Fresh Hell: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (The Ghosted Series Book 1)

by David Bussell

  I turned to Lords. ‘This woman, tell me about her.’

  ‘Hard to say, she was wearing sunglasses. The big movie star kind.’

  Sunglasses indoors? Now I really disliked her. ‘What else can you tell me about her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, the corners of his lips twitching, ‘women aren’t really my thing.’

  I once had the displeasure of eyeing some particularly illegal images on his computer, so I had a pretty good idea what Lords’ “thing” was, the dirty bastard. I pulled back my arm and went to give him a taste of my ring hand.

  ‘You’re going about this all wrong, Fletcher,’ he snapped.

  ‘How am I?’

  ‘If you want to find a killer you don’t go looking for them. You go looking for their next victim.’

  Damn it, he was right. I’d been going about this all wrong. The ID of the killer wasn’t important right now. Catching her before she killed the last magician was what mattered.

  I made for the door, but just as I was about to leave, Vic called after me.

  ‘Oh, Jake?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  A splinter of sunlight caught his bloody grin. ‘You ever want some work, son, you just let me know. It’ll be just like the good old days.’

  18

  It was the dawn of day six of my investigation. I needed to track down the killer’s next victim before she popped his clogs, and I had a pretty good idea where I should start. The man was a magician after all, and if it’s a magician you’re after, what better place to kick off than the Magic Circle?

  If this were a movie I’d be taking a pause right about now. Grabbing a quick breather before the climactic showdown and ruminating on what I’d learned so far. If I only had that luxury. I had an hour at most before Maddox’s body rejected me, so the best I could do was put on my big boy pants and get cracking.

  I was about to get going when I heard a ringing noise and realised it was coming from the inside pocket of Maddox’s coat. I reached in and fished out a digital police radio, which was halfway between a walkie-talkie and your granddad’s mobile. According to the read-out it was DCI Stronge on the other end. I prevaricated for a moment, then decided to take the call.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, instantly wondering if that was the appropriate greeting.

  ‘Where are you?’ came the terse reply.

  ‘Just… um, grabbing a bite.’

  ‘Well, get yourself back to the nick. Our coma witness woke up and she’s given a description of the suspect.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Are you okay, Maddox?’ asked Stronge. ‘You sound weird.’

  I coughed and deepened my voice, as if that was going to help. ‘I’m fine. What’s she saying then? The witness.’

  ‘She’s saying our suspect’s a woman for starters.’

  ‘No way,’ I replied, acting as shocked as my limited acting skills would allow.

  ‘A real looker she reckons. Model quality. Not what I was expecting at all. Sounds more like a fit for our first vic than the Jack the Ripper I had in mind.’

  This came as no surprise to me of course, not since I’d learned that the demon was running amok in Ingrid Vallens’ skin.

  ‘Bizarre,’ I replied.

  ‘Bizarre?’ Stronge repeated, but with an inflection that told me she was growing increasingly suspicious of my Maddox impersonation.

  I changed the subject. ‘How’s Mark doing? Jake I mean… You know, Nostra-bleedin’-damus. The man I really, really hate. The bastard.’

  ‘Fast asleep in his cell. And you know what they say about the prisoner that sleeps soundly?’

  ‘Guilty as fuck,’ I sighed.

  Great. On top of bringing a rogue magician to justice and sending her demon back to hell, I also had to find some way to clear Mark’s name. The bloke’s no angel—he’s a bully who kicks his dog about and takes a pretty dim view on immigrants—but I couldn’t let the tosser spend the rest of his life behind bars because of me.

  ‘I have to go,’ I told Stronge. ‘Um… over and out...’

  ‘What is going on with y—?’

  —I cut off the call before her pitch could get any higher.

  ***

  Being as I was hitchhiking in Maddox’s body, I wasn’t able to do my Mr. Benn trick and zap inside the Order’s HQ. Instead, I had to go the old-fashioned way, catching the Tube to Euston, hoofing it to the Magic Circle on foot, and bypassing the magical cage surrounding the place with a spot of the old hocus pocus.

  I made it into the building’s ground floor lobby and took stock of my inventory. Being as I’d left my gun in my other trousers—so to speak—I had to work with what I had. Turned out what I had amounted to an extendable baton and some harsh words. Maddox must have checked his Taser in back at the station before I took hold of him. An arsehole to the end.

  A noise drifted under the crack of a door marked STAFF ONLY. I stepped close and pressed my ear to the door. I heard shuffling sounds beyond, accompanied by some kind of incantation. I went after the noise, pushing the door open and creeping softly down a corridor painted with murals of stage illusionists from days gone by. Rounding a corner, I found a man with a disfigured mouth stood by a door, frantically reciting the words to an unlocking spell.

  Cleft Lip.

  The last living magician of the Order of the Eternal Flame, and I’d caught up with him before the killer crossed him off her shopping list. At least I’d managed to save one of them. Hoo-bloody-ray.

  I held out a hand. ‘You’ve gotta come with me, mate. Right now.’

  The magician ignored me and continued to chant, stuck inside of his spell.

  ‘Pack it in, will you? We’ve got to get moving, sharpish!’

  He placed his palm on the door and it began to glow. He wasn’t leaving until he had that thing open. What could he be after that was so important he was ready to die for it?

  I went to grab him by the elbow and yank him upstairs when he suddenly spasmed. A jet of blood blasted out of his mouth like an accident with a beetroot smoothie. After that came a hand, exploding through his chest and clutching a pulsating, human heart.

  The hand retracted and the magician’s body flopped to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut.

  Stood there in the gloom, a still-beating heart in its hand, was the demon, all dressed up in Ingrid Vallens’ skin. The flesh hung off it now, loose and putrefying, a mockery of its former beauty. And it stank. Stank like a forgotten WWII death camp discovered in the mid-fifties.

  The soul feaster dipped a pair of Prada shades, revealing twin hollows underneath that flared sulphur orange.

  ‘Oh, look,’ it growled, ‘a witness…’

  The demon padded towards me with murderous intent. Its rotting skin suit was scorched from its encounter with the wand-wielding Mustachio; feathered with a pattern of lesions that looked almost tree-like. It had a bullet hole in its left shoulder too—in one side and out the other—the shot I’d dealt it back at the fetish club.

  The soul feaster grinned and sunk its teeth into the magician’s heart, biting down on it like a candy apple. The demon’s eyes rolled back in its skull as it swallowed and hoovered down the elder’s eternal soul. It bowed its head, letting Ingrid’s blonde hair cascade down its face like a golden waterfall. When it looked up again I saw its stolen features had tightened and become symmetrical once more. The demon’s second skin flushed pink, its wounds stitching together until they were gone completely. It removed its sunglasses to reveal a pair of perfect, husky-blue eyes.

  There was Ingrid, just as she was the day I’d met her, only even more beautiful. Rejuvenated and in the prime of her life.

  The demon drew its lips back in a snarl and crushed the sunglasses underfoot.

  What had I blundered into this time? I’d busted in, all ready to do battle with the forces of darkness, but stood before the enemy I realised just how stupid I’d been. Not only could the soul feaster do me a mischief, it could take chu
nks out of Maddox too, and no matter how big of a tool he was, he didn’t deserve to end up on a demon’s dessert tray.

  I decided to do a possibly very stupid thing, I decided to double-down and go on the offensive. ‘So, come on then,’ I yelled. ‘Who’s behind the mystery door? Who’s pulling your strings?’

  The demon arranged Ingrid’s perfect, Cupid’s bow lips into a glowing smile. It wasn’t just an approximation though, this was Ingrid’s own smile, as beautiful and beguiling as it was on the bank of Regent’s Canal.

  ‘Hello, Jake. How lovely to see you again.’

  That smile. That voice. And that’s when it hit me. I took a wavering step back as the truth of the situation made my stomach drop. This wasn’t just some demon running around all snug in Ingrid Vallens’ torn-off skin.

  No, Ingrid was actually in there.

  Ingrid’s ghost.

  The victim was the villain.

  19

  Everything I knew about Ingrid Vallens had turned into smoke, and I was choking on it.

  ‘Surprised?’ she said, blood dripping down her chin. ‘Well of course you are. I was your damsel in distress and you were my knight in shining armour. Just a dumb dead girl, waiting on a man to show her the light.’

  ‘That’s not true…’ I protested.

  ‘Yes it is, Jake. You don’t know me, but I certainly know you. All my life I’ve had to deal with your type. Men who see me as a thing. A piece of meat on their casting couch. Well, eventually I got tired of playing the victim. Tired of photo shoots that turned pornographic. Tired of fat arseholes telling me size zero was too heavy – pushing drugs on me to keep my weight in check.’

  My mind was racing. How? How could Ingrid Vallens be the soul feaster? ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you’ve been dicked around by men, I get it. That doesn’t explain how we got here though.’

  ‘I got here through hard work,’ she said, her jaw muscles twitching. ‘I had to fight for my spot on the pentacle. Do you think this old boys’ club wanted a catwalk model on their members list?’

  I’d spotted a link between the elders already: a theology professor, a plastic surgeon, an HIV patient—the kind of people who’d be pretty keen to know the secret of everlasting youth—but only now was I seeing how obviously a former model slotted in there.

  I still didn’t get it though. How could Ingrid be a murder victim, the fifth elder, and a demon too? That was a lot of hats to wear.

  Blood dripped from her chin onto the generous upper slopes of her breasts and down the runnel of her cleavage. ‘Even when they accepted my membership,’ she said, ‘I was a second class citizen to them. I’d studied magic for years, passed every test they threw at me, and still they treated me like a bimbo. I had ideas, Jake. Real ideas, to achieve what the Order was created for: to attain immortality! She lashed out and punched a fist through the corridor’s plasterboard wall. ‘But they wouldn’t listen!’

  ‘Easy, tiger,’ I said. ‘Don’t give yourself a nosebleed.’

  ‘You sound like the rest of them,’ she spat. ‘Frightened. Scared of the unknown. For my colleagues, the quest for eternal life had become academic. But they were men. This world lets men grow old. Not me. I was a woman, my looks fading, my best years behind me. I was ready to do whatever it took to get my youth back, and I wasn’t about to wait for permission.’

  Okay, I got the motivation, but I still wasn’t seeing the whole picture.

  ‘I don’t understand. You died. I saw your ghost.’

  In a flash, she leapt forward and seized my head between her hands, clamping down on me like a vice.

  A riot of images washed through my brain.

  I saw Ingrid, in the warehouse by the canal, stood before a chalk pentacle.

  I saw a ritual, a summoning, a demon drawn from the Nether.

  I saw a mistake. A flaw in Ingrid’s ward. The demon crossing her protective barrier.

  I saw the demon punishing Ingrid for her impertinence. Claiming its blood sacrifice.

  I saw it drawing a fingernail across Ingrid’s flesh. Stripping her of her perfect skin.

  I saw Ingrid escaping. Fleeing before the demon could feast on her soul.

  I saw her red handprint on a boat’s porthole.

  Saw her running until she could run no more.

  Saw her topple from the bank of the canal and into its murky waters.

  The images raced away from me, sucked from my head like water down a plug hole. I staggered and butted a shoulder against the nearest wall, clammy and hyperventilating. I’d had it all wrong. The rogue magician and the demon weren’t colluding. They were one and the same. ‘How though? How did you get inside a demon?’

  She offered a high, brittle laugh. ‘With your help.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  But she wasn’t taking bollocks for an answer. ‘You’ve been helping me since the second you showed up. Ever since I first fluttered my eyelashes at you.’

  ‘Except I haven’t done a thing for you. I’ve been too busy blundering all over Camden chasing the bodies you left behind.’

  ‘Mostly, yes, but not entirely. My first victim was all thanks to you.’

  ‘The body at Highgate?’

  ‘That’s right. You’re the one who gave me the idea to lay some bait.’

  She grabbed me by the head again and I felt another deluge of pictures.

  I saw the ghost of Ingrid Vallens at the cemetery.

  I saw the elder with the weak chin—Glass Jaw—furtively picking his way through the tombstones.

  I saw the two of them talking. Saw the elder tell Vallens that she’d deserved her fate.

  I saw the knife in Vallens’ hand. Saw it lash out and cut the elder from balls to sternum.

  I saw the look on his face as he watched his innards slop onto the dusty ground.

  The kaleidoscope calmed and my thoughts became my own as she released her grip on my skull. I shook my head, trying to shake the images away, but they were seared into my psyche like a cattle brand.

  Now I knew. While I was busy at The Beehive, laying bait for the mysterious rogue magician, she’d taken inspiration from me and laid a trap of her own.

  ‘You’re good,’ I told her. ‘It took me years to handle objects like you did that knife.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, performing a smug little curtsy.

  I managed to put together the rest. Vallens must have been lying in wait at the cemetery when the demon came sniffing around, eager to feed, hungry for a two course meal of heart and soul. When the off-brand Beelzebub went for the bait and tripped Vallens’ weakening magic, she’d struck out, capitalising on the soul feaster’s vulnerability and making its body her own. For once it hadn’t been the demon that possessed the human. This time the person was on the inside.

  That was certainly a turn-up for the books. I had no idea a reversal of that sort was even possible. The ghost of a dead magician possessing a demon dressed in the magician's original skin? We had a real Russian nesting doll situation going on here.

  ‘So, that wasn’t the demon eating the heart out of the old man’s chest,’ I said, piecing the last of together, ‘that was you inside the demon.’

  ‘Got it in one,’ she replied. ‘I have to feed to stay in control of the soul feaster, and since those daft old codgers had already made my shit list, I thought why not kill two birds with one stone?’

  I laughed. What else could I do, given the circumstances? ‘You must be chuffed to bits,’ I told her. ‘You got your looks back and immortality to boot, and all it cost was four dead men.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s not the way I planned it, but it’ll do. C’est la vie, or Telle est la vie éternelle if you want to get technical about it.’

  She really had played me for a mug. I’d only taken the Vallens gig for the karma, but the whole time I thought I’d been wiping red from my account, I’d actually been helping a psychopath get comfy inside a demon. Something told me I wouldn’t be earning any Brownie points for that little stun
t.

  ‘So, where do we go from here?’ I asked. ‘I don’t suppose you want to be a good sport and follow me to the cop shop, do you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ she said, her face cut with a devil’s smirk. ‘See, I need one more soul to bond fully with my new body... and yours looks absolutely delectable.’

  I could almost have taken it for a compliment if it wasn’t for the fact she was eying me up like a full English breakfast.

  A forked black tongue emerged from her mouth and whisked around her lips.

  20

  Vallens came at me fast, but I wasn’t defenceless. Yes, she could hurt me, but then I could always hurt her back… or at least, my host could. DI Maddox might not be too sharp up top, but he had a club on him and a meaty set of arms to swing it with.

  I whipped out the extendable baton, grabbed it in both hands and battered Vallens in the neck as hard as I could muster.

  Crunch.

  The weapon broke in half like a piece of dry kindling.

  The impact sent a shock coursing through my arm and into my shoulder, where it exploded like dynamite. I might as well have been hitting a marble statue for all the damage I did. It was as though Vallens’ skin was draped over a tank.

  I didn’t stand a chance against her toe-to-toe, so I made a tactical withdrawal that definitely wasn’t a desperate, cowardly scramble.

  I pushed through the STAFF ONLY door to the lobby and surveyed the area in search of something to defend myself with. Unfortunately, the best I could find was an old umbrella hanging in the lost and found section of the cloak room.

  A thought struck, a memory from the last time I’d paid this place a visit.

  I remembered the elders talking about their previous skirmish with a soul feaster. Mustachio had sent it back to the Nether that time, and he’d done it using something called the seraphim sword, which I suspected, or really, really hoped, the Order kept in-house. The locked door the last magician had just died trying to open—that must be where they kept it—and now I was cut off from the bastard thing. Not that it mattered. The vault was sealed tight with magic, and by the time I was done cracking that, Vallens would have sucked down my soul like a pup on a tit.