by Alexis Hall
“Booze, drugs and a massive dick are why I’m popular with the ladies.” He extricated his arms from his entourage and leaned forward. “Now what do you want?”
“You stole something from my client. Somebody stole it from you. Tell me who it was so I can go after them.”
“Out of the goodness of your heart?” He had yeah right face on.
“Out of doing my job. And you’re going to help me because it’s that or let somebody get away with stealing from you.”
His air of smug prickery didn’t falter but the rhythm of the club shifted in a way that made my ears pop. It wasn’t exactly reassuring. I knew I was pushing my luck here, but at this point I was kind of low on options. I was gambling on King and his men not being able to deal with whatever had gone wrong with the robbery and fight Nim at the same time. Of course, the trouble with gambling was that you quite often lost.
“Do you think,” asked Lake, “that I am a fucking moron? Your boss and my boss are at war and you waltz in here, tell me I can’t handle my own fucking business and expect me to be fucking grateful.”
“Look—” I made a no-need-for-anyone-to-get-stabbed gesture. “I thought we could maybe help each other out on this. I’m not working for Nim. I’m working for myself.”
“Don’t try to bullshit a seer, love. I can taste the oaths on you from here.”
Well, bollocks. I hadn’t factored that in. Stupid fealty making me supernaturally bound to do something I was going to do anyway. Guess that meant it was time to play bait the psycho. “Suit yourself. But the way I see it, nobody would have dared steal from Arty King before he went inside.”
Lake folded his hands. Rested his chin on two fingertips. “You have ten seconds to reconsider trying to play me.”
“I’m just calling it how I see it. The Arty King from ten years ago wouldn’t have needed outside help to hold up a faery shop keeper. He wouldn’t have let three of his boys get their faces ripped off and he wouldn’t have let whoever did it get away with it. Right now, he’s looking weak as piss. Give me a name and it all goes away.”
Lake waved a hand. Three figures loomed out of the darkness of the club. One of them looked so much like Elise that I actually thought it was her for a moment. But she was dressed differently—far more provocatively than Elise preferred. Not only that, her whole manner was different. She seemed like she meant business. Violent business, not sex business. Although honestly it was kind of touch and go. At least from where I was standing.
I gave Lake my best “I’m not angry I’m disappointed” look. “Is this your way of saying you’re not going for it?”
The Elise-alike glanced at her boss. He nodded.
I had about three options here. I could try to run, but that would make this trip a complete waste of time. I could go full faery princess, but unleashing my mother in a crowded nightclub would turn the whole thing into a bloodbath and I was really trying to have less of those. Which left option three.
Two of Lake’s men flanked me. I slipped sideways and struck one of them in the jaw while the other closed in. Spinning back around, I hit him in the neck with the edge of my hand. Then cold fingers closed around my arm and that was pretty much it. I’d felt Elise’s strength before, but she’d never been actively trying to hurt me. Her double, on the other hand, was. It was like being trapped in stone which, y’know, go figure. And this was where option three got nasty because I was about to take one hell of a beating.
I took one hell of a beating.
When they were done I was in a heap on the floor, wheezing and spitting blood, with a whole new collection of interesting bruises. My ribs might have been cracked as well. I painfully craned my neck to see Lake standing over me.
“You’ve got some fucking nerve,” he said.
I stayed down. It was that kind of deal.
“You’re looking for Rose Red. And when you find him, show him your face and tell him it’s a message. Tell the little cocksucker that he’ll get his soon enough.”
“Fuck you.”
He kicked me in the ribs again for good measure. Then one of his men hauled me up by my collar, dragged me out of the club and threw me into the street. The real Elise was standing on the kerb waiting for me. She rushed over and helped me to my feet.
“Miss Kane!”
I leaned against her. “It’s fine, Elise. All part of the plan.”
“This seems an unusual plan.”
“Fastest way to get the information. People like that need to feel like they’re winning.”
She was quiet a moment. And then said, “Unless there is some nuance I have not understood, it appears that, in this instance, the feeling was justified.”
“Yeah, it’s a nuance thing.” I poked my tongue around my mouth, checking for loose teeth. “I lost the who-gets-punched-most competition. But I got the information I needed and all he got was to save face.”
“I still do not think it was wise to put yourself in harm’s way, Miss Kane.”
I laughed, then winced as my lip split open. “I spend so much time in harm’s way, I’m thinking of setting up a forwarding address. Really, I’m half-faery, I heal fast, I’m fine. And I got a name.”
“He told you who betrayed them?”
“He said to look into Rose Red.”
“I do not believe I’m familiar with the individual.”
I almost was, but I couldn’t put my finger on it right at that moment. Then again, my fingers had been stamped on fairly recently. I reached for my phone. Unfortunately, it turned out that the all-over fist massage had been as bad for my personal electronics as it was for me. Good thing I’d got into the habit of keeping backups at the office. I swear if I ever hold on to a handset for more than eight months, I’m going to buy it a birthday cake.
“I’ll look it up when we get home,” I said.
First rule of surviving a magical shadow war: avoid privately operated, culturally significant modes of transport. Ideally avoid any form of public transport but, right now, it was lie on the floor and bleed or get a bus and hope it didn’t turn out to be somebody’s metaphor.
It took us a fair while to get back to the office but I didn’t really care. We got stared at a bit because I looked like I’d just been beaten up by a gangster wizard and his minions, but I was kind of used to that. The being stared at, that is. You’d be amazed how much attention you get with a vampire bite.
I hobbled upstairs, hanging off Elise’s shoulder, and went straight to our first aid cabinet for the bandages and the emergency vodka. I could have done with a lie down, but the problem with hunt-the-McGuffin cases is that taking a break is a recipe for falling even further behind than you already are. Worse still, I had a nasty feeling the whole case was going to turn out the same way it had last time: everybody involved winding up dead or insane or imprisoned in a silver cage on the other side of the sky. I poured myself a shot—it was mostly for the pain, but it was also just getting on for that time of day.
I slumped into my chair, pulled the spare phone from among the knives and empty bottles in my desk drawer, switched the SIM, and sent Julian a quick text. Still alive, phone not so lucky. A few seconds later, a message came back: Wonderful. I don’t think you’d wear dead as well as I do, sweeting. It made me smile—which I immediately regretted, because my jaw wasn’t on board.
Pocketing the phone, I swivelled round and looked out the window. The old stone of Bow Street was lit with the electric glow of a London night. I was making progress, but I knew how this went. I’d spend the next three weeks diving down rabbit holes and chasing wild geese and, before you could say “near limitless source of mystical power” the city would be full of ambitious wizards from halfway round the world, a bunch of my friends would be dead, and I’d get sold out at the last second by someone I never saw coming. The smart thing to do would be to walk away.
Oh,
who was I kidding? I turned back to the desk, booted up my computer, and Googled Rose Red.
Well, that was easier than expected. It’s always a good day on the job when the answer to your question is “a truly fabulous drag queen.” Rose Red turned out to be the stage name of a Brighton-based performer who ran a pop-up cabaret experience called the Enchanted Kingdom, all moody lighting, lip-sync and mirrors.
She’d had pretty good reviews in Edinburgh, but I could find more or less nothing in the way of contact details or tour information. That figured—if she was some kind of sorcerer, she’d be living under the radar, or as under the radar as you could get if your job was to stand in a spotlight for money. It was time to hit up my contacts.
I called Kauri.
It rang a couple of times and then I was greeted by a cheerful Kiwi accent. “Kate! To what do I owe this completely unexpected phone call from my good friend who in no way only contacts me when she wants something?”
“Hey, I’m a busy lady.”
“All right, busy lady, lay it on me.”
“Rose Red.”
Kauri laughed. “Good act. Second best in the business.”
“Who’s the best?”
The line was silent a second. “You know, I’m quite insulted you even asked.”
“How do I get to the Enchanted Kingdom?”
The line was silent again. “Oh my God, are you actually ringing me up for a party invitation?”
“It’s work.”
“That doesn’t make it better. If anything, that makes it worse.”
“Fine. I’m a terrible person. But I’m a terrible person who needs your help.”
“You’re lucky I’m bored, immortal and sickening. I’ll pick you up tomorrow night. Wear something that won’t embarrass me.”
“My current plan is cashmere, pearls and go fuck yourself.”
“Sounds good, but maybe go easy on the cashmere and pearls.”
We hammered out the details, I failed hard at small talk, and then we hung up. And that was me officially done for the day. What with the legwork and getting my head kicked in, I was pretty much ready to pass out in my chair.
I got Elise to drive me home, made myself a cup of Bovril, and slumped in front of the TV. Elise stood next to the sofa for a little while—she still hadn’t really got into the habit of sitting, but I got the impression she was being there for me. Which made it very hard to not to bring up the thing I in no way wanted to bring up.
“Elise,” I began. “The guy who made you?”
She paused Sharpe’s Peril and turned to me. “Yes?”
“You’ve never really said anything about him.”
“I am not sure there is a great deal to say. He created me; I displeased him.”
Despite my job, I’ve never been that great at reading people unless they gave me big obvious signals like trying to shag me or murder me. And Elise was hard to read at the best of times, what with the whole animated statue thing. But I’d known her for a while now, and I’d known weird supernatural beings for a whole lot longer, and the trick with people who weren’t human was that when something really got to them the mask slipped. Vampires got deader. Wolves got wilder. Faeries flipped the fuck out. And Elise just...stopped.
“If...” I really wasn’t sure how to phrase this. “If I thought I had a lead on him. If I thought there were others...”
Elise was silent for a moment. “I would want to know, Miss Kane. If that is what you were asking.”
“That’s pretty much what I was asking. One of King’s men has a woman working for him who looks exactly like you. She’s got the same too-strong-can’t-be-hurt thing going for her as well.”
“Oh.”
I patted her arm, in what I hoped was a consoling way. Truth was, we were both pretending to be ordinary people. “It’s your call from here. I can drop it. I can try to speak to her. You could try to speak to her.”
She was silent again. For even longer this time. “May I think about this?”
“Whatever you need, Elise.”
And then I went to bed. Sometimes it was all you could do.
Chapter Four
Bathrooms & Battles
The Dream of the sun beat down on the Dream of a city. I stood in a white room beside a white bed. In the bed, a woman I thought I recognised was wired to white machines that gave off white noise. Outside, I could hear the crackling of flames.
Well, fuck. I really thought I was done with this shit.
I leaned closer to look at her. There wasn’t much to look at—what wasn’t bandages was bruises. Whoever it was, somebody had come after her hard, hard and personal. A nimbus of blue light flickered around her head, like the glow from a dying phone.
Nimue took my hand. She wasn’t there. Then she was. That was normal here. “We don’t have much time.”
“What the shit is going on?” I turned to face her, half fearing she’d vanish again when I did.
“King hit us in the east.” Slowly, she looked down at the bed. “Rachel was my eyes. This will be harder without her.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
Nimue’s shoulders hunched. The sense of power that normally surrounded her dimmed. “King needed to stop her seeing and speaking. He hurt her badly.”
Somewhere in the distance, I heard gunshots. “What can I do?”
“You’re looking for a weapon. Bring it to me.”
I stared at her and for a moment there was nothing in the Dream but the two of us. Nimue bathed in sunlight, a goddess from a pagan past. “Nim,” I said. It was hard to speak to her when she was like this. “This thing gets people killed. And it belongs to my client, not to me.”
“It belongs to whoever takes it. And you swore an oath. You wanted something from me, remember?”
Sometimes I really wasn’t sure if I was talking to my friend, my ex, or an unyielding sorcerer-queen arisen from the collective unconscious of humanity. But now wasn’t the time to think too hard about that. “I’ll do what I can.”
“This is going to get bad, Kate. Really bad.”
“So what else is new?”
She leaned up and kissed me on the cheek. I shut my eyes and let the heat rush over me.
* * *
I woke up. It was still uncomfortably warm. The newspapers were saying we were headed for the hottest summer on record, but then they’d said that last year as well. Since Kauri wasn’t getting me into the Enchanted Kingdom until the evening and every other lead had gone dry, I was stuck with a day to kill. On the plus side, that meant I had some time to recover from having had the utter shit kicked out of me. On the down side, it meant I was going to be lying around feeling like there was something really important I should be getting on with, but being completely unable to get on with it.
The morning after a beating was always the worst. The adrenaline and endorphins were gone, and all that was left was the stiffness, the aches, and the horrible shooting pains every time I poked myself in the ribs. New plan: stop poking myself in the ribs.
I got gingerly out of bed, and grabbed the coffee and the banana that Elise had left for me. It looked like the window had closed on the banana thing, and I was going to have an immortal being making sure I got my daily dose of squishy, stringy good-source-of-potassium until the day I died. Elise had gone into the office to do the stuff that made the invoicing work and the bills get paid. Chances were, even if I tried to go in, she’d send me home. Yes, I was technically the boss but she’d get all concerned and I’d get all guilty and then I’d get annoyed at her for making me feel guilty and that would put me over my daily emotion limit.
Only a little reluctantly, I decided I’d give the recuperation thing a try. I lay myself very carefully down on the sofa and put Sharpe’s Peril back on, but I’d lost track of the plot on account of the whole awkward “by the wa
y there’s more of you” conversation last night. Something something war something something attractive woman something something pit of cobras. I checked my phone and realised it was only ten thirty. Wow, I was bad at this. Getting better sucked.
Since Sean Bean wasn’t cutting it, I went back to bed and stared at the ceiling for a bit. Given how much I resented getting up in the mornings I’d really thought that my circadian rhythms would jump at the opportunity for bonus circadianing or whatever. But no. I just felt uncomfortable and restless. Debedding, I decided to keep busy by getting on with the kind of household tasks I was usually too lazy to do myself and too embarrassed to get Elise to do for me. I’d scrubbed exactly half the bath when I decided that domesticity, on balance, could go fuck itself.
I got my hat and my coat and went into town, figuring that while I wasn’t well enough for the more running-jumping-punching bits of the job, I could at least fill my client in on where we were. And, yes, I could have phoned but I’d been alone in the flat for a bit under three hours and I was losing my goddamn mind. Elise had taken the car, I was in no state to limp to Seven Dials and every bus, train and taxi in the city was at risk of being co-opted into a secret battle for divine kingship. But if it was risk getting caught up in a nexus of mystical conflict or finish cleaning the bath, I’d go nexus every time. And logic said that most journeys on public transport would not end with the lights going out and a suddenly empty train carriage pulling into a station that doesn’t exist.
Twenty minutes later, the lights went out and my suddenly empty train carriage pulled into a station that didn’t exist.
Here lies Kate Kane: really walked into that one. Beloved daughter. Sorely missed.
The trick in this kind of situation was not to do anything hasty, which was a mixed blessing because, on the one hand, haste wasn’t really a thing I could do right now but, on the other, caution and foresight weren’t things I could do, well, ever. Also the underground is, and this may surprise you, underground, so when it gets dark, it gets proper, absolute dark. And while I could have used the light on my phone, it would have been a really good way to say “come murder me” to anything lurking out there. No getting around it. This was a trust-your-senses-use-your-mother’s-instincts situation. I fucking hated those.