Wolf in Shadow-eARC

by John Lambshead

  “Frankie is unwell,” Rhian said, not moving from the doorway. “I can take a message.”

  “Let them in.” Frankie’s voice was raised to carry from the lounge.

  Rhian reluctantly stood aside to allow them access. The mouth of the Durham Cathedral door knocker twisted. Its eyes opened and followed the woman.

  “Beware, daemon,” it said in a hollow voice.

  Rhian blinked; it had never done that before. She followed the visitors into the lounge, noting that they seemed to know the way.

  “Hello, Frankie, you’re looking knackered,” the man said, cheerfully.

  “Let me introduce you to Major Jameson of The Commission,” Frankie said, ignoring the jibe. “And Karla, who is . . . how do I introduce your friend?”

  Frankie smiled at him with sweet venom.

  “Partner will do,” Jameson replied.

  “Partner.” Frankie drew the word out.

  Gary and Rhian exchanged meaningful glances and Gary firmly sat down with the air of one who is not to be moved.

  “We’ve met your assistant, Miss Jones,” Jameson said, pleasantly. “And this is?”

  He looked at Gary and raised an eyebrow.

  “Gary Hunter, a friend of mine,” Frankie said.

  “I see, a friend,” Jameson said, drawing the word out.

  “Mister Hunter manages the Black Swan,” Rhian said. “I work for him.”

  “Oh the Dirty Duck,” Jameson replied. “I thought they would have bulldozed it by now.”

  “Not quite, Major,” Gary said.

  He rose and shook Jameson’s hand. The men stood for a moment, gripping each other’s hand in some unspoken male communication that passed Rhian by.

  “Call me Jameson, I’m retired from The Army.”

  “Gary.”

  “So Miss Jones works for both of you. She is a lady of many talents. That must be how she can afford the designer clothes.”

  “You wanted something specific?” Frankie asked. “Or is this a social visit?”

  Jameson retrieved a silver cigarette case from an inner jacket pocket while looking meaningfully at Gary.

  “It’s a delicate matter,” he said.

  “You can talk in front of Gary,” Frankie said.

  “Ah, a close friend then,” Jameson said, tapping a cigarette end on his case while fishing through his pockets for a lighter.

  “I’d be obliged if you’d refrain from indulging your disgusting habit in my flat,” Frankie said. “I realize addicts find it difficult to control their cravings, but I can do without the smell.”

  “Ah, right.”

  Rhian hid a smile, forty-thirty Frankie.

  “Tell me about the Excel job,” Jameson said.

  “You’ve read my report, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but I want to hear about it again. I need to know your impressions, your intuitions. All the useful details not found in one of Randolph’s antiseptic bloody files.”

  “Hold hard, are you talking about the pyrotechnic disaster at Excel that was in the news? All those people burnt?” He stopped, looking at each face in turn. “That wasn’t a special-effects accident, was it?” He turned to Frankie, “You don’t have flu.”

  “Not that close a friend, then,” Jameson said, to no one in particular.

  Love all, Rhian thought.

  “If this is a confidential meeting then perhaps I should leave you to it,” Gary said in a neutral tone, but Rhian saw the hurt in his eyes.

  So, apparently, did Frankie.

  “No, please stay, Gary. I could use your support.”

  “Okay,” he said, sitting down.

  Frankie took Jameson though the full details once again, omitting only the wolf. Gary looked at Rhian thoughtfully, no doubt wondering about her contribution. Fortunately he kept his own counsel about his barmaid’s alter ego.

  At the end of Frankie’s story, Jameson asked, “Have you got a drink?”

  Rhian found some wine and glasses and handed them round. Karla smiled at her but shook her head.

  “So there’s no doubt this was the big one, an attempt to fix a major portal open using blood magic?”

  Frankie shrugged, “Why else a target like that? There must have been five thousand people in the wargame show alone.” It’s later than we think. More people in London every year, more ticking minds weaving stories in the Otherworld, more release of entropy with every death, more power flowing through the digital networks, more energy added to the stew of two thousand years. The Commission is fighting a losing battle, Jameson. How long can you fire-brigade? How long can you hold it all together, papering over the cracks in reality before London goes up like a psychic Krakatoa?”

  “We do what we have to. What else is there?” Jameson changed tack. “How did you just happen to be in just the right place at just the right time, Frankie?”

  “I was hired by a client to protect the area.”

  “And the name of this client?”

  “Confidential.”

  “Lawyers, doctors, and private eyes can plead client confidentially. Frankie, you are no Sam Spade. Surely you understand that I need to know how they knew?”

  Frankie shook her head.

  “We could force it out of you, but you wouldn’t be good for much afterwards.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Gary said.

  “It’s okay. Jameson is just wind-bagging,” Frankie said. “They might need me again.”

  Jameson finished his wine in one gulp.

  “You did well, Frankie. You always were the best, but you’re getting too old for solo missions like this. Come back to us and the Coven can support you.”

  Frankie firmly shook her head. “Absolutely not, I’m done taking orders.”

  “But perhaps you weren’t entirely flying solo. Perhaps you’ve been using unlicensed help.”

  Jameson turned to Rhian.

  “Do you have a nickname?”

  “Like what?” Rhian said.

  “I don’t know, but let me have a guess. Let’s see, something suitable for a Welsh girl with raven hair and pale North European skin, Snow White perhaps?”

  Rhian’s face tightened despite her best efforts. How did he know? How much did he know?

  “Max thinks you’re a witch, doesn’t he, Rhian?”

  This time Rhian kept poker-faced, but Jameson knew. He saw something in her eyes, or the way she held her hands, or something.

  Jameson glanced at Karla, who walked up to Rhian and smeled her.

  “She smells of magic,” Karla sniffed again. “But it’s secondhand. She’s not a witch, not a daemon either, but there is something.”

  Karla undid the buttons on Rhian’s blouse to reveal Morgana’s pendant. She reached out for it. When her hand was still a few inches away, a bright blue spark arced from the silver to her finger.

  Karla screamed and leapt back, unsheathing her claws and teeth. The wolf surged within Rhian. She leaned forward, balling her fists and snarling at Karla. Gary jerked, his chair going over backwards. Rhian fought to control the wolf. Before Frankie’s spell took effect she wouldn’t have had a chance. She would have transformed and attacked the vampire, but now she was in control, if only just.

  “Did I mention that Jameson’s partner was a daemon?” Frankie asked Gary, calmly sipping her wine.

  Go girl, match point, Rhian thought.

  “It must have slipped your mind,” Gary said, recovering his chair and his dignity.

  “I’ve always had an odd taste in women,” Jameson said meaningfully.

  Love all, Rhian decided, Jameson having returned serve with a lob.

  Gary and Rhian exchanged another look, both thinking that one suspicion was confirmed. Frankie and Jameson clearly had a history that went deeper than merely work issues. No one was that bitchy about a colleague. An old flame was another matter. In Rhian’s limited experience, the degree of bitchiness was directly proportional to the intensity of the original relationship. On that scale, Jameson
and Frankie must have had a screaming affair that ended very badly. Frankie was the one driving the exchange. Jameson must have meant far more to her than she meant to him. Rhian hoped Gary had not picked up on that.

  She wondered whether the affair was before or after Pete, or maybe during. Perhaps Pete had reasons for running off with Suze-with-an-E that Frankie had not thought it necessary to expand upon.

  “That answers one question. Max is your confidential client,” Jameson said, breaking Rhian’s train of thought before she got really catty.

  Jameson had a closer look at Rhian’s pendant, handling it without fear.

  “That’s a heavy-duty protective amulet on your assistant. You usually employ herbal magic so why use a Celtic brooch?”

  “She’s Welsh and she has a sentimental attachment to things Celtic. It makes the spell more potent, as it can feed off those emotions,” Frankie said casually.

  “She’ll need good protection if you are working for suckers,” Jameson said. “Especially if she fronts them like she just did Karla.”

  At that moment his phone chimed and he examined the message.

  “You’ll have to excuse us. Don’t get up, we’ll see ourselves out.”

  Jameson drove, which didn’t please Karla much, but he had enjoyed enough excitement recently. He keyed the phone on its dashboard rest and told it to contact Kendrics. The security systems took a little time to convince each other that they were friends, but eventually Kendrics’ number rang. He picked up after just one ring.

  “You wanted me,” Jameson said, changing down to kick in the turbo and overtake a bus. The driver attempted to “shut the door” on the Jag, as they say in racing circles, but stood no hope.

  “Yes, that is, no,” Kendrics said. “I’m transferring you.”

  There was a click.

  “What the hell have you got us into now?” Randolph asked.

  “What?”

  “Those Egyptian hieroglyphics that you gave Kendrics. Why the hell didn’t you bring them to me first?”

  “I hadn’t realized you were an expert on ancient civilizations, sir,” Jameson said, politely. “I thought you read politics at the LSE.”

  The London School of Economics, founded by George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, was a college of London University. Its alumni included the lead singer of the rock group Bankers Bad Breath, James Bond’s father, and Eliza Doolittle, as well as prominent politicians such as President Bartlet and Prime Minister Jim Hacker.

  “Don’t give me any of your Light Blue crap,” Randolph said, referring to Jameson’s appearance in the Boat Race for Cambridge.

  “Of course not, sir,” Jameson said, smiling broadly and getting a return smile from a flustered housewife of a certain age riding in the back of a black cab. “The LSE is a notably good university, especially given its short existence.”

  Oxford was founded a few years after the Battle of Hastings. It was about the time William the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus, was King of England. Randolph knew when he was batting on a sticky wicket, so he moved the conversation on.

  “Kendrics found nothing in The Libraries’ records, so he extended the search out to other government databases,” Randolph said.

  There was a pause while Jameson negotiated two youths on an overloaded moped who seemed to be under the impression that traffic lights served only to decorate the streets.

  “And presumably he got a match,” Jameson said, when he had the Jaguar back under control.

  “I don’t know,” Randolph replied. “Nothing showed up, but ten minutes later I had The Black Museum on the phone accusing me of crossing departmental boundaries and threatening unspecified retaliation.”

  “I see,” Jameson said.

  “Can you imagine how many favors I had to call in to buy them off?”

  “Well . . .”

  “No, of course you can’t, or you wouldn’t have dropped me in it so deeply that only my ears are clear of dung. The Black Museum have consented, actually demanded, to see you and Karla immediately. Get over there, but don’t give the slimy bastards an inch.”

  The phone went dead.

  Karla smiled. “Randolph is wasted as a man.”

  “What makes you think he’s human?” Jameson asked.

  The Black Museum was an eternal thorn in the Commission’s collective flank. It had started as a sub-department of Anthropology at the British Museum dedicated to the curation of unusual artifacts connected with ancient religious beliefs. “Unusual” was a euphemism for disturbing, obscene, or blasphemous. The gentlemen who ran the British Museum were academic enough to forbid the destruction of any items in the National Collection no matter how horrific, but Victorian enough to keep them off display. They might corrupt weak minds such as women, servants, or the lower orders.

  Both the BM and The Commission were independent entities that predated the formation of the modern Civil Service. When they learned of each other’s existence there was no overarching body to arbitrate the resulting turf war. The Commission’s Library took the view that the BM’s paranormal collection should be transferred to their control for safekeeping. The Museum took the view that The Commission could get stuffed. For the last hundred years or so a standoff had prevailed. Hostilities had been reduced to sniping from fortified positions across the barren wasteland of British Civil Service procedures.

  An invitation to visit, even one framed as a summons, from The Black Museum to Commission enforcers was as likely as finding the Staffordshire Hoard of Saxon treasure with a twenty-pound metal detector. It was theoretically possible but one didn’t expect it to happen in one’s lifetime.

  Jameson parked the Jag in Bart Street, just south of Bloomsbury Way, taking care to display his Special Branch Parking Permit.

  They walked the short distance into Bury Place, to a round concrete windowless shell a couple of meters in both diameter and height. Structures like this served a variety of boring but essential utilities all over central London. They were so commonplace that the populace no longer noticed them. This one was covered in illegal posters announcing pub concerts, street sales, and the services of ladies sporting exotic underwear and whips. The only free area was where a brass plate greened with age was sunk into the door. At various times posterers had tried to utilise this attractive freehold, but their posters had mysteriously caught fire.

  Jameson put his hand on the plate, which shone silver at his touch.

  “Major Jameson, The Commission. I believe I am expected.”

  “And your companion,” said a disembodied voice.

  “Karla. I’m with him,” she said, putting her hand on the brass plate in turn.

  This time it turned dull rust red, the color of dried blood.

  “Come in,” said the voice.

  A solid metallic click sounded from the lock and the door slipped outwards by a few inches. Jameson pulled it open for Karla to step over the concrete sill. Following her, he pulled the heavy door to, shutting them into a steel cage. The floor dropped and a high-speed lift carried them down under London. Lights showed the walls sliding by faster and faster as the lift accelerated.

  Abrupt heavy braking pushed Jameson down when the lift stopped. He found himself face to face with a slim man in a dark business suit set off by a salmon-pink tie.

  “Director Bellevue,” Jameson said, inclining his head. “I had not expected to be welcomed by you personally.

  The man examined Jameson with an expression of faint distaste.

  “Welcome is not quite the word I’d employ, but no doubt it will suffice.”

  Jameson slid back the cage door and followed Karla out.

  “My associate, Karla . . .”

  “Is a daemon, I know,” Bellevue said coldly. “We have taken the appropriate measures, or she would not have got this far without being destroyed.”

  Bellevue turned on the heel of his black leather shoes and stalked up the corridor, which had an arched roof of red brick. The walls were pl
astered and painted in the insipid pale green that Jameson associated with government buildings. The Civil Service must have bought a job lot of several hundred thousand gallons back in the early twentieth century.

  “Follow me,” Bellevue said over his shoulder.

  The corridor curved gently, dropping downwards until they came upon a black cat sitting licking its paws. It ignored Jameson but arched its back and spat at Karla.

  “We discussed this, Mike. I don’t like it any better than you,” Bellevue said.

  The cat spat again, then stalked up the corridor with its tail straight up in the air.

  “You will have to excuse Mike. Deep down he is convinced he’s the Museum Director, and he has an aversion to daemons. He doesn’t much like Commission officers either.”

  “And Mike is?” Jameson asked.

  “A cat, what does he look like? He’s Mike, The Museum Cat,” Bellevue pronounced each word with a capital letter. “You must have heard of Mike?”

  Bellevue looked at Jameson.

  “You never read Mike’s biography, written by Budge? Good grief, what do they teach you people in The Commission?”

  “E. A. Budge, the Egyptologist?” Jameson asked.

  Bellevue nodded.

  “But that would make the cat a hundred years old.”

  “At least the rest,” Bellevue said. “Mike has patrolled the Museum catching and killing vermin since its earliest days.”

  He looked speculatively at Karla. “Rats, pigeons, daemons, it’s all the same to Mike.”

  Karla grinned at him. “I am pleased that you have such a dangerous beast under control.”

  They entered a much larger tunnel with a gravel floor that was used as a storage area for wooden crates and steel containers. A three-rail line ran along one side, disappearing around a curve into blackness.

  “Does that link up with the tube system?” Jameson asked, pointing.

  “Useful for moving larger artifacts,” Bellevue replied.

  “How on earth did the Museum afford all this? How did you excavate your own tube line without anyone noticing?”

  Bellevue smiled, obviously pleased that Jameson was suitably impressed. “It was not as difficult as you might think. Haven’t you guessed where you are? For God’s sake, man, this is the British Museum tube station.”