‘Eat shit,’ she said, then ran back the way she’d came, escaping the dead end.
She wasn’t powerless, wasn’t helpless. This axe gave her power. Power to capture and to control magic, to understand it and turn it against the person who would use it against her. Rita smiled, almost laughed. She wasn’t going to carry on running. Dan Waterson was dead, and the person responsible for that was in here, in the Night Fair, with her, and she was going to do her damndest to bring him to justice.
‘Hey, big scary Angel, where are you? Come to mamma!’ Rita sounded brave, bold, but her stomach still churned and her heart beat-beat-beat.
She whirled round to see Jenner walking towards her.
‘Oh, decided to stop the flying bit, have you?’ she asked.
‘You are alone,’ he said, the Angel’s voice emerging from Jenner’s mouth.
‘A girl is never alone with a chip on her shoulder and a magic hatchet in her hands,’ she replied, raising the weapon up, ready to fend off whatever came her way.
Jenner just smiled.
‘You can repel an attack or two, perhaps even three, but I will get you. Beat you down. It’s just a question of time, and I am immortal. I’ve all the time in existence.’
He flung another ball of crackling magic at her and Rita gasped, swinging at it, taking control of it, and sending it back in the direction it came from. But Jenner, the Angel, was ready this time, and casually swatted the returned magic aside.
A food stand burst into flames. He was right. It was right. But Rita had no intention of standing her ground and seeing how many balls she could hit before she was out.
‘The Magician, your erstwhile boss, is connected to the Angel of Blackpool.’
‘The smoke thing?’
‘That is what is feeding magic, feeding power, to the Magician.’
‘So we’ve gotta find a way to cut the cord.’
She flexed her fingers around the hilt of the axe and searched for it. Called to it. Demanded it did as she wished.
There it was.
More magic flew at her, thrown contemptuously, and she returned it with a cry of effort.
Mr. Cotton and Mr. Spike, hidden in their dreamscape. That was her one hope. Her one chance.
‘I have toyed with you long enough,’ said the Angel.
Rita ignored it.
Instead, she began to speak with the axe, not in words, but in thoughts, in feelings, in understanding.
It held the magic still.
The magic she had taken when she struck Mr. Spike.
The magic she had not yet used.
It was dark magic, she could sense that. Magic from a bleak place of nightmares and pain. And it was hers to use.
The Angel lifted Jenner’s arms and a storm of angry magic swarmed around him. Flames burst into life around him and he floated once more, levitating slowly into the air. He was laughing. That birdsong laugh, but it no longer sounded beautiful. It sounded wrong. It sounded cruel.
It was almost the end.
But not in the way the Angel expected.
Rita spoke with her axe, with the dark magic that raged within. She soothed it and it responded to her request.
It built a prison.
The flames around Jenner’s body died in an instant, and he dropped to the ground, crashing down to his hands and knees in surprise.
‘It’s over,’ said Rita.
He looked up at her with wide, confused eyes. The eyes were no longer ink-black. ‘What… wh-what have you done?’ he asked in his own voice, his actual voice, not the Angel’s.
‘I’ve done my job,’ replied Rita. ‘I’ve caught the murderer and put him away.’ She walked slowly towards him and Jenner fell back onto his rear, scrambling away from her, terrified, until his back hit against the side of a stall. He looked around, confused.
‘Yeah, still the Night Fair,’ said Rita. ‘Well, sort of. It’s not the actual Night Fair, this is one me and axe here made.’
‘I don’t… I don’t understand…’
‘I took Mr. Spike’s magic, or a piece of it, anyway, and that pair, they can create little, like, dreamscapes. Little places cut off from the real world. So that’s what I did. Quicker just to copy where we were in the first place. Now this is all there is for you. This Night Fair. There isn’t anything past the fences, past the gate. Just this place.’
‘Angel?’ said Jenner, grabbing the edge of the stand’s counter and pulling himself to his feet. ‘Angel, talk to me. Please, talk to me!’
Rita almost felt sorry for him, he looked so pathetic.
Almost.
‘It can’t hear you. Can’t get to you. It’s reach doesn’t extend into here, into a dreamscape, I’m afraid, Guv. The blabbermouth thing sort of let that slip. Careless, eh? But then arrogant twats like that always say more than they should. Can’t help themselves.’
Jenner fell back to the dirt, tears streaming down his face. ‘No… no… I need it… it’s not in my head anymore, not in my head…’
‘And neither is your connection to magic,’ she said, crouching by him. ‘That was all the Angel, now it’s just you again. Sorry. Well, not sorry. Not at all, really.’
‘You don’t understand, I’m a good man.’
‘And how do you work that one out, genius?’
‘We were going to punish God. For killing my mum. My dad. He deserves it.’ Jenner made a grab for Rita, but she struck him on the forehead with the butt of the axe and he stumbled to the ground face-first, blood streaming from his forehead. He rolled on to his back, crying.
‘Angel… please… talk to me… help me…’
‘Those women. Dan Waterson. You’re guilty, and this is where you’ll rot. Hey, now you’ve got a prison, and your crazy Angel pal has a prison. Nice how that balances out, isn’t it?’
Rita stood and walked to the Night Fair’s gate.
‘You can’t leave me in here!’
‘I bloody well can, Guv.’
And she walked out of the gate, and back into the real world.
27
Rita was lining up a bowling ball, one eye closed, scoping out the pins at the end of the aisle, when Carlisle walked through the door into Big Pins and joined her.
‘So you’re not dead?’ he said.
‘You neither,’ replied Rita, then rolled the ball, swinging out her right leg for balance. It shot down the aisle and cleared the pins in one.
‘Get in!’ she said, giving herself a celebratory fist pump. Rita turned and sat opposite Carlisle, taking a sip of her drink. She could feel Carlisle’s eyes on the axe as it dangled from her belt.
‘What happened to you then?’ she asked.
‘Knocked out for a few hours. And how about you?’
‘Just closed the case. Bad guy locked up. Connection to evil angel severed. And all was well in the world. Or Blackpool at least. For a bit.’
‘You are still hexed.’
Rita frowned, then shrugged and took another sip from her ale.
‘So the Magician is not dead?’ asked Carlisle.
‘I’m not a killer,’ she replied.
‘Then where is he?’
‘In prison. Safe from the Angel’s magic.’
‘I asked where?’
‘I told you. Prison.’
‘Then you will remain in this state, trapped in Blackpool and hidden from the ordinary world.’
‘Seems so.’
‘I could kill him for you.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not sure I’m cool with that, either. I want him to serve his time. His life sentence. That’s justice.’
Carlisle snarled and swept the glasses from the table. ‘We had a deal.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she replied. ‘I can’t just… he was being used. Influenced. Pushed. Ever since he was a kid.’
‘Oh, so he lives because of what? Diminished responsibility?’
‘Yeah. If you like. That thing, that Angel, used him. Moulded him. He deserves justice, he doesn’t deserv
e death.’
‘That artefact is mine. Give it to me.’
Rita placed her hand protectively on the butt of the axe. ‘I can’t.’
Carlisle flinched towards her, his face a mask of anger, and for a second she thought he might attack her. ‘It belongs to me,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘I helped you. I died for you. It is my property.’
Rita dropped her head then looked up at Carlisle, into his fierce eyes. ‘Until I know how to get out of all of this, I need it. It’s staying with me.’ She gripped the axe’s hilt. ‘So, will you help me?’
Carlisle straightened out his long, dark purple coat, then turned on his heel and walked out of Big Pins.
Rita sagged back and blew, trying to get rid of the tension.
Formby shuffled over from a corner and joined her. ‘May I?’ he said.
‘Sure.’
Formby took her drink and downed it.
‘I thought you meant ‘may I sit down’, but okay.’
‘You might have made yourself a bit of an enemy in Carlisle, Detective,’ said Formby, scratching at his round, stubbled face.
‘He’ll come around,’ she said. She wasn’t sure she believed herself though.
‘And the Angel. You cut off its access to the magician, but don’t think that’ll be that.’
Rita waved until she caught Linton’s attention. ‘Two pints here, mate.’
Linton gave a little salute and got to it.
‘Then maybe that’s what I’ve got to do. Take down an angel gone bad. It wasn’t Jenner’s magic that even did this to me, the hex. It was the Angel’s magic. Maybe… maybe if I stop the Angel, the hex will go away and I can go back to my life.’
‘Maybe. Wasn’t much of a life to start with though, was it?’
‘Oi! It was okay!’
‘I hear lots, remember,’ he said, exposing his piranha teeth with a big grin.
‘Charming. You know, it was okay, actually. Bits of it. Sometimes.’
‘Really?’
Rita stuck her tongue out at Formby and took her pint from Linton. She’d wanted something different. Something new. Anything new. And yeah, maybe she was stuck, literally, in Blackpool, but hadn’t she got her wish? Sort of? Okay, it wasn’t ideal, but what in life is?
Rita sat back and patted her magic axe as she sipped a pint within a bowling alley that catered to monsters and the magical.
Yeah.
This was certainly different to her usual.
The Angel sat with its legs crossed on the floor of its glass prison, and it concentrated.
It tapped. It tapped. It tapped.
This was just a minor setback.
It would take time, but more chances would come.
Yes, all it would take was time.
And the Angel of Blackpool had all of eternity on its side.
The End.
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Branded: Sanctified
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The city of London is infested with vampires.
Only one person can stop them from rising up and wreaking havoc.
Too bad she’s a twenty-something goth working a desk job in a lost property office.
When Abbey Beckett received a briefcase containing a mysterious dagger, she should have left well alone. But no, she had to fiddle, and now she’s got a brand seared into her palm and an angel telling her she’s the only thing standing in the way of a vampire apocalypse.
1
Desk Babysitter.
It isn’t actually my job title, but it might as well be.
I work for the London Underground’s Lost Property Office, or the LPO as it’s known in the biz.
The biz?
Who am I kidding? This isn’t Hollywood. There’s no glitz or glamour to this job. I man a phone, I tag lost items, I enter data into a computer. Any monkey could do it. It’s a career so meaningless that the nameplate on my desk is a piece of paper folded into a Toblerone shape and inscribed in ballpoint pen.
But you didn’t come here to hear me bellyaching about my poor life choices, did you? You came here for the vampire stuff: for the sprouting fangs and the stakes through the heart and the blood spraying phut phut phut against the walls. And spray it will. Gallons of the stuff. But this is an origin story, and you can’t have an origin story without a bit of preamble.
I know. Boo, right?
Don’t worry, you’ll get to meet the vampire-killing machine who strikes fear into the hearts of the undead soon enough, but first of all, say hello to boring old Abbey Beckett.
That’s me.
The Desk Babysitter.
The girl who didn’t get the grades she needed for university and wound up working in a lost & found. I know, I know, I can already guess what you’re thinking...
How bad can it be? A job’s a job. Buck up and stop your whining, girl!
Besides, it sounds like a cool place to work, doesn’t it? London’s famous Lost Property Office. You’ve probably read about it in one of those whimsical articles on The Guardian, or a Buzzfeed listicle if you’re hard of reading. Maybe you’ve cycled through a photo gallery of all the weird and wonderful things that find their way into our basement. The peculiar artefacts that people leave on the Underground, all piled up on top of each other like the treasures of Aladdin’s cave: wedding dresses and false limbs and grandfather clocks and wheelchairs and water skis and burial urns and medieval swords. Only the other week we recovered a stuffed swordfish mounted on a big wooden plaque. It must be at least five feet long. I mean, how exactly do you leave a thing like that behind?
I’ve taken delivery of a lot of strange stuff since I started working in that office. All day long it comes my way, and all day long I tag it, bag it, and send it down the chute to the basement for storage.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Working at the LPO is the same as any other dull-as-dishwater office job. The kind you tell yourself you’ll stick at for a month or two before moving onto something better, then before you know it, it’s been a year, then two years, then some more. I started my stint there as a temp – a stopgap job before I retook my exams and headed off to uni. That was three-and-a-half years ago.
I like to tell myself that everything would have been different if I’d made it into Higher Education. What a laugh. Even if I did have my Honours, I’d still have no prospects. The job market’s a joke these days, and the economy’s in the toilet. It’s not like having a few letters after my name was going to bury me tits-deep in diamonds.
So, there I was, twenty-one years old and already feeling like nothing. Like I belonged down the chute in the LPO’s basement, stuffed to the back of some creaky old shelf, collecting dust, long forgotten.
I know, I sound like a right cheery one, don’t I?
As I sat at my desk, head in my hands, the new temp hoved into view; peppy, eager to please, and done up nicely in zingy colours and respectable footwear. In other words, the polar opposite of me; dressed like Halloween and wearing makeup that has been described, on more than one occasion, as looking like it was applied by a drunk mortician.
I saw the temp mouth a swee
t hello as she approached. What was her name again? I’d promised myself that I was going to take the time to remember it one of these days, but this was not one of these days.
A middle-aged woman trailed after her, grossly overweight, and moving with one of those lumbering walks that looked as though it ought to be accompanied by a tuba.
The temp spoke first. ‘Hi Abbey,’ she chirped, as she pulled up in front of my workstation. She’d taken the time to learn my name, and she’d only been there a week. That’s a level of politeness I find genuinely hostile. ‘This lady could really use your help,’ she added, beaming a Colgate smile.
I was about to protest, but before I could think of some other sucker to palm the woman off on, the temp was already flitting away. I tried calling after her but, like I say, her name eluded me. This is what happens when you don’t take the time to socialise with your co-workers; you end up dealing with *ugh* members of the public.
‘Are you who I talk to about lost property?’ the woman barked, which, given where she was standing, ranked pretty highly among the most inane questions I’d been asked that week (the other contenders being, ‘Will you be taking the full hour for your lunch break, Abbey?’ and, ‘Are you going to finish that chocolate pudding in the fridge?’).
I painted on a smile. ‘How can I help you, Miss?’ I asked.
She replied with a tart, ‘It’s Mrs, actually.’
‘Okay,’ I said, measuring just how much of a shit I gave about her marital status and finding the scales tipping not one bit.
‘I’ve recovered a lost item that I’d like to hand in to the proper authorities,’ she went on, terribly pleased with herself.
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