Bad Blood

by David Bussell

  ‘When you’re ready,’ said Waterson, before inhaling from his e-cig and blowing a cloud of vapour out of the window.

  ‘Why do you always have to be in on time, Waters?’ asked Rita, as she yanked open the passenger seat door and collapsed into her seat, rocking the car.

  ‘Because that’s what time we’re paid to start.’

  ‘Teacher’s pet.’

  ‘Man hands.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  Waterson smiled and reached down, grabbing a styrofoam cup of overpriced coffee and handing it over. It was as she sipped the coffee that she noticed the front door to her house open, and saw Chris Farmer emerge, blinking into the morning light.

  ‘He does not take direction,’ she grumbled as Waterson spotted him and turned to her with a shit-eating grin on his face.

  ‘Well, well, well, is that young Chris Farmer I spy, beginning his walk of shame from your house of sin?’

  ‘Why are you always so cheery in the morning, Waters?’ Rita asked. ‘It’s your third most irritating trait. Why can’t you be quiet and depressed like a normal person?’

  ‘How many times do I have to ask you not to call me Waters? You know I don’t like it, you know it annoys me, why do you still do it?’

  ‘I think you just answered your own questions, Waters.’

  Waterson sighed. ‘Also, I thought you said you and him was a one-off?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘And how many times have you enjoyed this one-off?’

  ‘About fifty.’

  ‘He’s uniform,’ said Waterson. ‘It’s like bonking the hired help; very unseemly, Rita.’

  Rita gave Waterson the finger as she slotted her seatbelt home and the car pulled away.

  The stone was slate grey; two metres in length, one in width, with rusty metal manacles affixed, ready for wrists and ankles.

  The figure in the blood-red robe ran his hand across the stone’s surface.

  ‘It’s time,’ said the voice that only he could hear. The voice that had been with him, a constant companion, since he had been a child.

  ‘At last,’ he replied, and felt a tear run down his cheek.

  End of Extract.

  Intrigued? Then click the link below to grab your copy of Familiar Magic today…

  FAMILIAR MAGIC

  Branded: Sanctified

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

  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 sweet 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 wit
h 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.

  I’d dealt with her sort before. The type of person who considers themselves a scrupulously honest samaritan, but is really just a pious old shrew.

  ‘And what is it you’d like to hand in?’ I asked, clicking on the Received tab of the LPO’s computer system, which, would you believe, is called Sherlock. It’s named after the fact that our office is located on Baker Street, right opposite the super-sleuth’s fictitious residence, as though reuniting clueless members of the public with their knackered old brollies can be equated with Holmes solving some great, police-eluding mystery.

  The woman reached into her handbag and produced a wallet; one of those old-fashioned bifolds with the metal clasp that the elderly love to lug around.

  ‘Here you go,’ she said, digging around in its bulging depths and fishing out a single pound coin.

  I watched her place it down on my desk as if it were a solid gold nugget.

  ‘A quid?’ I said, staring at the thing. ‘You came all this way to give me a quid?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, indignantly. ‘Why, what else should I have done with it?’

  I could think of about a dozen alternatives, most of which involved her shoving the thing up one of her bodily orifices, but instead of answering, I settled with staying quiet and corkscrewing my hair in frustration.

  The woman stared at me, hard and unblinking. ‘You don’t seem very grateful,’ she noted.

  ‘Of course I’m bloody not,’ I thought back.

  The woman snatched up the coin. ‘Maybe I should just keep it then, if that’s the way you feel.’ She said it with the intonation of a serial killer shouting at a victim she was keeping at the bottom of a well.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ asked a new voice.

  It belonged to Gary, my idiot supervisor. Gary was kind of like a man, only smaller.

  ‘I came here out of the goodness of my heart,’ screeched the woman, ‘but this girl’s been nothing but rude.’

  ‘I absolutely haven’t,’ I said, and I hadn’t, not out loud anyway.

  Gary shook his head in my direction and apologised on my behalf, never once taking my side into account or considering that I might be the one in the right. He then spent the next ten minutes consoling the old bat and assuring her that no, of course she hadn’t wasted a journey, and yes, of course her pathetic donation was appreciated. He even took the lone pound coin and placed it in a Ziploc bag, like it was forensic evidence in a murder. Meanwhile, I sat there with my arms folded, listening as Gary alternated between grovelling for forgiveness and admonishing me sideways for my lack of professionalism. Only once the woman had been reluctantly appeased and had left the building, did he engage me directly.

  ‘What was that all about?’

  ‘Seems like you already made up your mind,’ I replied.

  He jutted out his chin to make himself look more authoritative, but ended up looking like he was trying to blow a troublesome fly off the tip of his nose. ‘I suggest you have a good, hard think about the way you talk to me, Beckett, because if your attitude doesn’t buck up sharpish, you’re going to be out of a job. Get me?’ The last part he said so close to my face that I could smell the vending machine coffee on his breath.

  ‘I get you,’ I mumbled back, the words like tin foil in my mouth.

  ‘Good,’ he said, then did a strut around the office, peacocking for the sake of my so-called co-workers, who sat at their desks, sniggering into their sleeves. For a moment, I thought he was going to go in for a round of high-fives.

  Having completed his “victory” circuit, he then arrived back at my desk for round two. ‘Since you’re obviously so keen to carry on working here,’ he said, ‘I’m going to need you to step up your game. I’ve got sixteen bags of unsorted lost property over there that need dealing with, and someone needs to input the backlog into the system.’

  ‘I’ll get right on it,’ I muttered.

  ‘Too right you will,’ he replied, ‘tonight. Shouldn’t take more than a few hours. And don’t make that face, you’ll get paid for the extra time. Standard rate,’ he added, under his breath.

  Instead of voicing my disapproval, I bit my tongue, stayed quiet, and imagined setting him on fire a bit.

  ‘Oh, and one more thing, Abbey,’ he said, holding up a finger, ‘there’s a dress code now—new company policy—so no more coming into work looking like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.’ He eyeballed my black clothes and matching nail varnish. ‘It’s morbid.’

  It is true that I have a morbid streak. For instance, whenever I meet a new person, I always think to myself, ‘I wonder what I’d wear to their funeral?’ It’s just a habit really, not because I actively wish the person any ill will. With Gary though, things were different. With Gary, the thought occurred every time he opened his idiot mouth. And every time I imagined standing over his coffin, I pictured myself dry-eyed and dressed in my best and brightest.

  2

  Seeing as my flat in Thamesmead was an hour’s commute away, it didn’t seem worth making the long trek home just so I could drag my skin all the way back to the office again. That left me with a big slab of time to kill between the end of my crappy day shift and the beginning of my crappy night shift. A big slab of time that I ended up spending in the staff cafeteria gorging on high-calorie snacks while I caught up on some reading.

  My boyfriend, Neil, is a novelist. I’d been lugging around his newest manuscript for days under the pretense that I’d finish the thing, but I was stuck at the three-quarter point still. Don’t get me wrong, Neil’s a great writer, but his stories... they just don’t float my boat. While I like to read weighty hardbacks about orphaned peasant girls overcoming historical prejudice to become successful, independent women, Neil—how can I put this kindly—Neil paints in more… primary colours. His protagonists tend to be of the fantastic variety: modern-day magicians and shapeshifting monsters and generals of Satanic cabals. I mean, I love the boy, I really do, but seriously, give me a break. Just because I dress like a character from an Anne Rice novel, doesn’t mean I want to sit down and read one.

  Anyway, this particular manuscript was book five of Neil’s W&W Investigations set, a pulpy, urban fantasy series about a warlock and a werewolf who run a detective agency in San Francisco. Maybe that’s your bag, I don’t know. To me, that’s homework. Still, I only had a few chapters to go, so I took a deep breath, knuckled down, and got to reading. Or at least I would have, if I hadn’t been disturbed by the sound of a nearby conversation...

  I looked up from the loose pages of Neil’s manuscript to see my supervisor, Gary, a couple of tables over. Apparently, he’d decided to take a break from getting on my case so he could chat up the office temp.

  ‘...There are a lot of old secrets in the Underground network, you know,’ he told her, apropos of nothing. ‘For instance, did you know there’s a hidden tunnel that runs off the Circle line and connects to a classified military bunker in St. James’ Park? Fascinating, right?’

  The temp’s barely suppressed sigh said quite the opposite, but Gary continued to drone on at her regardless. Over his shoulder, the two of us exchanged knowing eye-rolls.

  ‘If you like,’ Gary continued, flashing the temp his supervisor laminate, ‘I could take you on a tour of the tunnels some time. My treat.’

  The temp cleared her throat. ‘That’s nice of you to offer,’ she replied, ‘but I can’t that day.’

  ‘I didn’t say a day yet,’ he huffed back, then turned and caught me earwigging on the conversation.

  He narrowed his eyes at me, as though I’d somehow poisoned his otherwise perfect pitch. Annoyed, he marched over to my table and used a pudgy finger to stab at the face of his Casio wat
ch.

  ‘About time you got to work, I reckon,’ he said, pressing his palms to the surface of the cafeteria table.

  I stood slowly and straightened up. ‘Aye aye, Cap’n,’ I said, firing off a sarcastic salute.

  He gave me a stare that I think was meant to look tough. ‘Enjoy your shift, Abbey,’ he said, taking his jacket from the back of a chair and tugging it on. ‘I’ll be going home and putting my feet up now.’

  And with that, he turned on his heel and strutted away.

  What an actual prick.

  It was getting on for half two in the morning and I still had a long way to go before I was finished doing Gary’s dirty work. I was fuming, but more than that, I was experiencing a heavy crush of disappoint. In myself. I always thought I’d be on the road to something by this stage of my life, but instead I was stuck in a rut, on my own, slaving away in a windowless tomb until the sun came up.

  I jolted at the sound of a sharp buzz.

  The office intercom.

  I made my way to reception and checked the CCTV monitor to see a stocky man from the LPO’s collection team shielding himself from the rain with a newspaper. Using the button on the underside of the reception desk, I buzzed him in and he fired into the foyer, shaking himself off like a wet dog.

  ‘Bit late for deliveries, isn’t it?’ I said, checking my phone for the time. ‘Or is it early?’

  He didn’t bother answering, just dumped a plastic basket full of junk on the reception desk and thrust a device into my hand for an electronic signature. I rattled off a jagged scrawl and cast a glance to the basket. Inside, nestling among the usual assortment of umbrellas and mobile phones, was a brown leather briefcase.