I knew full well that I was not. Storm had insisted that I agree to seek psychological help as a condition of being hired onto his cases, and then Theo had insisted the same after he had worked his magic on me and found that the outcome was not as he had desired. We had been trying to merge together the two parts of my separated personality in order to get rid of the troublesome and dangerous half. But instead of being banished, it seemed my troublesome half was more me than either of us had thought.
The outcome would have horrified the old Diana too, but I was glad to be me. Or we, I should say. Despite not knowing exactly what that meant. The only part I regretted was not knowing exactly what ‘we’ was.
Theo was probably right to be worried. For the past three weeks a feeling growing inside me had been keeping me lying awake at night. At those times the almost-music of the world, the song of the universe that I was hearing, became a deep and dreadful menace. There were bad things in the world, it seemed to say. We need to stop them. Stop them. Stop them. Stop them. We need to kill them. It’s our duty. And those words resonated inside me and felt good. Too good. Like love or lust maybe. It was a wanting, a yearning, that was bone deep.
And that was how I knew I was going to do it. Sooner or later I was going to kill someone or something, and it was just a matter of when and how and who. And I needed to make sure I got the right who, otherwise I was not going to be able to face Theo or Storm or even myself afterwards. I didn’t want to become the monsters I was meant to hunt.
I was hoping it would be just one. Kill one monster and get the urge out of my system and go back to a normal life. The kind of life where I could go to work and come home and relax in the evenings with a wonderful someone of my choosing. And I knew exactly who I wanted that someone to be. Was that so much to ask?
So here I was, stuck with seeing Roopa twice a week more often than I would like, because Theo thought I needed to talk through the anxieties he was sure I must be suffering. Little did he know that I was high as a kite, reveling in this seemingly endless sunshiny good mood.
“So Roopy-Roo, what do you want me to say?” I asked her, trying not to give her a big fat grin.
“You tell me,” she retorted.
“Are you really a qualified therapist?” I asked her, a question I had asked during every one of my six sessions to date.
“Yes I am,” she snapped.
“Did you get qualified so your family would stop calling you mad?” I said cheekily. This was probably going a step too far, but I couldn’t help goading her. Her family life was immensely interesting, probably because I had never had one — or at least not a real one.
“They wanted to lock me up in an asylum and throw away the key,” she said pertly, looking rather pleased with herself. “So I told them I will become a qualified therapist and then we will see who is mad and who is locking who away!”
Her answer took me by surprise. She had always refused to speak about this before. Seizing the opening, I asked her, “But I’m the only real client you’ve ever had, right?”
“There is no need for your boss to know that,” she said craftily.
“Theo already knows all about you.”
“Not him. The handsome one.” She waggled her heavy dark brows at me. If she tweezed them a little she would have a striking face instead of a forbidding one. I preferred it forbidding.
“Theo is handsome,” I told her stubbornly.
“That Theo is a silver fox. But I mean the other one. The one who is hot as fire and has been keeping you up at nights.” She cackled, clearly interested in seeing if I would blush in a maidenly fashion.
I sighed exaggeratedly. “I wish he was keeping me up at nights.”
She roared with laughter. “Ha! So he has been keeping you up at nights!”
“Did I deny it?”
“No. But you didn’t admit it either. It is one of your big dark secrets that you like to hide as if it makes you special.”
“Don’t say that. I thought I was special. Now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings.”
“You children are such babies. It is easy to look at you and see what you are thinking.”
“I’m not a baby. I’m twenty three.”
She tutted. “You are an embryo. Even my children are older than you.”
I sat forward in my chair. “Really? How old are they?”
“Never you mind. You may think I’m old,” she gestured down at herself, “But when you get to my age you’ll know what it is when your body still wants a man. Just because he looks like fire and you look like ashes, it doesn’t mean you won’t take a long juicy look. Hmm?” She waggled her eyebrows again. I swear she did it to make me squirm.
She seemed to know full well that I was rarely in the mood for squirming, but that didn’t stop her from trying. I waggled my eyebrows back at her. “You should come into the magi shop and try your charms on Theo.”
“Never mind that. Tell me about your hot one,” she insisted.
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“I bet you wish there was something to tell,” she said, chuckling at my expense.
“You’re impossible. I don’t know why I bother coming to you.” I don’t want to speak to her or to anyone about Storm.
“You come because I can keep your secrets.”
I gave her a surprised look and she cackled again. “Oh yes, I know Theo told you to come to me because I can keep secrets.”
She was right. When I had refused to see a proper psychiatrist, even one accustomed to working with the eldritch as Theo had called it, he had reluctantly told me about Roopa. He knew her through his magic shop. She sourced customers through him for her special amulets — her taweez as she called them. Theo got a percentage for any referrals he made, and the sums were hefty given how much people were willing to pay for them.
Theo said she was a powerful witch. I would never have guessed it to look at her. The thing that made me give in was that Theo had said she would keep my secrets even from him if I desired it. And that he trusted her not to try to use anything I told her for her own use. Aside from her large family, Roopa was pretty much a recluse. She was untrained too. She only knew how to use her magic one way, and that was to make her taweez. Even she couldn’t say how they really worked, only that they did. Theo was her only contact in the world of magic and otherkind, and that was only by accident.
In the moments that it took me to have these thoughts, Roopa’s mood had flipped. “Tell me a secret or I won’t sign your paper,” she said abruptly.
“But you have to sign my paper,” I wheedled. “The deal was that I come here to talk to you, and I haven’t been doing anything but talking of these past thirty minutes. Don’t be mean, Roopy-Roo.”
“Not real talking. Just nonsense talking. Three weeks you’ve been coming to me and you tell me this nonsense and that nonsense. But Theo said to me you are a dreamer — a firr. But you have not told me once about any of these dreams! Tell me a dream. I want to hear it today.”
“Ugh. You’re killing me here.” I pretended to glower at her.
Trust her to pick today when Storm was mad at me to make a fuss. I needed my paper signed. These past three weeks I had been working every Monday to Wednesday at Agency Headquarters. I even had my own office, sort of. But only so long as I completed this course of therapy and proved that I was not a danger to myself or to anyone else. All because I had accidentally got a murderer’s head blown off that one time.
And I very much wanted to keep this job. I needed it. Storm’s team were the Agency’s top hunters in this part of the world. They were the ones that the Devil Claw Killer case had been assigned to. DCK was the notorious serial killer who had murdered my biological mother Magda. Working for the Agency was the only way I would get put on the the case next time DCK murdered again. And I was determined to catch the evil elusive murdering bastard.
“What’s a firr?” I asked.
“No distractions.”
“Tell me w
hat a firr is and I will tell you about a vision of mine.”
“You know! A firr!” She shouted it as if volume would clarify matters, and waved a hand at me impatiently as if only an idiot lacked this knowledge. “A person who sees things. In my country our people go to see them to find lost things or seek paths to lost dreams. They practice in the occult. But their knowledge comes from the djinn you know, and the djinn aren’t to be trusted. Half of what they tell you is the truth but the other half are lies. But you are an interesting one. A different type of firr. I should send my family to you next time.”
“Do your family think you are a firr?”
“My family think I am mad. They think I should be locked up. They call my gift a curse. They don’t believe it works, even when my taweez cured them of the bad spirits that were plaguing them. All my life I thought I was mad and then your friend Theo comes along and tells my I am a witch. Ha! He says witches and magic and werewolves and vampires are all real. Ha! He says this Otherworld is real!”
“Otherworld is real. It’s common knowledge! Has been for decades.” I was astonished she would think otherwise.
“It’s only real in the fake news. They make these things up to scare you.”
“You can’t really think that!”
“Have you been there?” she demanded.
“No,” I admitted. “But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You’re a witch. You’ve met Theo and you must know he is a wizard. He wouldn’t have sent me to you if he didn’t think you’d understand. I know you don’t think Otherworld is a myth or hoax.”
“I did think that. So do all of my family, my community. But now I don’t know what to think anymore. If I said it out loud they would think I had gone even more mad. Your friend Theo is a funny one, huh? He changed my life, but his news is not easy news for the mind to understand.”
“I thought Theo was your friend too!”
“Pah! I don't have friends. What are friends? Nobody. They will stab you in the back as easily as smile at you.”
“That’s a harsh way to look at the world.”
“You tell me about your friends, huh? You have no friends. If you had friends you’d be talking to them, not to me!” She said this triumphantly.
“I do have friends actually.” I glowered at her. She was right. There were only two girls I could possibly call friends And I only ever saw them at Luca’s, a restaurant where I still worked occasional shifts. They were fellow waitresses and last time I had seen them was three weeks ago when I had worked my last shift there.
Roopa saw that my mood had soured and she looked a tad contrite. But only the tiniest bit. It didn’t matter. My annoyance had already passed as quickly as it had come.
“Theo is a good man,” she conceded. “He told me he would pay me money for my magic and he did. Astaghfirullah! Magic, he called it. I told him is was God’s gift. He said other people needed the gift God had given me. People who could pay a lot. And what choice did I have? If I didn’t have this house my family would have found a way to get rid of me. And at least now I have something to leave to my children. And I give more zakat than I ever gave before and I can only pray God will forgive me.”
“If you believe God gave you your magic then how could it be bad to use the gift that God gave you to help other people?”
She smiled sadly. “Maybe you are not such an embryo after all. Now out with a secret! We agreed on a vision, and you have five minutes left before I decide not to sign this paper.”
I rolled my eyes heaven-wards. I had thought she might have forgotten her little ultimatum in the middle of her tirade.
“Fine,” I muttered, wracking my mind to find something appropriate.
I really didn’t want to have to go into any of my past visions about murder because that would open up various cans of worms. I didn’t want to talk to her about my biological mother Magda’s death, the real reason that Storm had wanted me to see a therapist in the first place. Why dwell on the past when I could look forward to a future of happily delivering vengeance on the evil bastard that killed her in the first place? I didn’t want to tell her about the dream that I’d had just this morning of the handsome yet cruel-faced man shackled to his prison of a chair. Half naked as he had been, Roopa in her current mood would no doubt have many choice words to say about that.
I sighed, staring at a rose on Roopa’s coffee table. It was a single yellow rose. I wondered where it had come from because I had never seen flowers here before, and Roopa was definitely was not the sort to buy them for herself. Was the rose why she was in a mood today? Was that why I was seeing the rose change? It went from yellow to orange a deep dark scarlet that was so full of a density of red that it was almost black. And then it was black. A deep dark, the color of ink. I shuddered. A whispering hissing music was coming from it. The sound was a taunt, as jarring as the sound of unkind laughter. Its cruelty made me grind my teeth.
Suddenly I was filled with anger. I want to tear the goddamn thing to shreds. I was going to crush it to smithereens. I was going to vent my desire for the dark and the deadly on it. My navelstone was vibrating, sending quivers deep into my stomach. Its movement was violent. That had not happened in a long time. It wanted something. It wanted me to do something. It wanted me to tear the rose apart. It wanted me to find the source of that laughter and cut it to pieces.
I had to force myself to breathe deeply and steadily. I had to force myself to believe that the rose was just a rose. But the laughing taunting whispering music of the rose grew louder. It had no words and yet I could almost decipher a meaning, as if I was hearing foreign language that I did not quite understand. The goddamn rose was taunting me. What the fuck? I reached out with great control and I forced myself to pick it up, to feel it and know that it was only a rose. But the moment that my fingers met the stem, the rose crumbled into ash.
There was a sharp pain in my thumb. I blinked in pain, and then the rose was there again and yellow again, Its green thorny stem between my finger and thumb had pricked me.
The vibration in my navelstone had stopped, but I was shaking.
“Well?” Roopa said impatiently.
“I saw a rose,” I told her. My voice came out croaky. My throat had gone painfully dry. I swallowed hard to ease the soreness but it didn’t work. For the first time in three weeks that sunshiny buoyant feeling inside me had fully dried up. I resorted to taking a sip of water from the glass that Roopa always brought me.
“A rose?” she said looking skeptical.
“A rose,” I repeated. My hand, which was still holding Roopa’s rose, was trembling.
She took her rose as if irritated that I had touched it. She placed it carefully back in its slim vase. “My son got it for me,” she said, a hint of pride in her voice that she could not hide.
“A rose isn’t enough to make me sign the paper,” she said.
“It was taunting me,” I said. “It was laughing at me.”
“In your dream? What does it mean?” she asked.
My fists were clenched so tightly that my nails were cutting into my palms. I opened them up and stared at the little crescent shapes left by my nails. “I don’t know. Someone was laughing at me.”
I was certain of it. Someone was out there laughing at me. I knew it in the way that I have that made the small things seem like the most important things in the world. As if they were signs that something bad was coming. No wonder Roopa thought I was mad. She had never had to experience one of my visions and how real they felt. It was like how dreams seemed to make total sense when you were in them but when you awoke and tried to tell it to someone you realized all of the gaps in the logic. That was what my visions and psychic dreams were like. That was what this new music was like. They were so real, but as soon as I reached out to touch them they disintegrated and made no sense.
I had been still staring at the rose. I looked up to Roopa and found her studying my face with a frown. She took pity on me. She reached over to take the piec
e of paper that I had put onto the coffee table and signed it. “Next time you will tell me more about this dream,” she insisted.
By the time I was ready to leave my memory of the incident with the rose felt foolish. It was just a stupid rose after all. How bad could it be? As I put on my jacket, Roopa disappeared in through the door that I was not allowed to go through, and came back out with two plastic carrier bags. Inside each I could make out the outline of a stack of tupperware boxes which I knew from experience would all be filled with various home-cooked curries. The sight made my mouth water. Roopa’s home cooking had left me stunned the first time I had eaten it. It tasted like love poured into a dish.
“One for Theo, one for you,” she said as she ushered me impatiently towards the door.
“Thank you Roopa.” I gave her a big hug, squeezing her until she protested.
Killer's Gambit Page 4
