It took him a second to remember why he’d slept on the couch, drunk, a little longer to open his eyes and pick up the phone from the tiles.
“Jane wants to talk to you,” said a woman without preamble. As always.
Holland had half a mind to tell the woman to get fucked. But he didn’t often bite the hand that fed him…no matter his feelings about the owner of that hand.
“Put her on then.”
“In person.”
Holland raised his eyebrows, there in his overly warm front room. Rumpled suit, smelling of alcohol and cigarettes and fat man sweat.
Wondering if he’d heard her right…
He imagined the woman on the end of the phone waiting. Wondered if she’d ever cared about anyone or anything. He thought maybe not.
“Where?”
“There’s a comic book shop in the north of the city.”
“She’s coming here?”
“She’s already there, Mr. Holland.”
Holland had questions and plenty of them. He just didn’t have the patience for all the runaround. He knew the caller would never volunteer anything. Talking to the woman on the phone was less fun that having a Mexican shit.
He hoped they never met in person. Holland didn’t like shooting women, and the woman was a bullet magnet.
“Text me the postcode.”
“Done,” she said, and hung up.
Holland got up then, after shaking his head at the silent phone for a second.
He did some morning things, but kept it minimal when he could…he figured he’d get a burger or something on the drive. Just the essentials; coffee, cigarette, car.
On the drive his mind started to tick.
Not like most people think, right there on top, but thinking deep down, where the real business gets done. Thinking up top is tidy. Thinking down low, everything gets tangled, but that’s how you make the connections. Holland did most of his thinking down there, where the mess was.
He thought about a wizard in a book and Jane, but mostly about his daughter. Thinking about a murdered man in a council house with no soul, and his daughter, with no soul.
One was dead, for sure.
Ank…he just didn’t know. All he knew was she was gone. He didn’t know where, how, why. He did know her soul wasn’t around, which meant she was either alive, somewhere else, or the same man who’d killed the council house man for the book was working a hell of a lot faster than Holland.
Holland drove and decided that it wasn’t the last option, simply because he wouldn’t let it be.
32
Mostly, people don’t kill two cops, steal a police car, and live free. Not for long.
The wizard wasn’t most people. He was barely a person, in any true sense. He was just beyond mortality, or above it, or so powerful that he wasn’t bound by normal rules, by the laws of man or Gods.
For a while, in the early morning, his slave drove the police car around the city. There were few people around and even fewer cars on the road. She drove in a kind of haze, a sickly grin fixed on her malnourished face. She hit the curb, a few cars, ran down a young boy on a bike. She got a little better, but she was never going to be a great driver, and the majority of her intellect, the portions of her brain devoted to doing things like driving, walking, talking, were a mess.
A spool of dribble ran from her lip while she tried to figure out how to get the car moving in the right direction, and then to stay moving in the right direction. Stop, start. Gears. She didn’t bother with indicators, or anything other than first gear.
She couldn’t, in fact, drive.
The engine roared hard, screaming, as she tried to navigate the city.
She drove like that for twenty, twenty-five minutes. Aimlessly, with little more control over the car than a kid had over a stick thrown in a river.
The tortured engine made almost as much noise as a fighter jet. Then, it blew. Something gave up the ghost. A massive metallic bang from under the hood of the car, a dent in the hood, pieces of metal, too, flew from the exhaust and hit the pavement, bounced, then cracked the windshield of a car behind.
The driver of the car behind was bemused, to say the least. It wasn’t every day you saw a drunk cop car trawling the streets of Norwich City. The police car slowed, stopped, poured oily smoke from the exhaust, the front wheel arches, the grill.
No one stopped to check if the policemen were okay, drunk, dead, alive. You didn’t. People don’t ask if cops are okay. They weren’t, of course. The cops were dead on the other side of the city.
The wizard frowned at the carcass of the car as he got out and stood. No one wondered about him, or his slave, standing around the smoking car. They didn’t wonder, because they couldn’t see them.
For a man, a being, almost beyond mortality itself, the feat was nothing to the wizard. He did it without thinking, disappeared from view. To an observer, there was just a broken-down police car in the street.
The wizard looked around. What the young man knew, he knew. The young man was native to the city. The wizard was native, now, too.
“Fucked that up, didn’t you?” he said to his slave. She only nodded and dribbled.
There was a helicopter in the sky above. It had been searching for them. It couldn’t see them, but now the wizard was out of the car the pilot of the helicopter could see just fine.
The wizard figured if the girl couldn’t drive a car, she probably couldn’t fly a helicopter. She was a rather repulsive, too, he thought. Mangy, like a sick dog.
Maybe his load had been a little too potent.
“Live and learn,” he said to himself. Then, “I want you to kill any policemen you see. It’ll hurt, after a while, but you’re a good girl, aren’t you?”
The girl nodded. Dumb as a dog, dead anyway. The wizard forgot her instantly and moved on. There were no theatrics. One minute he was there, the next, not.
The girl looked around, too broken by his vile infection to think more than the minimum. His power fled with him, and suddenly the entire street and those above could see the girl. A bedraggled girl who had once been known as Carolyn Anne, standing beside a smoking police car on a city street. Chin painted in black ink. She looked like a Maori ghost.
And all around, suddenly, policemen, policewomen, where none had been before. Whatever magic had allowed the broken girl and the wizard to roam free was gone, and reality returned to all but the girl.
The world didn’t let people kill cops and steal cop cars.
For an instant, the police and the people seeing the girl and car materialize from nothing were too shocked to act.
Before anyone could call a warning, she was running.
Not away, though. She ran in an awkward, loping gait toward the nearest officer.
He was shocked and confused, like a person would be, if a girl suddenly appeared from nowhere. So, he was slow to react. He wasn’t an armed officer, but he had a baton, a stab vest, and a taser. None of which helped when she tore into his throat with her teeth, and shook her head back and forth until flesh came free.
All around the girl, men and women in uniform ran. They ran at the girl atop their fellow officer. Not one of them ran away. Police don’t run away. They just don’t. There’s a kind of blood that runs in a copper’s veins that runs forward, after someone, something. A bloodlust like The Wild Hunt might know.
Holland would have understood.
Pounding feet all around the girl, until she looked up with crazed, black-ink eyes.
Then, those pounding, thumping feet slowed.
Down her inked chin, on her cheeks, her jaw, were vast gobs of blood and flesh. The policeman beneath her bucked and shuddered and filled his regulation trousers with shit while he died.
She did not stop.
Pushing herself up without a sound other than her heavy breathing, she whipped her head toward the nearest uniform and ran. This time, the girl was armed with the dead policeman’s baton. She swung it hard as her malnourished arms
would let her, dislocating her own shoulder in the process. The baton hit a female officer just to the right of the center of her skull. The policewoman dropped, instantly, legs suddenly useless.
Again, like it was some insane game of checkers, the young girl knocked down a bystander and took on the next cop. He managed to taser her, but she was on him. They both jumped as electricity coursed through their bodies. She recovered first, hit him again and again.
An armed officer managed to get her down, finally, with a shot to her spine. Her legs simply quit on her.
All around her, officers stood, shocked, too frightened to get close. The armed officer who’d destroyed the girl’s spine thought about putting a round in her skull. Wondered, seriously, if anyone would care.
He didn’t have to. She puked up black blood all over the pavement she lay on and then she was still.
All used up.
33
The wizard looked down at the scene below with no emotion but boredom. He shrugged his shoulders into the harness in the helicopter and bade the pilot to fly away.
The helicopter pilot controlled the helicopter, and the wizard controlled him. Once, the pilot’s eyes had been brown. Now, they were pure black. He stared at nothing while he waited on the wizard’s whim.
For a man who’d spent millennia in a storybook, the wizard had very little idea of what to do, now that he was free. A simple man, perhaps. A hedonist, a sadist. He enjoyed power, death, sex.
He had no need of food or drink. Sustenance did not matter to him.
He could, he realized, do almost anything he wished. He was untouchable.
The thought gave him pause.
Untouchable.
In a world with flying machines. In a world with technology. A world without God or mage to oppose him.
The magi were gone from the world. He could feel none of his brethren or sisters. The Gods were all dead or irrelevant.
“I am the last,” he said to his slave. “The last. The only one.” His voice was halfway between awe and sadness.
His slave said nothing.
“I drank tea with Scheherazade. I saw a boy named Simon Magus, once, many moons ago. I met the one named Jesus of Nazareth. Zoroaster himself bathed my feet. I told tales to Homer, and Crowley held my own book in his hands once, and shook, too afraid to read me…did you know that?”
The pilot remained mute. The only reply to the wizard was the gigantic humming of the engine, the rotor above, the wind.
“Now? There is only me…” said the wizard. “Only me.”
34
The northern edge of the city of Norwich boasts age. Not grand old age, like in the bigger cities. Not the gaudy age of money, of society. Stone-built edifices built with trade and science and old gowned men’s money.
Wooden building that had an air of weary beauty built with agricultural money. Money from old, calloused hands.
Just as dirty as the money of the big cities, maybe. But Holland liked the leaning wood and the reinforced brick more than all the towering stone of London and Liverpool and Edinburgh.
On Magdalen Street, Norwich, Holland looked up at the building above the comic shop. Three stories, the wood bowed out. Black wood against white plaster. Lead windows.
The comic shop below wasn’t called anything fancy. No puns. Holland was a little disappointed.
It was called “Dave’s Comics.”
And from within, he could feel something immense pulling him. It made his teeth ache, like being next to an arcing generator.
Something powerful, dangerous.
Jane.
The woman with the cold voice had not lied. Jane was here. Right here.
Holland felt his skin prickle as he stepped inside.
35
The shop was well kept. It smelled of polish, new carpet, a little hint of sawdust. The sun shone hard through the broad windows at the front of the shop, but there was very little dust in the slanting sunshine.
It was tidy, clean, well-stocked…which either meant the shop did no business or a lot.
A fat man—not, Holland thought with a strange kind of satisfaction, as fat as he was—sat behind a counter. A till sat on the counter, the old kind that said “ting.”
Comics weren’t massive business, he figured, because the shop was all but empty. Well-stocked, probably, because no one bought anything.
Holland’s mind, ticking.
A lady was looking at figurines, like little toys, of dragons. A young kid, probably younger than Ank, stood before a rack of comics in plastic sleeves, reverential, not touching.
“You Dave?” said Holland to the man behind the counter.
The fat man behind the counter hadn’t taken his eyes from Holland the whole time. In fact, he’d been staring at Holland since he came through the door.
Nice, thought Holland. No wonder Dave doesn’t do any business. Kind of rude.
“Yeah.”
Holland wasn’t in the mood for chatting either.
“I’m Holland.”
“Good for you,” said the man. He turned away, picked up a can of drink from a shelf behind him and turned back, sipping.
The man didn’t say anything else.
Holland didn’t get angry. He was already angry.
“I’m expected.”
“Okay.”
“What?” said Holland.
“Okay. Good. Don’t care, mate. I don’t know you from Adam, you stroll in. Never seen you before. You want a comic? Buy a comic. Don’t buy a comic. I don’t care, mate.”
Holland seriously thought about shooting the man right there, in front of two witnesses. Walking out.
Fuck Jane.
But he wasn’t wrong. She was here. Something was here. He could feel it.
“Jane,” he said.
Nothing. No recognition in the man’s eyes.
Have I got it wrong?
“Is there another comic shop?”
Dave—if he really was Dave—raised an eyebrow.
And Holland woke up. His mind started ticking again. Not like he’d been ticking all the way on the drive, full of cloudy anger. Not like when he’d walked in, angry with everything and everyone and fucking blind, like a civilian.
He started thinking again. Feeling. Like a man whose soul was right slap bang in the center of a mountain of fat. Like a man with a gun in a holster just beneath his left armpit.
Wake up, Holland, you dozy bastard.
There wasn’t another comic shop. This was the place.
It hummed with power.
This is the place.
He’d fucked up. Jane didn’t want to see him. She wanted him dead.
“This is the place.” He nodded. Holland moved faster than a man his size had any right to move.
36
Anger clouds a man’s mind. Angry Holland walked into Dave’s Comics with his head up his ass.
Moving, things cleared. The clouds in his mind shifted.
The place wasn’t clean, or well kept. It was brand-new. The carpet smelled new. That smell of sawdust…it was still there because this place had only just been built.
Probably, with Jane’s resources, in a day.
But it wasn’t just the smell of the place, the way it was so pristine.
It was the people.
The kid, standing looking at comics in plastic sleeves. The woman looking at dragon figurines. Dave/fat guy behind the counter, turning, taking a fizzy drink from the shelf behind him.
The woman was middle-aged. Good figure, good hair, nice shoes, no handbag.
Middle-aged women were a foreign country to Holland. Last woman he really knew passed on, giving birth to his daughter, nearly eighteen years ago.
Middle-aged women had stuff. That was one thing he did know. What kind of stuff, he was never sure. Never go in a woman’s handbag. Never.
But they carried handbags.
They stood, by and large, with their legs closer together. Not with their legs apart, like a caricatur
e of a man in the picture on the men’s toilet door. Not unless they had something between their legs.
Not a gun. She didn’t have a gun.
This was Jane’s deal. It wouldn’t be anything sordid, like a pistol, that made the woman stand with her legs so far apart. Jane didn’t do guns. She didn’t like guns, didn’t like them near her.
Holland did.
Figuring, thinking, turning.
He was still figuring things out and letting his mind do the work while he fired.
The shell was hand-loaded, and the bullet was silver. The bullet hit the well-put-together woman between the eyes and about an inch above, where a third eye blossomed instantly.
No doubt. He didn’t see what she had tucked up there by her thighs, because she whirled on the spot and fell head toward him, legs away.
The kid.
The kid had good shoes. He looked to Holland to be around Ank’s age or maybe a little younger. Good shoes, polished. A sixteen-, seventeen-year-old kid, wearing good polished shoes.
Enough to shoot him?
Should the kid get a medal?
The sun was still coming through the front of the shop. Long glass, wooden frames. Woman with the odd stance had cast a shadow.
Holland’s gun hand was tracking round, fast as each thought.
So?
The kid wasn’t where he should have been.
Doubt gets people killed. Anger gets people killed.
Take the shot, Holland, he thought, and fired at the spot where the kid had been a second ago because he was right about the shadow.
The kid wasn’t where he had been, standing before the comic display.
But his shadow was still visible, even if the kid wasn’t. It moved toward Holland.
Even the shadow-kid wasn’t faster or smarter than a bullet. Blood sprayed out of thin air, and as the kid died, his body, now visible, fell to the floor.
Master of Blood and Bone Page 6
