. . . helped the bride out of the car and held up her long train. Arriving separately in a silver £300k Rolls-Royce Corniche V were Magnus and Helen Ashford-Grasser, making a rare public appearance. The publicity-shy Ashford heiress declined to pose for a picture but stood out from the crowd in an off-the-shoulder blue ruffle dress before heading into the stunning Grade II listed church. Meanwhile, putting on a leggy display in a smart red outfit was . . .

  I closed my laptop and leant back against my bedroom wall.

  * * *

  —

  I stayed up late that night.

  My first reaction, once the truth had finished sinking in, was anger. All of those bastards had known. Lucella, Tobias, Charles, probably more. They’d known and said nothing, just sat back and laughed as they’d watched me blunder around. For so long I’d thought about my mother, wondering what had happened to her and why she’d disappeared, when all that time any of the Ashfords could have told me.

  Except it had been worse than that. They hadn’t just said nothing, they’d done nothing. All those years that I’d been alone and struggling, they’d been sitting in their mansion, ignoring me. Even the tiniest bit of help would have made so much difference. It would have been easy for them, they’d barely have had to lift a finger, and they’d done nothing.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I paced up and down my little room while Hobbes slept on the bed.

  At least I finally had the answer to the question of where my mother had been all these years. She’d been right there in the Ashford mansion. All this time, she’d been less than an hour’s journey across London. That was how long it would have taken her to come see me if she’d wanted to.

  She hadn’t.

  A little worm of resentment started growing in my heart. All these years, I’d told myself that there’d been some reason for all this, that it had made sense somehow. The more I learned about my mother’s family, the harder it became to keep believing that.

  I tried to shake off the anger by giving myself something to do. I went back to my notebook and sketched in a few more lines, putting myself on the family tree, then looked at the diagram. So Tobias was my half brother and Bridget was my half sister. A lot of little things about how they’d both acted made a lot more sense now.

  And it finally explained why Lucella had been so willing to believe that I might be a rival. I wasn’t some distant relative; I was Charles’s grandson. And speaking of which, good God but that guy was a bastard. He’d acted like that to his own grandchild?

  Thinking about the other Ashfords instead of my mother helped me calm down. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t see how any of it helped. I knew how I fitted into the family now, but I didn’t know what to do about it.

  I puzzled over it until one in the morning, but didn’t get anywhere. At last I gave up and went to bed.

  * * *

  —

  The next day was a Saturday. I knew I should get back to investigating, but last night’s discoveries had left me frustrated and I decided to spend a day locating to clear my head. Luck was with me, and I found a whole cluster of temporary Wells in a part of South London that everyone else seemed to have missed. All were only half-charged, and no more than D+ in strength, but if I could wait for them to fill, they’d be quite the treasure trove.

  The find didn’t exactly make me happy, but it helped, and I went home that night in a better mood. It was September 10; in another week, it would be my birthday.

  The next morning, the black minivan was back on my road.

  CHAPTER 18

  I woke to the sun streaming through my window. It was a pleasant September morning, puffy clouds making a patchwork of white against a blue sky. I put down Hobbes’s food, then sat on my bed reading while he ate.

  Father Hawke had been branching out a bit with the books he’d been lending me, and this one was more to do with politics. It was arguing that the idea of a utopian society was impossible because humans were inherently flawed, so no matter what kind of technology or system of education you had, people were still going to be born with an inclination towards evil. Despite myself, I was actually starting to find the subject kind of interesting, although I still wasn’t sure what the point of any of it was.

  Hobbes finished eating and meowed to be let out. I opened the window, leaning out to look around. I supposed I shouldn’t complain: Father Hawke might be weird, but he was harmless enough compared to—

  A jolt went through me as I spotted the van.

  Hobbes had sprung onto the windowsill and was just about to jump down to the ledge; now he stopped, looking at me questioningly. “Inside,” I told Hobbes quietly, then picked him up, dropped him back inside the room, and shut the window. Only then did I lean against the wall and take a deep breath.

  So they’re back.

  It’s funny how you can see something coming months away and still feel a shock when it happens. I’d been expecting this ever since April, but as week after week had gone by, I’d let myself be lulled into a false sense of security. Now, all of a sudden, my time was up.

  But I hadn’t put that time to waste. I was a lot stronger now than I had been. It was time to find out whether it would be enough.

  I shut Hobbes in my room with a firm command to stay, then went downstairs and outside into our house’s tiny back garden. I moved into the shadow of the wall and slipped on my invisibility and vision sigls, watching the world go black, then blue. Once I was sure that the diffraction field was working, I jumped up and scrambled over the wall into the grounds of the block of flats, then walked to the side gate and let myself out.

  The streets felt strange in the light of my vision sigl, faded and washed out. I circled all the way around the block, then approached Foxden Road from the other side. Peering around the corner, I could see that the black minivan was right there, less than thirty feet away. It was the same one as last time—same number plate. Cars buzzed past on the main road, but Foxden Road was quiet.

  I knew that I was taking a risk. I’d made a point of researching ways to see through invisibility, and it turned out that there were a lot. In fact, invisibility was practically an arms race, with different corporations selling sigls specifically designed to counter the ones from their rivals. If your invisibility sigl hid the part of the spectrum that the other guy was using, you were fine. If they had a sigl that let them see at that particular frequency . . . tough luck.

  My invisibility sigl was pretty basic. I’d tried to make it bend away as much of the spectrum as I could, but I’d been limited by power requirements, meaning that the only thing I was sure it hid me from was visible light. Ultraviolet was out since my own vision sigl needed that for me to see, and I wasn’t too confident about my ability to hide from infrared, either, meaning that if they had a sigl that let them see in either of those two bands, I was in trouble. For that matter, if they were watching closely enough, they wouldn’t need a sigl at all, given that my diffraction field left a shimmer as I moved. Most people would dismiss it as haze or a trick of the light. Someone who knew what to look for wouldn’t.

  I took a deep breath, then started around the corner.

  I crept towards the van, muscles and nerves on edge. The tinted windows made it hard to see in, and so I got closer and closer until the shadows in the windows took shape, becoming two bulky figures in the driver and passenger seats, facing towards my house. I might have guessed who they were just from the silhouettes, but the sigls on their chests, glowing with a web of green light, made me certain. It was the same ones who’d attacked me before, Diesel and Scar.

  Slowly and carefully, I withdrew around the block, through the flats, over the wall, and back into our garden. Only once I was sure I was safe did I pull off my sigls, let my eyes adjust to the light, then go back into the house and climb the stairs to my room.

  Hobbes meowed as I came back through the door, rubbing against my leg and looking up at me with concern. I slid down to the floor and stroked him, staring up through the window at the white-and-blue sky.

  All right. I knew what I was up against.

  Now what?

  The obvious answer was to hide. Between my sigls and the back garden route, I could stay out of sight of Scar and Diesel for a long time. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t work forever. Scar and Diesel might be willing to wait for a while, but eventually they’d run out of patience.

  Running wasn’t really an answer, either. I could lie low and avoid Foxden Road for a day or two, but, again, I couldn’t do it forever. Sooner or later they’d track me down.

  So if running and hiding were out, what about fighting? Pick my ground, go out fully loaded, and take them on?

  The funny thing was that if I did that, I actually thought I’d have a good shot at winning. Scar and Diesel were tough, but I had a sigl specifically designed to counter them. They were just hired thugs; if I sent them packing, Lucella (or whoever was giving them orders) wouldn’t care. She’d just get more thugs.

  No, going after Scar and Diesel wasn’t the answer. I needed to stop this at the source.

  But to do that, I’d have to figure out why they were here. The Ashfords had left me alone for five months, so why were their men showing up now? I didn’t think that even Lucella would do something like this totally at random. What had changed?

  I puzzled over that question for a while. The best answer I could come up with was what Bridget had told me two days ago, something about Charles putting Calhoun in charge of a Well, but I couldn’t see how that had anything to do with me.

  The frustrating thing was that I had the nagging feeling that if I just went to the right member of the Ashford family and asked them the right questions, I could solve all this. The trouble was, I didn’t know who. Lucella and Tobias were obviously out, and Charles was almost as bad. That just left Bridget and Calhoun, who for all I knew might be trying to screw me over too. In fact, there really wasn’t a single member of the Ashford family who I was willing to bet wasn’t trying to screw me over, with the possible exception of my mother, and honestly, I wasn’t even all that sure about her.

  And for all I knew, more than one of them might have it in for me. Hell, maybe they all did. After the kind of treatment I’d had so far, I wouldn’t put it past them.

  I sat there in my little room, feeling very small and alone.

  At last, after half an hour of my mind fruitlessly going round and round in circles, I shook it off. All right. I couldn’t solve this on my own, and I couldn’t go to the Ashfords. What did that leave?

  Go to someone else. That was the lesson I’d taken away from the last time Scar and Diesel had shown up, right? Don’t try to handle everything on your own. If you need help, ask.

  Who to ask?

  I went down a mental list of everyone I knew, trying to think of someone that I could trust with something like this, and who cared enough about me that they’d be willing to help. One name came to mind.

  * * *

  —

  I made a phone call, then sat in my room, on edge and tense. Hobbes kept on meowing to be let outside. I showed him his litter tray. Hobbes gave me a dirty look.

  Eventually my phone pinged. I glanced at the text message, peeked carefully out the window to check that the minivan hadn’t moved, then shut Hobbes in my room and went downstairs and out into the back garden. Then I leant against the wall and waited.

  Five minutes passed.

  There was the scrabbling sound of shoes on brick and Colin’s head poked up over the wall. “There you are,” he said breathlessly. “Dude, this climb is a pain in the arse. Can I just use the front door?”

  “No. And keep your voice down.”

  Grumbling, Colin heaved himself over the wall and dropped down heavily next to me. “Someone’s been eating too many pies,” I told him.

  “It’s Sunday morning! I’ve got a hangover!”

  “Oh, right.” For the last five months I’d been working more or less seven days a week. I’d started to forget that other people spent their weekends doing things like going out drinking. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Colin said, brushing himself off and looking around. “All right, you said you didn’t want to do this over the phone. What’s the big emergency?”

  “Come upstairs and I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  —

  “That’s them?” Colin asked. He was next to the window in my room, craning his neck to see.

  “That’s the van,” I said.

  “You’re sure it’s the same one?”

  “Same van, same guys.”

  “And you’re sure they’re here for you?”

  “Jesus Christ. Why else would they be here? This is Plaistow, they’re not coming here for the scenery!”

  “Okay, okay, sorry,” Colin said. “But look, you’re telling me that a couple of bouncers on some rich family’s payroll are trying to kidnap you. You have to admit, it sounds a bit out there.”

  “I know,” I said, leaning against the wall with a sigh. “That’s the problem. Most people aren’t going to take me seriously, and the ones that will won’t care.”

  “All right,” Colin said. “So if they’re here because of you, what are they waiting for?”

  “My guess is for nightfall.”

  “What’s going to happen then?”

  “They’ll wait for me to go for a run or something, park the van somewhere to wait for me, jump out and grab me, then drive off.”

  Colin stared at me.

  “Either that or they’ll try to kill Hobbes,” I said.

  “Mraow,” Hobbes said. He was curled up on the bed in meatloaf position and had been watching our conversation through half-closed eyes.

  “Again,” I added.

  “Jesus, dude,” Colin said. “What did you do to piss these people off so badly?”

  “All right,” I said. “You know that kung fu movie you showed me last year? The one where the old master takes in this young outsider, and the guy who used to be his top student gets angry because he thinks that the master’s going to make the new guy head of the school? It was called Fist of Legend or something.”

  “No, Fist of Legend is the one where Jet Li’s master gets killed in a duel so he has to go back home,” Colin explained. “Then he finds out that his master was actually poisoned by someone within his own school and—”

  “Okay, okay, so I got the name wrong. Point is, I’m the outsider, and the other Ashford kids are the students who think I might be competition. Except in my case the guy in charge made it really clear that he’s never going to choose me for heir anyway, but that doesn’t seem to matter.”

  “All right,” Colin said. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Hear what?”

  “Why they’re so interested in you,” Colin said. “You promised you’d tell me the truth, remember?”

  I let out a breath. Well, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t seen this coming.

  “Because I’m a manifester,” I told Colin.

  “A what?”

  “An advanced kind of drucrafter. It doesn’t count for much in most places, but apparently these Houses place a lot of stock in it.”

  “Is this that drucraft thing again?”

  “Look, you know I’ve been working for that company finding Wells, right?” I said. “Well, one of the things I can do with them is use them to make sigls.”

  “Sigls?”

  “You saw one last time you were here. The ‘green shiny thing.’ ”

  “And you’re getting paid to make them?”

  “No, not exactly, I . . . okay, look, never mind the details. Do you believe me or not?”

  Colin looked at me.

  “Oh, come on,” I said.

  “Stephen . . .”

  “You said you wanted me to tell you the truth.”

  “Yeah, but not a bunch of conspiracy bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit!”

  “Look, I know you take this drucraft thing seriously, but . . . come on, dude. The only people who believe in this stuff are weird losers who live in their mum’s basement.”

  I stared at Colin for a second. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Colin said with an uncomfortable look. “It’s just . . . look, I get it, okay? If your life kind of sucks, then it feels a lot better if you can tell yourself that you’re special and that it’s all happening for a reason. But at some point you have to just kind of get over it.”

  I looked away. I suppose I should have seen this coming, but it still hurt.

  “Look, I’ll help you out with these guys, whoever they are,” Colin said. “But once this is done, you need to get your life back on track, okay? Go to uni or get a real job. Not this weird multi-level marketing thing where you’re selling crap that doesn’t work, or whatever it is you’re doing.”

  I thought about pulling out my flash sigl and triggering it right in Colin’s face. See if he’d think that was multi-level marketing. But I knew that doing something like that just because I was upset and pissed off was a bad idea. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll show you exactly what’s going on and what I’ve been doing. Then once this is over, if you still believe that this is all fake, I’ll let you point me at a better job. Sound fair?”

  “Sure,” Colin said immediately. He sounded a little relieved.

  “All right,” I said. “So. Got any ideas?”

  “About what, those guys in the van?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Colin said. “First off, why do you think they’re going to try and kidnap you once it gets dark?”