So that was Luna’s potential teacher. I tried to figure out how I felt about her, and didn’t come up with any definite answers. She wasn’t telling me everything . . . on the other hand, I hadn’t been telling her everything, and it’s not like I’d expected more at a first meeting. I still didn’t completely trust her, but I didn’t know whether that was just natural suspicion.

I did know that I wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with leaving Luna in her hands.

But Luna wasn’t a child anymore. I had a responsibility to protect her, but not to overprotect her. This was a decision I should be making with her.

I looked down at the pad Chalice had written on. She’d taken two of the lines I’d sketched, and turned them into the numbers of the street address, 34. If I squinted a bit and looked sideways, those lines I’d drawn did kind of look like a 3 and a 4.

That didn’t make any sense. I’d just been sketching. How could she turn that into an address that I didn’t even know?

But hadn’t that been exactly what Chalice had been getting at? That chance magic didn’t work by the same logic as divination? Maybe that was why I’d never managed to make any real breakthroughs with Luna . . .

I shook my head and stood up. No point thinking in circles. I walked to my computer, typed in the postcode, and hit Search.

A map result came up of a district in west London. The postcode was UB8, out in Uxbridge. I switched from map to satellite view and saw nothing but a street full of houses. I wanted to path-walk and see what I’d find, but I didn’t have an unobstructed route. If I could gate to that location it would have been easy, but I didn’t have a gate stone that went anywhere near. That just left car or train, and the cumulative uncertainty of that kind of transport would cut off any path-walking before I’d covered a fraction of the distance.

But I had time to spare, and my divination magic to warn me of danger, and Chalice’s visit had left me wide awake. The sounds of the Camden night were all around me, life and noise and activity, and I felt full of energy. Nothing makes me more curious than a mystery. I wanted to go and see what was there.

I grabbed my coat off the hanger . . .

. . . and . . .

. . . wait a minute. This was exactly what I’d done last night. I’d gone rushing off on my own to investigate, without my armour and without backup. It hadn’t turned out well.

Maybe I ought to do this the smart way. I laid my armour out on the bed, then started making phone calls.

| | | | | | | | |

I took the tube out west to Hillingdon, then caught a bus for the last leg. I think I’m possibly the only mage in London who uses public transport on a regular basis. Most use gate magic or get a bound creature to ferry them around, and the ones who don’t either get chauffeured or drive a car. Part of it’s paranoia—I’ve had a couple of bad experiences with taking cabs, and while the tube can be crowded and slow, being several hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth makes it much harder for someone to pull an assassination attempt in the middle of your commute. But if I’m being honest, the real reason’s something else. When you’re a mage, you live in a different world from normal people. Your lifestyle is different, your problems are different, you have a new set of hopes and fears and worries. And the longer you spend in magical society, the further away you get. If you put a sixty-year-old master mage in the same room as a twenty-year-old college student, they can’t hold a conversation with each other. Their lives are so far removed that they don’t have enough points of similarity to be able to meaningfully communicate.