Page 44 of The Light Within

He stepped back, blinking back the hot prickles behind his own eyes.

Rummaging around in her bag again, she brought out a scrap of paper and scribbled a phone number on it. “You’ll have to come round before you go back. And your…friend,of course. Julien, wasn’t it?” She beamed at Julien, the smile a touch too bright, proving something.

Julien had been the quietest Cinn had ever known him to be in the history of their entire existence together. It was unsettling. Creepy, in fact.

He could only imagine how much it was paining him.

An overwhelming urge to kiss him, fiercely, struck Cinn. But he tucked it away for later.

Cinn’s mother turned her smile back towards him. It was at once both heartbreakingly familiar and strangely foreign, as if time had reshaped it into something different. Something new.

“It was so good—”

An intense wail sounded from just outside the café. Next came gasps of shock, then a flurry of hushed, concerned murmurs.

They stepped back into the lobby, stopping dead at the sight that was causing the commotion: three people staggering towards the reception desk, surrounded by a growing audience that had cleared a wide semicircle around them. A young woman clutched her side, her fingers slick with blood from a deep wound, while an older man limped beside her,his arm hanging at an unnatural angle. The third, a teenage boy, had a gash across his face, his eyes wide with terror as he stumbled forward.

He looked towards the hospital staff. “Help!”

The less-than-helpful receptionist from earlier stood up from her desk. “The emergency department is—”

“Help,” the teenager repeated, falling to both knees and clutching his stomach. Blood pooled around his fingers.

“I’ll go see who I can find,” Cinn’s mother said, disappearing into the crowd.

Julien snaked an arm around Cinn’s, tugging him to close the space between them.

A knot formed in Cinn’s stomach, one that grew tighter with every passing second.

“Hey!” Darcy’s face, with Elliot standing close behind, appeared beside them. “We saw these three from across the road. The old man was screaming about invisible demons throwing people about. Pretty loudly.”

Elliot pushed past the throng, beelining straight towards the teenager who’d now half-collapsed sideways onto the floor. He knelt down, gently moving his hands away from the wound.

A female doctor shoved Elliot away with force. “What are you doing?” she snapped, before barking orders to several staff just behind them. Three stretchers were placed on the floor. The receptionist barked that the crowd ‘move along please’, giving Cinn in particular a pointed look. He had a new enemy for life, apparently.

Wild-eyed, Elliot lowered his voice to hiss, “I knew it. His wound has umbra contaminant in it.”

“What?” asked Cinn, but as he said it, his mind flickered back to the umbraphage attack they’d witnessed in Seville—the blackened veins of the officer who’d been treated by the paramedics, the tiny flecks of black ink that looked like they were swimming in his blood. Madame Sinclairhad said that it made the wounds difficult to close, poisoned them, and often gave their victims terrifying hallucinations and delusions.

The teenager let out a harrowing wail as a team of doctors marched him down a corridor, out of sight. Was this poor boy about to experience such a thing? Cinn was lucky his own encounter hadn’t resulted in that outcome. Then again, he had been imprisoned in some hellish version of the shadowrealm…

“Which direction did they come from?” Julien snapped, eyes darting to the hospital entrance, where the torrential downpour was intensifying—sheets of rain pounded the pavement, obscuring visibility and sending pedestrians scurrying for cover.

“The old guy was shouting about Westminster Bridge.” Water dripped from Elliot’s soaking wet curls. He hesitated. “I’m sure the alarm is sounding back at HQ, but it’ll take a while for them to get through the Baths. It’s Christmas Eve—skeleton staff only. Plus, we’ve got bare minimum gendarmes on shift, with the rest on call. Fuck!” He slammed his fist into a nearby column.

Cinn winced. This was an Elliot he’d never seen before—frantic, a raw, urgent energy dictating his actions.

Conflict passed over his troubled expression. “Look,” Elliot said, “Ihaveto go. Swore an oath, in fact. But as for you three…”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Julien snapped. “As if I’d let you go alone. That’s quite frankly insulting.”

Before Julien even considered ordering him and Darcy to stay put, Cinn caught her eye and suggested, “Darcy and I will come but stay way back.”

“That way, we can brief the gendarmerie as soon as they arrive,” Darcy added.

Julien’s lips curled into a thin line. He and Cinn entered a staring match, a silent battle of wills that Cinn refused to back down on.

“Fine,” Julien said through gritted teeth, storming towards the entrance. “Let’s go, then.”

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