Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  “For Nimue to win the present war.”

  Now this was getting super confusing. “Hasn’t Nim had me fighting you in my dreams for, like, a year? Why are you on her side now?”

  “I have always been on her side. She just doesn’t trust me.”

  I looked at the woman in green. I was beginning to entertain a suspicion. “Take off the mask.”

  She reached up and did as I asked. Her sparkling mask fell to the ground, and she looked back at me with Nimue’s face.

  Really should have seen that one coming. I sighed. “So, you’re what? Dark reflection? Evil twin? Parallel universe version?”

  “I am what she could become, had she the courage.” She glided closer. Inappropriately closer.

  “Yeah, I’m going with dark reflection.”

  “Then you understand why I want her to win this battle.”

  This was a bad idea. “To be super, super clear, I’m not swearing eternal fealty to you.” I gave it a moment’s thought. “Or fucking you.”

  Nimue’s Evil Twin smiled. “Pity. But for now you just need to listen.”

  It was the less exciting option, but I listened.

  “King is close to victory. He needs a distraction.”

  “So what, you want me to track him down and flash him my tits?”

  “No.” The Evil Twin looked up into my eyes. Hers were this strange, deep green like some ancient rainforest. “I want you to kill his grandmother.”

  “Why is everybody so keen to have me job this old lady?”

  She put her hands around my waist, and whispered in my ear. “Because she is the only thing King cares for in this world, and because while she is frail now, she has done enough in her life to earn death many times over.”

  I reached idly into my pocket. At least in the dream, I was still carrying the iron spike that Mooncalf had given me for pretty much exactly this job. Stabbing a pensioner really hadn’t been on my to-do list for this, well, this lifetime, really. Then again, Nana King had stolen the soul of a child, was supporting a maniac who wanted to burn down London, and was directly responsible for me having to go to actual Hell.

  I still wasn’t sure I had it in me. “Look,” I tried, “there must be some middle ground here between ‘roll over and die’ and ‘shank a granny.’”

  The Evil Twin turned sharply away from me in a swirl of emerald. Lightning sheeted across the sky. “You try my patience. Let Nimue act as she wishes, and she will fall. That is unquestionable. I offer you an opportunity to save her, and you flinch from doing what must be done, as she does.”

  “You don’t think killing his nan might, say, really piss him off?”

  “I am certain it will.” That smile again. “Just as stealing the child really”—she paused, rolled the words around in her mouth as if she wasn’t sure how she liked the taste of them—“pissed you off. And look what happened: you struck a bargain with a demon, then descended into Hell, where you struck a different bargain with a different demon.”

  “How the shit do you know all that?”

  She gave me that I don’t know what happened to make you such an idiot look I got from wizards all the fucking time. “You do realise this is happening in your head?”

  “Still not sure that explains things.”

  “It doesn’t have to. The point is that angry people make mistakes. Terrible, soul-destroying mistakes.”

  I was getting really weirded out hearing this kind of talk from somebody who looked like Nim. Honestly, I’ve never exactly got a warm fuzzy feeling from hearing somebody use words like terrible and soul-destroying with quite that much relish, but hearing it from somebody with the same face as my hands-down-least-psychotic ex-girlfriend made things a whole lot creepier.

  “You know,” I said, “I’d really like to wake up now.”

  The Evil Twin blew me a kiss. “Take my advice, Kate. Or don’t, and wonder what would have happened if you had.”

  * * *

  I awoke to the smell of coffee and a stabbing pain in my hip. Right, slept in my clothes again. Well, it saved time.

  The coffee meant that either Elise was back, or somebody had broken in. My luck being what it was, I made certain I left the room armed. I still had the iron spike of old lady slaying in my pocket, but I made sure to grab a dagger as well, just in case I had a non-old-lady intruder.

  I felt a bit of a dick creeping into the front room like I was expecting a ninja attack, but the sheer number of things that had jumped out and abducted me recently meant I cared way less about dignity than survival.

  Turned out it wasn’t a break-in. Elise was standing in the middle of the sitting room, gazing contemplatively into a cup of coffee. I slumped onto the sofa.

  “That for me?” I indicated the mug.

  She looked up. “Yes, Miss Kane. I am sorry, Miss Elise made it, and I found the warmth pleasing.”

  Right. Not her, then. You know, I was really getting sick of doppelgangers. “Lisbeth, yeah?”

  She nodded. “I was told I could stay here.”

  Sure, why not. What did I have to lose? Yes, it was going to turn my flat into a terrible sitcom: she’s a gay private detective who lives with a pair of identical magic sex-golems, they fight crime, but the way my life was going that would probably have been an improvement. “So...” I began. I’d more or less got to the point where I could make something like small talk with Elise but I wasn’t sure what to with her not-exactly-sister. “How’s it going?” I finished. Damn, I sucked with new people.

  “Well,” she said. “Except I am afraid many things are still very new. I am very aware that other people have expectations, and that I am not fulfilling them. That is upsetting to me.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe try not sweating it?”

  She looked blank. Either she hadn’t understood me, or she hadn’t learned to do facial expressions yet.

  “Don’t worry. I have no idea what it’s like to be, y’know, a magical statue person thing, but it seems like you get to be whoever you want to be. Not everybody has that.”

  “I am not sure.” She wasn’t moving at all—Elise had been the same when we’d first met. “I do not think I know what I am supposed to want to be. I was created for a purpose that Miss Elise tells me was...” She paused. Unblinking. “She tells me it was not appropriate.”

  I nodded. “I’m pretty sure you didn’t want to spend your life as...” I realised too late that there was no polite way to say a magician’s fucktoy. “To spend the rest of your life with Russel.”

  “No.” She was silent again. “I am sorry. I do not really...” She stopped again. “This is hard for me.”

  It was hard for me too. And right when I thought I was about to actually drop dead of awkward, Elise appeared from the kitchen.

  “Miss Kane, you have arisen.”

  “Yeah.” I checked my watch. It was before noon. Given the week I’d had, I was calling that a win. “You been back long?”

  “Some hours. You seemed to be resting.”

  “Sort of.”

  She gave me a look of concern. “Dreams again?” Seeing her next to Lisbeth, it was weird how different they were. Elise had changed a lot in the last year. She was less, well, statuesque than she had been. She’d gone through eerily still into over-emoting into something that felt natural and entirely hers. I was sort of proud of her.

  “Dreams.”

  “Miss Nimue has another task for you?”

  “Not exactly.” I explained the situation. At least, I explained it as best I could; I still didn’t really understand how the whole dark reflection thing worked, or whether taking out King’s only living relative was a vital but ruthless move, or if it was just as pointless as it was distasteful.

  Lisbeth listened as patiently as only somebody made entirely out of marble could. I had a nagging voice in the back of m
y head saying I shouldn’t trust her, that she was essentially a robot that had been programmed by one of our enemies. But fuck it, she was alone in the world and there was no way I was making Elise turf out the closest thing she had to family.

  “So,” I said, “what do you think I should do?”

  “I am not certain I understand the dilemma.” Elise’s voice was hesitant, like she’d hit the limit of her experiences. “You care for Miss Nimue. You have reason to believe that Mrs. King is a cruel and vicious woman. You have already made a bargain with a demon, which my limited understanding tells me it would be dangerous to break, in which you have undertaken to do this thing. You have killed a number of beings before, and felt no such difficulties.” She blinked, a calculated action. “I understand that there may be legal reprisals, but I am certain Miss Saint-Germain or Mr. Douglas would be able to resolve such issues.”

  “It’s not that. It’s—” I waved my hands in a flustered sort of way. “It’s an old lady. She’s somebody’s nan.” I wasn’t proud of much in my life, but at least up until now no matter how badly I fucked everything else up, I’d been able to look in the mirror at the end of the day and say well, at least you’ve never murdered an elderly woman in cold blood.

  Elise cocked her head to one side. “Ah. I am afraid I lack a reference point for such issues. I have no grandparents, and the closest thing I have to a father is the man who created me purely in order that he might use my body as a masturbatory aid.” A flash of something crossed her face. I wasn’t sure, but I think accepting that it was okay for her to be angry with Russel had opened a bit of a floodgate. “Perhaps if I had more experience of such things I would better understand your reticence.”

  “Thanks.” I patted her on the arm in a slightly distracted way. “I know what I have to do. It’s just that it feels like crossing a line.”

  “I understand. Perhaps it would help if you were to think of it less as murdering an old lady and more as slaying a wicked witch.”

  “Yeah, maybe if you could avoid using the M-word?”

  Elise put her hands on my shoulders in a way that I think was intended to convey sincerity. “Miss Kane, although my experience is limited and I have little basis for comparison, I believe you to have good instincts in these matters. If you truly feel that Miss Nimue does not need your help, or that the death of a woman so evil that Hell itself seems afraid of her is too great a price, then I am certain you are correct.”

  I looked into her eyes a moment. “Are you trying to use reverse psychology on me?”

  “I do not think so. Although I confess that I am not sure what it would sound like if I were.”

  “Right.” I finished my coffee and grabbed my coat. “I’m going out to deal with a creepy granny. You two just...” I wasn’t really sure what I wanted them to just, only that I wanted to deal with this on my own. “Just carry on with whatever you’re doing.”

  I left Elise and Lisbeth behind and took the car into the city. Even if I was going to do what Mooncalf and Nimue’s Evil Twin wanted, I wasn’t completely sure how I’d go about it. Elise had been half right when she’d said that I’d killed people—in the sentient beings sense, rather than the biological humans sense—before, but it had always been a secondary kind of thing. Maybe I was reaching, but I thought there was a real difference between heading into a confrontation with someone, or something, knowing that it might come to a fight where one of you got killed, and deliberately setting out to destroy somebody.

  While I’d been under my mother’s control at the time, I was sure that I could find my way back to the house in East London where they’d kept Phoebe. It had been somewhere in Hoxton, and I had a decent sense of direction. King wasn’t likely to be there—he was off doing whatever the hell magic city kings did somewhere in the south—but the old lady might be, and even if she wasn’t, it was a good place to start. I hit the A103 and drove around until I found the place where I’d caught that scent of sulphur and lavender.

  Parking across the road, I sat there for a while not really moving or thinking too hard about what I’d come there for. It said something unfortunate about my life choices that I was spending so much of my career hanging around trying to convince myself that the thing I was about to do wasn’t flagrantly immoral. I pulled the metal spike out of my pocket. It was covered in flaky rust, but didn’t seem any weaker for it, and felt colder than it should have—or maybe that was my imagination. As hell-forged weapons went it seemed pretty basic, but it would do the job.

  I stayed in the car.

  Right. I’d come this far. No backing down now. I tucked the spike into my jacket pocket, decarred, and made my way across the road. It was broad fucking daylight. Waiting until the evening would have given me more cover, but unfortunately prime stabbing-people-without-getting-noticed time was also prime summoning-demons-to-rip-Kate’s-face-off time.

  As I crossed the road, I realised I’d given myself about forty-five seconds to figure out what my play was going to be. It was a fairly quiet area, and I would probably have been able to pick the lock without anybody noticing, but somehow that would have made things feel one step too murdery.

  So, like an idiot, I knocked on the door. For a moment I heard nothing. Then there was a shuffling from inside and it swung open on a chain.

  Nana King’s face appeared in the gap. “Hello dear,” she said. “Why don’t you come in?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Tea & Chaos

  Shit shit shit shit shit. I was in. I was in and face-to-face with a tiny old woman who I was sure was totally evil, and who I was going to have to kill if I wanted to stop Arty King burning everything I cared about to the ground. Very slowly, I moved one hand towards the rusty hellspike. I’d say that this wasn’t going the way I’d imagined it, but honestly I wasn’t sure how I’d imagined it.

  Nana King turned away from me and hobbled into the kitchen, where she began busying herself with a kettle. I followed.

  Come on. Just stab her. She’s a horrible demon summoner who sends children to fiery pits.

  I didn’t stab her. She began bringing delicate china teacups down from an overhead cupboard.

  “So,” I said, “do you...umm...do you know who I am?”

  She turned. She had this smile that made me think the stabbing plan was the way to go. “I know, dear. And I know why you’re here. Mooncalf ain’t half as clever as he thinks he is.”

  This was turning into one of those confrontations. “You’re not even a little bit concerned, are you?”

  China clattered as Nana King laid the tea things on the kitchen table. “Not even a little bit.” She sat down and eyeballed me. “You ain’t going to kill me.”

  I wanted to say “wanna bet,” but I was beginning to think that it was a bet she’d win. I tried another tack. “I’m guessing you let me in for a reason?”

  The old woman fished a Garibaldi biscuit out of a floral-patterned tin and dunked it in her tea. “I wanted to meet the competition.”

  “And?”

  She took a bite of her biscuit. “Not impressed.” Another bite, a sip of tea. “You’re going to die, my girl. My Arty is going to kill you, your Queen, and her whole court.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  The cup clinked back into place. “Why wouldn’t I be? It was your mistress what started all this. Should’ve got behind my lad when the old man passed on all them years ago, ’stead of making her own play.”

  I thought back to when I’d first known Nim. Back when she and Arty had been working for the old Witch King of London. I’d not been paying that much attention to the ins and outs of magic politics in those days, but my admittedly biased opinion had always been that she was the natural choice to take over. I couldn’t see how anybody would support a nutter like King over somebody like Nim for any job that didn’t involve chewing the heads off dogs, but obviously the Nana Kings
of this world felt differently.

  “Your tea’s getting cold.”

  Funnily enough, that wasn’t at all my priority. “No offence, but I don’t think I’ll be having any.”

  “You come here to murder me, and then won’t even share a cuppa before you do it?” The old lady sneered. “That’s just rude.”

  “Y’know, I’m really beginning to think this was a mistake.”

  She shrugged. “Suit yourself. When you get to be my age it’s nice to have company.”

  Well, this was awkward. My heart hadn’t exactly been in this to begin with, but I wasn’t sure that I could back out either. At the end of the day she was still my enemy, and she’d as good as said that she intended to help her grandson slaughter all of us.

  “Not leaving?” Her lips curved into the wickedest smile I’d ever seen on an old lady. “You’re still hoping I’ll make this easy, ain’t you?”

  “What do you mean?” I knew what she meant. But I was hoping I could bluff it out.

  She helped herself to another biscuit. “If you’ve got half the brains you was born with, you know you need to kill me. You know the kind of power I’ve got. You know that with me around, Arty has an army of devils to back him up if he needs ’em.” The teacup clinked again in its saucer. “But you’re hoping I won’t give you a choice. Hoping I’ll try to burn you alive or suck your soul out or some such.” She crunched the last of the biscuit between her teeth. “You ain’t getting off that light.”

  Okay, this had gone past awkward now. It was getting actively creepy. But not, and this was where the old lady was infuriatingly right, creepy enough that I wouldn’t feel shitty for stabbing her. “It’s beginning to sound like you want me to kill you.”

  She was standing now, and she moved quicker than you might expect from a whatever-number-she-actually-was-agenarian. “And that,” she said, “is why you’re going to lose. That’s why my Arty will be a better king than your mistress ever will. Because when you get right down to it, you’re both weak.”

  Her feet made hardly any sound as she moved. She was behind me now. Unsettling, but not enough to be murder-worthy.