Urban Enemies

by Jim Butcher

  “You might as well kill me,” she told him as he pushed her into a passageway so narrow both of her shoulders scraped against the walls on either side when she stumbled forward. “I’m not going back there.”

  “Then you die,” he told her. There was no anger in his voice, only resignation. It was easier to let her see the effects of remaining where they didn’t belong than it was trying to drag her back by the hair, kicking and screaming. He had to trust that despite her defiant words, when she was confronted by the reality of watching herself age, her self-preservation instinct would kick in.

  He pushed her forward, her heel catching on the uneven cobbles, but he didn’t let her fall. He kept on pushing her until she stood outside the blacked-out window of an old cinema on Latimer Road, and saw her reflection. For a moment it was obvious she didn’t know what she was supposed to be looking at, but when he wouldn’t let her walk away she had no choice but to study her reflection and slowly recognize the changes creeping in between memory and the reality standing in front of the cinema.

  She looked down at her hands then back up at him through the backward landscape of their reflections.

  “What’s happening to me?”

  “Time,” he said. “Look around you. This isn’t the city we left. This isn’t 1924. It’s not even 1941 or 1965. Everything’s different now. We don’t belong here. Time is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s catching up with you. Stay here and you’ll be an old woman before long.”

  She looked like she wanted to argue with him, but the truth of his words was writing itself on her skin.

  “How . . . ? Why?”

  “I wanted you to myself.”

  “You’re a monster.”

  “Probably,” Seth agreed. “And if not now, soon enough, given the things I’m going to have to do if we ever want a normal life. So if you really want to die, all you have to do is stay here a little while longer. The years will catch up with you and you will save my soul in the process. Or you can return with me to that place and give me time to try and work out how to undo the mess that damned magician made. Right now I don’t care either way. I’m done with considering you a prize. If I could I’d take you back to where you came from and dump you on my brother’s doorstep and be done with you. But I can’t.”

  She looked at him then, realizing something. “Is this where you took my baby?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Although he’s old enough to be your father now.”

  There was a moment as the pain registered and the loss settled in, then Eleanor shook her head, not in disagreement so much as in denial.

  And because of her one moment of stupidity, they couldn’t come back here again, not safely. Isaiah had seen her. He knew she was still alive, even if he couldn’t explain how she could have lived so many years without aging a day. He had seen her. He wouldn’t let that go now. Even if no one believed him, and dismissed his claims as the ravings of a senile mind lost too long in grief, it didn’t matter. It would stir it all up again: the beautiful young actress who had disappeared, the jealous brother who was anything but an ordinary criminal, and the magician who had disappeared off the face of the earth. It might feel like a lifetime ago, but bringing that shit back into the public consciousness after all this time was just going to make any hope of living here more problematic than simply undoing Damiola’s curse.

  There were options, of course. The most obvious one was that it was time for the Reel to claim its first victim. The creature had made no secret of its hunger. It needed to feed to sustain itself, and the longer it burned the fiercer its appetite became. He was still learning how his monster functioned, but he was beginning to think that if it didn’t feed, it would burn forever, unquenched, unsatisfied. It would feed. It would have to. So it was only fitting that the first blood it tasted should be the blood of his blood.

  “So?”

  He knew he’d never be able to trust her again, no matter what she said now. There would come a time when she’d slip through the fissure again, stepping back into this world, unable to resist the draw of the place and the life she’d lost—without understanding it wasn’t here to be found. That unforgettable need would eventually be their undoing. There was no getting around that. It was that, or cast her out now and let time unravel her. “Take me back,” she said, becoming a willing prisoner this time.

  “Wise choice.”

  When he next returned to the city he’d lost, his brother was dead.

  Minutes had passed for Seth, months for the others. He’d intended to put the frighteners on Isaiah, lean on him, maybe crack a few bones to be sure he forgot what he’d seen at the market, but instead he had been the uninvited ghost at the family funeral. Seth watched the relatives who’d long since forgotten he existed pay their respects to his brother. The whole charade left a sour taste in his mouth. They had no idea who Isaiah really was. His boy, Boone, delivered the eulogy with customary tears and trembling. As they lowered the coffin into the ground he talked about hoping his father could finally find the woman he had spent his entire life looking for, and if not her, then at least peace. He gave the dead man his own promise that he’d never stop trying to work out what had happened that night in 1924. It would become his obsession, handed down from generation to generation like some twisted heirloom. Seth hawked and spat in the direction of the open grave. Boone’s own son was next to pay his respects, kneeling at the graveside to place what looked like a wooden rattle on the top of the coffin. Some sort of memento that no doubt meant something deeply significant, even if it looked cheap and childish.

  Seth watched them mourn, the Reel kid beside him fidgeting like a real boy might.

  Just because he couldn’t scare Isaiah anymore didn’t mean he couldn’t end this now. With that in mind, a plan slowly formed in his mind. Seth dismissed the Reel, sending it back through the fissure to Glass Town, and followed Boone to the memorial.

  He watched him for an hour, talking with his friends, trading his stories, and chinking glasses as they drank another one down. Music played in the background. No one was singing. Finally, when the old man had drunk enough, he wandered over to introduce himself, a spare glass of diluted whiskey in his hand. “Sorry for your loss,” he said, holding out the second glass.

  It was as easy as that.

  They shared a drink, face-to-face with the blood of his blood, in the smoke-filled bar of the workingman’s club, no flicker of recognition passing between them. He was almost disappointed. He listened to the son tell tall stories about his old man, unable to tell truth from lie as the exaggerated life of a man he never really knew took life around him. He waited for the story of Eleanor to come up, knowing it would. How could any night in honor of Isaiah Lockwood—though he’d taken the name Raines, it would seem, from the order of service someone had left lying on the table amid the beer rings and ashtrays—not revolve around the great tragedy of his life?

  “Did he ever come close, do you think? To finding her?”

  Boone shook his head. “It was a fool’s errand. She’s dead. They both are. Long gone. You ask me, the magician was behind it. Look at the stuff we know. He canceled his last ever show, disappeared the night they vanished. What you’ve got to remember is it was different back then. Much easier to get away with things. I always figured they were dumped somewhere like the Hackney Marshes or Leyton Marshes, Rainham or Erith, plenty of places you could make a couple of bodies disappear with little risk of them turning up to haunt you.”

  “So, you’re not going to carry on looking for the truth? I thought you said—”

  “The old man was only ever looking for the truth. He knew they were dead. He wasn’t an idiot. Well, not until his last days, at least. He left me this.” He took an envelope from inside his jacket pocket. Seth assumed it was his eulogy. “I’m not sure what to do with it.”

  “What is it?”

  “His dying declaration. It’s all in here, his story, everything that happened to him, everything he’d worked out
about what happened, all of it.”

  “That’s got to be some read,” Seth said, measuring his words carefully.

  “He swears that only a couple of weeks ago he’d finally seen her, in the same red dress she’d been wearing the day she disappeared. He swore she hadn’t aged a day.”

  “Well, that’s hardly likely, is it?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  “You want my opinion? Sometimes things are better left forgotten,” Seth said.

  “Maybe. I just can’t shake the feeling there’s something . . .”

  “May I?”

  Boone shook his head. “I don’t think so.” And then his brow furrowed. “You know, I don’t recognize you. I feel like I should. . . . How did you say you knew my father again?”

  “We go way back. We were like brothers once upon a time.” The other man looked at him then, and he realized he’d said too much. “He looked after me when I needed looking after. He was a good man.”

  “He was anything but,” Boone disagreed. “He was obsessed with finding Eleanor, with seeing his brother, Seth, brought to justice. Nothing else mattered. He ignored my mother. He only married her because she was Eleanor’s sister, and if he couldn’t have her, then he’d have the next best thing. He didn’t care about us. He didn’t care about anything in the end. And judging by his letter, it damned near drove him crazy by the end. That one night tore his life apart. He never got over it.”

  Which is music to my ears, Seth thought. But that wasn’t what he said. “So, why do that to yourself? Do you really want your boy looking at you the way you obviously looked at your father?” Seth turned to look across the room at Barclay Raines, young, handsome, and almost a twin for Isaiah, proving the apple didn’t fall far from the biological tree. “Walk away while you can. Make a clean break from the past. Do what’s right for your family.”

  Boone took a swig from the half-empty pint glass in his hand, knocking back more than half of what remained.

  “He looks like a good kid,” Seth said.

  “He’s hurting. He worshipped his grandfather.”

  “Most boys do.”

  “He didn’t deserve it.”

  “Can I be frank, Boone? I feel like I can be. We’re talking man to man here. We’re both men of the world.”

  “Spit it out,” Boone said with an amused smile.

  “Here’s the thing. Take a good look at that boy of yours and ask yourself this: if you knew that chasing this fool’s errand of your father’s would end up getting him hurt, would you still be hell-bent on doing it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I’m saying. You wouldn’t want anything to happen to your boy, would you?”

  “Who are you? And don’t give me some crap about being a friend of the family. You’re not.”

  “No, I’m not. But you know me. Or my name at least.”

  “Who are you?”

  “What if I told you that we’re related. Family.”

  “I’d ask you how.”

  “And I’d say through your father,” Seth said, playing the game.

  “Again, I’d ask how.”

  “Then I’d tell you how your father was my brother.”

  Boone shook his head. “Not funny. Now stop taking the piss and fuck off out of here, you’re not welcome anymore.”

  Seth nodded his head, his smile almost affable. “Shame. I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this. I’m only going to say this once, no second chances, Boone. My name is Seth Lockwood. I am a lot older than I look, you are my nephew. If you don’t forget everything you read in that letter, your boy will die, because I want this chain broken. I want to come home. And I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to make that happen. This doesn’t have to get any worse than it already is, that’s the thing. All you need to do is walk away. Burn that letter. Move on and live happily ever fucking after. Do we have an understanding?”

  “Fuck you. Just fuck you.” Boone’s voice spiraled. People started looking their way through the corkscrew curls of cigarette smoke. “Get the fuck out of here before I lose my temper and do something you’ll regret.”

  “I take it that’s a no? All right.” Seth shook his head. He looked across the bar at the young Barclay. He really didn’t want any more blood on his hands, not if it could be avoided. Looking at the kid was like looking at himself. “Last chance,” he said. “Agree that this ends here and I’ll walk away. Promise that you will stop looking for us, Eleanor and me, and I’ll go happily.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  “Probably,” he said. “I’ll even give you this to seal the deal.” Seth took a set of keys out of his pocket and offered them to Boone. He hadn’t thought it through, but it made sense. Sometimes it wasn’t about breaking bones, just getting people to see things your way. Money tended to make that happen. “It’s a flat, in Rotherhithe. I haven’t been back there in a long time, but I’ve gone to great pains to keep it, even paying a housekeeper to clean once a month, although nothing is ever out of place. It’s across the street from The Angel. You’ll recognize the name on the door. Think of it as an inheritance you didn’t know was coming to you. It’s got to be worth a lot of money now.”

  He dropped the keys in Boone’s hand even as his nephew said, “I don’t want them.”

  “Do the smart thing. Close your fingers around them. Make a fist. Hold them really tight. Drink to your dad, then walk out of here and forget the letter, forget his obsession with Eleanor, forget me, move into your nice new place down by the water, hell, give it to your boy as a wedding present when the time comes, just walk out of here and live. You can do that, can’t you?”

  But of course he couldn’t. He could no more let go of the family obsession than Seth could turn over a new leaf and live the life of a virtuous man. The rot had eaten into him a long time ago. He wasn’t about to change now. He walked out of that place, through the rain-drenched streets of London, thinking how little stuff had really changed, how things were only different on the surface despite all of the flashing lights and fast cars and the endless circus of noise, back to the oblique and slipped back through the fissure into Glass Town. He was only there a few moments, long enough to summon the Reel. All he’d needed to do was feed the kid a name, as the candle flickered inside the spinning drum, and visualize the face of his victim, planting it in what passed for the Reel’s mind. He sealed the pact with blood, drawing a few drops from his wrist with a piece of broken glass before he turned the Reel loose.

  A couple of years had passed in the time it took him to return, long enough for Boone to have forgotten his threat, long enough for Barclay to have started his own family, ensuring the bloodline would live on. Even with Barclay Raines dead there would be kin in London.

  He could live with that.

  Seth followed the Reel kid as it prowled from street to street, sniffing the air like some ghostly bloodhound. Static roared out of its mouth as it called a challenge to the rising sun. Each fresh burst of white noise reminded Seth of the Reel’s true nature. The pair attracted strange looks from those not too busy to see them, but Seth didn’t let that bother him. This was about buying himself a chance at a normal life; about breaking the chain; about ending his exile and starting life anew; it was about finding peace, finally. But more than anything—and this was hard for him to admit to himself—it was about winning. About beating his brother once and forever. Because Seth Lockwood did not lose. Not now. Not ever.

  The kid walked into a new part of town, a housing estate filled with hopes and dreams of fresh starts, neatly parceled-off lawns and paved garden paths. The sign on the green welcomed visitors to The Rothery. Seth followed the kid as the Reel phased into and out of existence like a flickering flame.

  So, this was where Boone had ended up?

  He’d seen worse places.

  The front door to one of the houses in the horseshoe of bright and shiny glass doors and leaded windows on Albion Clo
se opened and Barclay Raines emerged, shouting over his shoulder that he was just nipping out for a packet of cigarettes.

  “They’ll be the death of you,” Seth said, much to his own amusement as the kid followed Barclay to the corner store. He followed a couple of steps behind, and watched as the young man went in.

  “Wait,” he told the Reel. It inclined its head, listening, obeying. Seth went inside. It was a small shop, with jars of candies and toffees and striped mints on display, newspapers laid out on the counter, and a few everyday essentials on the shelves. Barclay was in conversation with the shopkeeper. For last words they were inconsequential, a back-and-forth about the game the night before. Something and nothing. Seth joined them at the counter.

  “Can I help you, mate?” the shopkeeper asked with a welcoming smile.

  “Just a copy of today’s paper. I want to remember everything about today.”

  “Then maybe you want tomorrow’s instead,” Barclay Raines said. He tapped two fingers on top of the headlines. “This is all yesterday.”

  Seth smiled at that. “Maybe I do. Sorry, don’t I know you? You’re Boone’s lad, right?” He nodded. “Thought so. I want you to know something before you die. I’m not the monster here. He is. It’s all on him. He had a chance to make this all go away. I begged him to, for your sake. But he didn’t think you were worth it.”

  “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “That’s okay, you don’t need to. You just need to die today. That’s more than enough for you to worry about.” Seth took the top copy of the newspaper and left without paying. At the threshold, he looked back to see the two men looking at him. Neither moved to stop him from stealing the paper.

  Seth sent the kid in to kill his nephew’s only child while he made his way back to Hell. And as he walked those lonely streets, he caught repeated reflections of himself in the windows, and saw again how many years had been stolen from him by that damned illusion, by Glass Town, and knew that the only hope he had of ever having anything approaching a real life would be if that damned magician could do the impossible and give them back to him. And that was the problem with impossible things, they were impossible.