Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

"She's a pyrokinetic, remember?" explained Gene. "That's not just setting fire to things with your mind. It's control over temperature. She's made her own cocoon of warmth, inside her coat. Look, she's steaming."

Susan turned, smiling wide. Hot fog rose from her shoulders, and snowflakes hissed when they got near her as if falling onto a griddle.

"Are my ears burning?" she asked.

"Never mind your ears," said Keith. "What about everything else?"

Susan's footprints were shallow puddles, which froze a few seconds after she had made them.

"I'm not a proper pyro," she said. "I don't set fires. I just have a thing with warmth. Saves on coins for the meter. Otherwise, it's useless — like wiggling your ears. It takes me an hour to boil enough water for a cup of tea, and by then I'm so fagged out I have to lie down and it's cold again when I wake up. That's the trouble with most of my so-called Talents. Party pieces, but little else. I mean, who needs a drawer full of bent spoons?"

"I think it's amazing," commented Keith. "Mind over matter. You could be on the telly. Or fight crime."

"I'll leave that to the professionals, like Jamie's Dad. You're not seeing me in a union jack bikini and one of those eye-masks which aren't really disguises."

"You'd be surprised how well those masks work," said Jamie. "When she was Kentish Glory, Mum wore this moth-wing domino. Even people she knew really well didn't clock it was her."

"I like a quiet life," said Susan. "So, enough about me being a freak. Gene, what's your secret?"

The blonde shrugged, teasing. "Diet and lots of sleep."

"Come on, slowcoaches," said Susan, who was getting the hang of it. "Last one there's a rotten…"

The snow collapsed under her and she sank waist deep, coat-skirts spreading out around her.

"Shit," she said. "Pardon my Burgundian."

"Didn't Gene say you could levitate?" said Keith, going to help her.

"She's not the one who knows everything," said Susan. "That was only once, and I was six. I've put on weight since then."

Keith took her hands — "she's all warm!" — and hauled her out of her hole.

"Abracadabra," he said, flapping the cloak.

"It doesn't do to get overconfident," cautioned Gene.

Susan made a rude gesture behind the other girl's back.

Jamie felt something. Deeper than the cold. He looked around. The whirling blizzard was thickening. And something was different.

"Hey, gang," he said. "Who made the snowmen?"

"I know the Cold is spreading," Catriona Kaye told Derek Leech. "It's here, in Alder. We're three miles from you. Now put Richard on, would you?"

In the Manor House, the telephone was on a stand near the front door. She had to leave her guests in the drawing room to take Leech's call. The hallway was still cluttered from Edwin's days as Lord of this Manor: hats and umbrellas (and Charles Beauregard's old sword-stick) in a hideous Victorian stand, coats on hooks (she liked to use Edwin's flying jacket — still smelling of tobacco and motor-oil — for gardening), framed playbills from the 1920s, shotguns (and less commonplace armaments) in a locked case. Since Edwin's death, she'd tidied away or passed on most of his things, but here she let his ghost linger. Upstairs, on the landing, his shadow was etched permanently into the floorboards. After a lifetime in service to the Diogenes Club, it was all he had for a grave. She supposed she should throw a carpet over it or something.

As she waited for Leech to pass the phone to Richard, Catriona caught sight of herself in the tall, thin art deco mirror from the Bloomsbury flat she had shared with Edwin. At a glance, she was the girl she recognized — she had the same silhouette as she had in her, and the century's, twenties. If she looked for more than a few seconds, she saw her bobbed hair was ash-grey, and even that was dyed. Her wrists and neck were unmistakably a seventy-six-year-old's. Once, certain Valued Members had been grumpily set against even admitting her to the building in Pall Mall, never mind putting her on the rolls. Now, she was practically all that was left of the Diogenes Club as Mycroft Holmes would have recognized it. Even in the Secret World, things were changing.

"Catriona," said Richard, tinny and distorted as if bounced off a relay station in the rings of Saturn. "How are you? Is the Cold…?"

"In the village? Yes. A bother? No. We've enough lively minds in the house to hold it back. Indeed, the cool is misleadingly pleasant. What little of the garden survived the heat-wave has been killed by snow, though — which is really rather tiresome."

Richard succinctly explained the situation.

" 'The planet's first evolved intelligence'?" she queried. "That has a familiar ring to it. I shall put the problem to our little Council of War."

"Watch out for snowmen."

"I shall take care to."

She hung up and had a moment's thought, ticking off her long string of black pearls as if they were rosary beads. The general assumption was that they had been dealing with an unnatural phenomenon, perhaps a bleed-through from some parallel wintery world. Now, it seemed there was an entity in the picture. Something to be coped with, accommodated or eliminated.

The drawing room was crowded. Extra chairs had been brought in.

Constant Drache, the visionary architect, wanted news of Derek Leech. Catriona assured him that his patron was perfectly well. Drache wasn't a Talent, just a high-ranking minion. He was here with the watchful Dr Lark, corralling the persons Leech had contributed to the Council and making mental notes on the others for use after the truce was ended. That showed a certain optimism, which Catriona found mildly cheering. She had told Richard's team not to call Leech's people "the villains", but the label was hard to avoid. Fred and Vanessa were still in London, liaising with the Minister.

Anthony Jago, wearing a dog-collar the Church of England said he was no longer entitled to, was Leech's prime specimen — an untapped Talent, reputed to be able to overwrite reality on a large scale. The former clergyman said he was looking for property in the West Country and had taken a covetous liking to the Manor House. The man had an understandable streak of self-regarding megalomania, and Lark was evidently trying to keep him unaware of the full extent of his abilities. Catriona would have been terrified of Jago if he weren't completely trumped by Ariadne ("just Ariadne"). The white-haired, utterly beautiful creature had made her way unbidden to the Club and offered her services in the present emergency. She was an Elder of the Kind. Even the Secret Files had almost nothing on them. The Elders hadn't taken an interest in anything in Genevieve Dieu-donne's lifetime, though some of their young — the Kith — had occasionally been problematic.

Apart from Jago, none of Leech's soldiers were in the world-changing (or threatening) class. The unnaturally thin, bald, haggard Nigel Karabatsos — along with his unnaturally small, plump, clinging wife — represented a pompous Neo-Satanic sect called the Thirteen. Typically, there weren't thirteen of them. Maureen Mountmain was heiress to a dynasty of Irish mystics who'd been skirmishing with the Club for over eighty years. Catriona would gladly not have seen the red-headed, big-hipped, big-busted Amazon in this house again (she'd been here when the shadows took Edwin). Maureen and Richard had one of those complicated young persons' things, which neither cared to talk of and — Catriona hoped — would not be resumed. There were enough «undercurrents» in this Council for several West End plays as it was. Jago and Maureen, comparatively youthful and obnoxiously vital, pumped out more pheromones than a beehive. They took an interest in each other which Dr Lark did her best to frustrate by interposing her body. Leech obviously had separate plans for those two.