“You’ll wish you’d never clapped eyes on me, ya daft bint,” Brick roared, and began to grow, proving he wasn’t the sharpest pin in the cushion. The stairway was far too narrow for his grotesque bulk. The plaster on the walls started cracking when his muscles slammed into them, the stairs creaked ominously under his weight, almost as loud as the sound of his bones breaking and reforming, and his neck bent forward as his head pushed against the ceiling. His clothes ripped away from his body, hanging in shreds, and he seemed to become red as his skin stretched so tight she could see the inhuman musculature beneath it.
“Oh, very well then,” she sighed. “In for a penny, in for another pound of Ronnie Staunton flesh.”
He roared devastatingly loud in the small space, drool falling from his mouth. Even his teeth had grown in the sudden transformation.
“Can you even move, you crimson pillock?” she taunted.
He roared again but stayed where he was.
She leapt forward and kicked his chest, which did absolutely nothing, then jumped back before he could grab her. His upper arms were through the walls now, embedded deep inside them, so he could only move from the elbow down, and that was easily avoided.
Still, it meant she couldn’t use her previous tactic, and without it she didn’t think she could defeat him.
“Shall we call this one a draw?” she suggested.
The house shook as he roared, and the stair he was on broke as he stamped a foot. It toppled him left and forward, the wall on that side collapsing as he went through it. His right hand, suddenly free, shot towards her as he fell. She leapt further back, but his fist caught her calf, and she felt the bone snap. She fell on top of him, and he threw her off so hard her mask cracked when she hit the wall behind him.
She sat up, her head spinning, her stomach suddenly queasy again. Her broken leg was agony, her silk lay lifeless around her, and Brick was trying to dig his way out of another mound of rubble.
Stella took instant stock of the situation and tossed herself down the next flight of stairs. She bumped and rolled along them and gasped in pain when her broken leg smacked one’s edge, and then she was in a heap at the bottom. A young Black woman was staring at her. She was pushed aside by an older white woman who had iron-coloured hair, a flour-covered apron, and a shotgun.
“Ah,” Stella said. “My apologies to the mistress of the house. I may have caused a bit of a to-do upstairs.”
The woman cocked the shotgun. Stella threw a steel ball at her. It smacked her in the forehead, and she dropped like Punch without a puppet master. The Black woman behind her looked frightened.
“I shan’t hurt you,” Stella promised. They both glanced at the shotgun, although the other woman might have been looking at the unconscious matron. Still, Stella amended her earlier words. “I shan’t hurt you unless you attempt to hurt me.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m… nobody, at least until I can get a codename. What about you?”
“I’m Violet.”
There was another roar from upstairs.
“Well, it was very pleasant making your acquaintance, Miss Violet. Do excuse me, but I have another pressing engagement to attend to.” Her power was back, and the silk around her thigh slid down over her calf and tied itself around her broken leg. She rose up on her tentacles as a window shattered above her, and she heard Brick bellow outside.
Stella sighed. Dr Jekyll wasn’t even here, and instead she’d faced a man transformed into a monster, who’d broken her leg as easily as she’d snap a twig. Plus, that fish had definitely been off. She needed to get through this fight without vomiting.
She took a step towards the street then stopped, letting one of her tentacles snake down to lift the shotgun. When it dropped the gun into her waiting hands, she gave a nod to Violet and headed for the door, muttering to herself. “Brick… bricklayer… I’m the bricklayer? There has to be a catchy witticism about laying bricks, surely? Brick… It’s no use, sek tos. I have nothing.”
Ronnie bellowed again from outside, letting her know exactly where he was. She stepped out the door and shot him. He staggered half a step back and turned to face her, snarling.
“Muro del,” she muttered. “I’m bricking it. Oh, that’s a good one.”
He started running towards her. She pointed the shotgun at his feet and pulled the second trigger.
It knocked his footing off, and he slammed face first into the ground and slid, carving a furrow through the grass. She tossed the shotgun aside as he groggily picked himself up. A half-dressed man in an expensive overcoat and top hat sprinted past her, and a moment later a second man, in a bowler hat and towel followed.
All her attention was on Brick.
Oh, he was a wall, and she was going to graffi- no, that was worse than all the names she’d tried out earlier. That was as bad as squel… as bad as that other phrase she had definitely scrubbed from her memory and was not still replaying in her mind, at night in bed, three months later.
“Huuurrrrttttt yooooouuuuu,” Brick said.
“My goodness, that is terrifying. Not a very eloquent threat, but impressively nerve-wracking for all its simplicity.”
He was on her in a moment. She dodged under a huge fist, side-stepped a powerful kick, put weight on her broken leg and stumbled. A hand as large as her head seised her shoulder and she screamed as it broke under the pressure. Then she was soaring through the air, over the wall that separated the garden from Beaufort Street. She smacked hard into the road and rolled to a stop against the far wall, then lay there gasping, under the branches that overhung the road.
The first wall exploded outwards as Brick stepped through it. He glanced around the darkened street. She tried to make her clothes the same colours as the street and wall, but her grasp on her powers was nebulous. He saw her and started stomping towards her. The ground cracked under each footstep.
Well, a lady did not die on her arse. Stella rose to her feet, wavering unsteadily, blinking back tears and holding in screams of pain. Leaves fell from the branches above her, the trees shaking as if they, too, were terrified. She straightened to her full height, her fists clenched, her breathing laboured.
Brick wasn’t rushing. He didn’t need to rush.
She pulled a small metal ball from her pocket. She had one chance, one shot at not dying here tonight. He was too tough, too invincible, too kavreck stupid to scare away. His vulnerability was his mouth, her ball bearing both small enough to fit and large enough to be a choking hazard.
Her attention focused in on her target. She ignored everything else; the cracking street, the falling leaves, the thrum of an engine, the distant screams that still came from the brothel, rattling bottles, barking dogs. All of it disappeared from her mind as she focused. There was just her breathing; in, out, steady, peaceful. She closed her eyes and found her centre.
She opened her eyes and found Brick close enough that her tentacles could have wrapped him up. His huge head. His eyebrows like hairbrushes, his eyes surprisingly small, as if they were the only part of him that hadn’t grown. The muscles on his cheeks like pink string. The red slab of his forehead. His drawn back lips as he roared at her. The drool falling from his chin. His tombstone-like teeth.
Her vision dimmed and cleared. Her body swayed. The pain was too much. He’d destroyed her left shoulder, but she was right-handed. It would be alright. She raised her hand, tossed the little metal ball and caught it, and couldn’t think of a single good thing to say.
“I am certain of only one thing,” she told Brick, “this would never happen in the försvarsdepartementet.”
Defeat Brick, eat peaches. That would be a good end to a bad night.
She pulled her arm back, pain exploding outwards from her other shoulder and her broken leg, then tossed the ball. It arced through the air in a perfect line as she dropped sideways.
The ball hit its zenith and started a descent as her vision dimmed.
Brick roared as the ball flew straight into his mouth.
She smacked into the road as the ball struck his teeth and pinged off to the side.
Fekas mi.
She was fading into unconscious when the motorised milk float smacked into him at twenty miles an hour and overturned, three hundred bottles of milk exploding as the one tonne vehicle landed on top of him.
The last thought she formed before the darkness claimed her was the obvious one. Did that really just happen?
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