by Hall, Alexis
“It won’t come to that.”
“What are you going to do? Call in an airstrike?”
Eve said nothing.
We nipped over the zebra crossing and turned left down a long, walled alley where a series of cheerful blue arrows pointed the way to the Snakes and Ladders playground, Syon House, and the garden centre. The dome of an enormous glass conservatory loomed on the horizon like a lost boob. We strolled into the garden centre, doing our level best to look casual. It was the Monday before Christmas and the place was doing a pretty good trade in poinsettias and fir trees. We browsed for a bit in an effort to blend in, just two everyday lesbians doing their last-minute Christmas shopping at a stately home in Brentford.
We wandered out into the aquatics and general nonsense section, where you could buy bits of decorative wood and massive chunks of quartz. I stared at a lump of green stone. “Who’d pay for four hundred quid for a rock?”
“It’s a fountain topper, Kate. It’s not that expensive.”
“Sorry, clearly things have changed since the last time I was having a fountain installed in my two-bedroom flat.”
“Look, this is a posh-people shop. They’re going to sell posh-people things. Try not to take it personally.”
“I’m just saying rocks are, like, free. You can pick them up off the ground.”
Eve jammed her hands into her pockets. “I can’t believe I missed this crap.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that some of us had been raised to know the value of money, but then I realised I missed it too. It’s not like Eve had been rich when we started dating, but she’d always been the sort of person who bought expensive cheese from Covent Garden when you can get perfectly good cheddar for two quid from the supermarket.
We stared at the overpriced rock for a while like it was some kind of metaphor for our relationship. Heavy and green and with a hole through the middle. It wasn’t a very good metaphor.
“Back door,” whispered Eve, “four o’clock.”
I glanced wildly around.
“Over there.” She pointed over her shoulder.
Between the restaurant and the pointless fish shop, there was a blue gate leading to the gardens and the conservatory. It was locked with a numeric keypad. We could probably have climbed over it but we’d have looked bloody obvious trying. I sauntered over there and took a closer look at it. Fortunately, it was cold enough that not many people were sitting outside and only the most dedicated rock fanciers were poking around this part of the shop.
It was a fairly simple lock, mechanical not electronic. I guess Percy didn’t worry too much about mortals breaking in to nick his shit, which meant he probably had something really nasty waiting inside. I couldn’t see any subtle way to bypass the lock, short of trying every possible combination or ripping the damn thing off. Yes, he’d figure out how we got in, but hopefully he’d be too busy fleeing the Council to care.
Eve came over and nudged me out of the way. “I’ve got this.” An eyepiece snapped into place, blue lines crisscrossing over the surface as she stared at the lock. She tapped in a code, turned the handle, and pulled the door open. I slipped inside as quickly and quietly as I could manage, and Eve darted through behind me.
“Neat trick.”
“It’s a surface-analysis package. Measures minute variations in the wear of the metal. You can work out which buttons are pressed most often. The codes for those kinds of locks don’t have to be in order.”
Huh.
We skirted the edge of the conservatory. Up close, it was even more ridiculous. This guy had a room for his plants that was bigger than my parents’ house. In the middle of the garden was a fountain with a statue of a flying dude, and just beyond that, a pair of wrought iron gates, also locked, this time properly, in a key-requiring way. I could probably have picked it with enough time and the right kit, but right now I had neither and it was easier to go over. I scrambled up, doing my best not to impale myself on the spikes at the top, and finally dropped down the other side. Eve pulled back her sleeve, and a grappling hook shot out from her wrist.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”
She grinned and whipped neatly over the gate.
We were in another little walled alley, which led to the main building. Syon House looked like a child’s drawing of a castle, big and square, with crenellations and turrets, all done in thick gold stone. I guess this was the sort of place where you’d build a crazy wizard palace.
The front was way too exposed, so we were going to have to go in round the side. A long run of lowish outbuildings led to an extension that was bolted onto the north wall. Probably the servants’ quarters. If we would get onto the roof of that, then we could dash across to the main house. The whole thing was raised so the ground floor was actually about ten feet up, and the windows looked period appropriate which meant they’d probably pop open fairly easily.
“How much weight can that hook take?” I asked, peering up.
“About sixty kilonewtons.”
I sighed. “And what’s that in real money?”
“About six tonnes.”
“Think you can get us there?”
“Hell to the yeah.”
Eve put her arm around my waist and pulled me against her body, which was pretty solid right now but still felt familiar. I reminded myself that this was a business hug.
“Hold tight.”
She fired off her grapple again. It hooked onto the battlements at the end of the stable block, and whisked us into the air. The last time I’d flown about in someone’s arms, Julian had been carrying me across London. This was way shorter, but I guess I’d got a taste for it. I was a bit breathless when we landed on the roof of the extension.
“Um, you can let go now.”
Eve pulled away.
“Um, that window over there looks like a good bet.”
Eve was busily snapping bits of her tech back into place.
“I’ll just go deal with that, shall I?”
I nipped over the roof, moving as lightly as I could because I had no idea how much weight it would take. As I’d thought, the window was old and not very secure, and it only took a moment’s work with one of my daggers to pop the catch and slide it open. I slithered inside and put my foot straight through a glass display case.
“Shit.”
Eve stuck her head through after me. “Smooth, Kate, smooth.”
I landed in the hall and cleared the worst of the glass out of the way as Eve slipped gracefully through the window. It turned out I’d stood on a bronze cast of some kind of fruit, which wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting in the lair of an evil mastermind.
“What is that even doing there?” I asked.
“It’s celebrating the fruiting of the first mangosteen to be cultivated in the British Isles.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
Eve’s eyepiece snapped out of the way, and she grinned. “Google image search.”
“What the fuck is a mangosteen?”
“A tropical evergreen tree believed to have originated in the Sunda Islands and the Moluccas of Indonesia.”
“You just looked that up on Wikipedia, didn’t you?”
“Yep. And my Facebook status is currently ‘Infiltrating Syon House.’”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Course I am. I’d never use Facebook.”
We were standing in a fairly narrow corridor with lots of heavy oak panelling that I thought was probably wainscoting. The walls were lined with portraits of serious-looking historical people. I figured it was probably best to avoid the front of the house, in case there was anything big and slobbery there, or, you know, a security guard, so we headed off the other way, passing a really elaborate family tree and a cabinet full of fans.
Eve stopped to take a look at the tree. “Hang on a second. You said this guy’s name was Percy, didn’t you?”
“Yeah? So?”
“What, you mean, he’s an actua
l Percy? One of the was-in-Shakespeare Percys?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?”
“Did you not even watch The Hollow Crown?”
I remembered seeing it advertised on telly, and I’d thought at the time it was the sort of thing that Eve would have made me watch if we’d still been together. “I was distracted when it came out because my girlfriend had left me and my partner had just been murdered.”
“Well, that was a conversation killer. But, seriously, Kate, this guy is descended from fucking Charlemagne.”
This was kind of a feature of my relationship with Eve. She’d say a thing and expect it to mean something to me, and it wouldn’t, and then I’d feel like an idiot. “And that matters why?”
Eve shrugged. “Charlemagne was the dude. The guy invented paladins and, like, Europe.”
“Is this going to help me find a magic pot?”
“Holy Zarquon’s singing fish, have you no intellectual curiosity?”
We pressed deeper into the house, past a bunch of posh staterooms, and through the kind of dining room where you’d hold intimate gatherings for you and thirty of your closest friends. Finally, we came out into an enormous, book-lined gallery that seemed to run the whole length of the building. It was pretty bloody bling, with gold candlesticks on every available surface and vast mirrors between the bookshelves.
Eve went straight for the shelves.
“Pots, not books.”
She’d dragged down a slim, leather-bound volume and was eagerly flipping through it. “I’m looking for clues.”
“So, what, you’re going to read everything in the library?”
“Kate, I’m pretty sure this is an original John Dee.”
And there was that you should know what this means feeling again.
“Look,” she went on, “if we can get some idea what he’s up to, we’ll be a whole lot less likely to get killed.”
“Yes, but the longer we stand around in his house, the more likely we are to get killed.”
Eve shrugged and stuffed the book into her inside pocket. Normally, I feel quite strongly that you shouldn’t nick things on investigations, but this guy had tried to kill me twice and had stolen my sword, so he could kind of go fuck himself.
I dragged Eve out of the library, through the far door, and we came out into a room entirely decked out in blood-red silk. He might as well have just scrawled I am a vampire over the walls. By my reckoning, we’d walked more than halfway round the ground floor of the house and found nothing remotely pot-shaped. The whole building had been pretty low on hiding places. There’d been lots of little nooks and alcoves, but they’d either been empty or full of statues. I was getting a nasty feeling there was going to be a hidden safe behind one of the portraits or something, and we didn’t really have time to pull up every carpet and look behind every picture.
I gave the room the once-over, checking under the sofas and in the fireplace. There was a silk folding screen in the far corner. It was far too obvious as a hiding place, but I checked behind it anyway, just because it was there. Nothing.
I was just going to tell Eve we should move on and try the next room when I noticed there was a very slight mismatch in the hang of the wall coverings.
An actual fucking secret door. I should have known.
I approached it really bloody carefully. It was probably rigged to explode or turn me into a chicken or something. I let my senses sharpen, and I ran my fingers gently over the wall, trying to feel the shape of any enchantments. There was something cold and sharp and brittle. I followed the trail out and away from the door. Razor threads spiderwebbed across the room and spiralled towards the huge antique mirror above the fireplace.
Well, fuck. I fucking hate mirror monsters.
“Okay.” I sighed. “I’m going to open this door, and something nasty is going to come out the mirror and try to kill us.”
Eve stripped her coat off, dumped it on a chair, and started adjusting the tech strapped to her forearms. “You couldn’t be a tad more specific?”
“Not really; could be anything. Big cloud of poisonous shadow. Image of your worst fears. Flowy liquid metal thing. Straight up army of demons.”
“And we fight any or all of those things how?”
“We work it out when they show up.”
“Sometimes I am genuinely amazed you’re still alive. Look, why don’t I go back to the library and see if I can find something on mirrors?”
“Take too long.” I crossed the room and yanked open the door.
“Oh, you—”
There was a snapping sound like breaking ice, and the mirror shattered, shards of glass sheeting down onto the carpet and into the fireplace.
I went for my knives.
The scattered fragments of the mirror sprang up like a marionette, taking the shape of a distorted, many-legged spider thing. It lunged straight for Eve, making the kind of eerie, high-pitched noise you get when you run your finger around a wineglass. The creature lashed out with two of its limbs, gouging deep scars into Eve’s body armour.
I rushed it, realising at the last second that my knives were practically useless. They skidded across what I suppose was its body, scoring nothing but a few shallow scratches and a nails-on-chalkboard shriek for my trouble.
Eve, who’d only given up on one thing in her entire life, smacked her gauntlet into it, sending cracks across its surface. She’d been doing tae kwon do since she was about ten, but I was pretty sure she had no experience fighting giant mirror spider beasts, and one swipe of its legs could take her head clean off.
I dropped my knives and looked for something I could use as a weapon. The far side of the room was lined with hefty marble tables, topped with fancy mosaics. I dashed over, reaching for my mother’s strength, and shouted a hasty warning. Eve jumped clear as I grabbed a table and hurled it at the monster.
There was an explosion of glass and dust and stone, and then silence.
Eve rolled to her feet, panting a bit. “Wow, that’s some serious property damage. Hulk smash.”
The table had knocked a huge chunk out of the fireplace and been none too kind to the carpet.
I was trying to think of a witty comeback when I was interrupted by a crackle of shifting glass. The shards sprang back together, creating four smaller copies of the spider thing I’d just fucking killed.
I should have guessed that had been too easy.
Eve brought up her guard. “Oh shit, ads.”
I grabbed the nearest chair and walloped one of them as it came skittering towards me. It stayed down for all of two seconds before its broken pieces reassembled. Great, now there were eight of them and I was running out of furniture.
They were about the size of large cats now, and moved about as quickly. Two of them jumped on me, jagged glass pincers shredding my clothes and ripping into my skin. I was bleeding, like, a lot. I tried to pull them off but only managed to slice up my hands as well. Oh, this was not good.
There was a crunch as Eve grabbed one of the spiders and threw it against a wall, shattering it into yet more pieces that turned into yet more spiders. She rushed over and yanked the little fuckers off me in a shower of blood. Well, at least I was taking the carpet down with me.
Eve was clinging to the struggling creatures as a glinting tide of tiny mirror monsters started to crawl up her legs.
We needed a plan.
“Run,” I yelled and did.
There was a tinkling of glass from behind me as Eve shook off her attackers, and we bolted through the secret door, slamming it behind us with a crunch. I heard a scrabbling against the wood as the spiders tried to tear their way through.
Eve bolted the door, but it was only a matter of time.
It looked like we’d found Percy’s study. It would have been quite cosy if it weren’t for the complete lack of any other exits. And the swarm of deadly glass monsters lurking outside.
There was a three-foot earthenware pot just sitting on the desk like it was taking
the piss. From the looks of it, it had been broken into about eight hundred bits and carefully pieced back together. Guess this was the MacGuffin, then. No sign of my sword, though, which was a bugger because it would have been really handy right now.
“Kate, you’re a mess.”
I was about to say I was fine, but there was blood seeping through the ruin of my clothes. There was enough residue of my mother’s power still sloshing through me that I didn’t really feel much pain, but I was probably going to fall over in a bit. I tried not to think about it. “Okay, we’ve found what we came for. Now we just need to get it the hell out of here.”
“How about we deal with your extensive blood loss first?”
“Well, sorry, but I came out without my field surgery kit.”
Eve sighed, dropped to one knee, and unbuckled something from her calf.
“That’s a field surgery kit, isn’t it?”
“Shut up and drop your trousers.”
“Wow, it’s just like we’re dating again.”
I backed up against Percy’s desk and unbuckled my belt. It really wasn’t the time to be worrying about the quality of my pants, but I kind of couldn’t help it.
Eve pressed between my thighs in a thoroughly nonsexual way and started poking around. “You know, one of these is about two inches from your femoral artery.”
I stared at the fancy moulding on the ceiling. “I love it when you talk dirty.”
There was a cracking from the doorway.
“I haven’t got time to stitch this up now. I’ll get the worst of the glass out and whack some bandages on it.”
“I’d really like to be able to put my trousers back on.”
“Give me a minute.”
It was slightly less than a minute and I was back to fully dressed, or as close to fully dressed as I could get with everything in tatters. That just left the giant pot, the killer monsters, and getting out without getting arrested.
Something pointy thrust its way through the door, filling the room with a chorus of high-pitched shrieks.
“Uh, any ideas?” I asked.
“Build a time machine, go back six hours, tell ourselves not to do this.”