Page 125 of Never a Hero

Nick stopped, still looking at Joan. He and Owen were in the middle of the street, shoppers streaming around them. But Nick only had eyes for Joan.

Joan walked over. She had to force out the words: ‘Make sure he can still fight Eleanor,’ she told Owen. ‘And make it as strong as you can. He broke your compulsion last time.’

Nick’s eyes widened in betrayal and hurt—and shock. As if he hadn’t believed that Joan still had the capacity to hurt him. He stared at her as Owen gave him a series of orders. Joan could barely hear Owen’s words. She forced herself to hold Nick’s gaze while Owen made him verbally acknowledge the details of the new compulsion.

Joan hadn’t understood until this second that Nick had still trusted her—just a little. In the carriage ride back from Holland House, she’d promised him that she wouldn’t compel him. She’d just broken that promise and what was left of his trust.

‘It’s done,’ Owen said.

Nick’s eyes stayed on Joan, expression hardening from betrayal to something far darker. Joan’s heart pounded. She replayed the moment that Owen had said, Come here! Had there been a moment of hesitation before Nick had obeyed him?

Joan remembered suddenly something else that Nick had said in the carriage: Truth is, I’m not sure the Argent power would work on me again. I can feel how I’d break it. I know how.

She breathed in sharply. Had he been able to fight off Owen’s compulsion just now?

Frankie barked at something, and Nick looked away from Joan finally. Beside Joan, Jamie and Ruth seemed relieved. Only Tom was frowning. Did he suspect, as Joan did, that Nick was still free?

An awkward cough from Aaron. ‘So,’ he said, ‘these stalls sell monster stuff? Just out in the open?’

Tom shook out of his reverie. ‘This isn’t the market.’ He beckoned them to follow him up the road.

Joan walked behind Nick’s straight-backed form. She wanted to catch his arm and explain: You killed my family. I couldn’t risk you killing more people I loved. And: This is just temporary. Just to give us time to go our separate ways after Eleanor. But in her heart, she knew what Nick would say in reply: You should have told me that instead of trying to control me by force.

That was what she’d have said if someone had done this to her.

Tom went to a dodgy little shop with dirty windows and a white stencil on the brick wall: We buy and sell anything. Inside, there were no staff—just stacks of old pots and pans, a shelf of chipped cups, a bin of rags and other tat.

Tom whistled an unmelodic phrase. When he’d finished, a door opened silently in the back wall, apparently of its own accord, revealing a flight of rickety wooden stairs leading to a basement.

‘This is the real Roman Road Market,’ Tom said.

Joan tried to catch Nick’s gaze again, but he avoided her eyes. She swallowed around the lump in her throat and followed Tom down the stairs.

thirty-five

If Joan hadn’t felt so uneasy, she’d have been awed as she descended into the basement. The market was a vintage shopper’s dream, a ballroom-sized space packed with circular racks of clothes: suits, dresses, shirts, skirts, overcoats.

Natural light streamed in from a strip of Portelli glass running down the long length of the ceiling. It showed a sky so blue that Joan expected to feel the warmth of sunshine, but it was only light.

Aaron lifted a dark jacket from the nearest rack, waist-length at the front and long at the back. It was pristinely clean, but slightly worn at the cuffs, and Joan thought he might sneer at it for being second hand.

Instead, he murmured in shocked reverence: ‘Is this a Jonathan Meyer original?’ He examined the stitching. ‘It is.’ He looked around the shop then, like a starving man surveying a buffet. ‘I didn’t know this place was here.’

‘There’s always been a market down here,’ Jamie said. ‘Doesn’t get picked over as fast as the West End ones.’

‘Huh,’ Aaron breathed.

The left wall was all shoes, some velvet, some satiny with polish; a sliding ladder reached the highest shelves. The right wall was a rainbow of hats and gloves and bags. And the back held glass cabinets of jewellery. There was so much here that Joan could barely see a path to traverse it all. It would have taken days to look at every piece.

‘This market is mostly clothes,’ Tom said, ‘but there’s equipment from future periods in the offshoot room. We should be able to find some weapons among it all.’

‘Well, that’s … illegal,’ Aaron said.

Tom shrugged. ‘And time is there.’ He nodded at the jewellery on the back wall.

Time? It took Joan a moment to understand that he meant human time. She folded her arms around herself. Nick’s mouth curled down. As the others spread out among the racks, Nick strode straight to the equipment room. Joan’s stomach churned as she watched him. Was there some way to test whether the Argent compulsion was active?

She bit her lip and looked around. She needed clothes for this time jump. She lifted a dress at random, long and structured, made of heavy grey wool. A bit of rough-cut cloth was pinned to the collar with a date: c. 1936. She put it back.

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