Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) by Kate Griffin Page A

“Okay, so you may have something there. But seriously, this treading softly thing isn’t our style, and while I’m generally an open and honest kind of guy, and I know you may have a hard time believing this, in my experience all that this open, honest groove has led to is serious cleaning bills and writs for damages. So, sorry if I haven’t just jumped in there with ‘Yo Sharon, there’s shit going down, please fix it.’ ”
    Sharon felt herself swallow without meaning to, and murmured, “You know my name?”
    “Sure I do,” he replied. “You’re Sharon Li. You’re twenty-two years old. You work in a coffee shop as what I believe we’re now meant to call a barista, and you are, Christ knows why, the founder of Magicals Anonymous, a self-help group of the mystically buggered. You’re also, in case you’re wondering, so far in over your head that I imagine you’re soon going to have a hard time working out which way up is anyhow,
and
you’ve probably got enough brains to realise it,
and
though you’re a shaman you’re clearly not practised enough to recognise the hollow shell of a place, like this building here, where a spirit should once have been, so I’d work on that, if I were you.” She thought she saw the flash of a grin in the darkness, then he asked, “Have you considered evening classes?”
    “Have I—”
    “You seem like you’re big on self-improvement, and anyway…” He stopped, his head turning with pigeon speed towards some unseen shadow. Sharon shifted, listening for something more, and thought she heard… maybe just a train passing below?
    “The question you have to ask is this.” His voice sounded far-off, distracted, his blue eyes were turned elsewhere. “Where did they go? I’ve done all I can but I’m no shaman. I don’t know how to walk down the hidden paths. The spirits of the city are missing and it’s not natural and it’s not evolution and it’s not right and—”
    And she heard it and so did he, somewhere outside in the settled gloom, a sound which you hoped would be an engine starting, the slow winding-up of oversized gears and which, as you listened, the more you listened, truth intruded on hope and it became…
    “Don’t look back,” he said. “It wants you to look.”
    It became…
    “Time to go now,” he added. “Time to run.”
    Starting at the very bottom of the register, almost too low to almost too high, it grew and grew and it became from the floor to the sky:
hhhhhoooowwwwwillll!!!!
    She looked up at the man in the window and there was light in his hands, light on his skin, a brilliant electric blue and he wasn’t human–nothing human looked like that–he was a thing wearing human flesh, he was a face pretending, a body bursting from something else inside, and as he looked round at her his eyes burned and in them were a million million voices all shouting all as one and she…
    … ran.

Chapter 17
Movement Is Freedom
    Sharon ran.
    She didn’t know why and she didn’t know what from, but the man in the darkness had said run, and from his back had grown a pair of burning angel wings and she knew they weren’t real, of course they weren’t real, but they were real to her eyes, which was all the reality she felt she could cope with right now and
    and she’d had supper with a troll
           and shaken hands with a banshee
                     and heard a creature howl
    So now she ran.
    She ran straight through the shaman’s walk, that place where she became invisible and all the invisible things began to crawl out for her to see. She ran straight through it and out the other side, unseen footsteps running through the night, a gasp of breath heard where there was nothing to be seen; and as she ran, the shadows dragged behind her and the whispers of the things buried just beneath began to creep and clutch their way out from beneath the paving stones, tangle their memories around her legs and tell