Long Live the Queen (Book 5 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Twenty Three: Mightier

It was drizzling in the gardens of Trinity College – a fine spray that soaked into Sam's shirt and softened the earth around him until it oozed.

He was standing in a pit six feet deep, trying to negotiate his spade around a block of granite. The early layers had been easy and satisfying, especially as all the porters, bulldogs and dons had been standing around, seething at the intrusion and the damage done to their pristine croquet-lawn.

Officially, the city police had no jurisdiction within the colleges – officially, too, this was not police work, and he had no right to do it anywhere – but doors opened for the little mother, and not just the ones she conjured out of thin air.

Besides, Sam had all Jack's notes, his incriminating documents, his little secrets about the great and the good in Oxford. And the Master of Trinity had a penchant for cross-dressing. So he had seethed on the sidelines while Sam's spade bit into the turf.

Now Sam couldn't see the angry faces. Possibly, they had all gone indoors. Danvers and Elsie were still there, though, at the edge of the pit, sheltering under an umbrella.

When Sam looked up at them, he got an odd, vertiginous feeling, as though another, almost identical image had been overlaid on this: two figures standing under an umbrella, beside an open earthworks of some kind. The fit wasn't precise. The new figures were darker, taller, standing closer together. The edges didn't quite line up. Elsie and Danvers shone through them, overlapped them, peeped out behind them. It made his eyes ache.

"Have you hit stone?" said Elsie, leaning down, out of the shelter of the umbrella. "That should be it. He said it was under a granite slab."

"Wonderful," said Sam grimly. "And how do you propose to lift it?"

He didn't say 'How do you propose I lift it?' But he knew it would come to the same thing. Somehow, she could get round him. He preferred not to think it was the demon inside him standing up and saluting. She had said that the demon inside him was just as belligerent as he was – in fact, she didn't know who'd caught belligerence from whom.

"A crowbar, a hoist, and a few strong men would seem to be in order," said Alice Darwin. She smiled sweetly and added, "That is, if anybody's asking my opinion."

She had not stopped wearing mourning, in spite of the discovery that her husband was alive. This morning, her neck and chest flaunted a fabulous jet necklace. Or the jet necklace flaunted her neck and chest – Sam didn't know and didn't want to think about it.

He caught her eye, and then looked away again. They both felt ambivalent about being here, he knew that. Neither of them wanted to be a pre-ordained weapon, and neither of them wanted to kill anyone.

But they couldn't say so. Had the little mother cast a spell on them? Could she do that? Manda trusted her, and trusted that killing this sorceress was the right thing to do. That was a big part of why Sam hadn't stomped out of the door and told her to go back to hell. But why hadn't Alice?

He was adamant that he was still him – that no demon had been winding its tendrils into his personality these past three years. If he wanted to throttle people, it was because they were stupid, not because he was feeling the effects of demonic hunger. Besides, since Manda had said she would marry him, he'd been wanting to throttle people a lot less, and the demon had still been there.

No, he was himself. At any rate, when he was awake.

That was the problem – that was what opened up a second pit at his feet and threatened to swallow him this morning.

The demon had got him up in the middle of the night and walked his body to Headington Hill. How could he marry Manda – how could he lie next to her at night – knowing that that had happened?