caterpillar.

“It’s that way, down the end, you trying to get yourself killed or—”

The side of the ancient brick building behind him jerked as if it had been kicked by an unseen giant. The man never got to what came after the “or,” because the front of the building just dropped on him in a brutally short avalanche of brick and stone.

Edie instinctively put her hand over her mouth as the dust cloud rolled out. It thinned, and she saw the white W of the hat slowly rolling toward her. It hit the curb at her feet and turned over. She got a glimpse of something wet inside, and looked away.

In the inferno surrounding the unscathed dome of the cathedral were plumes of water arcing futilely into the roiling mountains of fire. At their base were the dark outlines of small groups of men wrestling fire hoses. In the sky above, the fingers of the searchlights quested back and forth, and the intermittent lines of tracer fire squirted into the dark heavens like fiery echoes of the water jets playing on the devastation below.

Edie realized she had her hands jammed over her ears, trying to keep the jarring assault out of her head.

And then something grabbed her arm.

She spun to see the Friar. His normally jolly face was tight and worried.

“Come,” he shouted over the sound of another building crashing to the ground on the next street. “Back into the mirrors. You don’t want to die here.”

For once in her life she didn’t even think of arguing. She let him drag her back toward the shop entrance, where she saw, with relief, two mirrors facing each other on either side of a bookshop window. That was their way out of this nightmare.

The Friar stopped dead.

“What?” Edie began.

And then she heard it, an instant before it hit: a whistling sound from out of the chaotic sky overhead, shockingly, intimately close.

There was another sharp jerk on her arm, and the Friar pulled her to him and turned away from the bookshop and the safety beckoning in its mirrors just a pavement’swidth away. He curved around, enveloping her.

The bomb hit, and Edie’s feet were blown out from under her. Only the unbreakable grasp with which the Friar held her to his chest stopped her from falling. The very air seemed to punch them viciously, and there was a sudden jagged horizontal silver hailstorm as the windows of the shop blew out. If she hadn’t been completely shielded by the arched metal back of the Friar, she’d have been just a red mist and so much ground meat blown across the cobbled street. The shop window was followed by the shop’s contents. Whole books spilled across the pavement, and a snowstorm of pages from volumes shredded by the explosion swirled around them.

After a second the Friar straightened, and they turned to see that they were in the middle of a slow-moving blizzard of paper, some pages on fire, some not, but all whirling up into the night sky on updrafts created by the heat around them.

The Friar crossed the pavement in four fast paces, batting the airborne page storm out of his way as he went. Edie stumbled after him—and she stopped when he stopped.

The mirrors were gone, shattered by the same blast that had destroyed the shop window. Even through the maelstrom of the Blitz around them, Edie could hear the single sharp tutting noise the Friar made. It was more ominous than a building falling.

“Those were the mirrors,” she said.

He tutted again.

“Those were our way out,” she went on, voice rising.

He peered up at the sky. She tugged at his robe. Glass shards fell out of the folds and tinkled to the ground around his feet.

“What do we do now?”

The Friar looked up and down the street. Seeing him unsure made Edie more frightened than she already was. Finally he looked at her.

“Can you run?”

She glanced up at his great bellied bulk standing over her. “Can you?”

The ghost of a smile flickered across the flame-lit face above her.

“Lady, when my survival depends on it, I can practically fly. . . .”

He hiked up his cassock above the knee with one hand and grasped her hand with the other—and ran. And even though she would never have admitted it later, the fact that he held her hand did pull her out of her stunned state, and she ran alongside him, matching his every long pace with two of her own.

The details of that headlong dash through the firestorm and the falling bombs blurred together so that later she could not remember exactly what had happened. But single moments remained, disconnected with each other, one minute there, next minute gone. An old-fashioned taxi with spoked wheels was blown across the road in front of them, burying itself upside down in a second-floor bay window. They ran on. At some stage, a stream of fire suddenly flashed out of an alleyway, blocking their way. The Friar just grabbed Edie and hurdled through it. There was one point where she remembered running past a London bus, on its side, and she registered the curling staircase that ran up the back to a top floor that had no roof. She turned away before her brain could make sense of the twisted coat and hand sticking out from under the side of the bus.

They ducked down narrow lanes between vertiginously high walls, and at one point dodged through an old graveyard that appeared out of nowhere in the warren of streets. She remembered the whump of a bomb hitting the graveyard behind them as they left it, and turning and seeing a long box toppling back down out of the sky and dashing itself to pieces on a church wall, and turning away before she had to see what was in the coffin. She remembered the Friar saying:

“They’ll be burying those poor souls again in the morning.”

They were running on and on, through strangely empty and quiet streets one minute, then through flaming ruins the next. And it was only when she saw a street sign hanging off the corner of a building reading “Puddle Dock” that she realized where they were running to.

Though tired, she redoubled her effort, and they skidded around the final corner to see the Black Friar standing on the prow of his building above them. He didn’t look down to see himself running past, or if he did, Edie was sprinting too quickly to notice.

The Friar pushed open the door, and they tumbled in. She had time to notice that the windows were crisscrossed with tape, before he yanked her forward in between the two mirrored arches.

“Right,” he panted. “Home, I think.”

“James who?” inquired a familiar voice from the alcove within.

Edie peered in but couldn’t see him. What she could see was a poster, a finely drawn cartoon of two men leaning on a bar, talking—and the bottles, and even the beer-pump handles behind them, all had the familiar face of a man with an angular sweep of hair and a—in fact the— Hitler mustache, listening carefully. Below it, the message, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” It was a colorful and funny-looking poster.

“You’re right,” she said into the darkness, aiming her voice toward where she knew Little Tragedy would be listening. “I do like the poster.”

The Friar snorted and pulled her arm, and they were falling back into the mirror; she staggered and found she had different carpet under her feet and the world outside wasn’t blowing itself to hell, only grinding itself quietly down with the traffic beyond the windows—windows no longer crisscrossed with antiblast tape.

“I think,” said the Friar, “that that explains the mirrors.”

“Yep,” said Edie, trying to stop her legs and voice from trembling. “Got the mirror thing. Definitely not for saddoes. Definitely real.”

She sat down suddenly, right there on the floor, because something had to give, and her shaking legs just did so first.