A Madness of Angels

shock – long, beige, and with the faded brownstain of where my blood had seeped into it, dried, and been crudely washed out again.

He saw my expression and murmured almost petulantly between his jutting yellow teeth, “I keep something in honour of all my friends. I was going to take your heart – but when I looked again you had kept it for others!”

He neared the barrier, slowed, looking it over with a scornful air.

The woman’s fingers tightened on my arm.

He hunched down in an almost animal pose, head on one side, and then without any apparent effort, leapt. As he rose, the darkness seemed to stretch around him, and for a second, his coat – my coat, on his body – was nothing more than a raven’s wing, catching at the air, and his form stretched and shimmered like it was made of bent fog. His leap carried him up and forward. He sailed over the barrier, hit the space directly above its middle, and was, with a bang, thrown backwards. He sprawled across the floor in the darkness, and then, not showing any sign of injury or pain, picked himself up again. His eyes glowed with silvery light.

“Will you think to hold me?” he hissed.

I held up my Oyster card like a policeman’s badge in front of me, pointed directly towards him, and said, “These are the terms and conditions of carriage: ‘If you do not have an Oyster card with a valid season ticket and/or balance to pay as you go on it, you must have with you a valid printed ticket(s), available for the whole of the journey you are making. You may use your printed ticket in accordance with these conditions. All printed tickets…’”

The creature threw itself with a roar at the barrier again, his form stretching out around him until he almost filled the station; and again he was thrown back with a sharp electric bang.

“‘… remain our property and we may withdraw or cancel any printed ticket at any time. We will only do this for a good reason, and if we do, we will give you a receipt.’”

He opened his mouth and roared, and from his throat came the smell of rotting flesh and a rolling tide of darkness, physical darkness taking shape like moths that threw themselves at the barriers and the air above them and the spaces below and, whenever they hit the middle of the barrier, shattered into little black pieces of ash that faded as they sank to the floor.

I kept speaking, lost now in the spell, thrilled with it, and as I did, the air around the barrier thickened, growing firmer with every word until the shadow of the creature on the other side of the barrier was distorted by the sheer density of magic between us and it. I yelled, revelling in the feeling of it, “‘You must only buy printed tickets from official ticket outlets. If you buy a printed ticket from anyone else, it is illegal and may result in the ticket being withdrawn and the seller/you being prosecuted…’”

On the other side, the creature grew claws of ebony blackness and raked them across the barriers, but they didn’t even wobble. I screamed, the spell burning around me, filling me from head to toe, “‘The single fare that you must pay at London Underground stations or for journeys on London Underground and for journeys to places served by other operators, is the fare from the station where your journey begins to the station/Tramlink stop where…’”

With one last, almighty hiss of frustration, the creature launched itself at the barrier, scrabbled at the invisible wall of power suspended in its path, tore and snatched and pummelled at it and finally, wailing like an injured animal, fell back.

“‘… where your journey finishes.’”

I realised I was out of breath, my head spinning, my entire body now feeling light to the point where if I moved, I thought I’d float off the ground.

The lights started to come on around us. They spread back up the escalator and curled round the walls, encircling the black shadow, which now looked vaguely human again, standing in the middle of the concourse.

Through the wavering wall of force between us, it said, “I’ll come again, Matthew. For the blue electric fire, for your guardian angels, I’ll come again.”

Then, without a sound, without a sigh, it melted, darkness shimmering off its frame and boiling down to nothing but a shadow on the floor that raced away, up the stairs and into the night, as the lights all came back on.

I slid to the floor. Bewildered, I sat on the dirty tiles of Bond Street station, the slow, sneaky awareness slipping through my bones that I was alive.

The woman squatted down in front of me, keeping her distance. After a while she said, “You all right?”

“Uh?”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Can you walk?”

“What?”

“We need to leave this place.”

“We do?”

“I told the guard you had a gun.”

“Oh, yes, right. Walk. Sure. No problem. Give us a hand?” She hesitated, face crinkling in displeasure at the thought. “Fine,” I muttered, crawling onto my hands and knees and laboriously up. I felt like I hadn’t eaten for a week, or that this was the precursor to an almighty hangover. “Fine.”

I staggered up to the barrier and beeped myself out. She followed suit. The barrier opened and closed like the wings of a butterfly around us, no problems, no questions asked, the miracle of a valid ticket on the London Underground.

“Will it come back?” she asked, as we staggered up the stairs.

“You know,” I said honestly, suddenly very tired, “I have no idea. But I doubt it. Not tonight.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not used to being thwarted. Let alone twice.”

“Twice?”

“Come on,” I sighed and, fixing my eye on the nearest bus stop, went to find a way from that place.

On the night bus as I lay across the front seats of the top deck, she said very quietly, from the row behind me, “Twice?”

“Give it a break.”

“That… abomination… knew you. It called you by your name.”

“Uh-huh. It did too.”

Outside, the shop lights were green, yellow, orange, white, lighting up mannequins in all the latest fashions of the day, staring out contemplatively onto the quiet street below. Even the beggars were calling it a night, opening up their pieces of cardboard in front of the shop doors and stretching out their sleeping bags at the feet of the ATMs while the day’s litter – takeaway boxes and McDonald’s packaging, HMV bags and the plastic wrappings of newly purchased CDs, receipts and cigarette butts – billowed in the wake of the passing night bus.

“You knew what it was. You knew that it was coming.”

“We’ve met before,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll work it out.”

“What was it?”

“A shadow,” I said. “Just a shadow. You can call it Hunger. That’s all. All there is to see.”

“What was the spell that stopped it?”

“Basic warding.”

“With an underground ticket?” She sounded amused, rather than surprised.

I groaned and sat up – explaining the intricacies of magical theory while sprawled across the top deck of a bus wasn’t, I felt, the appropriate way to deliver the lesson. “What exactly is your part in this?” I asked flatly. “You seem to know bugger-all about magic, have sod-all feel for it. You have no… flavour on the air, your movements leave no colour, no smell of spice. What the hell are you doing with Sinclair and that lot?”

She smiled thinly, and looked down at her bloody hands, folded in her lap. “My disposition lies elsewhere.”

“What’s your name?”