Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1)

by David Bussell

  Naturally, Jazz Hands had tried to talk me out of it, but I’d charmed her into helping me – by which I mean I’d begged her for close to forty minutes.

  I know a thing or two about magic, but Jazz Hands? Well, she may not have written the book on it exactly, but she sure owns a fuck of a lot of them.

  She took a scraping of the sample, verified that it was indeed demon blood—soul feaster blood to be exact—and diluted it with a potion that practically hummed with magical energy. After that, she took the stirred-together solution and smeared a dollop of it on the centre of my chest.

  ‘Just follow the pull,’ she’d told me.

  The dowsing effect wouldn’t last long I was told, so the chances of it working were slim, but I was feeling lucky. I’d find that demon in no time, I was sure of it.

  I tromped around Camden for something like three hours.

  I wandered this way and that, up main roads and side streets, hopping from location to location, and each of them proved a bust. Occasionally, I had a feeling like my chest was tingling and the spell was working, shepherding me in a certain direction, only for the sensation to peter out and disappear.

  I was about ready to call it a night and go back to my boxed sets when my chest suddenly broke out in tingles, like a family of ants was hang a party between my nipples.

  And that’s when I heard them. Screams.

  Lots of them.

  The noise came from up ahead, a little further down the high street and tucked down a side alley. What was it? Cries for help or just a bunch of drunks exercising their lungs? Had I finally found what I was looking for? I wouldn’t know unless I checked it out, so I sprinted down the road and took the corner.

  Terrified ravers were pouring out of an all-night fetish club called F*I*S*T. They were scared out of their wits, wailing like banshees, their faces chiselled with dread as they piled onto the pavement.

  I worked against the tide, passing through the screaming clubbers as I forced my way into the building and past the empty ticket office. I phased through bodies dressed in studded leather, in rubber tuxedos, in gas masks, and, in the case of one particular reveller, a crown made of foot-long dildos.

  Thrash metal blared from downstairs, loud as gunfire, jangling my senses like marbles in a tin can. I followed the noise-abatement-order-defying racket to the basement, bounding down the steps three at a time. The stairs bottomed out in the club’s main room, and there, in the middle of the dance floor and lit by the frantic pulse of a strobe light, I found a dead body.

  But that wasn’t all I found.

  A mirror ball shaped like a human skull swarmed the grisly scene with pinpricks of white light. Hunched over the dead body was a figure, head bowed and feasting noisily on the corpse’s heart.

  I’d found the fucker.

  Stood nearby, her mouth agape, was a lone lubber dressed like Tank Girl—all pink neon dreads and bovver boots—a peculiar specimen known as a cybergoth that you only find within a hundred square yards of Camden. She was frozen to the spot, knees locked with fear. ‘W-what are you?’ she squeaked, not at me—I was invisible to her eyes—but at the creature on the dance floor emptying out a dead man’s chest cavity.

  It was a fair question. I circled around the DJ booth to get a better look at the thing, moving silent and unseen. It was hard to make the demon out under the UV lamps and dry ice, but I soon found the right angle.

  The demon wasn’t what I expected at all. The soul feaster looked nothing like the woodcut in Jazz Hands’ bestiary; all sinewy limbs and smouldering eyes and razor blade claws. It looked like a woman. A human woman with bad table manners and a real thing for offal.

  She lifted her head and her blood-matted blonde hair parted to reveal a face.

  It was a face I recognised. A face that made the room tilt and threaten to drop me to the floor.

  The demon was Ingrid.

  Ingrid Vallens.

  But that couldn’t be.

  Ingrid was dead.

  Wandering Camden’s waterways as a ghost.

  No way it could be...

  …and then it clicked.

  This wasn’t Ingrid. This was Ingrid’s skin—the same skin that had been peeled from her body—now worn by the soul feaster. It hung from the demon’s bones like a badly-fitted suit, baggy and uneven. She looked beautiful still, but her features were like a death mask, lifeless and limp. The demon definitely passed for human though, which would explain how it had been able to walk the streets without drawing attention. I’d assumed it was using some kind of concealment magic, but this was a far more elegant solution. Gross, but elegant.

  The demon sniffed the air and its hollow eyes darted my way and flared orange.

  The cat was out of the bag.

  I went inside my jacket and pulled out my gun.

  Tank Girl shrieked, startled by the sight of a pearl-handled revolver materialising from thin air. It was invisible inside of my ghost clothes, but out of my pocket it was there to see, plain as day.

  The demon saw the gun too and froze, caught in the open, uncertain of what to do next.

  I didn’t know what kind of damage a six-shooter was going to do a soul feaster—I might as well have been waving a fertility crystal at it for all I knew—but from the way it stalled, the demon was just as clueless as I was.

  ‘Stay there,’ I told it, cocking the gun’s hammer.

  Tank Girl screamed at the sound of my disembodied voice. Poor love. She really was having one of those days.

  The soul feaster twitched.

  ‘I said stay there!’

  But the demon was having none of it. Quick as a flash, it darted behind a pillar then around the other side to grab the cybergoth. She screamed as the demon brought its arm around her throat, turning her into a human shield.

  ‘Please,’ she begged, ‘whoever you are—whatever you are—don’t shoot!’

  I adjusted my aim but couldn’t find a clear target. No way I could risk taking a shot without slotting Tank Girl. Besides, what do I know about firing a gun? I’m no marksman – the only firefights I’ve ever been involved in went down on Xbox Live.

  The three of us stood there like human statues.

  It was a standoff.

  Or at least it was a standoff until the demon lifted Tank Girl off her feet and tossed her at me, sending her soaring across the dance floor like she’d been fired from a cannon. She passed through me but collided with my gun, taking it with her. The revolver span from my grip and went clattering across the floor, lost beneath the dry ice.

  I scrabbled around under the fog, desperate to find the one weapon I had to defend myself with, when suddenly I saw it.

  I snatched it up and levelled the thing—

  But the demon was gone.

  I fouled the air with some choice profanities.

  No one left but me and Tank Girl, out cold on the ground.

  I scanned the room. The demon was fast, but it couldn’t have gotten too far. I went looking for a trail and found a path leading through the dry ice, coalescing now, but distinct enough to show me the way the demon had fled.

  I followed the path to the bar and found smashed pint glasses where the demon must have vaulted it. Sliding through to the other side, I saw an open trapdoor and a set of steps leading to the beer cellar. I leapt through the hatch, landed like a feather—easy enough when you’re a phantom—and flashed my gun to every corner of the room.

  I caught a blur of movement and popped off three rounds.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  BANG.

  The third one did the business.

  The soul feaster squealed like a stuck pig.

  I’d winged it.

  I lined the bastard up in my sights and squeezed the trigger again—

  But the demon was quick.

  And desperate.

  With no way to get past me, it hurtled pell-mell into a cellar wall.

  CRUNCH.

  It landed hard. Hard enough to b
ust through to the other side and leave me lost in a cloud of brick dust. By the time it had cleared, the demon was gone. All that was left was a trickle of black blood leading through a crumbling hole in the cellar wall.

  I stuck my head through the opening and peered into the inky gloom. The demon had punched through to the city’s old, Victorian sewer system. No way I was chasing it through there. The sewers were home to all manner of Uncanny – the kind that only walk the streets by cover of night. Creepers, lurkers, lurchers, not to mention fey folk. And I don’t mean the Tinkerbell kind of fairies that frolic at the bottom of your garden; these are spiteful, evil little bastards. Vicious bottom-feeders who lay eggs in your stomach that hatch like a pound of Semtex.

  I pocketed my gun and headed back upstairs. Tank Girl was starting to come around, woozy still from being ragdolled across the room. It didn’t seem right to leave her head full of all the stuff she’d seen, so I stepped inside her and gave that blob of grey meat a good old scrub. I don’t like to possess strangers if I can help it—least of all women—but it was that or a lifetime of nightmares for the lass.

  After I was done scouring, I gave the girl back her body, along with a big hole where some bad memories used to go. Far as she knew, she’d had one too many snakebites and nodded off. She might wonder why she was the only one left in the club when she came to, but I doubted it would occur to her until she woke up the next day.

  With that taken care of, I went to the mutilated corpse spread-eagled on the dance floor. The dead body used to belong to a man. He looked to be in his mid-forties, but that was just a guess. Ordinarily, I’d have confirmed the deets with his ghost, but once again, the demon had snacked on his soul.

  The deceased was dressed in a latex catsuit, complete with a tasteful peephole for his unmentionables. Much like the last body, the rib cage was torn open and the heart taken out, except by the looks of things, this torso had been pried apart by the demon’s bare hands.

  It seemed the demon had decided to strike out on its own this time, without its summoner in tow. What was that all about anyway? I couldn’t make sense of it. A demon and a magician in cahoots? It made no sense. What was the summoner getting out of this? And where the hell was he now?

  I took a closer look at the victim, trying to get an ID. Brown hair, blue eyes, a cleft chin...

  Huh.

  One of the elders at the Magic Circle had a cleft chin. One of the Eternal Flame guys.

  And then the obvious fell into place.

  He was a member of the Order. Chin Dimple! The body at the cemetery, the one with the weak chin; that must have been Glass Jaw. Why was I only figuring this out now? I was losing my touch. Bad detecting, Jake. Bad.

  It looked as though Chin Dimple and Glass Jaw were the victims of a vendetta. The rogue magician must have been the empty spot on that pentacle they were all stood on.

  I had no idea how he was doing it, but the tricky swine had figured out a way to talk his pet demon into bumping off his former colleagues.

  Chin Dimple must have known what was going on though, surely? That someone had cored one of his buddies and left them laid out in a graveyard? It was on the front page of the Metro for crying out loud, and what does this genius do? Squeezes into a latex catsuit and heads off to a fetish club to air out his privates. I mean, come on, man. Priorities.

  So, who was this guy laid out at my feet? I firmed up my ghost hands and patted him down; no easy task when the act of turning a door handle can leave me shaking like a washing machine on spin cycle. Still, I soldiered on, and after a little while I found a pocket sewn into the upper leg of the dead guy’s latex outfit. Horny but practical – a winning combination.

  Inside the pocket was a leather wallet, which I plucked out with a squeak and rifled for clues. His driver’s license had his name as Timothy Martin Jones, D.O.B February 4th, 1969. Other than that, he had forty quid in cash, an expired rail ticket and a creased-up library card. Nothing much of interest there.

  I was about to return the wallet to its pocket when I noticed a zip on the side. I opened it up to find a condom and a half-empty blister pack of pills. I held the medicine up to the light to check the brand.

  Ziagen.

  I knew that name. A flatmate of mine at university used to take the stuff. Called them “Nukes.” Used them to treat his HIV.

  Guess that explained why Chin Dimple was living each day like his last.

  Too bad for him that this was the one.

  14

  By the time I left the club, the sun was coming up and colouring in a new day. The police would find the body I’d left at the club soon enough, in the meantime I’d check in on Ingrid and let her know how things were progressing. I made a mental note to keep the stuff about a demon running around in her skin to myself. That just struck me as an overshare.

  When I got to the canal, there was no sign of her though. I walked the towpath from Camden Lock to St. Pancras, checked under every bridge, inside every narrowboat, but Ingrid was gone.

  Where the hell was she?

  Had she drifted away and turned feral? Was she out there somewhere, haunting the streets, springing from alleyways and frightening the sensitive? Or had she gone full Bloody Mary, materialising from mirrors and scratching people’s eyes out?

  I thought about Ingrid’s glowing smile. About how much I missed it already.

  Then another theory occurred. What if the magician had gotten to her? What if he’d been down here, tying up loose ends while I was busy having it out with his demon at the club? Did he rub her out? Did he obliterate her, like an exorcist cleansing a haunted house? Just like I used to do.

  I should have been here. Should have protected her. I was so busy trying to scrub that red ink from my account that I lost sight of what mattered. I was thinking about myself, not Ingrid. About getting square with the Big Man. Typical me. Selfish to the end. Till after the end even.

  It was all starting to feel like a lost cause, but then I had a thought. If Ingrid really had been obliterated, where was God’s stooge? Why wasn’t he here with a shepherd’s crook, ready to yank me off stage and drag me in front of my maker?

  I decided to keep my worst fears in check until I knew what had happened for sure. So long as there was a chance that Ingrid was still out there, I was going to fight for her.

  I went to Frosty for the word on the street.

  He occupied his usual spot, the patch of pavement under a Sainsbury’s cash point, a stone’s throw from Mornington Crescent Station.

  ‘I need your help, Frost.’

  He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. ‘My fee?’

  I didn’t have time for his bloody fee. It was day five of my investigation and the hourglass was almost empty. ‘I don’t have any booze for you, mate. Not right now.’

  ‘Then you’re shit out of luck, son.’

  ‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Sort me out this once and I’ll have three cans for you next time. Scratch that, I’ll have a whole bloody six pack. A crate if you want!’

  His lips smacked like waves lapping against a rock. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’ Again, not really a promise you could take to the bank, that one, but it seemed to convince Frosty.

  ‘Alright then,’ he said, ‘what do you need to know?’

  ‘Ingrid Vallens. Where is she?’

  ‘Ingrid Vallens the underwear model?’ he asked, arching a frostbitten eyebrow. ‘What are you up to, you mucky old bastard?’

  ‘I don’t have time to piss about, Frosty. She’s dead and I need to find her. Can you tell me where she is or not?’

  He flared his nostrils. ‘You owe me one, Fletcher. Or six to be exact.’

  He closed his eyes and did whatever it was he did. When he opened them again, his face was crossed with confusion. ‘That’s weird, I can’t get a fix on her. I know I should be able to. It’s like I can sort of smell where she should be, but I can’t get to her. Like something’s…’

&nbs
p; ‘Blocking you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I filled a speech balloon with some swears. The rogue magician had figured out a way to cover his tracks. Of course he bloody had.

  ‘What have you gotten yourself mixed up in this time?’ Frosty asked.

  ‘The Order I told you about. One of them’s gone AWOL and started bumping people off.’

  ‘And you think he’s hiding his footprints?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  He made a, “We’ll see about that,” face and scrunched his eyes closed to seek out the errant magician.

  A minute passed. Any other day, Frosty would have come back with a hit in about the time it took a roulette wheel to stop spinning, but he was struggling with this one. I watched his eyeballs darting about under their lids. His face screwed up and an axe-wound crease furrowed his forehead. Finally, his eyes flicked open.

  ‘I don’t see him. It’s like someone went through a box of photos and cut the heads out of all of them. The bloke’s a mystery wrapped in an enigma—’

  ‘Dropped in a bucket of dog shit. Yeah, I know.’

  I firmed up my foot and booted an empty can of Fanta across the street, surprising a couple of passing tourists.

  Another dead end.

  ‘Oh…’ A smile cracked the crust of ice on Frosty’s face. ‘Your magician… I did manage to get one thing on ‘em.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, in a pitch that came out just a bit too high.

  Frosty showed me two rows of rotten teeth. ‘I can’t give you a name, I can’t give you a face, but I can give you one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A place.’

  15

  I didn’t have time to round up the authorities and take them with me. Three people were dead already, and I wasn’t hanging around to let another one croak. Besides, if I could just find the magician, I was convinced I could get the whereabouts of Ingrid from him, even if I had to beat them out of him with my bare fists. Or Mark’s bare fists anyway.