“Remember the Boy Scout motto?” Wendy said ironically. She let go of the ropes and harnesses: a moment later they thinned into vapor, merging with the mist.
“We took to the rooftops ’coz that seemed safest, what with all the shooting,” Del explained. “Where’s the book, then?”
“Oh, wait.” Game Boy took a deep breath, then bent down. “Hello, book,” he said, laying hands on the leather cover: it felt greasy and slightly warm, and his mouth tasted like he’d just licked the contacts of a nine-volt battery. “I am picking you up because you seem to be lost, and I’m sure you need help finding your way back to your rightful owner.” It seemed very important to get these words exactly right. “I want to help return you to where you belong. It’s not right to leave books lying around on the streets in the rain. Del—” Game Boy swallowed—“here is a book. It does not belong to me but I want to help it go where it needs to be, to where it rightly belongs. I’m sure—” his mouth was abruptly dry—“it won’t hurt someone who is trying to put it right. Would you accept it from me now? It needs to go home.”
The devil was in the details: if the curse was activated by illegitimate acts of possession, Game Boy might have triggered it (or not), but by passing it voluntarily to another before the curse could fully power up, he was simultaneously insulating Del from it and removing himself from its crosshairs. Or so he hoped. Promising to take it to where it belonged was just a belt-and-braces precaution. He didn’t want to be on the receiving end of a razor-blade smile just because an insane eighteenth-century inquisitor hadn’t anticipated modern offshore financial vehicles in his ritual magic’s definition of ownership.
“Got it,” said Del. She opened the carpetbag she carried and slid the book carefully inside. “Follow me, I know exactly where we’re going.”
“To meet up with Imp and Doc?” asked Game Boy.
Del nodded. “Then we’re taking the ley line.”
“About time, too,” said Wendy, glancing around. “This place is getting to me.” A gibbering howl of sorrow and heart-stricken loss spiraled into the night, and the clappers of police rattles buzzed like huge, slow-moving hornets in the mist. “I can’t wait to get home.”
Del stalked up the alley beside Wendy, Game Boy scurrying along to take up the rear. Behind them, a slow tinkle of windchimes sounded, slow and doubtful. And then they went elsewhere.
“We’ve dropped the ball,” Eve announced, “I need to get home ahead of the rush. Which presents us with a bit of a problem.”
“Hmm,” said the Gammon, staring up the high street. They’d made their way out of the slum and onto a relatively well-lit road near Spitalfields. “We could take another cab…?”
“Not fast enough. We could take the ley line route instead, but we’d be behind them and on foot and we need to get ahead.”
A man on a bicycle—a recognizably modern safety bicycle with a chain drive, not a penny-farthing—pedalled slowly past, and Eve smiled, delighted. But of course, we’re at the right end of the 1880s, she thought.
The last decades of the nineteenth century had been a time of massive change and innovation, with new inventions coming thick and fast, upending the old order. Telephones, steam turbines, electricity, an endless litany of change: gas fires, electric timers, cylinder phonograph music players, movie cameras.
The modern safety bicycle was just another of the innovations of the 1880s, albeit one of the most visible. It landed in the middle of the decade with a bang, like a Victorian harbinger of the iPhone. They were suddenly everywhere, the first form of cheap mass transportation to emerge and a must-have personal accessory for the modern generation. Unlike the earlier penny-farthing, safety bicycles didn’t require gymnastics to mount and dismount—and they were available to women, who took to them with alacrity.
By 1892 they’d killed the older two-wheeler stone dead. And they were the answer to Eve’s dilemma.
“Mr. Franke? Get us bicycles.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The Bond hid among piles of skeletons wrapped in stiff and rotten shrouds like too-old spiderwebs. While he lurked, he brooded: and as he brooded, he checked his sole remaining pistol.
They’re not late yet, he told himself. The indefinite they applied equally to Imp’s motley crew and the assclown Transnistrians (whom he had every intention of teaching a short, sharp lesson in fire discipline), or even the chilly ice maiden Miss Starkey. It was only a matter of time before somebody brought him the book, and when they did he’d be ready.
He’d made it to the plague pit highlighted on the map, swallowed his misgivings, and tackled the sunken road at a ground-eating jog. Time moved strangely in this space, and he wasn’t sure how long he’d been there—but whatever, he’d not run into anyone along the way and it was pretty clear that neither the Lost Boys nor Miss Starkey were up to the sort of brutal wilderness forced-march he’d cut his teeth on in BUD/S land warfare school. (The mafiya guys were another matter, but he was pretty sure they had run into something—someone—heavily armed. They wouldn’t be coming at him without prior attrition.)
The ley line thoroughly spooked him. That bell-like mocking laughter—he’d lit up the sunken path with his guns, bullets thundering into the mist. It hadn’t worked, and he’d expended half his remaining ammunition along the way. He’d also lost his second Glock 18. He’d put it down while he prepped a reload magazine, and when he reached to pick it up again the tree roots fought him for it, gnarly tubers coiling around the grip and the barrel until he released it and fled, swearing up a silent blue streak inside his skull.
So now here he was, holed up in a graveyard charnel house at the homeward end of the ley line, all tooled up
