The Dark Matters Quartet

by Claire Robyns

  It struck him that the general ease with which he navigated his life was showing cracks. He didn’t know whether to blame Lily or the latest demon epidemic.

  And it was a damned epidemic.

  Elagos, last seen in 1834, had made itself known in an extravaganza of fire snaking across the Thames, devouring barges and flotillas like a riptide inferno.

  And then Valacha, otherwise known as a butcher of long-standing popularity at Whitechapel Market. His meat was cheap, probably more rat than retired workhorse, but few who lived there had the purse to care and even fewer noticed the disappearance of the occasional street urchin. The mere thought of that nasty bugger sent a shudder through Kelan, but what worried him more was the Pied Piper act that had led him to the demon last week.

  Demons tended to make a grand stand sooner or later, no matter how hard they tried to live in obscurity. It was in their nature. But two in rapid succession?

  Something was changing and damned if he knew what.

  He reached the end of the wall where limestone met the spiral of tubular metallic hinges attached to an ancient gate. Beyond the iron bars, a pebbled driveway sliced through a garden of sculptured hedges, flower patches and a series of small man-made lakes strung together with gurgling canals and miniature waterfalls.

  It would appear Winterberry’s new wife hadn’t much fancied the manicured lawn and hundred-year-old oaks that had graced the front of Stobcross House last time Kelan had been here.

  The driveway circled in front of the portico and the phaeton pulled up there was far too sporting a vehicle for Winterberry. Kelan supposed it could belong to the man’s younger, very much younger, wife, but he’d wager on the demon first.

  “Is it still there?” Armand asked when Kelan made his way back.

  Kelan nodded grimly. “We wait and follow.”

  “And…?” Armand gave him a sharp look.

  “I want to see where the vermin nests.” He braced his legs and crossed his arms, settling in for the wait while the light slowly bleached from the already dull day.

  Close to an hour passed before a hissing sound alerted him to the gates swinging open on a propulsion of hydraulic steam hinges. From their obscured position, the phaeton only came into view once it was well past them and gaining speed along the service road. The unimposing form of the driver, and the glimpse of pale hair beneath the trim of his hat, was enough to convince Kelan they had their demon.

  The pursuit took them to the northern outskirts of the city. Kelan kept a steady hand on the rein, guiding his mount even deeper into the cover of the pine forest as the phaeton slowed its manic pace to manoeuvre through narrow gateposts. The sound of hooves squelching sodden leaves from behind indicated Armand had caught up.

  The forest bumped against a wooden fence that enclosed outbuildings, empty stock pens and, at the far end of the trampled dirt yard, a cobbled-together farmhouse. The fading light and dense foliage provided ample shadows from which to watch as the demon drew to a halt before the stables and jumped down from the high-perched seat.

  Reassured when the demon set about unfastening the harness, Kelan signalled a short retreat to where they could dismount and tether their horses.

  “You’ve seen where it nests,” Armand said in a low voice as he detached the satchel from his saddle. “Can we please banish it now?”

  “Not yet.” Kelan’s first instinct was usually, always, to banish the demon back to the hole it had crawled from at his earliest convenience. His gut agreed wholly with that sentiment right now, but he hesitated, evaluating the worst possible outcome if he went with his head this time.

  The McAllister history with demons went back two centuries and the pattern never changed. Demons rose, they annihilated and a McAllister banished their pungent asses back to purgatory—or whatever hellish world they inhabited.

  And therein lay Kelan’s newest concern.

  Two hundred years later, and they knew precious little about the demons and their dimension. Interrogating a demon was risky business and could easily incur a far heftier price than the interrogator realised he was offering.

  But what if the demon’s association with Winterberry was significant?

  “We’re missing something,” he said to Armand as they picked a path back to the fence. “And I intend to find out what.”

  The yard was deserted. The horse had been stabled, the phaeton left parked where they’d last seen it.

  “Do we have a plan?” Armand asked.

  “Don’t accidentally banish the demon before I’m done,” Kelan said as he hopped the fence.

  Armand scrambled over. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  Kelan took slow, deep breaths, realigning each of his senses to that soft spot, a projected epicentre of heightened awareness that trapped the subtlest movement and cut a fraction of a second off natural reflexes. Dampness thickened the air and carried a trace of honeysuckle. A horse blew its nostrils. An undercurrent of faint noises brushed along the ground.

  “Take the Stylometor out and keep it on the ready.” He shook his limbs loose and grinned at Armand. “I’ll worry about the rest.”

  They moved quickly and quietly, wending their way behind the outbuildings to come up against the rear of the house. Kelan tried the door, not surprised to find it bolted. The shuttered windows were another matter.

  Kelan grimaced. “We’re going in blind.”

  Armand’s protest drowned in the splintering of oak as Kelan’s leg shot out, connecting with a solid thud. A second kick flung the door clear off its hinges. In one fluid movement, he unsheathed the retracted sword strapped to his shin, flicked sharply to extend the blade and surged forward.

  A glance around the dim interior encapsulated an open cast-iron range, sturdy table, flagged-stone floor, three steps leading to an open doorway. Without turning, he jabbed a finger at the ceiling where floorboards creaked beneath hurried footfalls and then held his hand out, silently ordering Armand to stay put as he crossed the room swiftly.

  The steps took him into a dining hall, which in turn opened onto the hallway of the front entrance.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” The demon appeared at the bend halfway up a flight of stairs. “Who are you? What do you want?” it blurted, playing the human role so convincingly with that bland face contorted into an incredulous expression, Kelan paused.

  Lily’s description fit a dozen men, and that just from his personal acquaintance. He’d made a hasty assumption. He was losing his edge. Damnation, he was—a strobe of black flashed from the stairway.

  Kelan’s sword arm was raised before he fully registered what he was seeing. A perfectly executed slice refracted the bolt of anti-light. Wood, stone and glass crackled wherever the finer black threads sprayed upon.

  “A McAllister,” snorted the demon, shooting another bolt from its fingertips, and another, rays spitting from a midnight sun. “I should have known.”

  “Don’t overestimate yourself.” Kelan moved with lightning speed—no time to think, no time to judge where the next ray would spit, no time to worry about a misstep. This one had nothing on some of the adversaries he’d faced, but a demon was still a demon. “No one else does.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do—”

  “Apparently not.” Kelan dipped, swerved and leapt, his blade deflecting at ease, reflecting where possible, manipulating the assault as he advanced on the demon. His pulse threatened to race and he pulled it back, balancing exertion with concentration, casting his senses wide like a net to trap and despatch the flashes coming at him.

  “You interrupted.” The demon shrank from the banister, further into the shadows. “I was saying… Don’t you have anything better to do than die today?”

  Kelan had reached the base of the staircase. He flattened his length against the wall, narrowly missing a bolt. The next flash he caught, his blade angled with carefully measured accuracy to reflect. The anti-light bounced in a direct hit. The demon staggered back
ward, arms floundering.

  Kelan bounded up the stairs, shouting for Armand to join him. He kept his gaze steady on the demon as it struck the wall and then crumpled to the ground. They had less than thirty seconds before the stunned demon recovered.

  Footsteps pounded over stone and then thudded on the wooden planks of the stairway. “Now?”

  Kelan kicked the demon’s legs out of the way, then stood aside as well, leaving the small landing area clear. “Be quick.”

  Armand fumbled with the Stylometor, almost dropping the silver-plated rod in his haste to compress, click and release the studded hilt. The other end popped into a cone of about fifty long, flexible feelers. Releasing the catch instantly activated the cell that discharged energy to heat and magnetise the iron filings as they pulsed through the hollow tubes of the feelers.

  Molten red iron sprayed with engineered precision into the shape of the rune to bind and keep, scorching the magnetised pattern onto the landing. Buried inside the rod, a tiny glass capsule would have been pierced to diffuse human blood onto the iron filings before they were emitted from the canister.

  Kelan and Armand stood there a moment, staring at the meticulously crafted design of tangled triangles and circles permanently melted into the wood.

  “Everything looks good,” Armand observed.

  The diagrammatic of the rune had never been in question. That had been tried and tested ad nauseam while Armand had been tinkering on his device. Kelan already has his proof that the Stylometor was a rune-stamp, but was it also a rat-catcher?

  There was power in the symmetry of symbols, a hybrid energy humming along the lines and collating in the angles, swirling around the diameters and vibrating into the kind of force that could tear through the veil between dimensions, create invisible protection shields, drain demons and much, much more.

  But symmetry alone wasn’t enough. Every rune needed to be activated with human blood. What other elements of nature were at work? Runes could be carved, or drawn, but could they be burnt in?

  Kelan grabbed a fistful of the demon’s collar and dragged the dead weight into the circle, prodding at the protruding limbs with the stub of his shoe to ensure all parts of the demon were confined within the rune.

  “Stand back,” he told Armand when the demon stirred. “Actually, I want you at the bottom of the stairs.”

  Armand didn’t look happy about being relegated to a safe distance, but neither did he argue. Once, years ago, he’d thought to help fight the fight and Kelan wore the scar of that distraction across his chest.

  The demon groaned, rolling over onto its stomach, pushing onto hands and knees.

  Kelan glanced about him. He should perhaps have planned this better. As it was, the landing in the bend of the stairway wasn’t large enough for him to draw an alternate rune the good old way.

  The demon’s head came up. Light brown eyes met Kelan’s.

  Damnation. Kelan quickly ran through his options. He’d fight the demon up the stairs to the top floor. Or draw it down to the hallway below. His gaze followed his thoughts and found Armand’s. He shook his head. Armand would know to retreat even further.

  Instead, the man mouthed, “Blood.”

  The demon launched to its feet, hands raised, the blur of movement snatching Kelan’s attention.

  Kelan slid the blade across his palm and followed through with the arc, raising his sword to block any blasts of anti-light even as he bent low to smear his blood along the grooves smelted into the wood.

  Black sparks fizzled and spluttered and then nothing more as the demon clenched its fists, flicked its fingers, snarled and growled, and turned red-rimmed eyes of boiling tar on Kelan.

  Kelan grinned, allowing his sword arm to fall to his side. “Well, I’ll be…” He made his way down the stairs to Armand. “It damn well worked.”

  “Christ, that was close.”

  “The blood evaporated?”

  “The water content in the blood evaporated, but that’s not the problem. Runes remain active long after the blood has dried.” Armand rubbed a hand over his jaw. “I’m sorry, I should have factored in the extreme heat. It must have changed the composition.”

  “When you two have finished your tea party,” came the demon’s sneering voice from behind, “could we get on with this?”

  “You have somewhere else to be?” Kelan waited a beat before turning.

  The demon shoved its hands into its trouser pockets. “My existence is not confined to your puny world.”

  “Puny,” Kelan said, ascending one slow step after the next, “and yet you can’t seem to stay out of it.”

  “I came, I saw—”

  “—and I conquered,” Kelan finished.

  The demon gave a shrug of indifference, but the ring of flames surrounding the black pits of its eyes flared. “Humans have such limited foresight, but here’s one for your gravestone. Pride cometh before the fall.”

  “A demon quoting scripture.” Kelan let his gaze trail down the full length of the demon and up again. “You’re absolutely right; I never saw that coming.”

  The demon’s eyes drifted left and a hiss gurgled up its throat.

  Armand. Or rather, the whiff of stale seawater from the sheepskin container he’d brought with him.

  “Stop torturing the demon,” Kelan chided him lightly, gesturing him back a couple of paces.

  “Just get on with it,” the demon rasped.

  “As you wish.” He flicked the tip of his sword to its face.

  The demon strained back, and froze midway between extracting its hands from its pocket as the first scratch drew a line of blood down its forehead.

  “Never done this before?” Kelan mocked as, with two more deft flicks of his wrist, he completed the three-pronged mark to compel the dual truths that clung to a demon when it breached the tear. “Civitas vestry titulus ut is eram in exordium quod forever ero.”

  “Saloese.” The utterance gurgled from deep inside its throat, a sound thrust up straight from the depths of hell.

  Kelan spared a glance at Armand to remark on the unfamiliar name. “This one really hasn’t done it before.” He returned his gaze to the demon. “Ostendo sum balanus of obduco inter universita.”

  “Eighteen fifty-three,” gurgled Saloese. “June, twenty-second.”

  Kelan drew aside to confer with Armand in a low voice. “So, this is its first appearance topside and it’s been here just under three weeks. Didn’t waste time attaching itself to Winterberry, did it?”

  “No, m’lord,” Armand said thoughtfully. “Unusual behaviour for a newling.”

  Stepping up to the demon again, Kelan said, “What is your business with George Winterberry?”

  The mark on its forehead had faded, the power leached now that the truths had been compelled. “Why should I tell you anything?”

  “Excellent point.” He wrapped both hands around the hilt of his sword and plunged the blade deep into the demon’s gut.

  Saloese’s eyes bulged, tar boiling over into fire. “Your—your w-weapons—” Hands closed loosely over the blade, the instinct to yank it out warring with common sense “—cannot kill me.”

  Or truly harm. The worst assault might shred the human form, on a lucky day disable it temporarily, and even then the demon probably only felt a mild discomfort. But Kelan’s sword had been forged from ore mined in the Cairngorm Mountains, rock taken from the very cave in which the tear had been bartered between their worlds. He couldn’t kill the demon, but he could inflict excruciating pain.

  “We humans have another saying.” He twisted the blade ruthlessly to add a little more incentive. “There are things worse than death.”

  A high-pitched squeal tore from its mouth. Saloese writhed from side to side and, irrationally, tried to pull the blade out, severing tendons on both hands. Its arms flung wide, hit against an invisible barrier and stayed there, dark blood pouring out the wounds.

  A sour taste invaded Kelan, curdling his humour from earlier. He�
��d always imagined he’d rather enjoy torturing a demon, the vilest and lowest of any predator to crawl upon the earth.

  He did not.

  He gave one last twist, then ripped his blade free. He made himself watch the agony distorting Saloese’s face, chiselled a grin that would be mistaken for mild amusement from the tension in his jaw and swallowed the rising bile.

  After a couple of minutes, the wounds on its palms sealed, the writhing stiffened to a wary, stationary posture and the distortions settled into a snarl. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  Kelan raised his sword arm.

  The demon gagged. “Wait… Maybe we can broker a deal.”

  “With all due respect, m’lord,” Armand spoke up. “You’re not considering anything foolish? No information that demon has is worth the price.”

  Except, Kelan thought, he had so very little that could be taken. He looked Saloese in the eye.

  “What is your business with Winterberry?” he demanded. There was more at play here than a demon slipping through the dimensions just because it could. “What is your purpose here?”

  “M’lord!” Armand barked. “You’d offer your soul for that?”

  “Souls,” Saloese scoffed. “So very last century.” Its eyes slid to Armand, then back to Kelan. “Besides, don’t we already own yours?”

  In that moment, Kelan regretted the torture a little less. Determination settled in the bottom of his abdomen like a bar of lead.

  He intended to end the demon plague. The tear in the Cairngorm Range would be sealed on his watch. No cost was too high.

  “State your terms,” he said coldly. Armand made another noise of protest. He ignored it, not wavering for a second. “Let’s see if we can reach an agreement.”

  “A delectable quandary,” Saloese drew out on a sigh. “What to choose. What, indeed, when there—”

  “Yes, I know, impossible decisions,” Kelan ground through his teeth. He wiggled the tip of his blade in the air. “Do you need help to make up your mind?”