Contents
Part 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Part 2
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Epilogue
Enjoyed Reading?
About the Author
Also by Phil Williams...
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Part 1
Monday
1
Electric soldiers marched across her vision.
Between them and an abyss of black stood legions of unnatural things. Alive but unmoving, familiar but obscure. A blur of animal parts and humanoid shapes, sharp and soft, solid and fluid, all writhing together. Things that should not be, amassed in the darkness. Each was individual, but all combined into one whole.
The electric soldiers formed a cordon. Managing, monitoring, watching, silently. Their limbs spread out and drew the world in. Their lightning flashes snapped against the features of Ordshaw. A wall of tall bricks, lit blue. A concrete pillar, before a body of still water. A weather-worn bridge, arching like a wave. The grimacing face of a statue – a fountain. Black metal stairs, a scaffold of steps. A small hall, cracked as though lashed by a tremendous whip. A high point, atop a tower looking down on the sleeping city. Each thunderous, flashbulb moment, connected somehow to a central crackling ball of light.
They were drawing together.
Her heart burnt and pressed against her ribs, drawn there too. With each beat, the creatures were lit in fearsome poses, baring teeth, watching her, hating her. The electric soldiers watched too. Monitoring. Monitor. Minotaur.
The jaws of the beast ripped through it all.
Pax Kuranes jolted awake. She put a hand to her chest, taking gasping breaths as the feeling faded. Some old machine rumbled in mechanical stops and starts on the other side of the room. She frowned. Had that woken her? Created images in her dreams?
There were no monsters, nothing to be scared of.
She rubbed her eyes and took in the dusty floor she was sitting on. Dirty plastic trays teetered over her, atop a table and bench, and the scent of a harsh chemical made her nose crinkle. She recalled where she was. An old telegraph station in Long Culdon, the home and workplace of Darren Barton’s doctor friend. A doctor who ran experiments on unusual plants and creatures. Possibly monsters.
There were monsters. Lots of them.
Pax leaned against the wall. Her back ached, but her outstretched legs felt fine. She flexed her feet, trying to remember why that mattered. There was a rip in her jeans, stained dark from blood. She touched a finger to a tiny but deep scratch. It had scabbed over, and it hurt like a dull bruise. She’d taken a bullet there, from a fairy gun. A fairy bullet.
What else?
She ran a hand through her hair, pulling it out in front of her face. Frizzy, smelling like she’d rolled in burnt animal fat. The edges of her jeans and her hoodie were marred with scorch marks and concentrated filth. She picked up one of her boots. The treads had warped as though left on a hot plate. For six years, these unbranded boots had been a comfortable constant. One thing in her life unaffected by the march of time or the turns of a deck of cards. Victim, at last, to an intangible electric beast.
The minotaur. An underground monster, formed of light, that looked nothing like its namesake; a ball of electric limbs that had pinned her to the ground and tried to suck the life out of her. All because she’d tried to save Barton’s teenage daughter, Grace, while Barton himself, actually eager to fight the monsters, had succumbed to terrible injuries elsewhere in the secret labyrinth that was the Sunken City.
It had been an interesting night, hadn’t it?
Pax took out her phone to check the time, but that was warped too, screen cracked and unresponsive. Her coat was balled up on the floor. That, at least, looked unharmed. Pax bent over it and whispered, “You in there?” No response. “Letty?”
“Screw off,” a little voice replied from somewhere in the folds.
“Hang on,” Pax said, scooping the coat up. The voice started to complain, but Pax warned, “I’m taking you outside – you’re the one that wanted to stay hidden, remember?”
The voice went quiet.
Pax scanned the rest of the room as she stood. It was filled with laboratory equipment and overgrown plants. There was a corner sectioned off by frosted glass that formed a makeshift testing chamber, where the machinery sounds were coming from. The doctor’s vaguely scientific tests suggested she was some kind of botanical scavenger, collecting weeds, perhaps living off worms. The sort of person you could make a documentary about, if anyone realised she existed. Pax had barely spoken to her, in the drama of their arrival; the doctor had avoided eye contact and flitted off to her experiments as soon as she was sure Darren Barton wasn’t going to die.
He, presumably, was in the bedroom with his family, where Pax had left them.
Pax stepped into her boots and tested the uneasy balance of their soles, then navigated a corridor of roots to get outside. The building’s surroundings mimicked the wildness of the interior, with trees reaching towards the porch and invading the lumpy track that led away. Pax spotted a sliver of light through the thicket, morning threatening to break through.
Her coat emitted a muffled snarl.
“Wait,” Pax warned. Letty burst out of the coat pocket and circled in the air. The two-inch fairy drew level with Pax’s face. She had a single beating wing and a contraption strapped over the opposite shoulder, which whirred and distorted the air like a heat shimmer.
“You mountainous turd, you wake me up by picking up my fucking bed?”
With her miniature t-shirt and shorts, colourful hair and holstered pistol, it remained a marvel that a creature so delicate was so vulgar.
Pax swung the coat on. “Let’s get clear of this place so we can talk.”
“Talk, hell,” Letty said, but she was already away, gliding through the trees. Pax followed. Thick as the trees were, they soon ended, abruptly, at the edge of an empty expanse of grass. The sky was a blanket of steely white beyond, muting a curved landscape of peaks and valleys.
“The Drumdon Hills,” Pax said. “I never realised they were so close.”
“Big whoop,” Letty said, landing on her shoulder. “A whole lot of nothing.”
“You have to stand there? Want to give me a crick in my neck?”
“Yeah,” Letty said. “Maybe it’ll break.”
“Not a morning person, are you?”
Letty snorted. “Thought we had that in common.”
The fairy had a point. The sun’s glare sat low in the clouds. This was three days in a row that Pax had risen before lunchtime. A personal record. She said, “Something woke me. Didn’t feel right.”
“Baby had a bad dream?” Letty responded harshly.
“You blame me?”
The fairy paused, finally taking stock. Her voice softened. “Where’s it hurt?”
“It doesn’t, actually. Which
isn’t right, is it? I got shot. And that thing got me. It felt like I was being skewered by light. Or raped by a river.”
“That old feeling.”
Yet there was no pain now. Only the echo of that other feeling. The burning in Pax’s chest, and the sense that she was being pulled towards something.
“You touched it,” Letty said, following her thoughts. “Who knows what kind of effects that’ll have on you. I wouldn’t let her know, though.” She indicated the doctor with a nod in the direction of the telegraph station. Surrounded by trees, it was the sort of place where a prowler would invite gullible college students and play disco music while he sawed them up. “You’d wake up in a white room full of tubes.”
Pax agreed. The unreal creatures in the city’s hidden labyrinth had powers she didn’t understand, beyond the knowledge that one of them was sucking energy from oblivious Underground commuters and the buildings above. Reaching that understanding had driven her into financial ruin and potential homelessness. Revealing to a scientist that she’d touched an intangible creature and might be suffering side effects wasn’t going to make her life easier. She rocked on her heels. “My boots are screwed.”
“Good luck shopping,” Letty said. “The Ministry will have eyes on every camera in the city. If this hill-dyke doctor doesn’t turn you in first.”
“We lasted the night.”
“And now it’s time to leave town and join a travelling rodeo.”
Pax considered the hills ahead. In their folds, she could see a small hamlet. The government wouldn’t have surveillance in places like that. She could start a new life. All she needed was locals with spare cash and an affinity for gambling. She could conceal herself in a blanket of countryside or hide in the crowds of another city. But it’d taken years to build her life in Ordshaw, and that had only just started taking shape. “How do I go back to how things were a few days ago?”
Letty laughed. “Unsee everything you saw? Hope the Ministry forget you exist?”
Pax hummed. No. The Ministry of Environmental Energy weren’t going to leave her alone. And if they didn’t hunt her, then the fairies – the Layer Fae – would, for the things she’d seen. Those miniature maniacs were as keen on protecting the status quo as the MEE. “So. We’ve got my government protecting a monster because they think its weird aura benefits people. Your government think it’s all better left alone. Neither of them are aware that this thing isn’t just a parasite, it’s connected to something else. Someone needs to open all their eyes.”
“Uh-huh. Except there’s no one but us to do it.”
“Yeah,” Pax said. They had themselves, the painfully normal Bartons and a reclusive botanical scientist. And Rufaizu – she couldn’t forget Rufaizu. The young man had been abducted by the MEE. He was interested in the answers, and possibly had a few of his own. “You know where the Ministry are based, here in Ordshaw?”
“Yeah,” Letty said. “Cheap ugly building in Central. Labs, cells, a right little den of intrigue, all sandwiched between a bunch of offices so you wouldn’t know they’re there.”
“Could you sneak in?”
“Sure,” Letty said, in a tone so light Pax knew a tirade was coming. “If you turn off the Fae detectors and knock-out gas and get their access codes and make them look the other way. Use your book-brain, Pax, they’ve got ways of killing us that would make you shit kittens.”
“I don’t like leaving Rufaizu locked up in there,” Pax said. She wasn’t sure if it was thoughts of her brother Albie, or her struggle to keep Grace alive, but she couldn’t quench the protective flame that had been stoked in her. Whatever miracle might see her clear of this, it wouldn’t be enough if Rufaizu was totally abandoned. To justify it, she said, “He must know things that could help.”
“Seriously,” Letty said, then yawned loudly. She stretched her arms up, an almost inaudible click coming from her back. “You’d need an army to go up against the MEE. Your best and only chance to get that boy out of there was before he got put in there.”
That would have meant crossing Cano Casaria, the Ministry agent who’d drawn Pax into this. The unstable oddity who had tried to induct her into his way of life, threatened to arrest her and, finally, broke rank to help her. Pax had left him stranded with another agent who wanted to take them in, so it was likely he had his own problems now. Sighing, she said, “You got any ideas yourself, or just more problems?”
Letty shrugged. “Already gave you one: get out of here.”
“Are you going to run?”
“Hell no,” Letty snorted. “But it’s not like this is your fight.”
“It’s my city,” Pax replied defensively. It was her home, her poker circuit, her heart that burnt uneasily in the night. “I can’t let it be overrun by mythical monsters. And if I left, what’d happen to you? And the others?”
“Me, I can hide a hell of a lot easier than you. Now I know for sure that monster can be hurt, we can find another way to destroy it. I can take the Sunken City back myself. I could be queen all on my own, my people be damned. As for the others, who gives a shit? Think they’d stick around for you?”
Pax was fairly sure Barton would do anything to protect anyone in need, even a stranger. And she suspected Letty might too, despite her words. But the mention of Letty’s people made her pause, as she recalled Letty’s past speeches about reclaiming the Sunken City for the Fae. The Fae Transitional City, or FTC, existed because the minotaur and its minions had driven the tiny race from their territory in those underground tunnels, long ago. Letty still referred to the Sunken City as home, and directed every atom of her considerable will towards getting the Fae safely back there. Pax said, “Aren’t there other Fae who think like you?”
“No one thinks like me,” Letty said, informatively. “I’m a superstar.”
“Ones who sympathise with you. They can’t all be happy living in the FTC, peace or not. Surely others want to reclaim the Sunken City?”
“Definitely, but I’d be caught trying to get anywhere near them. And they’d have to be willing to defy our governor. A crew like that takes a lot of time to find.”
An army of Lettys was a troubling thought, but it might be just what they needed. “There aren’t others already in exile?”
Letty screwed up her face, uncomfortably. “Yeah. The sort I would avoid myself. But now I’ve got a few choice things to say about the great governor Valoria Magnus, we might find ourselves on more equal ground. Yeah. Rolarn comes to mind.”
“Roland?”
“Rolarn,” Letty corrected. “Fat fucker out in Broadplain who controls one of the best bits of Fae real estate you’ll find. Best for you – you’d actually fit in there. Personally, I think it’s a dump. He’s a difficult, irritating loner, but he harps on about the old guard, dreams of putting the FTC back in the hands of someone willing to stand up for Fae rights. There’s a chance I could get him on board.”
Pax raised an eyebrow. “You got his number?”
“You don’t have conversations like that over a phone,” Letty said. “I can get over there in no time, check in with him while you wrap things up here. Or do you wanna come, sneak off before the others wake up?”
Pax shook her head. “The doctor and Barton have information to share, this –”
A noise from the woods cut her off. A dog-like growl, feral and angry. It recalled the low and terrifying sounds that had haunted Pax through the tunnels of the Sunken City. She stared in its direction, wide-eyed, but the sound didn’t come again.
Letty hopped off her shoulder, into the air. “You oughta be more scared of that doctor and this place. While you’re sharing information, make sure her experiments are locked up safe.”
2
“Something’s happened, across town,” Holly Barton announced, as Pax returned to the telegraph station. Holly had positioned herself at a chunky laptop near the centre of the scrappy workspace, and Pax took more interest in her than the news. After surviving Ordshaw’s tunnels, Holl
y had driven them here, negotiated their stay with a woman she disliked, and single-handedly dressed her husband’s wounds. She’d even remade the hot chocolates, after spitting out the doctor’s brackish first attempt. Pax had last seen her sitting by the bed, where she might have stayed all night. Now she was wide awake and presentable, her shoulder-length hair free of tangles and her clothes oddly crisp, despite her t-shirt being stained and torn.
“I’ve only been gone a few minutes,” Pax said. “How did you...”
“I heard you moving,” Holly said. “And I saw this antique out here last night. I thought I’d check if we’d made any Most Wanted lists. But this came up. It’s literally just happened.”
Pax came closer, sensing before she saw it that this news was somehow connected to them and what they’d been through. She leaned in to read the headline: Breaking – Five Injured as Burst Gas Main Shakes Ordshaw.
“It’s on the BBC,” Holly said. “National news. We were near there last night, weren’t we? And look – right here –” She searched for a line. “Potentially caused by a trespasser in the sewer system. Did we cause some kind of structural damage?”
Pax stared at the photo on the article, showing stricken residents recovering in the street, and got an unsettling sense of déjà vu. She recognised the face of a young dark-skinned man, but she couldn’t place him. Had she played Hold’Em in that area once? At least passed through? A name came to mind – Greg? The memory felt intangible, like she’d seen it in a dream. Perhaps the dream she’d woken from, with the electricity, the monsters, that feeling. “When...exactly when did this happen?”
“It’s just breaking,” Holly said. “Couldn’t have been half an hour ago. Probably less. Don’t suppose we could’ve felt the tremor at this distance, but I bet we would’ve felt it back home in Dalford.”
Pax was wary that she had felt something, waking in that panic. “Does it say anything about us?”
“No. Which is rather odd. You’d think our names and faces would be out there.”
“They want us found but not seen. Or heard. Or whatever.”
Holly made a frustrated sound, scarcely believing the nerve of these people. “I’ve spent my life accepting that the government do good work. I happily pay my taxes.”
Blue Angel Page 1