CHAPTER FOUR
Smiler with a Knife

Edie was staring at the downpour beyond the awning, face unreadable as she hugged herself against the cold. George was still absorbing what she’d just told him.

“You killed your dad?”

“Well, yeah; no, not as such.”

He looked at her in outrage. “Edie! That’s not funny—”

“No. I mean, he wasn’t really my dad. My real dad. He was a stepdad sort of thing.”

George deflated a little. “Oh.”

“No, don’t worry. I killed him all right.”

George nodded slowly. Keeping up with Edie was sometimes exhausting, and this was not only exhausting but also distinctly confusing.

“Right.”

“No. It was all wrong.”

A stream of water changed direction in the breeze and splattered them. The awning wasn’t much help. In fact, it seemed to be doing a better job of channeling water onto them than actually offering protection. Edie pulled her clothes tight around her and ducked into the alleyway beside them. George was still trying to get used to the fact that she had just claimed to be a killer, so a couple of seconds passed before he realized she had gone, and he hurried after her into the rain.

The alley was empty.

“Edie!” he shouted, suddenly panicked. There was nothing in the alley but a dead end and a dented Japanese car by a Dumpster.

“EDIE!”

He ran into the narrow space, checking the car as he went, looking for a hidden way out. He couldn’t believe it was starting again.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” said a small voice from knee level. “I just belted him.”

He looked down. Edie was squatted in the dry area provided by the angled lip of the skip and its overhanging tarpaulin, looking up at him. She shuffled sideways, making a space.

He exhaled in relief and ducked out of the rain next to her. Once more he couldn’t make eye contact because she seemed to be looking at something beyond the wet traffic hissing past at the end of the alley.

“Don’t do that again.”

She might as well not have heard him for all the reaction she had to his words. She just carried on with her train of thought.

“I just hit him. Didn’t know how else to stop him. See, he kept coming after me. With a knife. It was on a beach. I just hit him. I didn’t mean to kill him. I just hit him.”

“You killed him by just hitting him?”

“Well, I had a big rock in my hand. He . . .”

She pulled her legs up to her chin and rested it on top of them. George waited for her to go on.

She chinned herself hard on the knees, as if punishing herself for the momentary catch in her voice.

“. . . He was a boozer, drunk all the time. When the pubs were closed, he’d go fishing. That’s what he called it, but he just went to his beach hut and drank more; that’s what my mum said. And then later, when my mum went, when she was taken away and never came back, and it was just me and him, he took me down to the beach. It was the first time I’d seen his hut. It wasn’t much. It was one of a half dozen, sort of set into the cliff next to each other. I’d always thought it’d be wooden, a cool shack on the beach kind of thing, but it was more like concrete bunkers set into the rock, and when he unlocked his, I saw something and I knew I was in the wrong place, and . . .”

She ground her chin harder into the tops of her knees, jamming her mouth shut to help keep something inside.

“What did you see, Edie?”

She shook her head and exhaled. “Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t something that was really there anyway. It was something that had been there. Once upon a time. When I touched the wall, I saw it, and I knew I should never ever go in that hut, and I ran.”

He thought of her gift for touching stone and metal and experiencing the memories of highly charged past events recorded in them.

“You glinted it? You saw the past?”

“Yeah.”

She wasn’t going to tell him what she’d seen. She’d made a deal with herself that what she’d glinted in the beach hut was one of the things she just wouldn’t ever talk about.

So instead she turned and looked at George and told him the rest of it, the other stuff: she explained how she had just run, and when her stepfather had tried to grab her and ask what was wrong, she’d hit him in the middle of his smile and sprinted off along the pebble beach.

She told him of how tired she had got, running on pebbles, and how calmly he’d followed her, climbing over the wooden dividers on the deserted beach, the smile on his face wholly at odds with the open knife he held in his hand.

She told George how she’d run up a final steep hill of pebbles and found her way blocked by a deep chasm between her and the new wooden wall being built to contain the pebbles in high storms.

And then she explained the worst bit: how he had caught up with her on the lip of this man-made ravine. She didn’t tell him what he’d said, or how unnaturally bright his smile had been. She did tell him about the knife, and how she had felt the smooth flint stone under her hand, and how when he had lunged, she had hit him with it.

He had gone down like a tree, tumbling into the dark pit at the bottom of the chasm, dislodging an avalanche of stones that landslid down in his wake. When things stopped moving he was more than half hidden by pebbles. She hadn’t known what to do. She had looked at the heavy stone in her hand, and when she saw something wet glistening on it, she’d tossed it in after him.

And then she’d walked back into town and got on a train and come to London.

George nodded slowly, trying to make sense of what she was telling him.

“So it was an accident?” he said slowly.

“No,” she said flatly.

George saw the doors closing in her eyes, locking whatever heavy burden she was carrying back inside.

“Look, Edie—” he began.

“Have you thought where we’re going?” She dropped the question in front of him like a roadblock.

It took him a moment to slam on the brakes and change mental gears.

“I thought that’s why we stopped,” she continued. “So you could think.”

He was aware that she was staring at the side of his face. When he turned, she turned away faster, as if she hadn’t been staring. But he knew she had. Her jaw worked.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked.

“Stay alive. Rescue the Gunner.”

“How?”

“No idea. Start by asking for help seems like a good first step.”

Edie thought of the things that had helped them before, things and people who hadn’t really given them straight answers, only riddles and obscure clues. Still, he was right. They had helped, after a fashion. But there was a problem.

“We can’t go to the Sphinxes or Dictionary, because of the City dragons. We’re on the wrong side of the boundary, aren’t we? They’ll still be guarding it, on the lookout for you.”

“We could go to the Black Friar.”

She stared at him. “The Black Friar? Are you mad? You said you didn’t trust him!”

“I don’t. Not entirely. Not as such. But he did show us the way to the Stone, didn’t he? I mean, he dressed it up and made it all flowery, but the information was good. He just—”

“He just smiled too much and seemed too eager to get his hands on that broken dragon’s head of yours, right?”

George felt the now-familiar heft of the dragon’s head in his pocket.

Edie went on. “—and the Walker, he was awfully keen to get his hands on it, too.”

He nodded slowly and then shook his head. She was right but she was wrong, too. She had to be wrong, otherwise they really didn’t have a place to start.

“I think he might be dodgy, but I don’t think he’s evil. Not like the Walker. I think he’s just out for himself a bit more than the Gunner or Dictionary, you know? I think he’d be open for a deal.”

“A deal? What have we got to deal?”

He pulled out the broken dragon’s head and looked at it. He realized that though he’d been sure it was a dragon’s head, when he looked closer it was beakier. More like a gryphon kind of dragon—

“This. I didn’t give it to him because I wanted to make amends by putting it on the Stone; but I decided not to, didn’t I? So maybe we can give it to him in exchange for help. Yeah?”

In the absence of a plan, and in the presence of fear and danger, sometimes all one needs to feel better is forward movement. Edie couldn’t argue with George’s thinking. So she nodded.

“The Black Friar it is.”

He saw she was still shivering. He took off his jacket and handed it to her. “Go on. I’m warm enough.”

“I’m okay.” She tried to push it back toward him.

“Edie. You’re shaking. Put the coat on and let’s get moving. We’re not going to save the Gunner just sitting here shivering.”

After a long beat, she gave in and draped the coat over her shoulders.

And then she stopped and pointed.

“George. Your hand.”

“It’s fine.”

His eyes followed her look. He suddenly felt sick.

“Okay,” he swallowed. “It’s not.”