I came up out of the Underground on the other side of the street and headed out of the naked jungle and into the expensively suited jungle of the business section. People started giving me even more room than before, often actually stepping aside to let me pass. Of course, they weren’t stepping aside for John Taylor, PI, but for the new Walker, representative of the Authorities. Those powerful but shadowy grey eminences who ran the Nightside, inasmuch as anyone did, or could. Some people faded back into dark doorways, or disappeared down even darker alleyways, and a few actually turned around abruptly and headed back the way they’d come. Part of me thought I could get used to this.

I stopped for a moment, to consider my reflection in a shop-window to see if my new authority had changed me in any way. But the same shabby face looked back at me, a little more battered and hard-used as I headed towards the end of my thirties. The same long white trench coat, traditional armour for a tarnished knight-errant. Tall, dark, and handsome enough from a distance, that’s me, with cold eyes and a colder smile. And perhaps only I could see the beaten-in tiredness, from carrying so many burdens. I made a face, to keep me from getting above myself, and continued on my way.

It does help that I have a special gift for finding things, and people. Whether they want to be found or not.

There was a time when the burdened and the disenfranchised, the desperate and the hag-ridden, would have approached me in the street and hailed me as a King in waiting. The rightful ruler of the Nightside. But I declined that dubious honour; and for my pains ended up as the new Walker, both more and less than a King. I had become the Man; the very thing I spent most of my life fighting against. I suppose we all grow up to become our parents, in the end.