Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  Russel looked at me. “Yeah, no.” He tried to shut the door. I shoved back against it and, almost without thinking, my mother’s strength ran through me and the door burst inwards, ripping the chain out of the frame. I’ve got to admit I’d never really understood what those things were supposed to protect you from.

  “Right, you petty little hedge wizard.” I stepped over the threshold and saw Russel scrabbling backwards. His hands were raised in what I thought was some kind of mystical gesture—I hoped this wasn’t going to turn into another magic duel. Elise followed me, shutting the door quietly behind her.

  “You don’t know who you’re dealing with!” Russel’s voice was on that iffy borderline between menacing and shrill. He began tracing sigils in the air.

  I folded my arms and glared at him. “I came here with a person you created. I have a pretty good idea of the kind of magic you do. And since you haven’t shot fire in my face yet, I’m betting good money it’s the kind of magic that’s too slow for you to pull anything before I can break at least three of your limbs.”

  “Hey!” He stopped tracing immediately. “You’re the one who barged into my house.”

  I took a step back. He was annoying as hell but he kind of had a point. “Okay, so we got off on the wrong foot. How about we start over, nice and friendly, and you answer some questions for me.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  Elise spoke up without warning. “Why did you attempt to destroy me?”

  “It’s you?” Russel stared. “I assumed you’d be buried by now.”

  “That is not answering my question.”

  He waved his hands in the air. “I don’t know. I was frustrated. I was nervous. I’d put two of you out there already and I thought three was pushing my luck. Lake was already breathing down my neck asking if I could make him more and—look at me—do you think that’s why I’m in this? To pump out merchandise for some cockney dick in a sharp suit?”

  “So you instead elected to have me crushed in a scrap metal yard?”

  “It wasn’t personal.”

  Elise stood for a moment. “No, I suppose it would not have been.” She closed her eyes. “Thank you for answering my question.”

  The part of me that lived in wild forests and endless twilights wanted to tear this guy’s throat out and eat his heart. The part of me that was human, but had worked with too many nasty people down the years still wanted to smack him in the teeth. Unfortunately the part of me that actually gave a shit about Elise knew this was a million miles from my fight. I swallowed my anger and tried to get on with the job in front of me. “What did you do for Fisher, and how can we find him?”

  “I didn’t find him. He found me. Said he needed to borrow Alissa. I knew why he was in town—same reason all the big players are in town—and so I said that if he wanted to use my girl he needed to cut me in on the action.”

  “The action?”

  “The Tears. A couple of drops of the Tears of Hypnos might be exactly what the formula is missing.”

  I was about to ask what formula he was talking about, but I realised that there was really only one possibility. “You sold your old girl for a way to make a new girl?”

  “I didn’t sell her. I said he could keep her. Gesture of goodwill.”

  “And you’ve got your sample?”

  “Not yet.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “How are you planning to get your payment? You must have some way of picking it up.”

  “I’ve got a friend. She introduced us, she’ll collect for me. I’m not an idiot, I know who Fisher is. It’s best for me if I keep him at arm’s length.”

  “But it’s okay for you to let your friend deal with him, and for you to literally hand Alissa over to him?”

  Russel gave me an uncomprehending look. “He’s dangerous, not a total psycho. They’ll be fine. Becca knew him already.”

  At least I had a name. “You couldn’t get Becca on the phone for me, could you?”

  “Right, because I always give out my friends’ contact details to total strangers. What kind of guy do you think I am?”

  I wasn’t even sure I could dignify that with an answer. “Look,” I tried. “This is important. People are going to die if I don’t find Fisher and get him to give me back the Tears.”

  “And I’m going to believe you why?”

  “Where is she?” Elise’s voice came out of nowhere.

  “I told you, I’m not saying.”

  “Not your friend. The replacement. The one that will take over from Alissa.”

  Russel looked perplexed again. “In the shed. Why, you want to see?”

  “Yes.”

  We were kind of in the middle of a thing, but I didn’t want to step on Elise’s toes. She went through the house and out the back door. I suppose she knew the way.

  The shed was this odd mix of clutter and really specific attention to detail. Old tools, bits of broken stone, and the kinds of ancient-looking books that were probably technically grimoires were scattered about the place, covered in a fine layer of marble dust. The middle of the shed, however, was a meticulously prepared ritual circle with a statue in the centre. A statue that looked a whole hell of a lot like Elise. Only naked. Well, that was a bit embarrassing. I couldn’t quite stop myself staring. Russel had his flaws but he was a very talented sculptor. And while I might have been distracted by the situation, Elise was fascinated. Hypnotised even. To be fair, in her place I’d be freaking the fuck out.

  Slowly, she circled the statue. Ran her fingers over its face. Stared into its eyes. I couldn’t begin to guess what was going through her mind right now.

  “She isn’t ready yet,” said Russel.

  “Yes, she is.” Elise seemed pretty fucking certain about that.

  He hurried over to her. He had that expression that people get when their friend’s toddler starts taking an interest in their collection of crystal glasses. “Hey, now, back away from that. Okay? This is my thing. I know what I’m talking about.”

  Elise turned around. For the first time since I’d known her, she looked angry. “This is not ‘your thing’. This is her thing. This is my thing.”

  “Babe, it’s just a statue.”

  Of all the things he could have said, that was very close to being the worst. Next thing I knew, Elise had a hand around Russel’s neck, and was raising him slowly onto tiptoes.

  “No.” Her voice was cold. “She is not.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wins & Losses

  I wasn’t at all sure where all this was going. I kind of hoped that Elise was just making a point, because the alternative was that she was going to choke this guy out, and while he super had it coming, we really needed some things he had. Also, murder? Still illegal last I checked. Stupid mages and their stupid actually legally existing.

  “You’re blowing this way out of proportion,” protested Russel.

  “You tried to kill me. No, worse. You threw me away.”

  Some people, when they’re in a hole, are pathologically unable to stop digging. Russel was one of them. “It wasn’t working out!” That didn’t help. “I just, I needed to start over. To get you out of my system.” That didn’t help either.

  “It is curious,” said Elise. “I do not have any especial wish to hurt you. I thought perhaps that I would.”

  “Great.” He was kind of taking what he could get here. “We’re making progress. We can build on this.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “However, I find myself possessed of a quite extraordinary desire to prevent you from doing to anybody else what you did to me.” Gently, she lowered him to the ground. “You will finish the girl in the garden. Then you will let her go. And you will make nobody else.”

  Russel was hunched over, a mixture of getting his breath back, straightening his neck out, and
—I admit this was mostly wishful thinking—kissing his arse goodbye. Finally, he stood up. “How the fuck do you think it’s okay to give me orders? You wouldn’t fucking exist without me.”

  “Which part of ‘sent her to an actual scrapyard’ are you either forgetting or not understanding?” I didn’t like to butt in, but this guy was really beginning to get on my wick. “You are so far from the moral high ground here that you couldn’t even see it on a clear day. Right now, the only reason I have a mild preference for Elise not splitting your head open like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange is that you have information I need. If I don’t think I’m going to get it, then I have zero reason to object to her doing whatever the hell she thinks needs to be done here.”

  “Fine!” He dug in his pocket, fished out a phone, unlocked it and tossed it over. “Becca’s number’s in there. Now can you please call her off?”

  I checked that he wasn’t bullshitting me. He wasn’t. There she was. I made a note of the number in case I needed it. “I don’t actually get to tell her what to do,” I explained. “Okay, I do in some situations, like when we’re out of paperclips and I have to say ‘Elise, can you order us some more paperclips?’ But here? Not the boss of her.”

  She looked at me. Her expression had softened a bit since she’d decided not to crush Russel’s throat. “Thank you, Miss Kane. I confess that I am not certain what I should do next.”

  “Here’s a good suggestion,” Russel snapped, “how about leaving my house?”

  “Not without my sister.”

  He collapsed against the wall of the shed. “Will you let it go? She isn’t your sister. She’s a lump of rock.”

  Again, not the right thing to say. “You have given her form,” said Elise. “She has a shape, an identity. All that she lacks is impetus.”

  “This is bullshit.” Russel curled up by the wall and put his head in his hands. “All I’m after is some company. Is that too much to ask. Shit, what does it say about the world when a guy like me finds it easier to wrest the secrets of life from the Gods themselves than to get a real woman to pay attention?” He gave me an accusing look. “Seriously. You’re all fucking mental.”

  I stared right back at him. “Oh right, because I’m the one building people at the bottom of my garden?”

  “You think I want to be doing this? If anyone would give me a chance I’d have been fine. But Bill Hicks was right. There’s studies on it.”

  Okay, this was getting special.

  “How about this for a deal,” I said. “You’re going to finish whatever magic ritual you have to do to wake this lady up. Then you’re going to ring your friend, so that she can get us in touch with Mr. Fisher. And then we’re going to take all your books, and either throw them in a river or hand them over to the Witch Queen of London, whichever comes first. And you’re going to go along with this, because otherwise you’re going to have a really pissed off animated statue to deal with.”

  He looked subdued. I hoped I hadn’t misjudged the guy, but I was pretty sure he cared more for his physical safety than his work. The books might have been pushing it, but Elise clearly wanted him out of business for good, and I was betting that he was betting on it being easier to rebuild his magic library than, say, his kneecaps.

  “Alright.” He stood up. “Clear some space, and I’ll do it. She’d be better, though, if you let me wait for the Tears. She’d be more... I don’t know. More complete. More real.”

  Elise had that stone look again. I couldn’t blame her.

  Audibly sighing, Russel went to one of the books, flipped over a few pages, and began an incantation. There was about a seventeen percent chance that he was going to try to screw us over. To summon something horrible or—and this was a really nasty thought—undo whatever he’d done that made Elise. Then again, I suspect he’d worked out that if he did that I really would kill him, and fuck the cops and the evidence and everything else.

  Magic in practice tends to be either really super impressive, like when people are slinging fire all over the shop or opening gaps into nightmare netherworlds, or else really nothingy. The nothingy kind tends to be the most powerful—half the magic Nim did you wouldn’t even know was magic at all, but it suppressed crime rates, eased the flow of traffic, and generally made things way better for people without anybody noticing—it was part of why I was so mostly okay with her having a hold over me. What Russel was doing, that felt extremely nothingy. There was a faint tingle at the back of my mind, a sense that something uncanny was going on. But there were no sparks or flashes of glittering light, just a skinny guy in a shed saying words to a statue. Elise watched, expressionless. It must have been weirdly like looking at your own birth. I wasn’t sure I wanted to think too hard about how that would feel.

  Minutes passed. Sometimes magic took a tediously long time. Finally, Russel walked up to the statue and, with surprisingly little self-consciousness since Elise and I were both staring at him pretty intently at this point, kissed it on the lips. And then there was that two-faces-vase thing you so often got with mystical transformations. A change in the way you held your head or focused your eyes, and instead of seeing a statue you saw a live woman, and once you’d seen it you couldn’t unsee it.

  She stumbled forwards like the little mermaid using her legs for the first time. Which I suppose she was in a way. The legs thing, I mean, not the mermaid thing. Russel caught her and for half a second the scene looked almost romantic. He gazed down at her with real adoration and the way she looked back at him it was almost like he was a fairytale prince and she his princess. His naked princess. His naked princess who he had deliberately made, for himself, using magic.

  Russel led the woman to a relatively stable-looking pile of junk and sat her down. He even retrieved a blanket from somewhere in the corner and draped it over her shoulders. I bet he was the kind of guy who self-defined as chivalrous.

  “Thank you.” She pulled the blanket a little tighter, and looked around the shed. “I am sorry, I do not know exactly what is happening.”

  “My name is Russel.” He patted her gently on the thigh. “I created you. These here are Elise and...did you even tell me your name before you broke into my property and threatened me?”

  “Kate Kane,” I said. “You might not have realised this yet, but my friend here is basically the same as you. Less naked, pretty much the same otherwise. What this kind gentleman forgot to mention is that before he made you, he made at least four other girls, and he ditched all of them.”

  “And they’re all fine!” His hand was still on her leg. “You know the saying: if you love somebody, set them free.”

  “You did not set me free,” offered Elise. “You locked me in the boot of your car, and then you sent the car to be crushed.”

  “And I’ve said I’m sorry.”

  I wasn’t going to let that slide. “Actually, you haven’t.”

  “Okay, fine.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry. It was a moment of madness. But look, you’re fine now. We’re all fine. Just leave us alone, and we’ll pretend this never happened.”

  This was getting into some seriously shonky philosophical territory for me. When she’d been a statue, I’d been perfectly happy to say we should take her away from this prick and that she’d be a thousand percent better off for it. Now that she was a scared, alive, human person, it was a lot more complicated. It was really hard to rescue somebody when you not only weren’t sure if they wanted to be rescued, but couldn’t be certain they even understood the idea of rescuing. She certainly had no way to understand what we’d be rescuing her from.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “Miss...do you even have a name yet?”

  “I called her Lisbeth.”

  “Like Salander?”

  Russel shrugged. “I like strong women and thrillers. Sue me.”

  “And”—I turned to the girl—“you’re okay with
that?”

  She nodded. I guess Elise had been named roughly the same way. Hell, I suppose I had—but it had been Dad and Jenny who did it, rather than a creepy wizard.

  “Fine. Lisbeth, you’re going with Elise. She’s been where you are. She’ll help you, and she’ll do it without expecting you to bang her afterwards.”

  “Hey!” Russel looked genuinely and deeply offended. “You’ve got me totally wrong. Like, totally. If you think for one second that I...”

  Calm down, Kate. Don’t stab him. “Will you shut up. Please? For one fucking minute? Elise. Take Lisbeth into the house. Find her something to wear. Then take the car and go. I’m going to have a word with our friend here.”

  Lisbeth clearly didn’t have a clue what was going on, but she let Elise take her out the shed, through the garden, and back into the house, leaving me alone with Russel. He stood sulkily in the middle of the ritual circle and gave me an evil look.

  “You’re a total bitch, you know that?”

  “Thanks, I get that a lot. Now”—I handed him his phone back—“ring Becca.”

  “You realise that Lisbeth won’t cope without me.”

  Okay. Maybe only stab him a little bit. “Honestly? I think what you do is ugly and shitty, but it’s my partner that’s all about shutting you down. Me, I’ve got a completely different job to do, and it’s a job that you’re currently making way harder than it has to be. Now dial the fucking number.”

  He dialled the number and handed me the phone.

  “Russel?” The voice at the other end of the line was breathy, trembling. Familiar. “Russel, what’s wrong? I need a little more time with Mr. Fisher, and you’ll have everything you need. I promise you.” Yeah. Definitely familiar.

  I took a deep breath. “Corin. It’s me. Don’t hang up.”

  She didn’t miss a fucking beat. “Kate? Kate, I’m so glad you found this number. I’ve been in such terrible danger ever since we met the werewolves. I knew Mr. Fisher from before, you know. From New York. I stayed there a while after everything that... He’d always been so kind to me, and I needed somebody to protect me. From Henry Percy, and from everybody else. I’m in so much trouble, Kate, and I don’t know what to do.”