Mina was downstairs.
“Fire!” Stephen yelled, and his throat screamed raw agony with the word. He drew a painful breath and shouted again. “Get out of the house!”
None of the doors along the hallway opened; no light came on underneath them. Stephen ran down the hall anyhow, trying one knob after another and getting no answer.
Then, from the bottom of the stairs, he heard Mina calling his name.
He turned from the final door and ran for the stairs. The mist was hazier now, diluted with the extra space. Still reeling from the initial cloud, he wasn’t sure how deadly it remained. Halfway down the stairs, he had to stop and hold on to the banister while he coughed.
“Stephen!” He looked up through the mist to see Mina, holding a handkerchief over her face and ascending the stairs toward him.
“No!” The word came out bloody. Stephen reached forward, half-blind, and grabbed Mina by the shoulder. “You’ll die. Get out.”
“You too,” she said, and now she’d grabbedhim, her hand tight on his wrist. Without so much as a by-your-leave, she turned and began pulling him down the stairs. “Mrs. Grant’s next door. She’s called the police.”
“Anyone else?” he managed.
“No. Move.”
Mina dragged him, with considerably more strength than he’d have thought she had, and Stephen aided her as much as his pain-wracked body would allow. Keeping his eyes on her made it easier to stumble onward. He watched the strands of hair that hung down her back and the determined set of her shoulders, and he almost forgot how much effort it took just to put one foot in front of the other.
Then the doorway was in front of them; then Mina was through it, and Stephen staggered through after her, just sensible enough to slam the door shut behind him. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall.
“My God,” someone said, “what’s happened to him?”
“Was it a fight?” another voice asked.
And then Mina, blessedly calm and steady and close at hand. “Can’t I take you anywhere?”
***
They got back home. Stephen wasn’t entirely sure how. Most of his attention was focused on drawing breath into lungs that felt lined with broken glass.
The voices swirled around his head, exclaiming and questioning. Mina’s rose above them. They faded. Mina spoke again, sharply but unsteadily, with tears in her voice. Stephen tightened his arm around her, squeezing her shoulder with one hand. She was shaking. No wonder. He should do something, he thought. He should at least say something, but the coughing took over again.
“…get a doctor,” said Mina.
Stephen shook his head. “Won’t help. I’ll be all right. Home.”
He saw the carriage as a large, almost formless black shape. He thought briefly and uneasily of legends—the black coach on the Royal Mile, foretelling death or taking souls to Hell—but the elderly dapple-gray horse and the talkative cab driver dispelled that impression quickly enough. Inside, the seats were cracked and badly sprung. Stephen let himself fall back into his as if it had been a featherbed.
Slowly, he stopped coughing and his vision cleared. He saw Mina sitting opposite him. Her lips were a thin line, her eyes fixed on his face. Stephen lifted a hand and felt dried blood on his mouth.
“Sorry, lass,” he said.
“Don’t be stupid,” said Mina. She passed him her handkerchief, cold and wet and smelling of tea. “And don’t talk.”
“I can talk,” said Stephen, doing the best he could for his face. Now he could feel the scalded tissues of his throat repairing themselves—a gift from his heritage. “Quietly. Shouldn’t move too much, either. Hope we have no more visitors.”
“Right. Or I’ll have to learn how to use a sword.”
“I’d have to teach you,” said Stephen. The idea had some appeal—guiding her hands on the hilt of a blade, seeing her figure in athletic costume—but his body was not in any state to follow through on it. Absently, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the bit of shell.
Up close, it looked like any bit of pottery. It was about the size of his palm, and one side was mostly flesh-colored. The other glimmered with a shifting green-and-red pattern.
“What’s that?”
“John Smith,” said Stephen, “or part of him.”
