Josh cleaned his plate and set the knife and fork down at a slight angle on it. It always made him smile, but there was no getting around the little habits that were ingrained in him thanks to years growing up with Boone. There were proper ways to do things, like setting your knife and fork down together at five twenty-five on the clock face of the plate.
The weather had worsened over the last thirty minutes.
London looked particularly sodden, but then the city was getting used to flooding—well, vacillating between flood and drought, to be more factually accurate—and had been for the last few years. The weather reports were filled with freak floods, freak snows, freak hailstorms with hailstones the size of golf balls, and stock footage of people sandbagging their doors and canoeing down the middle of what had been the road. The rain never seemed to drain away, meaning every year the water table rose a little higher, meaning every year the streets flooded a little faster than the last as though Mother London was trying to wash away her sins. Even the Thames Barrier, the last great defense against the elements, built to save the city from flooding, was next to useless as the water table had essentially risen above its protection in the few short years since its completion.
A kid hunched over the curb, making a paper boat out of a nightclub flier to set sail down the gutter as a black cab aquaplaned around the corner soaking her. Unperturbed, the kid scrambled forward on her hands and knees and launched her paper boat in the taxi’s wake. The little boat was stubborn.
Josh looked up from the girl and saw red writing on the wall that he knew hadn’t been there ten minutes ago. He couldn’t read it from where he was, and the rain was already making it run.
He pushed himself out of his seat and hurried out of the door and across the street, nearly getting himself run over in the process. The driver yelled something at him out of his window. He wasn’t listening. He stared at the wall, and then grabbed the kid, who wriggled like a lizard in a tin trying to break free of his grasp. “Did you see who wrote this?”
“Get your hands off me, you fuckin’ perv!” Only it sounded like fackin when she said it. “You want Yewtree chasing you?”
“Did you see who wrote this?” Josh asked again, ignoring her protests and twisting her around so that she could see the two red words dripping like blood down the wall: Find Me.
“I didn’t see nuffin,” the girl grumbled, but he refused to let her squirm away. “’n I’m serious about Yewtree so get your hands off me, mister.”
“So you saw something?” Josh said, turning the double negative around.
“What? I just said, I didn’t see nuffin. You stupid?”
“Forget it,” he said, letting go of her collar. She went sprawling across the pavement, and then looked up at him like he’d completely betrayed her by actually letting her go like she’d asked him to.
“She went that way,” the girl nodded down the street, toward the huge market hall filled with designer foods packaged up at designer prices.
“What did she look like? What was she wearing?”
The girl shook her head. “Dunno. Pretty. Long coat. I couldn’t see her face because of the umbrella.”
“Think. Please. Anything you can remember that might help?”
The girl sat there on the wet paving slabs looking up at him as she made a show of thinking. “Long yellow coat. Red umbrella.”
He’d seen her, he realized. Not only had he seen her, he’d sat there admiring her legs, or rather the impossibly straight black seams of her stockings. It had to be her. “Thank you.”
Josh started to run in the direction the girl had indicated, the soles of his shoes slapping on the wet paving slabs. The pavement was slick and slippery. He twisted and dodged around a couple of pedestrians shuffling along like the walking dead, and reached the corner, looking left and right.
The downpour intensified, the rain spiking up six inches off the road around him. He couldn’t hear for the drumming and the whistle of the wind as it howled through the high buildings, rattling windowpanes and loose tiles. It was like staring out into a gale, but there she was, a couple of hundred yards away, about to disappear around another corner. It had to be her. And if he let her walk around that corner he knew he’d be letting her walk out of his life just like that. So the rain could pour and the wind could howl, he wasn’t slowing down or stopping.
He ran faster, gritting his teeth and calling, “Wait!” after her, but his words were drowned out by the rain.
She didn’t slow down.
She didn’t look back.
She walked into the heart of the storm even as it whipped up into a righteous fury. The ferocity of it, and the speed it came on, was frightening. It was as if the elements were trying to keep them apart, the universe conspiring to keep its secrets.
Josh kept his head down and fought his way across the road, following her onto a narrower street. The tarmac changed into cobblestones halfway down the street. He looked up, trying to see her. The rain streamed down his face. He wiped it away, but it didn’t matter how much he rubbed at his face it kept getting in his eyes, stinging and blurring his vision and making it impossible to focus as it tried to drive his head down.
There were no shops on this street.
Gone were the lunch restaurants and designer delis. Gone were the secondhand stores and the florists and the offices.
He stumbled into what quite literally felt like another world—a Victorian slice of London that must surely have been unchanged since the time of the good Queen herself, and more aptly, since the days of Number 13. The cobbles were worn smooth and there was no white line down the middle of the road. If he’d reached out, he could have touched the buildings on either side of him as he ran down the middle of the street, it was that claustrophobic. There were fewer people here, but the street felt twice as crowded because it was so narrow. The second storey of the nearest buildings loomed in over him, casting deep shadows across the street as it narrowed yet again, until it felt no wider than his shoulders.
“Wait! Please!” Josh called.
She heard him this time, and visibly hesitated before she threw a backward glance over her shoulder. Despite the misstep she didn’t slow down for more than a fraction of a second. She didn’t need to, because Josh stopped dead in his tracks.
They were less than one hundred yards apart.
He recognized her.
Even with the rain in his eyes and the wind making it difficult to focus for more than a moment at a time. How could he not? She was the reason he was out here in the first place. She was the reason his great-grandfather had lost his mind and the reason Boone had lived a secret life all those years.
She was the woman who hadn’t aged a day in ninety years.
She was Eleanor Raines.
And she really was beautiful. Not what they called beautiful in those glossy adverts and magazines he sold; beautiful in a truer, purer sense of the word. Not all sharp angles and shadows and heroin chic. None of the pictures plastered on the bedroom wall did her justice, he realized, and knew he was standing there gaping like a fool. The reality of Eleanor Raines made every photograph seem flat, dull, and lifeless.
In that moment he could see why Isaiah had refused to just let her go.
“Eleanor,” he called, taking a step forward, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry. He didn’t want to shout for fear of breaking the moment. “Wait.”
She turned away, breaking it for him, and carried on down the alleyway. The sound of her high heels clicking on the cobblestones was lost beneath the rain. She ducked down an even narrower passage, this one more like a shadowy crack between two buildings than a footpath. “Wait!” He called again, chasing her to the mouth of the empty alleyway. “Please.”
He could hear something … children laughing? No. Not that. Birds. Starlings. He looked up and saw a vast flock of them banking on the fringes of the storm, the flock spiraling overhead tighter and tighter until their wing tips touched and they looked like a vortex in the sky, their black bodies the eye of the storm itself, casting a shadow over the streets below.
When he looked back down there was no sign of Eleanor Raines and nowhere she could have gone. No doors into the buildings that started the alleyway; no gates in the high wooden fences that continued it.
He was alone.
It was as though she’d slipped between the cracks and simply disappeared right before his eyes.