Alex Verus 5: Hidden Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Light mages of the Council would like me. Going from Dark to independent is one thing; going from Dark to Light is something else. Talisid might be able to get me in the door, but he wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that I was the ex-apprentice of a particularly notorious Dark mage, with a worryingly high body count of my own. Now, there are altogether too many Light mages who couldn’t care less about body counts, but the fact that a couple of the deaths attributed to my name were Light mages would probably make even them think twice. And ironically enough, the Light mages whose good opinion I’d most value and whose respect I’d most want to earn would be exactly the ones
least
likely to trust me.
    Maybe staying outside the fold as an independent was better.
    But was that wisdom talking, or fear?

chapter 2
    A nne lives in Honor Oak, a mostly forgotten part of South London with an abundance of hills. Pricewise it’s not as expensive as the inner city, but nothing in London is exactly cheap and I was pretty sure the only reason Anne could afford to live there was because Sonder had set her up in Council-owned property. (The Council is not known for its spontaneous generosity but it owns a lot of buildings it doesn’t use, and given the amount of stuff it’s responsible for, a lot gets by under its radar.) Anne’s place is near the top of a hill, by the side of a gateway leading down into a wooded area. It was after working hours, but as I looked ahead I was surprised to see a small crowd.
    Anne’s flat was on the first floor of a converted building, and there was a line of people outside her door. As I studied them from a distance I realised that they were queued up (more or less) and waiting to go inside. Now that I thought about it, I remembered Luna had told me something about Anne running a clinic out of her flat. Luna had made it sound small-scale, though. By my count there were a good fifteen people there.
    There wasn’t any danger, but it did pose a problem. Anne had never explicitly told me to stay away, but I knew that her current feelings towards me were ambivalent at best. Getting her to talk to me was not going to be easy, and having a crowd waiting outside would more or less guarantee a response of not-now-I’m-busy. No obvious solution presented itself, so I found a nearby spot to observe from.
    The people outside Anne’s flat were a mixed bag: male and female, white and Asian, short and tall. The youngest was a babe in arms while the oldest looked to be fifty or so. Most were working class, a smaller fraction were middle class, and there were two or three that I was pretty sure were addicts. The different members of the queue were very obviously uncomfortable with each other, and there was the sort of low-grade tension in the air that you get in job centres and NHS waiting rooms. From within the flat I could just make out Anne’s soft voice, along with the sound of the man she was talking to.
    I sat on the landing above Anne’s flat and waited. Twenty minutes passed, then forty. Every now and then Anne would finish with one person and admit a new one, or a new arrival would show up at the back of the queue. The queue seemed to be getting longer rather than shorter, which didn’t bode well for the “wait for her to finish” plan. I toyed with a few ideas to speed things up; the plan involving a smoke bomb and the fire alarm was tempting, but I had the feeling Anne wouldn’t appreciate it. In the absence of anything else to do, I fell back on my short-range eavesdropping to see what Anne was up to; it’s not as reliable as other methods of magical surveillance, but it’s virtually impossible to detect. (Yes, it’s spying. I’m a diviner, it’s what I do.)
    Just as Luna had said, Anne was running a clinic, and she was getting a
really
big variety of patients. Some were what you’d expect, like the woman with flu or the man with backache. Some were odd, like the guy claiming he’d