He rolls over as far as he can in the cramped coach seat. Thomas is polite to a fault, and hasn’t reclined his chair back. His neck is going to feel like a trampled pretzel when he wakes up, if he manages to sleep at all. I close my eyes and do my best to get comfortable. It’s close to impossible. I can’t stop thinking about the athame, buried inside my luggage in the belly of the plane, or at least it goddamn better be. I can’t stop thinking about Anna, and the sound of her voice, asking me to get her out. We’re traveling at over 500 miles per hour, but it’s nowhere near fast enough.
* * *
By the time we touch down at Heathrow, I’ve officially entered zombie mode. Sleep was fleeting: a half hour here, fifteen minutes there, and all of it with a kink in my neck. Thomas didn’t fare much better. Our eyes are red and scratchy and the air on the plane was so dry that we’re about ready to flake off and fall into a pair of Thomas- and Cas-colored piles of sand. Everything is surreal, the colors too bright and the floor not quite solid beneath my feet. The terminal is quiet at ten thirty at night, and that at least makes things easier. We don’t have to swim through a torrent of people.
Still, our brains are slow, and after collecting our luggage (which was a nerve-racking chore—waiting around the carousel on the balls of my feet, paranoid that the athame didn’t make it onto the connecting flight from Toronto, or that someone else would grab it before I did), we find ourselves milling around, unsure of where to go next.
“I thought you’d been here before,” Thomas says crankily.
“Yeah, when I was four,” I reply, equally crankily.
“We should just take a cab. You’ve got his address, right?”
I look around the terminal, reading the overhead signs. I’d been planning on getting travel cards and taking the Tube. Now it just seems complicated. But I don’t want to start this trip with compromise, so I haul my suitcase through the terminal, following the arrows toward the trains.
* * *
“Wasn’t so hard, was it?” I ask Thomas a half hour later, as we sit, exhausted, on the bench seat of the Tube train. He gives me an eyebrow, and I smile. After one more only mildly disconcerting line change, we get off at Highbury and Islington station and drag ourselves up to ground level.
“Anything familiar yet?” Thomas asks, peering down the street, lights illuminating the sidewalk and the shop fronts. It looks vaguely familiar, but I suspect that all of London would look vaguely familiar. I breathe in. The air is clear and cool. A second breath brings in a whiff of garbage. That seems familiar too, but probably only because it isn’t any different from other large, urban cities.
“Relax, man,” I say. “We’ll get there.” I flip my suitcase onto its side and unzip it. The minute the athame is tucked into my back pocket, my blood pumps easier. It’s like a second wind, but I’d better not dawdle; Thomas looks tired enough to kill me, hollow me out, and use me for a hammock. Luckily, I Google-mapped Gideon’s address from this station, and his house isn’t more than a mile away.
“Come on,” I say, and he groans. We walk quickly, our suitcases wobbling on the uneven pavement, passing by Indian-owned diners with neon signs and pubs with wooden doors. Four blocks down, I head right on my best guess. The roads aren’t labeled well, or maybe they are and I just can’t make them out in the dark. On the side streets, the lamps are dimmer, and the area we’re in looks nothing like Gideon’s neighborhood. Chain-link fences border us on one side, and there’s a high brick wall on the other. Beer cans and garbage litter the gutter, and everything seems damp. But maybe this is the way things always were, and I was too young to remember. Or maybe this is just how things have become since then.
“Okay, stop,” Thomas breathes. He pulls up and leans on his suitcase.
“What?”
“You’re lost.”
“I’m not lost.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” He taps his index finger to his temple. “You’re going round and round, in here.”
His smug face sets me off, and I think very loudly, This mind-reading shit is f**king annoying, and he grins.
“Be that as it may, you’re still lost.”
“I’m turned around, that’s all,” I say. But he’s right. We’ll have to find a phone, or get directions in a pub. The last pub that we passed was inviting; the doors were propped open and yellow light streamed onto our faces. Inside, people were laughing. I glance back the way we came and see one of the shadows move on its own.