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'Hey, there was no problem. It split after it ate Dupre.'

'Ate Dupre,' Fitz repeated stupidly. 'Hang on a minute. You mean ate him?'

'The Doctor never tells us anything' Anji hissed.

'What's the problem?' said Swan impatiently. 'He was all right. The police found him. I saw him yesterday'

Anji ignored her. 'Have you seen him since then, Teddy?'

'I mean, I think there was a demon,' he said slowly, frowning, 'and I think it ate Dupre. But I was drugged.'

'Teddy!' Swan gasped.

'Yeah. Dupre put something in my something.'

'Oh my God!' She clasped him to her.

'I know what something he should have put it in,' Anji muttered, turning away from the newly entwining couple. 'Come on, Fitz. I need air.'

Thales was just letting the police out the front gate when the young couple ran up. 'We're closed!' he insisted.

The man grabbed the gate. 'We're friends of the Doctor'

'Oh?' Thales peered at him nervously. Thin and scraggly-haired. Sounded English, to be sure. The woman was dark and very pretty.

'Please let us come in,' she said.

'I Oh, really I'm not very well.'

'We think he's in trouble,' said the man. 'He's gone missing.'

'Oh dear, that's terrible. But what can I do?'

'We need information. Advice.'

Thales swayed, holding to the gate. Even caught up in her anxiety, Anji noticed how ill he looked. 'Can we help you inside?'

'No!' he said, almost weeping. 'I need to I've had a very bad day. I can't help you, anyway. Go to the police.' With surprising strength, he wrested the gate from Fitz's hand and clanged it shut. 'I'm sorry,' he mumbled, turning away from them. 'Maybe another time.'

They watched him hobble into the house.

'He really does look sick,' said Anji.

'He might be sick and lame, but did you see those shoulders? I wouldn't want

to try to wrestle with him.'

She leaned tiredly against the wall. 'What now?'

'We'll just try him again in a couple of hours.'

'Maybe he can't help us. Maybe we're grasping at straws.'

'Nothing else to grasp at, is there?' # * *

The magician was elated. The magician was afraid. He had spent hours gazing at his unconscious prisoner, trembling, uncertain, amazed by what he had captured. So human, so inhuman. The cool skin. The orange-red blood. The strange heartbeats. When he had first grasped his prize in the dark, after he had subdued it, he had collapsed with his head on its chest, breathless and sick. He was uncertain what he had. Around him he heard the chimes of its astral presence fading as his Earthly senses restored themselves. He may have fainted. For suddenly, with seemingly no transition, he could feel, pounding against his ear and vibrating in his cheekbone, blood pulsing from a double pump. The beating of his hideous heart.

The magician had rolled away. It could not be more terrible than things he had talked with, things he had bargained with. But it was more terrible, because he had it. Because he had wanted it, and now he had got it.

Because it had been beautiful in the darkness, even though he had used darkness to find it.

It had been wounded but was healing itself, augmenting the unconsciousness he had forced on it with a trance state of some sort.

When he laid his head back on its chest, he imagined he could hear the cuts drawing together, the skin regrowing. There was so much he could learn here.

He hoped fervently that what he planned to do - what he had to, must do -

wouldn't kill it.

The Doctor knew that he wasn't where he was. He appeared to be standing on a New Orleans pavement some time, by the look of the cars, in the late 1970s, holding a Browning 9-mm semi-automatic. He knew that he wasn't, in fact, doing any of this, because nobody noticed him. Though no one actually walked through him, he realised that he was fundamentally insubstantial - a trick of the light, an echo, only invisible and inaudible.

His spine ached horribly. He didn't know why. The pain was so bad that