Thaumatology 09 - Dragonfall

by Teasdale, Niall

  Ceri frowned. ‘Don’t you have your own people for dealing with this? I mean, you know I know you’re MI5. I don’t see much point in keeping up the pretence. Surely you can investigate this yourself?’

  ‘Do you honestly think I’d be coming to you if I hadn’t tried everything else I could come up with in house?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘You think I’ve been sitting on my hands for three weeks?’

  ‘No… I guess not. It’s just… This long after she’s vanished. I’m not sure what either of us could do?’

  ‘You realise she’s almost certainly dead?’ Lily commented, her voice carrying enough sadness that it did not sound callous.

  ‘I do,’ Sachs replied sourly, ‘but my superiors don’t. I think she was abducted and someone hacked our systems to delete her files. They think she took the files, deleted them from our system, and vanished herself.’

  ‘Don’t like the idea that someone cracked their firewalls?’ Ceri suggested. Sachs nodded. ‘You’ve tried diviners, of course.’ Another nod. ‘Did she have a travel card?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t used that night. I can’t find any taxi which picked her up either. It had to be a private car, and no one reported seeing a woman being bundled into a vehicle on Millbank that night.’ He sighed. ‘I realise this is asking a lot, but you’ve found people no one else could before…’

  ‘Did she have a boyfriend? Family who want her back?’

  Sachs shook his head. ‘Her parents are both dead and you may have noticed she was a little shy.’

  ‘Yeah. The technique I used to find Naira when she was taken by the Witch Finder used peak emotional surges to break the scrying wards. I’d need someone with a strong emotional attachment for that.’

  ‘What about that vampire you located?’

  ‘That was a wide area search for concentrations of negative thaumitons. I wasn’t looking for him, I was looking for a large gathering of vampires.’ Ceri’s brow knitted. ‘Look, leave it with me. I’ll see if I can come up with something. Whatever I do, I’ll need a focus. Something she owned that she was fond of, or some hair.’

  ‘I’ll have something sent over.’ He rose to his feet, business concluded. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed your afternoon.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Lily said. ‘I kind of liked her. Ceri will find her if it’s even vaguely possible.’

  With Sachs gone and the door closed behind him, Lily started for the stairs. ‘I take it the dancing is off? You’ll want to think about that problem?’

  ‘Yes, I will, but we’ll still practice,’ Ceri replied, heading for the cellar door. ‘I’ve got no idea how to find her at this point so I’m going to have to let inspiration slap me in the face. Your dancing is very inspiring.’

  Lily turned around and started to follow her. ‘I didn’t think it was that kind of inspiring though.’

  ‘Frankly, I’m going to need every ounce of inspiration I can get.’

  Soho

  ‘What about when you found Julia’s body?’ Lily asked. ‘You used the emotion of her death to track her.’

  No amount of sexy gyration around a pole had persuaded Ceri’s brain to have an idea, and now they were at work and Ceri’s brain was still refusing to have a brilliant revelation. ‘We knew exactly where she was attacked from the film, and we had a good idea of when. This time we have the whole of Millbank as a possible target area.’

  ‘Oh… true.’ Lily sounded dejected.

  ‘It was a good idea though,’ Ceri said, attempting to cheer her up. ‘Better than anything I’ve had anyway.’

  ‘It’s a shame it’s so long since she was grabbed. Michael could probably track her easily enough, at least until she was taken. Then you could probably track her down from there once you got her locked…’ Lily stopped as she noticed Ceri staring at her. ‘What?’

  ‘You’re a genius?’

  Lily giggled. ‘You’re the genius. I have the occasional good idea.’

  ‘You’ve just been promoted.’

  ‘You’re not making sense, love,’ Lily said, grinning indulgently.

  ‘When we found Julia, I searched back in time for her. All we have to do is let Michael do the same with his nose and he can track her to where she vanished. Then, hopefully, I can latch onto her signature and try to locate her.’

  ‘Time sniffing? Awesome!’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll call it that. We’ll do it in the morning.’

  Lily giggled. ‘I like it. Michael, Battersea pack Guard and Time Sniffer. Oh, and table thirteen.’

  Ceri started for the customers in need of further intoxication. ‘I’m pretty sure Michael’s not a table.’

  Millbank, August 11th

  The sight of two women and a werewolf searching around the footpaths of Millbank did not go unnoticed by the people walking past, or a lot of people in their cars. There were even some yells from the top of a tourist bus as it drove past; Lily just waved to them.

  It took them over an hour to work their way down the footpath nearest the river. Beside them was the expanding wedge of green which was Victoria Tower Gardens and they had managed to follow Mayhew’s scent trail for about four hundred yards before Michael stopped, casting around with his furry forehead furrowed.

  Odd scent, he growled. Man smell, but not Man smell. Less smell of girl. Carried, maybe.

  Ceri frowned. ‘Carried? Can you tell which way? Toward the road.’ Michael shook his head and pointed further up the street. ‘She was carried up the street by someone, past the Houses of Parliament, and no one noticed?’

  Michael shrugged. More than one Man.

  ‘That makes no sense,’ Lily commented.

  Ceri sighed and cast her spell further up the street, and thirty minutes later they were half way past the huge, gothic building which housed the nation’s politicians when Michael lost the scent entirely.

  Stops, he barked. No scent after here.

  ‘It doesn’t go to the curb?’ Ceri asked, receiving a shake of the head in reply. ‘How can she just have vanished? And why here of all places?’ Then she noticed Lily.

  The half-succubus was turning slowly on the spot, her arms held out from her sides, hands cocked upward as though she was trying to feel something. ‘Magic,’ Lily said. ‘There’s magic here, running out of the building and across the road.’

  Ceri blinked her Sight on and, sure enough, there it was. Running along the ground, straight out of the Houses of Parliament and heading off across the road, was a ley line. Ceri snapped her fingers. ‘Of course! Watling Street ran through here. It followed a natural ley line. Or the line followed the road. No one’s ever come up with a valid theory on why they form.’

  Michael was suddenly human. Ceri dug into her bag to hand him some knee length, khaki shorts and a T-shirt. ‘Watling Street?’ he asked.

  ‘It was the main Roman road going from east to west,’ Lily said. Ceri smiled; it was always kind of neat when Lily, a girl who had dropped out of school, demonstrated that she was not dumb. ‘A lot of ley lines run along old track ways, Roman roads, Neolithic trading routes. I didn’t know one ran through here, but I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ceri said. ‘It’s not a particularly strong line, but maybe someone used it.’ She reached into her bag again, producing a small, carved wood jewellery box. According to one of the MI5 diviners, Mayhew had owned it since she was a child. Inside it there was a little model of a ballerina which turned on a spring while music, The Sugar Plum Fairy, played when the lid was lifted. ‘Both of you, put a hand on my shoulders.’ She focussed on the box, on its link with its owner. ‘This might not work…’ Then she felt the slight tug. ‘Oh shit. Take a deep breath.’

  The world seemed to stretch around them, the buildings across the street suddenly shrinking into the distance and then snapping back toward them. They were moving, the world flashing past in a blur of buildings, then fields and trees. Ceri’s pulse was thudding in her ears, almost blotting out the roaring sound. Her lungs began to ache,
begging for air, and then it stopped, just as suddenly as it had started.

  ‘Where are we?’ Lily gasped out. There were mostly fields around them. A few buildings were visible off the edge of the road they had stopped on, and a larger area of trees off to the east.

  Ceri focussed her will again, this time on a simple location spell. ‘Wroxeter, Shropshire. Basically at the end of Watling Street. There’s another line joining it from the south, but it feels like Mayhew is…’ She pointed off toward the trees. ‘She’s that way. Not too far.’

  They crossed the road and hopped the fence into a field, the ground hard-packed from the recent heat, and started walking toward the trees. Michael raised his head and sniffed as they got closer. ‘I smell water.’

  ‘The Severn should be around here,’ Ceri replied.

  Sure enough, the trees were on a small, island-like bank in the river. The box led them onto the island over the narrow bridge of land which connected island to riverbank, and then deeper still until Michael suddenly held up a hand. His nose was twitching.

  ‘I think, maybe, we should call someone. I’m not sure we want to see what’s up ahead.’ Ceri looked at him and saw the grimace on his young face. ‘I smell… well, I smell rotting flesh. A couple of weeks old at least.’

  Ceri swallowed. ‘We need to know.’ Stepping forward, she pushed through some undergrowth and came face to face with what was left of Jennifer Mayhew.

  ‘Oh shit,’ Lily breathed from behind her.

  Someone had had a little fun with the analyst while killing her. There were strips of cloth lying around on the nearby bushes; the remains of whatever she had been wearing, though identifying what that had been was impossible. They had strung her up from a low branch by her wrists, her back to the trunk of a tree. Her legs were pulled apart by another rope strapped around the base of the bole, suggesting something sexual, but it was going to be hard to prove rape; her stomach was a gaping hole and there was no sign of any internal organs. Her once attractive face looked as though it had been beaten to a pulp before the flies and larger animals had got to it.

  Ceri took her phone from her bag and dialled a number. Some part of her mind was thinking that she should be throwing up about now, and maybe she would get to that once the shock wore off. This was not the first horrifically mutilated body she had found; Michael had been with her when they had found one of the Witch Hunter’s burned victims, Lily had been there when they had discovered several of Raynor’s playthings in the dungeon at Demi-monde. But she had known Jenny Mayhew. She had liked the woman whose remains were now decorating a tree in front of her.

  ‘Sachs.’ The voice broke her out of her thoughts.

  ‘It’s Ceri Brent. We found her. Do you want me to get local CID in or will you deal with it?’

  There was a long moment of silence and then Sachs spoke, his voice sounding hard even over the phone. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘A little island in the Severn, just west of Wroxeter. They used a ley line to bring her here and then…’

  ‘I’ll make some calls. Can you stay there until the police arrive?’

  Ceri swallowed, tasting bile. ‘We’ll wait for them. At the edge of the trees.’ The call cut off without further comment and Ceri turned around. ‘Let’s get out of here. Sachs is sending the cops over and I don’t think I can stay here much longer without disturbing the site.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Lily said as they headed back for the field. ‘Why? Why would someone grab her, bring her here, and then do… do that to her?’

  No one gave an answer; no one had one to give.

  Kennington, August 12th

  The sun beat down on the roof of High Towers, and the skin of Ceri, Lily, and Michael. Twill was down in the kitchen, putting together a meal involving a gammon joint and salad. Even Michael, who considered Sunday roast one of the high points of his week, had allowed that it was just too hot for a big meal. That, and none of them had eaten that much since finding Mayhew’s body.

  They had given what little information they had to the local detectives, who were really just going to perform whatever tests they could, collect information, and hand it all off to Sachs and his people. Then they had gone back to the ley line and Ceri had tapped into it to get them home. Ceri had been glad to be working that night; it kept her mind busy rather than seeing Mayhew’s battered body everywhere she looked. Michael had gone back to Battersea and suggested that Anita, his Captain, take the night off with her boyfriend. He had wanted his mind kept busy as well.

  Michael growled and sat up on his lounger. ‘That thing you did,’ he said as though he was irritated at not being able to stop thinking about it, ‘transporting us along the ley line? Could anyone do that?’

  ‘It was a weak form of teleportation. Anyone could do it, if they knew how.’

  ‘But it’s pretty unlikely that many people would know?’

  ‘A demon might,’ Lily said. ‘A fae, some of them anyway. Or a dragon, I guess, but I think we’d know if there had been a dragon on Millbank.’

  ‘There’s a lot fewer of them too,’ Ceri agreed. ‘You said the “people” who took Mayhew didn’t smell right?’

  Michael gave a nod. ‘I’m not sure what they were. I’ve never smelled anything like them.’

  ‘You couldn’t get any scent of them where we found the body?’

  ‘All I could smell there was decomposing body. Neither of you could sense anything out of place there either.’ It was true, and annoying. Too much time had passed. Even if there had been magic used, and to Ceri it looked as though the damage to Mayhew had been purely physical, any trace of it would have faded.

  ‘Some sort of half-demon?’ Ceri suggested.

  ‘It… didn’t smell like demon,’ Michael replied. ‘Even Lily’s scent has a little of the same feeling as a demon. She smells a little of her father.’

  Ceri nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose she does.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Not much, love,’ Ceri said reassuringly. ‘It’s like a background flavour.’

  ‘Fire and magic,’ Michael said, ‘and in your case, and Faran’s, a kind of musky, earthy scent. Sex. Earthy, basic sex.’

  Lily gave a soft giggle. ‘I kind of like that. What about other demons?’

  ‘Devim are heavy on the fire,’ Ceri replied. ‘I’ve never smelled any of the others.’

  ‘Anita says Dakag smell like snakes,’ Michael supplied. ‘The things that took Mayhew were… There was heat to the scent, but not the same. More like hot meat. A lot of sweat, like a human after they’ve been running. Smoke… Yeah, a bit like smoked meat.’

  ‘Something new,’ Ceri said, her tone dark. ‘That’s unlikely to be good.’

  Battersea, August 15th

  Ceri pushed the bag with her clothes in it into the hole in the tree roots where she always hid it. Getting to her feet, she stretched and then reached for the leather, silver-studded collar around her throat; it and the fairy silver chain around her ankle were the only things she was wearing. A small push of power, a shimmering, tingling sensation that washed over her skin, and the world was different.

  Of course, technically, it was Ceri who was different. She had black fur, a dog-like head, eyes which saw much better in the dark, and a nose which almost immediately caught Michael’s scent on the breeze. She estimated he was a hundred yards away, give or take a bit, which likely put him at the edge of the lake. He probably had not caught her scent yet and was possibly busy. Giving a soft snicker, she slipped through the bushes and out onto the footpath, staying low and trying to ensure she was not seen.

  She spotted him as he was sending two of the Guards off on a perimeter run. Dropping down behind a bush, she waited for the two wolves to lope away before making her move. Michael was entirely oblivious until about a second before she tackled him. Then he let out a yelp which turned into a gurgle as they both went into the boating lake. They emerged from the greenish water spitting and coughing, and in Michael’s case growling. Ce
ri snickered.

  Rolling his eyes, Michael waved for her to follow him and set off across the lake toward the island in the middle. She got the feeling Alexandra wanted to talk to her and she was not wrong. Michael shifted as he climbed ashore, and started toward the clearing. ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ he huffed. ‘I just got dry.’

  Ceri lifted her hand to her collar, shifting back to human and then running a couple of paces to catch up. ‘You were going to bring me here anyway. And you jump me every chance you get.’ They emerged into the clearing with its oil drum in the middle where Alexandra usually had a fire, though not tonight. ‘You’re just sore because I turned the tables on you.’

  Alexandra, curled up beside the oil drum, lifted a mug of tea toward Ceri, who took it without a word. The old woman tended to know when she was going to have visitors; she was kind of annoying like that actually. ‘Of course he is, dear. You’re getting to be as good as him. He won’t be able to use training you as an excuse for al fresco sex in the bushes.’

  Ceri’s cheeks coloured a little, but she smirked. The embarrassment was irrational; it was down to being caught out by Alexandra more than what she was suggesting. The Battersea Alpha was well over a hundred years old and her age was showing, just not nearly as much as it should have. She was a black-fur, like Alec was, and they tended to age slower than humans, or other werewolves. Alexandra was a picture of fading beauty made regal by age. She always held herself straight and her body, while not as perfect as it had been, was still attractive. Her hair, long and silver-white, gave her the look of a wise grandmother. Under a full moon her hair shone and she looked truly incandescent.

  ‘You wanted to talk to me?’ Ceri asked, curling onto the grass. Michael settled behind her, sliding in close and wrapping his arms around her waist. His chin rested on her shoulder and he nuzzled her neck. Werewolves had no idea of personal space and a very tactile view of affection.

  ‘I told you that my visions of the future had… more or less stopped?’

  Ceri nodded. ‘Things were probably too uncertain for anything clear to come through.’