I don’t keep records, but I remembered the day I’d acquired the thing very clearly. One winter evening three years ago, an old man came into my shop and asked if I would be interested in an imbued item. There would be no charge; he just wanted to pass it on to a good home. He explained that it could grant any five wishes its owner desired and I could use it however I saw fit.

  I refused. I told the old man that wish-granting items usually came with some sort of horrible price, and you never got something for nothing. If he was offering it for free, it was a pretty safe bet it wasn’t something I wanted to have.

  The old man agreed that the wishes came at a high price. He asked if I would be willing to simply keep hold of the item and give or sell it on.

  I refused again. If the thing was that dangerous, I wasn’t going to be responsible for handing it over to anyone else. The old man smiled and left.

  The next day, the monkey’s paw was sitting on the shelves in my shop next to the focuses. I put on a pair of gloves, picked the thing up, and placed it in my safe room upstairs. Three months, six months, nine months went by and I forgot about it.

  Then one day a woman picked the monkey’s paw off my shelves, out of a spot I would have sworn was empty. She wanted to buy it. I said no and closed the door firmly behind her. When I checked that evening the monkey’s paw was gone. I found out the woman’s name and learnt that the monkey’s paw was in her possession.

  She committed suicide a week later. The monkey’s paw was back on the shelves the same evening. I put it back in the safe room and left it there.

  A year later, someone else picked up the monkey’s paw in the exact same way. This time I didn’t try to stop the man from taking it. I agreed to give it to him on the condition that he promised never to use it. He gave me his promise and left, happy.

  The man came back to my shop one last time, on a Saturday evening just before I closed up for the night. I remembered his shifty eyes, the tension in his movements, his insistence that everything was fine. Under pressure he admitted he’d been using the paw. According to him he’d made four wishes. There had been problems. He wouldn’t go into details but he wanted to know if there was some way to make a wish do exactly what you wanted.

  I never saw him again. By the next day he had disappeared, and no one ever found out where he’d gone. But while cleaning the shop that Sunday night, I saw the monkey’s paw had returned.

  And now Luna was alone with the thing’s next owner. Just the thought of that made my skin crawl. I thought of ringing her, but what would I say? To stay away from him? Yeah, that had worked so well last time …

  I wondered whether Luna’s curse would be enough to keep her safe. The luck-twisting effect of the curse is a powerful protection but it has its limits, and I didn’t know how it would interact with the monkey’s paw. The only bit of reassurance I had was that judging from the last two times, the monkey’s paw wouldn’t do anything straightaway. Luna was supposed to be meeting me tomorrow to train at Arachne’s. I couldn’t tell for sure whether she’d show up but I didn’t think anything terrible would happen before then. Maybe she’d have calmed down enough to listen to me. And maybe I wouldn’t screw things up so badly next time.

  With that decided, I felt a bit better. I went and fixed myself some dinner, then washed up and returned to my room. As I did, I turned my attention to the immediate future and saw that someone would be wanting to get into my shop. It was well past closing time but most mages don’t like to go shopping during business hours. It’s not common for them to show up after dark but it’s not rare, either, and it’s happened enough that I’ve installed a bell by the front door.

  The bell rang just as I finished tying my shoes. I pulled on a jumper and walked down the stairs, flicking on the light as I reentered the shop. The place always feels a little eerie after dark; row after row of silent shelves, watching and waiting. I could see the outline of somebody through the shop window, half hidden by the door.

  I opened the door and the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen stumbled in, gasping and wide-eyed. “Please, I need your help! There’s something trying to kill me!”

  My precognition screamed. I took one look at what had set it off, grabbed the woman, and yanked her back, pulling her with me into the middle of the shop. An instant later, the shop window exploded in a shower of glass as something came flying through, landing with a slam on the spot the woman and I had been standing in just a second ago. Without pause the creature pulled itself to its feet and lunged straight for us.

  Some days are just better spent in bed.

  I shoved the woman out of the creature’s path and let the momentum push me back so the thing went between us. The move would have been a lot more graceful if I hadn’t hit the herb rack on the way, almost tripping over. The woman stumbled and fell, and the creature was on top of her before she could recover. It dropped to its knees, its hands reaching for her throat.

  The creature looked human, but wasn’t. It had two arms, two legs, a head and a body, but there was something about it that was just wrong. Before it could get a grip on the woman’s neck, I took a step and swung a roundhouse kick into its ribs.

  I’m not a real hand-to-hand expert but I’ve done a fair bit of training in the past, and a swinging kick against a low target carries an awful lot of force. The impact flipped the thing over and sent it rolling to slam against the shelves. The shelves swayed and crystal balls and statuettes rained down on the thing with a crash. I pulled the woman to her feet and hustled her towards the door to the hall. “Get out! Go!”

  The creature stood up. Now that I got a good look at it, I saw it had the face of a nondescript man in his thirties with brown hair, brown eyes, and a bland expression. The eyes were locked on me now, and as I looked into the future I saw that its movements were solid lines of light, changing to match my decisions but without choice or variation. A construct. The woman and I backed to the door and the construct followed.

  My counter is an L shape set against the wall. As the woman opened the door I moved into the dead-end space, reaching for what was under the counter. I’m not so paranoid as to carry weapons in my own home, but I’m just paranoid enough to stash them where I can reach them quickly. I knew without looking that the construct would follow me, and as it came around the counter I straightened up with the gun in both hands, thumbed off the safety, sighted at a range of less than two feet, and shot the thing in the middle of the chest.

  My gun’s a M1911, a single-action semiautomatic. It had been a while since I’d fired the thing and I’d forgotten how damn loud it was. The crash echoed around the shop and made me flinch, and the construct jerked. As a general rule anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice, so I brought the gun down and shot the construct again.

  The construct jerked a second time, then closed in. In the instant before it reached me, I had just enough time to realise two things: first, the shots had done absolutely nothing, and second, I was backed into a corner with nowhere to run. A moment later, the construct had its hands around my neck.

  By construct standards, the thing was weak. Unfortunately, weak by construct standards is still freakishly strong for a human. The thing’s fingers locked around my throat like iron, crushing my windpipe and cutting off the flow of blood to my brain, and in panic I dropped the gun and grabbed at its hands, trying and failing to pull them away. The construct stared at me, its eyes empty and bland as it methodically choked me to death. My vision was just about to grey out when I remembered my training. I put my hands together under my chin knuckle to knuckle, fingers down and slightly hooked, then jerked my arms apart in a single explosive motion.

  The leverage was enough to break the construct’s grip. Its hands flew apart, air flew back into my lungs, and before the construct could recover I kneed it in the groin with the strength of panic and slammed both palms into its chest. The knee to the groin did nothing but the palm strike sent it stumbling backwards. Its legs caught on the rope to the magic item section and it went over, its head slamming into the floor with a crack. It started to get up immediately.

  I staggered through the door into the hallway, gasping for breath. The woman was there, looking at me with wide eyes, and I gestured and rasped, “Up!” The woman turned and ran up the stairs, I followed, and as I scrambled upwards I heard the construct come through the door right behind us.

  Constructs are made things, a physical body animated by magical energy. The most powerful ones use the bound spirit of an elemental, but even the weakest can be deadly because they’re so persistent. They don’t feel pain, they don’t get tired, and they can’t be bought off or bargained or negotiated with. Once a construct’s been given an order, it’ll follow it to its own destruction, and it’s not harmless until it’s completely destroyed. I’d been fighting for less than a minute but already I was gasping for breath, my limbs heavy and tired. The construct hadn’t even slowed down.

  The woman raced up the stairs with me right behind her. The construct reached through the banisters, grasping for my ankle, and missed. The extra few seconds were enough for me to reach the landing. The woman was there and looking from side to side. I rushed past her into my living room. “Hold the door!”

  The woman hesitated. She was small, frail-looking, with long dark hair. “I can’t—”

  I slammed the door behind her just as the construct appeared at the top of the stairs. “Learn!”

  The moment’s breather had given me time to get my brain working. Weapons weren’t going to hurt this thing—the only way to physically destroy it would be to literally tear it to pieces. But I’d picked up an item a long time ago designed specifically for this. Now where had I put it?

  My bedroom’s just through the living room, separated from it by a connecting door. I pulled open a desk drawer and started rifling through. There was a thump as the construct hit the living room door and out of the corner of my eye I saw the woman recoil, then throw herself desperately against the door and slam it closed again. I rummaged through the drawer: knives, tassels, jewellery boxes, marbles, figurines, carved stones, bags of powder, vials, clear plastic boxes filled with everything from dried flowers to Russian dolls. Wrong drawer. I yanked open the next one. Counterspell ingredients, no. Gate stones, no. Notebooks, no. Wands—

  “It’s coming through!” the woman shouted from the living room, her voice high and panicked.

  “Hold it a second,” I told her. Fetishes, no. Crystal holders—wrong kind. I moved on to the next drawer.

  “I can’t!”

  There. Beneath a sheaf of handwritten papers was a needle-thin stiletto made of gleaming silver. I snatched it up and moved back into the living room. The construct had stopped hitting the door and was simply pushing. The woman was being slid back as the door was forced steadily open, the carpet scuffing up beneath her heels. “Let go!”

  The woman jumped back almost as soon as I spoke and the door flew open. I’d been watching the futures and I knew exactly how the construct would come through the doorway, its hands up, grasping blindly. I let the door breeze past my face, saw a flash of the construct’s emotionless eyes as it came in at me, then I ducked and the thing’s hands swept over my head. The construct ran straight onto the stiletto, the blade piercing its stomach.

  The construct’s eyes seemed to flash. Sea-green energy wreathed its body, pouring out into the air, soaking down through the floor, then the energy cut out and the eyes went dead. It was over in an instant. The construct dropped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

  And everything was quiet.

  I stood still, feeling my heart pounding in my chest. The construct lay motionless and a scan of the futures confirmed that it wouldn’t be getting up. I kept looking, searching for other threats.

  “Is it dead?” the woman asked at last.

  I opened the window and stuck my head out, looking down into the street. I could see movement at the far end near the corner, but no one was approaching. I scanned through the futures, checking to see if police were coming. The fight had been noisy, and there had been shots fired, but I couldn’t find any trace of a future in which police cars arrived. I gave a silent thank-you to the rain and to the fact that most Londoners don’t know what gunshots sound like.

  “What was that thing?” The woman’s voice was shaky. “How did—?”

  I held up a hand. “Wait here. Don’t touch anything.”

  The shop downstairs was a mess. Shattered glass and merchandise were scattered across the floor and a cold wind was blowing away the smell of gunsmoke. I checked to see if either of the bullets had gone through the construct and into the wall behind (they hadn’t), then got some plastic sheeting from the stockroom and tacked it over the broken window. It didn’t do anything to keep the cold out, but it blocked line of sight. With that done, I locked the door and hid the gun. The adrenaline rush of the battle had worn off, and I knew that if I did what my body was telling me and sat down, I’d go to pieces. Experience has taught me that the best way to get through postbattle shakes is to walk them off, so I went back upstairs.

  The woman was sitting on my sofa with her knees together and her hands clasped, shivering slightly. She didn’t try to speak as I knelt over the construct and gave it a quick search. I came up empty, as expected; mages don’t send construct assassins out with identification. The wounds hadn’t bled or oozed. Most constructs are basically a big energy battery with a simple guidance program and this seemed to be one of the more basic types, an outer shape wrapped around a jellylike storage material. At a glance it looked similar to the ones I’d seen made at Richard’s mansion: a short-range design, without the intelligence or stamina to operate for long on its own. That suggested whoever had sent it was close by. The stiletto had been a one-shot designed to disperse a construct’s energy pattern. It had worked perfectly. I’d have to get another.

  I was avoiding looking at the woman. I sat on the chair facing her and met her gaze.

  It’s hard to describe just what made her so incredibly beautiful. She had near-black hair, long and slightly wavy, falling down her back and framing a diamond-shaped face with slightly tanned skin and dark eyes. She was small, only a little over five feet, but with such perfect proportions that you wouldn’t realise it unless you stood right over her. She wore dark clothes that looked so simple that they had to be very expensive, and a single ring on her right hand. Somehow, though, neither her clothes nor her features seemed to matter—they were the adornments of a painting or a picture, not the real thing. What made her so captivating was something else, not so easily named: the way she moved, the glance of her eyes, the manner and sound and form. All I wanted to do was sit and gape. If I’d let myself fall into her eyes, I think an army of constructs could have battered down the door and I wouldn’t have noticed.

  “What’s your name?” I said. I’d meant to say Who are you? but found myself changing my mind at the last second.

  “Meredith.” She leant forward a little. “Thank you so much. You saved my life.” Her dark eyes shone with a hint of tears. “Without you I wouldn’t have had a chance.”

  I felt my face burn and wanted to look away. A less polite but more vocal part of me spoke up with several suggestions as to how she could show how grateful she was. “Don’t worry about it. Where did that thing come from?”

  Meredith shivered. “I don’t know! I was just—” She covered her face with her hands and started to cry.

  Somehow I found myself on the sofa next to her, my arm around her shoulders, speaking quiet reassurances. Meredith hung onto my sleeve and kept crying. Gradually her tears ran dry and eventually she excused herself and vanished into the bathroom. She was gone for ten minutes and when she reappeared she looked a bit more composed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go to pieces. I’m not usually like this.”

  “It’s okay, you just had a shock. I did a lot worse my first time.” Was that true? I couldn’t remember. “Feeling better?”

  Meredith nodded. “Yes, thanks. I must look terrible.”

  “Really, you don’t.”

  Meredith returned to the sofa, sitting down naturally next to me. “I’m sorry for all this. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I was trying to find your shop and then that … that thing started chasing me.”

  I glanced over at the construct’s body, still lying on the floor. Meredith followed my gaze. “I’ve never seen one before. I heard stories but—”

  “It’s an assassin,” I said. “Programmed to go after you. It only attacked me when I got in its way.”

  Meredith shivered. “It’s horrible. There … won’t be any more?”

  I shook my head, and Meredith sighed in relief. “Do you know who sent it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know their names. I was so afraid they’d come after me. I heard it and I just wanted to find you and—”

  “Why me?”

  Meredith looked up in surprise. “But you’re famous. Everybody knows about you. You fought all those Dark mages in that battle in the British Museum. And you can see the future.”

  “Um …” That took me aback. I’m definitely a lot better known since that business with the fateweaver but it was the first time I’d heard the word famous. “And you thought I could help you?”

  Meredith clutched my arm. “Please don’t send me away! I don’t know if they’ll try again. I know it’s a lot to ask but can’t I stay here? Just for tonight?” Wide dark eyes looked up at me pleadingly.

  I’m not sure I could have said no even if I’d wanted to.

  And that was how, an hour later, I found myself lying on my bed with Meredith on the sofa in the next room, about ten feet away. The house was quiet but for the sounds of the city. I could hear the shouts and calls from the restaurants one street over and the hum of traffic from the main hub of Camden Town.

  I found myself listening for what Meredith was doing. I couldn’t quite hear her breathing and I wondered if she’d moved. Maybe I should have offered her the bed. No, that wouldn’t have been smart. All of my items were here. But still …