I grabbed Ash’s arm and tried to pin it to the gurney. “Can’t you give him something?” I asked.

The paramedic gave me a wild look. “Give him something?” she said. “He should be dead.”

Ash tore his arm from my grip and grabbed at the railing.

“Get it out!” screamed Ash. “It’s cold iron, get it out!”

“Can we pull it out?” I asked.

That was the last straw for the paramedic. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“Cold iron,” he said. “Killing me.”

“We’ll take it out at the hospital,” I said.

“No hospital,” said Ash. “I need the River.”

“Dr. Walid will be there,” I said.

Ash stopped thrashing and grabbed my hand, pulled me closer.

“Please, Peter,” he said. “The River.”

Polidori talks about cold iron having a deleterious effect upon the fae and their many cousins but I assumed he was making it up or stating the bleeding obvious. Cold iron has a deleterious effect on anyone if you shove it right through their body.

“Please,” said Ash.

“I’m going to pull this out of him,” I said.

The paramedic expressed her opinion that she felt this would be a poor course of action and that, for even contemplating it, I was an anatomically incomplete person of low intelligence and with a penchant for self-abuse.

I got both hands on the railing. It was slippery with blood. Ash saw what I was doing and held himself rigid. It wasn’t the ripping sound it made when it came out that bothered me; that was masked by Ash’s screaming. It was feeling the vibrations as the bone scraped along the rough edge of the iron that I won’t forget.

A jet of blood smacked me in the face. I smelled copper and, weirdly, a mixture of greasepaint and ozone. The paramedic shoved me out of the way and I fell backward as the ambulance took a corner. She started slapping dressings on entry and exit wounds and taping them in place. The dressings were soaked red before she’d even finished. As she worked she swore under her breath.

Ash had stopped thrashing and gone silent. His face was pale and slack. I stumbled forward in the ambulance until I could stick my head into the driver’s cab. We were heading up Tottenham Court Road—less than five minutes from the hospital.

The driver was my age, white, skinny, and wore a skull-and-crossbones stud in his ear.

I told him to turn around and he told me to fuck off.

“We can’t take him to the hospital,” I said. “He’s booby-trapped.”

“What?” yelled the driver.

“He may be attached to a bomb,” I said.

He hit the brakes and I was thrown headfirst into the cab. I heard the paramedic in the back scream with frustration and I looked up to find the driver’s-side door open and the driver legging it down the road.