by Richard Amos
“I know. I know.” He pulled away, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper. “The state of me.”
“You could never be a state.”
“You’re cute.”
“I know.”
“And so modest.”
“That’s me, baby.”
He leaned in for a soft kiss. “Be careful in the snow. Can’t be having you breaking anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
He sniffed, sitting up straight. “When you get home tonight, I’ll pop out and start talking to goblins.”
I nodded, frustrated that Rebus hadn’t been accommodating to Jake at all, and nervous at the thought of him going out alone. The good thing was we lived close to De Wallen, which was the area he’d be covering. He wasn’t going to be branching out too far from home.
I kept my face and posture as relaxed as I could and nodded.
He kissed me again. “I’ll call Luuk in a bit, see how Soph’s doing. She seriously went down hard.”
“Let me know how she is.” I gulped back the last of my coffee. “I need to go.”
“Cool.”
“I won’t be late,” I said, stroking the side of his beautiful face with the back of my hand.
He nuzzled into my touch. “What do you want for dinner?”
“You really are husband material.”
“Aren’t you a lucky git?”
“Definitely. I don’t mind. Surprise me.”
“Done.”
We kissed again and then it was time for me to pull away, to head back out into the cold and confusion. I hugged my little girl goodbye, kissed Jake one more time because those lips were so addictive, then pulled up my collar, stepping outside as the sun broke through gray clouds.
At least there was sunshine again.
AT THE MORGUE in Bosje hospital, the woman murdered by way of fence spike had gotten up again just like Sander, attacking Dr. Geels.
The doctor was okay, calming her nerves with a coffee and a maple and pecan Danish while Lars and I stood out in the hallway watching Merel Dees, the reanimated victim, thrash on the operating table while strapped down. A white sheet was fixed over her to cover her nudity.
Things had gotten to the autopsy stage, Dr. Geels ready with her scalpel. Just as metal had touched skin, Merel had woken up, and the chaos had begun, though contained quickly.
It was just like Jake had described—red eyes, kind of speaking in tongues, savage. Her jaws kept snapping at the air as she strained against her restraints.
There was one word she spoke between the jumbled talk. “Kyler!”
I’d made a note of the name.
“A shame she’s not saying Thomas,” Lars said. “That would be more straightforward.”
“If only the world worked like that.”
The necromancers were aware of this new situation and would be here soon. At least Merel was secured in the operating room, unable to do any harm. But that also meant an examination wasn’t possible. Maybe the necromancers could help better. From the look I’d had before Merel had reanimated, I saw there were no visible puncture marks. A second look would be needed, but this probably meant she wasn’t linked to Brem.
Rather than go to Brem’s and demand to talk to him, which wasn’t the best way to play things, I’d have to go to his house and politely request an audience. Hopefully he would talk to me, otherwise I’d have to go down the route of law. One of his human servants had been murdered, so he’d have to answer questions. But hitting him with the law would rile him up, and he was an extremely difficult bastard to deal with without the added aggravation.
The door behind us opened and a small, red-faced woman walked in with six necromancers all dressed in black.
“Hallo,” she said. “My name is Marie. I am here representing Mr. Z.”
Lars greeted her first. “Is Mr. Z not coming?”
“No. He is preoccupied with the male specimen.”
Specimen? “Hallo. I’m Dean Tseng.”
She shook my hand. “Yes. I met your partner earlier. Nice to meet you.”
“You too. So, any solution to this problem?”
Marie didn’t say anything straight away, coming to stand beside me at the window, the necromancers gathering around her.
“Kyler?” Marie finally said. “Who is that?”
“Working on it,” Lars replied.
“Thomas Ark is not a registered necromancer,” Marie announced. “That doesn’t mean he isn’t one, though.”
“What about Kyler?” I responded. “Could you check that name against your database?”
“I can indeed.” Her attention was glued to Merel’s unrelenting attempts to be free, red eyes flaring with dead rage.
“Also, can you do anything about her thrashing?”
She shook her head. “There’s nothing we can do to override the magic.” She turned to face me. “It is unbreakable. Sander is completely immersed within a spell we have not encountered before. Mr. Z is trying to break through, but finding no way in. Usually, with power such as this, there is a way in, a little give to pick at. It can take hours, but that give is always there. Not in this case. There is no weakness in the magic. Not one single soft spot.”
“So this is potentially a completely new power?” I asked.
“Yes, Mr. Tseng. And that is terrifying. It means we have no idea how to deal with what this necromancer is capable of.”
Not a fun situation. “Do you have any way of tracking down this person?”
“No. We cannot find a way to lock onto the power. Usually we can use sensing runes to locate necromantic energy, but not in this case. It is nowhere—which of course is impossible as we’re seeing the results of it before our eyes at this very moment.”
“What’s the plan?”
She shook her head. “If we cannot find anything from these corpses, then they must go straight into the fires.”
“Keep us updated,” Lars added. “I’ve every faith there is a way in.”
“So do I,” Marie replied. “Mr. Z will fix this.”
Mr. Z sounded like a complete wimp when the chips were down, but maybe he worked better off the field, working his magic in the safety of Deathwell, Amsterdam.
“There’s nothing else I can do here,” I said. “I need to take care of some other things.”
One of those things would be visiting the home of Thomas Ark. The police had done their sweep, and now it was my turn.
“Sure,” Lars said. “See you later, buddy.”
BEFORE THOMAS’ house, though, I needed to head to the office.
Mila had texted me, agreeing to meet me at Jake & Dean Investigations within the hour after I’d explained the latest developments in my own message, which saved me heading down to her home in Spui. I’d gathered some evidence for her, hoping the pod traces would last until she had a chance to look at them. She’d possibly find something else on the fingerprints that I wasn’t seeing.
The snow was thawing. Just like that. It was still freezing cold, but it in the short time I’d been inside the hospital, it’d halved in size.
I sat down at my desk, checking the messages.
“Hallo, Jake and Dean,” a woman’s voice said, “this is Miss. Shoe and I’m in a bit of a situation. Someone has stolen my tomato plant. Ja, it grows in the cold weather. All weathers actually. I’ve been adding pod to some of its feed, which has given it the strength to withstand the elements and grant me such wonderful fruit. You should try one. You could if it were here. If you can help, I will not only pay you for your time, but also offer you plenty of tomatoes. Store bought will never look the same again. Thank you very much. My number is…”
Unfortunately, she was for real. We got calls like these all the time as there were plenty of idiots messing with pods. It wouldn’t surprise me if she was somewhat mutated herself from not only feeding her tomato plant with pod essence but consuming them too.
Yes, we’d pay her a visit. Yes, we’d find the tomato plant. Ye
s, we’d destroy it. Hopefully it hadn’t fallen into the wrong hands.
There was another message.
“This is Miss Shoe again. I still haven’t heard a response from you. How rude. What sort of business are you running when you don’t call prospective clients back? I heard you were the best, but I must have heard wrong. Deeply unprofessional and unacceptable. I’ll be taking my business to the Jansen Agency.”
She’d called this morning when Jake would have been here—when he’d left after the whole Ricci twins encounter. Fine. Let the Jansen’s have it. They were a rival PIA agency, who were idiots and unnecessarily aggressive in their competitiveness with the five other agencies in the city—including us. However, they would also get the job done. They’d destroy the plant and put Miss Shoe on a watch list for her pod misuse.
The buzzer went off and I went to the window.
Mila.
I buzzed her in and sat back down.
Footsteps on the stairs and the door opened. “Hallo to you.” She swept into the room, her pink sari billowing as if she were standing in front of a wind machine.
And she had no coat on. She never had a coat on. Ever. It could be arctic conditions and she’d still turn up in one of her saris, acting like summer was in full swing.
“How are you?” she asked, sitting down.
Mila was a highly skilled alchemist. We depended on her for potions and information, and she’d relied on us back in December when Sonny the Snake had stolen a luck charm from her.
She placed her bag on the table, pulling out a hand mirror to check herself.
“I’m fine, thanks. Yourself?”
“All is well. How are Jake and Louise?” She brought out some powdered foundation and a hand mirror, brushing some over the brown skin of her face.
“They’re good, thank you,” I replied.
“Excellent.” She snapped the mirror closed, returning the beauty tools to her bag. “I’m glad to hear it. I’m not so glad to hear about all of this drama going on.” She waved her hands dramatically, golden bangles jangling. “Dead bodies getting up, murdered goblins, invisible necromancers. Awful. I do apologise for my late response, but I had a prior commitment.”
“That’s fine. Thanks for coming.”
“Of course. Now then, let’s get to it. First of all, I have my own research underway regarding invisibility potions. So far, nothing, but I am waiting to hear from a few people. As you may know, invisibility isn’t something even the nastiest of criminals are prepared to deal in. It is too unstable. Witches avoid it for the same reason.”
I nodded. “But pods are a different ball game.”
“Indeed they are. Do you have the items for me to work with?”
“I do. Let me set things up.”
From the store cupboard by Jake’s desk, I dragged out a fold-out table for her to work on. Sometimes she conducted her experiments here, rather than at her lab. I always let her decide what do. If there was a chance there’d be an explosive reaction, she’d say and move things to the lab for further investigation.
Nice and reassuring that she wouldn’t blow a hole in our building.
I laid out the evidence as she set up a rack of three vials containing powder in different shades of blue. Then she placed an ocular lens onto her right eye, which was surrounded by smaller lenses and some tiny bronze levers. She leaned closer to the petri dish containing the pod traces, then moved onto the prints.
“Hmmm.”
Mila uncorked one of the vials—the one with the lightest blue powder—and sprinkled it over the fingerprints.
“Interesting. Bring your UV light over here, Dean.”
I did as I was told. “What is it?”
“In my bag you will find another lens. Fetch it, then run your light over this.”
Again, I did as was asked and fixed the lens to my left eye. It really brought the world into an intense focus.
“How is the vision?”
“HD.”
“Good. Do you need any adjustments? If you do, push the levers on the right to make it focus better. The levers on the left will replace the larger lens with the smaller, should you need more scrutiny.”
“I think this is fine.”
“Good.” She gestured to the table. “Now look.”
The powder was glistening on the fingerprint, almost rolling across each line of print, showing me something else. There wasn’t just the fingerprint of Thomas Ark here, but a mark of purple. It was a smudge, faint and barely there. Most contraptions would have missed it, but the combination of revealing powder and this lens brought a whole new level to the investigation.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That is a signature of a necromancer—purple to match the colour of their magic. Now step back for a moment. We must ascertain if this signature belongs to the same man.”
Signatures were as notoriously hard to pin down as pod traces. In fact, they were worse. I’d never found any to use as evidence. This was like finding a spec of dust in a wind tunnel.
Mila sprinkled the next shade of blue onto the print, followed by a tiny amount of the darkest. She didn’t ask me to come closer as she bent over the table.
“This signature doesn’t belong to your suspect, Dean. Not a match.” She straightened, removing the lens.
“Then we have to find someone called Kyler.”
“Help me!” a man roared from outside. “Please help me!”
I was off, straight down the stairs and into the melting snow. He tumbled onto his front right before me, scraping his face on the exposed part of the canal pathway. His coat was ripped, exposing a pale and bloodied torso. Part of his blonde hair looked like it’d been ripped out of his scalp, leaving an angry patch of bleeding mess behind.
“Oh, thank God!” He looked up at me, chin and right cheek grazed, then he looked behind him. “Get me inside! Get me inside!”
Someone further down the canal screamed and I saw it, the shimmering figure of what looked like a man.
Thomas?
I grabbed the man by the hand and dragged him through the door.
“Please!” he screamed.
“Don’t let him—”
The figure was on us, had the guy by the ankle and yanked him out of my grip with terrifying force before I could slam the door. He flew through the air, crashing through the icy surface of the thawing water.
“Shit!”
The figure stood before me, flickering in and out of my vision.
“They always come to you.” The voice was male and slightly raspy, the language Dutch.
“Thomas?”
The figure seemed to startle, then turned and leapt into the canal. I ran after him, pausing at the edge as the water churned and splashed violently.
“Is it him?” Mila asked, arriving by my side.
“He’s in there with—”
Before I could finish, the water went from gray to crimson, then the head of the blonde man floated to the surface, eyes scrunched shut, mouth wide open in pain.
“Where is the rest of him?” Mila crouched down for a better look.
A sheet of ice a few feet away smashed open, and the shimmering figure surfaced, clambering for the edge.
I ran, making straight for the bridge to cut him off on the other side. The bastard wasn’t getting away. He was struggling, slipping every time he tried to climb out.
What to do with an invisible perpetrator? Sure, he shimmered, but he didn’t always.
Mila was right behind me, letting out a cruse about the slushy ground. I was with her on that one, slipping as I darted onto the bridge.
Thomas was still stuck. That water would be freezing cold.
“No!” A small guy cried, his face hidden inside the hood of an oversized white hoody. He was standing some feet away from the bridge on the other side of the canal. “No!”
“Get down!” I yelled, hitting the ground.
The guy had a wand in his hand. Deadly things wands, and practi
cally forbidden unless you knew who to speak to in the darkest of markets. They could also blow you into oblivion.
A rush of pearlescent wand energy roared overhead, crackling and deadly. The boom that followed rocked the bridge beneath me. Dust and debris came crashing down on top of me. I covered me head with my hands as I was swallowed by a dust cloud.
NINE
JAKE
“Concussion, but she’s doing well. She’s with the doctor now.”
“Oh, thank fu-, God, for that,” I said to Luuk down the phone. Narrow escape from the swear box there. “When can she come home?”
“Hopefully soon. The hospital is chaotic at the moment. There are rumours that a dead body attacked a doctor. People are frightened.”
“That did happen.”
“What?”
Dean had texted me a while ago about the dead Merel attacking Dr. Geels. My sim card hadn’t been damaged by my phone’s dive into the snow, so I was back on the grid with the crappier phone I kept in my beside drawer for emergencies. Maybe I needed to have fewer fancy phones.
“It happened just before the doctor was about to perform the autopsy,” I said. “Also happened here. That Sander guy went mental, tried to attack everyone.”
“Oh, God!”
“Please be careful.”
“That’s awful! Who is doing this?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“So awful.”
“At least the snow’s melting.”
He sighed. “Too quickly.”
“Stupid weather. Anyway, how are you doing?” Poor Luuk having to see his wife go through that, and I wanted to get him away from panicking about crazy corpses.
“I’m fine. Relieved she’s awake. She’s in very good spirits.”
“That’s Soph.”
“It is. What’s happening, Jake?”
“The pieces aren’t quite fitting together yet,” I said. “Even the necros are stumped.”
“Are they zombies?”
“No, zombies are different. Doesn’t lessen the danger though, mate.” Ah, friggin’ hell! I was supposed to be reassuring the poor bloke, not making it worse. “So, yeah, hopefully you’ll be home soon.”