CHAPTER 21

Oxford Circus

SERGEANT KUMAR was very clear about one thing—you don’t do shit when the train is in motion.

“Someone pulls the emergency stop between stations, you can lose a passenger to a heart attack there and then,” he said. “And you do not want to be evacuating members of the public down a live track—trust me on this.”

You certainly didn’t want to be leaping out on a possibly armed suspect in something shaped exactly like a firing range—especially if you’re going to be the target at the far end.

And the carriages were packed, which took me by surprise, and not with your normal commuters either. Lots of parents with kids, clusters of chattering teenagers, older people in good coats clutching cloth bags or towing shopping gurneys. Last full shopping day before Christmas, I remembered. Kumar was right—we really didn’t want to be kicking off anything we couldn’t contain.

It’s a sad fact, but policing would be so much easier if you didn’t have to worry about members of the public getting under your feet.

Kumar had Agent Reynolds—the only one of us who didn’t look like they were remaking Ghostbusters—go ahead and peer through the double set of grimy windows and into the next carriage. When she signaled all clear, we opened the connecting doors and stepped through.

There’s no connecting enclosure on a tube train. You open the door and step across the gap to the next carriage. For a moment I was caught in a rush of air and darkness. I swear I heard it then, the whisper, behind the clatter of the wheels and the smell of dust and ozone. Not that I recognized it for what it was—not that I’m sure I know what it was even now.

The Central Line runs what is imaginatively called 1992 Tube Stock, consisting of eight carriages. Our suspect was near the front and we were near the back, so it took us twelve minutes and five stops to work our way forward. As the train pulled into Oxford Circus we had our suspect, unknown to him, bottled up in the front carriage. So that, of course, is where he chose to get off.

Reynolds spotted him first, signaled back to us, and as he walked past the open doorway where we were standing, we jumped him.

It was as sweet a takedown as anyone could wish for. I got his left arm, Kumar got his right, I slipped my knee behind his, hooked him, and down he went. We flipped him over on his face and got his arms behind his back.

He wriggled, as sinuously as a fish. It was difficult to keep him pinned. All the while he was completely silent except for a weird hissing sound like a really pissed-off cat.

I heard someone in the crowd ask what the fuck was going on.

“Police,” said Kumar. “Give us some room.”

“Which one of you has cuffs?” asked Reynolds.

I looked at Kumar and he looked at me.

“Shit,” said Kumar.

“We don’t have any,” I said.

Wriggling boy subsided under our hands. Beneath the thin fabric of his hoodie he seemed much skinnier than I expected him to be, but the muscles in his arms were like steel cables.

“I can’t believe you didn’t bring handcuffs,” said Reynolds.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“It’s not my jurisdiction,” said Reynolds.

“It’s not my jurisdiction,” I said.

We both looked at Kumar. “Evidence,” he said. “You said we were looking for evidence, not suspects.”

Our suspect had started shaking and making snorting noises.

“And you can stop laughing,” I told him. “This is really unprofessional.”

Kumar asked if we could hold him down on our own and I said I thought we could, so he loped off down the platform in search of a Help Point where he could contact the station manager.

“I don’t think you want to be here when help arrives,” I said to Reynolds. “Not while you’re tooled up.”

She nodded. It was just as well she hadn’t pulled it out in front of a CCTV camera. I glanced down the platform to where Kumar was talking into the Help Point and I must have loosened my grip or something because that’s when the bastard tried to throw me off. In my defense, I don’t think the normal human arm is supposed to bend that way, certainly not twist up in some weird angle and smash its elbow into my chin.

My head cracked back and I lost my hold on his right arm.

I heard a woman scream and Reynolds yell, “Freeze!”

A glance told me that, despite everything, she’d stepped back and drawn her pistol.

Training, I learned later, specifies that you never let your weapon get close enough to the perp to get snatched. I was also informed that the biggest fear an American law enforcement officer lives with is the prospect of dying with their weapon still in its holster.

The guy underneath me didn’t seem impressed. He reared up and then slapped the ground with the palm of his free hand. I got a flash of fresh loam and ozone and the cement floor of the platform cratered under his hand with a loud bang. I actually saw the start of the concussion wave in the dust around the crater and then it knocked me, Reynolds, and half a dozen members of the public sprawling. We were lucky the train was still in the station or somebody would have gone onto the tracks.

Not me, though, because I still had a grip on one of the fucker’s arms. Because that’s how I’m trained. I pulled on it hard to try and keep him off balance and drag myself up to my feet. But he dug his fingers into the ground and twisted.

A crack the width of a finger shot across the platform and up the nearest wall. Ceramic tiles splintered with a noise like teeth breaking and then the floor lurched and dipped as if a giant had put his foot on one side and pressed down. The cement cracked open and I felt my stomach jump as the ground I was lying on dropped a good meter. And me with it. I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think—fuck me, he’s an Earthbender—before falling into the black.

FOR A long moment I thought I was still unconscious, but the long stripe of pain on my thigh changed my mind. Once I noticed that pain, all its friends queued up to say hello, including a particularly worrying throbbing patch on the back of my head. I tried to reach up to touch it with my hand, only to find that I literally didn’t have enough elbow room to bend my arm. And that, as they say, is where the claustrophobia really starts.

I didn’t call for help because I was fairly certain that once I started screaming I probably wouldn’t stop for quite a long time.

The ground had opened up and I’d fallen into it. Which meant there might not be too much rubble above me. I thought it might even be possible to dig myself out, or at the very least make myself some more breathing room.

So I yelled for help, and just as I suspected, it turned into a scream.

Dust fell into my mouth—cutting me off. I spat it out and, weirdly, that calmed me down.

I listened for a while in the hope that all that noise had attracted some attention. Consciously keeping my breathing slow, I tried to think of everything I knew about being buried alive that might be relevant.

Thrashing around is not helpful, hyperventilation is not your friend, and it’s possible to become disorientated in the darkness. There were documented cases of survivors digging themselves deeper into the ground when they thought they were going up. There’s a happy thought.

However, I did have a major advantage over run-of-the-mill victims—I could do magic.

I made myself a little werelight, floated it over my stomach, and had a look around. With a visual reference reestablished, my inner ear informed me that I was lying, feet-down, at something like a forty-five-degree angle—so at least I was pointing in the right direction.

Five centimeters in front of my face was a concrete wall, the imprint of the wooden forms it was set into clearly visible on its surface. The clearance narrowed toward my feet, reaching a bottleneck over my knees. I gently moved my feet around—I had more room there.

Hard up against my left was a wall of what looked like compressed earth, and to my right was a space blocked by a portcullis made of rebar that would have neatly bisected me had it been half a meter closer. Then, presumably, I could have been pickled, put into a glass case, and displayed at the Tate Modern. Brit art’s loss was my gain, but it did mean I couldn’t wriggle that way. As far as I could tell, I was currently lying inside a sort of concrete tent with no visible way out.

I extinguished the werelight—they burn underwater but I didn’t know yet whether they burned oxygen, and I decided it was better safe than sorry. In the renewed darkness I considered my options. I could try and use impello to dig myself out, but that would always run the risk of collapsing the rubble on top of me. I had to assume that a rescue attempt would be made. Even if Reynolds had been a casualty, Kumar was farther down the platform, and he knew I was here. In fact, there had to be CCTV footage of the whole thing from the feed into the station control room. I bet it was spectacular and even now probably finding its way to the news company with the biggest checkbook.

Any rescue attempt would involve people clumping around in big boots, yelling at each other, and operating heavy equipment. Chances were that I would hear them long before they could hear me. My most sensible course of action would be to lie still and wait for rescue.

It was remarkably quiet. I could hear my heartbeat and was in danger of starting to think about my breathing again, so I made myself think about something else. Like who the hell our pale-faced hoodie Earthbender was. Now, you could literally fill two whole libraries, complete with card files, reference sections, and a brass ladder thing that whooshes around on rails with everything I don’t know about magic. But I think, had it been at all common, Nightingale might have mentioned a technique for gouging great big holes in solid cement.

Nightingale aside, the only practitioner that skilled whom I’d ever met was the Faceless Man—who could catch fireballs, deflect flying chimney stacks, and also, possibly, leap moderately sized buildings in a single bound. I knew this hadn’t been the Faceless Man himself because the Earth-bender’s body shape and posture were all wrong. Could he have been an acolyte or a Little Crocodile or possibly one of the Faceless Man’s chimeras?

Lots of possibilities, not a lot of facts.

The Earthbender had been traveling east, back into the West End, and got off at Oxford Circus, a station less than a kilometer from the original Strip Club of Doctor Moreau. After closing the club down, Nightingale and I speculated that the Faceless Man’s new base of operations couldn’t be very far from Soho. He might be faceless, but his chimeras, his poor little cat girls and tiger boys, weren’t exactly inconspicuous—hard for them to move around unnoticed, and most sightings of them had been in the area. When I was chasing after the Pale Lady, she’d headed for Piccadilly Station as if it was a safe haven. But they certainly weren’t getting around on the tube with its ubiquitous CCTV cameras and the ever-vigilant Sergeant Kumar.

Now I knew there were other tunnels, secret tunnels and who knew what else, all going who knew where. Perhaps the Faceless Man knew where. Perhaps the Earthbender was helping him build more. A subterranean secret base in the fashion of a James Bond villain. The Faceless Man had the accent for it, true, but did he have a cat? I had a flash of him sitting in a swivel chair with a full-sized cat girl called Sharon perched on his lap while she was talking to her BFF on her mobile. “And then he’s like, ‘Do you expect me to talk,’ and the master’s all ‘No, I expect you to die!’ and he’s … What? I’m just telling Trace about last night.” The thought made me giggle, which was nice—you need a bit of humor when you’re buried under a ton of rubble.

I reckoned the sly fucker had built his new lair under cover of the Crossrail construction work. Why not? The project had been sinking random holes into the ground for years and wasn’t even expected to be completed for at least another five—you could have stuck a whole hollowed-out volcano adjacent to Tottenham Court Road Station without the public noticing.

But not without the contractors noticing, or Health and Safety for that matter, then I remembered a cool autumn night and coming across the Murder Team closing off a crime scene at the top of Dean Street. Was that Graham Beale’s little brother? A top subcontractor on Crossrail and a tunneling specialist, as their family had been for more than 160 years.

Could he have been done in by the Faceless Man to cover up his new base? In which case it didn’t work, did it? I thought. Because now I know where to start looking, you freaky faceless phantom you.

I laughed out loud. It felt good, even if it did cause dust to fall into my mouth. I tried to spit it out but as I turned my head to the side I started giggling again. A little warning bell in my head went off and I remembered that euphoria is one of the warning signs of hypoxia.

Along with impaired judgment—which might explain what happened next.

I conjured a second werelight and had another look around my concrete coffin. To maximize my chances of getting some air, I wanted to punch a hole upward, but not so close to me that if I brought the roof down I would be under it. I chose the top corner on my right on the far side of the rebar portcullis and ran through the impello variations in my head. Impello, like lux, is what Nightingale calls formae cotidianae, meaning that generations of Newtonian wizards have poked and prodded and experimented and found lots of fun variations they then pass on to their apprentices who pass them on to theirs. The hardest thing to learn about magic is that it’s not about wishful thinking. You don’t make an invisible pneumatic drill by picturing it in your mind. You do it by shaping the correct variation of impello, lining it up in the right direction, and then essentially turning it on and off as fast as you can.

No doubt there was a fourth-order spell, of elegant construction, that would have served. But I didn’t know it, and when you’re buried under the ground and running out of air, you go with what you’ve got.

I took a deep breath, which didn’t satisfy the way it should have, and smacked my drill into the corner. It made a satisfyingly loud thumping sound. I did it again, then again, trying to get a rhythm going. Dust spurted with each impact, falling slowly as a haze in the still air. I stopped after about twenty strikes to check my progress and realized there was no way of measuring it.

So I started banging away again as dust thickened and my breathing got shorter, and then suddenly there was a thud just behind my right eye and everything went dark. Sweat broke out on my face and back and I was suddenly terrified that I’d done something irreparable. Had I just pushed myself into a stroke? Had I gone blind or had my werelight gone out? In the pitch-dark it was impossible to tell.

I didn’t dare conjure another werelight for fear that I’d give myself another stroke—if that’s what had happened. I lay still and pulled funny faces in the darkness—there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with either side of my face.

Then I realized I was breathing deeply and the air smelled fresher. So at least the drill had worked.

I don’t know how long I lay there in the darkness, nursing a really bad headache, before I noticed that water was pooling around my boots. I did a little kick and heard it sloshing around. Ever since I’d started hobnobbing with Goddess of the Thames and her daughters I’d started taking a keen interest in the hidden hydrography of London. So it didn’t take me long to work out that the nearest river to me was the Tyburn. But from the lack of smell, I figured that this water was more likely coming from a ruptured water main.

In 1940 sixty-five people died when a bomb ruptured water and sewer pipes that flooded Balham Tube Station. I really wasn’t in a hurry to re-create that particular historical precedent.

I told myself that my little void was unlikely to fill very quickly and in fact there was no reason for me to think the water level would reach any higher than my ankles. I found myself just about as convincing as you can imagine, and was considering whether to indulge in a bit more panicked screaming when I heard a noise above me.

It was a vibration in the concrete, sharp percussive sounds of metal on stone. I opened my mouth to shout but a shower of earth fell from the darkness and I had to turn my head and spit frantically to avoid choking. Bright sunlight struck me like a blow on the side of my face, fingers dug into my shoulders. There was swearing and grunting and laughter and I was yanked into the light and dumped on my back. I flopped around like a fish and flailed my arms around just because I could.

“Watch it, he’s fucking possessed,” a man said.

I stopped moving and lay on my side, just getting my breathing under control. I was on grass, which was a surprise, I could feel it against my cheek and the green smell was tickling my nose. Birdsong, shockingly loud, came from above me and I could hear a crowd, which was to be expected, and the lowing of cattle—which wasn’t.

As my eyes adjusted to the bright light I saw that I was lying on a grassy bank. About three meters in front of my face was a haze of white dust kicked up by the feet of passersby and a herd of a cattle. Pint-sized cattle, I realized, because their shoulders barely reached the chest of the teenage boy who was driving them with expert flicks from a longhandled whip. The minicows were followed by a stream of strangely dressed people all carrying sacks over their shoulders or satchels under their arms. They mostly wore long tunics of russet, green, or brown, with caps and hoods open on their heads, some bare-legged, others in tights. I decided to stop looking at them and concentrated on sitting up instead.

Oxford Circus is fifteen kilometers from the nearest farm. Had I been moved?

I tried to work some saliva into my mouth—somebody had to have something to drink. And soon.

A couple of meters away a trio of disreputable-looking white guys was staring at me. Two of them were bare-chested, wearing nothing but loose linen trousers that were rolled into their belts and barely reached their knees. Their shoulders were ropey with muscle and sheened with sweat. One had a couple of nasty red welts striped down his upper arm. They had dirty white linen caps on their heads and both of them were sporting neatly trimmed beards.

The third man was better dressed. He wore an emerald tunic, with fine embroidery around the neck and armholes, over a brilliantly white linen undershirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The tunic was cinched with a leather belt, an elaborate buckle that supported a classic English arming sword with a cruciform hilt, contrary to Section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, which prohibits the carrying of blades in a public place. He had black hair cut into a pageboy, pale skin, and dark blue eyes, and looked familiar. As if I knew his brother or something.

“Has he been burnt?” asked one of the half-naked men.

“Only by the sun,” said the man with the sword. “He’s a blackamoor.”

“Is he a Christian?”

“A better Christian than you, I think,” said the man with the sword. He gestured in a direction behind the men. “Is that not your master? Should you not be about your work?”

The silent member of the pair spat into the ground while his friend jerked his chin in my direction. “It was us who dug him up,” he said.

“And I’m sure he thanks you for it.” The man’s hand slipped down to rest casually on the hilt of his sword. The silent one spat once more, clasped his comrade’s upper arm, and pulled him away. As I watched them go I saw there was a line of similarly dressed men, perhaps thirty, working with shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction on a ditch by the side of the road. It looked like a chain gang right down to a large man in beige tights, a russet tunic with sweat stains around the armholes, and a sword at his belt. The only reason he wasn’t wearing sinister mirrored sunglasses was because they hadn’t been invented yet.

My young friend with the sword followed my gaze. “Thieves,” he said.

“What did they steal?” I asked.

“My birthright,” he said. “And they are stealing it still.”

Some of the men were lowering hollowed-out tree trunks into the ditch, which, once sealed together with pitch, would form a crude pipeline otherwise known as a conduit.

“Water,” I said, wishing I had some.

“Not so burnt by the sun as to be lacking your wits,” said the man.

I recognized him then; or rather, I saw the resemblance to his father and his brother Ash. With an effort I clambered to my feet and turned to look along the road in the other direction. It stretched out, straight and dusty, between big wide fields that had been planted with green stripes of crops. A continuous stream of people, carts, horses, and livestock trudged toward a hazy orange horizon from which reared the oversized gothic spike of St. Paul’s Cathedral. That was London, this was the Oxford Road, and the young man with the sword was the original Tyburn from back when the stream tumbled down from the Hampstead Hills to quench the thirst of the crowds come to watch the executions. Now being diverted, by Royal Charter no less, to slake the forty thousand throats of London.

I hadn’t been moved. I’d been dug up eight hundred years too early.

“You’re Tyburn,” I said.

“Sir Tyburn,” he said, “and you are Peter of the Peckwater Estate, apprentice wizard.”

“Bugger,” I said. “This is an hallucination.”

“And you know this for certain?”

“I’ve heard Chaucer read out,” I said. “I understood one word in five and there’s this thing called the great vowel shift—which means everyone pronounces everything differently anyway. Which means I’m still stuck in the hole.” And if I started singing David Bowie’s “Golden Years” someone would just have to shoot me in the head.

I looked down into the ditch from which Tyburn and his merry band had “rescued” me. At the bottom there was a ragged hole a little bigger than a cat flap.

“Since you are fixed for certain, and can do nothing for yourself, does it matter where you wait for rescue?” asked Tyburn. “And I seem substantial to myself.”

“You might be a ghost,” I said, studying the ditch and wondering whether I should go in head- or feetfirst. “Or a sort of echo in the memory of the city.” I really had to come up with some better terminology for this stuff.

I jumped down into the ditch. The soil was soft, sticky yellow London clay. Headfirst would be quicker.

“Or we could get a boat to Southwark,” said Tyburn. “Hit the stews, get steamed—meet some hot girls from Flanders. Oh come on,” he pleaded. “It’ll be kicking and I’ve …” Tyburn trailed off.

“You’ve what?”

“I’ve been alone—here,” he said. “For a long time, I think.”

Possibly since you “died” in the 1850s, I thought, under a tide of shit, or so your father claimed.

“Now you’re saying things that I’ve just thought of,” I said. “You see why I’m suspicious.”

This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I’ve never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.

“Did you hear that?” asked Tyburn.

I was going to ask what when I heard it—a long wail floating over the landscape from the direction of London. I shivered.

“What’s that?” I asked.

The wail came again, wordless, angry, filled with rage and self-pity.

“You know who that is,” said Tyburn. “You put him there, you pinned him to the bridge.”

As an experiment I stuck my foot in the hole, which sucked at it with an unpleasantly organic movement.

The wail was fainter the third time, fading into the wind and the noise of the passersby.

“Sooner or later you’re going to have to set the hook-nosed bastard free,” said Tyburn.

Not anytime soon, I thought.

“I don’t want to die in a hole with my eyes closed,” I said, and shoved my foot in up to the ankle.

“Don’t do that,” said Tyburn and jumped into the ditch with me. “I know a better way.”

“Really?” I asked. “What’s that, then?”

“This,” he said, and hit me on the side of the head with the pommel of his sword.

I regretted the decision as soon as I opened my eyes to darkness, and the feel of water sloshing around my knees. It was cold—a wet suit won’t keep you warm if you don’t move about.

I wondered if I hadn’t been a bit hasty. Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge? The answer, if you’re a Londoner, is that it’s better not to die at all.

So that’s when I came up with the most ridiculous plan since I’d decided to take a witness statement from a ghost. It was a plan so stupid that even Baldrick would have rejected it out of hand.

I was going to reach out and contact Toby the Dog with my mind. Well not exactly with my mind—that would have been unlikely. Ever since Molly sent me on my little trip down London’s memory lane it had seemed obvious to me that all the accumulated vestigia that seemed to power the ghosts of the city were somehow connected. Information was definitely being passed from location to location. Like a magical Internet. How else had I seen so much of the city while my physical body remained in the Folly? I figured that if I could generate a sort of formless forma, enough to put magic into the stone, it might be possible to create a signal—a beacon that would propagate through the stone a memory that might be detected by a particularly sensitive dog of my acquaintance. Who would then bark in an expressive fashion and rush over to Oxford Circus as fast as his little legs would carry him. There, he would scamper about snuffling amid the debris and a particularly intuitive rescue worker would say, “Hold up, I think the mutt may be onto something.”

Did I not say it was the most ridiculous plan I’d ever thought of? It had to be Toby because one of the first things I’d done, once Lesley became an apprentice, was buy a pack of ESP cards and see if I could use magic to talk mind-to-mind. So me, Lesley, and Dr. Walid spent a fun afternoon re-creating various bonkers telepathy experiments from the 1960s and ’70s, with disappointing results. Even the one experiment where I tried to identify the forma that Lesley was creating didn’t work properly because while I could sense the “shape” in the magic, I couldn’t have told you what it was. And besides, even that much only worked when we were less than a meter apart.

That’s what I hate about science—negative results.

But Toby had proven to be sensitive to magic. And I’d always thought we shared a special affinity. And the water was pooling around my ribs and I was getting desperate.

I took a deep breath and created a forma in my mind. It was like lux, which you use for creating werelights and, with a bit of modification, fireballs, skinny grenades, and a really hot flame thing that I have hopes to use for burning through steel if I could get the heat to go in one direction only. Like the ESP experiments, I try to avoid telling Nightingale about my little innovations unless I have to explain why one of the labs is on fire. Lux was perfect because it’s known to put a lot of magic into the environment, and what I was going for was cool but noisy.

A dim blue light filled my concrete coffin, which was now half full of water. Reflections rippled across the ceiling in thin twists of green. I tried to maintain it as long as I could, but the pain in my head got worse and the forma slipped from my mind.

In my imagination, I began to hear the voices of the dead. At least I hoped it was my imagination. A lot of people have died in the Underground, through accidents, stupidity, or suicide. All the one-unders whose dying wish had been to make other people late for work.

I heard all those one-unders as distant wordless cries of despair and anger that was cut off with the same sudden bluntness as Macky the luckless graffiti artist.

“I’m not one of them,” I shouted—although I think it was only in my head.

And suddenly they were upon me. All the accumulated casualties, from the train crashes and the fires and the victims of the hideous suicide of the Bradford boy who didn’t want to work in his father’s chip shop no more. A lot of them had gone without warning, but others had time to realize what was happening, and some, the worst of all the cries, had time to build up a head of hope before the darkness swept them up into the stone and concrete memory of the tunnels.

The rising water was a cold band across my chest.

I didn’t want to die, but the truth is, the choice isn’t in your hands.

Sometimes the only thing you can do is wait, endure, and hope.

I heard rattling and scraping above me and for a moment thought it might be Sir Tyburn back for another chat, but then I heard the unmistakable and beautiful sound of a pneumatic drill.

I waited for a pause in the drilling and gave panicked screaming one last shot—this time with feeling.

Dust filled my mouth.

Then there was light in my eyes, which was suddenly obscured by a big black face.

“You all right, mate?” asked the face. I refocused and caught a flash of yellow helmet and heavy fire-resistant jacket. “Are you Peter Grant?” he asked.

I tried to say yes but my throat was clogged with dust.

“Want some water?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. Instead he gently pushed a plastic drinking straw between my lips. “Just a little bit at first,” he said. “I’m sorry there’s no paramedic for this, but things are a little tricky.”

Water trickled into my mouth and tasted the way water does when you’ve been thirsty for hours—like life itself. How long had I been buried? I tried to ask, but it just made me cough. I stuck to drinking the beautiful water instead. I sluiced it around my mouth and pulled my head back—the fireman withdrew the straw. I realized he was lying on the platform floor peering down at me through a hole. Behind him was a portable floodlight on a tripod, and behind that, visible in the reflected light, was more rubble. This was confusing me. I was fairly certain I’d only fallen a couple of meters.

It took them at least another hour to dig me out.

It’s difficult to describe the serenity of rescue, like a second birth. Only this time you’re secure in the knowledge that you know what you’re going to do with your life—even if it’s just what you were doing before.

They put me on a stretcher, plugged me into a drip, a heart monitor, and gave me a cool breath of oxygen. It was all good right up to the moment Lady Ty leaned over and frowned down at me.

“Tyburn,” I said.

She smile thinly. “Who were you expecting?” she asked. “International Rescue?”

I didn’t say Toby the Dog because I don’t have a death wish.

“Did you hear me calling?” I said, checking to make sure nobody was close enough to hear. “I was calling with magic.”

“I smelled you, boy,” she said. “You were stinking up the sewers, and while I had half a mind to leave you, I couldn’t take the risk that you’d smell worse dead.”

She leaned down until her lips were by my ear. Her breath was spiced with nutmeg and saffron. “One day,” she murmured, “I will ask you for a favor, and do you know what your response will be?”

“Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am—three bags full, ma’am.”

“You only become my enemy if you get in my way, Peter,” she said. “If you get in my way you should make sure my enemy is what you want to be.”

She straightened up, and before I could think of something clever to say she was gone.