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

by David Bussell

  Eva slapped her forehead with the heel of her hand and staggered back, which I’d never seen anyone in real life actually do before.

  ‘Of course! Don’t you see?’

  ‘I see a lot these days but understand very little.’

  ‘The cats, you wretched, foul, puke! The cats!’

  ‘The cats?’

  Eva stepped forward, grabbing me by the collar and pulling me toward her wildly smiling face. ‘The cats know, idiot! The cats always know!’

  Eva shoved me aside and bolted for the door.

  ‘The cats always know what? Eva?’

  Apparently, this day wasn’t going to be any less insane than the one that had gone before it, so I grabbed my coat and ran off in pursuit.

  26

  As we sped towards Oldstone in the Uncanny Wagon, I peered at Eva in the rearview mirror as she stretched out across the back seats, eyes closed.

  ‘You know, you could sit up front like a normal person.’

  Eva gave me the finger.

  I gave my phone a quick glance; no reply to my Hey from Chloe. Damn. I was really in the poop there. Made a real fool of myself. Well, a fool and a loon of myself.

  Shit.

  ‘Okay, let’s say I’m a witch.’

  ‘I thought you went with warlock, Mr Look-at-me-I-have-a-penis.’

  ‘For the record, I have never referred to myself that way.’

  Eva snorted. Then burped. Delightful.

  ‘You’re magic,’ I said. ‘You’re very magic. But you said you’re not a witch, so what are you? Besides violent, terrifying, and gaseous?’

  ‘I already told you. I’m Eva Familiar.’

  ‘That doesn’t… oh…’

  Familiar. A witch’s familiar.

  ‘Are you my familiar?’

  Eva opened one eye and glared at me with it: ‘Un-fucking-fortunately, yes.’

  ‘Oh. Well. Right then. Righty-right.’

  ‘Give me strength…’

  ‘Okay, well, where have you been for the last ten years?’

  ‘Around.’

  ‘Where? Doing what?’

  ‘I forget. Though I know I spent a really cracking fortnight as a French Bulldog in Devon.’

  ‘A dog? Really?’

  ‘Sure. Probably. Why not.’

  One thing was very certain, Eva was not a fan of straight answers, nor filling in the whole picture. I wondered what it was she was holding back, and why she was so keen on my not mixing with the Red Woman.

  ‘What does that actually mean, by the way? That you’re my “familiar”? Are you sort of, my magical servant, or...?’

  ‘Oi! I’m nobody’s lackey, got that, love? I am my own person and I’m the one in charge here, and if you forget that, I’ll deck you, got it?’

  Sounded like a sore point best left alone.

  ‘Wake me when we get to the cat place.’

  And with that, her head nodded down and she was sound asleep (the “sounds” being a collection of snores, sleep-talking, and violent, gassy eruptions).

  I’m a warlock. A witch. And I have a coven and a familiar and I am a magic person. Who doesn’t know how to do magic. Okay. Well. Big few days. On we go. Despite the fact that the answer seemed to be “something that only exists in fiction,” it felt rather wonderful to be filling in a blank or two on the real me.

  A warlock. That’s one avenue I definitely hadn’t considered. Because that would have been nuts.

  I drove on, glancing down at my phone every few minutes, trying to will the thing to drag a reply out of Chloe.

  I pulled into Oldstone and parked up without receiving said longed-for reply, so I cracked again and decided to send another message. This time I upped the ante: I sent a smiley face emoji.

  As soon as it said “delivered,” my insides clenched in horror. I was a moron. No, no, no; I was King Moron. An Emoji? Yes, she obviously loved the things, but I’d just unloaded a whole pile of crazy-bananas on her. A “hey” and a smiley face were hardly going to erase that.

  I was done.

  It was all over.

  Wave the white flag and embrace a life of quiet contemplation, celibacy, and—

  My phone vibrated and I snatched that thing up quicker than The Flash. A reply from Chloe. She’d replied with a smiley face of her own. A yellow circle with a big, toothy, mother-flippin’ grin. I hopped out of the Uncanny Wagon and punched the air, followed by a tight, circular strut, chest puffed out like a champ.

  ‘Tosspot,’ came Eva’s voice, as she rolled out of the back seat, shielding her eyes from the morning sunshine.

  I pocketed my phone, relieved at Chloe’s response. Okay, I could work this. I’d just tell her, I don’t know, after the incident with Mrs Coates, that I ended up in a pub and I think someone spiked my drink. She’d believe that. That’s the sort of thing that happens. I certainly acted like someone who had been completely off their tits. Okay. Cool. All was well.

  I turned to find Eva down on her hands and knees, sniffing and licking at the ground.

  ‘That is disgusting.’

  ‘I’ve sniffed worse. This is the place,’ she said, pushing herself back onto her feet.

  ‘You still haven’t actually told me why we’re here.’

  ‘Yes I have, you just don’t listen.’

  ‘No. Okay, true. Often true, but not in this particular case. You just had a snooze instead for most of the journey.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Huh. Well isn’t it obvious? Can’t you feel it?’

  I knew what she was talking about. It was the same sensation I’d felt each time I’d visited Oldstone. That creeping prickle across my skin. The sense that something wasn’t right with the place.

  ‘I feel it. What is it?’

  ‘Bad news, that’s what it is.’

  ‘I hypothesised that it’s why the cats made themselves scarce. The cats could feel the oddness of Oldstone.’

  ‘Cats and soul vampires. They don’t get on. It’s the magic the soul vampires secrete into the world around them. Messes the cats up, so they move away from it. And that’s why we need to catch one of the little buggers.’

  ‘And how are we supposed to do that?’

  Eva smiled. ‘We need a canary.’

  I lead us to the barn I’d found the cats huddled inside of, expecting them to have flown the coup by now, but there they were.

  With very little help from Eva (by which I mean no help at all), I managed, at length, to herd one of the unwilling mogs into my cat box. Which is not a euphemism. We then spent the next hour strolling around Oldstone, holding the furious cat-in-a-box in front of us, Eva using each twitch, hiss, and flick of the cat’s tail to decide which way we should go next.

  The theory was that as we approached the point where these soul vampire thingies were holed up, the cat would become increasingly agitated. The theory was successful in practice, and was also successful in encouraging many a passer-by give us a wide birth as we speed-walked randomly up and down streets with a cat that was doing its damnedest to pull off a jail-break.

  ‘This feels a bit predictable,’ said Eva, as we found a narrow opening in the small hill lurking behind Oldstone’s Church, hidden by decades of overgrown foliage.

  ‘I thought vampires hated churches, and crosses, and things of that holy, blessed nature,’ I said, as I placed the cat box down and opened the door.

  The cat erupted from within and out into the world at such speed that it resembled little more that a furry blur.

  ‘You’re thinking of ordinary vampires,’ she replied, and kicked aside the scraggle of bushes hiding the thin entrance. ‘Those are bloodsuckers, these are a completely different kettle of twats.’

  ‘I take it they don’t drink blood, judging by their name?’

  ‘Nope. They eat your essence. Paint an incantation around you in your own blood to trap your soul so they can catch and eat the thing.’

  ‘Oh,’ I pulled out
my phone and showed her the picture I’d taken of the symbols around Mary Tyler’s bed.

  ‘That’s them. I’m surprised that didn’t clue you in. They literally say, “Soul, you are mine to feast upon.”’

  I squinted at the picture, ‘They do?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, you don’t even have the basics in there anymore, do you?’

  ‘Well, no, I thought that was pretty obvious. Why is that? If I’m a warlock, why can’t I remember any of it? What happened to me?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Eva, and began to squeeze into the narrow opening.

  ‘Fine, but you’re going to have to tell me at some point,’ I said as I followed after. Something told me that if she was so eager to keep the answer to herself, then it wasn’t going to be anything good.

  I’m not generally the claustrophobic type, but I admit to sighing in relief that after a few metres the tight entrance opened up considerably and I could walk head-on as we moved further into the gloom.

  ‘Hey, it’s getting a bit dark,’ I said, ‘I’ll use the light on my phone.’

  ‘No need.’

  A click of her fingers and Eva’s right arm was a torch, her fist wreathed in rippling orange flames.

  ‘Neat,’ I said. ‘I actually did something a bit like that earlier. Somehow.’

  ‘It’s not a competition, love. Come on, and be prepared to run, because these things will happily tear you into a hundred wet pieces.’

  ‘Fear not, running away is something of a speciality of mine.’

  Eva grunted and pushed on, her heavy footsteps echoing off the wet rock around us. After a few minutes we found ourselves in a large cave, the walls dotted with hundreds of holes. It reminded me a little of the mortuary back at the hospital. The openings were of roughly the same size, but there were no shiny metal doors hiding the bodies within. No bodies, either.

  ‘Well,’ said Eva, poking her glowing hand into hole after hole and then leaning in to take a look, ‘this was the place alright.’ She ran a finger around the interior of one of the spaces and licked it. ‘They were here up until a day or so ago. Still reeks of them, yes?’

  It did. A smell like the sea, mixed with blood and rot. I can’t say I was super upset to find the place empty. One of those things was bad enough; who knew how many had been stuffed down here? Looking at the number of empty spaces across the cave walls, the answer was: A LOT.

  As Eva moved the light from her hand around the cave, it revealed symbols painted all across the walls. More of the occult shapes.

  ‘That is not good,’ said Eva.

  ‘What? What do they say?’

  ‘Just stuff about being ready to rise up and feast on the souls of all of Great Britain.’

  ‘Yeah, that is definitely not good.’

  ‘Not good, and weird. They’re usually the sort that likes to stick to random snacks, but this sounds like something bigger. Something more ambitious.’

  A pack of ambitious, soul-eating vampires? That did not sound pretty.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to tell the police?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with police. This is our job. The Cumbrian Coven’s domain. Fuck up monsters and protect people from the Uncanny turds that want to chew on their insides.’

  ‘Oh, so we’re, sort of, magic police? I like that. Magic Police! You have the right to remain unmagical, all spells cast can be held against you in a court of law.’

  Eva sagged and groaned. ‘Don’t say that again, it sounds oh so very shit.’

  27

  I pulled out of Oldstone in the Uncanny Wagon and headed for Carlisle Hospital, leaving Eva behind. She hadn’t been too impressed with the fact that I needed to show up to my job to earn money and function in normal society, and called me a number of colourful names, complete with accompanying hand gestures.

  I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really sure how I was talking to Eva Familiar. She claimed to be my familiar, my partner, but seemed like an obnoxious, gassy mess. Not to mention the fact that she’d recently punched me in the face for reasons she’d yet to divulge. What could the old me have done to be worthy of that kind of treatment? Seemed like if anyone should know it was me, and I was increasingly peeved off that she was keeping so many of the puzzle pieces to herself.

  Still, for the last ten years my history had been a complete blank, now, at least, I saw a sliver or two of the truth. Even if the truth seemed a mite tricky to fully buy into.

  I was going a little too fast down an empty country lane when it happened.

  I turned a blind corner, only to find a person stood blocking my path. It was a woman with pale skin and long, red hair.

  I yelped, twisted the wheel and hit the brakes, the world spinning as my poor car screeched and span, before coming to a halt with its rear end in a hedge. Not so much as a near thing in the last ten years of driving and now two accidents on the trot.

  ‘I’m okay. Not hurt. Okay.’

  I stepped out of the car and looked for the Red Woman, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Okay, that’s not funny, or clever, right? You could’ve bloody killed me!’

  ‘All hail the saviour!’

  My shoulders sagged at the voice, and I turned to find the fox stood on the roof of my car, little Roman helmet on his head, axe held aloft.

  ‘You know a text message would be fine if either of you ever want to get in touch again.’

  The fox slid down the windscreen, shuffled along the bonnet, and landed in the road.

  ‘So, now you know,’ it said.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘Who you really, truly are.’

  ‘Some of it. Hey, have you got me bugged?’ I ran my hands over the fabric of my coat in search of a listening device.

  ‘Ah, but she did not tell you all, that tricksy familiar.’

  ‘Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t.’

  I felt a cold arm around my waist, then a pair of lips at my ear: ‘She didn’t tell you about the others, did she?’

  I turned to see the Red Woman. ‘You know… that was shocking road-sense. I could’ve hit you. You could have ended up a flesh bag full of bone shards. With red hair on top.’

  Her smile could have sliced into flesh.

  ‘She wouldn’t like you talking to me, your familiar, because she knows I tell the truth.’

  ‘Oh? What sort of truth?’

  I felt a hand tug at my coat and looked down to see the fox. ‘The truth about the other witches of the Cumbrian Coven. Didn’t think it was just you and her, did you?’

  ‘Other witches?’

  The Red Woman shook her head sadly. ‘It pains me that Eva feels the need to keep you so in the dark. You are one of three witches that looked over this county. Now why would she keep that information from you, Magic Eater?’

  It was a fair question.

  ‘Maybe she has good reason not to tell me.’

  ‘What sort of a reason?’ asked the Red Woman, her hand trailing lightly across my chest.

  ‘You know, a… good one. Sort of thing.’

  ‘Ah, now it’s all clear,’ said the Red Woman, pulling me close and planting a kiss on my lips. ‘I never lie to you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I squeaked.

  ‘I only want the best for you. Only want you to reach your full, glorious potential. Destiny is waiting for you, Magic Eater. I am waiting for you.’

  I blinked and I was alone.

  It’s fair to say that the rest of the journey to work found me deep in troubled thought.

  Three witches.

  Was that true? And if so, why wouldn’t Eva have told me? Perhaps the other witches were like family. I deserved to know about family. I’d often wondered about siblings, about who my parents really were. Perhaps this was it. I was a warlock, and these other two mystery coven members were what passed for my family.

  I confess to feeling a little burble of excitement in my stomach. Warlock told me what I did, but other people, family, that would tell me who I was.

&nbs
p; ‘You’re ten minutes late,’ said Big Marge as the automatic doors hissed closed behind me and I strode towards her reception area, brow creased, hands plunged deep into the pockets of my long coat. ‘It looks like you’ve got a load on your mind, Joe.’

  ‘A thing or two rattling around upstairs, yeah.’

  ‘You’re not built for deep thought, you’re built for cleaning up shit. And lucky you, there’s a fresh batch waiting for you on the third floor Ladies.’

  With a heavy sigh, I headed for my locker to change into my work things, only to have Chloe push open the reception area’s double doors as I was about to push my way out.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, oh, sorry, did I hit you with the door?’

  ‘A bit, but that’s okay.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Yep. Good.’

  It felt like awkward had given birth to twins.

  ‘About last night...’ I started.

  ‘That’s okay, Joe.’

  ‘No, it’s not, I was just, all messed up, you know. From the murder! And I was in a pub, and I think my drink was spiked. Someone definitely spiked my drink. I think.’

  ‘Okay. So that’s why all the...’

  ‘Crazy faces and witch talk.’

  ‘And the talking fox. It was a talking fox, yes?’

  ‘Mentioned that, did I?’

  ‘Yes you did.’

  ‘Right. Bloody... spiked drink..’

  I could practically see the tension escaping from Chloe’s body. I hated lying to her, but the truth would scare her silly, so a lie would have to do for the time being.

  ‘I should’ve known,’ she replied. ‘I am a doctor, I should have rationalised how weird you were acting.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Yeah, you always act a bit weird.’

  ‘Ouch, but valid.’

  ‘But not like that. You really had things turned up to eleven.’

  She laughed and touched my arm and suddenly any guilt at having lied to her skipped out of my brain to be replaced by a cloud of chirping love birds. So it was a pity that the moment had to be broken by a terrified Doctor Neil half-running, half-falling towards us down the corridor, his face even paler than usual. And his usual face was almost Casper-white.