While Greta paced and argued on the phone, Fastitocalon had let his eyes half-close and his other senses calm and then flow outward, smooth as oil over stone, perceiving not simply on this plane of existence but several above it, where he could sense things other than physical objects in space. The trail of the thing that had attacked Greta was old now, cold and overlaid with the trails of hundreds of other living creatures, but it had a peculiar sort of rancid sharpness to it that drew his attention. He had kept very still, listening to Greta’s voice only on a distant, shallow level of awareness, most of his concentration focused on that trail.
Fastitocalon had, in fact, felt a little of the attack on her itself, through his connection with her mind. It hadn’t been at all clear exactly what was happening, but the sudden spike of vivid terror had been unmistakable. Before he had been able to figure out what, if anything, he could do about it, the terror had passed off into what he had come to think of as Greta’s maintaining mode, and he had known she was, if not safe, then at least not in immediate danger. It had taken him a while to calm down again, nonetheless.
Now he led her along the attacker’s trail, trying not to think about how visibly shocked she had been to see him looking actually demonic for once. The jab of fear had passed almost immediately, to be replaced with first the truculent expression he remembered from her childhood rebellions and then, somehow terribly, with an almost exact replica of her father’s determined look, as she went back to maintaining. It had been bad enough when he hadn’t known the cause of it; witnessing that shock and knowing it was his own bloody fault was worse. Fastitocalon missed Wilfert Helsing very sharply sometimes. It should be Wilfert watching over her, and not his own self.
The trail led across Priory Park southwest, toward Barrington Road, and as they came out onto the street he lost it briefly. Too much had happened since the thing leaving the trail had passed by. He leaned against a lamppost, ignoring Greta’s questions, and slid a little way up the planes again, losing some of his visible presence as he did so, but keeping up a general anti-attention field to limit the effect. Up here there were fewer distractions, and he didn’t have to pay attention to things like buildings and cars; all that was locked on the prime material plane. Here he could see/sense the essence of individual humans, their pneumic signature, what might in a somewhat earlier era have been called their souls. At once the trail of the thing that had attacked Greta sprang back into his awareness, a bright and somehow toxic blue.
It had come out of the park here, paused, and then continued southward—but not by road. Fastitocalon could see the dim outlines of the buildings and streets, but the blue trail paid no attention to them; it passed below these obstacles.
He slid back down to the prime material plane, becoming all the way visible again, and this time remembered to keep his eyes shut until the immediate feedback effects had passed. Greta was shaking his arm, saying something; he turned his other senses back on one by one. “… scaring me,” she was saying. “Snap out of it, Fass. Come on, don’t do this to me right now.”
Fastitocalon drew a deep breath, cold and painful in his chest, and opened his eyes, once he was pretty sure the orange light had passed. He found Greta staring up into his face with a mixture of worry and irritation.
“This way,” he said. “We can’t follow it precisely, but I have it now, it’s clear again. Sorry.” Beneath their feet an iron manhole cover hid the low rush and chime of water: a storm sewer. “It’s gone underground,” Fastitocalon said, toeing the metal cover. “Into the tunnels. That’s where they hide. That’s where they’ve been hiding, all along.”
Distracted from all the things she’d been going to say to him with regard to scaring sixteen kinds of hell out of her with his intermittent vanishing act, Greta stared first at the metal circle and then at Fastitocalon, eyes widening. “In the sewers?”
“In the dark places under the city,” he agreed, pulling Ruthven’s coat tighter around his shoulders. “Sewers, tube tunnels, utility tunnels. Come on, the weather’s not getting any less nasty, and I’ve got its trail again. Let’s see where it’s been.”
Two hours later, wet and chilled and in an extremely unfriendly frame of mind, Greta stood on the corner of St. Pancras Way and the Camden Road, shifting from one foot to the other and wiggling her toes to try to get the feeling back in them. They had been walking steadily ever since leaving Crouch End, and while it wasn’t so very far a walk, having to stop every so often for Fastitocalon to reorient himself on the trail and do unsettling things he refused to explain to her—“it has to do with planes” was all he’d said—and the general cold, unpleasant louring weather had made it a thoroughly unenjoyable experience.
Fastitocalon was currently walking in a small circle with his eyes tight shut, an activity that should have drawn more attention than it was, in fact, doing. Even Greta was having trouble seeing him clearly, and she had the advantage of actually knowing he was present; she thought probably he was broadcasting a Don’t Notice Me signal, or a Somebody Else’s Problem field, or something of the kind. Not that she had any idea how he was doing that, not that “how” was an answerable question, or what other magical abilities he had that she’d never been informed of, but—
“Oh,” he said, and she turned to see him looking for an instant very ill indeed. The orange light in his eyes was back, but this time it seemed less noticeable, or perhaps she was just getting used to it. “There’s more than one.”
“It met up with friends?”
“I don’t think so,” said Fastitocalon. The orange was the only color in his face. “No, I rather think they caught up with it. There’s …” He waved his hands in the irritable gesture of someone trying to convey a complex point in a language they don’t speak well. “There’s nuances to the signature. I can feel at least three of them as well as our chap, and they’re all that nasty sort of cyan blue and smell terrible, but … ours fades out and then comes back different. Guttering. It’s … I think they found it, and took it somewhere, and then brought it back changed. It’s very close.”
Greta shivered, a long involuntary wave that raised the hair on her arms. “It’s close to us? Now? Underneath the street?”