Kate Griffin - The Neon Court: Or, the Betrayal of Matthew Swift

As he stormed through a door into what I guessed to be the sitting room I followed. He reached out for a phone, and I tapped him on the shoulder. He spun, hands coming up into fists. As he did, we caught him round the throat with our scarred hand. Sapphire fire flared behind our eyes, we felt the hair stand up on the back of our neck. The light flickered in the hall, electricity snapped in the sockets, blue sparks crawled around the handset of the telephone, the TV flickered on and mad static danced over its screen. He wheezed and pawed at our hands as the electrical fire built inside our soul and, for a moment, he met our eyes, and was afraid.

Hi, we said. Let us make our position clear. We are the Midnight Mayor, protector of this city, carrier of its secrets and bearer of its shadows. The shadows watch us as we pass, the pigeons turn away at our passage, the rats scurry beneath our feet and shudder at the sound of our footsteps on the stones. We are the blue electric angels, the telephones sing at the passage of our voice, our blood is blue fire, our soul carries a pair of angel wings. We are the killer of Robert Bakker, sorcerer, master of the Tower; we destroyed the death of cities; we came back from the dead, Swift and the angels, two minds become one, two souls in one flesh, in one form, in one voice. We are me and I am we. And were frustrated.

A Madness of Angels
The Midnight Mayor

By Catherine Webb

Mirror Dreams
Mirror Wakes

Waywalkers Timekeepers

The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle

The Obsidian Dagger:
Being the Further Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle

The Doomsday Machine:
Another Astounding Adventure of Horatio Lyle

The Dream Thief

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-0-748-11919-6

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Catherine Webb

Excerpt from The Drowning City by Amanda Downum

Copyright 2009 by Amanda Downum

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

Who, me?

Midnight Mayor. Protector of the city.

Go figure.

Remark attributed to M. Swift, 127th Midnight Mayor of London; probably apocryphal

Theres something at the end of the alley.
Its waiting for you.

Anonymous graffito, Soho

In which an enemy asks help of the last person in the world you might have expected, a fire leads to more than just minor burns, and a war breaks out in Sidcup.

I thought I could hear footsteps in the darkness behind me. But when I looked again, they were gone.

I was in the middle of a sentence. I was saying, dragon is probably too biologically specific a way to look at the

Then someone grabbed me by the throat with the fist of God, and held me steady, while the universe turned on its head.

There was a hole in the world and no fingers left to scrabble.

I fell into it.

It was my phone ringing in my pocket that woke me.

I fumbled for it and thumbed it on, held it to my ear without raising my head, just in case stillness was the only thing keeping my head attached to my body. My throat was dry. I guessed it had something to do with all the smoke. I said, Yeah?

Penny, my apprentice, was on the other end. She sounded too cool, too calm, and therefore afraid. You vanished.

Uh?

Like hello poof whoops bye bye.

Uh-huh?

You dead?

That supposed to be funny?

I rolled onto my back, every rib in my chest pressing against skin like they had been vacuum-packed into place. Something wet and sticky moved underneath me, made the sound of velcro tearing. My fingers brushed it. It smelt of salt and iron. It had the thickness of thin honey. She said, So what the fuck happened?

I licked my lips. They tasted of charcoal. Summoned, I wheezed. Why was it so much work breathing in here? Some bastard summoned. Me. Summoned me.

The smoke was getting thick now, grey-black, tumbling in under the crack beneath the door. Through it I could half see the walls, cracked and grey, the only colour on them from scrawled messages in cheap spray paint,

ANARKST 4EVR

JG WOZ ERE

NO GOD GAMES ALLOWED

help

WERE WAITING FOR YOU

I said, Ill call you back, and hung up before my apprentice could start swearing.

My eyes burnt. The room was too hot, the light behind the smoke too bright. Somewhere outside the broken window it was raining, thick pattering on the still London night. I crawled onto my hands and knees, ears ringing. Something warm dribbled into the hollow of my ear, pooled there, then continued its journey down the side of my neck. I felt my head, found blood drying in my hair, and a lump. I looked down at the floor and at the same sticky stuff on my fingertips. Against my skin it had appeared almost black, but in the dull sodium light that reflected off the belly of the night-time clouds, and the glare of the unknown something on the other side of the smoke-tumbling door, it was undeniably crimson.

Undeniably blood.

But not my blood.

That at least was a pleasant discovery, though it came with the snag that it was not my blood because nothing bled that much and lived. It had saturated the thin carpet, splattered across the gutted tattered remains of a couch, smeared its paw marks over the paint-scrawled wall behind a low gas stove and a graveyard of broken beer bottles. It was fresh, and only felt cool because its surroundings were so rapidly growing hot.

Someone had been finger painting on the floor with this blood. Theyd painted a pair of crosses. One was smaller than the other, nestling in the top left-hand quadrant of its big brothers shape. Look at it with a knowing eye, and you might consider it to be a sword, not a cross, although when your tool was blood and your surface was carpet, the distinction was academic. What it was, and what there could be no doubt that it was, was the ancient emblem of the City of London and, by no coincidence at all, the symbol once carved by a mad bastard, with a dying breath, into the palm of my right hand the mark of the Midnight Mayor.

I made it to the window, pulled myself up by my elbows, broken glass cracking underneath the sleeves of my anorak, looked out, looked down. A half-moon was lost on the edge of rain clouds turned sodium orange by reflected street light from the terraced roads below. A line of hills cut off the horizon, their tops tree-crowned and unevenly sliced by the carving of motorway planners. The falling rain blurred everything: the neat straight lines of buildings that peeked up between Chinese takeaways and bus stations; the pale yellow worm of a mainline train arcing towards a floodlit station; the darker stretch of a public heath on a low hill around which tiny firefly cars bustled; the reflection of TV lights played behind curtained windows; big square council estates with bright blue and red buttresses as if the vibrancy of colour could disguise the ugliness of what they supported. But no distinctive landmarks other than to say that this was anonymous surburbia, not my part of town. But still my city.

I looked down. Down was a long way away. Paving stones shimmered black with rain-pocked water, like a disturbance on the dark side of the moon. A play area of rusting swings and crooked see-saws. A little patch of mud sprouting tufts of grass for dogs to run about on; a bicycle rack that no one had trusted enough to chain their bicycle to. A line of garages, every door slathered with graffiti ranging from would-be art to the usual signatures of kids out for a thrill. A single blue van, pulling away up the narrow street leading from a courtyard below and out of my line of sight. The glow of fire where there should only have been fluorescent white floodlights, and somewhere, not very far at all, the sounds of alarms starting to wail and flames eating at the door.