Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

I looked down at Toby, who was crouched half hidden behind Molly’s skirts. He gave me an experimental yap.

“You’re not making any friends around here, you know,” I said.

DR. WALID let me watch while he fed my father into the MRI scanner at UCH. He said it was a 3.0 Tesla machine, which was good, but that really the hospital could do with another one to cope with the demand.

There’s a microphone inside the tube so you can hear if the patient’s in distress — I could hear my dad humming.

“What’s that sound?” asked Dr. Walid.

“Dad,” I said. “He’s singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’ ”

Dr. Walid sat down at a control desk complicated enough to launch a satellite into low earth orbit or mix a top-twenty hit. The magnetic drum in the scanner started to rotate with the sort of banging sound that makes you drive your car into the nearest garage. It didn’t seem to bother my dad, who carried on humming, although I noticed he did shift his rhythm to match the machine.

The scans went on for a long time, and after a while the microphone picked up my dad’s gentle snoring.

Dr. Walid looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

“If you can go to sleep while my mum’s on the phone,” I said, “you can pretty much sleep through anything.”

When they’d finished with my dad, Dr. Walid turned to me and told me to strip off and get in the machine myself.

“What?”

“Simone was probably feeding off you too,” he said.

“But I don’t play jazz,” I said. “I don’t even like it that much.”

“You’re making assumptions, Peter. The whole jazz aspect may just be a boundary effect. If your lady friend is an uncharacterized category of thaumovore then we can’t know what the mechanism is. We need more data, so I need you to stick your head in the MRI machine.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s for science,” he said.

There’s something uniquely claustrophobic about sliding into an MRI scanner. The rotating magnets are on an industrial scale and generate a magnetic field sixty thousand times that of the earth. And they feed you into it wearing nothing but a hospital gown that lets a breeze flap around your privates.

At least Dr. Walid didn’t make me wait around for the results.

“This is your dad’s,” he said. He pointed to a couple of dark gray smudges. “Those look like minor lesions, probably hyperthaumaturgical degradation. I’ll have to refine the image further and make some comparisons to be sure. This is your brain, which is not only pristine and unsullied by thought, but also showing no sign of any lesions.”

“So she wasn’t feeding off me. Then why did I pass out?”

“I’d bet she was feeding off you,” he said. “Just not enough yet for it to damage your brain.”

“She was doing it while we were having sex,” I said. “She practically told me that herself. Do we know what she’s actually feeding off exactly?”

“The damage I’m looking at is consistent with the early stages of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.”

“She’s a vampire,” I said. “A jazz vampire.”

“Jazz may just be the flavoring,” said Dr. Walid. “What’s being consumed is magic.”

“Which is what exactly?”

“We don’t know, as well you know,” he said and sent me off to get changed.

“Is it brain cancer then?” asked my dad as we got dressed.

“No, they just wanted to record your empty head for posterity,” I said.

“You’ve never been very lucky with birds, have you?” he said. It’s weird watching an elderly parent when he’s half naked. You find yourself staring in fascination at the slack skin, the wrinkles, and the liver spots, and thinking — one day all that will be yours. Or at least it will be if you can avoid getting killed or falling in love with vampires.

“Apart from the thing with Mum, how did the gig go?”

“Not bad at all,” he said. “We could have done with a bit more rehearsal, but then you always can.”

Even with sterile needles supplied by the NHS my dad had still collapsed the veins on his arms and I’d assumed he’d been injecting into his legs. But looking now I couldn’t see any tracks.

“When was the last time you had your medicine?” I asked.

“I’m temporarily off the gear,” he said.

“Since when?” I asked.

“Since the summer,” he said. “I thought your mum told you.”

“She said you’d quit smoking,” I said.

“And the rest.” My dad slipped into his rifle-green shirt with the button-down collar and shook his arm in the approved cockney geezer manner. “Got off both horses,” he said. “And to be honest giving up the fags was the harder of the two.”

I offered to take him home, but he said that not only was he all right but he was looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet. Still the sun was going down so I waited with him at the stop until his bus came and then I walked back to Russell Square.

I’m used to having the Folly to myself, so it was a bit of a shock to wander into the atrium and find half a dozen guys making themselves comfortable in the armchairs. I recognized one of them, a stocky man with a broken nose, as Frank Caffrey, our contact in the fire brigade and reservist for the parachute regiment. He stood up and shook my hand.

“These are me mates,” he said.

I gave them a nod. They were all fit-looking middle-aged men with short haircuts and while they were dressed in a variety of civvies their manner suggested that uniforms were a very real possibility. Molly had supplied them with afternoon tea, but slung under the occasional tables and stacked beside their armchairs the men had sturdy black nylon carryalls. The ones with the reinforced straps and handles allowing you to carry small, heavy metal objects around in safety and relative comfort.

I asked where Nightingale was.

“On the phone to the commissioner,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the word.”

The “word” made me cold and sweaty. I doubted this word was to extend Simone and her sisters an invitation to tea. I managed to keep the fear off my face, gave Caffrey’s mates a cheery wave, and headed through the back door and across the yard and out the coach house gate. I reckoned that I had at least ten minutes before Nightingale figured out I’d gone, twenty if I left the car in the garage. He knew me well enough to know what I was going to do next. He’d probably thought he was trying to protect me from myself, which was ironic because I thought I was trying to protect him from himself.

Twenty minutes to notice I was gone, ten minutes to tool up and pile into whatever nondescript van the paras had brought with them, ten minutes to reach Berwick Street. Forty minutes, tops.

A black cab was turning the corner as I stepped out on the pavement and shouted “Taxi.” I stuck my hand out, but the bastard pretended he hadn’t seen and cruised right past me. I swore and memorized his license plate in case an opportunity for petty but deeply satisfying vengeance came along later. Fortunately a second cab came around the corner immediately and dropped off some tourists outside one of the hotels on Southampton Row and I slipped in before the driver could experience any problems with his night vision. He had the cropped hair of a man too proud to cover his bald patch with a comb-over. Just to make his day I showed my warrant card.

“Get me to Berwick Street in under ten minutes and I’ll give you a free pass for the rest of the year,” I said.

“And the wife’s car?” he asked.

“Same deal,” I said and gave him my card.

“Done,” he said and demonstrated the amazing turning circle of the London black cab by doing an illegal U-turn that threw me into the side door, then accelerated down Bedford Place. Either he was insane or his wife really needed help with the traffic tickets, because we did it in less than five minutes. I was so impressed I even paid him the fare as well.