End of the Line

By ChocolateEclar

Disclaimer: I do not own A Madness of Angels or The Midnight Mayor. Those are the creations of the wonderful Kate Griffin, aka Catherine Webb.

A/N: Thank you to the site for creating the Matthew Swift category so that this story doesn't have to get lost in the miscellaneous books section and thank you to those who are reading. Please leave a review to let me know what you think about the story thus far. Enjoy.


Part II: Blood of My Blood

In which family becomes a theme and it is time to take flight.


Oda sat and read her e-mail with the detached air of someone who was not in the least bit concerned that both of us were garnering strange looks from everyone else in sight. I tried to smile reassuringly at the old woman in the computer station across from ours, but it was hard to do so with my jaw aching and bruised and she hid behind her monitor as if I'd made a rude gesture.

Oda stood up and slipped around the desk without saying a word. "What – " I began and then hurried to catch up with her. The bell clanged as we passed out into the grey afternoon. She rounded a corner into an alley and leaned against the bricks with her arms crossed. I waited about ten seconds of her staring down at her feet before blurting out, "So?"

"So?" she repeated without looking up.

"So what are we doing now?"

"We have to get out of the country," she said and did meet my gaze. It was no shock to see that she was as cold and determined as ever, but there was fatigue there. As if she was resigned to her fate.

"Did you get hate mail from the Order?"

"Something to that effect. I now get top priority above you."

"I feel mildly insulted by that," I said as she pushed off from the wall and started down the rubbish-filled alley. I kicked a glass bottle that clinked against the bricks and buried itself amongst the plastic bags. "Do you have a way of getting a passport for someone who spent two years technically dead?"

She did not answer, which I took to mean she had suspicious underground contacts outside of the Order.

"Sinclair might – " I started. She stopped walking and held out her arm to block me.

"Sinclair organized this!" she snarled.

"Oh."

"Oh!" she mimicked and curled her outstretched hand into a fist.

We wondered briefly if she was going to strike us, but she reined herself back in. I felt a slight tingle of guilt, as if I had robbed Oda of the only family she had left.

"Oda," I said softly. She stuffed her hands in the pockets of her tight, black jacket. "Oda, we have to visit someone before we go."

On the bus ride, Oda rang someone up. She spoke very softly and hung up in less than a minute. Then, she turned to me and said, "You haven't asked again."

"About why you suddenly betrayed the Order for no apparent reason?" I asked cheerfully, as I gazed out at the passing countryside. Stupid bloody countryside.

She rolled her eyes and said, "The Order had my brother resurrected."

That got my attention. "No fucking way."

She told me what happened.


Second Interlude: The Brother

In which Oda explains the situation in very brief terms.

"After I left you yesterday, I rendezvoused with others outside a club. But, there was no one there. Apparently, there had been a change of plans. The higher ups wanted us to pull out and let someone else take care of the Neon Court.

"It was my brother. We exchanged pleasantries. I defended innocents," she spat the word out like bile stinking in the back of her throat.

"Not simply collateral damages?" I asked.

"Children. Caught in the snares of the Court, but… unnecessary."

"Could you please repeat that?"

"No."

"Oh. Carry on then."

She stared at me, daring me to make any more comments, and continued. "Lady Neon was grateful… The end."


I nodded very slowly. "Resurrecting your brother crosses a line?"

She didn't answer.

"So what? Are you cutting all ties with the Order?"

"There is a sect in the States."

"Oh goodie," I said and clapped lazily. "I really wanted to take a vacation to visit more religious nut jobs that may or may not agree with your opinion."

Silence. There was something more to the story. Some bone deep betrayal maybe, or perhaps I was just being melodramatic.

Either way, I had a feeling it would be a very, very long time before Oda said anything about the subject to me again.


I stood outside the little white building at five o'clock as the sun sank behind it and felt like a schoolboy again. I toed the ground, hesitated at the bottom of the creaky old steps, tapped my fingers against the banisters, and may not have ended up going inside at all if it had not been for Oda. She prodded me in the back and forced me to stumble up the stairs.

The peeling screen door scraped open at my tug and it took a considerable amount of willpower to step over the threshold. The woman at the front desk was young and bored, obviously here only for the summer hols. She did not even look up from her mobile as we passed.

Oda followed me up the rickety stairs. The first room on the left was some sort of common room with old ladies knitting and both genders engaged in a furious debate in front of a game show. We continued on to the third room on the right. It was as if I had never been gone. I opened the door to find my mad old gran sitting under the window with the pigeons all around. As one, they all turned to us; my gran didn't. The smell of moulting feathers was strong.

"You been back for how long, boy, and you ain't visit?" she asked. I could tell by how gummy she sounded that her false teeth were out. "And don't you lie to me. The pigeons told me all, didn't they?"

"'Ello, Gran."

"Don't get shirty with me, boy."

"I'm – Yes, Gran," I said and actually heard Oda bite back a laugh.

My gran turned to look at us then, but I didn't think she could actually see with her own eyes. They were cloudy with a tint of pigeon-iris orange. She was wearing an ancient pink robe and slippers and her hair was long and silvery grey. Grabbing a knotty cane, she smacked her thigh with it and said, "Well, what'd I tell you? You been listening all these years or just daydreaming?"

I shrugged. "The shadow got me," I admitted.

"Teach you to keep your wits about you?" she grunted.

Oda snorted.

"I try," I told both of them.

"Trying ain't doing," Gran said and then fixed her eyes and those of every ratty bird upon Oda. Under so much attention, she looked distinctly uncomfortable. "Are you going to introduce your friend, boy?" Gran demanded.

"Of course," I said and had to fight not to laugh at the absurdity of it all. "Gran, this is Oda. Oda, this is my grandmother."

Oda surprised all of us by stepping forward and offering her hand. "It's a pleasure, ma'am," she said. I mostly think it was a pleasure for her to see me squirm, but Gran accepted the handshake with a hand covered in bulging blue veins and liver spots. She seemed to deflate into her wheelchair after that. Many of the pigeons dispersed and flapped out of the window and I stood there unsure what to say to someone for probably the last time.

"You be a good boy, you hear?" she mumbled as her head sagged against her chest.

"Yes, Gran."

"Stay away from telephone boxes unless it's time to dance and dance again."

"Yes, Gr – " I looked at my scarred palm and grimaced. She was a little late on that one.

"Spinning around forever and ever and – " She let out a loud snore.

"Goodbye, Gran," I muttered and felt something tighten in my chest. I watched the pigeons peck at a plate of breadcrumbs on the windowsill and switched to their eyes for a moment to escape the heavy weight of everything pressing in from all sides.

"Matthew," Oda said.

I took a shaky breath and returned to myself. "Hmm?"

"This is you."

"What?"

I turned to see her looking at the picture frames clustered on the nightstand like monuments to the dead. My mother and grandfather were prominent. Mum in a flowery summer frock sitting on the front porch of my grandfather's farm with pigtails in her hair. My grandfather wearing the tidy suit and silk tie that he used to wear every Sunday to church. Mum with me in her arms as a messy-haired infant.

I grimaced. "Yes, Oda, even wretched spawns of Satan, such as myself, have to start out somewhere."

"It's strange," she whispered. "I've actually become used to your cursed blue eyes."

"Thanks. I think. That one is me too." I indicated the teen in the school uniform in the back. I had longish hair that stuck up in odd places and a dark-eyed scowl that indicated average teenage angst in most people of that age group, but actually was a sign that I had been deep into my descent of madness as the magic of the city overwhelmed everything else.

"Not my best years," I said merrily.

"Before Bakker?"

"Before Bakker," I confirmed and sat heavily on the edge of the stiff bed. It was covered in a pink and green flowery quilt that Gran had made for Mum's birthday one year when I was small and Gran's eyesight hadn't been so poor.

That gave me a view of a tiny photo in the back of Mum, my dad, and me as a toddler. He had always been "my dad" and not "Dad." I was surprised to realize that I couldn't remember him as well as I'd thought. We shared a certain scrawniness that Vera had once, at a different time in My Old Dutch pancake house among a host of magicians and magician-haters, called the "starving pigeon" look.

Oda saw my frown but did not comment. "Well, that's that then?" I said with a smile and we left.


Back in Oda's Secret Hell Hole, which is where we ran to after dodging the Order the night before, the passport that Oda threw at my head had one minor oddity that I noticed instantly. "In this picture, I have brown eyes," I noted.

"Coloured contact lenses," she replied.

"And my name is Melvin?"

She said nothing, so I snatched up her passport. "And yours is Patricia? And we're married? That or we're brother and sister and one of us is clearly adopted. What joker made these passports?"

She continued to ignore me.

I was bored and worried. Oda's little apartment (the Order apparently didn't keep things like member addresses on file, which I found mildly hysterical) was all browns and greys and closed curtains. It didn't have a television or hot water apparently, hence its nickname. I took a frigid shower and slumped on an ugly brown corduroy couch to sleep.


The phone rang with an annoying clang. I had only just dropped off to sleep so it was just a moment before I was fully aware again. Oda, who was sitting at the window staring out at the night with a gun in her lap and the desk lamp on at her elbow, looked at the phone and then at me. I grimaced. "The last time I answered a random phone in the middle of the night, things ended very, very badly," I pointed out.

She made no move to answer it and we could not bear the impulse any longer. We dragged ourselves out of bed and padded across the stiff reddish brown carpeting. When we answered the phone, we heard:

"Sorcerer, do you want to know the power of blood slashed from a warm throat?"

I nearly dropped the receiver and Oda stood up, slipping the gun into the pocket of her jacket.

"It's extremely potent, although not as much as it is when taken from the blood of one's own kin," said Oda's brother in the calm, almost apologetic tone you would hear from a debt collector who is just reminding you that you owe several thousand pounds (and would you be so kind as to submit a payment of a few hundred by next week?). "You know, you are very easy to find. Your blue electric nature is like a beacon in the night."

I hung up. I didn't need to hear any more to know where to go. Oda followed us out without a word, but, as soon as we were settled onto a bus, she said, in a voice that reminded me very alarmingly of the one on the phone, "If he has done something to someone you know or the Order has, we cannot go there. It won't do any good."

"It's my fault."

"Most things are, sorcerer, but you can't – "

"Fucking hell," I hissed and buried my face in my hands. "She knew. That's why she said – My fault. Our fault. He wouldn't have known – Our fault."

"Matthew."

"No. We have to run, but I can't – No. Our fault. My fault. What if he goes after Penny?" A dim part of me realized that I was rocking back and forth on the cold bus seat and shivering.

"Matthew!"

"I couldn't – we couldn't – No – There's no one else. Runrunrunrun."

Oda pulled my head up by my hair and out of my hands. It surprised us so much that we made no struggle and just blinked up at her as she held us by the roots. They still stung vaguely from the last time someone had grabbed me by the hair, but her touch was surprisingly gentle.

"Speak to me, Matthew," she said firmly.

"Gran," I said and I wasn't sure if it sounded as much like a sob to her as it did to me, but I was almost embarrassed by it. "He's killed Gran."

She released my hair without a word and we passed the rest of the trip in silence. I could tell that she was not pleased about going into an obvious trap as she sat across the aisle from us with her arms crossed.


We didn't bother with things like knocking or niceties. We passed a hand over the lock on the screen door and marched right in. A puddle of blood trailed out from behind the front desk. I did not look.

We met no one. There was the soft sound of the elderly snoring and our steps on the stairs. Gun drawn, Oda followed at our back. We found it more reassuring than we once would have. No time for thought.

Gran's room was darker than the hallway. It took a long moment for my eyes to adjust and then I could only make out a figure in the wheelchair by the window.

In one swift motion, Oda snapped the light on. "Hello, sister," said the figure in the chair.

Someone behind us cocked a gun and Oda threw me down and rolled away from the doorway. The shot fired wide as we tumbled towards the bed and I stole the electricity from the lights. I got one glimpse of a slumped, bloody shape on the bed before everything went dark.

Oda ended up on the bottom of our pile of limbs with her arms free. She levelled a gun at the Order member in the doorway, but he dove out into the hallway. I flipped off of her and tossed the light I had gathered at her brother's face as he came at us with hands soaked in blood. Blood magic. Gran's blood.

We snarled and relished in the brother's cry of surprise as the light blinded him. We were prepared to dive for him, to tear him to pieces with our nails, when Oda grabbed our shoulder and shoved us towards the open window.

No pigeons this time. Instead, we went flying through the window to land below in a tangled heap in the shrubbery.

Oda's landing was much more graceful. She landed in a crouch with one arm extended behind her and her gun arm pointed up at two gunmen in other windows.

"Run!" she hissed. My feet obeyed.


I don't remember much of what happened next. The fall had not been kind to me. My mind was a confusing hurricane of blood and pain and Oda's orders. I know we spent a long time running and then dodging through alleys while both cars and runners dashed after us.

The pain increased when Oda's brother caught up. She gave him four rapid-fire shots before I had even assembled enough energy for a spark.

I think it must have been me that got him off our trail that night, but I hazily remember him vanishing into shadows.

Back at Oda's dump, I slumped onto the couch. I don't remember having any dreams.

In the morning, Oda woke me up with the scent of fresh bagels and I felt abruptly nauseous. I curled up on myself, flipped over so that I faced the back of the couch, and went back to sleep.

She prodded me in the back about five minutes later and tossed me my passport and ID.

Melvin. Ha.


Gatwick Airport was miserable and packed. We felt every bit of the confusion of the travellers milling about like ants on the hunt for food and it made our anxiety even worse. Our flight to Atlanta was in four hours and, although it was too crowded for anyone to find us and if they did we were prepared, or so Oda said, every suspicious person in a padded coat was a threat and even perfectly ordinary teenagers in too-tight clothing set us on edge.

I decided to hunker down on a bench in a corner to use my mobile, while Oda ate something that looked far too healthy for airport food. There had to be a catch somewhere.

Penny answered in two rings. "Sorcerer?"

"Hello, sorceress," I said and ignored the pointed look Oda sent my way.

"Oi, where have you been? The Aldermen – "

"Listen," I said quickly. "You need to watch your back and – "

"Is this one of those times when someone is like, 'Stay behind and, bloody hell, don't do anything stupid!' and the other person gets left behind to deal with whatever the latest threat is and all that?" Penny asked.

"Well, I am leaving the country for a bit…"

"Fab. I suppose you haven't told the Aldermen then?"

"No. Figured I would leave the message with you. By the way, can I temporarily give you the title of Midnight Mayor to watch over the city?"

"Well, searing pain didn't just start in my hand so probably not, but I'll try to convince the Aldermen that the woman whose insides they want to boil is now their boss. We'll see how that goes."

"Also, he should be following us, but watch out for resurrected witch doctors anyway."

"Super fab. I look forward to that."

"Domine – "

" – dirige nos," she finished. "Yes, yes, I know."

"Thank you, Penny."


"You call her 'sorceress?'" Oda asked in some amusement.

"She calls me 'sorcerer,' but not in a way that implies any Satanic implications like some people I could mention," I grunted and drank the frothy grass-green drink that Oda had bought for us. "This," I said in wonder and disgust, "tastes like health."

"What a wonderful change for your stomach from the food the angels normally delight in," she said. "Oh look, it only took the Aldermen four minutes to find us based on your call."

"There's no need to be smug," I said, as we watched two men in long black trench coats make their way purposefully towards us. "I wanted them to."

The men peered around, looking for threats I guess, and then muttered something into their Bluetooth headsets.

A woman sat down beside us on the bench and crossed her long, lean legs. They were encased in black trousers that flared out over pointed heels. I did not need to look up at the rest of her to know that she was blonde with severe cheekbones and red lips. I also knew that she was wearing a long black coat like the other two.

"Ms Dees," I said and turned to her.

She smiled. It was the sort of dry, patient smile that the Aldermen tended to bestow on me, their unfortunate boss, all the time.

"I hear you are going on a trip," she said. Beside me, Oda stiffened. She didn't have her gun on her. She had left it at her place because, as she said, "It's easier to buy a new gun in the United States than it is to stow one on a plane."

"Yes, just a jaunt over the Atlantic," I told the Alderman. "New scenery and all that."

"It wouldn't have anything to do with the walking dead man I have been hearing about, would it?"

"If he follows us, then I suppose it might."

"So, the city is to be unprotected by its Midnight Mayor while you are away?"

"No."

"No?"

"Talk to Penny."

"Ms Ngwenya is not – "

"Ms Dees," we said and flashed her a wicked smile. "Must we repeat ourselves on that subject?"

She continued to smile, although it seemed to fade a little. "No, I suppose not," she said.

"Thank you."

"While you are away, the situation with the Order will be dealt with," she continued.

"Are you going to send over a severe note concerning their behaviour and its consequences?"

"Decisions have been made concerning the fate of the one who resurrected this witch doctor."

"I see," I said. "And he'll be an example for the Order? A 'do this again and you'll be next' sort of thing?"

"Yes."

"He or she will already be dead," I pointed out. "The Order or the dead guy himself will have killed him or her."

"We assume so, but it is best to be sure," she said calmly.

"Of course."

A girl tripped over a rolling suitcase. A man shouted about his freedoms and being searched. A woman in a grey suit sat on a bench and pressed her nose into a thin paperback bought in a gift shop.

Ms Dees said, "Goodbye, Mr Mayor." She clicked-and-clacked away on her impressive heels and the two men followed. It made a very dramatic, Matrix-esque exit as their coats flapping when they walked. We were impressed.

"I'm surprised they haven't killed you yet," Oda said.

"It's sort of in bad taste to kill your boss, I guess," I said without looking at her.

"That never stopped them from trying before."

"Thanks for that, Oda."

She gave me something that might have been a small, strained smile. Or indigestion. Considering what she was eating, the latter seemed more likely.


The plane ride was long as hell. We were bored, antsy, and a little hyper on the sweets we had purchased while Oda wasn't looking before boarding.

Speaking of our friendly assassin, she was blissfully asleep. She was stiff with her arms crossed and her head tipped back against the seat. I followed the fine line of musculature from her left shoulder, across her collarbone, and to the other shoulder. There was something very understated but profoundly strong about every aspect of her. It awakened something strange in the pit of my belly. We found it faintly nauseating and confusing.

By the time the lights had been dimmed inside the plane and most of the passengers had drifted to sleep, we had exhausted all options of entertainment. The in-flight movie was the latest James Bond flick, a confusing array of car chases and indecipherable plot but a Bond flick at least. That only lasted a few hours and the next one was some "uplifting" movie about sports that bored us.

We had purchased several different food packages – one was all dry crackers and cheese dips, while another consisted of tiny crumbly biscuits – and sampled them all. That left staring out the window at nothing or at our fellow passengers.

"Matthew," Oda said.

We turned to her, tapping our fingers absently against the arm rest between us.

"Close your eyes," she said and it wasn't what you might think. It was all exasperation. "They're glowing."

"Oh." I suppose the other passengers might find it strange in the semi-darkness. We complied with her order, although not without fixing her with a bright, blue-eyed look of utter cheerfulness. She rolled her eyes and went back to sleep.