She checked the people around her, looking for another threat. The streets were narrow. She stood at a T-junction overshadowed by office buildings with dark windows. A pub stood on one corner. Noise and light spilled out of the pub and more than a dozen people stood around, smoking and holding a pint or glass of wine in hand, chatting up or being chatted up. Foot traffic streamed past her in both directions, people intent on wherever they were going. It wasn’t as busy as a Friday night, but any night in London was an opportunity for a time out.
Three smiling young men about Rob’s and Julian’s age stepped out of the flow of people. “Hi,” one of them said. “I’m Carl.”
“Hi,” she said and continued her search, still wondering what Sorcha had in store for her. She finally spotted a sign further down the street by a closed coffee shop. She was in Covent Garden.
Carl ducked into her line of sight. “And you are?”
“Busy,” she said.
“Aw, don’t be like that. I’m just trying to be sociable. This is Dale and Rick.” He gestured to his two smiling friends.
Fiona didn’t like the smiles much. Three young idiots didn’t strike her as Sorcha’s likely line of attack, but what did Fiona really know about a being like her? She let her senses open to the young men, searching for some sign that they were other than what they seemed.
“Hey, no need to frown at us like that,” Carl said. “You work around here? Maybe you’re a model?”
She thought she detected a snigger from either Dale or Rick. “No, I don’t.” She could feel something from them, like wisps of smoke rising. She wondered if they were warlocks.
“Why don’t you come into the pub and let us buy you a drink?” Carl asked.
“Not interested,” Fiona said.
Dale or Rick laughed. “You can do better than that, Carl.”
Carl kept smiling, though for the first time she noticed the smile ended below his eyes. His voice changed. Though it was still his voice, a new resonance came with it. He put his hand on her arm and said, “Come into the pub and let us buy you a drink.”
Fiona forgot all about Sorcha. About Alice, about Maleeha and Obasi at work – it all slipped from her mind. A drink in the pub with smiling Carl and his smiling friends sounded like a great idea. She wondered why she’d been against the idea at first.
A black arm snapped up out of her shadow. The big hand grabbed the front of Carl’s coat and slammed him into the nearest wall. He crumpled to the ground.
Fiona blinked. Her thoughts tumbled around in her head like a wind had poured into her skull.
“Holy shit,” said Dale or Rick.
Fiona rounded on them. “What was that? Did you just use charm magic on me, you slithering little snakes?”
Dale’s face – or maybe Rick’s – contorted in anger. “You fucking bitch. I’m going to fuck you up!”
He came at her, fists raised. But the monster in her shadow was so much faster. One long arm snapped out. Its hand slapped against Dale’s face – or it could have been Rick’s – and its spider-like fingers closed around his head. It yanked him down.
Dale – or perhaps Rick – vanished into Fiona’s shadow.
“Oh no,” she said.
She backed away a step, as though she could get away from her shadow. She was barely aware of Rick – if he wasn’t Dale – as he let out a squeal and ran away. Fiona stared down at her shadow, horrified, wondering what to do.
Nothing that her shadow swallowed had ever come back out.
Alive or dead.
Chapter 15 – Fiona
Fiona knelt down and pressed her hand flat against her shadow. The chilly ground was hard, rough and grimy. She beat her fist against it. “Give him back.”
“He was trying to hurt you.”
She was unsurprised to find Sorcha standing over her. “My shadow listens to you. Tell it to give that boy back.”
“He was going to hurt you,” Sorcha said. “I thought you were a killer. You boasted of killing Savraith.”
Fiona surged to her feet, nose-to-nose with Sorcha. She refused to let the tears prickling the corners of her eyes fall. “He was just a boy. A stupid boy. I would have–”
“What?” Sorcha regarded her like a piece of clockwork, as though she were observing the winding of the gears and wheels inside her head. “Their charm spell was not even strong, but you were under its effect. Without the creature in your shadow, you would not have escaped them.”
“That doesn’t mean he deserves to be dead! A good kick in the balls, or permanent impotence, that’s what he needed, not – not–”
She spun away from Sorcha, shaking. Carl was still slumped against the wall, unconscious. The people going past, on their way to Tube stations or restaurants or hotels, none of them noticed Carl or Fiona or Sorcha. The people outside the pub went on drinking and smoking and flirting.
I can’t be a murderer, Fiona thought. I can’t be.
“They did this quite often, you know.” Sorcha drifted up behind her. “Find a girl like you and isolate her. Charm her, get her drunk, take her home. The one who ran away is good with memory charms. The girls never remember their faces. This doesn’t bother you?”
“Bother me? It makes me furious,” Fiona said. “But they should be in jail or–” She remembered what Alice said her kind did to those who broke their laws. “Some kind of jail.”
“This place has little in the way of such things,” Sorcha said. “Justice must still be served if order is to be maintained.”
Good at clean-up, Rob and Julian said of the Shield Foundation, but bad at prevention. Surely good at clean-up meant they knew how to handle things like this. Or did they? Did misbehaving warlocks like unconscious Carl and his two friends get nothing more than a slap on the wrist?
She turned on Sorcha. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and husky. “Why did you do this to me?”
“A ruler must dispense justice as they see it,” Sorcha said. “Come, let us walk again.”
“No, I–” But Sorcha had her arm again and there just wasn’t a way to disentangle herself. Their arms were like two links in a chain.
The Covent Garden street was replaced by an escalator in one of the city’s big Westfield shopping centres. Fiona snatched at the rubber handrail to steady herself. They travelled up, behind a couple arguing heatedly in what Fiona thought sounded like Polish.
“People like that,” Sorcha said, “like those young men, they’re nothing to beings such as you and I.”
“I’m nothing like you,” Fiona snapped. Her brow wrinkled. “What do you mean by that?”
“You must know something of what you are,” Sorcha said. “You must sense it, at least.”
Fiona lifted her foot to step off the escalator and then she was stumbling through an empty hall. The grand ceiling high above was supported by polished marble columns and her boots clumped on the same gleaming stone beneath her. The light was poor, as though from near-extinguished candles. It spread from bronze sconces high up the columns. Every tiny sound carried.
“I thought you’d looked into my mind and figured me all out.”
“Perhaps you are not as far along as I thought,” Sorcha said.
They approached shuttered, triple-locked doors. Fiona assumed they’d be somewhere else before they reached them. She realised she’d already grown accustomed to the motions of her strange stroll with Sorcha.
Growing accustomed to anything about this one is probably a bad idea, you know, the voice in the back of her mind said.
She told herself that was obvious, thank you.
“What’s all this in aid of?” Fiona asked. “I want to be home in time for dinner.”
“I think it would be a waste to leave you here, living a small life,” Sorcha said. “Far more interesting to see what you make of a greater one.”
They were somewhere else before they reached the door, just as Fiona expected. Fiona rocked as though she’d been standing on a bus and the driver had stamped on
the brakes. Sorcha had brought her to a halt in a supermarket. People on their way home from work roamed the aisles, snatching up groceries as they dodged around each other.
Fiona found herself face-to-face with a dark-skinned woman with empty eyes, dressed in a long skirt and a blue cardigan. She carried one of the wire baskets the supermarket stacked by the front door, but Fiona noticed the basket only contained tinned goods.
The woman with the empty eyes stared at her.
Fiona was just starting to feel a strangeness to her, when her eyes changed and what stared out at them, directly at Fiona, was not human. Had never been human.
Before Fiona could speak, the world lurched and she stood outside Flat 2 Hawthorn House. Her arm was free, not threaded through Sorcha’s. She refused to let herself back away.
“Who was she?” Fiona asked. “What did you just do?”
“I revealed you,” Sorcha said. Without malice, or a sneer, or a smile of anticipation. Whatever she had done, Fiona knew it had to be trouble. “Now you are seen.”
“Why? Why show me to that – that – whatever was in that woman?”
“Ikandror,” Sorcha said. “It will hunt you now. A ruler must be capable of safeguarding her realm. We shall see if you can fulfil your promise.”
Then she was gone, as though Fiona had blinked and missed her departure. She checked the street around her, in case Sorcha had arranged an ambush.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. “Jess?”
“Where have you been for the last hour?” Jessica asked, sounding frantic and exasperated at the same time. “How did you end up at home?”
“Is Alice okay?”
“I’m here,” Alice said over the same line. “I was lost for a while, until I found myself by the river.” Her voice hissed with frustration. A hunt without a bloody end, Fiona supposed, was not what Alice had had in mind.
Fiona sighed. Warm light shone in the windows of Flat 2 above her. A hot meal and a comfortable bed waited for her inside. So tempting. “Better bring us to your lair, Jessica. We have things to talk about.”
Fiona stalked across the bridge. “I don’t know how to fight her. I don’t have any way of fighting her.”
Charo walked at her side. They were together in the dream of London, on the bridge spanning the Serpentine, the body of water that split Hyde Park from Kensington Gardens. Charo looked much as he had the last time she’d seen him, in his black military toga and leather boots. After some careful questioning, Fiona had guessed their last meeting was a short way into his future.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about beings like her?” Fiona asked.
“Stay away from them?”
“Oh, you’re helpful.”
He made a circling gesture with his left hand, the hand on which he wore the glove striped with metal and gemstones. She had learned to interpret the gesture as a kind of apology.
They crossed the bridge, moving west into Kensington Gardens. In Hyde Park the leaves had worn their yellow autumn colours, but in Kensington Gardens the branches of the trees were stark and bare. The ground was covered in hard-packed snow, the icy kind that had been melted and refrozen over days and nights and would be dangerous to walk on.
She hadn’t seen inconsistencies like that before in London’s dream. Usually it held to a time and place for her visit, unless she or Charo shifted them elsewhere.
“What is that?” Charo asked.
Fiona followed his gaze. Up ahead, a glass tower rose in four sections above the trees. The three upper sections were circular, stacked upon each other like a glass cake. The lowest level was square in shape and a clock face looked out from each side.
Fiona said, “I think that’s where the Prince Albert memorial is supposed to be.”
“Perhaps it’s from your future,” Charo said.
“Or maybe it never was,” Fiona said. “Like that mausoleum on Primrose Hill.” She could find out, but her thoughts remained with Sorcha.
“There are beings like the one you describe,” Charo said. “They exist beyond our world, beyond the starry gulf. We do our best never to attract their attention.”
“Are they human?” Fiona had avoided speaking Sorcha’s name. It might not be her true name, but she had the feeling speaking it would make Sorcha aware of her presence in the dream and invite her in.
“They were once,” Charo said. “We don’t call them such now. Too easy to underestimate them.”
They emerged from the trees into one of the park’s wide-open spaces. The Round Pond was far off to their right, covered in ice as it never had been in her real memories. To their left lay the glass tower. Fiona finally had a complete view of it. Another square level supported the one she’d seen through the trees and below that, forming the structure’s base, was a yet another level, this one with a grand arch in each side. The whole thing was over three hundred metres tall.
“I know what this is,” Fiona said. “The bottom level is the Crystal Palace. Well, a square version of it. The real thing is a rectangle. This is where they originally built it in eighteen fifty-something, for the Great Exhibition. Afterwards the architect wanted to build the tower on top of it but they wouldn’t let him.”
“Another dream of something that never was,” Charo said.
Fiona craned her head back to take in its height. “He must have really wanted it, for it to have made a lasting impression here.”
Charo grabbed her hand. “Fiona.”
At his tone, all of Fiona’s fears of Sorcha rushed back into place. Where he pointed, she saw a man approaching them across the hard-packed snow, his footing sure on the slippery ground. He wore a long Victorian coat that fluttered around him, despite the still air. The coat was grey, but marked with darker patterns like a moth’s wings. His large head was bent forward and the brim of his tall hat concealed his face.
“He could be just a dreamer,” Charo said. “He could be the architect. It would make sense for him to dream himself here, wouldn’t it?”
The snow warped and shifted in the coated man’s trail, as though the man were only the head of a long, worm-like body burrowing just below the surface. “I don’t think so.”
Charo’s sword appeared on his belt. He drew it with a smooth, practised motion. The pale steel glimmered like starlight. When he spoke, he did so with such command it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. “Hold and announce yourself.”
The grey-coated figure stopped. The ground behind him did not quite settle, as though the giant worm Fiona imagined there was restless. The man brought his gloved hands to the lapels of his coat. He raised his head.
His face was a black void.
Sorcha, Fiona thought. What have you set after me?
“Ikandror,” Charo whispered.
“As I was once known.” The man spoke with the cultured accent of a Victorian gentleman, but his voice was a flat monotone.
“By my rank and authority as a battle mage of the first circle,” Charo said, “I order you to leave this place.”
“You know what he is?” Fiona asked.
“He knows what I was,” the grey-coated man said. “Once I was Ikandror. But then this one” – he spread his gloved hands – “found me in my crumbling castle. He called himself Lawrence Moth. He did not take precautions. Now he is my shell. Now his name is mine and you have no power over me.”
Charo barked a word. The snow around Lawrence Moth exploded. Charo tightened his grip on Fiona’s arm and ran.
They raced along one of the park’s icy paths. Fiona felt Charo exerting his will on the place, clearing the path in front of them so they ran on concrete. When she glanced behind her, she saw the snow and ice re-form.
“Who or what are we running from?” she asked.
“A monster we created,” Charo said. “A trap in place of the dream of our third city. If it catches us, it will swallow our spirits and inhabit our bodies.”
Ikandror – it wasn’t one of the seven names on the map in Je
ssica’s lair. Little wonder she hadn’t been able to find them.
They passed a statue of a man on a horse stamping its plinth. Charo cut right and they ran towards the water. They turned left when the path reached a fork. Fiona looked back over her shoulder and saw Lawrence Moth gliding after them in long, weightless bounds.
Charo skidded to a halt by the statue of Peter Pan. “Wake up, Fiona.”
“What about you?”
“It isn’t after me.” His grabbed her by the shoulders. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s strong here. Without its name, I have no power over it. Don’t come back here unless you can find a way to fight it.”
Lawrence Moth dragged the toe of one shoe on the icy path to slow himself as he came around the corner. He sped up again, pushing himself forward like a skater. The path rippled and bulged behind him.
“Damn it.” Fiona wrenched herself away.
Lawrence Moth’s empty face seemed to follow her back to the waking world.
Fiona was huddled on the train platform at Ealing Common the next morning when Sorcha came to her.
“What do you think of Ikandror?”
The other morning commuters paid Fiona and Sorcha no attention. If they saw Sorcha at all, and that was an assumption Fiona knew she couldn’t make, they only saw yet another young woman in a grey coat and chequered scarf.
Fiona scowled. “He goes by the name of Lawrence now, apparently.”
“The Moth,” Sorcha said, “of the Principled Society. I looked across the geography of time and saw his incautious exploration of the ancient dream creature’s habitat. The Moth was consumed. Ikandror retains only enough of him to maintain a human-like shell. You should be pleased to meet even just a revenant of him.”
“What do you mean by consumed?” Fiona asked.
“You’ve seen it already,” Sorcha said. “Remember the woman from last night? The one whose eyes he saw you through?”
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