I just stood there shocked and still shaking with adrenaline. The dome of refusal burst and came down in a brief cloud of glitter, and Alfie said, quavery, “What—why did it—” only he didn’t finish, because I understood, we all understood at the same time: It was running away. From me.
“Fuck,” I said succinctly, and ran after it.
The maw-mouth kept rolling away at top speed. By the time I reached the top of the narrow spiral, it was completely out of sight somewhere along that endless corridor, the columns vanishing into the dark like an illusion of infinity, as if someone had set up two mirrors facing one another. I stood panting for a moment. No one else had followed me back up—I couldn’t blame them—and I did have a moment of wondering what the hell I was doing, only someone screamed again from inside the maw-mouth, a cracked-glass shriek, and they were inside it, they were trapped inside, like my father, like Orion, and I couldn’t let it have them, either. I ran after it.
The only reason the maw-mouth didn’t manage to completely shake me was the crying of the voices, but in the corridor I couldn’t tell exactly which doorway the sound was coming from, and the cries slowly started to fade out. They gave way to exhausted labored breathing that was somehow even worse, the thick struggling desperate sound coming at me like the maw-mouth itself, all around, rasping out of the corridors and echoing dully against the stone walls.
I kept going down one side passage and back, and another, and another after that. They all ended in dead ends that almost certainly weren’t dead ends if you knew what you were doing. It was possible that the maw-mouth did know what it was doing—it had London wizards in its belly—and had got to the other side of one of them, but I couldn’t stop long enough to go find Alfie and make him help me. If I’d stopped that long, I’d have had to think about what I was doing. Instead I just kept trying doggedly, over and over.
The only thing that helped me was that it all began to remind me forcibly of the wretched games of hide-and-seek I’d played as a kid in the commune, where none of the other kids really wanted me to play, but their parents, who loved Mum or had come to the commune to see her, would make them let me. So what they did was make it a game of keep away from El instead. All of them running and hiding in whispering small groups while I ran desperately from one place to another trying to find someone, anyone, and I knew what they were doing, but I pretended not to and kept trying to play anyway because it was the only playtime I could get; if I ever tried hiding myself, no one would ever come to find me, and they’d all just go play something else without telling me.
It felt insistently like that, with the maw-mouth’s voices sunk back into whispering and mutters and gasping breaths, just on the edge of my hearing and scraping at my brain. It made me so angry, more and more angry as I went, the grating miserable irritation of it building on layers and layers, just like it had back then, until Mum would have to come and get me and take me away because she felt me reaching incoherent rage from all the way across the commune. Only Mum wasn’t here. No one was here. It was only me hunting the sly whispering through the endless horrible murky corridors of this place, and they were deliberately making it go on and on, weren’t letting me find them; in a moment they’d be sniggering at me, at how pathetic I was for submitting to this, enjoying their game at my expense.
Then I rounded a corner and there they were—there it was, the hideous mass of the maw-mouth completely filling one of those stumpy dead ends, pulsing and seething and moaning, and for just that one instant, I was glad I’d found it.
In that same instant, cornered, the whole thing came surging at me, attacking me openly—the way the other kids never had, because they’d all known, the way the maw-mouth had known, that if they ever gave me that chance, that excuse, I could hurt them in some terrible inhuman way. That there was something in me they didn’t dare to face head-on. But the maw-mouth gave me the excuse because it knew I didn’t need one, and for that one heartbeat, that one breath, too crammed full of rage for fear to really grab me again, I screamed at it, “Come on then! Come at me! You’re dead, you sack of putrescence, you’re already dead,” pumping myself up like some drunk in a bar. I was going to slaughter and destroy this whole bloated monstrosity—
The whole thing disintegrated. I hadn’t even used any mana, really, but it came apart before it even reached me, the skin of it giving way like holes opening up in a shirt that had been mended with magic for two years too many and now had finally lost too much of itself to keep together, fraying completely apart in an instant. Eyes and mouths and limbs and organs spilled out horribly everywhere, a rotting wave of flesh pouring out like a torrent over the floor of the corridor and sloshing over my feet and my legs like a wave while I screamed again, in pure unadulterated horror this time. A single grotesque contorted body at the center bubbled up to the surface for a moment, in a fetal curl—just like the one I’d seen in the maw-mouth that I’d killed in the library. And then even that was coming apart too, disintegrating and sinking into the mass of corpse matter.