The man that met her in the car park in Burnham-on-Sea was one of the biggest men she’d ever seen in her life.

He was huge, hulking, and his bulk was made all the apparently heavier by the large great coat he wore, which she knew by sight was an antique – and had probably been part of this man’s Great War uniform allotment. He didn’t look that old, looked like he was only in his fifties, but there was an energy about him that was weighted not just with magic but with time, and the coat was tailored to fit him perfectly.

The dark blue of the fabric had faded only a little with age, and the brass buttons with the crown over the anchor embossed on each one were polished to a shine.

He wasn’t wearing it as part of a naval uniform, of course – he wore the coat open over a thick, flannel shirt tucked into a pair of oil-stained jeans and a set of heavy yellow boots, his cap held loosely in his hand rather than on his head but that, too, a little bit more contemporary, albeit only just.

He towered over her, at least six foot four if not six six, and he was broad across the body with strong, square shoulders and such a generous chest she could almost be excited about it, if only he were a woman. He was one of those guys that was so white he threatened to blend in with the fog, a stony undertone to the white hue of his skin, with eyes that were such a crystalline blue it was honestly a little bit creepy. His beard and moustache, which were neatly trimmed around his chin and jaw, were white with flecks of grey and black, much like the careful haircut he was sporting.

For all he looked a little messy, wind-whipped and sea-swept, everything but his ex-uniform coat looked expensive – the haircut, the gold rings on his big, sailor’s fingers, the designer jeans, the designer boots.

“Miss Kuroda?” he asked.

His voice was a deep rumble, but for the life of her, she never expected the accent that came out of him, posh as anything and sounding like he’d just walked out of a 30s war movie on top of wearing the coat. She looked up at him, taking him in, and she wondered if this one was the contact, or the husband. He had to be the contact, right?

“My name is Thursday Carmicheal,” he said evenly, sounding as though his mouth had been stuffed with pound coins. “Mr MacKinnon advised you’d be meeting us here. Do you have the cat?” The speech impediment – although, for very posh people, she supposed they didn’t think of it as a speech impediment, just part of the accent – impacted his Rs more than his Ls, and she wondered if he spoke around those letters a lot if he could to keep them out of his mouth.

Velma, her hands in her pockets to keep them warm despite the cold hiss of the seaside wind, nodded back toward her car, which was rocking slightly with the aggressive and angry movement of the demon cat trapped inside it, pacing as best it could in its box.

“I’d be careful about moving it,” she said as Carmicheal went to the car boot and flicked it open. He picked up the top of the carrier with one huge hand and supported it underneath with the other – it was so easy for him that Velma actually took a second to marvel at the ease he showed, at the amount of muscle there must have been rippling under that huge coat.

There was a thick, white fog on the water, and Carmicheal walked confidently into it, his white hair and white skin fading into it so that for a second it seemed like just the coat was left, walking like a ghost.

“Edmund’s waiting for you in the café,” Carmicheal called from over his shoulder as he faded entirely into the cloud of white, unnaturally thick and wholly unexpected, and Velma considered the surrealism of it, wondered if she’d fucked up, somehow, if Hamish had sent her into a trap, or something else dangerous, scary.

The sun seemed to get hotter, and the white mist faded as she walked across to the café, which was empty except for one plump man sitting alone at a table inside, sipping from a cup of tea.

Carmicheal was in a little wooden rowboat, holding the cat’s carrier in his lap as another two men rowed them out to his ship, which was further out – she half-expected to see some kind of tall ship, but it was just a normal fishing vessel, or it looked something like it to her, red and green metal, a few decades old but in what seemed like good nick.

When she opened the door to the café, she saw there was a bell resting on a table right beside the door, which had been taken off of its hook so that it wouldn’t jingle. She dropped the door shut behind her, looking around the place as she walked further inside, but there were no staff, no chef, no waiters or waitresses.

The whole seafront was deserted, the whole place strangely quiet.

“How’d you do that fog?” Velma asked, and the plump man sitting at the table glanced up at her.

There was something about him that made him seem to her as if he’d been cast from the same mould as Hamish – like him, he was short, plump, and pear-shaped, with a delicacy to his mannerisms and the way he settled at the table, although his hair was a mousy brown that was giving way to grey, and his eyes were brown as well. His hair was thicker than Hamish’s, and had slightly more volume rather than hanging in the lank strands that the other man’s did.

“Mr MacKinnon neglected to mention that you were a fellow Scot, Miss Kuroda,” he said.

When he said “fellow”, he obviously meant fellow of Hamish’s, because this man was even more English than the other guy, albeit with a slightly more modern inflection.

“What did he mention about me?” Velma asked, pulling out a chair to sit across from him, and the other man took a sip from his drink, looking across at her with a calculating expression on his face. He was looking her over in a way she didn’t like, taking her in.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked.

“No,” said Velma.

“My name is Sir Edmund Horvasse,” he said quietly. He was stirring his tea with a teaspoon, which he did without touching it. It slowly rotated through the liquid – no milk, judging by the colour – with just magic moving it in place. Like Carmicheal, this man radiated a sense of weightiness, or magical depth. “Does the name ring a bell?”

For a second, Velma’s mind felt like it was taken over with a slideshow of bookplates and book covers in Velma’s bedroom, in Ginchiyo’s stacks of books, in various libraries she’d been in and out of over the years – Encyclopaedia Demonata, The Denizens of Hell, Tenets of Demonology, all of these ornate titles so often followed by the words, Written and collated by Sir Edmund Horvasse.

Edmund Horvasse wasn’t just a demonologist – he’d basically invented the field, had been one of the first ever scientists to walk into the avernal dimensions and start studying and writing about the life there, not just about the demons and all the species of them, but also the living crystals there, which dominated Avernus much like plants did Earth or the fae dimensions.

If Carmichael was a century old, this man had to be at least two, if not three.

“You scared of bells?” she asked, instead of answering the question.

He blinked, looking distinctly unamused as he looked across at her, holding the cup between his palms, still. His teaspoon didn’t even make a sound as it moved, then came to a stop. Like Hamish, he had pretty, prim hands and beautifully manicured fingernails – unlike Hamish, he wore several rings on each of his plump fingers.

The alastora would chew on them, Velma thought, if Hamish tried.

“Not scared,” said Horvasse quietly. “I merely find them… crass. We hardly need a loud jangle of sound to announce your presence, do we? You’re hardly some sort of circus act.”

Velma looked out of the glass wall of the café, out over the beach that was now looking properly sunny again, the mist evaporated under the bright warmth of it. Carmichael’s boat was a dot in the distance, getting slowly closer to the fishing boat.

Horvasse, funnily enough, was not unfamiliar in his mannerisms, his accent. Going into the art trade, this sort of man was exactly who she could expect to deal with – posh and heavily embedded in academics to the exclusion of anything (or anybody) else.

“I know who you are,” said Velma. “I’ve studied your books. What did Hamish mention about me?”

“That you were an intelligent young lady, brimming with potential,” said Horvasse. “I shouldn’t worry about the cat, you know. Thursday has ferried far more dangerous creatures at my behest.”

“Is he going to mount and pin it?” she asked. There was a sort of sickly feeling in the base of her throat, thinking about the instructions in some of the oldest editions of Horvasse’s guides to demonology, how they described and outlined how to mount and pin demons, the same way people did bugs. She thought about Hamish’s alastora mounted and pinned under glass, still and dead with sharp pieces of metal stuck through their chests, their wings, their little laughing heads.

“He isn’t,” said Horvasse. “He’s going to bring it to an appropriate park in Alba. You might have asked that question before you let him take the creature, if that was such a concern for you.”

Hamish was right.

She didn’t fucking like him.

There was something slimy about Horvasse that Velma didn’t like, something that made her feel ill-at-ease and uncertain, more than just the fact that he was too posh and too English. She wondered how often he did shit like this, how often he’d do something like this, fog out a whole town and get rid of them all so that he didn’t have to listen to the unnecessary noise of the people there – people on the beach, people in the café, to the fucking bell over the door.

He talked in a naturally condescending way, and it didn’t feel, somehow, like the blustering expertise MacKinnon wielded – it didn’t feel like it was just how he talked because he was a grumpy old man.

There was something in the way Horvasse talked, something in the way he looked at her, that made her feel small and unsafe and sick and—

“How did you do it?” she asked again. “With the fog?”

“I have a natural ability with precipitation,” said Horvasse softly. “Thursday likes an element of drama – natural for a seaman, I’m told, a certain fancy for storms and heavy fogs and so forth.”

He said the word “seaman” as if they were a lesser, non-human species, somewhat removed from higher beings. She wondered, if he described her, what words he’d choose to employ – Japanese, no. Asian, maybe. Oriental? Ethnic?

“He’s younger than you,” said Velma.

“We’re both of us angels, my dear,” said Horvasse. “Technically, we’re precisely the same age, if our origin is taken into account.”

That explained the heavy weight of the both of them – Velma had met angels before in passing, but had never really had cause, she didn’t think, to speak to one in detail.

“I’m not the only one of we two,” said Horvasse, setting his cup aside and making a gesture over the tabletop, “with an inclination to control of an element, hm? Where I command water, you command fire.”

Velma felt her brows furrow, her lips pressed together as she looked at the old man and is utterly expressionless face, although whether it sat that way because of his British upper lip or because he wasn’t human and didn’t feel emotions like she did, she had no idea.

“Hamish told you that?” she asked, and Horvasse shook his head. “You can… What, you can feel it?”

“I can. Are you familiar with the genesis of your gift, young lady?”

Velma was fiddling with the bandages on her forearm, stroking her thumb over where it was bruised and grazed underneath by the demon cat’s raking claws. She was glad she was up to date on her injections.

“It’s inherited,” she said. “From my grandfather, on my mother’s side.”

“Some magical gifts,” Horvasse said softly, “come from a confluence of genetic factors. It’s not quite so simple as breeding the most powerful magic users to the result of producing the most powerful stock – various elements contribute to one’s magical command. One’s natural capacity for channelling or exercising control over raw magic, of course; any natural talents or tendencies, such as elemental or spiritual inclinations; any inherited potential, genetic or otherwise.

“Nurture has as much an impact as nature, of course – your friend, Mr MacKinnon, is a clear example of that, isn’t he? He strayed into fae lands as a young boy and became suffused with magic he otherwise would scarcely have seen, let alone touched, all this before that… unfortunate incident with his alastora.”

Velma didn’t say anything as she listened to him talk, watched his blank expression and the natural coldness in his eyes. It was obvious to her that that was bait, that he wanted her to chase after that line and ask more about it, to inquire about Hamish, but there was something in Horvasse’s tone and even just the way that he said Mr MacKinnon that grated, like he felt Hamish wasn’t deserving of the title.

“Your command over fire and heat is embedded in your genes,” Horvasse went on, “as a scar is embedded in the skin, even as one exfoliates and regenerates the upper layers.”

Velma said nothing.

“I ask you again, as the two of us seem to be making a habit of repeating our questions to one another,” said Horvasse quietly, “do you know the genesis of your pyromantic ability?”

“My grandfather, my mother’s father, pulled a man out of a fire.”

“Not a man,” Horvasse corrected her. “An angel. Raphael.”

“The archangel Raphael?”

“No angel recalls his position in the Host, young lady,” said Horvasse softly, and for the first time in their conversation, it seemed like there was the barest hint of vulnerability in his tone, some actual emotion there. “The Fall is for each of us – was for each of us – a fracture of being, a cleave from all which we were, and are. When first we come to Earth, it is a literal Fall – rapid, sudden, where we burst into being on this plane as blood excised from a pulsing vein. For some angels, their descent is so rapid as to create a sonic boom or a small explosion, some Falling with impact enough as to create a crater in their wake.”

“Did that happen to you?” Velma asked, curiosity overtaking her natural distaste for the man.

Horvasse smiled at her. It was a thin, anaemic smile – his mouth lacked definition, but it tended to a natural frown, and his smile seemed like it took more effort than it might take another man.

“I Fell, in fact, to a plane of Avernus, not to Earth. It has been known to happen – angels Fall to all realms on this planet, not merely this terrestrial one.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Velma, and Horvasse inclined his head, spreading his ringed fingers.

“Many don’t,” he said. “Many don’t know, either, the sense of emptiness that accompanies the Fall. There is ever a sense of disconnection in our being. We go from the solace of our collective to the agony of the individual – we reach out desperately for anything, anybody, that might anchor us. Other angels, humans, fae, any life possible – we reach for light, sound, heat, sensation.

“Raphael Fell to Earth some many years ago. His Fall was more traumatic than most – he was engulfed near entirely by the weight of the fire that flowed through him, that commanded him, as he commands it now. It partway consumed him – burned out his eyes, burned the hair from his body. He gained more control of it later on, but while he was still new, scarce a few weeks Fallen if not days, he came, still smoking, upon a burning building.

“Firemen were doing their best to staunch the blaze, but there was chaos among them – a beam had burned through and broken, collapsing the weight of the first floor upon one of their compatriots. Raphael, untouched by this fire, walked through the blaze, gripped the man under his arm, and pulled him free, carrying him out. Even through the thick weight and layered materials of his fireman’s suit, he left a visible handprint, I’m told.”

 Velma had been ten when her grandfather died – she remembered the shape of the handprint underneath the old man’s left elbow, the finger-shaped marks mostly on the inside and underside of the arm, so that you didn’t really see them unless you knew to look for them. When she’d seen him shirtless, swimming, they’d been more obvious – not the handprint under his elbow, but the other one on the back of his shoulder, where the other man had supported him out.

She’d heard the story, obviously, had heard of the man who’d pulled Grandad out of the fire, and while no one had ever said it explicitly, her mother had said it was that event that gave them the pyromancy.

It was news to her that the man had been an angel.

She nodded her head. “Handprints, multiple,” she said.

“May I?” asked Horvasse, gesturing to one of her hands. Her fingers twitched, but she slowly put her hand out anyway, turning it palm up. He didn’t touch her fingers or her palm, like she expected him to – he rested the weight of his palm on her forearm over the bandages, and she let out a noise of surprise at the liquid warmth that bubbled under the tied-up bandages, rippling over the skin.

She grabbed a butter knife out of the cup on the table and pushed the blunt blade underneath the coiled bandages, making the gauze tear at the pressure from underneath as she pulled it free, then tore off the pad over the cat scratch.

What had been a cat scratch, anyway – now, the skin had healed up good as new, without even a mark or a blemish.

“And your chin?” asked Horvasse, and Velma nodded her head before she lifted it. His touch was gentle when his thumb brushed the underside of it, the digit a bit cool, and he didn’t linger any longer than necessary, retracted his touch as soon as he’d imparted the magic to heal the bruise up.

“So you can feel it,” Velma said. “That my pyromancy came from him.”

“Angels recognise one another,” Horvasse said as Velma balled up the bandages to toss in the bin. “In you is a small part of him, one that I recognise. Didn’t you recognise something familiar in Thursday and I?”

“Is that what that was?” asked Velma, and Horvasse chuckled. “I want to go home, old man,” she said, and where Hamish responded to that sort of casual disrespect with amusement or feigned offence, it was clear that Horvasse didn’t have any humour about it. His eyes narrowed, and his lip curled slightly. “Hamish said Carmichael would take the cat to Scotland if I did a favour for his husband. What’s the favour?”

If Horvasse had looked offended at being called “old man”, he looked almost disgusted at being called Carmichael’s husband.

“Captain Carmichael,” he said pointedly, as though Velma had somehow spat on his whole reputation by just using his surname, “is, indeed, ferrying the creature north in exchange for a favour you might do me. Mr MacKinnon’s degenerate sense of humour aside, I wanted to ask that on your next occasion travelling to Scotland, that you pick up a scientific collection for me from the University of Glaschu.”

“A scientific collection,” Velma repeated. “Of demons?”

“Indeed.”

“Why can’t you get them?”

“I don’t drive,” said Horvasse.

“Your driver won’t take you?” asked Velma, and Horvasse looked at her flatly. “Captain Carmicheal,” she put even more emphasis on the title than Horvasse had, and he looked disdainful, “can’t pick it up?”

“He cannot. You needn’t rush up to Glasgow – as I said, merely pick up the collection on your next journey.”

“Is it cursed?”

“It isn’t.”

“Is it alive?”

“Need we play through this tiresome Twenty Questions?”

“Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

“I don’t recall saying there was something wrong with it.”

“I don’t recall either, but obviously there is, or you wouldn’t want a stranger picking it up for you and driving it down rather than your fucking bestie out there.”

Horvasse sipped his tea.

“Is it illegal?” Velma asked.

“Of course not.”

Velma looked back out of the windows. They’d winched the rowboat up onto the ship deck, and she couldn’t see the people on the deck from here, nor the crate with the cat in it. The ship wasn’t moving just yet, though. She thought about the cat, and the fact that she’d technically already violated the law by crossing out of Cernyw with it, even if it wasn’t in her hands anymore.

“Would it be illegal?” Velma asked. “Transporting the collection by sea, instead of by car?”

“Keen little girl, aren’t you?” asked Horvasse venomously.

“Demons?” Velma asked as she got to her feet, taking a business card out of her pocket and sliding it across the table.

“Yes,” said Horvasse as he picked it up with his thumb and forefinger, holding the card by the corner as though it were something filthy. His voice was airy and cutting as he asked, “Oughtn’t I follow some sort of queer custom as to business cards?”

“I’m not a salaryman, Mr Horvasse,” said Velma. “You can eat it for all I care. Email me the details for the collection, who I need to talk to, how big it is, shit like that. I’ll let you know when I’m driving up there.”

“Do send Mr MacKinnon my regards.”

“I’ll tell him how…” Velma looked at him deliberately, and made a point of making an obviously fake, polite smile. “Well you’re looking.”

Horvasse’s face fell, and Velma let herself smirk as she walked away. Outside, she could begin to see people starting to come out of their homes and back toward the sunny beach front, including a woman in a red tabard with a notepad in the front pocket of it, who looked confused and mildly disoriented.

She hung the bell back up so that it made a loud jangle as she left the café and went back out to her car.

Dialling Hamish’s number, she pulled back onto the road, heading toward the M5.

“That was quick,” said Hamish.

“You’re right, I don’t fucking like him,” said Velma. “Is he as racist as he comes off?”

“Far more so,” said Hamish. “I’m surprised he left you with doubts.”

“He called me a little girl. I didn’t fucking care for that.”

“No, he’s a deeply odious man. I’ve never liked him.”

“He was fucking raging that I called Carmicheal his husband, by the way.”

She heard MacKinnon chuckle on the other end of the line. “Technically, I suppose they’re civil partners. He’s always been a staunch opponent of marriage equality.”

“God,” said Velma.

“Sad, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand how a cunt that full of himself can be so fucking self-loathing.”

“The world is full of contradictions, my dear. Are you driving home?”

“Back to London. I have a lot of lectures this week, and I’m on top of my assignments, but I’ve been driving a lot – haven’t had time to do my reading.”

“Ah, I see,” said Hamish. She didn’t think she was imagining the slight disappointment in his voice, and she glanced to his name up on her phone before looking back to the road.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Of course, why shouldn’t I be?” Velma opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Hamish said, “What does he want you to do?”

“Drive a scientific collection down south from Glasgow. Dead demons – they’re illegal to ferry by sea.”

“Yes,” said Hamish. “He was a lecturer at the Royal Magical College, you know, up until a few years ago. The head of the Demonology department.”

“Not anymore?”

“He trades in books and antiques now, primarily.”

“He take business off you?”

“Not business I want.”

Velma was joining the motorway now, and as she pulled into the right lane, she said, “My pyromancy.”

“Your pyromancy,” Hamish repeated.

“We talked about it. Have you met many angels?”

Hamish was silent for a few seconds on the other end of the line, and then a few more – he was silent for long enough that she wondered if he’d dropped the phone, although the line was still connected.

“Hamish?” Velma asked.

“I’ve met a few,” he said, as though he hadn’t paused at all. “Most angels aren’t like Horvasse and Carmicheal. The alastora are frightened of them.”

“Of Horvasse and Carmicheal?”

“Of angels.”

“Do you know a lot of them?”

“A few.”

“Do you know Raphael?”

“I’ve met him,” said Hamish. “He’s a very cool and collected man – he tries to be, anyway. He used to wear bandages over his sockets, as he doesn’t have eyes, and he doesn’t like to wear glass ones – I think he ordinarily wears sunglasses now. Edmund brought him up, did he?”

“He saved my grandfather’s life,” said Velma. “Raphael did, years ago. He was a firefighter, and Raphael pulled him out of a collapsed building.”

“Ah,” said Hamish. “That was the source of your inherited gift, was it?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you alright, Velma?”

Velma shifted her hands on the wheel, thinking about the week she had ahead of her, all the fucking lectures, all the people around her. She didn’t hate the other people in her MA course, but none of them were really her friends, were really people she connected with or understood, let alone who understood her.

“Just one more week,” said Velma, “and then it’s half-term.”

“Doing anything special?”

Velma sighed. “Coming up to Nottingham, trying to make my little brother practise his fucking karate.”

“You should bring him over some day,” said Hamish. “I’ll cook for you.”

“Uh,” said Velma.

“There’s no obligation, of course, I hardly meant to—”

“No, he’s just a little cunt, that’s all, it’s hard to get him to do stuff. I’ll try, Hamish.”

“I’ll let you get back to your drive,” said Hamish. “I’ve customers to be getting on with.”

“Hamish—”

The line cut off.

“Right,” Velma murmured to herself, and flicked on the radio.