by Alexis Hall
Pushing open the door—it still had Kane & Archer on the frosted glass, a state of affairs that transitioned from apathy to policy—I found Elise sitting behind my desk. She was wearing a pale blue trilby and scribbling in a spiral-bound notebook. The chair opposite her was occupied by a slight, angular figure, androgynous and tousle-haired. They turned as I walked in.
“Kate.”
“Merchant.” Their real name was Sheyne, or so they’d told me last year. At the time, we’d been having something that might have been a moment in a snowbound faery realm in the back of a cupboard. In any case, they usually went by the Merchant of Dreams, and given the many weird taboos that governed faery crap, it seemed best to call them that in public.
“I have been robbed.”
Elise sat up and tipped back the brim of her hat. “It seems a relatively straightforward case. But it is my understanding that those mysteries which seem most superficially perplexing are often those that prove easiest to solve, since the very elements that render them obscure to the untrained eye in fact offer a wealth of anchor points to which the trained observer can affix their investigation.” What with being made of stone Elise technically didn’t need to breathe, which meant she didn’t need to pause for breath. Which made it difficult when she got enthusiastic about something. “Conversely, a crime with a simple and uncluttered narrative presents the investigator with few points of ingress. A simple crime could, consequently, have been committed by anybody.”
“Summary, Elise?”
She nodded. “Our client was tending their pawnbrokers in Seven Dials when three men burst in. They were armed with shotguns and wore stockings over their heads. They took only one item, a plaster bust of Napoleon that had been deposited six months previously by a Miss Corin Black. The bust was believed to contain a phial which itself contained a magical reagent called the Tears of Hypnos.”
“Oh dicks, piss and bollocks.” I buried my head in my hands. The plaster bust of Napoleon had been the thing Corin was looking for when we’d first met. The case had killed my partner and damn near ruined my life. Then the fucking thing had turned up again six months ago in connection to the wacky become-a-god ritual the evil vampire wizards were messing around with. Basically, I’d never seen the Tears of Hypnos, or touched them, and didn’t really know what they were, but they had an annoying habit of popping up every now and then to shit all over everything I cared about.
“My understanding of these matters is limited,” Elise went on. “But our client assures me that it is unusual for people to be able to break the sanctity of their store. Normally they would”—she looked at her notes—“‘find their bodies twisted into blackened thorns and their souls entombed within the debtor’s prison in the realm of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter.’ That this did not occur suggests that they had protection. Further, their guns were loaded with iron shot, which also suggests foreknowledge and some preparation. It has been a day since the robbery. Our client has not gone to the police, since the mundane authorities are not equipped to deal with supernatural agents and because”—she read again—“‘they are riddled with vampire spies.’”
The Merchant of Dreams glanced my way. “That’s the shape of it.”
“And you’re hiring us to...?”
“Retrieve my property and leave the thieves to me.”
I perched on the corner of my desk. I really needed to talk to Elise about taking my chair. “Getting stuff back I’m okay with. Letting you do whatever it is you do to people who piss you off, that’s on the wrong side of legal.”
“What if they aren’t human?”
“Three guys with stockings on their heads? Does that scream ‘otherworldly menace’ to you?”
The Merchant of Dreams made a sort of generically mystical gesture. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy. And beyond heaven and earth there are more things still.”
“Tell you what. How about we focus on finding the thieves, and work out what to do about them when we know who they are?”
“Are you proposing a deal?” The Merchant grinned at me over steepled fingers.
I almost fell off my desk. “Oh no you don’t. Let’s get one thing crystal fucking clear. I’m happy to take this job. I’m happy to find your shit for you but you’re going to sign a completely normal contract and pay me in completely normal money on a completely normal schedule. And there’ll be no deals, no bargains, no ‘I trade you my happiest memory for a handful of sunlight.’ We clear?”
“Oh, Kate,” said the Merchant, “why do you fight so hard against your heritage?”
I glared. “Because my heritage eats people and, near as I can tell, yours steals babies.”
The Merchant laughed. It was a deceptively pleasant laugh. The kind that said I am in no way secretly plotting your downfall. “Cash it is.”
“And not the stuff that turns to leaves when the sun comes up.”
“I would never have dreamed of it.”
“Then we’re good.”
Elise took the rest of the details, and I started the various bits of background work you needed to do if you wanted to track down a smash-and-grab. There’d be CCTV to sort out, witnesses to interview, and a whole lot of legwork. On top of that, there’d almost certainly be a police report—people didn’t just bust into shops in busy shopping districts and leg it with bulky bits of ornamental tat without somebody calling the cops. I phoned around, looked through some databases and, after a couple of hours of finding not very much, Elise and I got in the car and made for Seven Dials.
Don’t miss Fire & Water by Alexis Hall, available wherever Carina Press ebooks are sold.
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Copyright © 2019 by Alexis J. Hall
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ISBN-13: 9781488057007
Shadows & Dreams
First published in 2014 by Riptide Publishing.
This edition published in 2019 with revised text.
Copyright © 2014 by Alexis J. Hall
Copyright © 2019 by Alexis J. Hall, revised text edition.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
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