Authors: Kat Richardson
“Yeah, I think so. . . . There’s a sign for an emergency exit. We can try it.”
We headed for the steel mesh door Michael indicated at the end of the platform and pushed. It opened with a mild complaint of hinges onto a steep staircase that looked a lot newer than the station. We started up and kept climbing for what seemed a very long time. Finally we came to another door and had to push very hard. It creaked open reluctantly, and I poked my head out first, scanning for vampires and other things that might lie in wait.
Just the usual ghosts, Grey, and humans lay beyond the door, and we emerged onto Piccadilly with the door clanking locked behind us. Michael pointed to our right.
“That’s Hyde Park Corner! Hey, we’re close to my garage!”
“Garage?” I questioned. I knew most people didn’t have private cars in London, except for the collection I’d seen in Clerkenwell that the vampires shared.
“Yeah, where I keep the bikes—well, it’s Loren’s, really. It’s just an old horse stall, but he might have left the key to his boat there. We can borrow it—he won’t care.”
“A boat,” I said doubtfully.
“On Regent’s Canal. No one would look for us on a narrow boat!”
Marsden and I had to agree that it was unlikely anyone would stumble upon us in such a place—especially since it was on water, which vampires tend to dislike and ghosts rarely haunt unless they are on the shore or on a boat themselves.
Michael led the way north and a bit west.
Marsden turned his head toward him as we went, as if he were peering at the boy with his empty eyes. “Your mate has a horse stall in Mayfair?”
“It’s his sister’s place.” Michael blushed, keeping his eyes averted from the disconcerting face beside him. “Loren’s family has money—like the kind of money even rich people think is a lot of money.”
We went a few more blocks into a very nice, old residential neighborhood until Michael stopped in front of a long row of connected houses with tiny yards in front. Then he led the way up a short alley to a green-painted door in what looked more like a shed than a stable. The door certainly wasn’t wide enough for any sort of car. Michael dug his keys from his pocket and used one on the padlock attached to the door’s hasp and handle assembly. The door swung open to show a tiny space packed full of motorcycles and repair gear. There was barely room to step in and move the bikes.
“The Ducatis and the Enfield are his. Mine are the BSAs,” Michael said, rummaging through a rack of keys on the wall. “I meant to take the Comet to a rally in a couple of weeks, but I’m guessing that’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?” I asked. “This should resolve in a day or two. It’s not the end of the world. At least not yet.”
Michael goggled at me. “If Will’s skipped work for a week, they can deport us both. I mean, they might not, but who’s to say? He’s on work contract and he has to show up for work at the job that brought him here or he has to leave. Keeps people from coming at an employer’s expense and then ducking out for some other job or just slacking around on the dole.” He found the key he wanted and held it up with a shout. “Got it!”
“Where’s the boat?” I asked.
“Last time he left it in St. Pancras Basin. It’ll have to be somewhere between there and Islington. That’s only a mile or so to walk on the towpath, and we can take the Tube to Pankers to start.”
“St. Pancras will do quite nicely,” Marsden said.
“Nicely for what?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ll see, girl. You’ll see.”
Michael looked at me and rolled his eyes. “Do we have to keep him around?”
“Safer to keep him where we can see him,” I replied. But it wasn’t just that.
Someone had wanted me here in London. There’d been no guarantee Edward would talk me into coming, so I was guessing that the bad dreams sent through the golem had been an additional goad to force my hand—was that Alice’s part? Whoever it was had tricked Purcell or gained some kind of hold over him so he’d stopped disputing the customs bill and used the charmed note Jakob took to Sotheby’s to help snatch Will. They had to have Will to control the golem, and they hadn’t wanted anyone but me to come looking for him, so they’d left the golem in Will’s place.
I wasn’t sure what connection there was to Edward’s problems, except that with Alice in the mix there had to be one. I knew she wouldn’t want to let that grudge go, but I was also certain she wasn’t the key player. I liked that part better for the asetem-ankh-astet, the Egyptian vampires Sekhmet had described. They were involved in this and in my father’s fate and my own. I still hadn’t figured that angle completely; I didn’t know what they wanted or how Wygan—who I was sure was also asetem—fit in, but so far, things were connecting and I thought they’d all come together when I could figure out what Alice was doing and what the asetem wanted with me.
Several things still bugged me. I didn’t know why they’d snatched Will instead of Quinton if they were trying to get a lever on me, unless it was simply that he was here and so were they. In addition, Marsden may have spilled the beans to the vampires about where I was, but then he’d shown up to detour me and Michael away from them. He didn’t seem to be their friend any more than they were mine. Greywalker or not, he wasn’t my friend either, but I didn’t know where he really stood or what he was up to. He did know something about my father, though, and I wanted that information, even if it meant playing with fire. I wasn’t going to let Marsden slip away—he had answers or he could lead me to them, of that I was sure. I thought about these problems as we made our way north and east toward the canal.
Another ride on the Underground got us up to St. Pancras Train Station. It was a massive, echoing pile of Victorian Gothic architecture—looking more like a red brick cathedral than a train station—that was being rehabilitated and partially renovated into expensive flats. We had to thread our way through leggy forests of scaffolding to get out of the building and around the back, up several industrial blocks to Regent’s Canal.
We passed a sign directing us to ST. PANCRAS OLD CHURCH as we detoured around some construction and the rail yards, looking for a way down to the canal. I noticed that the train rails cut right up against the churchyard walls before they crossed the canal on a low bridge. The rail yard was deep with ghosts and blurry with a mess of disrupted ley lines. The canal, being older than the rail yard and full of water, had bent the energy lines of the Grey gently into its own shape so the magical supply lines curved with its bends and crossed them without a hash and noise of magical strife. It was a relief to get down to the water’s edge and walk across a small park to find the towpath, away from the growl of furious magic.
Along the canal wall, several long, skinny boats were moored to iron mushrooms or stakes driven into the grass. Upstream stood the brick piers and wooden doors of a small lock. Michael led the way toward the lock and around a sharp corner in the path to the sudden appearance of a boat basin. The St. Pancras Cruising Club building stood on the landward side, overlooking a rectangular body of water cut from the canal that was filled with more of the long, thin boats.
The sun was dipping toward the horizon, turning the sky a watercolor pink, but the boats were magnificent even in the waning light, all painted in bright colors and many sporting designs of stylized flowers, castles, and ribbons, with touches of gilding, polished brass and bronze, and gleaming, varnished wood panels on the hatches. Some of the boats had louvered or shuttered windows along the sides while others had names painted on colored panels on the sides that looked a lot like old-style advertising. Some had tillers of curved and tapered poles covered in rope and ribbon for grip, sticking out of oversized rudders that looked like half a Dutch door, while others had stern rails and tiller poles of slender painted iron. Tin smokestacks poked up from the flat roofs of the low, slope-sided cabins. It was a riotous display but still oddly uniform. All the boats were about the same width and height, and most looked between forty and sixty feet long with flat roofs and very narrow side decks. None had lifelines or stanchions on the outside but seemed to rely on fingerholds on their roofs to keep the crew on board when they scampered along the deck—and scamper was what you’d have to do if you couldn’t traverse the boat inside.
Michael trotted down along the basin path and pointed at a primrose yellow boat with green and red trim. “There it is!” The big side board had been lettered “Morning Glory, St. John’s Wood” with curlicues of green filling the corners and trailing around the edges of the rectangle, evocative of the boat’s namesake vine. He stepped aboard at the stern, pulling from his pocket the padlock key he’d taken from the garage, and opened up the boat.
I stepped aboard and down into the aft cabin. Marsden made a face and chose to stay on the land. I found I had stepped down into a utility room with a tiny washing machine tucked under a counter and a number of foul-weather coats and fluffy towels hanging on pegs nearby. I looked forward, into the boat, following Michael’s progress inside. The interior was like a very long and luxurious camper trailer that had been cut down to about seven feet wide. Compact and efficient, it had more than enough headroom for my five-foot-ten frame even in heeled boots. It wouldn’t be much fun if you were claustrophobic, but it was fine for our purposes. Michael pointed out that the boat had one large bedroom and a dining area that could be made into another bed, so we’d each have a place to sleep—except for Marsden. That gave Michael pause.
“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “I suspect he’s not going to stay.”
“I could stand that—the guy gives me the creeps—but how do you know?”
“He didn’t come aboard and he looks like the very idea of a boat makes him queasy. I think it’s just you and me, Michael. Right after I have a little chat with Mr. Marsden. Will you be OK alone for a while? Don’t go anywhere while I’m gone.”
“I can manage. Although . . . we’re going to need food. . . .”
“We’ll figure it out. I’ll be back soon.”
I ducked back out and collared Marsden, who was still standing on the quayside, scowling.
“Seasick?” I asked.
“Not a bit of it. I don’t like them closed-up things—like floating metal coffins.”
“Then you’re not staying with us?”
“I should say not. Two of us in the same space for long might attract the wrong sort of attention, and we’re not the only things what can see into the Grey and talk back to those hunting you.”
“I’d like to talk to you a bit more about that—” I started, but he cut me off.
“Good, because there’s a few things you need to know. But here is not such a grand idea. Come with me.”
“Why and where?”
“Where is old St. Pankers, and why is that the presence of a lot of ghosts may mask the presence of the pair of us. And there’s something you should see. Come on.”
“Come in, girl. They’ll be waking up soon to do their own dirty work.”
I looked into the graveyard. The shadows were growing long as dusk fell, but the cemetery in my sight was a field of colored lights, close packed and spiking upward like searchlights reaching for the sky while a tangle of Grey power lines surged beneath it. For a place of the dead, it was one of the liveliest in London. Reluctant, I sank into the Grey and found a temporacline where the gates stood open and rusted. I stepped through and pulled back from the Grey.
The churchyard was busy with ghosts. They pressed in closer than the rush-hour commuters on the Tube had. Marsden led me deeper into the cemetery to a large stone tomb that stood in its own little oval of lawn behind its own iron fence. Marsden slipped through it and crossed the lawn toward the tomb, which looked a lot like an oversized stone phone booth with a tiny Grecian temple in it and a big stone block inside that. Feeling like a trespasser, I followed him until we were both standing beside the memorial stone of one Sir John Soane, an architect with rather odd taste in monuments, and his family. The silence under the stone roof was profound—even the Grey chorus of the city was distant—and it was empty of everything but the two of us.
“Hundred years ago,” Marsden started in a low voice, “this churchyard was three times the size it is now. Reached near to the Euston Road. Then they built a railroad and exhumed the bodies—well, some of ’em. They moved the stones from the lower churchyard to the inner churchyard. There weren’t enough room for ’em all, and a lot of the coffins was rotten or they had none to begin with, so they lined ’em up in trenches or mass excavations or just dumped ’em all in one big hole and made the memorial stones look as nice as they could. Some of them dead was nigh to fifteen hundred years in the ground, and they did not take well to the move. They’re restless. Just look out there; look at ’em movin’ about. You see how they’re clustered like prisoners round that tree and up that rise? Them’s the places that fool Hardy stuck ’em, pilin’ up the ghosts in batteries that could light half of England. This fella here, he wanted his rest quiet. So he built this. Grand and mad, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I doubt he quite knew what he was doing, but the way he had it made and the way it’s laid, the shape of it as it lies across the leys, makes a sort of eddy in the Grey. We’re surrounded by a fence of the supernatural but immune to its touch until we step out. The ghosts don’t even know we’re here, so they can’t grass on us to any snooping mages or sorcerers. So, what made Edward send you?”
“I don’t breach client confidentiality without a damned good reason.”
“Don’t play games with me, girl.”
“I think a game is exactly what you want. You keep alluding to my father and to answers, but you’re not giving any. What game are you up to? You show up from nowhere and you know too much. Then you vanish and suddenly there are demi-vamps on my tail.”
“’Twasn’t my work as done that.”
“Really? How did you know where to find me today? Or yesterday?”
“I told you—I had a premonition. That’s one of my particular talents. Yours seems to be giving offense.”
“And here I thought it was attracting pains in the ass like you.”
Marsden’s pale, eyeless face was smooth and cool as the stones we stood on. For once I couldn’t see someone grinding ideas and lies into a response, but he was thinking. After a moment, he spoke again, chuckling a bit.
“He’s lost his control.”
“Excuse me?”
“Edward. He sent you to Purcell. But Purcell’s not there. The empire is failing—he’s been pulling strings in London for a dog’s age, but they’ve been cut, haven’t they? Edward’s panicking. He hasn’t any more idea what’s going on than you do.”
“And you do?”
“In no wise.”
“Then how do you propose to help me?”
He laughed. “I’m not here to help you, girl. I’m here to stop you.”