Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives

by Gustainis, Justin

The gutted body next to Naomi told Dawn the rest. Gigi, the ex-vampire, still liked her blood, and Dawn might just be her next meal if the fans could find a way to cover up their own hunting. And her fans would always indulge her, just as long as she kept touching them with her stardust.

  While Naomi kept petting Gigi, the star watched Dawn, as if she was pleading with her.

  Then Gigi spoke. “The only time I’m not watched is when I can escape to the theater, but they always catch me…”

  “Gigi,” Roberto said soothingly, “we’re just keeping you safe.”

  Dawn kept sucking in the diseased air, not only to calm herself, but because she’d heard the agony in Gigi’s tone. Felt the despair, just like it was her own.

  As it scraped through her, from her awakened dragon-blood skin down to her soul, something consumed the room like a flash and bang of lightning, obliterating Dawn’s vision.

  Then it all went into fast-forward.

  Nothing but a field of white from the flash bomb — footsteps … running …

  It was Kiko — shoving a gun into her hands while Dawn heard Naomi, Roberto, Steve, and Gigi calling out to each other in their own temporary blindness. She could hear him cocking a pistol while Dawn’s vision gradually turned to color, then solid images, again.

  The first thing her gaze latched onto was her partner. “Don’t move,” Kiko said, aiming at the fan club, cool and collected. They’d dealt with a hell of a lot worse on hunts.

  The devotees had their hands up, but Gigi…

  Gigi was turning around, toward a table where Dawn’s confiscated weapons lay.

  “Stop moving!” he yelled. Then to Dawn, “Are you okay? A showgirl saw you and I—”

  “Gigi’s not a ghost,” Dawn said. “She’s human.”

  Kiko looked sick about that. But Gigi had heard Dawn, too, and her gaze drifted to the corpse on the wall, then back to Dawn and Kiko.

  Human? she seemed to ask.

  Gigi was already reaching across the table for Dawn’s revolver. Dawn felt like her own soul was lead, an echo of what was in Gigi, and she couldn’t call out for the star to stop because she knew what would make the ex-Elite truly happy now.

  Knew all too well.

  Before anyone but Dawn understood what was happening, let alone why, Gigi shoved the barrel into her mouth.

  Later, Dawn could have sworn that a smile appeared on Gigi’s ravaged face in the half-second before she pulled the trigger.

  Chris Marie Green is the author of the “Vampire Babylon” series, which includes Night Rising and A Drop of Red. In 2011, Ace will publish her new postapocalyptic urban fantasy western noir “Bloodlands” series. She has a website at www.vampire-babylon.com

  Former Hollywood stuntwoman Dawn Madison is currently in retirement from vampire hunting and resides near San Diego. Kiko Daniels, who lives nearby, runs a paranormal detective agency with his partner, Natalia Petri.

  Under the Hill and Far Away: A Black London Story

  by Caitlin Kittredge

  A shadow fell across Pete Caldecott like a bird flickering across the sun. She looked up from her drink, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  The Fae was a head and a half taller than she was. Pete was short for a human, so that likely made him short for a Fae. He tilted his head when Pete made eye contact. “Madam Caldecott?”

  Pete straightened up, fixed him with her worst copper stare. “I think you have the wrong Madam Caldecott, mate.”

  The Fae spread his hands. “No, miss. I’m quite certain it’s you she wants.” He had pupiless eyes, silver. Beautiful, if you were into that Tolkien bullshit. Or Shark Week.

  Pete deliberately put her eyes back on her pint. The Lament was theoretically a neutral zone in the Black, the ebb and flow of magical London that existed out of most people’s sight. No fighting, no magic and no Fae.

  Pete told it, “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Sir Jack Winter.” The Fae inclined its head again. It looked a bit like David Bowie and a bit like it wanted to turn her into a skin handbag. Pete felt the back of her neck crawl and a faint scent of orchids and earth crawled up her nose. The Fae had its magic up — it would have to, to cross the iron bands in the Lament’s door and the assorted protection hexes that surrounded the pub like a cocoon of ethereal razor wire. To penetrate it, the Fae was stronger than any Pete had ever seen. Not that her experience with Fae was vast.

  “It’s none of your bloody business,” Pete said, “but, yes.”

  “He won’t be coming,” the Fae intoned. “Madam Caldecott…”

  “Look, if you insist on speaking to me, lay off of that before I call the bouncer and get you thrown right the fuck out,” Pete ordered.

  “Petunia,” the Fae tried, her given name looking like it caused it — him? — pain. “I bear a request from the Senechal of the Seelie Court. I need you to come at once.”

  The Fae reached for her, and Pete lost what little patience she had for the creatures. “You lay that pretty hand on me and you’re getting a pretty stump back,” she said, swatting. Contact with its skin sent a spiraling jolt of power up her arm and into her heart. Pete didn’t make it her practice to cause a scene in the middle of pubs — at least not when she was sober — and when the Lament’s few patrons looked over, she felt herself flush. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “But here, you don’t just swan in and grab people…” she waited for the Fae’s name.

  “You can call me Rowan,” it said. Pete crinkled her nose.

  “That’s a bit swishy for a strapping thing like yourself.” The expression on Rowan’s face showed he had no idea what she meant. Pete sighed. “Rowan, what do you want? You’re making me conspicuous.”

  “You must come,” Rowan said. “If I don’t deliver you…” The magic about him changed subtly, a darkening, a chill across Pete’s bare skin. “If I don’t,” Rowan whispered, “they cut off my head.”

  Pete blinked. “How medieval,” she said dryly. “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Don’t you know?” he said. “Seelie Fae can’t lie. We are bound by blood. Our very nature forbids it.”

  That caused Pete to consider. Jack, the one with actual experience of the pasty bastards, had only spoken of Fae in the most dismissive of terms. She had no idea whether to trust Rowan or laugh at the audacity of his put-on.

  “They told me you were smart,” Rowan said. “That you were a detective.”

  Pete took a sip of her dark beer. “Used to be. Not any more.” It was hard to reconcile murders and robberies and the orderly procession of the Metropolitan Police with magic and curses and a place like the Lament Pub. Too hard. Six months next week, she’d been off the job.

  “That’s why they want you,” Rowan continued. “The puzzle. The bloody business. Human eyes are needed.”

  Pete raised her eyebrow at that. Rowan was growing more fidgety by the second, like a first-former itching to tattle on a classmate. “Come out with it!” she said.

  “A murder,” Rowan said. “It’s the first in … well, a very, very long time, even for us. Honor killings are one thing. Duels. Assassination. But this…” He scrubbed his hand against his forehead. “It has no sense behind it.”

  Pete sighed. “You look for murder to make sense, you might as well be looking for meaning in ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. Don’t Fae have … I dunno, investigative types?” The idea of Fae police, in everyday Met uniforms, made her smirk a bit. Most of the Black was lawless as the American West, and it was by pure meanness and cunning that you kept your blood and entrails inside your body. Jack had taught her that. Where the fuck was Jack?

  “We used to have Inquisitors,” Rowan said. “But the Queen disbanded them, long ago. It’s said … they said Petunia Caldecott was the cleverest human in the Black. And this needs a human’s eyes.”

  Pete looked at the door again, at Rowan’s haggard face, and finally back at her mostly-still-full pint glass. “Fine,” she sighed, tossing down a few pounds for it. “Le
t’s have a look at your corpse, then.”

  They left the Lament, which opened onto an alley that was never in the same place twice. Rowan visibly relaxed once they were outside, and Pete felt him shift something, the enchantment that had allowed him inside in the first place, though his magic still prickled her. “Have you ever visited Faerie?” he asked Pete. His voice was stronger, with the clearbell-like quality she associated with Fae.

  “Never have, never wanted to,” she said. Feeling in her pockets for her pack and a lighter, she lit up, inhaled, and added a small blue cloud to the low wet fog that fell around them like frayed lace.

  “This way,” Rowan said, starting down the stairs of a long-abandoned tube station. In the light world, it would be full of people, buskers, newsagents. In the Black, it was boarded up and painted with graffiti in a dozen arcane languages, the steps slippery and the air dank. Pete hesitated on the top step.

  “If this is a setup to get me eaten by something nasty, I’m going to be very bloody upset with you, Rowan.”

  Rowan held out his long pale hand, the color of a drowned man’s. “I mean you no harm. I swear.”

  Pete didn’t take his hand, but she did take the first step down to the tube platform. A shadow passed over the clouded moon, and for a moment there was perfect blackness. Something whistling and unearthly breathed in her face.

  Pete’s cigarette went out.

  When she could see again, she was in Faerie.

  Pete didn’t know what she’d expected, exactly — perhaps some Froud-esque fantasy of pixies at play under giant, Alice in Wonderland mushrooms. Or perhaps a palace of tall, pale, ridiculously good-looking Fae straight out of Hellboy. She’d expected soft things, silver eyes, the scent of elderflower.

  Faerie was hard, instead. It was brick and iron, blackened to the same color by soot and grit. A sign was worked into the tiles of the tube station, in a language that looked like twisting vines to Pete’s eye.

  Rowan slowed when she did. “Is something the matter, Lady?”

  “It’s, um…” Pete gestured at the wood track, broken and empty. “You have the tube here?”

  “Used to,” Rowan said. “When people and the Fae were much closer. We shared a great deal.”

  He hopped from the platform and started to walk. “The court is this way.”

  Pete shivered. Things lived in the dark, of the Black and of the light world. That she knew. Demons, murderers, angry ghosts. If it was a toss-up between the Fae and the dark, Pete knew which she’d choose. She hopped the platform, her feet crunching into shifting gravel between the ties, and followed Rowan into the tunnel.

  The Seelie Court loomed from nowhere, when Rowan and Pete emerged onto a rail trestle. Below her, in the dark, Pete heard the rush and burble of a creek, and laughter that sounded like water on rock. Selkies, or naiads. Maybe a kelpie.

  “I thought it was always summer here,” she said to Rowan. Another tidbit from Jack.

  “It is,” he said. “The Prince’s death has changed that.”

  Prince. “Bloody fucking hell,” Pete muttered to herself. Not only was she supposed to Sherlock Holmes a culprit out of the thin Fae air, the victim was royalty. Pete had worked an overdose case once, an MP’s son, and the MP himself, his supercilious face and veiled threats, still haunted her. He’d wanted it swept neatly under the rug, had actually sent a bloke in a dark suit to Pete’s flat to offer her fifteen thousand pounds to say his son’d had a heart attack and blot out all mention of the pharmacy floating in his bloodstream.

  Pete had told him to fuck off, in exactly those words. But she had a notion that her usual routine wouldn’t play well with the ruling members of the Seelie.

  She wasn’t even a DI any longer. Why the fuck had she agreed to come?

  Before she could find a decent answer, they had been swept through a private entrance, past a coterie of guards armed with billy clubs and short, brutal swords that Pete had no doubt would do the job they were intended for, and into chambers guarded with a twined seal of two oak leaves. “Bow your head,” Rowan muttered. “You’re about to receive an honor few humans ever dream of.”

  “Aren’t I a fucking prizewinner,” Pete said under her breath. Then she remembered those blades, and thought better of finishing the thought.

  The Queen of the Seelie wasn’t a person Pete had ever fancied meeting, and she could tell the reverse was also true. The Queen drew herself up and in when Pete and Rowan came in, patting at her cheeks with a handkerchief spun from something white and translucent. She wore a simple black gown, the kind of thing you saw in old photos of Victorian mourning. Flanking her were three more Fae, two men and a girl.

  Pete took their measure even as she smiled and inclined her head. She’d treat this like any other homicide. “You’re the mother?”

  The Queen’s throat worked, tightening, but not with sorrow. “I am the Queen.”

  Pete nodded, as if that explained everything. “I’m sorry for your loss, madam.” It all came back, like getting on a bloody bike. The somber tone, the sympathetic yet determined demeanor, letting the family take the lead to get the information you really needed. “I realize this is hard for you,” Pete said, “but anything you can tell me about your son’s last hours will likely be helpful.”

  The bigger of the two men stepped in. “Anything you need to know, ask me.”

  Pete gave him the eye. “Don’t tell me you’re the family barrister.”

  The Fae’s lip curled back. His two front teeth came to points. “I am the captain of the Ash Guard.”

  “Ah,” Pete said. A security heavy. This was familiar ground as well. “And your name, Captain…?”

  “Tolliver,” the Fae said gruffly. “The Queen is indisposed. You speak to me.”

  “Tolliver,” Pete said, grasping him by the arm, “can I speak to you over here, please?” She led him to a shadowy corner, where a leaded window looked out on the storm-tossed hills of Faerie. “I understand,” Pete told him.

  Tolliver blinked, clearly having expected to be lectured. “You do?”

  “’Course,” Pete said. “You’re responsible for the family, and the boy getting done in was your cock-up. But being a pillock to me is not going to find the bloke, so how about you step aside while the chance is still there to catch him? Or her?”

  His throat worked. Pete saw a scar there, under his jaw. His clothes were fine as the rest of the group, but his hands were roughed at the knuckles, bent and square from bare-fisted fighting. Tolliver was a man who believed in blunt force. Pete hoped that also meant he believed in honesty.

  “I found him,” he said, and his voice went rough. “I came to get him for our daily fencing lesson and he was on the floor, like a doll with all of the stuffing gone out…” Tolliver’s jaw worked and he looked away from her, out at the boiling thunderheads illuminated by a sickly green light in the eastern sky. “Unseelie land,” he murmured. “They’ll be putting up a ruddy festival. This is their dream come true.”

  “Could an Unseelie have done this?” Pete asked. Her hands felt restless and she wished for her leather-bound reporter’s notebook. Ollie, her old partner in the met, had used his PDA to take notes, but Pete preferred the feel of paper and ink.

  “No.” Tolliver was back in control. “Our borders prevent it. The Courts are neutral ground. So it’s been since the accords long past, when we made the Seelie and Unseelie lands half each of Faerie.”

  “So who’s your money on?” Pete asked. Tolliver’s eyes expanded, then contracted. Wrinkles sprouted like weeds at his cheekbones. After a moment he said, “That’s your job, isn’t it?”

  Pete allowed herself a flicker of a smile. “You thought of someone,” she said. “When I asked. You have an answer back there behind that big, ugly scar.”

  “I protect the Queen,” Tolliver said brusquely. “I protect the family. And I’ve told you all I’m fit to tell.” He turned his back, and stared out the window.

  Pete sighed, and returned to the i
cy stare of the Queen. She was beautiful, of course. It was hardly remarkable in Faerie. Her beauty was that of statues, and ice — remote, chill and unearthly. Hair of the whitest white, like Rowan’s, skin to match, traced only by blue veins. A young face with eyes ancient as the stones under Pete’s feet. There was a little pink around them from crying, and they made Pete think of animal eyes. Hungry eyes.

  “Tolliver’s given me leave to ask you a few questions,” Pete said.

  The magic in the room, slithering and sliver, came to a boil when the Queen spoke. “I am in mourning. I have nothing to say.”

  Pete normally didn’t open herself to the Black. Being a Weir meant she was a repository rather than a conductor, and too much magic could turn her to cinder, surely as fire. She felt it, though. Every flux and flow. Every push and pull. And the Queen was at the center of something that was alien and frozen as the surface of another planet. Pete bit her lip, and let the magic lap at the back of her mind.

  “You know who we look at in my world, when someone dies?” she asked quietly. “Family. Parents. Wives. Brothers. Family knows you best. Family can hate you more than anyone else in the world.”

  The Queen shot a glance at the other man, who was slender as Tolliver was enormous. He cleared his throat. “Perhaps Miss Caldecott would care to examine the body and the scene of the deed?”

  Pete knew when she was being brushed off, but she didn’t expect the young woman next to the Queen to pipe up. “I’ll come.”

  “Snowblood, no,” the man insisted. “You’ll only upset yourself.”

  “Shut up, Crowfoot,” she hissed. “You may have my aunt fooled but you don’t fool me!”

  “Snowblood!” The Queen’s voice snapped like the lightning outside. “That’s enough.”

  “All right,” Pete spread her hands. “You, young miss — you’re with me. The rest of you, stay put. I’ll have more questions once I’ve seen the body.”

  The prince was kept in a chamber below the Court, older than the building above, cool arches dripping water into drains that lead to places only rats would know. Pete scented the familiar rotten-orchid scent of decay, along with something foreign, a bit like char. Blood, she guessed. Fae blood.