Chapter One

Serendipity

Running was a good thing, maybe the only good thing left to her. She'd been running for ages now, her legs moving in a rhythm she no longer had to think about, her feet pounding the wet concrete through the soles of inadequate tennis shoes. The police cruiser peeped round the corner as she dashed headlong into the curve the street took, once again losing sight of them. She kept running.

The tires squealed in the rain as the car tried to avoid hitting something on the slick, wet street. Spiky heard it stop, and then move forward again, and saw that she was coming to a dead end street. Without hesitating or slackening her pace, she vaulted over a low fence and into someone's back garden and kept going. Now going through backyards, she moved no slower than she had on the street.

A passer-by would have heard her before seeing her -if they heard her at all. Her footfalls were drowned in the pounding and obliterating downpour, and her breathing was heavy but calculatedly quiet. She was a sodden streak in rain-dark, ragged jeans and a cast-off jacket covered in patches and studs, hair of indefinite colour plastered down over her face, where red livid spots burned in the centres of otherwise pale cheeks. She climbed another wall and kept going.

She couldn't hear the police anymore, and decided they had probably lost her. Lucky, that, because she was pretty damn lost herself.

As Spiky went on, the houses and yards grew bigger and bigger until she was in the most enormous garden she had ever seen attached to someone's house. The house was huge too. For a moment she paused and looked around, thinking the flowers very pretty and the grass very well kept. But a moment later, she had to run for it again, because she heard a low growl from the shadows and was suddenly faced by two sleek, angry Dobermans. Over the muddy grass she ran, the run now more serious than before. Pelting forward, she felt herself growing tired, her muscles burning in her legs, her breath coming harder. She had to make it to the wall.

Grabbing hold of the ivy that covered it she climbed up out of reach of the dogs and was reaching up to pull herself over...

"OW!" she hissed, cursing roundly under her breath and stealing a nervous glance up at the house. She looked at her hand and found it bleeding from half a dozen or so small cuts that crisscrossed her palm. There was broken glass in the mortar.

Using her legs and her unharmed hand she carefully pulled herself into a standing position on the top of the wall and looked around quickly. On the other side there was nothing but trees and darkness and she couldn't see more than ten feet into it. But the dogs were leaping for her, and as she looked back, a light went on in the big house. She jumped down, into the dark.

Leaning against a tree a little ways in, she wondered if she had stumbled on a park. These trees seemed to go one for ages and ages, and there was no light coming from anywhere. She closed her eyes a moment and tried to get her breath, and after a bit she looked around more carefully. Above her were tall oak trees, blocking out any sight of the sky and intensifying the sounds the rain made as it came down on their round, flat leaves. As she looked harder into the distance it seemed she could see little lights, as if from windows, twinkling past the trees.

Spiky straightened herself and began walking towards the light, feeling nervous here in the dark. She moved swiftly and silently except for a couple blunders owing to the fact that, if she had bothered to stop and check, she couldn't have seen her hand in front of her face.

The lights of the house approached more quickly than she had expected, but before she had quite reached the point where she could see the house, or even very far out of the trees, a shrill voice like nothing she'd ever imagined rang out in the dark, cutting through the rain-sounds like a razor.

"Stay there, don't move a muscle, you! Stay where you is! I'm bringing out the Master to see to you, yes I am!"

She looked around wildly. She couldn't see the speaker but the voice had frightened her badly. What had it been? That voice, it couldn't have been human, it sounded like a bloody cartoon. She heard tiny feet scurrying off in the direction of the house and thought she saw a funny shape in dim silhouette, very close to the ground.

A dog?

No, it was different; it was the wrong shape to be a dog. She squinted and couldn't see it anymore, but had caught a glimpse of what looked like gangly legs and something that was either a head or a body...She shivered.

She didn't know if the speaker was still there or not. She had not heard a peep since the scampering thing. If they were still there they were being perfectly still and silent as the grave. She couldn't even hear breathing. But on the other hand, if they weren't still here, she had heard only one pair of footsteps leave the area and that would mean that that tiny little thing had...spoken to her?

She pondered a moment and decided to make a break for it. She ran as hard as she could pelt, skirting the edge of the trees and shearing off to the left, meaning to circle the house and find another place where she could get over the wall, broken glass be damned.

And then several things happened at once.

The first was a loud CRACK! That split the air and made her insides do a back flip.

The second was a shouted word that was drowned out by the rain, and a flash of light.

The third was that, as Spiky fell immobile to the ground, she realized that the walls were all twelve feet high if they were an inch. She couldn't have gotten out anyway.