Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  Note to self: try to ruin the lives of fewer teenagers. Fuck, I hoped I wasn’t turning into Patrick in my old age. That would be depressing as shit.

  “A problem, Miss Kane?” Elise had to have heard most of what went on, but I filled her in anyway.

  “Do you wish me to go in your place?” she asked. “I believe that I will be able to pacify Master Knight if necessary.”

  It was tempting, but I kind of felt that Elise would be worth having around, especially if Lake was less dead than we thought and showed up with his—I’d never quite worked out what the term was—his animated statue lady? “No, I’d rather have you with me on this.”

  “As you wish.”

  She turned the music back up. Something growling, thumping and anticapitalist with an angry man shouting about fire and destruction which, given what we were up against, was a little bit on the nose.

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed to get hotter the closer we got to Bromley. That was magic for you. The weather in this country was unpredictable enough without wizards dicking with it. We dumped the car in the multistorey at the civic centre and hit the streets.

  We were as good as working blind again. All I knew was that an ancient vampire with a reputation for deception had told me two people whose entire MO was working half in an invisible dream world would be meeting here. I could have been walking into a broad daylight superpower battle or two people exchanging significant looks in a café. True, King didn’t exactly seem the significant looks type, but on the other hand, Nim wasn’t the sort to get into a huge fight with massive collateral damage unless she couldn’t avoid it. And I really, really hoped she could avoid it.

  The last time Nim had been drawn into an open confrontation—which had technically been with Julian over this big misunderstanding about a murder attempt, but that wasn’t the important detail right now—she’d managed to get the entire population of a London borough off the streets. It didn’t look like she’d been able to do the same this time. But she might have tried something similar.

  I scanned the horizon. It was blue skies pretty much all the way, except one patch of thick black cloud to the north. A bright ribbon of rainbow stretched out towards the ground. Okay, wizards dicking with the weather was annoying, but sometimes it was really freaking convenient.

  Elise, Lisbeth and I followed the clouds. I still wasn’t one hundred percent clear on what I was supposed to be doing when I got there. It didn’t seem likely I could talk them out of fighting. But maybe I could jump King from behind or something. The closer we got, the more certain I was that we were going the right way. There was an uneasy, prickling sense in the air, and despite the time of day, the streets were getting that deserted quality they had when Nim was clearing the decks for a battle.

  Rain started falling. It was a welcome change after the heat. Also hopefully less stuff would get set on fire this way. We followed the gathering storm up past one of those random rows of suburban shops—the sort where you get three takeaways, a funeral director, and a bookie’s in the middle of an otherwise totally residential area—and all of them had their windows shuttered now, the rain clattering hard against the steel. Either things were getting more intense, or I was getting closer to the centre of whatever was happening. Or both. From here it was just a matter of going street by street until we found something.

  We found something.

  A sign tucked into a completely ordinary privet hedge said that we’d turned onto Camlan Road, but the walking-into-cold-water feeling that rushed over me said we were on the edge of somewhere else entirely. Up ahead, the road curved away, but I could see that somebody had parked a car across it. And then set the car on fire. The flames battled against the downpour in a way I was pretty sure even a petrol fire wouldn’t if we were still in the land of real physics.

  Beyond the burning wreck, King and his men waited. Lake wasn’t there, and Nana King obviously wasn’t. He had a lot of rough looking guys with rough looking weapons, but seemed pretty low on actual powerful wizards. Elise’s rogue sister was with him, though. I really hoped that didn’t make things weird.

  Further up the road, Nimue stood. She was dressed in grey jeans and a grey hoodie, but in the rain they sparkled like silver. Rose Red stood at her left hand wearing a gown the colour of blood. On her right, Fisher leaned heavily on a walking stick, blood still seeping through his otherwise immaculate suit jacket. He was backed up by his own Elise-alike, Alissa, I think it was, and the girl who’d bundled me into the van that one time. Of Nim’s court, only Michelle—the flame-slinging, Fat Boy-riding Guardian of the Watchtower of South—was with her. I guess Rachel was still in hospital, Jacob dead or imprisoned underground and hopefully Gabriel had got out of the city with his family. This was looking bad. Nim had most of the heavy hitters, but even if they pulled through there was a non-zero chance they’d turn on her the second King was dealt with.

  “They might.”

  I turned. In his fussy white linen, Sebastian looked completely out of place leaning against a weather-beaten garden wall in Bromley. He also looked completely out of place because he’d as good as told me the vampires were staying out of this one on account of daylight.

  “We are.” He really had to stop answering questions I hadn’t asked him. “But I felt it important to at least witness the battle.”

  “I thought you lot stayed away from anything that could actually hurt you.”

  He looked contemplative a moment. “Normally. But I have found over long years that there is little so deadly as ignorance. Come, perhaps we should move to a point of better vantage.”

  I followed him. I didn’t want to, but he wasn’t the sort of person you let out of your sight if you could avoid it.

  In the middle of the street, King’s people and Nim’s people were gradually moving towards each other. I was really glad nothing had exploded yet, but I didn’t like the way this was going. Nim broke from the group and stepped forward. No, I definitely didn’t like the way this was going.

  “You have one chance.” Her voice was quiet, but it carried over the rain. “Stand down, stand your men down, and deliver the Tears to me, and we can have peace.”

  I couldn’t help but notice that King had a knife. He wasn’t exactly hiding it, just letting it rest by his side in a way that could make a less paranoid person forget to watch for it. Of course, the guy could also throw fireballs, which was more of a problem from a practical perspective, but there was something about a blade that meant business. That said in no uncertain terms “I am willing to hurt people to get what I want.”

  He sneered. “You think I’m scared of you, the poof, and the cripple?”

  Quietly, Nimue stood in the storm. “No, I think you’re afraid to walk away.” The wind gusted, the rain lashed, the fire surged back. “Still, I am giving you the chance to try.”

  “Y’know...” King raised his knife casually, running his thumb across the edge. “I’m really looking forward to killing you.”

  Nim nodded. “Then so be it.”

  Thunder cracked and shit got real. The flames billowed up from the wreck of the car, and I thought I could see a figure taking shape—something wild and winged. King’s men rushed forward, but two were snatched up by a whip of thorns that lashed from a decorative hedge, and two more fell to their knees in front of Fisher, who looked down at them cruelly. That still left Nim down on numbers, so I broke ranks and got stuck in.

  I grabbed one of King’s men from behind and remembered in the nick of time that this was going to be a knife fight, shoving him away just as he stabbed backwards at me. He went sprawling to the ground, but gathered himself quickly and came back. My mother watched patiently from the Deepwild and I tried to remember that this was a fight for my life and forget that the last time I’d had a weapon in my hand it was to murder an elderly woman.

  As it turned out there was nothing like the
risk of disembowelment to keep your head in the game. I moved to the outside and caught my opponent’s knife-hand as he came in. It was a risky move but my mother’s blood made me faster than most people. Stronger, too. I twisted, and the guy’s arm bent behind him in a way that I really hoped was uncomfortable. In the Deepwild, my mother pressed me to go further. Take the blade, slit the throat, drink the blood. In Hell, the Palace of Wrath agreed.

  Well, that was new and fucked up. So fucked up that I hesitated when I shouldn’t have. My enemy shifted his weight and turned close enough that he could drive his fist into my gut. That gave him room to pull his arm free and that got the knife back in play. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it coming towards my face. I put a hand up to protect myself, but it gouged a chunk out of me. When the adrenaline wore off, I was going to feel that. But right then all I was feeling was threatened and angry. I managed to pin his weapon arm again, stepped through, hooked his leg, and bore him to the ground. More than one voice in my mind told me to kill. I covered his face with my hand and drove his head into the tarmac. I did it again. I was kneeling on a road in a city. I was kneeling on a rock in a river in the Deepwild. I was kneeling on an iron altar in Hell.

  I was totally fucked.

  With more effort than it should have taken, I pulled away. I was sure I hadn’t killed the guy. I really wanted to be sure I hadn’t killed the guy. Breathing sharp and shallow, I looked around. The various Elise variants seemed to have been drawn into a complicated four-way tussle I couldn’t quite get a grip on. Fisher’s entourage, Michelle and King’s men faced off a little further up the road, while Rose Red seemed to have gone full Sleeping Beauty’s Castle on some poor bastard’s front lawn. Sebastian had basically vanished, which didn’t surprise me.

  Lightning struck. When I could see again, I looked towards the place it had hit. Nimue stood alone in the rain, her street clothes replaced with a dress of silver scales, a long silver spear in her hand. King stalked towards her, flames playing about his fingertips and across the blade of his knife. The raindrops steamed when they struck his body. Part of me wanted to just rush the fucker and hang the consequences. The rest of me knew Nim would want to handle this herself.

  They circled each other. With the rain and the flames and the chaos I couldn’t tell what they were saying, if anything. King raised a hand and fire streamed towards Nimue, but guttered out of existence inches from her body. He tried again. And again. Dude, learn when a strategy isn’t working.

  He retreated, his back to the burning car. Reaching out towards it, he was surrounded by a great rush of fire that billowed up around him like wings. And then he and the flames surged forwards together. Fuck this non-intervention thing. I ran towards them. At least, I tried to, but the air got so hot that I couldn’t breathe and I smelled my hair beginning to burn. I pushed forward...one step...two. It was too much. My legs and my lungs gave out at roughly the same time, and I crashed to the ground. This, I knew far too well, was what losing felt like.

  Then the wind picked up again, stronger than before, and lightning sheeted across the sky, so bright and sudden that for a moment everything was afterimages. The fire died. Staring through the rain and the smoke, I saw Nim standing with her spear levelled, King impaled on the end.

  Then, slowly, he began dragging his body forward. I threw myself towards him, but a fresh rush of scalding air and burning embers pushed me back and knocked me flat again. I reached for the Deepwild but I couldn’t think through the heat or see through the mist. I reached out to Hell and it laughed in my face. Forcing myself to my knees, I looked up just in time to see King close the last of the distance and bring his knife down viciously into Nimue. If I screamed, I didn’t hear it. In the Deepwild, my mother revelled in the bloodshed.

  When at last Nimue fell to the ground, Arty King turned his head stiffly towards me. He looked like he was having trouble standing, which wasn’t much comfort given he’d damn near killed one of my closest friends. The rain stopped abruptly and the sun flooded back. A wall of fire roared into life between us, and with agonising slowness, he pulled the spear out of his body. Then, from inside his jacket, he pulled out the vial containing the Tears of Hypnos.

  He unstoppered it, bent down, and lifted Nim’s limp body with his free hand. I thought she was still breathing. I hoped she was still breathing. She had to be still breathing. “You think this is bad,” he said, looking me straight in the eye, “you don’t want to know what I’m gonna do to you.” He soaked his hand in Nim’s blood, letting her drop back to the ground, and began to anoint himself with it.

  There was no fucking way this was happening. I crawled into the fire. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stand, and I could smell my own flesh cooking, but while I had anything left in me I wasn’t letting this complete arsehole use my ex-girlfriend to achieve ultimate power. My clothes began to smoulder, my eyes watered, my skin screamed in the heat. I half thought my teeth would crack. Then I was through.

  King looked down at me. “You—”

  Something moved past us at unbelievable speed. I heard a sickening crack and King’s head twisted at an angle heads are not meant to twist at. His body collapsed over Nim’s. And, in his place, Sebastian stood with the Tears of Hypnos in one hand. He smiled. The flames around me turned blue.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn’t make words come out. What the fuck didn’t even begin to cut it.

  He stepped towards me. I hadn’t come armed to fight vampires, and even if I had, it was looking a lot like the normal rules didn’t apply here. It was barely past noon and Sebastian seemed no weaker than he’d be at midnight.

  “I think that went very well, don’t you?” he asked.

  It was too hot and I’d been through too much in the past few days to come up with a snappy comeback. The sunlight gathered around Sebastian like a halo, playing across his face like a golden mask. This was beginning to make sense.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Now sleep.”

  His eyes were blue and gold, his voice calm but impossible to disobey.

  I slept.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Something Rather Unfortunate Has Occurred

  I had gone with Miss Kane to the battle on Camlan Road in order that I might limit the probability of her coming to harm. I fear I failed.

  At the moment the storm broke, when Mr. King struck down Miss Nimue I was distracted by my efforts to negotiate a peaceful understanding between myself and my various sisters. I take comfort in the knowledge that nobody present foresaw Mr. Douglas’s intervention and, even had I been more conveniently positioned it is unlikely that I should have been any use.

  When the battle ceased we were, I think, all aware that something had gone very wrong. Few of Mr. King’s men were left standing, but the sudden cessation of Miss Nimue’s contribution to the elemental turmoil did not bode well for her allies either. The entire scene was quickly obscured behind a line of flames, first red and then blue. Once they had cleared, Mr. Douglas stood amongst several bodies. Of the three, only Mr. King’s was entirely inanimate, although I observed even from a distance that Miss Nimue had sustained significant damage to her form. Her essence, however, had proved more resilient.

  Mr. King’s followers had been first to respond, and this decision had proved costly for them. The three who were still standing broke away from their previous targets and threw themselves at Mr. Douglas.

  I have always found it interesting to watch vampires move. Like myself and my sisters, their actions are a product of conscious will, and therefore, not constrained by the limitations of their physical bodies. The three men, whose physiologies operated by the altogether cruder intercession of bioelectrical signals, stood little chance. Two fell to swift strikes at the throat, the necessity for oxygen being another limitation of their construction. The third was broken down by an act of will involving no physical action, Mr. Douglas’s thou
ghts simply reaching out to the poor man and twisting him about in directions quite incompatible with his continued functioning.

  Mr. Fisher and Miss Red made the next attempt at intervention. Their wills matched against that of the Prince of Wands (to give him his proper title—I hope I have not hitherto been addressing the gentleman disrespectfully). Little changed in the world of shapes, but the world of essences shifted dramatically, Miss Red striking first with a blue-black hue of chaos and malice, which was not entirely compatible with Mr. Fisher’s red-and-gold inclination towards stillness and rebirth.

  I apologise, it is difficult to describe these things.

  Sadly, it transpired that their enemy’s will was, in this moment, the greater. A golden gleam of certainty and walls upon walls upon walls. He swept up Miss Kane and departed. I attempted briefly to follow him, but soon realised that to do so was unhelpful. His being, tied to a peculiar admixture of sunlight and shadow as mine is tied to stone, was necessarily lighter and more swift. I returned to the site of the battle. Mr. Fisher and Miss Red appeared to be arguing about the most appropriate course of action, given all that had taken place. I considered it best to leave them to their discussion, and returned to my sisters.

  Since encountering my creator’s other creations, I have been reflecting considerably on the implications of their existence. It was strange to see the three of them gathered together. Beth, who had worked for Mr. Lake, was the eldest of those present, and had a way about her that I was not sure I envied. She seemed more like other people, less like my sisters and I. There was a confidence about her that I felt I would like to share, but I am uncertain whether it would suit me. I was next in line, and it troubled me somewhat to realise that my entire family had, between us, existed for less than a decade. After me was Alissa, who had been given to Mr. Fisher, and then Lisbeth, who I had been coming to know over the last few days.