Darker London

It was a cold, still morning, quiet and grey. Marcia's breath fogged in front of her face, and across the hospital grounds fog lay there too, waiting for the morning sun to burn it away. There was a little frost on the ground, and it hurt her bare feet, but she curled her toes in the icy grass all the same.

Her body was still drenched in heat from her wolfish excursions, her senses high, and her heart felt happy and strong. The reek of London's pollution clogged her nose though, as she took a deep breath in, and choked on it.

"I'll never get used to the smell either," said the demon boy she'd spent the night with. Not in the sense that they'd touched - at all - simply in the sense that he'd been out in the grounds when she'd come out to change, and he was here still. Marcia knew his name was Koshchiy, but it was hard not to put the word demon over his head; even at rest, as he was now, he stood with his dark wings stretched out behind him.

( ... )

Stephie lay out the road atlas across the bedroom floor in the small inn in Clun, and Marcia weighed down the rolling edges with plain white tea cups taken from the communal kitchen.

“I’ve always wanted to go to the Green Man festival,” Marcia was saying to Nancy, as she traced a black felt down the roads they’d traveled today, marking off each unsuccessful leg of their search. She was talking to Nancy because Nancy was much more receptive of small talk than Stephie, who sat on the floor scowling at the satellite map on her laptop, making hopeful orange crosses on the paper map whenever she saw an aerial shot of a potential big house somewhere in the country, as Astrid had described.

“It would be nice,” Nancy said, with a smile toward Marcia. “It’s quaint here.”

“Quaint is good,” Stephie said, without breaking her scowl as she looked up at them. “Quaint is more likely to be hiding something. If I was going to kidnap people, I’d pick somewhere quaint and lovely. I have a good feeling about Clun.” She dropped her gaze back to the map and made another X.

( ... )