Authors: Kate Griffin
A phone rang.
The blue electric angels hesitated. The skin of the body they wore opened and contracted, opened and contracted, bursts of blue electric light slicing in and out of the flesh as it tried to decompose, tried to heal itself around the creatures that resided in it. The face that had once belonged to Matthew Swift stared, first at Sharon Li, then at the phone in her hand.
Her hand was shaking.
She held the phone out to them.
It kept on ringing.
Caller: Unknown.
“I think it’s for you,” she said.
They hesitated, not moving, their hair writhing about their head, skin rippling with blue fire, ready to burst. Then, very slowly, they reached out, the fires receding from their hand as, gingerly, holding it by the fingertips, they took the phone from Sharon, and, like a child with a new, delicate toy, the blue electric angels answered the telephone.
Chapter 91
… Unless Speed Is of the Essence
“So, yeah,” said the Midnight Mayor, as Arthur Huntley blazed with fury before him. “Basically… hi.”
Arthur hesitated, weighing up this unexpected development. Then feelings overwhelmed rationality, and with a flick of his hands he hurled spinning glass wrapped in jagged electric sparks towards Swift and Sharon, where they stood by the entry to the lifts.
The glass dissolved before it reached them, the electricity fizzing out into nowhere. Swift took a cautious step forward, swayed a little, and Sharon caught him under the arm. Arthur’s face darkened. “Don’t think,” blurted the Midnight Mayor, before the wizard could move, “that I’m in any way intimidated by this whole… magic thing you’re doing! This,” he gestured at his own shaky body, even as Sharon tightened her grip on his arm, “is merely the result of not being used to having legs for a while. I mean, we’ve had legs, of course we’ve had legs, but I haven’t had legs, and not having legs has been very disconcerting…”
Another blast of fire from Arthur was swatted aside like an irritable wasp, barely interrupting Swift’s speech. “… but we’re feeling better now. It’s been an experience… enlightening, educational, a little disturbing but…”
A roar, a tearing jagged blast of bundled static and microwaves, which fizzled through the wall as Swift batted it aside. “… but basically I feel that we’ve… what did you call it, Sharon?”
“Grown as a person,” offered Sharon.
“Grown as a person!” agreed Swift with manic cheerfulness. “I like that. It’s like growing as a mushroom, or growing as a bit of mould in a damp bathroom or something, only better.”
“Much better,” Sharon assured him, as his left foot tried to be where his right was at the same time as his right tried to get with his left. “If you carry on like this, you’ll end up happy in yourself before you know it.”
“Will we? I suppose we will!”
He giggled, a hyperactive sound; and as he giggled, he flicked out a hand, absent-mindedly. Arthur was picked up off his feet and slammed back against the wall. A shiver rocked through his body, and where his back had impacted with the concrete a single, tiny fracture wiggled like an ancient riverbed across a bare landscape, through his shell of glass. “Oh look!” exclaimed Swift. “He’s all, um… what’s the word I’m going for here? Uh…”
“Hyped up?” suggested Sharon.
“That’s it! That’s exactly it! Sharon, you are brilliant! Have I promoted you lately?”
“No, but actually, about that…”
With a roar, Arthur staggered upright, the crack spreading as his hands came up to form a spell. But before he could do so, Swift raised his own hand again. A cage of electricity twisted up out of every plug, every wire embedded in the floor or cable running through the ceiling, spinning around Arthur and spinning Arthur around, a giddy vortex of UV-bright light that ended when the wizard slammed down hard into the floor.
“I should promote you,” said Swift. Then, with a moment of realisation, “Am I… high?”
“We gave your body a lot of sedatives…”
“You did what?!”
“You were screaming and threatening to tear the sky down.”
“Were we?”
“Um… yes.”
“Why on earth were we doing that?”
“Stress-management issues?” said Sharon.
In the moment of surprise it took for Swift to process this idea, Arthur crawled back onto his feet. The cracks were spreading, moving visibly now, through his glassy skin. He staggered as he rose, stared down at his hands in surprise, mouth moving in a silent O, and even that was enough to cause the lines to spread, rippling out across his body. He raised his head, looked at Swift, at Sharon, his face twisted, like that of an angry animal.
“I’ll… I’ll… show…” he wheezed, cradling his arms across his chest.
“I really don’t understand anything that’s been going on,” said Swift, and, with a roar, Arthur flung back his arms.
The glass skin across his body splintered, cracked, shattered, burst apart in a moving wall of glass and light and heat. It tore through the wall behind him, a flying shrapnel, splitting the concrete through in great gaping holes. It blasted the panels out of the ceiling, ripped up the fresh carpet from the clean floor, shattered every windowpane, blowing them out like exploding plastic bags. It burst apart, too bright and too white to look at, a heat that sizzled Sharon’s hair and made her skin contract; instinctively she dived for cover, cradling her head against the straining floor. Meanwhile, Swift, grinning like an idiot, squinted against the glare.
On the other side of London Bridge, a sleepy street cleaner looked up to see a burst of whiteness erupt from the forty-fifth floor of the Shard, and wondered why, and went back to cleaning. On the railway lines of Waterloo East, the supervisor of the night railway crew heard a bang, and looked round sharply to see who had dropped their tools on the in-progress track. In a flat in Blackfriars, a musician’s dream changed from Brahms to Tchaikovsky, and she rolled over in her little bed to dream of cannon and overtures; and in the concrete concourses beneath the Shard itself it rained shards.
The silence was a long time in coming.
When it finally asserted itself, it wasn’t even a silence of all things coming to an end. Rather, it was the rush of wind dancing through broken windowpanes, tinkling the shattered glass dust across the floor, pushing it in eddies and forming Zen-garden patterns in the torn-up mess of mortar and sand that had twisted across the room. Sharon listened to the wind, and when it became evident that the wind wasn’t about to go anywhere and neither was she, she opened her eyes.
Swift stood in the centre of the room, his shields still palpable around him as a bubble where the writhing dust didn’t go; and even those were contracting back into him as, swaying a little, he surveyed the damage. Kelly was there, peeking out between her fingertips; and Gretel, her large body braced between the sorcerer and the still-prone shapes of Sammy and Mr Roding. Kevin, too, already fumbling with one bloody hand for his emergency packet of sterile wipes; and Rhys the druid, struggling against drowsiness, antihistamines and adrenalin in equal measure, his features at once swollen and contracted, bursting and withdrawn. Sharon climbed to her feet, staggering with the effort, every part battered, dirty or bloody.
Swift grinned. “So,” he sang out, “I’m guessing I’ve got some catching up to do?”
Sharon looked round the room, searching for the one last person who should, who needed to be there.
Arthur Huntley was gone.
Chapter 92
Adversity Is Merely Opportunity in Disguise
The sun rose over the city.
The day crew, come to inspect the Shard, were first alarmed, then bewildered, and finally infuriated to find a snowstorm of shattered glass scattered all around the base of their building. Infuriation turned to outright rage as the building supervisor, inspecting the floors for structural damage, stumbled upon whole rooms gutted, stairs scorched, carpets torn, ceilings buckled – a veritable redecoration with grenades.
If the structural engineers felt outrage, the managing directors, on discovering several dust-covered, bewildered men and women on the very top floor, groggily trying to worship a shattered window and a lot of cracked dirt, were so utterly perplexed that all they could do was reach for the nearest handy lawyer.
The sun pressed up over the buildings of the Square Mile, pushing the shadow of St Paul’s down towards Fleet Street and throwing a great open-armed hug from the figure of Justice on top of the Old Bailey, out across the city below.
The sun stretched through into the offices of Harlun and Phelps, and into one office in particular where a voice said,
“Ow.” Then, “Ow!” And finally, “Ow, do you mind?”
“Now, Mr Mayor, this is very important, we really need to make sure that you are physically healthy after your ordeal.”
“I’m fine, I’m… ow! – I’m giddy.”
“That’s very reassuring, Mr Mayor, but if you don’t mind I’d like a professional medical opinion on this subject.”
“And you think… OW! – that Dr Seah is the right person to give that?”
“Hey, sweetheart, if you wanna meet the unprofessional me,” sighed Dr Seah, “I can totally arrange that.”
A moment, as Matthew Swift considered this. Then, “Okay, fair enough.”
Kelly Shiring beamed. She was, all things considered, satisfied with her job performance. A temple had been destroyed, and while structural damage had been suffered during the process, at least it was very highly insured structural damage, which was always a source of comfort to her when doing the paperwork, and her boss was back in the office after an unscheduled absence, which meant…
“Now, I know you’ll want to ease back into things, Mr Mayor, but you do have a lot of email to catch up on…”
“You are kidding me.”
“The cogs of the city don’t stop just because you’re having an out-of-body experience, Mr Mayor.”
“I thought you’d be…” Swift’s voice trailed off. “… you know…”
“Mr Mayor?” Kelly waited politely.
“I thought you’d… handle all that stuff,” he said, shamefacedly staring at the floor of his grubby, paper-strewn office.
Kelly waited, a beatific smile on her still-grimy face. Swift cleared his throat, then said, “So, uh, Kelly…”
“Yes, Mr Mayor?”
“I’ve been thinking about management… stuff… and I was actually wondering. How do you… uh… see your place in the organisation?”
“My place? Why, as your personal assistant, Mr Mayor!”
“Yeah, but I mean, like… what do you want to be in five years time?”
“I really don’t understand,” she exclaimed. “I am
personal assistant
to the
guardian of the night
. If my careers officer could see me now! She always said I should go into government…”
“Kelly!” Swift threw up his hands in despair. “What I’m trying to say is… how’d you feel about promotion?”
“A… promotion?”
“Yeah. To something more… you know… more managery. Something with a big title, with a bigger office. And a pay rise. And dental.”
“This is still Britain, despite the government,” chided Kelly. “You only offer dental in countries where there is no NHS.”
“The kinda job,” replied Swift, eyes narrowing, “where you get to offer
other
people jobs, with dental or without depending on your personal discretion.”
Kelly thought about it. “Still reporting to you?”
“Christ,
yes
!”
She thought a little longer. “Just one thing…”
“Go on?”
“Would I still have to wear black to work?”
Chapter 93
From Our Trials, We Grow Stronger
She said, “Hey, Miles.”
The Alderman looked up. One leg was suspended before him, held up by pulleys and cables. The other was tucked away beneath a clean white sheet. A portable tray on wheels had been pulled across his bed, and bore a plastic jug of water, a small tablet PC and a copy of
The Economist
. The Alderman raised his head from this latter, saw Sharon, and his face split into a smile.
“Ms Li!” he exclaimed. “How delightful to see that you aren’t dead yet!”
Sharon shuffled between the curtain that separated Miles’s hospital bed from its neighbour, and sat down in the padded chair that threatened to overflow from its tiny space. “I was gonna say something like that to you.”
The new day had brought, if not healing, then clarity as to the extent of cuts and grazes across Sharon’s body, and while she wasn’t actually suspended within a plaster cast from the ceiling of an NHS hospital, barely three consecutive inches were free of a plaster or ointment. When the Aldermen’s first-aid kit had run out of big pink fabric plasters, they’d gone to blue catering plasters. When the blue catering plasters had been used up, Kelly had been forced to break out her secret stash and now, dotted over the cuts and abrasions, several large Winnie the Pooh plasters greeted the day with a happy smile and jolly teddy-bear faces.
“So, yeah,” said Sharon, “I brought you grapes.” A brown paper bag of grapes was deposited on Miles’s tray. “Then I thought you mayn’t like grapes, even though they’re traditional and that, so I got you blueberries, too.”
A pot of blueberries was duly revealed.
“But then the blueberries were on special offer, and it seemed kinda stupid not to do it, because it was, like, two for three quid, you know? So I got raspberries…”
Which were deposited before Miles.
“… but then I thought maybe you don’t like red fruit, because people sometimes don’t, like, it makes them sick and that, so I got you a KitKat.” This last was laid with ceremonial care before the stricken Alderman. Sharon waited as Miles inspected his haul. “So, um… hi,” she concluded.
“Ms Li…” breathed Miles. “You didn’t have to!”
“Yeah, I know, but it was this or flowers, and I don’t think girls are meant to get guys flowers, even when they’re stuck in hospital, which is actually stupid, if you think about it, but I guess one social battle at a time, you know?”
Miles looked patient and smiled. “How are you, Ms Li? I heard there was an incident.”