Immortal Make

by Sean Cunningham

  “She’s coming out now,” Fiona said. “Grey coat, black and white chequered scarf and a black cap with a white bird on the side. She’s just walking past the ambulance now.”

  Jessica made a noise. “All those colours should narrow her right down.” Fiona had wanted her at home for their investigation into Sorcha, working from her loft, secure in the strange safety of Hawthorn House. Jessica had poked her tongue out and insisted on working from her ‘lair’ under Russell Square.

  “Shush,” Fiona said. “Do you have her?”

  “No. The whole patch of pavement has gone wonky. I guess I can follow the wonky though.”

  Fiona tracked Sorcha to a pedestrian crossing. She was waiting with a growing group of impatient people for the lights to change. “Alice?”

  “I have her.” Alice was also on the call, conferenced in by something Jessica had set up on her laptop.

  “I still don’t see you,” Fiona said.

  She heard the smug smile in Alice’s voice. “You won’t.”

  Jessica broke in. “Are you on the rooftops? I bet you’re on the rooftops. Oh, Mr Beak says he’s spotted her too. I told him to keep his distance.”

  Fiona doubted that order was necessary. The sky above was dark beyond the lights of the street, too dark for anyone to spot a glass-feathered raven circling. She was sure Mr Beak liked it that way.

  The front door of the Cerberus Watch offices opened again and two paramedics in green and fluorescent yellow uniforms emerged. They carried one of Fiona’s co-workers between them on a stretcher. Obasi, the office’s self-proclaimed keenest Tottenham Spurs fan, had collapsed forty minutes ago, convulsing and bleeding from his eyes, nose and ears.

  If these attacks on her co-workers were Sorcha’s doing, Fiona meant to know. And she meant to end it.

  “She’s stopped at a bus stop,” Alice said.

  “Four different routes stop there,” Jessica said. Fiona could imagine her hunched over her pink laptop, clicking through web pages, hunting for data. “According to Mr Beak, there’s three 220s coming, so close together they’re” – she giggled – “sniffing each others’ arses.”

  “Tell him to mind his language or he’ll get a talking to from me,” Fiona snapped.

  “220s cross the river,” Alice said. “Putney, or Wandsworth.”

  “Can you keep up?” Fiona asked, still thinking of words she meant to have with a certain raven later.

  “In this traffic? No challenge.”

  The keen edge in her voice was a reminder that Alice lived to hunt, despite choosing to deny herself that pleasure. We play nice in this world of Shadow Councils and treaties, Alice had said that night at the pub, but she’d said it with a hint of disdain. Fiona supposed tailing Sorcha was a pale imitation of the night-dark pursuits she had followed long ago.

  She hadn’t put much thought into what she would do if it really was Sorcha who had caused her workmates to collapse. Reporting her to the Shield Foundation was a thought and she’d stored their number in contacts list, but the lack of faith Rob and Julian had in the Foundation left her doubting she’d use it.

  When she’d asked Alice how shadow world justice worked, Alice had shrugged and said each faction dealt with their own in their own way.

  “How would you deal with this then?” Fiona had asked.

  “Death,” Alice replied, her blue eyes flickering amber. “Or – well, there are creative ways to punish immortals.”

  Which hadn’t been much help, really.

  All three 220s arrived at the bus stop at the same time. Fiona couldn’t see Sorcha from where she stood – she stayed out of sight, trusting Alice and Jessica to keep her on the trail – but according to Mr Beak’s report she boarded the middle bus, showing few signs of impatience in the press of people.

  Like a normal person.

  Having second thoughts? the voice in the back of her mind asked.

  “Stay on her,” she said.

  The buses moved away, the regular evening snarl of traffic complicated by the ambulance siren. Fiona boarded the next 220, twenty minutes later. By then Sorcha’s bus was nearing Putney Bridge. According to Alice, Sorcha wasn’t amongst those who’d got off the bus at any of the stops on the way. According to Jessica, the ‘wonky’ clung to the bus they were following.

  “She’s off,” Alice said. “Putney Pier.”

  “I’m only just past Charing Cross Hospital,” Fiona replied. “I’ll be a while yet.”

  “If she’s going to try and give us the slip, it’ll be now,” Jessica said.

  “No chance,” Alice said.

  Fiona’s bus stopped yet again. At this hour, someone boarded or disembarked at every stop. “Be careful. We still don’t know what abilities she has.”

  Her bus rumbled past the hospital at a crawl. Fiona told herself it didn’t matter. Sorcha would enter a house in Putney and wasn’t likely to leave again in the twenty minutes it would take Fiona to catch up. Whoever and whatever Sorcha was, Fiona thought it unlikely she could elude a three hundred year-old vampire.

  And she kept thinking that until, while her bus chugged across Putney Bridge, Jessica said, “Mr Beak has ‘temporarily misplaced’ the target.” She sounded cross. “And I can’t get a tight fix. The wonky area just blew out to half a mile wide.”

  Fiona sat up straight in her seat. “Alice?”

  She heard nothing but the sound of an open phone line.

  “Alice? Can you hear me? Jessica, get that damned raven of yours looking for Alice.” She couldn’t be dead. A three century-old vampire couldn’t just vanish. She had seen Alice covered in the gore of battle and knew that if Alice ever fell, it would not be quietly.

  “He’s looking,” Jessica said. “Why is he -? Mr Shell, find out why he’s flying in weird circles like that.”

  “What’s happening Jess?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded more puzzled than alarmed. “He’s gone … wonky.”

  Fiona heard Mr Shell, his tinny voice betraying a hint of concern, which was as close to panic as he came. “Sifting through the profanity, Miss Jessica, I believe Mr Beak’s internal compass is malfunctioning.”

  Julian will kill me, Fiona thought. She remembered him and Alice sitting together in the pub, absorbed in each other. If she’d got Alice killed, she just knew Julian’s quiet control would come apart all at once. It was her fault Alice was in harm’s way. She’d been the one to send Alice in.

  This is a fine time to lose your head, said the traitorous voice within her.

  She punched the STOP button on the bus and pushed through the crowd towards the side door. “Pull Beak back. What was Alice’s last location?”

  “Um, beats me,” Jessica said.

  “Then give me the name of the street where you last saw Sorcha.”

  The bus lurched to a halt. She ignored the angry stares she received from other passengers as she shoved through them to get out. The damp air by the river bit into her exposed cheeks.

  Jessica gave her directions. “Keep your phone on. I’m using it to keep a teleport fix on you.”

  Fiona checked her shadow. The monster within was a black, liquid thickness. She hoped the local street-lighting was good. She hoped that whatever threat Sorcha represented, her monster could – and would – be able to fight it.

  Putney was quieter once she left the high street and moved deeper into the twists and turns of its residential area. Putney had been a favoured getaway spot for Londoners in Queen Elizabeth’s time, but the city had swallowed it long ago. The streets were lined with terraced and semi-detached houses, with white window frames set in bricks that all looked the same shade of brown in the poor light. The trees and hedges were bare of leaves and cars, polished and modern, stood by the gutters.

  On one corner she stepped aside for a shivering group in their early twenties, all antipodeans from their accents. They hurried towards the nearest pub, the boys drinking cans of Fosters beer. Further away, a couple beside a car were negotiatin
g a pram and a wriggling toddler into its interior. An upper window of one house had been opened so its occupant could lean out with a cigarette.

  What was Sorcha doing here?

  “That’s it,” Jessica said. “That the last time I had her.”

  Fiona stared down a long, straight street. It was the same as the ones she’d already walked. She felt a little hitch of panic as she wondered if she could find her way out. A glance down at her feet assured her that her shadow was with her, indistinct but big in the light of the widely spaced streetlights.

  “How did I give myself away?”

  Fiona was proud of herself. She didn’t scream. She raised her gaze to Sorcha, who stood on the pavement behind her. And then Fiona had to stop herself from stepping back.

  It wasn’t the intensity of Sorcha’s stare. That stare reminded her of the way Julian had pinned her and peeled her open in the pub, though Sorcha held back from doing the same. It was a stare she was not entirely surprised to see.

  But Sorcha’s face was drained of all humanity, like a corpse.

  “Did I fall out of character at the office?” Sorcha asked. Her arms hung at her sides as though she’d forgotten about them. “I can never tell.”

  “What did you do to Maleeha and Obasi?”

  “I borrowed their perceptions,” Sorcha said. “I was trying to make sure I appeared as a mortal human. Your people are frailer than I expected. A frustrating misjudgement.”

  As though she’d put too much sugar in her coffee. “What are you? What do you want?” Alice was missing. Mr Beak had withdrawn. She was alone with her shadow against whatever Sorcha turned out to be. Her shadow, though it usually protected her, had not always.

  The wind blew Sorcha’s hair across her face. She either didn’t notice or considered it beneath her to react. The headlights of a small silver car swept across them as it thrummed past. Fiona, her senses wide open, was sure the beams of the headlights frayed at the edges as they touched Sorcha.

  “I had thought to draw this out,” Sorcha said, still in that bloodless voice. “To lead you down the path in tiny steps, to test you as you went. But I find I am pleased that you have discovered me so quickly. It means I have made the correct choice.”

  “I have a very low tolerance for cryptic nonsense from human-looking monsters,” Fiona said. “You don’t want to get on my bad side.”

  She heard a chuckle from the back of her mind. Yes, you might fail to light a candle at her.

  Fiona mentally kicked the voice in the shins.

  “As you say,” Sorcha said. “Because you kill wizards.”

  Fiona sucked in a breath. “That was you? When we reached out to the stars? Who are you really? Why have you come here?”

  Sorcha tilted her head a wisp to the left, as though to peer around Fiona’s eyeballs. It was the first movement she’d made. “We can’t go on like this.” Her appearance changed.

  She was still Sorcha, with the same narrow face and pale eyebrows. She still wore the same coat and scarf, with the same fair hair escaping her cap one strand at a time.

  But her skin was covered in writing.

  “No,” Fiona whispered.

  The writing was formed of dots and dashes, horizontal and vertical. Tattooed onto her skin, it was small, so small and so tightly packed as to be barely visible for what it was in the weak light. It wasn’t just written across her face. It went down what she could see of Sorcha’s neck. Fiona knew that if she took off her gloves, the writing would be on the backs of her hands and spiral around her fingers.

  “You’re like Savraith,” Fiona said. “You’re one of the wizards of Teleoch.”

  “You’re better informed than I would have thought, considering your disadvantages.”

  I can hear your knees knocking together, smirked the voice in her mind.

  Fiona stiffened with anger. “And you’re a girl.”

  A human would have shrugged. Sorcha said, “The word that translates to ‘wizard’ in English is not gendered in my usual languages.”

  “So this is just revenge then? You’re not above petty old human revenge?” Fiona’s eyes narrowed. “And what disadvantages?”

  “Shall we walk?” Sorcha asked. Before Fiona could answer she bent in the middle and spoke to Fiona’s shadow. “I am not going to attack you.”

  Fiona tried to pull back. Savraith had said the same thing before he snatched her off her home street in Ealing and teleported her to Trafalgar Square. But Sorcha threaded her arm through Fiona’s somehow, as though Fiona had blinked and missed all the interim movements required to do so.

  “Let’s walk your city,” Sorcha said.

  The street in Putney was gone. With a great big lurch – like a train hitting a length of loose rail – they strolled through a restaurant. The room was long and narrow, with a metal roof that slanted upwards to windows that gave a view of the river. A dome of pale stone rose across the river, lit up, sitting amongst the buildings that surrounded it like a sinking moon. All around her, the guests at the tables ate and drank and conversed without noticing Fiona and her companion. The men wore tailored suits and the women wore costly gowns, some of them adorned by a great deal of sparkling jewellery, others with only a small gleam here and there.

  “I considered revenge,” Sorcha said. “We do take some of our humanity with us.”

  “Really? I can’t tell.”

  “But indulging those kinds of desires is rarely rewarding.”

  Another lurch – she remembered it from when Savraith had transported her to Trafalgar Square – and the restaurant was gone. Low constellations of the Christmas lights of Carnaby Street shone over their heads. The crowd was wrapped up against the fine mist of rain in the air, wandering from shop to brightly-lit shop like grazing cattle. The crowds parted around Fiona and Sorcha with unnatural smoothness.

  “I had to come here,” Sorcha said. “One of our number was pulled from his death-sleep, yanked across the dark gulf between worlds and did not return. We had to know if it was an attack.”

  She knew she was in danger. Sorcha had subdued the monster in her shadow – it almost never did what she told it to do – and could probably kill her in a hundred different ways with a single syllable. “I’m not actually responsible for that part.” An entire clan, from grandparents to overactive children, flowed around them without even coming in elbow range.

  “I know what happened to Savraith,” Sorcha said.

  She gave her arm an experimental tug. Sorcha’s grip was not tight, yet she couldn’t pull free. “You, um, weren’t close or anything, were you?”

  “No.”

  A jump, a blink. She rocked forward, would have fallen without Sorcha’s padlock grip. Carnaby Street was gone. They stood outside a phone shop, side by side, facing in through the glass front as though window shopping. Inside, between the mute, black-screened phones lined up in costly ranks on the walls, a young blonde woman with an air of restrained impatience held out a brochure to an older couple. She pointed and spoke and Fiona got the sense that whatever she was explaining to the couple, it was taking some repetition.

  “An old foe,” Sorcha said. “One you did not kill.”

  Fiona blinked. She saw it then. Kate. A fellow student of the Red Sisters. Her skin was sallow, as though she were ill. Her hair was lank and tangled. She hadn’t wondered what had become of Kate after the Red Sisters fell. The change in her was so striking she felt an unexpected surge of pity.

  “Well, no,” she said.

  “A ruler must be ruthless,” Sorcha said. “Those who oppose must be killed, as you killed Savraith.”

  Fiona found she didn’t have an answer.

  “You are intriguing,” Sorcha said. She sounded like she’d never been interested in anything, Fiona included. “Your different lives, one laid over the top of the other. The training you have received but cannot access. Overcoming your disadvantages presents an unusual challenge.”

  Savraith had been able to see her past selves
behind the pattern of false memories. She hadn’t held out much hope Sorcha would miss it too. “What do you want, Sorcha, or whatever your name is? Why are you toying with me?”

  “I am not.” Sorcha moved her head in a gesture small Fiona would have missed it if Sorcha wasn’t otherwise as still as architecture. “Well, not much.”

  The phone shop was gone. Fiona had to skip a step to get her feet under her. She and Sorcha walked into a tunnel, one large enough for cars and trucks to pass through. A sign up and to Fiona’s right read ‘Graffiti Tunnel’ and inside, in the damp chill, the walls of the tunnel were covered in graffiti.

  Electric words blazed in a riot of colours along the walls. Far down the tunnel she could see a figure in a mask standing back from the wall, spraycan in hand. As she watched, the figure stepped forward and waved the can in front of the wall in practised up and down motions.

  “A ruler must be willing to dispense justice,” Sorcha said.

  Fiona pulled her gaze away from a mural painted over a closed door. The figure that rose over the door had the body of a human woman, sitting in the lotus position. She had two heads, one a goat and the other what Fiona guessed was a lion. The two-headed woman floated over a green sea beneath a blue sky. Silver letters in an exaggerated style surrounded her like a nimbus. She couldn’t make out the words.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Fiona asked.

  For the first time, a glimmer of emotion showed on Sorcha’s features. But the emotion tugged at her like vertigo. It made her stomach bubble and turn.

  Sorcha stepped back, unlinking their arms and taking Fiona’s hand. Sorcha’s grip was barely more than a touch, but Fiona still couldn’t tear away.

  “Let us see what kind of justice you have in you,” Sorcha said.

  And then she stood on a street somewhere in central London and Sorcha was gone. She staggered as though the ground heaved beneath her like a ship on rough seas. When she steadied she searched around her, unnerved by Sorcha’s absence.

  She was free. But she didn’t think Sorcha was finished with her.

  While Sorcha had her, she had pushed herself into anger because it was better than being afraid. It was tempting to let it go, to unclench the core of herself, but there was no way to tell if Sorcha was waiting for her to do that very thing before she pounced.