I’d just nearly been killed three times in four days. The first time I’d been saved by Luna, the second time by Anne, and the third time by Caldera. If I kept this up, then sooner or later Will’s lot were going to catch me when I didn’t have a super-powered woman around to help me out. When what you’re doing isn’t working, you stop and figure out what’s wrong.
What was I doing wrong?
The first time, Will and the adepts had found me at the casino. The second time it had been at my house, and the third time it had been at Richard’s mansion. But looking back on it, I had advance warning each time. Before the casino, I’d met Lee on the rooftops, and I’d gone out anyway. I’d spoken to Will in the shop, and even though it was obvious they knew where I lived, I’d gone to sleep in my flat. And then, even knowing that they had a way to track me, I’d gone to Richard’s mansion. I’d used the annuller, which would have blocked most tracking spells . . . but I hadn’t known for sure that it would block their tracking spell. What I should have done was find an empty, quiet place and then look into the future for however long it took to confirm that they weren’t going to find me. Trying to make sure that something can’t happen is slow and frustrating work, but I should have spent the hours to do it and I hadn’t.
Arachne was right—I had been careless. And I’d put Caldera and Sonder at risk as a result.
It’s an unpleasant feeling to realise that other people are paying for your mistakes. Worse, this was something I was supposed to be good at. I’d been careful about this kind of thing once. Back in Richard’s mansion I never would have been so thoughtless—if I had, I wouldn’t have survived. The only thing that had kept me alive through those two years had been a hair-trigger sense for danger. Every second and every thought had been utterly focused on survival. What had changed?
I’d changed. It was as simple as that. For most of the past year I’d been spending my time teaching Luna, helping Anne and Variam, dealing with customers, working, relaxing, socialising, and generally having something much closer to a normal life. Oh, there had been danger, but it had been the sudden kind of danger, usually solved by running away. I’d never been seriously and persistently hunted. Even when I’d realised that Will and the adepts were coming for me, I’d treated it as a problem to be investigated.
But right now I wasn’t an investigator, I was prey. If the Nightstalkers caught me, they would kill me.
First they’d have to catch me.
Understanding that felt like opening a door to a part of my mind that had been closed for a long time. I felt the old animal wariness start to seep back, and I looked at the problem coldly and dispassionately. As long as the Nightstalkers had a reliable way to track me, they could keep forcing fights on their terms. If I allowed them to do that then sooner or later I’d be brought down and killed. The first priority had to be to break their tracking link.
The only thing so far that seemed to have blocked the link was Arachne’s lair. I’d been there for a day and a half after the casino fight, recovering, and the Nightstalkers hadn’t gone after me there. It had taken them much less time than that to track me down everywhere else, so evidence suggested that the wards on Arachne’s lair were strong enough to hide me. Which meant that whatever their spell was, it wasn’t unstoppable.
But I couldn’t stay in Arachne’s lair forever. I needed a way to hide while moving, and my best chance at doing that was my mist cloak. The first task was to retrieve it.
Getting past the police was the easy part.
I could only guess at the number of detectives who must have been swarming over my flat throughout the morning, but London’s a busy place and, no matter how spectacular the explosion, sooner or later the police have somewhere else to be. There was only one PC on duty, standing at the front of my shop and waving tourists away from the blue-and-white POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape.
Humans have a habit of thinking in two dimensions rather than three. We remember to guard the back door and the front door; we don’t usually guard the roof. I got onto the rooftops via the nearby flats, passed the railway line where Anne and I had made our escape last night, then crouched in the shadow of a chimney stack and looked into the future of what would happen if I stayed here.
The Nightstalkers were on their way, which wasn’t good news but by this point really wasn’t much of a surprise. Not only had the nocturne not shaken them, they actually seemed to be homing in on me faster and faster each time. I followed up the routes to check and . . . yes, they were going to gate onto the roof ahead, probably at the same spot they’d used to try to cut me and Anne off last night. I had maybe five minutes before they arrived.
I could run, but that would just be making the same mistake all over again. They’d keep chasing, and I’d be burning energy running away, reacting to them instead of doing anything constructive myself. Instead I looked into the futures in which I got my mist cloak. There wasn’t time to confirm that it’d hide me but it looked possible, and even if it didn’t work I’d have a better chance behind my home defences than out in the open. I moved quickly across the rooftops to my flat, skirted the hole in the top, and climbed down to the balcony to let myself in. My flat was a mess. While Anne and I had been busy with Ja-Ja, Variam and Luna had been fighting off the rest of the Nightstalkers below. It looked like they’d made their stand on the top landing, and the walls and banisters were charred. I moved down the stairs, heading for my safe room.
There are three floors to the building I live in. The first floor is the shop, along with a small boxroom for storage. The third floor is the flat where I actually live, with my bedroom, living room, bathroom, and kitchen, as well as the way out to the balcony and the roof. The second floor has the main storage room, a spare room which I converted into a bedroom last year and which is currently being occupied by Anne, and another door which looks sealed off. It isn’t—it’s my safe room, and it’s where I keep anything really valuable or dangerous.
I touched a spot on the door, said the command word, and felt the wards go down as I let myself in, shutting the door behind me. My safe room doesn’t have any windows and with the door shut it was pitch-dark. I didn’t turn on the light, relying on my diviner’s senses to navigate. My mist cloak was hanging on a peg at the side of the room; I pulled it around my shoulders, feeling the magic in the item meld itself around me, then I stepped to the corner and waited.
It’s easy to pick up magic items when you run a magic shop. I’ve been doing it for years and the size of my collection would surprise most mages . . . if I’d ever show it to them, which I wouldn’t. Although the safe room was dark, I could feel the dozens of overlapping auras from the items, holding steady in an uneasy equilibrium. The contents of the room would have looked bizarre to anyone able to see them. There was a sword hanging on the wall, oddly curved and with a hilt sculpted into the shape of a crocodile. A pale green egg rested on a shelf, point up in apparent defiance of gravity. Three darts were clamped tightly into a metal holder with a lock on it, and a white-and-blue tube of lacquered wood carved with flowers sat on its own in the middle of the table, far away from everything else. Odd items with odd purposes, most of them useless except for the person or situation for which they were designed. But just a few were very useful indeed, and my mist cloak was one of them.
My mist cloak is an imbued item and actually alive, though not in a way most people would understand. It’s weak by imbued-item standards, which makes it vastly more powerful than the one-shots I usually carry, and it does two things. The first is a type of adaptive camouflage, its colour changing to match its surroundings. It’s not invisibility—you can be seen if you move, and in broad daylight you just look very unfashionably dressed—but in cover or shadows, it makes you pretty hard to find.