Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19 CHECK
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
CHAPTER ONE
Putting down the book I'd been reading to pass the time, I laughed at how the character, a fellow Magician, had been poor and driving a car that regularly needed fixing because of the way Magic interfered with technology. Starting up my Porsche Boxster, I nudged the nose out into the traffic and started to follow my Mark.
By Mark, I don't mean some bloke called Mark, I mean my target. A Mark is a contract. Signed by myself and a client, and Magically, if not technically legally, binding. Legality tended to be secondary to the fact that if either party broke the terms of the contract, deliberately that is, accidents happen. Nasty things could and would happen. Yes, nasty with a capital N.
And I should discuss capitals. For some arcane reason I can’t be arsed to learn about, the Magical Community capitalises words.
Marks, Spells, Icons, Wards, Charms, Glamours and so on. All capitalised. It does make things easier when writing reports and you say you charmed your way out of a situation. Rather than Charmed your way out of a situation.
And these weren't empty capitalisations in speech either. When a Magician uttered such words, you could hear the M, C, and the E.
Marks meant that I was able to buy nice cars, have all my suits and shirts tailored by Huntsman of Savile Row, own a couple of very nice houses, and attract only the best-looking birds there were.
Shallow? Maybe, but you only get one life, and if I could do a job that I enjoyed, which made a real difference to the safety and security of country and paid a bloody good salary, then I was going to grab hold of it with both hands and never let go.
Unlike many people, I'd known true hunger, known what it felt like to be spat on when I asked for help, for a little change that would have got me a hot cup of coffee, and I was determined that I'd never go back to that work again.
Rowling, Aaronovitch, Carey, Newman, and Butcher all got it right when they wrote about a Magical world living alongside the Mundane world. I just wish this world was as Magical (see what I did there?) as Rowling's.
It would be bloody marvellous if I could click my fingers and everything would start cooking. Or if I could get my hands on a chocolate frog.
I've a real weakness for chocolate, and the idea of having to chase it down before I ate it appealed. Exercise and sweet goodness all in one. Heaven.
I get the feeling, though, that at some point, they have met someone like me. Or at least connected to the world of Magic somehow. They just seemed to get so many other bits right. Wouldn't surprise me if they were commissioned to write in the first place. Best way to hide is in the open.
Why not have a host of books and films that detail what's truly going on? If someone, by which I mean a Mundane, discovered the truth, who'd believe them? I mean, everyone would laugh, say they'd read it in a bestseller, or seen it in some blockbuster, then completely ignore anything they said.
Hell, it wouldn't have surprised me if someone from the Magical community was penning the books for them, using a Compulsion to make them think that they wrote the books themselves, letting them have all the glory and a shit load of moolah. Not a bad life if you're lucky to be picked like that!
People talk about the Illuminati ruling the world. As if a bunch of Mundanes (Magic-less people if you were wondering) could rule the world.
Hell, you've seen just how incompetent successive governments have been. It's because they only have the short-term in mind. No political party is that far-sighted, and fair, that they would implement changes that would take decades to work as they might only be in power for four years. Or less in some countries.
No one can change society for the better in four years, no matter how hard they try. We rule the world. Or rather, the more powerful of us rule the world. The Merlins, for example. They rule the UK. Fingers in every pie. Fingers in every eye, as well, if necessary. They are well tough bastards.
It was the Merlins I worked for. My sole clients. Some people freelanced, but I preferred to be on the right side of the law, especially when the law was so damned powerful.
They had the Far Sight and have been steering us along a course they determined we should take a long time ago. God knows where they're taking us, but it seems things have picked up in certain areas. Such as everyone driving electric cars by the middle of this century. Something gave the Mundanes a serious push in that direction, and I'd bet my life that it was due to their altruism.
That doesn't mean that the Magical community was pure as snow. It wasn't. We had our own fair share of psychopaths, law breakers, and downright nasty people.
It's just that with Magic, a lot of us thought we were far better than the Mundanes. It didn't help that we tended to live longer than them.
As a result, some of the less conscientious members of our community like to use Mundanes as pawns in their political games.
One such pawn was the Mark I was following. She was a very, very nasty woman. I'd been contracted by the Merlins on behalf of a Mundane government agency to ensure she didn't manage to accomplish the very, very nasty thing she was about to do in the name of her religion.
She was a Cassabian, a follower of Cassabia, the Virgin Goddess, bitch from Hell. All life to her was sacred. She advocated veganism, love of all animals, and death to those who killed animals, even if it was a mercy.
The Mark was a Mundane and believed she had undertaken a Holy Mission to protect her fellow beings.
She'd picked the Happy Friends veterinary clinic, which was known for the incredibly gentle and professional service it offered to help sick pets end their suffering to suffer her righteous ire. To do that, she was Iconed up to the max, which is why my Mundane clients couldn't touch her.
Bullets would bounce off her if the shooters could look at her, marksmen would miss from even a couple of feet away, and a Mundane hitting her with a baton would see that baton shatter, as well as the wielder's arm. That was if they could even see her.
The reason others would find it so hard to look at was because - according to the file - she had a Charm, which meant any Mundane trying to look at her would find their attention suddenly being caught by something else.
Something so utterly absorbing, that they literally wouldn't be able to see her. A real cloak of invisibility. It could cause merry hell in the right circumstances.
Whilst I was tasked with ensuring she didn’t cause any nastiness, the Merlins were actively seeking who had given her all this marvellous kit in the first place. Who knew, it might even be my next Mark.
The terms of my Mark were simple. Save everyone at the vet’s clinic, kill her.
Naturally, they didn't use the word kill. People get squeamish when they're signing death warrants. They use words such as remove or terminate, anything to avoid having to acknowledge that they've had a hand in killing someone, no matter how evil that person might be.
But that was my mission. Kill her, save everyone else. It was a living that, ironically, I could live with. I had my rules, of course. As did the Merlins themselves. I wouldn't kill innocents, n
ot unless doing so would mean saving a lot more.
It's a grey area, but if you kill a sacrifice before the person sacrificing them can say the right words and do the deed, then it's mission accomplished. Especially if the person doing the sacrifice is impossible to harm in the time left to save the world.
Kids were a definite no-no, as were straight-up Mundanes. By which I mean, Mundanes who had none of the hardware psycho-bitch, as I'd decided I would call my Mark, was currently sporting.
The Mundane government was more than capable of removing those if it needed to. Although, sometimes, the odd one or two got away.
I also don't do political jobs, of which there are a lot. The Magical community isn't all Magical missiles and cuddly beholders, you know. We're just as divided as the Mundanes, only those doing the protesting can be incredibly powerful. Bit like a landmine walking through the packed streets of London with a sign saying “Free Claymores.”
Such rebels made the Merlins, as well as the Mundane government, very nervous indeed. Still, unless they turned out to be utter evil shits like my current Mark, or were actively seeking to cause harm, I wasn't going to do much more than rough them up.
If that.
Usually a, 'Do yourself a favour and shut the fuck up,' would suffice.
Nope, I was a vanilla-kind of Witch Hunter. Show me the baddy and they're toast. Anything else? Well, if you keep pushing me to kill innocents, then you're toast.
Twenty or so minutes later, I was parked, laughing as Jon Humphreys on Radio 4 ripped into a minister about the latest shit policies.
We'd swapped one incompetent Tory government for an incompetent Labour government, and things were just as shit as they were before. Which was exactly how the Merlins liked it.
It kept people from noticing where the real power was. To be honest, it stopped them from freaking out and utterly losing their shit about the fact that Magic was still going strong.
After all, everyone was keen to avoid the pitchforks, rampaging mobs, and innocent women being burned at the stake.
Not that that didn't still happen over in less-enlightened areas of the world. But we were doing our best to make sure it stopped.
Still, YouTube and LiveLeak continued to be filled with horrendous videos of such acts. Memories of the Dark Times, pre-Mundane-history were buried deep in their psyche.
Psycho-bitch had parked her Fiat Cinquecento (converted to electricity, of course) a few metres up from me, and was, from the look of it, praying. Even holy warriors need to psyche themselves up to kill their fellow human beings.
It takes a lot to override the instinct to preserve the human race, believe it or not. That's why soldiers must undergo so much training. And why they still struggle with the deed after that.
It takes a certain mindset to be able to kill without caring.
I'm not talking about killing and enjoying it. Just not caring. Or truly believing that what you're doing is for the best of humanity. If she was praying, then it seemed she had some doubts. Or maybe she was just worried she might get hurt, or not kill enough people. I didn't really care, to be honest.
Her target was a couple of hundred metres down the road. Parking being utter crap in Exeter, she'd been forced to drive around before finding her space.
A holy warrior stymied by the fear of having her car clamped. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Still, a clamp would have slowed her getaway. Although, knowing my own community, it was all too possible that one of those lovely Icons would end up killing her along with her victims.
I switched off the radio, grabbed the pet carrier on the passenger seat, and clambered out of the Porsche. I could never find a way to do that gracefully, especially if I've got a nice dress and high heels on.
Still, I bloody loved that car and wouldn't have traded it for anything else. It wasn't subtle, but then what was the point of being subtle?
When looking for an assassin, do you look for a Porsche, or a bland car doing its best to look bland? Exactly. Well, that was my thinking, and I was going to stick with it.
Straightening my business suit, I activated my own Charm and Wards, grabbed hold of my messenger bag, and set off down the road.
She was still praying when I knocked on her window. The way she jumped reminded me of those cat and cucumber videos on YouTube. They proper crack me up. Her eyes were wide, and there was drool on her chin.
What the hell? I thought, stumped for a second. She stared at me, the black-flecked drool gradually forming into a drop on the point of her chin. She's been doing mushrooms, I thought. Most likely to give her the Sight, or to make her impervious to pain in case someone started to fight back. It didn't matter. She was committed to mass murder, and I was now utterly committed to killing her.
I made ‘wind your window down motions.’ She was quite good looking once you got past the psycho-stare and dribbling.
She was no doubt wondering how the hell I could see her. She bit her bottom lip, made no effort to press the button for her window to wind down.
'Could you wind down your window please. I need some directions, I'm looking for the vets,' I said loudly and slowly, enunciating the words. I lifted the pet carrier, and it contained a thoroughly miserable-looking cat. It glared at the both of us, hunched in the back of the cage.
'Meow.'
The cat summed things up quite succinctly. Its message was plain: 'I fucking hate you. I'm going to claw your eyes out as soon as this bloody cage thing is open. Then I'll eat your corpse.'
To be fair, I'd have felt the same if I'd been shoved in a cage barely big enough to hold me by someone I’d never met before that morning. Yes, I’d stolen a cat. Well, ‘borrowed’ to be honest.
That got her attention, with the drooling slowing somewhat. Her pupils were almost filling. I needed the window down. The Mark was very specific. She was to die, and it had to look natural.
Just another unfortunate death, a weakness in the body never spotted before it proved to be fatal. Happened all the time. Not even newsworthy unless she was of some standing in the community.
The window finally hummed down. Naturally, she didn't wind it down. I don't know anyone who has a car that needs you to do that anymore.
'What did you say?' She had a husky voice. Marvellous to listen to.
What a fucking waste, I thought. It was a voice perfect for radio, for music, for anything other than trying to kill a load of innocent people.
I held up a piece a paper, a letter I'd got Dawn, my assistant and apprentice-in-training, to fake. It had the vet's letterhead very clearly printed across the top of it.
'I'm looking for a vet's that's supposed to be here. Look, this is the address.'
I held out the letter. She stared at me some more, so I put on my brightest, whitest, happiest smile. I might have even tilted my head and given her a flutter of my green eyes. Anything to get the mission completed and go home safe.
'Fine,' she snapped, as if she had something better to do.
She reached out. Her hand touched the letter.
'Shazam.' My favourite activation word. I couldn't be arsed to use Latin, or some other long-dead language kept alive only by academics and pretentious Magicians.
There was a little shimmer in the air, and she looked at me quizzically for a second.
'Unnnggghhbbb…buh, buhhhhh.' More drool. Some vomit. A few convulsions. Then the stillness that only comes with death. It hadn't taken much training for me to carry out such acts.
I pulled the letter back from her loose grip, slipped it into a pocket, then checked her pulse. Nothing. I held my fingers there a bit longer. Still nothing. Job done.
Opening her door, I buzzed the window shut, wiped the button, closed the door, wiped the handle, and left the scene.
'Jane, good to see you,' John Smithers—not his real name, real names have Power— said and stood up as I approached. He was old school in his manners, something I found refreshing. It's nice to have people pamper you sometimes.
He held my chair out for me, slipping it smoothly in as I sat. A waiter immediately appeared to hand me a menu. John always liked to do business in restaurants, and Harry's Grill Bar was one of, if not the best, restaurants in Exeter. Their Porterhouse was simply divine.
'Payment has just been confirmed,' he said after we exchanged pleasantries and I ordered a gin and tonic for starters. Marks always made me want a drink.
'Thank you. Has she been found yet?'
He smiled. 'A concerned member of society has just found her.'
The waiter returned, pad at the ready. I ordered a bottle of red and the venison in a blackberry jus. Pretentious sounding? Maybe, but it was simply divine.
'We have another Mark, if you're ready.'
That was quick. Exceptionally so. Usually, I had to wait months between Marks. Recently though, they had been coming quicker and quicker.
'Where?'
'Here. Possibly Widecombe-in-the-moor as well.'
'Who?'
'We're not sure. The Merlins think someone is trying to summon the Hound.'
'Fuck me,' I breathed.
The Hound, a myth of epic proportions that had seeped over into the Mundane world and become part of popular culture. A dog the size of a pony. With two heads, the tail of a scorpion, and the ability to spit acid and breathe fire. A lot of people had died to Bind it. And now, someone wanted to release it.
'I'm rather regretting ordering that food. My appetite seems to have diminished somewhat,' I said, downing the gin in one long gulp.
'Sorry, my dear.' He leant forward and squeezed my hand. His hand was warm and soft. It was like getting a hug from a cushion.
'Why can't the Merlins deal with this?' I entwined my fingers with his. We'd known each other for years, the good part of a decade, and had become friends over that time. I could see he was just as upset about this as me.
'They will deal with the Hound if it gets loose. You will deal with finding out who's doing the summoning. It's an intelligence gathering mission only. No need for any shenanigans.'
'Why can't they gather it themselves?'
He shifted in his seat and let go of my hand, the skin going cool as the air touched it.
Hell Hound Page 1