Free Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) by Kate Griffin Page A

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