Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  “Nim...” I began. I had no idea how to finish the sentence. I wasn’t even sure what sort of idea I wanted to get across. That we were depending on her and had faith in her? That it was okay if this was all too much and she didn’t want to do it anymore? You could only really say one of those things at once. “Whatever happens,” I tried, “whatever happens I’ve got your back.”

  She leaned her head against my shoulder. “I know. It’s just. I can’t think.”

  “You don’t have to, not right now.” I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. “Get some rest and we’ll talk about it in the morning. And remember that no matter what goes down in the next few days, things would be way worse without you here.”

  I laid Nimue on the bed next to Phoebe. It looked like she’d fallen asleep, but whether she was resting, or if she’d gone to do that fighting-a-mystical-war-in-her-dreams thing that took up so much of her time, I couldn’t say. I left the two of them where they were, and went to crash out on the sofa.

  Well, we were fucked.

  This might come as a surprise, but I’m not normally Miss Massive-Social-Responsibility. I’ve never done voluntary work. I blank people who come up to me with clipboards and sincere expressions. I only buy the Big Issue if I’m feeling unusually upbeat. But Nim’s crusade to make the world slightly less shitty by stopping bad things screwing with the lives of not-especially-bad people was the nearest I had to a cause I believed in. If we couldn’t save Phoebe, she’d be through. Then again, if we couldn’t stop Arty King, we’d all be through. Forgiveness wasn’t the man’s style.

  Okay, Kate. Think about this logically. You need to rescue a girl’s soul from some kind of evil Satan-granny. There are options here. They’re all profoundly terrible options but they’re options. In any line of work you built up a few contacts—Archer’s wife knew about six million accountants, Nim’s dad knew a whole lot of cabbies. As for me, I knew at least three people who had personally lived in Hell.

  I left Nim behind, locked up, and took the carriage to Brewer Street.

  It was pretty late by most standards, but getting on for peak business hours for nightclubs owned by hedonistic vampires. I skipped the queue, because skipping the queue was a major perk of fucking the owner, and because this time I wasn’t even going in. Ashriel eyed me from his position by the door.

  “Inside, upstairs,” he said. “And you look even more like shit than last time.”

  “Thanks. But actually I’m here for you.”

  He straightened up and eyed me suspiciously. “You know, sometimes, I really wish you only wanted me for my body.” He smiled, and I must have been looking especially pathetic that evening because he followed up immediately with “Sorry. What do you need?”

  I jerked my head in a “can we please not talk in front of a line of pissed clubgoers” gesture, and Ashriel handed the door over to another one of Julian’s many minions. We walked back to the carriage and got in.

  “Should I?” he began.

  “No,” I said.

  We just sat for a bit. Sharing wasn’t my thing. Asking for help wasn’t my thing. Also I was fucking knackered. “You heard of a man called Arty King?” I asked at last.

  “Gangster-wizard? Got into a fight with your friend the Witch Queen a few years back?”

  “That’s the one. You know anything about his grandmother?”

  Ashriel visibly paled. “Maybe. What’s her name?”

  That, I hadn’t thought to find out. “Nan?” I suggested. “Nana King?”

  “I remember a Vera King. Back in the fifties, maybe even the sixties. Scary woman.”

  “How scary?”

  “She fucked Gethsemane and got away with it. She was serious business, proper bad news, one of the ones that you did not mess with.” He rested a foot on one of the opposite seats, slightly messing up the velvet, not that I cared. “Believe me, the community has a blacklist and she was on it. She was smart, powerful, ruthless. One of the only people I’ve met who could make a soul box.”

  Well, that was good to know. “She’s got a kid. I mean, she’s got a kid’s soul. She’s keeping it hostage somehow. Said it was in a pit of fire?”

  Ashriel sucked in a breath through his teeth. “That’s fucked up.”

  “Kind of hoping you’d be able to help?”

  “I am helping. Stay away from her.”

  I stared straight ahead, trying to ignore the fact I was staring at the back of a pair of woobly magic steeds. “We’re talking about a child here, Ash. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as cynical as the next faery-blooded lesbian paranormal detective for hire, but this is an actual little girl. One I’ve even met a couple of times.”

  “It’s not that simple.” He leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “I’ve stayed away from this stuff for centuries. Worked really hard to not be what I used to be because I didn’t like the way it...look, this isn’t your shit to deal with, but what you’re asking for means getting down and dirty in the Lake of Fire. And that’s something I can’t do.”

  I didn’t know much about Ashriel’s whole celibate incubus deal, but from what I understood about the way demons worked, for one of them to give up feeding souls to the inferno was kind of like a human giving up smack, food and reality TV in the same week. I looked at him. “Can you at least point me at somebody who can?”

  “You’re really set on this?” He gave me a glance through his long, golden lashes. He was an incubus so it partly said I am gorgeous and you want to do me, but it mostly said this is a gigantic mistake. “What am I even saying? Of course you are; you’re pointlessly stubborn even when there aren’t children to rescue. Gethsemane and the Angel can both help. Don’t go to the Angel unless you absolutely have to, because you will regret it for the rest of eternity. Gethsemane might go easier on you because I suspect they’d like another shot at Vera King. Just remember that dicking about with Hell is mythically inadvisable.”

  “I’ll be all right. Mythically inadvisable is my middle name. Names. Are my middle names. You get where I’m going with that.”

  He pushed open the carriage door. “Julian will be really cross with me if you get your soul devoured.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  I let Ashriel get back to work, and went looking for one of the metropolis’s less affable sex demons. Gethsemane spent most of the day hanging out at this massive branch of Foyles on the Charing Cross Road—apparently bookshops were a good place to pick people up if you knew what you were doing. At this time of night, they would have moved on. Ashriel had suggested a couple of places, and I decided I’d try my luck at the McDonald’s up the road. It had that not-where-you’d expect vibe that Gethsemane seemed to like and, besides, I could murder a Big Mac.

  There was no queue, so I placed my order and then leaned back on the counter looking for likely victims. By the time my large-meal-with-a-milkshake-because-I-hate-my-arteries-and-want-to-die-young had arrived, I’d spotted one. Skinny guy, picking at a Filet-O-Fish and a portion of fries. I waited, took a bite of my burger. About forty-seven seconds after I’d started my stakeout, a cute little nerd girl with a tight black bob and enormous librarian glasses walked into him. Literally walked into him. Her fries went everywhere, so did his.

  “Sorry!” she said in a tone of distractingly endearing embarrassment. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.” She waved her phone by way of explanation. “Somebody Is Wrong on the Internet.”

  “It’s fine.” He started hurriedly picking up the scattered chips and popping them back onto his red plastic tray. The girl did the same, and as they scrabbled about their fingers brushed ever so accidentally. “Do you...” he stumbled. “Do you want to sit down?”

  She did, it seemed. “Thanks. Sorry. Heeeey...cool!” She pointed at his T-shirt, which was black with a kind of upside-down spiky horseshoe thing on it. “Lok-tar ogar!”

  “Umm...
” He gave an awkward laugh. “For the Horde.”

  She gave a smile that managed to be innocent and wicked simultaneously. “Except I’m afraid we have to be mortal enemies. I’m secretly a gnome warlock.”

  “N-no, it’s okay. My main raiding guild is Horde but I’ve got alts on both sides.”

  “Oh wow. I’ve never been in a proper raiding guild. I, y’know, I thought I’d really enjoy it but I wasn’t sure I’d be good enough.”

  The guy was getting actively perky. “It’s really fun. You should try it. What server do you play on?”

  Okay, this was stopping now. I made a really bad attempt at looking casual, and half-strolled-half-jogged over to their table. “Hi!” I said to the girl who I really hoped was secretly a soul-devouring monster, and not a perfectly innocent young woman on a night out. “Haven’t seen you in ages. How’s your boyfriend? Is he still...” I searched for something that would sound threatening but not obviously pushing it. “Trying to break into the UFC?” Okay not too obviously pushing it.

  The girl smiled and shot me a look so venomous that I was convinced I’d called it right. A stranger would have just been confused. “Hi!” she threw back. “This is Kate, she’s an old friend who really likes to embarrass me in front of guys.”

  “Yeah, it’s exactly like that. So look. I’m glad I ran into you because I wanted to talk to you about Vera King. You know Vera, who we know from...work?”

  She gazed at me, and suddenly her eyes didn’t look human at all. They were all promises and secrets and horrible temptations. She made you want to crawl with her into a dark place and fuck until you died. Not an innocent nerd-girl on a night out, then. “Okay, we’ll talk.” She turned back to the boy in the significant T-shirt. “I’m really sorry, but me and Kate have a lot of catching up to do. I feel really bad about spilling everything all over you like that and...well...” She fished a pen from somewhere about her person and scribbled a number down on a napkin. “Like the song says, call me maybe?” She gave a sweet, vulnerable, geeky, apologetic smile and watched with a hopeful look on her face as the guy cleared up his meal and walked away.

  “I probably shouldn’t ask this,” I asked, “but what are you planning on doing with him.”

  “Nothing he doesn’t want me to.”

  I shivered. A sick, cold shiver. I said nothing.

  “Don’t give me that.” Gethsemane pushed her glasses up her nose and smirked at me. “You’re here right now because you want something from me. So you can cut the righteous champion of the innocent act, it doesn’t look good on you.” A smile again, exactly that hint of the devil I found so hard to resist in a girl.

  “Vera King. She’s holding somebody’s soul and I need it back. I was told you could help.”

  “And what’s in it for me?”

  “Revenge.”

  She popped an unwanted chip into her mouth. “That does sound tempting. But I’ve got a feeling that I want revenge much less than you want what you want.”

  “I can walk away from this right now.” It was a lie and she knew it.

  “I’m trying to work out if you’d be far more fun or far less fun if you stopped pretending to be a good person.”

  I facepalmed. “Why is everybody talking as if it’s this totally absurd thing to want to get a child out of Hell?”

  “Oh, we’re talking about a child, are we?” Gethsemane leaned forward, her whole posture changing. Now she looked genuinely predatory. “That should most certainly be worth something.”

  Well fuck. “Fine.” There was no point being coy about this. “Lay it out for me, what do you want?”

  Gethsemane’s eyes gleamed. “I’m a succubus, Kate. What do you think I want?”

  “To trade my soul to Hell so you can suffer less unbearable torment?”

  “You make it sound so mercenary.”

  “I’m not fucking you.”

  She laughed. “You underestimate me. Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that it would be...pleasurable.” She gave me a look that was way too sultry for somebody in dorky glasses. “But, your one-woman crusade to cockblock me aside, I really don’t have difficulty getting laid.”

  “You still haven’t told me what the deal is.”

  “That isn’t how it works.”

  “Then how does it work?”

  Gethsemane grinned up at me. She still had this brain-screwing mix of innocence and evil about her. “Hell is like Heaven,” she said. “We don’t make deals. Ask, and you shall receive. But you have to ask humbly, and in supplication.”

  “And when you ask what’s in it for you?”

  “I want you to ask me nicely.”

  God, succubi could be so sleazy. Which, thinking about it, was kind of their job description. Alright Kate, do your best. I reached out and took her hand. “Gethsemane, I need this. Help me. Please.”

  She darted forwards and kissed me. It was surprisingly chaste for a sex demon, just a peck on the lips, but there was a nasty feeling of violation that went with it. Like you’d done something you could never go back from. Note to self: don’t make these kinds of decisions at this time in the morning.

  Silently, she rose, and led me out of the McDonald’s and onto the Charing Cross Road. After a while, it became pretty clear that she wasn’t going to let go of my hand.

  “Umm,” I began, “where are we going?”

  She laughed. “Where do you think?”

  This wasn’t good. “I’d kind of assumed you’d be able to... I don’t know, swing something? Talk to someone? Get onto a friend of a friend?”

  “And where would be the fun in that?”

  We passed a really absurd number of bookshops, souvenir shops, and quirky independent clothiers until we arrived at an incongruous-looking building about a hundred years older than the ones around it. London is full of places like this—things that used to be churches or whatever and are now bars or nightclubs or trendy art venues. Ninety-five percent of them didn’t have mystical portals to other realities in the basement. Something told me that here we were dealing with the other five percent. We stopped in front of a graffiti-covered green door, and Gethsemane traced her fingers over some of the markings. It swung open, revealing a dingy concrete staircase that smelled faintly of urine.

  Well, this was going to be a barrel of laughs.

  We went down into the dark. Gethsemane’s hand was warm in mine, and as we descended I began to hear whispers behind me and feel fingers running gently up my spine. My heart quickened and the scent of piss gave way to a heady scent of sweat and sex. I really hoped that this wasn’t a trap.

  Here lies Kate Kane, fucked to death in a cellar because she thought it was a good idea to trust a succubus. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.

  It was getting hotter. Not in a fire-licking-your-feet way, in a short-summer-nights way. There was a flickering, reddish light coming from somewhere up ahead. These not in Kansas anymore moments were beginning to really hack me off.

  “What’s the plan?”

  Gethsemane had dropped the nerdgirl disguise and gone back to what I figured was their natural form—tall and androgynous with waist-length, pale gold hair. “Vera King got where she is by playing the Lords of Hell against one another. She has enemies.”

  “And that helps us how?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We reached the foot of the stairs and came out into a vast, richly decorated hall. The place was packed. People—and by people, I mean a whole lot of different sorts of...things, some that looked like regular humans, some that really didn’t—were fucking in clusters and piles all over the place. Not one of them looked like they were enjoying it. There was real despair in the air, a clawing, awful, hungry need. It was like that movie where Michael Fassbender wanks a lot and looks really sad about it. But with everybody. Forever.

  “What the...” I’d have
said “the fuck” but it seemed a bit too appropriate.

  “Welcome,” purred Gethsemane, “to the Palace of Lust.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Hellfire & Damnation

  So it turned out that Hell was a pretty shitty place to be. The way Gethsemane explained it, the whole thing was divided up between seven factions, who lined up pretty much how you’d expect. I’ve always been a bit iffy on the whole concept of sin on account of how arseholes have been using it to control people since 34 AD, and also on account of how the one time I met an actual angel he totally tried to kill me. But having seen the Palace of Lust, the whole thing made a lot more sense. If it had been a kinky, sex-positive playground filled with hot demon babes in leather and corsets, then I’d have said that the Devil had been getting some seriously unfair press for the past several thousand years. It wasn’t. It was about lust in its rawest and most horrible sense, an endless wanting that was never satisfied. It was sex with none of the stuff that made it good; no joy or pleasure or passion, just an empty hunger that fed on itself. An eternity of repetitive, mindless motion with nothing to look forward to and no hope of satisfaction. The air was full of moaning and panting and sobbing desperation.

  Hell: making the best things suck since the dawn of creation.

  Gethsemane took me through the Palace of Depressing Vanilla Miseryfucking and out onto a kind of parapet overlooking an enormous funnel-shaped pit that went down a lot further than I liked to think about. We were headed for this huge spiky fortress, all iron and rust and smoke belching out of blackened chimneys.

  “Should I even ask?” I asked.

  “The Palace of Wrath. If your girl’s soul is being held anywhere, it’s being held there. We need to persuade somebody to let it out.”

  A thought occurred. “And you need me here because?”

  “Leverage.”

  Another thought occurred. “Over who?”

  “You’re learning.”

  I really needed to stop getting into bed with random supernatural entities. I also really needed to start picking metaphors that didn’t have a sexual undertone.