May Contain Traces of Magic

by Tom Holt

  “All right?” SatNav’s voice, filtered through the partition.

  “Yes. Look, can I go home now? I don’t like it here.”

  “Shh. Someone’s coming.”

  He shushed, carefully slid the bolt across, and sat down on the toilet seat. Someone, he noticed, had written KH4CP in biro, just above the toilet-roll holder. KH, he thought. Karen Hitchins. That hadn’t been there, the last time.

  He tried to remember the third girl’s name. Ellie something. Jill would know. Well, of course she would. After all, Jill had murdered her, in this very toilet. No, correction: Jill was just about to murder her, in this very toilet—

  “SatNav,” he whispered.

  “Keep your voice down.”

  “SatNav,” he repeated, a little louder, “is that why you’ve brought me here? To stop it from happening?”

  “Stop what?”

  Voices. Voices that Chris recognised. Karen was talking. I’ve tried to get him to notice me, she was saying, but it’s like I’m just not there. He cringed.

  You’re overdoing it, he heard Jill reply, you’re trying too hard. Just be yourself, act natural, otherwise he’ll just think you’re strange. SatNav, he thought. Get me out of here, please.

  He heard her laughing, inside his head. “One good turn deserves another? I don’t think so.”

  Come on, please. It’s going to happen any moment now, and I really don’t want to be here. Not again.

  “It’s not as though you freed me on purpose,” SatNav’s voice went .on, in the precise centre of his head. “I just happened to be in your pocket when she pushed you, and you just happened to ask for directions once you’d landed, which meant I could wake up and come out; pure chance, you see. So I don’t owe you any favours.”

  Someone had just turned on a tap; hand-washing noises. Karen was saying, “I think he’s got his eye on that new cow.”

  “What, Ellie?” Confirmed: he’d been sure Jill would’ve known her name. “Hel-lo, I don’t think so.”

  “He was looking at her in RE.”

  “He’s got to look somewhere.”

  “Yes, but I saw how he was looking at her. I hate her, she’s horrible.”

  Next door, Chris heard the sound of a bolt moving, the creak of a hinge. The conversation stopped dead; and then he heard Karen say, in a tiny little voice, “Hi, Ellie.”

  Now or never, he thought. I can save her, just so long as I— And then he thought: hold on, next door. Isn’t that where SatNav—?

  He heard a swish, and then the scream, and then the scream’s abrupt end, as if the sound had been sliced off with a blade (and he thought, cuts through anything); then a silence that was the scream in negative, equal and opposite. And then Karen’s voice, saying, “Jill...”

  And Jill saying, “I never liked her much, either.”

  SatNav, Chris thought, and burst through the cubicle door.

  There was Jill, standing over a body, a tape-measure in her hand, and there was blood—real blood—in a pool on the floor. Too late. She’d already done it.

  She looked up at him, and smiled. “Fancy seeing you here,” she said.

  (Where was Karen?) “SatNav,” he said. “You killed her.” She shrugged. “You know what she was,” she said. “It’s only like a game death—reset to zero. Her parents’ll be upset, of course, but I can’t help that. Human emotion—” She licked her lips, then frowned. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “If they catch you, you’ll be in so much trouble. Illicit time travel and spying on teenage girls in a lavatory. If I were you, I’d go back the way you came. I’ll pull the chain after you.”

  Chris wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at the body, and the blood. Never seen a girl hacked to death before. SatNav, he thought; I loved her, and you killed her.

  Something slapped his face, hard enough to make him stagger. It was the wing of a very small bird, and the second slap knocked him off his feet. He fell back into the cubicle, balanced for a moment on the edge of the toilet seat, and fell backwards into a long, smooth-sided shaft—

  Chris was standing in water up to his ankles. People were staring.

  “Where the hell did you get to?” Jill was saying. He didn’t reply. He was looking down.

  He realised what was wrong with the ducks; why they were floating like that, sort of on their sides with their heads trailing in the water. They were dead.

  “Chris?”

  The ripples nudged a dead duck against his shin. “What?”

  “Come out of there,” Jill hissed. “Before someone calls the police.”

  He frowned, staring down at the water. “Jill,” he said, “what happened to the ducks?”

  “Get out of the water, you idiot.”

  Well, yes, he thought, that’d be a sensible thing to do. “The ducks,” he repeated, as he squelched ashore. “Did you—?”

  “You’ve got to understand,” she said, dragging him along by the arm, “this isn’t a bloody game. The sort of forces being used here aren’t to be trifled with.”

  “Jill—”

  She shook her head. “Something happened while you were gone,” she said. “It was pretty nasty, actually. I had to earth it, so to speak, before it blew both of us away. Just as well those ducks were there, or God only knows what might’ve happened.” She let go of his arm but carried on walking fast, so he had to work hard to keep up with her. “You didn’t answer my question,” she said. “Where did you go?”

  Chris didn’t answer straight away. He’d noticed that he was holding something in his hand: an earring, in the shape of a hummingbird. He stopped dead in his tracks, and looked at it.

  “Chris?” Jill had stopped too, and was staring over his shoulder. “What’ve you got there?”

  “Oh, nothing,” he said, but too late. She’d seen it.

  “Where did you get that, Chris?” she asked.

  He turned his head and looked at her, and at that moment he didn’t need Dave Ackery’s sunglasses. “It’s Karen’s,” he said. “She got them in—”

  “No, it’s not,” Jill said firmly. “It’s mine.”

  She held out her hand, just like a teacher confiscating bubble gum, but he closed his fist around the earring, so hard that its little pointy wings dug into his palm. “Debenhams,” he said. “That’s where she got them. She told me so herself.”

  And then his fingers unclenched and opened, like the petals of a flower, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Jill picked the earring up between her thumb and forefinger, then dropped it immediately, as though it was hot or something.

  “That’s one of a pair I had for my fifteenth birthday,” she said. “I was really fond of them. If you turn it over, you’ll see there’s a little tiny letter K just next to the pin.”

  “It was in my hand,” Chris said weakly. “Haven’t a clue how it got there.”

  He felt his hand come back under his control, and immediately shoved the earring into his shirt pocket. “What happened, Chris?” Jill said. “I need to know, you must see that.”

  It was as though he’d taken off a coat whose pockets were filled with lead bricks. “Search me,” he said. “I fell down this pipe thing, I think it was a sewer, and I came out in the girls’ toilets at school. I think it was the day when—”

  “Oh.” She blinked twice. “Well, I guess that’s possible. That occasion’s most definitely in there. But it wasn’t where I wanted you to go.” She frowned. “Did you—?”

  “I heard it, yes,” Chris said quietly. “I was in a cubicle, so I didn’t actually see— But I heard the scream. So, you didn’t send me there?”

  “Certainly not. It isn’t something I’d want to share with anybody. I was planning on showing you my birth, actually, the moment when I became human.”

  “Ah. Glad I missed that, actually.”

  Jill muttered something about men under her breath, and they walked on for a while in silence. Chris was thinking: Ellie, the girl in the cubicle next to mine, the girl w
ho got killed, and then the hummingbird earring. Serves me right for skiving off work, I guess.

  “Have you made up your mind yet?” she said.

  “What about?”

  “Whether you believe me or not.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  Chris sighed. “On balance, yes, I think I do.”

  “Good,” Jill said firmly. “Only, our friendship’s important to me.”

  Indeed, he thought; the way pigs are important to a sausage-maker. But he took that back. The crazy part of it was, even though he was pretty sure she wasn’t actually human, she was still Jill, a fundamental part of the furniture of his life, even though their shared past was rapidly falling to bits all around him. Lunatic, he thought; human, he thought. And of course it’s our duty to embrace diversity in all its many-splendoured forms.

  “Right,” he said. “What now?”

  She looked at him. “What now what?”

  “What do we do?”

  Jill sighed. “Well,” she said, “I get on with protecting humanity from malignant demons, and you get on with selling portable parking spaces to gullible people. I think that ought to cover it.”

  Chris stopped and stared at her. “You mean, we don’t do anything.”

  “We don’t, yes. We, as in you and me as a team, heroine and sidekick. It’s not like anything’s changed,” she went on. “Yes, all right, they’ve been hassling you—”

  “Hassling—”

  Stern look. “You’re still alive, aren’t you? All right,” she conceded, softening the glare a lumen or so, “they’ve been after you because they think—correcdy, as it turns out—that you know where I am. Fine. You’ve drawn this to my attention, and I’ll deal with it. Note,” she added, “the pronoun. Not we’ll deal with it. This is what I do. What I need from you is dumb cooperation, not input. I’ll get rid of the demons for you, and that’ll be that. We can all go back to normal.”

  Normal, Chris thought. Normality, where my girlfriend and my best friend are demons who live by sucking pain and angst out of people’s heads; and they’re the nice ones. “You can do that, can you?” he said. “Get rid of them, just like that”

  Jill nodded. “We can. Now that we know what they want, we can design a containment and protection strategy, and you can live happily ever after. All right?”

  Containment and protection strategy; he didn’t like the sound of that. He suspected that it had been put together out of the same box of verbal Lego as new government initiative and independent inquiry, the sort of thing They say when they want you to shut up and go away. Was Jill really just Them? If so, maybe he ought to start eating runny cheese and checking out yodelling classes for beginners. “Such as?” he insisted.

  Sigh. “Such as,” she said, “trapping the demons who’re after you and killing them. Will that do? Or would you rather we declared war?”

  “Oh,” Chris said. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

  Jill grinned. “Force of habit,” she replied. “The K word tends to make people nervous. Mind you, so do demons, so I take your point. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about it any more. We’ll take care of it. OK?”

  Put like that—”Fine,” he said. “I’ll leave it to you then.”

  “Good.”

  Simple as that? Apparently. So why was he so completely, overwhelmingly unconvinced? “And what about you?” he asked.

  “Me? Oh, I’ll just carry on carrying on. It’s a bit like painting the Forth Bridge, except it’s with blood rather than non-drip gloss.”

  And that’s me told. But Chris persisted: “So how’ll you go about it? Hunting them down, I mean.”

  Jill put on a business face. “We’ve got a number of different approaches. We can bait traps, or there’s stuff like probability wells and consequence mines, better mousetraps, phase-variance triggers. Gadgets, basically. But they work. And we’ll keep a tag on you at all times, so the moment one of them tries to come through at you we’ll be down on them like a ton of bricks. That’ll put them off in no time. Demons don’t have a concept of acceptable losses. There aren’t enough of us for that”

  All very reassuring, but if anything Chris was even more on edge than before. “That, um, SatNav thing of mine,” he said, as casually as he could manage. “Did you ever find out what happened to it?”

  Jill pulled a different kind of face. “Got clean away, as far as we can make out. Bloody annoying—it’s made us look like complete idiots. Must’ve been a defective containment charm; they may have to recall all of that model. It’ll be us that get yelled at, of course, it always is. I never did like the idea, there’s no such thing as one-hundred-per-cent-secure containment. Trouble is, the companies hire these high-powered lawyers for the compliance-committee hearings, they’ve got their own pet scientists, what can you do? Personally, I’d ban the bloody things, but nobody listens to us, they just leave us to clear up the mess.”

  Chris took a deep breath, to tell her with. A moment later he let it go again. Stupid, he thought as he did so, how can you expect her to protect you if you don’t tell her all the facts? “Do you think,” he said instead, “that she had anything to do with it?”

  “Sorry, I was miles away. Anything to do with what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Do you think she’ll come back after me?”

  Jill shook her head. “Highly unlikely,” she said. “If we can’t find it, it almost certainly means it managed to get back where it came from, so hopefully that’s the last we’ll see of it. The dryad authorities’ll give us a really hard time for letting one of their convicted criminals escape, but that’s all.”

  Dryad? Chris remembered: some kind of elf that lives in trees. But she wasn’t. At least, she’d told him she wasn’t. Free, she’d said; thank you. So, fine. What did it matter what she’d really been, if she wasn’t coming back any more. Except—

  “That Ellie,” he said nervously. “The girl in the—”

  “The girl I killed, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  Jill clicked her tongue. “For your birthday, I’m going to buy you Tact For Dummies. Promise me you’ll read it.”

  “That girl,” he said firmly. “You’re absolutely sure she was a demon?”

  She looked at him as though he’d just hit her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “She couldn’t have been something else. A what-you-just-said, dryad, for instance.” Slight hesitation; then, “Or a Fey.”

  Jill frowned. “No, of course not. And who’s been telling you about the Fey?”

  “Just something I read somewhere.”

  Sigh. “You know what,” she said. “You’re like a hypochondriac with a medical dictionary. You read about all the really rare, once-in-a-lifetime stuff and you start thinking it’s everywhere. We aren’t even sure the Fey actually exist. The chances of ever running into one-are—well, forget it, basically.”

  “Oh. As rare as that”

  She grinned. “Let’s put it this way. You come down one morning and something’s ripped open your dustbin bags. Now it could be a yeti or the Loch Ness Monster, but most likely it’s just cats or urban foxes. The Fey are—what’s the word I’m looking for—mostly theoretical. Like, there are stars nobody’s ever seen with a telescope, but they figure out that they exist by doing all sorts of complicated maths. Tripping over one in a Morrisons car park isn’t something you should lose sleep over.”

  “Ah.” Chris nodded. “But wasn’t mere one of them working for JWW a few years back? I think I heard something—”

  Jill shook her head. “Commercial folklore,” she said. “You know the kind of wild stories you get in the trade.”

  Yes, but they’re mostly true. “Oh, right,” he said. “Only, assuming there are such things as the Fey, where would they live?”

  Shrug. “We don’t actually know,” she said. “Some researchers think they’ve got a dimension of their very own, others reckon they shar
e the same plane as the demons, though I really doubt that. After all, I come from there and I certainly don’t remember seeing any of them hanging about. But of course it’s not as simple as that. If you really want me to explain, we’ll have to find a month when we’re both free and hire a cottage somewhere quiet.”

  “Right,” Chris said. “Only—last one, I promise. If I were to run into one, how’d I recognise it?”

  Jill was looking at him very oddly, but he pretended that he hadn’t noticed. “Actually,” she said, “that’s quite simple. At least, according to the scientists, and don’t ask me how they think they know.”

  “Well?”

  “Why are you so interested in the Fey all of a sudden? Is there something you haven’t told me, because if there is—” “Well?”

  “All you need is a mirror,” Jill said.

  “Oh, I see. Like vampires, you mean. They don’t show up.” Jill grinned at him. “Oh, quite the reverse,” she said.

  “They show up, all right. But, like I say, it’s entirely hypothetical, so I don’t see any point in discussing it. Unless there’s something that you’re keeping from me, and you say there isn’t. And,” she said, looking straight at him, “I believe you, so that’s that”

  The conversation pretty much died after that. Jill went back to her office—

  ( “Don’t worry,” she said, as they parted in the car park. “Really. We’ll take care of it”

  “Fine.”

  “So promise me you won’t do anything stupid.”

  Grin. “You wouldn’t want me to make promises I can’t keep.”

  “All right Promise me you won’t do anything stupid about this.”—And he went back to the flat, where he found an envelope on the kitchen table. It had Chris written on it in Karen’s distinctive spider-with-rickets handwriting. Of course, she left notes for him all the time. But she didn’t waste envelopes.

  Dear Chris,

  We’re finished. I’ve known for a long time. We don’t talk to each other any more. We hardly even see each other. And obviously you know it’s not just because I’ve been busy at work. Actually, it’s been pretty quiet recently. I just sit in the office after everybody’s left because I can’t face going home. That’s a stupid way to carry on. So I’m leaving. We’ll have to sort out the stuff at some point, but I can’t face doing it now. I’m not all that bothered about anything, to be honest. It’s mostly junk, anyhow.