a very, very few creatures walking upon the earth with the mystic fire-power at their disposal to cut a man’s skin beneath the nail, while leaving the nail itself intact. All of them frightened us.
So I went looking for Raleigh Court, North Kilburn.
There was an internet café lurking on the Goswell Road, between a launderette and an all-purpose purveyor of rotting vegetables and cheap biscuits. It was open twenty-four hours, and as in most such places, the computers had been padlocked to the desks and the desks bolted to the floor. A young man reading an A-level textbook and sitting with his feet up on the office desk took a couple of quid with an expression of apathy and gave me a computer for an hour. There were only two other people in the café: one was a woman with prunelike skin and a giant weave of orange fabric on her head, using the internet telephone to talk to somewhere far, far away where the sun was still shining; the other, a pasty-skinned man, had chosen the furthest computer in the darkest corner for what could only, at this hour, be crime or porn.
I sat in the middle of the row of whining machines, proud of my nothing-to-hide, and looked up Raleigh Court. My A-Z covered the Kilburn area, but for specific details, you can’t beat the internet. I found it, a beige blob in the middle of yellow grid streets, and, because no one can know everything, interrogated the machine a little more on how to get there. No Tube trains, but the night buses from the centre of the city understand their basic role - to carry those too drunk to walk, to the most obscure corners of suburbia quickly, cheaply and with no questions asked.
Then, because I’m rarely online, I checked my email.
I deleted “PILLSPILLSPILLS” on automatic. If we had been in a more malign mood, and less tired, we might have replied with something obscene or cursed the computer from which the message was sent.
“We need to talk” from Oda77 was short and to the point. It said:Sorcerer -
The Midnight Mayor is dead, the ravens are dead, the Stone is
gone, the Wall is cursed, the city is damned - if you believe the
I wasn’t in a hurry to meet Oda. Psychopathic fanatic magician-murderers with a penchant for dentistry and corrupted Christian theology were not high on my list of confidantes. She’d promised on a number of occasions to kill me, by grace of being a sorcerer, and especially to kill us by grace of being an abomination crawled from the nether reaches of the telephone lines into mortal flesh. God was her excuse, guns were her weapons, and the second I stopped being useful to her and her dentistry-crazed cult, the Order, would be the day I got to meet both. She had helped me only because she feared my enemies more than she hated me.
Besides, the last person who’d helped me . . .
. . . the last person . . .
Had been Vera.
Melted into a puddle of paint.
Hadn’t even stopped to think.
Too much to do. Too damned. Too . . . too much too.
Hadn’t even stopped.
Angry.
Sick and angry. Blink and here we are, looking back with a pair of bright blue eyes colder than the iceberg that hit the Titanic. On fire with frost. Angry. Attacked, burnt, attacked, hurt, attacked, fled, attacked, attacked, attacked, gunning for us, gunning for me, gunning for my . . . for people who stopped to help.
Angry.
Didn’t know what to do about it, except doing itself. So I kept on doing while we clenched and cramped and twisted in rage.
I kept on at the computer.
The last message was obviously bad news. A sensible user would have deleted it and been done. We didn’t. Maybe it was the arrogance from using an internet café, where the computer about to be infected by bad mail wasn’t our own; maybe it was curiosity; maybe it was inspiration; maybe it was none of these things. Whatever it was, we, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be good, opened the message.
It said: END OF THE LINE.
The screen went black.
I swore.
A white pinprick appeared at the very centre of the screen and started to grow.