by Alix Hadden
"Long story," she said, collapsing on the sofa and propping her crutch next to her. "Work injury. Sort of. Kir, could you...?"
"Of course," Kir said, resignedly. "Tea? Booze?"
"Not sure how well booze will go with these lovely painkillers they gave me," Ali said. "Peppermint tea, if I could."
"Ooh, me too," Heather said brightly. "Anyone else?"
One of Heather's friends -- one of the ones Kir faintly recognised -- was looking over at Ali with an expression Kir couldn't quite read.
"I'd be up for a tea," he said. "Hey there, Ali. Haven't seen you in a while."
"Hey River," Ali said. She was concentrating on settling her leg comfortably and didn't look over at River.
There was 100% consensus for drinks. Peppermint tea for six, then. Seven, if he wanted one too. Kir grit his teeth, then pasted on a smile, and went across the corridor to the kitchen. He put the kettle on, and began digging around in the chaos of Ali and Heather's kitchen cupboards for teabags.
"What're you up to here, then?" Ali was asking Heather.
Kir was only half-listening, but he heard Heather's bright reply of "Leylines!" before tuning out of the rest of what she was saying. She seemed enthusiastic about it, though, which was nice, right? And it was a distraction for Ali from the rest of the day's events, which was probably for the best.
He could do with a distraction himself. He was beginning to wonder whether Ali was right after all, and he really had made a horrible mistake with Zach. Unbidden, his mind was running back over the fight in the coffee shop, showing him Zach wading straight in to a situation that must have seemed even more terrifying to him than it had to Kir and Ali, because Zach had only a few days of knowing that weird shit really could happen, magic was real, all that stuff. But he hadn't run away, he'd just -- gotten on with it.
It was Kir who'd done the running away. Maybe not right there in the shop, but...
No. He was right. Everything was much easier if he just didn't get involved with anyone, didn't put anyone else in the firing line, didn't distract himself from what he was supposed to be doing. How much had he gotten done on his current research projects, since starting to get interested in Zach? Yes, fine, he'd been distracted by this whole bloody mud-things business too, but it wasn't like he'd been putting all that much energy into that either, was it? They still didn't know what was happening.
No. Fewer distractions was clearly better, that was all there was to it. And then people were less likely to get hurt. He should know that by now.
He distributed peppermint tea around the hippy friends, then the last two mugs over to where Ali was ensconced on the sofa with her leg stretched out. There wasn't much room for anyone else on there, so after handing mugs to Ali and Heather, Kir lowered himself onto the floor next to Heather and all her papers and maps and what-have-you. He leant his head back against the sofa, and Ali scratched affectionately at the top of his head. Ali might not be knackered, but he definitely was. He didn't want to leave until he knew Ali was safely settled in bed, but if she was going to stay up after this mug of tea, he might have to. Heather and her friends were drawing lines and crosses across a map, with frequent reference to what looked like some photocopies from the library and a very untidy notebook. He didn't bother listening to them.
"Ugh," Ali said after a minute. "I need the loo. Kir, if you even think about asking if I can manage on my own I will stab you with one of Heather's felt tips."
"Wouldn't dream of it," Kir said, waving his hand in a negatory way.
While Ali hobbled across the room, he cast a mildly curious eye over them. One of the maps was the Ordnance Survey for this area, he could see from here -- he recognised the shapes of the roads. There were red crosses on it in several places, and green lines joining them up. He leant over to get a better look.
"Those are leylines," Heather told him, seeing what he was looking at. "We've been plotting them for the last few weeks in the group, you see."
One of the lines ran across Kir's road. Kir blinked, and looked a bit more closely. No. One of the lines ran right through Kir's actual building, give or take. Although, with this scale of map, he could be overstating the case. Probably any one of three or four buildings could be where they'd drawn that particular line.
"Today I was out marking the exact locations where the lines cross roads," Heather said. "Look, there's house numbers. I've only done one of them, so far, though."
She was pointing at the line that crossed Kir's road. And there, in pencil, were two numbers. His building, and the one over the road.
"Maria was saying she's been recording disturbances along the lines," Heather said, impressively.
Kir wasn't really paying attention. He was looking at the other line. Which ran just behind Peckham High Road. And the thing with OS maps was, they marked Post Offices. And yes, there was the Post Office, and there was the alleyway behind it that Ali had called him to, that first mud beast she'd encountered, and there was the leyline going right through it. And when he followed it further through Peckham and towards New Cross...
The coffee shop. It was on a corner, so even if Heather hadn't marked the street numbers yet for that line, Kir could be pretty certain that the line, as marked, went right through it.
Heather was talking about disturbances. Missing pets, sinkholes, a minor gas explosion...
Sinkholes.
"What, like, holes in the ground?" Kir asked, looking up.
"Well, kind of," Heather said. "A bit like something was sucking dirt up out of the ground, I guess. But I suppose it's all about tree roots and stuff, isn't it?
"Like that enormous one I saw on the internet a while back," one of Heather's friends said, seriously. "I mean, how much power must that have?"
Kir couldn't quite believe that he was taking this seriously. Leylines? Really?
"Well, yes, some leylines are more powerful than others," Heather agreed. "And of course, when they meet, or cross, or whatever, that can certainly be particularly powerful."
Where they cross. Kir looked over the map, and there, right enough, was the place where the two leylines Heather had marked crossed. Just up the road from the coffee shop, a couple of streets over.
"Do you know where these two cross, then?" he asked, doing his best to keep his voice level.
Leylines. This couldn't possibly be anything to do with the mud-things. It had to just be a coincidence. But then, they were ground-linked, and it wasn't about bones... What were leylines supposed to be, anyway? Could it be possible that they were tracking something magical, something actually true, that just didn't have an explanation other than the magical one and so was routinely dismissed? But then why didn't mages know about it, if so?
Mages didn't know that much, though. Kir was regularly frustrated by how much the older ones, in particular, didn't know about anything.
"Oh, we haven't been there yet," Heather said. "Maria said, we'll go next week, and test out the feel of the crossing point. Dowsing and stuff, you know? See if we can feel the full power of it." She looked cheerful.
Kir didn't feel terribly cheerful. If there was anything to this... He needed to show Ali. In fact -- where was Ali? She'd been in the loo for a fair while. He looked around the room. And where was River? The back of his neck prickled. He got up, muttering something meaningless under his breath, and went out into the corridor.
River and Ali were standing outside the bathroom door. River was saying something, leaning over a bit, right in Ali's face, and Ali looked -- frightened? Kir was there with them in two strides, grabbed River's shoulder, and pulled him back.
"Hey! What the hell are you doing? Leave her alone!"
River swung round and glared at him. "Fine. You ask her what this is about. She's broken a fucking agreement, right?" He looked back at Ali. "You need to sort this out."
Ali leant back against the wall. Her skin looked slightly grey with exhaustion.
"What was that about?" Kir asked, reining himself in a
t the last moment before he crossed the line into hassling her himself.
"Oh god," Ali said wearily. "I suppose I'd better tell you. I thought I could fix it, but..." She sighed, and Kir felt a spike of real anxiety.
"Let's go into your room?" he suggested, then remembered. The leylines. He needed to show Ali before Heather put everything away. "Shit. I need to show you something, first. Can you manage another couple of minutes in there?"
"Is it really necessary?" Ali said. Her eyes were shut, and her face looked drawn.
"Um," Kir said. "It might be. With, you know, the things?"
Ali's eyes shot open. "Really? Fuck. Okay. Come on."
They went back into the living room, and Ali sat back down and took another gulp of her tea.
"Hey Ali," Kir said, once he was sitting down again too. "Did you see this! One of Heather's leylines goes right through your shop."
He had his finger on the map around where the shop was, but as she leant over to look, tapped with the other hand on the spot where his flat was marked. Ali glanced down there as well, and her eyes went wide for a second before she laughed and said something non-committal and clever about what effect it might have on the coffee.
He was counting the minutes until they could both reasonably get up again and he could find out what was going on with Ali and River; but then River himself stood up, shouldering his rucksack, and said he needed to be off. That set off a flurry of departures, and five minutes later, the visitors were all out of the door, and Heather had yawned, and packed her stuff away, and gone off to bed.
"You saw it," he said, turning around to face Ali as soon as he heard the door of Heather's room close.
"Yes," Ali said. "But fucksake, Kir, this is ridiculous. Leylines?"
"I know. I know, okay? But going straight through my flat, and the shop, and that damn alleyway? I mean, sure, it could just be coincidence."
"But we have to look into it. Yeah. I take your point. Just not right now, okay?"
Kir rolled his eyes. "Don't worry. It's all I'm going to be able to do to get myself home."
"You're welcome to the sofa," Ali said.
Kir shook his head. "I'd rather get home. But before that..."
Ali grimaced. "River. Yeah."
"What happened?"
Ali rubbed at her eyes. "Okay. Look, get off the floor and come up here, okay? Talking downwards is awkward."
Kir rearranged himself on the sofa with Ali's injured leg on his lap, and listened to Ali's explanation.
"So. You remember Arsehole Ben? Well, he left me with a bit more of a money problem than maybe I let on, because," she grimaced, "I loaned him some money myself, and obviously that disappeared with him along with the bills-and-rent money."
"You could have just asked me," Kir said, before he could stop himself.
"I hate that," Ali said fiercely. "I didn't want to ask. I wanted to sort it out myself. Okay? And I knew if I told me you'd get all worried about it, and want to help, and Kir, you're really hard going once you've got it into your mind that you ought to be helping someone. Like, you never back off."
Kir winced.
"So, I was talking to River about potential flatmates, and he mentioned Heather, and then he said, if I wanted to earn a bit of cash-in-hand, he had some stuff he needed to store for a while somewhere safe, and perhaps I could see my way clear to keeping it in the basement of the cafe for a bit. And he'd pay me."
"Stuff," Kir said flatly.
"Yes, Kir. Stuff. Mostly dope. Bit of ayahuasca as well, I think. So I thought, hey, this is pretty easy money, and it would get me out of a hole. No worries. And then there was a fucking great tidal wave of coffee, and I realised that just maybe I should have put it off the ground."
"It got wrecked?" Kir asked.
"Yeah. And it's not like I could even slightly afford to pay for it, and if you say I should have told you at the time, Kir, I am going to hurt you. But what I did think was -- you remember I said I'd done magic just beforehand? Well, I felt the energy of the stuff, while I was doing it, and I wondered if that was what triggered it."
"What about the alleyway, though?"
"Might have had a spliff in my pocket," Ali said, looking down at her fingers. "I mean, never been a problem before, obviously, but I wondered if maybe there was a specific strain or something like that, maybe..."
"And you didn't tell me?" Kir demanded. "Come on, Ali, that really was out of order. I went over that alleyway with a sodding tooth comb and you didn't say you already had a theory?"
Ali shook her head. "I didn't, then. I hadn't thought about it. It was only after what happened in the coffee shop. And then I didn't really want to tell you til I could work out if I could fix up the stuff, because I'd have had to cop to the whole thing all at once. I thought, if it was that, I could let you know once I wasn't in shit with River, right? And then there was the thing in your flat, and I know you don't keep anything like that around, so obviously it wasn't that and it didn't matter any more."
"Apart from the bit where you were in shit with River," Kir said.
"Which I didn't want you wading in and rescuing me from," Ali snapped. "Stop being so over-protective, Kir. I am not your responsibility, okay? And nor is Zach, come to that."
"How about we leave Zach out of this for now?" Kir said, his jaw clenching.
"Okay, yeah, you're right." Ali gave a huge sigh. "So. I've got a big bag of coffee-soaked skunk and ayahuasca which River wanted back, like, yesterday, and I was having to avoid him increasingly hard. And I thought, Jean says it's not death-magic, and it's happened in different places each time, so maybe it would be okay to do magic in the shop again."
"That -- um. That doesn't sound like such great logic," Kir said.
"Yes. I know. Well, I definitely know now. You see where this is going, right?"
"You tried to fix the stuff up -- pull the coffee out, I guess, or something? -- using magic. In the cafe. Tonight. Did it at least work?"
"Didn't get the chance to find out," Ali said. "That thing came up at me soon as I started, and from there you know as much as I do."
"Shit," Kir said. He rubbed at his face with his hands. "So. If you're telling me about it now, does that mean you're open to help?"
"I suppose so," Ali said, with obvious reluctance.
"How much would it cost to buy the stuff off River and be done with it."
Ali named a sum that made Kir's eyes widen.
"Right. Well, I don't exactly have that much lying around either, so maybe there's another way out of it." He bit his lip. "We could just -- let the police know. About River."
Ali leant forwards and punched him, hard, in the arm.
"What was that for?"
"That was for you being a total knob," Ali said. "I am not bloody dobbing River into the cops for dealing weed and hippy DMT. You total arse."
"Okay, sorry," Kir said. "Can we call it blue-sky thinking and you can forgive me?"
"With some reluctance," Ali said, "but yes. Think again, mate." She sighed. "I do think the cleaning it with magic thing would work, you know. I can see how I'd do it. But..."
"Huh," Kir said. "In that case -- what if we fix the mud-things problem first, and then you can just do that?"
"Fix the mud-things problem, he says, as if it's as easy as that," Ali said to the ceiling.
"We have a lead now, though, right?" Kir said.
"A stupid hippy lead," Ali said.
"But. It's a lead. Is River going to be back after you again tomorrow?"
"I told him to give me a couple of days," Ali said. "I kind of made it sound like I'd put it somewhere safe and Patience had lost the keys. He's not so urgent about the dope, but he said the ayahuasca is for a thing at the end of the week, and it's not that easy to get hold of in a hurry."
"Well then. Let's see what we can do with this leylines stuff tomorrow."
Ali gave an enormous yawn. "When one of us might have a spare awake braincell to apply to the problem. Right."
"And back to not doing any magic at all," Kir warned her.
"I have no intention of doing any magic," Ali assured him. "None at all. Go home, Kir. Get some sleep."
Kir leant over and hugged her. "I'm sorry," he said into her hair. "For being so interfering that you didn't want to tell me about it."
Ali hugged him back. "Thanks. For apologising. I still love you, idiot person, even if you are massively over-controlling sometimes."
"You too."
He thought about it, both what Ali had said about herself, and what she'd said about him and Zach earlier, all the way home. It wasn't comfortable.
CHAPTER NINE
It was well into mid-morning when Kir woke. He spent a while blinking himself into consciousness, faintly wondering why he was so tired; then the events of the previous day hit him like an anvil to the side of the head.
Zach. That was the part that felt worst and hit first, until he reminded himself that he should be worrying more about Ali, and possibly more still about the mud-things, in particular the fact that they were getting stronger. And then there was the whole business of the leylines and whether that had anything to do with things.
But the fact that he wouldn't be seeing Zach again was what kept coming back to him, leaving him feeling tense and empty -- and guilty. He bit his lip. It was for the best. Wasn't it?
He spent a while under a very hot shower, attempting to wake himself up, before putting a pot of coffee on -- a large pot of coffee -- and texting Ali. The coffee was brewed and he was halfway through his second mug of it, consumed while scanning and deleting email, before she texted back.
Only just up. Feel like hammered shit. Absolutely not going hunting mythical ground-based power sources today. x
Well shit.
Just leaving it alone doesn't seem like the best of ideas either, he texted back.
Kir. I can't, okay? Just don't do any, you know, stuff. That seems to be needed to trigger anything, right? x
True, there was that. Even so. He scowled down at his phone. Surely they should be treating this business with more urgency? What if someone else wandered into this area and casually did a bit of magic? Should they be warning everyone else in London away?