Nora Walker, a psychic vampire, is conscripted into a task-force of supernatural legends that care more for themselves than the cataclysmic threat they face...
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My blood came alive with the first sip of coffee, senses sharpening like a camera lens. I saw every misty puff of breath; every pockmark on the pavement; every thread of broken glass in the bus-stop windshields. I even saw two sparrows fighting over scraps, fat and dishevelled from years of gorging on overflowing rubbish bins. The victor took wing with a stale McDonald's chip clamped in its beak, and all was right with the world.
I made a point of stepping on every crack in concrete I came across, chanting the old childhood rhyme in my head. Step on a crack and you'll break your mother's back!
How easily such a curse would solve all of my problems.
Ruben quickened his step. I thought he was trying to get away from me at first, until he seized my elbow and dragged me along with him. Coffee splashed over my fingers, scalding hot. I glared at him as I sucked it off, waving my hand to cool the burn.
"We're running late because of your coffee stop," he said. "We're going to have to take a shortcut."
I snorted. Some apology. "What do you have in mind?"
Ruben veered left, into a side-street. "You'll see."
We ducked around a row of colourful wheelie bins and turned down another street, narrower and dirtier than the last. The roads back here were made from grimy cobblestone, but every so often one of the bricks was painted gold.
A chill passed over me, like the sun had gone behind the clouds. Soon there were more metallic bricks than normal ones, and the walls transitioned from concrete limits on my vision to a gallery of stone canvases. I found myself oddly entranced by one particular mural, which depicted a forest made entirely from flags. The canopy was comprised of colourful banners, bearing the badges of nations great and small; known and unfamiliar; arcing in an imagined breeze so perfectly executed it looked as though someone had stitched the very wind into the wall.
But it was so far from Hosier Lane; from anywhere that tourists could chance upon the artwork to admire it, take pictures of it, only to print them for free and sell them for a premium. It was mind-boggling to think that someone had created something so breathtaking without financial or egotistical incentive, with no resources save spray paint and patience.
We turned down another street, and another. The only constant was a mustard-yellow clocktower that peeked over the roofs of nearby buildings, but I soon realised that every time we turned a corner it presented a new face. Slowly, like the sun struggling to make itself known through city smog, it dawned on me that our journey made no navigational sense.
"What is this place?" I asked, suspicion leaking into my voice. "It smacks of magic."
"Observant," Ruben remarked, but it was a snide compliment at best. "It's a corridor, as far as I can tell. A kind of cache, if you will."
"There are different kinds of caches?" I didn't even try to disguise my bewilderment.
"Of course," he said, as if it was common sense. "Think of the Mother Dimension — our dimension — as the world above the ground. Now think of caches as tunnels, dug under the surface of the earth to create new spaces, adjacent but hidden from plain sight."
