Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  ‘Get lost,’ I replied.

  His face faltered for a second before he rebounded. ‘Can I, uh, get you a drink?’

  The barman placed my just-ordered pint in front of me.

  ‘I’m all good here.’

  The man dithered as he tried to think of what to say next.

  ‘I’ll make this easy for you, mate,’ I said, ‘go away now or I will punch you in the throat.’

  The man went away.

  My phone buzzed. A message from Parker: Where you at, girl?

  My heart leapt and I messaged back: At church. Is the job ready?

  I stared at the phone for several minutes, willing him to answer. He did not answer.

  It was getting dark outside, and the chances of the job dropping in my lap before the day was done seemed dim. Looked like I was going to have to stick with using giant amounts of booze as my emotion-muffler.

  I downed half the pint in one and let loose a burp of such ferocity that it would have rendered anyone within a foot of me unconscious.

  ‘Fuck,’ I grumbled, upset that as much as I drank, as much as I tried to keep my thoughts elsewhere, the same picture kept forcing itself to the front of my mind.

  A hospital bed.

  My mum, small, broken, unconscious, tubes jabbed into her, the only thing keeping her company the steady beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor. Why was I so disturbed by that image? So upset? My mum didn’t deserve my worry. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d been more upset at the idea of me visiting her than by the accident itself.

  Was that fair? Maybe not. But since when did my thoughts about that woman have to be fair?

  I swore as I realised my eyes were getting wet. Fuck that.

  ‘Oi, Shaggy,’ I yelled across the pub at the guy who’d tried chatting me up.

  He looked over to me, eyes wide, pointing at himself. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah, you. It’s your lucky day, I’ve decided you can buy me a drink.’

  Ten minutes later the toilet cubicle door slammed closed behind us. One of his hands fumbled the lock into place while the other fumbled at my bra strap.

  ‘I’m, uh, John, by the way,’ he mumbled as I chewed on his neck.

  ‘Couldn’t give a shit,’ I replied, and shoved my tongue into his mouth.

  I didn’t have a job to distract me, and alcohol wasn’t doing the job, so this would have to do. Losing myself to lust. A stupid, desperate hook-up in a pub toilet with a randy random. I’d lose myself in his flesh. Give in to the eager hands that roamed over my body, that groped at my chest and kneaded my arse.

  I reached down and grabbed hold of the bulge straining inside his jeans. He let out a yelp of surprise and hopped back.

  ‘You’re not gonna get shy on me now, are you?’ I asked, grinning as I undid his belt, unbuttoned his jeans.

  The man—what was his name again? James? Jason?—shook his head and lunged for my mouth again. He wanted me. He was going to have me. That’s all that mattered right there, right then. Not my mum, not my missing brother, not anything.

  There was a knock on the outside of the cubicle door.

  ‘Obviously occupied!’ I said, unbuttoning my jeans, ready to yank them down.

  A second knock.

  ‘Are you stupid, mate? Piss off.’

  With a loud crack, the hinges were torn from the cubicle’s cheap wooden frame and the door wrenched away to reveal a man so large I took him for a semi-shaved yeti. Despite his imposing bulk and terrible manners he was dressed like a gentleman in an expensive dark blue suit and tie. He offered a nod of his meaty head.

  I recognised him.

  He worked for Jenkins & Jenkins, defence lawyers for the Uncanny Courts.

  ‘All right, Alan,’ I said.

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ asked my bewildered hookup—John, that was it!—no doubt taking this hulking beast for a scorned boyfriend.

  Alan placed a finger to his lips then grabbed John by the collar and removed him from the cubicle. Alan wasn’t always in control of his own strength, and this was one of those occasions. Instead of pulling John out of the cubicle and pushing him to one side, he accidentally propelled him across the bathroom and landed him in the sinks. A mirror shattered and rained down on my not-quite-lover, tinkling off the bathroom’s tile floor.

  ‘Ow…’ he managed to say, dazed but not too badly hurt.

  ‘Bad Alan,’ I said, wagging a finger at him.

  He frowned and pulled out a pad of paper. The word Sorry appeared on the page. He tore it off and handed it to John.

  Alan was mute, but had the ability to make his thoughts appear on paper without the need of a pencil or pen. It’s not the most amazing use of magic you’ll see in the Uncanny Kingdom, but it always tickled me, kind of like the first time I saw an Etch A Sketch in action.

  ‘Well?’ I said, buttoning my jeans and stepping out of the cubicle, glass crunching beneath my battered black boots.

  Alan lifted up another page of his pad: Parker said you’d be here. You are needed. Follow.

  Alan put the pad away and left the bathroom.

  ‘Sorry, John, duty calls,’ I said with a shrug.

  He looked up at me with a combination of hurt, confusion, and anger. A difficult mix to pull off, but bless him, he managed it.

  I turned away from my would-be shag and followed Alan.

  Yup, this was definitely a better distraction than terrible, short-lived toilet sex.

  End of Extract.

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  Here’s a SNEAK PEEK at the first Hexed Detective book, another series set in the Uncanny Kingdom universe…

  Detective Rita Hobbes’ life has been mysteriously erased, and her day isn’t about to get any better.

  All Rita wants is to abandon dreary Blackpool and start over somewhere new. But when she triggers a magical hex that renders her invisible and traps her in her hometown, escape seems impossible.

  Thrust into a world she doesn’t understand, Rita finds herself trying to solve a case that by any sane measure is unsolvable.

  1

  Neil Stevenson was about to die.

  It would not be a natural death but would be treated as such. Only Neil would know the strange truth of it; only Neil would know about the voice and what it made him do.

  Many people thought Neil to be odd, his own wife among them. He would iron his socks, and sing lesser-known Billy Joel songs to break an awkward silence. Then there was his morning routine. He’d get up at the crack of dawn, whether it was baking with summer sun outside or freezing with winter
cold, and out he’d go with a whistle on his lips and a towel in hand.

  He’d walk the short distance from his house to the beach, putting on his swimming goggles as he did so, ready to wade into the sea.

  ‘A dip in the big blue,’ he’d say to anyone who’d listen, ‘twenty minutes splashing around in the sea and you’ll be astonished how it jump starts your mental faculties.’

  It was one of the main reasons Neil had lived in Blackpool his whole life; that faded tourist trap on the North West coast of England that had, most agreed, seen far better days. Now the tourists were smaller in number and the crime rates were reaching record highs. Cars rusted as the salt air nibbled at them day after day, and people walked with their heads down as whip-crack winds struck out from across the water.

  But the sea.

  Being so close to that seemingly endless expanse of water.

  It made Neil Stevenson’s heart sing.

  Unfortunately, on this particular morning, it would also make his heart stop.

  Neil took off his shoes and placed them on the sand, tucking his house keys into the toe of one of the loafers, then placing his towel on top. He breathed in forcefully through his nose, then did some vigorous squat thrusts, the half-wetsuit he was wearing squeaking each time he rose.

  ‘Right then,’ he said to himself, running his hands through his thick, black hair and striding towards the water.

  The sea that met him was cold; it was always cold. Neil didn’t mind. The cold was the point of it all.

  He was halfway to the buoy, which bobbed 100 metres from shore, when he first heard the voice.

  ‘Neil.’

  At first he only half heard it. A whisper on the breeze; a sound he dismissed as the water sloshed past his ears and he felt his brain crackling to life.

  ‘Neil.’

  I mean, it was absurd. There was no one within earshot, no one else mad enough to be in the sea that early on a weekday. So of course, no one could be speaking to him in such a soothing, deep voice.

  ‘You are Neil Stevenson.’

  He heard it for sure that time. Four words, clear and true, that he could no longer ignore. He stopped, still some distance from the buoy, his target every morning for years. His legs slowly bicycled, arms washing snake-like, as he turned in a circle trying to find the source of the voice.

  ‘Hello?’ said Neil.

  ‘You are Neil Stevenson, your parents are Arthur and Judith Stevenson.’

  There was something disquieting about the voice. Something other than it being disembodied and impossible. Something that made his skin crawl.

  ‘Who is that?’ Neil asked. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Stop moving your legs, Neil.’

  His legs ceased their kicking and he momentarily ducked below the water. He emerged, coughing and gasping seconds later. Why had he done that? He hadn’t meant to, his legs had just stopped.

  ‘Neil Stevenson.’

  He was scared now. He turned back to the beach, kicking his legs out and driving forward, his little shoe and towel pile visible in the distance.

  He would not make it that far.

  ‘Stop.’

  He stopped swimming and began treading water again.

  ‘Please,’ Neil begged.

  ‘You are going to drown.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  Neil tried to fight the voice, but he was a passenger in his own body. He thought about his wife as his limbs stopped kicking and he slipped below the water, lungs burning, brain screaming. Soon enough he gave in and opened his mouth, filling him with water, turning his body into an anchor. As he sank to the depths, Neil was sure he saw the ghost of something terrible beneath the water. A great dark shape, insubstantial, unreal, monstrous.

  It smiled at him.

  And then Neil died.

  As she dressed that Tuesday morning, Detective Rita Hobbes had no idea she was about to take a tumble down the rabbit hole. That life as she knew it would soon slip away and be replaced by a hidden, dangerous world. A world that lived in the shadows and tip-toed behind the known; that skulked down secret streets and lurked within whispered rooms.

  No, all Rita knew when she got up that morning was that she’d drank far too much the previous night, and now her head felt like the Incredible Hulk was using it as a stress toy.

  ‘Christ on a bike,’ she groaned as she surveyed her face in the mirror. Her eyes looked as though someone had used her face as a coffee table and left behind two dark rings. ‘Never again,’ she said, knowing there was every chance she’d break that vow before the day was done.

  She didn’t have time for a shower. Instead, she sniffed at her dark red hair, then her armpits, and grimaced before grabbing a can of deodorant and spraying herself from head to toe. Having half-arsed her ablutions, she padded out of the bedroom in desperate need of about two gallons of water and a bacon sandwich.

  Rita was thirty-one years of age and liked to pretend she was much happier in her thirties than she had been in her twenties. She’d lived in Blackpool her whole life, and very much hoped she didn’t die there. Rita was an orphan, passed from orphanage, to foster family, and back again, multiple times. The most oft-cited reason for the termination of her foster family placements had been the biting. She had bitten so many people so many times. Not just a nibble, no, she’d sunk her teeth in right up to the gums.

  And that had not been the end of her youthful rap sheet. There had also been the fires. And the stealing. And that time she’d poisoned Jason Cooper, a fellow orphan, with pellets meant for rat traps. She’d done that after he’d grassed on her for drawing a penis on Maggie Karen’s forehead while she took a nap.

  Rita Hobbes had been marked down as a ‘bad egg.’

  Many had feared that all that lay ahead for young Rita was a life of crime, or perhaps a spell on the women’s wrestling circuit, but instead she’d surprised them all by ending up on the other side of the law. Grown-up Rita hadn’t wound up in jail, or face-down on the wrestling mat, instead she’d become a Detective Sergeant for the Blackpool Police.

  Rita was stood in the kitchen of her house, gulping down her third glass of water, when she realised she wasn’t home alone.

  ‘Oh, you’re still here,’ she said as she turned to the kitchen table and discovered a man sat there in his underpants, eyes half-shut, hair a thick, dark, bird’s nest.

  ‘Yup, still here,’ agreed Chris Farmer, Rita’s sort of, but not really at all, boyfriend. She’d been quite clear on the terms of their relationship: they could go to the pictures to watch a film and then talk about the film over beer and pizza afterwards. They could also have sex, should they both feel so inclined. And that was as far is it went. No emotions. No sharing. No obligations. No sleeping over. But there he was. It was morning and there he was.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, gnawing at a piece of toast that had clearly been left in the toaster a minute too long, ‘meant to go, but I fell asleep after we had the sex. And now here we are.’

  ‘Looks like it, yeah.’

  ‘Don’t mind, do you?’

  Rita really, really did mind. Like, a lot. A more subtle soul would have put this across gently, or even pretended it was no big deal. But this was Rita Hobbes he was dealing with.

  ‘Of course I bloody care, Chris, you know the rules. I told you to print off the list I emailed and pin it to your fridge so you wouldn’t forget.’ She sat opposite him and swiped a slice of toast from his plate. ‘You’ll remember to go home next time though, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s not like we’re bloody married.’

  ‘Heaven forbid.’

  Rita munched on the pilfered toast and spat crumbs as she spoke. ‘Exactly. This is a very casual pleasure thing. As agreed. No point rocking the boat now.’

  ‘We are on the same page,’ he replied.

  Rita chewed on the burnt toast as she eyeballed him. She wasn’t entirely convinced that they were on the same pag
e, or that they were in fact reading the same book.

  ‘It’s just, we are both very good at the sexy times business, right?’ said Rita.

  ‘No complaints here.’

  ‘Good, so why ruin it by adding all the relationship stuff? The pretending to care about how each other’s day went, the holding hands and throwing bread at stupid ducks, the his and her matching pyjamas and the simmering resentment. All that crap.’

  ‘Those are your best examples of relationship things?’

  ‘I’m telling you, a loving relationship is the best way to ruin a casual shag.’

  Chris stood and took his empty plate over to the sink. ‘Okay, okay, I get the message. I will never sleep over again, scout’s honour.’ He checked his watch. ‘Shit. Shit it. I’m going to be late. The Guv will have my balls.’

  Rita watched him scamper off to retrieve his clothes from upstairs.

  Rita lived in a small, two-bedroom house on a street of identical looking houses. The rent was incredibly cheap as the place was riddled with damp and the electrics were, at best, massively dangerous.

  Still. Cheap.

  People had asked why she didn’t just buy a place, but buying a place meant staying in Blackpool, and that was the last thing Rita wanted.

  A car horn blared outside.

  ‘Shit.’ She knew who that was. ‘Chris, stay out of sight, yeah?’ she called upstairs.

  ‘I’m the phantom shagger, got it. So, are we gonna meet tonight? Rita? Hey?’

  Chris poked his head over the banister and looked down just in time to see the front door closing behind Rita.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘let’s play it by ear.’

  Rita waved a middle finger in the direction of the car parked on the opposite side of the road. The smartly-dressed man with neat, sandy hair sat behind the steering wheel gave his horn a further, very annoying blast. This was DS Dan Waterson, Rita’s partner, and ride to work that morning. She had a car of her own, but more often than not it stayed in the station car park, due to her habit of drinking too much to drive home after work.