A Madness of Angels

no more space left in the tunnels, they climbed up onto the streets and drew their creatures and their words onto the walls of the university library, and the Starbucks, and the closed shutters of the newsagents, and the pillars of the stations.

Below ground, the delegation of a dozen or so warlocks moved from room to room and blessed them in the names of the spirits from whom they drew their special powers: Harrow, Lord of the Alleyways; the Seven Sisters, Ladies of the Boundaries; Ravenscourt, Master of Scuttling Creatures; and of course, our personal favourite spirit to invoke – Upney, Grey Lord of Tar. Theirs was a borrowed magic of other powers; high priests in the service of skulking city shadows.

The Order kept themselves to themselves, but the street kids under the Whites’ protection, scampering from room to room with wide, marvelling eyes, whispered of enough weaponry to fight a war, and I believed them. I didn’t like to ask what the shapeshifters did, and they didn’t offer to tell. We all knew Lee would come. He would find us. Nothing would stop him now.

Blackjack found me, eventually, sitting with my back against an old, abandoned stack of telephone connectors, standing like an overgrown tombstone of dead wires and slots and metal frames and broken bulbs. Its presence comforted us, reminded us, in a strange small way, of our life before now, when we’d been on the other side of those wires, looking out.

He sat down next to me, considered his words, then said what I think he’d been intent on saying all along. “You look like a piece of rotting road kill.”

“Thanks.”

“Why the long face?”

“We don’t like waiting. Sitting around waiting for them to attack; we want to be outside, looking, exploring.”

“You’re talking in plurals again.”

“What?”

“‘We’,” he explained with an embarrassed expression.

“Sorry.”

He leant back nonchalantly against the bank of forgotten equipment, its edges flecked with rust, and pulled a small whisky flask out of his pocket. He downed a slurp and offered it to me. I took it and we risked a cautious gulp of the stuff; an acquired taste, we decided, although it grew in charm as it sunk deeper into our stomach. “So,” he said finally, in a strained voice that was leading to something more.

I waited.

“I got told I owe you for getting me away from the nutters with the guns.”

“The…”

“The Order.”

“Right. Yes.”

“Nice stunt; how’d you pull it?”

“I cursed the leader of the Order – Chaigneau – with a long and withering death,” I said. “He saw my point of view.”

“Bastard’s going to kill you, Matthew Swift,” he said brightly. “Just in case you hadn’t figured it out.”

“I know.”

“Although, if you need help when push comes to shove…”

“Thanks. I appreciate the offer.”

He gave me a long, sideways glance. “That means ‘no’, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“You like working alone.”

“I… have nothing here,” I said, struggling to find the right words, caught off guard. “The people I trusted or thought I could trust either can’t be, or are gone. Vanished, dead. Or those who may live I put at risk by my presence – people will get hurt around us. Given those circumstances, wouldn’t you rather work alone?”

“Don’t get me wrong; I get the whole lone rider vibe,” he said, raising his hands in defence. “But I’m just saying: it’ll put you in the scrapyard twenty years earlier than might’ve been.”

“We think… that we are grateful for your concern,” we stumbled. “Thank you.”

“That’s a fucking weird thing you’ve got going there,” he grunted, turning away and half shaking his head, hand going towards the whisky flask again.

“What is?”

“For Christ’s sake, Matthew, this is a fucking telephone exchange! Do you think no one noticed when suddenly poof, the voices in the wire went missing? Do you know how many nerds in basements were watching those rogue pieces of frequency, the bursts of inexplicable interference in the system? One second there’s a semi-demonic power whispering out of the telephone to anyone with half the senses to hear it, and the next second it’s just gone! And there you are, walking around with bright blue eyes and a bewildered crap expression and, you know, it doesn’t take a million brain cells to work it out. That’s what’s so fucking weird, the way you can’t work out if you’re even bloody human any more.”

I looked away, ashamed. We mumbled, “We… meant no harm.”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

We looked up sharply, trying to read his voice, his words. His eyes were fixed on an opposite bank of dead machinery as, with shaky fingers, he unscrewed the top of his whisky flask. “We also have nothing here, except what I remember, and that’s largely gone. We did not mean for any of this to happen; we hope you will understand.”

“This is a new one,” he groaned.

“What is?”

“Me talking to a bloody mystic power no less, disguised as a guy with a face like a soggy sandbag.” Clumsily he touched his forehead with a couple of fingers and smiled. “Nice to meet you, blue bloody electric bloody angels. How you doing?”

We looked him straight in the eye and said, “Things have been better.”

“I bet they bloody have.” He waved the whisky flask at us again; we shook our head.

“Was that Matthew or the angels saying no?” he asked. “Just in case one of you’s teetotal.”

“We are the same,” we said. “The distinction is merely one of presentation and form. To us… all things are new. Humans and the things they do. We were made by them… but had never experienced them before. As for me… I just want to get on with it. When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am… afraid… we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is… frightening, having to be me.” I caught his expression, somewhere trapped between genuinely bemused and hopefully open. I shrugged. “And I’m not teetotal. Thank you. I’d just like to keep a clear head.”

“Things are very weird,” said Blackjack.

“There,” we said, “we also agree.”

We waited in those tunnels for another two days before it happened. By the time it did, I almost believed that it wasn’t going to, that Lee had got his head screwed back on right, that Bakker wouldn’t order it, that they wouldn’t come. No one said it; but we had begun to think it even after the first night. It was hard to tell whether I felt disappointment or hope when Vera woke me up with a shake in the dark and murmured, “Come. Now.”

I followed her through tunnels lined with sleeping bags below still-damp paint, stepping over the hunched forms of snoozing weremen, the curled-up shapes of slumbering warlocks and around the heavy black, weapon- laden bags of the Order, until we dropped down a narrow flight of grey concrete stairs, illuminated by a single light that sat in the wall like a squid clinging to the side of a sunken ship. The shadows here were almost thick enough to swirl like fog, and at the bottom, by a heavy, shut iron door, there lay a body, almost floating in a puddle of its own accumulated blood.

Holding up an electric lamp to see more clearly, Vera said in a hushed voice, “The door leads down to the Post Office tunnels. Trains used to go through there to the sorting offices. It’s not marked on the map.”

I said nothing and squatted down on the steps just above the body. Repulsed and fascinated, we reached out