‘That’s why you don’t play chicken with a car,’ cried Stronge, united in triumph.
Braaaaaaaaaiiiins, bellowed Frank, which I think was his way of saying congrats on executing a well-designed plan. That or he was hungry.
We caned it down the road, belching diesel, hooting like winners. I took a corner, then another, steering us into a tree-lined side street, fingers still choking the life out of the steering wheel. I heard coughing coming from the back of the car.
‘You all right, kid?’ I asked, looking in the rearview and finding the Arcadian pushing himself upright on the back seat.
He tried to talk but all that came out was more coughing. He raised a shaky arm, finger pointed dead ahead. Finally, the kid managed to force out some words.
‘They’re here…’
In front of us, smack dab in the middle of the road, were a trio of blue-skinned men. I recognised the one in the middle with the fur collar as Draven, the Arcadian Lieutenant. Shit. I’d been so caught up with bloodthirsty vampires, tattooed assassins, and extra-dimensional demons that I’d forgotten about the Unseelie Court.
The three fae stood firm as they combined their magic to topple one of the roadside trees, which came crashing down on the carriageway, right in our path. I slammed on the anchors but it was too late. We piled into the felled oak, hitting it so hard that the hearse was sent into acrobatics. Chunks of chassis went spinning and I went with them. Not Frank, just me, hurled from my partner’s body and sent spiralling into the road. The shock of being wrenched free of my corporeal form, plus the impact on the tarmac, made scrambled eggs of my brains.
I saw a grass verge and a weed-choked path.
I saw birds overhead, screeching like no bird I ever heard.
I saw the yawning mouth of a gated tunnel and the graffiti skull-face of MICKEY MORTE.
And then I was back in the present, spreadeagled across the broken white line of the road.
A leering blue face loomed over me, a predator’s smile etched across his chiselled visage. Draven.
‘You’re dragon food, Detective.’
He grabbed me by my tie and hauled my head from the tarmac, bringing it within swinging distance of his magic rod. I was getting ready to have my brain reset to factory settings when a guttural roar ripped down the street, making the fae’s arm go slack. Frank had made it out of the wreck and was wielding a weapon of his own: the bumper of the hearse, which he swung like a caveman’s club.
For a moment it looked as if Draven was going to take him on, but cooler heads prevailed, specifically the heads of his soldiers, who pulled him away like a girlfriend holding back her drunk boyfriend in a pub brawl. Draven shrugged the soldiers off but heeded their message.
‘Next time,’ he snarled, and slipped the rod back into his belt.
Then he dissolved into thin air along with the rest of the Arcadians.
Frank let go of the bumper and helped me to my feet. Together, we staggered back to the hearse, which lay on its back like a flipped turtle. Stronge was belted into the passenger seat upside down, a fresh cut on her head and broken glass in her hair. She was shaken up and a bit bloody, but otherwise fine.
But the kid?
The kid was gone.
Chapter Fifty: Things Fall Apart
Instead of snuffing me out, the Arcadians had decided they were better off getting their prince to safety and leaving me to rot. Happens quite a bit, that: folks underestimating me. It’s part of the reason I’ve stuck around so long.
Frank was able to flip the hearse upright and get the old girl back on her boots. Amazingly, the car wasn’t a write-off. I’m telling you, they really knew how to build a motor back in the day.
People came over to see if they could help, others whipped out their mobiles and dialled 999, but the three of us piled back into the car and got it moving before the ambos arrived. The Arcadians had the kid and that couldn’t be allowed to stand. Somehow we had to get him back before they could seal the deal with the Vengari, and to do that, we needed a plan with some hair on its balls.
A conflab was required, somewhere familiar, somewhere safe, and above all, somewhere with booze. Since the office was a no-go, that meant a trip to The Beehive. Sure, we’d been spied on there before, but since we had nothing left to hide, I figured what the hell. The pub’s dampening bubble kept most strains of offensive magic straitjacketed, and Lenny was always there to keep any other kinds of violence in check. All in all, we were safer within those four nicotine-yellowed walls than anywhere else in the city.
Nighttime. The troops were gathered, Shift included. She’d sloughed off the balding salary man we cornered at Citytex Solutions and arrived in her more familiar (and infinitely more pleasing to the eye) female form. Together we knocked back a round of pints as we tried to figure out a way to avert the oncoming crisis.
Now, some of you might question the common sense of trying to formulate a battle plan with a bellyful of booze, but you should know there’s historical precedent for this. In ancient Persia they say men used to debate ideas twice: once sober and once drunk. It was only if the idea stood on its feet in both states that it could be considered a winner. I don’t know for sure whether that’s true or not, but since I’d rather noodle an idea around my head with a pint in my hand than without, it’s what we were doing.
Except… well, the ideas weren’t flowing as fast as the beer was. We’d been sitting in a booth for half an hour already, and the most productive thing I’d managed was to make a set of Olympic rings on the table using the condensation at the bottom of my pint glass.
Shift was the first to break the silence. ‘I don’t want to sound cold here, but what’s the big rush on getting the Arcadian back? I get that this union’s bad news, but we don’t have to worry until he breeds and produces offspring, right?’
Stronge nodded. ‘She’s right. We should take our time, really think about this, find some allies.’
‘You don’t get it,’ I replied. ‘I owe that kid. I promised I’d get him out of this mess, and he’s right back where he started. I’m going after him with or without you.’
Frank grunted in agreement.
Stronge drummed her fingers on the table. ‘Okay, so how do we get him? Where is he?’
‘At the fae lair with the rest of the Unseelie Court would be my guess.’
‘And that’s where?’
I looked to Frank knowing he had no more of a clue than I did, but hoping against hope that he might have something rattling around in his noggin that had slipped out of mine. The shrug he gave back told us that he didn’t.
Shift blew out her cheeks. ‘In other words, you two have about as much of a plan as you do a pulse.’
We had visited the fae hideout—albeit against our will—but the only recollections I had of the place were loose scraps of memory that didn’t quite patch together. I shared them with the group anyway: the weed-choked path, the screeching birds, the tunnel with the graffiti.
‘Mickey Morte?’ said Stronge, parroting my description of the urban cave painting I saw on my way to a fae prison cell.
‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘Add that to the other two clues and that’s three things we’ve got. Can’t you take those and… what’s the word… triangulate? Can you triangulate them?’
Stronge laid a look on me. ‘Triangulate them?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
A sudden cheer went up across the other side of the saloon as a football team scored on Lenny’s big new telly.
Stronge stayed focused on the discussion. ‘In all the time you had the Arcadian in your custody, did it ever occur to you to ask him where his family were hiding?’
‘Apparently not,’ I replied.
‘Ruuunning otheeer waaaaaay,’ said Frank, pointing out the truth of it.
Shift wet her cherry-red lips with some beer. ‘I’ve looked into it but I can’t find anything on the Unseelie Court. Their hideout could be anywhere in the c
ity.’
‘So now what?’ said Stronge. ‘We stick a pin in a map and hope for the best?’
I was gathering my thoughts into something shaped like an answer when the room was stilled by a gasp so profound, so utterly aghast, that it seemed to suck all the air out of the place. I turned to see what the commotion was and found everyone looking in the same direction: at the widescreen television on the far wall, which was no longer playing the footy. The news was on now, BBC One, and it was showing something it really shouldn’t be showing.
The Uncanny.
Something beyond the realms of possibility had been caught on camera—on lots of cameras, in fact—and the evidence of it was being broadcast live on national TV. There on screen for everyone to see was a blue dragon circling the night sky. A big blue dragon breathing big blue fire.
‘Bloody hell,’ I whispered.
What is this? the reporter asked. What are we seeing here? Is it a hologram of some sort? It looks so real.
Experts were asked to give their opinions but were left dumbfounded. When they failed to offer anything concrete, the doors were thrown open to wild speculation. A member of the public with a camera shoved in her face suggested the sighting might be a promotional stunt for a restaurant in Chinatown. Another spouted some nonsense about Mercury being in retrograde. Finally, inevitably, conspiracy theorists were called upon to provide their harebrained takes. One member of the tinfoil hat brigade claimed the sighting was a mass hallucination caused by 5G phone masts messing with the brain’s alpha waves (never mind that the dragon had been captured on video in perfect 4K glory). Another nutter swore blind that the reptilian aliens who controlled the Earth had finally thrown off their human disguises and sprouted wings (wrong, but still closer than the 5G theory).
Shift’s mouth was a perfect O. ‘What’s going on?’
‘A victory lap,’ I replied.
The dragon belonged to the fae, and this was their carnival float, their big knees-up for getting their prince back. They didn’t care about the flying lizard being seen by normals. They didn’t care about the Accord. As far as the Arcadians were concerned, this city was almost theirs—so who cared if they celebrated early? It was only a matter of time now. The wheels had been set in motion. Their reign was assured.
It didn’t take a genius to see this was a disaster. Sure, the Accord had been broken before, but never like this, never so openly, so brazenly. The Uncanny got glimpsed by the wrong people from time to time, but those who shouted about impossible things were always pushed to the fringe. The rational mind is a world-class sceptic, and ideas that threaten to smash the matrix of reality have a way of being filtered out.
But this? A big blue dragon swooping about the skies of London? How do you filter a thing like that out? One sighting you could maybe pass off as a hologram or something clever with drones, but what about two sightings? What about three? If the fae carried on disregarding the Accord, people were going to learn the truth. They were going to find out that some of the things they’d seen on the internet—the things they’d passed off as made-up nonsense—were real.
That livestream of the talking crow in Hyde Park. Real.
The dashcam footage of the Arkansas woman who got hit by an eighteen-wheeler and walked away without a scratch on her. Real.
The video of the man who dug up his grandma’s corpse and gave it a kiss, only for the mummified cadaver to pucker up and respond in kind. All too real.
No pranks, no special effects, just flashes of the Uncanny. Glimpses behind the magician’s curtain. And those glimpses were just a fraction of what the curtain concealed. Pull it back completely and people were going to learn that there were monsters in this city. Not men with their heads wired up wrong, but real monsters, lurking in gloomy subway tunnels, watching silently from behind mirrors, staring up from the muddy riverbed of the Thames. And once people knew that, the whole world would unravel.
This was bad. Actually, bad didn’t really cover it. Saying this was bad was a bit like the 1945 mayor of Hiroshima saying there was a bit of a warm snap coming.
I downed the rest of my pint and quickly ordered another.
Chapter Fifty-One: As Below, So Above
Somehow I had to find a way to roll this turd in some glitter.
We needed to figure out where the fae lair was, and pronto. DCI Stronge headed for the station to see what she could turn up on there. Maybe the HOLMES suite had something to offer—that was her thinking. I told her good luck with that, but Frank and me would be using our own methods. She urged us not to go off half-cocked, to act like real detectives and work within the confines of the law. I told her we’d do whatever it was that needed to be done. The stakes were too high to be playing by the rules. This was war now.
And so the Fletcher brothers went looking for the skinny via a different channel, an altogether less salubrious one than Stronge’s: an eaves. The eaves controlled a spy network that ran the length and breadth of the country, and picked up on each and every whisper that passed their ears.
So why hadn’t we knocked on their door before? A number of reasons. First of all, they’re not the nicest people to work with, as demonstrated by the drug dealer who stuck a knife in the kid then ratted me out. Another problem was that the eaves don’t exactly have doors for knocking on. Their dens are hidden by convoluted labyrinths of their own design that make them all but impossible to find. Yet another problem with accessing the eaves network was that the only eaves I knew who wasn’t actively trying to get me killed would probably still put me in the ground given half a chance.
Razor was that eaves. I’d only met him once before, but the encounter had ended in him trying to stick a broken bottle in my face. I guess what I’m saying is, we weren't exactly what you’d call best mates. But Razor was good at what he did. Very good. If anyone in this city knew where the Arcadians were, it would be him. The problem was, how did I go about convincing him to share that information?
The solution? Magic.
Eaves love the stuff, and even though magic is a force that exists everywhere and within everything, they’re no more able to access it than you are. Since they can’t extract magic the natural way, they need the assistance of those who can: magicians, conjurors, enchanters, spell-casters of all stripes. That’s how an eaves gets his fix; he wins the favour of someone willing to reach into the cosmos and sprinkle him with a dash of stardust. But no one gives stardust away for free. To get the good stuff, an eaves has to cut a deal. He earns his dose of magic by trading it for the eaves’ most treasured possession.
Information.
And information was exactly what I needed. I’ve never been much of a spell-slinger myself, so I didn’t have much of the stuff at my disposal, but I had enough of a rep to pique Razor’s interest and convince him to parley. My hope was that the magic I was offering was worth the gossip I was seeking. If it wasn’t, I had another offer for Razor: two pairs of fists and a take-no-prisoners attitude.
Back in the olden days you could count on Razor to be lurking about in the shadows of The Beehive, but he’d since gotten on Lenny’s wrong side and earned himself a lifetime ban. These days, Razor preferred a more alfresco lifestyle, and liked to hang out under the Hammersmith flyover. That’s where he conducted business now, where he met with clients and scored his magic.
I was keen to talk with Razor the minute the fae unleashed their pet on the sky, but the following morning was the earliest slot he was willing to give me. So there we were, Fletcher & Fletcher, up with the larks and headed for Hammersmith. The part of town we arrived in gave me bad vibes right away. They say building the flyover meant clearing a big chunk of graveyard from St Paul's Church, and that a lot of graves were lost. Maybe that’s what gave me the heebie jeebies: the psychic trauma of all of those displaced souls. Or maybe it was just the prospect of breathing the same air as a man who once tried to kill me with a beer bottle.
We found Razor haunting a gloomy, litter-strewn stretch of the el
evated motorway, which arched over him like the spine of some ancient and badly-buried behemoth. It was his smile I saw first, small and yellow and made of teeth sharp enough to slice through a finger like it was made of wet tofu. Razor was short, but what he lacked in height he more than made up for with his stocky, well-muscled build. The lad was a hard case, a pitbull, but at the end of the day there were two of us and only one of him.
‘Well, if it ain’t Jake Fletcher, the Spectral Detective,’ he growled. ‘Still waiting to get raptured, son?’
‘Yup,’ I replied. ‘Guess the Man Upstairs didn’t find my name in the Book of Life just yet.’
The eaves’ beady eyes twitched to my companion. ‘I see you brought your old bag of bones with you, too. How nice.’
Seemed Razor knew about Frank already. I guess he must have heard on the grapevine that I’d formed a partnership with my reanimated corpse. Good. If Razor didn’t know that bit of trivia, what were the chances of him knowing where the Unseelie Court was?
Time to negotiate. ‘You’ve heard about the Arcadians I take it?’
Razor gave me a squint. ‘That your question?’
‘No, mine’s a bit more specific. I need to know where they are; the ones in London.’
His mouth sharpened into a feral grin. ‘Now why would I go and tell you a thing like that?’
‘Because I’ve got magic.’
He gave a phlegmy bark of a laugh. ‘That’s rich. Ghost magic.’
‘Good as any other.’
‘Not to me it ain’t. You think I don’t know everything there is to know about you, Fletcher? You’re no wizard, you’re a birthday party magician at best.’
The boy had done his homework. It seemed there was no wall in this town that Razor didn’t have a glass pressed against.
‘Okay, fair play. I’m not exactly flush with magic, but I know someone who is, and they’re willing to donate whatever you need.’
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 29
