Vanished

CHAPTER 18

Edward’s idea of long-distance air travel for daylighters started at business class. Since he had, in his weird way, damn near begged me to take the job, I got first-class treatment—literally. Not the corporate jet—the opposition would catch on to me soon enough without that sort of red flag—but the cushiest seating British Airways offered to commercial travelers nonstop from Seattle to Heathrow. Nine hours in transit. It was the first time I’d ever slept comfortably on a plane and arrived feeling reasonably alert and uncramped.

Edward had run the reservations through a couple of corporate blinds so only an insider would know I was in London under TPM’s aegis. The financial distance made for sufficient security to arrange for a car to pick me up and take me to my hotel without recourse to the Tube or my paying for a common cab myself. But the luxury of the car service—it was a huge step up from a cab, but you couldn’t quite call it a limo—set me on edge; conspicuous consumption is just that: conspicuous. As I sat in the back of the black sedan cruising away from Heathrow on the freeway—no, motorway—I put my mind into undercover mode and thought about what I was heading into.

A tourist is one among thousands, but a first-class traveler is one of a hundred and, like any other undercover job, I’d had to look the part. Now I had to act it as well until I could shift into the next physical and mental disguise. I suspected that most of my investigations in London would require a less-affluent wardrobe and an attitude that wasn’t as hard as my usual street armor. I already missed the convenience of my old, wrecked Rover with its cache of clothes and tools. The hotel would have to be my base of operations, so, first thing, I’d need to find an unobtrusive way in and out, or risk attracting attention. Vampires are a paranoid lot and if some local faction had moved against Edward as he seemed to suspect, they’d be on the alert for anything that indicated his eye was on them. Eventually, they’d connect me to Edward, but the longer I could keep that from happening, the better.

The car had just passed some kind of light industrial or office complex and the wide, multilane road descended from its protected cement embankments to run at street level as a highway when the preternatural world flooded over me. I hadn’t noticed the Grey much before that; the area west of London along the M4 was a little more rural than the suburban mix between Seattle and our own airport at Sea-Tac and not quite as haunted—which isn’t much to begin with. But leaving the motorway and entering the streetscape of western London was like stepping into a deep and turbulent sea of the Grey, even inside the damping barrier of the car’s steel and chrome. I don’t know why I hadn’t given much thought to the weight and chaos of the unseen that would grow up along with a city over the course of two millennia, but it was as thick and opaque as a one of London’s famous Victorian fogs and I shuddered with cold, although the sunny afternoon was pleasantly warm—hot by native standards.

“Would you like the air turned off?” the driver asked.

“Huh?” I coughed, the centuries choking and slamming through me.

“The air-conditioning. Would you like it turned down? You seem cold.” His speech wasn’t strict BBC bland but it was carefully correct. I suspected he spoke with a broader accent at home but was supposed to present a bit more polish on the job.

“Yes. Please.” If it would help me warm back up after the shock of sudden immersion in the icy sea of the past, I was in favor of it. I would have to gain some control and equilibrium before we reached the hotel or I might be completely useless—or at the least as sick and punch-drunk as I’d been the first few times I’d stepped into the Grey.

“Where are we?” I asked, groping for something to orient myself by.

“Just coming into Hammersmith. Not much farther.”

“How much longer to London, then?”

He laughed. “Sorry, miss. We’ve been in Greater London since we left Heathrow. It’s all London.”

“But you said Hammersmith. ”

“It’s one of the outer boroughs. London’s like. a lot of little cities that grew together. I’ve a cousin in Queens, New York, says it’s the same sort of thing there. One vast city made of a lot of bits. What you probably think of as London, that’s really just a couple of the old cities—the City of London, and the City of Westminster—and the inner boroughs.”

“Like most people think New York is just Manhattan,” I suggested.

“That’s what my cousin said!”

“So. how big is London?” I asked, realizing I’d bitten off a lot more than I’d imagined in agreeing to come with no idea which part to look in for Edward’s answers or my own.

“Huge! But not to worry. Your hotel’s central. You’re almost in the Square Mile.”

“What’s that—the Square Mile?”

“Used to be the old City of London. Now it’s business offices, banks, stock exchange, the Old Bailey, the Inns of Court, and the like. When your business associates say ‘the City,’ that’s what they mean. Westminster is right next door. That’s where the cathedral and the abbey and parliament are. You know: Big Ben and that sort of thing. Lots of sightseers round about, lots of one-way roads, narrow bits, alleys. Traffic’ll be a bit thick. Far more agreeable to walk in than drive.”

“So don’t rent a car.”

“Absolutely not. Stick to your feet when you can, cabs when you have to—even the Tube, buses, and so on, though they can be nasty—and you’ll get round much quicker and slicker. A bicycle is useful if you have one, but walking’s generally the thing.”

I nodded, making vague noises of agreement as the car wormed its way deeper into the thick of London and its ghosts. I tightened my focus to the deepest levels of the Grey, where the magical energy grid of London blazed in polychrome lines and labyrinthine whorls that darted in and out of the earth we passed over. I hadn’t been a good student of history, but I had heard that modern London was built on the wrack and ruin of earlier settlements and prior incarnations that had burned, or sunk, or been knocked down, and been built over again and again, rising higher on the delta of mud and memory. I concentrated on the hard power lines until I had a solid feel for the magical bones of the city and its layers of history before I let myself swim back up to a more normal level of vision.

As I drew a long, steadying breath and blinked around at the busy world of London’s reality overlaid with the riotous layers of its ghosts, the driver pulled to a halt in a narrow road.

“Here you are, miss.”

My hotel proved to be a modern, glass-and-steel-fronted tower on a tiny street just across a big road and a wide park from the Thames. I took a look up and down the lane from behind the sedan’s tinted glass, trying to set the scene and location in my mind. There was a low Victorian stone building just across from the hotel with a strip of bright blue signage that identified it as TEMPLE STATION. A pair of other buildings flanked the hotel but faced the roads to each side, like bodyguards. No sign of a service or employees’ entrance from the front of the elegantly stark facade, so I assumed there would be one on the side or a back alley where the public couldn’t see the unglamorous aspects of hotel service without going out of their way. The small street wasn’t very busy except for the people going in and out of the Underground station, but the wide boulevard running along the riverside was as warm with all sorts of people from immaculately dressed men and women in business suits to tourists in jeans and T-shirts with sunglasses and hats protecting their eyes from the glitter of light off the waters of the Thames. Surging through it, layer on layer of ghosts. The mix, so close at hand, reassured me that I wouldn’t find it hard to slip away from my glamorous pad and become anonymous.

A dark-coated doorman stood at the curb, wearing a top hat in defiance of the wind off the river. He stepped forward and opened my door as the driver fetched my suitcase from the trunk.

“Welcome to the Howard, miss.”

I barely got out a “thank you,” before I and my bags were whisked into the lobby. As I turned from the car, something near the Underground station gave a fractured glitter through the Grey like light tripping off a broken mirror. I turned around to catch it but saw only a white streak of movement that vanished into the shade of the station’s doorway to roost among the steam-shapes of the Grey.

From my room I had a view of the Thames and the street below. The room was a bit too high for me to see the inside of the Underground station’s doorway, but I could see the sidewalk in front of it. The layers of glass between me and the exterior filtered the Grey to a dim soup of mist and Saint Elmo’s fire, but I could still detect something near the station’s entrance that was more like a faceted void of Grey than the usual lingering energy colors. I observed it for about twenty minutes before it drifted deeper into the Tube station and disappeared. Something that wasn’t quite there was watching my hotel.