The pain was still there, but dimmer, when he opened his eyes. He could see a few little flames, so he guessed that either someone had come in to light the lamps, or hell was a lot less ferocious than he'd been led to believe. 

The flames blurred in his lashes and then resolved themselves into bright candle-wicks in clay pots. They were diya lamps. And there was moonlight too – not leaf-patterned as it had been at the Academy, but filtered through intricate lattice-work windows.

"This is the second time you've stumbled in here covered in blood," said a voice. "I had the measure of you the first time we met, didn't I? Your blood doesn't like to stay in your veins. It likes to get out and see the world."

Ohyesohyesohyesohyes.

He looked up, too impatient to wait for his vision to clear, and saw a smudge of darkness and golden brown that was wonderful enough without focus. He had often woken up like this – just with the blurred impression of her skin and hair – and had settled back down to sleep knowing he was exactly where he ought to be.

She was seated at the jigsaw table, wearing a fashionable coat and hat, as if she was just on her way out and couldn't stop for long. The same was probably true of him.

He got up, clumsy with eagerness, and sat down opposite her while she scrutinized the puzzle in front of them. There were lots of things he wanted to say – things he should probably take the opportunity to say before it was too late – but he was frightened she would run and leave him to face his last few minutes in here alone.

"So I haven't been entirely honest with you," she said, keeping her eyes on the jigsaw-table. She seemed determined not to sound apologetic, even as she apologized, because there was a tense, businesslike edge to her voice. "I told you I couldn't put the pieces together in your absence, do you remember? Well, that's not true. I just didn't want you to see the finished picture."

Jack looked down and realized for the first time that the jigsaw puzzle on the table was nearly complete. It was the familiar image of her dead body on the steps of the Turl Street Music Rooms, the red sweep of her skirts flowing down the marble and pooling with her blood on the pavement below. Red and white and a little glimpse of blue from the forget-me-not posy pinned to her bodice – it echoed the flag in the forecourt above her. But there was a gap at the top of the stairs where the pieces hadn't been assembled, and there were no loose pieces hanging about on the tabletop. Were they missing, or had she hidden them?

He shrugged, and felt the distant ache of his cuts begin to stir. "It's all right," he said. "I was lying too, when I said I couldn't keep my progress. It looks as though neither of us wanted the puzzle finished. I thought you'd have no reason to come back if it was complete."

She gave a stiff nod, but she probably wasn't listening, because he was telling her how much he'd wanted her to stay, and she wasn't bolting for the door. 

She motioned down at the puzzle and said, "It's from your memory. At first, I thought it was just here to torment you – or both of us – but now I think your memory was trying to tell you something. So I have to tell you before it does, if that makes sense."

Suddenly, Jack leaned forwards and had to fight hard to keep himself from folding up over the table, as another throb of pain went through him. He was running out of time. He didn't care what was at the top of the steps. He only cared about what had been at the bottom of them.

"I'm sorry, can I go first?" he said, with an aborted grab for her hand. "I'm fairly sure I'm dying, and I don't know how much time I have left."

Her mouth became that perfect little 'o' he had first seen on the hills of Edinburgh, the last time he'd been dying. "What?"

"It's a long story," he said. "No, actually, it's a short story. Your French girl found me and took the bracelet off, and my flesh remembered, just like you said." He waved a hand. "But that's not important-"

Ellini raised her own hand to her mouth. "Oh god."

"It's all right-"

"It's my fault," she breathed.

"No, no, no, no," he said, reaching for her hand once again, and once again thinking better of it. "It's my fault, remember? I'm the one who killed you."

He stopped and got up from the table, trying to assemble his thoughts. "And it's not – look, don't get me wrong. If I could see you like this every night, it would be enough. Just like this – I wouldn't have to – I mean, we could just be chatting over a jigsaw-puzzle, avoiding eye-contact, for the rest of my life, and it would still be enough. But I can't see you every night and, in the day, I have to remember-"

"Oh god," she repeated, starting up from the table. He had never seen her so agitated. She was pressing her hand to her mouth so hard that her lips had gone white. "What are you saying?"

"W – I haven't said it yet, that's my point. You keep interrupting."

But she wasn't listening. She was pacing back and forth, one hand on her lips and the other clamped against her stomach. "Is it too late? Could you save yourself if you wanted to?"

Jack sighed. "I don't want to, that's the bit I've already said." There was no being romantic with this woman. 

"Would it make any difference if – if I was alive?"

Jack went very still. "You're teasing me," he said. "No, teasing is too nice a word for it."

She didn't say anything. She just stood there looking wretched, as if she couldn't go on but she'd come too far to go back.

And that was worse than protests or excuses. It was more convincing than any argument she could have come up with. Suddenly – painfully – a little ember of something sank down into his stomach and burned there.

He felt his way back to the table and very carefully sat down. A strange, cold feeling was spreading over him. He started to remember odd things, like the post-mortem report he hadn't dared to look at, the absence of her body in the mortuary that night, the glowing spot above Elsie's breast-bone, and Lord Elsmere's strange insistence that she was alive and had been spotted in Lambeth with a well-dressed, handsome man.

"Would it make a difference?" she asked quietly.

"Would it make a difference?"

The little ember was a conflagration now. He could feel it scorching the back of his throat. God, what was that feeling? Panic? Terror? Anger? Hope?

Not hope, surely. He'd been through too much for hope. 

And yet he couldn't sit still. He couldn't shut his eyes – not while she was there in front of him, hoarding the answers to all his questions. 

He stood up so suddenly that he knocked into the table and almost sent the jigsaw flying. "I don't need to know how," he said, his voice croaky and raw. "I'll find out how. I don't even need you to tell me where you are, I can find that out too. I can do anything, just so long as you tell me that it's real. I would like to know it's – just tell me you're alive. Can you do that?"

She gave him a sad, steady look and said, "You'll wish I wasn't."

Jack burst out laughing. The audacity of this woman, to not even tell him that! And yet the audacity made him so happy. He would have thought he was dreaming if she hadn't been so exasperating. 

Was there a way to save himself, he wondered? Could he somehow drag himself back to consciousness and, from there, drag his body to an infirmary before he bled out? How long would he have? Anna's stabs had been random but enthusiastic. They'd be deep, even if she'd managed to miss all his organs and arteries. And there was no way she had, because there was an extraordinary concentration of them in the neck and chest.

Ellini reached into her coat. She was still shaking, but she seemed to have got a strangle-hold on composure. When her hand emerged from her pocket, it was holding the last few jigsaw pieces. She had already slotted them together. She laid them on the table and they clicked satisfyingly into place.

"I think you've always known," she said. "Or, anyway, you've always known where to start looking."

Jack leaned over the puzzle eagerly, expecting to see some kind of treasure-map on which her current location had been marked with an 'X'. But it was still a picture of the Turl Street Music Rooms. For a moment, he was hard-pressed to see what had been added, or why it was important.

The top of the steps had been the missing part, yes? But now it was filled in he could only see the top of the steps of the Turl Street Music Rooms. He'd walked past it every day. It had always looked like that.

Oh. But the curtains were usually closed. Come to think of it, they were always closed, even in the daytime. Now they were open, and the gas-lights were blazing inside. A figure was standing at the window, but the light behind him was too bright for Jack to see his face. Whoever he was, he was staring out at the steps, and Ellini's body, and the nervous knots of people that had formed on the pavement. Jack didn't remember seeing him the first time, but then his attention had been understandably riveted elsewhere. Now he wondered how long the man had been looking, and what the man might have seen.

"Who the hell is that?" he demanded.

Ellini didn't answer, but she pointed at the figure with shaky fingers. "Find this man and you'll find me." She mustered a smile, as if she knew how provoking she was being. "The last piece of this puzzle is the first piece of a new one, you see?"

"Yes, but who is it?" said Jack, hoping against hope that this wasn't the handsome, well-dressed man she had been spotted with.

"He's the new Orpheus," said Ellini. "Believe it or not, I think he'd like to meet the old one."

***

Shikari was the only one who doubled back. Mr Danvers was distressed but, like most honourable men, he was fatalistic. He protested all the way down the drive – he told the Inspector that Jack had been a good man and that it behooved us all to be compassionate. But he was already talking about him in the past tense. Some part of his mind had accepted that it had to be this way.

The little mother – Elsie, or whatever they called her – she wouldn't have accepted it, because she had an enquiring mind. She would have asked why it had to be this way. But she was upstairs in bed. You could always tell where she was by following the direction of Mr Danvers's gaze and, all the time he'd been pleading with the Inspector, he had been darting anxious glances up to the ivy-shrouded window on the second floor.

So Shikari was alone. This didn't worry him, because he was always alone, but he did wonder what even an army could do against a woman like that cockney French girl. Still, he had to try. He waited until the big, heavy-handed policeman was yelling at one of his underlings and then slipped soundlessly up the gravel drive.

No one saw him go. He was small and stealthy but he didn't even have to be anymore. Silence followed him around like a damp newspaper stuck to his shoe. Perhaps that was his demonic symptom. He knew his mother had been able to pass through solid objects, although when she got weak – and she had always been weak in the colonies, even before the bout of malaria that had killed her – she couldn't do it anymore. Perhaps his skill was to pass unnoticed through a press of people. Perhaps they were both half-ghosts.

Nobody was going to stop him going after Jack, anyway. He had never had a father or a hero. He wasn't sentimental. But he needed Jack Cade to live.

Silent on the gravel, Shikari hastened to the front door. He lurched to the side – into the wall of ivy that cloaked the building – when the cockney French woman opened it and swept past him. She was walking with balled-up fists and rapid strides, as if she was trying to run away without suffering the indignity of running.

He watched her retreating back until she was past the ring of gargoyles, and then re-opened the door and slipped inside.

He hadn't got far in the leaf-patterned moonlight before he tripped over the body. And when he did, he realized that his shoes were wet – the bottom of his trousers were wet – the whole room was wet. The floor of the entrance hall had been chequered black and white, but now there were no white squares visible for a radius of three feet around him. Everything was buried under black, shiny blood.

He stifled a cry of alarm and knelt down, getting his knees and sleeves wet too. Jack's clothes were sodden. The smart morning coat and Ascot tie were the same uniform black as the floor. He looked as though he'd been bleeding for hours – and for a moment, Shikari looked around stupidly, unable to believe that this was the same room he'd left five minutes before.

He rolled Jack onto his back and checked for signs of life, without really knowing what he was doing. But even if he did know – even if he'd had ten years of training at the finest medical academies – what could you do against that much blood? He was lucky not to drown in it.

The only thing he could think of was to get him out of here – away from the Inspector who practically vibrated with rage and the French woman who had managed to cram so much deadly injury into the space of five minutes. 

He hauled Jack onto his back, and then staggered – not so much from the weight as from the astonishment that there wasn't more weight. He was so light.

Shikari regained his balance and set out for the only place he knew – the only person he could think of who might possibly help him. With every step, his errand seemed more and more futile. Jack's blood was soaking into his clothes now. He was wet-through by the time he got to Holywell Street, and almost choking with despair. He hadn't even cried when his mother had died, but now his throat was constricted, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

One living hero, he thought. Please. Just let us have one living hero. He doesn't have to be perfect, just don't let him be tragic. Don't let him be another statue.

And he didn't know which building he was looking for. He'd only been there once, and they all looked the same, with their sash windows and pastel-coloured stucco. He weaved to and fro on the pavement, knocking Jack's unconscious body against doors and lintels, suddenly feeling the weight of the life he was carrying.

At the last house, he stumbled up the steps and hammered on the door, thinking that at least he could ask directions – and if they screamed, even more people would rush to their doors, and he would find the man he was looking for eventually.

But, just this once, one of the new-breeds had a bit of luck, because the door was opened by Sergei Petrescu. His shirt-sleeves were even rolled up, as if he was ready to operate.

He didn't gasp or cry out or ask stupid questions. He looked at Shikari, and then at the blood-soaked lump on his back, but there was no horror discernible behind the moustache. Perhaps all men looked like blood-soaked lumps to a doctor – just with greater or lesser degrees of bloodiness.

"Please help'm," said Shikari, the words coming out all garbled in his haste. "S'dying."

"No kidding," said Sergei. His eyes once again roved over the wet lump on his son's back. "Death by a thousand cuts, was it?"

"You can save 'im," said Shikari, staggering against the doorframe.

But Dr Petrescu took a step back, like a man who was being hunted. "There's too much damage."

Shikari shook his head. "You can save 'im."

The doctor took a longer look. It didn't seem to see any hopeful signs that it had missed the first time, but it took in the desperation on Shikari's face. He nodded, and stepped back from the door. "Bring him inside."

To be Continued...