He felt oddly detached from his surroundings as he wandered down Broadway. Everywhere was bright and well-lit. People surged along the wide-open streets in great waves, spewing out from the theatres and the restaurants in their hundreds. Great skyscrapers ploughed up from out of the busy traffic on every street in sight. And as he finally came to Times Square, there was a sense of something truly giant in the air –not just the massive neon hoardings cranked up high over the city, or the TV screens the size of a condo, or the buildings that outstretched and outshone the night sky. There was a brash, rough-and-ready optimism about the place, the feeling that you could come here and stuff would happen. That anything was possible.

Tom tried and tried to give himself up to such feelings, but he was still struggling to come to terms with his behaviour back on the bridge, and the wild mood swings he’d experienced since taking the serum. He kept getting flashbacks, frozen moments of violence that stung his senses. He hoped against hope that he’d ridden out the side-effects and that now he was normal again –at least, as normal as he could hope to be.

He’d hated the lupine nature within him before, but if he could no longer control the beast and its power …

At least he felt a little warmer now. Practical as ever, Kate had pointed out that Tom was going to draw some unwelcome attention at his rendezvous if he walked around Times Square naked. Luckily, Stacy remembered a hot tip from one of the street kids in her program: a thrift clothes store on Broadway regularly dumped unwelcome donations outside with its trash. Kate had managed to find him a holey sweater and a threadbare tweed jacket and a pair of tuxedo pants sporting some very suspect stains. They went nicely with the grubby pair of basketball shoes, straight out of the Eighties and a size too small.

But dress sense was the least of his worries, whatever the smirking hordes thronging the sidewalks around him might think. His stomach was fizzing with nerves at the thought of meeting Jicaque, after so many tricks, so many false hopes …

It was five minutes to midnight. Tom found his step was quickening as he turned on to West 44th Street. Did he dare to think he really could be cured?

The Vegetarian Kitchen was a tiny bistro that had snuck into the street between a 7-Eleven and a tacky video store.

Tom stared at it in disbelief.

It was closed.

He swore. There was no doubt about it: the place was dark, empty, shut up for the night.

‘Hey,’ a man’s voice whispered close by. ‘Down here.’

It was coming from an alleyway that ran beside the bistro. His hopes igniting once more, Tom rushed to the mouth of the dark alley to investigate.