A concrete car park framed by a concrete wall. I landed on my palms, felt something crack, pain shoot up through my right arm, then tingling numbness in my elbow. Tried to get up, fell, tried again. I wiggled the fingers of my right arm, and every bone and muscle, every tiny connection shrieked, and I did not move them again. A muzzle flash behind my left shoulder and a smack of bullet into concrete propelled me up, and, cradling my arm, cradling any part where the pressure of finger against skin might outweigh the shock still reverberating through my body, I ran.

Chapter 54

Alice Mair.

Nice body, shame about the use I was making of it.

I ran through the night, a bleeding woman underdressed for the weather, out on to an alien street in a place I did not know.

Let no one tell you that fear is fun or exhilarating. Their fear is the fear of the funfair ride where reason tells you the seat belt will keep you safe.

True fear is the fear of doubt; it is the mind that will not sleep, the open space at your back where the murderer stands with the axe. It is the gasp of a shadow passed whose cause you cannot see, the laughter of a stranger whose laugh, you know, laughs at you. It is the jumping of the heart when a car backfires in the street; it is the shaking hands that shake and shake as your thoughts do, until you laugh at it because you cannot comprehend that it is a thing for which you should weep. It is the flash of the snake’s head as it turns in the forest, the startled jump of a deer, the furious flapping of a sparrow’s wings and yes, I am human

I run.

And I am afraid.

Once upon a time

a long time ago

Hecuba came to me in the body of a man with great sideburns and an ivory cane, and said, “I’ve found them.”

I was Victoria Whitten. Her parents had named her for a queen, and left her the wealth of a princess, and her husband had beaten her until I’d lost patience and stepped into Victoria’s skin and beaten my husband. He now lived in Norwich, I in London, and once a month he wrote to me to assure me that he was well, and I did not reply.

We sat in my drawing room sipping tea as Hecuba said,

“A whole nest, right under our noses. They call themselves a brotherhood.”

“Would you like a macaroon?”

He leaned forward, the end of his pink nose quivering, and said, “I’ve found them. Will you come with me?”

“To do what?”

“To stop them.”

“Are we talking explosives?”

“Whatever it takes.”

“I don’t like knives,” I explained, rolling a tiny macaroon between my well-tended fingertips. “I try not to shoot people unless necessary.”

He sat back, one leg folding over another in a way which suggested that not so long ago Hecuba had been wearing skirts and was, at this moment, forgetting the nature of his own sex. “They kill us,” he snapped. “They are beyond the law. Does that not interest you?”

“Interest–yes. Is that interest sufficient to motivate me into infiltrating, if you’ll excuse my framing it so, a den, a lair even, one might go so far, a lair of individuals dedicated to my destruction, in order to kill them one at a time? No. I fear it is not.”

“You’ve lost hosts,” he retorted sharply. “Everyone’s lost someone. Maybe not to these ones, maybe not to this new ‘brother hood’, but down the years, people we’ve worn, they’ve gone to the fire, or the gallows, or the wall…”

“Because we drew attention to ourselves,” I replied, putting my cup down. “We switched a little too much, or perhaps not enough, and we left too many stories behind. The pre-emptive mass murder of individuals set upon our destruction is, if you don’t mind me saying so, a sure way to be noticed.”

Hecuba’s scowl deepened. There is a face which I have rarely seen since the 1880s. It was the face of that age, when sideburns erupted from the side of the head like whiskers on a water rat; when the moustache was an explosion of curling wax and could scowl something extraordinary. I have sometimes looked for that face, and found it only glaring out from the crabbed old men who squat in the shade of overcooked equatorial countries, or corrupted technocrats glowering through their insufficient pensions.

Hecuba scowled; his soul scowled with him.

“I had expected more from you, Ms Whitten,” he said. “I had understood that you were an estate agent.”

“I have been known to work as the same,” I replied cordially. “And go to some considerable lengths to ensure that the products I procure are neither traceable nor provoke much remark when their circumstances change. And you are correct: I have lost hosts to men such as those you describe. They wore different clothes, had a different name, and yet the motives have always been the same. Fear. Ignorance. The usual motives for the predictable cloud of nebulous prejudice that dogs human history. I cannot say my experiences have made me wiser, or kinder, or bequeathed me a moral plinth from which I may preach my message to the crowd, but I have learned this: that the massed letting of blood never, but never, solves the problem. Naturally, should you pursue those who would pursue me, I would be a hypocrite to offer anything but my grateful thanks. Yet my thanks would be, I think, premature. For there is a near-infinity of men and women who are fearful and wish me harm, but only ever one of me, standing in the dark with knife in hand.”

Hecuba grunted, rose to his feet. “I’ll thank you for the tea, if no more.”

I rose too, politely nodding in reply, and followed him to the door. He put his hand on the latch, then hesitated, half-turned.

“I am not some fool,” he said at last, “that I do not see the reason in what you say. But I have one question of you, which is this: those that would hurt us are many; we are few. You are unique, a sum of experience beyond any other. Why do you give so much credit to the survival of men who are, next to you, common as muck, mindful as stones?”

I considered his question for a long moment, standing in the cold hall with its high ceiling. “I heard a story once. It was the story of a man called al-Mu’allim. One day a jinn came from the desert and possessed al-Mu’allim, and banished his senior wives but stayed and loved the youngest, who was beautiful and clever, a woman out of her time. They had a child, but the wife died, and the jinn fled. This is the story I have heard, from a long time ago. And do you know what it is to me?”

A shrug from Hecuba, who neither knew nor sensed he would much care.

“A story. That is all that the lives of other men ever are–a tale told about another. Including mine. It is the only trace we leave behind, quickly reported with the details blurred, soon forgotten.”

Hecuba thought about this, then tutted.

“If that’s all you think you are, then perhaps you’re not worth the effort of saving. Goodbye, Ms Whitten.”

“Goodbye,” I replied. “Good luck.”

Four days later the London Gazette reported on the killing of eleven men and three women in a warehouse near Silver Wharf. Two witnesses had survived. One claimed that the occupants of the wharf turned on each other, butchering their neighbours one after another, as though they were possessed by a demon.

The other survivor, who was far slower to speak, having had both eyes carefully gouged from their sockets, said no, that wasn’t it at all.

It wasn’t one demon.

It was two.

And as the second demon had pulled his eyes from his face, he’d laughed, a child-like laughter, and whispered:

“Do you like what you see?”