Read A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift for Free Online Page A

were willing to try, the power felt so good, that brilliant, sacred word we hadn’t dared to whisper since I had first reopened my eyes, the magic of the streets, my streets, our magic…
     
Lights started turning on; there were voices in the houses; car alarms started to wail in the street. I didn’t want to be caught, I so badly didn’t want that to deal with on top of everything else now, please not now. I wanted to sleep. We wanted them gone.
     
Neither, it seemed, were they prepared to stay. They started backing away; then turned and ran, scuttling into their car, and firing the engine. We let the power slip from our fingers, although I knew, so easily, I knew that just a thought could burst their brakes or shatter their windows or twist their pipes or burn their fuel, we knew we still had that strength inside us, so simple, so easy to just…
     
I let the power go, let the built-up magic between my fingers slip away; and it hurt. There was so much of it, just letting it go without bursting into flame made my head ache and my heart pound. Inside, I knew that we loved it. We loved that fire in our fingers, we loved that victory against the monster, we loved the rain and the rubbish and the night and the noise, and we would never, entirely, let it go.
     
As the first person started shouting from their window, “What the fuck is…”
     
… I turned, and walked away, into the night.
     
     
That was the first night.
     
By the end of everything, I missed the calm of those hours in Dulwich.
     
     
I had fifty stolen pounds in my pocket. I sat on a bench until dawn, a slippery grey turning from monochrome to colour crawling up from the east. I didn’t have to wait long. Sleeping was out of the question; we wouldn’t let our mind stop, wouldn’t shut our eyes, although I so wanted to sleep.
     
At sunrise, I took the first bus that came along, to the first tube station I could find. The man behind the counter couldn’t see my bare feet, so didn’t ask; but I knew I still smelled and looked wild because even through the plastic glass that separated us, he recoiled when I approached.
     
He was, I now realise, the first person I had spoken to in nearly two and a half years. The daily Metro , newly delivered to the newspaper rack inside the station, gave me the date; the man behind the window gave me conversation.
     
The date should have appalled me.
     
But I suppose the night had brought me time to think, to reconcile myself to the worst of all possibilities, and when I read it, I was almost relieved to find it hadn’t been longer since I had last held a newspaper.
     
The man selling tickets said, “What d’you want?”
     
“An Oyster card.”
     
“You OK?”
     
“OK?”
     
“Um… yeah. OK?”
     
“I had a rough night.”
     
“Oyster card, right?”
     
“With a travelcard. Monthly, zones one to six.”
     
He named a price. I was duly appalled – two years had not been kind to inflation. But we weren’t about to care about the cost of travel-cards, not yet, so let it go.
     
“What can I get with what I’ve got?” I asked, pushing the fifty pounds through the copper-plated hollow between us.
     
He gave me a weekly travelcard, and not much change. I hoped a week would be long enough.
     
It would be two more hours before the shops would open. I waddled down to the platform. The escalator felt warm, the slats an unusual sensation between my toes. I curled my feet over their edge as I rode down; and then, since the feeling had seemed so strange, we rode up again, and down one more time, trailing our fingers along the polished metal surface in the middle of the escalator shaft, or leaning against the black rubber handrail as it moved at a slightly different speed from the stair itself, dragging our body faster than the stairway could carry us.
     
I caught the first train of the morning, almost empty, travelling north beneath the river. I went to Great Portland Street station, and walked along Marylebone Road. Even at this early