The Minority Council (28 page)

I shook my head and indicated the pharmacy. “You okay forcing the lock?”

“You asking me to do something illegal or shit?” shrilled Penny.

“Yup.”

“So long as it’s you asking,” she replied, and bent down to try coaxing the lock.

Nabeela said, “Are we cool with doing illegal things? Only I
do
have a regular job to go back to, and just because you two don’t really work doesn’t mean I can put my life plans on the line, you know?”

“Don’t work?!” I squeaked. “Do you know how many perks you get as Midnight Mayor?”

“If I said ‘lots’ that would be a mistake, right?”

“Not even a bloody company car.”

“Matthew doesn’t need a bloody company car,” said Penny. “He just calls me, isn’t that right?” The lock clicked, a whiff of Penny’s bright magic drifting away from it, and she pushed the door back with a triumphant “Ta-da!” She asked, “What we looking for? Painkillers, bandages, that kinda shit?”

“Earplugs,” I said.

Enlightenment dawned. “Hey-hey! Get you, not totally a bozo. I mean, respect.”

She roamed through the shelves by the glow of the sodium street lamps outside. Nabeela followed her, stepping across the threshold with a wince, as if her council pay cheque were dissolving before her eyes. The earplugs were found between verruca treatments and baby bottles; Nabeela counted out four pounds eighty-three pence onto the counter, mumbling that she’d make up the last sixteen pence at some point in her life, honest. As we made our way back towards the car, Penny handed out the plastic bags containing the plugs, thin green things we rolled between our fingers into tiny tubes, which expanded once inside the ear. I was trailing behind the others, finding it painful right now even to raise my arms. How many hours had Dr Seah said between painkillers? How many doses had it been?

Because I was moving slowly, I now heard what they didn’t. It was a rattling noise, a sound of clattering from just down the street. We were only yards from Penny’s car, the keys already in her hand and, as I turned, I saw it, lurching round the corner towards us. It was moving too fast for balance, and found itself propelled by its own weight into the side of a parked car, which started wailing. Righting itself, the creature charged.

I shouted, “Penny!,” realised the futility of my action
and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, saw the creature, and instinctively threw her hands up in self-defence. Silver-white fire crackled at her fingertips, danced around the telephone lines overhead, and struck sparks off the alarms and aerials on nearby buildings. I grabbed Nabeela and pulled her down as, with a yell and a flare of light, Penny flung spitting electrical fury into the heart of the approaching creature.

The impact knocked it to one side, slowing it for a second, but didn’t stop it. A black smoking stain marked its armour; glass continued to clatter and whirl inside its belly. As it opened its mouth to roar again, I felt the sound rumbling through the ground and tearing the air. Penny threw another blast of fire and once more it staggered, but still it approached, slower now, eyeing up its opposition. Car alarms were wailing all up the street, lights were going on behind windows, and then it raised its head and lifted up its voice. Windscreens cracked, window-panes fractured, and glass showered down from the street lights.

The monster was nearly on top of us now, opening its jaws before that impossible pit. Tottering from the weight of the magic she’d flung, Penny tried in vain to gather strength for one more fiery assault. We saw sapphire blue in front of our eyes, tasted metal in our mouth, fire in our blood, pulled ourself up as our hair began to stand on end, felt the electricity beneath our feet, and tasted the breeze of microwaves and radio waves carrying a thousand million voices through the air. I looked down and our hands were blazing with blue fire, stretching out across our skin, spilling its crystal light across the earth, and the creature was there, ready to burn, going to burn, and Penny was struggling, trying to force herself into another spell and

and a voice said, “Don’t look.”

The voice was right by us and, though it was familiar, it was distorted. A voice that should have been Nabeela’s, but which was now something else; laced with electricity, it went through the earplugs like they weren’t there; not sound, but still a hissing, straight into the brain. Involuntarily we started to turn, and she barked louder: an order. “Don’t look!” I saw the beast drawing itself up overhead, ready to dive, felt fire and tasted rage and then…

The insect froze.

It froze, hanging above us, like a wave trying to fall. There was a discoloration in its eye, a greyness spreading from its eye outwards. It rushed over the surface of its slate skin, trapped the spinning glass within its mouth mid-whirl, took the sheen off its legs and slipped grey dull hardness round its belly and back. The greyness spread down its legs, crossed the empty gap without a pause between head and thorax, and was already spilling into the great swollen abdomen before the thorax was completely changed.

Penny staggered back, mouth open in surprise, turning her head to see what had caused this. I caught her and pushed her to the other side of the car, pressing her face against my shoulder. “For Christ’s sake,” I breathed, “don’t look.”

The greyness was all across the creature now, locking it rigid; and it wasn’t just a colour, it was a texture too, rough and grainy. “Phone,” I breathed. “Give me your phone.”

Wordlessly, Penny pressed it into my hands. Her body was shaking, whether from exhaustion or fear we couldn’t tell. Her phone had a camera, which could be angled away
from the phone itself, so I twisted and turned it so the camera could see what we dared not, and we could see the screen. “There,” I whispered. “Look at this.”

She looked at the screen and together we saw the thing that had frozen the monster—more than frozen, transformed; turned this creature of moving parts and glass into a statue of old, grey, unadorned concrete.

We saw Nabeela.

She stood a few feet in front of the mosquito, looking into that obscene, wide-open mouth. Her headscarf dangled from one hand, and on her head was revealed, not hair, not human hair, but something else, something that writhed and jerked and spun like living things. Once upon a time, they might have been snakes; but magic had evolved with the times, and now these snake-things had bodies of metal tubes, laced with fibre-optic cable, and heads of little hooded camera-eyes that swung this way and that to survey the world, darting no less lifelike than their organic cousins, but hissing not with venom but with motorised cogs. And the mosquito had stared straight at them.

Penny breathed, “Is she…?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean a…?”

“Yeah.”

Silence. Then, “That is so totally fucking awesome, I’d like, kiss her, if my heart wasn’t already given to a guy called Femi.”

“You’d kiss Nabeela?”

“Jesus, wouldn’t
you
?”

“I thought you had to cancel your date with Femi.”

“You learn a lot about guys from how they handle
rejection. He handled it in a totally cool way, which means he’s got my heart and is going to be, like, the sexy sexy man of my dreams, when I’m not dreaming about monsters and shit. But yeah,” she added, voice rising indignantly, “thanks for reminding me about screwing up my love-life!”

In the camera screen, Nabeela was putting her headscarf back on, quieting the roaming creatures on her head, easing them back to sleep as, methodically and with great care, she tucked the folds of her scarf back in place. I flipped the camera shut and handed it back to Penny, then called out, “You decent?”

Penny punched me gently in the arm. “That is like the most dorkish thing you could have totally said.”

Nabeela came back over. “Yeah. I’m fine.” She stood uneasily, arms straight, hands clenched. “Um…” she began.

Penny burst out, “You are the most totally fucking totally awesome bitch ever! Yo, sister, give it here!”

Nabeela was surprised to find herself high-fiving my sorceress apprentice.

“This!” added Penny, turning to look at the frozen concrete statue still hanging over us. “This is like… it’s like… it’s like totally amazing and if we’d just fucking known then we could have skipped all of Matthew’s wanky enchantment stuff and just gone straight to the ear-plugs and concrete shit, you know what I’m saying? Because this…” she punched one of the mosquito’s protruding frozen limbs triumphantly, “… totally kicks ass!”

Something went,
pop
.

All eyes turned.

Where Penny had hit the mosquito, a shard of concrete had fallen away, revealing the slate underneath.

Penny said, “Uh…”

“Time to go!” I sang out.

Nabeela’s jaw was hanging open. “But it shouldn’t…”

From the space where the concrete had dropped, a crack appeared. It became a fault line that began to run the length of the insect’s immobilised hide.

“Ladies!” I exclaimed. “Take it from a guy who knows about implausible danger: nothing beats running away.”

They didn’t need to be told twice. Penny was in the driver’s seat and putting us into gear before I had the passenger door open. Nabeela was struggling to pull her seat-belt on as Penny swung us out into the street. Already cracks were racing across the creature’s body, their growth speeded by a shuddering from within. We were swinging round the corner and accelerating as the concrete burst from the creature’s wings.

Some people, when stressed, respond by drawing into themselves.

Some do not.

We sat at traffic lights on Commercial Road as Penny screamed at a neighbouring car. “You call that driving, wanker? Do you even know what a box junction is?”

Some parts of London never stop; Commercial Road is one of them. It was a wide street of curry houses, garages and sari shops that sliced through the East End of London like a lava flow, carrying a sluggish stream of buses and lorries into the heart of the city from the Blackwall Tunnel and Isle of Dogs.

Some eccentric navigation on our part had, I assured Penny and Nabeela, probably shaken the creature. We agreed to say no more on the subject.

Where now? Penny had asked.

I’d taken a while to answer, and then decided: what we really needed was a safe place to stay.

I knew just the man.

There was nowhere to park in the grand Notting Hill square, but Penny, ex-traffic warden as she was, found the double yellow line that, she assured me, was least likely to be done come 8 a.m., and even if it was she’d just forward the charge to the Aldermen and let them do their shit, yeah?

Black iron railings framed the kempt trees and trimmed grass of a residents’ garden. Around the square, stone steps led to porticoed entrances, each adorned with a brass knocker almost as heavy as the door itself. Great sash windows, nearly twice the height of a man, had lofty wooden shutters or swagged and tasselled curtains. The area had been Victorian London at its most confident, built to remind all future generations that the British needn’t be showy To Be Great.

The lights were out in every house; all good people had gone to bed. But a motion sensor picked us up as we climbed the front steps in question, turning on a bright yellow bulb in a big black antique lantern overhead. I rang the doorbell and waited. A light went on behind the door. A chain was taken off. The door was eased back and a man with dark eyes, dark hair, almond skin and a sense about him of thick treacly magic opened it just enough. He sighed.

“You,” he said. “Come in.”

A hall too tall, a living room too wide. The house was decorated in a neutral style for neutral people, complete with magnolia wallpaper, fittings in beige, and paintings guaranteed neither to offend nor divert. A fire burnt
beneath a wide marble surround, and a vast sofa and two button-backed chairs were turned towards it. One of the chairs was occupied. Its occupant said, “Good evening, Matthew. If you would mind not leaving the smell of curry on everything in the house, I’m sure its owners would appreciate it on their return.”

His name was Dudley Sinclair.

He Knew Things.

No one quite knew how he Knew Things, or exactly what the scope might be of the Things he was determined to Know. But he was, as he described himself, a concerned citizen in a world where the general citizenry’s lack of concern was, in itself, a cause of grave concern for him.

Information broker, negotiator, diplomat, master puppeteer, power behind the throne, call him whatever you wanted to, if you looked hard enough, there was Dudley Sinclair, looking right back at you.

A man well into his fifties, if not beyond, with a great rolling belly barely compressed into his pinstripe suit, he had the aura of a man born into a waistcoat, for whom pyjamas were a phenomenon that happened to someone else. Even at this hour of the night, if you phoned he would answer within a few brief rings; never asleep, never in bed, never off-duty. There was too much world to let Dudley Sinclair close his eyes for long.

We were each led by Charlie, his ever-present assistant, to a bedroom, every one larger than the first flat I’d rented. The beds were so deep that it was hard to tell where duvet stopped and mattress began, and the headboards were piled with enough pillows to start a tournament. I slipped out of my shoes and tried to rub a little life back into my feet, washed my face in cold water dispensed
from a tap so clean you could see your face in it, in a bathroom composed of perfect and unforgiving mirrors, and did a quick inspection. Dr Seah had removed the worst of the blood from the side of my head, but my ribcage was coming out an interesting shade of violet. Feeling like an idiot, I rubbed a little more garam masala into the palm of my hands and round the back of my neck. I hadn’t heard the howl of the bloodhound for a while; maybe Dr Seah did know what she was doing after all.