by Alexis Hall
Back at the flat, I settled down on the sofa and rang the Merchant.
“What can I do for you?” Their voice had an edge of irony to it.
“It’s me. Your thingummy is at Safernoc Hall with the wolves. This is as far as I can go because stealing from werewolves is still stealing and that’s still against the law.”
“I want my property, Kate.”
“I know. And if you want me to negotiate for you, I can do that. But breaking into a wolf’s lair isn’t part of the job.”
“Then I would be grateful if you talked to them for me.”
I stopped. I was probably being paranoid. “Sure, but let’s be clear: still not making any faery bargains.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. But one day, my dear, you might want to learn the trick of dealing with the devil.”
I was walking into something, wasn’t I? “Which is what?”
“Be the devil. You’re a changeling, Kate. Act like one. Go to the wolves, tell them that you speak with my voice, with the voice of the Cold and Dark and the voice of the Deepwild. You might even enjoy it.”
“You know there’s no way that’s happening.”
“I know many things, sweet child. That is far from being one of them. But handle this by whatever method you think best.”
That was easy. Well, easy-ish—I still had to find a way to talk a pack of arrogant wolves into giving a bottle of pure magical power to a faery-blooded pawnbroker they had no reason to trust. And, right now, I had no idea how to handle that one. It was what Sherlock Holmes would have called a three pipe problem. Except I didn’t smoke a pipe and a three fag problem had really different connotations.
In any case, having made the mistake of sitting on the sofa, I now realised there was no way I could get off it. I guess this was what I got for spending the last few days getting the crap kicked out of me, fighting demons, going clubbing, getting mind controlled, getting kidnapped, banging a vampire, nearly burning to death in my dreams and running around a forest with a pretty sociopath.
When I opened my eyes again it was way later than it had any right to be and Nimue was standing over me. That girl really needed to learn to knock.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in person for months. Funny how easy it was to lose track of that kind of thing when somebody kept doing cameos in your dreams. Although, now I thought about it, she always had a way of slipping out of your mind when you weren’t paying attention. She looked exhausted. Like literally used-up-nothing-left exhausted. No visible injuries, but from what I knew about the way Nimue worked, her enemies wouldn’t get near her—at least not physically—unless things were going terrifyingly badly. Then again, she wouldn’t have been here at all if things weren’t pretty fucked.
“What do you need?” I asked, struggling into a less horizontal position.
She sat down next to me. I’d never got used to the way she could switch from being this unstoppable mystical queen one second to this regular flesh-and-blood person the next. “It’s that obvious, huh?”
“You’re fighting a war, Nim.” I put an arm around her. “I get that you don’t have time to make social calls.”
She sat in silence a moment, then said. “King’s got Phoebe.”
It took me a moment to place the name. “Gabriel’s daughter?”
She nodded.
Oh, fuck. I was suddenly feeling a lot more awake. This had been the one front of the mage war I hadn’t been keeping an eye on. “What can I do?”
She stood up again. I’m not exactly Miss In-Tune-With-People’s-Feelings, but even I could tell there was a tension here. For a moment, just a moment, the room stilled and I felt a sense of power rolling off of her. Then it died. “Where are you with the Tears?”
“I don’t have them.”
“But you know where they are?”
I couldn’t really deny that. Although since I knew that they were in a mansion full of werewolves, the information was pretty close to useless. “You know I’ve been hired to get them for somebody else, right?”
Nim gave me a look that was so far beyond disappointed I wasn’t sure I had a word for it. “We’re talking about a kid’s life, Kate.”
Yeah, that was kind of a trump card. “Do you think we can rescue her?”
“Maybe.” She looked uncertain. I wasn’t used to her looking uncertain. A few years ago this had been much simpler—there’d been less children caught up in it for a start. “Or we could trade.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “Trade? You can’t give your worst enemy a weapon that can break the universe.”
She stood there, all kind of drawn into herself. “Using them would take time. Phoebe doesn’t have time.”
And again it looked like she was hovering between two worlds. I got up and took her by the shoulders, somehow resisting the temptation to shake her. “Nim,” I said. “You know this is a bad idea. Even if we could give King what he wants, we shouldn’t, because the man is a fucking psychopath.”
“You’ve got a better plan?” She sounded half angry, half hopeful.
I didn’t have a better plan. But I had a different plan. “Let me track her,” I said. “Show me where they took her from. I’ll follow. King knows he’s got you over a barrel, and if we work fast he won’t see me coming.”
“Is that...” She stopped, seeming to struggle again. “Would that be safe?”
“For who?”
“For you? For her? For anyone?”
Honestly? No. Mystically tracking shit meant getting way closer to my mother’s side of the fence than I was comfortable with. I only gave my body to a bloodthirsty maniac from another dimension when it was really fucking important. But that wasn’t what Nim needed to hear. “It’s safer than the alternative. Which is trusting somebody completely untrustworthy who you know for a fact wants you dead.”
Nim said nothing. She tucked her hands into the sleeves of her hoodie. Seeing her like that made me feel a bunch of difficult things and, let’s be very clear, I don’t even like feeling easy things.
“Come on,” I said. “I get you don’t want to ask me to do this, but you blatantly came because you knew I could and you needed me to.”
There was another silence, even longer than the first.
Then Nim reached up and took my hand. “Follow me.”
There was a black cab waiting by the kerb. There was always a black cab waiting for Nimue. It was part of her whole vibe. And about half an hour later I was standing in front of a primary school in Edgware. According to Nim, Phoebe had gone missing from just outside. The teacher on duty had seen her talking to a sweet-looking little old lady a few minutes before she disappeared. Which could have been a coincidence but more likely meant that not only were we dealing with an actual literal kidnapping, we were dealing with an actual literal kidnapping orchestrated by Arty King’s terrifying amoral hellgranny.
Still, it gave me something to hunt. I closed my eyes and reached out for my mother’s instincts. I felt my heartbeat slow, and the stone and steel of the city fell away to reveal the wild and savage land that lay inches beneath its surface. I tasted blood and sweat, I smelled sulphur and lavender, crayons and fresh grass. There was weakness here, the weakness of prey, and a weakness of a different sort that smelled wrong and tasted wrong and that my every instinct said I should flee from or destroy.
I followed the trail. A sharp and bitter road that took me down rocky paths where metal creatures moved without purpose, and all that lived and was wild scurried in dark places and wriggled in cracks in the stone world of the thinking creatures. I followed the trail. South and east, along well-used paths. Crowds or herds or flocks. Life amidst the stones that walked or flew or crawled. I hunted. Miles passed beneath me. The trail was muddled, crisscrossed with others, hundreds of others or thousands. This place was wrong, all wrong. Frozen where it sh
ould move, changing where it should not. I followed the trail. Miles passed, across an iron path where great beasts ran unthinking and unchoosing and all impossible, abominable, shackled and unforgiving. I followed the trail. The hunt was all. The hunt and the kill and the wild and the hateful cracking of the stone.
A path. A path like the other paths, but closer now. Dark now. Hunted long. Over. Creatures pass me. Quicken. They know what they see, feel it if they do not know it. Yellow walls line the way. Red and yellow walls. Glass covered with metal. In the Deepwild, my mother tasted blood. Somewhere a voice that was my own called to me. Said the kill was not tonight. Said I had another purpose. I stopped, caught the scent on the air. Sulphur and lavender, crayons and grass, and now another scent: oil and steel and fire and ash. There was danger here.
In the Deepwild my mother whispered to me. Said that I should not stop. Said that I had to be quick, to be cruel. To kill my enemies and lick their blood from my hands. I closed my eyes and listened to my heartbeat. Slow. Needed to think. Needed to be able to think. I tasted blood and smelled fear. The voice that was mine grew louder. I looked around with human eyes but hunter-sharp. I bit my tongue and made myself remember the names of things. Street. House. Window. I was on a street of terraced, yellow-brick houses behind high red-brick walls. The first thing I had to do was keep moving. If I stopped, looked like I was casing the place, I’d be putting Phoebe in danger. I walked on.
It was a sweltering night, and several of the houses had windows open, including the one the trail led to. That was pretty much the only lucky break I was going to get, though. Open windows meant this was a second storey job. I sauntered to the end of the road, doing my level best to look casual and trying not to dwell on the fact that a child would die if I fucked this up. I waited for a quiet moment, which didn’t take long what with how late it had got, and climbed a wall. Time for some good old-fashioned roof-crawling. It wasn’t the best way to be sneaky, but it was better than approaching from the street. I worked my way along the terrace. While I make a big thing about how subtlety isn’t in my repertoire, I can actually be pretty stealthy when I have to be. It’s part of the whole queen-of-the-hunt package. Also, PI.
I got to the roof I was looking for and waited, listened. There were people moving underneath me. I let my senses sharpen, tiles cool under my hands, night air warm against my face. Three people. One in an upstairs room, still. Another on that floor, restless and moving. One downstairs, slower and more patient. I crept to the edge of the gutter and lowered myself down, found my footing on a window ledge and hauled myself through. Inside was a mixture of bedroom and box room. Football posters from the early nineties poked out from behind piles of spare bedding and packs of toilet roll. Phoebe was in here as well, lying in bed looking worryingly Sleeping Beautyish.
I poked her. “We’re getting out of here,” I whispered. “Come on.”
She didn’t stir. She was alive—my senses were still in smelling-fear-hearing-heartbeats mode, and she definitely still had one. This was going to be difficult. A conscious person, particularly a small conscious person, I could probably have wangled out of the window, but I wasn’t sure about an unconscious one. I picked her up and turned back the way I’d come.
Yeah, this wasn’t going to work.
I put her down gently and ran through my options. I was really hoping that it wasn’t going to come down to fighting my way out. Also, Phoebe hadn’t woken up, which suggested she was either a really heavy sleeper, or she was drugged, or she was enchanted. Given the situation, I was going with enchanted. On the plus side, as long as I could keep myself between her and the bad guys, she’d last longer than I did. Admittedly, it wasn’t much of a plus side.
I could hear whoever-it-was moving outside. Since I was trapped in a tiny room with a comatose tween and an impractically large stockpile of bog roll, the only advantage left to me was surprise, and that was evaporating pretty fast. I crept up to the door. Listened. Waited. Footsteps came closer—a light tread, whoever it was would be quick. I let them pass by the room.
Door open. Through, grab the collar, shaved head or would have gone for the hair. Hammer fist to the temple, then down and trap the wrist because the fucker had a gun. One arm on the throat, choke if you can. Get the weapon away. Now.
Fire.
I leapt back, burned. A shotgun dropped to the floor. Across the landing of a tiny terraced house in East London, I squared off against Arty King.
He was tall, with the kind of taut, lean frame you got when your daily workout was beating people’s heads in. His face was what I guess they call chiselled, with strong cheekbones and these deep-set eyes that said “I’m going to buy you a drink, and we’ll be mates, but if you fuck with me I will shove a meathook through your jaw and hang you up in my garage.” Also, right now, his whole body was on fire.
“Oh, you are fucking kidding me,” he said.
There was a gun within jumping distance, but I’d never been a big fan of them. Also, if I shot him there’d be that whole murder-trial-prison thing. “I’m just here for the girl.”
King said nothing. He stretched out a hand and sent a jet of flame leaping through the air towards me. I twisted to one side, but the wall and the stairwell between them left no space to dodge. Dropping to the ground, I brought my leg up and sprang forwards. There wasn’t really a plan here, but since he could throw fire and I couldn’t, it was pretty important to close the distance. I came up and hit him in the solar plexus with my full weight. He fell backwards, still burning underneath me. I knelt on his chest, my trousers beginning to smoulder, and punched him hard in the face. His hand closed over my wrist, and I felt my skin begin to blister.
Then there was a touch on my shoulder, and the flames cooled. A silver mist coiled around me and a strange calm came over me. I stepped back. Arty King got to his feet, spat blood and glared. I could feel Nimue by my side, though why she only ever showed up after I’d done all the dangerous bits, I’d never been able to work out. I guess it was a mystical monarch thing.
“You got some balls at last, eh?” snarled King.
“We’re just here for the girl,” I said again.
“What, you think you can bust in and wreck my Nan’s house, and I’ll let you walk away?”
“I don’t think you have a choice.” That was Nimue. Until she spoke, I hadn’t been entirely sure anyone else could see her. “My eyes are on you now, and your power will not avail you.”
He looked from me, to Nim, back to me. “Oh, you fucking little... You got yourself a fucking perfect knight, didn’t you?”
I was pretty sure I’d never been anybody’s perfect anything, but I wasn’t going to argue that right now. “We’re taking the child, King. And you aren’t going to stop us.”
“You can have her.” A new voice, this time from behind me. “Arty won’t stop you, will you, love?”
I turned, and there was Nana King, all blue-rinse and wrinkles. She smelled of lavender and home baking and the faintest hint of sulphur.
“Go on,” she went on. “Go get the kid.”
I bent down and picked up the shotgun. It was an empty gesture at this point, but walking away and leaving a weapon on the floor would have been a rookie move. Then I backed slowly into the bedroom, scooped up Phoebe’s still-unconscious body, and carried her back onto the landing.
“Take her if you want.” Nana King smiled sweetly. “Won’t help you.”
Nimue laid a hand on the girl’s forehead. “You didn’t?”
“Give young Arty what he wants, or her spirit stays in the pit of fire.”
Nim tensed. “Release her. Or...” she petered out.
“You worthless sack of shit.” Arty King was staring at us roughly the way you’d stare at somebody telling an anti-Semitic joke at a Bar Mitzvah. “You haven’t got the guts to come for me, have you? Get out of this house, and if any of your little band of carpet
-munchers comes this way again, I’ll break her wrists, strap her to a kitchen table, and start getting creative with the bolt cutters. Understand?”
The old lady hobbled over to her grandson and patted him gently on the arm. “He takes care of his nan, he does.”
I really wasn’t sure this was a win. All the same, I carried Phoebe out of the house to where, true to form, there was a black cab waiting for us. For me, really. Nim was gone—had never really been here.
Chapter Ten
Burgers & Devils
Back at the flat I laid Phoebe’s body out in my room. Looking at it from one perspective, the rescue mission had been fifty percent successful. But I didn’t think Nim could go to one of her most trusted advisers and say “Good news! We got half your daughter back!”
The two of us sat together on the end of the bed. Nim wasn’t saying anything, but she didn’t have to. However shitty I felt for my part in this, I knew she was feeling about four hundred and six times worse. I took her hand and tried to give off here-for-you type signals. Last time we’d fought Arty King we’d been a whole lot younger and stupider, and he’d been about two degrees less of a psychopath. This time around we had way more to lose and he had way less. And Nim, unlike me and Humphrey Bogart, was good at being noble. She’d lay down her life in a heartbeat if she thought it was what her city needed, and she expected her followers—yours truly included—to do the same. But she wouldn’t be able to let innocent people, even one innocent person, pay the price for her throne. That unwavering sense of good-person-ness was the only thing that made owing her my supernaturally enforced loyalty even remotely bearable, but I was also beginning to see that there could come a time when it got her killed.