فصل بیستم

CHAPTER TWENTY

A Wolf in the Night

The Walker, for a change, wasn’t walking. He was standing on the open back platform of a Routemaster bus, holding on to the pole. His hair streamed back out of his hood in the slipstream. The Raven flapped steadily behind him, at head height, a couple of feet back, so as not to draw attention to itself.

The conductor asked him for his ticket. And then thanked him, even though he didn’t produce one.

The conductor started to climb the steps to the upper level, brow furrowing as if he’d forgotten to say something. He turned.

“Oh, er, please come inside, sir. It’s dangerous… .”

The Walker didn’t look at him. “I’m not going to hurt you.” The conductor nodded, as if that made perfect sense.

“Okay.”

The conductor disappeared up the stairs, unsure as to why he felt strange, and relieved, but what he wasn’t thinking about anymore was the Walker. Because the Walker was able to be forgotten as easily as he was able not to be seen. That was why he’d been able to walk for so long without people noticing he was always there, always walking, always, more or less, the same as he had been when they’d seen him as children. Or when their grandparents’ grandparents had been children and had seen him, for that matter.

The Raven got tired of flapping along and flew onto his shoulder. It tucked its head in against the slipstream. After all, it thought, there was no point tiring itself out trying to remain unobtrusive when the Walker could do it for both of them. The Walker watched a street name pass on the corner of a building.

“Lupus Street. From the Latin lupus—a wolf. Nearly there.”

Since the Raven didn’t react, it was hard to see if it was interested. In fact, it wasn’t. Even older than the Walker, from its perspective, Latin was just another of those Johnny-come-lately, here-today-gone-tomorrow modern languages that caught on for a bit then fizzled out.