disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity into sentience, an obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.
No, they didn’t really know what that meant, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out.
BILLY STUMBLED AT THE DAY, THE COLD SUNLIGHT, THE PASSERSBY. At people in everyday clothes carrying papers and bags and on their way to south London shops. None of them looked twice at him. The trees leaflessly scratched the sky. It was all washed out by the winter.
A clutch of pigeons rose, wheeled and disappeared over the aerials. Dane stared at their retreating forms with frank suspicion. He beckoned Billy.
“Move,” Dane said. “I don’t like the look of those birds.”
Billy listened to the flatness of his footsteps on tarmac, not echoing at all. His pulse was fast. There was a stretch of low skyline and neglected brickwork. The church behind them was little more than a big shed. “I really do not like the look of those birds,” Dane said.
They went past newsagents, past bins spilling from their rims, dogshit by trees, a row of shops. Dane walked them to a car. It was not the same one as before. He opened the door. There was a whisper.
“What?” Dane said. He looked up. “Was that …?” There was no other noise. He was looking at a crude clay dragon, a little Victorian flourish in the matter of a roof, ajut from its vertex. He hustled Billy into the car.
“What was that?” Billy said. Dane let out a shaking breath as he drove.
“Nothing,” Dane said. “It’s a thought, though. God knows we need some help. We need to put some mileage behind us.” Billy did not recognise any streets. “Any second now London’s going to be teeming with my pissed-off crew. Ex-crew.”
“So where are we going?”
“We get underground. Then we start hunting.”
“And … what about the cops?” Billy said.
“We ain’t going to the police.” Dane smacked the wheel. “They can’t do shit. And if they could, it wouldn’t be what we want them to. Why do you think they’re looking? They want it for themselves.”
“So what are you going to do with it if you find it, Dane?”
Dane looked at him. “I’m going to make sure no one else gets it.”
DANE HAD HIS HIDES. IN EMPTY-LOOKING SHELLS, IN SHABBY squats, in neat-seeming places that appeared to have permanent tenants holding down jobs respectable and unrespectable.
“We move, we stay a day or two at a time,” Dane said. “We get hunting.”
“Surely the church’ll find us,” Billy said. “These are safe houses, right?”
“Not even the Teuthex knows these. When you do the work I do, you have to have leeway. The less they know the better. Keep their hands clean. It ain’t ours to kill, we ain’t the predators, get me? But needs must.” To defend heaven you unleash hell, that sort of sophistry.
“Are you the only one?” Billy said.
“No,” Dane said. “I’m the best, though.”
Billy put his head back on the seat and watched London go. “Goss just opened his mouth,” he said. “And Leon was …” He shook his head. “Is that his … knack?”
“His knack is that he’s an unspeakable bastard,” Dane said. “A jobs-worth.” He unfolded a piece of paper with one hand. “This is a list of movers,” he said. “We’ve got a god to find. This is who might’ve done the job.”
Billy watched Dane for a while, watched anger come and go across his face, and moments of aghast uncertainty. They dossed down finally near the river, in a one-bedroom flat decorated like student digs. There were books on biology and chemistry on cheap shelves, a System Of A Down poster on the wall, the paraphernalia of dope.
“Whose is all this?” he said.
“In case it gets broken into,” Dane said. “Or remote-viewed. Scried or whatever. Got to be convincing.” A toothbrush crusted with paste-spit was in the bathroom, a half-used soap and shampoo. There were clothes in the drawers, all suited to the invented inhabitant: all the same size and unpleasant style. Billy picked up the phone but it was not connected.
Dane checked tiny bones tied in bundles on the windowsill. Ugly little clots of magicky stuff. From a cabinet below the bed he took a machine made of rusty old equipment and nonsense: a motherboard, an old oscilloscope,