Chapter 11

I just want someone to talk to
And a little of that human touch
Human Touch, Bruce Springsteen

Cambridge, Essex, December 2^nd

Exhaustion sapped at Sophie's strength and concentration, a black aura dimming the edge of her vision, and still Gabriel writhed on the bed before her. She'd had to close the window when the rain started around midnight, but hadn't dared let the heat into the room, and found herself tugging the coat tighter as a chill breeze crept in under her shirt.

"You up already?" Caerys asked from the doorway, her hair still ruffled with sleep and the cold of the room bringing goose-bumps to her exposed arms.

"Not already." She managed a tight smile, for a moment, then turned away as the cold brought other reactions from Caerys' body. "Still."

"Give me a minute to get dressed and I'll take a turn watching him." She offered, quietly, after a pause. "You must be exhausted."

"You're not... I'm..." Sophie struggled for a moment against the tiredness to find a nice way to phrase it, until Caerys cut her off.

"Is being a doctor really helping at the moment?" she asked, quietly. "I'll keep an eye on him, and call you if he does anything except moan, sweat and roll around." Sophie tried to turn a scornful eye on her, but she wasn't having any of it, crouching down to stare at her intently. "When something significant does happen, you'll want to be ready, and right now you aren't."

"This is what we have nurses for, isn't it?" Sophie finally asked, of no-one in particular, and Caerys managed a slight laugh.

"Christophe's in the double-bedroom opposite the top of the stairs, I put your things in there." Caerys explained, as she stood up. "I'll be back in a minute."

Sophie struggled to her feet, walking quietly back and forth across the room a few times to rid herself of the pins and needles sensation in her legs, trying to remember what had happened when they'd arrived, but it was all a blur and she realised that Caerys had done just about everything.

"Right, you," Caerys entered, still brushing the tangles out of her hair, "off to bed and try to actually get some sleep."

"Merci." Sophie whispered, unwrapping the coat from around her shoulders and passing it over. "Thank you, for everything last night."

"I was at a loose end." She shrugged, settling the coat into place. "You were busy, he was... incapacitated. Someone had to settle things in."

"Not just that, though... before we left."

"I thought we weren't going to talk about that any more."

"We have to. I want to."

"Later, then." Caerys cut her off. "When you've had some sleep."

"Yes, later." Sophie stopped at the door. "He's been writhing more, and getting hotter, but for shorter periods, closer together. Its down to about ten minutes in every thirty, now."

"Right, when was the last one?"

"About five minutes before you came in."

"Then I have time to settle in. And you have time to get to bed."

"I don't know if it's worth it." Sophie admitted. "I don't think I'll be able to sleep."

"You look like it shouldn't be hard."

"That bad?"

"Not bad, just tired." Caerys assured her. "If you're going to stay, though..." She held the coat open shuffling across on the seat to give her space.

For a while they sat in silence, sharing warmth and quiet companionship until, just as Caerys was beginning to think Sophie had finally slipped off to sleep, she spoke.

"How did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"The door, back... back there. The door burst open when Gavin kicked it. Lightning and flames... was that in the book?"

"That wasn't me." Caerys admitted, after a moment. "That was... I'm not sure if it was him, or if it was the knife."

"The knife?"

"Maybe both..." she reached into the pocket of the oversized coat and drew the blade out, wiping a few specks of dirt from the surface. "I didn't notice it at first, it's a much different shade, but it glows like the cards do. Like the book does."

"What does it do?"

"I think... One of them was throwing fireballs around, and I know there was electricity somewhere. I think the knife... stole those. Marduk imbued the powers into his followers; he's a warrior demon, so those abilities fall within his realm. So then when Gavin used the knife it stripped those powers out of them and into him..."

"You don't sound sure of that?"

"Well, it's just... I didn't know that demon powers could be transferred like that, and I've been around them my whole life." "It's probably not something you'd want to make public." Sophie decided after a moment's thought. "So... one was fire, one was lightning... what was the third?"

"The one with the whip. That wasn't... he wasn't holding it, it was like his arm became the whip. I think that's what all the spines and hairs and things are on Gavin..."

"Will he get control of it?"

"I don't know." Caerys admitted, with a shrug. "I don't know how the knife works, I don't know what Gavin is. At least we hurt him. Marduk, I mean."

"We did?" Sophie thought back for a moment. "He... you think we did that?"

"Yeah, when Gavin stabbed the first one with the knife — in the chest — Marduk started bleeding from the chest. Then in the face and in the head, two more wounds."

"Because he invested that power in his... whatever they were."

"Golems." Caerys pointed towards the book where it rested on the table. "I didn't know that before... there are golems and homunculi — homunculi are real people with demon powers invested in them — like Marduk says he invested his healing ability in Gavin."

"I... how did you remember all this, I was just panicking."

"I don't know. I guess I'm... not numb to it, but it's a different part of my head that's watching what's happening to the one that's screaming about it."

"So what are golems then?"

"Golems are animated bodies, invested with power that gives them a purpose. Once Gavin — or the knife — stripped that power away, they died again."

"Is it..." Sophie hesitated, leaning forward a little out of the coat's warmth.

"I think it's the knife." Caerys answered the unasked question. "It might be him, I can't be certain it isn't, but... I think it's the knife." The silence gathered again, wrapping around them for a while until Sophie's head began to sink. "Go on." Caerys nudged her, gently, back to wakefulness. "Go to bed."

"I think I will." She decided, with a slight smile. "Thank you, for this... I feel better."

"Good." Caerys' smile followed her out, and then faltered as soon as she was out of sight. "I wish I felt better for it. I wish I felt as confident as I hope that sounded..."

Cambridge, Essex, December 3^rd

Gavin woke slowly, trying to open his eyes and finding one of them swollen almost shut, his face aching and bruised. He racked his memory, futilely, for several minutes trying to recall the details of the fight that had left him like this; nothing came to him, and he drifted for a while, pained and weary.

Finally, at the distant sound of conversation, he forced himself to roll on the bed, feeling pain across his torso as it shifted on the coarse cloth of the sheets. Spines dug into the mattress, pressing against his skin, and he forced himself to push up off the bed and turn to face the door.

"Monsieur Gavin?" a quiet voice asked, and Gavin looked over to focus on the wide-eyed stare of Christophe sat on the chair in the corner of the room.

"Bon matin, Christophe." he managed a weary smile which just made the boy shrink back a little further. "Oú est ta mére?"

"Dans la cuisine." He pointed, trembling, and Gavin struggled to his feet at the second attempt.

"Comment ça-va, Christophe?" he asked, at the door.

"Ca-va bien, merci." the boy replied, then forced himself to follow Gavin down the hallway to where he found the full-length mirror at the top of the stairs. "Monsieur Gavin... est-tu bien?"

Gavin stared at the twisted, gnarled body in the mirror. Spines jutted through the ragged cloth of what he'd been wearing, matted with coarse, twisted hair that sprouted from several irregular patches across his body. Jutting, jagged, blade-like bone fragments jutted along the outside of his forearms and shins, and his eyes glittered red with their own light below the bowed, hunched lump on his back that showed over his shoulder.

It was the folds and ripples of the flesh of his face that caught his attention, though: raw and weeping, hanging over one eye, obscuring the other with a protrusion from his cheek that looked as though it were about to burst.

"Je ne sais pas, Christophe." he admitted, with a sigh.

"Gavin?" Caerys, crossing the foot of the stairs looked up at him, paling visibly as he turned to face her.

"How long has it been like this?" he asked, wheezing a little as the energy seemed to drain from him.

"I don't know." She hurried up towards him, seeing him start to falter. "An hour ago you looked normal. Half and hour ago you were covered in tiny spines, like a porcupine. It changes."

"But now I'm awake." His stomach rumbled, urgently.

"And hungry. I don't know if that's a good sign or not. Get back to bed, I'll bring you something."

"Don't you have to check with Doctor Sophie?" he asked. His voice was expressive enough to convey the self-mockery, which was good because the grin completely failed to show through the distorted visage.

"She's..." Caerys looked behind her, but Gavin couldn't tell which room her attention was aimed at. "This has her completely spooked, Gavin." She turned her attention back to him, and he almost laughed when he saw the increase in her concern now that she was thinking about the Doctor and not him. "As far as she's concerned you should be dead."

"She's right." Gavin admitted, weaving his way away to the bedroom again. "I should be."

"You're pulling through it, though." Caerys belatedly noted the defeat in his tone, but he couldn't summon the energy to cast a withering glance back in her direction and collapsed onto the edge of the bed as another series of spasms tore through him.

Caerys hurried through the kitchen, grasping a loaf and some of the grilled chicken they'd found in the freezer — the only food they'd had all day — and headed back out past the startled Sophie. "He's awake." She managed to point out, pausing at the door. "Could you bring some coffee?"

"Mais oui!" Sophie stumbled over her chair getting up. "Of course."

By the time Caerys reached the bedroom, Christophe was back in his seat, and Gavin was writhing once more on the bed. The coarse hair was retracting back in from wherever it had come, and most of the swelling seemed to be reducing, but long, jagged, talons were sprouting from the ends of his fingers, seeping and weeping a grey-green ichor as they came.

"What is that?" Sophie leant closer, but Caerys pulled her back as the sheet started to gently smoke where the fluid dripped.

"Acid, apparently. Poison of some sort, maybe. Marduk's slain many demons in his time, I don't know all the powers he's taken..."

"Taken powers?" Sophie slumped onto the floor beside Caerys, putting the coffee pot down with a thump that sent the contents sloshing over the sides. "I don't understand."

They both looked, briefly, as Gavin's groans grew a little louder for a moment, but he settled back, and Caerys took up the conversation.

"Each demon has powers. When one demon kills another they can... absorb them, adopt them as their own. Or, they can go through magical rituals that imbue one with the power of another. Once, a long time ago, they used to use this as a sort of society — you pledged loyalty by sharing your power with someone superior, and they promised to look after you.

"Eventually, through wars and whatever else, the powers were condensed into a dozen or so individuals. They shared what they needed to to arm their soldiers and achieve their goals. A few independents remained, but they're the exceptions rather than the rules: Absolom's one, he can become invisible..."

"Why have you never told us any of this?" Sophie demanded, finally sputtering to life. "You said you didn't understand how this had happened."

"Would you have believed me?" Caerys turned back to her, bluntly. "With time, you might just have brought yourself to the point where you'd think I'd been brainwashed. He wouldn't believe me. I've never known people to be able to do it — demons do it to each other."

Despite the pain, Gabriel listened, knowing it for the truth. He'd sought out explanations for everything — some variant of Stockholm syndrome for the awe in which she held her father, genetic experimentation and exotic military experiments involving drug therapies. Even Camael's amulet, still warm against his chest, was supposedly some high-tech jamming device.

And some of that was actually part of the truth, but wasn't all of the truth. The greatest tracking devices in the world couldn't have followed them the way they'd travelled, but at each stop someone had found them. Genetics and narcotics could just about explain some of the soldiers they'd faced, even the 'half-trolls' in the forest.

His father's three henchmen, though, had been something different. Discharging lightning and fire might have been exotic disguised weapons, but that didn't ring true, and the rubbery, fleshy whip that had struck hadn't been tanned leather, it had been flesh and blood; blood that sprayed when he'd cut with the knife.

The knife. That was the key to the revelation. He'd wielded it like any other blade, but it hadn't just cut; it stole something from whatever it hit, drew out soul, or spirit, or some other nameless something, and it had flooded him with it. Deep in the pit of his stomach, somehow beyond just being inside, he'd felt it gather and boil and rage and then flood through him like every adrenaline burst he'd ever had rolled into one.

His heart had pounded, his senses exploded and for a moment he'd been beyond pain or suffering or hurt; for a moment he'd been immortal, and through all the pain and changes that had followed, it was the memory of that moment now lost that weighed heavily on him; because he knew it was never coming back again.

Cambridge, Essex, December 4^th

Somewhere down in the hallway, the clock gently ticked the minutes away, the last echoes of the midnight chime fading as Caerys lifted the lid from the box.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Sophie asked, leaning over the edge of the bed to stare at the flat board Caerys had laid out on the floor.

"What else can we do?" she replied, not looking up, upending the box. "They aren't powerful in the same way as the knife, or the book, but they are powerful." She caressed the decorously inlaid backs, the gentle patterns of crushed stones and delicate enamels. Her first impression had been that they were thick card, but closer inspection showed they were something more like ivory; impossibly thin, but still supple, and the imagery on the faces was exquisite.

"What will you do with them?" Sophie finally asked, quietly, breaking Caerys out of her protracted examination of the first card.

"Divine." she replied, as though it were obvious.

"I mean... when I was a young girl, we used to go to the fortune teller at the travelling shows — sometimes she would tell our own futures, sometimes just a general future... different things. What are you going to look for?"

"Cut the cards." Caerys held out the deck with a faint smile, and Sophie dutifully separated the cards into two piles. "As many times as you like." Three more piles, and then Sophie handed the set back gently, reverently almost. "Let's look at you."

"NO!" Sophie squeaked, with a faint smile, but saw that Caerys wasn't merely being playful. "Why me?"

"You're an independent witness to let me know if I can truly access the power in the cards. If I did me I'd influence my own reading, and Gavin's in no fit state to shuffle."

Taking the pack in one hand, calming herself, Caerys chose the pattern for the cards from somewhere deep in her memories; an image of one of the layouts her mother had used, though she'd never had the chance to formally teach her a great deal. Dealing without looking, she placed the cards slowly, feeling the enchantment slowly build through the movements, a mesh of power that followed the path of the deck.

She didn't deal in any fixed order, placing the cards unseen wherever they felt comfortable within the pattern, even passing one or two over because she somehow knew they didn't belong, all the time giving a quiet commentary to Sophie.

"This is you, at the centre, the querent." She explained, laying down a card showing two dogs baying at the moon. "Then we've got your past, here, and the good and the bad in it." She laid three cards in a line to the left of the first, and Sophie started to be drawn into the images on the cards, half-listening as Caerys continued.

"These are the future, what you need from it and what you must avoid." Three more cards flicked down with a gentle noise, a cluster of chalices, a man at a table, and a single sword. "This is your salvation, and how you can come to it, and this is your damnation and how you can come to that."

"This isn't how I remember it at the fairs." Sophie admitted, looking a little closer at her damnation, a young man bearing a cup.

"We aren't out for some candy-floss and a pony ride, are we?" Caerys noted, laying three more cards down. "Your spirit; a warning, a defining trait and something you need to cultivate."

"Lots of chalices." Sophie observed, seeing the two and five. "And a lion wrestler." She reached out to turn one of the cards round.

"Leave it."

"It's upside down." Sophie pointed out, as Caerys laid down the last three cards and put the deck aside.

"That has a meaning of its own." She noted. "And these three are your body, a warning, a trait and something you should cultivate."

Sophie looked over the array before her, small details and curiosities catching her attention as she drifted, and Caerys settled herself to look over the whole thing. "So... what does it mean?"

"Run and hide, now." Caerys intoned, dramatically, unable to keep the smile from creeping across her face.

"WHAT!" Caerys' giggle drew a half-hearted frown.

"Quietly, Soph..." Caerys muttered. "Look, you're The Moon, romantic but confused, conflicted inside. Here's how you see yourself, the Knight of Cups; just arrived, a new beginning, idealistic and looking for challenges to overcome. Others see you like this, the Queen of Cups..."

"That's good, then, that they're close together — it means I think almost the same thing about me as everyone else."

"Well, in a way." Caerys admitted. "It speaks of a sort of honesty — you portray yourself to others as you see yourself; it is in conflict with The Moon, but then just about everything is, the Moon represents conflict. The Queen of Cups is honest, trusted and wise, almost a mother-figure."

"So what's the significance of the cups? You said all of the details have meaning."

"Cups represent emotions, creativity, happiness and are often associated with Pisces, Cancer and Scorpio."

"Oh. Right."

"Shall I carry on."

"Oh, yes, please. Sorry."

"That's OK. Let's see... you need the Ten of Cups — a family — to achieve your future which is the Magician — the querent grown in wisdom and balance, in possession of more talents and faculties, ready to face the oncoming challenge. However, you need to avoid this, the Ace of Swords inverted, which is being confused inside, bottling things up and not communicating.

"This comes from your past, the nine of cups here."

"Upside down again... that's a bad thing, isn't it?"

"It depends. It's not bad in and of itself, it just is — it can have bad implications, it can have good implications. The cast is read as a whole, and things relate to each other more than they have individual meaning."

"So how can you read them one at a time, then?"

"I can't, at the moment, because someone keeps interrupting." Her smile took the bite out of the words, and Sophie mimed zipping her mouth shut. "Good. Now, you come here, primarily, from loss through a mistake, or a misplaced loyalty."