"Discrimination," she babbled. "I mean I know there's people who say that positive discrimination is still discrimination just like unpositive discrimination, I mean like negative discrimination but you gotta look at things and go 'Shit, there are way more rich white dudes than rich black dudes' but then I guess it's all proportional and really I don't know much about it so-"

"Which are you? White or black?"

"What?"

"You?" demanded the goblin. "What 'ethnicity' or whatever are you?"

"I'm... well, I suppose I'm ethnically Chinese but I was born in Barnet."

"Barnet, Barnet, shitty shitty Barnet!" sang out the goblin, and Sharon closed her eyes, waited for the shout, the gasp of horror, the cry of amazement, and it was...

... nowhere.

She opened her eyes and lookedreally lookedand saw the world as if through a broken magnifying glass, or a TV screen set to interfere. Someone had sprayed a settling mist over all things, but rather than cause the world to thicken, it seemed to make all things that it touched a little more translucent. The glass shimmered in the shop front like a caged liquid trying to break free, and at the empty tables sat the shadows of those who had sat there before, their features shifting in busy silence. The light from outside made each mote of dust visible, rippling away from her fingers as she moved them through the air. And looking round at the people, she saw...

She saw not one but many, a many that was one...

She saw Pallid features of the man reading the newspaper, hair growing thin before her eyes, falling away, skin turns white and retracts into bone and he glances up and wonders why she stares and She saw Another shyly holding hands with Greg as he speaks words in another language, which she knows though she has never before heard these sounds and Above Gina's head, in Gina's head, the sound of music, a song half heard, half remembered, what and where, and the what is Sung by her sister And the where is Richmond Park as a child, barely able to walk, a deer came by and she laughed and her mother was afraid and that made her laugh harder And she heard Tick tick tick beneath the streets And smelt Burning on the earth And she felt Burning in the palm of my hand our hand our hand burning in the palm ours is mine is And she looked down at the grinning face of the goblin and there was an infinity between her and him, an infinity before and an infinity behind and a world of dust between his toes and she held on to the counter for support but it was barely there, barely real, she was gasping for air, gasping for breath, and he said, the words too far off: "Do you have any toothpaste?"

She rocked back to normality, the real world asserting itself like a slap on a choking man's back. The shadows were gone, the sounds were gone, the goblin was gone and he was No, not quite gone. There was a faint something in the air, a shimmering of movement, a clattering of change and a sulkily paid two pounds twenty was there in front of her where it hadn't been before and a little voice, far off, was saying: "We'll start at Seven Dials, eleven tonight. Don't be fucking late."

If she scrunched her eyes up, she thought she could see the walk of the goblin as he waddled towards the door, and trace his passage by the splatter of tea as it slopped over the edge of his cup. Then he was gone, out through the door and into the street.

Although, she noticed, as he left he didn't bother to open the door.

Chapter 19.

Lonely Is the Burden of Command Some four and a half hours before a goblin walked into Sharon Li's life and demanded extra large tea with milk and sugar, Sammy the Elbow, second (possibly third, really, who could say?) greatest shaman who'd ever lived, was annoyed if unsurprised to receive a visitor to his den.

The den was in Camden, and had been advertised as a "studio flat", which was far too small for Sammy with his bed of cardboard, soft beds being for losers, and his extensive collection of tinned food and toothpaste.

This visitor, from whose back blazed wings of blue fire that might have been those of an angel, or perhaps of a dragon, and whose eyes were two endless pits at the bottom of which burned unending madness, said, "Wotcha."

Sammy had replied, "Oi oi, you look shit, don't you?"

His visitor considered this proposition. Since it came from a three-foot-nothing goblin whose body had clearly interpreted the genetic command to sprout hair as relating more to ears, nose and belly button than any real growth on the surface of his skull, he wasn't sure if he was ready to accept Sammy's diagnosis without querying the perspective from which it was made. Then again, what Sammy lacked in outward presentation, he more than made up for with a certain unstoppable grasp of the situation. So the visitor gave a shrug and said: "Rough couple of... well... everything."

"You know about Dog?"

"I love the way you do that."

"Do what?"

"Just know stuff."

"I am the second greatest shaman ever to walk the earth, ain't I; how thick would it make me if I didn't know shit? It's not like you get to be as talented as me without picking up some stuff."

"It's killed again."

"Some prat in Clerkenwell, I know."

"It-"

"Tore his throat out, ripped off his ear. I know, I know!"

"And last night I went to the place where the spirits were and heard-"

"Its howl, of course you fucking did, it's been howling for weeks now and you're just too fucking 'boom' to do anything about it, aren't you?"

"Its footsteps-"

"Burn the earth, I know, I know!"

Silence. Then the man whose blood was fire and whose eyes were an endless storm, said, "Sammy, in all the many things you know, and I get that there's a lot, has it occurred to you that sometimes it's just plain good manners to let the other guy finish?"

"I'm a busy goblin, I can't sit around for everyone else to catch up. Besides, you're the Midnight Mayorwhat you going to do about it?"

The man addressed as the Midnight Mayor sighed. "I'm trying. It's hard."

"Fucking lame."

"I've found someone I think you should meet."

"You wanting favours now? Bad habit to get into, needing favours."

"She's a shaman."

"Any good?"

"Maybe. Maybe very. But she needs training."

Sammy spat, a single globe of green-tinted spit flying across the floor. Where it hit concrete, it began to smoke, giving off a thin acrid white vapour. "Can't be handling kids."

"It's important."

Sammy's eyes narrowed in suspicion, a finger waggling towards the other's face. "You... scheming, Midnight Mayor?" he asked.

"Me? Scheme?"

"Don't get me wrong, I think you look like a thicko in a bin bag just like everyone else, but then that got me thinking, maybe you want to look like a thicko in a bin bag, maybe that's all part of the game, pretend to be a thicko so that when you stop being a thicko everyone's so surprised that no one notices you're not that bright anyway."

"I can see you've thought this through."

"Too right."

A silence stretched like the screech of chalk across a blackboard.

Then, "She's founded this thing, this society. It's called Magicals Anonymous."

"Shit name."

"Dog's killings aren't random."

"Course they ain't."

"He's targeting a very specific group of people, all connected to a very specific operation."

"Course he is! But you're too tied up with the cash thing to do nothin' 'bout it!"

"The four greatest killers the world has ever seen are in town."

"What's new?"

The man addressed as the Midnight Mayor said, "I think they were hired by a wendigo."

Silence again.

Then, "You pillock."

The man called the Midnight Mayor grinned. "Thought you might say that."

Chapter 20.

To Understand Others Is to Comprehend Yourself There were a lot of messages waiting for Sharon when she got home. Her shift had been long, occasionally stressful and frequently dull, all beneath the shadow of her boss, judging his employees without raising a finger to contribute. Three months she'd worked in the coffee shop, and that was two and a half months too long. But where else was she to go?

She sat down in front of a tiny laptop, her leaving-school present to herself, and flicked through the logs. Most of the messages were via Facebook, and nearly all were from members of Weird Shit Keeps Happening to Me And I Don't Know Why But Figure I Need Help. Some were nice. Sally the banshee wished to thank Sharon for her initiative and enthusiasm in chairing last night's meeting; Gretel the troll had attempted to express her delight at Thai food and wondered if maybe next week they could try Mexican, but unfortunately the size of her fingers had crunched the keys and most of what emerged was an unintelligible medley of letters. Chris the exorcist had attempted to post an ad on Facebook for ExorminatorExorcism With Lovewhich Sharon removed with a firm little note requesting that all promotional material be kept off the group page.

One was from a stranger, requesting permission to join the group. There was a message attached, which read: Sorry to run off last night, but there was a bloodthirsty hound prowling through the spreading shadows. Asked a friend to pop by and see you at work. He's cranky but okay. Bring toothpaste.

It wasn't signed. The name of the sender was one MS. She clicked through to his profile page. It was almost entirely empty. In the "About me" section someone had written: Protector of the City, Defender of the Night, Guardian of the Mystic Walls. Like you believe a word of it.

Only one other person seemed to have ever looked at the site of MS.

KS: This is not what I meant when I suggested we raised your public profile.

MS: Bite me.

KS: How do you feel about Twitter?

MS made no reply, but two days later KS was back again.

KS: Did you have to hex the backup servers too?

After that the conversation lagged.

Sharon sat back, drumming her fingers along the edge of the desk. It wasn't every day, she concluded, that a goblin demanded you met for purposes unknown at 11 p.m. in the middle of town. But then it wasn't every day you had curry with a troll or got patronised by a guy with invisible burning wings at his back. So perhaps she should just write off the entire week as being a bit odd and go with it.

The man in the empty factory had said she was a shaman.

He'd said a lot of other things too, most of them in haste and with an infuriating lack of detail, but that had been the part that stuck. That had been the bit she knew was right, as she had spent so much of her life knowing without knowing how.

She googled shaman.

Her laptop chugged through the search, chewing every byte like an old cat on dry biscuits.

Pictures populated her screen, one pixel at a time. Shamanism didn't look like a profession with great fashion sense. Feathers she could handle, though less so through her nose. Pages of ravaged faces, men and women with lives etched canyon deep into their features, stared out of the screen with the reproachful gaze of the too wise wishing for ignorance. She tried reading a few articles, and the words blurred before her. Vegetarianism seemed in, especially mushroom dishes. Drumming seemed likely. Leadership was an absolute must, but nowhere did it say exactly how, or give any useful pointers like whether to bring a clean pair of trousers. The implication was that if you were a shaman, then you probably knew already what you were doing.

She looked at the clock on the wall: 9.45 p.m.

A pile of books stood on the wobbly fake-wood table by the bed. They were much thumbed and well annotated, and featured such helpful titles as Believe in Yourself and You Are the Best. They offered a variety of guidelines on how to live your life in this uncertain age, ranging from five minutes of meditation every two hourswhich Sharon had calculated to mean at least five hours a week of sitting on her behind trying to breathe through her nosethrough to a healthy diet of celery and beetroot juice. She felt rather guilty about her collection of self-help books, not least because she couldn't shake the feeling that much of their wisdom was the stuff her grandmother would have spouted when tipsy on too much rice wine. None of the books advised on what to do when you accidentally turned invisible, or walked through walls; nor, above all else, whether either of these had dangerous medical implications. Having no real information on such conditions and being largely unable to control them, Sharon had tried instead to manage her concern at the situation through helpful mantras, extensive lists and, during particularly difficult times, multicolour highlighted charts entitled "My Aims" pinned to the inside of her cupboard door. These proclaimed things such as I will get a proper job and I will learn how to use the self-assessment tax service and of course, above all else, I will take control of my own magical nature. This last point she'd highlighted in both blue and pink, creating a smudged, rather unintelligible note of good intent.

10.10 p.m.

Downstairs Trish was watching TV, loudly, with the living-room door open. It wasn't much of a living room, mostly dominated by one grubby sofa and a coffee table supported on books, yet for all its lack of space somehow they could never find the remote. She loitered in the bedroom doorway, listening to a merry male voice proclaiming, "What a stunning performance! She really gave it everything she's got, and here's her mother, looking so proud..."

Ayesha was out for the night. When they'd moved in together, Ayesha had told them she liked to study late in her university library. Trish had laughed and made a joke about a line of boys; Sharon had laughed too, until she'd seen how deeply Ayesha had blushed and caught the smell of old paper clinging to her hands. Sharon didn't like touching old books; it annoyed her to hear the scratching of the pen and the rippling of the thousand microscopic bugs that lived in the spine. Certain things, it seemed, wanted her attention whether she was invisible or not; books and blood being right up there.

She put her satchel over her shoulder, pulled on a pair of thick socks and her purple boots, and went downstairs to the living room.

"Hey, Trish," mumbled Sharon.

"Hey, babe!" replied Trish, eyes not turning from the screen. "Good day?"

"No," admitted Sharon. "I got told off by my boss, and a goblin came into the shop and ordered tea, and last night a guy with these wings told me that I had to find a dog and then there was a howling and I ran away."

"Sounds good, babe, sounds good!"

"I think I'm meant to do something, something important, and I don't know what it is."

"I get that all the time, babes," sighed Trish. "It's like, I'm looking at myself in the mirror and I can't work out what's wrong and it takes like, for ever to realise I forgot my earrings!"

Sharon smiled meekly, the only response she could find, while Trish suddenly leapt forward on the sofa and screamed at the TV, "What the fuck? You can't vote for himhe was fucking shit! Jesus!"