Iron & Velvet (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator #1)

by Alexis Hall

  There was only one sensible option that an ordinary, rational, safety-conscious person could take. I had to do another background check. This time a “does she murder her girlfriends?” check, not a “would she kill a random guy outside her own club and then not pay you?” check.

  I had a quick poke round the usual places—the National Archives, the Criminal Records Bureau, government agencies, that kind of thing—but found nothing I hadn’t found last time. Vampires are very good at staying out of the public eye, and they tend to work through intermediaries. I spent some time looking into the Calix Group. Three of her venues had been brought up on public health violations within the last six months. Julian had mentioned someone calling the health inspectors, but I couldn’t quite see how it fit into anything, and it wasn’t really what I was after right now. I made a mental note to come back to it later and went on digging around for evidence that dating her would go horribly, horribly wrong.

  Time for a different strategy. Start from the beginning.

  I Googled the Order of St. Agrippina, not really expecting to find anything, but it turned out they had a website. They were a group of exorcist nuns based out of Rome. That shouldn’t have been weird, since I’ve met and exorcised demons myself, but it totally was. There are plenty of groups that deal with supernatural shit, but they don’t normally talk about it on their website. Well. They don’t normally talk about it on their website and expect to be taken seriously.

  I clicked past Today’s Homily and the Welcome from Sister Ignatia to the history of the order. It wasn’t particularly helpful. You can just about get away with mentioning evil spirits and possession and the power of Christ, but “In the year of our Lord 1206, Sister Julian did get turned into a vampire, lo” is probably pushing your luck. There was, however, contact information for their archivist, so I registered a fake email and pinged off a quick query, claiming that I was writing an academic paper on the history of demonic possession with a particular focus on the all-female Catholic orders of the twelfth century. I didn’t push too hard for specifics, but I said that I’d heard about an incident involving a member of their order and an entity called Anacletus the Corruptor, and was wondering if they had any more information.

  That was about all I could achieve without leaving the house. If I wanted hard information on Julian’s past, I’d have to find someone with access to a thousand years’ worth of obscure information, half-forgotten secrets, and forbidden knowledge dredged up from the darkest recesses of the city.

  Thankfully, I knew someone like that.

  His name was Jack.

  He and someone I thought was probably his sister had a market stall near Camden Lock, where they sold shiny tat to teenage goths.

  I got there just as he was packing up. He looked much like he always did, small and scrawny, with a floppy black emo fringe and too much eyeliner. He looked about eighteen, but he’d looked about eighteen for the last ten years.

  “It’s been ages,” he said. “Buy me a waffle?”

  “Sure.”

  I picked up his box of bling and tucked it under my arm. There was a waffle stand across the road, in front of a shop that seemed to sell exactly one type of boot. I bought him a waffle with everything on it, and a coffee for me, and we wandered into the covered part of the market until we found a wall to sit on.

  Jack squashed up really close and shovelled too much waffle into his mouth with his fingers.

  “You’ve got cream on your nose,” I told him.

  He wiped it off on the back of his hand, licked it up, and then smiled shyly at me. “Can I have some of your coffee?”

  I handed it over.

  He took a sip and made a face. “I don’t like it without sugar.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I ordered my coffee the way I like it.”

  He giggled and then grew serious. “There’s something nasty in the sewers.”

  When Jack wasn’t running his stall or charming people into buying him waffles, he was basically a swarm of rats. It meant he’d lived in some pretty weird places.

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Jack shrugged. “We moved out of there months ago. Got a cellar now.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  He nodded vigorously.

  I finished the last of my coffee. “So, look, I wanted to talk about something.”

  “Okay! The Veiled Lady walks again, the Library of Lost Books has closed its doors for the war with the Fifteen Hundred, the Prince of Wands is seeking the key to the Discarded Stair, and there are delays on the Circle line between Embankment and Barbican.”

  The rats are all part of this weird group mind thing called the Multitude, and Jack sometimes forgets I can’t hear what he’s thinking, which can make him pretty difficult to talk to.

  “Errr,” I said, when I could get a word in edgeways. “I wanted to talk about something specific.”

  “Oh.”

  “What can you tell me about Julian Saint-Germain?” I asked.

  “That’s not specific at all.” Jack looked confused.

  “Okay.” I tried again. “Does she, for example, murder her girlfriends?”

  Jack twitched his nose thoughtfully. “Only once.”

  As far as I was concerned, that was one time too many. “Uh, what happened with that?”

  “She made her a vampire.”

  “Just to check: do you mean made her a vampire and then murdered her, or do you mean made her vampire which constituted murdering her?”

  “Ummm . . .” Jack licked the remains of the waffle off the polystyrene tray. “The second one.”

  Well, that was a relief. That was a relief, right? I must have looked pleased or something, because Jack went chattering on eagerly.

  “But then they went away. And then the Morrigan fell. And then she was at the Conclave. That was where all the vampires talked a lot. Julian Saint-Germain used to eat rats. She used to be called Julian of Colchester. She came here when she was alive. Then she went away. Then she was dead and she came back. That was when she ate the rats. Lots of rats.” Jack made a pouty face.

  Eve used to have one of those posters where it’s all shots from Star Wars and then you step back and it’s Darth Vader’s head. Talking to Jack was kind of like that. And the best thing to do was to wait for the whole picture to come together.

  “Then she stopped eating rats and started having lots and lots and lots and lots of sex. Then she was at the Wars of the Roses. That was where all the people fought a lot. Then she was at the theatre dressed as a boy. That was when she stabbed a man in the eye over a bill. She did a lot of stabbing when she was alive.”

  I was starting to get a headache.

  “She used to stab vampires and demons. Once she stabbed a faery lord with an iron sword and threw him in a hole.” Jack suddenly remembered what I’d actually asked. “She never stabbed her girlfriends, though. Unless she went away and stabbed them. And then we wouldn’t know.”

  “What happened to the one she turned into a vampire?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted the answer.

  “She was in the theatre as well, but then they went away and then she was a punk rocker. And then there were a lot of fires. My sister likes punk rock. And fires.”

  At least she wasn’t murdered. In my experience, most relationships end with a lot of fires, one way or the other. I tried to work out how I felt about Julian now and came down on the side of weirdly reassured. She’d been doing crazy, irresponsible shit for the best part of eight hundred years, but that was kind of what I’d signed up for. And if anyone would know about a secret pile of mouldering corpses, it would be the rats.

  Overall chance of getting murdered: low.

  Overall chance of miserable, soul-destroying break-up: moderate.

  Overall chance of lots of red-hot monkey sex: high to extreme.

  Overall chance of boredom: zero.

  I was liking those odds.

  “Come on,” I said, “I’ll take you to dinner.”

>   Jack smiled and grabbed my hand. His fingers were slightly sticky with cream and maple syrup, and his nails were painted in chipped black varnish.

  I’m not a cheapskate, but Jack really really likes KFC. There was a branch just round the corner on the High Street. I bought us a bumper bucket of undifferentiated chicken fragments, with coleslaw and beans, added a box of hot wings for three quid, and threw in a bottle of Pepsi Max. Once I’d bought enough chicken to feed a swarm of voracious rodents, we scrambled over the railing and sat on the edge of the lock, with the bucket between us.

  We didn’t talk much. It was one of those low-key English sunsets, pretty in a grey way.

  I was actually doing okay.

  Jack hoovered up the chicken, stripping the bones and flinging them into the lock. I ate a couple of hot wings to keep him company. And then my phone rang. Unknown number. Again.

  I picked up. “Kane.”

  “There’s been another one.” Ashriel’s voice drifted over the line like digitally transmitted aural sex. “It’s fucking nasty, get down here now.”

  He hung up.

  Wrong as it felt to get excited about the death of an innocent person, at least this proved I hadn’t been going crazy the last few days. I was back in the game.

  I said good-bye to Jack, and left him sitting on the lock, staring into the sunset and eating beans. Then I grabbed a cab to Brewer Street.

  Twenty minutes later, I was in the unisex bog at the Velvet, ankle-deep in blood and sewage.

  Being a PI is such a sexy, exciting job.

  Ashriel was leaning by the door, his usual incubus smoulder dampened by the ming.

  “So . . . what happened, exactly?” I asked.

  “You’re the detective. We think it’s probably the plumber.”

  There really wasn’t much to go on: a shattered toilet, a wash of dirty water covering the floor, scraps of shredded clothing, and a scattering of stripped bones.

  I really wished I hadn’t had that KFC.

  I pulled a pair of latex gloves out of my inside pocket and put them on. Then I crouched in the filth and fished out a long bone, probably one of the arm ones. Not for the first time, I kicked myself for having spent A-level biology staring at Patrick. The bone had been thoroughly gnawed. Hundreds of tiny teeth marks pitted the surface. I put it in the sink and checked another. Same story. Whoever this was, they’d been killed and eaten. Hopefully in that order.

  I plunged my hands back into the sewage and made a slow, methodical search of the bathroom floor. Ashriel came and squatted down next to me. He smelled considerably better than the rest of the room.

  “Can I help with that?” he offered.

  “You want to stick your hands in poo and look for clues?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve not got a fetish or anything. I just thought it’d go faster with two of us.”

  “Dude, you are more than welcome. I just thought you’d be squicked out.”

  He laughed. “I used to live in Hell. I’m basically unsquickable.”

  “Well, I’ll do this bit, you take here to the door, and we’ll meet in the middle.”

  I found a wrench and a plunger, a mobile phone that had seen better days even before it’d been chewed and drowned, and a big chunky ring of keys, practically a life story in themselves. I was just sorting through them when Ashriel yelped and jerked back so quickly he nearly fell over.

  “Unsquickable, huh?” I reached over to steady him.

  Ashriel was shaking his hand in an ow fuck way. “There’s sanctified steel down there.”

  I felt around where he indicated, and eventually my fingers closed on something hard and round. I cleaned it up in the sink, shook it dry, and put it on the palm of my hand. It was a tarnished metal ball, about the size of a Mint Imperial, with a hole through the middle.

  Huh.

  I put it down carefully and continued the search from where I was. Scattered across the floor I found five more balls and a worn cross made of the same metal. I laid the bone and the pieces of metal out next to the sink. There was a loop on the top of the cross about the same size as the holes in the beads.

  We had a dead plumber. With a rosary. With pieces of a rosary. With pieces of a rosary that looked really old. That made no sense.

  “Can you think of any reason your plumber might be carrying this?”

  Ashriel peered over my shoulder. “Actually, that’s some serious hardware. It takes more than a few Our Fathers to make steel burn like that.”

  “And you’re sure your plumber wasn’t a demon hunter in disguise?”

  “I’m pretty sure she was just a plumber. We investigate that sort of thing pretty thoroughly. Although . . .” He trailed away, staring at the crucifix.

  There was an obvious conclusion here, but I wasn’t jumping yet.

  “Seen it before?”

  “One a lot like it,” he said cautiously.

  “It’s hers, isn’t it?”

  His eyes shuttered suddenly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Julian. She used to be a demon-hunting ninja nun. Also there was something about pudding.”

  His eyebrows went up. “She told you?”

  “Doesn’t she say that to all the girls?”

  “No. Really not.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or freaked out. I decided I’d worry about it after I’d dealt with the dead plumber.

  There was just too much here that made no fucking sense at all. I really needed a cigarette.

  “Going for a smoke. By the way, what was her name?”

  “Whose?”

  I gestured to the floor. “The plumber.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Find out for me.”

  I went into the alley where poor old Andrew had bought it and lit up. There was a white van parked at the end, which had “J. Brown, Son & Daughter, Plumbers, est. 1976” painted on the side. Well shit. Make that “J. Brown & Son.” I heaved out a smoky sigh.

  There’d been three attacks now. Two on the Velvet, one on Julian. That alone didn’t add up. These things escalated. This thing wavered. You don’t follow up an assassination attempt with an exploding toilet. What was with that, anyway? There was no pattern here. Mages who summon bloodsucking star demons don’t fill rooms with sewage. And what about the rosary? That had to be a message. Which also meant it had to be an old enemy, not a new one.

  Unless it was an incredibly elaborate bluff by someone who’d found out that Julian used to be a demon-hunting nun, sourced an original thirteenth-century, mystically sanctified rosary, and planted it in a toilet, along with a swarm of killer whatevers. I’d seen some byzantine shit in my time, but if we were up against someone who would go to that much trouble for a red herring, I was going home.

  It also confirmed that Maeve was off the hook. For some of it, anyway.

  Oh fuck. Maeve.

  I flicked my cigarette down the sewer grate and ran back into the Velvet, shouting for Ashriel.

  “Did you tell Julian about this?”

  “She’s in charge. I went to her first.”

  I pulled out my phone and dialled her number. It rang for a while and then went to the default voice mail service. I didn’t leave a message. She wouldn’t have picked it up anyway. I turned back to Ashriel.

  “Where the fuck is Julian?”

  “Do you really think she tells me where she goes?”

  I don’t even know why I was asking him. I suppose I was hoping for “she’s having a quiet night in with some Horlicks.”

  I knew exactly where she was.

  I had to get to Tottenham. Now.

  I had just enough presence of mind to grab the rosary bits before jumping in a cab. It should have taken half an hour, maybe only twenty minutes, at this time of night, but after an hour we were still driving, and the meter was climbing.

  “Uh, what the hell are you doing?” I asked the driver.

  “Nearly there, just a bit further.” He spoke in a weird, fara
way voice.

  “I think I’ll just get out here.”

  Something was messing with this guy’s head, and he clearly shouldn’t be in charge of a cab.

  I got out somewhere by the reservoir, moonlight gleaming on the flat, wide water. It was strangely silent. And then I realised there wasn’t any traffic. I crossed the bridge and turned down Forest Road to Tottenham Hale. As I walked, a mist thickened around me, and, even though the road was straight, I kept feeling as though I’d taken a wrong turn.

  This had Nimue written all over it, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up wandering Tottenham ’til dawn.

  I closed my eyes and tried to feel the shape of the enchantment. It was woven with the currents of the city like a stone shifting the ripples of a stream. I didn’t know much about magic, but I was pretty sure this was some serious shit. If I concentrated, I could feel the mist pulling me in two directions, as though it couldn’t decide whether I was an innocent, to be gently led aside, or an enemy to be drawn deeper.

  I knew how it felt. I was pretty sure I was here to save someone’s arse, but I wasn’t sure whose. One of these days, I’d get a girlfriend nobody wanted dead.

  But it wasn’t like I had a choice: spell or not, I was going in.

  I let the mist draw me down Ferry Street. I didn’t see a single fucking soul.

  I passed a random pub (traditional Sunday roasts: £6.95). It had just gone chucking-out time, but no one was being chucked out. It was all closed up and silent, no cars in the car park.

  I kept walking, past quiet apartment blocks, a deserted car wash, and bus stops with no buses and no one to wait for them. At a barren junction, I saw a glare of light through the mist. An empty KFC, lights still on.

  It was official. I was in a zombie movie, except there were no zombies and everybody was tucked up safely at home. Nim had got sixty thousand people off the streets.

  More houses, more shut-up shops, another pub as quiet as the first. I finally passed a late-opening Tesco that wasn’t as late opening as it should have been and turned onto West Green Road.

  Julian was stalking down the street, somewhere ahead of me, the tails of a military coat billowing behind her and her boot heels striking the pavement steady as a metronome. I’ll say this for Julian. Even on a psychotic vengeance crusade, she had one hell of a sense of style.