Chapter 2

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"Praying for the devil?"

Josiah stood in the doorway, his great bulk filling the space and his head slightly bent as he watched me with those cool white eyes that saw far too much.

The hard wood floor was unforgiving under my knees where I knelt at Harper's bedside, my hands clasped tightly together.

Had I been praying?

Pleading, maybe. Begging, definitely.

Not that it seemed to do me any good to do either of those things. It had been a week since we had arrived at Josiah's door and still Harper hadn't regained consciousness. Ironically enough, I'd never been one for prayer, but right then I would have done just about anything to see his emerald eyes again. I would have done anything just to see that trademark Cain scowl he was so fond of sporting. A scowl or a smile seemed on equal par when I hadn't been party to either for seven agonising days.

Seven days. Seven days stuck in limbo. Seven days frozen in time. A lot could happen in seven days and yet nothing had changed within these walls. I was still Josiah's property, having failed to meet my side of the bargain, refusing to desert Harper when he needed me most and worst of all, Garrick was still lost to me. Maybe he was wandering those dark seas of Purgatory, maybe he was treading water amongst the other desperate, miserable souls, but I hadn't mustered the courage to return there since my encounter with the one being that could inject fear into little Lucius. The Smiling Man had offered me no threat, no malice, no ill-will, but I understood Lucius' fear completely. Like I said, a scowl and a smile could be on equal par.

I stood up abruptly, still feeling the imprint of the floorboards on my knees and pulled the scratchy wool blanket up around Harper's chest, tucking it in under the thin mattress, even though it didn't really need adjusting. My ineffectual nursing techniques were pointless. I knew it. Josiah knew it. And all the while, I could feel the weight of his stare upon me but I refused to be baited by him. I knew he was amused by my need to care for Harper, amused by my wasted efforts to revive him; maybe he was even amused by my pain. Well, whatever it was, I didn't want Josiah here, not in this room, not where Harper lay. His presence felt intrusive, as if he was invading our space, despite the fact this whole building belonged to him, as so apparently, did I.

The building that Josiah called home was an old derelict Baptist Chapel in Holborn, barely a stone's throw away from the busy Southampton Row. If it hadn't felt so much like a prison, I think I would have loved this place, for it reminded me of the old Whitechapel asylum, with its beautiful decay and decadent dilapidation. It had that old-building smell about it, an aroma at which most people would no doubt wrinkle their noses, and yet I couldn't help but feel wholly comforted by it. To me, it was a sweet, pungent mix of damp and old brick, infused with heady undertones of incense and candle wax. White church candles of varying shape and size could be found in each room, many molten right down to their base and creating silky sculptures out of the wax that had dripped down and hardened onto every surface, every windowsill, fireplace, table and shelf.

Great splashes of graffiti scarred the puckered walls and cracked tiled floors. Where many would have found it highly offensive to see the tags and crudely-drawn cartoonish images emblazoned across the interior of a supposed house of God, I felt it added a certain something. Each brightly-coloured scrawl was like a tattoo, meaningless to everyone else who passed through these rooms, but a moment in time that had meant something to the person who had inscribed it here. I liked to trace my fingers over each marking, just as I did over the inked patterns on Harper's skin. It felt real, something tangible I could focus on, even when everything else around me seemed to be crumbling faster than the walls of the chapel itself.

The Chapel was made of two parts: the old Baptist Union Headquarters that had formed much of the west side of the building and which had been mostly destroyed during the Second World War and the chapel itself and its adjoining tower. When Josiah had first given me the grand tour of his humble and derelict abode, he'd marked both the old HQ and the tower as no-go areas. "Unless of course, you fancy bringing the roof down on that pretty little head of yours," he'd remarked with a wry grin. "And we wouldn't want that, would we?

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