Yet the running felt good, as if he could run so far and fast that he’d outpace the grief and chaos that had fallen around him. In the planted square opposite Lee’s house he dashed past an old tramp who was just waking, gathering his bulging plastic bags around him and muttering about thieving squirrels. The old guy watched him go and Marty threw him a half wave, pleased when the man waved back. Out of the square, along a street lined with lawyers’ offices and big glass-fronted real estate agencies, he passed a score of BMWs, Mercedeses, and Porsches, four tires from any one of them probably worth enough to give the old tramp somewhere to sleep and eat for a month. Injustices like this hit Marty a lot, especially living in London, and his dad had always responded with: We all make our own luck in life.
He wondered what his parents had thought about their own luck over the past few years.
Make our own luck, he thought. That’s what he was doing now. He could have stayed back in Lee’s house with them for half a day while the world went on around them, but doing this felt like he was taking action. If he was very lucky and made really good luck for himself today, he might even have the Bane in his possession come nightfall.
Some of this was a distraction from the shattering grief that pressed down on him. Grief was real—his parents’ deaths were real—but pursuing a mythical vampire’s artifact from four thousand years ago, a magical thing that was said to bestow great power on any vampire possessing it… that went to keep some of the reality at bay.
When he reached a main shopping street, he stopped running at last, leaning back against a bank’s wall and checking the cash in his pockets. I’m just someone late for a bus, he thought, but he was no longer concerned about what people thought of him. In Lee’s posh residential neighborhood, he might have turned heads. But anywhere like this in London—with shops and pubs, buses and cabs—he was part of the norm.
He had maybe twenty pounds in his pockets. That was enough. He walked along the street toward the nearest tube station, and just as he caught sight of the familiar Underground sign, he passed a baker’s. The smell was too good to resist. He slipped inside and waited behind a line of people in suits, watching what they bought, deciding what he wanted to eat. Even by the time he reached the counter he hadn’t decided, so he bought a meat pie, an egg and bacon roll, a coffee, and a custard tart for afterward.
“Hungry?” the amused woman behind the counter asked.
“Starving!” As he paid and walked out with the food, he considered the pangs of hunger and the pleasures of eating, and wondered what it would be like to feel a different hunger that it brought no pleasure to satisfy. He bit into the hot pasty and savored the taste; sipped from his hot coffee; smelled the egg and bacon roll.
The street was bustling. The usual London traffic was building already, though it was not even eight o’clock, and the pavements were filled with people filing to and from work and parents taking their children to the upscale school nearby. He thought of his parents, then diverted his attention once more to the Bane. Walking among them, he was still not quite part of the same world as these commuters. Not anymore.
It was when he saw the cover of the early-morning edition of London News that he realized just how far removed he was. There were no photographs, but he just knew who the headline referred to: MAN FOUND MUTILATED IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE. He walked quickly toward the tube entrance. A woman did a double-take at him, and Marty felt the tears already coursing down his cheeks. He took another bite from the pasty and chewed, looking at the ground, thinking of the Bane and Ashleigh Richards and 56 Otter Street in Colliers Wood. And slowly he blinked back the tears yet again.
There’ll come a time, he thought, and he knew that was true. Grief couldn’t be fought like this without consequences. But as long as these horrors could hold back the reality of his loss, he was content to let them.
He threw out the rest of his food, bought a Travel card, and carried his coffee with him into the station. It was good to be an anonymous part of the crowd, and he stood on the right of the two long, deep escalators, watching the people pass him by in such a hurry to reach somewhere else. Marty reckoned he had maybe forty minutes on the tube, including one changeover, before he reached Colliers Wood. He should use that time to think about what he’d say to the archaeologist, and what he’d do if she really was as crazy as Lee had suggested.
It was only as he boarded the first train that he realized what a stupid prick he’d been.
There was no sun down in the tube station.
He gasped, winded by his foolishness. What if they were waiting in one of the nearby houses? What if they’d been watching all the time, or they knew where he was? He couldn’t imagine how that could have worked—he’d walked through the daylight, and no vampire could have followed. But the idea was still planted, and he couldn’t now shake it.
The usual tube play began. Everyone stared everywhere but at someone else, but Marty started scanning the people around him as covertly as possible. A big black guy sat next to him, reading Metro and humming along to something on his iPod. Across from him sat two good-looking young women, heads close together and faces serious as they swapped gossip. Marty’s eyes flickered to their long legs and short skirts, and when he looked up again, one of them was looking right at him. He glanced away with a nervous smile. Beside one of the girls sat an old woman, glasses perched on her head as she read a novel by some writer Marty had never heard of. A few people were standing, their suits and office wear making them all but anonymous. No one was looking at him.
He sipped more coffee, looking down at people’s feet and examining their shoes. When he looked up again, one of the girls was looking at him while her friend whispered something in her ear. The girl stared right at him without seeming to see anything at all. Marty smiled, then glanced away when there was no reaction.
Can a girl that pretty really be a vampire? He looked at her again. Her makeup was light and subtle, and she seemed to have good color about her. She was carrying a bottle of water in one hand. Disguise? A cross hung on a silver chain around her neck, dangling into her cleavage.
She saw him looking and turned slightly toward her friend, crossing her arms and legs.
Marty sighed and drank more coffee. Fucking paranoid.
But at the next stop, he alighted and waited on the platform, and five minutes later he boarded the next train. This one was more packed, and he didn’t manage to find a seat. He stood pressed against a door instead, scanning faces, trying not to be seen, and every second of his journey he felt watched.
It was a relief to emerge into the sunlight once more in Colliers Wood.
“Spare some change?” The beggar was sitting close to the tube station exit. It was a guy not much older than Marty, a scruffy dog curled up on a blanket by his side. A couple of cans of cider sat on the pavement beside him. He was looking up at Marty, shielding the sun from his eyes so he could see him clearly.
Marty delved into his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. As he was going through it, looking for a pound coin, the beggar chuckled.