Ten minutes later and she was on the train to Euston, trying to read but finding her eyes skipping over the words. Around her, the carriage was three-quarters full of people. They were going into town for late shifts or were dolled up for parties or clubs, out on the razzle. They were doing all the gloriously mundane things people did when they didn’t know the world had magical stone circles or monstrous Birdmen in it. Lee kept glancing at them and felt like leaping up and yelling, “I’ll be able to prove everything soon! And you’ll be sorry you laughed at me.” But she didn’t, of course, because that wouldn’t have been very British of her.

The sky was cloudless, baking, when she got out at Camden and waded through the homeward-bound commuters. She was there in plenty of time to prepare the ground, check for ambushes, all that spy stuff.

Scouting for ambushes turned out to be difficult when the place was packed, though. Mal had specified a cafe where every coffee came with three Italianate descriptors and the barista had an improbable moustache, each side curling up almost high enough to frame his eyes like spectacles.

Lee slid into a seat as the current tenant was vacating it. She was still ahead of the time Mal had given, but she scanned the crowd, just in case. Nobody looked familiar. She had been buoyed this far on a tide of optimism that abruptly left her and headed out to sea again. Instead, she had a bleak epiphany. Some rational auditor stepped into her mind and evaluated the precise odds that her four-years-lost friend had called her from—let’s face it—beyond the grave and asked her to meet up in a coffee shop in Camden at ten o’clock at night. Put like that, it didn’t seem exactly reasonable, did it? It didn’t even seem like a good hoax. She looked inside herself and recognized what she had been feeling a moment before. The old excitement that came without any real sense of reality or peril. Because part of her always knew it wasn’t real, that there would be no proof, not even an out-of-focus photograph. It was just another cryptid hunt. She could pretend to believe, as usual, all the way up until she returned home and got on with her life, without the world being any different.

She stared into the dregs of her mochaccino and felt her whole tower of thought slide sideways into the abyss.