Greywalker - Vanished Part 11

Goodall answered his phone on the second ring. "Goodall. Go ahead."

"Mr. Goodall, Harper Blaine."

"How's England?"

"Mixed. I arrived at the hotel about six hours ago. Since then I've tried to contact Purcell, but he was abducted about eighteen days ago. Looks like some faction within the local branch of the fraternal order of bloodsuckers, but I don't know whose yet or where Purcell is now. Purcell's . . . a.s.sistant is still around, but he's not much use-he's homicidal and disinclined to help, to be blunt about it. The upside is that Purcell is still walking around somewhere. Or that's my guess based on the relationship between Purcell and his flunky."

I heard his thoughtful grunt and the sound of typing. "So no idea where Purcell is or who's got him. Any leads?"

"Not specifically. His office had been stripped of papers, except a few incomplete items. I'm following up on those tomorrow, since the business offices are closed here now."

"What sort of items?"

"Some bills and letters about taxes and rents. A lead from Jakob-the minion-that might be undevelopable. It comes off as gibberish, but he's not an idiot, so I'll have to see if I can make anything of it. It's not quite dark enough here yet, but I'll be going out again soon to see about Edward's other local contacts. No idea how that will go. So far, it's looking bad."

"Anything else?"

I didn't say I'd been followed. The sinister Mr. Marsden didn't seem to be part of the vampire community-quite the opposite-and I thought it was wiser to keep his presence to myself for now. "That's all I've got at the moment."

"I'll report. Stay in touch."

"Planning to."

We disconnected and I took my map out again to plan my evening stalking vampires. Prep can make up for a lot when you're not familiar with an area and I was going to do my best to case the vampire neighborhoods before I hit the streets again. At least this time I might not walk down an alley that had ceased to exist unless I wanted to.

Funny thing about vampires: They're arrogant. Sometimes stupid-arrogant, and I've used that to my advantage in the past. This was tricky, however. I couldn't just say I was there on Edward's behalf, since something had gone against him and I couldn't risk bringing the wrong attention to myself. I made the rounds of pubs and clubs, looking for signs of vampires on the prowl. Drunks and romantics were easy marks, and in the right kind of club, the herd would be especially pliable. Any place that catered to the emo and the fashionably disaffected would provide a preselected pool of easy, even willing, victims, but frankly any bar or club could do the same once the hour was late enough. Clerkenwell hosted a lot of possibilities around Cowcross and across the road from Smithfield, as well as farther up St. John's Street, where another fairy ring of pubs and clubs had sprung up around Clerkenwell Green near the small church of St. James Clerkenwell. The rowdy workingmen's establishments were unlikely to be useful, and I quickly learned to recognize them from their traditional signs and loquacious crowds spilling onto the street. The more avant garde and exclusive places with quiet frontages proved better stalking grounds.

As I poked about, I began to discern a pattern of local investment and caching that was interesting but not entirely clear. Several of the buildings that housed pubs heavily favored by vampires appeared to be in office blocks that were otherwise empty but very well-maintained. One of the pubs was located near the only gas station-petrol station, as the sign read-in the area. It also had a small, locked yard nearby where cars, motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles were stored. Remembering what my limo driver had said about the difficulty of negotiating traffic on anything bigger than a bike, this seemed to be a storage yard for a transportation pool. It looked like the vampires of Clerkenwell had collectivized a bit. Whether they could afford it as individuals or not, in such a close-packed environment owning a private car would be comment-worthy, and vampires don't like to draw comment. London's vampires were being discreet and careful. Centuries do that for you, I supposed.

I found a pale, pale woman in a club called Danse Noir. I'd never seen a vampire who looked so much like one-more than most-but I knew what she was by the gruesome red and black of her energy corona and the odor of things rotten and painfully dead. Her face was long and gaunt. Her skin was translucent, almost pearly, with the pal est of blue lines suggesting veins and cold vessels in a vague reticulated pattern below. Her long hair was naturally colorless, a dead, icy shade of white that had been streaked with wide swaths of artificial black gleaming like an oil slick. I glanced at her eyes, not wanting to be caught in her stare, and found them a strange, flat brown. The color was like my own, but lifeless as paint. Then I realized they were contact lenses, dry from a lack of tears but seeming to gleam from some inner light the color of h.e.l.lfire.

I started backing away, some instinct urging me to flee, though I'd backed away from only one vampire in my life. Then she stood up and lunged, grabbing my wrists and pulling me onto the bar stool beside her.

"No," she whispered. "Can't have you causing a scene. I'd like to stay a while longer. So you stay, too." Her fingernails bit into my skin like claws.

"I'll stay if you let go of my hands."

She looked surprised. "But if I hold on, you can't leave. Can you?"

I smirked at her-I had tried to smile but the still-panicking part of myself had twisted it a bit-and shifted aside through a cold ripple of temporaclines, wrenching my hands from her grasp as I slipped. She twitched in surprise but didn't try for my hands again. "That's a wicked trick." Her voice was low and a little sibilant, with broad vowels. "You must be the American creature there's been so much talk of."

"Who's talking about me?" I asked.

"Can't you guess? I'd heard you were clever."

"I prefer not to make wild suppositions," I replied, still feeling a ridiculous urge to get away. She reminded me a bit of Wygan, and the fear and disgust that particular vampire engendered in me was welling up in the back of my mind as I sat next to this one.

"Oh, but I don't want totell you. What fun would that be? It's so much more delightful to feel you fret. Let's play a game."

"No."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed my hand again and twisted my wrist. "You'll be sorry if you don't," she hissed. "She won't like it. She wants it to be a surprise, but I think it's much more fun to build the fear a bit first. I'll be doing you a favor if I tell you."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said, keeping my voice steady with effort. Was she schizophrenic and referring to herself or to some other "she"? I didn't know if vampires could be insane, since the human value for sanity wasn't applicable to them, being human only in their outer shape and pure monster at the core.

"Of course you don't. Not yet. And she won't know it was me that stopped her from wrecking the Pharaohn's plans. Oh, this will be fun! So much fun!" She was almost wiggling with excitement at whatever delight she antic.i.p.ated. "Here's a clue: The deacon of Christ Church wrote her name up and down and side to side."

It meant nothing to me. I liked mysteries, but that sort of riddle had never been my fascination. I didn't know where to start with it.

"No?" the vampire said, disappointed. "Oh, here's another, then: She isn't small so much as little." That was no better, but a feeling of dread was building in my guts as if some part of my brain had figured it out and wasn't telling the rest. She wanted me to guess something that would terrify. Toying with me brought a smile to her wide-cut mouth that made me queasy by its almost s.e.xual excitement. She chuckled and it rolled over me like the first wave of an Arctic storm. "Now you're thinking and you're scared. I like that. That's the difference between terror and horror."

She leaned very close and I could smell her breath of dust and carrion. "Terror is the instinct that tells you to run, dear G.o.d, run," she murmured. "Run for your life. But it just makes you into meat. Predators take the ones who run. Horror is the mind-thing, the worm of knowledge you can't stop turning over no matter how awful it is. It grows in your mind and destroys you by your own intelligence. That's why humans are the best prey. That is the thing that will drive you to despair if I tell you Mr. Dodgson's little heroine does not intend to let you go."

My heart lurched and stuttered in my chest. I wasn't a student of British literature and I had never been crazy for fantasy books or fairy tales, but even I knew the Reverend Mr. Dodgson had been Lewis Carroll. Alice Liddell had been the model for his "little heroine." I knew-had known-an Alice Liddell who'd looked just like the grown-up version of the photo by Dodgson in the front ofThe Annotated Alice. I'd seen it in a hundred bookstores. Not possible, I thought. She's just trying to scare me, though I don't know why-how-she'd know to pick that.

The Alice I'd known had been an ambitious vampire and tried to use me to break Edward's power and take control of Seattle herself. She'd interfered when a contingent of vampires and I, along with Mara Danziger and Quinton, had dismantled a dangerous magical artifact and accidentally set fire to a building. She'd spied on me for Wygan. Then she'd forced me into a magical binding that stopped me from helping Edward against her so she could grab the artifact for herself. In the struggle, I'd finally given in to the Grey and survived, sealing my fate as a Greywalker. But Alice had been staked to the floor of the burning building and left behind when the rest of us barely escaped alive.

It's not possible, I repeated to myself, but I had the awful feeling it might be. She could not have survived. But we'd never seen a body. And if anyone might hate Edward enough to come to England and ruin him, it was Alice-if she wasn't permanently dead. Alice had been good at grudges, good at hate. If she'd escaped from the flames of the doomed building, she would hate me with red pa.s.sion and black spite.

I stood up slowly and stepped away, keeping my eyes on the pale monstrosity on the bar stool. She glanced over her shoulder toward a door at the back. Then she returned her gaze to mine. She smiled so wide her fangs seemed to grow over her lip-more like the venomous hooks of a viper than the usual vampire's. Behind her dull contact lenses, her eyes flared with orange fire.

I had to look. I raised my gaze over her shoulder and saw Alice stepping through the rear doorway. My lungs seized and I thought my heart had stopped.

Alice had changed; in the crowd and at such a distance, details were lost, but it was her. She was in the company of two men wrapped in the fire and darkness of her aura. But they couldn't be men. They were something magical, though in the mess of swirling energies between us, I couldn't tell what. I backed to the front door, unable to keep the fear from rising in my chest like smoke that choked my lungs and made my head ring. Alice and her companions didn't see me, but the pale horror in front of me did and she laughed with sickening joy.

Outside in the street, I could still hear the white vampiress laughing, and the sound raked my spine and made me shudder. I steeled myself against it, but in the end, I ran. I dashed across Clerkenwell Green and down to the Tube station. I bolted away-anywhere away from that taunting laugh. Away from the impossible vision of Alice walking through the door.

TWENTY-FOUR.

Once again, bad dreams about Will roused me from sleep several times but they were amorphous things that couldn't keep my sleep-addled self up for long. Considering the state of my mind when I'd returned to my hotel, it wasn't surprising my sleep was disturbed. In the light of day, I told myself it was impossible for Alice to be walking around-she'd been burned to cinders-but I could not pretend I hadn't seen her, and the enraptured laughter of the vampire in the club at my hor her, and the enraptured laughter of the vampire in the club at my horror drove a nail through the heart of any hope that it wasn't true.

How? Why? What was she doing? Was she responsible for what was happening or was it a coincidence? The questions chased each other through my mind in a debilitating circle until I forced them aside. Alice wasn't the solution to Edward's questions, only a new facet to the problem. Even if she was causing the problem, she wasn't doing it alone. I crawled out of bed to work out until my brain relinquished the useless panic and let me concentrate on other angles. I put my mind to the scanty information I'd gathered at Purcell's and turned it over and over, looking for patterns, for leads and clues. When I picked them out, I concentrated on seeing where they led, not worrying about a dead vampire.

The hotel's concierge was very helpful when it came to finding the right places to ask questions about the import duties and real estate issues I'd glimpsed at John Purcell's.

The rents turned out to be a group of terraced houses in the suburb of Bishop's Stortford that had been, as the agent said when I found him in his office, in the Purcell family for a donkey's age. In fact, he couldn't find a record of the land ever having belonged to anyone else. The same was true for the narrow house in Jerusalem Pa.s.sage-land and building had been the property of a Purcell since the beginning of record keeping.

"Pro'ly back to the Romans," the estate agent joked. It wasn't impossible that it had been the same Purcell then, too, though it was unlikely. Vampires would have stood out a bit more back when the population was smaller. And whoever heard of a Roman named Purcell? So the land was Purcell's own little nest egg. His kidnappers wouldn't have cared about it if they were only interested in making trouble for Edward. They'd done nothing about his properties, which argued that Purcell's value to them was strictly as a lever against Edward.

The estate agent started rambling off on some tangent about what a lovely little town it was and he could find me another terrace or a semidetached in the area if I were interested. . . . I wasn't and had to shut him down rather harshly just to get out of his office. Clinging like a remora appeared to be a trait common to real estate agents on both sides of the Atlantic.

Having wasted a few hours with the real estate question, I then went after the remaining lead: Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs. I'd been advised that it would be easier to telephone than appear in person. Finding the correct office for the question you needed answered could be a right trial, the concierge had said. I paused for lunch in a prefab cafe sort of place called Pret before returning to my hotel to make the phone call at Edward's expense.

It was the sort of phone call that causes some people to go to the government bureau in question with fully automatic weapons and a duffel bag full of ammunition. I lost track of how many offices I was bounced through before anyone was willing to talk to me at all, and the person I got was, just like an IRS agent in the US, a recent immigrant whose English was heavily colored with an accent. "Look," I said to the woman, who finally agreed to help, "we want to pay the duty, but I need to find out what my client is being billed for."

She sighed. "Importation of six amphorae from Greece. Not considered historically significant pieces. It's on your letter."

"Yeah, a letter that's been destroyed. When and where were these amphorae delivered? Because we don't have them." I certainly hadn't seen anything like that at Purcell's home.

"That might be because you're over a year delinquent in paying the duty."

"That was before my time, so fill me in. When were they delivered and to where?"

She heaved another sigh and I could hear her typing and shuffling papers before she answered. "On twelfth July 2007, the six amphorae were held in the Excise and Customs warehouse in the Docklands and shipped on later that week. As they weren't bonded goods, they weren't held pending duty. Your client was billed but never paid. I've notes indicating he challenged the billing several times-claimed they were not his goods. These challenges are still in the process of resolution. Although . . . this past April he agreed to pay, but he has not yet."

"Where were the amphorae moved to? You must have a record of who picked them up, at least." "Oh, yes. I do have that. Sotheby's-the auction house, you know."

"Yeah. I know."

Will had told me Sotheby's moved a tremendous volume of goods from all over the world every year, so the coincidence of the amphorae being sent to the place he worked wasn't outrageous. And it wouldn't have anything to do with Will: He handled western European furniture, not Mediterranean antiquities. I did wonder why Purcell had suddenly decided to pay the duty after a year of contention. I still wasn't sure if he'd ever owed it or not.

I didn't get much more out of the woman and hung up feeling slightly trampled. A trip to Sotheby's was in order-the sooner the better-and it didn't hurt that I'd have an excuse to check in on Will. The increasing frequency of my bad dreams and my vision about him was worrying. I wanted to see for myself that he was all right, and I wanted to know if my sudden dreams of him were somehow connected to my search for my father and the truth about my own Grey past.

It took a bit of flipping back and forth in my maps to work out a route to Sotheby's on New Bond Street. It was longer than I could walk in a short time and I wanted to be there well before they closed up for the day. I'd have to take the Tube, and that seemed to mean walking to Embankment Station so I could get a train to Oxford Circus and walk on from there.

Since it was a cla.s.sy business dealing in antiques and things most of us can't afford, I dressed up, but I didn't go out the front door. I was pretty certain that it had been Marsden who'd followed me the day before, but I wasn't sure that others couldn't find me now that I'd been rummaging about among Clerkenwell's vampires. I slipped out the side door again and around the block to the Strand so I could join the crowds of students at King's College next door before I exited the school on the water side. The walk along the Embankment to the Underground station was lovely and busy enough to make losing a possible tail easy, though no one appeared to follow me. There were already plenty of students and workers heading for the trains, so I merged into the stream, just another businesswoman on the move. The trip from Embankment to Oxford was hot and crowded, and I emerged into chaos. Technically a circus in England is a traffic circle, but you could have thought of it as a big-top show just as well. The place was insanely busy, packed with workers, and tourists, and mothers chivvying children who had no interest in behaving, and I couldn't tell which direction I was facing. The pedestrians were a lot less polite than those I'd encountered in Farringdon Station, pushing and scurrying to get to the street crossings since most of the curbs were fenced away from the motorized traffic by chest-high iron railings. The openings in those railings were narrow, the walk signals were short, and the vehicles in the road were aggressively oblivious. I had to stop short of being shoved in front of a truck and then dash with a group of young men in bankers' suits to make it to the other side before the light changed. Then I wasn't sure where I was or which direction I was facing, and the other people on the sidewalk seemed to resent my stopping to look at my map while trying to orient myself.

People in more casual clothes stood in the middle of the sidewalks offering free newspapers from hip-high piles in plywood frames and further bottlenecking the foot traffic flow. I tried to work into the lee of one of these news pushers, but there was no lee. Rushing pedestrians, tourists, and commuters filled every s.p.a.ce and I had to back up against a stone wall to get even a tiny relief from their pressure to keep moving at all cost.

I turned my back to the traffic circle and tried to find a street sign. The nearest building had a white placard on it that seemed to read "John Prince's Swallow." A closer look showed it was two streets: John Prince's Street to the right and Swallow Place to the left, which met as they joined Oxford Street. Regent Street was behind me, Oxford Street running past me. I looked at the map, twisted it around a few times, and finally got the gist of where I was: only three blocks from New Bond Street, straight ahead.

I walked, pa.s.sing one shop after another jammed with clothes from the fashionable to the outrageous. The preoccupied commuters and the ogling sightseers were joined in their throng by shoppers weighted with bags that smacked into the legs and elbows of everyone nearby.

As soon as I turned onto New Bond, the foot traffic waned. Down a side street I saw a crowd gathering around the black-painted facade of a public house, the sidewalk and street choked impa.s.sably by their numbers. At first I thought the crowd was waiting for the pub to open, but then I noticed the gla.s.ses in hands, the clink and rattle of post-work social drinkers chattering like starlings and raising a fog of cigarette smoke.

The farther I walked, the lighter all traffic became until I could see little sign of the bustle at Oxford Circus and even the pubs had disappeared. The buildings were dignified and sat right at the edge of the wide sidewalks with no greenbelt or setbacks, putting up their predominately white fronts in an aloof row. The numbering system was not the orderly odds-on-one-side, evens-on-the-other of most US cities, and as I walked south I kept glancing across the street to be sure I hadn't pa.s.sed the building I sought on the wrong side.

A blue banner hanging over the sidewalk let me know when I'd found my destination. I stopped in front of the wide cream-colored building and looked it over. Two arch-topped plate gla.s.s windows flanked an arch-and-column doorway. In one window there was a photo display of Chinese ceramics and a sign giving information on their auction date. The other window showcased an upcoming auction of Asian metalware. Over the door a basalt bust of Sekhmet, an Egyptian G.o.ddess of something, looked out at the street from her small shelf. The figure radiated spokes of white and red light.

Then it moved.

TWENTY-FIVE.

In the Grey Sekhmet turned her lion head and stared at me. "What are you?"

For a moment I just blinked at her. She was a lion-headed woman-half a woman, really, since the statue was only a bust-and the window below her had in it what someone uneducated might well refer to as "pots." Sotheby's was the last place Jakob had ever run an errand for Purcell. Sotheby's, where the amphorae that Purcell said weren't his had been delivered and where my ex-boyfriend worked when he wasn't turning up tortured and murdered in my sleep.

A shape of light moved away from the carved black stone bust above the doorway and trickled to the pavement beside me, manifesting as the misty image of the G.o.ddess-a thin, bronze-skinned woman with the head of a lioness and a false mane created by her heavy, braided wig. She wore a thin dress of crimson linen that left her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s bare. Her hands were slim and graceful, but the fingernails were black claws. A sword and a knife were loosely belted at her hips. Gold bracelets and bands decorated her muscled arms and she had a bow slung on her back. A golden cobra sat on her head, holding up a disk that was as red as the sun seen through clouds of battle smoke. The cobra moved restlessly side to side, making the small sun sizzle.

Sekhmet looked me over with kohl-darkened eyes in her leonine face and licked her chops. "I have seen something like you before. . . ." she said. "Speak up: What are you?" she commanded. Her voice was an angry growl in my head, without substance in the air. "I may have to kill you."

"You'd be the second in as many days to try," I replied. She spooked me, but I wasn't going to let her know that. Lionesses are the ones that do the killing, after all, and last night I'd done all the running from predators I intended to do for a while.

She turned her head a little and looked at me from the corner of her eyes. "Have you an enemy? Are you a hunter that your prey turned upon? Speak!"

"I guess I'm a sort of hunter," I replied, glancing at the few people pa.s.sing on the street. They pretended not to notice my conversation apparently with myself, but hurried on. Maybe they thought I was using a cell phone with one of those ear widgets. "I look for things, for people, for answers." "And you come to my house on what business?"

"Your house?"

She sniffed in disdain. "They are soft and care not for blood-shed and war-they prefer gold as their weapon and baubles as their love-but they have taken me as their own for these past years when others had forgotten me. I do not let them suffer if it is in my power to stop it. You touch darkness and death. I shall not let you spread them here. What brings you? And do not prevaricate. My patience thins." "A man-a sort of frog-man-named Jakob came here a few weeks ago on an errand. I want to know what it was."

"The river sp.a.w.n. He brought a charmed letter for one of my people within. He had a stink to him I did not care for. I made him leave it and go."

"He's the servant of a vampire."

"Ah! The asetem-ankh-astet."

"The what?" I asked, wincing internally at having interrupted a G.o.ddess-they tend to be cranky about that.

She showed her teeth but forbore from attacking me. "The tribe that are the life of Astet-the priest who died, yet lived. They are numerous here, but not like the kind of my home. Those-the true asetem-are few, and you can tell them from the common blood drinkers by their fine white skins and cobra forms. They do not feed on blood, but on the ka-the soul. Once they helped me, but now . . . even they do not honor my name! Ambitious fools! I did not think your river sp.a.w.n reeked of their habits, but perhaps his own odor and that strange charm confused me. . . ." Sekhmet scowled. "I should have sent him away the first time with an arrow in his spine. He would have been better as a frog on a pike, roasting in the sun for crocodiles."

My mind was spinning and I felt a sense of doom rising in me. Some shrieking, distant voice in my mind was insisting that something horrible from the past was repeating itself, swelling out of history into the present like poison gas. The vampiress in the club-surely she was one of the asetem-ankh-astet? The description fit. It rang another bell as well: Hadn't my father described his "white worm-man" in similar terms? The thought made me queasy and I wanted to ask her about it, but I knew she wouldn't have much patience. And what about Alice? The white vampire I'd spoken with last night hadn't even liked her, so what was the connection? If the asetem were responsible for Purcell's disappearance, how was Alice connected? Or was she? She hadn't been connected to my father or she'd have taunted me with that information long ago.

I chided myself. I wasn't seeing something. I was letting myself be distracted by my fear and incredulity. I needed to stick to the most immediate question. "Jakob was here before?" I asked.

"I say it; it is so! He has been here several times in two cycles. He did not stink so badly at first, but he began to rot once he touched the wine jars. The corruption sealed in those vessels offends me even yet. What waste of blood! The asetem took them away, but the smell lingered."

"These wine jars . . . were they Greek ones? Amphorae?"

"They were the Greek style, but they never came from the clay of Greece. No Greek stores blood in jars such as those."

"There was blood in the jars? Old blood?"

"No! Corrupted with death and magic but fresh enough. I should have slaughtered them all!" And she gave a roar of fury, s.n.a.t.c.hing at her blades to clang them together over her head. She whirled back to face me, menacing and enraged. "Now you say you seek these things?"

"I don't. I wanted to know what was in them. I have a bad feeling they're meant for something terrible, that they have something to do with my past and my father's, but I don't know what. And I have a friend here I'm worried about. Someone who shouldn't have had anything to do with these jars, but I'm starting to wonder. . . ."

"Who? Which of mine do you care for?"

"His name is Will."

She shook her dreadlocked mane and growled. "Describe him to me!"

"Tall, talks like me, has silver hair, but he's young-"

"Gone! He has not come here since he took the letter your Jakob creature brought."

"The charmed letter? Was for Will?" Cold clutched my chest, strangling the breath in my lungs. My dreams weren't just dreams: Will was in trouble and it was Purcell who was behind it-Edward's agent, Edward's "friend." Or the asetem who seemed to know Alice and Wygan and white worm-men who'd probably killed Christelle and driven my father to suicide.

I started to bolt, to find Will wherever he was. The G.o.ddess s.n.a.t.c.hed my arm, jerking me back around. I should have been able to pull free, but I couldn't. Sekhmet sliced the palm of my left hand with the tip of her knife, releasing a fine bead of blood. She bent her head and lapped the wound, which closed again as she touched it. Then she narrowed her eyes at me.

"I taste life and death in you, hunter. You are of my charge-a warrior-but you shall have to choose your course yourself. I will not help you this time. You must first prove your worth. I charge you to choose justice. Or I shall see you at the gates of h.e.l.l and Anubis shall eat your heart. Do not betray me-I am a forgotten G.o.d, but not powerless where you go."

She threw down my hand, spinning me back to face Oxford Street. "Now. Run," she commanded. I ran, twisting back only once to look for her, but she'd returned to her plinth above the door, cold stone, black and patient. It wasn't fear of a G.o.d that made me go, or even fear of the past that chilled my bones, but fear for the living. I didn't understand how it had come about. I was here on Edward's business and it was Edward's broken empire that had been used to set this up, I had no doubt. Alice had tried to topple Edward before and it seemed she ought to be the one I found at the core, but the leads somehow came back to me and my father and whatever had happened to him. This was the cycle again, whatever it led to: The asetem had wanted something from my father, so they took Christelle. Now they may have taken Will. . . .

TWENTY-SIX.

I knew the address of Will's flat but I didn't know where it was in this rabbit-warren city. The tail end of rush hour clogged the streets and I fought for every step toward Oxford Circus. I'd I find a place to search my map once I was in the station's ticket lobby-I'd make one if I had to. There were eddies near the big maps on the wall that I could stand in long enough to find his street, people I could ask to direct me, poor befuddled American that I was. I'd even play the helpless female if I had to. I'm not religious but I do take the words of G.o.ds seriously these days. It's safer.