by Alexis Hall
“Excellent.” Elise settled her trilby at a freshly rakish angle. “I have been meaning to further familiarise myself with the layout of the city. Though despite the criminal nature of these gentleman, I am saddened to think they have most likely been horribly murdered.”
We hit the streets. This was one of those bits of private investigatoring that made you feel either really cool or really frustrated. Because criminals have this annoying habit of hiding the fact that they’re criminals. And what that meant in practice was that Elise and I spent the best part of an hour walking up and down a perfectly ordinary row of shops trying to find the one that was ordinary in a subtly different way from all the others. It was hard to say what we were looking for exactly, but if three guys with shotguns got into a barney in the back of a fried chicken emporium on Friday, it wouldn’t have a sign outside saying Try our new gunfight special! This week only! but it also wouldn’t still be open for coleslaw and hot wings on Monday. Which left...well... I’d know it when I saw it.
I saw it.
Abandoned office space, rental notice in the window, scaffolding up the front, takeaway next door. Could be nothing, but worth a look. I moved in the least sidle-y way I could manage up to the front of the building, and peered in. It looked like somebody had decided to trick this place out as a glazier’s, got as far as “put mirrors everywhere” and then run out of steam. I was also about eighty-five percent sure I could see bloodstains on the floor.
The problem with this kind of case—the kind where the suspects had guns and vans instead of claws and fangs—was that there was a way, way bigger chance of the actual police getting involved than I was used to. Somebody shows up exsanguinated by a killer sewer monster, you can be fairly confident you aren’t going to get done for destroying vital evidence. Somebody shows up shot to death in Peckham and you’re on much more obstruction-of-justice-y ground. But what the hell, you’re only young once. Well, only in your midthirties once. I gloved up and picked the lock.
The interior was either the creepy sort of rundown or the rundown sort of creepy. No matter where I turned, my reflection was waiting for me, like I wasn’t sure what it would do if I turned away. I was half sure one of them winked at me. And in my line of work, you don’t write shit like that off. Rule 31: never assume it’s your imagination.
“Watch the mirrors,” I said.
Elise dutifully began scanning the walls. “What am I looking for?”
“Anything that might be looking back.”
With Elise on monster watch, I shifted my attention to the floor. Yep. Definitely blood. Also plaster powder. I followed both into the back room. Guess I’d found my thieves. And the bust for that matter. It was in pieces on the ground and they...honestly, they weren’t much better. Their faces were slashed to ribbons with long, straight cuts that didn’t seem to come from any obvious weapon. Thousands of tiny scratches covered their hands and arms, and I’d had way too much close contact with faerie not to know scourged-with-briars when I saw it. And if all of that didn’t scream “something horrible and wibbly came through a looking glass and killed them,” three of the mirrors were cracked from side to side. Because of course they were.
On the whole, mixed bag. Good news: not a job for the actual police. Bad news: whole building almost certainly some kind of magical death trap.
Here lies Kate Kane. Something creepy with mirrors. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.
Annoyingly, I had a job to do. Trying my best to ignore the something-wicked-this-way-comes vibe, I took a closer look at the bodies. Their guns were nearby and hadn’t been fired. It was possible they assumed that whatever attacked them wouldn’t be especially vulnerable to anti-faery ammo, but that seemed unlikely on account of how a big spray of iron pellets will ruin anyone’s day. More likely, whatever had happened had just been really, really quick.
One of the corpses had collapsed on top of something. I rolled him aside to see what it was, and it turned out to be a skull. A not-entirely-human-looking skull lined with mystical inscriptions.
“Got a soul box here,” I called out. Honestly, the damn things were like buses. You could go years without seeing any, and then two turn up within six months of each other. Corin had used one last year to protect herself from the Morrigan, and chances were these guys had been using it for something similar. That explained why they’d been immune to the Merchant’s usual brand of defensive fuckery, and also why they’d been in such a hurry to get back to this place. You didn’t leave your immortal spirit in a magic box made of severed demon head for any longer than you absolutely had to.
Elise came in from the main room. “Is it...occupied?”
I wasn’t really sure how I could tell, but it didn’t seem to be. “Best guess, they stashed their souls in here while they hit the pawnbroker. Then they came back to put themselves together, and somebody jumped them.”
“Somebody from the mirrors?”
I nodded and went back to the victims. Their faces had been pretty much shredded, but a couple of them had some major ink. Some major ink showing a knight in black armour leaning on a sword. And all at once, I knew exactly who these guys were and who they worked for.
Shit. I grabbed the soul box and made for the door.
“Are we done, Miss Kane?”
“Good as. Whatever we’re looking for isn’t here, and these guys are well past anything the Merchant can do to them.” I wasn’t completely sure that last bit was true, but I didn’t think it was a good time to be debating the retributive power of fae enchantments over the spirits of the departed.
Instead, we hightailed it back to the office. I called the crime scene in to the police from the car. I’d probably disturbed a bunch of shit I shouldn’t have disturbed but unless the Met had started putting terrifying otherworldly monsters into the National DNA Database, I wasn’t likely to be getting in the way of their investigation.
Civic duty done, I had one more call to make. This was going to be more difficult. There was this whole deal where one of my ex-girlfriends was the mystical queen of London, and a little under a year ago I’d had to swear fealty to her to get her help rescuing Julian from this...look, it was complicated. Anyway, point is she was hard to reach—if I wanted to contact her directly I had to do a big fiddly ritual, and the alternative was to leave a message with some call centre in East London in the hope she’d get back to me. Since right now I was in a car with a phone, and without the time to embark on a mystical geocaching expedition, I went call centre.
From the other end of the line, I heard a ringing, then static, then a click.
“Rachel,” I began, “I need to talk to Nim.”
“You’re through to Avalon Taxis.” That wasn’t Rachel. It was a man, for a start. A man with a broad cockney accent. “How can I help you?”
Fuck. I hung up. This was bad.
This was really bad.
“Is something wrong, Miss Kane?” asked Elise.
“Yeah, I think we’re in a shooting war.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because Rachel’s not picking up, and the guys who hit the Merchant worked for Arty King.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know the name.”
I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “No reason you should. Long story short: he’s a skinhead wizard gangster with a thing for fire who fought Nim for the soul of the city about ten years ago. It got really fucking nasty.” Curse your bloodline to the tenth generation nasty. Nail your wrists to a table nasty. Nim and me had been through a lot together back then, and though we’d broken up since, it’d left me with this highly inconvenient sense of residual loyalty.
“But I presume you defeated him?”
“Not exactly.” I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “Nim kind of won by default. Fighting wizards isn’t like fighting vampires or faeries. They’re real people with legal identities, and that kind of cuts
both ways. He was far more into the actual-physical-violence thing than Nim was, and he ended up doing a ten stretch for GBH.”
“That seems an ignominious way to lose a mystical shadow war.”
I blew out an aggressive sigh. “Maybe, but what makes fighting wizards so piss awful is you can never tell. You think you’ve got them exactly where you want them and it turns out the whole time you’ve been playing your part in some fucked up story they’re telling the universe.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Miss Kane.”
“That makes two of us. But what I do understand is that he’s a violent arsehole who wants Nim to die painfully, and he’s back.”
And there was me hoping I’d make it a whole six months without getting drawn into a sodding great supernatural shitstorm.
When we got in, I stuffed the soul box in my desk. It meant taking a couple of my emergency scotch bottles out, but my non-emergency stash had been getting low anyway. Then I flopped into my chair, leaned back and shut my eyes. It had been a mixed couple of days. In the plus column, I’d done at least part of the job I was hired to do in that I’d found the thieves and, for that matter, the remains of the bust which was technically the item that was stolen. The only thing missing was the unknowably powerful magical reagent that had been inside it.
I was half tempted to go to the Merchant and call it quits. They’d made it pretty clear they wanted the thieves way more than they wanted their stuff back, and if Arty King was making a comeback then setting a pissed off half-faery on his arse would only increase my life expectancy. Which was, honestly, a fucked up thing to be considering, and might have been evidence I’d spent too much time hanging out with vampires. Archer taught me better than this: you don’t ditch a job unfinished and you don’t use your client as a shield in a possibly metaphorical wizard conflict. Okay, he didn’t say that exactly but I’m sure he would have if it’d come up.
Besides, there was still part of me that couldn’t help poking a mystery. Arty King, or at least the Arty King I’d known ten years ago, wasn’t the kind of guy to whack his own men for the sake of misdirection. That meant there was another player out there—somebody powerful enough to risk crossing Arty King but not so powerful they’d take him on directly.
I opened my eyes. “Looks like we’re going on a witch hunt.”
“Literally or metaphorically?” Elise cocked her head to one side. “Although, giving the matter some consideration, I am not certain which variety I am least willing to participate in.”
“A literal witch hunt. Whatever killed those men might have been all dressed up with mirrors and mysticism, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still a robbery. When you get right down to it, it’s just one magic crook ripping off another magic crook.”
“Shall I get the whiteboard, Miss Kane?”
I nodded, and poured myself a drink of my newly promoted non-emergency scotch.
Elise’s enthusiasm for the whiteboard was on the charming edge of creepy. She’d told me once it liked to be involved, which I’d carefully blanked in case she decided to share any more of the private thoughts of my office furniture. Once everything was set up, I started making lists. Arty King’s associates. Mages I’d known who worked with mirrors. People who’d gone after the Tears the last time and weren’t definitively dead.
King’s gang had the same structure as Nimue’s court—four lieutenants to go with four elements or four points of the compass or something. They’d gone silent when he was banged up, but if the man on the phone was anything to go by they were back in a big way. Then there were the rest of his hangers-on, a bunch of small and not-so-small-time criminals, some of them mystically inclined, others just scary bastards who were a bit too quick with the claw hammer.
The other lists, the ones with the, y’know, suspects on them, were much shorter. There was Henry Percy, the vampire wizard who I’d tangled with last year. He had a reason to want the Tears (because ritual) and, on top of that, the freaky glass monster guarding his house suggested he could work some kind of mirror shenanigans. But I’d left him unconscious in a burning building which, hopefully, meant he was out of the picture. There was a good chance Corin was involved again, but she was strictly work-for-hire and as far as I knew had no actual magical powers. And that was pretty much it. Turns out my knowledge of merciless but cautious mirror sorcerers was far from encyclopaedic.
If I was going to make any progress, I needed to talk to somebody who knew way more about wizards than I did. In fact, for preference, I needed to talk to somebody who knew way more about wizards than I did and had an inside line on how Arty King’s gang worked, and who would have been in a position to fuck them over.
“Elise,” I said. “If I was about to do something suicidally stupid and reckless, you’d stop me, right?”
“I would attempt to stop you, Miss Kane. I doubt that I would be successful.”
“That’s what I thought.” I pulled out my phone and hit redial.
Ringing. Static. “Avalon Taxis. How can I help you?”
“I need to have a word with your boss.”
“That a fact?”
“That’s business. You robbed my client. Then somebody robbed you. Figure you know who it was.”
There was a moment of silence at the other end. “We’ll send a cab.”
The line went dead.
“I assume this is the moment at which I am supposed to tell you not to do this?” Elise didn’t wait for a reply; she crossed the room calmly and stood in the doorway.
“It’s only a meeting.”
“With a person who you know for a fact wishes to harm a person that you are mystically compelled to protect?”
Stupid magical oaths. Stupid fealty. Not that I needed magical compulsion to take Nim’s side in this particular fight, and I’d given King’s men plenty of reasons to hate me last time around. “Look, these guys were ambushed by somebody who knew where they’d be. Chances are, that somebody has our client’s property. Simplest all round if we go straight to the source and ask who screwed them over.”
“I am not leaving this doorway until you reconsider.”
“Do we need to go over the whole employer/employee thing again?”
Elise folded her arms. “I am quite adamant.”
“Okay, okay.” I raised my hands in a gesture of surrender. Then I rushed her. The plan was to sort of slide around her or past her or something, but I guess I’d underestimated either my own width or Elise’s general immovability. I wound up wrapped around her in a flailing mess. It was a workplace harassment suit waiting to happen.
“Perhaps,” she said when I had disentangled myself, “you would at least permit me to accompany you?”
“These people are dangerous.”
She tilted her head at me. “Of the two of us, which is impervious to physical injury?”
And, once again, she had a point. “Fine. You can come with me, but not to the actual meeting because it’s that kind of deal. And I don’t want Arty King getting interested in you. If anybody can work out how to hurt you, it’s him.”
I heard the sound of an engine in the street and looked out the window as a cab bearing the logo of Avalon Taxis (which, I couldn’t help noticing was an actual sword in an actual stone—some wizards have no subtlety) pulled up outside. Well, this was it. As a final precaution I fired a quick text to Julian. She wasn’t exactly reliable but she hated it when I went running off nearly getting killed without giving her a heads up.
Taking strange taxi to meet psycho wizard gangster. Send cavalry if not home by midnight.
I probably wouldn’t need it. She’d probably be too late if I did. But I felt weirdly better knowing she was out there.
Chapter Three
Faces & Names
The cab took us through the city in silence. I’d have made a crack about it being the first time I
’d had a taxi driver keep quiet for a whole journey, but truth is the chatty cabby thing is kind of a myth. It was after sunset by the time we got where we were going, which turned out to be a swanky North London club called the Undertow. The place was new, but from what I remembered of King’s gang, his man in the north was this sleazy promoter type by the name of Lake. Then again, I thought I remembered him and King having a big falling out over a woman, so maybe he’d been replaced.
“You’re waiting here,” I told Elise. “Give me ten and, if I’m not back, come looking for me.”
I got out the cab and made my way into the club. The guy on the door let me off the cover charge—guess he knew I was coming—and I found myself in a world of neon blue light and dance music that thudded like a heartbeat. And not in a metaphorical way. I was pretty sure King wouldn’t show up himself because, let’s face it, we both had good reason to think the meeting was a set-up. Nobody had told me exactly where to go or what to do but I’d been to enough nightclub-based mystical showdowns to know the score. I was here to meet a flunky and it was a pretty good bet he’d be in some roped-off VIP area draped in hot, drunk women.
And, sure enough, there was Lake. Blond and square-jawed and with the easy smile of a man who either loves everybody or doesn’t give a crap about anybody. He’d aged since we last met. The girls he was sitting with hadn’t. I mean, because they were different girls, not that they were the same girls and hadn’t aged. He was still a sleazebag, is what I’m saying. I went over, doing my best to look confident but non-confrontational. Or non-confrontational but not non-threatening. Basically, I was going for something that said “I’m not going to start anything, and you shouldn’t either.” I wasn’t totally sure I nailed it.
“Here to talk.” Not my most original opener, but it did the job.
He looked up. Still smiling. “I know you. You’re in the army of dykes.”
“I can see why you’re so popular with the ladies.”