by CW Lynch
White closed his eyes. So, that was it.
Game over.
DARK SIDE
"I remember…" said Able. I was lost, living rough in the cemetery. Marv found me.
*"He'd come back to the city after he heard what had happened to the circus,"* replied Dorothy. "He was making a TV show. 'Paranormal Cities'."
"He told me. They'd heard the bodies were being disturbed in the cemetery. Corpses were being… eaten. They came looking for something the press were calling The Ghoul."
*"Sound like anyone you know?"*
"I was… eating them?" asked Able. His voice, even inside his own head, trembled.
*"You were surviving. No one can judge you for that. It was before you understood what you were."*
"Who says I understand what I am?" asked Able glibly.
Another memory flared into life, a flashbulb bursting inside Able's mind, cutting the conversation short.
***
Able opened his eyes in another new place. His head was fuzzy, the memory felt hazy, as if everything was being seen through a soft, warm, fog. He was lying down on an uncomfortable bed, his limbs disobeying all instructions from him to rise.
"Don't try to get up."
It was Marv's voice. Deep, comforting, assured. A voice that always sounded like what it was telling you was right.
"I gave you something to help you to calm down, but it knocked you clean out. Last time I buy drugs from a sound engineer."
"I slept?" asked Able, his voice slurring, his mouth full of fuzz.
"Like the dead," said Marv. "No pun intended."
"Where are we?"
"My trailer, why?"
"We have to move. He'll find us here. We're all… we're all in… great danger."
Able crashed off the small bed onto the floor, his limbs finally obeying his instructions but lacking the strength to complete them. Marv's hands lifted him back up, helping him sit.
A cup of water, held to his lips.
"What is it?"
"Just water, this time," said Marv. "Now tell me who's after you."
"My father," said Able, breathless between mouthfuls of water urgently swallowed. "My father, Adam King."
***
"Adam King… was my father?"
"Yes, son. And, please, believe me when I tell you that none of us wanted you to find out like this."
"But you all knew?! You knew I was a fucking King?!"
"No, son, I promise. Those of us that knew, he hid himself from us somehow. Whatever memories we had of him were as lost to us as yours are to you. We only remembered him, who and what he was, when he revealed himself tonight."
"I still don't understand how we're going to beat him."
"Think about it Able. This power, this thing you call 'The Magpye'? It's a **birthright**. You're Adam's son. His power passed to you when he died. He can only control The Magpye if you *let him*."
"I came here to destroy Cane King, now you're telling me I'm the rightful heir to the King empire."
"And who better to burn it to the ground?"
For the first time in a long time, the ghost of Able Quirk smiled.
"Why didn't I remember him?" he asked indignantly. He was getting tired of ghosts playing tricks with his mind, hiding in its darkest recesses to jump out when he least expected it.
"Marv," replied Dorothy. "That would be Marv's doing."
Able felt the tug of memory, and opened his mind's eye once more.
***
Marv clicked his fingers, and Able opened his eyes.
He looked around, scanning his surroundings. He felt his heart beating in his chest: slowly, rhythmically. Not the rapid hammering he had grown used to, the drumbeat of his fight or flight response that pounded in his ears every second of every day. No breath on his neck, either, no shadow rising up behind him. No monster. Just Marv's trailer, and the old magician tucking his pocket watch back into this pocket.
"How do you feel, Able?"
Able turned his head one way, then another. Where the monster had been, there was something else. Something different, something that didn't scare him, not like before. It was something very old, and very big, but… quiet. Patient. It was waiting for *him* to reach out to *it*. And so he did.
"Able? Able, can you hear me, son?"
"Call me Magpye…"
COME AND GET ME
Taylor stalked through the corridors and offices of the old paper mill. The bullet wound on his side, little more than a graze in the soft flesh, ached. Blood was still seeping slowly from it, slowly but surely sapping his strength. His shoulder, meanwhile, had gone numb and icy cold, a bad sign, and his arm left was growing weak. He would have to finish this quickly. One of the advantages of the perfect clarity that he possessed was that it told him when he was losing, when he has weak. He laboured under no illusions of his own strength. He always knew exactly what would be required to win in any situation and Taylor had never gotten into a fight that he could lose. Hopeless fights were for hopeless people. A knife in the back was always an option and Taylor wasn't above running, when he had to. But running out on Cane King meant that you stayed running for a very long time, probably the rest of your life. And if you stopped running, life was sure to get a whole lot shorter very, very quickly.
Taylor didn't like to be trapped and his uniquely perceptive mind began to search for an alternative solution as he crept soundlessly from room to room. He could kill King, of course. That had been on his agenda for a long time, but there was still too much of the organisation that was fiercely loyal to King, or at least to the King bloodline, for Taylor to put that plan into action now. Killing King would create a power vacuum that he could not control, not yet. There were the other crime syndicates to take into account as well. Bringing them to heel required demonstrable power and control, power and control that Taylor was far from possessing.
No, killing King was not an option. Yet.
To Taylor's way of thinking, that also meant that he had to keep King alive, and Cane King lacked the clarity required to know when to run away from a fight. He thought that never backing down made him strong, but Taylor knew it made him weak. It made him predictable and that made him vulnerable.
No, getting Cane King to run was not an option either.
Jack Taylor's mind, with perfect clarity, settled on a single course of action. He focussed on isolating the pain, packing it away to deal with later, and turned his thoughts to the singular task of hunting and killing Officer Nutt before he bled to death.
Nutt paused at a junction between two parts of the mill. Spiral stairs led up and down while the corridor stretched away from him in two directions. The building was deceptive, its layout not true to the expectations set by its exterior. There had been a lot of remodelling over the years, with pieces being changed and melded back together like a Frankenstein's monster of iron and brick. The vast body of the thing was a patchwork, a history of its rise and fall told in cement and plaster. Nutt hated buildings like this, where even the layout was against you. A shot could come from anywhere: above, below, left, right. He'd have wished for a squad, if only the junction weren't so narrow. The place was a death-trap.
Dropping to a low crouch, he crept towards the junction. There were no sounds other than his own movements, but something was telling him that there was someone else nearby. Two hunters, moving through the labyrinthine veins of the desiccated carcass of the mill, each seeking to make the other prey. Nutt had already seen how fast Taylor was, he had to assume that he could move as quickly and as soundlessly as Nutt could too. Most men were less dangerous with a bullet in their shoulder, but not Jack Taylor. Nutt knew the type. Only a kill shot would stop a man like Taylor, anything else just made him more dangerous.
It was time to change the rules of the game.
Nutt pulled the hammer back on his pistol and fired a shot into the ceiling.
"I'm here!" he yelled, walking towards the deadly junction. "Come and get me!"
> FALL DOWN LIVING
Cane King jogged quickly down the stairs towards the bowels of the old mill, trying his best to mute his footfalls. He trusted Taylor to deal with the last cop, whoever he was, but he wasn't sure he trusted Taylor. His death in the heart of his fiasco would be too easy to explain. White hadn't been the first person to intimate to King that Taylor had his eyes on the throne. In Cane's experience, there wasn't a worthwhile person who didn't. It was how he had been raised, of course. Power through succession had been the way of the Kings for a very long time.
He reached the gantry above the giant presses themselves. The rusting old leviathans still oozed a strange, stagnant power. Cane remembered playing in the place as a child, and listening to his grandfather's long diatribes on the power of print. They said the old man had ink in his veins. Cane had been glad when his father had killed the old bastard.
A droplet of ink, cold and dark, landed on his cheek.
Instinctively he looked up as he smudged it away.
The Ink was on the ceiling, a dark patch in the shape of a man. Before King could react it had fallen towards him, emptying in a sudden torrent. He stumbled backwards as the Ink filled his mouth and blotted his eyes. He felt his back hit the railing and struggled to keep his balance.
It had to be a trick. A trap.
Maybe something that Grace had set up, to trap the non-existent vigilante.
"Grace Faraway is dead."
King twisted towards the voice and toppled head first over the edge of the gantry.
Adam King turned, recognising his brother's scream instantly. He watched as Cane fell from the gantry and fell, colliding with the giant wheels and gears of the old printing press underneath the gantry.
Sliding over the side of the machine, Adam watched as Cane tumbled the rest of the way, his body contorted and twisted from one impact after another.
As Cane vanished from sight, Adam could only smile.
"Hit every branch on the way down," he said to himself and jogged over to inspect his brother's body.
On the floor of the mill, Cane King choked on what should have been his last breath. Everything was black, his eyes filled with ink, his mouth frothing with dark bubbles. The fall had broken bones and torn his flesh. Inside his twisted body, organs had burst and released their precious fluids.
"So many wounds," mused the Ink to itself, as it set about its task. "So much blood."
The rips and tears, the gashes proud with protruding bone, they all just made it easier for the Ink to slip inside and to start rebuilding, rewriting, Cane King from the inside out.
King gasped, then swallowed, and the Ink rushed inside him, filling his stomach and lungs and breathing into him a new life.
BAD COP
Taylor came from the left, stepping out of the shadows with his gun raised. Nutt could tell from the way that he was holding it that he wasn't a natural right hander. Dumb luck, but he'd put the guy's dominant arm and shoulder out of action with the bullet meant to go through Cane King's head.
Nutt raised his pistol, keeping the sub-machine gun at his hip. If Taylor tried to duck or dive, he'd fill the corridor with lead at shin level and cut the guy to pieces. He should have fired already, but Nutt wanted the kill shot to be clean, neat, professional. Taylor was an animal, Nutt was a hunter. He'd make the distinction all the way to the grave.
"So, you're Grice's partner huh?" shouted Taylor.
Nutt rolled his head in a circle, loosening his shooting shoulder.
"He told me a lot about you," continued Taylor. "You're a hell of shot, apparently."
"You're about to find out," retorted Nutt.
"Well, I've already been shot twice today," said Taylor. "I don't intend to make a habit of it."
Nutt shook his head. The guy really had a screw loose, that was for certain.
"Put the gun down, put your hands on your head and drop to your knees."
Taylor laughed. "Are you serious?"
Nutt was asking himself the same question. He'd said the words without thinking. Was this what Grice would have wanted? He asked himself. Drag the guy in front of the courts, make him spill his guts on King, Garrity, the whole crooked crew? Nutt shook his head. It was a pipe-dream. Six months and all they had were empty files and a dead friend to show for all their efforts. So they'd made a few busts, so what? All they were doing was wiping the shit away so King could crap on the city some more. The whole shitty mess had pulled them over the line, the vortex of corruption that powered this city sucked everyone in eventually and those it didn't make dirty it destroyed.
Lee Grice was dead. Rosa Blind was dead. Rigby, Cooper, Rogers, Hartley, all dead.
The vortex was pulling at Nutt too. He could feel it.
He thought about Grice, a good man reduced to a soggy jigsaw puzzle and tossed into the gutter like trash. A good man turned into someone's game.
Nutt wasn't going to play their game anymore. He might be the last of them, but he was going to be a good cop. Just this once. For Grice. The trick was to make sure that Taylor didn't know that.
"I can drop you where you stand," threatened Nutt.
"Then do it," replied Taylor. "Take your best shot. Then I'll take mine. Sounds fair, right?"
"I'm not playing games with you,"
"You know, your partner read me my rights? Tied to a slab, buck naked and shit scared, he read me my god-damned rights."
"Grice was a good cop," said Nutt. "I'm not."
"Oh I know," replied Taylor coyly. "Like I said, Grice told me a lot about you. He told me a lot about all of you. He was a talker, wasn't he? Wanted everyone to like him, wanted everyone to get along. He was the type that 'took an interest', you know what I mean?"
"Like I said," replied Nutt, re-fixing his aim on Jack Taylor's head, "He was a good guy."
"He cried at the end," said Taylor. He started to walk down the corridor, moving from side to side like a snake as he did so. "He cried like a little bitch."
"Don't take another step!" ordered Nutt. He put a warning shot into the ground a yard ahead of Taylor, sending up a plume of flooring.
"Up to you," said Taylor, retaking his aim at Nutt. "You know, it wasn't what I'd done to him. I mean, he was pretty cut up about it…" Taylor stopped to chuckle at his own joke, "… but really he was worried about his kid."
"Grice didn't have a kid, idiot," said Nutt. "No family, no connections, any of us. You want to throw me off my game? Good plan. But get your facts straight."
"Oh, my facts are straight. No one can lie to me, officer, did you know that? I see lies like other people see the sun on a bright day. Clarity, you see, that's my thing. Grice had a kid alright. He just didn't know it when he signed up with you guys."
"Bullshit."
"He told me, just after I'd finished cutting off his right leg at the knee. He didn't tell any of you because he didn't want you to know he was compromised and he made sure his lady friend kept him off all the paperwork. She didn't want her kid growing up with a cop for a Dad anyway, that's what he said. He begged me to let him go, guess he thought he could pension out with his lost leg and go play happy families or something. He gave me everything on you guys, just for that shot."
"And you killed him anyway, I get it," said Nutt. "You're a hard-case and you can kill a guy even if he's got a kid somewhere. That doesn't make you special, Taylor. It just makes you another scum-bag who ruins lives because he can."
"What it makes me is a scum-bag who cut your friend to pieces while he was still alive," said Taylor, taking a sudden step towards Nutt, then another. "Toes, feet, legs, knees, thighs, fingers, arms, ears. I left him for hours like a broken doll on that slab and when I came back the only thing he'd been able to do was piss and shit himself. I put your friend in a fucking bag just to send you a message, and it brought you all here like moths to a fucking flame. I'm the guy who killed each and every one you."
"Except one," said Nutt, pulling back the hammer on his pistol.
He hea
rd the ominous clunk of a shotgun being primed and felt the hard nose of the thing in the small of his back. He'd been so focussed on Taylor he hadn't heard whoever it was coming up behind him. Taylor closed the remaining distance and put his gun up against Nutt's temple.
"And it makes me the guy who kept you talking long enough for that fat fuck Mick Garrity to put a shotgun in your back."
Nutt closed his eyes. The last thing he heard was the ghost of Lee Grice, telling him he should have stayed a bad cop.
A KING IS BORN
Cane King awoke in the perfect darkness of the Ink.
His first thoughts were of the fall. He remembered the pain, the searing pain, as his body was smashed and split and torn and ripped by the unyielding metal of the printing presses as the fell. He remembered the final impact, a shock-wave that had sent him spiralling into darkness.
This darkness, the perfect darkness of the Ink.
It was warm here. He felt like he was floating in a warm ocean, but with no light he could not be sure where the horizon was or for how far the darkness stretched. He breathed the liquid darkness, understanding only that he could and that he should. Light was not the only thing absent here. In the perfect darkness there was no doubt, no questions. Cane King understood everything.
"Grace Faraway is dead."
The endless, perfect dark offered no answer. It did not need to.
"You're it, the thing that lived inside her. That lived under her skin."
Again, there was no answer. There were no questions here.
"You are inside me now."
A pulse rippled through the obsidian ocean, then another, then another. Weak, at first, then growing strong. Cane King recognised the rhythmic beating of his own heart.
"You are fixing me."