The Devil You Know

So I climbed the companionway steps to the middle deck and kept on going to the top. The crowbar was reassuringly heavy in my hands, but I wasn’t pinning much of my faith to it. I was counting off the seconds in my mind, and forty had gone by already. I could see Scrub up ahead of me, still contemplating the iconic chimneys of the Battersea Power Station.

I took a few quiet steps toward him, the crowbar raised in my hand. Then, when I was about ten feet away, I let my foot fall heavily on the deck. The big man turned and saw me.

“You don’t look any prettier by moonlight, Tinkerbell,” I said.

Scrub bared his teeth and growled. I think that meant that he was happy to see me. He lifted his elbows off the rail and came up to his full height, which was every bit as scary as I remembered it being.

“Castor,” he said, spitting out the word.

I didn’t answer. I just backed away, the look of terror on my face not at all difficult to assume. Scrub made a lunge, and that was nearly it for me. He was a hell of a lot faster than I would have expected, and if I’d gone backward, he would have had me. I jumped to the side instead and vaulted over the rail onto the middle deck.

It was too dark for acrobatics. I landed in a sprawl and scrambled up again as Scrub came charging down the companionway steps. He’d cut me off from the gangway now, so I stepped up onto one of the scuppers and made another death-defying leap down onto the wooden walkway below. The crowbar was still in my hand, and as an added bonus, I managed to avoid breaking my leg with it.

Scrub came down the gangway at his leisure. He had me trapped in the little dead-end section aft of the Mercedes, where there was nowhere to go but down.

“You little fucker,” he burred deep in his throat. Ninety seconds gone.

I took a few experimental swipes with the crowbar, making the air whistle in a way that I hoped was intimidating. But Scrub just laughed and started to lumber down the walkway toward me. “I wish you’d stuck with the whistle,” he said, smirking horribly. “I was looking forward to jamming it down your fucking throat.”

I backed away, dipping my free hand into my pocket. “Scrub,” I warned him, “I’ve got a secret weapon. Coincidentally, it’s behind you.”

He ignored that and just kept coming toward me. I was hoping that the crowbar might give him a moment’s pause, but he must have been threatened by bigger men than me and had probably eaten them for breakfast. (I really wish some other metaphor had occurred to me.) I brought my hand out of my pocket; the metal arc across my knuckles flashed bright in the light of the streetlamp. Scrub’s eyes went to it—not scared or even wary, but mildly curious.

“It’s silver,” I said. “You know what silver does to your kind. Keep your distance.”

Scrub shrugged massively. One of his huge hands reached out toward me, fingers spread wide. Out of options, I blocked and jabbed at him with the cuff. The metal grazed the skin of his wrist, and he flinched, feeling the pain. He hesitated, then took a step back. I did, too, taking advantage of that moment’s respite to shift my balance. That was when he charged me.

It was like a bull’s charge—no finesse, but lots and lots of momentum. His forearm hit me first, and it was rising, with all his weight behind it. That offhand, almost negligent swipe lifted me off the walkway and threw me ten feet through the air. I came down on my back at the very end of the planking, my head over the water and all the breath slammed out of me in one jarring gasp.

I tensed myself to roll aside, but Scrub was on me before I could move. His foot came down on my chest, pinning me to the ground and sending a jolt of electric pain through my stressed ribs. He glared down at me; one hand fumbled in his jacket pocket and came out with a knife. It would almost have counted as a sword in anybody else’s hands: a thick-bladed dirk with a recurved tip. He bent from the waist, caught a handful of my lapels in his other hand, and hauled me half upright. The edge of the blade touched my cheek.

“I am fucking gonna love this,” Scrub rasped.

One hundred and twenty.

The first blast of music split the night. Actually, “music” is far too generous a word for it; it was a mauling shriek like the sound a dying cat might make. It was a whistle playing three octaves above middle C. Scrub stiffened, a look of wonder and dismay crossing his face. Still with his foot planted on me, he swiveled to look for the source of the sound. But we were alone on the walkway; no piper, pied or otherwise, hove into sight.

The whistle modulated through three slurred discords, dropping from screeching treble to skirling bass. There was no tune, just burst after burst of raw noise hacked into a barely perceptible pattern. It made strange shifts from major to minor, from key to ham-fisted key. It polluted the night with its imperfection.