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It was midday, though one could hardly tell, and Alastair and Thomas were hunting for Watchers in Bayswater.
It had started off as more of a reconnaissance mission. Follow the Watchers without being seen, Anna had said; find out where they congregated, and if possible, how they might be harmed or killed.
It had been hours now. They had seen several Watchers and tried following them, creeping through the streets after them as they wandered, but that didn’t bring them any closer to figuring out how to defeat them, since everyone in the city—mundanes, Downworlders, even animals—gave the Watchers a wide berth. There was no way of discovering what they could do in a fight, or how they could be stopped, just by watching at a distance.
They had decided: the next Watcher they saw, they would engage in battle. They were both heavily armed; Thomas carried a halberd, and Alastair a long shamshir, a curved Persian blade, in addition to the seraph blades and daggers in their belts. Ordinarily, Thomas would have felt fairly secure, but it was impossible to feel secure in this London.
They were walking down Westbourne Grove past the lightless, grimy windows of Whiteleys, a department store that took up half the street. It was normally thronged with stylish carriages, delivery vans, and excited shoppers. Now there were no carriages at all. One lone old gentleman sat collapsed like a beggar on the pavement outside the Gents’ Hosiery window, his frock coat crumpled and his hat askew, muttering to himself about socks. Beyond him a flash of movement jolted Thomas for a moment, but it was just an abandoned and very grubby ladies’ umbrella, which might have been pink once, flapping like a dying bird beside an expensive display of hats, dimly visible through the mud-splashed window. The hats also looked grubby. It was not a particularly cheering sight, and Thomas could not help but agree with Alastair.
“Do you mean, you preferred London when it was not cut off from the rest of the world, or you preferred London when the mundanes were autonomous rather than puppeteered by a demon?” Thomas said politely.
“I mean,” said Alastair dryly, “I preferred when the shops were open. I miss buying hats. Come on out, Watchers!” he called in a louder voice. “Let us get a good look at you!”
“I don’t think there are any in this neighborhood,” said Thomas. “We’ve looked everywhere. But we could try Hyde Park. When I was walking Jesse and Grace to Grosvenor Square, I saw a big clump of them there.”
They proceeded down Queensway, which was also deserted and equally depressing. Drifts of rubbish two feet high had blown up against the railings along the east side of the street. They both tensed as they saw a figure in a white, flapping robe—then relaxed; it was not a Watcher, but a young mundane nursemaid in a white apron, pushing a large, fancy white perambulator. “Once upon a time,” she was saying brightly. “Once upon a time. Once upon a time…”
As they passed her, Thomas glanced under the hood of the perambulator and saw to his relief that there was no baby there, only a collection of rubbish the woman must have picked up off the street: dirty old rags, crumpled newspapers, tin cans, dead leaves. He thought he glimpsed the bright eyes of a rat staring out from the nest of litter.
How long could the mundanes go on like this? Thomas wondered. Were they feeding themselves, their children? Would they starve, or begin to wind down someday, like dying clockwork? Belial had claimed he wanted to rule over a New London—was he going to rule over a London of corpses? Would he bring in demons to populate the houses, the streets?
They had reached Bayswater Road and the park entrance. Tall black wrought-iron gates stood open on either side of a broad path lined with leafless beech trees, which stretched away into foggy gloom. There were none of the usual groups of tourists, or dog walkers or kite-flying children, or indeed anything alive at all except for a group of horses peacefully cropping the grass; a scene that should have seemed pleasantly bucolic, but they were all wearing bridles and blinkers and head-collars, and one appeared to be trailing part of the broken shaft of a hansom cab. As Thomas watched, he caught a glimpse of a redheaded figure slipping behind an oak tree—he blinked, and it was gone.
“Thomas,” Alastair said. “Don’t brood.”
“I’m not,” Thomas lied. “So what happened with Cordelia and Lucie? Did you know they were going to Edom?”
That morning Jesse had shown them all the note left by Lucie, explaining that she and Cordelia had worked out a way to get to Edom, Belial’s realm, and had gone there hoping to rescue James and Matthew.
Everyone had reacted as Thomas would have expected them to. Anna was angry but resigned, Ari and Thomas had tried to be optimistic, Jesse was quiet but firm, and Grace was silent. Only Alastair’s response had confused him: he had seemed as if none of this came as a surprise to him at all.
“I didn’t know exactly what they had planned,” Alastair said. “But Cordelia asked me for Cortana yesterday, and I gave it to her. It was clear she was brewing up some sort of scheme.”
“Did you think about trying to stop her?” Thomas asked.
“I have learned,” Alastair said, “that when my sister sets her mind to something, there is little point in trying to stop her. And besides, what would I be stopping her for? So she could experience more of this?” He gestured around. “If she wants to die as a Shadowhunter, in battle, defending her family, I can’t deny her that.”
The words were defiant, but beneath them, Thomas could sense the depth of Alastair’s worry and pain. He wanted to pull Alastair close, though they had barely touched since the night of Christopher’s death. Thomas had felt too raw, as if his whole body were an open wound. But the lost sound in Alastair’s voice…
“What’s that?” Alastair said, squinting. He pointed in the direction of Lancaster Gate, which led out from the park back into the city.
Thomas looked. He saw it too, after a moment.… A flash of white robes through the iron bars.
They hurried through the gate, keeping out of sight. Sure enough, a single white-robed, white-hooded figure was headed briskly north, its back to them. Thomas and Alastair stared at each other before dashing after the Watcher as silently as they could.
Thomas wasn’t much paying attention to where they were going until Alastair tapped him on the shoulder. “Isn’t that Paddington Station?” he whispered.
It was. The station didn’t have a signpost or a fancy entrance: it was a rather unprepossessing, long, grimy Victorian building, accessed by a sloping pavement leading down to a covered arcade labeled GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY.
Normally there would have been paper sellers and crowds of passengers flooding through the doors. Now the place was deserted—save for their Watcher striding down the ramp.
Thomas and Alastair hurried to follow it into the arcade. It swept ahead of them, seemingly unconscious of their presence, and whisked through a doorway that led into the Second-Class Booking Office. It was dark and deserted inside; the ticket windows along the mahogany counter were shuttered and the marble floor was littered with abandoned luggage, some of which had burst open. The archway that led into the station was blocked by a large brown leather suitcase, spilling a pair of red-and-white-striped pajamas and a child’s stuffed bear. Thomas and Alastair leaped over the mess and emerged into the cavernous vault of the station.
They were on platform one, which, like the booking office, was strewn with abandoned luggage and a random selection of passengers’ personal items, all laid out like a stall at a giant bazaar. The big station clock, permanently stopped at a quarter to four, was wearing a red woolen scarf; an enormous, befeathered “cartwheel” hat hung at a jaunty angle from the top of a chocolate vending machine; and five cheap novels, spilled from a velvet bag, lay on the floor like collapsed dominoes.
Above them soared the huge triple arch of the great iron-and-glass roof: a gigantic cathedral, supported by rows of delicate, ornate wrought-iron columns, like the ribs of some metal giant. In normal circumstances it would have been filled with trains and clouds of steam and smog and crowds of people and sounds—the babble of voices and railway announcements and guards blowing whistles and slamming doors; the deafening clanking, chuffing, and whistling sounds of the trains.
Now it was empty. Belial’s demon twilight filtered down from the soot-laden glass roof through a misty haze, broken sporadically by flickering lamps; there was a weird fizzing electrical hum coming from them that sounded eerie in the echoing quiet. The faint illumination from the open end of the station, where the trains came in, cast an uncanny glow across the far ends of the platforms and threw everything else into a gloom that made the deep shadows deeper. Sometimes they seemed to be moving, and small scuttling noises came from them—rats, probably. Hopefully.
