Blood Stones: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Dark Lakes Series Book 2)

by M. V. Stott

  I shook off, zipped up, and went to wash my hands.

  Chloe was waiting for me in the mirror as I looked up.

  ‘Joe!’

  ‘Jesus, Chloe.’

  She looked awful. Okay, she was dead, but the other times I’d seen her, she’d still looked, well, healthy. Now she was drawn, grey-skinned, her body trembling.

  ‘Please, Joe. You’re the only one that can help me!’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  I didn’t want to look at her. It gnawed at my insides. Why couldn’t she just be dead? And by dead, I mean dead-dead, not whatever this was. And as soon as I thought that, I felt a wave of shame crash over me. How could I even think that? And how could I let myself become so distracted by everything else that I’d just put Chloe on the backburner?

  This was my responsibility.

  ‘Chloe, what’s happening to you over wherever it is you are?’

  ‘They keep coming for me,’ she said, her voice a stammering whisper as her head kept twitching to look back, and to the side, obviously terrified that someone was going to creep up on her.

  ‘Who keeps coming for you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, barely keeping it together enough to speak. ‘They want me, Joe. They said... they said they’re going to eat what’s left of me, and then that’ll be it. I won’t even have an afterlife. You’ve got to get me out of here!’

  I pressed my hand against the mirror, wishing I could push straight through and grab hold of her, pull her back into this world, make her safe.

  ‘I’ll ask Eva. Make her help.’

  ‘She won’t help, you know that. Or worse, she’ll make sure she helps out the thing trying to end me entirely. It has to be you, Joe. I know you can help me. You can help me and then we can leave this and be together. Properly together, forever.’

  There was a blur of movement to her left and I pulled away from the mirror in surprise.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘They’ve found me! Please, Joe, please be quick! I know you have the power to help me. Please.’

  ‘Chloe!’

  She turned and ran as I slapped the mirror.

  ‘You’ll never believe it.’

  I jumped at the voice, turning to find Malden in the doorway, shaking his head. I looked back to the mirror, but there was no sign of Chloe, of whatever it was that was after her.

  ‘Go on,’ said Malden, ‘never in a million years will you believe me.’

  I turned back to Malden and sighed, ‘What won’t I believe?’

  ‘Guess who’s about to check into his usual toilet stall for a fifth solids deposit of the night?’ Malden pointed at himself, then shook his head. ‘What a crazy, crazy day.’

  He chuckled to himself as he shuffled over to the toilet stall. I gave a last glance into the mirror, my heart beating way too fast, and left in search of a drink.

  I joined Eva, downing half of my pint in one go.

  ‘Oh, now we’re talking,’ said Eva, rubbing her hands together. ‘Big boy drinking time, is it, love?’ She raised her glass high. ‘To Malden’s fifth shit of the evening,’ and then downed it in one go, before pulling out her tobacco tin and starting to roll a fresh smoke.

  ‘Another two over here, Grunt,’ said Eva, waving her hand at the giant barman.

  ‘So, Elga and her Kin, who are they exactly?’

  ‘Beats me. Before my time. We could go back to the coven, search through all those boring books and see if there’s any record of them, or…’

  ‘Or…?’

  ‘Or I could do some more potentially dangerous fucking with your brain.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Yeah, like with the magic amplification trick I banged together to take care of all those bastard soul vampires the other day. Sorted those fuckers out, but forcing me through you left you with a bit of brain damage. Won’t be able to pull that trick again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, brain damage? You gave me brain damage?’

  ‘You probably won’t even notice it, considering how fucked that lump of crap between your ears is anyway.’

  Grunt placed a couple of fresh pints before us.

  ‘Thank you, garçon,’ said Eva. ‘Grunt, how’s the magic dampening in here?’

  ‘Is good,’ grunted Grunt.

  ‘Should be possible to do a little bit of memory work though, right? Only I can’t be fucked to go outside to do it, not with us getting so comfy here.’

  ‘It possible.’

  ‘Nice one.’

  Grunt moved away as Eva somehow inhaled a lungful from her cigarette and took a gulp from her pint at the same time.

  ‘Magic dampening?’

  ‘Oh yeah, all these sort of social drinking holes employ a bit of the old magic dampening. Imagine two Uncanny types in here, loaded up and pissed off. Not a happy end to that story. So, these places sit in a dampening bubble. They don’t stop magic entirely, but it stops anything too tasty going down.’

  Well, that certainly made sense. Flying fists were one thing, but literal flying whilst two pissed up blokes lobbed fireballs at each other would definitely be an issue.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Eva, ‘seeing as, for once, you know more than me, only you don’t know more than me, I’m going to see if I can rattle a memory or two loose.’

  ‘How are you going to do that?’

  ‘With great fucking difficulty.’ Eva reached out and placed the tips of her thumbs on my temples, closing her eyes.

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Just think about Elga and her Kin. Think about that title, and think about those stones, I’ll try and throw a rope in and see if anything climbs up.’

  ‘Right. Okay. Thinking now.’

  And so I did. I closed my eyes and thought that name, over and over, like a mantra. At first, nothing happened, but then Eva’s fingers began to feel hot. The temperature slowly rose until it felt like my skin was burning. My whole face. My whole head in fact.

  ‘Eva.’

  ‘Shh, I’m getting something.’

  The temperature rose higher and I felt myself pulling away.

  ‘Stay still, idiot.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Aha! Got something!’

  ‘Eva, that’s starting to hurt.’

  ‘Well, this is gonna hurt a fuck ton more.’

  ‘What is?’

  I opened my eyes in time to see Eva pull a fist back, and throw it at my head.

  She was not lying.

  It hurt like a mother-shitting bastard.

  Though not in the way I was expecting. Rather than her fist connecting with my nose, her knuckles cracking the bone, blood exploding out, and me falling back off the stool and onto the floor, Eva’s fist passed through my face and into my head. You could say it was like her hand had become ghost-like, insubstantial, only I felt it. I felt jagged shards of pain shoot through every bit of me.

  I’m pretty sure I was screaming by that point. I mean, you would, wouldn’t you?

  Then I saw them.

  Elga and her Kin.

  It was night and I entered the dark place, with Lyna and Melodia either side of me. They were waiting for us, Elga at the front, her head encased in a goat mask, a freshly torn out heart in her hand, blood and gore dripping through her fingers and onto the ground.

  ‘Elga!’ I heard myself say, only it didn’t sound quite like me. There was a different flavour to the voice. I looked down and saw my hands throbbing with power, with fire, and—

  The picture skipped, onto another memory, another shard. No, a jumble of shards. Dead bodies strewn across the ground, broken, hundreds of them. No, thousands. Tens of thousands. Generations torn apart by Elga and her Kin as they destroyed, unstoppable.

  But then there we were again, the three of us, the three that stop the unstoppable.

  But only just.

  Only just.

  I could see Lyna, see Melodia, battered, bodies criss-crossed with wounds, exhaustion about ready to take
them down.

  ‘Janto,’ said Melodia, her voice a weak whisper. ‘Stop them. You have to top them.

  I blinked and the visions, the memories were over. I was still at the table, Eva wiping at her hand with a napkin, Malden sat opposite.

  ‘Did… did it work?’

  ‘Sort of. I certainly saw the twats, but nothing exactly useful. Apart from seeing how strong they are. Fuckers nearly wiped you three out. That’s some crazy, next level power, that.’

  I reached for my drink, hand trembling, and took a sip, only spilling a little down my chin.

  ‘Did you put your hand inside my head?’

  ‘Sort of. Also sort of not. Spells can be complicated, know what I mean?’

  ‘I really don’t.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry, forgot who I was dealing with, love.’

  Malden raised his hand, ‘If you’re interested, that was a mission aborted on my end. From my end. A false alarm.’

  ‘Better luck next time,’ said Eva, then snorted.

  ‘I still have the memories in my head, the memories you shook loose,’ I said.

  Eva shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, you would, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Couldn’t you have done that before?’

  ‘Could have, yeah, but it hurts me more than it hurts you, and it hurts you like a mother fucker.’

  ‘But you could help me remember more about my past, about me. Not just me hearing about things, but actually experiencing them, knowing them, you could do that with your ghosty fist trick, there, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I laughed and clapped my hands together.

  ‘Not gonna, though.’

  ‘What? Why not?’

  ‘Trust me, neither you nor I want you remembering all of that shit. You don’t want to remember being Janto.’

  ‘Of course I do!’

  Eva looked at me, her eyes were, well, an odd mix. I saw fear, I saw sadness, all just for a moment. Then she looked away.

  ‘No. Trust me. You don’t.’

  There was a silence so heavy it could crush a diamond.

  ‘Well,’ said Malden, breaking the awfulness, ‘unless my arse is playing silly beggars again, it looks like number five is a go.’

  22

  I left Eva and Malden to it shortly after that. It was late—beyond late—and I had a shift the next day. I’d also had a bellyful of being awake for one day.

  I left the Uncanny Wagon at the entrance to the blind alley and made my way on foot through the empty, silent streets of Keswick, the night air crisp and soothing against my skin.

  For those of you keeping score, I now had three seemingly insurmountable problems pressing against me.

  There was Elga and her Kin, who were apparently some sort of deadly, ancient, killer cult, buried under a bunch of murderous standing stones. From the flashes of memory Eva had teased out, it didn’t look like they were going to be as easy to deal with as the soul vampires. Especially if the amplification trick Eva employed that time was now off the table (I tried not to think too much about the brain damage revelation – there’s only so much awful you want to be aware of at any one time, and self delusion is a wonderful thing).

  Then there was the fact I now owed my eternal soul to a bunch of very competitive demons, who were in a hurry to facilitate my untimely demise.

  Last but not least? Chloe. I’m a glass half-full sort of a person most of the time, and I like to think the best of people, even rotten buggers. I knew Chloe long before her bad side made a show, and she did seem to have an excuse for that. Provided I believed her about the spirit of her dead dad possessing her anyway.

  I mean, that sounded plausible, right? We’ve all seen parents trying to live out their failed ambitions through their offspring. And I knew Chloe. I was sure of it. I’d had years with her, by her side, laughing with her, whiling away the hours, getting closer. She couldn’t have been hiding a dark side like that the whole time, surely?

  I had to believe her, had to give her the benefit of the doubt. I was going to try and save her, and I had an idea how to go about it.

  I just needed to have a word with a certain talking, axe-wielding fox.

  ‘Hello?’ I said, as I walked one of Keswick’s backstreets. ‘Hello, Mr Fox, are you there?’

  I wasn’t sure how it all worked exactly. Whether he watched me the whole time, or whether he was able to just hear me, but the little blighter seemed to be able to pop up at will, so maybe if I asked nicely, he’d appear. Not much of a plan, no, but it was all I had. I could hardly ask Eva to put me in touch with Mr Fox, could I? She’d made it quite clear what she’d do to me if she found me messing around with the Dark Lakes.

  ‘Mr Fox, Mr Fox, this is the Magic Eater, please pick up if you’re in.’ I snorted, laughing a little, at the ridiculousness of it all.

  I cupped my hands around my mouth: ‘The Magic Eater will see you now!’

  A noise off to my right, something down a creepy, darkened alley.

  ‘Hello? Is that you in there?’

  Could it be the fox? He did favour a surprise appearance. Of course, it could also just be some poor, rough sleeper, roused from his slumber by an idiot yelling nonsense in the middle of the night.

  Another noise, a shuffling.

  ‘Fox, is that you in there?’

  I walked slowly toward the mouth of the alley. This wasn’t of the magical, blind variety. This was your common or garden, rubbish-strewn sliver, tucked between two buildings. A likely spot for a man caught short, or for someone to do something not exactly above board, out of sight of any passersby.

  ‘Hey, Mr Fox, it’s me. You know, the saviour.’

  I took a couple of steps into the alley, squinting to adjust to the drop in visibility.

  Movement just ahead, by the large, rusted bins.

  ‘Hello?’

  Was that fur? I was sure I could see fur poking up over the lip of the bin.

  ‘It is you! You’re not usually so reticent to shoot your mouth off,’ I said, relaxing as I walked forward.

  As it turned out, relaxing was a mistake.

  What I saw when I looked behind the bin was not a fox stood on its hind legs, a Roman military helmet perched upon its head. What I saw was a rat.

  A big rat.

  A rat the size of a large family dog.

  Its yellow eyes were fixed to mine. Large, jagged teeth dripping with saliva chattered in my direction.

  I’m no expert when it comes to rats, but I was fairly certain that what I was seeing was somewhat on the impossibly large side.

  I began to slowly back away from the thing, my stomach churning. ‘There, there,’ I said, as the rat thrashed its thick tail back and forth, ‘no need to, you know, sink those disgusting teeth of yours into my neck or anything.’

  ‘Ours!’ hissed the giant rat.

  I stopped in surprise. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Ours! Ours! Ours!’

  Oh. And ah. And oh shit.

  One of the demons was trying to call in the debt.

  I turned to bolt from the alley and back into the street only to pull up short, almost falling over my feet as I forced my body to suddenly stop moving forward. The entrance to the alley now had three more oversized rats sat in it, blocking my escape.

  ‘Ours!’ they said as one. ‘Ours! Ours! Ours!’

  Rats to the front of me, a rat to the side, all ready to rip me apart so a demon could reach in and pluck out my soul. Well, balls to that.

  I turned and ran to the other end of the alley, the heavy footed rats thundering across the cobbles after me, screaming their claim on me over and over.

  Of course the alley lead only to a dead end.

  Of course.

  ‘Shit! Shit it!’

  I turned, my back pressed against the crumbling brickwork. It wasn’t even a wall I could scrabble over, it was a three storey building. No sign of a window to smash my way through. I was trapped, and the rats knew it. All four of them had stopped their hurry
and now slowly, oh so slowly, padded toward me, their long nails scraping across the ground, relishing my fear. No need to rush now that my end was inevitable.

  I held out my hand, palm up, trying to ignore how much it was trembling, and tried to think hot thoughts.

  ‘Come on, come on, I’m magic, very magic, it’s time to actually do some shitting magic!’

  The rats chittered, apparently amused, as I tried to wriggle my way out of my untimely end. They were moments away from rushing me, sinking their rotten teeth into my flesh, spilling my blood across the black cobbles.

  ‘Ours! Ours!’

  ‘Come on, hot thoughts, fire, flames, come on!’

  I strained, I gritted my teeth, but nothing was happening. It wasn’t going to work.

  I heard a low chuckle that made me feel as though the ground was about to disappear and I would fall, fall, fall. It wasn’t a natural chuckle.

  I could see a shape near the mouth of the alley. An indistinct, grey shape against the black. It moved slowly, step by step, closer and closer

  It was the demon. The one responsible for these rats. It must have been. It was here, ready, eager, enjoying its victory. It had won and my soul would be his, and not any of the other demons who Annie had promised hers to.

  The magic wasn’t happening. This was it. Come in, Joseph Lake, Janto the warlock, Magic Eater, your time is up. Apart from the time I was going to spend being tormented in Hell, anyway.

  I shifted and something metal attached to the wall on my right glinted in the moonlight. A metal ladder. A fire escape. A Joseph escape!

  No time to consider what to do next – I ran and leapt for the bottom rung of the ladder. There was no way the rats would be able to make the leap up to follow. It would have worked too, if it wasn’t for my lousy, some would say non-existent, upper-body strength.

  I dangled from the ladder, legs bicycling through thin air as I strained to pull myself up. The rats screeched as they pogoed into the air, teeth scraping at my boots. I kicked them away, straining at the ladder, urging myself on. My whole body was shaking, limp as wet lettuce. I wasn’t going to make it.

  No! I refused to die in some Keswick back alley. One more push would do it. I was so close. Just a little higher and I’d be out of there. Come on, Joseph! You can do this!