Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2)

by David Bussell

  ‘What?’ she yelled over the roar of the engine. ‘You think you’re the only one who knows how to hot-wire a car?’

  The crowd of fae shrank back as if the exhaust pipe was spewing mustard gas instead of diesel. The air was fairy poison now.

  Acting quickly, the Queen limbered up her fingers and began mouthing an arcane evocation. The air crackled and thickened, becoming pregnant with something that strained the stitches of reality. A fissure cracked open in the roof and released a web of tree roots that snaked through the air before interlacing and forming an archway large enough to house a castle gate. The space within the arch shimmered and rippled like a pond disturbed by a skimming stone then revealed an opening to another place. What place I couldn’t say, but judging by the landscape on show—a flat expanse of blighted earth dotted with charcoaled tree stumps—it was a long way from the pastoral Eden of Arcadia.

  ‘Go,’ she commanded. ‘Leave this place.’

  The remaining courtiers did as ordered and slipped through the archway, vanishing like thieves in the night. We’d given the fae no choice but to run. Wherever they were headed, they were better off there than suffocating in this toxic pit. And yet the King and Queen hadn’t seen fit to leave just yet.

  The King turned an accusing finger on his son. ‘You did this. You destroyed the pact and doomed your people. You are not fit to be my successor. You are not fit to live!’

  A bolt of lacerating blue light sprang from his fingertip and struck the kid square in the chest, lifting him off the ground and smashing him against the far wall. He smacked against the brickwork with a gristle-grinding crunch and landed with all the grace of a fly-tipped mattress.

  ‘No!’ screamed the Queen.

  In a rage, she plucked the ivory pin keeping her hair in place and thrust it into the King’s neck. His throat released a Pollock-like splatter of arterial spray and he dropped to the ground, gurgling his last.

  ‘You always were a useless old fool,’ said the Queen, stepping over his body on the way to her fallen son.

  She crouched low over the kid’s body and placed a hand on his chest. ‘He’s not breathing,’ she said, then turned to me. ‘You have to save my boy.’

  Chapter Fifty-Eight: If it’s Not One Thing it’s Your Mother

  We’d stopped the wedding, but it was beginning to look like a pyrrhic victory. The kid was down, and from what I could tell, he was staying that way.

  The Queen craned over him, her icy, aristocratic features splintering, emotion leaking through the cracks.

  I signalled for Stronge to kill the hearse’s engine, then the two of us went to Frank and levered the lump of rock off his back. I merged with him right away, taking on his pain, sharing the load. I could spend a paragraph or two describing how it felt, inhabiting a body that had lost an arm and been hammered by a bloody great chunk of roof, but I reckon you get the idea. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly a teddy bear’s picnic.

  I was busy turning Frank’s belt into a tourniquet when I saw Erin back on her feet and surveying the wreckage.

  ‘What did I miss?’ she asked, skin flushed pink, her neck not even so much as blemished. She watched as we gathered around the kid. ‘What’s up with him? Did he snuff it then?’

  Ordinarily, I’d have looked for the kid’s ghost for a definitive answer to that question, but since none of the mangled bodies littering the floor had left any behind, I could only conclude that the fae weren’t the haunting kind.

  ‘Come on, kiddo, on your feet,’ I said, patting his cheek with the one hand I had left.

  Inside my head, Frank mewled pitifully. The kid wasn’t getting up. I grabbed his wrist and checked for vitals. Nothing.

  ‘Can’t you conjure up one of your magic cocoon things and fix him?’ I asked the Queen.

  ‘There isn’t time,’ she said. ‘You need to help him. Now.’

  Stronge pressed an ear to the kid’s chest. ‘Whatever it was your man hit him with, it stopped his heart.’

  In the movies, this is the part where the paramedic would have shown up shouting “Clear!” and stepped in with the chest paddles. But not this time. The end credits were already rolling on this flick.

  I turned to Erin. ‘What about your tattoos? Can’t you magic him better?’

  ‘Do I look like Florence Nightingale to you? The tats fix me, no one else.’

  Of course not. Erin dealt the damage, she didn’t cure it.

  ‘How about you?’ I said, looking to Stronge. ‘You’ve had first aid training. What about CPR?’

  ‘You need a defibrillator to get a stopped heart going. Doing it with CPR is a million-to-one shot.’

  ‘Kat, we just rinsed a small army. There’s room for a miracle here.’

  She held up a mangled hand. ‘It would take more than a bloody miracle to do CPR with this.’

  ‘Come on, we’ve got two good hands between us.’

  She nodded dutifully and placed a palm on the kid’s sternum. ‘Okay, with me…’

  Stronge laced her fingers through mine and I followed her lead, pumping in time with her compressions. Again and again we bore down on the kid, working in tandem, driving the heel of my hand into his chest. After a couple of dozen compressions, Stronge craned over the kid’s head and delivered two sharp breaths into his mouth. The fae’s chest rose but the rest of him remained an inert bulk.

  ‘It’s not working,’ said the Queen, tears forming in her eyes.

  ‘Again,’ I said, and began another round of compressions, determined to kickstart the kid’s heart and make good on my promise to keep him safe.

  But it was like pulling the ripcord on a busted lawnmower. Stronge filled his lungs with another blast of oxygen but the kid stayed just the same, unmoving, lifeless.

  ‘Give it up,’ said Erin. ‘He’s copped it.’

  The Queen shot her a death stare.

  ‘Just saying...’

  With Stronge’s help, I ploughed ahead with the CPR, but after another fruitless couple of minutes, she withdrew her hand and settled on her backside, exhausted. ‘We did everything we could but we were too late. I’m sorry’

  I wasn’t having that and neither was Frank. We’d keep on going until we got what we wanted, because if this ordeal had taught us anything, it’s that fairy tales could come true.

  With one hand I went on, pumping at the kid’s rib cage. I took over the mouth-to-mouth, copying what I’d learned from Stronge, administering breaths and returning to a steady rhythm of chest compressions. But despite my best efforts, each drive of my palm came quicker than the last, heavier, more desperate. Faith was flying out the window. Erin was right. Stronge was right. The kid wasn’t a person anymore, he was a corpse. Soon the flies would come and his body would bloat and decay until one day there was nothing left of him but bones. He was undone. His magic extinguished.

  And yet I couldn’t stop. One last chance. One more breath.

  I reached a phantom hand from Frank’s body, plunged it through the kid’s rib cage, and took a hold of his heart. It was an insane move. The only reason I’d done anything like this before was to hurt somebody, and here I was doing it to someone I’d promised to save. My fingers closed around the slippery mass of his cardiac organ and squeezed.

  A jolt.

  The kid coughed and bucked.

  His chest rose and fell.

  He was alive.

  I pulled my hand free of his chest and screamed with unfettered joy. ‘You legend! You actual legend!’

  Inside my skull, Frank squealed like a Japanese schoolgirl.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Stronge, shaking her head in disbelief. She’d seen some shit in her time, but this just about took the biscuit.

  The kid’s mother cradled his head in her hands, openly sobbing. ‘My boy, my boy, my boy...’

  With eyes half hooded, Erin remarked, ‘How about that. Good for you.’

  The resuscitated Arcadian had the look of a man clinging to a life buoy after a violent shipw
reck, but his heart was beating, his lungs drawing air. We saved him. We defied impossible odds and we saved him. It was enough to bring a tear to a glass eye.

  I separated from Frank, adding another grinning face to the kid’s impromptu bedside.

  ‘How you feeling?’ I asked.

  It took a moment for him to gather the strength to answer, then he croaked, ‘If that’s what dying feels like, you have my eternal respect.’

  I laughed. Frank laughed. What an irony, I thought: the only thing that could bring the kid back to life was two dead men. Alanis, get out your pen and write another verse.

  ‘If you lot are finished, I could use a ride to the hospital,’ said Stronge, clutching her wrist.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied, helping the kid into the back of the hearse, where he immediately passed out. ‘Give us a second to grab Frank’s arm and we’re out of here.’

  But the Queen had other ideas.

  ‘Stay right where you are,’ she said, barring our way.

  ‘Are you having a laugh? I save your son’s life and you’re still gonna be a pain in my arse?’

  ‘You’ve won a stay of execution, Mister Fletcher, but you’re not going anywhere with my son.’

  Frank stepped in front of me. Stronge did the sensible thing and took up the rear.

  Erin took out her knife. ‘You really wanna do this, missy?’

  The queen bee remained calm despite the forces arrayed against her. Even the threat of Erin—a woman who’d unleashed a wave of havoc upon her people that I can still see when I blink sometimes—failed to put the willies up her.

  ‘What makes you think I’d ever leave the kid with you?’ I asked the Queen.

  ‘Because if you don’t, my promise not to kill you is rescinded.’

  She was so thoroughly outmatched, and yet the confidence in her voice gave me pause.

  ‘Why should I believe a word you say?’ I said. ‘You’ve been lying to me since the day we met.’

  She fixed me with an owlish gaze. ‘How so?’

  ‘You looked me dead in the eye and said you’d torn up your contract with the Vengari. So what’s the deal? I thought you Arcadians didn’t lie.’

  ‘We don’t,’ she said, reaching into the pocket of her gown and producing a fistful of shredded paper, ‘but just because the contract was torn up, didn’t mean we couldn’t write an identical one.’ Reaching into another pocket, she produced a fresh piece of paper fastened with a royal seal.

  ‘And that’s not lying?’

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s being liberal with the truth.’

  Having let us peek behind the curtain of her little illusion, she tossed the shredded contract into the air like the end of a magic trick.

  ‘Clever,’ I said. ‘Shame that’s the only confetti this wedding’s getting.’

  I watched her smile fade. That was a hit. It felt good.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Erin, cutting through the treacle. ‘Is anyone else finding this way too talky?’

  That Frank put up his hand was no big surprise, but I was a bit thrown to see Stronge’s arm go up, too. Was I the only detective in the room interested in getting some answers?

  I thought about some other promises the Queen had made and realised they were easily undone by weasel words and careful distortions. Her son’s crimes would be dealt with according to Arcadian law? Fine. Since he wasn’t responsible for Tali’s murder, he hadn’t even committed a crime. And yet there was one promise I couldn’t quite shake...

  ‘I asked what you’d do if you got your boy back, and you bullshitted me. You said you’d go back to your homeland.’

  ‘No I didn’t. I said—and I quote—This city will be behind us. And it will be. Behind us, in front of us, and either side of us.’

  ‘You crafty bitch.’

  The Queen grinned like a barracuda. ‘Naturally. Now give me back my son before I make good on my threat to cast your spectral form to the wind.’

  I stepped in front of the car and Frank did likewise.

  ‘Not on your nelly, Your Highness.’

  The kid was going nowhere. Sure, the Queen had me touching cloth, but what chance did she have against all four of us? She was an Arcadian, not a goddess.

  ‘Have it your way,’ said the Queen.

  Erin’s hand tightened around the handle of her knife. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

  And she was right not to, because she hadn’t even taken up a fighting stance before the oubliette swung open on the Queen’s command and disgorged a big blue dragon.

  Balls. In all the excitement I totally forgot about the giant fire-breathing lizard curled up in the basement. Freed from its prison, the dragon erupted from the pit and landed at the Queen’s side with such force that it shook the surrounding sconces and sent a ripple of blue firelight dancing around the chamber. The creature flexed its muscular shoulders and spread a pair of enormous webbed wings, one of which draped across the Queen’s shoulders like a great leathery shawl. The dragon drew back its gums to reveal a set of teeth like icicles from some deep and forgotten cave.

  I looked to Erin, half-expecting to see her striding into the fray, knife in hand, tattoos broiling with strange black energy, but even she knew better than to go up against this monster. The dragon was covered in an intricate layering of shield-shaped scales, each as brilliant as stained glass, each as strong as steel. In the presence of the Queen’s winged protector, Erin was a Lilliputian with a toothpick.

  As I withered beneath the terrifying glare of the dragon’s gimlet eye, I wondered why the fae hadn’t released the beast earlier. My guess was that the damage it caused would have been too indiscriminate. Erin was dangerous, but she had focus. She was a heat-seeking missile; this thing was an atom bomb.

  The dragon’s nostrils belched twin plumes of steam as its serpentine tail curled about the Queen’s ankles.

  ‘It seems I won’t be giving you that reprieve after all, Mister Fletcher. Such a shame.’

  She gave the dragon a nod and it flexed its talons, gouging inch-wide grooves in the floor. The monster reared up on its hind legs, nose forward, ears back, mouth wide. From the depths of its bottomless gullet, tongues of blue flame lapped at the air like hungry kittens going at a saucer of milk.

  Frank planted his feet and made himself into a human shield. It was a nice gesture, but utterly futile. The heat was already rising, hot enough to make even the dead sweat. As the flames intensified, welling up in the beast’s throat like a white-hot furnace, the temperature climbed so high I felt like my brain was going to turn into glass. The blast the dragon was about to unleash would kill me. Would kill us all. It would charcoal our bodies and atomise any trace we left behind, even our souls. The flames rumbled and the dragon puffed out its chest, ready to discharge its deadly payload. I closed my eyes but the fire was so bright that my eyelids might as well have been transparent.

  ‘Stop!’

  I dared to open an eye and saw the kid standing between us and the dragon, one hand held out, fingers splayed.

  Presented with the fae prince, the dragon’s chest fell and the flames it was about to expel retreated into its belly. The Queen pinned her son with a stare so hostile it made her fire-breathing pet seem flat-out amiable by comparison.

  ‘Have you no shame, boy? Get into that portal now and wait for me on the other side.’

  ‘The only person stepping through that thing is you, Mother,’ said the kid, arm shaking, stance wide but struggling to support his weight.

  She laughed. ‘And leave you behind? What makes you think I would do that?’

  ‘Because it’s over. The pact with the Vengari is done. There’s no need for you to be here now.’

  The Queen scowled. ‘What happened to you, boy? How could you let these pitiful scrags of life brainwash you into thinking it’s your destiny to live among them as their equal?’

  ‘They didn’t brainwash me, I just realised I have more in common with them than I do you.’


  ‘You’re being ridiculous. Now step aside so they can suffer for their interference.’

  The dragon drew in another breath but the kid stood his ground.

  ‘If you want to kill them you’re going to have to kill me, too.’

  Radiating glacial menace, the Queen hissed, ‘Don’t tempt me.’

  But it was a stand-off. The Queen couldn’t mete out punishment so long as her son was barring the way. The kid stood defiant.

  ‘Without me, you have no heir and the Unseelie Court has no future.’

  ‘Then so be it. I would rather our empire crumble to dust than be held hostage by an ungrateful child.’

  ‘Then go ahead, Mother. Burn me down. Murder your only son.’

  The Queen’s hand came up, index finger pointed to the ceiling, ready to drop like an executioner’s axe and order the death of us all.

  ‘You have devastated all hope for our kind,’ she snapped, spitting the words like they were made of broken glass. ‘And for what? A dead girl?’

  The kid returned a melancholy smile. ‘Yes.’

  His mother lowered her arm, not as a command to her dragon, but in defeat. ‘If you’re not prepared to think of your family, at least think of yourself. You won’t survive on this cursed isle, my son. It’s not just the pact you’ve damned today, you’ve damned yourself.’

  The kid nodded. ‘It was worth it.’

  Gravity took hold of the Queen’s shoulders. There was a sadness in her eyes. An understanding. ‘Then goodbye. I hope this world serves you better than ours.’

  She hugged the kid, then with a swish of her cloak, turned on her heel and marched towards the portal. The dragon trailed her, folding its wings flush to its body so it could fit through the woven tree roots of the archway, and together they vanished from the realm of men. The archway withered and unwove before turning brittle as old bones and crumbling to the floor in flakes of dust.

  For a while the throne room was quiet as a tomb, then came a collective gasp of relief so potent I felt it in my eardrums.