I am not paid enough for this shit, the Bond thought disgustedly, as fog swirled around his ankles. He bent over the body at his feet, probed with two fingers above the stiff blue collar. The unconscious constable’s pulse held steady. Fuck. He reached down with his other hand, grabbed the man’s chin, and yanked hard until he felt the cervical vertebrae grind. In the distance, wooden rattles clattered like knucklebones in a graveyard crypt, converging on the Whitechapel rookery.
The cop had nearly iced him, and it would have been entirely his own fault that he’d fallen to an amateur. He’d been so busy reloading and focussing on the headbangers with the full auto kit that he’d nearly missed the double-barrelled shotgun sneaking up behind him. Loss of situational awareness was a perennial problem, and—he froze, alerted by the sound of a different caliber of automatic weapon opening up.
Well, fuck this for a game of toy soldiers. Stalking Miss Starkey’s clown crew was one thing. Taking on a goon squad with AKs was another. Throwing feral Victorian cops toting shotguns on their home turf into the mix was something else again—and now some joker was lighting up the night with a machine pistol. Nope, this mission’s a bust. Four groups stalking each other in the fog: What is this, a fucking Peter Pan pantomime? All it needed was a crocodile scuttling around with a ticking bomb in its stomach, leatherbound death on four legs. It didn’t matter how good you were; if enough bullets were flying, you could catch one in the neck purely at random. This was shaping up to be a total shit-show, and the Bond was acutely aware that he was hanging his ass out here without backup.
Oh well. Someone else could get their hands wet collecting the consignment. They’d have to come back to the house if they wanted to get home, and when they did, he’d be waiting for them.
The Bond kept his back to the wall as he stole away from the firefight at the front of the reading room. There was a crash of breaking glass as something whizzed out through a skylight and disappeared into the night: they were fighting inside the building now. Another hiss, and someone screamed above his head, then fell off the building and hit the cobblestones with a meaty thud. A grenade exploded round the front, the blast muffled by the mist. It sounded like a pitched battle.
An alleyway over, a corner turned, and the screams and percussion ebbed as if they were a distant memory of another world. But the wooden rattles were still audible, coming closer. The mist parted briefly, affording the Bond a glimpse of two burly figures in police helmets and capes. Unfortunately, it also gave them a glimpse of him. “Stop in the name of the law!” shouted one of the constables. “’E’s the Ripper!” shrieked an unseen woman. The Bond winced and dived into the next street as the clatter of a policeman’s rattle echoed off the walls behind him.
The gunfire and explosions cut off abruptly as he rounded the corner, crossed a backyard (carefully skirting a noisome midden), and turned onto White Church Lane. He drew his coat tight, concealing his webbing vest and twin Glock 18s. Boots on cobblestones behind him, hurrying: “Stop, I say!”
Fuck. The smog, a classic yellow-tinged pea-souper that smelled of burning coal and sulfur, was getting thicker. The Bond hurried towards the hitching rail where he’d left the stolen cab. Entirely predictably, it was gone: not just the horse and hire-trap, but the hitching rail too. He squinted into the murk, eyes watering as he searched for what he knew to be there. There’d been a pub, and there still was, but the signboard was … was it the same one? Navigating by pubs in the late Victorian East End of London was like navigating by fire hydrants in Manhattan. As he looked around, the Bond gradually realized that he was on the wrong street: he’d lost situational awareness again and taken a wrong turn, become lost inside Whitechapel.
The Bond was not a neophyte navigator. He’d hiked through mapless jungles in Central America and trackless mountains in Afghanistan. He wasn’t a slave to satnav and GPS, like so many contemporary civilians: he’d been orienteering since he was old enough to tie his own bootlaces. But navigating Whitechapel in 1888 was another matter. The whole point of a rookery was that it was unmappable, with seventeenth-century streets crossing medieval routes cleared by the Great Fire of London that subsequently got filled in and fractally overgrown. People lived in a rookery because they could afford no better or they didn’t want to be findable. A surveyor who ventured inside without a police escort would likely wake up several miles away with a splitting headache, minus his charts, instruments, wallet, and clothing—if he ever woke up. And this version of Whitechapel was just wrong, like the dream of an architect delirious on absinthe, specifying angles that didn’t add up properly.
Another police rattle clattered behind him and the Bond took off into the mist and night again, furious and hunted as he searched for something, anything, he recognized and could orient on: a church, a pub, a hitching rail.
Behind him, the silvery chatter of windchimes in the fog tinkled louder.
“That was lovely, dear,” said her mother, lining up her knife and fork to bisect her empty plate neatly. She covered her mouth, trying and failing to suppress a yawn. “I’ll just … I think I need a lie-down.”
“You go right ahead,” her father said indulgently. “Evie and I will do the washing up.”
Mum was really out of it. She hadn’t been herself for months, but this was by far the worst she’d been in Evie’s presence. When she came home she didn’t ask Evie why she hadn’t come to church with her, or how her flatmates were, or … anything, really. She just smiled vaguely, recited grace, and ate her food, swaying tiredly in her chair. Her body was sitting at the table but her mind was elsewhere. Evie had never been any good at aura work, but even she could tell there was something wrong. It wasn’t a zombie-like absence; it was somehow Stepfordian to Evie’s mind. It was as if her mother’s soul was a candle wick that had been pinched between finger and thumb so that the flame was out, only a burning ember at the tip bespeaking the possibility of reillumination. I hope Dad knows what he’s doing, she told herself.
Mum yawned again, this time without covering her mouth. Her eyelids were closing, lifting slightly then falling again. She made no move to stand up, but the swaying was growing more pronounced.
“Evie, would you mind helping your mother upstairs?” Dad asked. “Otherwise I think she’ll fall asleep at the table.”
“Yes.” Evie stood, and helped her mother up from the chair. Mum mumbled something that might have been a gargled Thanks, then shuffled towards the stairs, her head nodding. Evie got her up to the landing and into the bedroom, terrified that she might face-plant on the carpet at any step. Finally, they were there. “Why don’t you lie down, Mum?” she suggested.
“Yes, I’ll just…” Her mother sat on the edge of the bed, then slowly toppled backwards until she sprawled crosswise atop the covers. A moment later she began to snore.
Evie removed her mother’s shoes, then tried to turn the sleeping woman. Mum turned out to be unexpectedly heavy. “Dad? Dad!”
Heavy thudding on the stairs. “What is it, Evie?”
“A hand, here? She’s totally zonked. I can’t move her.”
“Let me.” Dad slid his arms beneath his sleeping wife and gently took her weight while Evie swung her legs up on the bed. “Oww.” He straightened up and rubbed the small of his back, breathing heavily. His brows wrinkled as he stared at the sleeping woman, as if she was a puzzle he couldn’t solve.
“Dad.” Evie found herself holding his hand. “It’s going to be all right.”
“No, no it isn’t.” For a moment he sounded distraught.
“But Dad—”
Her father leaned over her mother’s head. “Attend,” he told Evie, slipping into the didactic, professorial manner he adopted for her lessons in magecraft. “Your mother is infected.” Using his thumbs at the sides of her jaw, he gently levered her mother’s mouth open. “Observe.”
Evie only just made it to the toilet. She never again ate a Sunday roast.
When she finished, she rinsed out her mouth in the sink, and lingered in front of the bathroom mirror staring at her face, seeing half her mother’s features reflected back at her. Her hands were trembling, not with fear or anger, but with a less familiar emotion: hatred.
She joined her father. “What the fuck is that thing?” she snarled, wiping her runny nose on the back of her sleeve. She pointed past her mother’s sagging lips, at the silvery articulated shield nestling in her lower jaw like an armored parody of a normal tongue: “How did it get in there?” She reached for it, but Dad caught her hand.
“There is a species of deep sea isopod, Cymothoa exigua, that is called the tongue-eating louse. It crawls into a fish’s mouth and attaches itself to the tongue. It’s a vampire—it severs the blood vessels supplying the tongue, which falls off, and then it attaches itself, drinking the fish’s blood and becoming its new tongue.” Her father swallowed. “This is a relative. It’s what that church she goes to uses in place of a communion wafer.”
“But it’s eating her soul—” Evie lost it and went straight back to the bathroom. It was a couple of minutes before she could speak again. “Fuck.”
“Why doesn’t somebody stop them?” she demanded, when she could face the bedroom again.
“How?” Her father shrugged, and for a few seconds the entire weight of the world was mirrored in his expression of despair. “They’re too powerful, Evie. They’ve got the government wrapped around their little finger—their head preacher man is best mates with the Prime Minister. They’ve got thousands of communicants who’ve taken the host, like your—like Jenny.” He swallowed. “If you take them on, they’ll steamroller you. Put you on a plane to Colorado Springs and make you one of them. Evie, we’re small fry. We can’t—”
“You can’t.” Her eyes burned with rage. “I’ll find a way, Dad, that I promise you.” She picked up her mother’s hand. “That I promise her. This is evil, and I’m not going to stand for it. Whatever it takes—I’ll do it.” Her back straightened.
“You can help me right now by checking my circle and lighting the candles, love.” While they’d been talking, dusk had fallen and the bedroom had dimmed to twilight. “We can discuss what you might be able to do—might—about the Golden Promise Ministries some other time. Assuming they fail to raise their sleeper,” he added in an undertone. “If they succeed, we’re all fucked.”
And without further ado they began their half-assed and foredoomed attempt to exorcise her mother.
The style of invocation her family used was long on preparation and props but short on chanting. Dad had already diagrammed the precise integration of forces he wanted to produce on an expanse of paper tucked under the bed. It was a simple exclusionary ward, to force out anything non-human—and by human, he’d been careful to include in his definition the human microbiome, and endosymbionts like mitochondria. (As his ancestors had discovered the hard way, failing to do so had varied and drastic consequences ranging from explosive diarrhea to sudden death.) What it boiled down to was an occult vermifuge. The Lares’ mana or stored power, bottled up in the inscribed skull like an osseous Leyden jar, would surge through the grid and burn out anything that didn’t belong inside it. Simple, powerful, foolproof.
Dad was already breathing heavily and sweating as they started. “Are you feeling okay?” Evie asked.
He nodded tensely. “I’ll be fine.” His brow wrinkled in concentration as he chanted instructions to the reined entities in the skull, invoking the long-ago pact his family had made with them.
Mum lay on her back, mouth slightly agape, snoring softly as Dad chanted. Evie echoed Dad’s invocation, but something felt wrong even though the ritual objects were all beginning to glow softly with the radiance that bespoke an operational summoning. She felt oddly hollow. And Dad seemed to notice it, too: his voice rose, his ritual commands growing emphatic.
Evie licked dry lips. This isn’t working, she thought. Why isn’t it working?
The bell sitting on the floor at her feet, at the end of the bed, chimed softly, and she startled.
“In the name of our ancient agreement I command thee to—”
“A sacrifice has not been made,” tinkled the bell, and somehow Evie understood exactly what it was saying, what the Lares were conveying through the medium of metal. It was a language not English, but something much older that plugged straight into Broca’s area in her frontal lobe, generating speech in a form she could understand. “Broken dependency. Backtracking. Failed to initialize compact. Make sacrifice or die.”
“What—” Alarmed, Evie tried to step away from the circle, but her legs refused to obey her.
Dad looked up at her in horror. “Evie!”
“—Does it mean?” she heard herself asking.
“Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. The curse.”
Of course, Evie realized distantly, Mum refused to have any more kids because she couldn’t bear to let Dad sacrifice one of them—as if Dad would ever do that to me or Jerm—Her father was no psychopath, nor even an abused and damaged teenager like Grandpa with his endless guilt over what was behind the painted-over door on the top floor of the house he couldn’t bear to live in any longer—
“Make sacrifice or die,” demanded the Lares.
—One must die in every two generations, that the pact with the Lares be renewed: and now Eve found herself staring into her father’s eyes as his pupils blew out, darkening in the twilight—
“Can we abort?” she asked.
Her father shook his head. “Not at this stage, no…” He swallowed as he stared at her. “I’m sorry, Evie: be strong for me,” he said, raising the athame, the ceremonial knife. Then, before she could stop him, he said, “Take me instead.”
Alexei and his crew stormed the library. There were defenders: at least one with a submachine gun, and a joker with a bow. They fucked up Boris but good. He was up on the roof with Yuri, scoping out the interior and positioning to drop stun grenades inside, when he took an arrow to the knee and fell off the roof. They were all wearing ballistic vests, but arrows were much slower and heavier than bullets and he lost his balance and fell. Fuck. The occupants retreated and Alexei’s crew wasted vital minutes checking the offices in the back and upstairs, making sure nobody was sneaking around behind them, before they discovered the targets had barricaded the fucking doors with an oak table or something. At which point Alexei saw red. The forced entry went smoothly but when they rammed the table out of the way they were too late: a door at the other end was already closing, and although Yevgeny wasted half a magazine on it, there was no likelihood of a kill. With his team at half strength—Yevgeny was limping badly and Igor and Boris were dead—he wasn’t about to go clearing ratholes.
Get the fucking book. Get the hell back to the mansion. Shoot anyone who gets in the way. Get home and bring the house down behind you. Simple. Right?
“Fuck,” he hissed, sweeping the catwalk under the upper shelves with his flashlight as Yevgeny and Yuri methodically took the lower galleys and the librarian’s counter.
“Is fucking library. How the fuck we meant to find right book?” complained Yuri. He poked his gun barrel at a stack of unshelved books at the front desk, dislodging them.
“Index cards. Stop that. If it is a mess, search will take ten times longer.”
“Index cards—” Yuri processed—“in English?”
Alexei forced himself not to clout his subordinate. Yuri was not the sharpest hammer in the toolbox. “Yes, Yuri, in English.” Except according to Intel, the book had been deliberately misfiled. Fuck.
Their forced entry hadn’t exactly left the library in pristine condition. There were cracks in the plasterwork and dust everywhere. Broken glass and books on the floor, tumbled higgledy-piggledy in the gloom. Gas lamps hissed but barely beat back the darkness. No blood, dammit, and Alexei wanted to see blood badly, wanted it with an urgent and righteous anger. Because fuck this job, fuck these English assholes with their smug magical mojo, fuck this shithole version of London—he hadn’t seen this much poverty since the time he’d been posted to the favelas outside Rio—fuck. All this shit for one goddamn book?
He shone his flashlight towards the door at the far end of the room. Broken lock, clear signs of a hurried exit. Books strewn around the path of the defenders’ stampede. They wouldn’t be so stupid—he told himself, even as he strolled towards the big leatherbound tome that someone had dropped facedown on the floor in their hurry to escape the flash-bangs. Well, maybe. He grinned humorlessly and reached for the magic compass doohicky on a cord that hung around his shirt collar. It twisted in his grip and tugged straight at the book on the floor. “Hey, Yuri, is your lucky day,” he called softly as he edged towards it, every sense on full alert for trickery, “or is maybe an IED.” Because if he was mounting a staged withdrawal he sure as fuck wouldn’t leave his target lying on the floor—but he might yank the cover off and use it as bait for a trap.
But the charm-fetish-thing still tugged towards it. Which meant it was full of magical go-juice. Well. Maybe it was a trap, but—Alexei bent towards it. There was nothing to be seen: no wires, no pads, no infrared beams visible in his night-vision scope. “Yuri. Does this look clean to you?”
Yuri joined him in his inspection. “Sure, boss. What, you think they drop it while run away?”
“Why, yes, Yuri.” Alexei straightened up. “That’s what I think.” He forced himself to relax and shake the tension out of his neck and shoulders, even though his heart was still hammering and he was on a hair-trigger in case the asshole with the submachine gun popped up again.
“Then why we not—” Yuri bent towards the book—“take book and go home?”
He straightened up, cradling the book across his body as he looked at Alexei expectantly.
Alexei gave him a hard stare, then nodded to himself. “Yes, Yuri, why not,” he breathed. Raising his voice: “Yevgeny? Target acquired! Going home! Last one to the bar is buying!”
He turned and strode back through the ruined front doors of the reading room, into the lobby, and then into the Whitechapel night. Behind him, Yevgeny and Yuri followed.
His ears still ringing from the flash-bangs, he didn’t hear the glockenspiel tinkling that followed them out of the library.
Game Boy waited for the angry bowler-hatted Russians with the very big guns to leave, counted to fifty, then sat up. He clutched his head and suppressed a moan of pain as he blinked furiously, trying to flush away the purple and green afterimages. He’d had his head turned to the wall when the flash-bangs detonated, but the wall in front of his face was painted ivory and the flashgun aftermath was taking its time to fade.
“Fuck,” he whispered, frightened to move: even breathing seemed like a dangerously risky activity. But his sixth sense twitched, prodding him. He needed to make a speed run and start nownownow or it’d be toolatetoolatetoolate—and through the muffled buzzing in his ears he heard nothing else, no footsteps or grumpy Slavic tongues. He rolled over and looked down on a scene of devastation by gaslight. Books and broken glass strewn everywhere, furniture smashed or pushed aside. Across the galley from his niche he saw shadows stir. “Becca?”
“Shh.” The whites of Del’s eyes were startling in the darkness. Her drab gown was draped unevenly about her, like a fallen curtain or a pile of dirty laundry.
“They’ve gone and I’m on my way.” He straightened up and dropped lightly from his hiding place. Del followed, a rustling fall of cloth across the shadowed floor. “They went out the front door. You go out the back and meet me round the side.”
Game Boy nerved himself to move. He pulled his top hat tight around the crown of his head, shot his shirt cuffs (then thought better of it, and tugged his gray coat sleeves down over their bright white shine), and cleared his throat. Bad men with big guns. Well yes, but he’d done it a million times before in games, done it for reals as well—stolen a letter right out of Becca’s new girlfriend’s grasp, ducked and weaved between security guards—but bullets. Game Boy swallowed. Then he ghosted out through the drunkenly askew front doors, feeling the familiar prickle of knowing where to put his feet, where to lean his back, nudging at the back of his skull with a hungry, chattery feeling like insects chewing on his tension.
It was still night out there, and a sea of mist rose nearly to his kneecaps, swirling in the dim overcast from a million streetlights diffusing through the smog. The air was acrid, choking, and cold. Leftleftleft said his scalp, driving him with a sense of unease. Catchup. He heard boots clattering on cobblestones ahead, then a low chatter. Polish or—he supposed this was Russian—sounded odd to his ears, the phonemes unfamiliar and nasal with rolling Rs.
He heard an abrupt strangled wail cut eerily short. It broke through the ringing in his ears and his talent screamed divefortheground. Game Boy dropped face-first to the pavement, choking on the sweet-sick stench of raw sewage nearby, just before an arpeggio of eardrum-pounding automatic gunfire cut the night apart just above his head. He wasn’t the target, though. The target was a tinkling, chilling laugh of tinkerbell windchimes ringing in the steel breeze, voicing a wild, malignant glee that made his skin crawl. He’d heard it before, back in Imp’s mansion, and thought nothing of it. But it had followed them through the maze of memories of times past, growing more terrifying with every passing era: the Lares, the household gods bound to Imp’s family by their curse.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” Game Boy babbled under his breath, frightened half out of his wits even though the angry shouting gunmen hadn’t spotted him. Someone else had caught their attention, but not their fire. Only one of them was shouting now, clearly issuing orders to the others. Bright spotlight beams lashed out, visible like searchlights in the foggy air as they crisscrossed the alleyway with lethal blades. Game Boy threw himself sideways, out of the path of deadly light. He heard metallic clicking and barked orders as the gunmen swapped out their magazines. One of them crouched over another, who had fallen, bubbling bloody froth that ran black in the tenebrous gaslamp glow. Something was stalking them.
Game Boy waited until their flashlight beams shone away from him, then scuttled for cover against the nearest wall. There he waited and watched, shivering from tension.
The one who had fallen did not move again, and now there were two. The one who had been on the receiving end of the other’s orders bent and picked up something rectangular—the book, Game Boy realized. And now his power was shouting GoGoGo! in the back of his head again, so Game Boy was off—racing away from them in the opposite direction, half-skipping and shuffling to break up the rhythm of his stride, until a prickling in his scalp told him to duck into a doorway and push. The door, slimy and rotten beneath his fingers, swung inwards into darkness.
Game Boy skipped along a narrow passageway in total darkness, walls close enough to touch without stretching his arms, and bounced over more than one body—sleeping or dead, he couldn’t tell—then into a room where he dropped and rolled to avoid clotheslining himself on a horizontal rope against which sleeping derelicts leaned. Another rope, another roofed-over yard, rats scuttling for cover.
A silent voice sang glassy-toned in his ears: “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack duck under the razor’s flick”—and then there was another door, an alley with flagstones slippery with noisome muck, a rotting gate, and another narrow street carpeted in unnatural mist. He tiptoed to the next corner and turned, to see two retreating backs half-shrouded by the smog, their bowler-hatted heads twitching side to side. His talent had taken him on a shortcut through a doss-house just as the thugs with the book began a sweep of the alley for threats. If he’d been in sight—
Game Boy darted after them, sure-footed with the practiced buzz of a speed run through a well-known level. Only his lack of health potions and power-ups held him back; that, and the sick knowledge that he’d never played this game before in his life, and might not live to do so again if he took a step wrong. Jack be nimble, this is the Ripper’s vestibule, only I’m not a—
A gurgling scream and a hand up-flung in the coiling fog-banks of the past: this Ripper targeted men as well as women, hard or soft made no difference. Game Boy dropped again, shivering with fear, as the last man standing from the goon squad screamed imprecations into the night then punctuated his rant with a squeezed trigger, blasting gunpowder shadows that strobed across the weeping brick walls on either side.
It takes about a minute, a quietly rational corner of his mind narrated: a minute from taking the book without permission to being struck down. The curse isn’t instantaneous. Assuming the stalker in the mist was actually the curse finding its way to the target, and not something else, some metaphysical epiphenomenon of this fever dream of Whitechapel made real. Not Leather Apron, not Spring-heeled Jack, but the tangible effect of a curse applied to a physical object. Game Boy breathed deeply of the foul air, suppressing his coughs until the gunman wound down from his screaming jag and ran off into the night, heading in the direction of the plague pit and ley line. He totally lost it, Game Boy marvelled. Not so easy to be a hard man when you’re on your own among aliens, is it?
Game Boy crept across the alley to where the book thief had fallen. It was mercifully dark, shrouding the dead man’s face in shadows and hiding the frightfulness that had been inflicted on his body. He’d dropped the book a few paces away, and Game Boy nearly tripped when his toe struck the spine. Bingo.
He raised his face towards the fuming chimneys and the clouds above and whispered, “Deliverator? I’ve got a package for you.”
Something rustled behind him: he jumped and spun round just in time to see the end of a rope drop to the pavement. A couple of seconds later a body dropped from the gutter above, stockinged feet gripping the rope as Del abseiled down from the rooftop. She unhooked her sling, shook down her hitched-up skirts, and stepped away from the wall as another body joined her. Game Boy’s jaw fell. “Mountaineering gear? Where did you get that?”
“Remember the Boy Scout motto?” Wendy said ironically. She let go of the ropes and harnesses: a moment later they thinned into vapor, merging with the mist.
“We took to the rooftops ’coz that seemed safest, what with all the shooting,” Del explained. “Where’s the book, then?”
“Oh, wait.” Game Boy took a deep breath, then bent down. “Hello, book,” he said, laying hands on the leather cover: it felt greasy and slightly warm, and his mouth tasted like he’d just licked the contacts of a nine-volt battery. “I am picking you up because you seem to be lost, and I’m sure you need help finding your way back to your rightful owner.” It seemed very important to get these words exactly right. “I want to help return you to where you belong. It’s not right to leave books lying around on the streets in the rain. Del—” Game Boy swallowed—“here is a book. It does not belong to me but I want to help it go where it needs to be, to where it rightly belongs. I’m sure—” his mouth was abruptly dry—“it won’t hurt someone who is trying to put it right. Would you accept it from me now? It needs to go home.”
The devil was in the details: if the curse was activated by illegitimate acts of possession, Game Boy might have triggered it (or not), but by passing it voluntarily to another before the curse could fully power up, he was simultaneously insulating Del from it and removing himself from its crosshairs. Or so he hoped. Promising to take it to where it belonged was just a belt-and-braces precaution. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a razor-blade smile just because an insane eighteenth-century inquisitor hadn’t anticipated modern offshore financial vehicles in his ritual magic’s definition of ownership.
“Got it,” said Del. She opened the carpetbag she carried and slid the book carefully inside. “Follow me, I know exactly where we’re going.”
“To meet up with Imp and Doc?” asked Game Boy.
Del nodded. “Then we’re taking the ley line.”
“About time, too,” said Wendy, glancing around. “This place is getting to me.” A gibbering howl of sorrow and heart-stricken loss spiraled into the night, and the clappers of police rattles buzzed like huge, slow-moving hornets in the mist. “I can’t wait to get home.”
Del stalked up the alley beside Wendy, Game Boy scurrying along to take up the rear. Behind them, a slow tinkle of windchimes sounded, slow and doubtful. And then they went elsewhere.
“We’ve dropped the ball,” Eve announced, “I need to get home ahead of the rush. Which presents us with a bit of a problem.”
“Hmm,” said the Gammon, staring up the high street. They’d made their way out of the slum and onto a relatively well-lit road near Spitalfields. “We could take another cab…?”
“Not fast enough. We could take the ley line route instead, but we’d be behind them and on foot and we need to get ahead.”
A man on a bicycle—a recognizably modern safety bicycle with a chain drive, not a penny-farthing—pedalled slowly past, and Eve smiled, delighted. But of course, we’re at the right end of the 1880s, she thought.
The last decades of the nineteenth century had been a time of massive change and innovation, with new inventions coming thick and fast, upending the old order. Telephones, steam turbines, electricity, an endless litany of change: gas fires, electric timers, cylinder phonograph music players, movie cameras.
The modern safety bicycle was just another of the innovations of the 1880s, albeit one of the most visible. It landed in the middle of the decade with a bang, like a Victorian harbinger of the iPhone. They were suddenly everywhere, the first form of cheap mass transportation to emerge and a must-have personal accessory for the modern generation. Unlike the earlier penny-farthing, safety bicycles didn’t require gymnastics to mount and dismount—and they were available to women, who took to them with alacrity.
By 1892 they’d killed the older two-wheeler stone dead. And they were the answer to Eve’s dilemma.
“Mr. Franke? Get us bicycles.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Bond hid among piles of skeletons wrapped in stiff and rotten shrouds like too-old spiderwebs. While he lurked, he brooded: and as he brooded, he checked his sole remaining pistol.
They’re not late yet, he told himself. The indefinite they applied equally to Imp’s motley crew and the assclown Transnistrians (whom he had every intention of teaching a short, sharp lesson in fire discipline), or even the chilly ice maiden Miss Starkey. It was only a matter of time before somebody brought him the book, and when they did he’d be ready.
He’d made it to the plague pit highlighted on the map, swallowed his misgivings, and tackled the sunken road at a ground-eating jog. Time moved strangely in this space, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d been there—but whatever, he’d not run into anyone along the way and it was pretty clear that neither the Lost Boys nor Miss Starkey were up to the sort of brutal wilderness forced-march he’d cut his teeth on in BUD/S land warfare school. (The mafiya guys were another matter, but he was pretty sure they had run into something—someone—heavily armed. They wouldn’t be coming at him without prior attrition.)
The ley line thoroughly spooked him. That bell-like mocking laughter—he’d lit up the sunken path with his guns, bullets thundering into the mist. It hadn’t worked, and he’d expended half his remaining ammunition along the way. He’d also lost his second Glock 18. He’d put it down while he prepped a reload magazine, and when he reached to pick it up again the tree roots fought him for it, gnarly tubers coiling around the grip and the barrel until he released it and fled, swearing up a silent blue streak inside his skull.
So now here he was, holed up in a graveyard charnel house at the homeward end of the ley line, all tooled up and waiting for a partner to dance with—
Voices. Echoing up the tunnel that led from the rusty gate onto the sunken road. “I tell you, we’re nearly home. See? The floor, here? We’re nearly back to the garden gate.”
“I barely care.” A squeaky voice. “My feet are killing me. Like, I’ve got blisters on my blisters.”
“You can have a footbath when we get home, dearie.” A man, somewhat effeminate in the Bond’s disdainful opinion. “Keep moving. You’re sure you haven’t seen any sign of Eve?” He sounded worried: Interesting. Possibilities fanned out in the Bond’s mind, a flowchart of goal-directed options from theft and murder to hostage-taking and torture.
“Could she have gotten ahead of us?” asked Squeaky-Voice.
“Anything’s possible, I suppose,” said another, deeper male voice, roughened from smoking (or the damnable coal smog back in dream-time London town), “but I doubt it.” And so do I, gloated the Bond.
“Fucksake, let’s just get this over with,” groused a different woman. One of the lesbos from the cafe in the park, the Bond figured.
They were nearly in range, so he stepped out from the charnel room and raised his gun. “Good evening.” He smiled, the moonlight inking his eye sockets with shadow and turning his teeth the color of old ivory.
The short, squeaky-voiced guy screamed and clutched the arm of one of the other overgrown kids. They were barely out of their teens: sucked to be them. The girls stood shoulder to shoulder. The black one clutched a carpetbag against her chest, her chin aggressively tucked down as she glared at him: her special friend looked like she might be more of a problem from her posture—Some martial arts training there, the Bond thought—but was focussed on his gun. Good.
“You are going to give me the book,” he explained patiently. “Otherwise you will all die, and I will take it from you anyway.”
“How do we know you won’t kill us?”
The Bond resisted the impulse to roll his eyes: “Because I don’t fucking need to. Have you any idea how hard it is to find 9mm Parabellum in London these days?” (The answer: extremely hard, unless you had an end-user certificate and a licensed arms dealer at your beck and call who could have it shipped to your boss’s private island base and flown in on his VIP helicopter.) “Give me the book and I’ll let you live. I’ll shut the gate behind me when I go. You’re not stupid so you’ll sit tight and give me a fifteen-minute head start before you follow me because if I ever see you again I will kill you. Clear?”
He snapped his fingers. “Do. It. Now.”
“Give him the book,” said Squeaky-Voice, his tone dismal.
“Fuck.” The black woman sounded totally disgusted as she held up the carpetbag. “Really?”
“Do it,” hissed her girlfriend.
“Stop!” the Bond said tensely. “Put the bag down and open it. Slowly. Show me.” This was when they’d try something if they were stupid.
She put the bag down and then opened the top. One of the boys slowly reached for a pocket. “Flashlight,” he said.
“Very, very, slowly.” The Bond smiled again and the boy shook in his boots as he carefully removed a phone and tapped its screen.
The interior of the bag lit up, revealing a leatherbound volume.
“Kick it towards me,” said the Bond. “Now I want you to go back that way, all the way down the tunnel to the sunken road—” their impresario-ringleader startled, as if he hadn’t realized the Bond had known about it, how stupid was he?—“behind the gate. And then you wait fifteen minutes. Remember that. You got a stopwatch on that thing? Fifteen minutes, or maybe I shoot you. Do you understand?”
The Impresario nodded. “Worst game of hide and seek ever,” said the squeaky-voiced boy.
“You got it. Now piss off. Damn meddling kids.”
They backed away, looking bereft. Lost, maybe. Sucked to be them, utterly incapable of fighting back in a real man’s world. The Bond grabbed the bag with his free hand and hastily retreated to the crypt entrance. He holstered his gun, then shut and locked the cast-iron gate. Next, he pulled out a small double-barrelled syringe of quick-setting epoxy resin and squirted it into the keyhole. It’d be set hard in two or three minutes, although it’d take a day to cure to full strength. But that didn’t matter. It’d stop them picking the lock, and he’d hear the noise if they somehow smashed the gate while he was still in the vicinity. Once he was home, well, he had a couple of kilos of C4 in the boot of the Aston Martin: more than enough to drop the entire rotten Georgian town house on their heads before they found their way back from Neverland.
Whistling tunelessly to himself, the Bond jogged through misty streets towards the Starkey family mansion, and the portal back to the real world.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
“Shut it, Game Boy, I’m trying to think here.”
Game Boy rounded on Imp. “Since when are you in charge any more? You got us into this mess! Why didn’t you roll him? Or you, Doc—”
“I tried.” Doc massaged his temples. “My head hurts. He had a ward—”
“He also had a great big gun, and in case you hadn’t noticed there are no save points in real life,” Imp scolded Game Boy.
“I shouldn’t worry, though,” Wendy chipped in. “He’ll be dead soon enough.”
“Why—”
“Oh.” Game Boy smiled. “Oh. Oh!”
“Yes, oh indeed.” Del smiled back at him. It was not a friendly smile. “He’s fucked. That guy’s a dead man walking, he just doesn’t know it yet.”
“If Eve’s right about the curse,” Imp pointed out. “And if her boss didn’t send him as insurance, did that occur to you? And we need to get moving. I’ve got a bad feeling about this place. Like the wallpaper is falling off and there’s something rotten underneath.”
“Sit tight,” Wendy told him. “It’s only been a minute and he can murder the lot of us if we run into him before, the, the curse hits.” She took a deep breath. “Did you see the size of the magazine on that thing? I’m pretty certain it’s a Glock—the Met use them—but the fully automatic version. While we’re bunched up in here…”
She punched her left hand forward and flourished her fancy compound bow in front of Del: “I’m not feeling that lucky, thank you very much.” The bow vanished. “Anyway, assault with a deadly weapon is not my cup of tea and I’m not feeling much love for a self-defense plea in mitigation, so let’s maybe wait another twelve minutes before we try to get ourselves killed?”
Game Boy spoke up again: “I’m not sure we can hang on that long.” He shivered. “You know that thing when you’re on a trap run through a kill zone and the ceiling’s coming down right behind you and it’s a trade-off between movement speed and hit points? I’m getting that feeling. That one. We’re on a timer and we don’t have fifteen minutes.”
“You’re saying we’re fucked,” said Doc.
“Yeah, and you—” Game Boy rounded on him—“this isn’t helping.” He deflated.
Imp focussed on Game Boy. “You’re absolutely sure we’ve got to move right now?”
Game Boy nodded.
“Okay, I’ve got this.” Wendy shoved her way to the front of the queue and marched straight up the stairs to the gate at the front of the crypt. “Torch.” Del passed her a flashlight and she summoned up the same skeleton key she’d used before. “Huh. Shit. It’s not going in properly, it’s—fuck! He jammed the lock!”
The key morphed frantically in her hand, expanding into a pry-bar and then a flat surface she could use for leverage. But the lock was well and truly jammed. “Fuck.” Wendy froze, then looked over her shoulder. “We’re going to need to break it, but if he’s waiting outside he’ll hear—”
Del laid a calming hand on her shoulder. “Peace! There will be no battering here. Listen, can you make a stepladder?”
“Yes, but—” Wendy gestured at the staircase—“it might slip—”
“Not if you hook it over the top of the gate.”
Game Boy was positively frantic, hopping up and down on his toes: “Do it! Do it! Do it! The bad things are coming!”
Wendy made Del’s ladder appear, while Imp gaped, his usual pose of detachment abandoned for the time being. She stood aside as Del scrambled up the ladder and dropped to the graveyard dirt on the other side of the gate. “Game Boy? You go next.” Wendy gripped one side of the ladder. “If I let go it’ll fade,” she said tensely. “Go on, go, I can’t hold it for long, it’s too heavy.”
The Lost Boys scrambled over the gate and dropped—or in Doc’s case slithered—down the bars on the other side. Finally Wendy scrambled up and over. Del caught her, cushioning her fall. “That was wicked!”
“Thank me when we’re home,” Wendy gasped.
“Come on.” Game Boy scurried towards the lich-gate, paused, then scuttled forward some more. “It’s safe,” he called quietly. “The big bad is behind us, not in front.”
“Big bad?” asked Doc.
“Tink—Tinkerbell,” Imp stuttered, on the edge of losing his shit completely. He’d heard the glassy chimes of malevolence ringing through the streets of a London that never was, the voice of the Lares in their true form, kept out of the real world by the psychopomp pets interred in the grounds of the mansion. Propitiated by the blood of Starkeys, generation after generation, maintaining custody over the family’s dream-buried treasures. He’d never truly believed, until now, whatever Eve said: and believing, he felt no desire to clap.
Together they traced their route back to the door to the real world. The mist swirled thickly now, forming bizarre illusory sculptures that climbed hip-high in places, dulling sounds and making it impossible to see more than a hundred meters in any direction. “Walls are coming down,” Imp repeated. He peered at the mist between his legs. “Does anyone else see this?”
“See what?” Doc took the bait.
“Mermaids and pirate ships,” he murmured, “the set dressing for the ultimate pantomime—”
“We can’t stay here.” Doc took his arm and tugged. “It’s not safe.”
Imp didn’t move. “Scared now. Don’t wanna leave. You can’t make me.”
“Yes I can.” Doc wrapped his arms around Imp. “You’re not staying. They’re illusions for kids, Jerm, it’s trying to trap you.”
Imp fell silent as Del and Wendy followed Game Boy through the side-door, even though it was alarmingly ajar. If Game Boy’s gamer sixth sense said it was safe to proceed, then the bad man with the gun wouldn’t be waiting on the other side.
“Dude,” said Doc. “We can’t wait.”
“But the book—”
“Forget the spell book, that asshole’s going to get what he deserves from the curse—”
“—No, I mean the other book, the one I need to be inside—” Ticking crocodiles and flying infants and a shadowless boy with the burned-out corpses of stars in his eyes—
“You can’t live here,” said Doc, then gently kissed him. After a couple of seconds, Imp relaxed in his embrace and kissed him back, hugging him tight. Finally they separated for air. “You’ve got to grow up sooner or later,” Doc told his lover.
Imp took a deep breath of Neverland. “I never wanted that.”
“Come on. Come with me, or your sister wins.”
Imp scowled. “It isn’t like that, we’re not rivals.” Neither for human sacrifice, nor the favor of their father.
“Prove it, then.”
The mist rose chest-high now, extruding tentacles filled with hypnagogic images that swirled almost to their heads. Some were fantastic, others were scarily plausible; but either way, they sucked the eye in and demanded the attention of the beholder. Elves and dragons danced a deadly waltz across high moorlands, around a castle on a mountain at the center of a perfectly circular lake that had once been a giant city beneath the shattered moon. Then all were swept aside to make room for a merry row of gibbeted felons, dangling like the Devil’s Christmas baubles along a Regent Street where carol singers chanted praise before the throne of the All-Highest, the Dread Lord of Downing Street—
“This is amazing,” Imp whispered. “All the dreams of films unmade: I could be Fritz Lang—” He shook his head.
“What do you think your sister saw in the mists here?” Doc challenged him: “Come on, tell me!”
“Eve … she lost her I; she’ll have seen nothing.” Imp smiled crookedly, or maybe it was meant to be a grimace. “Evie would have been another matter.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about and I’m scared now.” Doc relaxed his grip, now that Imp was at least responding to stimuli. “Come on, let’s go home.”
Imp sighed, then set one reluctant foot in front of the other. “I’ll never get a source of raw material like this again,” he complained.
“Save it for later.”
The mist rose head-high and obscured almost everything now, but a faint rectangular glow limned the outline of the doorway. “Come on.” Doc tugged Imp’s hand. “Nearly there!”
“Nearly where?” Imp’s voice sounded so dreary.
“Nearly home. Just another step.” Imp wasn’t moving. Doc tugged, but Imp’s feet were planted. He turned and grabbed Imp’s arm in both hands and heaved him forward, feeling a faint sucking resistance as his shoes slithered free of the dream pavement and they crossed the threshold into a lobby lit by the cheery yellow glow of a low-power incandescent bulb and the welcoming cries of their friends.
“What took you so long?” demanded Game Boy as Del slammed the door behind them. “What happened?”
“He froze up,” Doc told them.
Imp rubbed his forehead with one hand while he leaned against the door. “I feel drained,” he complained. Then he looked down, and shuffled nervously aside, searching for something on the floor.
“What is it—” Doc began, just as Imp said, “Has anyone seen my shadow?”
But answer came there none.
The Bond had a smug. But of course, to his way of thinking he had good reason for it.
Despite the pileup of hunting parties outside the Neverland reading room, he had the book. The black dyke chick had given it to him fair and square and her crew of deviants and shoplifters hadn’t even tried to stop her. No surprise: they didn’t have enough guts to house a tapeworm between the lot of them. The men were faggots or trannies, the women were ugly bitches, and he was … well, he was going to be a lot richer once he figured out how to extract Miss Starkey’s collection bonus from her bank account and fence the goods, which would be a lot easier once the numb cunt was dead.
He hurried through the nodes of the treasure map with bag in hand. Somewhere off in another room the windchimes were jangling—somebody had probably left a window open—but it wouldn’t matter for much longer. Not once he set the charges and brought the house down.
He was feeling the burn now. He’d walked several miles around Whitechapel, managed to avoid getting sucked into a firefight—there was always an insane adrenaline crash afterwards—then pushed through the crash and jogged several more miles up that spooky sunken road. He hadn’t brought any protein bars or hydration, not having expected what he’d found on the top floor of the haunted mansion. He was probably dehydrated by now, and he wasn’t as young as he used to be. As he faced the seventh flight of stairs (three up, then two down, not to mention a whole bunch of corridors and a ring around the roses) he thought, Why not take the elevator? After all there was a lift just two corridors and a receiving room away from his current location, and he’d seen the other elevator doors on the top floor. It was the brass wire slam-door kind that had been current in the late nineteenth century, but dammit, why not? It’d save a couple of miles of this shit, and the Bond was all in favor of doing that right now.
The Bond stole along the passage to the elevator lobby. But as he came close, who should he find but Miss Starkey and her bodyguard, already waiting for the lift car as if it was no big deal? How the bitch had gotten ahead of him was a question for another time. Right now, his biggest problem was the Gammon with the submachine gun who was covering her six. He was alert and doing his job properly, which is to say he’d clearly swept the lobby seconds ago and was now drawing a bead on the darkened elevator shaft beyond the shuttered gate. Miss Starkey was looking the same way, her back turned to the Bond. The whine of ancient machinery covered the Bond’s final step, although something—possibly a shadow, or his presence disturbing the air flow—made the Gammon whirl towards him and aim just a fraction of a second too late. A tight cluster of red-rimmed holes flowered around the bridge of his nose and he dropped like a sack of potatoes, his gun clattering to the floor.
“Freeze!” barked the Bond. Miss Starkey froze in the act of turning. “Hands on top of your head, fingers laced!” She complied. “Kick it away! Now! Do it or I shoot! Face the wall!” The sinister windchimes chuckled their appreciation of his performance.
The lift finally put in an appearance, sliding glacially down to halt behind the gate.
The Bond licked his lips. “Open the lift gates,” he ordered her.
Miss Starkey stiffened, then shrugged, drawing attention to her arms, her hands—
“One hand only,” he warned. “Then back on top of your head.” He had zero intention of giving her the slightest opportunity to make a dive for her bodyguard’s gun, now resting on the carpet halfway across the lobby.
Beside her feet, a pool of blood was spreading. Miss Starkey stepped delicately around it to reach for the outer gate. It clattered as it retracted. She drew the inner gate back as well, revealing a wood-panelled room, as cozy as a coffin sized for two.
“Go inside and face the wall,” said the Bond, already stiffening with anticipation. This was not quite how he’d envisaged the trapped-in-a-lift-with-Miss-Starkey scene playing out—her dressed like a Victorian widow and himself returning from a mission exhausted and sweaty—but it was close enough. “Move!” he growled, stepping over the dead meat. He had a headache: best to get this over with.
Miss Starkey finally spoke. “Did you get the book?” She sounded mildly curious, as if she was asking about the weather or the latest test series. Her lack of fear was irritating.
“Shut up, bitch.” He held his gun to the back of her head as he dropped the bag on the floor of the lift and drew the outer gate shut with his now-free hand. Then he reached for the inner gate. “I got it. We’re nearly done here. No witnesses, like M said.”
“Who’s M?” she asked.
“The boss, Rupe—” He gritted his teeth furiously against the rapidly worsening pounding in his skull—“shut up! Only speak when I tell you to! Do you understand?” She shrugged again. He winced as he glanced at the brass control panel, then pushed the topmost button—black Bakelite with no label. “Going up.” The lift began to rise.
“Do you want money?” she asked tonelessly, ignoring his earlier order. “Whatever he’s paying you, I can pay more.”
“Turn round.” She slowly turned to face him, her expression botox-blank. Miss Starkey didn’t have resting bitch face; she didn’t have resting anything face. She’d have revealed more of her thoughts to him if he emptied his magazine into her perfect turquoise eyes. She was, however, beautiful. Beautiful like a priceless Ming vase or a very expensive supercar, one outside his price range. The kind of beauty that made him want to hurt her, to bring her down to the level of his own inner ugly, to make her feel something of the ache that gripped him right now, everywhere from his head to the soles of his feet. He shivered. This wasn’t normal; this was the vestibule to the land where dreams come true.
“Kneel,” he demanded.
She knelt. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Anything I fucking feel like. Tell me, how much is the book worth? Really?”
“How much is anything unique worth?” She might have shrugged. “How much is your life worth?”
“More than yours.” He held his gun to her forehead one-handed, his cock springing rigid with excitement. “Yes: I know about the curse.”
“Why do you think it hasn’t killed you?”
“I made them give me the book,” he gloated, willing his hand not to shake. He was sweating: it was unaccountably cold in the lift car. “Any final words?”
“Mm, yes. Did I ever make you a cup of coffee?” She looked up at him with a quizzical smile on her face.
“No, why—” He felt really sick. “The book. It’s worth … worth…” I’m burning up, he realized. A fever out of nowhere, sweeping over him like one of the sudden death diseases of childhood that swept through Victorian London leaving black crepe and tiny headstones in its wake. “Shit.”
“I didn’t ever make you coffee,” Miss Starkey said, “so you missed out on my special demonstration. Pity, that.”
The wall of the lift rippled in front of his vision, and began to fog. The pain behind his eyes was excruciating. He tried to squeeze the trigger, but his hand wasn’t working properly. In fact, nothing was working properly. The Bond leaned against the back wall of the lift, breathing hard.
“Wha…”
“A mug of coffee contains about half a liter of water,” Miss Starkey calmly explained. “I can bring it to a near-boil in about a minute. A human skull contains about two liters of stuff that can be approximated to greasy water. I can raise its temperature by ten degrees Celsius in about fifteen seconds. That’s enough to denature proteins, such as neurotransmitter receptors, like soft-boiling an egg—”
But the Bond wasn’t listening any more. His feet drummed a tetanic tattoo on the elevator car floor. He’d bitten his tongue badly, a bloody froth trickling from his lips.
Eve winced. “Damn it,” she complained softly.
Finally, the lift arrived at the top floor.
Eve rose and took a couple of deep breaths, clearing her mind. Then she leaned over the bag and addressed it politely in a dead language no human tongue had evolved to utter: “By the life I claimed on your behalf, the next one is yours also.” She opened the lift gates, stepped out, and closed the gates again. With ghostly mental fingers she reached through the lift gates and pushed the button to send the car back to the ground floor. With a somewhat greater psychic exertion, she ripped out the wires behind the call button. Then she made her way back towards the real world.
Behind her, shadows lengthened in the lift as it descended towards Neverland. Inside it, the carpetbag sat in lonely splendor on a floor restored to pristine condition, all evidence of the Bond’s presence banished like a dream. Within the bag, the leatherbound book throbbed gently as a dead man’s pulse, waxing plump and powerful.
Imp and his crew knew better than to touch the book. Which, to Eve’s way of thinking, was a very good thing indeed. She knew better, too: custody of the tome had already cost her family far too much. They’d bled for it ever since the late nineteenth century, when an ancestor had acquired it and foolishly followed one of the rituals it described, trading baby lives for Lares to protect his family and heirs in perpetuity. As long as it slumbered in Neverland it couldn’t do too much more harm—but now that it had come to the attention of Rupert and his friends, it fell to Eve to cover it up again.
Sacrifices had to be made, starting with the Bond.
Eve had always been of the opinion that when life handed you lemons, you should make lemonade.
Rupert dabbed at his forehead with his monogrammed silk kerchief, then paused on the landing to wheeze. Damn these stairs, he thought irritably as he reached for his asthma inhaler.
Eve had popped out of the office with her alarmingly overpriced bodyguard a few hours ago, then she’d completely dropped off the map, as Rupert had discovered on arrival at London HQ. However, Tech Support had a tracker on her smartphone, and Rupert held the other end of its high-tech leash. It had led him here, to a decaying shitpile on Kensington Palace Gardens. It was an investment property, currently overrun by squatters and suchlike riffraff. According to the Tech Support database one of the squatters was a Person of Interest—Eve’s younger brother.
Rupert had brought bodyguards along. They made short work of the gate, and he stalked through the overgrown debris-strewn drive to find a stove-in front door and shattered windows. Disgusting, he thought. What on Earth is she doing here? The only clue he could see was parked just around the corner—his Aston Martin. Obviously the Bond had come here, then Eve had followed him for some reason of her own …
“Sir, I’d recommend that we check the building for squatters before you enter?” one of his guards advised.
Rupert smiled tightly and shook his head. “I’ll be perfectly fine,” he told the man. “You fellows can stand guard outside. I don’t expect I’ll run into any trouble.” At least, not into any kind of trouble that might pose a threat to a High Priest of the Mute Poet. Rings of power dug into the fleshy skin at the base of his fingers, and he wore a ward under his shirt collar. His waistcoat lining was spun from the silk of a venomous spider, embroidered with fell runes and a powerful grid to absorb incoming imprecatory energies. It would take more than merely human malice (or bullets) to wound him.
He’d entered with flashlight in hand, only to find chaos. Tables overturned, paper strewn everywhere, a lingering sickly stench. One of his rings pulsed luminous blue. Poison, he realized, startled, then commanded the ring to decontaminate the entire building. What kind of squatter throws poisonous substances around his own digs? Curious and curiouser.
Of course he’d brought along a copy of the rather odd diagram Eve had printed before she nipped round to visit her brother. Looking at the diagram, it made more sense now. It was a map of sorts, and it started out right here. In fact, now he thought about it, this must be the document Eve had tried to buy at auction. He chuckled quietly. So the lost concordance to the Book of Dead Names had been in her family’s custody all along, but she hadn’t known? Such irony!
It would be interesting to hear what Eve had to say for herself before he dropped the hammer on her.
By the time he made it to the top floor Rupert was breathing stertorously and sweating like a pig. His opinion of Eve’s brother, low to start with, was now at rock bottom. How could anyone stand to live in such a shithole? Obviously he was an even worse wastrel than the reports had indicated, back when he had a PI looking into Eve’s background.
But now Rupert found something promising: a door, wedged ajar where no door should be—a door between two rooms, and it was the source of the occult power he’d felt flowing through the building like effluent from an overflowing sewer. Well then.
Rupert strode forward into the corridor behind the impossible door. He’d read of such interstitial spaces: he knew the hazards. This one was long-term stable—it had to be, anchored as it was by the Starkey family’s magical pact (never call it a curse, for it brought such wonders into the world). Eve had undoubtedly come this way. So in all probability had the Bond.
He had just arrived at a curious sight—a dead hedge maze in a glass-walled penthouse, a roof garden or conservatory of sorts dotted with markers like graveyard headstones—when he heard footsteps. A door at the other side of the conservatory opened and a familiar figure stepped onto the path through the skeletal bushes. He drew himself up. “Miss Starkey!” he called, smiling widely. “Good to see you at last! Have you found the book?”
She gave no sign of hearing him, but as she drew closer he registered that something was not quite right. Her gait was tired and her eyes dull. She wore a coat over a long dress that dragged on the footpath, its hem filthy and soaked in mud or some other noisome liquid.
“Miss Starkey!” he called again, peremptory. “Pay attention!”
Eve finally looked up. Her lips moved soundlessly, as if she was mumbling something. Rupert tensed and readied his rings of power, swollen with mana and charged with the blood of innocents. To confront an oneiromancer in the dream palace of her family, where every room represented an inherited spell, was dangerous even for him, even though his control over her was unassailable.
“Where. Is. It?” he demanded, enunciating each word clearly and distinctly.
“What?” She shook her head and saw him, as if for the first time. “What? Mr. de Montfort Bigge? What are you doing here?”
“It’s been eight hours, Miss Starkey! You’ve been gone from the office since yesterday afternoon. Did you find the book?”
She looked down—not at his feet, as he expected, but at one of the stones protruding from the maze. “Oh yeah, he’s here.” She rested a hand companionably on top of the stone before engaging with him: “Do you know what this is?” she asked.
“Do I care?” he asked, not unironically.
“Life … can be defined as the set of natural processes that copy information into the future. Power comes from the destruction of information, by computational or other means, you know.” She patted the headstone. “Our power—yours, mine—comes from death, doesn’t it? The Book of Dead Names, the so-called Necronomicon. Or the bodies in the sub-subbasement, the altar in the chapel in Castle Skaro.” She shrugged: “They all tap into the same source of energy.” She patted the headstone again, looking thoughtful. “Only the personal cost varies.”
“Where is the book?” Rupert repeated, a hint of steel creeping into his voice.
“My family is at least honest: the pact we made requires us to sacrifice our own, and we hurt and we bleed and we remember them.” Now she smiled at him, an expression quite fey with derangement. “These are the graves of my ancestors’ brothers and sisters, did you know that? They’re all buried in here. This one is Grandpa’s younger brother. Imp would have been buried here, too, if Grandpa hadn’t broken and Dad hadn’t chickened out. He paid for it with his life, and all I got for it was a doubly incontinent nursing home bed-blocker with no tongue.”
“Fuck your mother!” Rupert burst out, exasperated. “Where is my book?” he demanded, taking a step towards her.
“Fuck you, Rupert, I quit!” She sent him a glare that by rights ought to have reduced half of London to cinders.
“You’re overwrought,” he snapped. He could escalate, he realized, but then he’d have to reveal his true degree of control over her, and she’d react unpredictably. “We’ll talk about this in the office—”
“You can get the book yourself.” She straightened up. “It’s in the elevator, which is stuck on the ground floor. Give me the map, I’ll mark it for you.” She snapped her fingers at him. “Come on, I don’t have all day to wait around—”
Rupert handed her the map, and a pencil. “I understand you’re very upset,” he oozed, “but I’m sure if you sleep on it you’ll feel a lot better. And really, you can’t quit.” She scribbled illegibly in the margin and drew an arrow on the map, pointing to the alleged location of the elevator. “Go home, take tomorrow off, and we’ll pretend we never had this conversation—”
“Enough.” She shoved the map back at Rupert, and pointed to the arrow. “Go through that doorway—we’re in this room, here—and down the hall, then keep on the map until you get to the lift. It’s stuck on the ground floor, the call button up here burned out. There’s a carpetbag in the lift, and the book’s inside it. I verified it: it’s the real deal.”
“You had it and you left it there?” Rupert said with palpable astonishment.
“Believe me, it would have been very unwise of me to have carried it further!” she said sharply. “You can go get it yourself if you want it so badly. Like I said, I quit: I no longer work for you.”
“You can’t quit,” he repeated, “but we will continue this conversation in the office, the day after tomorrow.” He strode off in the direction she’d indicated.
Eve turned away from him and departed, unwinding the trail through the labyrinth of dreams, leaving the family graveyard in peace.
A few minutes later, Imp, Doc, Del, Game Boy, and Wendy walked in, checked their bearings on the map, and exited through the same doorway as Eve.
Far below the dead conservatory, malign windchimes played their Tinkerbell theme again as Rupert opened the gates of the elevator and reached for the spell book lurking in the shadows, sleek and vicious with anticipation, waiting to feed again on dreams of death and avarice.
A week later, Imp returned to Bigge HQ to visit his sister in her office.
The Lost Boys had spent six days tidying up after they got home. The scene that had greeted them on their return was dismaying. Broken glass everywhere, overturned or slashed furniture, someone had trampled the Christmas present Imp had so carefully wrapped for Game Boy, and the kitchen sink contents had achieved sapience and were threatening to sue for full human rights. There was only one thing for it: they did the best they could with the front door, then bedded down on the top floor, Imp and Doc in one bedroom, Wendy and Del in the other, and Game Boy in the bathroom.
The morning after they won the war for Neverland, Imp had set them to work tidying, scrubbing, cleaning, and fitting new glass in the broken window panes. Four days later the house was spick and span, everyone had their own bedroom back (although Del seemed to be spending most of her time round at Wendy’s flat), and the door to Neverland was nailed shut and boarded over, with a second coat of paint drying.
Then Imp received a text message—a very headmistressy SEE ME—and of course he had to go and find out how Eve had fared with her boss.
This time, he didn’t dress to impress. What you see is what you get, and in Imp Eve was going to get what he wanted to grow up to be, which was to say, an aspiring director of artistically challenging long-form visual media, starting with the movie he intended to make: Dead Lies Dreaming.
When he got to the front door of Bigge HQ and rang the bell, he discovered that there had been a few changes.
“Mr. Starkey, sir? Please come in and have a seat! Would you like some tea or coffee? Your sister will see you shortly—” The receptionist fawned on him and the imperious butler was perfectly polite, as long as Imp ignored the apprehensive sidelong glances that implied he feared Imp might have him flogged for insolence. Which, quite honestly, wasn’t Imp’s kink, any more than the conventionally pretty blonde receptionist who kept pushing her chest up at him. (For the time being, Imp had decided, his type consisted of Doc, and Doc alone—at least until he got bored with the lack of variety and decided he was poly again.)
After accepting a cup of very fine tea—just to shut the poor woman up and stop her fussing—Imp settled down to wait. He didn’t have to cool his heels for long. “Jeremy!” His sister smiled warmly as she stepped out of a corridor leading back into the town house, an expression which (judging by the butler’s double-take) was most unusual. “Long time no see!” she added, unironically air-kissing him as she led him into a gigantic and luxuriously appointed executive lair.
“This isn’t your office,” Imp said, sounding stupid even to his own ears. There was nothing for it: he doubled down on the oropharyngeal toe-massage. “Moving up in the world, baby?” He propped his hip against the desk and grinned crookedly at her.
Eve shut the door, stalked around the desk, and flopped bonelessly into a classic Evil Overlord chair that was probably worth more than the house they’d grown up in. “Welcome to my world,” she said, with a careless wave at the bay window overlooking a neatly manicured garden that went on and on and on, looking out over some of the most expensive real estate in the world.
“Wait, what—” Imp’s brain finally caught up—“you got a promotion?”
“What can I say?” She shrugged: “Dead man’s shoes.” She smiled a pixie grin that Imp hadn’t thought he’d see again, not since the day their father died.
“Wait, your boss…”
“He was so eager he went to get the book himself.” She frowned slightly. “You didn’t run into him upstairs, did you?”
“No! What happened?”
“I told him I quit, and he could get it his own damn self.” She glanced around. “Obviously I worded it very carefully. And did it in precisely that order.”
“Wait, you—”
“I resigned, then I told him where he could find the book.” The fey grin came out to play again. “He never came back. I’m pretty sure the curse got him: if not, he wandered off into Neverland and didn’t make it out.”
“Damn.” Imp rubbed his forehead, frowning. “How? I mean, he bought it, didn’t he? Isn’t he its legitimate owner now? Shouldn’t it have recognized him?”
“You might think that, but the book doesn’t necessarily agree.” She smiled to herself, a knowing expression that made Imp’s blood chill momentarily. “Rupert was the chief executive of de Montfort Bigge Holdings, you see, an investment vehicle domiciled in Skaro for tax purposes, private equity with a specialty in highly unprofitable global subsidiaries—subsidiaries that forwarded their profits to Rupert’s beneficial trust via a double Irish with a Dutch sandwich, or whatever wheeze the rocket scientists in accounting have replaced the Double Irish Jammy Tax Dodge with this week, to stay one jump ahead of the legal loopholes the authorities keep trying to close on us. And sure, he told me to acquire the book for him. And yes, I did that. But I didn’t pay for it using money in one of Rupert’s personal accounts, or even a company he owned a majority share of.
“Instead, I used Rupert’s funds to buy a house. And then I remortgaged it. It’s a very valuable property, apparently—it’s on Kensington Palace Gardens, don’t you know? I think you can guess the address. Anyway, it gave me a line on the twenty-five million and change I needed in order to preempt the auction, plus a bridging loan and a few other odds and ends I needed. This all went through a management company I set up, and by the way your name is on the deeds along with mine. Which means the purchase of the book used money coming directly from an offshore financial entity that you and I jointly own, which owes Rupert the twenty-five mil but what the hey, he’s not about to come and collect it any time soon.”
Imp flapped his jaw. “What. The. Fuck?”
“Dad was right, you know: accountancy really is magic,” his sister told him. “Only I figured that out too late,” she added quietly.
“The curse affected anyone who took the book and didn’t own it. But we owned—we own—the family house again? So the curse couldn’t affect you or me, or someone acting under our instructions, but your boss … oh dear fucking me.” He rocked back and forth, thinking furiously.
“I’m pretty sure Rupert learned about the book a few years ago, when he hired me. But it took him ages to find the map Grandpa left lying around, and even longer to set me up to go fetch. He told me to buy the book for him. But he didn’t say how I was to buy the book for him, and I was very careful indeed not to give him any authority to collect the book on my behalf.”
“Which is why you resigned first, before you told him where you’d left it.” He looked at her, eyes glittering. “What now?”
“You go back to the house you co-own and check your bank balance,” she said. “I paid the finder’s fee we agreed, in full. The solicitors should be getting in touch soon. When they do, forward me their email?”
“But, but…”
“I’m putting you on salary,” she announced. “You’ll be listed as a janitor, working at, oh, a certain property I mentioned buying earlier: duties to include any housework necessary to keep it in order, the money isn’t great but it includes on-site accommodation for yourself and up to four designated friends and family? You should have plenty of time left over for making movies on the side. But your principal job—which will not be written down anywhere—is to keep that fucking door shut. And don’t, whatever you do, breed. Are we square?”
Imp stood. “This isn’t fair!”
“Jerm.” She walked around the desk until she was close enough to reach out and touch his nose: “Life isn’t fair. If life was fair the family curse would come with an escape clause, Dad wouldn’t have died for you, Mum wouldn’t be in a care home, and your elder sister would probably have babies instead of control of a multi-billion-pound hedge fund.” She looked thoughtful. “Although the hedge fund is a really good consolation prize, come to think of it.”
A pair of cut crystal tumblers filled themselves from the decanter on the sideboard and floated across to her. She took one and passed it to Imp. “Here’s to family,” she proposed, and they raised their glasses to their parents, and the brothers and sisters and children they would never have.
(THE END—for now)