by CW Lynch
On Cane himself however, there didn't appear to be a single wound. His clothes were ripped and stained with blood, but he breathed easy and seemed unhurt except for some bruises. There was something under his clothes, Taylor could just about see it, but he couldn't work out what it was. Shadows moved in odd ways around King, as if they could choose where to be rather than being simply cast by the light around him. They were hiding something.
Anyone else would doubt what they were seeing, write it off as their own imagination, but not Jack Taylor. He never, ever, saw anything that wasn't there and he'd seen enough around King's house and businesses to know that there was far more to be seen in the world than most people realised. Taylor wasn't afraid of magic. He could see it for it was. And he wanted it.
So, the shadows were hiding something. Fine. Taylor would find out what it was, sooner or later.
***
"Are you going to stand there all day or are you going to help me with this body?"
"Sorry, Mr. King. You looked like you needed a moment alone."
"I just killed my nephew and my brother," replied King, hopping nimbly to his feet. "What I need is a drink, a shower, and a change of clothes. Maybe dinner at Pierre's. Do you think they're still open?"
"I'm sure they'll make an exception for you Mr. King." replied Taylor. He didn't react to the revelation that the masked vigilante that had plagued their organisation was related to King or that he somehow had managed to kill two people but leave only one body. Taylor would understand that too, sooner or later. "A car is on its way," he continued. "Paddy Keane and his boys are on their way too."
"He knows what to do?"
"Of course."
King looked down at the body at his feet. Devoid of life now, he wasn't sure if it was more his brother, Adam, or the nephew he had never known, Able, who stared back up at him with dead, white eyes. Whoever, whatever, he had been, it was over now. King had a new story to write, a story being whispered to him by the Ink.
"I want you to get this body out of here, before Keane and his idiots arrive."
"Sir?"
"No matter what he did, who he thought he was, he's still a King. I don't want him burning up here with no one saying a word over him."
"Of course," said Taylor. Cane King, the sentimentalist. Even dead, his family were his great weakness. Taylor suspected that that was why he had been so afraid of the clean squad, the cops that no-one could get to. King's family had given him strength, given him a legacy, but it was his greatest weakness too. Taylor wondered if there were any cousins or uncles out there, waiting to come squirming out of the woodwork of the family tree.
"Move the cops too," continued Cane. "We've had too much heat in this city for too long. Someone will coming look for those missing detectives, I don't want any trace of them being found here."
"The pit then, Mr. King?" asked Taylor.
"Where else?"
"And what about Detective White? He's still alive."
"Call him a cab."
COMING HOME FROM THE CIRCUS
Able walked amongst his friends through the rapidly darkening circus. Clouds of smoke were moving overhead and the smell of burning was unmistakable now. There was heat everywhere, the heat of fires that burned as yet unseen, and from somewhere distant Able could hear screaming.
"What's happening?"
Marissa took his hands in hers, her face etched with sadness.
"Memories," she said softly. "There are so many memories of that night, they're overwhelming everything else."
"So this is it?" asked Able. "This is what our afterlife is? That night, over and over again?"
"That night forever," replied Marissa. "I'm so sorry, Able."
***
At Marv's caravan, Marv watched as something moved in the rubble. Burnt out, the caravan had collapsed in on itself like a piece of overripe and blackened fruit. Beneath its collapsed sides however, something was moving. Something was alive.
He took a step forward, but found his wrist suddenly in the cold iron grip of the Magpye.
"Just watch," said the creature. Marv noticed that even in the half-light that had fallen over the circus, the Magpye still cast a longer and darker shadow than anything else. A little something of the creature that hid in the shell of a little girl was bleeding out in that shadow, and the hairs on the back of Marv's neck stood up on end when he saw. Magic could be lost, but a magician was something you always were, no matter what.
The debris shifted again, a sheet of metal sliding back, taking others with it as it crashed to the ground. A door, an impossible door, opened from the floor of the ruin. The door was soot-stained and dirty, but Marv knew it at once.
"My magic box?"
"Your magic box," replied Magpye. "The womb into which I was born dead and Able fell from life to undeath."
Marv watched as a body, limp and lifeless, was slowly pushed upwards from inside the box. Part of the head was missing and the jaw was hanging on to only one side of what was left of the skull. As the arms and upper torso flopped into view, Marv registered the gunshot wounds. Too many to have been inflicted by anyone who could see their target, Marv deduced that whoever it was had been shot through the walls of the caravan. One leg, than another, and the body was finally ejected.
"That's not Able," said Marv.
"No," replied the Magpye. "That's Adam King, Able's father."
"He died in the circus?" asked Marv, not expecting an answer. "That explains…"
"Everything," said Magpye. "Adam died protecting his son from his own brother's hired guns and passed on his birthright in the process."
"You mean you?"
"I mean me. Adam King's death was all the chance I needed. I freed myself from the line of the Kings and was reborn in Able Quirk."
Together, the old magician and the little girl, who was anything but, watched as Able slowly climbed out of the box, pushing the corpse of Adam King away.
"Does he know?" asked Marv.
"He does."
"How long?"
"Just before he died," said Magpye. "For the second time."
Shivering, soaked with the blood of his father, Able climbed up and over the body of this father, then took his first tentative steps into the world. His eyes were the same dead eyes that Marv had grown accustomed to. As he watched, Able's flesh took on the cadaverous pallor Marv recognised as Able stripped off his blood soaked clothing and dropped it carelessly onto the grass. He looked right past Marv and the Magpye, his dead eyes blind to them.
"This is how I found him," said Marv. "Confused, frightened. He doesn't know where he is, even who he is."
Looking down, Marv saw that Magpye was smiling. It was a sick smile, too wide for the child's face that the creature was wearing, splitting her face almost in two and revealing double rows of tiny needle-like teeth.
In front of them, Able tripped and fell headlong onto the bloodied corpse of his father. Face to face, the two dead things looked at each other.
Only one moved.
Screaming, Able scrambled away from the body and ran.
Marv watched as the Magpye's shadow tore itself from Magpye and raced after Able, enveloping him in shadow so that he vanished from sight.
"They were surrounded," said the Magpye, unable to disguise the relish in its voice. "Adam was shot, again and again. He shielded Able, shoved him into your magic box. The last thing he did was pull it down over them before he died. Inside the box, Able listened as they set fire to the caravan around him, all the while his father's still warm body was bleeding out on top of him. What little King blood he might have lacked, he had received that day in spades."
"And the box?"
"It did for them what it had done for you a thousand times," replied Magpye. "It let them escape."
"Marv?"
Marv turned, started to hear Able behind him. Beyond him, the last of the circus was burning to the ground.
THE PIT
Taylor hated The Pit.
Pitching the second half of Officer Nutt over the crumbling brick mouth of the pit, Taylor wondered how many bodies there really were down there. The pit was a wet and stinking thing, its inner walls slick with a deep red viscous ooze that seemed to bleed from the brickwork itself. It was a like a wound, as if you could wound a place in a way that wouldn't ever heal.
Taylor had dumped a lot of bodies here on orders from King, but the pit's depth and appetite seemed to be endless. A mass grave, hidden under an old slaughterhouse in the heart of the city. It was ridiculous but, just like King, the thing was somehow able to hide in plain sight.
He heard that there were some Kingsmen who wouldn't come here, even some that said you could go mad by staring into the pit. Taylor had stared deep into the pit and all he saw was a growing pile of stinking, festering evidence that could bite them all in the ass if it was discovered. Having cops and politicians in your pocket only went so far, and Taylor was confident that a mass grave was crossing the line.
And now Cane King had him dumping not only the bodies of a bunch of federally empowered, front page new detectives into the pit, but also the body of his nearest and dearest. When Taylor was in charge, things would be different. King had been raised to believe he was untouchable, another explanation Taylor supposed for why Cane had gone out of his way to destroy these reputably untouchable cops. To Taylor, it was just another belief that was becoming a weakness. King craved the limelight, the theatricality of it all, and he courted disaster more passionately and ardently with every move. He said he wanted to bring his family into the 21st century but, to Taylor's eye at least, it was nothing but trappings. The tools changed, but the strategy remained the same. The 21st century just made things faster and cheaper than ever before, including change itself.
Cane King was changed undoubtedly and, whilst it wasn't for the better in Taylor's opinion, it could be to his advantage. Taylor knew, with the absolute clarity that had guided him his whole life, that his time was coming.
Until then though, there was nothing for it. The pit was dangerous to them all. The pit would have to be watched.
And fed.
RETURN TO THE FIRE AND FLAME
"Able…"
Able, Dorothy, Malcolm, Marissa and the others all stood and stared at Marv, and at Magpye. Behind them, the circus was bursting into flame a piece at a time. Each small eruption brought with it a shard of memory, a blade of shadow and smoke and fire and horror. The world was turning into stained glass and, chunk by chunk, the mosaic was changing before Marv's eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice vanished. His eyes were locked on Marissa.
He had always believed she was beautiful, what father didn't think that of his daughter? But in this unreal place her strange and ethereal beauty seemed somehow magnified. Even against the backdrop of flame and ruin, she was a gleaming light to him. She was, he reasoned, not herself. She was as he remembered her, and therefore more beautiful than it was possible for anyone to truly be. The knowledge that she was really gone hit Marv like a hammer blow for the second time. Tears welled up in his eyes and his throat closed, forbidding speech. After all, just what was there to say? He had seen what had happened to Able that night with his own eyes. Somewhere in these fractured memories that were stabbing through into the world around them, the real Marissa was dying.
It was Malcolm who broke the silence.
"Good to see you, Marv," he said coldly. "Face to face, as it were." He gave Marv the particular look that he sometimes gave him, a special acknowledgement passed between two men who both had very secret lives and pasts that they wanted to remain just that - secret. Marv, the magician, hiding in plain sight as a circus conjurer and escape artist. Malcolm, the sharp shooter, hiding a past that made him very good with guns and very keen to use them.
"It's good… to hear your voice," said Marv. "Honestly, you make Able sound weird. With either accent." He laughed nervously. For the first time, Marv was facing the people that he had abandoned to their fates when he had fled the circus, believing Grace Faraway's lie that Cane King was sending his men after him. At the time he'd justified it to himself as the only way he could protect them but, in truth, Marv knew that he had only one instinct and that was always, always to save himself. Being a father hadn't changed that, until it was too late.
Next to Malcolm, Wally Wu shuffled his feet. He turned around as another part of the world exploded, replaced by a nightmare chunk of fire and mayhem. "Get on with it," he hissed.
"We're in trouble here, Marv," said Malcolm. "We need the little girl there."
His finger pointed at Magpye, who had found a place to lurk behind Marv.
"You want to go back," said Marv.
"If we don't," said Able, "All we have is this. At least we have a chance to do some good, all crammed together in my head."
"Some good? Is that what you call it?" argued Marv. It was a reflex action, born from months of trying to persuade Able, and Magpye, to walk away from their shared vendetta.
"We don't have time for that right now," implored Able. "Don't ask me how I know, but I know that if we start to live that night again, if this place becomes… what it was when we all died…"
"We'll be trapped," interjected Marissa, finishing Able's sentence. "And none of us want that, do we?" Her eyes were focussed not on Marv, but on Magpye. Marv stepped aside, turning to face the creature shoulder to shoulder with his dead friends, lost daughter, and Able. The creature was smiling again, the same smile Marv had seen before, the smile that looked like someone lifting the top off a boiled egg full of poison. Double rows of razor teeth, a writhing, twisted scarlet tongue and a jaw that seemed to go all the way back to her ears.
"No we don't," said Magpye, in a voice that didn't belong in a little girl at all.
From her feet, a new shadow grew. It spread out at first in the shape of a girl and then slowly, gradually, it became the shape of a giant bird. It was icy cold under their feet as it slid under them, the same icy cold that Marv had felt in the creature's flesh. He reached out his own hand to take Marissa's, but found her already holding tight to Able.
"I don't know if I'll remember us, afterwards," he said. There was an uncommon tenderness in his voice, a tone Marv hadn't heard Able use in either of his two short and strange lives so far.
"I'll remember you," replied Marissa. "I did before."
"You didn't say anything…"
"You weren't ready. You are now."
"This is different," said Able, and Marv knew that he was referring to him. Until tonight, Marv realised, all three of them had been living in their own secret worlds, all orbiting each other but all utterly separate and alien from the rest. Able, trapped in his own head with the ghosts and the ancient and vengeful thing called Magpye; Marissa the ghost that Marv had unknowingly conjured at the cost of his own magic; and Marv… the culprit, the traitor, the coward. He had lived a life filled with so many secrets and yet he hadn't been able to see the biggest lie of all when it was right in front of him. His daughter was dead. His daughter was dead and it was his fault.
The shadow began to rise up behind them, bringing with it a cold wind and blotting out the light from the fires. Marv's fingers twitched. This was old magic, and it spoke to something deep inside him. Whatever strange twist in his body or mind that made him a magician was waking up. Old magic, deep magic, the type that the oldest magicians warned you never to mess with, and here he was in the heart of it. Old magic, the kind that never came easy. The kind that never came wi
thout a price.
"Stop!" shouted Marv.
The shadows stopped moving and the creature called Magpye let out a snake-like hiss.
"What are you doing?" asked Able. "We have to go, now!"
The shadows began to fall around them like old curtains, revealing the growing horror of the circus. Dark figures moved through the smoke-filled landscape that, for the moment, they somehow stood apart from. There was a flash of gunshots, screams and shouting. The night played out in slow motion before their very eyes, speeding up as it grew closer, a juggernaut bearing down on them all.
"Dad?"
"It's too easy, Marissa," said Marv. "Magpye told me that it didn't want you to die, but I don't think it wants you to live either."
The creature hissed again. "I don't give life, silly magician," it said. "But I can take away death. You think this is the worst afterlife that there is? You should see the afterlife that they have for betrayers, Marv. You won't find your precious daughter there."
"I know," said Marv. He took a deep breath and drew himself up to his full height. He was a magician and even if he didn't have any magic left he was damned if he wasn't going to try and pull one last trick. "But I also know that you're not going anywhere without Able. You need him. You need his bloodline, whether you like it or not. If he stays, you stay, and I think you want that even less than he does."