Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher Page A

George.
    “He’ll still get there before us,” gasped George. Although he seemed to have been hurtling through London ever since he’d broken the carving at the Natural History Museum, this new sensation of running in snow made him tired in entirely new and more painful ways.
    The screaming stopped dead.
    The sudden silence was shocking in itself, so much so that the Queen and the Officer came to simultaneous halts, and stood straining to hear any more noises.
    George heard the Officer curse under his breath as he ran past him.
    “Damn and blast.”
    George kept plunging ahead in the wake of the Gunner, who hadn’t slowed one bit as he ran in under the trees, unholstering his pistol as he went.
    “Look out!” shrieked Edie as something large came crashing through the branches in their direction—an angular jagged shape getting bigger with startling rapidity as it spun straight at them. The Gunner ducked and George swerved, and then the thing hit the snow and cartwheeled between him and Edie in a savage series of impacts before embedding itself in the trunk of a tree.
    They stared at it.
    “Your gargoyle,” said Edie, deflating.
    It was a stone wing, torn off at the root. George looked at it for an instant longer, then threw himself forward into a lurching snow-hobbled sprint.
    “Spout!” he yelled.
    “I’m sorry . . .” shouted Edie, trying to keep up.
    George said nothing more. He needed all his breath to keep running. The extra surge of energy was not despair, because Edie was wrong.
    The wing wasn’t Spout’s.
    He heard the crack of the Gunner’s pistol ahead of him, and then he burst out of the trees, crashed through a hedge, and stopped dead.
    Spout was fighting two gargoyles at once. Or rather, he was fighting one intact gargoyle with the other one, whose wing he had obviously just torn off, swinging the damaged one by its undamaged wing, using its truncated body like a hammer.
    The intact gargoyle yammered in fury and pain as Spout stood astride the broken-winged figure of the boy, cutting huge swaths of air with his gargoyle-hammer, trying to keep it at a distance and prevent it from darting in to rip at the unmoving figure on the ground.
    As Spout’s improvised bludgeon whirred past its snarling face, it pounced in and latched on to the boy’s outflung leg with its teeth, shaking it with the growling terrier noises George had heard from a distance.
    Up close there was something truly horrible about the inhuman fury and malice in the taint’s onslaught. It seemed to want to hurt the boy even if it meant putting itself in greater danger, a danger that manifested itself almost immediately as Spout gave it a bone-crunching blow with its partner. The intact gargoyle was knocked head over heels. There was another sharp crack as the gargoyle-hammer broke, leaving Spout with a second dismembered wing in his talon.
    He tossed it over his shoulder and leaped for the undamaged gargoyle, who took to the sky just too slowly to avoid Spout catching it by its foot. Spout stayed on the ground, one talon hooked around a park bench, anchoring his desperately flapping adversary and stopping it from escaping.
    Spout was panting with exhaustion. George could now see how much the uneven fight had taken out of him. He had a great gouge across his chest, and one of his brows was lopsided, having been sheared off by a blow from his attackers.
    “ Eigengang! Gow, Eigengang!! ” he howled hoarsely at George.
    “Shoot it!” George yelled at the Gunner.
    BLAM . The Gunner’s first shot knocked the gargoyle out of Spout’s grip. It stuttered in midair, nearly fell, but then flapped away. Spout launched himself after it.
    “Again!” roared Edie, who had caught up with them.
    “Your bloody pet’s in the way!” snarled the Gunner in frustration, running after the disappearing gargoyles, leaving George alone with the injured boy.
    “Spout! Leave it!” George shouted. “SPOUT! GET DOWN.”
    Spout swooped lower,