Free The London Pride by Charlie Fletcher Page B

one of those colossal creatures would have been like a chihuahua challenging an elephant.
    Will suddenly thought to check the bathroom, his heart leaping with hope, moving fast, wondering if Jo was perhaps frozen in her own fug of terror within the marble space. His heart fell with a lurch as he saw she wasn’t.
    He had to find another way out, so he could start looking for her, but he was trapped in the room. He had noticed there was a flat roof one floor below the window, and he thought that if he could get the window open he might be able to hang from the window ledge and drop safely onto it, making his escape down a drainpipe. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was better than no plan. Except for the fact the windows probably didn’t open. Maybe he could throw something through them, like a chair. Or maybe hitting it with the dragon shield would do the trick.
    He pulled the curtains.
    At first he thought it was morning, and he was seeing bright golden sunlight dappled through the leafy branches of a tree moving in the breeze.
    Then his eyes focused properly.
    There was no breeze. It wasn’t quite morning. It was the flat, cold light of a drizzly pre-dawn. And the gold light was not coming from the sun, or anything as warm and comforting.
    It was coming from the cold gilded metal of the skittering things pressed against the window, the giant bugs and ticks and mosquitoes from the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the partners of the snakes and the rats. They were pressed against the glass, just like moths trying to get into a well-lit room at night.
    But they were, of course, bigger than moths. They were bigger than soup plates, and they were not hungry for the light within the room, which was dim. They brought their own light. And as he stared at them, at the way the mosquitoes whirred their wings and jabbed at the glass, seeing how hard they could hit it before either it broke or they knocked themselves out, he realised that they were not just hungry. They were angry. He couldn’t have explained it rationally, but they gave off a wild and furious energy as they rattled at the glass.
    There was something extra unsettling about their malice, something insectile and alien and wrong. It did more than frighten him. It made his skin crawl, like he was itching from the inside and he couldn’t scratch the feeling away.
    Suddenly, opening the window seemed like the single very worst idea in the whole world.
    One of the giant mosquitoes flew backwards and hung in the air, three metres out, just like someone taking a run-up to barge open a door, and then flew forwards at speed, ramming the window.
    There was a harsh crack, but the window was made of toughened glass and it held. Will found he had instinctively raised the dragon shield to protect himself, which was strange because not only was it an entirely unconscious gesture but he also had no memory of having picked it up. The self-preservation autopilot seemed to be working overtime.
    He yanked the curtains shut.
    There was another sharp crack from behind them.
    ‘Jo,’ he said, voice crackling with worry. ‘Where are you?’

13
Up and out
    Jo was boosted up the stairs by such a surge of fear-fuelled adrenalin that her bad leg didn’t hurt at all. Or if it did, the pain had got pushed so far down the list of things to be paid attention to later that it made no difference. It was only when she hit the cross-bar that opened the exit to the roof, clunking it forwards and making the door spring open, that she felt her knee spasm and lock up as she jarred to a halt
    ‘Ouch,’ she winced, and bent to rub it. Then she remembered the mayhem that might at any moment come bounding up the stairs behind her, so she took a moment to slam the fire door shut, and leaned back on it, getting her breath.
    Her hot face was immediately cooled by the rain driving down out of the grey pre-dawn sky. She took a couple of deep breaths, and then checked the roof for any new threats: it