It was a bus with a letter in its name.

We rode it because it was there, and neither knew nor cared where it was going.

I pressed my head against the glass and felt the cold of it and knew I was shuddering and couldn’t stop it and didn’t care.

The place hurt where Templeman had broken our skin with his needle. A dull slow throbbing.

Motorway became A-road, which yielded to wide city street. Name such places, then see if you can taste the stories that come with them—Mile End, where the city had once stopped and which was now firmly, officially, inner city; Victoria Park, by day, at least, a lake and ducks and playing children; Bethnal Green, where the rural cottage had become the urban slum and now, after a hundred years of neglect, the comfortable middle-class idea of a cottage.

On Mare Street, the magic tasted of the local food, sweet potato and chilli and ginger, a medley of unreconciled senses. It was a place for spells of old black time and new sodium streets, where old met new and didn’t like what it saw.

The bus terminated at Hackney Central, at a car park framed by raised railway lines that carried only freight at this hour of the night, and one-way systems laid out to tangle the senses.

Where and why didn’t matter.

No buses, no trains.

I put my hands in my pocket, and walked.

Somewhere between Templeman and Oscar Kramb, I’d lost my bag.

I walked, westwards.

The orange indicator board behind the gates of Dalston Kingsland station proclaims it to be nearly four in the morning. In the locked-up hardware store along the street, a disco ball spins perpetually, sending out dots of purple and emerald light. In the window of the local library are invitations to attend first-aid courses, take up Pilates, learn jiu jitsu, read this week’s book of the week on this month’s theme of American Noir, sign a petition to Save Our Library.

The hairdressers in Dalston will give you any cut you want—so long as you want Afro. For an extra £12 they’ll throw in nails and, for £25, you can have the complete nail and pedicure indulgence. Sets of nails without fingers are lined up in the windows, arranged in rainbow-arcs. The betting shop next door offers £15 free towards your first bet. The pawnbrokers, two doors down, guarantees you a good rate of return, should it all go wrong.

My hand hurt.

Somewhere between Templeman and Oscar Kramb, I’d lost everything.

I held up my fingers to a sodium street light and looked at the twin crosses carved into the palm of my hand. I turned my wrist this way and that, framing the bubble of sodium between forefinger and thumb, then pinched a little harder, catching it in the hollow of my hand, pinning it there. The street lamp I’d stolen it from hissed and whined irritably, trying to glow. I let it hum, and held up the bubble of stolen light close to my face until I could feel its heat pushing softly against my skin.

Silence in the city.

No.

Not quite silence.

Not quite.

Half close your eyes and listen, and somewhere underground there is the service train rumbling back towards the depot from a night of maintaining the lines; and put your head on one side and listen and there is the delivery lorry come from the warehouses to the north to drop off tomorrow’s bread into the back docks of the supermarkets; and click your heels on the pavement and see if the sound resembles the sharp-snap footsteps of the woman trying to get home after he swore he’d give her a lift and then turned out to be such an arsehole.

These things do not break the silence but, like a coin in a well, are reminders of how far down it goes.

I snuffed out the light between my fingers, and stood in a puddle of darkness beneath the street lamp looking down a long straight road from one unseen horizon to another. In that darkness, the twin crosses on my hand still seemed visible, discolorations in the gloom, a different kind of blackness. There was blood on my sleeves. I looked away.

Need help.

Templeman took everything.

Then again, a nothing so absolute is, in and of itself, a powerful thing.

I knelt down on the paving stones.

Pressed my scarred hand into the dirty ground. Bits of chewing gum, dried and pressed to black, had been so walked on that they were now part of the pavement itself.

I could feel the pipes under my feet, see the steam curling around the sewer grating a few yards further below.

I could feel my heart beating in the palm of my hand.

I said, “Domine dirige nos,” and felt the words shudder through me like hot sickness. “Domine dirige nos, domine dirige nos!”

Need help.

I pressed my head down to the ground, dug my fingers into it, into the cracks between the paving stones. There was a place between the cracks, a world just visible out of the corner of the eye, the thing that mothers invoked when they laughed at their children, saying, “Don’t step on the cracks” without knowing quite where they’d heard the warning told.

“Domine dirige nos,” I whispered, a few centimetres from the stones. “Please, domine dirige nos.”

Footsteps.

They were soft on the ground, but we felt them.

They started from nowhere, and got closer without seeming to grow louder.

There was no light to throw a shadow, but we felt the air move above us as the source of the footsteps stopped. Even had we not known, we could have smelt him. He stank of a life lived without showers, of cigarette smoke and ash.

I looked up.

A cigarette flared orange-red in the night as he drew in a puff of smoke, before letting it out in a long blast from the corner of his mouth and flicking the ash away.

“Hey, Matthew?” he said. “You’re one screwed-up sick pup, you know that?”

If it hadn’t been so funny, we might have cried.

“Please,” I breathed. “Please help me.”

He squatted down in front of me, blew smoke above my head, flicked ash into the gutter. “You’ve still got some blood on your face,” he said. “You should be careful about things like that, you never know where that stuff has been. Haven’t you been watching those government health warnings?” The glowing end of the cigarette stuck the air with each word, to undermine its solemnity. “Chlamydia Is Everywhere.”

I looked up at him, hands still pressed to the ground. The sound the Beggar King made as he rubbed his beard was like snapping bone over splintered wood. “I don’t do interventions for just anyone,” he said. “Beggar Kings aren’t just sprung into existence to solve your problems; only to walk beside.”

“Templeman took Penny.” The words came out fast. To say them slow would have been not to say them at all.

He sighed. “I’m sorry to hear that, I really am. She was a nice girl, you know? I thought she had balls, and I don’t think that about many people.”

“He tricked me. Used me.”

“Come on,” sighed the Beggar King. “Like that’s so hard.”

“He killed your people. He did it.”

A shadow passed across the Beggar King’s eyes, almost too swiftly to see. “Is that right?” he breathed, the flame burning steadily down on the paper between his dirty fingertips. “And by the looks of you, he tried a little something with your internal soft bits too?”

He straightened up, drew one last firm puff on his cigarette and tossed the butt away. Held out a hand. The nails were ridged yellow bone, cracked and ragged; the dirt was so deeply ingrained it had become part of the skin. His hand was cold as I took it, pulling me up. “Come on,” he said, looking me over. “Jesus, what a mess.” Then he grinned. “Let me take you to my masseuse.”

On a road with a No Entry sign at either end was a low grey building that had once been a primary school. Its windows were boarded up; an area of neglected grass was littered with old plastic bags and Coke cans; and wires hanging off the walls suggested that the electricity board had long since lost control over who powered what where.

But there were some new additions.

These were bright green signs that proclaimed the following:

Security Monitored 24/7

Danger—Children Do Not Play

Live-In Guardians Protect This Building

Next to this sign someone had written with bright red paint:

MY GOVERNMENT DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

Underneath someone else had written

Underneath that, someone had drawn a quizzical owl, all in black, who stared out as if surprised to find itself so far from the Hundred Acre Wood.

There was a padlock on the main entrance. Either someone hadn’t bothered to lock it, or it knew not to argue when the Beggar King came calling. The hall inside was dark, the air heavy with the smell of rising mould and settling dirt. Its walls were covered with paint, sometimes pictures, sometimes words, moving in and out of each other, messages from

Anne find me

To:

Caz woz ere

And laced in between, in bright paint that had dribbled down to the floor:

MISERY LOST

TEK 33

HEROES WITH GRIMY FACES

SUFFER IN SILENCE

WE DO NOT FORGET

A gloomy orange-yellow stain of light at the end of the hall led off into a room, student-sized with the remains of a single bed, the stuffing long torn out to make animal nests. In the shell of a metal bin, a fire had been lit from old timber fragments, siphoned petrol and newspaper kindling. Four sleepers were huddled around the flames, on cardboard beds, faces and breathing barely perceptible under a mass of sleeping bag. A big nylon shopping bag stolen from a store offering designer bathrooms at cut-price rates, get your quote now, leant against the wall, its sides bulging.

The Beggar King put his finger to his lips and stepped round the sleepers to the bag, unzipping its top and rummaging through. Even from the door, I could smell it, a mixture of dried sweat and exhaust fumes. He pulled out an armful of clothes from a bit too far down in the bag for its depths to be natural, pulled the zip tight and moved back past the sleepers, a hand extended over their heads like a priest blessing his flock. At the end of the hall we entered another darkened room, where a fire was burning low in an iron stove. A purple bloom of mould was spreading across the walls, and a dark stain on the floor had been scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and would not be shifted.

Closing the door behind us the Beggar King put the bundle of clothes down on the floor and said, “You’re not one of these guys who goes to the gym, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Didn’t think so.” He leant back against the driest patch of wall he could find, patting down his pockets for another cigarette, which he found in a mess of torn white tissue and old bits of plastic. He ran it lovingly between his fingers and put it to his lips. It waggled like a seesaw as he said, “Okay, lose the clothes, burn them, before the coppers do you. There’s fresh ash on the floor, I suggest you use it and I got…”

Another search in a pocket, and a small glass vial emerged, the label long since rubbed away. Even in the low light, I could tell the colour, and when he opened the lid I recognised the smell.

“Garam masala?” I asked weakly.

He grinned. “You gonna be the sweetest-smelling bum on the block.”

I took the chipped glass vial. “I thought Dr Seah was making it up.”

“Wouldn’t put it past her,” replied the Beggar King. “But sometimes even the truth is funny. Come on, chop chop.”

I struggled out of my blood-stained clothes, huddling close to the stove for warmth. With the cooling ashes from the floor, I rubbed my hands, my arms, my face, my neck, my shoulders and my feet, working them in well. Sure enough, when it was done, I felt cleaner. The dirt beneath my fingernails was flecked with blood; I scratched in the cinders until they were raw and black, and threw my old clothes onto the fire, to wither and die in a lick of flame.

Then the Beggar King rose, and unfolded my new clothes.

“Kneel,” he said, and I knelt.

He held aloft a pair of shredding jeans, stained down one leg, with the pockets hanging out.

“I give to you,” he proclaimed, “the foul-smelling trousers of my clan. All who see you shall look away, and you shall bring shame, disgust and pity wherever you walk.”

He handed me the trousers ceremonially, which I hugged to my chest.

Then, “I give you the oversized second-hand shirt of the great fat man who went on a diet and no longer fitted his old clothes. He walks now in pride in tailored suits, does not give the beggars change but will perhaps one day donate a pair of torn-up shoes. Wear it with gratitude and bow your head when strangers walk away.”

I took the shirt. It smelt of chemical disinfectant, and something else, faint and sickly.

A large coat was flourished ceremonially.

“I give you a coat of infinite pockets and vile smell. The last man who owned this coat died in a church porch from exposure on a bitter night. But the vicar buried him in the yard beneath a stone cross, and the vicar’s wife laid flowers, and, though she did not know why, one of the paramedics came who had found the body and pronounced it long dead at the scene, joints stiff before the sun came up. Though you walk by yourself through the city streets, may you never know the truth of what it is to be alone.”

One of the pockets still held a battered plastic cup and the red felt-tip pen that had been used to write, hungry, please help.

A pair of trainers was held aloft. The uppers had come away from the soles, so that the last wearer’s toes could stick out, and the laces had each been knotted together from many fragments.

“These are the shoes of the beggar who cannot afford the bus, who does not have the money for the train. They have walked north and south, east and west, laying their footprints upon the earth with the lightness of a feather. We do not walk as others do, we are not the busy clatter of well-shod heels, we do not march with the stride of the rush hour, we are not joggers in a park or running for the bus. Ours is an ancient walk, the oldest walk known to man, down a path that has not changed since the first stone of the first city wall was laid. We walk together, the city and the beggars, until only the city remains. Take them, and be nothing but the city.”

I took the shoes, huddling them into my meagre bundle of possessions, and looked up.

The Beggar King’s open palm caught me across the side of the face hard enough to knock me down, landing awkwardly on my elbow. He stood over us and for a moment there was an ancient darkness in his eyes, as deep and wild as the whirlwind. “You’re one of us now,” he said, and his soft voice filled the room. “Don’t screw up.”

I scrambled back onto my knees and, at his nod, started shivering my way into the stained clothes. They felt sticky against my skin, dozens of owners embedded into every stitch. When I was done the Beggar King said, “Can you walk without pride?”

I bowed my head and nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Walk with me.”

In the city, there are many ways of walking.

Let me name them:

Rush-hour scurry, retiree’s shuffle, drunkard’s ramble, frightened scuttle, tourist’s wander, shopper’s amble, mother’s purpose, children’s skip. Who needs to see knees-upwards?

This was the beggar’s walk. It was the sideways winding of those who are not there to be perceived.

We walked south, zigzagging between residential streets sealed off from traffic to prevent the rat run, around schools with the lights coming on as the caretaker arrived for the morning, past shop-front shutters coming up. At this time of year, the city began to wake long before sunrise.

“Tell me about Templeman,” said the Beggar King; so I did. “Yup,” he concluded, when I was done, “I mentioned that you were one screwed-up pup. What you want to do about it? Vengeance? I hear you do a good line in vengeance.”

“I want… we want… Penny. I want Penny.”

“Well, that may not be rosily possible.”

“Have to try.”

“I’m guessing that Templeman won’t be giddy that you didn’t kill the fairy godmother. Not like you couldn’t have claimed self-defence.”

“But it wouldn’t have been.”

He waggled his thick eyebrows in demand of an explanation. I shrugged and immediately regretted it, pressing my hands to my ribs as pain shot through my chest. “Fairy godmother thought he could use our blood, sell it for a profit. Sure, bad idea, no question there. But what we did… what we became… it wasn’t self-defence. Not that.”

“You enjoy it?” he asked, not angry or sad, just words.

I swallowed acid and didn’t answer.

He tutted, and picked up walking speed to just above comfortable. “Well, what you gonna do? Go after Templeman, spells blazing, cowboy style? Bang bang whoosh, ‘You calling me a pussy’ ‘No I ain’t calling you no pussy’ ‘You saying you ain’t calling me a pussy’ ‘Yeah I’m saying I ain’t calling you no pussy’ ‘So you is calling me a pussy’ ‘No I ain’t…’—you get the idea?”

“Don’t know where he is.”

“He’s an Alderman, he thinks you’re dead; where’s the problem?”

“If I was dead,” I replied, “then the Midnight Mayor would be dead. Some poor bastard would be waking up right now with a brand on the hand and there’d be alarms going off all over the city and memos and people would know. The fairy godmother, the dusthouses, everyone will soon bloody know I’m not dead and, in fact, not only am I not dead but there’s a whole great pile of dead behind me that I didn’t bother to tip when paying the bill.”

We kept walking.

The Beggar King said, “You know, I gotta tell you, since you’re one of the flock right now, it’s crap.” I tried in vain to read the meaning in his eyes. “You feel guilt because you think you’re a good man, and good men feel guilt. But I’m gonna tell you, good men don’t have to burn their clothes regularly because there’s too much blood in them to wash out. Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t do the guilt thing—it’s better than, say, you just taking what you’ve done in your stride, because that would make you a psychopath—but Matthew, as a guy who’s in the know, I’m here to tell you, you’re not a good guy. Sure, it’s sweet that you try, but don’t trick yourself into thinking you can relax. Don’t think that just because you’re beating yourself up about it now, you won’t do it again. You will.”

We said, “We did not…” and stopped.

I said, “I couldn’t…” and realised how futile it was.

The Beggar King tutted. “Hey, I’m just saying, you know. I was never here to judge.”

His footsteps made no sound as he moved.

Neat trick that, if you can do it.

“Got anyone you can trust?” asked the Beggar King.

Penny.

“No,” I replied.

“Lone hero sounds great in the ad, not so good in the picture.”

“Templeman took Penny,” I said. “And he can’t have done it alone. Templeman… had friends, and they took Penny. The Minority Council. What kind of piss-poor bloody Midnight Mayor am I if I can’t even sort out the office politics?”

“Hell, you’ve got other qualities,” he said with a comforting pat on the shoulder. “You’ve got… well… you’ve got…” He shrugged, and gave up. “You’ve got a great sense of humour.”

I thought hard.

“There may be one person left.”

Her name was Kelly Shiring.

Because you had to see it, to believe it.

She lived in a flatshare in Maida Vale. Her flatmates were madly in love. He taught at a primary school, she ran sales for a specialist arts magazine. Neither of them believed in magic, and frankly why should they? Kelly was a PA in a not very interesting accountants office, and if she kept unsociable hours, what business was it of theirs to ask? She didn’t clutter the sink, always took the rubbish out, and only ever watched the TV for her weekly dose of crime drama. Her hobbies were harmless. On Tuesdays she did “hot yoga” at the nearby gym, proclaiming with wonder and amazement on her return from the sessions, “I’ve already had a shower and I still smell!” as if in this single phenomenon, whole schools of medical understanding crumbled. Once a month she attended the local feminist book group, and on the bottom of a very old draft of her CV, underneath the courses in practical exorcism and intermediate spreadsheet software, she listed as her favourite holiday pastime off-road bicycling.

And so Kelly Shiring moved through the world, healthy, hearty, never late with her gas bill, never caught skipping a bus fare, a junior PA in a firm of not much note, the future not simply in front of her, but all around her, just waiting to be seized.

Finding her wasn’t hard.

I lay in wait outside Harlun and Phelps, sitting on the pavement with my knees tucked into my chest, head bowed, hands open to the world, as the sun rose and the city came with it. In the city, with the horizon lost behind office walls, dawn was a shift in colour that happened too slow to see, and so fast you barely realised it had begun before it was finished. The orange-black of night became a deep blue stained with streetlight. The blue faded to grey, the street lamps dimming in comparison to their surroundings. Ribbons of gold threaded the thick sky, and the summits of the topmost buildings reflected a rising watery glow where the sun peeped from behind the horizon and the clouds.

I listened to the sound of a rising rush hour, to the rhythm of feet moving faster, cars jamming up bumper to bumper, voices growing, the rumble of trains beneath my feet and the clatter of bicycle bells. Automatic revolving doors began to spin non-stop in the expectation of a day of human traffic. A stream of people started moving into the offices of Harlun and Phelps: some of them Aldermen, most not, bankers heading in for the working day, either ignorant of, or oblivious to, the darker operations of the place.

There was magic here. Hot rush-hour magic, and deep old-town magic that went right down to the base of the Roman walls. And another magic, hard to identify, but there, just in the corner of my eye. Beggar magic. I sat with my palms turned upwards for change, and the eyes of strangers and those who should have known me, should have recognised the brand on my hand, slid straight on by. I was an oil slick on water, a spot of coal-black blackness on a soot-black wall.

And Kelly was nothing special; her eye went past me like any other. But as I saw her pass I raised my head and called out, once, “Kelly.”

She hesitated, stopped, turned; but even with my voice in her ears, her gaze still ran over me, unwilling to process what her eyes saw. I stood up and she stared straight at me, straight through, and didn’t seem to recognise me. Then a flicker of doubt crossed her face as even the magics of a beggar’s smell and a beggar’s coat crumbled in the face of determined scrutiny. But I was already turning and shuffling away, the beggar’s shuffle without purpose or direction, heading towards Guildhall.

And though Kelly was young and quite possibly naïve, she was no fool. She glanced to her left, she glanced to her right, turned her eyes to the heavens in the manner of someone who’s forgotten something vital and can’t believe their own foolish mind, spun on her heel, and marched after me.

In the wide open square by Guildhall, stones had been laid that were centuries old, where the guildmasters of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers had all walked, in the days when the guilds ruled the money, in that part of the city where the money has always ruled. In the streets nearby, dignified plaques declare that here is the Wax Chandlers’ Hall (“The Truth is the Light”) and there the Saddlers’ (“Hold Fast, Sit Sure”). Where a few ancient buildings, in all their proud Gothic glory, had survived the bombs of World War Two, dragons with rolling tongues cling to their rooftops, and spikes of knobbly stone stick up for the pigeons to poop on. Sometimes you can see the rituals of the city still active in this place—clergy with long sticks who both know and care about parish bounds, or officers of the Lord Mayor of London, dressed in red and fur-trimmed hats who will, for £35 and a friendly chat, grant to you the Freedom of the City, bringing with it the right to lead your cattle across London Bridge, but which, please note, does not exempt you from parking tickets.

Linger long enough beneath the red eyes of one of the guardian dragons that look down from the rooftops and out of the carvings on the wall, and you could begin to feel the well of power buried just beneath the water-swept stones. Like the spire at Charing Cross, Speaker’s Corner where once men had been led to hang, or St Paul’s Cathedral in the quiet hours of the night; you could feel those forces that the druids used to call ley lines, bunching and breathing under city streets. It was a place where here and there, then and now, met and lost their way.

I found a doorway where I could huddle out of the wind, and away from the watching eye of the CCTV cameras.

Kelly strode into the square a few seconds behind me, walked by as if I wasn’t there, then paused, bent down to check something in her briefcase, couldn’t seem to find it, cursed quietly under her breath and, in a single movement that was all innocent frustration, moved into the gloom beside me, every inch the harried businesswoman accidentally sharing a corner with a stranger.

Without glancing at me, and with no change to her expression as she searched through her case, she exclaimed, “Good morning, Mr Mayor! May I say how glad I am to see you not dead today!”

“Morning, Kelly,” I groaned.

“You’re not here for your 9.30 are you?”

“My…”

“You have an appointment at 9.30 with representatives from the Church of Our Lady of 4 a.m.; something to do with a missing goddess and a dog. It was on your schedule.”

“I’m really not here for that.”

“Ah, well,” she said, snapping the briefcase shut and glancing up, just once, with a gaze that encompassed the entire square. “I’m sure we can rearrange; did I mention that last night every scryer we have woke up screaming in the night, reporting symptoms ranging from an overwhelming sense of dread through to actual visions of death and destruction raining down upon the earth? I sent you an email, but I wasn’t sure if you’d got it.”

“Funny thing, I kinda haven’t.”

She barely flinched, smiling her way through her disappointment. “Something to do with—and I apologise for the vagueness of the details—a creature of light and fire suddenly becoming manifest on the earth and attempting to rip the heavens into hell, unleash damnation upon the earth and so on; you know I really must talk to the scryers about finding more precise and less melodramatic language in their reports, it only encourages hysteria.”

“Did they say anything else?”

“They said it was in Heron Quays.”

“Well if I was going to bring about Armageddon, that’d be the place.”

“It went away again,” she concluded. “Although, funny thing is, someone did mention something about the fairy godmother having some sort of investment interests in Heron Quays, I think there was a row with the council about building permissions for a swimming pool or something, anyway, this probably isn’t helping you, I’ll have someone check with the planning office.”

She finished, the words all coming out in one breath, and, for the first time, turned and looked directly at me, her smile widening. “Mr Mayor,” she exclaimed, having surveyed my present state, “have I ever spoken to you about the wonders of a health spa?”

“No.”

“They’re wonderful!”

“Really.”

“I have a friend who does aromatherapy.”

“I’m fine.”

“Mr Mayor,” she chided. “Last night someone unleashed magical forces like unto which the city has rarely seen, you stopped answering your phone and are now, if I may say so, dressed as a beggar in both body and magic, hiding outside your own office… How about acupuncture?”

“Templeman took Penny.”

The words happened a long way off.

Kelly’s smile stayed fixed, but the light went out behind her eyes. Then even the smile began to fade. She looked down, bobbing her head as if to ease the digestion of this news. Finally she said, “Why?”

“He’s been using fairy dust to conduct experiments on beggars. Making concoctions to enhance magical capabilities without killing the subject. He tried one on me. It’s got a few side-effects.”

“Are you all right?” she asked. “I mean, alternative medicine is all very well and good, but I really do think that MRIs are one of the most astounding scientific achievements of the age.”

“I’m… fine.”

“You say that, Mr Mayor!” she exclaimed. “But you say it in your special brave voice and, you know, I’m really not sure if I can trust your special brave voice these days because, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr Mayor, there’s a very thin line between being brave and six months of physiotherapy and liquid foods.”

“Kelly! Please! I need you to listen.”

She pursed her lips, and raised her eyebrows at me to go on.

“Templeman,” I tried again, “did it. The culicidae, the Minority Council, fairy dust—he’s there, just out of sight, moving through it all. He took Penny.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

It came out flat and fast now, tick-tack-tock, sharp and cold. “He was being blackmailed by the fairy godmother. The dusthouses supplied Templeman with the initial dust for his experiments, and in return the fairy godmother got what he thought was a tame Alderman in his pocket, someone he could rely on to do whatever he wanted and turn a blind eye.

“That’s why, for so long, the Aldermen have been ignoring the dusthouses, why Templeman didn’t dare move openly.

“Then along I come, and I start kicking up a fuss and the Beggar King gets involved and, suddenly, Templeman sees an opportunity to get rid of the fairy godmother without actually getting his hands dirty because what am I?

“I am dangerous,” I spat the words, “unstable, reckless, quite possibly psychotic, the kind of Midnight Mayor about whom your hard-working Alderman can say ‘I tried to stop him, I really did, but he’s just out of control.’

“Templeman used me. He used me to destroy the dusthouse in Soho, and he wanted to use me to kill the fairy godmother, to end Oscar Kramb’s hold over him without ever alerting the Aldermen to the fact that he, Richard Templeman, is a traitor.

“He sent us to kill the fairy godmother and we… we were… it was… I could have done it. I could have I could have killed him, we could have killed them all, I could have and I… he took Penny. He took Penny and let me believe that the godmother had her, let me believe that she was dead she’s dead she’s dead she’s…” I choked on the words, pressed my hands, tasting of ash, over my mouth to stop the sound.

Kelly put a hand on our arm, trying to say words she couldn’t find.

“Where is he?” I asked at length. “Where is Templeman?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s at the office. I can find out.”

“He’s dangerous.”

“You said he’s killed beggars?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s violated his contract. I mean, we don’t like to talk about it, but sometimes Aldermen have to do jobs that would cause gossip at the Met Police; but beggars… and the Beggar King, I’m guessing he’s annoyed?”

“You could say so.”

“But he gave you his sacred vestments—that was sweet.”

I glanced down at the ragged clothes I wore. After a while, I’d even stopped noticing the smell, forgot what I was wearing. “These?” I asked.

“Of course!” she exclaimed. “I mean, it’s not my field, obviously not, it’s not something I really specialise in, but I can recognise the blessed vestments of the austere and ignorant masters when I see them—you know, they’d fetch an amazing price with the collectors. If you don’t mind the curse that would befall you if you tried selling them, that is.”

In vain I tried to process Kelly’s words. I said, “There’s something else I need.”

“Of course, Mr Mayor, anything at all!”

“I need the culicidae’s heart.” Though her smile stayed locked in place, her lips thinned. “What?” I asked, harsher than I’d meant. “What’s the new disaster?”

“The culicidae’s heart…” she began. “Now, about that… Mr Caughey and Ms Holta took it.”

I pressed my head back against the wall, closing my eyes against the rising glare of the day. “I’ve been gone for less than twelve hours—less than twelve—and already two prats in black have gone and pinched one of the nastiest bits of magical pollution in the city?”

“Um, that would appear to be the case.”

“Kelly, I’m going to use my special authoritative voice, and I want you to know this, so that when I actually do use it, you’ll understand exactly what it is and not say anything annoying, or flap or ask stupid bloody questions; are you ready?”

“Yes, Mr Mayor,” she confirmed. “Authoritate away.”

“Find them. Find me the culicidae’s heart, find me the Minority Council. And Kelly?”

“Yes, Mr Mayor?”

“Find me Templeman.”

Kelly set to work.

At least, I assumed she did.

From outside the office, huddled in the shadows, it was hard to tell.

Businessmen and businesswomen passed me by and spared me not a glance.

A city constable on a bicycle, yellow jacket pulled over his bulletproof vest, paused on the corner beside me, and looked down, and round, and through me, as if I wasn’t there, and looked bemused, and cycled on.

(“But he gave you his sacred vestments—that was sweet.”)

A pair of tourists stopped not a foot in front of me and argued furiously in Spanish about the way to St Paul’s. A child was with them. She was no more than four years old, and proudly wore a striped purple and green hat with knitted braids hanging down by each ear. She looked me in the eye and grinned. I smiled back. Her parents pulled her on, in not quite the right direction.

I sat until I was too cold and stiff to sit any more.

My knees clicked like castanets as I clambered to my feet.

The CCTV cameras looked away as I approached, moving to stare at an empty wall or a quiet street.

Though it was hard sometimes to recognise, through the plate glass and sounds of traffic, this was the oldest part of the city, where every bollard bore twin red crosses, the mark of the Lord Mayor of London, responsible for daylight things, and the Midnight Mayor, lumbered with all the rest.

Look hard enough and you could maybe perceive the anomaly of things beneath the surface. When life started moving to the cities, magic came with it, and when the magic started moving, so did all the creatures that lived within it. If you wait until the dead, dead hours of the night, when the only texture on earth is street-lamp glow, you might see the metal of an ornate lamppost part and the grey-skinned city dryads peep out into the darkness from their wiry home.

There, above a stone doorway built by men who believed in empire and cricket, the statue of a woman in classical drapes, face turned downwards to mourn an unknown loss and whose stone eyes, which should be sandstone beige, are framed with redness from weeping.

And just below the artificial waterfall that glides down black marble into a pool beneath an iron grid, a shadow moves in the water that might be an infant kelpie, its skin the colour of the copper coins, tossed in with a wish, on which it feeds.

Had I told Penny about kelpies?

Of course I bloody had; I mean, how do you miss telling someone about kelpies? Once creatures of the sea and shore, worshipped by the fishermen who taught their children how to whistle to secret songs, they had migrated first up the rivers, then the streams, then into the drains, then the pipes, then the fountains and secret pools of the cities, adapting to their new environment as readily as the elves had taken up casino management and the dwarves had learnt a love of the London Underground.

I’d told her.

Just because I couldn’t remember, didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

On Cheapside a security guard stood in the door of a delicatessen.

The windows were full of shining, egg-painted pastries and fresh breads.

The smell of rising hot yeast was being pumped through the store.

Men and women sat drinking coffee topped with whipped milk and sprinkles. I stood in the window, hands pressed against the glass, and watched the steam rise and fall around my fingertips with each pulse of my heart.

The security guard’s eyes swept over me and did not see; but his nose twitched and his back stiffened as he detected the stink of my beggar’s clothes. His gaze turned on me again and, now that he looked to see, he saw, with a look of instinctive hostility.

I ducked my head and walked on.

(“Can you walk without pride?”)

Hunger, thirst.

They must have been coming for a long while, but the sight of others eating and drinking brought such feelings to the fore.

I thought about the soup kitchen at Tottenham Court Road. Where did a guy even get a drink round here for less than ten quid?

I thought about stealing.

It would be easy—so easy—not an alarm would trip, not an eye would flicker; this was still my city, and I stood at its heart.

(“You’re one of us now. Don’t screw it up.”)

Maybe not stealing.

Not today.

What was Kelly doing?

Where was Templeman?

I drifted back towards Guildhall, sat down in a doorway out of the wind, and waited.

Kelly Shiring didn’t come out of the office until half past two.

She walked briskly to Guildhall and, not seeing me there, paused to check her mobile phone, using this ploy to scan the square, seeking me out. I detached myself from the opposite side of the street, walked up behind her, then straight on past. Her eyes locked onto my back and, with a sigh at some unseen annoyance on her mobile phone, she fell into step behind me, keeping a careful distance.

The oldest streets of London hadn’t been built for heavy traffic. On crooked lanes and narrow alleys, between grand office blocks, lay patches of ground too small even for Londoners to build upon. I led Kelly to one of these places, where wooden benches stood near a tiny fountain shaded by pleached lime trees. She sat down, swivelled to face me, and declared, “Now, first things first, Mr Mayor, crayfish with rocket or halloumi and couscous salad?”

A plastic bag was opened as she proclaimed this, and the objects of the moment brought forth along with a bottle of water, a bright green apple, and an oatmeal bar.

I ate like a deprived animal, taste forgotten, volume all that mattered.

Through the crumbs and bits of damp salad, I mumbled, “Well? Where?”

“Would you like a napkin, Mr Mayor?”

“No! Where are they?”

“How about a lemon-scented hand wipe…”

“Kelly!”

She managed not to sigh, folding her hands in her lap. “I’ve got good news and bad news, Mr Mayor. I hope you don’t mind if I start with the bad news, but my mother always told me to get the bad news first, eat the things you don’t like before the pudding, and always try to do at least one unpleasant task per day so that it doesn’t have to prey on your mind when you go to sleep at night, and obviously at the time I thought she was talking utter nonsense but now I realise that she was right. But anyway, yes, the bad news: Templeman has disappeared.”

I paused on my last bite of sandwich. Then lowered it, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and said, cold and quiet, “ ‘Disappeared’?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “Isn’t it funny how these things happen? I mean, at first he was just ‘late for work,’ but then Templeman’s never late for work, is he? Then he was ‘not answering the phone’ and then he was ‘definitely not at home’ and then it was ‘by now he should have called’ and then he was ‘not at the local hospital’ and then he was ‘heavily warded from scrying attempts by a mass reflective shield spell’ and then he was ‘evading authorities’ and then, I suppose, by a process of elimination, he was ‘disappeared.’ The police like these things to take forty-eight hours before they say as much, but you know, I think, considering the circumstances, we can maybe, just this once, but maybe, skip the procedural stuff? So long as it doesn’t become a habit, I mean.”

“And you’re telling me,” I said, “that the Aldermen, psycho-bastards extraordinaire, can’t find him? That one guy, one murderous, murdering, murderer guy, can evade the lot of you?”

“Embarrassing, isn’t it?” she conceded. “But then again, you did, didn’t you, Mr Mayor? In your time. Which isn’t to say that he’s at all like you, I think even the Minority Council would admit that experimenting on beggars and betraying us all to the fairy godmother is, you know, a little out there… I’m just saying, it can be done, by exceptionally talented individuals. We aren’t Jedi.” She paused to blow her nose on a small white linen handkerchief. As she folded it neatly again she exclaimed, “In fact, you know, a few people are beginning to wonder where you are. And I mean, I am just your PA, it’s really not within my remit to authorise the kind of operation I had to put in hand to track down Templeman and besides, no one can quite believe he’d do all that stuff, I mean, a lot of people are really quite fond of him, so actually, all things considered, it might be handy if you… maybe… told someone yourself? Which isn’t to say I can’t handle it, I’m completely on it, but, um… it’s just a thought.”

I stared at her, long and hard, until she turned away. Then I said, “Fuck it,” stood up, and marched over to the nearest bit of blank wall. I licked the end of my grimy finger, and on the stone surface began to write.

I wrote:

THEY THINK HE’S INNOCENT.

YOU BELIEVE THAT OR WHAT?

This done, I stepped back.

Where my finger had run across the wall, it had left a barely perceptible ashen mark.

A moment, a pause.

Then the mark began to deepen. It turned grey, grey-black, then solid coal-dust black, smoking black, burnt black, burning its way into the stone itself, giving off a dry, carbon smoke as it etched itself in deep.

We smiled and turned back to Kelly. “Someone will be by soon,” I explained, “to let the Aldermen know that they’re twats. What next?”

“Um… may I ask, Mr Mayor, exactly why you don’t just tell us personally that we’re twats? I mean, obviously you’re a great inspiration to us all and I’m honoured to be working with you, but you’re not exactly renowned for not telling people that they’re twats when you think that they are, if you don’t mind me saying.”

I sat back down on the bench and ticked the points off on my fingers. “Finger the first says that Templeman must have had help if he took my Penny.

“Finger the second says that help was probably from the Minority Council.

“Finger the third says that I still don’t know who was or was not Minority Council and therefore can’t necessarily trust a single one of you.

“Finger the fourth says that the fairy godmother is gonna be pissed at me and hunting and guess where he’s gonna look? Nowhere is safer than the streets, nowhere more dangerous than prancing around in black.

“Thumb the after-thought adds, everything the Aldermen have done up to this point disgusts and repulses me: the culicidae, the fairy dust, everything; and I would rather trust in the enemies of my enemies than put my trust in those who tell me that they are friend.”

Silence.

Then, “But you… trust me?”

“I dunno. Guess I must.”

The moment paused, wobbled on the tightrope, flailed its arms around, and moved on. Kelly’s face split into a delighted grin. “Oh, Mr Mayor!”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“Obviously it’s important for a PA and her employer to have a mutual understanding, a relationship of openness and appreciation, but I had heard so many things, so many people had warned me off and, you know, they were completely wrong! Positive thinking can win the day, a cheerful attitude towards all the world’s vicissitudes, free and frank discussion, good sandwiches, decent coffee, these are the principles on which modern management should be based!”

I took a deep breath, let the words wash by. “You mentioned good news,” I intoned. “Talk to me about the good.”

“Good… ah, yes, good news! Yes, well, I’m sure this will help a bit in brightening up your day, Mr Mayor…”

“Something should.”

“… we found Mr Caughey.”

I sat up straight, food and drink forgotten. “Where?”

“Weybridge.”

“Weybridge? What the bloody hell—no, actually, never mind, don’t care. Have you approached him?”

“Not at all. I mean, I’ve been very discreet, it’s all been ‘Hey, has anyone seen Caughey?’ and ‘I’ve got this memo for Caughey’ instead of ‘I think the boss wants to throttle him’ or anything like that, because you know how it is, people might take that the wrong way and no one likes office politics do they, I mean, it only makes for friction, but anyway. And I did a bit of scrying—not really my thing but you know how it is—and he’s shielding but I realised that if I used his office keyboard, then there’s all this hair and skin and stuff between the keys, it’s really gross actually, I mean, things breed in there, but… you don’t really want to know about how I scryed for him, do you?”

“Maybe another time.”

“In that case, um… Weybridge.” She handed me a folded scrap of paper. It bore an address written in the bold capitals of the very neat dealing with the genetically messy. “He’s got this mistress who has this amazing house that she got from her second divorce and it’s got this amazing garden and I think you can play golf near there on this incredible course which you need these little buggies to get round, but anyway, he went there and I think Lucy Holta’s with him and you know, the Minority Council are probably gonna have dinner there or something because they’re keeping their heads down after you shouted at them last night, so, um… you know, you could just say ‘Avengers Assemble!’ or something and we’d be like, in there. I mean, I know how you can’t trust Aldermen right now because of how you’ve been screwed over by the Minority Council, but I really think that Sean in finance would definitely be on board for something and, you know, Louis in the Department of Demons, Shades and Shadows always said that Caughey was ‘this totally stuck-up prick and I hate guys like that,’ and you’ve got me!”

If Kelly had owned a golden fluffy tail, it would have taken this opportunity to wag.

I found myself almost smiling. “That’s… very nice of you,” I said. “But if it’s okay with you, just this once, I’ll handle things… another way.”

“If you’re sure…?”

“I’m sure.”

“I just feel like I’m not being very helpful…”

“You found Caughey.”

“Yes, but like I said and, really, once you’ve got the keyboard it’s all downhill from there anyway and besides, you’re not eating right.”

“Thinking of which…”

She was already reaching in her bag, pulling out a purse. It was small, clip-closed, made of woven white and purple beads formed into a tulip pattern. She saw my face and blushed. “It was a present,” she explained. “From my mother.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

She opened the purse and passed me every note inside it.

“I don’t need…” I began.

“Yes, you do!”

“It’s… he asked, ‘Can you walk without pride?’ and you did say these are the vestments of the Beggar King; it’s…”

She put her hand to her mouth in sudden comprehension and snatched the money back. “Oh God!” she exclaimed. “You’re so right, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t even thinking, you’re wearing the sacred vestments! Wait a moment…” The notes were stuffed into her pocket and the purse itself tipped out into the palm of her hand. Coppers were separated from silver, silver from tarnished not-ever-gold. She sorted through the smallest change, eventually picking out nearly six pounds fifty, which she dropped into my open hand. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “I sometimes forget how these things work, you know, I mean, it’s like inviting a troll to munch on ogre bones, it’s completely disgraceful and I’m so, so…”

“Thank you, I’m… I’m grateful. I know it seems like… but I am grateful. For what you’re doing.”

She beamed. “Just doing my job, Mr Mayor.”

“No,” I replied, tipping the fistful of coins into the seemingly bottomless pocket of my coat. “No—much more than that. I’ll be in touch.”

Weybridge.

Did the citizens of Weybridge even get to vote in London elections?

On the train out of Waterloo it was harder to stay unseen; the magic of the Beggar King was only solid in the street, in places where you were expected, and expected to be ignored. Here I was an anomaly, and people glanced at me with polite uncertainty. I had a group of six seats to myself, three facing three, and a table just big enough to lean on. A free newspaper, the crossword puzzle torn out, offered Saucy Celebrity Gossip and advice on New, In, Chic—Get The Look For Your Home.

Small factories and frugal-looking streets gave way to semi-detached villas, then golf courses and wooded commons. At Weybridge I was one of four people and a baby in a buggy who got off. The sun shone with winter clarity on a platform far too long for our suburban train. Outside the station, a wall-map included the road whose name Kelly had given me.

I walked.

It was a place where the magic of the city stretched thin.

Still there, still just there, but like the sound of the ocean heard beyond a towering dune, the smell of salt though you cannot see the water. We were close to the green belt, far too close for comfort; to that place where the magic of the city and the country met like hot and cold air riding a storm front. We knew of country magic, could sometimes even feel it, in the raw power of the wind on the cliff, or the rustling of leaves in the forest, but it was a thing alien to us, distant and untapped. Outside the comfort of walls and light, we were vulnerable, mortal.

At first there was no sign of any town, or even a suburb. The station seemed surrounded by forest. I followed a road that took me through a dense oak wood—but not past anywhere you might confuse with real countryside. A wide pavement lay on either side, and the traffic was fast and heavy. I passed bus shelters for routes across the centre of London, as well as notices declaring, “Bridleway.” The paths beneath the trees looked as if hundreds of people, dogs and riding-school ponies trampled them each day.

I came to an area of large houses, many on roads announcing, “No Thoroughfare” and “Private Estate.” In some windows, half hidden by trees, I glimpsed Neighbourhood Watch stickers; with a shudder, I also saw a large black-and-white image showing a large, watching eye.

Three doors down, the words running in thin white paint, someone had written on a garage door:

It has claws

After more than a mile of turnings that announced names like Cedar Grove and Forest Chase, I came to the quiet side road I was looking for. It looked much like all the others. The house was pastiche Georgian, in the style of much smaller new homes on more crowded estates; it looked like it was made from giant plastic Lego, and included a three-car garage with white automatic doors. It stood in a half-acre of recently cleared woodland, and had a professionally tended garden of mown grass and dwarf conifers. An ugly rockery featured floodlights and a small electrically operated cascade.

I rang the bell, and heard a musical ding-dong from inside.

No answer.

I rang again.

Then knocked on the big brass knocker in the shape of a swan’s head.

Still no reply.

I ran my hand over the warm wood of the door, pushing my mind between the cracks, testing for any form of magical defence, and for a moment heard

this is all your fault all your fault all

for fuck’s sake Mum it’s not like you can stop me!

you don’t talk to me like that how dare you

It was faint, heard far off, but turn our head to the side and listen, listen, and there it was, the gentle background beating of the culicidae’s heart, rage and confusion in a fistful of fiery heat.

I couldn’t sense any wards.

But, this close to the countryside, I considered there might be other defences, spells woven, not from coils of wire but from the roots within the earth. I knocked one more time, and when there was no answer I headed to the back of the house.

There, a curving glass wall looked out on a patio with an ornamental pool, teak garden furniture and a mothballed barbecue. Inside was a spacious living room of plush sofas, and fitted carpet deep enough to take footprints. I smashed a French window with a rock stolen from the ornamental pool, bashed away a few splinters left from the frame, and unlocked the door from inside.

The house was silent.

Except perhaps for…

You never listen you don’t care you never understand!

when I was your age we knew how to behave

you call this acceptable behaviour, young man?

“Mr Caughey?” I called out.

My voice was dulled amid heavy looped curtains and engulfing upholstery.

“Templeman betrayed you,” I declared, turning to climb the wide stairs. “He betrayed everyone.”

A corridor on the first floor, long and white, doors on every side, fresh paint shining on panelled walls. A wall table on the landing held thick clean towels and a vase of coppery glycerine-dried beech twigs.

“It’s over,” I went on, trying a door that opened into a bathroom, a dozen kinds of shower gel made from honey and mint, tea tree and strawberry, arranged along the side of an oversized bath. “There’s no salvaging the Minority Council after this. You’ve screwed up. You screwed up the culicidae, you screwed up with the dusthouses and now Templeman has screwed you for good. All anyone’s going to say when they think of the Minority Council is ‘Hey, weren’t those the guys who got played by a traitor?’ Because you were. We all were. Templeman played us like a fiddle.”

A door at the end of the corridor, white like the rest; locked.

I could feel a warmth on my skin, a tingling in my fingers, as I tried the handle. I knocked, and thought I heard something move in the room beyond; tasted bitterness at the back of my mouth.

“He took Penny,” I said, barely aware that I was saying the words. “He took Penny and told me she was dead. Used me. Us. But he can’t have done it alone.”

Silence.

No—not quite silence.

Not entirely.

I pressed my ear to the door. I could hear a gentle sound that might have been wind against a window-pane, might have been breath after suffocation, might have been whispered frantic words.

Listened.

“… told them told them told them told them fuck! Fuck fuck they never why would they never hate them hate them he wouldn’t have he wouldn’t have done to me FUCK OFF hate them hate them hate them don’t understand don’t understand don’t understand why didn’t they understand…!”

I stepped back, considered my options, then gave a good kick.

It probably hurt my foot more than the door, but I heard something splinter, and kicked again.

The door bounced open, revealing a room with one small window, one small bed, one small, unused jogging machine, one small, unplugged TV; and one not very large man, huddled around a small box.

The box was insulated, the kind of thing well-organised mothers use for taking ice cream to a picnic. It was encased within the form of a man dressed all in black. His face was flushed, his salt-and-pepper hair was wild, revealing how thin it was beneath its comb-over; his black suit was rumpled. As he knelt, arms wrapped around the box, his eyes darted to and fro almost as fast as the words tumbled from his mouth:

“Fuckers! Fuck fuck fuck bitch bitch never understood never understood I don’t need it why should I care don’t care don’t care it’s always them them telling me what they want me to be not what I want they don’t understand what I want don’t listen don’t fucking listen…”

I squatted down in front of him.

His eyes swerved to me then away, his body tightening around the cool-box. At the base of the box, the carpet was smoking, and a brown-black stain was spreading from beneath it. The air was heat-hazed, smelling faintly of tar, and where Caughey’s cheek rested against the plastic of the box, blisters were emerging, yellow-white on a roaring-red background.

“Cecil Caughey,” I murmured, balancing painfully in front of him on my haunches.

His eyes darted to me again, and were gone as quickly. “If they loved me they wouldn’t have left me left me left me left me no one fucking loves me and that’s fine that’s fine I’m okay with that because why the fuck should I care anyway about those stupid bitches who don’t fucking love me they’re all going to go to hell anyway shit!”

“Mr Caughey, Chairman of the Minority Council,” I breathed, “did you read the health and safety leaflet that comes with this thing?”

I tapped the edge of the plastic box with a fingertip. The box itself was burning, a thin sticky layer beginning to form on its surface like syrup on a pancake.

“You take everything!” he wailed. “I didn’t mean it I didn’t I didn’t mean it you always make it out like it’s my fault my fault my fault when it wasn’t it wasn’t why the fuck would you listen to those fucking cunts anyway they don’t know anything they don’t fucking care it’s just a job to them but this is my life!”

I stood up, dragging in breath as fire surged through my ribs. Tearing the sheets from the bed into strips, I wrapped them like fat gloves around my hands. I squatted back down in front of him, took the box in my sheet-swathed hands and tried to pull it free. Anger flared in his eyes; he wrapped his arms tighter around the box, the black fibres of his jacket starting to smoke at the increased contact.

“Mine!” he screamed. “It’s mine it’s mine it’s mine! Fuck off!”

I hesitated, let go of the box, watched him huddle closer to it.

Then I said, “You probably won’t recover, but if there is something in there which can hear this, I reason you should know. I’m going to take the culicidae’s heart now. I’m going to use it to destroy the dusthouses. Not because I think I can win, that this war can ever be won. Not because of Penny. Or Templeman, or Hugo and the bloodhounds, or Oscar bloody Kramb. Their time will come. Not even for Meera, not any more. I’m going to do it because, at this stage, I have nothing else left to do. I have nothing that is mine. I have no one that I… there is nothing left of me but this. Nothing to do but finish it.”

I seized the box again, and pulled it free with a single tug. Caughey cried out and fell onto the floor; scrambled after me with blistered broken hands, one side of his face oozing blood and clear fluids.

“Mine mine mine!” he screamed. “Give it back to me give it back to me bitch bastard slut cunt I hate you I hate you I hate you why did you give birth to me why did you if you didn’t love me why why why…?”

I stood up quickly, stepping aside as he collapsed in sobs at my feet. Even through the padding of the sheets I could feel the heat from the culicidae’s heart, hear its beating in my ears, a relentless pulse that longed to be heard, fed on rage and loneliness and despair.

“We ought to kill you,” we explained to Caughey as he beat on the floor with his fists. “Templeman cannot have done everything alone. But we realise now that death… it is not sorrow or grief or despair. It is not guilt and retribution, it is not justice and the cries of the lost. Is merely a not-ending. A stopping of all things. A blackness without feeling. We could kill you, and by now…” We grimaced at the thought. “By now we are so washed in blood that your life would run off our skin like spray off the surface of the ocean. You would never be on our conscience.”

Caughey’s thrashing about grew less; he wrapped his head in his hands, words trickling out with animal sounds between his lips, body shaking, tears mixing with blood on his face.

“Please please please,” he whispered. “Please please why don’t you listen to me why don’t you ever listen I’m just a kid okay? I’M JUST A KID!”

We backed off into the doorway, cradling the burning box that held the mosquito’s heart. Between sobs he was scratching at the raw places on his face. “This,” we said, “is much better.”

We walked away.

The strips of sheet I’d used as protection from the culicidae’s heart were already blackening and turning crisp by the time I got downstairs.

A set of car keys sat on a table by the door.

They unlocked a silver hybrid car parked in the drive outside. I put the box in the back.

It had been a long time since I last drove, and I struggled to work out which complex part of the dash related to what. Even the indicator stick came with options, from turning on the radio to warming the driver’s seat.

Suburban driving was a mixture of wide open roads where 70 mph was allowed but not recommended, and busy roundabouts where all things merged to a 4 mph slog. I could smell the back seat beginning to burn and, through the sharp stench of it, there was the inescapable beating of the culicidae’s heart.

why didn’t you

it’s not fair!

she said she would never

i hate you!

time to grow up

I knew where I needed to go. It wasn’t far.

I headed for the river.

Travel through London up the river and you see the Thames change its nature very quickly. Above the wide muddy estuary, it ebbs and flows in a controlled torrent of controlled water between tall stone embankments, sliced by the central bridges of the city. Further west, the banks are lower, and by the old riverside mansions of Chiswick and Richmond, where the cyclists and dog-walkers throng, the towpath is frequently flooded by the tides. Up towards Hampton Court Palace the water curls past more lazily: swans glide on its current, herons nest in tall trees, and small pleasure boats are moored at the end of long waterside gardens. “Private” signs abound.

I parked on a dirt path between two walled-off white houses, where a sign said “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted,” and unloaded my smoking treasure. One side of the lid was starting to melt; inside, drops of dirty plastic had fallen onto my rosy-tinted prize: the culicidae’s heart. Seeing it only increased its pressure against my own mind; for a moment I tasted that bitter taste, that rush of adrenaline, in the mouth of all its victims as the culicidae had descended out of darkness to feast on their anger and rage, to drain them of all the furies of youth and leave them as hollow shells.

Between me and the river stood a wrought-iron gate fastened by an electromagnetic lock with a keypad. I snatched the electricity from the lock, holding it in the palm of my hand before shaking it away; the gate swung ajar.

Well-trimmed grass ran down to wet mud and the water’s edge. A pencil-thin skiff, rowed by three men in matching orange sweatshirts, skimmed across the water. A cormorant, surfacing between dives, rode up and down on the boat’s wake. I carried the box into the shallows, and let the water wash over my knees. Carefully, I lowered the box until the water slipped over its edge, and filled it.

Immediately it touched the heart, the water began to hiss and steam. I stepped in deeper, up to my hips, and pressed the box downwards until it was almost full, the culicidae’s heart floating inside a bubbling mass. I unwrapped the sheets from my hands, pressed my fingers into the river mud, coating them with grey-brown sludge, then reached into the box of hissing water, pulled out the culicidae’s heart, and plunged it into the river.

Heat.

Not just any kind of high temperature, but the burning sickly heat of feeling and disease. It was the fire a scream might have made, if it could burn; it was the fury of an ocean unable to tear apart the rocks; it was the stomach bursting from the inside out, the heart cloven in two, the eyes blinded by fatigue, the mind popping asunder under the weight of thoughts it could not comprehend. The water bubbled and boiled, steam rising up to sting my eyes and scald my skin, the heat running straight through my fingers and into the marrow of my bones, scorching out all other sense. And then came the rest of it.

Not just the fire, but the thing that made it burn. Our body arched as claws gouged our back, and our mind surged with a shrilling sound that went straight through the brain like an earthquake’s roar through antique glass, and our nose bled and our ears bled and something ruptured in the thinking part of us and, for an instant that lasted forever, we looked up and saw the shadow of a creature etched in darkness, its jaws opening to feed. Above, as a lance longer than my body emerged from the pit of its spinning-glass throat, it moved with infinite slowness over less than a second, balanced for a moment between our eyes, and thrust straight through.

We screamed.

Or someone screamed.

They blurred into one, the voices in this creature’s heart, the thoughts sucked out of them like blood from a wound. Didn’t matter whose or what they’d been; all that counted was the pain, and the sense of loss when the creature withdrew, its jaws dripping with thoughtless nothing, from the hollow inside that could never be healed.

Someone fell forward, clutching a scorching heart, and it might have been me.

Water broke beneath and above me, rolled over my head, filled my nose and tickled, cold in my throat. The rumbling of the river rushed into my ears, and through it, far away, the rattle of a barge engine choking on cheap diesel, and the beating of great wings as a flight of swans made their way skywards.

Old Father Thames was real, as true a god of his dominion as the Beggar King and the Bag Lady, and there was more than a little truth to the rumour that, if you looked hard enough, at certain hours the river dragons could be glimpsed below the water’s surface. The silver-skinned dragons of the Thames should have died when the cholera-infested sewage of the city began to taint their waters; in fact they had lived, evolved and would, one day, evolve again. Not stone or street had such power, not enchantment or prayer.

I forced open my eyes under the water, and in that instant I saw nothing but pain.

Closed them, opened them again, strove to look through the churning murk; saw the bubbles popping from the blackened heart between my hands, a bundle of broken plastic bag and shattered old childhood things. The fury of the water was turning, being tugged with the current, away, and, as I looked through my own blood staining the water shark-bait red, it seemed that something else was sliding free: an oily brown stain, thick and viscous and organic, slipping out from between the folds of the heart and rolling away.

I stayed under, holding out the heart at arm’s length, until it became hard to tell if the pain in my chest was from ribs breaking, lungs bursting, fire washing or just an all-purpose exploding from the inside out. And when to stay under any longer was to pop like a boiling orange, I lifted my head up and gasped for air, and the culicidae’s heart came with me, to rest on the surface of the water.

I hauled down air: one breath, two, three, gulping it like a thirsty drunk, and when the world had stopped pirouetting, I looked down, at the heart.

Traceries of oil were still peeling from its surface like starch from boiling rice, but the pain of burning was now merely a throbbing heart-red in my fingertips, a memory of distress running up my arms. The heat had baked the river mud, like potter’s clay, onto my hands. I picked it off in chunks, and flinched as the skin on the palms of my hands came loose. I gathered up the floating plastic box by what I hoped was the least scalded part of my hands, and scooped the culicidae’s heart and several litres of water back inside it. A pause, before leaving: I trailed my fingertips in the water held by the box, the heart floating inside, and listened for…

… nothing.

The thin layer of oil had vanished, drifting into the pull of the stream.

(“Sometimes people come here to get clean.”)

Meera on the river.

(“It’s where I’m me.”)

Keeping my injured hands clear, I clasped the box within my arms and, dripping and squelching, I headed back for the car.

Wet clothes and fresh car seats do not mix well.

I took off my socks and shoes, and the foul-smelling coat of infinite pockets, and laid them out as best I could across the car’s heaters, turned to full. Then I pressed my toes against the pedals and curled my fingers as best I could around the steering wheel, and went in search of medical aid.

I drove as far as I could, gingerly prodding the wheel this way and that, before giving up and parking, badly, on a double yellow line.

The joints of my hands were swelling up, making it hard to separate my fingers.

A shuddering was starting to eat through my body that wouldn’t stop even as the temperature in the car rose higher and steam began to run down the inside of the windows. I staggered barefoot out onto the pavement, river water dribbling from the ends of my sleeves, and half walked, half fell towards a row of shops.

Before I could get there, the throbbing in my chest burst into full-fledged agony. I gasped for breath and slid down onto the pavement, clutching my side with my swollen hands and shaking. A mother with a buggy came towards me, saw me, accelerated away. A man on a mobile phone hesitated across the street, conscience fighting with caution as he wondered whether to help. Caution won.

I curled over on the ground, and now nothing could stop the shaking. Cold and heat and pain and a few things besides, a few terrible things that we could not name, pinned us to the earth and we just shook, head pressed to the ground, legs kicking, unable to believe there was no place they could be to stop this agony.

A pair of feet at eye level.

A voice said, “Um, excuse me?”

Male, middle-aged; the shoes were brown leather, clean laces. Above them, beige flannel trousers, neatly pressed.

“Excuse me, you can’t stay here.”

“Help me,” I begged. “Please, help me.”

“Mary!” hollered the voice.

Another pair of shoes snapped on the pavement. A pair of navy-blue pumps lined up beside the brown loafers. A voice said, “For Christ’s sake, can’t you see he’s in pain? Hello? Excuse me? I’m going to call an ambulance.”

I shook my head, whimpered, “No… no ambulance…”

A moment, a pause, in which thoughts turned and turned again and decided that no matter how they looked at it, they didn’t like the view. “I’m calling the police,” murmured the woman called Mary.

“No!” Our hand shot out and grabbed her by the ankle. She screamed and all at once the man shouted a wordless cry and kicked our arm, twice. We held on and she was still screaming, so he turned on us and, with a grunt and a limp flail of limbs, he kicked us in the belly.

Fireworks burst behind our eyes.

Something black and bright and hot wriggled its way out from the back of our brain and started boring its way forwards. A big squirm-shaped hole, eaten by worms, led to the place between our eyes where, if it had lived, the culicidae would have enjoyed sucking out our thoughts. There, something opened its jaws wide enough to blot out the sun, to engulf our head, our throat, our body and our all, before snapping us into darkness.

I thought I heard Penny’s voice.

I thought I heard a lot of things, but Penny’s voice was the only thing I wanted to remember.

I thought I saw a dragon.

Its black wings were folded time, its eyes a red endless pit.

It stood on the black walls of the city, silver claws curled round a blazing shield, tongue rolling out, licking the air.

There was blood on its lips.

Bones beneath its feet.

Then it looked at me, and I was tiny, and it was vast, and it was not impressed.

I staggered towards the pit inside its eyes, that great red falling pit of a thousand thousand years lined with a million million bones, and didn’t fight it, and didn’t argue, didn’t even pause on the edge to catch my breath, lined with flame, but fell in, laughing all the way.

Someone was playing bad songs of the 1980s in another room.

The DJ called them “vintage classics,” which was never a good sign.

Someone else was unwrapping cling film from around my hands.

Funny thing, that.

The DJ said, “Now, we’ve got a request here from Sharon in Hoxton, who says this song reminds her of the time she first accidentally walked through a wall, and it’s for all the gang in GCSE Chemistry who wanted to know why and never got an answer—interesting shout-out there, Sharon, not often we get that kinda request but then, you’ve asked for a classic of the 1980s and all afternoon we will be playing your Vintage Classic requests so here from Sharon to everyone in Chemistry class is your choice…”

Something cold was run over my skin.

It tingled to the touch, like icing sugar on a sore.

Somewhere else, a kettle was boiling.

A voice said, “… milk and sugar?”

Another voice, much nearer, replied, “Just milk, ta, and leave the teabag in.”

I knew those voices.

The smell of tea drifted on the air.

Somewhere overhead—not so far overhead as it should have been—a jet plane locked its undercarriage for landing, or maybe unlocked it from takeoff, or perhaps merely came in low to have a better look at the seat. The dishes rattled in the kitchen at its passage.

I opened my eyes.

Dr Seah sat on the edge of a small single bed in a small single room, a pair of latex gloves on her hands, holding a fistful of white cream. She was chucking the cream at my hands and lower arms like a paintballer testing the quality of their ammunition, bottom lip curled in concentration. I was certain I hadn’t made a sound but she said, without looking up, “Now, when I said ‘bed rest,’ did you take this as, like, meaning the bed should get a rest, because I think we both know that wasn’t what I was getting at.”

I opened my mouth to answer, and regretted even that much movement.

Someone had made a corset of bandages and steel and wrapped it round my chest: mostly, I felt, to enhance the pain. I groaned and pushed my head back against the lumpy pillow on the bed. Dr Seah said, “Yup, that right there is what I’m talking about but do people listen, oh no. It’s all ‘I know my body’ and I’m all ‘You only think you know your body’ and they’re all like ‘Hey who the fuck are you’ and I’m all like ‘Hey, you know what, it’s your fractured ribcage, whatever’ so, basically, I figure, screw it.”

A footstep in the doorway to the room and the smell of tea grew stronger. A voice rang out, “Mr Mayor! You’re not dead!”

Kelly Shiring—grinning hugely—scurried up, nearly dropping a mug of tea.

“Mr Mayor,” she babbled. “You would not believe what happened, but I was just about to leave the office when…”

“Kelly?” I groaned.

“… when the Beggar King burst through the door! He marched right across the floor, stood on a table, clapped his hands together and shouted, ‘Right! Which of you bastards thinks Templeman is innocent? Come on, stand up right now and let me kick you and your smug, polished white teeth in!’ I mean I couldn’t believe it…”

“Love a cuppa tea,” murmured Dr Seah, taking the mug and circling it under her nose like a wine taster.

“… and then he grabbed poor old Rumina Rathnayake by the scruff of the neck and I thought she was going to cry poor thing, and he starts shaking her and shouts, ‘I put the curse of the beggars upon you! May all eyes turn away from you in distrust and fear, may the cold wind find you in the warm corners of the street, may you be forever lonely in a crowd! I command the doors of the city to be shut upon you, all that you eat shall taste of the garbage from whence it came, all that you drink will be slewed with mud, there shall be no charity, nor no redemption for you and your departure will be cold, alone and unmourned, a headstone placed upon your tomb which reads simply “unknown” and he lets her go and she’s shaking and he turns to me and I think, ‘Whoops, that’s it, I’m next,’ but he just marches up to me, takes me by the elbow, pulls me over to the water cooler and says, ‘Your boss is a stupid fucker who can’t keep out of trouble and that’s why I like him’ and next thing I know he’s sending me down to the Weybridge police station and I’m having to…”

“… are there any biscuits?” asked Dr Seah.

“… do the Alderman thing and pull rank and be generally, you know how it is, generally ghastly unpleasant and then here you are!”

“Here you are,” concluded Dr Seah over her mug of tea. “I should probably add, I don’t usually do house calls.”

I looked from Dr Seah to Kelly and back again. Kelly’s smile quavered, unsure if it was appropriate for the moment but hoping it would do. Dr Seah’s face was one of pure tea-filled contentment.

I tried a deep breath, and regretted that too.

“You’ll get that for a while,” said Dr Seah, eyes not leaving her mug of tea. “Bed rest. Did I mention the bed rest and, oh yes, while I’m here, can I just add, bed rest.”

I managed to wheeze, “Kelly?”

“Yes, Mr Mayor?”

“Don’t think that I’m not grateful for the intervention—I am—but I gotta ask a few questions and I’d like you, if you don’t mind, to answer them succinctly, if not, in fact, briskly, is that okay?”

“Oh, sweetie, you have had a bad day,” said Dr Seah.

“Go ahead, Mr Mayor!” trilled Kelly.

“I was in a police station?”

“Yup. Apparently you assaulted some woman. And possibly trespassed. And stole a car. Mr Caughey’s car, in fact! And passed out on the pavement isn’t really a criminal offence, might be a civil disobedience. But actually there’s something…”

“Does some great curse befall anyone who arrests the Midnight Mayor?” I asked hopefully.

“Um… I don’t know. Why, do you want one to?”

Dr Seah had put down the mug of tea and was looking in her medical bag for bandages.

“As a matter of fact, there is something you should probably…” began Kelly.

She was interrupted by Dr Seah snapping on a new pair of gloves with every look of relish and demanding, “So which part of bed rest are you still not clear on?”

She wiggled her fingers inside the latex and waggled her eyebrows and grinned a malicious grin.

“I promise,” I intoned, “that as soon as I’m not being hunted, chased, betrayed, abused and neglected, I will find somewhere, possibly with room service, and do the bed rest thing.”

“Sweetie, it’s your body, I can’t be here all the time to stop you destroying it. I’m just saying, sooner or later you gotta take responsibility for these little things like, I dunno, breathing.”

“Actually, on that subject…” began Kelly.

“Where’s the culicidae’s heart?” The thought struck too hard for me to let Kelly finish; the words just tumbled right out.

“Um, the…”

“The culicidae’s heart, Kelly, the thing that I went to all this trouble to recover from Caughey, who is, by the way, completely mad.”

“Mr Caughey is mad?”

“Well, yes. Bit too much exposure to the beating heart of a creature fed on bile and rage will do that to a guy, and I’m not one hundred per cent convinced he had a psyche of stone to begin with.”

“But he only had it for a few hours…”

“He helped make it, helped create it, had a longer exposure to the whole affair, and besides, I only had it a few minutes, and here I am,” I retorted, brandishing my scorched and gloopy hands.

Dr Seah tutted, swatted them back down. “Professional at work here!” she chided. “This is me, bandaging and all that crap, on a house call and all that crap, but don’t you worry, I’ve got my professional face on.”

“Which does raise the question of where here is,” I added, looking round the room.

Baby-pink walls, featuring a total of two pictures—one a Japanese print of a wading bird in still waters, the other a faded photograph of a school gathered in their best bow ties. A wardrobe, white, shut; a dresser, beige, empty; and a large mirror, cracked at the edge and framed with plastic gold. Somewhere outside, but not far enough outside to be civil, the roar of planes passing overhead, wheels locked to land.

“It’s a safe house,” explained Kelly. “Basically, my ex-flatmate has a cousin whose boyfriend has a house…”

“Where in London?” I asked.

“Osterley.”

“How the hell did I get to Osterley?”

“Well, I managed to convince two very nice young policemen to carry you from the station to my car, and then when I got here I convinced a passing dog-walker to help carry you from my car to the house, and then I convinced Dr Seah…”

“Have you found Templeman?”

“No, but actually…”

“What about the fairy godmother? He about to come storming in here, guns blazing?”

“Well, he might,” admitted Kelly, “but actually you’re sitting inside a very fine specimen of its type, a series of anti-scrying wards constructed mostly from wire ties, Post-it notes and kitchen forks balanced together in that way, you know when you get three of them and they all support each other but don’t really support each other, that kind of counterbalanced thing that boy scouts learn to do…”

“And Brownies,” added Dr Seah. “Youth activities are all about the magic tricks.”

“If we can call it a trick…”

“The bit with the forks is a trick. Obviously the anti-scrying ward is more magical but you gotta ask, where’d you draw that fine line between amazing tricks and basic magic? Or maybe you’re not asking, but you should.”

“Point being,” concluded Kelly, raising her voice, “no one knows except you, me, Dr Seah, and my ex-flatmate’s cousin’s boyfriend where you are, so even if Templeman or Mr Kramb have sources still active within the Aldermen, which I must admit is a rather distressing thought, even if they did, I can’t imagine they’ll be doing anything about it soon. Which actually does bring me to my final point…”

There was a thud from the end of the hall, the sound of a heavy door being shut. Our fingers tightened instinctively. A footstep in the hall, the sound of plastic bags being put down on a lino floor.

“You, me, Dr Seah… and who?” I asked.

“I was trying to explain,” said Kelly. “You see, the anti-scrying ward…”

The footsteps came closer, a hand pushing back the door to the tiny bedroom. The fingernails were long and painted, the pads on the fingertips warm pink, the skin above the nails, deep-baked brown.

“… wasn’t actually cast by me…” babbled Kelly.

A foot, wearing a boot laced up to the knee, a knee clad in black, an arm in blue denim, a head covered with an explosion of frizzy black hair. A voice.

A familiar, unbelievable voice.

It said, “Yo, what the sister’s saying is that this…”—a gesture taking in the shape of the room and its unseen defensive magics—“… is no ordinary fucking spell. This is a totally awesome fucking spell.”

Penny.

Penny Ngwenya.

Once upon a time, she’d stood on London Bridge and looked towards the east and said, as a curse, give me back my hat, and things had gone downhill from there.

Ex-traffic warden, ex-cleaning lady, six GCSEs, grades A–D, one higher education diploma in art and media studies, two years’ experience in retail at her local supermarket, one point on her driving licence from that time when some total wanker, like, cut her up at the traffic lights or whatever; wannabe sorceress; my apprentice.

Penny Ngwenya.

She stood in the door and stared at me, and, by the look on her face, all the clever things she’d been practising saying weren’t so clever any more.

I stammered at the others, “Out. Please.”

Dr Seah was already at the door, pulling Kelly into the corridor with a cry of, “So where’d you get cake round here…?”

She closed the door behind them on the way out.

Penny hooked her fingers into her pockets and said nothing.

Then, “Fuck it, I hate, like, fucking awkward fucking silences anyway, so I’m just gonna say, Matthew, you look like totally shit. Sorry, I know we should be all like ‘It’ll be fine’ or whatever, but you look really crap.”

We felt it was our turn to speak, and found we couldn’t.

Penny blurted again, “So yeah… Templeman is, like, a psychopath. But I figure you’ve worked that out, right, because if you haven’t then you are such a twat you, like, deserve to lose.”

“We thought… I thought… we… he told us the fairy godmother had you. He told us you were dead.”

Something swept over Penny’s face, something I hadn’t seen before, couldn’t name. She nodded slowly, biting her lip, folding her arms. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess he would. He lied.”

Third Interlude: Sometimes, You Can’t Be Saved

In which Penny tells her story.

She said, “It was fine. It was all going fine.

“I was with Nabeela, we were…

“… I was with Nabeela.

“We followed you to your meeting in Covent Garden. Watched you talk with the Aldermen, watched you get into the car with Templeman. Nabeela said, ‘Uh… should we follow the car?’

“I told her you didn’t look frightened or scared or enchanted, and it would probably be okay. And it was okay, wasn’t it? You called, we talked, you said it was fine and we went shopping. I mean, I know it’s a bit clichéd, okay, two girls, out together, going shopping, but it wasn’t like we were going to buy anything and it’s Covent Garden, you know; it’s not like you can’t really not go shopping in Covent Garden, everything smells of soap and chocolate, it’s like going to Edinburgh and not having haggis. And I liked Nabeela. I did. She was cool. Sure, she’d got the medusa thing, but she handled it in a groovy way; I liked that.

“So we went shopping. And we must have pissed off so many people because we didn’t buy anything. I mean, we tried everything on, moved it all around and messed it all up, but have you seen how much these things cost?

“I really think it was good for her, you know, what with her condition, she almost never got to dress down with the girls and there was one shop, and we were looking at the dresses and she saw this purple one with, like, long sleeves and this amazing skirt with these, like, waves sown onto it and she wanted to try it and we went into the changing room and there were these mirrors and we were the only ones there and she said, so long as you only look at the mirror you’ll be okay, just look at the mirror, and so I did and she…

“I guess she ‘let down her hair.’

“I hadn’t really seen it, close up, I mean, before.

“I’d only seen it in that crappy mobile phone screen. But I stood right next to her in this tiny little changing room with these mirrors on every side, close enough to touch, and she said it was okay, because I was a girl and because I was a sorceress and I would understand.

“The… things on her head… they were part of her. Her hair was cables, thin and silver, each one ending at a lens, and they moved and writhed like living things, but where the cable met her skull it wasn’t like it plugged in or anything, but like it just melted into her. Like, if you looked, you could see tiny wires running along her head like veins, before they vanished down deep, and if you touched one of them it’d twitch like a frightened rabbit, but if you ran your finger down it, it’d sorta relax, like a cat.

“She said, ‘There’s a recessive gene somewhere in my family. My great great great aunt had it too, but it wasn’t like this for her. She had black iron snakes on her head that wheezed coal dust when they turned, and their gaze turned all who looked at them into carbon monsters. And her great grandmother before that, she had the whole proper snakes-on-the-head thing going, I mean, real proper adders and stuff, and the people would come to her for advice and teaching, and call her an imam, a teacher, one who knows the path.

“ ‘We—I mean, my kind—don’t have kids. My great great great aunt didn’t have kids and I won’t. It’s not that we can’t, I think, it’s just… you know… you don’t want to take the risk, do you? But the boys are carrying it, the gene I mean, and have you tried stopping boys doing their thing? I mean, God, it’s so depressing.

“ ‘My family’s from Lebanon originally—well, we moved around a lot—but my grandmother wanted to move here. I think she thought, maybe it wouldn’t happen in the city. Maybe it would be different, another land, another place.

“ ‘And yeah, she was right, it was different. But it didn’t stop. I was home-schooled until I was old enough to wear hijab. It keeps me safe. My Mum wears it too sometimes, when we go out to big dinners. She always said, when I was growing up, it was really useful—men would see it and they’d sorta talk to her, like she was a person, you know? A someone, not a something, without trying to get a snog or anything like that. Seems to me that guys my age are either so desperate to get off with you they can’t say anything at all, or so busy thinking you want to get off with them that they still don’t say a word. Now that she’s married, she says she kinda doesn’t feel like that any more. She loves my dad, and he loves her, and they’re comfortable together, and that’s all that matters. But she wears a scarf when she’s with me. I think she does it to keep me company. Silly, really.’

“She looked at herself in the mirror, hair all writhing around her head, glass catching the light. She was beautiful in that dress, she had this figure, I mean, proper hourglass stuff. But she was sad, and she said: ‘I will never have a husband. Too risky. One day, he’ll want to see my face, touch it, and I’ll turn the wrong way and he’ll look at me and see and then he’ll… it is a curse. I know that. But there must be a reason.’

“She started putting her headscarf back on, smoothing her hair back down beneath the cotton. I watched, and then I said, and I don’t know why, ‘I summoned the death of cities.’

“She looked at me, surprised, in the mirror, like, but didn’t need to ask. Her face was doing the questioning.

“ ‘I didn’t know what I was doing,’ I explained. ‘I was… hurt. I was lonely. My friends were scared of me, they didn’t understand what I was going through and as they became more scared, they stopped being my friends at all. And I had this shit job and I didn’t know what I wanted or who I was or why all these things… and then one day this total bastard hit me, and I was just doing what I was meant to, and he called me all sorts of shit things and I know it was, like, a little thing but you know how little things add up after a while? And a kid stole my hat. The kid was called Mo. He stole my hat and I was so angry and so confused I went to the river and stood on London Bridge all by myself and raised my hands to the sky and screamed, I just… I just screamed it, “Give me back my hat! Give me back my hat give me give me give me back my hat!” And something heard. This… parasite… this thing that feeds on the death of cities, it heard and it came crawling out of the shadows, out of paper and rage and it… it killed people. I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know I couldn’t have I didn’t… but it killed, and I made it. It killed the kid. It killed the last Midnight Mayor. It nearly killed Matthew but he… he was supposed to kill me, you know? The Aldermen, those fuckers in black, they wanted to kill me, to break the spell and he just swanned up and said, “I brought you back your hat” and I was like, “What the fuck?” and he said, “I heard you lost it. I brought it back” and I knew… fuck, I don’t know what the fuck I knew but I knew… everything. Everything that had been, everything that was, everything that might be. Not like God or shit, not like parting of the clouds stuff. Just something solid, here, inside. But the thing is, what I’m trying to say is… I nearly destroyed the city. How screwed up is that? How screwed up does that make me?’

“She was quiet for a while.

“I guess it wasn’t fair to kinda just throw that at her, but I hadn’t told no one and she had told me and it felt right. The right thing. Not often you get to be sure.

“Finally she said, ‘Thank you,’ and I didn’t really get what for, but I smiled, and she smiled back, and got on with pinning down her hair. And we had lunch at this Persian restaurant and I asked if Nabeela spoke any Persian and she said, my family’s from Lebanon, so it’d be Arabic, idiot, and no she didn’t, she was from Finchley, what did I expect, and we had humous and pitta bread and those little plates of stuff you get with like dates and vine leaves, and everything comes all at once so you look at the table and think ‘Shit, I’m such a pig’ and then somehow you eat it all and find yourself ordering more and… do the Aldermen do expenses? Only I’ve got the receipt somewhere, and it was a big lunch, you know what I’m saying? Anyway.

“I guess what I’m saying is, we got pretty relaxed.

“I mean, I’d spotted the Aldermen following us.

“Of course I’d spotted them.

“But fuck me, Matthew, they’re supposed to be on your side. I mean, I get it, I get the Minority Council shit, I get how that’s bad news, but, like, you’re the Midnight Mayor. No! You’re more than the Midnight fucking Mayor, you’re the blue electric angels, you’re the guy who said no to the Neon Court and pissed off the Tribe, the apprentice of Robert fucking Bakker, destroyer of Blackout, banisher of the death of cities, I mean, you may not look like much, but on paper you’re really cool until people meet you! So what the fuck? How the hell were we supposed to know? And you taught me to be a sorceress. You taught me how to bind and compel, enchant and exorcise. Not what to do when some fuckers in a big blue van pull up beside you on St Martin’s Lane and suddenly the two guys in front who you thought were just a pair of tourists have guns and the two guys behind who you figured were theatregoers in fancy coats are grabbing you by the arms and there’s some guy in the fucking van pulling a bag over your head!

“You taught me that life was magic, that in all things that live there is not just power, but wonder and possibility, shadows and time, that magic is a reflection of layer upon layer upon layer of life plastered across this world like air; you taught me that and then went off to do the Midnight Mayor thing and these guys they just came out of nowhere, they came out of nowhere and they…

“They took us.

“And I’m no fucking damsel in distress, I wasn’t going to scream, I was going to ensorcel their ass, but they had drugs. I felt them stick something into my skin and it burnt. And I felt sick and all my muscles went slack and then…

“… they drugged me.

“That’s all I remember about then.

“They took us some place.

“It was dark when I woke up, really dark and quiet, like dead-night in dead-place black. They must have kept on drugging us, keeping us out for hours and hours. Maybe they’d wanted to keep us asleep until they killed us. Maybe they’d just run out of needles.

“The place smelt.

“It was a shed of some kind, a concrete shed, but you could feel it hadn’t been lived in for a long time, all dark and damp and cold as the outside air.

“There wasn’t any light.

“Someone had killed the power.

“Everything felt… a long way off. Slow. I guessed we were in the countryside; I couldn’t hear traffic or planes or feel the city close or anything like that. They’d tied us up. They’d been real paranoid about it. They’d put handcuffs on, and cable ties around my feet and knees, like I was about to get up and cha-cha my way outta there, you know? They’d given me something and it made me sick. I puked. There wasn’t anywhere good to do it, so I just did it there. I heard footsteps move outside and tried to wriggle away against the wall. They sounded like they were walking on more concrete. There wasn’t a window, but there was a door at one end; I could see the outline of the grey. I tried to summon light but it was so hard, everything was so hard, so far away, and I couldn’t see and my mouth burnt, tasted of acid. Then something else moved and I swear to God, that’s the closest I ever came to screaming. There was something else and I thought at first it was a rat, but then it moved a little more and it was too heavy for a rat, and grunted as it moved; a woman.

“ ‘Nabeela?’ I asked, voice all sticky in my throat.

“ ‘Penny? What’s happening?’

“ ‘Are you okay?’

“ ‘I’m… there’s tape, I can feel tape I can’t move my hands I can’t open my eyes I can’t…’

“ ‘Are you hurt?’

“ ‘I feel a bit sick.’

“ ‘Me too. Hey, it’s going to be okay, okay? You’re gonna be fine and I’m gonna be fine and we’re gonna bust our way out of this like the kick-ass bitches we are, and even if we don’t, which we will, Matthew’s gonna come on down here like the kick-ass bastard he is and do the saving thing, and he’ll be insufferable for a while, but basically cool, okay?’

“ ‘Okay,’ she trembled.

“ ‘Hey, girl, we’ll be okay, okay? It’ll all be… okay.’

“I think I heard her nod. I tried to crawl towards her. It was hard, wriggling on the floor or something, like, head and shoulders banging against it and kicking with my knees. But I was glad she was there. Is that wrong? I was fucking glad she was there, because she was a medusa and I was a sorceress and between us we’d be okay, and because she wanted me to say it was going to be okay and I was going to do it. I was going to make it okay.

“I bumped into her head first and heard her gasp for breath. I said, ‘It’s me, it’s me, we’ll be fine. Hey, can you move?’

“ ‘No,’ she replied. ‘There’s… they used gaffer tape, they… they stuck it over my face, over my… my head. There’s like, tape on my head or something; it hurts, I feel really weird.’

“I got to my knees and whispered, ‘Okay, okay, like, move your head towards me or something, I’ll see if I can feel anything.’

“I was close enough to feel the heat off her body; I leant down and I brushed my cheek against the top of her head. The fuckers had wrapped her like some sort of Egyptian mummy, they’d fucking wrapped her; they’d got this really cheap tape and they’d run it round and round her skull and under her chin and taped her hair down so it couldn’t move, but even under the tape I could feel it moving, trying to press its way free. I said, ‘I’ll find an end. There’s gotta be an end to the tape or something; maybe I can pull it free.’

“I tried to stand up properly, so I could feel the tape around her head with my fingers, but every time I tried I kept on falling back down until Nabeela said, ‘Hey, try this.’ And she lay down. I turned my back on her and she put her head in my hands and I felt around the tape on her head, trying to find a place where it was thin, something I could pull at. Every time I thought I’d found an end, it was just another long length of the strip, and the stuff was taped down too hard, too thick to just tear it, and I couldn’t move my fingers. I tried to summon magic, tried to put it into my hands, make them stronger, harder, but it wouldn’t come and I was scared of just scratching at it with my nails; I didn’t want to hurt her or scratch her eyes or anything like that. But she was calmer now. She said, ‘It’s okay. I trust you,’ so I kept looking, systematic like, starting just above her eyebrows where the first bit of tape was and moving my hands side to side across her head, trying to find a place where it was weak.

“And I found it.

“It was round by her neck, a place where the tape was weak. So I whispered, ‘Hold on, I think I’ve got something…’

“But there was a sound outside. Nabeela gasped and sat up straightaway, which was smart because otherwise they would have caught us, and she pressed her back into the wall but I tried to stand up again and just fell straight back down.

“The door opened and there was this light outside, thin, grey light like really old moonlight, but it came from this flood above the door and there were two guys in the light and they wore black. One of them I didn’t know; a woman, I think. The other was a man, and even with his back to the light, I thought I recognised him.

“Then he said, ‘Good evening ladies. Actually, forgive me, it’s more like good morning at the moment. My name is Richard Templeman. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience I’ve put you to. I hope your stay will be safe and temporary.’

“ ‘Wow, that’s so sweet,’ I said. ‘Tell you what, you let me go and I’ll show you my sweet fluffy fucking gratitude with bells on.’

“ ‘I understand your anger, Ms Ngwenya,’ he explained, and his voice was all cold and telephone-like, I mean like a sound with no face. I wished he’d shouted, or dribbled or raved like a proper madman, but he just stood there so still and just talked like a sad headmaster or something. ‘I can only assure you again that, if you are cooperative with this process, your stay with us should be as peaceful and easy as possible. Please do not attempt to do anything unwise, as you will be forcefully restrained should you do so and it will only make this process harder. Matthew is presently aware of your situation and is doing everything he can to ensure your safety. You may be confident of freedom soon, once he has cooperated.’

“I went cold at that, it was like it took all my words. But he waited, and I hated him even more for waiting for me like he was wise and I was just a child, and when he was done waiting it was because I shouted, ‘What the fuck do you mean: “Matthew is presently aware”? What the hell do you think you’re doing? He’s going to fucking kill you, I mean gut you, rip you to little pieces, when he finds out what the fuck you’ve done to us!’

“ ‘I have no doubt that Matthew will seek retribution against me for my actions,’ said Templeman, like it was a really boring thing. ‘But at this present moment, his cooperation is all I seek and the removal of you both from the current scenario was the most suitable way to expedite affairs. Should he survive, I have no doubt he will seek my blood, in which case the preservation of you two as healthy, happy hostages would be to the benefit of us all.’

“He was talking balls so I started screaming, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you’re talking like this isn’t fucking real, what the…?’

“But then Nabeela cut in, like, right in, and said so quiet, but so clear all at once, ‘What are the conditions of Matthew’s behaviour that will allow for our freedom?’

“I thought Templeman brightened at that, at hearing a voice that talked like his own. I guess everyone talks like that in local councils.

“ ‘To put it simply, I require the destruction of the dusthouses. This is an ambition, Ms Ngwenya, Ms Hirj, which benefits us all. Leaving aside its current practical necessity, it could be argued that there is indeed an ethical benefit to such an eventuality. While I have no doubt that Matthew would have, eventually, taken it on himself to act against the fairy godmother, the pressures of the situation required rather more… drastic action… to expedite events. The godmother would have exposed certain pieces of information that would have compromised me, and our Midnight Mayor himself perhaps… overreacted… to a situation rather beyond his control. A speedy solution to our problems was called for. Simply put, you will be released once Matthew has killed the fairy godmother. Oscar Kramb’s death will benefit many, including you, and Matthew, and me.’

“ ‘What happens if he doesn’t do it?’ I asked. ‘What happens if, like, he doesn’t kill the guy?’

“ ‘Alas, it is to be regretted by us all that Matthew does not sometimes engage in more radical solutions,’ Templeman replied. He still hadn’t moved, standing in the door. But now I thought I could see his eyes, and something else. There was something yellow in them, something that I could see though there wasn’t enough light to see by, something sick and yellow, and a smell about him that wasn’t just bad deodorant.

“ ‘I am aware of Matthew’s fondness for you, ladies, that’s why you’re both here. He is currently under the belief that the fairy godmother has you. I am hoping that this will inspire him to do what has to be done. Should he not… well then, as I said, there is advantage for us all if you are helpful.’

“ ‘Not for us there’s fucking not!’

“ ‘Yes, for you,’ he replied, and his eyes were too bright in that darkness. ‘For see it like this, Ms Ngwenya. You could be dead. At this time, in this place, you could be dead, and you are not. It is within your power to remain alive, if not free.’

“He seemed happy with himself, a clever guy making a clever point to stupid people. He turned to go but then Nabeela said, ‘May we know why?’

“He paused in the door. I think she’d surprised him.

“ ‘Why?’ he asked, not looking round.

“ ‘You know, so that we can, like, get where you’re coming from, understand your point of view, be better, nicer, more cooperative hostages. Do we get to know why?’

“I thought he wasn’t going to answer.

“Then I thought it was something worse. I thought he was angry. There was something in his shoulders, this tiny thing, but like he was all stiff inside. But then he breathed it out and turned and looked at us and I knew what it was that was wrong with him, that smell. He stank of magic, but wrong magic, sick magic, the smell of rotting bodies and sand, things left out in the desert for vultures to pick. He was on something, he was fired up on it, and even in this place, where everything was too far to reach, I could taste it on the air.

“Then he said, ‘We must evolve. Society evolves all the time, every day in new ways. That which was forbidden is now permitted, that which was magic is now science, that which was fiction is now fact, that which was unspoken is now sung from the wires. The world is changing, mankind is changing. We magicians take pride in the evolution of the spells we cast, our adaptability to this changing world. But we contribute nothing. We are… irrelevant. We must change. I will make us change. Do you understand?’

“ ‘Yes,’ breathed Nabeela. ‘I understand.’

“I didn’t know if she was lying. I hoped she was, because he was talking psycho-shit and I wanted to say it. But there was madness in his eye and belief in his voice, and if I know one thing from bitching with my aunt, it’s that you don’t never reason with true believers.

“I think I knew the other thing then too.

“He was gonna kill us.

“He was talking to keep us quiet, keep us sweet, but when you were done, even if you did it, he’d kill us.

“Were you gonna top the fairy godmother?

“I didn’t think so.

“You’d come storming in here first.

“But that didn’t mean I was gonna wait for it to happen.

“When he was gone, I turned back to Nabeela.

“She said, ‘Perhaps we should…’

“ ‘He’s gonna do it,’ I replied. ‘You know he’s gonna. He’s gonna kill us.’

“ ‘But he said it himself, if he wants to control Matthew then he needs us alive.’

“ ‘Babes,’ I explained, ‘there’s only two things you do with Matthew. You get on board with him or you get out of his way. You and me are on board. That means Templeman is in his way, and we do not want to be round here when that shit goes down.’

“ ‘Will Matthew kill the godmother? Will he do it?’

“ ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it matters. Moment he does it, we’re dead. And if he doesn’t do it… then he’s not gonna change his mind just because Templeman goes “Hey, it’s okay, I’ve still got these two bitches alive.” And even if he does try that, he’ll probably try to scare Matthew, try the whole frightening thing, and I’m buggered if I’m gonna sit around and let some psychopath cut off my toes or pull out my fingernails or shit. I’m gonna get out and find this really hot guy called Femi, and you’re gonna get out and, like, kick local council ass, and we are not gonna let this happen, okay?’

“ ‘Okay.’

“ ‘Come on, I think I was getting somewhere with this fucking tape.’

“She shuffled back down and I felt around her head, blind, looking for the tape. I could feel her hair moving restlessly, feel it jerk whenever I tugged at the gaffer tape holding it down. Some wanker had really done a number on it; it didn’t want to come and, in the dark, it was hard, slow progress. I found an end and pulled and at once she shouted out in pain and I said, ‘I’m sorry babes, I’m sorry; you okay?’

“ ‘Yeah,’ she answered in that little voice that tells you they’re not okay at all but are way too brave to make you stop. ‘Just… be quick.’

“I started ripping the tape away, and I realised that, in this place, in the dark, I might be just one bad look from turning into a concrete statue myself, if I could get her free. There were more sounds outside, voices. I tried to move faster, to pick at the tape with my hands, but it was round her chin and she was nearly choking, trying not to cry out; I could feel her shaking with it.

“Footsteps at the door, a brighter light, a torch, flashed under it, and then I heard a key in the lock and I was only halfway there but some of her hair was coming free, I could feel it pushing up but the door was opening and there was this one guy in the light and he had a bottle of water in one hand and a little plastic box in the other and I didn’t need to be bloody Einstein to guess what kinda needles a guy might carry in a box like that.

“He shone the torch right in my eyes and then saw Nabeela behind me and the tape I’d already pulled off on the floor and he opened his mouth to shout and I just charged at him. I mean, there wasn’t much there, there wasn’t anything solid to cling to, but there was that light in his torch and it was all I had, so I grabbed at it with everything I had and heard a pop as the light-bulb went and in that moment of surprise I guess he must have panicked because he dropped the torch.

“And my hands were still tied but I went at him head first, kinda jumping like a jack-in-the-box, and knocked into his belly as hard as I could and used my weight to push him down; the thing was to keep on biting and twisting and not give him a chance to realise how fucked I was. He went staggering back and tripped right over his own feet, falling on his arse, legs flying, me on top of him. I was going to headbutt him; I pulled my head back and, I knew, the trick was to go straight for his nose but he shouted out and got one of his hands under my chin, pushing it back.

“I tried to find something to hit him with, electricity, fire, light, anything, but we were in like this field, we were in a fucking field and I could see the lights of a motorway at the end of a distant hill and I guessed it was the M25 because there was this big blue sign with an aeroplane symbol on it and because the traffic was really slow, but then he rolled, got himself on top of me, legs out either side, and he was shouting for help and calling me a stupid bitch, and he clenched his fingers into this ugly fist, the bones all standing out at the knuckles like troll hills in rocky country, swung his arm up high and then…

“ ‘Close your eyes.’

“It was Nabeela who spoke and there was this shadow behind him and I didn’t need to be told twice. I mean, I was going to close my eyes anyway, because there was this fist heading for my face, but I closed my eyes proper now and I could hear the sound of tape tearing and felt his head turning and heard the beginning of a gasp, but it didn’t have time to finish. He started to breathe and it was like the breath got stuck somewhere in his throat, didn’t even make it to the lungs. And then I felt the rest of it.

“He’d been turning, the weight on one leg, but there was still his weight on me and suddenly it went from really fucking heavy to crushing; I mean, I couldn’t move my chest, couldn’t breathe in, just lay there gasping these thin little wheezes of air, and his legs, which had been warm, grew cold really fast, and hard, and where his thigh had bumped against my wrist, I felt fabric turn rough, ragged, grainy—like concrete.

“I just lay there, eyes squeezed shut, until Nabeela said, ‘Okay, I’m going to turn my back.’

“I waited.

“ ‘I’ve turned my back,’ she called, and her voice was shaking. I opened my eyes.

“The guy was just frozen there, one hand still raised in a fist, his head turned towards where Nabeela stood with her back to me, his eyes open wide. Her hair was writhing like it was angry, dancing on the end of its silver wires, bits of tape still hanging off and the ends of the lenses pushing at it like they were annoyed, trying to pick each other clean. I crawled out from under the guy and there were more footsteps running towards us. The keys to the handcuffs had been in his bloody pocket, bloody turned to stone, and as the footsteps approached Nabeela said, ‘Duck!’

“I wasn’t arguing. I got down with my head on the ground and heard the footsteps round the corner, and that same sound—that beginning of air to shout or warn or threaten or whatever—then that sound just stopped. If a medusa turns you to stone, does everything turn? Blood, bone, blood, air, electricity in your brain, sense in your spine? It’d be shit if you kept on thinking as you died.

“Whatever happened, the footsteps stopped.

“ ‘Okay,’ said Nabeela. ‘You can look again.’

“I looked up. She had her back to me, facing out towards the motorway. Two more guys were stone. I looked at them. One of them was an Alderman; I mean, the full, proper bloody Alderman get-up. I guess that was the moment I realised the other thing, the thing that was probably scarier than Templeman being a psycho. I realised that the fucking Aldermen were involved, that nothing and no one could be trusted.

“I looked round at where we were, taking it in properly.

“It was one of those commercial estates; you know, the flat-roofed buildings, the empty car parks, the old metal chutes that carry nothing from nowhere to a place where a lorry should have been. Everything was rusting up. A sign on our shed said, ‘Gleeson’s Printers—Digital Design for the Digital Age’ and was covered in pigeon shit. There was another shed across the way that was for importing Turkish wines, and all the windows had been smashed in. Looking back behind us I saw a hill, and I guessed, if that motorway was the M25, the city had to be somewhere on the other side of it. There was just one road heading up, no street lights, but there was that city-orange glow beyond it, and I knew, I just knew, it was London.

“Then I saw a car moving on the road on the hill, coming towards us. I wondered how long it’d be before Templeman worked out what had happened, so I hopped up onto my knees and said, ‘We gotta get out of here.’

“Nabeela just nodded.

“ ‘Hey, if I close my eyes, do you think you can do something about this tape around my feet?’

“ ‘I’ll try,’ she said.

“So I closed my eyes, and it was hard. I mean, when your heart races and your head is pounding and you’re still breathless and scared and waiting for something to move, it’s hard. But then, looking: that would have been harder; that would have been death. And she kinda wriggled round behind me and started scratching at the tape around my legs until it tore and my feet came proper free. We still had these fucking handcuffs but, with all the guys turned to concrete, I guessed there wasn’t anything we could do about that and at least we could walk now, so I nodded towards the road and said, ‘We gotta get going before they come looking for us.’

“ ‘Perhaps you should leave me.’

“ ‘Fuck that, babes, no offence.’

“ ‘I mean it. If you look at me…’

“ ‘I won’t look.’

“ ‘If you look at me…’

“ ‘Babes, I love you, seriously, you’re really sweet and that, but in case you haven’t worked it out I am one shit-stubborn bitch and I’m telling you, either you fucking come with me right now or I don’t move an inch, okay?’

“I thought she might say no, and then how fucked would we be?

“But she whispered, ‘Okay.’

“ ‘Great! Probably safest thing, yeah, is if I walk, like, ten yards in front or something. And I won’t look back, and you won’t say boo, and we’ll be fine. Can’t be too far from here to somewhere with proper civilised magic, right?’

“ ‘Right.’

“So we went, past these three frozen statues, eyes staring at nothing, while Nabeela’s hair writhed on her head, and made a noise like metal rustling against metal. I wished I knew something about stars, could find north and work out if we were outside Barnet or Croydon, Upminster or Uxbridge. But the sky was a fuzzy orange-pink on black, and there was nothing to focus on, except the tug of the city.

“I could hear Nabeela walking behind me. It made me stiff, my head locked on my shoulders, like I didn’t dare turn it, like my own body wouldn’t let me turn it, and the more I didn’t look the harder it became. Your mind plays tricks, you start thinking maybe you can’t hear Nabeela behind you, maybe it’s someone else coming up behind, someone else gonna grab you by the neck and stick a knife in your ribs; that there’s something there in the dark, watching you, laughing.