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moved towards the dumpster with them.
    Owen sank back further into the shadows. For a moment he forgot he was dead and tried to hold his breath.
    They threw the savaged bundle of rags into the bin, and then came the worst part of all. The really bad bit – that was worse than any amount of flesh-tearing, bone crunching and blood-licking. The part that made Owen grateful that he no longer slept, that he would never have dreams that could be haunted by what he heard as the two women held hands and walked off into the darkness.
    Their laughter. Musical and ethereal. And enough to chill a dead man’s bones.
    Owen didn’t move from the darkness from behind the dumpster for maybe a full minute. And when he did, he looked down into his hand and saw that he still held the automatic, fully loaded, not a shot fired.
    Why didn’t you use the gun?
    And he didn’t know what scared him the most.
    That was why he had kept what he had seen to himself. When morning came, he had gone to the Hub, seen Jack, Ianto and Toshiko and he hadn’t said a word. But that night he had returned to Constantine’s and he had waited for the twins to show up. They hadn’t, but Owen knew that they would. Some time. They were hunters and hunters always returned to the site of a good kill. Lions hunted at waterholes, these things stalked bars and coffee shops.
    A couple of days later, the Hub’s computer system picked up a missing persons report on the Cardiff police system. Owen recognised the guy with the ponytail. Jean-Claude Gabin, a French philosophy student. He had been reported missing by his flatmate. The police had so far failed to find any trace of him. Owen doubted that they would. But people went missing all the time, and most of them turned up again safe and sound – even in Cardiff. Jean-Claude Gabin wouldn’t show up on the Torchwood radar unless parts of him showed up in the gutter, and the twins had been too fastidious for that.
    So that night Owen had walked the streets of Cardiff once more until daybreak. And he had spent hours bent over a cooling, and cold, mug of coffee in Constantine’s. But the twins hadn’t shown up again.
    And tonight he was here again.
    For all he knew – or cared – the kid behind the bar could be just putting the same cold Americano in front of him that Owen had been bent over for the last week as he waited.
    All that mattered was that he was there when the twins returned.

SEVEN
    Goldman and Grace had offices that looked out on the Castle. Jack Harkness stood before the estate agent’s massive window that was filled with colour photographs of the city’s prime housing market – much of it located high up in the sky – and his eyes roved across the interior shots of stylish twenty-first-century accommodation to the looming presence of the Castle reflected in the glass from behind him. This was where ancient Cardiff met the modern city, in an estate agent’s window. It was kind of fitting, he thought. And then his eyes roved some more, and found his own reflection.
    Not bad.
    Not bad at all, considering all that he had been through over the years.
    And there had been a lot of years for Jack Harkness. He had decided to quit counting them a long time ago. Time hadn’t held the relevance for Jack that it had for most people in a very long… well, time.
    It was one of the first things you revised your opinion on when you were a Time Agent, and your work took you across galaxies and aeons, and it was a tough job to work out which was the cooler.
    Eventually, however, he had wound up in London in 1941. The Blitz. He and the Time Agency had had a parting of the ways by then, and Jack was more of a lone operator doing what he had always done best – taking care of himself. And that had been when he had met the man that was going to change his life. And, pretty soon after, the concept of time and the point of counting it in years, even centuries was going to come pretty low among Jack’s priorities.
    Jack