by Alexis Hall
Dropping into a crouch, I put my fingertips to the cold lacquer floor and listened. Whispers in the shadows. Not “I’m on the Tube, bit of a delay” whispers. More “this place is haunted as fuck” whispers. An incessant weeping like a child in a BBC drama about sad Victorians. The distant crackling of flames and heavy footfalls, growing closer. Yeah, I really needed to get out of here.
I inched my way along the carriage to the doors. I’d spent enough time on the Tube that I could basically have found my way around with my eyes closed anyway: seats, holdy-on pole, second holdy-on pole, open door button that never works, doors. Or, in this case, empty space. Whatever had brought me here didn’t want to keep me trapped, but did want to have easy access to me. It was kind of the definition of good news/bad news.
Taking great care to mind the gap between the train and the platform, I crawled out. To my right, a lighter sparked, illuminating a hunched figure in a reflective Transport for London jacket.
“Jacob?” I called out. Sure, it could have been a different Tube worker carrying out an occult ritual in an abandoned station at quarter to twelve on Tuesday. But what were the chances?
“Kate.” He calmly finished lighting his circle of candles.
I like to think of myself as a woman of few words but Jacob—Nim’s man in the west—made me look like I was played by Prunella Scales in an eighties sitcom.
“Sooooo,” I tried. “Any idea what I’m doing here?”
“Nim sent you.”
Stupid fealty. It was moments like these that I really had to remind myself that Nim was a fundamentally good person, because if I didn’t I’d feel really fucking used. “What for?”
He pointed past me. “That.”
I turned to see the tunnel behind me erupt into a wall of something that was definitely hellfire. Which, if you’ve never seen it, is basically fire but about twelve percent fierier and two hundred percent hellier. Out of the flames walked a seemingly ordinary pensioner.
Well, fuck. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: never tangle with seemingly ordinary pensioners. At best they’re monstrously powerful otherworldly entities with agendas you have no hope of comprehending. At worst they’re the sorts of people who’ve done the sorts of things you have to do to reach eighty despite being neck deep in blood, chaos and witchcraft.
And I had a good idea who this one was.
“You’ve made this far harder than it had to be,” she said. “And that vexes me something awful.”
I glanced at Jacob. But he had his eyes closed, which I hoped meant he was doing something magical and important. Although, to be honest, if I had to describe Jacob to someone, top bants wouldn’t be the first thing I mentioned. I tried banting for him. “I see Arty’s still having his nan fight his battles for him.”
“That’s the problem with your lot. You don’t understand family.”
“I think I was raised with different values. We ate dinner in front of the TV and didn’t kneecap people.”
Nana King shuffled forward a few steps. “You think you’re so high and mighty, don’t you, girl? You and your pretender queen.”
This was getting difficult. Everything I’d heard about Arty King’s grandmother said she was just as much of a cold stone psycho as he was. But beating up an old lady in an abandoned Tube station didn’t sit right with me. “Okay,” I said. “It seems like we’ve got off on the wrong foot. How about you go your way, we go ours, and nobody gets stabbed in the heart or burned to death?”
Between the candles and the fire, I wasn’t really picking up fine details but I didn’t like the way the shadows moved across Nana King’s face.
“You messed with me and mine, love. You can go right to Hell.” Something in her tone suggested she didn’t mean that metaphorically. She turned and walked slowly back into the flames. Jacob spoke a word in one of the many wizard languages I didn’t understand and a cold, nauseating wind that smelled of ozone and formaldehyde came rushing down the tunnel. I jumped out of the way far faster than my body could really cope with and looked up in time to see an army of withered, corpse-like spirits riding the darkness like foam on the crest of a wave.
Before they could reach Nana King, she vanished, the fires billowing around her with renewed hellishness. Just as I was thinking we’d scared her off, new figures appeared in the inferno—human-looking, but moving with an urgent, animal hunger and baying in a distinctly demony way.
And this was why I never felt properly dressed unless I was armed.
I pressed myself against the tunnel wall as Jacob’s ghosts and Nana King’s minions tore into each other in a scene that, what with all the skulls, horns and burning, wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cover of an early nineties death metal album. Truthfully, I didn’t have much of a sense of what was going on here, mystically speaking, but I’d been in similar situations before and most of the time the important thing was to protect the guy in the magic circle. Because if you were sitting down chanting while actual monsters were trying to rip your actual face off, it was a safe bet that whatever you were chanting about really, really mattered.
Team Dead were making a pretty decent stand against Team Diabolism, but it was hard to hold a position when you were made of ectoplasm and regrets. A man with goat’s horns and eagle’s talons broke through the line and made straight for Jacob. Ignoring the pain in my everything, I drew the sanctified steel blade from my right forearm and threw myself at him. We went down heavy and rolled across the platform, clawing and slashing at each other—I mean, he was clawing, I was slashing. Long story short, I slashed better than he clawed, and got up only to run straight into the next one, a frenzied-looking woman who seemed perfectly human except for the fact her knees bent backwards and, as I discovered when her fingers closed round my throat and she lifted me off my feet, she was way stronger than she should have been.
Something I’ve learned over the years about the lift-and-slam school of fighting is that it’s really vulnerable to a dagger in the elbow. She dropped me and retreated, but I landed badly, which gave a third demon—something tall and pale, trailing what might have been a coat or might have been wings—the chance to slip past me and the ghosts, and break the edge of Jacob’s circle. I’d seen Jacob in action before and I knew how badly he could fuck you up if you were either alive or undead, but I wasn’t sure how much protection he had against...and it suddenly occurred to me that I also wasn’t sure what demons were. Look. It’s my job to investigate this stuff, not write papers on it.
The candles flared blue and the whole place got way colder. There was obviously some dark necromancy shit happening here, but I wasn’t sure if it meant Jacob was totally fine and had everything in hand or if he was desperately throwing whatever he had at an enemy that could easily kill him. I didn’t want to get all micromanagey on the battle but I figured this was one of those situations where over-helping was way preferable to under-helping. I rushed over as best I could with my ever-growing collection of ouchies and rammed my knife directly between two bony ridges on the demon’s back that I really hoped were shoulder blades.
It did not seem to appreciate this and swung to face me, hissing and baring way too many teeth, most of them longer than my actual knife. This was very much a “strike first and don’t fuck it up” kind of deal, but before I could get my stab on, the creature was swallowed by blue fire. There was a fair bit of thrashing, quite a lot of inhuman screaming and then it withered away to dust and ashes. Standing over its remains, Jacob looked at once utterly terrifying and utterly fucked. His whole body was wreathed in corpsefire, and I could feel the life, heat and hope leeching out of the air around him, but he had that “oh, I have over-reached myself” vibe that, frankly, mages got way too often.
“Go,” he said. “Tell Nimue we have lost the deep places.”
“I’m not a big fan of leaving people.” Although, to be fair, I also wasn’t a b
ig fan of getting killed.
He gave me a grim smile. “This train terminates here. Leave now or stay forever.”
Well, when he put it like that. “Okay, let’s say I’ve come round on the leave plan. How do I actually get out?”
Jacob pointed at a patch of darkness and a maintenance door opened where I was pretty damn convinced there hadn’t been a maintenance door previously. I fucking hated doors that I was pretty damn convinced hadn’t been there previously but you know what I hated even more? Being eternally trapped in an abandoned Tube station full of demons.
I pegged it.
Chapter Five
Sofia & Me
I emerged from the spooky tunnel of not getting murdered into a large, brightly lit hall under the gaze of a surprisingly chilled out Egyptian pharaoh. A statue of one, at least. And it probably says something about my life that this is the sort of thing I have to clarify. A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed the door had disappeared behind me—because of course it had—and a quick glance at my surroundings confirmed that nothing was immediately trying to send me to literal hell in a metaphorical handbasket. That moment of calm gave me precisely enough time to realise that I had zero clue what had happened to Jacob. I’d got a pretty distinct valiant last stand vibe from everything he’d been doing but, set against that, dude was a necromancer. If anybody would do well in a certain death situation, it’d be him.
I still had no fucking idea where I was, mind. Although the casual appearance of a clump of politely indifferent tourists suggested that I hadn’t gone back in time or been teleported to actual Cairo. Chances were, I hadn’t left London. More likely, I was in one of those massive, internationally renowned museums full of shit we nicked from other countries.
Putting my knives away as quickly and discreetly as I could manage, I did my best to look like it was the most normal thing in the world to be limping around an Egyptological exhibition in a battered fedora and a suit with a severe case of demonic wear-and-tear. I’d never been the biggest fan of culture in general, which came in handy now because it meant most of my childhood experience of museums had involved looking for the quickest way out of them. When in doubt, follow the signs to the gift shop. And, sure enough, in a few minutes I was in the fresh air and the blazing sun, making my unsteady way between the what-were-they-compensating-for pillars and down the unnecessary steps because fuck you Victorians.
Once I got onto Great Russell Street, I collapsed into a chair outside a Starbucks I wasn’t patronising. I had a feeling it was going to be really important to tell Nim what had happened—whatever that was—but my only way of contacting her right now was in my dreams and short of trying to pass out where I was, and getting arrested for vagrancy or at least chucked out of Starbucks, that wasn’t entirely an option. The most sensible thing for me to do was forget the mage war for ten minutes and go see the Merchant like I’d originally planned. Especially since, despite all the getting diverted to lost stations and popping up in random museums, I was still only about half a mile from Seven Dials. And this time, I was walking.
The pawnshop was empty when I got there. Thinking about it, I’d never seen it have an actual customer. But then again I suppose promises, dreams and incredibly rare occult artefacts wasn’t exactly a volume business.
Sheyne was watching me from behind the counter. “You are bleeding on my floor.”
“Good to know you care.”
“Have you found my property yet?”
“Good to know you don’t care that much. I found the men who took it.”
The Merchant smiled, thin-lipped and too many teeth. “Who?”
“They’re dead.”
“Wasn’t the question, my dear.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. This was about to go either very well or very badly. “It’s like this. Right now, the guy who had your shop hit is fighting a war against the Witch Queen of London. His name’s Arty King. He’s a trigger-happy thug and fully paid up wizard. Honestly, if you wanted to go after him, it would really help me out, but you should know what you’re getting into.”
“That was a very forthright answer.” The Merchant raised a finger to their lips. “Do you think I’m trying to trap you?”
“It’s nothing personal. But I want to be incredibly sure that I don’t come out of this owing anybody any favours.”
“You are too wary of your nature. And of mine.”
“Where my mother’s concerned, there’s no such thing as too wary.”
“She is a difficult one. But no, you have nothing to fear from me. My decision regarding Mr. King will be mine alone, and it shall be neither a trade nor a gift. I still expect you to retrieve my property, but it will be on the terms we discussed, you will be paid in the coin of the realm and we will owe one another no further obligation.”
“Thanks.” I gave the Merchant a kind of noncommittal nod. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“Please do.”
The heat hit me again as soon as I left the shop. Being the child of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter came with a bunch of perks of which a really fantastic aircon system was probably the least interesting but the most practical. I was half tempted to go back inside but—and maybe I was being paranoid—I was pretty sure the Merchant of Dreams wouldn’t even give cool air away for free.
I leaned against the window and lit a cigarette. I’d just started to enjoy the carcinogens when my phone buzzed. A text from Sofia. It said: Can we talk it’s about Patrick and ended with a blank-faced emoji that I thought indicated worry.
I’d got sort of close to Sofia, Patrick’s new girlfriend, over the past few months. Since Archer died, I hadn’t really done the friends thing and, even if I had, I wouldn’t have chosen someone fifteen years younger than me who’d spent the best part of a year convinced I was trying to steal her boyfriend. But, now she was over that, I think she liked having somebody around who’d gone through the whole immortal beloved, mysterious destiny thing. Because let’s face it, there weren’t many of us out there. Or if there were, we didn’t have a very good support network.
I texted back to tell her I was free this afternoon and we arranged to meet at this crappy cafe up the road from her college. This left me with a bit of a logistical problem because Sofia, and for that matter my flat, were about three hours away on foot. If I was lucky, Jacob would be keeping the demon thing contained and the Tube would be fine. But if I was unlucky he was already dead, and I would be dragged screaming into a fiery pit for all eternity the moment I swiped my Oyster card. And, luck-wise, I hadn’t really been having the best day, or indeed week. Or year. Or life. And, maybe, the fact the two rival witch-monarchs were fighting over the Tube meant that the buses would be safe, but yeah. No. That left walking and Boris bikes, and I wasn’t in any fit state to do either. Which brought my options down to 1) ring Elise like she was my mum and I’d missed the last train back from a party, 2) lie in the street and wait to die, or 3) I was going to really regret three.
I went back inside.
“Forget something, Kate Kane?” The Merchant smirked at me from behind the counter.
I looked at the suspiciously clean floor. “About that blood I left in here,” I began.
“I’ve taken care of it for you.”
“Save it for the tourists. You’ve got something that belongs to me. You can give it back or you can trade me for it.”
Their eyes brightened. “So you do want to make a deal.”
“I don’t, but I have to, which I’m guessing is the way you like it.”
“Aren’t we having a perspicacious morning?” They grinned gleamingly. “Now, how can this humble merchant serve you?”
I gritted my teeth. “I need transport.”
“Transport, you say?”
The Merchant sounded way too happy and I ran a rapid mental inventory of all the ways they could use a vagu
e request to fuck me over. There were a lot of ways. “I need access to a vehicle—specifically a vehicle, not any modification to my body, soul or any other part of me—that can get me around London about as effectively as a car would and won’t randomly carry me off into another reality, or need to be fed something weird like the blood of strangers or the tears of virgins. And that is not intended to be an exhaustive list. It should take passengers and not make me look like a total knob end. I’ll need it all summer.”
“And you expect all of this for a single drop of blood?”
“Oh, please, I’m half-faery and I’m dating a vampire. I know what blood is worth. This is a bargain and you know it.”
“Then”—the Merchant chuckled softly—“we have a deal, my dear.”
There was a pause. I’d kind of expected them to do something magic-y.
“Is that it?” I asked.
They waggled their fingers in a gesture I found, frankly, sarcastic. “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “Thank you. Where is it?”
“Outside.”
I left. I came back in again. “Okay. How did you go from ‘don’t make me look like a knob end’ to ‘actual fucking horse and carriage’?”
“Were I the sort to give free advice,” murmured the Merchant, “I might suggest that you use less subjective language in future.”
“They’ve got plumes on their heads.”
“And at no extra charge.”
I scowled. “You are taking the piss.”
“I am exactly as I appear to be. Perhaps you should try it.”
Rule Number What The Fuck Were You Thinking Kate: never make deals with faeries. I slunk out of the pawnbrokers and climbed sheepishly into the—and there was no other word for it—fairytale carriage that was still waiting patiently by the kerb. There was no driver, and no obvious way to control it, but the moment I got in, it started moving. I chose to believe that it would take me where I wanted to go. And, hey, it did.