Kevin was saying, "You can't have too much antiseptic..."

He stood in the wrecked remains of the hall surrounded by a largely curious gathering of Magicals Anonymous. The crowbar was still lodged firmly in his chest but, from the fact he was still on his feet, this didn't seem cause him nearly as much physical distress as hygenic.

Two witches, their hands covered by latex gloves, their faces by white masks, were tentatively slathering the crowbar with bright pink antiseptic fluid from a bottle found in the copious depths of Kevin's bag. Sharon approached gingerly, and at the sight of her Kevin shrieked, "Face mask, face mask! Oh my God, haven't you people heard of germs?"

A face mask was proffered, by Chris the exorcist, whose eyes were locked on the crowbar protruding from the vampire's chest.

Holding the mask over her nose and mouth, Sharon mumbled, "You okay, Kevin?"

"God no!" he replied. "They completely missed my heart, but have you seen this?" He gestured at the crowbar, all the while dripping a mixture of blood and medication onto the floor. "It just screams tetanus!"

"It's a magical crowbar through your chest, stupid!" corrected Sammy.

"That's worse!" wailed Kevin. "What if it carries magical tetanus?"

Nearby, Rhys sat, a cup of tea pressed into his hands by the concerned Mrs Rafaat. Every aspect of his body language suggested that here was a druid who had been pushed to the edge and whose survival could only be attributed to luck.

"Is that it?" he murmured as Sharon came over and sat next to him. "Have we won?"

"Uh... yeah. But kind of no."

"Oh," he said. "But at least it's progress?"

"I think it's all terribly sad," put in Mrs Rafaat. "I mean, those poor psychopathic builders probably had no choice about being a composite destructive murderous personality. I blame their upbringing."

Sharon turned to stare at the older woman. There was something about this lady, a certain... normality that, in this place, made no sense. Mrs Rafaat smiled, fidgeting with the long embroidered scarf around her neck. "Well, that's just what I think," she offered.

Sharon thought she saw the white-suited shape of Dez flit across the wall behind Mrs Rafaat. "You... get weird dreams, right?" she asked carefully. "I mean, you're not like... magical or unstable or explosive or anything like that; it's just that you get, you know, weird stuff happening, yeah?"

"I wouldn't want to exaggerate things," ventured Mrs Rafaat. "There are so many people in this world who are far worse off than me."

"Out of interest," Sharon heard her own voice, as if from a long way off, "when did these weird dreams start happening?"

"A few years ago, but really shouldn't we be focusing on this nice vampire with the impaling problem?"

Turning on the spot, a full 360 degrees, Sharon looked slowly round the room. As she did she saw, with a shaman's eye, all the truths behind the shapesof Kevin so gross so gross so gross of Chris the exorcist, who wondered: will the builders haunt this place I don't know it looked like a peaceful way to go, in a violent sense, but then with mystic forces such as these there are always deeper issues at work...

Her gaze wandered up to the rafters, where in the clouds of pigeons still flapping around she could see another shape, drawn out of the falling feathers, which swirled and drifted round each other and which formed, for a very brief moment, the shape of a human arm curling round the verminous flock, or a hint of a human face twisting up. Look a little deeper, and there were the shadows of the things which had taken place in this hallkids in judo uniforms tumbling on old stuffed mats; actors prancing round the room doing whatever exercises actors did as preparation for emoting; the Sunday prayer seminar for singles concerned about their love lives. Can't find a boyfriend? Can't sustain a relationship? Monstrous sounds or manifestations while having sex? Come to our singles prayer seminar, and all shall be explained.

And there was Dez, white suit and fake tan, big red microphone held up as he exclaimed, "And now a message from our sponsor! Do you have problems seeing the truth of things? Is the journey down the hidden path just a little too hard-going? Not convinced you've got the right aura of shamanly wisdom? Try doing it better, the ultimate solution for a difficult situation!"

Sharon glared at him, and her spirit guide had the good grace to fade unobtrusively into the grey realms of psychological discord from which he had sprung. Finally Sharon turned back to Mrs Rafaat: there she stood, a nice old lady with curling grey hair, one of Wembley's finest saris modestly sparing her ankles from the gaze of lewd observers, and she was... normal. Utterly and entirely 100 per cent Mrs Rafaat, not a hint of power, not a shadow of a doubt, not a glimmer of magic, not a- What had Edna said?

"Derek did hire a couple of very nice wizards to try and scry for Greydawn, but they didn't find anything. Which was odd, as you'd have expected some sort of mystical residue or glow, but it's really as if she's just vanished into the city."

And being a shaman wasn't, Sharon recalled, about being invisible. It was about being so much a part of your environment that no one even bothered to look.

"Excuse me?" Mrs Rafaat was staring politely at Sharon's left shoulder. "Um... Ms Li? Are you still there? Only you do appear to have vanished into thin air."

For a second the two of them stood there, shaman and smiling old lady, trying to puzzle each other out. Then Sharon turned around, snapping back into the world of perceived reality, her mouth already opening to shout, "Sammy! Get your arse here now!"

The goblin shimmered out of nowhere to appear where he'd always been, just behind Sharon. "No need to shout," he grumbled. "Drama drama drama, that's all humans everow!" Sharon's fingers had closed round one of his ears and she dragged him towards the troll-sized remains of the door. "You can't! It's my... This is not dignified!" shrilled the goblin as he was pulled out into the night.

She dragged him into the alley down the side of the hall, let go of his ear and hissed, "At one with the bloody city!"

Sammy paused, just in case he'd missed a deeper meaning to this sentiment. "I know you've got potato brains," he concluded, "and you're gonna have to talk me down to your intellectual level."

She hissed with frustration, turning on the spot like a caged animal. "At one with the city! That's how you vanish, that's what being invisible meansbeing at one with the bloody city!"

"Yeah, and-"

"And why would anyone care about us lot anyway, really? I mean, I know that like, Chris is looking to get more business and Rhys has these allergy issues, but no one cares about Magicals Anonymous."

"I'm with you there."

"But Mrs Rafaat isn't magical, isn't special, isn't powerful, isn't dangerous, isn't angry, isn't anything really that you'd think would make seeking help important; but you know what? She's so much not all of these things it's like she's nothing else, do you see?"

"No. What are you talking about?"

"That's all she is! Mrs Rafaat is too human!"

"Too-"

"Too human," insisted Sharon, "to be bloody true."

"Oh." Then silence. "Oh!" repeated Sammy, struggling with this syllable as being something not present in regular vocabulary. Then, raising his voice a little, "You may look thick as a brick wall, but maybe you're not so dumb after all."

"Thanks."

"Which isn't to say you're right, cos you probably ain't..."

"That's fine."

"... but if you are, then well... yeah. That's something, innit?" mused Sammy. Then, as if the desire to say it had been welling up until it became unstoppable, he exclaimed, "If it was so bloody obvious all this bloody time, why the bloody hell couldn't the Midnight Mayor arsehole figure it out for himself? Incompetent wanker!"

There was a polite cough from the end of the alley.

Sharon turned with the shuffle of one who has seen a lot of disaster but can't believe she's seen the last of it.

A man stood at the end of the alley, a disruption of the dark.

"Excuse me?" he said. "Would you be talking about me?"

Chapter 72.

Mrs Rafaat I really feel very embarrassed bothering you like this.

I have this... dream.

Again and again, it comes to me in the night.

I am...

... air. Or not air; I am a cloud within the air. No, that's not right. Not a cloud; that's far too like the weather.

I am breath.

That's what I am. My body is breath, my thoughts are wind, my fingers are the warm curling whispers from air vents, my toes are the rattling of old papers along the ground, my hair is the swaying of leaves and the singing of glass in the high towers.

I dream of the night, of the city at night, when everything is sleeping, that beautiful hour before the sun comes up when the roads are empty of all traffic except for the street cleaner and the late-night painter of lines; when the lights burn in empty offices where only the woman in rubber gloves moves between silent stations.

I sweep above the goods train creaking along empty railway lines; I dance through the tunnels where the engineers walk with grubby faces; I spin round the TV set of the lonely security guard in the too-quiet car park. I am everywhere they are, these people lost in the dark; and sometimes, to delight them, I tangle a plastic bag in my arms and a newspaper round my ankle and let it spin round me so that they may look up and see, in the detritus of the day, that I am there, walking beside them. That they are not alone.

And when the moon is hidden and the street lamps are flickering, I walk along the city wall, and it is as real to me as any paving stone in London. And outside the demons of the night howl and hammer and scream for admittance, all the nightmares that mankind has tried to lock awaythe spectres and the ghouls, the ghasts and the ghosts, the devils with pointed faces and the wendigos clad in the skins of the fallenand my dog is beside me, and he howls and growls, and they cower and are afraid, and I feel pity for them, and my dog does not.

That's my dream.

Every night it comes to me, and sometimes even when I am not sleeping I think I hear him, my dog, howling, calling to me, trying to find me.

Then I wake and remember what I really am.

I am a cleaning woman from Wembley, widow of a loving husband, and I cook an excellent prawn madras.

All the rest is just... longing, I suppose. Longing, and wishing for something more.

Nothing I can't live without.

Chapter 73.

... The Tough Rise to the Occasion He stood at the end of the alley, bright blue eyes beneath dark brown hair, fingerless black gloves at the end of a dirty beige coat, secondhand jeans and second-hand T-shirt. The T-shirt proclaimed: SAVE OUR NHS.

Sharon walked up to him, staring into his too-blue eyes, and said, very quietly and fast, "I think I should slap you but I'm not going to slap you because that would give off a negative energy and we're working really hard on doing positive stuff here but if it wasn't deeply immature and not at all socially responsible, I wouldn't just slap you now, I'd put a knee through your testicles, just so you know."

To her surprise, Matthew Swift, sorcerer, Midnight Mayor and all-purpose destroyer of anything flammable that got in his path, flinched. "What've I done?" he demanded. "I've been helpful without being crushing, useful without being obnoxious, handy in a corner-"

"Patronising without being informative," she corrected. "Cryptic without being directional and, and" and there it was, the pointing finger of accusation before which all who knew her quailed "and you drove a bus at me! That was bloody you, in bloody Tooting, wasn't it?"

Was it dignified for the protector of the city to fiddle so with the ragged end of his sleeve, whether or not beneath the baleful gaze of an angry barista-turned-shaman? "I drove a bus at the wendigo," he insisted. "At the wendigo. And I sent Ms Somchit to look after you, didn't I? And got Sammy to give you shamaning lessons-"

"A goblin!" Sharon felt nothing more needed to be said.

"Frickin' brilliant goblin!" corrected Sammy.

"And what I want you to really appreciate," Swift went on, gathering pace beneath Sharon's red-hot glower, "what I think is very important for you to understand is that, actually, while you've been dealing with these minor inconveniences, I've been offering a distraction. Serving, in fact, my role as a walking target."

"Minor inconveniences?! Wendigo! Killer builders! Blood! Claws! Liquid concrete! Howling in the night! Did I mention how calm I'm being here because of my self-control and responsible attitude, because I don't think I made it clear just how my positive attitude stands in such magnificent contrast to you, being an oily little shite! You tell me" the finger quivered with rage beneath Swift's nose, his eyes nearly crossing in an effort to focus on it "everything you know right now, no cryptic bollocks or I swear I'll start losing control of my more modest nature and go testicular on you!"

Swift breathed in long and slow, and on the exhalation said, "Uh, okay." He ticked the points off on his fingers.

"I knew that the city wall was down and Greydawn was gone, and therefore that nasty things were getting in, including her dog.

"I knew that a few years ago Burns and Stoke attempted to summon, bind and compel Greydawn and something went wrong.

"I know that in the last two months every member of the summoning team who attempted to bind Greydawn has been killed by what looked like an animal attackalthough where in London you can hide a twenty-stone animal with teeth the size of my fist and whose footsteps burn the earth I have no idea.

"And I suspectedsuspected," he added, "that the new CEO of Burns and Stoke might well be more than he seemed." He hesitated before the sustained ferocity of Sharon's gaze. "Honest, that's kind of it from me."

"He's probably telling the truth," admitted Sammy, "seeing as how he's just an arsehole sorcerer with as much spiritual sense as a cucumber."

"Did I mention the politics?" complained Swift. "Did I mention that the Midnight Mayor's office needs cash to run it? I mean, good intentions are all very well, but how far are you going to get on an empty stomach?"

"What politics?" Sharon's voice dripped suspicion.

"Burns and Stoke is heavily invested in Harlun and Phelps..."

"And I care because...?"

"... and Harlun and Phelps," he explained, hastening to address the smoking gun disguised as Sharon's indignation, "is the company that finances the Aldermen. And the Aldermen, like Ms Somchit, are the people I rely on to do my job. But the thing is, if Harlun and Phelps goes down, there'll be a lot of people who don't get their Christmas bonus. And I'm just saying, while I don't know much about managerial technique, I imagine that might dent company morale? And when company morale has a company armoury and that company armoury includes at least one bazooka, as a good boss I get concerned, yes?"

Sharon considered all these points. "Okay," she said, "so I don't have much management experience or anything like that, but I did do business studies at school and I'm just wondering why they couldn't hide the bazooka."

"I must admit, that never crossed my mind."

"There are books, you know? I mean, on how to do management?"

Now it was Swift's turn to scowl. "Books?"

"There are-" a nasty grin formed in the corner of Sharon's mouth "evening classes."

For a moment shaman and sorcerer locked gaze and wills. The Midnight Mayor's eyes were unnatural in colour and a little inhuman in their intensity. Not many people could look steadily into their bright blue depths. But Sharon hadn't spent long hours learning to meet her own gaze in the mirror and long, long hours riding the Underground and practising the art of making and breaking eye contact while whispering to herself the secret of all things that concerned her: "I am beautiful, I am wonderful, I have a secret, the secret is..."

... just so that she could flinch now.