He heard an abrupt strangled wail cut eerily short. It broke through the ringing in his ears and his talent screamed divefortheground. Game Boy dropped face-first to the pavement, choking on the sweet-sick stench of raw sewage nearby, just before an arpeggio of eardrum-pounding automatic gunfire cut the night apart just above his head. He wasn’t the target, though. The target was a tinkling, chilling laugh of tinkerbell windchimes ringing in the steel breeze, voicing a wild, malignant glee that made his skin crawl. He’d heard it before, back in Imp’s mansion, and thought nothing of it. But it had followed them through the maze of memories of times past, growing more terrifying with every passing era: the Lares, the household gods bound to Imp’s family by their curse.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” Game Boy babbled under his breath, frightened half out of his wits even though the angry shouting gunmen hadn’t spotted him. Someone else had caught their attention, but not their fire. Only one of them was shouting now, clearly issuing orders to the others. Bright spotlight beams lashed out, visible like searchlights in the foggy air as they crisscrossed the alleyway with lethal blades. Game Boy threw himself sideways, out of the path of deadly light. He heard metallic clicking and barked orders as the gunmen swapped out their magazines. One of them crouched over another, who had fallen, bubbling bloody froth that ran black in the tenebrous gaslamp glow. Something was stalking them.
Game Boy waited until their flashlight beams shone away from him, then scuttled for cover against the nearest wall. There he waited and watched, shivering from tension.
The one who had fallen did not move again, and now there were two. The one who had been on the receiving end of the other’s orders bent and picked up something rectangular—the book, Game Boy realized. And now his power was shouting GoGoGo! in the back of his head again, so Game Boy was off—racing away from them in the opposite direction, half-skipping and shuffling to break up the rhythm of his stride, until a prickling in his scalp told him to duck into a doorway and push. The door, slimy and rotten beneath his fingers, swung inwards into darkness.
Game Boy skipped along a narrow passageway in total darkness, walls close enough to touch without stretching his arms, and bounced over more than one body—sleeping or dead, he couldn’t tell—then into a room where he dropped and rolled to avoid clotheslining himself on a horizontal rope against which sleeping derelicts leaned. Another rope, another roofed-over yard, rats scuttling for cover.
A silent voice sang glassy-toned in his ears: “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack duck under the razor’s flick”—and then there was another door, an alley with flagstones slippery with noisome muck, a rotting gate, and another narrow street carpeted in unnatural mist. He tiptoed to the next corner and turned, to see two retreating backs half-shrouded by the smog, their bowler-hatted heads twitching side to side. His talent had taken him on a shortcut through a doss-house just as the thugs with the book began a sweep of the alley for threats. If he’d been in sight—
Game Boy darted after them, sure-footed with the practiced buzz of a speed run through a well-known level. Only his lack of health potions and power-ups held him back; that, and the sick knowledge that he’d never played this game before in his life, and might not live to do so again if he took a step wrong. Jack be nimble, this is the Ripper’s vestibule, only I’m not a—
A gurgling scream and a hand up-flung in the coiling fog-banks of the past: this Ripper targeted men as well as women, hard or soft made no difference. Game Boy dropped again, shivering with fear, as the last man standing from the goon squad screamed imprecations into the night then punctuated his rant with a squeezed trigger, blasting gunpowder shadows that strobed across the weeping brick walls on either side.
It takes about a minute, a quietly rational corner of his mind narrated: a minute from taking the book without permission to being struck down. The curse isn’t instantaneous. Assuming the stalker in the mist was actually the curse finding its way to the target, and not something else, some metaphysical epiphenomenon of this fever dream of Whitechapel made real. Not Leather Apron, not Spring-heeled Jack, but the tangible effect of a curse applied to a physical object. Game Boy breathed deeply of the foul air, suppressing his coughs until the gunman wound down from his screaming jag and ran off into the night, heading in the direction of the plague pit and ley line. He totally lost it, Game Boy marvelled. Not so easy to be a hard man when you’re on your own among aliens, is it?
Game Boy crept across the alley to where the book thief had fallen. It was mercifully dark, shrouding the dead man’s face in shadows and hiding the frightfulness that had been inflicted on his body. He’d dropped the book a few paces away, and Game Boy nearly tripped when his toe struck the spine. Bingo.
He raised his face towards the fuming chimneys and the clouds above and whispered, “Deliverator? I’ve got a package for you.”
Something rustled behind him: he jumped and spun round just in time to see the end of a rope drop to the pavement. A couple of seconds later a body dropped from the gutter above, stockinged feet gripping the rope as Del abseiled down from the rooftop. She unhooked her sling, shook down her hitched-up skirts, and stepped away from the wall as
