A moment to pause and consider.
Consider an office.
It is big, white, glass down one wall, abstract images of…
… well, art…
… down another. Fluorescent lamps burn above the long table, where during working hours important meetings for important men are held, complete with bottled mineral water to encourage important thoughts to flow. But now, here, in the dead of night, the lights are off, and the room is silent.
A man stands by the window.
Only…
… not quite a man.
Look at him, and you will see a stick-thin figure with wrists of bone made to snap at the lightest touch, pale hair and skin barely thick enough for the blood to pass, standing with his hands clasped behind his back, surveying all beneath him. The lights of Canada Water, steel and glass, concrete and iron, planned, perfect, cold.
But turn your head to one side and for a second, just a second, you might perceive what is truly there, your mind bursting apart as his skin floats from his back; and there he will stand, wendigo in all his glory, claws for fingers, bones of iron, flesh flying loose around him like banners in a breeze and even as you perceive…
… you will forget, your mind unable to accept what it has just beheld.
A knock on the door.
His head doesn’t turn as the door is opened. A woman, dressed in a grey trouser suit, makes her way in.
“Yes?” His voice barely an exhalation. The glass in front of him shows no sign of steam as his breath plays over its surface.
“M-M-Mr Ruislip sir?” Her knuckles are white, her skin pale as the silk that covers her body.
“Have they found her yet?” he murmurs, his eyes fixed on the lights of the city below. “Have they found Greydawn?”
“There’s been a problem, Mr Ruislip sir. The builders you sent to Magicals Anonymous, they’re… gone.”
“Gone?” A flicker of an eyebrow above a watery eye, a bare twitch in the corner of his mouth. “How ‘gone’?”
“Vanished, sir. Uh… dissolved, sir, the scryers say.”
“But I was assured that they were indestructible,” breathes Mr Ruislip. “I was assured that no lock could hold them, nor no magic bar their path.”
“Y-y-yes, sir.”
“I am disappointed by this turn of events. It seems to me that I have, at every step, made great efforts to guarantee the survival of this company. I have given it prosperity, which is a source of happiness to men, I have given it success, which causes pride; and yet the one favour I ask in return, the one… desire I express, has not been achieved. Why is this?”
“Ed-Eddie Parks fled.”
“Redundant. The summoning circle failed to bind and compel Greydawn, and I removed their Christmas bonuses. If Eddie wishes to seek employment elsewhere, then that is an acceptable reallocation of human resources.”
“The summoners are dead. They’re all dead. Dog is in the streets. The Midnight Mayor—”
He moves so fast she can hardly see, but he’s there by her side in a second, and, God, it’s fingers he runs over her cheek, fingers not claws, fingers…
“Tell me about your fear,” he breathes, so soft now, curious and quiet. “It is a feeling but it causes a physical change, yes? Your heart–it beats faster. Your face is red. Your breath comes quickly. This is a hormonal response to feeling? Your mind tells you that you are in danger and so your blood moves faster in preparation for a fight? Tell me, if you experience joy, how does your body alter?”
The woman half-closed her eyes, ran a leather tongue over sandy lips. “We can still find her,” she pleaded. “We’ll find Greydawn. The Friendlies… the shamans…”
“The Friendlies and the shamans are united!” roars Mr Ruislip, his anger a too-hot wave of breath in her face. “The Midnight Mayor has joined them, the builders are slain, and now they will come, and when they are all dead I will be no closer to my objective! All I ask is a very simple thing and yet you fail again!”
His fingers move.
It is a tiny gesture, a flick that might swat away a fly.
The woman sways.
She feels the blood from her neck run down and seep into her shirt. Feels the hot pulse of it draining away from her veins, the lightness in her skull as gravity takes over where the heart can no longer reach. She tries to speak, but air cannot pass through what is left of her throat. She falls, her blood a scarlet spray up the nearest wall.
Claws, not fingers, then.
Mr Ruislip turns away.
There is a phrase he has heard, uttered by humans in seeming jest, but meant to disguise some other feeling. How he despises it when mortals do that–layer one sentiment beneath the hollowness of another.
What was it?
“If you want something done, do it yourself,” he murmurs. It’s said so often in jest, but what it really means, what it so often disguises, is rage.