Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  He seemed genuinely in pain. And if he was trying to manipulate me into doing his bidding, playing on my famous sense of sympathy and fair play seemed a funny way to go about it. If he’d done the bare minimum of research, he’d have just sent me a pretty sociopath in a little black dress and had the Tears by teatime.

  “No offence”—I leaned forward, elbows on my knees—“but this seems kind of a crappy deal. I sell out a friend I took a magic oath to protect and you give me...as far as I can tell: nothing.”

  “I can give you liberty.”

  “Un-vague that for me.”

  “Work with me this once and your oath-tie to the Witch Queen of London will be severed.”

  “Yeah, fucking people over does kind of sever ties. But it has consequences.”

  “I’m sorry. I chose my words poorly. I meant to say that what a Queen has done a King can undo. I have the power to release you from whatever binds you to Nimue. And without the sanctions that fall upon oath-breakers.”

  This was beginning to sound like the interest-free-credit of mystical bargains. Betray now, pay later. Although, I had to admit it was tempting. Don’t get me wrong, I cared about Nim. I really cared about Nim. If I had to choose between giving her a weapon that could blow up the city and letting Arty King take her down, I’d give her the weapon every time. But I had enough trouble committing to a Netflix subscription. I really wasn’t okay with eternal fealty.

  “A one-time trade, Miss Kane,” he murmured. “And you walk away free.”

  I looked at him. Either the man was what they’d call inscrutable, or I was really bad at scruting. “And what’s the stick?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “That’s the carrot. What’s the stick?”

  Fisher pressed a hand to his side, his eyes closing for a moment. “I am a civilised man. No matter what you decide, you will walk out of here today. But only today. I will have what I want, with you or without you.”

  Well, at least he’d been honest. I stood up. “So, this has been fun, and thanks for the ambiguous promises and veiled threats. But I’m afraid I have this policy where I don’t do deals with anyone who looks even a little bit like the Devil.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  Mallory and the minions escorted me out, and then it was back into the van. I thought about asking them to drop me off somewhere specific but this was less of a lift and more of a dump. They chucked me out somewhere around Battersea. Which at least wasn’t the river.

  It did, however, leave me at a bit of a loose end for the rest of the evening. The thought of going home was pretty miserable since Elise was still out and I didn’t want to be alone with a bottle and my bruises. I risked the night bus to Brewer Street. No demons. Just the usual crowd you got on late night public transport, which, honestly, was only about ten percent better.

  By the time I got there, it was a bit before two but the Velvet was still open. Ashriel, Julian’s celibate incubus lieutenant, was lazily watching the door, although it was getting to the point where the job was barely necessary. I nodded at him.

  He eyeballed me. “What happened to you?”

  “The usual. Angry magic gangsters. Disappearing train. Legions of Hell.”

  “Rough. She’s upstairs.”

  Inside the club was a loud, pulsing mix of sweat and sex. I crossed the velvet rope and headed up to the VIP area where Julian held court with the kittens, her loosely defined collection of exhibitionist girl-on-girl pleasure junkies. Whatever you thought about Julian, you had to admit the lady knew what she liked.

  When she saw me, she sat up, a smile spreading across her slightly bloodstained lips. The kittens disentangled themselves, gathered what little clothing they’d been wearing and crept away—they’d been around long enough to know the deal.

  “Sweeting,” Julian purred, “you look positively...”

  “Fucked?”

  “No, but I hope to rectify that.”

  It should have been creepy that Julian found my injuries a turn-on, but truth was she found almost everything a turn-on. “Can we have a brief chat about the things trying to kill me first?”

  She stretched back out on her chaise longue. “I take a very dim view of people trying to kill you.”

  “I know.” I slid in under Julian’s feet. She’d gone for a kind of Louis XIV vibe tonight with lots of lace and brocade, and satin-bowed shoes. I tugged them off and stroked her stockinged calves. “Basically there’s about a hundred and ninety four different wizard factions coming down on the city. Things are getting kind of apocalyptic.”

  She nudged me gently with her toes. “You could leave the magicians to fight amongst themselves. It doesn’t affect us.”

  I’d been kicking the same idea around myself—ever since I’d realised what I’d stumbled back into. Except when Julian said it didn’t affect us, what she really meant was it didn’t affect her. Because I did have a horse in this race. Nim was my girl. Had been since I first came to London. Things hadn’t worked out between us romance-wise, but she was still one of my oldest friends in the city. One of the few who weren’t dead yet. I couldn’t hang her out to dry.

  Could I?

  Julian slithered out from under me and turned my face towards hers. Her eyes were that endless, perfect blue like a wild ocean. “You’re in your head,” she said. “Let me take you out of it.”

  She kissed me, and I tasted wine and rose leaves and eternity. Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought I was exactly in the mood but, thing about Julian—she was the mood.

  When I opened my eyes again, she was stretched full length on top of me, her fingers already at work on my clothes. For once, she was relatively careful. With me, at least. Not so much the ensemble. My blazer just about made it, but I heard my shirt rip. In some distant way, I was annoyed—it was one of my better ones—but then Julian got her hands on me, and everything was blotted out by the glide of skin against skin.

  “My poor darling.” She surveyed my collection of scrapes and bruises, and the sorry attempt I’d made to bandage up my shoulder. “You have been in the wars.”

  “Yes. There is a literal war going on right now. You know, the—”

  “Shhhh. Let me kiss it better.”

  “What, the war?”

  “All of it.” Julian’s eyes shone impossibly blue. The deepest places of the sky or the sea. “Everything that’s hurting you.”

  She bent her head and put her lips to a gash across my ribs—could have been anything, really, stray talon, gangster boot, casual van-bundling injury—and I gasped at the fresh sting. But, with Julian, pain was just another thing to feel. Not that I was usually the biggest fan of feeling things, but right now, it was way better than thinking.

  I let her have it: the noise and the questions and shitty mess that was my life right now. And in return she gave me her teeth and her fingers and pleasure, sharp as blood, deep as shadows, that covered me and consumed me, and was its own forever.

  Chapter Eight

  Hunters & Prey

  Fire raged through the Dream of a city. I smelled burning hair and burning flesh. A hand came to rest on my shoulder, and I turned to see a masked woman in green.

  I’d met this lady before—mostly I’d been fighting her in an endless dream-battle that put a real crimp in my sleep patterns. Back then I’d had a sword, but I’d lost it in the real world and somehow that meant I didn’t have it here either. I think the wizards called that synchronicity. I called it a pisser.

  “Pretty sure I should be trying to kill you.”

  She smiled. Put a finger to her lips. Her hair fell past her shoulders in loose, green coils.

  “Seriously, who are you?”

  “An ally.”

  “Didn’t I shove a sword through your neck last time we met?”

  “I can be forgi
ving.”

  The flames drew closer. My skin felt tight and it was getting harder to breathe.

  “The city is burning,” she said. “Nimue will need me.”

  The flames closed in.

  * * *

  I woke in a sweat. Even without nearly burning to death in my dreams, the weather was stifling. The cold and the wet I could deal with on account of having been born in this damned country, but the heat did me in. Groping for my phone, I realised it was about half five, which was in that exact window between too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up. Seriously, fuck that window. To make matters worse, in the hours of unconsciousness I’d managed, I hadn’t even been able to get in touch with Nim.

  You had one job, Kate, and it was a job you could literally do in your sleep.

  I flipped the duvet to the cool side, well, cooler side, well, less drenched side, settled on my back and closed my eyes. Honestly, trying to psychically hit up my ex-girlfriend using wibbly primordial dream magic that I’ve never got around to asking anybody to explain to me was a bit of a reach. But what else was I going to do for the next couple of hours?

  * * *

  Fire raged through the Dream of a city. I smelled burning hair and burning flesh. I was on the platform at Covent Garden station and everywhere I turned were flames. The air was furnace hot, searing my lungs and stinging my lips as I struggled to breathe.

  Well, this had a gone-horribly-wrong vibe.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and the world cooled. “What are you doing here, Kate?”

  I turned and it was definitely Nimue this time: grey hoodie, dark hair, eyes that could hold the whole world. And, just for a moment, she looked tired.

  “Got a message from Jacob,” I said. “We’ve lost the deep places. Whatever that means.”

  She looked down, suddenly smaller in the firelight. “It means we have lost half the city. It means I can no longer call on the shadows or control what stays buried. It means Jacob...”

  Dream silences were a whole new level of uncomfortable.

  “He was alive when I last saw him.” Alive and surrounded by an entire demonic army if we were being technical, but this felt like an accentuate-the-positive kind of conversation. “I’d have—I mean—I tried to help but he told me to get out.”

  “He knew I needed you for other things.” Nim stood a little taller, looking more mystic queeny by the second. “And he may yet live, necromancers have a number of tricks at their disposal. Even so, he is beyond my reach for now.”

  Were we getting our arses kicked? This felt uncomfortably like we were getting our arses kicked. “What about the others?”

  “King is strongest in the south, but Michelle thrives on fire and chaos. We are holding. The games in the north are subtler and King’s man there is reckless, and does not have his full trust.”

  Yeah, he’d recklessly cracked several of my ribs and then recklessly told me exactly where I could find the Tears of Hypnos. “You think Gabriel can take him?”

  “It’s more complicated than that, but yes.”

  “Last time I counted, that still leaves us two—one down.”

  The flames died and a mist rolled in. And we stood for a moment in silver nothingness.

  “This is war, Kate,” Nimue told me. “Even winning is loss.”

  * * *

  I woke up again. It was still too hot and I was still too sweaty. Peeling myself out of the sheets, I showered, dressed and, after ten minutes of feeling slightly better, was hotter and sweatier than ever. So sexy.

  Elise, as usual, was already up and fresh as a daisy. She was kneeling at my coffee table, building something big and gothic out of matchsticks.

  “Am I getting really oblivious in my old age?” I asked doubtfully, “or did we not have that yesterday.”

  “We did not. I began assembling it after I returned home from Miss Red’s party.”

  “You came home from a club and your first thought was I know, I’ll glue some wood together?”

  She glanced up, giving me what I was coming to recognise as her “I am not sure why you made that comment but I think it is peculiar and fear you may be mocking me” look. “Oh, no, Miss Kane. That would be a very strange thing to do. In actuality, I had been intending to begin this project for some time. The plans and materials have been in my room since May.”

  “You had plans to make—” Nope, I had nothing. I gestured vaguely. “This?”

  “It is a scale model of the Palace of Versailles circa 1873. It is quite complex. I would certainly not wish to embark upon it without plans.”

  I took my coffee and my banana.

  It was still early, which I frankly resented, but Corin’s trail was going cold fast and I’d lost enough time with my recent kidnapping. If I was lucky, she’d still be lying low. If I wasn’t, she’d already have ditched the goods and got the hell out of dodge.

  I pried Elise away from Versailles and she drove us to the office. She went for mellow Norwegian electronica over her usual hardcore German thrash metal, which made me immediately suspicious.

  “Are you worried about me, Elise?” I asked, forgoing my habitual car nap.

  “I am often worried about you, Miss Kane. You have a dangerous profession and persist in making a number of unhealthy lifestyle choices.”

  “Look, I’m eating the fucking bananas, okay?”

  “Very true, but you smoke, drink to excess, and walk alone into the lairs of people and entities who want to kill you. You should also eat more oily fish or get more sunlight.” She paused thoughtfully. “Although it bewilders me that these two activities have such similar effects on biological entities.”

  “I’ve been a biological entity for thirty-something years and I haven’t stopped entity-ing yet.”

  “That you have yet to actually die is what I believe they refer to as a low bar.”

  “I like my bars like I like my women. Low.”

  “While I understand that the ‘I like my blank like I like my men-stroke-women. Blank’ construction is a time-honoured form of innuendo, I am not certain it makes sense in this context.”

  “I’m not certain your face makes sense in this context.”

  “Ah.” Elise brightened. “Am I correct in thinking that the expected response is ‘I am not certain your mum makes sense in this context?’ But given your mother is a terrifying supernatural being of whom we both avoid speaking I am, perhaps, ironically not convinced that it makes sense in this context.”

  I pulled my hat down over my eyes, pretty sure I’d been beaten, though not entirely sure what I’d been beaten at.

  We tootled along with Royksopp wibbling ambiently in the background.

  Eventually, Elise cleared her throat, or rather she said “Ahem ahem,” which was as close as she could get without mucous membranes. My honed PI instincts told me this meant she wanted my attention.

  “Spit it out, Elise. I know something’s bothering you.”

  “I am concerned about Miss Black. I seem to recall that your last encounter was rather difficult.”

  Rather difficult in this context meant rescued me from a dungeon she’d also kind of got me thrown into, kissed me in the shower despite almost certainly knowing I was seeing somebody and then pulled a gun on me, leaving me to clean up a supernatural massacre that, by the way, she’d also played a key role in starting. “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “There is no need to use your sarcastic voice, Miss Kane.”

  “Sorry.” I sighed. “Corin Black is the last thing I need right now. But I don’t see we’ve got much choice.”

  “Do you have any idea how we are to find her? Surely, she could be anywhere.”

  “Could be, but I think it’s a shorter list than you might think. Once Corin latches on to you, she doesn’t let go until you stop being useful. I’d bet good money she’s s
till with Hunter. Which means they’ll be hiding out somewhere wild. Which should be fairly easy to narrow down in an urban area.”

  “Could they not have fled the city entirely?”

  “They could, but I don’t think it’s likely.” I sat up and adjusted my hat. Elise didn’t seem to care about little things like eye contact and not having a fedora over your face but since most people did I thought it best not to lose the habit. “The only reason she wants the Tears is because everybody else does. No matter who thinks they’ve hired her, she’s going to auction them off to the highest bidder, exactly like last time. And the best way to do that is to stay in town.”

  “So we will be looking for wild places in London?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  We spent the morning shortlisting locations that a nature-wizard would take a femme fatale who had just pulled off a dangerous heist by consciously re-enacting a Snow White narrative. Y’know, like you do. Eventually we got it down to three: Highgate Wood, Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest. With three locations and only two of us, I sent Elise to Highgate and took Epping for myself, with whoever finished first sweeping round to Hampstead. Given that we were, y’know, chasing somebody, we had to cover all the bases fast and, at the back of my mind, I was also very aware that if Corin felt outnumbered she was that much more likely to get murdery.

  To be honest, I’d probably bagsied the best lead. The weird thing about London—well okay, there are lots of weird things about London, but most of the little weird things about London come back to one particular weird thing about London, which is that it’s been around for fucking ever. And that means it has all kinds of really peculiar stuff in it. Including surprisingly enormous areas that are officially classified as ancient woodland. Areas that are officially classified as ancient woodland and contain an actual hunting lodge built by Henry VIII. An actual hunting lodge built by Henry VIII that happened to be mysteriously closed for unexplained reasons. Frankly, if I was a fairytale hunter-wizard on the run with a damsel in distress, it’d be the first place I’d go.