A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift by Kate Griffin Page A

ringing silence I heard the wailing of car alarms, burglar alarms from the houses around, the screaming of people, the flapping of terrified pigeons, the running of feet. And the grinding mechanism of the lift, rising up from the ground floor.
     
I shouted, “They’re coming upstairs for us!”
     
“Bedroom,” came the shrill sound of the warlock. “There’s a fire escape.”
     
“If they’ve got any brains, they’ll come up that too,” muttered the fortune-teller.
     
“You want to take chances?”
     
“Some help here, please?” came the biker’s voice.
     
I crawled on my belly round the back of the sofa. My fingers dipped into sticky blood mingling with wine; my elbows crunched on broken glass.
     
Behind the sofa was indeed the lady in jeans, with the biker, breathless, face spattered with blood but not his own, and what was left of Sinclair, wheezing desperately, the folders clutched to several holes in his chest and belly. Even though he was a large man, the bullets had penetrated well enough; and as he breathed, he sweated, he bled, he stank of salt and urine and death, as if his whole body was unclenching at once, every cell letting out everything within it, chemicals, blood, fluid, life and all.
     
The motorbiker was struggling to hold him up. “Can you do anything?” he hissed.
     
“Come on!” shrieked the fortune-teller. “They’re coming!”
     
The warlock glanced at Sinclair with a brief look of pity, but kept moving.
     
“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit.”
     
I pulled back the front of his jacket and there were even more holes. The entire shape of his body was distorted, as if he was sand pocked by tiny meteors, and bent into the odd dips and curves of impact.
     
“Do something!” demanded the biker.
     
“I can’t just fix this!” I retorted angrily.
     
“Fucking sorcerer!” he roared.
     
I heard the ping of the lift door in the hall. “Move,” we hissed. “Get him to the back escape.”
     
“It’ll be watched,” said the woman sharply.
     
“Then fight!” we replied. “Get him out of here now.”
     
They didn’t bother to ask questions. The woman snatched up the bloody folders and gracelessly stuck them down the back of her trousers, the tops protruding from behind the belt. With an almighty grunt she helped the biker raise up Sinclair’s great bulk, an arm over each of their shoulders, and started dragging him towards the back door.
     
I crouched behind the sofa and rummaged frantically in my satchel. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside and, as our fingers closed over the first can of spray-paint, a foot kicked open the remnants of the door. White torches swept across the room, dazzling us, if only for a second.
     
We stood, letting the world move slowly around us. We stretched out our left hand and pinched out the light on those torches, breaking the glass of their bulbs at our will. With our other hand we threw the spray-paint can at the door and, as it bounced off the shoulder of the first man through it, we pinched that too, and turned our back.
     
The can exploded with the bang of a firecracker, sending out a shower of blood-red paint and twisted metal. The spray tickled the back of my neck as I ran towards the door, and a razor-sharp shard of metal nearly took my ear off as it spun past. In the doorway I heard screaming, and a familiar voice shouting, “Shoot, shoot, dammit!” San Khay, a friend of Bakker’s even when I’d been one too. I’d never met him until now but, even back then, back before all the things for which I couldn’t find a name, his star had been rising.
     
One of them got enough paint out of their eyes to find a trigger, but not enough to aim well. I dove through the bedroom door and slammed it shut, one hand already in my satchel for another can of paint. As the crowd of attackers in the other room got control of themselves again, I drew a ward across the door, big and exaggerated, stretching it over the walls in long strokes that eventually described a crude key. A foot