The emulator running on the phone's a poor substitute for a real ward, and it's only going to keep it up for as long as its battery can keep its tiny electronic brain running at full power, but armed and warded is the first step to survival and now I see the peril I'm in with an icy clarity. The second app I looked at was the thaumometer, and I should have kept an eye on it earlier, as I walked—it's almost off the chart. And all because I'm walking the Necropolitan line. If you wanted to set up a ley line, what better source of power could you hope for than the accumulated grief and sorrow of millions of mourners, to say nothing of the decaying lives of the corpses that traveled it? I should have seen it coming—but I usually only use this cycle path as a shortcut to and from the tube station, in daylight.

I'm pretty sure I'm being trailed by cultists. When I left home I was angry in the abstract but now I am really fucked off. These are the bastards who murdered a bunch of nursery school tots and their teachers, put Mo through the horrors—and they're trying for me now. The only question is, are they chasing me or herding me?

I keep going, slowing my jog to a brisk walk, scanning ahead as I move. I hold my gun at the ready with both hands, close to my chest, relying on the invisibility ward to make it look as if I'm just clutching my right wrist with my left hand. The mist at ground level coils and curdles around a pair of translucent parallel rails the color of old bones, resting on a bed of ethereal track sleepers. The trees writhe and knot overhead, clutching at each other, imploring and beseeching. In the distance I hear odd noises—the ghost of sobbing, deep voices intoning something, words I can't quite make out.

I'm sure it's all very eerie, but when reality starts to imitate a second-rate computer game you know the bad guys have over-egged the pudding. Some fuckhead is hitting me with a glamour in hope of spooking me. It's the sort of tactic that might stand a chance of working if I was a little less cynical, or if they had enough imagination to make it, oh, you know, horrifying , or something. Luckily for me they don't seem to have grasped the difference between a Sam Raimi movie and standing by your dad's hospital bed trying to work up the nerve to switch off the ventilator. So I find the fact that they're sending me woo-woo noises and mist perversely encouraging.