Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  Elise took the car and I, to my complete lack of surprise, found that the fairytale carriage had anticipated my needs and was already waiting outside the office. I gave the horses a stern “I’ll be really pissed off if you’re reading my mind” look and climbed in. I ditched the damn thing, or—since it seemed to go where it wanted which, spookily, always happened to be where I wanted—the damned thing ditched me in the car park of a Premier Inn, leaving me to head across the fields on foot.

  It was still a blazingly hot day, so it felt nice to get somewhere at least vaguely grassy. The hunting lodge was just off the road—this boxy, white-washed building I was inclined to overlook. And, yes, partly that was because it wasn’t very interesting, but you didn’t hang out in a world full of wizards and faeries for as long as I had without getting mighty suspicious of things that obviously wanted you to ignore them. There was legit glamour going on here—the place had that why-is-nobody-reacting-to-this vibe that you got when somebody was using magic to dick with people’s heads.

  I ambled around the outside. The lodge was supposedly a low-key tourist attraction, which meant that I could at least get away with casing the joint without looking too suspicious, but if I had to break in there was no getting around the fact that I was clearly visible from a picnic area and a minor A road. If I was lucky, the nothing-to-see-here mojo that was protecting the house would protect me as well. If I wasn’t lucky, this was going to take some serious explaining.

  Leaning casually against the back door, I tried the handle. It wasn’t conveniently unlocked but a major advantage of authentic sixteenth-century home security was that it was pretty damn basic. It wasn’t one of my top ten most subtle moments, but a shove and a snap got me in.

  I recognised the kitchen from my pre-break-in Googling. According to the website, it was usually laid out so visitors could see what life was like back in ye olden times, but there was no sign of that at the moment. In fact, there were quite a lot of signs that it was being used to prepare real food that real people were really eating.

  An eerie silence covered the building, which was pretty much what you’d expect from an enchanted hunting lodge. I crept through the kitchen and towards the stairs, keeping alert for signs of movement. Nothing. But then I was looking for a professional thief and a fairytale huntsman, so that didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  The second floor looked even less like the website than the kitchen had. There were no incidental displays of Tudor pipes or cheery signs explaining how the king used to eat roast chickens in the foyer or how deer used to frolic up the A1096. The stairwell opened into a comfortable sitting room, where rustic-looking chairs sat by a large, empty fireplace, and a five-hundred year old deer head looked forlornly down at me.

  I moved cautiously forward. Not cautiously enough.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Kate.” Corin’s voice came from behind me.

  Damn, she was good. I turned around slowly, hands in the air. She had a crossbow pointed right at my heart. The look in her eyes said she was terrified. The look in her eyes was lying. “Where’s the Tears of Hypnos, Corin?”

  Her lips trembled. Her hands didn’t. “Jack took them. He said he knew somebody who would pay for them so that we could get away.”

  “Corin, just...don’t.” It was irrational, but even though I knew the woman was essentially a scorpion in a pretty frock, everything inside me screamed that I should trust her. A couple of incidents last year had made me wonder if she didn’t have something backing her up, something that smelled like sulphur and traded in deception. Something that made you forget things you knew to be true. That or I really, really wanted to do her.

  Her lashes fluttered anxiously. “I—I don’t know what else I can say.”

  “You can say where Jack is. You can say who he’s selling the Tears to. You can say why you came back to town. And finally, and most importantly, you can say, ‘I’m putting the crossbow down now.’”

  She knelt and laid the weapon gently on the floor. Then she hurried towards me, her face a picture of remorse, her eyes brimming with tears. “Oh, Kate”—she took my hands gently in hers—“I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened.”

  Don’t kiss her. Don’t kiss her. I closed my eyes. It helped a bit. “No, you’re not sorry. You’re a thief and a murderer and you care about nothing except yourself.” I had to say it aloud, or I wouldn’t have been able to remember it.

  “I’ve done so many terrible things. I understand if you can’t forgive me.” She stepped closer, laying her head against me. And this was how the game worked. How it always worked. She’d carry on swearing black was white and the sky was the sea until it was easier to believe she was right than that she’d commit so hard to a lie.

  I pushed her away, even though I could feel her whole body shaking. “Tell me,” I growled, “what I want to know.”

  She collapsed, tears spilling prettily down her cheeks. The part of my brain that was still paying attention noticed the way she’d managed to land right between me and the crossbow. “It’s...it’s the man who broke me out of prison last year. The vampire, I mean. He said he’d kill me. Jack’s gone to meet him. I didn’t want to come back, Kate, really I didn’t. But I had to. I had to or he’d have—”

  “Shut up.” If she wasn’t completely messing with me, then the clusterfuck had suddenly got a whole lot clusterier and fuckier. The vampire who’d sprung her from prison was the same bastard who’d tried to sacrifice me last year. I’d kind of hoped the burning building I’d dropped on his head would keep him out of action for more than ten minutes.

  Corin stayed curled up on the floor. She was very still, like a frightened child, or a snake waiting to strike. “What are you going to do with me now?”

  It was a good question.

  What I wasn’t going to do was make any sudden moves, because I knew from painful experience that if I genuinely scared her, instead of pretend-please-let-your-guard-down scaring her, she wouldn’t hesitate to crossbow me in the face.

  Over several painful previous encounters, I’d discovered that the trick with Corin was to work out which bits of the truth she was using to make her lies more convincing. Maybe Jack had the Tears or maybe she did, maybe Percy was really her buyer, maybe he wasn’t. But the one thing I was as sure about as you could be with Corin was that Jack wasn’t here. Everything she’d said boiled down to “you don’t want me, you want the other guy,” and if she’d had backup in the building it would have been all “please someone save me from the scary lesbian.”

  Which left me with one play. “You’re coming with me,” I said, “and we’re going to find Jack.”

  Corin got carefully to her feet. I saw her hands hover over the crossbow for about half a second, but she must have felt it wasn’t worth the risk. Of course, the fact she was considering shooting me in the first place meant I’d at least vaguely succeeded in messing up her plans. That was something else I’d learned about dealing with Corin: you either had to go along with her or scare her, but if you did either one too much it got you killed.

  She led me downstairs and out of the lodge, then up the road and deeper into the forest. Urban woodland is always weird, because you only have to walk a few meters from the street to feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere. There was this sense of being caught between a primal, magical world on one side and a main road through Loughton on the other. The contrast made my mother’s legacy feel at once immediate and distant. If Corin made a break for it now it would be a serious contender for the biggest mistake she’d ever made, because I was fairly sure that I wouldn’t be able to resist a chase through the forest. But, in the end, she didn’t even try to run. Perhaps she knew me too well.

  We walked for well over half an hour, mostly in silence. At one point we passed a lake, and Corin stopped for a moment and stared out over the water with a look of enigmatic melancholy. I genuinely wasn’t sure if
she was contemplating the beauty of nature or thinking about throwing herself in. I had to hand it to her, she committed completely to her part. Whatever it was. Sometimes I wondered if she knew herself.

  Finally we came out on a narrow road opposite an inn.

  Corin paused, seeming genuinely shaken. She always seemed genuinely shaken. She always seemed genuinely everything. It was what made her so hard to deal with. “Something isn’t right,” she whispered. “He isn’t here. He’s left me.”

  I didn’t think that was likely. Nobody left Corin. At least not without losing more than they could afford to first. But things did look a bit suss. It was still a while before noon, and there were only a few cars around. A few very expensive looking cars. “I think your man might be in trouble.”

  She was silent for a moment. Perhaps I was projecting but I thought I could see some very quick, very cold calculations going on behind those big dark eyes. “We should...but then—I don’t—what can we do?”

  I took her by the hand and tugged her out of the treeline. “We can go in and see what’s going on.”

  She struggled weakly. I thought it was mostly for show but that road led to a pointless tangle of I-know-that-she-knows-that-I-know-that-she-knows. If I was right about the cars, then I had a decent idea who’d intercepted Hunter’s mission, and Corin would be keen not to see them.

  I pushed open the door of the inn, dragging my not-exactly-captive through behind me. A small, delicate sign said that the building had been booked out for a private function. The people who had booked it were mostly not small or delicate. The room was full of Sloanes, most of them women and all of them—I was one hundred percent certain—werewolves. My amazing detective instincts told me that the ragged man who was currently being watched by two haughty ladies in Ascot hats and summer dresses might very well be the guy I was after.

  But then, I was only after him because I thought he had my client’s property, and now...

  “Looking for something, Kate Kane?” The voice came from a corner table. It was a good voice, rich and sultry, and posh in all the right ways. Unfortunately it was attached to Tara Vane-Tempest, who was one of the most infuriating, controlling and single-minded women I’d ever fantasised about. Sorry, met. She was dangling a little glass vial from her fingertips.

  “Thanks for keeping that for me.”

  She snatched it back up into her hand. “Thanks for bringing me the girl.” She indicated Corin. They’d had a thing last year that had ended in a big mess of dungeons, stolen cars, and midnight getaways. And Tara wasn’t the forgiving sort.

  I stepped sideways, putting my hands in the air and doing my best to make it clear that I was on nobody’s side except my own. “I’m just here for the Tears. What’s between you and her is between you and her.”

  “Oh, really?” She leaned forwards. “And what’s your claim on this little bottle of chaos?”

  “Mine? None. My client owns it.”

  Corin slinked out from behind me. “That’s not true, it was mine. I—I pawned it, that’s all. And I meant to keep up the repayments, really I did. But I had to go away for a while, you see, and by the time I came back my ticket had already expired, and I would have bought it but it had been stolen, so I looked for the person who had it and at last I found them and...” She gave the two of us the big eyes treatment. And what big eyes she had.

  “It’s true.” That was Jack Hunter. Although I doubted Tara would think his word was worth that much. “She needed the Tears to pay off a debt. She’ll die if they don’t get to Henry Percy tonight.”

  Tara growled. I’d been hanging out with werewolves for a while now, but I never really got used to how animalistic they could sound if they really wanted to. “I have a feeling,” she said, “that she’ll be fine. She has a way of being fine.” She rose gracefully and stalked over to where Corin was trembling. “If I were you, I’d run. Right now. Tell Percy that the Big Bad Wolf took his present, yah?”

  Corin nodded. Shivered. Seemed to be trying to speak. Wiped something from her eye that looked like a tear. Then ran, the door slamming behind her.

  “Any chance you could hand me that bottle now?” I asked. It was a bit of a long shot, but I figured it was worth a go.

  “Let’s see.” Tara came towards me. She got... I’d have said uncomfortably close, but I was pretty comfortable with it. “Will I hand over a weapon which could tear down the barriers my family has been oath-bound to protect for a thousand years?” She tapped her chin with her finger in an exaggerated pondering gesture. “You know, I think I might just hang onto it.”

  This, right here, was the problem with werewolves. They fundamentally believed that they had a sacred duty to tell the rest of us what to do on account of some pact they made a millennium ago, and they weren’t afraid to strong-arm anybody who disagreed with them. Or, to put it another way: this, right here, was the problem with werewolves—they were dicks. “Pretty sure you don’t get to keep other people’s stuff.”

  “What is it they say about possession and the law?”

  “That it’s against the law to take another person’s possessions?”

  “Don’t push me, Kate Kane.”

  I looked around. At some point—I wasn’t sure when—I’d wound up surrounded. Because that was how werewolves worked. Most of the time they didn’t look especially threatening, like a bunch of posh kids off on a jolly. Then suddenly they’d get all creepy-synchronised and start moving with too much grace and not enough noise, and you’d remember that deep down they were a pack of wild animals that would rip you to fucking pieces if you let them.

  One of the wolves broke ranks. A sandy-haired man with a grey pullover knotted casually by its sleeves around slim but muscular shoulders. Henry. Thank fuck. We’d met before and he was basically the only member of the family that was actually nice to me. “If I might, Bunny?”

  Tara glared at him, but let him speak.

  “The Merchant of Dreams is a scion of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter, whose territory borders our own. If this artefact is truly their property, keeping it from them might make us an enemy we don’t want.”

  “One shopkeeper?” This comment came from somebody who I suspected was called Tuffie or Smudge. I should really learn to get these people sorted out.

  “One shopkeeper”—Henry frowned—“and the fey lord that they embody.”

  Tara wheeled back to face me. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “You speak for your client. Is that their position? We hand over the Tears or else we earn the enmity of the Cold and the Dark?”

  “Hey, I’m an investigator, not an ambassador.” I shrugged. “All I know is that the Merchant wants this thing back. They’re kind of into their property rights. Because, y’know, Merchant.”

  Tara tossed back her golden mane. “Then we’re done, yah? Your client knows who and where we are. If they have a claim to the Tears of Hypnos, they can come and make it.”

  She was kind of right. I couldn’t make promises or threats on behalf of the Merchant of Dreams. In PI school they taught us it was unprofessional to drag your clients into open, supernatural warfare. “What about him?” I indicated Hunter.

  “Not our problem, Kate Kane. We came for the weapon. We have it.”

  The wolves swept out, leaving me and the mage alone in a rather nice little pub on the outskirts of Epping Forest. Pulling up a chair, I sat down opposite him and surveyed the menu. It was getting on for lunch time and all this chasing shadows had left me hungry.

  My companion was slumped in his seat looking five kinds of dejected.

  “So”—I glanced over at him—“you want anything?”

  Chapter Nine

  Finding & Losing

  Hunter hadn’t really felt breaking for lunch after a werewolf attack set the right tone, but I eventually persuaded him that there was lite
rally nothing we could do right now, that he was completely fucked if he went back to Rose Red, and that at times like these, getting something to eat was about the only uncomplicatedly sensible option you had.

  Overall he wasn’t a terrible lunch partner. I could see why Corin had gone for him. He had the build of an MMA fighter and a kind of vacant honesty in his face that suggested he’d jump at the chance to rescue a pretty girl. He confirmed what I already suspected—Corin had duped him into helping her steal the Tears of Hypnos with a sort-of-true-ish-maybe line about needing them to pay off a scary angry vampire who was going to kill her if she didn’t. She’d sent him to make the meet and while he’d been scouting the location he’d been caught by the Vane-Tempests, because although a magic woodsman working for a fairytale queen was pretty good at moving quietly through the forest, werewolves were better.

  It had passed noon by now and Percy hadn’t shown. Either he was never coming in the first place, or the whole crawling-with-werewolves thing had put him off. However you sliced it, there wasn’t much more for me to do here. I asked Hunter if he wanted a lift anywhere, but he didn’t. Honestly I wasn’t sure what he’d do with himself now—running back to a cross-dressing Witch Queen who had a mystical mandate to be petty and vindictive seemed like a bad plan. Perhaps he’d live wild in the woods for a bit. Yes, if we’re being picky Rose Red had asked me to bring Hunter back to the Enchanted Kingdom but, fuck her, she wasn’t paying my bills. I hopped in my outrageous fairytale carriage and headed for home. On the way, I texted Elise that I’d found Corin and she could stop traipsing around the greener bits of London. It was hard to read tone from a text, but her reply seemed a bit disappointed.

  As for the case—the actual case I was at least theoretically getting paid money for working on—it had got to one of those frustrating points where I’d technically done what I was hired to do, but only in a way that would leave the client unsatisfied. The problem was that a lot of people didn’t seem to see the difference between an investigator and a kind of... I don’t know...general troubleshooter, like that bald bloke on The Apprentice. As far as I was concerned, my job was to find stuff out, not to do anything about it, but clients had a nasty way of seeing things differently. They hire you to find something, they expect you to physically put it in their hand before they accept that you’ve done your job.