‘Detective Inspector Maddox,’ he said in the sleazy, phlegmy voice of a Carry On milkman. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
Vic Lords looked like a pile of spoiled luncheon meat with a layer of black mould on top: pallid skin and fish lips topped off with a head of greasy, coal-coloured hair and matching mutton chops. He sat sunk into a duct-taped, vinyl chair under a ceiling turned brown by decades of nicotine. His surroundings were the kind you didn’t want to touch, even with the soles of your shoes. I got the feeling that if someone were to shine a forensics blacklight about the place it would flare up like the Milky Way.
‘Vic,’ I said, and watched his lip curl. No one called Vic Lords “Vic”. I expect his own mother called him “Mr Lords”.
‘What do you want?’ he asked, stubbing out a cigarette.
‘I need you to answer some questions,’ I told him, pacing around his desk like a gestapo officer, arms behind my back.
Vic refused to be intimidated. ‘Anything I can do to assist your enquiries, Officer?’ he asked, with the oily smarm of a practiced toastmaster.
I thought it best I establish my intentions, so I grabbed a fistful of hair from the nape of his neck and ploughed his face into his desk. He landed hard enough to loosen a few letters on his keyboard, not to mention a couple of teeth.
‘Tell me what you know about Ingrid Vallens!’ I demanded.
Vic’s heavy was on the scene in seconds, crashing through the door, baseball bat in hand. He charged across the room and wound it up, ready to cave my head in, but Lords put up a hand.
‘Stop,’ he told him, wiping a dribble of claret from his chin. ‘No need to be alarmed, Kojo. Me and the officer were just having a little conversation, that’s all.’
Kojo lowered his weapon and looked me up and down. ‘As long as you’re sure,’ he said.
The bouncer took his leave and headed back downstairs to his post.
Vic grinned with bloody teeth. ‘It’s good to see you again, Jake.’
I’ll admit it, that shook me. I knew Lords was tapped into the Uncanny but I hadn’t realised he could see me inside of my meat suit.
‘An exorcist turned ghost, eh?’ he went on. ‘If I were comedian I’d be feeling some real pressure to make a joke right now.’
I composed myself and wrested control of the situation. ‘If you know what I am, then you know what I can do to you.’
I allowed my ghost hand to leave Maddox’s body and rested my fingertips on Vic’s chest. He flinched at the chill and held up his hands in surrender.
‘No need to get nasty, Fletcher, I’m happy to talk.’ He tutted. ‘You know, I liked you much more when you were alive.’
I ignored him. ‘You own a property by the canal. A warehouse—’
‘Yes, an officer already questioned me about it – the one you’re squatting in right now as a matter of fact.’
‘And?’
‘And I’m going to tell you what I told him: I don’t know anything about what happened there. Not a single thing.’
‘You better not be lying to me, Vic.’
He flinched as I raised my hand, but I wasn’t about to strike him. I was doing it to get a read from the magic mood ring Jazz Hands had given me. I put the stone to him, and sure enough, it turned red. The man was talking out of his arse.
Putting my hand between his flabby teats, I reached inside his chest and closed my fingers about the black lump of coal he called a heart. He gasped like he’d fallen through an iced-over lake and seized up stock-still, his eyes the size of dinner plates.
‘I loaned it out,’ he hissed, his lips moving like he was trying to throw his voice. ‘Gave them a key.’
‘Gave who a key?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘Give me name!’
‘I don’t bleedin’ have one!’
My voodoo truth detector turned blue this time. He was on the level.
I plucked my ghost hand from Vic’s chest and he let out a great sigh of relief. He sunk back into his chair, panting like he’d crossed the finish line of a marathon.
‘This guy, the one that rented the key, what did he look like?’
‘Not a guy. A girl.’
True again. How about that? This whole time I’d been on the tail of an elusive, rogue magician, I’d assumed I was chasing a man, but no, apparently there was a woman under that balaclava. A woman stripping Ingrid Vallens of her skin. A woman working in league with a demon.
So, the Order of the Eternal flame had accepted a female member, had they? Pretty progressive for an old boys’ club.
I turned to Lords. ‘The 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 the killer. 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 overcoat. I reached in and fished out a digital police radio, a communication device that 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. She was expecting her partner of course, and had no idea I was the one picking up the phone.
‘Just… um, grabbing a bite,’ I told her.
‘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?’ she asked. ‘You sound weird.’
I coughed and deepened my voice, as if that was going to help. ‘I’m fine, just a bit of a cold. 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 closer 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, tossed the sunglasses and crushed them 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 chunks 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 at the demon. ‘Who’s behind the mystery door? Who’s pulling your strings?’
The soul feaster 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 backwards as the truth of the situation made my stomach drop. This wasn’t just some demon running around 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 to smoke, and I was choking on it.
‘Surprised?’ she said, blood dripping down her chin. ‘Of course you are. You were my knight in shining armour and I was your damsel in distress. Just a dumb dead girl, waiting on a man to show her to 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 commodity. A piece of meat on their casting couch. Well, I got tired of playing the victim, Jake. Tired of photo shoots that turned into porno shoots. Tired of fat arseholes telling me that size zero was too heavy and 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 rest of 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 an awful 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 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 just like the rest of them,’ she spat. ‘Frightened. Scared of the unknown. For the rest of the elders the quest for eternal life had become academic. But they were men. This world lets men grow old. Not so for me. I was a woman, my looks fading, my best years b
ehind 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 still wasn’t seeing how Ingrid wound up inside a demon.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘You died. I saw your ghost.’
In a flash, she leapt forward and seized my head between her hands, clamping down on my skull 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 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, Jake. Ever since I first fluttered my eyelashes at you.’
‘Except I haven’t done a thing for you. I’ve been too busy for that. 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.’
Uncanny Kingdom: An Eleven Book Urban Fantasy Collection (Uncanny Kingdom Omnibus 1) Page 51
