It was a man. A naked man. More than that, it was Harry Horseshoe. It was Harry.

  She’d seen the pictures of him in the store, but she’d never actually met him – not in the flesh. He’d been dead by the time she’d bought the store. If you could call it dead. He had moved on from corporeal form to bookstore possession. Now he was back: bone, skin, beard, and all.

  Harry Horseshoe was back.

  And very naked. Thankfully, he had a wealth of beard to offer him dignity.

  “Don’t just stand there goggling, girl, and pass me my staff,” Harry said, his voice – for the first time since she’d known him – emanating from his mouth.

  Ebony silently handed it over. She was gobsmacked. She’d no idea that Harry could become a man again. She’d always assumed becoming a bookstore was a one-way ticket. Somehow, his flesh and beard had managed to pull themselves out of all those books, cushions, and yellowed magazines. And here he was.

  “Hmm.” Harry grabbed his staff and threw it lightly from hand-to-hand. He looked like some kind of martial arts master checking the durability of a fighting stick. From the way he swiped it through the air, it looked as though he had every intention of using it to donk No Name right on the head. “Alright, now let’s get to some blasting.”

  Though Ebony was still amazed by Harry’s transformation, she hadn’t lost her mind. “Ah, Harry, not that I have any problem with it… but….” She was trying to think of a polite way of pointing out that he was butt-naked.

  “But you’d rather I put some pants on before we go teach No Name not to mess with possessed second-hand bookstores and consultant witches.”

  Ebony offered a nod and a laugh. “Something like that.”

  “Right then.” Harry tapped his staff several times on the ground.

  Nothing happened immediately, but then clothes started to grow right from his skin. It was creepy to watch. It was like one of those time-elapsed videos of flowers opening or vines growing, or something.

  He was now wearing a ‘20s-style pair of brown trousers, complete with suspenders, and a white, stripy shirt. His beard also – rather grossly – grew backward into his face. He now had a clean-shaven chin, neat and oiled hair, and a very mean glint in his eye.

  He’d also aged backward. He looked like those old photos of him she had in the store… wherever that was right now. The ones that depicted him as a young man questing all over the world to collect books and deal blows to magical evil guys.

  He was almost handsome – with his strong, narrow face, and dark, short hair. He also had bright blue eyes and a mouth perpetually set in a half-kink of disapproval.

  “Harry, you look really good!” She laughed. “Who knew you would scrub up so well!”

  “It is important to look clean and mean when you are a fighting machine, trust me, Ebony.” Harry held the staff in one hand easily, despite its length and corresponding weight. “Now, if you are done ogling me – and don’t look like that, because you so were – I think we should finish this.”

  Ebony nodded. “Okay, lead the way. But shouldn’t we contact the others?”

  “I would imagine they are aware. I would assume that the fact an entire possessed bookstore was sucked through the city street would be news that would make it to the Coven and the wizards.” He walked forward, his flat, old-style shoes slapping against the stone loudly. “Plus, I do not think No Name intends to allow us to wait for backup.”

  “Well, we could just wait here until—” Ebony looked over her shoulder suddenly – something had caught her eye. Off on the other ledge something scuttled around. Harry’s staff had been producing considerable light ever since she’d run out of the store with it, and it was more than enough to identify what the creature was. It was a little rat with two strange eyes. It was familiar somehow, but she doubted she’d ever seen it.

  Harry looked right at it, his blue eyes almost disappearing under his brow as he frowned. “How very not clever,” he declared.

  “What is it? It’s just a rat, right?”

  “A rat? That? Why isn’t it off doing rat-like things, like squeaking and eating indigestible building materials? No, it’s watching us. Rats seek. They don’t watch.”

  Ebony opened her mouth to protest, but then she closed it again. Her neck was prickling and sparking like a live wire in water. “Those eyes…” she mumbled.

  “Indeed. The eyes are what are watching us, and somewhere someone is watching those eyes. What a crude way of getting information, really,” Harry mumbled to himself as he wielded the staff and pointed it right at the rat.

  The rat flattened itself against the wall, looking for all the world like a sprung cartoon character. “Squeak,” it said.

  Ebony shot Harry a look. Rats didn’t say squeak; rats simply squeaked.

  “All right, take us to your master, rodent,” Harry added with a strong swipe of his staff. “Or I’ll blast you right now.”

  Ebony, though she loved animals, was all for Harry blasting it. She felt odd around this rat. She felt like she’d seen it before. She felt, in fact, like she’d gone through this very same bizarre routine. She shifted backward until she was standing behind Harry. “Shouldn’t we just blast it now and be done with it?” she said. “I don’t much like the look of it.”

  “No, no, we have a job for this little mess. Come on now, my little fellow, take us to your ratty king.” Harry lunged over the sewer ledge.

  The rat pelted away from him at top speed.

  It was hard for Ebony to keep up with them, and she soon began to fall behind.

  When she got more than a couple of meters from Harry – who had all the speed and stamina of a robot – he dashed back and swept her off her feet.

  He proceeded to run along, legs pumping faster than any ordinary human’s could. “No falling behind,” Harry pointed out as they ran. “Time waits for no one.”

  Ebony offered a squeak as he carried her. Perhaps this made up for all the times she’d cleaned the soot out of his chimney and pulled the dead rats out from under his floorboards.

  Harry skidded to a stop, literally. She fancied his leather-soled shoes were even smoking.

  “Ah ha, a door!” Harry announced triumphantly. He dumped Ebony down. Then he marched over to a section of tunnel wall covered in inexpertly drawn symbols.

  Ebony picked herself up off the ground and patted her trousers. She turned to the door, nerves escaping through her stomach. “I… he’s in there, isn’t he?”

  “Of course.” Harry didn’t bother to look up as he traced a hand over the symbols drawn over the brickwork with what looked like a set of children’s crayons.

  Ebony stared at the door. The rat with the sparkling eyes had parked itself further off down the tunnel. It was watching them, those bright eyes never blinking.

  She felt nervous, sick.

  “Alright, I’ve had enough of this.” Harry put his staff flat against the brick and tapped it. The entire thing turned to dust. It melted away as if it had been an illusion made up out of tiny, fine particles of dirt. “It will take him a while to rebuild that,” Harry spat as he marched over the threshold of what had been the door.

  Ebony didn’t follow, not immediately. She stared at the rat. It stared back at her. Those glinting, glimmering little eyes. She… felt as though she’d seen them numerous times before. Not just over the past several days. No, it felt as if she’d been watching those eyes for weeks, months even.

  “Harry,” she said slowly. “I….” Something was watching her through those eyes. That’s what it felt like. Something important, something real. She moved toward them all of a sudden. Her body unbidden, her mind mystified by the look of those diamond-like eyes.

  “A gold hoard!” She heard Harry say from behind her. “There might be dragons in here!” he declared. There was a swooshing as if he were swiping his staff wildly in the air.

  Ebony couldn’t pull her eyes off the rat and its glittering gaze. She felt drawn to it.

  Stumbling, she took a step its way. Her legs seemed to pull themselves along; like someone had attached strings to them and was moving her like a puppet.

  She didn’t speak. She watched the rat.

  The rat began to move further off down the tunnel.

  Ebony followed, jerky step after jerky step.

  An arm yanked her back. No, a hand. No… something else.

  Something had a hold of Ebony, something that felt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before. Something old, something ancient, something before….

  It began to pull her back, but not away from the rat. No, it began to pull her down through the ledge of the sewer itself. Through the stone, through the ground.

  Ebony didn’t scream; she didn’t fidget; she didn’t even move. She felt herself being gently taken below, and she fixed her mind on the fact it was gentle. It wasn’t harsh, it wasn’t violent; it simply was.

  She heard someone shout her name. She even heard the rat squeak with alarm. Her hearing began to change the lower down she got. It began to morph; it began to mute. Sounds started to form directly in her mind, rather than take the tedious route of passing through her ears first.

  Do not be afraid.

  The darkness spoke to her.

  There are those who seek power. There are those who seek to destroy your body, your city, your world.

  You must stop them.

  You must stop them….

  Things began to change. Just as Ebony settled into her new formless existence – or her original existence, perhaps – things began to shift. The world around her changed. It formed. The shapes, the colors, the sounds – they swirled around her, coming from some point in space that seemed endless and unbound.

  She was standing in the sewers. She could feel her feet now. She could feel her feet because they felt different from her hands, from her throat, from her mind.

  Beyond, something formed from the darkness. It formed a man. It walked toward her.

  The earth began to shake.

  The ceiling collapsed, and the ground beneath her became gouged with great, gaping cracks.

  The formed man continued to move toward her.

  “What do you want?” Ebony asked as she watched everything change around her. “What are you trying to tell me? What is this supposed to be?”

  A beginning, an end, or a middle.

  Ebony was suddenly standing on a street in Vale. The street was crumbling. She saw the police station – it was crumbling. She saw every building and house, every stack and factory, every street lamp and park bench. They were all crumbling. They were all breaking; they were all being destroyed.

  Ebony’s hands shook as she clamped them over her mouth. She’d seen the buildings, but now she saw the people. They were all crumbling, as if they were statues disintegrating from heavy blows to the back. She saw snapped visions of different faces, different forms, different clothes – people. All being destroyed.

  She saw Ben. In a snap, he turned to dust by her feet.

  Ebony cried and swung out an arm to catch him. All she caught was half a handfull of dust. It was coarse and grainy against her sweaty palm.

  Then she saw Aaron. He was staring up at the sky, expression mesmerized, suit perfect. The same sudden, violent shift occurred, and he was dust. His face, his body, his suit – dust. It happened quicker than a click of her fingers.

  She stooped to the ground, put out a hand. There was nothing left of the man she’d once known.

  You must stop the destruction. Stop it before it begins.

  Avery appeared. Ebony could see every detail of her features – the sparkle in her eyes, that familiar lift to the corner of her lips, even the way her hair sat forever straight against her back.

  Then dust. This rolling, pervading, unstoppable destruction. In a second, she was gone. Once one thing – a mother – now another – dust.

  Ebony couldn’t even cry, she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t shout. Breath and emotion were stuck in a ball at the base of her throat. She couldn’t even breathe.

  The dust wafted away on some wind, scattering over the destruction that surrounded Ebony. It wasn’t so much a war zone, as a city that had been eaten – in several short minutes – by the ravages of time. If time were a virus or a bomb – something capable of great, wanton destruction of humanity and the structures it creates – then this would be what it looked like. The dust. This would be it.

  Finally, Nate stood before her. His shoulders were rounded and dropped, his face directed at the ground. In this statue-like, frozen form, he looked defeated. She couldn’t even meet his death-like gaze – his eyes were hooded by the shadow of his form.

  Dust.

  Ebony screamed. It cracked out of her throat in a wheeze and then shifted up into a full-blown wail. Her eyes were shot with tears. Then her face was streaked with a hot wetness as if she’d been crying for hours. It had happened in the blink of an eye, time twisting in on itself.

  Dust. Dust everywhere.

  She looked at her own hands. Skin, bone, flesh. The tips began to change.

  Dust.

  Her hands fell away from her, hitting the ground, their form disappearing into a pile of non-differentiable dust. Her arms, her shoulders, her legs.

  Then she was gone. Her body was dust.

  Her mind remained. There wasn’t a voice to scream with anymore, and there wasn’t a body to clutch at with fear and desperation.

  There was only a mind.

  You must stop this.

  “How?” she asked it, without a voice.

  To bring balance, you must—

  Ebony strained, forced her mind to concentrate on what the Forms were trying to tell her. But with every second, she realized her body was reforming around her. Not only that, it was being pulled backward.

  She was being tugged upwards, but this time not by some gentle force. She was being ripped back to reality by someone who had neither care for peace nor body.

  As her throat formed, her scream manifested from her mind. “No,” she cried, her voice reverberating through her throat. “No!”

  But there was nothing to fight, and no way to stop it. In another instant, she was flung from the ground with enough force to hit the opposite wall of the tunnel with a terrible thud.

  It took several agonizing seconds for the pain to form back into Ebony’s body. At first, it was hardly there – a manageable, far-off ache. Then it grew, it grew and solidified as she became aware of her body in time and space. As she could feel her hands, she could feel the stiffness and pain. As she could feel her back, she could feel the incredible ache and pressure. As she could feel her forehead, she could feel the warm trickle of blood.

  She opened her eyes. She was still in the sewers. But everything was different. There were scorch marks cut into the stone. There were bricks and chunks of wall littered everywhere. There were gouges in the ceiling, and great cracks running along the ledges and through the ditch.

  There was a sharp, bitter, acrid smell to the air – made all the headier by the enclosed, trapped space.

  There was no dust. Just destruction.

  Ebony tried to push up. Her hand slipped from underneath her, and she screamed at the sharp pain that shot through her wrist.

  Great clouds of dark, evil smoke billowed across her vision, obscuring most of her view. A terrible cracking sound echoed all around her.

  She’d been down – down there with the Forms. But something had ripped her up. That something… was still here.

  Ebony tried to get to her feet, but there was a horrendous, stiff pain in her back. She clutched a hand to it and managed to push herself into a standing position, even though her feet slipped on the ground.

  There was a rat sitting motionless several paces from her. A rat with cognac-diamond eyes.

  It watched, and then it moved. Its eyes never blinked, only glittered.

  The rat scuttled toward her, then it began to walk, and then it ran. As it moved – as it changed pace and throttled toward her – it changed form. It became a thing with a long, sinewy body.

  Ebony didn’t have the energy to move out of its way.

  The thing leaped at her, its clawed, thin, arms heading straight for her face.

  She put her arms up to defend herself.

  It sunk its claws right into her skin. It didn’t scream at her, or shriek, or even make a sound.

  She shrieked as those blackened claws sunk into her arms, as they tried to force their way to her face.

  Then the thing spoke. From its eyes, of all places. The mouth didn’t move. The eyes didn’t either. But that’s where the sound came from – deep within the yellow shimmer. “Don’t fight it.” The voice was calm, passive even. It was completely at odds with the frantic ferocity of the rat-man. “Give me your memory, Ebony.”

  Ebony was pushed back against the wall, the creature proving to have considerable strength, considering its weak little arms. Ebony gritted her teeth together and tried to press her head as far into the brick as she could.

  “You have no use for the memory – no grand design. I will give it meaning, I will give it power. The universe wants power; it wants greatness. Let me give the universe what it wants. Give me your memory.” Once again, the voice sounded so passive in comparison to the wild thrashes of the rat-man.

  The universe wanted greatness, ha? The universe, surely, was above wanting.

  Ebony didn’t stop trying to fight it, though her own power was ebbing.

  “I have more power than you. I can take what I desire. Resistance is pointless.”

  As the battle raged around her – if it was indeed a battle and not some grand illusion – she waited desperately for rescue. She waited for someone to leap from the darkness and pull this creature off her. She waited for Nate, for Aaron, for her mother, for Harry. They must be out there somewhere, they must be….

  The creature’s claws were almost on her face now. One came so close, it nicked her skin. She could feel the blood trickle down her cheek like a single tear.

  But no-one came for her. She simply tried to fend off this creature, shrouded by blackened smoke in this broken and cracked corner of the city’s sewers.