Erin snatched up her blade and scrambled on top of me. The other two came to my aid but were held at bay by a couple of thick black ribbons: magic tentacles that shot from the assassin’s arms and snaked around their necks, throttling them where they stood.
‘I’d love to keep this party going,’ said Erin, raising her white blade and placing a palm on the weapon’s heel, ready for plunging, ‘but I’ve got a bounty to collect.’
The tip of her knife became the centre of the known universe, then the blade came down—
And my hand shot out, into Erin’s chest and through her rib cage. Before she could get over the cold water shock of my phantom fingers penetrating her body, I closed a fist around her heart and squeezed, instantly sending her BPM to zero. She let out a long shuddered gasp and pulled a face like she’d taken the ice bucket challenge in Antarctica before keeling over sideways, stiff as a board.
The black ribbons holding my companions turned to liquid and splattered to the cellar floor like pools of Indian ink. The Arcadian shuffled up to me nursing an injured fist. I was about to put a hand out to stop him getting too close to the body by my side, but it was clear the assassin wasn’t playing possum this time.
Erin Banks was done.
‘Go fuck yourself,’ she wheezed.
‘Ladies first,’ the kid replied.
And Erin died.
Chapter Forty-Four: Mad About the Boy
Of course Frank wanted to chow down on the assassin’s skull meat, but I told him no. We don’t eat people’s brains, I reminded him, even if its owner was more hellion than human.
The assassin was dead, but her being here meant there was a good chance her employer, Tali, knew about this place. That meant Other London was compromised, which made it useless as a hideout. So we left Erin where she lay, licked our wounds, and made our way through the husk of the dead city, back to the portal.
Getting there was a safe paddle through the shallows, and exiting the gallery no harder. The Arcadian was recharged and could move invisibly this time, same as me, so Frank was the only one on display. Lucky for him, the place was still having CCTV problems, and the only night guard we encountered had his head buried in a sudoku. I wondered what became of the jobsworth who gave us all that grief on the way in, and imagined him venting into the ear of some poor barfly minding his own business, ranting about strange blue men vanishing through magic doorways. The thought warmed my cockles.
The sun was just peeking over the rooftops when we emerged outside the gallery, the birds in the trees singing their chorus, eager to attract a fuck buddy or two. I checked the time on my phone and found a text from Stronge. She was at the A&E getting stitches for the clump Erin gave her, and wouldn’t be back on duty for a little while. Not a problem.
We headed for Euston, occasionally passing the odd early bird commuter or nightclub survivor, none of which paid us any attention. While my partner’s stiff-legged hobble and the Arcadian’s blue skin might have drawn stares in some other city, this was London, where people kept their heads down and minded their own business. In a city this size, with a community this transient, why bother giving your fellow man the time of day? Knowing you’ll likely never see him a second time makes London an easy place to be an unfriendly bastard.
There was no car parked outside the office of Fletcher & Fletcher this time, no pack of hunchbacked vampires lying in wait. I figured as much. Coming after me and Frank was Enoch’s thing: his side project, to have us track down the fae so he could kill him and redress the insult to his sister. The rest of the Vengari would be looking for the Arcadian too, but their search would fan wider than just my doorstep.
‘You wait here,’ I told the kid as we set foot in the lobby.
I could sense another ghost on the property. I’ve been able to detect the presence of disembodied spirits since I was a kid; it’s how I found myself in the exorcism game in the first place. How I ended up flipping haunted houses for a living and dooming my eternal soul.
‘Tali’s still here,’ I explained.
I was counting on that being the case. Most ghosts have a tendency to roost. They might complain, might rail against the injustice of being trapped in a single locale, but deep down, they find comfort in familiar surroundings. Tali had spent enough time here that the place would be feeling like a home from home. And besides, where else would she go? What was waiting for her out there but more pain?
‘I need to speak to her,’ said the Arcadian.
I shook my head. ‘Not happening.’
I needed to talk to my client, needed to put her straight about a few things, and having you in the room would only muddy the waters.
‘At least let me explain myself,’ the kid pleaded. ‘I need Tali to know why I did what I did.’
I aimed a stern finger at the bench behind him. ‘Sit down. Maybe later you two can kiss and make up, but right now I want that girl nice and calm. She’s in a delicate place and I don’t need her getting all upset.’
Push a ghost too hard too fast and that’s when they lose it; when they go off their trolley and turn into the kind of tormented wraith I had to deal with when I visited the home of the old spiritualist lady. That’s if Tali hadn’t already transformed into a force of pure evil. I mean, she did set an assassin on us, which suggested she wasn’t exactly experiencing Dalai Lama levels of serenity. Then again, securing the services of a hired gun suggested a degree of rationality, so maybe Tali was still compos mentis after all. The only thing I could be certain of here was that I didn’t know what I was about to walk into, so I needed to be ready for anything.
I convinced the kid to park his arse while my partner and I headed for the office.
‘Good morning,’ I said as Frank pushed open the door with our name on it.
We found Tali doing laps around the communal desk. She froze in her tracks, coming to a stop in a slice of dawn light that would have picked out every flaw of another woman, but only served to make her look all the more gorgeous. She really was a stunner. Small wonder I let her get her hooks into me.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Surprised to see us?’
‘Why would I be surprised?’ she said, like butter wouldn’t melt.
I held up a warning hand. ‘Don’t bother. We know everything. We know you weren’t murdered, and we know you sent a killer after us.’
She dropped the act. ‘So what if I did?’
The turn was so sudden that I could only laugh at the brazenness of it. ‘You hear that, Frankie boy? No good deed goes unpunished, eh?’
‘Good?’ Tali seethed, her full lips thinned, eyelids pursed in an angry squint. ‘You were going to let him marry that vampire skank. What was I supposed to do?’
‘Look, we didn’t come here to argue with you, okay, we—’
‘Oh, you didn’t? Then maybe you should have done what you promised instead of selling me out.’
I banged a fist on the desk, making her jump. ‘Don’t you dare! You came to us for help then you signed our death warrant.’
Frank shot me a look that said, Chill out. He was right, I was getting worked up. That wasn’t the plan. Calm and professional was the tone we were trying to strike, so I took a breath and perched myself on the corner of the desk, nice and relaxed. Meanwhile, Frank stayed where he was, no sudden moves, a silent sentinel.
‘Where did you find her, Tali, this Erin Banks woman?’
At first it seemed like she wasn’t going to answer, then I guess she figured why not, the cat was already out of the bag.
‘I know her from my Brighton days, before I went solo, back when I worked in a brothel called the Pink Pearl. We drank in the same pub, got to know each other. She knew my line of work, and I knew hers. Never thought I’d have a reason to use her. Not until you told me you were going to work for the Arcadians.’
She gathered up an unpaid bill lying on top of the desk, scrunched it into a ball, and launched it across the room, only for it to land harmlessly at Frank’s fe
et.
So, Tali was able to manipulate physical objects, was she? I cut a glance to the landline. That explained how she managed to dial up the assassin. The woman had some tricks, but then I might have known. I’d seen this happen before to those who were born with the Sight and came back as ghosts, myself included. Spooky in life, spooky in death.
‘Tali, I never said I was going to work for the Arcadians.’
‘You said it was an option.’
‘Only because I couldn’t see a better one at the time, then I met the kid and realised there might be another way.’
The malice drained from her face. ‘What do you mean? For us to be together?’
She glanced at my partner and saw the hangdog expression on his face. No, that’s not what I meant.
I went on, ‘He wants you to know he’s sorry for the way things ended between you. He loves you, Tali, more than you could ever know, but what you had… it can’t go on.’
‘What are you saying?’
I formed the words with difficulty. ‘You need to go your separate ways now. He needs to go his way and you need to let me show you the way to the next place.’
The look on Tali’s face was cold and unpleasant. ‘He’s just scared of dying.’
This wasn’t working. I came here to smooth things over, to make nice, but I was only salting her grief.
I took a step in her direction, arms wide. ‘Tali, listen to me—’
‘No,’ she cried. ‘We had a deal and I’m not going to let him back out of it just because he’s a coward.’
‘If you really love him you’ll let him go. All you’re doing right now is hurting him.’
The stare she gave me could have stripped paint. ‘I don’t want him hurt, I want him dead, just like I am, just like we agreed. If he won’t honour that, I’m going to have to make it happen myself.’
‘If you mean calling Erin Banks again, you’re out of luck.’
‘Oh yeah. Why’s that?’
‘Sheee Deeeeaad,’ Frank explained, for what he lacked in subtlety, he more than made up for in candour.
I expected the news of the assassin’s passing to come as a bit of a blow, but the report only tickled Tali. She let out a bark of a laugh.
‘Dead? You obviously don’t know Erin very well.’
My phone kicked off and I took the call. ‘That you, Kat?’ I asked, expecting an update on her stitches.
A familiar voice answered, but not the one I was expecting. ‘Who’s Kat? Is she the copper I flattened outside of the Tate?’
Erin Banks was on the line. Tali’s eyes stayed fixed on mine, underscored by a knowing smirk. I put the call on speakerphone.
‘Hello again,’ I replied, trying my best to disguise the waver in my voice. ‘Gotta say, luv, you don’t die easy.’
‘Looks who’s talking, Casper the Unfriendly Ghost.’
Was this a trick or was I really talking to a woman I watched die in the dirt?
‘What’s the matter, Detective?’ she asked, filling the silence. ‘Did you really think I was done?’
‘Honestly, yeah, I kind of did.’
She laughed. ‘It’s going to take more man than you to crush my heart.’
I saw Frank’s shoulders sink. It was her all right. I don’t know how she managed it, but Erin Banks was up on her feet. What was in those tattoos of hers? What kind of deal had she struck to acquire healing powers so strong that she could come back from the dead? Even the Arcadian—a creature practically made of magic—needed to sleep off his wounds in a special cocoon, and something told me that his veggie pods were no cure for a corpse.
‘I’m guessing you didn’t call for a natter, Erin, so what are we doing here?’
‘Well, I can only speak for myself, but what I’m doing is sharpening my knife and getting ready to do something to you and your two mates that the Surgeon General definitely wouldn’t recommend.’
Frank let slip a pitiful moan. Erin Banks was going to keep on coming until we were all sniffing brimstone. That’s unless Tali did the right thing and called off her attack dog.
I thrust out my hand, phone aimed at Tali’s mouth. ‘Tell her the contract’s cancelled. Tell her she’s done.’
Tali shook her head. ‘You still don’t get it. We had a deal. This means something…’ She held out her hand, showing me her engagement ring.
I made a grab for her wrist. I don’t know what I’d have done if I got a hold of her, but I’m certain it wouldn’t have been too chivalrous. Probably just as well she whipped her arm back in time.
The bullet hole in her forehead throbbed and spat fire. A banshee cry ripped out of her. ‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed, her voice so loud that it felt like knitting needles in my brain.
Frank and I were busy cupping the sides of our heads when Tali turned tail on us and ghosted through the office wall. She vanished, leaving behind a buzzing note that I could feel in my spine long after she’d gone.
The Arcadian came running into the room, summoned by the awful wail. The looks on our faces told him everything he needed to know. Tali had flown the coop.
‘We have to go after her,’ he said.
Frank placed a steadying hand on his shoulder.
‘Let her go,’ I said. ‘We’ve got bigger things to be getting on with.’
‘Like what? Keep running?’
‘No. There’s no place left to run. And when you can’t run, you fight.’
Chapter Forty-Five: Wake Up and Smell the Sulphur
The quest to lay hands on the Arcadian had become a treasure hunt with a whole host of motley pirates searching for the X that marked the spot: Fletcher & Fletcher, the Arcadians, the Vengari, and now Erin Banks. We’d survived the fae and the vamps for this long, but Erin… she was very much the Bluebeard of the batch. I needed to lure her into some rocks and get her out of our wake before she unloaded her cannons.
But first I had to know what made her tick. She looked human enough to me, and though humans could learn to make magic their bitch, they weren’t generally able to cheat death with it. Besides, magic was a scholarly pursuit, and since Erin didn’t exactly strike me as the academic sort, that meant something else was giving her the good stuff. The tats were the key, I was sure of it. The question was, who gave them to her, and was there any way of undoing their effect?
‘I thought you said we were fighting back,’ said the Arcadian as we stood in a car park dotted with street lamps hooded by pigeon-deterring spikes.
Before us was a faceless office block; a great slab of concrete the same colour as the bruised morning sky. It was raining overhead and the raindrops had teeth.
‘This is fighting back,’ I told the fae. I was using Frank’s vocal cords. It was bad enough having to cart around a bloke with a blue face, without having to explain away old Roger Mortis. So long as we were combined, we could pass for human. A bit under the weather, maybe, but human.
The kid followed me into the building. A bit of negotiation with the feller on the front desk and we were taking the lift up to the third floor, to a business called Citytex Solutions. The lift doors opened into a dreary cubicle farm with grey-painted walls. None of that fancy Farrow and Ball stuff, just a generic, gunship grey—less a colour than an absence of colour. The office’s only notable feature was the floor-to-ceiling window on its north wall, which faced another equally drab office block.
I approached the reception desk, which was presided over by a manicured kraken with duck lips, Groucho eyebrows, and a tan that ended at her jawline. While I dealt with her, the kid hung back, facing the other way, hoodie pulled high.
‘Hello there,’ I said. ‘I’m here to speak with Alan Bridge.’
‘He’s on a break,’ she replied, showing me the white of her chewing gum as it rolled around in her mouth like a sock in a tumble dryer. ‘Think so, anyway.’
‘Would you mind checking?’ I asked, taking a slice of hair in two fists and wringing it dry. ‘We’ve come a long way and it’s chucking i
t down out there.’
She crinkled her nose, gave a weary sigh, and reached for the phone like it weighed two tonnes. ‘That Alan? Yeah, you’re wanted at front desk.’ She pivoted side-to-side in her swivel chair. ‘I dunno, some bloke in a dirty trench coat.’
She placed the receiver back in its cradle then started scrolling through her smartphone as though I’d ceased to exist. A minute later, a blond middle-aged man showed up wearing a sleeveless shirt with a bloom of ballpoints in its top pocket. He looked surprised. Well, surprised was an understatement.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Thought I’d pop in and see how you’re doing, Al. How are you, me old mucker? You winning?’
He grimaced then turned to the kraken. ‘I’m going to take a quick smoke break, Lucy. Back in a bit.’
‘Whatever,’ she huffed.
Alan led us back to the lift then down to the ground floor, where we found a concrete awning to shield us from the downpour. It was only once we were out of sight of any potential onlookers that he finally spoke.
‘What in the name of fuck are you doing here?’
‘Bloody hell, calm down,’ I said. ‘You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you swear, Shift.’
The person I’d so rudely interrupted was none other than your friend and mine, the wily doppelganger him/herself: Shift. And here he was, working a nine-to-five grind at a firm that dealt in high-end data storage.
‘This is the shapeshifter?’ asked the Arcadian, giving Alan a squiz.
‘That’s right, Your Majesty,’ said Shift, talking through his teeth. ‘So nice to see fae royalty show up at my place of business. What an honour.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said the kid. ‘What are you doing here? Are you on a mission of some sort?’
‘I’m here because I’m a professional tattle-tale, a job that’s made me a lot of enemies over the years. Lucky for me, I’m also an expert at blending in.’
The kid twigged on. ‘Alan’s your cover.’
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 26
