She really had been an angel once, descended now from the immaterial to the material world, and though she was much diminished from what she had once been, she was still a force almost beyond reckoning. No one knew what kind of angel she’d been, from Above or from Below, and whether she fell or was pushed, or what terrible, unforgivable thing she’d done, to be sentenced to the mortal miseries of flesh and blood and bone. No one asked; no one dared. She was Angel, and that was all anyone needed to know.
Jimmy hadn’t known she’d allied herself with the Serpent’s Son. And he hadn’t known that either of them were involved in running the Reality Express. It couldn’t help but make him wonder what else was going on, on his own doorstep, that he didn’t know about.
Hob’s calm voice and presence was finally having a soothing effect on the uneasy crowd of the newly human, as long as they didn’t look at Angel, and he was soon bustling among them, smiling and shaking hands and checking names and numbers against a list on his laptop. He’d clearly done this before. At his murmured suggestion, Angel had moved away to lean against the station-house wall, and was idly digging out long curls of mortar from between the stones with a bored fingernail, clearly uninterested in the proceedings. Presumably she was just there to ride shotgun. Jimmy realised with a start that Hob and Angel were the reasons why he was there. The Waking Beauty had wanted their presence confirmed. The train and its passengers were largely irrelevant.
Jimmy studied Angel from the darkest and most concealing shadows he could find on the waiting-room roof. A line from an old song ran through his head, subtly altered: Did you ever see a nightmare walking? I did… Just standing there, with her pale arms now crossed over her small high breasts, she looked as dangerous and malignant as all hell. She hadn’t been in town long, and everyone had been wondering which way she would jump. When God wanted a city levelled, or all the first-born slaughtered in one night, he sent an angel. They were Heaven’s stormtroopers. Angel’s very presence in Bradford-on-Avon was enough to unsettle any sensible person, man or god.
(Only one other angel had been reduced from the immaterial to the material in present times, and that had been voluntary—supposedly. But the old city of Maggedon was no more, and the angel was still chained to his rock in the cold dark heart of the earth, with nails through his wings. A little humanity can be a dangerous thing.)
Jimmy Thunder let his hand fall to the great hammer at his side. It had been a long time since he had been genuinely frightened.
Perhaps he made a noise, or he’d moved too suddenly; either way, Angel’s head snapped round, and she looked up and glared right at him with her blood-red eyes, seeing him clearly through the concealing shadows of the chimney stack. She shouted a warning to Hob and ran forward, the crowd scattering before her. She jumped from the platform, across the tracks and up onto the waiting-room roof in one impossible bound, as though borne aloft on invisible wings. Roof slates cracked and exploded under her bare feet as she landed, her long legs barely flexing as they absorbed the impact. She held her hands like claws, and her wide smile could just as easily have been a snarl. Jimmy Thunder drew his hammer from its holster and moved reluctantly forward to face her.
Down below, on the far platform, the newly arrived refugees were panicking. Everyone was shouting and milling about, and trying to get back into the carriages, but the doors wouldn’t open for them. There was pushing and shoving, and some fell to the ground and were trampled underfoot. Hob moved quickly among them, trying to calm them with his voice and his presence, but no one was listening. Newly human, no longer protected by their old natures or powers, the refugees were naked and vulnerable and they knew it. This was a perfect time for old enemies to strike, and pay off old scores and blood feuds. The crowd suddenly seized on the notion of escape, and headed en masse for the only exit, the black iron gate beside the station house. Hob was yelling now at the top of his voice, but no one gave a damn.
Up on the waiting-room roof there was neither time nor space for subtlety. Jimmy and Angel slammed together head-on, like two crashing trains. They exchanged blows that would have killed ordinary mortals, and took no hurt at all. Jimmy ducked one punch, and Angel’s fist went on to shatter the chimney stack behind him. It all but exploded, showering bricks and rubble down the sloping roof and onto the platform below. The two fighters circled each other silently. They had nothing to say. More slates cracked and shattered under their feet as they threw themselves forward again. Jimmy made no attempt to block Angel’s blow, taking it unflinchingly as he raised Mjolnir above his head and brought it down with all his strength. But Angel was still too fast for him. She leaped aside and the hammer came rushing down to strike the sloping roof, which broke open under the impact. The entire roof collapsed, plunging down into the waiting room below, and Jimmy and Angel went down with it, in a roar of disintegrating masonry.
Smoke and debris blew out the waiting room’s windows, while the large oblong room filled with rubble and dust. Jimmy and Angel hit the floor hard, but were immediately back on their feet again, not even out of breath from their fall. They saw each other through the dust-choked air, and surged forward once again. Angel caught Jimmy in the chest with a powerful blow, and he was thrown backwards, knocking a hole through the wall behind him with his semi-divine body. It wasn’t enough to damage him, but it still hurt like hell. And in the moment it took him to shrug off the hurt and rise out of the collapsed wall, Angel seized the advantage and went for his throat. Mjolnir leaped to Jimmy’s defence, and lashed out to strike Angel a vicious blow on the right temple. Her head snapped right round under the impact, her neck bones squealing, but her neck held and her skull didn’t break. Jimmy was frankly astonished, but that didn’t stop him lashing out with his other hand, driving her back while she was still off balance. He charged forward, broken masonry falling off him like raindrops, wound up and threw Mjolnir at Angel with all his strength, sure that even a descended angel couldn’t stand against the power and momentum of the legendary hammer that had split mountains in its time. Perhaps Angel wasn’t sure either, and at the very last moment she ducked, and the hammer sailed harmlessly over her head to punch a hole through the wall behind her. Jimmy yelled for the hammer to return to him, but nothing happened. Bloody thing was getting senile. He lurched forward and Angel came to meet him, and for a long time they stood toe to toe, giving and receiving blows of terrible force that could normally shatter anything the mortal world had to offer. Neither of them would give an inch, and they fought on remorselessly as the last of the waiting room collapsed around them.
Hob was still trying to keep his panicking refugees under control, barking orders now in a cold, authoritative voice that as a rule would never be ignored, but no one was listening to him. They’d pressed themselves into a tightly packed crowd before the narrow exit gate, and were all but fighting each other in their need to get away. A few had made it out into the car park, and were running wildly in all directions. Hob lost his temper.
He took his ancient aspect upon him, glorious and terrible, and glowed; bright as the sun, brilliant and blinding. A wave of impossible heat blazed out from him, boiling along the platform, and engulfed all the refugees in one moment, even those running in the car park. Men and women burned alive and were gone, their bodies utterly consumed by an unbearable heat. They didn’t even have time to scream before they were nothing more than a few ashes drifting on the night air.
Hob yelled to Angel, and she reluctantly turned away from the stunned thunder god, and vaulted back across the tracks to join her partner. They both disappeared into the car park, and a slow, sullen silence fell across what was left of the deserted railway station.
Jimmy Thunder kicked his way through the rubble of what had once been a waiting room, emerged out onto the platform and looked about him. The Reality Express was gone, returned to whatever place or state it called home. There was nothing left of the refugees but a few dark scorch marks on the station-house walls. For a moment it had been a
s though the sun itself had reached out and touched the earth, but it was Hob’s power, and it touched only what he chose to touch.
Jimmy looked back at the building he and Angel had destroyed during their fight, and swore briefly in Old Norse. Early hour of the morning or not, someone had to have heard the noise. He’d better leave before someone official turned up to investigate. Doubtless they’d come up with some real-world explanation; a gas explosion, probably. He stared up the empty tracks, still and silent now. He doubted there’d be any more runs on the Reality Express for the time being. No one would accept Hob’s promises of a new and better life in Veritie any more; not after he’d roasted his last lot of customers.
Jimmy wondered briefly how he was going to explain all this to the Waking Beauty. It really hadn’t been one of his better showings. He sighed, and started searching through the rubble of the destroyed waiting room for his lost hammer, calling to it as to a deaf and rather dim dog.
THREE
DEAD MAN WALKING
Leo Morn was having a quiet drink in the Dandy Lion when the dead man walked in. Leo put down his glass and glanced quickly about him, but no one else seemed to have noticed. This was Veritie, after all, and in the real world there was no magic, no enchantments, and definitely no walking dead men.
It was ten thirty on a Saturday, a quiet morning in a quiet country town. Bradford-on-Avon’s narrow streets and lanes were full of shoppers and tourists and running children, making the most of a warm summer’s day. Steady traffic rolled up and down the steep hill of Market Street, while harried motorists fought savagely over the limited parking space in adjoining Church Street. Just another Saturday morning, really, and Leo Morn was taking his ease at his favourite watering hole. The Dandy Lion was a very pleasant public house right in the centre of town, in an old, old building that had been many things in its time, and known many names, but these days it was a warm and cosy resting place, with wood-panelled walls, raftered ceilings, good booze and better food, where the lighting was kept just dim enough to be easy on the eyes. It was a good place to put your feet up, quench your thirst and soothe the inner man.
Leo was sitting with the arty set, local writers, musicians and artists who liked to get together of a morning, to exchange hard-luck stories about how harshly today’s commercial world treated the suffering artist, steal each other’s ideas and indulge in as much mean-spirited gossip as possible. The company was always good, and the conversation could be sparkling and acerbic by turns. Coffee was usually the order of the day, in all its more dramatic forms, dispensed by a loud shuddering thing of steel and steam that squatted darkly at the end of the long wooden bar. Leo didn’t actually care much for coffee, with or without whipped foam or chocolate sprinkles. He much preferred Dry Blackthorn, a locally produced cider that would bite your head right off if you weren’t careful.
Leo considered his half-empty glass, but he couldn’t blame the booze this time. He knew a walking dead man when he saw one. Not least because he’d been to this one’s funeral only two weeks before. Reed Smith had been one of his few friends. A fortnight underground hadn’t affected Reed much. He was still wearing the good suit he’d been buried in, and his slack face was pale under the last remnants of the undertaker’s make-up. He held his head at an angle, where the motorcycle crash had broken his neck. His eyes were open, but barely focused, and his mouth was still held closed by the tiny stitches the undertaker had put in, so that there wouldn’t be any unfortunate expressions on the dead man’s face during the viewing. His hands hung limply at his sides, as though he’d forgotten they were there. Leo had a brief vision of those hands scrabbling at the underside of a closed coffin lid, and quickly pushed the thought aside. There was a lot to be said for cremation, especially in a town like this. Reed stood very still, just inside the swing doors of the pub, looking slowly about him as though trying to remember why he’d come in.
There was no disputing Reed was dead. One look was all it took. He didn’t breathe, his chest didn’t move and he had no body language at all. Everything about him shouted his unnatural condition to all the world. In Mysterie, everyone would have known what he was the moment he walked in. But this was the real world, where such things just didn’t happen; so no one noticed anything.
Leo always drank with the arty crowd on a Saturday morning. So had Reed. They were currently tucked away in their favourite corner, where the table was set right next to the big bay window looking out onto Market Street. It was semi-private, a comfortable distance away from the damned jukebox and its fixation with minor seventies hits, and the window meant that when the conversation flagged, they could always look out at the world going by. People and traffic were always going up and down, back and forth, as they had for centuries past. Though the traffic these days moved a hell of a lot faster. Familiar faces were forever passing by the window, to be greeted with a wave and a smile, and perhaps a pointed comment it was just as well they couldn’t hear. And there was always the primitive drama of Church Street, as motorists tried to squeeze cars into parking spaces manifestly too small for them. There was a lot of lurching back and forth, revving of engines and jockeying for position. Conflicts here started with road rage and then escalated to open hysteria and bloodlust, happily viewed by those around. The arty set were currently ignoring the dead man in favour of laying bets on whether the poor fool in the Rover Rio Grande was going to be able to back his car into the space he’d chosen without first cutting a few inches off both ends. He was on his twelfth attempt now, and a small crowd had gathered, sensing trouble. The arty set were fascinated.
“He’ll never get that in there.”
“Or if he does, he’ll never get it out again.”
“Not without a crowbar.”
“Maybe we should just go down and offer to smear his bumpers with Vaseline.”
“It always comes back to sex with you, doesn’t it?”
“Not nearly as often as I’d like.”
There was general laughter, and mouths and nose tips acquired layers of foam as everyone drank their frothy coffee. Leo liked to hear them in full flow. He’d been there the day they invented gut-barging, the English answer to sumo wrestling. He still couldn’t believe it had actually caught on.
Leo Morn was a tall, slender, almost Gothic figure, all pale and interesting, who looked as if he should have been starring in a Tim Burton film. He wore black cords and a black T-shirt under a black leather jacket, and was so thin a breath of fresh air might have blown him away. In his early twenties, with a misleadingly amiable face under a permanent bad hair day, Leo played bass guitar in a punk-folk band, whose name kept changing so that promoters would book them more than once. He was currently resting between engagements. The band did a lot of resting. Leo mostly kept himself busy giving guitar lessons to teenagers who had more ambition than ability.
He was also prone to gambling with money he didn’t have, making promises he had no intention of keeping, and having brief but torrid affairs with married women whose husbands understood them only too well. As a result, he had also become very proficient at pulling off a disappearing act at very short notice when it all inevitably came crashing down around his head. Leo had heard of responsibility, but wanted nothing to do with it. He did try to be a nice guy, when he remembered, but mostly he just didn’t have the knack.
Meanwhile, the arty set’s conversation had moved on, to discussing the overnight destruction of the railway station’s waiting room. Theories were flying thick and fast. The current official explanation, of a possible gas leak, had been dismissed out of hand, on the unanswerable grounds of being both unlikely and boring. Much more exciting was the possibility of a terrorist bomb. A lot of Ministry of Defence people lived in Bradford-on-Avon, commuting in to the MOD centres at Bath and Bristol. As to which terrorists—take your pick these days.
Leo listened, but kept his mouth firmly shut. He knew the Reality Express had been running last night. He’d heard its unholy whistle sounding in t
he still of the night, and the roar of silver wheels hammering down the steel tracks into town. Leo was a half-breed: a magical father and a real mother, which meant he had a foot in both worlds and a home in neither. He lived in the real world by choice, but sometimes his father’s legacy sang in his veins, and the secrets of Mysterie paraded themselves before him whether he wished it or not. He’d walked by the railway station on his way to the town centre and paused a while to watch the police studying the mess from a safe distance. There was so much magic hanging on the air that Leo could smell it, even in Veritie. Some heavy hitters had clearly gone at it hammer and tongs somewhen in the night, and not for the first time one of Mysterie’s little wars had spilled over into reality. Leo had sniffed loudly and moved on. He didn’t approve of the Reality Express. In his experience, Veritie and Mysterie worked best when they were kept strictly separate, an opinion for which his own existence was one of the best arguments. Love might conquer all, but it can be hell on the offspring.
He drank his cider, kept a watchful eye on the dead man and listened with half an ear as Jason Grant, a local author, complained loudly to the rest of the arty set about his latest project.