The fight was over at the third strike since the Russian’s legs were no longer supporting him, only the ropes holding him up, but Usher delivered two more brutal elbows to the man’s jaw, shattering it like sandstone under a hammer and relieving his opponent of all consciousness.
Usher stood over the pulpy faced man that lay motionless at his feet, breathing hard and allowing the sounds of the world to slowly start to filter back into his mind. The tunnel vision broadened and the edges lost their blur.
He stood up, the pain returning to his body that adrenalin had temporarily relieved.
Sucking on a burst lip, Usher slipped under the ropes and jumped down onto the floor. He picked up a bottle of water and took a long swig. Kramer handed him his towel. All the while Dmitri, the big mafia boss, just stood there staring at him.
Usher spat some pinkish water into a bucket.
“So, what were we saying?”
Dmitri stared at him for a few moments then laughed, a big baritone chuckle that chilled Usher to the bone.
“Alright Mr Tom Fool, I think we can find work for you. But all I have to offer you is pain. This man you just fight, it will never be this easy again.”
Usher took a deep breath then nodded curtly.
Easy?
He was in. He was going to see and probably fight in the Secret Arena. Right now, he just wanted to get back to the safehouse and Christi, close the door, get blind drunk and let the world go to Hell.
15
After the fight Usher had gone back to the safehouse, taken two aspirin, and fallen into a deep sleep. He woke up in the small hours of the morning, soaked in sweat, with the Valkyrie Ursula perched in the corner of the room staring at him with her black eyes.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
Usher sat bolt upright and reached for the pistol he kept under his pillow. It was not there.
“How did you get in here? There are sigils all over this house.”
The winged woman sighed.
“Against the Deep. Not against me. I’ve been trying to tell you that this was your lot’s fatal mistake from the beginning. “
Usher tried to rub sleep from his eyes and sat up in his bed. He was disorientated and still coming to terms with there being a six foot myth in his bedroom.
She was just perched there on the headrest of his armchair, oblivious to her size or gravity. Her huge bladed wings were folded neatly down her back.
Usher didn’t feel comfortable being in bed for this meeting so threw back the covers and stood up naked. He grabbed his jeans and drew them over his legs. Then he stood there for a moment letting his brain adjust.
“Have you got something useful to tell me, or is watching men sleep another kink? Because I’m all out of kink. I’m all about the normal these days. You realize the effect, the actual psychological effect waking up and seeing a giant kestrel-woman squatting on a chair has on a person?”
Ursula shifted a little on her perch.
Usher suddenly felt slightly nauseated that he had had sex with this freakish thing. (Or that he had enjoyed it?). Not that he had been given much choice.
“I like watching you sleep. It’s the only time you ever look peaceful. I think you were dreaming about your family tonight.”
Well it’s the only time I get to see them so thanks for waking me up. Which was traumatizing by the way, if you’d let me finish.”
“I was protecting you. How could that be traumatizing? You never feel safe or guarded.”
Usher took a cigarette from the softpack next to the bed and lit one up to calm his nerves.
“What makes you think that?”
“You sleep with a weapon under your pillow. What is that for if not a feeling of safety?”
Usher blew out a plume of smoke and regarded the creature sidelong.
“It’s for scaring birds.”
“You regret our union.”
Usher paced his room.
“Do I regret fucking a mythical creature? A massive birdwoman that’s twice as strong as me? An insane riddling bunny boiler from another world that happens to be another species?”
“Yes. You regret it?”
Usher stopped and stared at her for a long moment.
“Honestly, I’ve had worse.”
The Valkyrie smiled and stretched her wings a little.
“May I sit down?”
“On a chair, like a normal person? Yes that would take the edge right off this situation. Or if you prefer I have a small table in the back garden with a spinning mirror on it.”
Ursula hopped effortlessly down to sit in the chair. Her wings wrapped around her like an elegant feathered cloak. The strange eyes regarded him with amusement.
“You’re not a night owl are you?”
Usher walked over and took a cold beer from the mini fridge next to the television. He tossed one over to Ursula who caught it without looking then watched him to see what he would do. Usher cracked it open and she did the same.
“I’m not. So that makes one of us. Can you do that turn your head right round thing?”
They both took a long swig of icy beer and regarded each other over the bottles.
Finally Usher put his bottle down on the table and flicked a hand at her.
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
He paused, drew the blinds a little to let the moonlight in.
“For looking out for me while I sleep. I don’t always sleep so well. Not deep enough to dream. And like I said, when I dream it’s the only time I get to see my family. Like they were.”
“Perhaps that is how best to remember.”
“What do you mean? Are they alive? Over on the other side?”
“I honestly don’t know. I’m like you Usher. A soldier for masters that only tell as much as is needed to get the job done.”
Ursula gestured to the cigarettes on the bedside table. “May I?”
Usher nodded, then leaned forward and lit it for her. The flame made her eyes glow like hot coals.
“I know exactly the feeling you mean. I always get it when I’m about to walk into some dark cave or jungle on orders. That sneaking feeling that they aren’t telling you everything.”
Ursula took a deep draw and regarded him coolly.
“They don’t know about us meeting. I think neither side would approve of our dalliances.”
Usher shook his head and let out a derisory laugh.
“No I don’t think they would. Unsanctioned contact with Otherkind? I’d probably get slotted by my own people and thrown in a ditch. It’s lucky I trust my team. Hell, most of them have fucked stranger things than you.”
The Valkyrie suddenly seemed to become very serious.
“Usher I have learned that the Unseelie have recovered the box of seeds that Arrik carried with him. He had hidden it on his travels in the place you call Afghanistan before going into the long sleep.”
Usher frowned. “So what kind of trees exactly do this Arrik’s seeds grow?”
“The box he bears contains the frozen seeds of the World Tree. The trees that grow from these seeds create doorways. Not unstable thin spots like the Unseelie have squeezed through for centuries. Stable portals where they could come through not piecemeal or as lone agents but as easily as from a room to a room. Do you see the danger?”
Usher blew out his cheeks and nodded.
“Thinspots are intermittent and dangerous for Unseelie. They run as much risk of killing themselves by coming through as they do us. They wax and wane like the moon and often they aren’t there at all. We don’t understand much about them but their instability is about the only thing that’s kept us safe for hundreds of years. These trees, how does it work?”
The Valkyrie seemed to struggle for words a little. Finally she spoke.
“The roots need blood to drink. That blood sacrifice is what opens the doorway of the tree. I think the Unseelie want to sacrifice Arrik to the World Tree in and open a permanent gateway to the De
ep Realm. I do not know what plans Arrik originally had for the seeds. Perhaps in your distant past he wanted to create his own empire between my side and yours. Perhaps he just wanted a means to come home to us when his self-imposed exile was over. Whatever the reason he saw the danger of the trees and hid the box.”
Usher moved to the window. He parted the blinds and opened the pane allowing night breeze to wash over him. He looked up at the moon. It was full and brilliant white above the city skyline. He watched an aeroplane fly high above the city, its warning lights flashing in the dark.
“I can’t allow that. I can’t allow any more of those monsters to come over here.”
The Valkyrie drained the last of her beer.
“Something we agree on. Those seeds belong to us, they are precious. I’m relying on you to help get them back. And Arrik too.”
Usher peered at her.
“This isn’t just a mission is it? You know him.”
“I knew him a long time ago. He may not even remember who he is now. Or who he cared for.”
Usher could not explain why but he trusted this creature. It exuded the same qualities he admired in the men and women he worked with. For Usher most Otherkind had always been duplicitous and evil creatures whose only objective was death and destruction. This Valkyrie was different. She was a soldier like him. He could relate to whatever loyalty she felt. A soldier will do anything for a comrade.
He turned around to face the creature.
“You realize I could still get killed for even talking with you?”
She nodded curtly.
“As could I.”
“Fine. Then we both have a much to lose. You need to know that I’ll do whatever it takes to stop Argent and those berserkers he’s created. If that means stopping it at source and destroying this old friend of yours then that’s what it takes.”
The Valkyrie stared at him a long moment then nodded.
“Agreed. Although you may not find that as easy as it sounds.”
Usher shrugged and lit another cigarette.
“Nothing I’ve ever done is as easy as it sounds.”
Ursula smiled and leaned back a little, stretching her wings and letting herself get comfortable in the chair. Her long muscular legs reached lazily out across the floor. In the moonlight her skin was alabaster white.
Her eyes seemed to soften to a warm liquid gold. “You are to be fighting tomorrow in the Arena? It will be dangerous. Do you need another blessing?”
Usher stood by the window in his jeans smoking his cigarette. This creature was stronger looking than most professional fighters he had sparred with, it had eyes like an owl, wings that stretched across the room, no social skills whatsoever and it was probably older than his distant ancestors. Ursula was a long way from human.
Yet Usher found himself looking at the milk white thighs that lazily parted before him. They were as rippling as an Olympic sprinter’s and ended in long perfect toes each sporting a razor sharp silver talon.
Usher stubbed out his cigarette and whipped off his jeans.
“Sure. Why not.”
16
The black limousines and Hummers had arrived in convoy at the rear of the hotel.
Usher sat in the rear of one limousine next to Sarkhov and one of his bodyguards.
Usher looked at the two Unseelie representatives sat opposite him in the limousine. The sat perfectly still in the car facing forward and appearing not to notice anyone else around them. Their rubber faces were identical, with benign moulded smiles. Usher had no idea what their expressions were underneath the masks, or if they had faces at all, but the expression they now wore mocked him.
Sarkhov held something up in front of Usher.
“Put this on.”
Usher fixed the blindfold over his eyes, and for the next hour and a half spent the journey in darkness, listening intently to the sound of the engine.
When it was finally removed, they were somewhere on the outskirts of the city and a hush descended over the cars like a smothering pillow.
As Usher exited the car, he breathed in country air and absorbed the deep silence in the trees around him. A few lights twinkled in the trees several miles away. A farm perhaps? In front of them was a steep green hillside that seemed man-made, with concrete shapes jutting out of the turf. It was silhouetted against the moon like an enormous barrow mound.
A bunker or some kind of nuclear shelter, long abandoned or so it seemed.
On a large flat area of grass in front, several cars and vans were parked. Usher stretched and peered around him at the trees. A barn owl sounded off then flitted up into the night.
Sarkhov gripped his arm like a vice and led him towards a dark graffiti marked tunnel lit with a flickering old electric strip light. Usher had a sudden panicky feeling that he was about to be shot, but he swallowed it down.
They wouldn’t bring you all this way and not get their money’s worth. Maybe I am about to get killed, but not before everyone has placed their bets.
They stopped at a heavy old blast door, rusted pockmarked and studded with rivets.
A section suddenly grated out and a pair of milky white eyes glared out at them from the letterbox sized gap.
Then the doors were opened and Usher was staring at a thick pair of heavy crimson curtains, held open by a huge bald man with a livid pink scar across his pale face. Through the material, Usher’s senses were assaulted with the sights and smells of two worlds colliding.
Then the red curtains were pulled open like slash in reality and there he stood as the entrails of London bled out towards him.
The Secret Arena.
The irony of its location was not lost on Usher. A long abandoned nuclear bunker on the outskirts of London, a place designed as an impenetrable shelter, to keep all the destructive forces of the world safely outside. A place forgotten by the world after the cold war, appearing only on a select few urban explorer websites.
How strange that this subterranean warren should be the thinnest of thin spots, a membranous sheet of tarry womb lining, squeezing out horrors from the great void beyond. Usher wondered if this was the crack that Isaiah Argent had crawled through like a cockroach three hundred years before, before leaving his trail of ectoplasmic slime all the way to London’s corridors of power.
It was crowded, a mixture of human and Unseelie involved in a strange, decades (centuries?) old truce such as Usher had never seen. A great deal of the humans present were Russian mafia, resplendent in prison tattoos over their steroid swollen muscles, but Usher also spotted a contingent of Hong Kong Triads, then unshaven men smoking strong cigarettes that he took to be Albanian people traffickers, leather jacketed and moustachioed Turkish heroin smugglers, a contingent of tall slim Africans in paramilitary uniforms, and others he could not identify. But some of the people here were simply the rich, the corrupt and the damned. Tourists in Hell, seeking the ultimate in experience and memories. People who had been initiated into the world’s most secret club.
Milling amongst them were denizens of the Unseelie Court, some wrapped in a tight swathe of pulsing human flesh, but others flagrantly displaying their true forms.
To see Court denizens so undisguised was shocking to Usher, like seeing a flasher in a busy shopping centre that no one else seemed to be noticing.
Usher stood there at the entrance to the Secret Arena, trying to give his mind time to adjust. This place had obviously been here a long time. The unreality and anti-physics of the Unseelie realm had leaked through over the years, encrusting the chambers of the arena like barnacles upon a ship’s timbers. It coated the walls like a fluorescent mould creeping into the cracks of an old house to give what should seem familiar an unsettling, alien appearance.
Within the vast main chamber of damp concrete, a vague cramped semblance of a marketplace had arisen over the years, but it was so confusing to the senses Usher did not know what to make of it.
Gravity was distorted, time periods merged, physics was bent in
to ugly shapes. It was only the constant stench of magic blowing through from the other side that stopped this place collapsing to a singularity under its own weight.
On one level this border trading post between worlds resembled a medieval market town, with crooked chimneys billowing crimson smoke and gravity defying towers that would give any engineer a nervous breakdown, on another it was a futuristic temple to mammon and avarice, all washed out neon lights and faded future.
Sarkhov held Usher lightly by the arm. Usher realised that despite all he had seen in his career, the existence of this place still managed to shock him.
Sarkhov smiled at Usher.
“So Tom Fool, you think you had your Veil lifted before, but you have never been to a place like this.”
Usher nodded in genuine amazement.
“How is this place kept secret? It’s insane.”
Sarkhov shrugged. “Anyone who can’t keep a secret gets eaten alive.”
Usher knew that wasn’t a euphemism.
“So where does the exchange happen? This doesn’t exactly feel like safe territory. It feels like the Court is more than dominant here.”
Sarkhov unbuttoned his overcoat and lit a cigarette.
“We have traded with the Court for many years, since back in Motherland, since before revolution. We have an understanding. And we have a contact on the inside that we trust.”
Usher felt his pulse quicken. His mind was still adapting to the myriad sights, sounds and smells of this secret place, but Sarkhov’s mention of a contact within the Unseelie Court snapped Usher’s mind to attention.
Sarkhov was smiling straight ahead. “Ah Mr Styx, good to see you again. You’re looking well, dapper as always.”
Usher followed Sarkhov’s gaze, and was confronted with a denizen of the Court such as he had not encountered before.
In a crystal clear melodic voice it addressed them.
“Good evening Dmitri, you look well fed and well dressed. Who is your friend?”
The being snapped it’s head quickly towards Usher and then remained still. Usher merely assumed it was staring at him, since it had no eyes.
The Last Line Series One Page 13