The man’s name was Booth, and he had to piss.

The thought rose up out of the fog and there it was, bright as a light. Booth scuffed his boots along the cobblestones to the nearest alley (he had the decency not to relieve himself on the steps, even if they had come out of nowhere).

He half walked, half tumbled into the narrow gap between the buildings, realizing only then how dark it was—he couldn’t see his own hand, even if he’d been sober enough to look for it—but his eyes kept drifting shut anyway, so it didn’t really matter.

Booth leaned his forehead against the cool stones of the tavern wall as he pissed, humming softly to himself, a shanty about women and wine and … something else that probably began with w, though he couldn’t remember now. He let the melody wander off as he refastened his pants, but as he turned back toward the mouth of the alley, his boot caught something on the ground. It skidded away with a scrape before fetching up against the wall, and he might have left it there had a gust of wind not blown the nearest lantern on its hook, sending a flash of brightness into the darkened alley.

The shard of light glinted off metal, and Booth’s eyes widened. He might have been several pints along, but greed was a sobering thing, and as the light vanished again, he found himself on his hands and knees on the damp alley floor, grasping in the shadows until his fingers finally curled around the prize.

Booth struggled to his feet and toddled a few steps nearer to the lantern light, and there realized that he was holding the casing of a sword, the weapon still safe within. The hilt glittered, not silver or gold or steel, but black. Black as oil, and smooth as rock. He wrapped his fingers around the grip and drew the weapon from its sheath, letting out a low groan of appreciation. The metal of the blade was as glossy and dark as the hilt. A strange sword, and rare by the looks of it. Booth weighed it in his meaty hands. It would fetch a pretty penny. A very pretty penny. Only in the right places, of course. Couldn’t be thought stolen, of course. Finders keepers … finders sellers, that is, and such, of course.

Funny thing, though.

His fingertips, where they curled around the hilt, had started to prickle. That is a bit peculiar, he thought, in that calm and distant way that comes with thorough intoxication. He wasn’t worried, not at first. But then he tried to loosen his hold on the weapon and couldn’t. He told his fingers to let go, but they remained firmly around the sword’s gleaming black hilt.

Booth shook his hand, first slowly, then vigorously, but couldn’t seem to free his fingers from the weapon. And then, quite suddenly, the prickle became a jolt, hot and cold and foreign at once, a very unpleasant feeling. It spread up his arm, beneath his skin, and when he stumbled back a step, toward the light at the mouth of the alley, he saw that the veins on the back of his hand, over his wrist and up his forearm, were turning black.

He shook his hand harder and nearly lost his balance, but still, he couldn’t seem to release the sword. It wouldn’t let him.

“Let go,” he grumbled, unsure of whether he was speaking to his own hand or the weapon locked within it.

In response, the hand holding the sword—which did not seem to belong to him anymore at all—tightened on the hilt. Booth gasped as his fingers turned the blade slowly back toward his own stomach. “What the devil,” he swore, grappling with himself, his free hand fighting to hold the other at bay. But it wasn’t enough—the thing taking hold was stronger than the rest—and with a single clean thrust, Booth’s hand, the one with the sword, drove it into his gut and buried it to the hilt.

He doubled over in the alley with a groan, hand still fixed to the grip. The black sword glowed with a dark internal light, and then began to dissolve. The gleaming weapon melted, not down, but in. Through the wound, and into Booth’s body. Into his blood. His heartbeat faltered and then redoubled, steady and strong in his veins as the magic spread. His body shuddered, then stilled.

For a long moment, Booth—what remained of him—crouched there on the alley floor, motionless, hands to his stomach, where the blade had driven in, and where now, only an inky black stain, like melted wax, remained in its wake. And then, slowly, his arms slipped to his sides, the veins running over them now a true black. The color of true magic. His head drifted up, and he blinked two black eyes and looked around, then down at himself, considering his form. He flexed his fingers, carefully, testing.

And then, slowly, steadily, he got to his feet.

SEVEN

THE FOLLOWER

I

Lila could have simply gone down into the belly of the Stone’s Throw, but she owed Barron enough already—he wouldn’t take her coin, either because he thought she needed it or because it wasn’t hers to begin with—and she needed the fresh air to clear her head.

Other Londons.

Men walking through magical doors.

Stones that made something out of nothing.

It was all the stuff of stories.

Of adventures.

All of it at her fingertips. And then gone. And Lila left feeling empty, hungry, and hollow in a new and terrifying way. Or maybe it was the same kind of hunger she’d always felt, and now the missing thing had a name: magic. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that, holding the stone, she’d felt something. And looking into Kell’s ruined eye, she’d felt something. And when the magic spun the wood of the wall around her wrist, she’d felt something. Again the questions surged, and again she shoved them down, and took in the night air—thick with soot and heavy with impending rain—and trudged through the web of streets, and across Westminster to the Barren Tide.