910 AST
Llewellyn Wren had loved his puzzle books, dainty mysteries by little old Englishwomen in which murder was an infuriating
riddle. Allie had tried to read a Miss Marple once but gave up less than halfway through, couldn’t get into it. Christie didn’t
address the sort of mysteries she cared about, like why Theo, who was fearless and kind, had died a virgin while she lived
on, someone who got drunk and made out with women, someone who had to fake enjoying sex with her fiancé when she was sober.
Her own heart was the most perplexing mystery she could imagine; her own impulses frightened and bewildered her.
But now she wished she had stuck with Dame Agatha. She had to solve a locked-room mystery between now and midnight, which
was rushing at them at more than five hundred miles an hour. She had to figure out a way to kill Horation Matthews—a man significantly
more imposing and physically powerful than her—in his first-class seat without being seen or connected to him.
He could believe whatever he wanted, but Allie doubted a scrawny, deluded old man nailed to a cross in central Iowa was going
to help anyone. King Sorrow must’ve chortled at the idea. The dragon would view Jacob Weyland’s slow, miserable crucifixion
as an entertaining bonus. Maybe she was wrong. She wanted to be wrong. If belief could bring a dragon through from the Long
Dark, maybe belief could keep one there, at least for a while.
But she didn’t think she was wrong. The dragon had been hunting people off Colin’s Enemies List since 1990, five years now, and all of them had prayed for intercession, had suffered, bled, feared, and bargained with Jesus, Allah, and the stars.
It always ended in fire. Allie didn’t know how hard it would be to penetrate the scales slabbing King Sorrow’s body, but she was quite certain that devout prayer bounced right off them.
She was less certain about St. Helen’s Well, where Horation hoped to scrub his evil taint. It didn’t matter, though. He wasn’t
ever going to find out about St. Helen’s Well. He wasn’t even going to get to Heathrow. His life was going to end on this
flight. The only real question was whether Allie could end it before King Sorrow did. Before King Sorrow blasted him, and
all the rest of them, right out of the sky.
Horation was eighty pounds heavier than her, a foot taller, and looked as fit and healthy as an active-duty marine. She was
not confident she could kill him even if she had a gun . . . he might well take it away from her and club her to death with
it. She had one thing going for her, which was that he seemed to accept her as a possible confederate, rather than an adversary.
Two things going for her, actually: he viewed women as helpless, hapless creatures, rated them not much higher than children.
He might underestimate her.
She hadn’t a clue how to go at him, though. She wished for another glass of wine, wished to be drunker. Inspiration lay somewhere
just beyond a blood alcohol level of .12 percent. She was a little like a wine bottle herself now, every useful thought corked
up in the bottleneck between conscious thought and unconscious possibility.
The corkscrew, she thought, and remembered that silver dragon embossed on its handle.
“You’re drinking milk,” she said.
“Alcohol makes you weak.”
“Alcohol makes you drunk. Under the current circumstances, I say that’s better than being sober. Look, what if your priest
can’t protect you? What if King Sorrow cuts this plane in half at the stroke of midnight? Have you considered that?”
He lowered his head and thought it over. Then he said, “I put it in God’s hands. He is my sword and my shield.”
And as if to punctuate this line of thought, there was a stroke of lightning so bright, Allie thought it had struck the plane. The cabin became a blinding capsule of light, a negative image of itself.
Someone screamed. The plane seemed to fall, to drop straight down, maybe ten feet, before arresting its plunge. Allie cast
her gaze outside and there was a rent in the black thunderheads, and in the dying flare of lightning, King Sorrow was there.
The sight was like being struck by lightning itself. It was a thunderclap of wonderment and terror.
She did not see the King himself. The lightning ignited a cloud from within and projected his shadow in sharp relief against
a distant wall of churning pale vapor. It was impossible to guess his size. The shadow, though, was as big as the 747 itself.
That flash of brightness pinned his shadow in place for one instant, his great, bat-like wings lifted above the colossal mass
of his torso. Jaws of shadow gaped, as if he were screaming. Or laughing. His tail was a whip that went on forever, streaming
behind him, disappearing into the larger darkness.
Black clouds whipped by and he was gone.
A sound rose around them. It was almost like a mournful, wordless song, a sustained, quavering note of despair, a mix of screams
and moans, which was how Allie knew other people had seen the shadow too. The plane swam violently back and forth. Lights
flickered. Allie found herself on her feet, without realizing she had stood.
Only Horation seemed undisturbed. He hadn’t seen King Sorrow’s shadow, and she doubted he’d care if he had. All up and down
the cabin, passengers had thrown off their headphones and lifted their heads from pillows to gaze out in alarm. But Horation
took only a cursory glance toward the window.
“You want to know what I’ll do if the beast tears this plane in two?
” he said quietly. “I’ll die. That’s all.
I’ll die, and a few hundred people—people who blindly paid taxes to a government that would disarm them to neutralize and sterilize the white race—will die with me.
My brother is prepared to send a letter taking credit for the destruction of the plane.
If the wreckage is ever found, I’m sure no one will be able to tell the difference between dragon’s breath and high explosive.
” He let her take that in, then added, “But it won’t come to that.
Not if the prayers of a faithful man count for anything.
And if my faith wasn’t dangerous, the dragon never would’ve come after me in the first place.
” That maddening half smile was back on his face, and she thought whatever happened to the rest of them, it would almost be worth it to see King Sorrow plunge a claw through one of the portholes and rake that look off his kisser.
“I need a moment,” Allie said.
She reeled past him into the aisle. He didn’t stop her. No one saw her go. All the other passengers were gazing raptly into
the simmering darkness beyond their windows. She might never have been there at all.
The waist of the plane was as dark as a basement, and at first Allie didn’t see the gangly flight attendant, Albert Shook,
or the little blond flight attendant standing next to him. They didn’t see her, either, not at first. Mr. Shook had a phone
clenched between shoulder and ear and was using both hands to direct his colleague back toward economy.
“Keep them calm,” he was saying to her, “and make sure everyone has their shades down. Tell them the storm is keeping people
from sleeping. Reach right over and lower the fucking shades yourself, while you thank them for their cooperation. And if
anyone says they saw a—”
The blonde’s gaze darted sidelong and fell upon Allie. She squeezed Shook’s arm.
“Ma’am,” Shook said, looking around and smiling in a way that made her think of a dog baring his teeth. “We can’t have people
roaming the cabin right now. Your seat, please!”
“I’ll walk her back,” Van said, ducking through the curtain from economy. “I was just coming to check on her. She’s been fighting
airsickness the whole last hour. Either that or the thought of getting married to me is making her physically ill.”
Van offered the flight attendants a weak smile, gripped Allie’s elbow, and propelled her through the curtain into economy.
Twin strips of light ran down the aisle, casting a dim, golden glow about their ankles.
The rest of the cabin was in gloom. The strongest source of illumination was the movie, playing on a fold-down screen against the forward cabin wall.
Passengers stared toward the front of the plane with the terror of people who have been made to dig a pit and are now gazing up into rifle barrels.
She was hit with a sour milk stink, the reek of fresh vomit.
Van was right behind her, but when he tried to lead her back to their seats she held him where he was, in the dim little entryway
at the head of the cabin.
“He’s here,” she said, in a breathless hush. “Horation Matthews. Upstairs. I found him. We talked.” She considered this fact
with growing amazement. It seemed so astonishing, she had to repeat it: “We talked.”
Van’s features paled to the point of bloodlessness. “Why the fuck would you talk to him? We don’t want to have anything to do with him! The safest thing for us to do is stay the hell away from him.”
“No,” Allie said. “No, we can’t stay away from him. Oh, Van. We’re in trouble. So much trouble. Colin was right.”
Van shook his head. “The iguana has to protect us, that’s one of the rules.”
“He doesn’t. He left a loophole big enough to fly a dragon through. King Sorrow only has to protect us from any people who come after us. Not from himself. Not from a burning plane.”
“He told you if you were on the plane, no one but Horation needed to die.”
“Yeah. And it’s true. No one needs to die but Horation . . . as long as we kill him ourselves. Before midnight.” Not midnight. Before dragonedy o’clock, she thought.
Van seemed dazed, his bright eyes struggling to focus. “With what? How?”
“You have to go to the cockpit. Tell them to land the plane. Right now. I can’t do it. I smell like a wino.”
“Where are we supposed to land? We’re over the North Atlantic. I don’t think there’s anything down there except icebergs and
water a mile deep.”
She wished she had got Colin or Arthur on the phone.
Colin was a deft strategist, would’ve known how to stop the plane from taking off without putting himself at risk.
Logic puzzles didn’t puzzle him. Finding his way to the surest solution—in a single, confident stroke—was Colin’s primary personality trait.
Arthur wasn’t smart that way. He needed time to work things out; he got snarled up in the morality of things; he wanted to read a few books before he made up his mind.
Arthur tripped himself up with his regret and his doubts, whereas Colin never let his conscience get in the way of making a decision.
And yet for all that, Arthur had not just studied and written about English cathedrals.
He had built one himself, in his head, a cathedral of fact and history, language and art.
He had built it one block at a time, a stonemason of the mind.
Arthur would’ve read something, heard something in a seminar, translated something from twelfth-century Coptic that would illuminate a way out of the corner they were in.
No doubt the Copts had a lot of thoughts about preventing dragons from destroying jetliners.
But for herself, she had only ever been good at statistics and trying to make up for what her parents lost when they lost
Theo. Van knew the lyrics to every song the Stones had ever recorded but was utterly baffled by conundrums. Arthur had tried
that one about the goose, the fox, and the bag of beans on Van. Van wanted to know what kind of fox: “Redhead? Blond? I’m
partial to blondes.” His solution was to drown the goose, eat the beans, and sweetly lay the fox by the riverside.
The plane shimmied underfoot and Van lurched into her, then steadied himself.
“Let’s sit down,” he said. “I need to think. Christ, I might need to be sick. It was a bad idea to have so much wine.”
Allie thought again of Robin’s bottle of wine and that silver corkscrew. It was hard to believe security would let a passenger
board a plane with something like that, something that could pop an eyeball out as easily as a cork. One of these days, someone
was going to walk onto a jet with something like a corkscrew, and people were going to get hurt.
More and more she was thinking that day was today.