The reality was somewhat different, marked by a trail of rich folks’ tears. Grandpa had been coasting on empty in the wake of family tragedies both personal and financial. Grandpa’s two elder siblings had disappeared or died in some scandalous manner that nobody would speak of thereafter. The complicated family trust he’d inherited—set up by his own father, long on Suez Canal bonds and shares in the steam locomotive industry—crashed disastrously in the 1950s. Grandpa’s peculiar profession provided less regular income than the Home Office hangman’s, for Grandpa was a sorcerer. But magecraft was in eclipse for most of the twentieth century, and Grandma’s Russian parentage cost him any chance of employment by the security agency that defended the Kingdom against arcane threats. Grandma had tales of letting the servants go during wartime, but remained silent on the matter of not hiring replacements after the end of hostilities. The death duties levied on Great-grandpa’s estate were the last nail in the coffin of the family fortune: by the time Imp’s father—Grandpa’s sole offspring—stood in line to inherit, the family house had been sold to a hotel baron and Imp’s father had reason to be grateful for his aptitude for numbers.
Numbers and magic went together like a horse and carriage, and were in roughly similar demand. The family traded in quaint séances and furtive rituals held in dust-sheeted ballrooms by the initiates of strange religions, rather than the great wreakings and summonings that had once shaken the chancelleries of Europe. Imp’s dad had missed out on the strange revival of magic by the secret state, on the gathering momentum of Moore’s Law, the systematization and formalization of computation as a sorcerous speciality. Mum might have had an in, but she’d been squeezed out of the increasingly stuffy and male-dominated British software industry in the eighties, too exhausted and pregnant to do aught but let her skills atrophy from disuse. She and Dad shared a certain way of thinking about things, a common fondness for the secret occult power that could be unleashed by way of Newton’s fluxions. If they’d met a couple of decades later they might have built a great and terrible magical empire. A couple of centuries earlier they could have brokered their insights for wealth and power at the royal court. But they had the supreme misfortune to be born just too late in the age of rationality to profit from his magic, and just too early to make use of hers.
One rainy half term Tuesday in the February of the year Imp turned twelve, he climbed into the attic in search of distractions. That’s when he found the old steamer trunk with Grandpa’s initials painted on the lid in faded gold leaf. It had been hidden behind an old coffee table and a stack of suitcases full of Mum’s 1970s shoes and dresses. The trunk was locked, but the internet was a thing, and his parents hadn’t yet worked out how much mischief a bored Imp with internet access could get up to. FAQs on lock-picking abounded, and it was much more interesting than doing homework: so the desperate curiosity of a bored tween armed with improvised picks and rakes collided with a woefully insecure chest—or rather, a chest warded so that only an heir of the pure bloodline could open it without fatal consequences. Imp was totally ignorant of this, of course. But then again, he was the heir in question.
It wasn’t his fault that Dad had held off introducing him to the contents and commencing his training in the old ways out of fear that it would distract him from his GCSEs. It wasn’t Dad’s fault that, after decades of neglect, he’d come to think of magecraft as an eccentric hobby or family tradition, rather than a deadly and puissant art. Nor could Dad be faulted for not realizing that magic was creeping back into the world on the back of proliferating computing devices that attracted the attention of things that thrived on information, so that the arcane arts grew steadily easier and more accessible with every passing year. It wasn’t even Dad’s fault for hoping that Imp would follow him into a safe and secure career as a chartered accountant, or perhaps an Inland Revenue auditor, and hadn’t bothered to explain the family curse to him, or the meaning of the struck-out names on the front page of the family spell book.
But if you leave a loaded handgun lying around the family home, you shouldn’t be surprised if a child finds it and pulls the trigger.
By midafternoon, the Bond was pissed off.
If it was galling to be outwitted by a woman, it was infinitely more so to be outfoxed by a dim-witted cycle courier driving a stolen car that was somewhat inferior to the boss’s shiny silver Aston Martin. Women, in the Bond’s opinion, were only good for fucking and cooking. Yet the car thief with the dreadlocks and attitude had dragged the thief-taker back to the stolen Porsche—which had somehow lost the wheel clamp while they’d been making gooey eyes at one another over ice cream—climbed in, and taken off like the London traffic didn’t even exist.
Not being a total idiot, the Bond had stuck a GPS tracker bug behind the front bumper before he trailed the duo to the ice cream kiosk, so he’d been able to tail the thief out to the North Circular before he lost her. He’d jumped a few traffic lights and tripped a whole series of Gatsos along the way, but Rupert’s corporate vehicle ownership would cover for him: some hapless minion would be fingered for
