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me I had to get away from the men behind me.
    As I stumbled over a break in the tracks, strong hands gripped me, pulled me off to one side. Gabriel. He jerked me against him, and I slammed into his body. We were in an alcove, a tiny metal door in front of us. Maybe it was a workman’s hatch. Maybe it was a storage unit. Maybe it was a way into the magical realm of Narnia – I didn’t care, I was just glad when Gabriel threw his bodyweight against it and heaved it open.
    He grabbed my hand again, and for once I didn’t stop to worry about the implications of his flesh touching mine. I held on and ran beside him, inside another tunnel now, this one narrow and black, drops of God knows what dripping down on to our heads.
    After what felt like hours but had probably been minutes, he stopped and indicated for me to do the same. I panted, my lungs screeching from the exertion, sucking in gulps of fetid air. Gabriel, infuriatingly, hadn’t even broken a sweat.
    ‘Stay still, stay quiet,’ he said in a voice that I wouldn’t dare argue with. He might have the looks of a Calvin Klein model and carry a man bag, but right now, his word was law. As the thought crossed my mind, a truth clicked into place: his word
was
the law. Because he was the king. Sounded crazy, but hey, I was used to that – and somehow, I just knew.
    Before I had time to process that particular snippet of weirdness, he made a waving gesture with his hands, and started to mutter under his breath. It was gloomy in the tunnel, and I was starting to sense the furious scamper of rats around my feet. Gabriel’s eyes were glowing in the darkness, bright and violet. His body seemed to swell, to enlarge, his chest expanding and his arms elongating, until he filled all the space between the ancient arches of brickwork. I hunkered back, not wanting to get squashed, and watched as he threw his fingers forward as though aiming a javelin.
    There was a thundering crash, and the air filled with crumbled particles of masonry, covering my face and making me sneeze.
    ‘Rockfall, further down,’ he said. ‘They won’t be able to get through. We’re safe – for now. Come on, we need to get out of here.’
    He stooped over his bag, clicked it open, and pulled out a torch. A bloody torch – of all the mundane, boringly human things. He flicked it on, and a bright beam of light shone into my flinching eyes.
    ‘You look a real mess,’ he said, laughing and pulling a chunk of plaster from my hair.
    ‘Yeah, well …’ I replied, fresh out of witty repartee. Near-death experiences will do that to a girl, I suppose. ‘What now?’
    ‘Now, we walk out of here. We leave, calmy, through the emergency exits.’
    And that’s just what we did, picking our way slowly and carefully along the abandoned tunnel until Gabriel spotted another door, similar to the one we’d entered. It was rusted shut, and next to it was a rolled-up copy of the
Gazette
. From 1979. I guessed these tunnels hadn’t been used in quite some time.
    With a quick curse, Gabriel managed to pull the padlock loose and manhandle the door open, this time using sheer brawn instead of any flicky-finger stuff. We emerged, blinking, into the light. I looked around, and realised I knew where we were.
    Edge Hill. The old one – the original nineteenth-century station that was now disused. We’d walked a few miles underground, and were now near the edge of the former platform. Very
Harry Potter
.
    Gabriel jumped up nimbly from the track on to ground level, as easily as stepping up a steep kerb. He reached down for me and, after a moment’s hesitation, I took hold of his hands. There was no other way I was going to get up there myself, unless someone conveniently brought me a dwarf to stand on.
    He hauled me up, and I fell, probably with a great deal of comedic value, on to the concrete.
    I wasn’t bothered about that, though. I was too busy coping with the buzzing head and the mega brain tingle as his fingers