Heavy drops pattered down on the windscreen, obscuring Mark’s view of the street. He stared at the address opposite, trying to ignore the feeling that he was looking out of a fish tank. He wanted to use the wipers, but that would mean movement and noise, and that would risk drawing attention. He could see well enough to notice if anybody left the house.

Shuffling deeper into the thick hooded top he was wearing, Mark stared out into the night. The road he was on was dark. Two of the streetlights were out, and the driving rain dimmed the rest. The terraced houses seemed to huddle together for comfort in the darkness and the cold, or maybe they were crowded together for safety.

The road he was parked on lay off Alexandra Road in the middle of Moss Side, the most infamous suburb of Greater Manchester. It was not nearly as bad as it had been, Mark thought. Hell, even in the 1970s when the gang-related violence in the area had led to Manchester being dubbed ‘Gunchester’, it had not been that bad. There had been worse times, but people forget.

Still, it was a deprived area with all the problems that deprivation brought. He had been here for hours, sitting in a beaten-up old Ford Escort, which was parked at the side of the road. He had arrived after dark with the intention of staying until just before dawn if necessary. He could not read a book for fear of missing his target. He could not listen to the radio for fear the noise would draw somebody’s gaze. All he could do was sit and stare at the house.

‘Why do you do it?’ he asked himself out loud. A surge of hatred flooded through him. The blind emotion answered his question. Gritting his teeth against the hurt and the pain, Mark focussed more intently on the house. This was his third night. He knew that sooner or later the target would have to leave. Its kind were too arrogant not to. Then Mark could take care of business and return to his warm home. He wondered if he should bring somebody else in – a mercenary to do this business for him. Sergei and his band of cut-throats would be ideal, and they were already on the books. It was a question that he had asked himself a million times over the years, and just as he always had done, he dismissed it. He had to do this himself for two reasons: First, he was the only one who could. Second, he needed to see them die.

The front door opened an inch. For a moment, Mark thought it was his imagination. Then the door swung wide and somebody scampered out into the rain. Darkness hid any detail, but the figure had the tell-tale hip swing of a woman. She appeared to be wearing sunglasses. Mark watched as the woman walked quickly up the road, her shoulders hunched, and her head bowed against the elements. Mark pulled a large syringe from the glove compartment of his car. The needle was five inches long. He looked at it distastefully, then tapped the tip a couple of times. He pulled his clothes up around his armpits to expose his chest.

Positioning the sharp point over his heart, he drove it all the way in with one powerful thrust. He sat there for a second, paralysed by the pain, hating the feel of strange steel in his body. Then, with barely a whimper, he pushed the plunger and felt the cold wash of liquid that drenched the inside of his chest.

Wrenching the needle out, he tossed it onto the passenger seat and massaged his left pectoral convulsively. Regaining his breath, Mark opened the car door and stepped out onto the footpath.

An icy sheet of water cascaded over him: he was soaked before he had gone two steps. The cheap black hooded jumper, though warm, was in no way waterproof. Beneath it, he wore another even cheaper jumper, and then a t-shirt he’d bought in a bag of three at his local supermarket.

When he left his house, the night had been cold but dry. The weather report had promised it would stay that way until mid-morning tomorrow, at which point a storm was expected. It had landed early. The severity of the downpour had caught Mark unprepared. Fortunately, he was wearing khaki canvas trousers and a sturdy pair of black Alt-Berg boots. They went some way to keeping the rain out of his socks.

Pulling the hood over his head so his face was hidden, Mark followed the woman. It was not hard: Whoever she was, she appeared to be completely absorbed with her walk in the rain. Mark knew that this wasn’t necessarily the case, but he did not mind. It suited his purpose. The woman moved on, hurrying through side streets in a southerly direction.

They came to Claremont Road. Mark was pleased to see that it was deserted. The rain was working for him. The woman crossed to the opposite side, and Mark followed. The railings of Alexandra Park appeared through the rain. The woman disappeared through a gate into the park. Mark walked up to the entrance and stopped. A frown creased his brow as he stared in cautiously.

It was completely black. There were no lights beyond the boundary railings, and any ambient illumination from the street was quickly beaten down by the hammering rain. Mark peered in as if uncertain, but he was smiling inside. After a few seconds, he moved into the park. The darkness swallowed him.

For a while he followed the curving paths randomly, trying to ignore the relentless rain that held the numbing chill of the night. Five minutes passed, then ten, and still nothing happened. Mark began to wonder if maybe the target had simply slipped through the park and vanished, leaving him soaked to the skin for nothing. It had already happened twice before – she was smart and seemingly possessed of a sixth sense to danger. Every time he had tried to get close with a gun, she had managed to slip away.

Mark kept walking. Soon he came to the side of a large pond at the opposite side of the park. Just as he was beginning to give up, she stepped in front of him from out of nowhere.

For a second they stood in silence. The wind had picked up and the rain was coming in horizontally now, slicing up under his hood and stinging his face and eyes. They watched each other, maybe ten feet apart. The path they were on was close to the road. Only a ragged line of bushes and a few leafless trees ran along the railings. Consequently, some light filtered through from the sodium lamps on Alexandra Road South. In the dull light, Mark saw that the woman was about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Her features were hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses.

‘Why are you following me?’ she hissed, her words cutting through the pounding of the rain like tearing paper. Cold water dribbled down Mark’s back, and he shuddered; whether from the cold, apprehension, or anticipation, he could not tell. Mark did not answer the question, and after a moment the woman continued. ‘I’ve seen you sitting outside my house in that old car for days now. You have followed me twice, carrying a gun, yet you come unarmed this time, so I allow you to get close. I am curious. You are watching me. Why?’

Mark just smiled. The woman grunted in anger. ‘What? Do you want to rob me? Do you? You have the wrong person if that is your plan. Do you think you followed me here? No, I led you here. I led you here to have a small heart to heart with you.’ Still, Mark didn’t answer. ‘Answer me, damn you!’ The woman’s shout rang through the empty park like a gunshot, then went on to echo around the squat buildings that surrounded it.

‘I’m here to kill you,’ Mark said quietly.

For a second, the woman simply stared through the thick, black sunglasses. Then she began to laugh. ‘Kill me?’ she asked through her mirth. ‘Little man, I do not know who put you up to this, but you have made a terrible mistake. Even with your gun, you are defenceless against me.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well I do.’ The sunglasses on her face suddenly cracked. The noise was loud, a sharp contrast to the pattering of rain. Spider webs marred the black surfaces, but these soon lost their lines as the plastic began to bulge outwards. The bulges began to glow a dull red, becoming blisters that bubbled and spat. Red burned to white, and the plastic lenses collapsed and dribbled away. Mark stared at what lay beneath.

Instead of eyes there were only gaping pits, the skin around them black and charred. In those holes, twin balls of flame spun and flared. The fire danced out over the woman’s face to caress her cheeks and nose. The glasses finally succumbed to the inferno and melted, running down her face and dropping in molten globs that hissed angrily when they hit the rain-swept ground. They left a trail of black plastic tears that ran from eyes to chin. The flames blazed brighter; fire spilled out of her eye sockets. Where the fire touched her flesh, the skin blistered and cracked, only to heal again almost instantly.

‘Do you see?’ the woman asked mockingly. ‘I will tear your heart out and eat it.’ She moved as she spoke, a fluid stream of lithe muscle in the curtain of water. Where the rain hit her eyes, it sputtered and steamed. Mark tried to throw his hands up in defence, but he was not fast enough. The woman with the flame eyes was on him in less than a second, and hot, slender fingers wrapped around his throat.

Mark drove a fist up into the woman’s gut. His knuckles popped against her tough, solid body. Up close, he could see deep into her fiery eyes, and it was like staring into the sun. A blinding pain ran through the back of his head as he felt his retinas sear away. The woman was laughing. Fire licked Mark’s face, and he felt his own skin begin to blister. The agony was intense. He screamed. It was a wretched, bestial sound.

Mark was carried to the ground, kicking and punching futilely. He felt something slam into his ribcage, over his heart. There was a tearing sound as the skin parted, and then a sickening cracking noise as the bones beneath splintered. A moment later he felt something scorching, writhing in his chest, and he knew it was the woman’s fingers.

Pain lanced through him, and he screamed again as his attacker began to tug at something deep in Mark’s body. Another scream as the arteries that held his heart in place parted under the assault, and Mark felt the organ ripped from him.

‘Kill me?’ the woman demanded furiously. ‘I, who have lived for centuries, feasting on your kind – you dare to threaten me? I’ll eat your heart and take your soul.’ Mark heard the woman begin to chew. He waited for a few seconds as the awful pain subsided. Then he sat up.

Vision was already returning. The damaged cells in his eyes were regenerating so quickly that he felt the tingle of growth. He felt a new heart growing in his chest, even as the bones fused back together and the skin puckered and healed without a scar.

He fingered the blood-drenched hole in his hooded top and absently thought it a shame that it couldn’t repair itself as well. He forgot about it as he levered himself to his feet and stared down at the woman who had torn out his heart and eaten it.

Her mouth was smeared with blood, her lips peeled back in a rictus of pain; the fires of her eyes began to dim. The woman thrashed around on the ground, clearly in agony. Mark wandered over to her and kicked her as hard as he could in the side. He heard something snap.

‘That’s for breaking my heart, you bitch,’ he said wryly.

‘What did you do?’ the woman gasped.

‘I haven’t met one of you bastards that doesn’t want to rip a man’s heart out, one way or another. You’re the first one that I’ve noticed enjoys eating them, though. I’ve been watching you for months; obviously, you noticed me. As you said, I couldn’t get close to you with a gun, so I improvised. I injected myself with a mixture of silver and cyanide. Right in the heart. The silver will keep you down until the cyanide can do its work. You’re going to die hard, but it’ll be quick. It’s more than you deserve.’

The flames in his enemy’s eyes were little more than a flicker now, and her eye sockets were nothing but blank, staring holes that led to nowhere. Mark hawked and spat into one of them. The flame went out.

‘How?’ the woman demanded with a death rattle. ‘How did you live?’ For a moment, Mark thought about telling her, and then he shrugged.

As he watched her die, he did not feel the rain or the cold, or the stickiness of the blood that had welded his clothes to his torso. All he felt was satisfaction. The feeling culminated when the last flicker of fire in her remaining eye – the light of her life – was finally extinguished.

Seconds later, the body ignited. Flames punched out of her torso and into the rain. Hunched up against the wet, Mark watched the corpse burn away until nothing was left but a sludge of soggy ash. When the last embers had died, he turned and walked away, back to his car, and back to his warm, comfortable home.

Cam felt like fire was running down his throat. He choked and nearly dropped his glass. Eyes watering, he turned to the woman in front of him.

‘Jesus, are you trying to poison me, Elsa?’

The woman looked at him with a bored expression. ‘You asked for the cheapest whisky, Cam. That’s the cheapest whisky.’

‘That’s antifreeze. No, that’s an insult to antifreeze – antifreeze tastes better than that.’

‘And how would you know?’ asked another man at the bar.

Cam turned and looked down the length of his nose at the speaker. Then, not deigning to reply, he turned back to Elsa. ‘Another one, I think.’

‘Even though it tastes like antifreeze?’ Elsa asked as she poured a second shot.

‘I find that after the initial bite, antifreeze is quite an acceptable substitute for whisky. As long as you don’t mind temporary blindness.’ Cam tipped back his head and poured the second shot down his throat. He gagged for a few seconds as he wordlessly gestured for a third.

‘Why would you want to drink antifreeze?’ Elsa asked as she filled Cam’s glass with more of the cheap whisky.

‘Sometimes providence leaves me a little light in the pocket, and the blue fairy is a good way to smooth out the inebriation-to-disbursement ratio.’ He smiled his best smile.

Elsa harrumphed. ‘Well, I hope you’re not a little light tonight.’

Cam’s eyes widened with outrage. ‘Of course not,’ he said, aghast. ‘If I was going to flit out on the tab, I’d be drinking the best stuff you’ve got, not this swill.’ He threw back the third shot and fought his gag reflex. ‘Jesus,’ he said after the nausea had passed, ‘I think I should go on to Guinness.’

Elsa poured him a pint. Cam paid her. Satisfied, she wandered away to serve another patron.

Taking a sip of his drink, Cam swivelled on his stool to survey the rest of the bar. The Green Man was a regular haunt for the downtrodden and world weary. The wooden floor was scuffed by the soles of a thousand staggering feet, the broad tables scarred by keys or knives, and stained with a multitude of spilled drinks. The lighting was dim and the shadows dark. Recesses in the walls provided hiding places for those drunk and wretched enough to count themselves as clientele. There was a jukebox, but nobody ever put money into it. There was a gambling machine too, but it had been broken for so long, it had become invisible. There were no pictures or posters or decorations of any type, and the brick walls were bare – not through any attempt at old world chic, but simply because there was no point in covering them.

This was a drinking man’s pub. The only woman that ever came in, apart from the occasional lost student, was Elsa. Cam risked a glance at the landlady out of the corner of his eye. Elsa was just over six feet tall and four feet across. She had arms like telephone pylons and brutal, flat features that lay host to a twice-broken nose. Cam was half-convinced she had Jötnar blood in her. Elsa didn’t bother to employ bouncers; the few idiots brave or stupid enough to tangle with Elsa usually took a trip up to Hope Hospital afterwards. ‘Brave’ and ‘stupid’ – in Cam’s opinion, the two words were synonymous with one another.

No, the Green Man was not a place to go and make friends or meet women. Nobody here enjoyed themselves. Nobody knew your name. Behind the plain bar with its grimy mirror and rows of half-full bottles, beneath the peanut-strewn floor and the stench of rarely-cleaned urinals, the Green Man provided only one thing: it was a place anybody could come and find alcohol-serrated oblivion.

Depressingly, Cam felt that he could see something of himself in the dirty, scarred bar. It was a place of helplessness and it harboured only the lost. The people that came here did not belong, but they had nowhere else to go. Around him were misfits and crazies, eccentrics and downright lunatics, all hitting the same low from a hundred different directions. Cam swivelled back and put his elbows on the sticky bar. He gazed at himself in the mirror. He fit neatly into the misfit category.

A frown wrinkled the brow of his image. Could you fit neatly into the misfit category? Christ, the cheap whisky was getting to him. He dismissed the thought and went back to staring at his mirrored self.

Long hair, which glowed with life and refused to tangle no matter how he abused it, framed a finely boned face that hadn’t an ounce of fat. High cheekbones and deep eyes gave him an otherworldly appearance, which was only intensified by the flawless alabaster skin stretched between them. His lips were full, and laughter lines creased the sides of his eyes and mouth in a way that inspired trust and warmth in those who met him. His eyes were a vivacious violet, and they sparkled no matter how poor the ambient light was. His hair fell below his shoulders like a spun gold waterfall. Cam knew, without any trace of narcissism, that he was not merely handsome. He was beautiful.

A croaking voice interrupted his reverie. ‘Maybe I should try and drink antifreeze,’ said the patron to Cam’s left. He turned and found himself staring into the bloodshot eyes of a scruffy little man. He had thinning hair and massive, uncombed moustaches that appeared to contain most of a shredded boiled egg. A waft of stale sweat and old socks came from his direction.

‘I wouldn’t,’ Cam said. ‘It’d most likely kill you.’

The man began to laugh. ‘I knew it. I knew you’d never drunk antifreeze.’ The man turned back to his drink, still giggling drunkenly to himself. Cam ignored him. He had lied, of course; he would never have to drink antifreeze simply because he was broke: he was never broke. Cam drank to escape, and occasionally he experimented. Antifreeze had tasted very nice. Almost sweet, but that could have been the pineapple juice mixer. In the end though, the stuff hadn’t really got him any drunker, so he’d gone back to tequila.

Finishing his pint, Cam ordered another and settled into the long, grim process of getting utterly and incapably drunk. He would not be happy until he could not remember who or what he was. It was going to be a long night.

Darkness reigned.

A thick blanket of angry cloud hid the moon and conspired with the driving rain to bring visibility down to a few scant feet. The December chill leeched the heat from everything, turning the city centre buildings into vague grey monoliths that reared, menacing and aloof, in the hazy glow of the streetlamps: cold, oversized tombstones that promised only grim indifference. The hard patter of fat raindrops falling onto concrete and into black puddles was lost in the whisper of the wind. The gusts that swept down the dark street were not particularly powerful, but they were still quite capable of cutting through even the sturdiest of coats, to run icy hands up and down a warm body.

Sam Autumn hunched his head into the upturned collar of his sadly inadequate jacket and cursed himself once more for not bringing an umbrella. He was cold and wet. The winter’s night had sneered at his thin suit, so practical for a Thursday in the office, and proceeded to work its frigid waters through the weave and weft to brush almost tenderly against his flesh.

Another gust of Arctic air washed over him, chilling the already cold water that had soaked into his designer shirt. A violent shudder caused his teeth to clash together in an uncontrollable chatter. He pulled the suit jacket tighter around his gaunt frame and flexed his fingers in an effort to work some heat back into them.

Numbness spread up his hands, and he clutched them under his armpits in a useless attempt to warm them. It didn’t work, and his jacket fell open. Sam shivered and swore. His words were slurred. Water dripped into his eyes. When he had first gotten caught in the cloudburst, rainwater had run through his hair, washing the gel from his stylish messy cut and burning his eyes. Now that burn had vanished with the purged hair product, and he suspected that he looked like a drowned rat.

It hadn’t mattered that he had no winter coat when he’d left the pub; he had expected to quickly find a taxi to take him home. Usually Manchester was awash with them. They parked on corners, or in box junctions, or stopped to talk to each other on busy main roads. They drove with scurrilous disregard for anybody else, their unexpected U-turns and lane changes left to other road users to sort out.

Whenever Sam had to drive into town, he was always forced to avoid some careering Hackney Carriage that appeared quite out of control. Yet when he actually needed their services, there wasn’t one to be found. Cursing all taxi drivers, who he half-suspected were a secret fraternity bound to create chaos, he trudged onward in search of that magical yellow light, which would promise succour from the hateful weather … and a lift home.

Miserable and damp, Sam kept walking for a few more minutes before he realised that he was heading into Salford and in completely the wrong direction. He stood still for a second, bemused that he could have got so turned around. He was on Quay Street. He blearily remembered turning up there to see if any of the late pubs were kicking out, hoping that maybe a rank of taxis had formed to ferry the late-night revellers home, but he had been disappointed. He’d drunk far too much. Tabby would be furious with him.

Deciding that Bridge Street might be a better prospect, Sam staggered into the gloom of Gartside Street, intending to cut through Spinningfields. Stoically, he fought his way into the wind and rain, and pulled his head deeper into his collar. He barely noticed the massive hole in the street in time. For a second, he teetered on the lip of a huge, dark chasm. He wind-milled his arms furiously as he felt himself sliding into the pit. The wind at his back seemed to take a gleeful delight in pushing him further into the hole’s gaping maw, and for a terrifying moment, he thought his drunken limbs were going to let him down. His expensive shoes slid on the damp tarmac, and Sam’s heart fluttered in despair. Then with one last wobble, he regained his balance and stepped backwards.

Roadworks. Some drunken moron had removed the barriers that had surrounded them, and Sam nearly fell in. A pizza box lay empty and sodden on the edge of the pit. He peered past it and could see the faint blue gleam of a gas main through a malevolent and muddy puddle. It was a conspiracy, he decided forlornly. Taxi drivers and the Council – those faceless bureaucrats that sat in offices and randomly redesigned the layout of the roads to include as many bus lanes and mini-roundabouts as possible – were actively seeking to make his life unbearable.

He kicked the pizza box petulantly into the hole and then carried on towards Bridge Street. The wind seemed to be laughing at him as he walked. Sam wrapped his arms around his frozen chest and kept on going.

It had all started off innocently enough with a few drinks after work. It was Thursday, after all – almost the weekend. Annalise had organised it, sashaying through the office in that low-cut blouse and tight black skirt, her long blond hair flowing behind her like a cape of liquid gold, her green eyes flashing dangerously while her lush, red lips quirked in that peculiar smile of hers. It was a smile that promised everything and delivered nothing, yet there wasn’t a man in the office who was going to say no to her. Besides, a couple of drinks after work weren’t going to hurt.

At six o’clock, Sam, Annalise, Toby the creepy office junior, and a few others (including Mr. Milton, one of the partners at Milton & Hill Solicitors where Sam worked), had all piled into a pub near the town hall. Mr. Milton bought the first round and waved off all attempts to pay him back. Twenty minutes later, Sam was listening to Toby tell him about his collection of spiders. He nodded politely while his flesh crawled at the graphic descriptions of poison, digestive juices, and fly soup. All the while, he battled an embarrassing surge of jealousy as he watched Annalise flirt with Mr. Milton.

Guiltily, Sam thought of his wife of three years. Tabby was a petite woman, with long black hair and a wonderfully wide smile. She was shy and kind and generous. But Annalise exuded a sultry miasma. Her hot eyes charged the air around her, and her smile oozed lazy sexuality. Annalise was a vision that grabbed the libido and simply wouldn’t let go. Tabby had none of that. They were two completely different people, and Sam was ashamed to realise that he wanted Annalise on a very basic level.

The train of thought had made him uncomfortable, and he stood up making his excuses to leave. Annalise was there in an instant, sitting down next to his vacated seat and stretching languorously in a manner that invited every eye to the swollen curve of her breast. She asked him where he was going, her throaty voice so full of promiscuous guarantee that he sat back down without a word. He had drunk far too much, staying until only the two of them were left.

When she placed a flirtatious hand on his arm and asked him huskily if he would like to share a taxi with her, he had jerked to his feet in sudden panic and apologised inanely. Leaving her sitting there with a wounded expression on her perfect face, he had staggered hurriedly into the night, thoughts of Tabby at the forefront of his mind. His wife was going to be so angry with him.

Back in the present, Sam cursed again. The rain was now coming down so heavily that there was nothing but a wall of water in front of him. Gushing jets tumbled from the overflowing gutters of the buildings around him, falling to the road with an angry susurrus.

‘I could be fucking Annalise right now,’ he said to himself under his breath. Immediately, a sobering rush of guilt flooded through him. He was many things, but he loved his wife completely and he would never cheat on her. God should strike him down for thinking that way.

A second later he was lying on his back, staring up into the blinding rain. The back of his skull throbbed where his head had hit the tarmac of the road. He lay in an overflowing gutter with cold water nipping at his back and legs. More rain pooled in the wells of his eye sockets and his open mouth.

Blinking and spluttering, Sam levered himself up into a sitting position and looked around him. Nobody was about. Holding the back of his aching head and fighting the urge to throw up, Sam got back to his feet, thinking that he must have fallen over. He had a vague memory of a flash of light, but he didn’t know what could have caused it. The streetlights were uniformly dull behind the wash of water, and the buildings around him were shut and lifeless. Maybe it had been lightning, he thought. Maybe God had been listening. He barked a nervous laugh. The rain hissed back.

He absently tried to scrape the excess