Moon Over Soho (37 page)

H
E WAS
standing at the far end of the roof garden leaning nonchalantly against the railing. He was dressed in a beautifully tailored dark suit and a pale silk cravat; he was carrying a cane topped with a mother-of-pearl handle. The witnesses had been right about his face. Even as I concentrated on his features, I found myself noticing the gleam of his gold cuff links, the scarlet triangle of his pocket handkerchief, anything except his face. This was him—the Faceless One.

“Oy,” I shouted. “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

“Do you mind?” said Faceless. “I’m trying to talk to the ladies here.” His accent was generic posh, public school, Oxbridge—which fit the profile and endeared him to my proletarian soul not at all.

“Well, you can talk to me first,” I said. “Or you can go to the hospital.”

“On the other hand,” said Faceless. “You could just take a quick jump off the parapet.”

His tone was so reasonable that I actually took three steps toward the railing before I could stop myself. It was
seducere
, of course, the glamour, and it might have worked on me if I hadn’t spent the year having various demigods and nature spirits trying to mess with my mind. Nothing gives you mental toughness like having Lady Tyburn trying to make you her house slave. I kept heading for the railing, though, because there’s no point giving away an advantage and I was
curious to know what he wanted from Simone and her sisters.

“Ladies,” he said, “I realize your true nature may have come as a shock and right now you’re a little confused.” He was speaking softly but I heard his words with unnatural clarity. Part of the
seducere
? I wondered. Nightingale and I were going to have to have a long chat about this sometime soon.

I’d reached the edge of the roof, so I turned and put my foot up on the railing as if I were about to climb over sideways before plunging to a horrible death. It also gave me an opportunity to see what Faceless was up to.

He was still chatting up the girls. “I know you believe that you are cursed,” he said. “Forced to satiate your unnatural appetites by draining the life force of others. But I want you to think outside the box.”

I still couldn’t see his features, but I’d done a bit of reading since Alexander Smith had given us a description of his face or, more accurately, hadn’t. Victor Bartholomew, possibly the most boring magician who ever lived, named it
vultus occulto
—which even I knew was pig Latin—and had devoted an entire chapter to the subject of countermeasures, which, typically for Bartholomew, I could boil down to one sentence—“Keep looking really hard and sooner or later you’ll see through it.” So that’s what I did.

“What if,” said Faceless, “—and I throw this out to you as a hypothetical—what if it was all right to feed on people? What is feeding off people anyway but good old exploitation? And we’re perfectly happy to exploit people, aren’t we?”

I glanced over at Simone. She and her sisters had stopped holding one another and were regarding Faceless with the same polite interest one might give to a visiting dignitary in the hope that he gets on with it and shuts up soon.

Ha, I thought. Tyburn would have them genuflecting by now.

“This notion that we’re all equal is so intellectually bankrupt anyway.” As he spoke I blinked a couple of times, and suddenly I could see his face. Or rather I couldn’t, because it
was hidden by a plain beige-colored mask that covered his whole head. It made him look like an unusually tasteful Mexican wrestler. I think he may have sensed that I’d pushed through the disguise, because he turned to look at me.

“Are you still here?” he asked.

“I wasn’t sure whether I should go headfirst or feetfirst,” I said.

“Do you think it will make a difference?”

“Statistically, you’re more likely to survive if you go feetfirst.”

“Why don’t you jump?” he said. “And then we can see.”

I felt it then, the
seducere
, stronger this time and bringing with it the smell of roast pork, freshly mown grass, the stink of unwashed bodies, and a metallic taste, like iron, in my mouth. I turned to the railings, paused, and then turned back.

“What did you say your name was again?” I asked.

“Jump,” barked Faceless.

He gave me his full attention but
seducere
never seems to work twice, and while he was using it on me he wasn’t using it on Simone.

“Run,” I yelled.

I saw Simone snap out of it first and pull at Peggy’s arm. They both shot me scared looks and then, thank God, grabbed Cherie and started climbing the parapet where it separated the roof garden from next door. I glanced back at Faceless just in time to see the swing of his shoulders as he threw out his arm in my direction. I recognized the gesture—I’d been practicing it myself for the last six months. This saved my life because I was already diving to the left when something bright and hot zipped past my shoulder and melted a two-foot hole in the railings. About where my stomach would have been if I hadn’t moved.

I flipped a couple of skinny grenades at him even as I was flying through the air, which would have been way more impressive if I hadn’t been trying for a straight fireball. As I skidded along the floor another chunk of railing melted behind me and I saw that one of my skinny mines had popped harmlessly in midair; the other fell out of the air and bounced to a stop at Faceless’s feet. He looked down and
through pure luck it chose that moment to explode. The blast staggered him backward and twisted him around. I used the time to scramble to my feet and face him.

“Armed police,” I shouted. “Stand still and put your hands on your head.” This time I knew I had the right spell lined up.

He turned and stared at me. Despite the mask I could tell he was incredulous.

“You’re the police?” he asked.

“Armed police,” I said. “Turn around and put your hands on your head.”

I risked a glance to check that Simone and her sisters were off the roof.

“Oh, don’t worry about them,” said the man. “I’ve found something far more interesting than them. After all, I can always make more people like them.”

“Armed police,” I shouted again. “Turn around and put your hands on your head.” They make this very clear at Hendon: If you’re going to put the boot in, there must be no doubt that you identified yourself and that the suspect heard you.

“If you’re going to shoot,” he said. “Then shoot.”

So I shot him. It was worth it just for the obvious outrage it caused him and I enjoyed it right up until the point where he caught the bloody fireball. Just snatched it out of the air and held it, Yorick-like, in front of his face.

I’d released it as soon as it got near him but it hadn’t exploded. He twisted it this way and that as if examining it like a connoisseur, which perhaps he was—I figured he wanted me to lob another one at him so he could catch it or deflect it or do something else with annoying insouciance. So I didn’t. Besides, the more time he spent taunting me, the farther away Simone could get.

“You know,” he said, “when I first saw you I thought you were with the Thames girls, or a new sort of fae or something really outlandish like a witch doctor or an American.”

The man popped the fireball like a soap bubble and rubbed his thumb and finger under his nose. “Who trained you?” he asked. “Not Jeffers, that’s for certain. Not that he was without skill, but you’ve got spirit. Was it Gripper? He’s just the
kind to bleat about what he’s doing. Have you noticed that about journalists—all they really want to talk about is themselves.”

Gripper was obviously Jason Dunlop. Dunlop tires, grip, Gripper—which gives you an indication of the lively wit promoted by our elite educational institutions. And Gripper obviously wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk. It’s no fun looking down on people if you can’t let them know you’re above them.

Come on, you bastard, I thought. Drop a few more names.

“You talk too little,” he said. “I don’t trust you.”

And suddenly the world was flooded with light and the massive downdraft from a helicopter blew dust and rubbish around our faces. He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him—that’s the London way.

I’d been working on loosening the chimney stack with what I call
impello vibrato
, but Nightingale called
will you stop messing about and pay attention
, while Faceless had been chatting. When the Nightsun searchlight from the police helicopter hit him in the face I created as pure an
impello
form as Nightingale could wish for and aimed it straight at the bastard. I knew he’d try to zap me, so I threw myself to the right and his fireball sizzled past my shoulder. I was hoping his gaze would automatically track me and not spot the quarter ton of brick and terra-cotta coming at him from the other direction, but he must have glimpsed it from the corner of his eye because he flung up his hand and the chimney stack disintegrated a foot short of his palm.

I didn’t get much more than a fleeting look as bits of brick, cement dust, and sand flowed around him, as if sliding across an invisible sphere, because I was too busy closing the distance between us. If we stuck to magic it was obvious he was going to bounce me around the rooftops, so I ran at him in the hope of getting close enough to smack him in the face.

I was close too, less than a yard away, but the fucker turned and stuck his palm at me and I ran smack into whatever it was he had used on the chimney. It wasn’t like hitting a Perspex wall. Instead it was slippery, like the wobbly sliding feeling you get when you try to push two magnets together.
I went spinning onto my back and he strode toward me. I didn’t wait to find out whether he was planning to gloat or just kill me. Instead I reached out with
impello
to grab the cheap plastic garden table behind Faceless and slammed it into the back of his legs. He pitched forward and met both of my feet coming the other way.

“Fuck!” he yelled, loud enough to be heard over the helicopter.

I was up now and managed to get in one good punch to the face before something snarling and covered in fur barreled into me from the right. It was Tiger-Boy, who’d evidently kicked his way out through the roof door to reach us. We slammed into the parapet railing and it was only because I got a solid lock on a bar with my right hand that I didn’t go over and fall to my death. I rocked myself back onto the safety of the roof and looked up to see Tiger-Boy drawing back one heavily muscled arm ready to strike. He had claws on the ends of his fingers—what are you supposed to do against somebody with claws?

What with the noise of the helicopter, and my own fear, I didn’t hear the shot. I saw Tiger-Boy’s head jerk backward and behind him a spray of red was caught in the glare of the helicopter searchlight.

The cavalry had arrived, although I couldn’t tell whether it was Caffrey and his ex-paratroopers or a sniper from CO19, the armed wing of the Metropolitan Police. I made a pistol shape with my hand and jabbed it in the direction of Faceless. I hoped that the sniper was one of Caffrey’s mob because a CO19 officer probably wouldn’t shoot an apparently unarmed civilian at my mimed suggestion without proper authorization. Nine times out of ten anyway.

Faceless wasn’t stupid. He could see the odds had shifted. He threw one more fireball and I ducked—but it wasn’t aimed at me. It went up and a moment later the searchlight went out. I made a lunge for Faceless’s last known position but he was no longer there and by the time my eyes readjusted to the gloom I saw he was gone from the roof. Above me, the helicopter made a stuttering, clanking noise. It’s not
the sort of sound you want to hear a helicopter making, especially when it’s right over your head.

I watched it as it lurched sideways over the street, wobbling while the pilot fought to get it under control. I should have been getting off the roof but I couldn’t take my eyes off it—Soho is as high-density urban as you can get. If it came down here the death toll would be in the hundreds. I heard the engine change pitch as the pilot pushed up the throttle and fought to gain altitude. There were screams and yells from the street below as people saw what was happening. There would be lots of phone-camera footage on the news that night from people with more media-savvy than brains.

I decided that the lack of brains included me when the helicopter lurched back toward me and I realized that my face was level with the landing skids. I ducked as they swept over my head in a blast of downwash that brought the smell of overheated oil. I could see where flying debris had dinged the paintwork on the underside of the fuselage and where cape-wearing boy had blown a hole the size of my fist through the housing of the sensor bubble on the nose. Then, with a clattering roar, the helicopter labored upward and away as the pilot went looking for somewhere safe to put down.

Apart from the approaching police sirens, it was suddenly much quieter. I sat down on what I still liked to think of as Simone’s and my mattress, caught my breath, and waited for more trouble to arrive.

First through the roof door was Thomas “Tiger Tank” Nightingale. He saw me and gestured at his eyes and then the blind spot behind the stairwell. I shook my head, pointed at the body of Tiger-Boy, and then made a walking motion with my fingers. Nightingale looked puzzled.

“He ran away,” I shouted.

Nightingale stepped out of cover and did a 360 just to be on the safe side. Frank Caffrey and a couple of mates followed him out. I’d expected the paras to be dressed in full-on ninja-commando rigs but of course they were still in their street clothes. If they hadn’t been armed with their service rifles I wouldn’t have given them a second look.

Two peeled off to check on Tiger-Boy, who stayed stubbornly dead even when one of them kicked him in the ribs.

Once Nightingale was sure that the roof was secure, he came over and I got up to meet him—after all, no one likes to get bollocked sitting down.

“Was that him?” asked Nightingale.

“That was the Faceless One,” I said. “Although I noticed he was wearing a mask.”

“It’s part of the spell,” said Nightingale. “Are you hurt?”