Iron & Velvet (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator #1)

by Alexis Hall

  I ignored it and kept walking. Dust caught at the back of my throat. A few more lights danced at the edges of my vision, like they were trying to get my attention.

  No, thanks. Not playing that game.

  A ghostly sobbing drifted out of the forest.

  Nope. Not playing that one either.

  I trudged on, realising I was in a bit of a bind. There was clearly something dodgy going on here, but I couldn’t find out what it was without letting it lure me into a trap. I figured the trick was to hold out for better quality bait.

  After a while, the lights and weeping faded. Then I saw a flash of silver in the distance. I froze, my hand tightening on the iron dagger. This time, there was definitely something out there. I waited, and there it was again. A gleam through the trees, and a huge white stag stood in the darkness watching me.

  Huh.

  I had no idea if this was what I was looking for, but I got a sense of its power, its age, and its anger. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that would command an army of bloodsucking monsters. Then again, I’m not sure what somebody who did command an army of bloodsucking monsters would look like.

  I inched towards it. Moonlight spilled down the many points of its antlers.

  If you shot this guy’s mum, you’d seriously regret it.

  When I got closer, it bolted. My mother’s instincts flared hot, and before I knew what I was doing, I was chasing the thing.

  I was dimly aware it was a really bad idea, but I just couldn’t stop.

  Faery magic: fucking with people’s heads since ten million BC.

  Okay Kate, stop running now. It’s a faery, it’s a trap, you’re going down. Seriously, stop running. Now. Any minute now.

  The trees rushed past in a blur, and I thought I saw glimpses of ghostly figures in the shadows. I heard the crunch of withered leaves under my feet. This was not good.

  All right, Kate. One last try.

  I stopped. The forest was noticeably deader here. And I could hear an eerie singing coming from everywhere at once. Logically, if I turned round and walked back the way I’d come, I’d eventually find my car.

  So I tried it.

  I got about ten paces, and then there were wolves in my way. They slunk out of the forest, surrounding me.

  Here lies Kate Kane. Eaten by big bad werewolves. Beloved daughter. Sorely missed.

  I did the gesture Tara had liked so much. “I’m a PI, I’m investigating a murder. I’m not carrying silver.”

  A sandy-brown wolf, slightly larger than the rest of them, padded forwards and shook itself. There was a fluid shift of skin and fur, and then I was staring at a naked dude, which was the last thing I’d expected. I nearly blurted out something stupid about men not being full shifters, but then I wised up. I guess it was about genetics, not gender identity.

  “Uh, hi,” I tried instead.

  “You’re trespassing.” He was tall and muscular, with a strong jaw and very chiselled cheekbones. Reminded me a bit of Tara.

  “I’m investigating the murder of a member of your family.”

  “Oh, you’re her. We thought you might try something like this.”

  I’d been on a balcony with Tara for less than fifteen minutes, and she already knew me so well. I was almost touched. “Well, your alpha wouldn’t tell me anything, and I couldn’t rule out the possibility that something you’d already pissed off was coming after your family.”

  Unlike Tara, this guy didn’t immediately freak out, but he didn’t look exactly thrilled either. “I’d probably do the same if I were you, but this is family business. We take care of our own.”

  I was hearing that a lot lately. “Look, I get the fact you’ve got the big pack loyalty thing going on, but somebody was killed by some weird-arse monster, and you’re living in a forest full of weird-arse monsters.”

  “Hmm.” He stroked his chin thoughtfully. I’d never realised how much I took fully clothed witnesses for granted. Finally he frowned, looked me in the eye, and asked, “How did he die?”

  Oh, God. We were here again. It was like a game of poker where nobody wanted to call. If I told him about the bloodsucking thing, there was a very good chance he’d leap to the obvious conclusion. But if I didn’t tell him, I’d get nothing, and this whole picnic would have been a giant waste of time. “Okay. He was sort of, well, exsanguinated. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a vampire. There were these bruisy-sucky bite marks all over the body. Right now I’m thinking demon or faery or general creepy monster.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Okay.” His eyes were still steady on mine. “We do not share our secrets with outsiders, but I will tell you that nothing in this forest could have done what you describe.”

  There was another long silence.

  “No offence, but why should I take your word for that?”

  He put a hand on his chest, and a faint smile touched the corners of his lips. “You doubt the word of an English gentleman?”

  “My line of work, you doubt the word of your own nan. But I guess I don’t have a choice.” Well, I did have a choice. My choice was believe the werewolf, or spend the rest of the night in a haunted forest, searching for something that might not even exist.

  “You’re very slightly more reasonable than Tara led me to believe.”

  I’ve never been good with compliments, but I didn’t think that was one. “Thanks.”

  I got a full wolf escort back to the road. I’d like to think it was for my safety, but by the way they chased my car halfway back to town, they probably just wanted to make sure I left.

  I got back to my flat close to midnight, which left me a couple of hours to look over the case notes and drink heavily. I hadn’t learned anything definite, but it looked like the werewolf connection was a non-starter for the time being.

  I laid out the evidence I did have. Archer’d had this whiteboard he liked to use, but I had a coffee table. I pulled the crime scene photos out of the file and stared at them. Still a dead guy, still missing eight pints of blood, still covered in those weird circular bruises. Further examination of the ziplock bag confirmed my initial suspicions: it was icky. The whole thing was icky. The weird goo. The marks on the body. Those alone almost ruled out the major powers. Vampires and werewolves are many things, but they’re not generally slimy. And the things at Safernoc hadn’t been slimy either.

  It could have been a random act of monster, but somehow it didn’t feel random.

  I laid out a mind map of the case with the contents of my drinks cabinet. Vermouth for Julian. Tequila for Tara. Tonic water for Andrew, poor bastard. Goldschläger for Kauri. I wasn’t sure how Nim fit into this yet, but I poured myself a shot of Drambuie to represent her.

  I spent half an hour moving everything about, until I realised I was sitting in front of a table of empty bottles with no idea what any of it meant.

  I woke to the taste of stale whiskey and the smell of stale cigarettes. Patrick was busy, so my pillow was mercifully picture-less. That called for a celebration, so I had a shower and poached an egg. Then I headed for the office to finish off my background checks. Julian turned out to be complicated, Ashriel even more so. Julian owned a vast network of businesses through a variety of shell companies, the most prominent of which was the Calix Group. Ashriel just plain didn’t exist. I dug deeper into Tara and Andrew, only to find I had the opposite problem. If I wanted, I could have got their family history going back to the Crusades, and a basic public records search crashed my browser. Once I’d filtered out some of the noise, checking on Andrew only confirmed my suspicions that, family connections aside, nobody would have any reason to murder him unless it was deeply, deeply personal. But deeply, deeply personal and bloodsucking ick monster didn’t exactly go together.

  I checked into Kauri fairly extensively because, not counting butlers, it’s the partner nine times out of ten. I couldn’t let myself forget the fact that, although he seemed to be a nice guy, he was still a vampire. Miss Parma Violet
had an excellent reputation on the boylesque scene, but the only information I could find connected to the name Kauri Kallili was a missing person’s report from 2001, which I assumed was when he’d been turned.

  I chucked it in at half five, with no leads and no patience. Supernatural crimes are always a real bugger. None of the suspects officially exist, there’s never any physical evidence because magic, and everybody’s motivated by thousand-year-old blood feuds, ancient debts of honour, or perverse occult master plans. And most of the time everyone blames the mages anyway.

  On the subject of which, I realised I’d better find out their alibi, because Tara seemed pretty convinced by the “let’s have a war” theory, and right now it was the best lead I had. Normally after a full day of getting nowhere, me and Archer would go round the corner to the Coach and Horses and have an overpriced beer. It was a bit touristy in there, but it was the closest thing we had to a local. Seeing as he was dead, I just went home and illegally watched a rerun of Lark Rise to Candleford.

  The next day, I went in search of Nimue.

  Ashriel had called me paranoid but, compared to the mages, I’m practically careless. Magicians are mostly self-taught, so they make a lot of mistakes and a lot of enemies, and the ones who don’t know how to protect themselves end up very dead very quickly. Nimue’s court moves around a lot, but she showed me how to find it years ago. It’s a complicated ritual and it only works if she wants it to, but she’s never turned me away when I’ve needed her.

  Once I’d washed and chased away the worst of my hangover, I made my way to the Southbank. The area under the National Theatre is the trendy hang-out of aspiring skater punks and posh kids who think they’re Banksy. From floor to ceiling, on the slopes, the pillars, and the arches, it’s an anarchic riot of colours and styles, the kind of graffiti that gets sold as Urban Art in respectable galleries. It’s also conveniently close to Waterloo tube station for your congestion-charge-averse PI.

  On the way, I’d picked up a copy of the Metro that someone had left on the seat opposite, borrowed a pen from the guy next to me, and scribbled Nim’s calling name into the crossword on the back page. And then I returned the pen. Like a good citizen.

  Huddled behind one of the pillars, I surreptitiously tried to burn the paper with my Zippo. The graffiti is legal, but starting fires in public isn’t. I gathered the ashes from the floor as best I could, hoping nobody had pissed there recently, and smeared them across my eyelids.

  There was a sudden shift in my perception. Everything was still the same, but I was looking at it differently. It was like one of those magic eye pictures. Or like I always imagined magic eye pictures were supposed to be, because I could never do the damn things. I stared dizzily at the graffiti, the colours writhing together like snakes. And then I adjusted, and everything popped back into focus, except one particular image was standing out from the rest. It was a drawing of a policeman with the head of Ronald McDonald, in a tank, pointing an AK-47 in the direction of Waterloo Bridge.

  Off I went.

  I headed south, away from the river, stomping along as the traffic roared past until I came to the IMAX. There was a huge billboard behind the circular glass walls, flicking between adverts for Samsung and Apple. I stared at them like a lost time traveller until the words “Stamford Street” flashed up.

  I took the first left off the roundabout and walked on, keeping an eye on the buildings and billboards for any further messages. I was starting to think I’d missed one when I passed a Pret a Manger with a scattering of steel café tables outside. Suddenly my world went monochrome, except for an abandoned cardboard coffee cup.

  This was the second part of the ritual. Sometimes it’s a pond, sometimes it’s a dustbin lid full of rainwater. Today it was half a cup of cold Americano. I lifted it to my lips and whispered Nim’s calling name three times. The oily sheen on the surface of the coffee stirred sluggishly and formed a sepia-toned image of a squat, square building at the corner of a terraced street. The sign outside read “Siddons Road Community Centre.”

  I made my way back to Waterloo and hopped on the Jubilee line to Green Park before taking the Victoria line to Seven Sisters.

  Tottenham, huh. Nim really knew how to show a girl a good time.

  Siddons Road Community Centre didn’t look much better outside the coffee cup. It was a plain, yellow brick building. The double doors were standing open, so I went in. Inside, it looked like every community centre I’d ever visited. The walls were painted in peeling cream and the carpet tiles were a faded blue. There were pinboards in the hallway, studded with typical community centre notices: yoga on Thursday, please wash up your cups, I have lost my umbrella.

  To the left was a tiny kitchenette area, where a curvy redhead was diligently washing a large pile of cups. There was a sign over the sink reading “This water is hot,” and an industrial-sized bottle of Robinson’s Orange Squash standing on the side. To the right was a decent-sized hall with plastic orange chairs stacked up against the walls.

  Nim and a couple of kids were hammering away at a foosball table near the back. It was obviously a quiet day. Two mages I hadn’t met before were playing Scrabble (one of them had managed to get “quixotic” on a triple-word score) and Gabriel, the court seer and Guardian of the Watchtower of the North, was feeding a baby. I regularly forget the birthdays of people I really care about, so I’m hopeless at keeping up with other people’s children, but I could vaguely remember that Gabriel and his wife had been trying for a third when Nim and I were last on-again.

  He was the only one of Nim’s four advisors I’d actually met. They had kind of an elemental theme going on, so Gabriel was all about wibbly watery prophecy stuff. Someone called Rachel apparently did strange stuff with the airwaves, and a guy called Jacob talked to the dead on the Underground. I’d known a Guardian of the Watchtower of the South—a big-up fire channeler—but she’d been killed in a really nasty mage war six years ago.

  “Hi, Kate.” Nim surrendered the game and crossed the room towards me. She was wearing faded jeans and a grey hoodie. She’d grown out her hair so it fell past her shoulders in loose, dark coils.

  It must have something to do with her magic, and I’ve never worked out whether it’s deliberate or not, but Nimue slips out of my memory like mist. It’s only when I see her again that it all comes flooding back, a rush of tangled images. Burying my hands in her hair, kisses that taste of cold mornings and deep midnights. Meeting all over London. The glittering terraces of Kensington, the muddled suburbs of Uxbridge, the concrete temple of a multi-storey car park in Peckham, the motley patchwork of stalls at Portobello Market. The city through Nimue’s eyes.

  The night she took me to the Eye, the barriers standing open for her, the lights coming on one by one, blue and gold and silver. Slowly, silently, the wheel beginning to turn, carrying us into a sky so dark and full of stars, like a reflection of the city shining below. That was the first time I kissed her. The first time I really understood who she was and the power in her. The city beneath her skin, a living landscape, as beautiful and terrible as the wilds of Faerie. Dawn breaking over a steamed-up capsule high over an oblivious London. The rising sun falling over us like a blanket, painting Nim’s body in shades of burnished copper, and gilding her black hair with fire.

  “Kate?” Nim waved a hand in front of my face. “Earth to Kate?”

  I snapped out of it, the memories scattering like pigeons. “Uh, yeah, hi.”

  “You remember Gabriel, right? I don’t think you’ve met Maeve, she’s on kitchen duty at the moment.”

  A disembodied voice called out a greeting in a faint Irish brogue.

  “And that’s Ector, and the other one’s Dinaden.” They looked up from the game long enough to wave.

  “I’m actually working a case,” I said.

  “Oh, so you’re here on business?” I couldn’t tell whether she was pleased I was working, or disappointed I was working an angle.

  “Somebody murdered a w
erewolf on the doorstep of the Velvet. Nim, I kind of have to ask. Are you trying to start a war?”

  She laughed. “No. Duh.”

  “Okay, just checking.”

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure—there were odd marks on the body. My best guess at this stage is somebody summoned something. And it looks like they were specifically trying to attack Julian’s holdings.”

  “Julian’s?” Nim tilted her head curiously. “When did you get on first-name terms with the Prince of Cups?”

  I cleared my throat.

  “I thought you didn’t work for vampires.”

  “It turns out that not working for vampires pays really badly. Look, I was hoping you’d be able to tell what killed the guy.”

  Nim folded her arms. “Sorry, Kate, I really don’t work for vampires.”

  I should probably have thought of that before I tried hitting her up for a favour. “The thing is—” I paused. “—it looks like magework. I don’t want to give them any excuse to come after you.”

  Ector glanced up from the game. “Let ’em try. Tottenham’s locked down.”

  “Oh, please,” I snapped. “You’re only safe because nobody cares enough to come and kill you.”

  He stood, knocked over the Scrabble board, and got all up in my face. “Where the fuck d’you get off?”

  I was really tempted to say Seven Sisters but I didn’t think that would help. God give me the serenity to accept angry young men being dickheads. Especially when they’re ginger. “Do you have any idea how much shit an angry vampire prince can throw at you?”

  “We can give as good as we get.”

  “Sure you can. You might even survive. But what about your family? What about your mates? What about the school down the road? Vampires don’t fight fair.”

  Nim put a hand on my shoulder. “Cut it out. You don’t come to my court for help and start a pissing contest. And, Ector, stop making an arse of yourself. Move the chairs.”

  Ector and Dinaden dragged six chairs into a circle while Gabriel gently ushered his older kids out of the room. Maeve came in with a tea tray, and while they set up I got myself a cup of Sainsbury’s Red Label and a custard cream. I twisted the top off and scraped the dusty yellow paste from the inside with my teeth. The familiar taste of sugar and sawdust reminded me of my grandfather—Jenny’s dad.