Page 30 of Never a Hero

They made their way to the staircase at the back of the room—the same sweeping staircase from the office lobby. There, it had been plain white with yellow walls. Now, it was carpeted in tasteful dove grey with a wyvern pattern embroidered in gold. As they ascended, Nick looked down over the banister at the figures below. ‘How many people with powers are there?’ He sounded almost as awed as he’d been when he’d looked out onto Londinium.

‘In the world? I … I don’t know.’ Joan was surprised by the question. Did anyone know? ‘It would be hard to take a census of time travellers, I guess.’

‘They probably congregate in comfortable periods,’ Nick speculated.

He was just curious, Joan told herself. It only sounded like reconnaissance because she knew who he’d once been.

‘Maybe they’d have home zones,’ he said. ‘If you travelled too far from your own time, language would become an issue …’

‘You’d want to avoid wars,’ Joan said slowly. ‘Plagues. Discrimination.’ How many monsters were there in London on any given day? What about in the rest of the world? Did they make up half a percent of the population? One percent? How many people were out there, preying on humans?

Nick looked at her, sharp and interested. His face was half in shadow, and out of nowhere Joan had a flash of her nightmare on the train—of him wielding a sword in the shadow of a high hedge wall.

For a moment, the boy with the sword and the Nick in front of her seemed to merge. The image was so real that it almost felt like a premonition.

Joan thought again about how the people on the river walk had looked at him. Unease churned inside her. In the other timeline, by the age of eighteen, he’d trained and led warriors to slay monsters. In the right circumstances, could he be capable of that again?

‘You’d want to stay near friends and family too,’ Nick said. ‘Time travellers who knew each other would probably cluster together.’

Joan blinked. The warrior image vanished; he was an ordinary boy again—the boy who’d saved her life; who she’d brought to this dangerous place. ‘Makes sense,’ she managed.

Above them, the sounds of a market were rising: footsteps thumped, and vendors called in familiar rhythms.

But as Joan and Nick ascended the last steps to the landing, they found a hotel-like corridor. The market noises were coming from the floor above.

Joan suddenly needed a moment. ‘Why don’t we start with the suite?’ she said.

The second door on the left was a long way down the corridor. Joan saw why when she opened the door with the silver key. She’d been expecting a hotel room, but this was a small apartment—a living room with doors leading to a bedroom and a bathroom. It was simple but homey: a blue sofa, a wood-panelled kitchenette. The only Gran-like touch was a landscape painting above the sofa: an empty field under a stormy sky, a ruined building in the distance.

Joan doubted that anyone had looked much at that painting, though, because the view was Londinium again. From this higher angle, more of the river was visible, its single bridge spanning an immense width of water that no modern London bridge had ever had to accommodate.

‘There are clean clothes in here,’ Nick called to Joan. He’d wandered into the bedroom.

Joan joined him, and Nick gestured at a huge walk-in wardrobe. It was full of clothes: utilitarian, formal, casual. ‘All kinds of sizes,’ Nick said, unfolding a soft white T-shirt.

‘They must be from this time period.’ Joan couldn’t see much difference between the cut of their own clothes and these ones, but she’d be glad to change into something clean.

She walked farther in and found a black jacket with an Elvis collar—flipped up, it would be high enough to cover the back of Nick’s neck. She offered it to him, and to her relief, he took it.

‘You want the first shower?’ he asked. Joan shook her head. She wanted to take stock and think.

Joan sat on the sofa and laid out everything she’d stolen from Corvin on a glass coffee table: twenty pounds in old white banknotes, twenty-five pounds with that unfamiliar queen, and over three hundred in monster currency. Joan had spent all the contemporary money—she’d need to exchange some of this at the market to get more. She turned the wallet upside down and shook it; felt for secret pockets. Was that it?

No, that wasn’t it. She reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out Corvin’s chop, chain first.

The pendant was a burnt elm tree, withered branches reaching up. On the underside, Joan made out reversed letters: Corvinus Argent. Son of Valerian Argent.

That was interesting. Corvin was the son of a family head, like Aaron. A prince of the Argents, probably equipped with a strong power.

The burnt elm sigil wasn’t replicated on the underside. In its place was the winged lion of the Court. Corvin had been a Court Guard. Joan wasn’t exactly surprised, but the hard proof made her feel sick.

A decorative half circle ran around the lion’s left side. Joan held the chop up to the light, tilting it until the metal shadowed to reveal more detail. It wasn’t a simple curved line, but a thorned stem: a rose stem, without the flower. Joan had suspected that there was something different about Corvin’s team. Was this the mark of a specialist group within the guards—one charged to hunt down people like her?

She folded her arms around herself. A specialist group …

Something had been nagging at her since they’d escaped from Nick’s house: Corvin’s words in the garden. The intelligence was flawed, he’d said. That boy wasn’t even supposed to be there.

But how could the Court’s intelligence have been flawed? Their historical records were perfect.

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