by K Childs
Her eyes narrowed. Ether swirled around us and a wave of it blew over me like dust and faint whispering wind. She licked her lips; I followed the trail of her tongue. She touched her left breast, making a small trembling noise and my fingers twitched to touch and hold her body to me.
I caught the swirling Ether. It was thick enough to inhale in here, and turned it into more water. I did not need to slide into the Dreamscape right now. After the dragon’s blunt-force power, the succubus barely made an impact.
Friday’s body sizzled with steam from the water dousing her, and all that perfect red hair soaked to her head. Literally
smoking hot.
“Don’t try it again or I will arrest you.” I adjusted my coat and waved at the room with one hand. “Now get me licences or I will start arresting people for indecent exposure.” I was blushing.
“Rose?” Darrien’s voice caught me a little off-guard and I looked over my shoulder to see him with two ladies on either side. His shirt wasn’t tucked into his pants and he had lipstick smeared around his chest, neck and face. It was almost as if he had been bleeding pink. The Duke looked drunk. His eyes were wide, gait a little unsteady.
I’d seen this before, plenty of times. Men mourning for a loved-one threw themselves into all sorts of strange ways of dealing with that guilt and sadness. Darrien had a reputation and it was for a very good reason. His fiancée had just been murdered and here he was, two days later, in a literal den of women looking to feed on him through his pants.
“Darrien.” I didn’t know what to say.
He straightened. “What are you doing here?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I had come to save him, of course. But did he mean, how dare I be here? Or did he mean, how did I get here? Or maybe he was wondering how I found him—maybe he was embarrassed to be caught in a place like this, or maybe he meant he didn’t know where here was and had drunk enough to find himself back in Wales.
I closed my mouth.
“Why isn’t she glamoured?” one of the women asked Miss Friday.
“I’m not having much luck. She’s from the Agency,” Florence told her brunette friend.
They were some of the most gorgeous women you’d ever see. I knew that they could shape their bodies to become exactly what a man wanted. I’d heard that they even changed gender to become men for women’s desires. But I was also aware that they fed on that lust. It wasn’t illegal since women’s sufferance had demanded that succubi also got the right to eat without killing. But how on earth they’d opened a club here… I wondered if it had slipped under the radar somehow.
This was the exact sort of thing that we, the Agency,
regulated.
The brunette shook her head. “Let’s get rid of her, then.”
I shook my head. “I wouldn’t try it.”
She, however, did not have any fear of me.
Ether gathered in the room.
I expected another seduction attempt. Perhaps she would try changing shape. Instead she shed her human skin.
If she was pretty as a woman, handsome, beautiful, buxom, she was stunning as a demon. She was still sort of human shaped, but with clawed hands, huge horns, leathery wings and scaled, clawed feet.
Fire glistened in her eyes and her palm, streaming into a ball of red flickering flames. It was made from pure Ether and she threw it at me.
I was standing next to a bar, so I grabbed the Duke and pulled him down with me behind the barrier as the flame crashed into the wall, ruining the poster advertising Guinness and blackening the fresh paint-job.
“Sarah, no!” Florence hissed.
It was too late.
Sarah threw another ball of fire around the bar, missing myself and Darrien on the ground by a long way and exploding a bunch of bottles. She was a terrible aim.
Alcohol and demon-fire mixed well enough and the resulting crash of liquor and smashed glass ran down the wall and across the ground in a moat of flame.
Not going to end well.
Darrien sobered and grabbed my hand, yanking us through the fire to the other side of the bar, diving for cover that was out of Sarah’s line of sight.
The Ether surged.
I sucked in a hard breath, made a deep motion with my hand and sprayed the world with water.
It wasn’t the right method to drown the fire in the bar; in fact it was almost precisely the wrong way of dealing with that, and the flames roared to life.
The Ether in the room was reduced, but the succubi stopped using it to keep everyone drunk and in a stupor. Women, men, demons screamed and ran for the door.
Even drunk, dumb, horny folk will run from a room on fire.
Sarah probably thought the bar was recoverable and threw a blast of fire at us that bounced off a table and shattered a beer glass against the side of my coat.
The front door was cut off behind a wall of fire—we were going to be cornered at this rate.
Darrien pulled me up and we raced upstairs, flames and the whoosh of demon fire following us. “What are you doing here?” he yelled.
“I came to save you!” I snapped. I kicked the upstairs door closed behind us.
The upstairs was a series of small bedrooms. Neat, large beds, cheap bedding and not much else. It was freshly painted and all very proper. The place had been a boarding house before they’d decided to turn it into a club.
Darrien tugged me away from the hallway door just as it burst open in a blaze of fiery splinters. “I was a lot safer before they decided to kill you!”
He found a small vase and threw it at Sarah. She batted it away with her horns, porcelain and flowers dripping down her face. It was less stunning when she snarled at us.
I pulled him away from the open door and into the first room on the left. It wouldn’t buy much time, but we needed to get out. It was a bad place to be.
I raced to the window while Darrien grabbed what looked like a whip and lashed out at Sarah as she came through the door.
It cracked like a whip too.
I flung the window open and looked down. It was too far to the ground.
I created a rope from Ether, tied around the bedpost and tossed it out the window, “Darrien!”
He saw the rope, grabbed it and me, and jumped out the window.
The bed was not nailed to the floor and we swung violently in the air. I screamed.
Darrien hit the wall hard and we slid down the rope, his grip clearly failing a little as he struggled to breathe.
The bedpost separated from its mooring and came flying out the window a second later, sending us tumbling to the ground.
Darrien took the brunt of the fall and I ended up on the pavement, wheezing and gasping.
He was staring at the sky, coughing.
I was winded, my chest burning agony as my lungs refused to take in air.
Sarah came flying out of the window.
I still had control over the rope, so I sent it lashing out at her, wrapping around her huge, bat-like wings.
She made a high-pitched noise, getting an arm and a naked breast free of the snaking rope and flinging another blast of fire at me.
It hit my chest hard, and the wool on my coat burst into flames.
I ripped the buttons off as I scrambled out of the material, too sore and winded to scream.
Darrien regained his breath and helped disentangle my coat, dragging me to my feet again and pulling me away from the screaming succubus I’d half-caught with rope.
Simmons came running over with his whistle, blowing it loudly, brandishing his baton. Sarah sent a wave of fire at us this time, writhing in the rope that I tightened around her body.
Darrien pulled me under the awning of the shop—it burst into flame, but saved us.
“Give up, or Simmons is going to turn you into a Spanish Piñata.”
To illustrate the point, Simmons ducked under her where she couldn’t see him properly and hit Sarah’s
kneecap, hard enough that I heard a pop.
She screamed.
“My shop!” Florence Friday, spilling outside with her guests, stared in horror at the fire crawling inside her business. She had tears in her eyes. “You ruined my shop!”
She was pointing at me.
“I didn’t ruin anything!” I gesticulated at Sarah.
Florence began to change shape.
“Run,” Darrien hissed.
“What?”
He grabbed my wrist and hauled me around.
We ran.
The street was full of traffic; we wove through the crowd of excited spectators coming to see the burning building and what all the fuss was about. Darrien veered left and we exited the crowd, entering a side-alley.
Flame exploded in the alley around us and the shriek of a cat, the rattle of a dustbin and the skittering of animals told me we were being pursued.
Darrien dragged me through Piccadilly with the expertise of a man used to evading screaming, crying, fire-throwing succubi.
I’d met his mother, so it probably wasn’t too inaccurate a visual.
We ended up running and dodging through Hyde park. The night was crisp and clear; people walked their dogs and admired the stars through telescopes. The children played with flashlights, looking for bird nests in the trees.
We bolted past the signage for the Speaker’s corner, which took a fireball to the centre. My legs were aching, my lungs felt like I’d been inhaling smoke, but Darrien showed no signs of tiring. Neither did Florence, who was setting trees on fire
behind us.
Darrien dragged me down behind some flowering bushes. “Get down.”
A twig stabbed into my side, hard enough to tear my shirt and flesh. I didn’t cry out. Instead I whispered, “Professor Hardigan from Aber University has a sword that will kill the dragon.”
Just in case I died of exertion, I wanted him to know.
“We’re running for our lives from a succubus and you’re worried about the damn dragon right now?”
“She’ll run out of steam.”
I hoped.
Darrien snorted. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head; my chest felt like it would explode with the force of my heart beating inside my breast. “Some of us sleep for a living.”
He glanced up out of the bushes, ducking back down quickly. “She’s on the other side of the park.”
I bit my lip as he started crawling and I followed. We slowly crept away, hiding below eye-line.
We ended up dashing from the park, slipping into a bakery like a pair of dunces.
Darrien pulled me into the shop proper like I was a lost breadstick he might be returning.
The counter was closed; the door should have been locked.
“You are a magnet for trouble,” he told me.
“You’re kidding, right? You know how they feed? Please tell me you haven’t been here for two days? Your mother is going to kill me.”
“I do indeed,” he coughed. “Well, I mean, one hears these things.”
He was not fooling me. “You are unbelievable, sir.”
“I am unbelievable?”
“I thought I would find you sad that your fiancée is dead, at least pretending to mourn, but instead you are running around cavorting with sexual demons!”
He shushed me, glaring. “For your information, I was just out walking with your constable when the ladies approached us. Should I throw myself weeping into a dark tower, or brood in the house all week? What would you like me to do? Your stupid plan got her killed… and I only loved her as a man loves a
sister.”
“Are you standing here, telling me that you didn’t do anything at all that might jeopardize that plan? No one else knew about the trap outside of Ben, Simmons, yourself, and me.”
He hadn’t let go of my wrist and we started marching around the front counter, toward the staff area of the little shop. Darrien stopped; we were in the backroom of the bakery, standing in a kitchen that was all floured benches and an angry Italian grandmother, cussing at us in Italian. “You want to blame me for that bungle?”
“I don’t blame you for it, Darrien. The enemy outwitted us both. I’ll lose everything if I can’t catch the real killer. And I doubt you’re going to last the week at the rate you accrue angry, jilted women chasing you!”
“This is my fault somehow?”
“Darrien, in the last few days I have been supplied more motives to kill a man than on any other case in the past three years I’ve been a member of the Yard.”
He stiffened at that. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I were. Your mother, best friend, fiancée, your fiancée’s best friend. You’ve cheated, lied, and alienated all of them.” I wheezed, puffing to try and breathe through the stitch in my side.
“Oh, don’t hold back now, Rose—let it all out. The great Detective Inspector Beaumont who sees everything, is it?”
“There’s not much to see with you; you sir, are a shallow womanizer!”
He was turning purple; rage or indignity, I didn’t know.
“I never would have guessed you were a wicked woman, hiding behind a badge to account for just how much of a shrew you are at heart,” he said.
“I’ve not hidden anything, Darrien. I’m going to save you from this blasted dragon and then we’ll never see each other again.”
“Fine!”
“Fine by me!”
“I said it would be!”
“Well it ought to be,” I agreed, viciously.
He pulled open the alley door, waving me through in a fuming rage. “I cannot think of a single hellcat I shall wish to see less than you, ever again.”
“And there ought to be a warning hung from your neck, telling impressionable heiresses that they are wasting their life waiting for you,” I snapped back.
He turned and stomped away.
I clenched my fists, wanting desperately to also stomp away, but the only way to go was down the alley or back into the park with the angry succubus.
The park was on fire.
Miss Friday had been going nuts with the demon fire. A bunch of trees and half the bushes were up in flames—the sky vanished in a rising tower of smoke and ash. So much for the Hyde.
I adjusted the collar of my shirt and started to concentrate on the Ether.
Florence was screaming something at the folk in the park. I frowned, listening as best I could since she was facing away from me.
“Come on out, or I’ll smoke you out!”
At least we’d gotten enough distance to lose her.
She’d set a hedgerow alight and this was providing her quite the backdrop of smoke and raging inferno. I guessed she probably wanted the place to be more like home.
Above her, in a large circle, I poured Ether into the world, transforming it into water. Simple objects were easiest, and a wave of water didn’t take anywhere near as much energy as creating something with moving parts.
The deluge flattened the angry succubus into the steaming bush and drowned the fire. My mother had always said water was not the most efficient way to deal with flame; it was better to smother it with a blanket. But a giant wave of water was efficient to deal with the succubus and get her on the ground.
She was coughing and spluttering when I yanked her arms behind her back and snapped my cuffs on her.
She ended up with a face full of mud for her trouble.
“You ruined my club. I sank my life’s savings into that place,” she wailed.
“Apparently, I’m ruining everyone’s night, Miss Friday.”
I hauled her up, gave the people a wave and began marching her back to her destroyed club. If I was lucky, the Agency would arrive before dawn.
The cavalry arrived while Simmons and I were judiciously repeating, ad-nauseum, the charges that we were bestowing on our horned, tailed friends.
The local firefighters got
to the club before the Agency did and managed to put out the fire. They used a hose on a spindle, running it inside while valves in the back of a truck compressed air and water and allowed the hose to jet out a blanketing blast over fires. It was most effective; if we’d had that during the London Fires, half the city might have been saved. They were calling it a fire-engine, not a truck, as the gears and mechanical parts created something that went beyond the normal applications.
The interior of the club was ruined downstairs, but upstairs was mostly untouched and the damage, the fire sergeant informed me, was superficial.
The streets were crowding with rich sticky-beaks watching the affair in a morbid and fascinated stupor. People flock to crime scenes. Some want to help, some want to hinder, most are just curious. The brain loves stimuli.
“Well now, Detective Inspector Rose.” The guffaw and sneer in that hail both belonged to Darby Puttick. A man with all the love of a skinned house-cat in his soul.
“Inspector Puttick.” I thrust my succubus at him. “I thought this might be a case you would wish to handle personally.”
Darby’s Sergeant stepped up, taking Florence Friday and snapping his own handcuffs on her wrists, so she had two pairs. He frog-marched her to a wagon that they’d borrowed from Main Branch and gave me a small wave.
Simmons took the angry brunette succubus over and helped load her in. I supervised, not keen to touch one of the succubi again.
“You aren’t taking on any cases after this Eye fiasco,” Puttick snapped.
I wasn’t sure I wanted another case, regardless, but this was news to me. “Oh, have the boys been gossiping?”
He straightened his collar. “Of course not; men don’t
gossip.”
The Agency was a fount of constant roiling gossip, and there were only two women in the office. At some stage, Puttick would have to admit to the crime.
“The Superintendent is out for blood. And I will be approved to sit the Detective course; you’ll be out.”
“Puttick, I believe these are now your witnesses. I expect I don’t need to tell you anything else as no doubt you are acquainted with the procedure. It would be a waste of your time to receive any instruction from me.”