by Alexis Hall
I wasn’t completely sure how much I could assist anybody, because this sounded about three points too mystical for me to really cope with. “I... Sure. Uh...how?”
“I will show you.” Nimue rose. I couldn’t quite remember what she’d been wearing before, but now she was back in that sparkly silver dress that meant she was in full on queen-of-the-city mode. With a gracious gesture she dismissed her companions, who sort of faded into mist along with the table, the room, and everything else.
And then we were alone in a high place. The city beneath us like a living, dreaming map. I thought that if I focused I could see anything. Everything. The great grey serpent of the Thames. The hidden, filth-choked veins of the city’s buried rivers. The hopes of office workers. The fears of suburbanites. The secret wishes of city brokers. She’d shown me this before. It had been beautiful then and it was beautiful now.
“The city,” she said, “is currents. Connections. Channels. Magic—my magic, King’s magic—is touching those channels. Changing them. They exist in the Dream, but they exist also in the physical world. Power here is power there, and the reverse is likewise true. King’s power in the north flows from his Guardian of the Watchtower of the North, from Lake.”
I had a sense where this was going. “From the Undertow?”
“It is a temple of sorts. A place of power. It is not the greatest of his holdings, nor the least. I ask that you deliver it to me.”
“Deliver it how? I’m not Ronnie Kray, I can’t just walk into a place and say nice club you’ve got here, be a shame if something happened to it.”
“You will find a way, Kate.” Gently, she took my hands and gazed fixedly at me. There was something deep and hypnotic about Nimue’s eyes, like you were looking back in time. “You are my strong right arm. My most trusted agent. My perfect knight.”
I was getting increasingly worried about how little of this I understood. “Great. No pressure.”
“You will find a way, Kate. You will always find a way.”
She leaned up to kiss me. She did that a lot in my dreams. I was hoping it didn’t count as cheating if you were asleep and it was redolent with mystical symbolism. Before her lips could touch mine, though, the dream shattered. The high tower and the city beneath dissolved like mist in summer.
* * *
I was alone, tangled in my bedsheets, and somewhere somebody was hammering on something in a way you really shouldn’t do at whatever the hell time this was. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes and doing my level best to shake the cobwebs from my brain, I slowly worked out that while the “somebody” was still a mystery, the “somewhere” was outside my flat, and the “something” was my front door.
Of all the weird, mysterious things I’d ever heard of in my time, a good night’s sleep was the only one I wasn’t sure I believed existed.
I crawled out of bed, pulled on the minimum respectable amount of clothing, and went to see who the fuck it was and what the fuck they wanted. Given how completely terrible the timing was, and how much of a gigantic pain in my arse my mysterious visitor was being, I should have guessed the first part pretty much instantly.
I opened the door.
“Katharine!”
Patrick. What a fantastic way to round out my evening.
Chapter Seventeen
Boys & Girls
I admit I’m not an expert, but I’d always thought that one of the perks of not being in a relationship with somebody was not having to deal with their infuriating bullshit. But I guess Patrick never got that memo. He stormed into my flat and began pacing the floor of my living room. He had this way of looking like he was constantly about to fly into a violent rage. I’d thought it was dangerous and exciting when I was sixteen, when I’d confused the thrill of physical danger with actual sexual interest. These days it just made me really want to slap him.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Sofia has been spending a lot of time with a guy named—what was it—Samuel? And either you’re afraid she’ll leave you for him, or you had a hissy fit and told her to leave you for him, or she straight-up left you for him. And now you’ve come here because in your twisted mind everything that goes wrong in your relationship is part of my master plan to get you back. Am I close?”
He stopped pacing and started to seethe instead. “Do not mock me, Katharine.”
“I’m not mocking you. I’m just not sure what you want me to do.”
“Find her! Tell her what danger she is in.”
I sat down on the sofa and pointedly switched on the TV. “Danger?”
“She is an innocent girl. Who knows what...plans this boy might have for her?”
Oh, dear me. This was getting beyond pathetic. “Can I clarify, when you say plans, do you mean you’re worried that he might secretly be some kind of supernatural being who wants to drag her into a centuries-ancient conflict in which she is a vital linchpin?” Given Sofia’s personal history, my experience, and the track record of Patrick’s girlfriends down the ages, this was actually fairly likely. “Or do you mean that you’re scared he wants to stick his cock in her?”
He seemed genuinely disgusted. Looking back on it, maybe the fact that my teenage self didn’t find Patrick’s nineteenth-century revulsion at the idea of sex remotely frustrating or off-putting should have been a clue that I didn’t like him that way. “We are talking,” he said with a low, menacing intensity, “about a young girl who is ruining her life.”
I’d say there were times when I really wanted to punch Patrick in the teeth, but that would imply there were times when I didn’t. “Okay, three things. One: No, she isn’t. She’s just breaking up with you, which might be the best decision she’s ever made. Two: The key words in that sentence are her and life. She’s old enough to have sex, get married, drive or join the army. She’s certainly old enough to decide who she wants to date. And finally three: Let’s assume that your worst fears are true and this guy turns out to be some cannibalistic axe murderer who wants to sacrifice her to some ancient hell god. I’m pretty sure we could still get her out of it.”
“You don’t understand!” He’d gone back to stalking the carpet like a caged panther. “I love her!”
“Your feelings don’t control her decisions. That’s kind of not-being-a-controlling-douchebag 101.” And gosh didn’t I sound mature and with it. He didn’t need to know that my last major breakup had involved screaming, crying, way too much drinking, disastrous rebound sex with a femme fatale, a year of zero communication, the murder of my partner and finally reconnecting over the rise of a vampire queen thought dead since the civil war.
For a while Patrick just stood there, digesting. To give the boy his due, he seemed like he was genuinely thinking. Possibly even about what I’d said. If so, it might have been a lifetime first. “What if I hired you?”
Or not. “Hired me?”
“You are an investigator. I will pay you to investigate. Find out who this boy is and what he wants with Sofia.”
Well, this was a quandary. On the one hand I did like money rather a lot on account of this expensive habit I’ve developed of eating food and sleeping indoors. On the other hand I hated the idea of having any relationship with Patrick where I owed him anything, and I wasn’t wild on the notion of spying on one of the few people in the world who still trusted me. “You know,” I said, “I’ve got quite a lot going on right about now. This has probably passed you by on account of it existing outside your weird eternally teenage bubble, but the whole city is about to get ripped apart by a magic gang war, and I’ve got a very limited window to stop it.”
“Katharine, I am begging you. I will do anything. I will give you anything.”
He said that sort of thing a lot. To be fair to the guy, he usually meant it. And right now I kind of needed all of the warm bodies—okay, room temperature bodies—that I could round up. Plus I was beginning to put together a plan for how
to deal with Lake. I took a deep breath. “Okay, Patrick. If you really won’t be talked out of this, then I’ll help you. But you’re going to pay my standard rate, and you’re also going to help me take out a nightclub.”
“Which nightclub?” He was looking at me like he was sure this was a trap but wasn’t sure how it could be.
“Place called the Undertow. I don’t want anything burned down, but—you used to be Sebastian’s man in the police, lean on whoever you have to lean on and get it looked at. It’s not even like you’ll have to make anything up, the place is a front for a whole pile of shady magic gangland bullshit. Point the cops at it and make sure that whatever pressure gets put on them, you pressure back harder.”
“And in return you will help me protect Sofia?”
“In return I’ll look into this Samuel guy on the off chance he really is as dodgy as shit. But if he isn’t, then he isn’t, and you’re going to have to accept that.”
Patrick stared at me for a moment, nodded curtly and held out his hand. I shook it somewhat awkwardly. Then he left. Which always brightened my day.
And yet again, things had got to the point where I had far too many balls in the air. I needed to catch up with Elise and Lisbeth at some point, I needed to get started on this job for Patrick, and then there was the little matter of Nimue needing me to hand her a key victory in her mystical war for the soul of London. Obviously, the mystical war kind of had to be my top priority.
I wasn’t exactly an expert on this sort of thing, but funnily enough I did have a certain amount of experience with nightclub-based supernatural conflict. When I’d first met Julian, she’d been under attack from this hacked off faery lord called the King of the Court of Love, and his first order of business had been to go after her territory by whatever methods he had at his disposal. Which—since years of neglect and imprisonment had transformed him into this twisted sewer beast—basically meant “throwing poo at things,” but you get the idea.
Faery magic is different from wizard magic—it’s three steps more surreal and about twelve percent more likely to leave you trapped in a magical forest for all eternity—but they did seem to share some basic principles. Back when I’d been with Nim in the romantic sense as well as the owing-her-my-undying loyalty sense—I really needed to find a way out of that—I’d paid more attention to getting her kit off than to learning the intricacies of her magical arts, but I’d picked up some of the basics. There was this whole as-above-so-below deal where what happened in real actual London would affect what happened in magic London and vice versa. My job from now on was to make life in real actual London as difficult for King’s men as possible. For Lake, that meant cracking down on his business in the north. Patrick had been an unexpected bonus there. It had been fifteen years but it was almost like we were getting to the stage where we could work together as grownups.
Then again, there was also a much more straightforward option.
I rang Julian.
It took her a while to pick up, which suggested she was feeling either busy or lazy or both. “Sweeting,” she purred, “I was just about to take a little nap. It’s morning and my power ends as does that of all evil things with the coming of the day.”
“Vampires don’t need to sleep.”
“I know, but it’s so very pleasurable. The terrible drawback of mortal lovers is that they’re always so damnably busy during the hours of daylight, it leaves one with no recourse but to entertain oneself.”
“So... I was going to ask you about the, y’know, the war? But it kind of sounds like you’re about to start wanking at me.”
Julian sighed contentedly. “What makes you think I haven’t started already? Don’t worry, I can multitask.”
“Wow, the word ‘appropriate’ really isn’t in your vocabulary, is it?”
“I’m teasing, sweeting. You have my full and undivided attention.”
“I’ve spoken to the mages. They’re not wild about the nobody-gets-the-Tears thing, but Nim seems willing to cross that bridge when she comes to it. She’s asked me to give her control of a club called the Undertow and that’s so far in your wheelhouse that it...” I stopped and thought for a moment. “What the hell even is a wheelhouse?”
“I believe it has something to do with baseball. But yes, I know the place you’re talking about. It’s run by the little fucker who shot you, isn’t it?”
“That’s the one.”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could hear Julian clapping her hands like an excited schoolchild. “Oh, darling, it’s like Christmas. You know how I love to put annoying wizards in their place. And you have all these silly rules about not killing your ex-girlfriends.”
“You want me to come over and talk strategy?”
“Well, I do love it when you talk strategy.” She sighed. “I suppose you’re going to want this to be all subtle and co-ordinated, aren’t you? What happened to the days when you could just feed somebody his entrails and have done with it?”
“It’s sweet that you care.”
“I’ll tell you what, give me the day to talk to my people, and this evening we’ll take a little trip out to show Mr. Lake what a terrible error he made when he messed with my lady.”
Well, they did say it was important for couples to do things together. Honestly I shouldn’t have been pandering to Julian’s penchant for random acts of violence, or her petty vindictive streak. But this fucking fucker had fucking shot me. Ergo: fuck him. She could feed him whatever bits of his body she liked.
With nothing else I could do for the war effort and Elise still busy with her own shit, I had the whole middle of the day to milk Patrick’s paranoia for all it was worth. I was kind of hoping that it wasn’t going to be rocket science. I mean, I did this for a living, if I couldn’t find out about a seventeen-year-old boy in these days of Instagram and Twitter feeds I was doing something seriously wrong.
By about lunchtime, I’d decided I must have been doing something seriously wrong.
I’d got the basics pretty easily because Facebook. He was tagged in a bunch of Sofia’s pictures—a classically pretty young blond boy, the kind you’d almost want to call a youth. With his tightly curled hair and look of nonspecific niceness, he could have been a model for a really bland sort of catalogue. Digging deeper things got weirder. I don’t want to make old-person-type generalisations about young people today, but that generation were pretty much raised on social media—I’d been able to dig up tweets that Sofia had sent when she was so young that even Patrick might have thought twice about drooling over her—but this Samuel guy had nothing before the start of this year.
It wasn’t a huge red flag. People sometimes did cleanses—got new accounts for things because they wanted to make a break with the past or whatever. And there could have been all kinds of perfectly mundane teenage drama behind the guy’s complete lack of digital footprint before January. Or he could have been a hired assassin dropping into a cover identity. Or a creature from another reality that had only recently materialised into this universe and had to quickly adopt the persona of an A-level student. Either way, it looked suss to me. I didn’t have kids, but if I was responsible for a seventeen-year-old girl, and she was about to start dating a guy who seemed to have popped into existence from the ether about two days before he started leaving flirty comments on her status updates I’d be pretty fucking concerned.
Fuck, I was turning into Patrick. I was webstalking a child and convincing myself that he was a terrible threat to a girl who was perfectly capable of looking after herself.
Still, I wasn’t wrong about the flirty comments thing. It wasn’t just that the guy was a bit of a ghost on the interwebs, it was that when he did show up it was always interacting with Sofia. I spent a good few hours trawling the walls, feeds and streams of her immediate social circle, and he was only there if she was there. And okay, maybe he was shy. Maybe he didn’t have m
any friends, and maybe he really was just so into her that he’d made his virtual life totally Sofia-centric. Which would mean that the girl definitely had a type, albeit a creepy and faintly obsessive type. So far I didn’t have anything that suggested immediate mortal peril. Hell, looking at it objectively this guy was still about ninety-four times less sinister than Patrick.
But it was enough to dig deeper.
By mid-afternoon I’d tracked down more big piles of nothing. I’d called the college, and they’d been naturally cagey because child protection, but they’d been able to tell me that he’d transferred from Charterhouse. Except he hadn’t, because nobody there had heard of him.
On a whim, I ran a similar set of checks on Patrick. His web presence was equally spotty, but his transcripts all checked out far better. On paper he’d gone to Latymer before switching to Sofia’s college for A level, he had an official address and I was pretty sure if I dug deep enough I’d be able to pull a birth certificate for him as well. Patrick worked for the Prince of Wands, and the Prince of Wands did his homework. In which case not only was Sofia’s new guy not who he said he was, but he also wasn’t in deep enough with the city’s secret masters to cover it up well.
I guess that was comforting?
I wasn’t completely sure what the best play was from here. I wouldn’t be clubbing with Julian until after sunset, so if I wanted to leave my desk and do actual legwork I had time to move from cyberstalking teenagers to physically stalking teenagers. God, this job made me feel dirty sometimes. Okay, most of the time. Still, work was work, and you went where it took you. Which was how I wound up staking out a bus stop outside a sixth form college, waiting for a kid to get on a bus, so I could intercept it and follow him.