He nearly lashed out with a fist when someone bumped into him, but managed to haul it back as he heard a female exclamation and felt the swish of skirts against his legs. Adelaide or Violet. He shoved whomever it was firmly in the direction of the open door, which was a dim picture frame showing frantically running people. Had George made it out? George had the contract pieces. Surely he’d be protecting them above all else.
Jack stumbled towards Edwin, face averted, and didn’t bump into anyone else. He could still hear the steady rhythm of Robin’s voice, though he couldn’t make out the words.
“Robin!” he shouted, thinking of what Alan had done for Maud in the cemetery. “Knock him out!”
But he could barely hear himself; his voice and Robin’s were both swallowed in a grumbling roar of rising noise.
All of a sudden the pressure of light vanished from Jack’s eyelids. He swiped them free of dust, wincing as tears spilled down his cheeks.
Edwin was standing—standing, thank God, though leaning hard on Robin, pale and filthy and wracked by coughs.
Jack had hoped that Edwin managing to stop the spell, whatever it had been, would also stop this disaster in its tracks. But the clouds were taking on a reddish tinge like wildfire and the violent shaking was, if anything, intensifying. The stone of the floor and the wood of the walls were blurring, as if they were an illusion dying with the end of the caster’s power. As if they were softening into mist despite the weight of the Barrel above them.
Unmake, Edwin had said.
“Time to leave,” Jack snarled. He took hold of Robin’s arm and dragged them to the door. The ground was uneven, as if potholed. Jack didn’t dare look down to find out what the floor was turning into, in case it was happening to his feet as well. He got Robin and Edwin out into the crowded, noisy lobby with one good shove, and then—paused.
“Hawthorn!” said Robin.
Jack swore and turned back around.
It was barely a room anymore. It was an ocean storm: nothing but blood-sky and lightning and fear and fog. Dust coated Jack’s nose and mouth as he plunged back in.
Part of him had wondered if Alan was faking the unconsciousness. If he’d managed to throw off George’s spell entirely and had climbed to his feet when the door opened and was already streets away and still running.
But Jack groped along the wall, and it took only a few steps for his foot to hit flesh. He bent and hauled the floppy, heavy body into his arms and then over his shoulder. His bad leg cramped hotly as he groaned his way back to his feet.
Door. Nearly tripping again, as the floor heaved as if to vomit him up. Door. And through.
The main foyer of the Barrel was bedlam. Every door on the floor was open and people were running through, some with papers or cups of tea still in their hands. For a wild second Jack thought it was raining indoors. No—what was falling, in delicate, beautiful shards, was the glass of the ceiling. Jack flinched as some landed nearby and shattered.
He couldn’t see any of the others, either his side or George’s. He did what everyone else was doing: racing full-tilt towards the huge wooden doors out onto the street, which had been flung entirely wide.
Pain kissed his forehead with hot lips. His eyes were watering again, or else he was bleeding. That itch of liquid was suddenly the unbearable centre of his world. But he ran, and got himself and Alan out and down the marble stairs and onto the street.
Behind him, the centre of British magical bureaucracy continued to tear itself apart.
16
Alan’s headache woke up almost before he did. It was a headache that demanded its own pillow on the bed; its own seat at the dinner table. It took a long, agonising stretch, in which opening his eyes was far too difficult to contemplate, for him to remember that he had other body parts below the neck, and to determine that none of them were hurting. Or perhaps they were and he couldn’t tell. You stopped noticing a blister on your hand when you wrenched your ankle.
What the fucking hell.
Was he hungover? Men described the state of hangover like this, with haunted expressions and thinly veiled braggadocio. Alan had never drunk enough to find out for himself. He’d never been able to afford it, being unwilling to stoop to the kind of gin that would strip the skin from inside his mouth.
Had someone clocked him over the head in an alley? Best of fucking luck to them finding anything worth nicking in his pockets. Might well have taken his shoes, though. Shit. To replace them he’d have to dig into the money from—
From whom? From what?
Alan’s eyes opened despite his skull’s fervent wish otherwise. He was startled into it by the sheer unbalancing weirdness of getting halfway through a thought and having it slip from his grasp like a slimy fish.
He immediately wanted to close them again, but didn’t. He wasn’t in his bed at home. He hadn’t fallen asleep on the floor of the Post’s office.
Alan was lying on his side atop a wide, soft bed with the kind of fiddly, curving bedposts that Caro used to complain about dusting. The pillowcase was slippery with quality beneath his cheek, sunlight fell through lace curtains, and there was a large man sitting in a chair by the bed and watching Alan with eyes like sapphires set in a statue of a snake. If a snake wore clothes worth more than Alan’s annual wages, with heavy streaks of incongruous dust at the collar and all down the tops of his thighs. Trousers, rather.
Thighs, insisted an interested little voice in Alan.
The man had clearly noticed that Alan was awake, but he said nothing. His eyebrows, dark and thick, rose a little.
Alan’s abused nerves were telling him, ludicrously, that to move an inch would be to invite an attack. Snakes were like that, weren’t they? Couldn’t see you if you didn’t move. Or was it snakes that hypnotised you until you couldn’t look away? That seemed about right.
Fuck, his head. His pulse had picked up, and the rate of the pain with it.
Finally the man shifted and sat forward, elbows propped on knees. （Thighs.） Up close his features were harsh, his jaw dark with shadow. He had a nose like a regal rock formation, a freshly scabbed cut on his forehead, and hair in a shade between walnut and ebony.
And how did Alan know what ebony wood looked like? And why was his mouth suddenly dry, his legs restless, at this man’s proximity?
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep while writing and dreamed himself into one of his own books. At least one of them began like this. If this man was a duke, it was all but certain.
“How much do you remember?” the man asked. A deep, cut-glass voice.
Alan opened his mouth to say God only knew what, and a memory landed in his head as if dropped from a height. He remembered the Lyric, he remembered waking up on the floor of a cabin with a headache much milder than this one, and—
“Lord Hawthorn?”
An unrecognisable expression crossed Hawthorn’s face. “And?”
“And wood, apparently.” He kept his eyes on Hawthorn, convinced that losing sight of the man would cause the memories to slip away again. “I don’t know. My mind’s been chewed up by moths. What—what happened to me?” His voice cracked over the words.
“My cousin George used a memory-spell on you. And if I’m not mistaken, you did your level best to perturb it.”