by Alexis Hall
He got on the number 82 at five past four. Sofia wasn’t with him, which was good. Once the bus pulled away from the kerb, I drove a couple of stops ahead, ditched my car, and got on myself. I felt a bit bad taking the car without asking Elise, but she was so busy with her sister that she’d be very unlikely to need it. Also you couldn’t inconspicuously tail a guy in a horse-drawn carriage unless that guy happened to live in 1764. Also, it was my fucking car.
Samuel got off about ten minutes later, and I got off as close behind him as I could manage without looking totally suspicious. I hung back, giving as much of a “we just happen to be walking in the same direction” vibe as I possibly could, and managed to tail him to a rather nice little semi-detached in Golder’s Green. I walked straight past, because nothing screams “you’re being followed” like somebody stopping directly outside your house. Then I looped back and settled into an unobtrusive position on the other side of the road. And I pretty much lurked there for the next couple of hours. Because even if Samuel was a hellbeast from another dimension, he wasn’t doing anything so hellbeasty right now that I’d be able to see it through the windows of a nice little suburban house in North London.
You get kind of paranoid in this job, and there was a nagging voice at the back of my mind saying that the lack of anything suspicious was suspicious. Once the front door closed, the house looked basically deserted. It was possible that his parents worked, but unless they were both doctors or lawyers or something—not impossible, it was a nice enough part of town—you’d expect at least one of them to be home before sunset. And you’d expect a kid that age to move around some. Instead he seemed to sit in this one upstairs room. Maybe he had homework, but if so that was a level of commitment to academic performance that a seventeen-year-old boy in an otherwise empty house wouldn’t normally display.
Yeah, I was leaning far closer to hellbeast.
I stayed watching the window until it started to get dark. I had nothing better to do and the more time I put into the case the more I could bill Patrick for at the end of it all. The target hadn’t moved from the upstairs room that I was assuming was his bedroom. I was about to head out—I had a date to go paint the town red with my undead lover and I wasn’t about to miss it—but then something caught my eye. A tiny flare of light in the upstairs window. Like a moment of sunlight before the world went dark.
Definite hellbeast.
Possibly a solar-themed hellbeast. But a hellbeast.
Still, he hadn’t eaten Sofia yet despite having ample opportunity, so the chances were she’d still be alive if I picked this up tomorrow. I filed it away under “problems to address really fucking soon but not right the fuck now.” And then my phone rang, right on cue.
“I’m outside your flat.” It was Julian’s pout voice, the one she did if I wasn’t where she expected me to be. “Are you ignoring me?”
“I’m in Golder’s Green. Had a job. Come get me?” I thought about this. “Umm, and if you’re in the limo, can you come get me somewhere not totally conspicuous. I’m trying to throw the odd bone to subtlety here.”
We arranged a pickup a few streets away from the building I was trying to keep under covert surveillance. Still not the best undercover move ever, but we were talking about a teenager. Even if there was a good chance he was a magic demon teenager with mystic light powers, I’d take the risk. In the back of the limousine, Julian sprawled like a cat who hadn’t so much got the cream as worked out where the cream was coming from and begun to take steps to secure full control over the cream supply in perpetuity.
“Dah-ling,” she purred. If she’d been human, I’d have said she’d been drinking. “You have no idea how much delight I am feeling right now.”
I sat down next to her. “The thought of strong-arming some guy really turns you on, huh?”
“Prince of Pleasure, sweeting. Everything turns me on. I’m sure I’ve explained that one before.”
“You know I’m still nowhere near a fit state for a fistfight?”
“I’m certain that I can do enough violence for both of us.” She swivelled around in a way that looked impossible and clambered across me. Her hands went places that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with hands going in a chauffeur-driven vehicle. “Now how shall we pass the time until we get there?”
I gently disentangled her. “How about you tell me what you’ve already done?”
She gave me a look of aggressive disappointment. “You know, you are perilously close to being no fun at all.”
“Quite a few times in the last couple of days I’ve been perilously close to dead.”
“I know plenty of dead people who could still make time for a quickie in the back of a limo.”
“Can you please just focus?”
Turning again, she laid her head in my lap and gazed up at me with her best big-blue-eyes. For an eight-hundred-year-old fiend, she could be pretty obvious sometimes. “I’m sorry. Let me explain how incredible I’ve been, and then you can decide how best to reward me.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Obviously these things take time, but the Calix group will soon own the Undertow outright. As of approximately noon today, no reputable or disreputable supplier will sell Mr. Lake so much as a cocktail stick for fear of losing my business. Environmental health, trading standards, and vice have all received anonymous tips about his operation. Tips which your irritating ex-boyfriend seems to have made certain they will take seriously. By the time this wonderful, luxurious vehicle arrives at his establishment I can confidently predict that the man will be having a very, very bad day.” She shut her eyes and sighed with a deep, almost sensual satisfaction. “I’ve had a simply lovely time. While tearing somebody’s throat out has a certain visceral rush, there is nothing quite like the sense of accomplishment you get from beating an enemy down with nothing more than a telephone and a list of contacts.”
Our eyes met. “I’ve got to admit,” I said. “I do kind of want to do you right now.”
“I love it when we’re on the same wavelength.” She wriggled in my lap. “After all, I have worked terribly hard on your behalf today.”
This was a bad idea. This was a terrible idea. We were about to walk into a life or death situation, and we needed to be focused and disciplined and not get distracted from the very important job in front of us.
I twisted my fingers in Julian’s hair and pulled her into a kiss. Her fangs grazed the tender places of my mouth and I tasted blood.
Blood and wine and rose leaves and the irrepressible joy of not giving a fuck.
Chapter Eighteen
Music & Mist
Pro tip: if you really want to make a dramatic, intimidating entrance at the nightclub-slash-mystical-sanctum-slash-criminal-hideout of a sleazy gangster-wizard, it’s best not to show up looking like you’ve just been interrupted in the middle of something sweaty and personal. It’s also best not to show up looking like you’ve spent the last week getting beaten, shot, stabbed and sent literally to Hell but, hey, you work with what you’ve got.
It was earlyish in the evening but there was already a queue outside the Undertow. Julian and I breezed past it and ran smack into an unimpressed bouncer.
“There’s a line.”
I eyed him up: heavy set, slightly taller than me, poorly chosen goatee. His expression suggested that he didn’t think Julian and I would gel with the clientele. Which is to say that we didn’t look much like randy, wankered straight people. To give the man his due, he wasn’t wrong. “So...” I began, “there are kind of two ways this conversation can go.”
“Three ways.” Julian sparkled next to me. I was pretty sure that her third way involved cold-blooded murder in front of witnesses. She was way too excited about the prospect.
The bouncer’s expression didn’t change. “Which part of there’s a line is hard for you ladies to understand?”
This guy was made of stone. What sort of person didn’t respond to a there are two ways this can go opening by asking what the ways were? Somebody who didn’t appreciate a classic, that’s who. “Right,” I tried, “let’s assume that you’re working here on the understanding that Mr. Lake is a completely legitimate businessman who never does anything illegal, or that breaks the laws of physics.”
“Line. Back of. Now.” I’d have said this guy must have had his imagination surgically removed, but that was unfair. Dealing with annoying horny drunks from ten to three every evening must have been a shitty way to make a living, and a zero-bullshit policy was probably the only way to stay sane.
“Look, this here is Julian Saint-Germain. She’s really big in the industry, she wants to speak to Lake.”
“She talk for herself?”
Julian flashed him her most condescending grin. Nobody did condescending like vampires. “She does, but she has this whole set of rules in which organ grinders and monkeys are a big feature.”
“He expecting you?”
“No, I’m a delightful surprise.” Her eyes gleamed like sapphires in the half-light. Fuck, she was distractingly gorgeous sometimes. “Now let me in or—and can I just say how much I resent your making me resort to cliché—you will never work in this town again.”
The guy let us in. Part of me instantly wished he hadn’t, because the Undertow was everything I hated about the club scene. Music too loud, lights too bright and strobing, and the smell of sweat and desperation in the air. Calling the place a meat market would be an insult to Smithfield. It reminded me a bit of the Palace of Lust. Not quite as literally in Hell, but with the same sense that something was feeding on everybody here. And for a moment, even with Julian beside me, I was very much aware that I was walking straight into a magician’s place of power. That we were going to throw down with this guy, with me only half recovered from a gunshot wound, in the one place in the entire cosmos where he was at his strongest.
Here lies Kate Kane. Started a land war in Asia. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.
I led Julian through the club to the roped-off area where Lake held court. I was ever so slightly bothered by how similar their two setups were. I kept telling myself that the Undertow was sleazy and exploitative while the Velvet was subversive and liberated, but I couldn’t quite avoid feeling like the major difference was that Julian happened to be into the same things I was.
There was another bouncer at the entrance to the VIP area, and beyond I could make out Lake, a pair of drunk, half-naked groupies, and the Elise-alike. It was getting to where I wanted this over as fast as possible. I strode up to the guard and gave him the executive summary:
“Hi. If you didn’t already know, you work for an evil wizard. My friend here is a vampire. She’s here to talk to him and, if you try to get in our way, she’ll kill you before you can blink.”
Julian gave a little wave. The bouncer stepped silently aside.
As we approached, Lake dismissed his hangers-on, and a couple more of his goons—the same ones who’d kicked the shit out of me when I’d started this whole case from the looks of them—loomed out of the shadows to back him up.
He stood. “You do not know when to fucking quit, do you?”
“I usually go with ‘when I’m ahead,’ and I’m nowhere near ahead yet.”
“You really think I’m letting you walk out of here again?”
I glanced at Julian. She was clearly itching to break into the nice place you’ve got here routine that I wasn’t able to pull off last time. She trotted over to the seat that Lake had just vacated and perched herself on the back. Surrounded by that pack of burly East End thugs, she looked worryingly tiny.
“Let me explain,” she began. “Within the month, I will own this establishment. Until that time, you will close its doors, cease trading, and go bother somebody else.”
Lake didn’t look even remotely impressed. “Or what?”
“Or nothing. I’m not making a threat, I’m telling you the way things will be. You might have missed the memorandum, Mr. Lake, but I rather run entertainment in this town. It’s a—” She waved a hand in the air as if trying to summon the right words out of the darkness. “It’s sort of an immortal-parasite-wound-around-the-very-life-of-this-city-like-a-serpent-around-a-chalice thing. You understand.”
He looked from me to Julian, then back to me again. “You got the vampires on your side?”
“They’re kind of on their own side. But turns out they also think your boss is a dick.”
Lake turned, nodding almost imperceptibly at one of his men. The guy reached for some kind of weapon, but I never saw what. Julian moved like a shadow and twisted his arm to an angle that arms really shouldn’t twist to.
“I was so hoping that you’d resort to violence.” She gave the man’s wrist a yank. “Do you want to see how many of your men I can eviscerate before I get bored?”
I glanced towards the dancefloor. We were visible, but this was the kind of place where nobody was really paying attention to anything except themselves. On the other hand, a full-on superpower smackdown kicking off somewhere this crowded was likely to get a whole bunch of people real dead real fast. “Tell you what,” I tried, “how about we take this outside?”
“How about we don’t?” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could sense something gathering around Lake now. Something deep and dark. I thought I could smell the sea. “You have some fucking nerve coming into my place...”
“At the risk of repeating myself...” Julian gave her victim’s arm another experimental jerk. He did a creditable job of not screaming. “It isn’t your place. It’s my place. You see, taking what we want and giving nothing in return unless it pleases us is rather what my species do.”
Lake sneered. “Think you’re real tough, don’t you. You come in here like you own the fucking shop...”
“Please try to keep up. I do...”
He ignored her. “I am going to teach you a lesson you will never fucking forget.” He nodded in the direction of the Elise-a-like, who vanished into a back room. Part of me was afraid that Julian would just kick off before she returned, but I needn’t have worried. The lady might have had no sense of shame, compassion, or self-preservation, but she had a tremendous sense of drama.
Still, it was an uncomfortably long time before the girl emerged. When she did, she was dragging Corin behind her.
Oh, yeah, there’d been that too. Shit. What with the dreams and the council of wizards and the council of vampires and everything, I’d kind of put her out of my mind. I tried to tell myself I thought she’d be okay, that Corin always landed on her feet, but the truth was I’d just had too much going on to care much about a woman who’d tried to kill me more than once.
Except I kind of cared now. Because she looked scared, and I realised that I’d never seen her scared. Not really. I’d seen her do the “save me, you’re my only hope” act more times than I could remember, and I’d bought it more times than I should have. This was different, defeated. Like she’d said all the things she always said and made all the moves she’d always made, and they hadn’t worked. She didn’t look hurt—at least not in any ways that showed—but there was no way I was leaving her behind.
“Here’s the deal.” Lake gave the kind of smile that large predatory animals give smaller, less predatory animals. “You walk away, and call off this fucking stupid plan to push me out of my own property, and I’ll let your friend keep her pretty face and all her fingers.”
There was a kind of popping, cracking sound as Julian casually dislocated something in her man’s arm. She laughed like a damned schoolgirl. “Are you honestly trying to get me to bargain for the life of a mortal woman whose only claim to my affection is that she once seduced and betrayed my current lover?”
I started eyeing the exits. Things were about to get super bloody, and I really didn’t want a cl
ub full of massacred civilians on my conscience. Well, more on my conscience than they already would be, what with this having been entirely my idea in the first place. Note to self: don’t point psychotic vampires at people unless you’re one hundred and ten percent certain you want to deal with the fallout.
Julian took a deep breath. Or I guess she kind of faked taking a deep breath for dramatic effect because, well, vampire. “I am going to ask you one more time, politely. Stand your people down, close your doors, and run back south of the river to your master. Or die.”
Well, that was it, then. From there things unfolded really fucking fast. Lake raised a hand and began to incant something—Julian moved like light and shadow towards him, quicker than I could see but not quick enough to catch her target. Lake vanished into silver mist—it was a trick I’d seen Nimue use hundreds of times and it was kind of weird to see somebody else doing the same thing. Julian didn’t miss a beat and, finding her hands empty, switched her attention from Lake to his men.
I went for the doors, hoping that the vampire-versus-wizard smackdown would distract everyone long enough for me to start getting at least some of the drunk idiots out of the building. One of the bouncers tried to block my path, but Julian struck at him from the darkness, all claws and fangs and death in those brilliant blue eyes. I dodged along the edges of the dancefloor and shoved open a fire exit. For good measure I smashed one of those In Case of Fire, Break Glass things on the way. A piercing alarm cut through the music and the sounds of the crowd, and a sprinkler kicked in.
On the plus side, a lot of wet clubbers were filing into the street and away from immediate physical danger. On the downside, it filled the building with this fine spray that shimmered in the club lights and gave the whole place a weird, dreamy feeling. I’d hung around mages enough to be really worried about weird, dreamy feelings. If King’s court worked like Nim’s then they’d have this whole elements-and-cardinal-points thing going on, and I wasn’t sure filling a water-wizard’s sanctum with, well, water was a good idea. Actually I was pretty sure it was a terrible idea. Just not quite as terrible an idea as leaving a bunch of innocent bystanders to get caught in the crossfire of a supernatural free-for-all.