Stronge looked even more astonished by Shift’s transformation than she did when she saw the gnome with the broken neck get back up again. ‘That’s incredible,’ she said, her half-full pint glass forgotten in her hand.
‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ Shift replied, speaking in gravel-throated masculine tones now. ‘Give me a minute and I’ll do the whole Benetton rainbow for you.’
As fascinated as Stronge was by that prospect, she spoke with a note of caution. ‘Wouldn’t that be a bit… I don’t know…?’
‘Racist? I wouldn’t know. I’m not human, so to me it’s the difference between a horse and a zebra.’
Stronge barked a laugh. It was clear from the look of wide-eyed wonder she wore that she found Shift absolutely fascinating.
I leaned forward. ‘Is that a smile, Kat? Careful, you’ll pull a muscle.’
‘Shut up,’ came the double-barrelled reply.
I turned to Frank, shaking my head. ‘Women.’
He avoided my gaze, refusing to be complicit—a traitor, maybe, but not an idiot.
Once again, Stronge steered us back to the matter at hand. ‘Look, it’s been lovely meeting you, Shift—’
‘Ditto—’
‘—But can someone please tell me what we’re all doing here?’
‘I was starting to wonder the same thing myself,’ said Shift, turning to me. ‘Well, why was I summoned, Fletcher? Surely not just for my sparkling personality?’
‘I need your help on a case,’ I explained.
‘You sure you can afford me?’
‘Don’t worry. You’ll get your fee in full.’
The truth was, funds were running pretty low. Most of the money I had socked away had been spent renovating the office, and work had been thin on the ground lately. Matter of fact, I was starting to feel like someone had dug an alligator-infested moat around the business to keep the punters away. None of which Shift needed to know.
‘All right then, what have you got for me?’ she asked.
I produced my phone and presented a photo I’d taken back at the nightclub. It was a photo of a monitor, or more specifically, a man on a monitor who’d been captured by a CCTV camera.
Shift looked at the image then back to me. ‘What do you want me to do with this?’
I nodded to Frank, who produced a second phone and placed it on the table in front of Shift.
‘That one belongs to a man we’re looking for,’ I explained. ‘The man in the photo.’
Shift went to open the new phone and got shown a padlock icon. ‘Locked, huh?’
‘Yeah. Only opens up if it’s shown the right face.’ I wiggled my eyebrows. ‘Don’t suppose you know a good mimic, do you?’
The corners of Shift’s lips drifted upward. Stronge’s were quick to follow.
Chapter Ten: Up Jumped the Devil
From the phone, we extracted an address marked Home. We were at the place within the hour. No sense hanging about; since we bungled our chance at a capture before, the suspect would be on high alert now. Might even be considering skipping town. We had to act fast if we wanted to bring him in this time.
The address the phone led us to was a sinkhole estate: a no-go site that had been scheduled for demolition for years but never torn down. It had been that way for a generation now, a Brutalist horror dusted with filth and shattered glass. Then again, the place was always an eyesore. The way the complex was laid out made it look as if it had been devised by an architect who designed prisons for a living. Squinting up at the imposing five-storey block, I could imagine burning mattresses raining down from its balconies and onto the open yard below.
If the suspect saw us coming he’d have ample opportunity to do a runner, and we couldn’t afford to drop a bollock this time. Thankfully, it was late and raining by the time we reached the estate—the perfect setting for an ambush.
Stronge and I passed a puddle of melted tar that used to be a bin, jimmied open a boarded-up doorway, and made our way up an echoey concrete stairwell. According to the information we’d gleaned, our man lived on the building’s top floor in a corner apartment. In any other place, that would have counted as a penthouse suite. Here, it would have been as much a source of shame as the rest of the block’s miserable dwellings.
We arrived at the fifth floor and crept along a corridor littered with used syringes and other drug paraphernalia until we found what we were after. The apartment door was covered in chipped brown varnish and hung on a single rusted hinge. Through the gap between the door and the frame I could make out a flickering light, but no sound. I made a sign for Stronge to hold her ground, then ghosted through the front door and emerged on the other side.
The apartment was not what I expected. Not at all. Instead of a derelict squat I found a forest. A mass of thorny brambles with stalks as thick as my fingers had grown in through an open window and quilted almost every surface. Lumps beneath the thick briar suggested a smattering of furnishings, but I couldn’t make out anything definitive. Then again, seeing wasn’t exactly easy. The only illumination the apartment had was provided by tiny flames dotted strategically about the place. Set on the floor between gaps in the brambles, fresh candles stood upon the congealed, molten messes of their fallen comrades, struggling to shed light on the surroundings.
I noticed a convenient aisle running through the centre of the knee-high hedge in the lounge and cut a path through it, more out of habit than necessity. Breezing through the overgrown apartment, I moved from room to room until I’d made up my mind. The place was empty. Whether the killer was hiding elsewhere or had already blown the city, I couldn’t be sure. All I knew for certain was, the bloke wasn’t home.
‘You might as well come in,’ I said, calling to the corridor outside.
Stronge pushed open the apartment door—no small feat given the amount of foliage blocking it—and pressed her way inside. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, taken aback by the indoor jungle. Taser in hand, she went about checking the corners. ‘Any sign of him?’
‘Not a sausage,’ I replied.
Stronge grunted with frustration and clicked the button on a pocket Maglite. ‘What is all this?’ she asked.
‘Buggered if I know.’
As Stronge’s torch beam browsed the undergrowth, I could have sworn I saw the vegetation moving, swelling up and down like the rise and fall of a heaving chest, almost as if the room was breathing. A trick of the light. Had to be.
I stuck my head through the adjoining wall to get a look at the apartment next door and saw nothing unusual. ‘Seems to just be this unit that’s gone rural.’
Despite the coop being flown, neither of us was willing to admit defeat. There could be something here, some clue that led us to the next breadcrumb along the trail. We’d come this far; surely we were owed something for our effort.
‘What part of the flat is this?’ Stronge asked as we followed a path through the brambles and arrived in a cramped room so blanketed with flora that its function could only be guessed at.
Searching for an answer, I concentrated on making my hand more like flesh and bone and less like smoke and nothing, then used it to sweep aside a patch of vegetation clinging to an upright unit of some sort. The greenery fell away easily, as though it had only recently grown to cover the appliance, which turned out to be a kitchen refrigerator.
‘After you,’ I said, showing Stronge the fridge’s exposed door handle.
Who knew what lurked inside the thing? Portions of human flesh wrapped in clingfilm? Milk bottles thick with congealed blood? A stack of heads with black tongues lolling from their unhinged mouths? I didn’t know. All I knew was, I didn’t want to be the first one to clap eyes on the fridge’s contents.
With an audible gulp, Stronge reached out a tentative paw, wrapped her fingers around the handle, and gave it a sharp tug. ‘Oh my God,’ she gasped, ‘did this bloke only shop in the treats aisle?’
Huh?
I peered inside the lukewarm fridge and saw shelves heaving no
t with body parts, but with food. Junk food, to be precise: chocolate bars, peanut butter, packets of biscuits, bottles of pop, buttered popcorn, all loaded with enough sugar to make Jamie Oliver cry himself raw.
‘Blimey,’ I said, digging around in the back of the fridge but only finding more snacks. ‘Must have a hell of a sweet tooth.’
Stronge closed the fridge and we resumed our exploration of the flat.
‘I’m guessing this is the boudoir,’ I said as we landed in a room with a flat, overgrown mound of brambles that could only be concealing a bedstead.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Stronge, chewing her bottom lip. ‘He went to all the trouble of lighting the place, he kept his food here, but where did he sleep?’
It was a good question. Aside from the narrow path through the vegetation that allowed access to each room, there wasn’t a square foot not covered in jagged thorns. Where the suspect laid his head was a mystery, at least until the beam of Stronge’s torch glanced off a couple of bright spots buried amongst an upright mass of vegetation in the far corner of the room. A mass that I’d assumed until this point was enveloping a wardrobe.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
Stronge redirected her torch at the tangle of tightly-knit brambles and caught two small reflections. Violet reflections.
Someone was watching us.
Chapter Eleven: Ready. Fire. Aim
The mass of brambles parted with a stiff creak and a figure stepped between the two curtains of vegetation. The perp had been with us the whole time.
He was dressed in his underwear, and was younger than I first took him for; late teens, early twenties at most. With his pretty boy looks and slight build, he didn’t seem like he’d put up much of a fight, but looks can be deceiving, especially when magic’s involved.
Speaking of which, I noticed the knife wound in his belly had all but gone. Instead of an ugly red hole there was only a pale pink mark, barely visible. No one healed that fast. No one normal, anyway.
‘You two,’ he hissed, eyes pinging between me and my companion.
Stronge didn’t waste any time. Rather than read him his rights, she gave him a taste of her left, which was wrapped around the handle of a police-issue Taser. But the suspect was fast, so fast that he had his hand around her wrist before the weapon made it anywhere near him. He gave Stronge’s arm a crank and the sparking stun-stick spiralled to the floor, vanishing beneath the carpet of brambles.
My turn. I made a fist and sent it at his jaw, where it landed with a sound like an ice cube cracking in water, only a good deal louder. He staggered back a step, head whipped to one side. When he turned my way again, the look he gave was dangerous and dark.
‘Oh, you didn’t like that?’ I asked, my voice high and mocking. ‘Then you’re going to hate the sequel…’
I chinned him again and he went reeling, stumbling towards the far wall in the direction of the room’s broken window. His fingers dug into the window frame, raising splinters, and for a second I thought he was going to use the leverage to propel himself back at me. Instead, he checked his cards, decided he didn’t like the hand he’d been dealt, and cashed his chips. Taking up his heels, he jacked his body through the window, using it as an escape hatch and landing on the fire escape balcony outside.
Thankfully, I had that avenue covered.
His feet had barely kissed the ground before a pair of arms wrapped around his midriff and hoisted him into the air. Being as he’d rabbitted on us before, I wanted to make sure we had our exits covered this time, which is why I posted Frank on the balcony, ready to cut off any sudden departures.
I went to help my partner wrestle the fugitive to the ground, but before I could join him outside, the suspect’s fingers glowed green and began to dance as if playing an invisible piano. I made it one more step before my feet took root, and looked down to find the creepers carpeting the floor had snaked around my ankles and were holding me in place. It seemed I wasn’t imagining things when I saw the vegetation shifting before. These were no ordinary brambles, they were loaded with magic and working at the behest of our target.
Stronge was similarly stricken, her feet fixed in place by another creeping knot of vegetation. Determined to break free, she took to tearing at the tendrils with her bare hands, but the thorns they were studded with made short work of that plan.
Out on the balcony, rain lashed down on Frank as he battled to get the suspect on his back. For a little feller, the squirrelly bastard was putting up a hell of a fight. I fought to tear my leg free of the tightening trap but it was like trying to step out of a block of quick-drying cement. What I wouldn’t have given for the power of translocation in that moment, or even a set of secateurs. But then I remembered, though I hadn’t come packing gardening supplies, I did have one tool at my disposal: my trusty claw hammer.
I slipped the lump of iron from its place in my jacket (in case you’re worried about all these heavy tools I lug about spoiling the cut of my suit, fear not: the magic I specialise in, kleptomancy, allows objects to fit places they shouldn’t and weigh next to nothing). I dropped to a crouch and used the claw part of the hammer to gouge at the tendrils wrapped around my front leg. It was tough work, but the tool was up to the task, and after a bit of frantic sawing, I had a foot free.
While I busied myself with the second shackle, I cast a look outside and saw Frank still fighting the fugitive. He squirmed and thrashed and kicked, and though Frank’s hands remained chained beneath his rib cage like a pair of iron links, it wouldn’t be long before he slipped those surly bonds. Frank’s fingers were about to give out, practically creaking under the strain.
The brambles around my other leg loosened up just enough for me to liberate myself from the trap, and I was off, sprinting for the window. I hadn’t made it two feet before the suspect managed to throw back his head and flatten Frank’s nose. His grip gave out and the suspect slipped our trap, vaulting the edge of the balcony and landing on the one below, bypassing a flight of zig-zagging stairs in the process.
I phased through the window without needing to hop the sill. The weather had really picked up now; being out in it was like being trapped inside an angry cloud. I wasn’t about to let that stop me, though.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ I told Frank, his eyes watering from the wallop he’d been dealt.
Moving at a rate of knots, I hot-footed it after the perp, leaping to the next balcony down, only to look through the grille of the stairs and discover he’d already put two more between us. The kid was a strip of wind. How he could eat all that junk food and move so fast was anyone’s guess, but he was leaving me for dust.
Then again, I still had my hammer.
I lined up a shot, swung it up to the side of my head, and hurled it at him like a wannabe thunder god. I don’t know whether it was my marksmanship, a quirk of the wind, or just plain good luck, but the hammer struck the back of his skull and flattened him. I wondered for a second if I’d been a bit overzealous, but I’d only made it down one more flight before he was finding his feet and preparing to make off. Whatever this bloke was, he was made of tough stuff.
With his wheels in motion again, the suspect scrambled down the final flight of steps and mounted the pavement. He was struggling, though. The hammer blow had him running like a newborn fawn, weaving to and fro. At this rate, I’d be on top of him in no time. I ran flat-out, my dead heart going a mile a minute, but my quarry had an ace up his sleeve.
Suddenly, he just... vanished. And yet he hadn’t gone anywhere, just camouflaged himself. Thanks to the downpour, I could make out a human-shaped void in the rain. The killer was there all right, but using some form of camouflage magic, had redacted himself from the picture. I wondered briefly why he’d gone to the trouble of pulling a gun at the night club if he could turn invisible. Unless maybe something was interfering with his powers there, same as mine.
But this was no time for philosophising. I chased the indistinct hole in the rain as it cut a wil
d zig-zag across the courtyard. I almost lost it a couple of times as a sheet of rain obscured my vision, or the hole found a shadowy patch between streetlights, but I kept my eye on the prize and ran the bastard down. With a flying tackle, I got my arms around his ankles and brought him crashing to the ground in a vacant backstreet, where he became coherent again.
I had him. At least for a moment. Before I could get a knee on his back and put him down for good, he flipped me over and had me facing the sky. The rain beat down on my face, but not as hard as his fists, which landed with such force that it felt like he was taking lumps out of me. You don’t need a blow-by-blow account of what happened next. It was ugly, and it was fast, and it didn’t end with me coming out on top.
As I squinted through the rain at the figure looming over me, I saw something unexpected. His face was striped with long blue streaks that ran from his scalp to his chin. I thrust up a hand and wrapped it around his mush, but he forced my arm back down and used his spare mitt to reach for something out of view. I twisted my head to see what he was going for and spotted a half-brick lying there, probably used as a doorstop by one of the restaurants that backed onto the alley. A brick wouldn’t usually do me any harm, but in the hands of a magic-user it could be as deadly as… well, a brick.
His fingers closed around the block and his arm shot up like he was raising his hand to ask a question: How many chunks will this clown’s face break into when I hit it with a brick, maybe. I considered calling for help, but screams were like crickets in this part of town: background noise.
I saw the muscles in his hand tighten, ready to bring down the rock, but a sudden shrill beeping pricked up his ears and made his arm go slack. A large vehicle was backing into the alley—a lorry coming to empty the restaurant bins. The rumbling six-wheeler pulled to a stop right by us, the noxious breath of innnercity fumes pumping from its exhaust pipe like dragon smoke. All of a sudden, the suspect cast the brick aside, scurried off me, and bolted out of the alley, still weaving as he bled into the night.
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 7