Alexander, the second son of Baron Steven Redstone, was hiding again.

Let me try to sum this up. I know myself to be one of the best spell-singers in England—one of the handsomest as well, if I can believe the girls I meet in the village with all their swooning over my “fine green eyes” and “beautiful black hair”—and twenty-five years old, a full adult by anyone’s reckoning. And where do I spend most of my time? Up a tower or out in the forest, hoping my oh-so-loving father and my even-more-loving brother Matthias do not seek me too hard.

He settled his back more securely against the stone of the tower wall and hummed a few more notes to reinforce his out-of-sight spell as footsteps sounded on the stairs. They were too quick and too small to belong to either of the other Redstone men, but his mother, Baroness Theresa, would be almost as bad.

Father has told her so often that what he does is necessary that I think by now she believes it herself. Or perhaps she always believed it. I have certainly heard enough tales about her father...

A tiny, brown-haired, point-eared head poked through the open trapdoor on the other side of the tower’s top. Big brown eyes swept back and forth, then fixed on Alexander. “Master Alex,” piped the brownie girl. “Your father is looking for you.”

“And as long as you keep your mouth shut, he will not likely find me, will he?” Alex patted the stone next to him. “Come and sit, Moxie. There is room for two.”

Moxie debated visibly for a moment, then scurried up the last few steps and seated herself beside Alex. Though she was sixteen years old and had the shape to prove it, her body was the same size as a human five-year-old, and she curled up like one, hugging her knees to her chest. “He is very angry,” she said gravely. “He wants to know why you have not completed the tests he set you last week.”

“Because the tests he set me last week were half nonsense I could do in my sleep and half things he knows perfectly well I will not do!” Alex pulled on a handful of his hair in frustration. “There are days I think I must be a changeling. I certainly bear no resemblance to anyone else in this family!”

The brownie tilted her head to one side. “You have more your mother’s face than your father’s,” she said. “And your skin is pale like hers, but you have his hair. And the Redstone eyes.”

“Well I know it.” Alex leaned back against the stone wall. “It drives me mad sometimes. My father has all the world to explore, all of magic to draw on, a brilliant mind and enough money to choke a horse, and what does he choose to research and perform? Only the darkest and most evil rituals he can find. Down to setting compulsions over you and your whole family using your true names, to ‘make sure they never leave us without our permission’.” He sneered the words in a good approximation of his father’s usual tones.

Moxie laid a hand on Alex’s sleeve. “You helped us with that, Master Alex. The new names you helped us choose are settling in. I hardly ever think about myself as Mari or Pixie anymore, only Moxie.” She giggled. “It was fun to make a new name out of my old name and my father’s pet name. And soon the new names will be truer than the old names. Then the old ones cannot bind us anymore.”

Alex shook his head. “One small victory. One, out of God-only-knows-how-many evil things he’s done. Mother aids and abets him, Matthias is only too eager to learn everything he knows, and all England whispers their name—our name—in fear. Never trust a Redstone, they say. As soon let the devil in your front door.” He sighed. “I am hardly surprised Uncle Richard wanted to make his own way in the world. And he had to use up his inheritance to do that, and sign on with a lord as a common armsman besides. I have no money and no skills besides my magic, and who would hire me with this face and this name?”

“Names can change,” said Moxie wisely. “And faces too, with magic.”

“Yes, but they would sense that I’d changed my looks, and want to know why, and as soon as I showed them...” Alex sighed again, more deeply. “I want nothing less than to leave England, Moxie. But it looks as if I may have no choice. Father will not let me ‘hide from my destiny’ much longer. If I refuse to be who he wants, he is perfectly capable of making me into what he wants.”

“What he wants?” Moxie repeated, her expression making it clear she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

Alex grinned wryly. “Father has always complained about how tiresome it is to have to use only his own personal power when he works spells, or go through the long process of finding a natural reservoir and changing the power so that he can use it. What if there were a natural reservoir that produced power very like his own, and would keep doing so as long as it were fed and cleaned and kept under the proper spells?”

Moxie’s eyes, already wide, widened still more. “But how could he take your power?” she demanded. “You would fight! I know you would!”

“You assume I would still be in any condition to fight.” Alex shivered, although the day was warm. He had seen his father break people before. Baron Steven was a master at finding a man’s, or a woman’s, greatest fear, and then...

Then he has Matthias, or Mother, play the evil role and fling them into their worst nightmares. Serpents, spiders, drowning, darkness, fire, ghosts... by the time Father comes to ‘rescue’ them, they would serve Lucifer himself if he promised to release them from their personal Hell. Anything he asks is cheap compared to their sanity.

And if it should happen he leaves it too long in my case... how terrible, our poor dear Alexander, accidentally locked in that tiny room for so many days. How lucky that he is alive, and what a horrid shame that he no longer has his mind. Of course we shall keep him safe and well-tended, his magic under careful restraint—you would think he has none at all, so docile he’ll be...

“Master Alex?”

Moxie’s frightened voice broke the daydream—or perhaps I should say day-mare, it’s certainly no dream I would ever choose to have. Alex pushed the thoughts away and smiled down at the little brownie, laying his hand over hers. “Thank you, Moxie. You watch—we can find some way through this.”

“Not if you stay here,” Moxie said, shaking her head hard. “You know your father too well. He will do what you have said.” It was her turn to sigh. “But if you run away, you know he will follow you. Unless you find a place he cannot go...”

“And where can a rich Baron of England with a name for cursing those in his way not go, if he is minded to go there?” Alex finished for her. “My dilemma exactly. Where can I possibly hide that he could not find me?”

“Have you considered,” said a third voice, “hiding not where, but when?”

 ***

A rather haggard-looking young man in a shirt and tie sank into a chair in a small cafe somewhere near St Pancras Station, flipping open a tiny laptop computer and plugging something into one of the USB ports. Instantly, a loud chime sounded. Swearing under his breath, the man extracted a small headset and plugged it in. “Hello? Morning, boss... Oh, not him again! All right, let me get breakfast down me and I'll get the Tube down there; it's quicker than driving at this time in the morning... No, I will not go straight there,” he said firmly, “overtime or no overtime. If you make me deal with Effing Jeff before I've had my coffee then he'll need surgery before I get my screwdriver back.”

Somewhat fortified by coffee and a bacon roll, he made his way to a tall, imposing and quite breathtakingly ugly high-rise office building near Canary Wharf Underground station. Double-checking that he hadn't got ketchup anywhere, the man negotiated the revolving doors and headed for the reception desk. “Good morning. I'm Mr Grey from Geek Squad, calling for KTP Solutions,” he said politely.

“Sign in over there,” the receptionist replied without bothering to look up from her magazine, gesturing in the general direction of a ledger lying open on the desk.

The man scowled, scrawling down his name and purpose of visit. “Yeah, you have a nice day too,” he muttered sourly, stalking off towards the lift.

He supposed he ought to consider himself lucky; Geek Squad was regarded quite highly in IT circles, and there had undoubtedly been a lot of applicants more experienced and better-qualified than him. Presumably the interview panel had seen something in him, however, and Jacob Grey had left his in-house repair job at PC World for the higher pay and more interesting work of a field service engineer.

Of course, it also got him regular contact with people like the owner of KTP Solutions, 'Effing Jeff' Peterson, whose leadership and interpersonal relationship style combined the worst aspects of Sir Alan Sugar and Gordon Ramsey; foul-mouthed, short-tempered and possessed of all the human warmth and forbearance of a speed camera.

Nobody at Geek Squad's London office seemed to know the man’s real first name; the nickname had been borrowed from a columnist in Computer Shopper, who had originally bestowed it on a client of his with similar propensities. Jake wasn't entirely clear on what KTP actually did, though he had a hazy idea it was something related to the insurance industry, but presumably it involved a fair amount of work taking place out of the office... or at least ample opportunities for the top talent to be somewhere Mr Peterson wasn't.

When Jake arrived in the office, the man himself was bawling out a rather younger man in a much less expensive suit. “About time you got here,” he snapped, looking up. “Maybe you can sort out whatever this idiot's done. And it's coming out of your pay,” he added sharply to his employee.

“Statistical probabilities not withstanding, can I suggest letting me have a look at it before you start apportioning blame?” Jake suggested somewhat acidly, counting slowly up to a very high number in his head to stop himself hauling off and belting the insufferable ass. This was rapidly shaping up to be one of those days...

An hour later, predictably enough when Jake was up to his elbows in cables, his laptop started chiming again. He cursed, then began extracting himself piece by piece, getting free just in time for the chiming to be replaced by the ‘missed call’ warble. “Definitely one of those days,” he muttered, plugging his headset back in and keying up the voicemail the caller had left.

“Hey, geek-partner,” said an American-accented alto in his ear. “Just me, calling to say we made sales targets for this month. Lunch at our usual place, noonish? My treat.”

Jake grinned, a large portion of his bad mood evaporating. “The magic words.” He hit ‘reply via SMS message,’ pecked out ‘Hell yes’ on the keyboard, and sent it off towards a bank building where a much politer receptionist than the one who’d greeted him in the lobby would shortly have a vibrating pocket.

Bet she gets paid less for it, too. Makes up for that some on her off time, though...

He’d first heard of Helen Morrow through a school friend who had sent him a couple of YouTube links, knowing his on-again-off-again interest in country and western. Her strong tones and shy delivery had caught his attention, as had her cover of Martina McBride’s “Concrete Angel” and her original “Evensong” about breaking up with her first boyfriend. An e-mail to the address provided in the ‘info’ section had, to his surprise, been answered promptly and politely, and they’d corresponded semi-regularly ever since.

Had a crush on her to start with, even if she does look a bit like my sister with that shade of brown in her hair, but I got over that. Good thing, or it would have thrown me a lot harder the day she showed up on my landlady’s step. To meet the cats she’d heard so much about, she said, and to ask me an important question.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea; I’m not just here because of you,” Helen had said, stroking one of the inevitable kittens, a gray tabby whom she had later adopted and named Righteousness (usually shortened to Nessie). “My boss got promoted over here and offered me moving expenses and a raise if I’d come with her. But as long as I’m here, would you like to help me out with an experiment?”

The ‘experiment’ had been a website of her own, where her fans from YouTube could come to purchase inexpensive downloads of her songs. Since she wrote songs like most people breathed, there was no lack of new material, and every now and again she’d post another free video to draw a few more eyes. Jake got twenty-five percent of gross sales in return for recording the songs and keeping the website running.

We may never quit our day jobs, but it’s easy work and it means I might get out of debt before I turn 40. No complaints.

“Well?” snapped Mr Peterson, shoving his head around the corner. “Have you got it yet?”

No complaints about Helen or the website, at any rate...

“Think so, yeah. From what the user described, it's probably the power supply, which means it honestly wasn't his fault; it was probably a defective component that slipped through quality control. The good news is, I can strip it out and fit a new one in five minutes, but the bad news is that since I came straight from the station without stopping off at the office to collect a car, I don't actually have one on me. You haven't got a disused PC in storage I could scavenge one out of, by any chance? If nothing else, it'll save me charging you for parts.”

Peterson hesitated for a long moment, torn between annoyance that the man hadn't been prompt and fully prepared and satisfaction at saving his firm a bit of money. “I think so,” he replied curtly. “If there is one it'll be in the cupboard opposite the server room, so help yourself.” He strode off without another word.

***

Alex knew he was staring, knew he should stop, but the buildings were so tall and there were so many of them and the people, they were everywhere, wearing the oddest clothing, and the noise—Moxie, shivering in his arms with her face buried in his shoulder, must be in agony with her bigger ears, but no, he remembered as he looked down at her, she no longer had those—

“Look out!” a girl’s voice screamed, and a body slammed into him, knocking him off-balance and sending him reeling out of the middle of the roadway where he had been standing. Stumbling backwards, he tripped over a raised ledge and fell ungracefully onto his rear. The person who had pushed him landed on top of him, twisting aside just enough to keep from squashing Moxie between them.

Alex lifted his head in time to see an enormous red-painted cart filled with people roll ponderously through the spot where he and Moxie had been standing a moment before. He’d seen the injuries left by simple farm carts when they ran people down; had that monster struck them, there likely wouldn’t have been enough left to bury.

“I think I may owe you for a pair of lives, mistress,” he began, turning his head to look at his savior.

Then he stopped, unable to keep himself from staring. The voice had been that of a young woman, the points of contact between their two bodies certainly felt female, but warm brown hair cropped just above the collar of a loose green shirt over sand-colored trousers matched far better with his mental image of a young man—

What kind of place—or time—have we come to?

* * *

Some distance away, an elderly man sat bolt upright and swore softly, then grabbed his cane and made haste for the kitchen, snatching a heavy leatherbound book from the top shelf as he did so.

Something new yet hauntingly familiar and very, very powerful had entered the world. He needed to find out what it was.