Read Online Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) by Kate Griffin - Free Book Online

Her lungs were heaving, grabbing down air, but this sound, this breathing, this steady roar–it could circle the globe and still have oxygen left for resuscitating an elephant.
    She told herself she was being ridiculous and knew she wasn’t.
    She told herself that this was absurd, that she was standing inside a dental surgery on City Road and she’d get in trouble with the police if they found her and soon an alarm would go and she should really move.
    And did not move.
    She thought about Gretel the troll and Sally the banshee, about Kevin the vampire and the man with electric-blue wings, and wondered what they would do.
    Stand here paralysed, she concluded. Frozen with fear at an unknown something waiting in the night.
    She told herself she was a shaman.
    She thought she heard a voice, tiny and far off. “Tonight, on who wants to be a shaman, will Sharon take the challenge or will she give up her dreams?”
    It seemed an unlikely voice to hear in the dead of night, and she concluded she must be going mad.
    Having proposed madness, she considered it further and decided yes, all things considered, that probably made the most sense.
    And that being mad, there was probably no escape from madness so, hell, she might as well go outside and dance the dance.
    She took a deep breath and stepped back through the wall.
    A woman at a bus stop with a violin case on her back glanced up and furrowed her brow as she tried to work out if she really had just seen a girl appear out of nowhere, or if she was joining in some universal process and going insane.
    Then she shrugged and chose not to think about it.
    Sharon looked around her: red brake lights heading in one direction, and white headlights streaming in the other. Old Street roundabout wasn’t big on sleep.
    No trolls lurched, no monsters stirred, no men with blazing eyes and burning wings appeared to offer cryptic messages.
    As an experiment, she walked back towards the Angel, until she hit that perfect stride where invisibility began to seep over her skin, where she was so much a part of the city that no one bothered to notice her any more, and she heard it again.
    The slow rumbling of breath.
    Further off now.
    Perhaps an illusion.
    Perhaps a plane passing overhead.
    Don’t look. It wants you to look.
    She walked away and then, in a single swift moment, moving too fast to have second thoughts, she turned and looked.
    There was a wall across the street. It towered above the houses, it blocked out the sky, it was black and ancient and its stones were sea-smoothed-round and the mortar dripped blood and whispers, and fingers beckoned from the shadows of every indentation, and in the centre of this wall, this giant, impossible wall that spanned City Road like an urban overpass, this wall that traffic drove through like it was nothing at all when it was clearly everything that ever mattered, there was a gate. Black wood soaked through with blood and corseted with bone and, above the gate, a shield of white from which red blood flowed, running down from a giant cross, while another bleeding sword set in the top left segment of the shield dribbled its liquor down to the ground, the whole thing encased in silver-black claws.
    Claws which rippled.
    Sharon looked up and there it was, metal skin and twisting lizard-tongue, wings folded back and knees bent, eyes spinning and wild, a dragon holding its bloody shield above the gate, just like all the little dragons around the city carved from stone: the symbol of the City of London. But unlike those stone dragons, this one was alive. And it was staring straight at her, and it wasn’t pleased.
    She backed away as the dragon flexed its wings, droplets of blood shimmering on their spiked tips. It opened its mouth to hiss and its throat was a yawning pit and its eyes were spinning red flame.
    Then something moved beneath it, and its head snapped round towards the gate. And it occurred to Sharon that, in this giant black wall that no one else