Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  I pushed back past the crowd. Between the music, the water, the alarms, the strobe lighting and the press of bodies, I didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on. I’d have expected people to be panicking more, but water magic was all about deception and forgetting. If I had to guess, I’d say Lake had enchanted the place to keep the punters drunk, happy and pliable. I kept seeing his face in the crowd, that mocking grin you got on a certain kind of smug magician when they thought they had you beaten. I’d completely lost track of Julian, but she could take care of herself. And I’d have said the same about Corin, except she seemed to be in over her head with this one.

  As the dancefloor began to clear, I realised I was standing in a shallow pool of water on a tile floor under a lighting system designed to conceal how unattractive a room full of sweaty drunks really looks. I was only half sure I’d come into the same building I’d come out of. Magic was tricky like that, this kind of magic especially, and I wasn’t a fan of tricky. I was way more comfortable with people who tried to burn my face off. The music and the alarms had faded away—they were still there, but muted like somebody had turned a slider down somewhere. There was a definite calm-before-the-storm vibe. I waited. It was a waiting kind of situation.

  Lake appeared across the floor from me. Visibility was shitty and there was that nagging sense of headfuckery I was getting way too used to. I couldn’t see anybody else, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He walked slowly towards me, his shoes splashing rhythmically in the water. “I am getting really fucking sick of you.”

  “Let me guess.” I did my best to sound cocky but I think I just sounded tired. “You’ve got us all split up with some mists-of-Avalon mystical bullshit, and you’re playing divide and rule. You’re probably having this exact same conversation with Julian and Corin right now.”

  “Well, aren’t we clever. But if you think a conversation is all I’m doing to your little girlfriends you are in for a nasty surprise.”

  Yeah, yeah, I knew that one too. I watched him carefully. I’d been around Nimue enough to know that this complicated controlly type of magic was as draining as it was powerful. If I focused I could see the tension in his face, and when he moved it was slow and deliberate, like he was having to concentrate on too many things at once. Darting forward, I swung a punch at him. He vanished in a swirl of silver mist. I’d expected that he would. The aim here was to wear him out, not knock him out.

  “Is that the best you can do?” He was behind me. They were always behind you.

  I turned and rushed him. Not too fast, not trying to catch him—that’d be about as useful as trying to catch fog. He vanished again, and before he could reappear I dropped my weight and covered my head. The blow came in right where I’d expected it. Teleporters got really lazy in a fight: it’s always bamf, taunt, bamf, smack on the back of the skull. I pivoted and dug a hook into his ribs. It barely connected before he went shadows and sea spray on me. I wouldn’t catch him like that again.

  Somewhere to my right, a body fell out of nowhere. Blood billowed from his throat and spread through the water. That would be Julian’s work. If I unfocused my eyes and concentrated, I thought I could see her through the haze. Then I stopped unfocusing my eyes, because that was a recipe for getting shot in the face. Instead I crouched down, put my fingertips to the ground, and fell back on my hunter’s instincts. In the Deepwild, I felt my mother’s approval. She didn’t like being played, and hiding from her only made her angry. I felt ripples in the water, I followed them, and I saw the bastard.

  He was only a few feet away from me, but whatever weird mind-twisting space-bending mojo he was throwing out made it seem a lot further. He had Corin at gunpoint. I sprang forward, pinned his arm, and pulled him away. His weapon clattered to the ground, and Corin went for it immediately. Give the girl her due, she never missed an opening. She came up with the pistol level, and Lake faded into mist again. I was beginning to get really tired of that.

  “You alright?” I asked.

  Corin glanced up at me with those big, vulnerable eyes of hers, and nodded. I reached out and took her hand. Breathing deeply, I tasted the air for signs of my enemy, or of my allies. I caught saltwater and alcohol, I caught wine and rose leaves. I went for the roses.

  Leading Corin behind me I stepped between the spray of the sprinklers, and crossed the dancefloor. As I moved, Julian faded into view. Her shirt was torn and her jacket soaking, but otherwise she seemed to be positively enjoying herself. Three men lay at her feet and if they weren’t dead she was seriously off her game. The Elise-alike stood opposite her.

  “If you wouldn’t mind, sweeting,” she called over her opponent’s shoulder. “We seem to be at an impasse. This lady and I are quite incapable of harming one another, and I am becoming a little frustrated.”

  I let go of Corin’s hand and circled around. The Elise-alike didn’t look particularly bothered by the situation. “Umm, hi,” I said. Not my strongest opening but you had to start somewhere.

  She flicked her head towards me, moving way more like Elise than I was comfortable with. But she didn’t reply.

  “You’re one of Russel’s girls, aren’t you?”

  She paused. It was hard to tell if she was thinking or just having a statue moment. “I was. I belong to Mr. Lake now.”

  Okay, this was going to be awkward. “You know you don’t have to belong to anybody, right?”

  “I was created to serve. I find pleasure in it.”

  Well, that was one for the philosophers. “And you don’t feel like serving, say, anybody in the world except that prick, do you?”

  “Mr. Lake is my master.”

  There was a swirl of mist, and the man himself appeared beside the bar. He was doing his best to look nonchalant, but he was pale and unsteady. All the shifting and mind warping and teleporting must have been getting to him, even in his place of power. “She knows what’s good for her.”

  Julian went straight for him in a rush of fangs, shadows and uncanny vampire speed. It wasn’t enough. He was gone again. She looked vaguely upwards and shouted at the ceiling. “I’m getting terribly tired with these games, you smug blond git.”

  The sprinklers froze, droplets of water hanging in the air like tiny jewels. Lake appeared in the centre of the dancefloor. “You think you’re fucking tired?” He raised his hands, and a sense of futility crashed over me. Something deep and cold and mysterious that said everything I’d ever hoped for was just a blink in the eye of the dark blue eternity of the oceans.

  I tried to move towards him, but it was worse than moving underwater. Everything felt heavy and grey. Breathing was going to get tough sooner rather than later. I’d seen Nimue do something like this to some extremely powerful people about a year ago, but it was way less sexy and exciting when you were on the receiving end of it. Julian got further than I did, but not by much. She managed to cross halfway towards Lake before the weight of his unbound mystical whatever brought her to her knees. The Elise-clone took the opportunity to grab her firmly around the neck. Corin was curled into a ball, trembling.

  Welcome to Screwedville. Population: us.

  “If you’d just stayed out of our fucking way...” Lake began walking towards me. He was speaking slowly, walking slowly. However bad this felt for us, I was betting it was pretty tough on him too. I wasn’t sympathetic. “But you had to get involved with things that were none of your fucking business. And now...” He paused for effect. “Now you’re fucking mine.”

  He twisted one hand, made a grasping motion, and a wave of nausea rose up inside me. I felt things crawling in my head. Biting hard on my lip in an effort to distract myself, I reached for the Deepwild. Pretty much my least favourite thing in the world was finding myself caught between two conflicting metaphysical forces trying to tear my soul in half—and really it said a lot about my life that I was in a position to know that it was one of my least favourite th
ings—but the alternative was giving in to this arsehole, and that really wasn’t an option.

  I tasted blood, and felt my mother’s heart beating. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to let me get to my feet and begin staggering forwards. Lake extended a hand, and my vision began to swim. Oh, this wasn’t good. I reached further into the Deepwild, but it was like looking through fog or falling through freezing water.

  “You will not learn to stay down, will you?” He closed his fist, and a stabbing pain ran through my whole skull. I really, really hoped this was wearing him down enough that I’d be able to do something. Maybe.

  He came closer. Touching close. I had knives, but I couldn’t make my limbs move.

  Here lies Kate Kane, casually dispatched by a sadistic gangster wizard. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.

  “You know”—he looked down at me with a mix of hate, disgust and anger—“you’ve really upset me.” He reached inside his jacket, producing a small, cruel-looking blade. “Now, what do you want to lose first?”

  He pressed the knife underneath my left ear and I felt it bite. I was cross at my arms for not moving. It didn’t help.

  “Next time stay the fuck out of my—” Blood spread across the breast of his suit, and through the fog in my mind, I became dimly aware that I’d just heard a gunshot. And for perhaps the first time in my life, I was incredibly glad I’d managed to give a heartless, paranoid opportunist a chance to pick up a firearm.

  Everything snapped back to reality sickeningly fast. The weird muted feeling Lake’s magic had been imposing on the club evaporated, and the whole place turned into this noisy echoing mess of dance music, fire suppression systems, and voices I couldn’t make out. I was fairly confident Lake was going down, but I thumped him in the gut on my way up anyway. The Elise-copy, or possibly the Elise-original let Julian go and rushed to her master’s side. I left her to it. Corin was already backing slowly out of the door, still very much armed, and I figured it was best to join her. I grabbed my girlfriend by the shoulder and yanked her in the direction of the exit.

  She gave me a pouty look. “Don’t you have a rule about making sure they’re really dead? He could easily walk away from this and come back to wreak terrible vengeance on all of us. And I know firsthand how infuriating an angry wizard can be.”

  “You really want to fight the indestructible statue again?”

  “You make a good point.” She followed me outside.

  Corin was waiting for us, still shaking, Lake’s pistol hanging from her fingers like she didn’t really know what she was doing with it. “He...” she said, “I mean... I... I had to. I didn’t mean to.”

  “Yeah,” I shrugged. “You did. You’re a cold-blooded murderer but right at this moment you’re a cold-blooded murderer who’s on our side.”

  “I’m almost jealous, sweeting.” Julian slinked towards Corin with a look that I hoped was mischievous-playful, not eviscerating-playful. “I’m not sure I like the idea of your having more than one remorseless killer in your life.”

  Corin gazed up at her, and again I caught that look of real fear. The look that was like-but-not-like her usual look of fear. “I...” She stumbled, and it was a genuine stumble. “I’m not a threat to you.” And in an eye blink, the mask was back up. “Kate is just...somebody I work with from time to time.”

  “Yes, so I’ve heard.” Julian shot me a glance. Then she leaned towards Corin, snatched Lake’s gun out of her hand, and kissed her gently on the lips. “There,” she said. “Now I believe we can be considered even.”

  I suppose that was fair. “Come on.” I turned towards the limo. “We should get out of here before somebody realises what’s happened and calls the police.”

  Julian smiled. “You realise that the police have very little power over an immortal being with immense wealth and the ability to control minds?”

  “Yeah, but that only describes one of us.” I opened the door and got in, and Julian pounced in after me. The driver pulled away. Through the window, I watched Corin vanish into the night.

  Much to Julian’s annoyance, I full-on crashed out in the back of the car. She was in a disturbingly celebratory mood.

  “So...your place or mine?” she asked. I had my eyes closed but I knew exactly what the look on her face was like.

  “You really aren’t at all bothered that we just walked into a fashionable North London nightspot, flooded it, evacuated the clientele, and left at least three corpses on the dancefloor?”

  I felt her shift and stretch next to me. “You worry far too much. Your enemies are as keen to keep the police out of this as you are, and even if they weren’t, Sebastian’s people would take care of it. That’s his job, after all, and he’s quite terrifyingly good at it.”

  She was right. There was something weirdly comforting about having an amoral immortal fiend in your corner. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” I said, “but could you actually drop me off at mine. I’ve got a report to put together for Patrick and I really need to get some actual sleep tonight.”

  “Do you ever work for anybody you haven’t banged?”

  “Hey, I took a job for the Merchant of Dreams. That’s what started this whole mess.”

  “Technically, that didn’t answer my question.”

  She folded up against me, and the limo whisked us through the late-night London streets and back to my flat. I had to admit that it was pretty tempting to say fuck the consequences and let it take me back to one of Julian’s many residences, but the twinges, aches and very real chance of tearing open all my stitches made me come down on the side of sensible. I kissed her goodbye, which took a while, and then struggled upstairs to a place where I could safely go unconscious.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sisters & Grannies

  The Dream of fire burned the Dream of a city. I really missed the days when my sleep wasn’t being hijacked by a mystical monarch.

  Nimue stood beside me. She had taken me to a high place, and shown me the city laid out beneath us like a map. Except now the map was broken. It was burning around the edges, like a letter in a fireplace. Smoke blocked out whole boroughs, especially south of the river. There was a fight happening here, invisible during the day but raging all around us, all the time. Two wills clashing over the fate of a city and everybody living in it.

  “You served me well,” she said. She was looking away, her voice soft and on the edge of cracking. “The north is mine again.” She closed her eyes, lowered her head. “Or soon will be.”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”

  “You have done much for me.” She didn’t seem especially happy about it. “But there is much more to do. The east and west are still in the balance, and the final battle will come in the south.”

  “What about the Tears?”

  “We have some time. Days, perhaps. Even King would not rush to use something so powerful without the proper rituals. For now, we should...” She broke off. “I should gather my strength. Wait.”

  That didn’t seem right. “If this guy is going to be basically unstoppable in a couple of days, is this really a good time to be playing it safe?”

  Nimue pulled away from me. She was dressed in silver and starlight, but in that moment she wasn’t the Witch Queen of London, she was the girl from Tottenham who’d loved her city so much that it broke the universe.

  “Nim.” I went after her. “Talk to me. What’s going on?”

  She stopped, turned, looked up at me. I’d never seen her this worn out. “Nothing,” she said. I think she sort of meant it. “There’s nothing I can do. Nothing I can ask you to do. Things will be as they will be.”

  I was about to say that this wasn’t like her, but that would have been untrue. The truth was that Nim had always had this kind of Zen attitude to things. Even big scary life-or-death things. It was part of her whole mists-and-
waters lady-in-the-lake vibe.

  “You know this is kind of scaring me?” I told her.

  “I know.” She looked away again. “But this is a scary time. You’ve done enough, Kate. And I thank you for it.”

  This was going from kind of scaring me to really fucking scaring me. I grabbed her by the arm. “Seriously, what’s going on? You can tell me.”

  She shook her head. “You’ll find out, when the time comes. For now, rest. I will need you.”

  Before I could make any kind of reply, anything like “what the fuck does that mean” or “you are really freaking me the shit out,” she leaned forward and kissed me gently on the lips. Everything dissolved into mist.

  I suppose that was one way to get the last word.

  As the world around me faded into silver and shadow, I kind of expected to wake up. That was how these things usually went. Instead I found myself standing on a bridge—the Millennium Bridge from the look of it—with a woman in green standing across from me.

  “You are the last person I wanted to see here,” I said.

  “I am not your enemy, Kate. Not today.”

  Great, she knew my name. I mean, that was clearly the first trick they taught you in smug villain school, but it was still creepy. “Okay, I’ll bite. Fuck knows one more deal with a dodgy supernatural creature won’t make much of a difference. Why are you not my enemy?”

  “We want the same thing.” She was masked, so all I could really make out was the shimmer of her emerald gown and the gleam of starlight on her lips, but I got the sense that there was a deliberate double-intent there.

  “Long life and happiness? Wine, women and song?”