Her heart was racing and her mouth was parched and crusted around the lips where blood was drying, and she wanted to laugh and throw her hands up to the sky and scream at the moonwhich was not thereand tear at the silent traffic that stop-started against the lights and could not see her, nor even perceive itself, the drivers oblivious as the black fog of their engines melted with the black fog that had hung over London for a hundred, two hundred years and She ran across the street and felt something move beneath her.

It was a jolt, a shock, an almost physical force that threatened to trip her, knocked the breath from her and sent her staggering, hands out to support herself against the nearest wall.

Her hands passed straight through and so did she, tumbling head first, through the wall of a private dental clinic and its posters of patients who reported their immaculate smiles to be the most important thing in their life, onto a scrubbed tile floor. She lay there gasping as the blood thundered in her ears and the world outside seeped back into place, reasserting the sodium colours of the night, the busy crawl of the buses and the weary honking of horns by irritated drivers.

Some lingering tracery of that shadow vision, the shaman's vision that came with the shaman's walk, was still settled over her eyes. She crawled to her hands and knees, then got up, keeping her back turned to the wall through which she had stumbled.

She listened but heard no howl.

There was, however, a breathing, a slow rise-fall, a steady drawing in and pushing out of breath, like a huge motorbike engine made of muscle, waiting to start.

She tightened her fingers around the strap of her bag, closed her eyes and prayed to who-cared-what-for-anything-good and slowly, stomach spinning faster than her step, turned.

No one there.

Just the slow thump-thump of breath that wasn't her own. Her lungs were heaving, grabbing down air, but this sound, this breathing, this steady roarit could circle the globe and still have oxygen left for resuscitating an elephant.

She told herself she was being ridiculous and knew she wasn't.

She told herself that this was absurd, that she was standing inside a dental surgery on City Road and she'd get in trouble with the police if they found her and soon an alarm would go and she should really move.

And did not move.

She thought about Gretel the troll and Sally the banshee, about Kevin the vampire and the man with electric-blue wings, and wondered what they would do.

Stand here paralysed, she concluded. Frozen with fear at an unknown something waiting in the night.

She told herself she was a shaman.

She thought she heard a voice, tiny and far off. "Tonight, on who wants to be a shaman, will Sharon take the challenge or will she give up her dreams?"

It seemed an unlikely voice to hear in the dead of night, and she concluded she must be going mad.

Having proposed madness, she considered it further and decided yes, all things considered, that probably made the most sense.

And that being mad, there was probably no escape from madness so, hell, she might as well go outside and dance the dance.

She took a deep breath and stepped back through the wall.

A woman at a bus stop with a violin case on her back glanced up and furrowed her brow as she tried to work out if she really had just seen a girl appear out of nowhere, or if she was joining in some universal process and going insane.

Then she shrugged and chose not to think about it.

Sharon looked around her: red brake lights heading in one direction, and white headlights streaming in the other. Old Street roundabout wasn't big on sleep.

No trolls lurched, no monsters stirred, no men with blazing eyes and burning wings appeared to offer cryptic messages.

As an experiment, she walked back towards the Angel, until she hit that perfect stride where invisibility began to seep over her skin, where she was so much a part of the city that no one bothered to notice her any more, and she heard it again.

The slow rumbling of breath.

Further off now.

Perhaps an illusion.

Perhaps a plane passing overhead.

Don't look. It wants you to look.

She walked away and then, in a single swift moment, moving too fast to have second thoughts, she turned and looked.

There was a wall across the street. It towered above the houses, it blocked out the sky, it was black and ancient and its stones were sea-smoothed-round and the mortar dripped blood and whispers, and fingers beckoned from the shadows of every indentation, and in the centre of this wall, this giant, impossible wall that spanned City Road like an urban overpass, this wall that traffic drove through like it was nothing at all when it was clearly everything that ever mattered, there was a gate. Black wood soaked through with blood and corseted with bone and, above the gate, a shield of white from which red blood flowed, running down from a giant cross, while another bleeding sword set in the top left segment of the shield dribbled its liquor down to the ground, the whole thing encased in silver-black claws.

Claws which rippled.

Sharon looked up and there it was, metal skin and twisting lizard-tongue, wings folded back and knees bent, eyes spinning and wild, a dragon holding its bloody shield above the gate, just like all the little dragons around the city carved from stone: the symbol of the City of London. But unlike those stone dragons, this one was alive. And it was staring straight at her, and it wasn't pleased.

She backed away as the dragon flexed its wings, droplets of blood shimmering on their spiked tips. It opened its mouth to hiss and its throat was a yawning pit and its eyes were spinning red flame.

Then something moved beneath it, and its head snapped round towards the gate. And it occurred to Sharon that, in this giant black wall that no one else seemed able to see, that traffic passed through like it wasn't even there, it didn't seem natural for someone to have left the gate open.

The dragon screeched its indignation and snarled at the gate, and its voice was the sound of untuned brakes and its breath stank of the hot dust of the Underground.

Sharon peered at what it could see, and thought she made out something beyond the open crack of the gate; and she knew, knew that it stood where the old city wall of London had run. Through the gate that shouldn't be open something was looking at her that ought not to be there. Its eyes were yellow, its jaw was wide, its fangs dripped black venom and, as its shoulders rose and fell, it made a whumph whumph whumph sound like a steam engine beginning to move. It looked at her, then raised its head and howled.

The dragon screamed and launched itself from its perch above the gate, throwing itself down at the thing in the gap. Fang met claw and Sharon put her hands over her ears as the two forces met and tumbled, gashing each other until their blood began to flow and burn the tarmac beneath their feet and she...

... turned and ran.

Chapter 18.

What We Do Defines Us It was called Coffee Unlimited and its tag line was SIMPLY AMAZING COFFEE!!

Its best price was 1.80 for a cardboard cup of thin brown slime which the blackboard behind the counter declared to be Classic Americanomade from finest hand-picked coffee beans and crafted to perfection by our trained staff, this is the classic beverage on which COFFEE UNLIMITED forged its reputation.

People came and people went, and weren't particularly happy about either action, yet somehow, impossibly, Coffee Unlimited had found a tiny part of Pentonville Road where there wasn't something better on offer.

Pentonville Road was not a glamorous place to spend a lunch break. Traffic roared east from King's Cross to the Angel with the recklessness of bored drivers who've spent too much time at a red light and are determined to make it into fourth gear if it kills themor anyone who gets in their way. In the opposite direction, traffic slouched round a one-way system where oversized lorries drove through undersized streets in search of that elusive sign that pointed, in all its cryptic glory, to THE WEST.

Shielded from these geographical misdemeanours by a grubby sheet of glass, worked the staff of Coffee UnlimitedHappy to Help!creating alchemical concoctions on whose mysteries they were sworn to secrecy and, frankly, did anyone really want to know? Greg, twenty-seven, Polish, studied stage management and worked towards his visa with relentless good humour and a wry resignation at the impossibility of anyone pronouncing his surname correctly. Gina, half Indian, half Greek, entirely stunning, apologised for other people's mistakes until the day Robin, American, brash and utterly unimaginative, finally went too far and blamed her workmates for the incident with the exploding pot of pressurised cream, when a new aspect of Gina struck down all before it in hitherto pent-up rage. And Sharon, who kept her head down and did her very best not to turn invisible before the customers' eyes or forget to open the storeroom door when fetching another litre of on-the-turn milk.

Above them all, ruling from afar, was- "Were you late this morning, Sharon?"

Mike Pentlace, five foot five of carrot-crowned lechery, iPhone fused to the palm of his hand, perpetually trying to make its voice activation recognise his drawling tones, forever failing.

"Uh... yes, Mr Pentlace, I was, a little."

This is the voice of Sharon Li, after four hours sleep, three of those spent in nightmare, who staggered out of bed forty minutes before her shift began and opened the door half expecting to find blood outside. This is the bleary look of Sharon Li as she hangs her head before the wrath of her employer, wondering whether her life is real or if in fact she hasn't made a terrible mistake to think so.

"Yeah, but you should just tell me these things."

"I'm sorry, but there was this meeting last night and it overran..."

"Yeah, but I get that, yeah, but you have a responsibility to be fit for work. I mean, I'm not angry, yeah, but you've got to come in here fit to work and I mean I didn't want to say nothing because, yeah, but it's not really something I usually care about but actually you're just kinda... You don't have a good attitude, you know what I'm saying?"

"A good attitude?" echoed Sharon, the milk in her hand gently turning.

"Which I don't get," added Mike Pentlace, thumbing his iPhone just to make sure there wasn't an app which could get it for him. "Because, yeah, but this job is important, yeah? But you seem to think that you're not so much one of the team and I'm saying, yeah, but you're not going to get better than this. I mean I don't want to sound... but you're not so you've gotta have a positive attitude, yeah, and that doesn't just mean turning up on time, it means smiling more and looking happy and being, yeah, but being more... I don't know... more less weird."

Sharon tried it.

"Yeah, but okay," concluded Pentlace, disappointed with her wretched attempt. "Well, just go back to work, okay, and we won't say anything more, yeah?"

She went back to work.

Robin exclaimed in her best head-turning whisper, "Wow, he is like totally an ass!"

Gina added, "You okay, hun?"

Sharon smiled gamely and topped up the espresso machine one bean at a time, placing each one into the grinder with a murmur under her breath of "I am beautiful."

Pop the bean inside.

"I am wonderful."

Pop another bean inside.

"I have a secret."

Push it down into the blade.

"The secret is-"

"Fucking service!" shrilled a voice behind her.

She turned.

There was no one there.

"Are you all like, deaf or what?" added the voice. It was male in that its highest register was still below the normal female range, but so bubbling with indignation that it had nearly cracked on through to a whole linguistic realm of its own.

Sharon looked around. Gina was putting out slightly stale muffins in a row on the cake counter. She liked laying out the cakes, and was continually adjusting them so that whenever someone took a muffin, the display was instantly restored to maximum mathematical neatness, for the next customer's aesthetic delight.

She didn't seem to have noticed the furious voice.

"What the fuck does it mean 'medio'?" ranted the voice, its indignation rising to a new pitch. "Where's tea?"

Sharon edged towards the sound just as a hand, grey-brown and all knuckle, gestured above the lip of the bar in lurid contempt at the available options. She leaned over and looked down.

A pair of gum-yellow eyes stared back, and a plume of black nasal hair quivered in indignation at the end of a flattened nose the colour of dirty slate. "About fucking time! I want tea. I want it in a mug this big." A pair of four-fingered hands, fingers too long, skin too leathery, made a gesture that was nearly the same size as the creature's head. "And I want the bag left in to soak. No point having fucking weak tea!"

Carefully, with a nonchalance that she'd cultivated with great care over many years, Sharon examined the rest of the cafe. If anyone else was aware that a three-foot goblin in a bright green hoodie which proclaimed SKATE OR DIE! across its back was attempting to order tea, they weren't showing it.

"Milk, sugar?" she asked.

"Both, lots!"

"Biscuit?"

"Do I look like I want a fucking biscuit? Why do you people always try to sell me shit I don't want?"

"I'll be a few moments."

She made the tea on automatic, staring vacantly ahead, waiting for the moment when Robin came back from wherever it was Robin went when she got bored, and saw the goblin, and screamed. Or for the clash of Greg dropping the tray as he surveyed the bare-footed three-toed little creature quivering with rage against caffeinated consumerism and all its follies, or foroh Godfor the moment Mike Pentlace swanned back in while trying to make a Very Important Phone Call, only to be stopped in his tracks by the bodily odour of a creature who had heard of this showering thing but thought it was for nonces.

She poured in too much milk and the cup nearly overflowed, its contents held in by surface tension alone. She tipped some away, then remembered the size of the goblin's gesture when he'd ordered his tea. A thin line of brown now dripped down, sullying the clean white cardboard with the trickle of shame.

Still no screaming.

She turned back to the counter and pushed the tea towards the questing fingertips of the goblin.

"Two twenty, please."

The fingers stopped mid-curl around the mug. "Two fucking twenty? For a cup of fucking tea!"

"A very large tea," corrected Sharon, and flinched even as she spoke. "In the mornings we do tea free with sandwiches between 8 and 10 a.m., or in the evenings sometimes we knock down the price on the muffins because if we don't then we have to throw them away or sell them the next day at the very front and hope no one notices."

"Where do you think I'm going to get two twenty from?"

Sharon considered. "Aren't there charities?"

"For goblins?"

"Um... I didn't know people were allowed to discriminate on grounds of... you know, ethnicity."

"Are you calling me ethnic?"

"No sir," blurted Sharon. "I'm just saying you're uh... you're probably a minority group and that's maybe good because you know when you get those forms and it says 'Do you consider yourself disabled?' and you say 'Yes' because then they have to give you an interview in order to fulfil their quota, well, you being like, you know, a goblin and stuff, you could probably say you're disabled and discriminated against and that's really good for these access questionnaires and-"

"What the hell are you talking about?" demanded Sammy the goblin, so loud that Sharon knew, she knew someone had to hear, someone was going to look, they were going to see her talking to a goblin and that would be it, another ignoble end to another ignoble job, sacked for a reason no one could quite name but everyone accepted, because they could have sworn they saw her turn invisible but weren't completely sure.