Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2)

by David Bussell

Razor’s arrowhead-shaped ears twitched. Chances were he knew I was telling fibs, but he’d hear me out all the same. That’s how much of a draw magic was to an eaves, because it’s not just a fix to them, it’s a way of life. Without magic, they have no way of building the mazes they use to keep their dens hidden, and as with all snitches (Shift included), privacy isn’t just desirable, it’s fundamental.

  ‘Who’s the lucky donor?’ asked Razor.

  Frank answered for me. ‘Stellaaaaa Familllliar.’

  The eaves eyed him sourly. ‘What are you trying to pull? Everyone knows that bitch ain’t around no more.’

  Apparently, Frank and I were the only people in this town who weren’t aware of the familiar’s walkabout.

  ‘Stella’s on her way home right now,’ I lied, ‘and when she gets here, she’s going to top your tank right up. I’ve had it out with her and she’s fully on board, trust me.’

  ‘Why would I trust you?’

  ‘Have you ever known me to be dishonest?’

  ‘No. Never known you to be honest, either.’

  This was getting us nowhere. Without being asked, Frank grabbed Razor by his thick neck and hauled him off his feet.

  ‘If I were you I’d start talking,’ I said as Razor’s feet pedalled air.

  ‘No chance,’ he croaked, staring Frank down.

  ‘This is too big a deal for us to be mucking about. Either you tell us what we need to know or we beat it out of you.’

  Frank made a fist, pulled back his arm, and prepared to knock the eaves’ teeth out.

  ‘You don’t have the balls.’

  ‘Listen, sparky, if you think you’re walking out of this place without telling us what we want to know, you’re in for a hell of a surprise.’

  But it was us who were in for the surprise. Eyes appeared in the darkness provided by the shadow of the flyover. Razor hadn’t come alone. A crowd of eaves was waiting in the wings, a dozen or more, looking at us like we were food.

  With an awkward smile, Frank let go of Razor and smoothed down the lapels of his coat. ‘Nooo haaarm donnne.’

  The pack of eaves took a synchronised step in our direction.

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t have you two torn to pieces right now,’ said Razor.

  Instinct told me to pile on some more bullshit, but since I couldn’t think of anything in the moment, I was forced to resort to honesty.

  ‘You saw what happened last night. You saw the dragon.’

  ‘Course I did. So what?’

  ‘Don’t you get what’s happening here, Razor? The fae are going to tear up the Accord. All of the things the normals used to pass off as delusions are going to crystallise. And when that happens the pillars of order will come crashing down.’

  ‘And? You ask me, this town could use a shake up.’

  Cackles from the peanut gallery.

  ‘You’re not getting it,’ I said. ‘When the likes of you and me get dragged into the light, what do you think’s gonna happen? You think the muggles will welcome us into the fold? No. There’ll be a war. A war that we won’t win.’

  ‘We’re eaves. Let them have their wars, they can’t touch us.’

  ‘For now, maybe. But what about when the war’s over and the magic’s all dried up? What then? Where are you going to get your supply from when the Uncanny is just a memory?’

  Without magicians to leach power from, the eaves were as good as dead, and Razor knew it. He didn’t want to know it, didn’t want to admit that I was right, but his sense of self-preservation was strong enough to let me keep talking.

  ‘What are you proposing?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m proposing you tell us where the Unseelie Court is so we can put a stop to the Arcadians before they bring it all crashing down. If we can blow their pact with the Vengari they’ll have no choice but to bugger off and find some other realm to pester.’

  Razor’s eyes flicked to Frank before swivelling back my way. ‘And I’m supposed to trust you Siamese idiots to take down the fae, am I?’

  ‘We’ve got allies. All we need is for you to point us in the right direction.’

  Given the amount of skin they had in the game, you might have expected the eaves to throw in with us, but that wasn’t their way. Much like the Vengari, their kind only played their hand when they knew they were holding all the aces.

  ‘All right then, Fletchers. I’ll give you what you’re after, but this is a one-time offer, capiche?

  ‘Once is all we need.’

  Razor nodded slowly, checked the coast was clear, then spoke from the side of his mouth. ‘Listen up. If you want to find the Arcadians, you’re going to need to—’

  A buzzing noise cut him off.

  ‘Whaaaa?’ groaned Frank, doing a sudden about-face.

  The drone was coming from behind us, jarring and high-pitched like a dentist’s drill dragged across a pane of glass. Something was coming our way: a big black cloud, pouring from a sewer grate. The buzzing had risen to fever pitch before I realised what it was. Wings. Thousands of them—maybe tens of thousands—beating in furious rhythm.

  Razor figured it out before we did.

  ‘Fairies,’ he cried.

  Sewer fairies to be precise, an army of them, surging towards us, flying in attack formation. A colony of rabid parasites packed together so tightly that they looked like a deadly, sentient smog.

  We were chum in the water.

  The swarm descended on the eaves first. Razor’s backup scattered like cockroaches chased away by a housemaid’s broom, leaving their leader to soak up the damage. We looked on in horror as the fairies went at Razor like a storm of needles, slashing, jabbing, ripping him apart. Within seconds he was on his knees, a pile of screaming ground beef. Blood spilled out of his body like a nest of glistening red snakes. He fought and thrashed but there was nothing he could do to save himself.

  ‘Run… you… idiots.’

  The fairies stripped Razor down like a shoal of piranhas skeletonising a cow until there was nothing left of him but rags and bones.

  The killer swarm turned its attention to yours truly. The cloud engulfed me, turning my world into a deafening hurricane of flashing wings and gnashing teeth and needling stingers. Through the chaos I saw Frank whip off his trenchcoat and helicopter it about his head, using it to swat the fairies from my orbit. He caught a bunch of them that way, pummelling their twiggy bodies and snapping their fragile wings, but the numbers were still very much against me. The buzzing grew louder as more fairies piled in, consuming Frank too. The swarm was suffocating, lacerating, and refused to let up. The only way we’d survive it was if we could outrun it.

  ‘Let’s go!’

  I grabbed Frank by the wrist and off we scarpered, beating a hasty retreat. At first my only thought was to get us the hell out of there, but the terrifying sound of the swarm riding our backs quickly wrangled my scattered thoughts.

  We ducked between some traffic, jumped a hedge, and sprinted across a small green. All the while the fairies advanced on us, their screeching din rising in pitch as they grew ever closer. After a couple of minutes of frantic pursuit we rounded a sculling club and there it was: the Thames. Frank’s legs were beginning to give out but I urged him on, one hand between his shoulder blades, pressing him towards the river. The swarm was in my periphery as we legged it down the final stretch, feathering the edges of my vision. Finally we vaulted a low brick wall and struck the septic green water of the Thames.

  Sanctuary.

  The fairies couldn’t operate underwater, whereas Frank and I—who had no need for oxygen—were more than comfortable in its depths. The blackness enveloped us, a perfect visual silence to accompany the hushing of the angry swarm. Down on the riverbed, among the sludge and the shopping trolleys, we had only our thoughts for company.

  Chapter Fifty-Two: The Shadow of Kingdom Come

  Our near-miss and Razor’s untimely end were just the beginning of what was wrong back there. Sewer fairies only came ab
ove ground to spawn, and even then, only at night. And yet it was still broad daylight. Something was off, and I had a feeling it went deeper than the fae taking a dump on the Accord. This was a targeted attack. Sewer fairies might be rabid dachshunds compared to purebred Arcadians, but they were still of the same blood. The fae were on to us. They knew we still had unfinished business with them and were doing their best to tie up loose ends.

  The river carried us a good mile before we dared resurface. When we finally emerged from the black and into the grey of the city, the sewer fairies were gone. They’d lost our scent and dispersed, which was just as well as we were in no shape to go another round with the bastards. I’d escaped the worst of it thanks to Frank, but he was all chewed up. The fairies’ stingers had unknotted cloth and flesh alike, leaving him covered in a lattice of weeping cuts. A quick riverside examination revealed that the damage was mostly superficial, however. It looked bad, but everything was still where it was supposed to be, no missing body parts, nothing mauled so badly that it couldn’t be fixed by a couple of courses of warmed-up cow brains.

  Being as our only lead was now a pile of bones, we headed to the station to see if Stronge had turned anything up in our absence. As we made our way to Kentish Town we flinched at the sight of every sewer grate we passed, each a gun barrel pointed our way.

  Given the state the fairies had left Frank in, I’d planned on leaving him outside the station and ghosting my way in alone. Turned out there was no need for that. The station was in a state of utter disarray. The entrance to the building was crammed with officers doing their best to calm agitated members of the public, who breathlessly shared eye-witness reports that belonged less in a cop shop than the pages of a funny book.

  A woman with a pinched face ranted about a reflection in her bathroom mirror that didn’t belong to anyone in her family.

  A mother with two frightened girls was spouting off about a pair of burning eyes staring out of the Wendy house at the bottom of her garden.

  An anxious old man harangued a uniform about a puzzle box he’d found in his attic that kept whispering sweet temptations in his ear.

  These weren’t crackpots, they were decent, salt of the earth members of the community. Sooner or later, the folks in charge were going to have to start listening to them, and when that happened we were all in trouble. It was bad enough that the death of the witches of the London Coven had left the fabric between our world and the Nether more porous than ever, now everyone wanted in on the action. It seemed the aerial display the Arcadians put on had acted as a kind of beacon, a rallying cry. Creatures that would ordinarily stick to the shadows were peeking out their heads, emboldened by the fae’s flagrant disregard for the rules.

  We had to shut this down. We had to squash the Arcadians and pour cold water on their pact before the people in this country learned that there are some old wives tales you can take to the bank.

  Frank and I slipped invisibly through the crowd, past the exhausted desk sergeant, and headed upstairs to look for Stronge. After breezing through a few doors and magicking open some more, we found the detective in her immaculate office, scrutinising a pinboard peppered with notes. She whirled about at the sound of Frank’s footsteps.

  ‘Christ. What have I told you about coming here, Fletcher? I almost maced you.’

  She immediately went about lowering the blinds.

  ‘No one cares, Kat. Have you seen it down there?’

  ‘Seen it?’ she replied. ‘It’s all I’ve seen. We had a man in just now who filed a report about a flying skull that chased him the length of Camden High Street. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.’

  I knew what I’d have done, and I usually have such a good sense of humour.

  ‘Whaaat thiiis?’ asked Frank, pointing at the object of Stronge’s scrutiny.

  Among the seemingly random assortment of photos and print-outs tacked to the corkboard was a satellite image of a building, plus a print-out of an email with a letterhead belonging to a bat conservation trust.

  ‘Bats?’

  ‘Yes, bats.’

  I nodded as though I understood what was going on, then thought better of it. ‘Why bats?’

  Stronge walked away from the pinboard and took a seat behind her desk. ‘I got thinking about your visit to the fae lair. What you told us about it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Those birds you saw, the ones circling the entrance that you said sounded funny—’

  ‘You think they were bats?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And why do you think that?’

  ‘Process of elimination.’

  She turned a laptop our way. On its screen was an image of a path with a steep verge angling upwards on either side. The path was overtaken by nature and fed into a familiar-looking gated tunnel—the same tunnel the Arcadians carried Frank and me into after they put our lights out.

  ‘Thaaat’s iiit,’ said Frank, jabbing the screen so hard it’s a wonder he didn’t break the thing.

  ‘He’s right,’ I agreed. ‘That’s where they’re hiding. What is it?’

  ‘The old Highgate Station,’ Stronge replied.

  ‘That’s a railway line? Where are the tracks?’

  ‘Thieves had them away years ago and sold them for scrap. The line’s been abandoned since the war. Bats have been roosting in its tunnels ever since, but the fae must have driven them out when they moved in.’

  ‘You’re telling me you figured out the exact location of the Unseelie Court just from that one little scrap of information I gave you?’

  ‘Not exactly. There were a couple of other things: your description of the surrounding terrain, and the graffiti.’

  She opened another doodad on her laptop and showed me a close-up of a patch of urban art on the tunnel entrance. It was a spray-painted skull, black in colour and topped with a pair of big round ears. Underneath it was scrawled the legend, MICKEY MORTE.

  I didn’t even bother suppressing my smirk. ‘So what you’re telling me is, you took those three pieces of information I gave you and—what’s the word I’m looking for here—triangulated them?’

  ‘That’s not what triangulating mea—’

  Too late. I was already busy doing a winner’s jig; at least until Frank’s discouraging look convinced me to cut it out. Back to business.

  ‘Okay, so now we know where the Arcadians are hiding, let’s do something about it.’

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ asked Stronge.

  I’d been considering this question for a while, so I already had an answer in the hopper.

  ‘I translocate. I’ve been to the place once already, and now I know where it is on the map. All I need to do is hop back in there, grab the kid, and pull him out.’

  Stronge rose from her chair. ‘Are you mental? They’ll be watching him like a hawk. There’s no way it’ll be that easy.’

  ‘Sure it will. Once I’m inside, all I have to do is ghost through a few walls until I find out where they’re keeping him. Anyone who gets in my way gets possessed.’ I pinched an inch of air between my forefinger and thumb. ‘There’s just one teensy problem…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I still can’t translocate. Or possess people.’

  Stronge collapsed back in her chair, which squealed in complaint. ‘Fuck sake, Fletcher.’

  ‘Easy, girl,’ I replied. ‘It’s all in hand...’

  Wiggling my fingers theatrically I firmed up my mitt, grabbed the cord of Stronge’s phone, and dragged it across the desk. With some difficulty—disguised by practiced nonchalance—I punched in the number for Legerdomain and put Jazz Hands on speakerphone.

  ‘This better be good, Fletcher,’ she barked. ‘Have you seen the news, for Chrissakes? Dragons buzzing the city! What’s next, the sky raining blood?’

  Apparently I was lost in that maze again, searching for Jazz’s gooey centre.

  ‘Yeah, I saw the news,’ I replied. ‘That’s why I’m calling, to get your help pu
tting the kibosh on it.’

  ‘I see. And how am I meant to do that exactly?’

  ‘That project you were working on… how’s it coming along?’

  She let forth a withering sigh. ‘I assume you’re referring to my ongoing research into the soul bond?’

  I was. I needed her to reverse it, to unfuse me from Frank, to fix my busted powers so I could creep back into the Unseelie Court and get the kid back.

  Jazz continued. ‘With a few modifications and a little divine providence, I believe I can adapt the Rite of Sequester in such a way that it can be used to affect the bond connecting you to Frank.’

  ‘Really? And that would give me my powers back?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘No shit? Translocation and possession? The whole shooting match?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I gave Frank a spirited high-five and hooted in triumph. Across the desk, Stronge seemed less enthusiastic, as though her cop instincts told her the news was too good to be true. It turned out her instincts were right, because Jazz wasn’t even half done.

  ‘Before you go celebrating, you should know there is a drawback to the procedure. A rather sizeable one. Once it’s done, you and Frank will no longer be separate entities.’

  It took a second to register what she was telling me. ‘You what?’

  ‘Unfortunately, the Rite of Sequester cannot be used to loosen your bond. In order to do what you ask, I would have to reverse its effect. In essence, strengthen it. Doing so will restore your powers, but it will come at a price: instead of being individuals, you will combine to become a single entity.’

  Frank let out a marble-mouthed cry of discontent. I was equally put out, but remained a tad more stoic.

  ‘That can’t be right, Jazz.’

  ‘I assure you it can. While I was hoping to displace the bond’s effect and sever the link you share, further experiments have taught me that this won’t work.’

  I tried not to think about what those experiments involved and concentrated on the core issue.

  ‘So I’d be bonded with Frank forever? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Yes, but probably not in the way you have in mind. You see, you wouldn’t bond to Frank in the sense that you’re used to, with you occupying his physical body. Frank would merge with you.’