“I tried, like, a dozen different things to calm me down. I tried breathing slow and deep, but that just made me breathless because the deeper I breathed in the faster I had to breathe out, like too much time was wasted getting air into the corner of my lungs. I tried counting, one two three four, one two three four, but the numbers just got faster and faster, like my thoughts were out of control. I looked at my own feet and broke up my steps into rhythms, into groups of eight, but then I was scared of looking up, and then, when I looked up, I was scared because I wasn’t looking down again. I mean, everyone says how you shouldn’t be afraid but I’m, like, fuck that, you should be afraid, everyone should be fucking afraid, bravery is all about being scared and carrying on despite it. So yeah, I was scared. And proud of it.

“The road from the estate led up this hill. There were trees either side, not thick forest-like, but close enough that the light stopped way too fast. At one point I heard an engine start and I went to hide, and Nabeela did too, and we crouched, the pair of us, behind the trees, mud up to our ankles, squatting like we were having a really difficult piss.

“And this van went by. I watched it go down the hill, to where the sheds were. I saw tiny men moving against a little light, and then they saw the statues, and they moved faster, and the engine of that van didn’t stop running, and then, I wasn’t afraid. When it’s all about staying alive, you don’t have time to be scared.

“We ran.

“It was hard, keeping our balance with our hands behind our backs, but we ran. Every car that went by I shouted at, trying to get them to stop. The first two just sped up, I guess they thought we were having a prank, but the third slowed down in front of us. I could see this woman inside, turning her head back to look at us better, and she was getting out a mobile phone. Then, as we approached, she sped up again, drove away. We must have frightened her, and then I realised—Nabeela’s hair. It was out, free, and that woman in the car was only one stupid fucking glance away from being frozen by it, one blink off being turned to concrete.

“And if she was calling the police, then how’d I know that the Aldermen wouldn’t be listening, because that’s what they do. They listen to the police, they use the cops, and now Templeman would be looking for us.

“We had to get off the road.

“I didn’t know what time it was.

“I guessed by how quiet everything stood that it had to be early-late, the little hours of the morning. There was this muddy path between the trees, with a green sign saying ‘Parkland Trail’ and a bin for people to put dog muck in. We ran down it, and there wasn’t any light, none at all; we slipped and stumbled on leaf mould and dirt. Eventually Nabeela held onto the back of my shirt and I tried to summon light.

“I pulled. I summoned light, a tiny twisted tangle of orange-pink that I dragged from the heat in my body and the pain in my head and the stain on the sky, a glimmer that drifted along at feet-level to mark the path, the weakest will o’ the wisp as ever got made.

“After a long, long while, the trees thinned out. The path sloped down onto an open grassy place.

“But it was proper grass, proper contained grass, inside a proper fence, kept under control by stomping feet and pissing dogs, kids playing football and all that shit, and beyond the grass…

“… God, I nearly laughed!

“Beyond all those fucking miles of grass, the city. South London. I never thought I’d be so fucking pleased to see it. It stretched out like a pinky-sodium star-map in front of us, neat little streets with neat little houses where everyone knows their neighbours and the kids can always find a quiet place to smoke after school, not much in the way of bloody landmarks except the odd red-topped mast and mobile phone tower, and the odd bit of rising dark in places like Norwood and that, but still, all around, my city.

“It all came back then, like light that had been hiding just behind a wall, just out of reach; it went straight in through my pupils so hard and hot I thought I was gonna burn; but I felt it inside me again, proper city magic, big and wide as that ten-million-light horizon, deep as night and strong as street stone, and the light at my feet grew brighter and stronger and I almost started to turn to Nabeela, to hug her or something, before I remembered just how fucking stupid that would be. But I thought I could hear the metal moving on the top of her head and, to me, it sounded like excitement.

“ ‘We’re gonna make it,’ I breathed. ‘We are gonna bloody make it.’

“ ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘I think…’

“And that was when Templeman shot her.

“I felt it, as well as heard it.

“Her blood was on the back of my neck.

“It was on my arms.

“She must have been standing close.

“You know how gunshots are supposed to be really loud?

“I guess it was, but I wasn’t listening for it, and the sound just sorta spread out big across that big bit of grass, so I suppose my brain didn’t connect at first. But my body did, because I turned and she was falling, already falling, and as she fell her eyes closed and all the hair on her head went sorta limp, wriggling down and dying around her, a few cables twitching but everything else soggy. Living, she’d been awesome; dead, and the freakiness of that stuff on her head was suddenly horrifying, blood curling round the places where metal met skin.

“He came out of the darkness behind her, gun in hand. It was a little thing, and he held it out to one side like a proper gangster. His eyes were flecked with yellow, only really visible when he turned his head too fast, like the flash of a reflective jacket caught at a funny angle, and he was breathing fast. He didn’t speak, didn’t have nothing to say, just turned the gun right towards me and I screamed.

“Not girl-scream.

“Not standing-on-a-table-oh-shit-look-a-mouse scream.

“I screamed a city. I turned my face towards him and I screamed from that place inside where all the light and the dark and the shadows went; I screamed the echo of a gunshot in the night and the look in Nabeela’s closing eye, the taste of concrete and fear, the smell of streetlight and shadows, the touch of night and the cold of day; I screamed the rolling drops of blood running down the back of my neck, the straight pattern of the streets pressed against my back, the pain in my legs and the ice in my fingers, the shriek of the culicidae and chitter of slate legs on brick, the memory of a bridge on the river and the sound of falling paper; I screamed everything, so long and so loud that the lights began to go out in the streets beneath me and the red beacons on the spires behind grew to a point and burst into black. I screamed until the streetlight spun on the surface of the clouds and I kept on screaming because my friend was at my feet,

“And Templeman staggered back like a seagull against the wind, putting his hands to his head, chin turning upwards in pain, and I kept screaming until the blood rolled from his nose and from his ears and the gun turned red hot in his hands and he dropped it and the tears rolled from his eyes and the tears were amber-yellow, tree-gum goo and his body bent like I’d hit it in the middle and then bent again like I’d punched it in the stomach and then bent a third time and I had fingers in his lungs and I was squeezing, squeezing the breath out of him and making it mine, digging in deep, trying to pop him from the inside out, stepping over the body of my friend to move that little bit closer so I could see the eyes bulge in his skull and…

“(Give me back my hat!)

“… and I guess something in the way he looked reminded me of… I dunno what. His tongue was lolling out of his mouth and his arms were twitching at odd angles, and I remembered…

“Give me back my hat!

“… remembered the way it had been that night on London Bridge, when everything had hurt so much and everything had burnt and I hadn’t meant to, but I’d made something bad, and this was the same, this was it, déjà vu, that pain again but so much deeper and so much more, and I knew I could scream forever and this time, nothing would be able to shut me up except me.

“And it was the hardest thing I’d done.

“Harder than not watching my back when scared of a knife.

“Harder than running through the darkness with a medusa at my side.

“Harder than looking at a guy with a gun and knowing he wanted to make me die.

“That was nothing.

“Stopping—that took everything I had.

“But I did.

“I stopped.

“And it was like I had nothing left; I just fell forward onto my hands and knees, and my foot fell on Nabeela’s arm as I slipped down, but she wasn’t complaining, her head turned to one side, blood and thicker lumps of stuff on her face. And, fuck me, but Templeman was still on his feet, curling round, his hands over his ears like the echo of the sound was still going through his brain, but he looked at me and there was something in the way he opened his mouth, a tightening in the air about him, and I knew, whatever it was, it wasn’t over.

“Then he shouted right back at me.

“It wasn’t a shout like I had done, it was something that came from inside him, and him alone, a force in the pit of his belly, and as he opened his mouth I saw something move behind his teeth, staining them yellow, and I threw up a wall between him and me on instinct, not knowing I had the strength to do it, and this stuff came from out of his mouth, this cloud of yellow dust, it burst out of him like a sandstorm and knocked back against my shield hard enough to make me gasp, the blood drum in my head, and there was stuff moving in the dust. There was water in my eyes I was like working that hard to keep my shield up, keep something between me and it, but I saw still, as the yellow stuff surrounded me, I saw the way it moved and it wasn’t moving like a normal thing: it swirled and it danced and it spun, and sometimes, if you were feeling imaginative, you could say that faces screamed out of that cloud before they melted again into nothing.

“And it kept on coming, sound lost now, world lost now behind the dust.

“But Nabeela’s blood was still on my face and I’d be damned if I got killed by some fucking psychopath in fucking Croydon. So I stood up. My knees shook so bad I couldn’t balance on my left at all and had to try again with my right, hardly able to keep more than an inch of magic between the end of my nose and that roaring yellow stuff, hands still behind my back. But I got up and, for my next trick, I took a step, and then another, and then another, moving towards Templeman, and with each step I took, it got harder, and harder, until my head was bent forward double and the cloud of dust was sparking like welding iron off my shield.

“He was just a shadow in the storm, a fuzzy dark shape, but I pushed and pushed again until I couldn’t see for the fire blasting off my shield as to where it met his spell, but I knew, I knew he was almost there, right in front of me, near enough that I could almost touch, and I took one last step and closed my eyes tight and took the warmth from out my skin and out my bones and I took the beating of my own heart and listened for it, for that de-dum, that moment between the beat and when it came again; I took the strength inside me and the rhythm of my blood and I threw it at him with everything I had.

“Something hot and bright and white burst across my skin, across the skin I wore just outside my skin, slammed into the dust-storm and broke outwards, with that sound exploding flour makes, a whoomph not a boom, a vroom not a bang, a sound that you can’t hear because it’s so high and so low and so everywhere all at once that the only part of you capable of feeling it is that squishy bit in your belly, and the hollow bit in your bones where it echoes up and down your body, and I was thrown right back, landing so hard I thought I had to have broken something, and he went flying back too, into the trees, landing with a crack against one of the branches.

“For a while we both just lay there.

“My head was spinning; all I could see were these dancing yellow stars.

“I think he tried to get up and then cried out in pain.

“The fucker broke something.

“Good.

“Hope it was one of those fucking breaks where the fucking bone sticks out of your arm, so you can like see all the little cracked ends and the veins and shit.

“Somewhere a long way off, a siren was wailing.

“I rolled over and I’d been lucky, I’d landed on grass made soft by rain, but I still fucking hurt everywhere and knew in my belly that that was it, game over, nothing left that wasn’t the end of the world, that wasn’t going to be more than I had to give. I’d taken the strength from a beat of my heart, and now the blood rushed back to the corners of my body like it was making up for lost time, and everything hurt.

“Blue light somewhere behind the trees.

“Someone had called the cops.

“Someone who knew more about what guns sounded like than me.

“I heard him try to get to his feet and that made me try to get to mine.

“I fell on my first go, landed right next to Nabeela, saw a place in the back of her head where the bullet went in, and wanted to puke. I crawled away on my belly and Templeman was trying to get up, shaking with pain. I didn’t have much left in me, but I saw the gun, still warm from where he’d dropped it. I crawled towards it, rolled onto my back, felt in the grass for the butt of it, found it, held it tight. Its heat burnt, but a good burning. I sat up on the grass, turned my body to the side so I had some kinda shot at him, and pulled the trigger.

“I must have missed by miles, I couldn’t fucking aim with the thing, but he didn’t know that. I saw him stagger up, and I fired again and he wasn’t waiting twice; he crawled away and I fired, and just kept on firing until the gun was empty and he was a fleeing shadow in the dark. Then I dropped the gun. He wasn’t coming back. Coppers were coming and we were both fucked.

“I sat there.

“I should have said something smart.

“I should have cried or something.

“I should have…

“… something.

“I guess when you’re a kid, you learn from your parents that you’re supposed to smile at funny things. And then you learn that you’re supposed to cry when you see someone bigger than you cry, and you learn that you’re supposed to shout when you’re angry, because that’s what your stupid primary school teacher did that day you dropped the paint pot on her new trousers.

“I hadn’t learnt what you do when your friend is dead at your side.

“I hadn’t got lessons in how to look when there’s blood on your face.

“So I just sat.

“She’d understand.

“After a while, the blue lights stopped moving.

“I heard people among the trees.

“I thought about sitting there longer.

“Or, I guess, that part that thinks with words thought about sitting longer. The part that thinks with words explained it all, said sorry, sorry, sorry to Nabeela, and didn’t move. But the part that doesn’t need a voice to speak said, shift your arse, woman, there’s a dead medusa by your side and you are still totally screwed if you sit around, and it was right, so I moved, thinking still, sorry, sorry, sorry.

“I headed down the hill, towards the city.

“Sick and tired.

“I walked to that place where green belt begins to stop and city begins to start.

“Once-country lanes, big houses with big gardens on cul-de-sac roads, with alleys round the side that lead into football pitches. Retirement houses, new estates in yellow brick where Ideal People lead Ideal Lives.

“There was a church with a tower, and the tower had a clock put up there by the kind donation of Mr and Mrs Woods, and it said it was nearly six a.m. Even Croydon would start to wake up soon, from the weird dog-walkers who don’t mind the cold to the kids with a long school run.

“I got rid of the handcuffs, finally, when I found the tram track. London isn’t big on trams, but I kinda liked this route just because of that, because it was strange, and different, and new. There was enough electricity above the track for me to drag it in, enough that I managed to put some into my fingers and burn the chains between the cuffs. The things were still locked around my wrists, but at least I could move my hands now, and I figured that, in this town, handcuffs were probably just another fashion statement.

“The sun was coming up by the time I got to the central station. Croydon comes in three parts. There’s the scummy shitty suburban part, full of people too skint to find anywhere closer to better things, who live in council houses that were designed to be ideal homes and haven’t stopped leaking since. Then there’s the posh leafy part, where the trees are tall and the cars are smooth, where in the spring there’s blossom in the gardens and on the streets and where your kid can learn horse riding without having to drive for an hour and a half to do it. Finally there’s the shopping bit, where every shop has a sale, and you just walk round and round and round trying to find your way out even though you aren’t really inside anything, and where all the signs pointing towards the bus stops lie, and you’re never more than fifty yards from a hamburger and a Diet Coke.

“I kinda walked round and round for a while there.

“Sure, even kick-ass awesome sorceresses get lost in shopping centres sometimes.

“And, sure, I didn’t know where to go.

“Templeman had taken my mobile phone, my wallet.

“I remember thinking that Femi’s number was in my phone, I didn’t have it written down anywhere else; that’s one hot date I’m not gonna make any time soon. Then I felt ashamed for thinking about that, when I should have been thinking about nothing except grief. Didn’t seem right to do nothing but cry. Didn’t seem respectful to do more than stand still in one place, until I was like stone too.

“But the sun was coming and the brain-that-has-no-words kept me moving.

“There was a public toilet in the train station. It stank and everything was lit blue to stop the junkies shooting up, but I didn’t care. I washed at my face and my hands and the back of my neck, scrubbed with soap and then a bit more until my skin felt like barbecued bacon. Then I went to the first newsagent I could find and stole a bottle of water and a packet of crisps. I’d never stolen in my life before, but I did it now and didn’t feel anything while I did it. I got pissed off after, because there wasn’t any recycling bin on the station and that’s just shit, because it’s a railway station and there should be like some government directive saying there should be a recycling bin there or something because it’s public property and we all use it and everyone drinks water on the train anyway.

“Then I got onto the platform by tricking the ticket machine; kicked it until it thought I had a ticket and beeped me through. Then I took the first train I could find. It was going to London Bridge and it was crowded, even at this time. I got a seat by using my elbows, and the woman opposite me didn’t meet my eye all the way; she was afraid. There were those free newspapers. I tried to read one but kept going back over and over the same line, not taking it in. All I can remember is that Wayne has been seen on the piss with Rochelle, and I don’t even know what that fucking means.

“London Bridge was too busy, too crowded, and I realised even the second I got off the platform my mistake.

“Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake, I don’t know; maybe there is like some higher power or something.

“Whatever, once I was there, I couldn’t exactly not do it, so I walked out of the concourse and up onto the bridge proper. It’s a crap bridge, you know. Nice at night when they light it up pink and stuff, but you’ve got Tower Bridge over there, which is all famous, and you’ve got Southwark Bridge over there, which at least has that kinda green nobbly thing going for it, and then London Bridge in the middle, which is just shit.

“But whatever. Let’s pretend like we’re not architects for a minute and go, okay, I walked out onto London Bridge. And even though it’s just a flat bit of concrete, I could feel everything it had been, all the bridges that had gone before, right back to the days when it was sticks and stones and falling down for some fair lady. And I walked to the middle of it, to the place where the wind was strongest and icy cold and turns your ears first to pain, then numb, and I looked towards the east and breathed out, and remembered the sound of paper and the pain in my belly, and wished that it could just wash away with the tide.

“I dunno how long I stood there.

“Something about time.

“So much time beneath me, around me, in the water under my feet and in the place where this bridge ran, that minutes and hours kinda lose their meaning.

“I stood and I looked at nothing and everything, and the wind numbed my face and my hands, my body and my back, and I felt almost clean.

“I guess the rest isn’t that great.

“I tried to find you.

“I thought about calling you, dialling your number, but then I thought if Templeman was fucking with you, he’d probably have your phone.

“Then I thought about the Aldermen—I mean, not all of them can be psycho-bastards, right?

“But just because one or two might be okay, didn’t mean I knew which ones they were.

“Then I thought about trying the beggars, but I didn’t know the rituals, the right way to start.

“I considered maybe a summoning. An electric elemental might know, or maybe the Old Bag Lady; see if she had any tips; but then I decided I couldn’t take the abuse.

“Finally I went for the safest sorta option.

“I went to the Tower of London.

“Do you know how fucking expensive the tickets are to the Tower? And it’s hard to just bluff your way in; there’s magic in those old stones that doesn’t like being tampered with, rock-deep magic that makes it really hard to trick the eye of the security guys on the door. I ended up having to go several streets away, pinch some cash from a banker whose wallet was, like, hanging out his back pocket anyway, and pay for an actual ticket at the Tower gate. And the sandwiches are stupid; I mean, they’re not very good for starters, and then it’s like five pound something for a bit of scrambled egg between two slices of rubbery bread.

“Then it was really hard finding what I needed to without getting shouted at, because I was still wearing these bloody handcuffs and I had to pull my sleeves right down and act all natural and people kept looking at me funny, but okay, whatever. I set off an alarm in the gallery where they keep the crown jewels and, when everyone went running there, I went down onto the grass beneath the keep and found a raven.

“It was bigger than I’d expected, and wore this tag round its left leg, but I figured if anything could bloody find the Midnight bloody Mayor in this fucking city, it would be a raven of the Tower. So while no one was looking, I tore my stupidly bloody expensive sandwich in half, and fed the raven one half, and it looked okay with it, and didn’t puke or go for the eyes or nothing, and then I left all nonchalant like while the coppers tried to work out what the hell was wrong with the alarms, and went out along the river.

“And you know how in the centre of the city there’s all those little churchyards left over, I mean, tiny places with stone graves where the names have been rubbed off and where a bomb must have dropped or something because there’s maybe one spire left standing and no church, and it’s all shadowed over by these great fat buildings? Well, I went to one of them and sat down and got out the other half of my sandwich and waited for the raven to come, and finally it did.

“I think all the ravens are supposed to be called after Norse gods or something, but this one looked like a Dave to me, and I fed it the sandwich and talked nice to it, and finally drew the symbol of the Midnight Mayor on the ground with a stick, and it seemed to get it, because it hopped up and started flying west immediately.

“And there was a bike hire place really close by, and I know how you’re not really supposed to take the bikes out of the congestion-charge zone, but it wasn’t like I knew where the raven was going to go so I sorta… borrowed… one of these bikes and started following the raven. It would fly a bit and then land and wait, and then fly a bit more, and land and wait, and keep on flying and, you know what, but this city is fucking big. I mean, I know it’s not exactly Mexico City or got twenty million people in it or something, but as someone who has now, personally, cycled across most of it following this one stupid bloody bird, I can tell you that it’s sodding huge and it’s a fucking miracle I’m still walking.

“I followed that raven, then, from the Tower of fucking London, west. Embankment, Westminster, Victoria, Earls Court—some wanker in a van nearly mowed me down at bloody Hammersmith and a copper shouted at me for being on a blue Boris bike that shouldn’t be outside the congestion-charge zone, but he was on foot and I just pedalled away. Chiswick, which was posh, Gunnersbury, which wasn’t, and then all these samey streets with samey little houses and still this raven kept on flying on and by now I was shattered, I was ready for bed, but it seemed to know what it was doing until finally, about an hour ago, it stops above this bloody house in this place called Osterley, wherever the hell here is, and caws a bit and preens and looks pretty pleased with itself, and I go up and knock on the front door and Kelly answers it and she says, ‘Oh my God! Ms Ngwenya!’

“And I can’t remember what I fucking said, but she seemed to understand.

“So yeah. That’s what I gotta say.

“The sandwiches out there, by the way, they aren’t for you. I mean, I figured having flown from Tower Bridge to Osterley, I should probably give Dave the raven more than a shit egg sandwich, so all the shopping I’ve just got, that’s mostly for him. And the coffee is for me, but if you’re lucky you can have some, if Dr Seah says it’s okay. And I guess I stole a bicycle. And a wallet. And jumped some train fares. Sorry. And Nabeela is dead. She’s dead and Templeman killed her. And I tried to kill Templeman but he ran away. And he’s on something, Matthew. I don’t know what it is but he’s on something big and bad and nasty and, if I were you, I’d be seriously scared. And I’m tired. I’m really, really tired. I think that’s it. I think that’s all I got left to say.”

Penny sat, a rag-woman in muddy clothes, on the side of the bed, shoulders bending with each breath, and said nothing more.

I put my bandaged hand on hers.

She was still wearing the remnants of the handcuffs around her wrists. Blood had dried in little spots on the metal.

Night had settled on the street outside.

In the kitchen, the Vintage Classics of the 1980s were playing at a lower level.

The radiator ticked.

The radio went onto a different song.

Penny said, “I hate this tune.”

“Why?”

“Everyone talks pretentious crap about it. Like how it’s all about female enfranchisement and race and stuff, when in fact it’s just another smoochy love song.”

I listened a while longer. “Oh yeah,” I said at last. “I get it.”

“And people say like ‘The music of the 1980s, it’s so great’ and I’m going ‘Why’s it great?’ and they go ‘Because it’s so crap’ and I don’t get that. I mean, I know I wasn’t around for much of the 1980s, but I really hate it when older people are all ‘Things were so much better in my day’ and you go, ‘Yes, the world before the collapse of communism—wow what a place.’ ”

So saying, she fell silent again.

I cleared my throat, and regretted it, as pain referred its way down to my elbows. She must have seen me flinch, because she turned on the edge of the bed and said, “Hey, what is up with you and the, like, mega-medical action anyway? Only you don’t exactly look like the living Apollo to begin with, but did you have to go get all Dr Frankenstein on me?”

“Frankenstein’s monster,” I corrected. “I mean, if we’re talking looking like crap.”

“What?”

“The monster wasn’t called Frankenstein.”

“What was the monster called?”

“I don’t know. ‘Monster,’ I guess.”

“I can see how that might’ve sucked—like kinda not leaving you many career options, is it? Besides, you got what I mean, so don’t talk like you’ve got an English Lit degree shoved up your arse.”

“I’m just saying…”

“You’re doing the avoiding thing,” she corrected sharply. “So here’s the real question, then. How bad was it, and do I want to know?”

I thought a while. Then, “It was bad. And no, you don’t want to know.”

“There’ll be a day when you want to tell me about it.”

“I know. But can we just put it off a little while longer?”

Silence again, but it was shorter, playing its not-noises to a different non-tune. At length Penny stood up quickly, looking anywhere that wasn’t directly in my eye, and blurted, “So what the hell happens now?”

Kelly made dinner.

She said, “I’m really sorry, Mr Mayor, I didn’t have time to stock up on the proper ingredients and the local shop was completely out of fresh coriander so that was that plan out of the window…”

Penny was already halfway through her third forkful and accelerating. I took an experimental mouthful. Then another.

“… honestly, I would have thought the kitchen would be better stocked but, essentially…”

“What is this stuff?” asked Penny.

“It’s seared tuna with a glass noodle in sweet curry sauce, and fragrant sansho pepper, mango and shiso salad on the side with just a pinch…”

“It’s totally bloody awesome!”

“And you found this… round the corner?” I queried.

“The trick is to be imaginative with your flavour combinations,” Kelly explained, doing her best not to flap as she stood in the door. “It’s not about many strong flavours all at once, but about several clean flavours which you can take one at a time, to complement each other during the meal as a whole experience. I also found some clothes which might fit you, Ms Ngwenya, if you want to change, and there’s a hot bath running in the next room and I’ve turned on the radiator in the living room and I think that at nine there’s a detective drama on the telly which might be worth watching…”

“Oh my God, is there ice cream? I love sitting in front of the TV, in a blanket, with the fire on, eating ice cream; it’s, like, the only good thing about when someone splits up with you.”

“I think there might be some strawberry ice cream…”

“Can we eat it from the tub?” demanded Penny. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, this meal is like… totally awesome… but seriously, ice cream from the tub in front of the TV—what did you say was on the telly? It’s not that one with the guy with the big hair, is it?”

“I’m sure at some point we’re supposed to do something noble and brave about the state of the city,” I quavered.

“Bloody hell, haven’t you heard of fucking working hours?” shrilled Penny. “You’re like that monster that doesn’t even have a name and I’m shattered and Kelly here has, like, done the cooking and the washing up and I’m just saying, do you think a half-hour sit-down will kill us?”

We sat in front of the TV.

Kelly had the armchair, and flitted in and out with fresh tea, hot water bottles and a seemingly unending supply of biscuits and ice cream.

Penny sat next to me on the sofa, a blanket pulled up to her chin.

We dimmed the lights down low.

On the TV, a detective with big hair strode around the city untangling enigmatic mysteries and foiling deadly plots with a gusto that left me feeling exhausted.

Penny’s head somehow ended up on my shoulder, her legs swinging round and tucking in on the sofa.

Her eyes were drifting shut even before it was revealed that the cabbie dunnit all along. Kelly sat forward in her chair, fingers pressed to the arms of the seat, eyes wide, mug of tea forgotten at her feet.

I pulled the blanket a little tighter around Penny’s shoulders and didn’t move.

Hero and villain danced around in an intricate and dazzling game of life and death.

Not even the final gunshot woke Penny up.

The credits rolled to the sound of a presenter inviting the audience to change channels now for a celebrity quiz programme on this week’s special theme of male leg waxing.

Penny’s head slipped from my shoulder and bounced against my chest. I started, dragging in breath, and the movement was enough to wake her up. She sat up, eyes rimmed with gum, and Kelly said, “Let me see if I can find a spare toothbrush…” and led her upstairs.

I watched the TV a while longer.

On another channel, a different detective was solving a different drama. Two channels over, and two men and a token woman were talking about cars in the language of drunken magi who’ve seen the Christ-child but weren’t impressed. One channel over from that, and three teenagers with Liverpudlian accents stood on the balcony of a council estate and screamed at each other, a proper circular argument with no beginning, no end, and a touch of mood lighting thrown in. The ice cream was reaching that melted consistency where refreezing would just create soft mush. It was a baby pink colour, with the occasional solid frozen strawberry trapped inside. I licked the spoon when I was done, and dropped it in the empty tub.

Kelly came back into the room just as the news was doing its regional recap of the Silly Local Story of the Day. Tonight it was a guide to the ten worst potholes in London—which local councils should we hold to account?

“Penny’s in bed,” she murmured, still-house soft.

“Sleeping?”

“Maybe.”

“Good. You should go home,” I said. “Go to the office tomorrow morning, carry on like nothing’s happened.”

“Something has happened,” she replied. “Templeman… the Minority Council…”

“The Beggar King has cursed Rathnayake in front of you all. Templeman went up against my apprentice and the final score was nil–nil without extra time. There are three men turned to stone on a commercial estate outside Croydon, Caughey is mad and the culicidae’s heart has been purged and is currently sat in the kitchen fridge. Penny was right. Time to breathe.”

“The fairy godmother…?”

“You’re a good cook, you know that?”

She hesitated, unsure whether to beam proudly or not. “Thank you.”

“How’d you end up in this life?”

A smile teetered on her face, then broke free. “Well,” she said, “with a degree in International Law and Economics and a Masters in Actuarial Science, it was either this or back to the checkout at my local Sainsbury’s.”

It felt like a while since I’d smiled and meant it.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Kelly.”

“Tomorrow, Mr Mayor.”

“And thanks for everything.”

“Just doing my job!” she beamed.

I waited for the sound of the door to close and the snap of her heels on the pavement outside, before I turned off the TV.

In the bathroom I put my head under, first, the cold tap, then the hot, then the cold again.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

It was hard to use my fingers properly, but I got a fist around the handle of a toothbrush, and scrubbed.

I checked on Penny.

I didn’t know if she was sleeping, or merely pretending.

Either way, I let her be.

My coat and shoes were in the bathroom. Someone had toyed with the idea of cleaning the vestments of the Beggar King, and changed their mind. I pulled them on, left Penny a note by the front door, found a bin bag at the bottom of a kitchen drawer, and opened the fridge.

The culicidae’s heart was still, cold and silent on the top shelf, wrapped up in kitchen foil.

I put it in my bag, tied a knot at the top, picked up the spare keys to the flat, and let myself out.

There is a moment in all big cities when the traffic stops. It may only last a few moments, through a tiny pause, a trick of the traffic lights. But when it happens it is louder than an engine as it backfires, deeper than the roar of the double-decker bus.

It was there, as I stepped out into the dark Osterley night.

A moment when the traffic stops.

I tightened my grip around my black bin bag, pulled the coat of the Beggar King tighter around my shoulders, picked a direction that looked like it might lead towards a main road, and walked.

This was my city.

Midnight Mayor.

Light, life, fire.

Osterley was built from timber and concrete. The flagstones sang where they were loose in the pavement, the cars slept in tiny little drives, the newsagents were local, the cul-de-sacs were residential, and the roads were main.

I walked and the traffic fled before me, though the drivers did not know why.

The lights bent as we passed.

Pigeons watched us from their dens, the rats scampered beneath our feet.

As we moved, our shadow turned and turned again, a sundial’s darkness moved by street glow, and our shadow was not our own. Sometimes we thought it had wings of black dragon-leather. Sometimes we thought its hands dripped, staining the cracks in the paving stones as it passed. I could feel the places where the bikers moved, those thin points in the architecture of the city where here became like there and it was possible to jump the gap without mucking around with the spaces in between. Ley lines crackled underfoot, following the passage of the underground tunnels, the old water pipes, the silent whirling gas, the dance of electricity. We put our head to one side and could hear the voices in the telephone lines overhead, far-off whispers of

Hey babe

So next week any

Sorry I didn’t call

Missed you

Midnight Mayor.

This was our city.

We caught the last train of the night, heading east, back to where it began.

It was called Avalon.

It was still, against all expectations, a nightclub.

Some nights ago, I’d stood outside its doors and explained to a bouncer about my mega-mystical pinkies, because my mobile phone suggested that Meera’s mobile phone was inside those walls, calling out to me.

Some nights ago, I hadn’t even heard of fairy dust.

Look what had happened.

There was a new bouncer on the door.

I walked up the thin red carpet to the silver door, and he glanced at me and said, “Sorry, sir.”

We looked him in the eye and saw the colour drain from his face. We whispered, “Walk away,” and he carefully reached up to his armband, pulled it off, let it fall from his fingertips, turned, and walked away, to where we knew not.

At our back, our shadow twisted with pleasure, arms flexing, dreaming of flight.

Down the stairs, back down into the pounding, pulsing dark of the club, taste of magic on the air, booming music from the speakers, and drinks that fluoresced in the low blue light.

I looked, and didn’t have to look long before I found a woman with sickly yellow eyes who split from her friends to go into the ladies’ toilet. I followed her, using speed to make up for the incongruity of my appearance, shoved past a drunken woman in six-inch heels who half fell past me out of the door, marched into the glowing dark of the toilet, grabbed the woman with the yellow-tinted eyes by the hair and put my hand over her mouth before she had a chance to scream.

“You’re a fairy,” I breathed. “You’re addicted to fairy dust. Scream and I’ll break your neck, do you understand? Just nod.”

She nodded, once, slowly.

“You’re going to give me the name and address of your supplier. Then I’m going to let you go. First I’m going to tell you this. The fairy dust will kill you. You will turn into dust yourself and your body will be swept up in a nice, clean plastic bag, and sold onto the next punter to sniff. Quit the dust, don’t quit the dust, I really don’t care and doubt I can make a difference, but as a public service and just in case, I figured I’d let you know. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded. Her little red dress had been zipped up so tight that a roll of flesh bulked over its low back. Now it shook visibly with the rest of her body.

“Right. I’m letting you go. Remember, if you scream, I break your neck. Tell me where to find your supplier.”

She was an addict.

She wasn’t stupid.

She told me where.

I let her go.

There was a taxi rank outside Charing Cross station.

The taxis came into the station forecourt, swung round the great neo-Gothic spike, adorned with sombre stone kings, that once marked the very centre of the city, waited, and then swerved back out into the stop-start traffic of the Strand and Trafalgar Square.

I queued.

When it was my turn, I let the people behind me take the first cab that came.

Then I let the next couple take the one after.

Then I waited a little longer.

The third cab that pulled up was black, like all its neighbours, with the yellow “For Hire” sign illuminated above the windscreen, but there was a man already in the back.

He opened the passenger door as I leant down, and said, “You going my way?”

“Sure,” I replied, and got in.

We pulled away.

Inside the cab, the man sat next to me was already busy, snapping open a large briefcase. He barely bothered to look at me as he said, “Okay, let’s talk cash…”

Then he smelt me.

His nose twitched in sudden distress and he looked up and, for the first time, met my eye, and he recognised me and I recognised him. Fear spread across his face. I leant across the seat, clawing our right hand around his face, index and middle finger below each eye. The street lights filed peacefully by as the cab swung round towards Westminster.

He had the good sense not to move.

“Morris Prince,” I breathed. “So you survived the Soho dusthouse.”

“Dudley Sinclair,” he hissed. “Or whatever the hell your name is. You are a dead man.”

We held up our right hand. He looked, and took in the scars carved into our flesh, the twin crosses, the badge of the Midnight Mayor, and his eyes grew wider.

“I’m surprised the fairy godmother is still talking to you,” I said. “After all, you did let me destroy your business. Or is selling from the back of a cab your new demotion?” I saw the corner of his mouth twitch, and my smile grew wider. “Oh, it is. Well, can’t look good on the CV, can it? Morris Prince, owner of the Soho dusthouse. At 10 p.m. he was a smug murdering bastard with everything to live for, and by three in the morning he was just a murdering bastard. And why? Because he got played. If it’s any comfort, we all get played. I’ve been played like pipes at a ceilidh—you barely made it to the tambourine.” I reached past him and pulled the briefcase off his lap.

There was a little snap-click behind my head.

The taxi had stopped.

In the reflection on the rear windscreen, I saw the shape of the driver, gun in hand, turned in his seat, ready to pull the trigger. Our eyes stayed fixed on Prince’s.

“Tell him to let us go,” we breathed. “Or everyone and everything in this cab will burn.”

“You can’t be the Midnight Mayor,” he whispered. “It’s a bluff.”

“Which part about it confuses you? Is it the power, the strength, the darkness, the magic?” Sparks coiled around our fingers, danced in front of his eyes; he flinched at the brightness. “I get it. You’re confused by the outfit. You don’t understand why a Midnight Mayor is wearing the vestments of the Beggar King. What crap luck you must have, to piss off every major power in the city. Or maybe it’s our eyes. Maybe you look at us and know, deep down inside, that we were never human. Perhaps that’s what you can’t understand.”

“A bullet will still kill you,” he wheezed.

“Will it?” I asked. “What part will it kill? My body, sure, that will rot and turn to muck; but then again, will it? What are the blue electric angels, if not more than flesh and bone? What is the Midnight Mayor, if not a power as eternal as the stones themselves? You think it’s worth it, then, sure, get your guy to pull the trigger. See if killing one out of the three of us is good enough.”

“He’d never…” blurted Prince, then stopped.

“He’d never… what?”

“He’d… the Midnight Mayor wouldn’t have… he wouldn’t…”

“Our infinite patience, on which many an epic ode shall one day be written, has been taxed by recent events,” we murmured. “The Midnight Mayor wouldn’t… what?”

Our fingers against the hollows of his eyes were leaving red marks.

“He… he… he wouldn’t have done all this for some woman called Meera.”

We hesitated.

I smiled.

Wanted to laugh.

Hurt inside.

“You know what,” I said. “I think you’re absolutely right. A proper Midnight Mayor wouldn’t have bothered, would he? I mean, look at all the shit it’s caused. But then again,” I pushed a little deeper, “do you want to meet the real me?”

He must have gestured, because the shadow with the gun turned away, the safety clicking back on. I eased the briefcase of little yellow packets away from his lap, tucked it under one arm, smiled at him.

“Screwed over twice in one week,” I exclaimed, pushing open the passenger door and stepping out into the cold night. “You might want to consider a different career, Mr Prince.”

I slammed the door, and watched the taxi speed off.

I needed somewhere to work, out of the wind.

I crossed the river, to Waterloo Bridge.

There was a place beneath the walkways of the South Bank centre. By day it was full of kids on skateboards and tourists ogling their tricks; by night, a place of paint and grey shadows. Its concrete walls were a graffiti artist’s paradise, scrawled with colour and movement that bore tags as mundane as “Police Greu” through to a more political “No To Cuts.” They changed every other day, as new contributors came in with their dirty bags and metal cans to spray on top of the thick bright paint. Look closely, and you could see the work of the Whites, those magicians who found life and power in the signs on the street. Some of the stones themselves echoed hollowly beneath these bridges, where imps and mean-eyed, foul-mouthed pixies had dug their lairs into the embankment floor, drawn by the powers at work on the walls. There were runes and wards, curses and invocations painted here; it was a good place for any magician to work, safe within its tangle of spray-thick magic.

I opened up Prince’s briefcase, pulled out the bags of fairy dust. So many—even now I was surprised—and money too, thick wads that I gave up counting after the first grand and a half. At the bottom of the case itself was a ridge in the lining. I felt along it, found the tracking spell scratched with a scalpel into the leather itself, and rubbed it out with the ragged ends of my nails. I kept on tearing until I found the GPS tracker too, plugged into a tiny lithium battery. Magicians aren’t good with technology. I let this one be.

Then I opened up the bags of yellow fairy dust, covering my nose and mouth with my sleeve as I did.

I spread them out in a circle on the ground, large enough to hold a man, patting down the edges like a chef fussing over a piece of pastry. I pulled the culicidae’s heart out of its black bin bag and placed it in the centre of the circle. I rolled my sleeve up and looked for the tiny scab in the crook of my arm where Templeman had pushed the needle in. I scratched at it until it bled, and held my arm out over the centre of the circle until a few drops of blood had welled and dropped onto the heart itself, which hissed as they struck. The red blood flashed blue for an instant on impact, before sinking into the plastic shell of the heart.

I rolled my sleeve back down, and stood well away from the ring of dust. I turned my hands palm-upwards and breathed in the river smell, let it fill me, then breathed it out again. I whispered,

“Meera.”

A ripple ran through the dust.

“Meera,” I said again, and the ripple danced round the rim of yellow dust and, in the centre of the circle, the culicidae’s heart contracted and expanded, just once.

There was no spell, no symbols I could define, but there didn’t need to be.

Here was the sound of the river, the memory of a ride on the boat.

Here was breath of her breath on the air, dust of her dust on the ground.

Here the place where once her feet had walked, and the recollection of the place in which she had died.

No one can come back from the dead.

Or rather, nothing human.

I said again, “Meera!” and raised my hands as I did and the dust seemed to dance in its circle, leap upwards like iron filings towards a magnet, and the heart in the centre of the circle beat once, then twice. I pulled again, and again the dust swirled and spun, and now, when the heart pulsed inwards, so the dust moved in, and as the heart beat out again, so the dust rolled away.

And here was my blood on the floor and dust of her dust spinning in its circle.

And once, perhaps, we’d shared something that only we had known about, and it had been one night, and it had been barely a few words and a little breath, but the taste of it was real, a lifeline to the world.

I didn’t know where the spell came from, or how it happened, but the words were there now, on my lips, and the dust was dancing, and I called out:

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

The culicidae’s heart shook with the strength of its own beat and now the dust was rushing into it, clinging to it, wrapping itself around the heart like a swarm of tiny insects, hiding it from view.

“My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at last I spake with my tongue; Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days; and verily every man living is altogether vanity. For man walks in a vain shadow, and disquiets himself in vain: he heaps up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.”

I couldn’t see the heart now, didn’t know where the words were coming from, but the fog was rising at my feet, the thick white fog that Meera had made, and the heart was rising inside its shell of dust, the dust itself shaping around the heart, the circle obliterated, forming a new, writhing pattern in front of me. I thought I heard someone shout from the bridge but didn’t look, couldn’t look away.

“Take thy plague away from me: I am even consumed by means of thy heavy hand. For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

A shape now in the dust, the heart was gone, vanished, consumed by the whirling fairy dust, but whatever it had become was solidifying, stretching outwards and thickening, forming something liquid but upright, solid but moving, and to stop speaking now was to explode, voices and sounds that were not my own coming out on my breath, my breath flecked with yellow, and I gasped,

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life!”

The spell snapped. It felt like an iron bar landing across my shoulders. I staggered forwards, head pounding, hauling down air. There were footsteps around me, men running; I sagged to my knees and looked up at the thing in front of me, which, though it had nothing I could call eyes to see, looked right back at me.

Alive.

It’s alive.

Skin of dust, hair of dust, eyes of dust; it could only be called human in that it was trying to grow legs out of a solid trunk, in that it raised up arms and sprouted fingers which at once melted away to dust, subsumed back into the living whole. Sometimes it had a head which opened a mouth as if it would speak, but the mouth collapsed like sand before a wave and the head vanished back into the worm-body before a new head grew, and sometimes the head had the neck of a man and the chin of woman, and sometimes its shoulders were round and broad, and sometimes thin and bent and always, all the time, the thing in front of me morphed and rippled, swayed and moved, as it tried to find a shape, and found instead a thousand. Only one thing about it was consistent, a hot place in what I supposed had to be called its chest, a beating pounding thing beneath its dust skin, a core that might have been a heart.

Then someone shouted and there were men running towards me, men in suits; some held guns, some held wands. I heard a footstep behind me and looked round and a man was already there. He slammed the butt of his gun into the back of my head, knocking me to the ground, then grabbed me by the collar and pulled me back up, gun pressed to my head. I went passively with him, eyes still fixed on this creature of dust that stood before me, and whose eyes, when it had such, I felt were fixed on me.

Then a voice breathed, “What have you done?”

He stood there, in a bright white suit with a yellow striped tie, leaning on a silver-topped stick. I almost didn’t recognise him outside the pool and not on drugs, but his voice was the same, though flecked with fear. Oscar Kramb, the fairy godmother, pushed through his men and past the empty briefcase, its GPS tracker exposed to the sky. He was staring at the living man-woman-thing of fairy dust, which turned its unformed head to look at him. An arm was forming, which tried holding a cane, before crumbling back into its own swelling surface. Mimicking, like a child, I realised. Alive, aware.

“What is it?” he breathed, eyes still fixed on the creature.

“It’s Meera,” I replied, and even the act of speaking earned me the gun pressed deeper against my skull, bending my neck to one side.

His eyes turned to me, and it was as if the act of seeing caused him to remember his hate, face darkening at the sight. “What do you mean, ‘Meera’?” he barked. The fairy-dust creature recoiled, as if surprised by the harshness of his words.

“I mean,” I replied, “that it’s Meera. Or, at least, that part of her that lived in her final breath, that was captured in the moment of death, that could be defined by heart, head, hand, skin, flesh, bone. It is Meera, solid and whole, fed on the beating heart of a monster, brought to life with just a little blood, and a little magic, since, all things considered, she didn’t exactly die a natural death.”

Kramb moved round to inspect the creature from every side, and it shuffled a leg, trickling dust, to watch him in turn. “Of course,” I added, “it’s also a lot of other things. There’s probably a Bob and a Joe, and a Mary and a Sarah, in there too. I mean, I haven’t met anyone called Bob or Joe or Mary or Sarah lately, but it seems a fairly good guess that of all the thousands and thousands of people you’ve killed, four of them had these pretty ordinary names.”

Kramb’s scowl deepened. He nodded at the man with the gun to my head, who kicked my knees out from behind and, as I flopped to the ground, pushed my head further down with the barrel of the gun.

“You’ll be wanting to ask what happens next!” I blurted. “I mean, obviously you’ll kill me because, shit, who wants to see the same killing spree twice? But you’ll be needing to ask yourself, ‘What is up with this dust creature anyway? Why the hell has this really annoying Midnight Mayor guy summoned it; is he still on something? I mean, wow he’s gotta be pretty mental to just let me come and find him with all my armed boys; I wonder if I should let him say something. I mean, that’s what I’d be thinking, if I had half a brain.’ ”

“Go on, Mr Mayor,” growled Kramb. “Spit it out.”

I craned my neck upwards so I could just about see the creature, and it turned and looked back at me. “Meera,” I breathed, and for just a moment it had eyes, and it saw, and it was, perhaps, a she. “I mean, shit,” I whispered, “you killed them. You killed them all, Mr Godmother, because it kept you in caviar. Don’t tell me you were fulfilling a demand. You could have stopped, and you didn’t, so they died. And it wasn’t a good death. Christ, but it wasn’t a good death…”

An instant in which the features of this ever-changing creature were feminine; a second in which a hand rose from the dust as if in greeting.

“… and the culicidae’s heart, you see, it was designed to focus in on one very specific thing—on anger, on rage—and to drain it out of the souls of its victims. Well this… this thing I’ve summoned; this… her…”—fingers evolved towards me, but they kept melting before they made it to the fingertips—“… she’s fed on the same magics, made from the same spells. She’s programmed to find fairy dust, to feed on it like the culicidae fed on anger, and nothing you do can stop it. Oscar, meet Meera. Not five minutes old, she is, and she’s going to destroy the dusthouses.”

There was a moment.

I think, perhaps, he understood.

Then, having understood, he chose not to believe, and raised his head to his boys and barked, “Kill him.”

It doesn’t take long to pull a trigger.

It took a fraction of a second less for the creature of dust to raise up a blob that might have been a head, stretch out arms longer than a human’s should have been, stretching and thinning like a rubber band, and scream. It had no lungs to scream with, no muscle to stretch out the air, but it had dust that buzzed like a swarm of bees, and if a giant’s foot had crushed the head of the hive’s only queen, it could not have roared with a greater rage and hate than this thing gave, fuelled on dust, heart and magic.

I covered my head with my hands as the creature seemed to burst outwards, in an explosion made from whirling grains of dust, each grain bearing a sting; pressed my head down and felt it roll over me, knocking back the men who stood all around, submerging them in a storm of dust that was twice, three times, a hundred times the size and shape of the meagre packets I’d spilt over the culicidae’s heart. I felt it burn against my skin, tried to breathe and lost all breath, tried to open my eyes and couldn’t do it, thought I heard someone shout, but there was only the roaring of the dust, the sound of it, the heat of it and perhaps still very very faint somewhere behind

just a…

didn’t mean…

never understood

just a…

… please why won’t you?

kid

Then it parted.

I felt it move away, and now the roaring of the dust was further off, a background buzz. I forced my eyes open, squinting in the gloom, and tried hauling myself to my feet. I couldn’t see the lights of the city: neither the reflections on the river nor the glow of the north bank. A dark wall hid them: a moving wall. I summoned a bubble of light, but all it did was to cast a pinkish-sodium glow on a patch of circle of ground just large enough to fit a corpse. There was no one to be seen, only a spinning prison of dust.

Then something curled round our ankle. I yelped and clenched my hands, ready to call fire.

A face that had been a man’s stared up at me, eyes yellow, skin burnt by abrasion and hanging off in tatters, hair blasted from the skull, clothes stained the same smeary yellow as his eyes. He stared up at me and managed to gasp with what was left of his lungs, breath bursting with yellow as he did so, “You… you… you make it… make it… make…”

I staggered away from Oscar Kramb, and the wall of dust moved with me. He screamed as it passed over his feet, consumed his legs; his body shook, his hands clawed at the air. The dust closed in fast, rising over his back and shoulders, swallowing them up in a thickness that left no room for seeing, until only his head was visible, and he tried to scream but his breath turned to dust and his skin was flaking off his face in yellow rags and he tried to say something, or possibly beg, or maybe curse, but the dust swallowed him whole, consuming him in darkness.

It ended as quickly as it had begun.

The wall of dust seemed for a second to freeze on the air.

Then it fell, drifting downwards like snow on a still winter day. It fell into a circle all around me, piled far thicker than it had been at the start, and lay there, a bit of refuse in an ordinary, undisturbed night. Buses passed on the bridge overhead. Seagulls competed for discarded chips by a Dumpster. A tug hauling a barge of yellow crates rumbled towards the estuary. Of Oscar Kramb and his men, nothing remained, except the undigested scraps of yellowed clothing and the guns they’d carried.

A light breeze caught the circle of dust and blew it along the ground. I recoiled as it tumbled towards my feet. The grains kept tumbling, even when the breeze had stopped, pooling together in thickening clumps, rising back up with a busy rattle, re-forming a little at a time, a yellow ant hill become a yellow spire, which became again a warping fragment of humanity. When the last few grains had been absorbed into its form, I looked at it, and it looked at me, face changing from male to female, happy to sad, body growing and shrinking as it mixed and matched, moving through various forms.

I saw nothing of Meera in it now.

Something animal in the way it turned its head.

Something alien in how it looked at the light.

We said, “Pain is difficult,” and its head turned towards us, neck rippling with the movement. We held out our hands, placating, adding, “Though you are of humans, you are not human. That is difficult too.”

Its body shimmered with movement, but we felt that what might be its eyes were on us.

We said, “Feeling is difficult. Mortals have other mortals with whom to share their thoughts. They have built houses to hide in, words to protect them, stories to make them feel right. You will have none of that. It will be difficult.”

A shudder took the creature throughout its body, shedding a small cloud of dust onto the ground.

“There are dusthouses in this city. There is fairy dust,” we stammered. “It killed you. You can stop it doing the same to others.”

The fallen cloud of dust had instantly begun to reassemble, wriggling back to join the fluctuating mass of its feet.

We said, “We have made you with three of the most potent forces we could find. Fairy dust, insect heart, angel blood. It will make you strong.” We took a deep breath and added, “Stopping will be difficult—when you are strong, when you can revel in it. Being weak will be difficult. Choosing to be weak. Choosing when not to… choosing to be human will be difficult.”

It hesitated, then formed a mouth.

The sound of little bones cracking, of pebbles sliding down a mountainside, of sand in a breeze.

It moved its head.

It might have been a nod.

It might have been a greeting.

It might have been goodbye.

We held out our hand in farewell.

Its fingers ran through our own, dissolving.

It turned away.

It managed a step.

Then another.

Its third attempt was less successful: it gave a lurch and its whole body spun forward, the human shape disintegrating for a moment into a yellow cloud, a grey shadow at its heart that might just have been, perhaps, the heart itself.

Briefly it regained a vague human shape, and took all of five steps before it span back into dust.

I called out, “Hey!”

My voice echoed back in the concrete pillars beneath the bridge.

It didn’t turn, but we felt it was waiting.

I said, “Hey, you! You be good, okay?”

On what might still have been its face, a flash of something familiar.

Then it dissolved, and billowed away, dust in the night.

I went back to Osterley.

Got lost in the streets near the station.

Identical semi-detached houses in endless straight lines.

It looked different as the sky grew lighter, and eventually I found a small park that looked halfway familiar. I sat on one of the empty swings, and rocked a little.

The warmth of the walk became a chill, the chill became cold.

At this time of year, dawn was slow to come.

I slumbered for a while in the mind of a half-sleeping pigeon roosting at the cracked base of a chimney stack.

I rolled through the water pipes under the streets, splitting and dividing at every junction until I was as wide as the city and as thin as light.

Thought I heard Nabeela say: “Fascist pig.”

And smiled, and felt guilty for smiling.

Hey, Nabeela.

Wow, you’re like, Midnight Mayor. You’re like, cooler and more powerful than all the little people, so everyone can fuck right off; I mean, don’t you hate that?

Yeah, Nabeela. Right now, kinda do.

Well stuff it, you’re still stuffed. Just saying. As one dust-stained corpse to another, you know? So come on, get yourself up.

I struggled to my feet.

Walked without thinking.

Walking without thinking took me back to the house.

Let myself in.

Penny was sleeping.

The house was grey and silent. Dead-hour morning silent, when the night shift start to think about breakfast, and the closed eyes of all day-shift dreamers jerk back and forth in response to stories due to be forgotten at the instant of waking.

I put the keys back on the table where I’d found them.

Went to bed.

Fell asleep immediately, and couldn’t remember our dreams.

We woke to the smell of bacon.

There was a dressing gown in the wardrobe.

It was pink, and had the image of a small brown teddy bear sewn into one corner.

The smell of bacon sang its siren song.

I put on the dressing gown and went to find it.

Penny was in the kitchen. As I walked in she said, “I’m not like, domestic woman or nothing, and when I find Femi again and we start going out proper, I’m not even gonna to tell him I like cooking, I’m not even gonna tell him I can cook, until at least the sixth or seventh date.”

Penny wore a dressing gown too. Somehow she’d managed to find a striped blue and white one with no teddy bears, and a pair of fur-lined slippers.

“So you’re an equal opportunist?” I asked as Penny professionally cracked open a couple of eggs on the sharp edge of the pan. Simmering became a sizzle.

“Way I see it,” she explained, kneeing shut a cutlery drawer with a brutal up-thrust, “there’s nothing romantic about equal opportunities. ‘Hey, you fancy me?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Do you feel like going halves on a meal?’ ‘Yes, how equitable.’ ‘I was thinking it might be nice to buy you some flowers.’ ‘Cool, keep the receipt and I’ll be sure to get you something of an equal floral value within three working days.’ ”

She laid a plate down on the table in front of me. The bacon was crispy, the egg was perfect. “So, yeah,” she concluded. “Basically, what I’m saying is don’t get used to me making breakfast.”

She plonked down opposite me, picked up a nearly empty bottle of tomato ketchup, shook it vigorously and squeezed. It made the noise of all plastic ketchup bottles everywhere. When there was no more ketchup left to come, she threw the bottle with perfect aim at a small green recycling bag hanging up by the sink, and speared a mouthful of sauce with a little egg garnish.

“Being shot at is shit for my diet,” she explained through the mouthful. “I was all ‘fruit and muesli’ and now I’m like ‘fuck it’ or whatever. Jesus, I’ve missed bacon.”

“You’re on a diet?” I asked.

“I know,” she declared. “You’re thinking, my apprentice is already like, amazing already isn’t she, so why the fuck should she need to diet? Thing is, Matthew, it takes work to be this sodding amazing. You’re a weird skinny freak and wouldn’t understand.”

Somehow, even having started later, and with more ketchup, she finished before me. She put the kettle on, and watched while I got up and made a start on the washing up.

Finally, “You have fun last night then, sneaking off and shit?”

“Oodles.”

“You gonna tell me about it?”

“You want to know?”

“Was it,” she stubbed the table with her finger at each word, “disgusting, sickening, repulsive, icky, sticky, stupid or wank?”

I paused. “If I went for ‘all of the above’ would that be a good thing?”

“I wouldn’t have to go far for my surprised face, put it like that.”

“I summoned a monster.”

Penny hesitated, teabag halfway to a mug proclaiming “I Love Cake.” Then, “Okay. Because… that hasn’t caused major shitty problems recently, oh no.”

“I used the culicidae’s heart.”

“And you’re gonna explain to me how that’s actually a shiny okay thing to do? I mean, instead of, like, a monumentally stupid fucked-up thick thing, yeah?”

I scraped at encrusted grease round the edge of the pan, watched it float clear.

“It was the only way I could think of to hurt the dusthouses. In a hurry, I mean. You don’t win these kind of battles by just… torching coca leaves or poppy heads or anything like that. You can’t change people by pointing guns in their faces and saying, ‘Yo, dude, your craving and your pain—deal with it already!’ But the dusthouses are evil. Evil’s a dodgy word, Midnight Mayors shouldn’t say evil, it doesn’t leave you much wiggle room after, but stuff it, it’s said, there it is. And we were angry. It will be a long time before we are not. So we summoned a… thing. A dust-storm. And it walks and it has… awareness… and it is made from the dust of all who died. It is made from those who were killed by the dusthouses. Because if there is a conservation of mass and energy in physics then likewise there must be a conservation of life in magic. And if I’m right, and if the culicidae’s heart works like I think it does, then this creature will seek more life where it can, and its life is of dust, and so it will hunt down dust, and find it, and absorb it, and no one will be able to stand in its way.”

Penny stood holding the teabag over the mug, mouth hanging open.

She said, “Oh my fucking God.”

I shrugged, putting the pan in the drying rack.

“No, but seriously,” she said. “Oh my fucking God. You’re fucking insane.”

She was quivering with the effort of suppressed vehemence. “You’ve summoned the culicidae 2.0. You’ve given life to something that should be dead. And dead is dead and it’s shit, it’s shit and it hurts and it hurts to die and it hurts to live when you’ve seen someone who’s dead when you’ve seen your friend… it hurts. But Jesus fucking Christ, Matthew. Would Meera want this? To be… sucked back, not herself, not human, just some fucking part of some fucking bigger plan with you in charge of it going ‘Hey, you ain’t got no life, no hope, no nothing now, just dust and more fucking dust, so off you fucking go.’ Didn’t you see? The Minority Council went ‘Let’s make a big fucking easy solution,’ but there are some things—there are some fucking stupid, fucking painful fucking fucked-up things and they make you feel… like nothing matters any more, ever again. What have you done?”

I stared down at the dirty water and had nothing to say.

“Can you control it?” she asked. “This thing?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Can you destroy it?”

“I… think so.”

Penny sat down with a quiet groan. I pulled off the washing-up gloves, and looked properly at my apprentice. Who looked away. Finally I asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“No.”

“I’m… sorry.”

“Don’t be. Don’t… I don’t blame you. You get that, right? It wasn’t your fault.”

She sighed, stretching out her legs slowly under the table, letting her head roll back. With her eyes half closed towards the ceiling she murmured, “What you gonna do about Templeman? And don’t say something as fucked up as what you just told me.”

I scratched the end of my nose with the rough cotton of a bandage, and thought hard. “Don’t know,” I said. “It’s… difficult. There’s no courts of law for these situations, no prison service, no friendly super-charged coppers.”

“There’s the Aldermen,” she replied. “I thought they were all, like ‘We make the law, we enforce the law, we are the fucking law’ or whatever.”

“Yes…” I dragged out the word. “But… Alderman justice is hard, fast and absolute. Their only guiding principle is: what’s best for the greater good? And sure, that’s supposed to be the guiding principle of law, but it doesn’t leave much room for redemption or understanding. Templeman has believed himself to be acting for the ‘greater good.’ ”

“You sound almost sorry for him.” Penny’s voice was unforgiving.

“No—no I’m not,” I exclaimed. “He did things to people, to me, to you, to… Nabeela.” Then, “Do you want him dead?” we asked, so quickly I was surprised to hear our voice.

Penny’s knuckles whitened around the tea mug.

“Would you do it?” we murmured. “Would you look him in the eye and make him die?”

“Yes.”

Something thick and heavy flattened the breakfast in my stomach, turned the taste of bacon to the raw bite of meat in my mouth. But we reached across the table, wrapped our hand around hers, and didn’t know why. “Don’t,” we said. “Dead is dead and it hurts until all you can do is hollow out the place where there’s pain. But don’t. Don’t do it.”

“Is that it?” she asked, not meeting our eyes.

“Yes,” I replied. “Pretty much.”

“Okay,” she breathed. A smile. Perhaps the first I’d seen on her face for a while, faint, but true. “Let’s go to the office and do that Midnight Mayor thing that you do.”

Walking, after all that sitting, was a mistake. I felt my pulse throb in the eroded skin of my hands, and forced myself to breathe regardless of the shooting pain in my chest.

At St Paul’s Underground, riding the long creaking escalator to the surface felt as much effort as if it’d been an ordinary staircase. The steps themselves moved slower than the rubber handrail, causing delight in a child who was leaning on it and found his body being perpetually stretched by the discrepancy and fury to a pensioner with a thick walking stick who cursed London Transport under his breath, loud enough for all to hear.

At Harlun and Phelps, out of instinct I headed for the goods entrance, looking round, as I went, for bloodhounds, gangsters, murderers, and medusas who had an angry agenda and strong feelings about local council politics.

Kelly was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She sprang to her feet with a welcoming grin. A magazine offering the true secrets to avoiding wrinkles disappeared under her briefcase as she exclaimed, “Mr Mayor! How lucky I happened to be sitting here enjoying my morning break when you turned up, isn’t that a coincidence? Please do come upstairs,” she babbled, the chinchilla in her soul bounding to the fore. “We’ve got the lunch of your choice and there’s a medic on call to have another look at those bandages and an acupuncturist as well if you need one and I don’t know how you feel about chiropody but actually it turns out the whole body is this great interconnected mass of nerve endings…”

“That much I’d figured.”

“… and there’s some people who’d really like to talk to you…”

“Oh God, who?”

“Well, there’s a representative from a group of individuals calling themselves Magicals Anonymous who are looking to set up a support agency…”

“Seriously?”

“… and there’s a goblin shaman who keeps on insisting that the earth is burning all around and we just can’t see it…”

“Should have stayed in Osterley!” sang out Penny.

“And of course your senior staff want to see you to talk about recent events.”

“Great. Because that’s not going to end in blood and tears, is it? Are any of them armed?”

“All weaponry within the building is kept under strict lock and key,” recited Kelly. “Access to the armoury is fully logged, and the issuing of any weapons likely to cause structural damage in excess of £50,000 must be countersigned by a senior watch officer.”

“How about a bed?” I asked as the goods lift rose up through the floors. “We’ve got a chiropodist, an acupuncturist, an armoury; do we have a bed anywhere?”

“No. But I’ll look into it at once, Mr Mayor!”

“How about a snooker table?” added Penny. She saw my expression and shrugged.

Sure enough, Kelly gave a cry of, “What a fabulous idea! Obviously I’m all for the team away-day, but they come so rarely; a snooker table on the premises could really help the departments bond with each other.”

The doors swished open at the top floor. We stepped out into a service corridor, past bags of recycling waiting to be taken down. “You have team away-days?” I asked faintly.

“Of course. Chocolate making was my favourite, although we also do the more traditional away-day sports—paintballing, rowing, ukulele playing…”

I stopped so hard that Penny walked straight into me. “No bloody way.”

“I’m sorry, Mr Mayor…”

“No bloody way, ukulele playing.”

“It’s an excellent team-bonding activity…”

I laughed, and it hurt, and I laughed anyway.

Kelly had prepared a meeting room.

Prepared in that there were extra cushions on the chair, extra sandwiches on the table and no one to watch me flinch as I eased my way into a seat.

Words were whispered at the door.

The door was too big, the room too wide, the ceiling too high, the table too long. Someone had laid out green leather mats in front of each chair. It made no sense to us. They looked far more expensive than the table on which they sat, so what was the point?

“Now, we’re going to do this gently,” explained Kelly. “I decided that you probably didn’t want to observe the usual protocols of the workplace, so had the agenda put aside until next week. And obviously, owing to the sensitive nature of the meeting, no one will be taking minutes.

“So, if you’re ready, Mr Mayor…?”

Kelly opened the door one more time.

Aldermen came in.

They wore their formal black, and entered with heads bowed, hands folded in front of them. I could have been forgiven for expecting a coffin. They lined up, first five, then ten, then thirty, then too many for me to see, pressing in around the room until it wore them as wallpaper. Penny’s fingers tightened on the back of my chair. Kelly waited until the last were inside, then closed the door quietly, walked to the opposite end of the table, put her briefcase down on it flat, looked me in the eye and said, “Domine dirige nos.”

“Domine dirige nos,” intoned the Aldermen, men and women, old and young, one voice, eyes still fixed downwards.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” she declared, “we are here to say farewell to some of our brethren. I wish us to thank Rumina Rathnayake for all her hard work as Minority Council Treasurer, a post she is giving up after tireless labour in order to retreat into the countryside and seek a cure for the irrevocable curse of the Beggar King. She will, I am sorry to say, experience sorrow, loss, regret, disease and, above all else, loneliness over the coming years as the King’s curse slowly blinds all the world to her passing, until she dies cold and alone, a frozen shadow on the earth. We thank her for all her service, and if you could all sign her farewell card on your way out, it would be appreciated.”

“Lord lead us,” intoned the Aldermen.

“Domine dirige nos,” confirmed Kelly. “I’m sure you’d all like to contribute to the flower and fruit package that we will be sending to Cecil Caughey, President, Minority Council. He’s currently confined in an asylum, on suicide watch after his overexposure to a burning heart of rage and fury of his own making, so please, if you do send him any gifts other than the fruit basket for which we will be accepting donations, I’d ask you to make sure they aren’t sharp. Lord lead us.”

“Domine dirige nos,” they repeated.

“After due consideration, our colleagues Ms Holta, Mr Fadhil and Mr Kwan are all standing down for personal reasons. We are getting them all cufflinks to commemorate their years of service, but must buy them as quickly as possible as these are likely to be confiscated upon the start of their prison sentences for murder in the second degree. So please, again, if you wish to contribute to these gifts do make your donation by the end of the working day.”

“Lord lead us.”

“Finally,” she informed us, voice light as a rising lark, “I’m sure we all hear with great regret about the actions of Mr Templeman. It is always a sad reflection on us when one of our own turns out to be a murderer, a traitor, a torturer of innocents, a manipulator of men, a dust addict, a madman and a danger to us all.

“I will be requesting a management review in the near future to discuss just how we managed to let ourselves be so utterly manipulated by a man who represents so much that is evil. Forgive the strong language, but I reiterate: evil. We have all been touched by it, we have all been used by it and so, in our ways, we have all been party to it, if only because we did not stand up and say no. Why, ladies, gentlemen? Why could not one of us, not one, say no?

“Our motto, the words that are burnt into the stones of this city, is Domine dirige nos, Lord lead us. We here gathered who do not believe in a god, we use these words of power to invoke something far more. We ask the city for guidance, for strength from its streets and its walls, its secrets and its shadows. We draw our power, our authority and our righteousness from all that is around us, and in that process we forget that the city is no more and no less than those who move within it. We are not greater than other men. We are not wiser, we are not smarter, we are not worthy of more or less than those whose air we breathe, whose water we share. This truth is universal, but never more important than within a city. Ladies, gentlemen, I propose that we have failed in our oaths. Our oaths to the city, to the people, and to the Midnight Mayor.”

She held up her right hand, and then took her left across to it. Her nails were tinted silver, a silver sheen around her palm, a reddish glow to her eyes as they met ours. A wisp of blackness curled round her nostrils; her hair wore a metallic sheen. She unfurled a thickening, curling nail that was, perhaps, growing closer to a claw, and in two swift cuts dragged it across the palm of her hand, top to bottom, left to right. The blood rose slowly, then didn’t seem to stop, trickling down over her wrist. “Domine dirige nos,” she breathed, showing no sign of pain, eyes locked on ours.

The Aldermen likewise raised their hands, and for a moment I anticipated blood and cleaning bills. “Domine dirige nos,” they repeated, and there was a power in those words, as there had always been power: not god-power, not spell-power, but city-power etched in with time built on time. We all felt it. Penny’s breathing was short and shallow, and the Aldermen as they stood round the table had a hint of crimson in their eyes, the fever-red of the mad-eyed silver city dragon that guarded the old London Wall, and their skins were stained with its metal taint, and the smog of the old city unfurled in the air as they repeated, “Domine dirige nos.”

Blood rolled down Kelly’s sleeve.

I could feel something thin and hot trickling over the palm of my right hand: blood was oozing through the bandages, seeping out in the shape of the twin crosses. I stood up, leaning on the table for support, then raised my right hand to them.

“Domine dirige nos,” I repeated and, for a moment, something stood behind me, a shadow that writhed in the light of its own accord, and it had eyes of fire and claws for hands and it had wings.

Kelly smiled.

And it was gone.

The Aldermen lowered their hands and, without another word, they filed out, heads still bowed.

Kelly stood there smiling, eyes fixed on me, waiting until the door had closed. The blood was still welling up between her fingers.

The second the heavy door clicked shut she waggled her hand in the air and exclaimed, “Oh my God, that stuff really works!”

Penny said, for the both of us, “Uh…?”

“I worried they would take too long to come in,” Kelly admitted. “I mean, the nurse said it wouldn’t last forever…”

“Your hand…?” suggested Penny.

“Exactly! Hold on…”

She eased open her briefcase, and pulled out a plastic pack containing an antiseptic wipe and a very large plaster. It was bright blue, and carried a picture of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet walking hand in hand.

“I was a little worried it would show,” explained Kelly, tearing open the antiseptic wipe with her teeth. “I mean, when the nurse applied it, it had this horrible smell.”

“Applied what?” asked Penny.

“Anti-bacterial numbing cream,” explained Kelly, wiping away the blood. “Oh, look,” she added with a cluck of annoyance. “It’s stained my sleeve; that’s not going to wash out. Ah well, I never liked this shirt anyway. Ms Ngwenya, would you mind…?” She waved the plaster at my apprentice, who dutifully peeled it open and applied it to Kelly’s upturned hand.

“Numbing cream?” she asked.

“Oh God, yes. I really hate getting hurt,” explained Kelly. “So I went to the nurse and explained I’d probably have to cut myself and what was the most hygienic, least painful, least-likely-to-leave-a-scar way of doing it? And do you know, she had all these really amazing suggestions. If I was going to self-harm, I’d completely get NHS advice first. I mean, not that I’m suggesting that; the whole ritual is really rather ridiculous, isn’t it?”

Kelly snapped her briefcase shut, admired the bright plaster on her hand with every look of someone who’d dreamt of the Hundred Acre Wood as a kid, twiddled her fingers to test that they still worked and exclaimed, “So, basically, I’ve asked every department—including catering—to help hunt Templeman down, and the Beggar King is going to do a bit of nosing and I’ve bought the Old Bag Lady on board and I’ve asked if the Seven Sisters wouldn’t mind joining in and there’s some guys having a chat with Fat Rat and I was thinking we really should see to actually appointing a consul to the Tribe, and the Neon Court kinda owe us a favour sort of anyway so really, all things considered, I’d say it’ll be fine. It’ll all be completely fine and in fact may I suggest that this could be lunch? Lunch anyone?”

“We kinda just had breakfast…” began Penny.

“Lunch,” we interrupted. “Lunch would be good.”

“Maybe a little lunch…”

“Posh food always comes in small sizes,” explained Kelly. “It’s how you know it’s worth it.”

So saying, she beamed one final burst of perfect dentistry, swept her briefcase off the table and was out of the door before I could remember to breathe.

I breathed.

So did Penny. “She,” Penny said, “is totally fucking awesome. What’s her job again?”

“She’s my PA.”

“You’ve got a PA!” Penny flapped with indignation. “You’ve got a fucking PA; that’s like… that’s like you’re going to get multicoloured highlighters and then, like, maybe those file divider things in all the different colours and that shit! Oh my God, you’ve got a PA!” She clapped her hands over her mouth as if trying to contain a bad thought, then slowly lowered them and breathed, “She’s awesome. What’s her salary like, because you read all these stories, yeah, about how PAs get less than the minimum wage and their bosses are on, like, a million plus bonuses, and that sorta crap makes me sick.”

“Penny, I don’t get paid.”

“Yeah, but you get expenses, right?”

The table seemed warm and inviting. I put my head down on it and asked it if it would be my friend. It seemed okay with the idea. “If I passed out right now, would that be okay?”

“So long as you don’t cry. Crying would completely undermine the moment and, besides, I don’t cope well when people cry around me; I get all puffy-eyed and don’t know what to say and it’s shit for everyone.”

“No crying,” I promised. “Just a bit of rest.”

There wasn’t a bed.

But there was a sofa.

The owner of the office it was in agreed to take the afternoon off to play golf, so I stretched out on it in my beggar’s clothes and a clean black coat for a blanket, and slept. The half-sleep of daytime snoozing, where time crawls and flies, crawls and flies, like a drunken woodpecker on a lazy day.

Sometimes shadows came to the door to try and disturb me, to ask questions or make requests, and the shadow of Kelly waved them away, and I thought perhaps I should say something, or do something, or make some noise to show I was interested, and found I wasn’t, and stayed where I was.

Shadows stretch and thin.

Between the glass towers of central London there are still some narrow views through which the eye can catch the city’s weather-vanes. There a boy balanced precariously on one leg, staring at distant horizons. There a galleon, sails swollen at the full; there a tiny golden dragon; and here a black crow in flight. If you know where to look, they’re still there, centuries on from when they once dominated the city, visible until the last light of day.

There were things to do.

I did them slowly.

Hauled myself down to the basement, Penny in tow.

It took a lot of bins, a lot of cleaning cupboards, before I found it.

Something moved in the bottom of the Dumpster.

I knocked politely on the lid before easing it open, and looked down into the stinking depths.

“Hi there!” I sang out.

Something moved in the depths, sending down a small landslide of packaging and torn plastic. A trio of tiny yellow-stained fingers curled up from the depths, followed by an oversized pair of ink-black eyes.

“Penny, meet imps. Imps, meet Penny.” Fine brown goo slid over the staring eyes from the bin, washing dirt with dirt. “Penny’s my apprentice,” I explained to the creature in the bin. “She really loves small furry creatures that stink of sewage, don’t you Penny?”

“Yeah,” said Penny, shuffling uneasily behind me. “Totally.”

I took as deep a breath as I could, and said what I’d come to say. “So, in recognition of your clan’s fine and sterling work in disrupting the interior of Harlun and Phelps, I, in my senior capacity as Midnight Mayor and keeper of promises, guarantee that should you and your kind be assembled here, at this Dumpster, at, say, eleven-thirty tonight, a pick-up truck will come and transport you and all your kind to the foulest, most pest-ridden garbage site within the Greater London area you could possibly imagine. Your once-in-a-lifetime trip to the dream wasteground of your choice is coming here, now. Well, here, tonight. We good?”

A tiny head nodded, black bristles straightening across a felt-grey skull.

“Fantastic!” I exclaimed. “Tell all your friends. Harlun and Phelps—what a waste of effort. Landfill—hello!”

As Penny and I walked back towards the elevator, she was unusually quiet.

“Okay,” I said as the doors slid shut behind us, “I may have incidentally promised a clan of imps a transfer to their dream rubbish dump in exchange for helping me out with a little problem.”

Silence. It lasted four floors.

“So… you’ve got, like, these kick-ass Aldermen suckers who are supposed to carry guns for you, and you’ve got, like, major-league mega-mystic powers, and you’ve got like, higher urban powers and all that shit on your side and you… went to the imps and promised them a holiday in a landfill?”

The doors parted with a faint ding-dong.

She added, “Is there like a word for anti-style? I mean, in like the way there’s antimatter which is kinda matter itself but sorta like not-matter so it behaves like matter until it hits matter and goes boom? Like that?”

“Mojo?”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

We paused by Kelly’s desk. It was set not quite next to my office, like a guard dog daring a cat to pee in its kennel.

I explained to her the fact of the imps, and my promise.

Kelly blanched. “But imps… rubbish dumps… the breeding cycle…”

“Yeah, I know, there’ll be kids, there’ll be a surge in seagull deaths, but I still think it’d be a lovely thing to do in this new and golden era of generous Aldermen with warm hearts. So if we could add it to the list of shit to get done, that’d be great. Thanks!”

I swept on by before she could argue.

I was getting the hang of management.

There was another duty to perform.

Penny went out and bought clothes.

It took her a long time.

When she came back, she was swaying under a weight of bags.

“So yeah,” she said, “there’s like… shirts for formal shit, and T-shirts for like casual shit, and kinda sports tops for running shit because, you know, you do loads of running, I mean, not like a professional or anything, more like a guy scared of being shot, but seriously, I think if you’re gonna make a habit of pissing off people with guns, you should take up running as a proper hobby, do this whole keep-fit thing. And then there’s smart black trousers because you can’t beat black; I mean, I know it’s a cliché and that, but seriously, black works. Even on you, which is, like, a total fucking miracle or whatever. And then there’s kinda less formal trousers which you can spill tomato sauce on and shit, because, hell I’ve seen you eat and I’m, like, what were you like growing up? And I got you lots of cheap trousers that you can get blood on because I realise now that you never do a proper wash or anything. Like, you just wait until you’re covered in blood and then some poor schmuck has to burn your clothes and lend you something and shit, and actually you stink a lot of the time. I mean, you do, not personal or anything mind; I’m just saying.”

I received each garment as gratefully as I could, and Kelly took the receipts, for expenses, with her smile locked in place.

Changing clothes was hard work.

Sweat and odd chemical reactions had glued the Beggar King’s vestments to our skin.

Bandages stretched.

Bones creaked.

When it was done, I looked at my face in the mirror. The shirt was white, the light was cold; it wasn’t a sympathetic place for a viewing.

I folded my beggar’s garb and put it carefully into a plastic bag.

“Kelly, I need to go out,” I said.

“Is that wise?” she asked. “I mean, obviously you can handle yourself, Mr Mayor, but right now do you really think you can handle yourself? I’ve heard that there’s a point when the body is in so much physical pain that actually it stops hurting, that pain can become euphoria at a certain intensity, but I’m not a doctor, I’ve never tested this and I would feel so much happier thinking that you weren’t personally trying to prove the theory tonight…”

I dropped the bag of beggar’s clothes on the table and waited for her to work it out.

“Oh,” she breathed. “Well, yes, I do see how that might be something you need to do in person.”

“And alone,” I added. “It’s important.”

She slumped, frowning in worry. “Oh, very well,” she sighed. “But if you absolutely must, may I give you this?”

She opened a drawer, and pulled out a small black box, from which she produced: a mobile phone, a pre-paid oyster card, a small bundle of ten-pound notes wrapped in a rubber band, a pack of lemon-scented travel tissues, a pair of tweezers, a penknife, a packet of baby wipes, and a gun. I looked at the gun. It was black, heavy, semi-automatic. Kelly checked the magazine, clicked it back in place, pushed it towards me. I said, “I don’t really do guns.”

“They’re a truly ghastly thing,” she agreed, “but other people do guns, and that’s always the problem, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but that’s kinda like saying other people do muggings and murder and rape, so get with the party.”

“Mr Mayor…”

“I’m going for a very short walk through the heart of my own city,” I interrupted. “You really think a gun and some baby wipes are called for?”

“Templeman does guns,” she answered.

A pause. Moment to think. Then, “If the police do me, you’re going to have to do the explaining, okay?”

She beamed. “You know, I’ve always had this amazingly good understanding with coppers. Some people don’t get them, but I find if you’re just willing to listen to their point of view and speak in a gentle tone of voice, they’re actually very reasonable people.”

I put the gun in my pocket. It was heavier than I’d imagined.

“Back before you know it,” I muttered.

I walked through the night all the way to Holborn Circus before I found what I was looking for. A church that had somehow survived the wartime bombing protruded into a bottleneck of traffic that wound round a monument to great generals and the glorious dead, rifles turned down and heads bowed in prayer. Here, in a narrow locked doorway, the beggars huddled. Eyes flashed up from grimy faces as I passed, took in my clean clothes and washed face, my empty pockets and single plastic bag, and looked away again.

Round at the side of the church, I found who I was looking for, sitting alone on an old cardboard box that had been pulled apart to make a small mat. She had two sleeping bags, one inside the other—the first was bright blue, a camper’s sack with drawer strings; the other was a duvet, sewn together, and rotted at the corners. She wore a grey woollen hat and her face was pale, tinged with blue. Her legs were shaking inside the bedding and there was a greyness to her lips, a wideness in the pupils of her eyes. As I approached she eyed me suspiciously, her expression veering between fight or flight. She wasn’t out of her twenties, and though the sleeves of her jumper hid the worst of the track marks, enough capillaries had burst under her skin to tell much of her story.

I held out my hands in peace as I approached, saying, “It’s okay, I’m not a copper or anything.”

She chose fight. “Spare some change?” she asked. Her voice was hard and sharp. I knelt down opposite her, and opened up my bag. Her lip curled in disgust at the smell of the clothes as I pulled them out. “What the fuck you doing carrying that shit?” she demanded.

“These are the vestments of the Beggar King,” I explained.

“You what?”

I gestured her to silence, and held each one up in turn. “These are the suspiciously soiled trousers of the beggar who has slept too many nights on cold, hard stone, and had nowhere to go when nature called, and lost dignity in the loss of all.

“This is the dubious shirt of third-to fourth-to fifth-hand, passing its way down into the pit of society through kindly intent and casual charity.

“This is the coat of infinite pockets, which hold not things but thoughts, memories and dreams tied away like knots in a string.

“And these are the shoes that have travelled too far. They walked too far and have been to too many places, not of speed, or distance, or time, not of maps and geography and the ordinary dirt underfoot of busy men. These… you wear in those places where you may only go alone.” I pushed the bundle of clothes towards the beggar. “Take them. They are a blessing. Keep them well.”

She took them uncertainly, closing her fingers round the thin handle of the bag, then pulling the bag in close to her. I smiled and straightened up, feeling the awkward weight of the gun in my pocket, the tightness of the bandages around my ribs. She watched me, half opened her mouth as if to say thank you, then closed it again. I wrapped my arms around my middle against the rising cold and turned to walk away, and he was there.

He stood, alone, on the other side of the street. One arm was held in a sling, and there were scratches down the side of his face. But he stood easily enough by the kerb, right arm hanging loose at his side, back straight, watching me across the traffic. People moved behind him, heading for the bus stops and the bike racks, the Underground at Chancery Lane and the restaurants of the West End. He stared at me, and I stared at him, and neither of us moved.

Templeman.

There was a sickly yellow stain to his skin, which hadn’t been there before.

A crackling in the air about him as he moved, a taste on the air of damp dust and dark corners. The CCTV cameras were all turned away from him, pointing at walls or straight down at the ground.

Then he smiled, and turned, and walked away.

I followed, keeping my distance, moving between the crowd. I felt the weight of the gun and my heart beat in my throat. He stopped at a bus stop, looked up at the indicator board, sat down carefully on the little red bench designed to be impossible for sleeping on, stretching out his legs. I stopped some twenty yards back, leaning against the wall of a bank, the ATM out of order beside me. There were five people at the bus stop. Two women, Russian by their voices, great fake-fur coats dyed a deep dark red, were getting annoyed at the delay in the bus. They flapped at each other, then at the traffic, and finally turned to the others waiting for the bus and asked in broken English if it always took this long. Templeman leant across and politely explained to them that it wasn’t usually this bad, and something must have happened further down the line.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Russia,” they replied.

Ah, Russia. He’d always wanted to visit Russia; he’d heard it was an amazing place. “Whereabouts in Russia?”

“Moscow.”

How beautiful it must be, and what an exciting place to live in.

It was okay. They were here for a holiday. They’d never been before. It was all right.

They must try Greenwich. The park was beautiful, the observatory was astonishing, the maritime museum was fascinating. Don’t do Madame Tussaud’s or any of that tourist rubbish. Go to Greenwich.

They smiled and thanked him, and with every second that passed I forced us to be still, forced us to breathe, to watch, to wait, fingers itching at our side.

Their bus came, and he boarded with them, eyes flicking back towards me as he climbed onto the bus. I let two more people file on past the driver before detaching myself from my bit of wall, and slipping on board too.

He’d gone to the top deck, sat at the very back seat.

I sat by the stairs, a pair of Chinese kids with spiky copper hair and headphones glued to their ears sitting behind me, the two Russians in front. They got off at Euston, in the grey bus station stained saturated pink by the overhead lights, as garish a gloom as the city could offer. I watched the reflection of the passengers in the darkness of my window, and waited.

Templeman got off at Camden. He walked right by me without a word, going down through the doors between a guitarist and a goth, not even glancing my way as he passed. I got off behind him, not one person between him and me, and we thought of throats and hearts and things being crushed. Here, now? Would anyone know?

Too many people in Camden.

The Y-junction where the street divided, this way for Kentish Town, this way for Holloway, was a heaving mass of big-soled boots, black coats, painted lips and hamburger wrappers. The shops selling T-shirts honouring Bob Marley and leather jackets with iron studs were still open, even now, and the multi-storey pubs and bars heaved, windows open wide to let out the heat of crowded merriment. Coppers with fluorescent stripes on their jackets stood by the Underground station, heads turned down to talk to the radios strapped to their shoulders.

Templeman made his way to another bus stop; I stood some ten yards off, watching. A girl came up to me. Her hair was dyed blonde and pulled back eyebrow-tugging-tight across her skull. She said, “You got a fag?”

Templeman’s eyes turned briefly to me; a smile lurked in the corner of his mouth.

I said, “Sorry, no; no fag.”

“Come on mate, come on, you gotta have a fag.”

“No, not me, sorry, don’t smoke.”

“Hey—you got a tenner? I really need to get a fag.”

No tenner.

“Guess how old I am,” she said.

“Don’t know.”

“Guess, go on, guess.”

A bus pulled up. Templeman stood as if examining the gutter, and didn’t move.

“Fourteen!” she exclaimed. “I’m fourteen years old, yeah, but all my friends say I look way older. Come on, you got a tenner right, I mean, it’s not like you’d miss it or anything, guy like you. You wouldn’t miss a tenner.”

We looked her in the eye and she saw something in our features that made her afraid.

She moved away quickly, and was starting to cry by the time she crossed the street to the station.

A different bus came.

Smaller, a little rat-route runner. Templeman boarded and sat right at the front, by the door. He didn’t look up as I passed, near enough to touch, but sat with his good hand folded in his lap. I sat two seats behind and watched the back of Templeman’s head. There were barely six, seven people on this bus. With bandaged hands, I might not get a good enough aim, but I could move closer, and there’d be no chance to miss. One shot and it’d be done, blood on the windows, blood on the floor, but it would be finished.

I stayed where I was.

The bus roamed through the back streets of Camden, heading west. Two passengers got off. Then another. Four of us left on the bus, and a driver. Only three people would see it, three people would know my face, and they’d run, they’d hide, from any man who could walk up behind a stranger on a bus and pull the trigger. The police would neither know nor, once the Aldermen had done their thing, care. I could change seats, aim, fire, and be off the bus before the next set of traffic lights.

Easy.

Couldn’t move.

We laboured up towards Hampstead Heath. Nearer the bottom of the hill, grey concrete estates; higher up, white Victorian terraces. Judge the quality of the home by the number of doorbells—here, houses with twelve apartments to a stairwell, while next door, just one family occupied space fit for three. The pubs had tall ceilings and served roast dinner on a Sunday. The greengrocer offered packets of polenta and salami in its window, and discount phone calls to Kenya.

Templeman got up some hundred yards before his stop, and stood by the door as the bus decelerated. It was a single stand, request stop only, no shelter above and no people waiting. The doors swished back. He got off.

I waited a beat, and followed.

Quiet streets, quiet night.

Here.

Do it here.

He turned up an alley, a patch of darkness between the houses, heading uphill towards a place where the night thickened like oil. I hesitated, felt the gun in my pocket, took a deep breath of the cold street air, and followed.

A fence on either side gave way to open grass.

A sign said: Be Considerate—Clean Up After Your Dog.

Underneath it, another sign warned: Littering £100 Fine.

The grass stretched out around us, above and below. I paused, looking up, looking down. Above was infinite sky wrapped round the crest of a bench-lined hill. Below, past the empty five-a-side football pitches lit up with floodlights and the deserted winding paths picked out by pinpoint lights, was the city, as far as the eye could see. The red light flashing on top of Canary Wharf, the orange walls of the Houses of Parliament, the deep blue circle of the London Eye, the silver arch of St Pancras, the golden cross of St Paul’s and rising spike of the Shard; it shimmered like a silent Christmas, as deep as the sky that covered it. The sight hit like a pillow fighter who forgot to pull his punch, and for a moment our hand burnt and our breath was black on the air and our shadow stretched out a pair of dragon wings.

Then someone whistled, very softly in the night.

Templeman was twenty yards ahead. He paused beneath a white lamp shining above the narrow path, and looked back at me. Then he turned again, and started to walk, up towards the top of Parliament Hill, his gait slow and steady.

I followed, eyes jerking from side to side, looking for a trap, a danger, a gun in the night.

Silence in the park.

Templeman climbed and kept on climbing, along a path that briefly vanished behind a clump of hawthorn bushes. He reappeared, looking back, waiting for me, his face open and polite. I followed painfully, the breath ragged in my chest. The magic of the city was fainter here, in all this grass and woodland, but, though faint, the distant street lights below still gave us strength, a promise of power waiting to be pulled.

And all at once he’d stopped.

On the summit of the hill stood a concrete plaque, indicating each landmark below. There was a bench nearby, where a single street lamp shone its too-white light on the narrow path and muddy grass. Templeman sat there, looking down at the city.

I went up to the bench, and sat down next to him.

And waited.

“You can’t save everyone,” he said at last.

Somewhere beneath us, doors slammed in the night. Taxis were hailed, buses stopped, trains flashed blue-white sparks on the tracks, foxes snarled, windows were closed, shoes were pulled off aching feet at the end of the working day, lights were switched off, music was turned down, and the city kept on turning, turning, oblivious to us.

“You can’t save those who don’t want to be saved,” he added. “You can’t save your friends. You can’t save yourself.”

I rolled my head a little, trying to ease the crick in the back of my neck. A few meagre stars were peeking through the clouds.

“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you know what it is to be the Midnight Mayor?”

I eased the gun out of my pocket. His eyes went to it, with what might have been surprise, but still he didn’t move.

I said, “You’re not looking so good. Took something nasty, did you? Something yellow?”

“What we Aldermen do… is irrelevant,” he replied. “We are irrelevant. I am attempting to change that.”

“Oscar Kramb is dead,” I said, surprised to hear the words come out. “Caughey is mad, Rathnayake is cursed. Penny’s fine, thanks for asking. The Aldermen have sworn allegiance, better late than never, and I’ve summoned a monster that is every bit as dangerous, mad and reckless as your culicidae. Every bit as stupid and pigheaded, every bit as arrogant and every bit as bad. The drug you gave me in Heron Quays… I won’t be recommending it for mass market approval any time soon. Nasty side-effects. I mean, that may just be me, it may just be what I am, and let’s face it, this was always about what, not who, I am. But, basically, there’s a lot of blood around, questions have been asked. You know how it is.”

His eyes darted back to the gun, then away; his smile curling wider. “You can’t save everyone.”

“No.”

“You can’t save those who don’t want to be saved.”

“No.”

“You can’t save your friends.”

“I… no. No, I can’t.”

“Do you understand? I did try to tell you.”

“I know. I get it now. I understand. And you’re right. You are right, I couldn’t… I couldn’t do it. Meera died and I couldn’t… and people died and Nabeela… and I couldn’t have changed it. I couldn’t. All this power, all this blood, all this magic and none of it, not one thing, could have made the difference. You’re right, Templeman. You are right.”

“You could thank me.”

“Could I?”

“I’ve been trying to teach you.”

“I know.”

“I’ve been trying to make you a better Midnight Mayor.”

“I know.”

“These lessons… will make you stronger. Look at you, now. You have no idea of the power of your office, no concept of what you could do, what you could be. There are things they haven’t told you, that you still don’t know about being Midnight Mayor… will you use the gun?”

I turned it over in my lap, slipped my finger into the trigger guard, thumbed off the safety catch. “Dunno,” I said. “It’s that or we have a major magical punch-up. But I hurt, and you hurt, and here we are, away from men and magic, and it’d be messy. I mean, I’m not saying it’s out of the question. But with you on fairy dust, and me in my state, there’s no way I could guarantee who’d win. But you do have to die, Templeman. There’s no simple way round it. You have to die.”

“Of course,” he replied. “You’re the Midnight Mayor.”

“Which makes you my responsibility?”

“Yes. You can’t save yourself.”

I groaned, slipping my hand tighter round the butt of the gun, knocking the barrel against my skull as I tried to concentrate. Everything was too far, too fuzzy, even him. “Thing is,” I sighed, “this whole… you can’t save shit, shit. I mean, it sounds great, doesn’t it? And you’re right, I mean, you’re right. You’ve been right about everything. I couldn’t save Meera, I just couldn’t; she didn’t want to be saved and there’s an end of it. And I couldn’t make it stop, when we… when we did what we did, I couldn’t make it stop, and then Nabeela… you killed her, you killed her and why? Because she was there and you were there and you had a gun. I couldn’t save my friend. You beat me.”

We hauled ourself up, holding the gun loose at our side. He followed us with his eyes, waiting.

“But here’s the thing,” I continued. “In all of this, with all this shit going on, and despite truth and logic and reason, despite the bigger picture and the wider issues and the great responsibility of being Midnight Mayor, despite what must be and what can be and what should be and what can never be and despite the fact that you won—you won and you were right—despite all of this, I still think I have to try.”

We raised the gun.

Our hand shook.

Levelled it at his head.

“Sorry,” I breathed. “I know it’s not what you were looking for.”

He picked himself up from the bench, eyes locked on ours, straight past the gun. I shuffled back a pace, keeping distance between us, supporting the butt of the gun with my other hand. His eyes were liver-yellow, his skin gleaming with more than sweat, a shimmer I recognised from Meera, just before the end.

“Go on then,” he murmured. “Go on.”

I swallowed, took another step back, tightened my grip on the gun. He moved closer, and I retreated, backing towards the edge of the path. “Go on!” His voice rose higher, “Go on, prove it! Show me what you are, show me that you can do it, show me, prove it, show me that you can make it happen, show me, do it!” He came towards us again and we backed off, hand shaking, vision shaking.

“Do it! You call yourself the Midnight Mayor? Do it, do it, this is what has to be done, this is it, this is the greater good, this is what matters, this is it, do it!”

“Stop…”

“What does it take? What does it take to make you do it? How many more must I kill, how much worse must things become, before you do what has to be done? What is the point of you?!”

I backed another step, slipping on the grass, eyes still focused down the length of the gun. Templeman hissed in frustration, not even interested in looking at us. He turned away, fingers flexing at his side. “Very well. If you can’t do what needs to be done, even now…”

His hand moved down to his side. We saw the shape of something beneath his jacket, something metal. His fingers closed around it; I heard the snap of the safety being released, raised my gun again, opened my mouth to shout a warning, our finger tightening around the trigger, “No, please, don’t…”

He turned, pulling up the gun from its holster in the same movement, arm outstretched, and there was a look in his face

He’d do it

He’d do it

He’s going to do it

He’s going to do it

Oh God

A shot in the night.

Hear it.

Not hear not with ear not hear just there and it stayed, it stayed inside us like the mind couldn’t get rid of it, would never get rid of it.

I stared at my own hands, dropped the gun, staggered back.

It landed heavy on the ground, and stayed.

Templeman stood, mouth open in surprise.

The gun was still in his hand.

He raised it, slowly, awkwardly, his body lurching to one side as he overbalanced to fire. He got it to belly height, chest height, shoulder height, and there was another shot.

This one seemed quieter, though it couldn’t be.

I saw the flash.

Star-like stab of yellow light in the dark behind the bench.

It briefly picked up the face of the shooter.

Templeman reeled as the bullet hit, square in his back. His legs brought him towards us, we scrambled away as he reached out, trying to hold onto us. He went, “Uh… uh… uh…” lips working at the sound.

His outreaching arm pushed his weight too far forward.

He fell, landing on his palm, which gave way, knocking him onto his elbow with a grunt. There were two holes in his back, through a lung. I could see the flattened metal gleam of one of the bullets, where it had wedged against a rib.

His fingers scrambled against the ground.

“Uh… uh… you…”

A figure stepped into the light, gun at her side.

She wore Alderman black.

Her auburn hair was pulled back.

She had a white badge, with two red crosses, pinned to her chest.

She looked down at Templeman, who tried to turn and see.

“Uh… you… uh…”

“Walk away, Mr Mayor,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Please, Mr Mayor,” she repeated. “Please walk away.”

I stared at her, and she didn’t smile.

Templeman breathed out blood and foam, mixed with a sound that, if it had strength, might have been a scream. “You… you… can’t… can’t save…”

I looked up at Kelly, who nodded, just once, in farewell.

“… can’t save… can’t…”

I turned.

Walked away.

The first gunshot came as I rounded the path down the hill, and I flinched.

The next were easier.