Shadows & Dreams (Kate Kane: Paranormal Investigator)

by Hall, Alexis

  “And the demon skull?”

  “An interesting historical curio. It was seized after the dissolution of the Templars in 1312.”

  “Does it do anything?”

  “Not every item in my collection has an obvious function, but that does not diminish their individual value.” He patronised me over the top of his glasses. “I must say, you are a very practically minded woman, Miss Kane. Most people express far greater incredulity when I discuss these matters with them.”

  “The way I see it, stuff you don’t believe in can still kill you.” I produced a printout of Corin’s picture from her file. “Have you seen this woman?”

  He looked sheepish.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “She told me she needed to use my telephone . . .”

  “And, let me guess, one thing led to another?”

  He actually blushed. Corin had that effect on people.

  “And this was a couple of days before your stuff went missing?”

  He nodded. “I did mention it to the police, but so far, they haven’t found her. She told me her name was Jenny.”

  “Can I see where you keep your collection?”

  “That didn’t end well for me last time,” he said, with a half smile.

  “You wouldn’t have let me in if you hadn’t checked my credentials.”

  “Very true, Miss Kane. Step this way.”

  Professor Fox’s collection was housed in a large, humidity-controlled cellar, protected by an alarm, a reinforced door, and a numeric keypad. It would have put off most casual thieves, but Corin was far from casual. The artefacts themselves were stored in oak-fronted, glass-panelled display cases like you get in museums. Again, most of them were locked. Again, it wouldn’t have stopped Corin. I wasn’t that deep into the occult black market, but I was pretty sure a lot of this shit was worth serious money. If Corin had gone straight for the skull and the Hand of Glory, she must have needed them for something specific. It would have really helped to know what the skull was for. And if anyone would know what you could do with a demon skull it would be a demon.

  We said our good-byes to the professor and I asked him to email me some pictures of the missing items. The moment I got back to London, I called Ashriel, and he agreed to drop by the office that afternoon. Elise and I had a pub lunch, or rather I had a pub lunch and Elise watched me eat and talked excitedly about all the new things she’d done in the last couple of days.

  Back at the office, I hauled Archer’s whiteboard out of the broom cupboard. He’d have been really proud of me if he hadn’t been dead. I drew up a timeline. Corin had got out on the tenth of November, had broken into Professor Fox’s collection on the nineteenth and hit Isis Fortuna on the twenty-fifth. She’d been a busy girl. Today was December twelfth, which meant she could be anywhere. Hell, she might not even be in this world.

  I took a step back and looked at the board. It wasn’t really a timeline so much as three dates in a sort of row with nothing much to connect them up. If I could find somewhere she’d been in the last day or so, I could track her scent, but her movements were too random for that.

  This was starting to look depressingly like square one.

  Okay, Kate, think about this. What do you know about this woman?

  She’s always on the run. She’s a compulsive liar. She’s capable of murder. She’s really good in bed (probably not helpful). She’s working with someone or for someone, who’d helped her get out of prison, but she values her independence and probably won’t want to stick with them. Which means she’s probably going to screw them over, which means she’s going to have to find someone else to hide behind, because that’s what she does. Last time it was me. So she’ll be working in cash, and she’ll need large amounts of it quickly. So she’ll need a fence, one that specialises in magical bling. There couldn’t be too many of those in London, at least ones who knew what they were doing.

  “Miss Kane,” said Elise, coming to the back office, “there is a well-configured gentleman to see you.”

  “A what?”

  “A tall gentleman, with pleasingly symmetrical features, and what I am given to understand constitute ‘bedroom eyes.’”

  “That’ll be Ashriel. I didn’t think he’d be your type.”

  “I am not certain I have a type, Miss Kane. I was merely making an observation.”

  Ashriel had poured himself into the same chair he’d sat in on his first visit three months ago.

  “Do you require anything?” asked Elise, following me into the room.

  Ashriel’s eyes flicked curiously in her direction and stayed there.

  “Mr. Ashriel, do you require anything?”

  “Um,” said Ashriel. Then he seemed to pull himself together. “No, thank you.”

  Elise nodded and disappeared into the kitchenette.

  “Ground control to Major Ashriel?” I waved at him.

  His attention snapped back to me, honeyed whiskey and whispered secrets and good old-fashioned down-and-dirty fucking. “What do you need, Kate?”

  “What could I do with your skull?”

  “Ideally, you could leave it exactly where it is.”

  I printed out the catalogue photo Professor Fox had sent me. “Okay, but what if I made it into something like this?”

  Ashriel gave a low whistle. “Where the hell did you find one of these, and no pun intended.”

  “Long story. I’m looking for someone who nicked one.”

  “It’s a soul box. You can, y’know, put souls in it.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “A couple of reasons. You can put someone else’s soul in it, and then you’ve got someone else’s soul to do what you like with. Or you can put your own soul in it, to keep it safe for a bit.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “Demons, for a start. If you, say, wanted to shag an incubus . . .” He waggled his eyebrows at me. “. . . or a succubus in your case, you could put your soul in the box and you’d be more or less safe. Wouldn’t be much fun for the demon though, and to be honest, you’re better off having a wank.”

  “Thanks for that. Good to know. Anything else?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “It could be useful if you had to go up against a serious mage or a powerful vampire. Vampire bites wouldn’t affect you, apart from the blood loss, and they couldn’t read your mind or sense your presence. And most ritual magic would slip off as well.”

  “So, hang on.” I stared at the picture. “What’s the downside here? Because it sounds like I should get me one of these.”

  “Kate, take it from someone who knows, you’ve got a soul for a reason. You kind of need it. Plus demons don’t die, so if you leave your soul in there for too long, it’ll get eaten. I’ve seen it happen. And then the demon gets your body. That never ends well.”

  “Let me get this straight. If someone put their soul in this box, they could, purely hypothetically, sneak up on an ancient sleeping vampire and it wouldn’t sense them?”

  He shrugged. “Guess so.”

  Once again, I was grateful that, as a paranormal detective, I didn’t need evidence that would stand up in court. Well, M’lud, the accused was hired by persons unknown to steal an ancient ceramic pot in order to wake up the former vampire queen of the British Isles. How, M’lud? We don’t know, but we think she stuck her soul in a box and used a candle made out of a dead man’s hand.

  I couldn’t prove any of it, but I was pretty damn certain that was how it had gone down.

  If I could figure out why, I’d be laughing. Or, more likely, dying.

  I slid the printouts into the Corin file. “Okay, next question. If I’d stolen one of these and used it and wasn’t going to use it again, who would I sell it to and how much would I get for it?”

  “These babies are fantastically rare. To make one, you have a decapitate a demon, stop its body getting sucked back into hell, and be up to your elbows in some serious infernal magic. You can’t
put a cash value on it because the people who want this sort of thing aren’t types to deal in money.”

  They never are. “Do you know if one’s popped up recently?”

  Ashriel shook his head. “I’m not as tuned in to that stuff as I used to be.”

  “Well, can you point me at anyone who is?”

  There was a brief pause.

  “I could,” he said slowly, “but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I know you can handle yourself, but I’m not going to send you off to chat with demons.”

  “I’ve met demons before.”

  “You’ve met the kind of demons who get caught. The ones who stick around are either like me or, uh, not like me. They’ve been around for a long time, which means they’re very powerful, they only want one thing, and they know to get it.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  “No you won’t. Kate.” He gazed at me across the desk. I got hit by a wave of his blood sugar sex magic, and it suddenly occurred to me he probably had a hard time getting people to take him seriously. “I don’t have many friends, but I think you’re one of them. And friends don’t send friends to get their souls sucked out.”

  “Uhh, thanks. If you had a soul I wouldn’t want it to get sucked out either. Not that you do. So, um, forget it. Look, I really need to find this thing, and if this is the only way, I’m going to do it.”

  He was still staring at me. I think he was genuinely worried. “There’s no way I can talk you out of this, is there?”

  “Basically, nope.”

  “Fine, but can I at least come with you? If it comes to a fight, we’re probably both dead, but we usually don’t attack our own kind.”

  “Honour amongst thieves, huh?”

  He looked away. “We fought a war together. We lost, but it still counts for something.”

  As usual, I couldn’t think of anything comforting to say, so I changed the subject. “Do we have to go a crossroads at midnight or something?”

  “Not exactly. Have you heard of the Angel of St. Paul’s?”

  “Vaguely.” There were rumours floating around of an old man who sat outside St. Paul’s Cathedral and could make wishes come true, but those kind of stories are two a penny, particularly in my line of work.

  Ashriel rose gracefully. “Come on, we’re going to see him. I’ll give you a lift.”

  I’d learned to my cost that Ashriel drove a green Mini Roadster that wasn’t really compatible with my legs. “Honestly,” I said, “I fancy the walk.”

  St. Paul’s was about half an hour from my office, and we set off together.

  “So,” he said, in his best casual voice, “when did you get the new assistant?”

  “I made a deal with the Multitude to find the King of the Court of Love.”

  He grinned. “And the deal was you got an extraordinarily beautiful young woman to help with your filing? That’s not exactly a Faustian bargain, is it?”

  “You know, I honestly think it just likes to help people.”

  “Help people? It’s an enormous sentient rat gestalt.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s got to be a dick.”

  There was a short, awkward silence.

  “So,” he asked, still using his casual voice, “what’s her story?”

  “This might sound a bit weird, but she’s an animated statue.”

  “That doesn’t sound weird at all.”

  “I really need to get more mortal friends. So, yeah, a wizard made her, didn’t like her, threw her out.”

  “Didn’t like her?” He sounded incredulous.

  I shrugged. “Be careful what you wish for, I guess.”

  “She seems . . . nice.”

  “She did say you were well configured.”

  “She said I was what?” He slanted a wary glance at me. “Is that good?”

  “I have no idea. Elise has her own way of thinking about things.”

  I see a lot less of St. Paul’s than you might think. The movies want you to believe that you can see the Cathedral and Big Ben from basically every window in London, but actually, I hardly ever had a reason to come down here. In fact, thinking about it, I might have only ever seen it on TV.

  It looked smaller in real life. These things always do.

  There was a steady trickle of tourists going in and a scattering of people sitting on the steps, talking and eating sandwiches. Slightly apart from the crowd, in the lee of one of the pillars, a man sat feeding the pigeons from a crumpled bag of breadcrumbs. He looked to be about fifty or sixty, which meant my streak of men in their late fifties who were really beings of unspeakable power and evil continued unbroken.

  “Is that what passes for subtle among your people?”

  The demon’s head came up, and he looked straight at me with pale silver-blue eyes.

  “Nice start, Kate,” said Ashriel. “We should go over, but don’t sit down.”

  “Hadn’t planned on it.”

  We climbed the steps. The Angel of St. Paul’s raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and squinted up at us. “Come and sit down.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “Feed the birds?” He held out his little bag.

  There are two schools of thought about the pigeons in London. One is that they’re a charming feature of the landscape of the capital. The other is that they’re basically rats with wings. I was squarely in the rats camp. “No, thanks.”

  He smiled in a way that reminded me of my granddad. “What is it that you want?”

  I was just about to say I want to talk to you when Ashriel cut in. “We don’t want anything. I’m going to ask you some questions. The lady here is going to listen.”

  “It’s been a long time, Ashriel.” He frowned slightly. “You look like shit.”

  “I’m not the one in the mac and the flat cap.”

  The Angel of St. Paul’s smiled again. This time, he did not remind me of my granddad at all. “Fine words from a vampire’s lapdog.”

  Ashriel smiled back. The sort of smile that was all teeth and no warmth. “And there was me wondering why we don’t have these little talks more often. Have you heard anything about a soul box?”

  “Why would you want to find one of those?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to find it. I’m just asking if you’ve seen one.”

  “Perhaps, perhaps not.” His eyes glinted like light skittering across diamonds. “Why don’t you let the lady speak for herself?”

  I had my sanctified steel dagger strapped to my right arm, and I seriously considered pulling it on him. But even if I survived the fight, I didn’t fancy getting done for knifing an old man in the street. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m not here to play games,” said Ashriel, with a touch of impatience. “I thought you might know something. I thought if you did you might tell me. Apparently you’re not going to.”

  There was a moment of silence. A strange warmth touched the Angel’s ice-bright eyes. “I would help you, Ashriel, for old time’s sake, but I’m afraid that would involve breaking a promise.”

  “Then I guess we’re done.”

  “Don’t be a stranger.” He glanced at me. “And if there’s ever anything you desire, you know where I am.”

  “Well, that could have gone worse,” said Ashriel, as we walked away.

  “True, we didn’t get killed. But we got no useful information whatsoever.”

  “That’s not strictly true. I think the Angel would have told me where the box was if he could. Since he didn’t, he probably has a deal with someone involved.”

  Huh. “I’m not sure that really helps.”

  “Probably not, but it’s always better to know these things.”

  We pressed on through the meandering late-afternoon crowds.

  “Is there a Plan B?” I asked.

  “We’re going to a bookshop.”

  “What, and say, ‘Hi, do you have anything on ancient mythical demon boxes?’”

  “We’re looking for someo
ne.”

  “Are they going to be any more helpful?”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  About half an hour later, we found ourselves at Foyles on Charing Cross Road. It did not exactly look like a hive of demonic activity.

  I gave Ashriel a sceptical look. “What kind of demon hangs out in a bookshop anyway?”

  “A dangerous one. Be careful.”

  “Is there anything I shouldn’t say or do?”

  “Don’t sleep with her.”

  “We’re going to see a succubus who works in a bookshop?”

  “Gethsemane isn’t exactly a succubus.”

  Inside, it was basically a book temple. The truth is, I’ve never really been a big reader. Patrick lent me his copy of Wuthering Heights once, but I couldn’t really get into it. Sometimes he’d try to talk to me about the book, and I’d just agree with everything he said. I don’t think he ever worked out I hadn’t read it.

  We wandered up and down the aisles and went up and down the escalators, which I would have found exciting when I was about four.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked, eventually.

  “I’ll know when I see it . . . Wait. There.”

  I followed his gaze. We were in that kind of weird crossover section between fantasy, horror, and romance, where it’s all books with swirly writing and flowers on the cover, and half of them have the word night in the title. A strikingly handsome man wearing the world’s most nonthreatening jumper had just caught the eye of the young woman who’d been browsing there.

  He gave her a self-deprecating smile. “Hi,” he said, in a voice of sex and chocolate that reminded me of Ashriel’s but about a hundred times more potent. “Sorry to interrupt, but you seem to know a lot more about this than I do.”

  She gave him a wary but interested look. If she was thinking it was too good to be true, she was right.

  “I’m looking for something for my goddaughter, Isobel. I know she really likes this writer called Lauren Kate, but I think she’s read all her books, so I was wondering if you could point me at something similar.”

  The mark guided him over to one of the shelves, and they began talking together in low voices. After a couple of minutes his laughter rang out, sweet as honey. The woman gazed at him, entranced, and when she reached to take a book down from the shelf, he reached up too and his hand brushed hers.