Alex Verus Novels, Books 1-4 (9780698175952) (10 page)

“Are you in the market?”

“Yes, but Alex, there are people everywhere! I can’t stay far enough—”

“I’ll be there in two minutes. Just keep moving, and—Luna? Luna!”

The line had gone dead. I swore and kept running.

C
amden Market is one of the big tourist attractions of London. It fills the blocks between Chalk Farm Road and the Grand Union Canal, and even on off days it’s busy. On
Saturday mornings it’s packed to the seams with street sellers, tourists, arts-and-crafts types, teenagers, goths, punks, trendies, performers, bargain hunters, antiquists, dealers, kids, and just about everyone else, all forming a seething mass. The shops sell antiques, knickknacks, and fashions of the kind that newspapers call
alternative
and most people just call
weird
, and everywhere is filled with people, talking and eating, bargaining and shopping, filling the place with noise. Finding one girl in Camden Market is like looking for a contact lens at a football match. It’s impossible for a normal person.

For a mage, though…

Luna turned off Chalk Farm Road and down Camden Lock Place. To most eyes she would have blended in with the crowd, a girl of medium height wearing casual clothes and backpack. Only the way she shied away from anyone who got too close made people glance at her. From time to time she would look nervously over her shoulder, scanning the bustling crowd.

Luna turned down a side street where there were fewer people. She shook her head at a man trying to give her a leaflet, skirted a clothing stall, crossed onto the pavement.

Something appeared out of the shadows next to her. Luna jumped, then stopped as she recognised me. “Alex?”

“This way. Quick!”

One of the best things about Luna is that she knows when not to argue. She’ll ask questions for hours without a break, but when I tell her to
move
, she moves. Luna ran down the stairs and I held the door open for her, then slammed it shut, hearing the lock click.

We were in an underground parking garage, filled with rows of cars lined neatly between support pillars. Fluorescent lights cast a weak glow over the concrete floor. The sounds from outside were muffled, a steady buzz. “Alex?” Luna asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Two people after you,” I said. I hadn’t laid eyes on them yet, but if Luna and I hadn’t ducked out of sight I would have. “A man and a woman.”

Luna just looked at me, confused. “They would have moved on you as soon as you got to the end of that street,” I said, and pointed. “Find somewhere to hide. We’re not out of the woods yet.”

As Luna hurried to the side wall, I pulled the packet of trail dust from my pocket and tore it open. I ran to the other side of the garage and opened the door at the end, leaving it ajar so that a sliver of light crept through. Then I paced the distance back, sprinkling the trail dust left and right. The brown powder sparked briefly as it touched the floor, vanishing. Once I’d covered all the floor we’d stepped on, I walked quickly to where Luna was waiting. “What are you doing?” she asked.

I threw the last handful of the trail dust back where we’d gone, then crumpled up the wrapper and stuffed it into my pocket. “Covering our trail. Are you okay?”

Luna’s face clouded. “I touched someone. I was trying to get away, but he bumped into me, and…Alex? What’s wrong?”

I’d been looking into the future; now my heart skipped a beat. “Get down. Behind the car!”

Luna’s eyes went wide and she obeyed, kneeling down next to the wheel of a big fourbyfour. I yanked my mist cloak out of my bag and pulled it around my shoulders, then stepped back into the shadows and flipped the hood up over my head, feeling the cloak blend with the wall. Luna had looked away for a second, and now as she turned back, her eyes passed over me without seeing me. “Alex?” she whispered.

“I’m here,” I whispered, and Luna started. “Stay down, stay quiet.” I shut up and an instant later I heard the door rattle. Luna heard it too, and went very still. I stood upright in the corner, just another shadow in the dark.

The handle of the door we’d entered by was rattling. There was a moment’s pause, then a flicker of sea-green light. Dust puffed into the air, and suddenly there was a hole where the handle had been. The door swung open with a creak.

The two people who stepped through wore different
clothes from last night, but I still recognised them. One was Khazad, spindly and stick-thin, his movements birdlike and quick. Now that I could see his face I could see he looked vaguely Middle Eastern, his eyes darting from side to side. The second was the woman who’d been ordering him around. Unlike Khazad, she still wore her mask, and as I saw that I leant slightly forward. Khazad came down the steps and turned from left to right. He was holding something in one hand, frowning.

“Well?” the masked woman said after a moment. She was still above, scanning the area. I saw her eyes pass over me, but she gave no reaction. I knew she shouldn’t be able to see through my mist cloak at this range, but it wasn’t me I was worried about.

“Wait,” Khazad said.

“Is she here or not?”

“This thing’s screwing up,” Khazad said in frustration. “Stupid piece of crap.” He raised a hand, and something dark gathered in his palm.

As it did, I felt something from Luna. I glanced down and stared. The silver mist of Luna’s curse was moving. A strand of it slipped invisibly outward, reaching ten, twenty times farther than normal, curving over the cars to brush against the object in Khazad’s hand. “Shit!” Khazad snarled.

“Well?”

“I don’t fucking believe this! It’s dead!”

“Is it,” the woman said absently. She was still scanning from left to right, her eyes passing over where Luna and I were hidden, and I didn’t dare move.

“Screw it,” Khazad said angrily. He stuffed the whateveritwas into his pocket. “What about a trail?”

“Wiped.”

Khazad glanced up, his eyes narrowed. “Thought she was a norm?”

“She isn’t a mage.” The woman’s eyes traced the wall from behind her mask. “But there’s something…”

I held my breath. The woman’s eyes had come to rest on
me, and she was staring right at where I was hidden.
Again. How does she know?
Five seconds passed, ten.

“Well?” Khazad demanded.

The woman looked away, and I let out a soft breath. “That door,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp again. She started walking towards the door I’d left ajar, disappearing behind the pillars. I strained my ears to listen. Khazad said something I couldn’t hear, finishing with “—not there?”

“We’ve got her address,” the woman said. “One thing at a time.” The door creaked open and their footsteps receded up the stairs.

Luna started to move, but I signalled for her to stay down and she did. I counted off a full minute, looking through the futures, then walked forward, pulling the mist cloak from my shoulders. “Let’s go.”

“Who were they?” Luna asked, scrambling to her feet. She looked anxious rather than scared, which probably meant she didn’t understand what we’d just heard.

“The man’s called Khazad. I don’t know the woman’s name. You don’t want to meet them.”

As we hurried back the way we’d come and emerged out into the street, Luna spoke up hesitantly. “They kept saying ‘she.’ Did they mean—?”

“Yes.”

Luna shut her mouth, and we walked the rest of the way back in silence.

W
e were back in my flat, above the shop. Luna was curled up on my sofa in the same spot she’d been lying in last night, watching me. Her white hands were curled around a coffee mug. She’d been sitting listening for the last ten minutes, speaking only to ask questions.

“So that’s how it is,” I finished. “Cinder, Khazad, and that woman tried for the relic last night. Now it looks like they’re going for something else instead.”

“The cube?”

“Cinder was looking for it yesterday, and those two are working with Cinder. Now they’re looking for you.”

Luna was quiet for a second. “Why?”

“Probably traced the cube to the same place you got it. They don’t know you gave it to me or they’d have been trying to break in here. Right now, you’re their lead. They’re not going to give up easily.” I hesitated. “I’m sorry for getting you into this.”

Luna only shook her head. “How were they tracking me?”

“Khazad had a focus. There are lots of ways; he was using one of the simple ones. Luna—”

“It was my curse, wasn’t it? That was what stopped him from finding me.”

I blinked. “You can tell?”

Luna nodded. “Sometimes. When there’s something I’m really afraid of. It’s like a part of me reaches out and touches it, and it’s gone.”

“Huh.” I sat back. I’d always thought Luna’s curse was a passive thing, but what Luna had just said made me wonder. Being able to feel it that clearly…

“She said she had my address, didn’t she?”

I’d been reaching for the glass of water on my desk. As Luna spoke I went still, then picked up the glass and took a drink, hoping she hadn’t noticed the pause. This wasn’t something I wanted to tell her. “Yes.”

Luna was silent for a second. “The man I got the cube from doesn’t know where I live,” she said at last. “He knows my number, but…Oh, of course. My name. They could have looked my address up with that.” She shook her head and looked up. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I can’t go home, can I?”

I let out a breath. “No. They’ll be at your flat by now.”

“They won’t hurt anyone else in my building, will they?”

“It’s not your neighbours you should be worried about! These people are
dangerous
!”

Luna nodded. “I know.”

I put a hand to my head and sighed. “I’m sorry. I should
never have gotten you into this. If I’d known you’d turn up something that would get you involved in this stuff—”

“No. This is what I want.”

I stared. “Luna,” I said carefully. “If those three catch you, they’ll quite likely kill you. You understand that, right?”

Luna looked back at me steadily, her clear eyes looking into mine, then she dropped her gaze and traced her finger around the rim of her mug. “When you called me this morning, you were afraid I wasn’t going to come, weren’t you?”

“I—” I checked. “How did you know that?”

“You always tell me how dangerous your world is,” Luna said. “It’s like you think you need to warn me off.” She dipped the tip of her finger into the tea and looked at it. “It doesn’t bother me, you know.”

“Luna—”

Luna looked up to meet my gaze. “If those three are going to be chasing someone, it’s better that it should be me, isn’t it? I mean, if I were a normal girl, they’d have caught me back there.”

I stared at her.

“So,” Luna said at last. “You said you needed me to run a test? I mean, before we got distracted.”

“I—” I let out a breath. “All right.” The cube was sitting on the coffee table in between us, looking ordinary and dull in the morning light. “Try picking that up.”

Luna nodded and obeyed. The cube swung between her fingers as she looked at it, then gave me a glance.

I grabbed a pencil and paper and scribbled a word, then pushed it across the coffee table, taking care to keep my distance. “This is a general-purpose command word. Hold up the cube and say it.”

Luna waited for me to sit back, then reached forward and picked up the paper. To my eyes the silvery mist of her curse engulfed the paper as she studied it, frowning slightly. The cube hung silent in her other hand, the silver mist sliding off it without sinking in. Imbued items have a will of their own. Until they decide to use their power, they’re nothing
but blunt objects. One way to get an imbued item to obey you is to find the item’s special purpose and bring it to bear somehow. If you don’t know the item’s purpose, you’re out of luck; the item won’t obey anyone except its master.

But if you can guess who its master might be…

“Annath,”
Luna said.

Light flowed from the cube and in an instant the gloomy room was lit up in red and white. The crystal surrounding the core glowed with energy and thin lines of light sprang outwards, playing over the sofa, the table, the walls. For one instant, Luna was backlit in the glow, holding the cube aloft, her eyes lifted up in wonder.