Darker London

OOC: Originally posted by Lewis in 2009 but we forgot and wrote things as if Magnus was still about so reposting NOW!

Getting back to London with Magnus in tow was even more difficult than finding him in the first place. Allanah took the first opportunity she had to find a very large bin bag and stuff Magnus inside, which made things marginally easier. It took a few bags to accommodate his weight.

Despite the cold conditions, Allanah was soaked through with sweat and extremely tired by the time she reached the Robert Macgavillary Memorial Hospital. The weather was bad enough that cloaking wasn't as difficult a matter as on some days, but it still took effort. Effort was something quite high on Allanah's list of things to avoid right now.

So it was that she strode into the hospital with her prize and dumped it in front of the reception desk. "Someone else can deal with it," she declared. "Inconspicuously." It wouldn't do to have any of the normal people see her bringing a man into the hospital in a rubbish bag...

Stephie had spent the night at the hospital as the on-call pilot on duty, which was usually boring – you wanted it to be boring, though; no one ever wanted a helicopter at two in the morning for a good reason, but the nighttime hours that she wasn’t on call was the perfect time to get in some practise flying with the night vision goggles.

There were very few times when flying wasn’t awesome, but flying with night vision goggles made Stephie feel like a goddamn superhero. She and Cal, they’d taken Joel and gone out of the city, flying a ways out to sea till the darkness beneath them was black as pitch. Cal had done hundreds of night flights before but Stephie was still getting used to it, and the lack of anything underneath them clamped up her stomach. All her equipment told her exactly how high she was, but without the goggles she couldn’t see a thing outside the helicopter and it was terrifying, but it was exactly this kind of terror she was out here to learn to control.

( ... )

Zena didn't much like going out into the world at large, since it meant having to be around actual people. It was, however, a reality of being alive. She needed to stock up on supplies and she didn't have anyone to really send out to get it for her.

She was winding around the aisles in Waitrose, trying to avoid the eyes of anyone else as she shoved things into her cart. She would have completed her shopping trip that way too, until she felt something tug at the edge of her senses. Some dark and familiar feeling she knew all too well.

Someone like her.

Abandoning her cart, Zena headed towards the demon, whether it towards a fight, or proof that she needed to flee. She stopped dead in her tracks, however, when she spotted the redhaired woman who was looking straight back at her. "You," Zena whispered, her eyebrows raising. "You- I've seen you-"

"The auction," the other woman whispered back, and Zena nodded quickly.

"I went to Amsterdam."

"Paris," the redhead answered back.

There was someone else who had escaped them, someone like her. Zena motioned her head outside and raised her eyebrows to see if the other demon wanted to follow.

The boredom was a killer and Josie wasn’t sleeping.

Peter was sleeping. Or at least, Peter had gone home for the night and was probably in bed with his wife by now or stressing about the world or still at Thomas’s reading Stephie old journal stories; either way, not here. Josie was also stressing about the world, but she wasn’t in bed, she was on the roof.

It was shitty weather up on the roof. But as much as Josie hated the discomfort of the cold, she wasn’t shivering. Was this, she wondered, a demon thing? Could she even get hyperthermia? Or was her skin and her muscles and her blood too removed from human to succumb to that?

( ... )