Killer's Gambit

by Hermione Stark

  “You know you love it,” I said.

  She needed my hugs even if she didn’t know it. I bet that prickly son of hers never bothered to hug her when he came over. Sometimes I got the feeling that in between each of my visits nobody had visited her at all.

  She returned my hug for a mere few seconds before pushing me firmly away. “Remember to bring back my tupperware back next time,” she chided as I left.

  Chapter 4

  DIANA

  I arrived to Grimshaw’s magic shop later that morning to find a small queue had formed outside. This only happened to us on the week before full moon, and after I had served all the customers with their waiting orders of wolfsbane potion, the shop became quiet again. Nobody was in here but me. But I wanted to check to make sure that Theo was not having a lie-in, so I called his name loudly up the back stairs that led to his living quarters upstairs. He did not respond.

  This did not surprise me. Theo had already told me that he would be out for most of today, and may not see me at all. I had very little idea of what he got up to when he was outside of the shop. When he was here he kept me company on the shop floor or pottered around his workshop in the back, tinkering with his latest magical inventions, many of which he ended up refining into merchandise to sell. But he was out as often as he was in, a fact which suited me very well. I quite liked having the place to myself so I could go through the files that I had stolen from Agency Headquarters. I hadn’t admitted this to Theo yet. He wouldn’t approve of me jeopardizing my job, which he had observed was important in giving me stability in my life.

  Having confirmed that Theo was out, I decided now was a good as time as any to check his ledger. I had been working for Theo for nearly a month now, and in that time had noticed his particular habits about certain things. For example, he kept a ledger of certain purchases that certain customers had made. He tracked which of his werewolf customers were up to date with their purchases of wolfsbane potion, but had never overtly told me that he kept an eye on them in case any stopped observing the rules of society. I don’t think anyone had asked Theo to do this, but maybe he just liked to be a good citizen. His werewolf customers would no doubt be offended if they knew about it.

  It made me wonder about all the ways that Theo might be keeping an eye on me. Which might not be a bad thing, so it didn’t bother me much. I pulled the heavy ledger out of its spot where it was stored beneath the counter in the magical section of the store and I leafed to the werewolf section. I updated the list with the ones who came in today. Several others would soon be running out of potion, but as they still had five days to come in before the full moon I was not worried.

  Next, I ran my finger down the list of names of customers who had all purchased items of a dubious nature. Theo did not sell anything that was outright dangerous in the store itself, but that didn’t mean that certain ingredients weren’t well known for being used in dangerous spells and the like. And it didn’t hurt for me to keep my psychic tabs on people. I don’t think Theo would have liked me to be looking at his list in order to hunt down anyone who was misbehaving. I had already made up my mind that if anyone was doing anything particularly naughty, I should investigate to see if they needed punishing.

  I needed to find a bad person and soon.

  At times like this I missed the little voice inside my head. I would have been able to have a conversation with her, and discuss why we were on the hunt for bad people. And then she would have told me that she wanted to stop them from doing bad things in all the brutal ways that appealed to her nature, and I could have told her that she was wrong. The problem was that she was now me. And I needed what she needed.

  I ran my fingers down several pages of names, hoping that something might tickle my psychic senses, but nothing did. Feeling annoyed, I put the ledger back in its place. I went to get my Agency files from the drawer that Theo had given me in the store room to put my things in, and returned to the counter to peruse them. Something was nagging at me. It took me a few minutes to realize what it was. Normally Mozz would have come to find me by now.

  I called for her. “Mozz? Mozzarella? Where are you?”

  She did not make an appearance.

  Frowning, I went to look for her. I headed up to Theo’s kitchen, where she was sometimes to be found guzzling a ball of fresh mozzarella cheese, the only thing she ate. Mozz looked like a toddler and had the habits and temperament of one too. Theo had told her she was not to eat the cheese anywhere else in the shop due to her tendency to leave behind a mess. She had not been happy about this, but it was pretty much the one rule that she obeyed now that I’d filled the kitchen with fresh flowers and made it a pleasant environment for her to loiter in. Since she took such a long time eating, pulling off strings of the cheese and nibbling them delicately, she ended up spending hours at a time there.

  But she was not there.

  I headed to one of her other favorite spots; Theo’s workshop. Neither of us was allowed in there without supervision, but that was probably what appealed to Mozz most. I knocked on the workshop door and called her name, but she did not answer. This did not mean she was not there. I tried the handle, and when it turned I knew she must be inside, because it never turned for me when the workshop was empty. It was probably some sort of spell that Theo had put on it to keep me out. Either Mozz knew how to break it or Theo didn’t mind me going in there to get her out.

  I opened the door a little and poked my head in. Mozz was sitting cross-legged on the ground outside of the large pentacle that was carved into the stone floor at one end of the room. She was staring at it and humming to herself a melancholy tune. Its eerie haunting notes made me shiver. For a moment I remembered how it had felt to be sitting inside that pentacle while Theo worked his magic. The room had been dark and lit only by candles. Inside that pentacle I had burst apart into a million pieces. At least that’s what it had felt like. I had blown apart and come together again. The pain and the power had been immense. The me that went into the pentacle was not the same me that emerged from it.

  As if sensing my presence, Mozz turned around and looked right at me. For a moment she looked scared, and then she realized it was me. A smile blossomed on her little round face, and she came running up to me with her arms stretched in front of her. But it was not cuddles that she was after. “Slime!” she demanded, holding out both hands.

  Mozz had long since grown bored of all the various knickknacks of interest in Theo’s shop. For her the more ordinary things I brought in from the human world were fascinating. Like glitter slime.

  Within minutes she was happily lolling around on the shop floor, pouring various colors of glitter into pots of multi-coloured slime and squashing it happily into a shimmering dough between her chubby little hands. When Beastie arrived, having made her own way across London to the shop and let herself in through the cat flap of that Theo had installed, Mozz found a new joy — the making of slime bubbles. Using her particular magic she blew them up into the size of balloons and made them float away. Beastie indulged her by chasing them and popping them with her claws. Mozz shrieked with laughter.

  Now that I knew that Mozz was safely preoccupied and not at risk of getting into any trouble under my watch, I returned to my files. Zezi’s case felt in hand. If Marielle Zamas did not call with anything interesting, I planned to go back to the Petrichor club from last night and scour it from top to bottom until I got a new lead.

  But the file on Steffane Ronin was still troubling me. It had been calling to me with its low persistent thrum since the moment that I had walked into the magic shop. I didn’t know why. Ronin was a vampire that was found in a locked vault of a room with the blood of his dead victim all over him. He had clearly been drinking from her. No other vampires had been in the room. The massive stone door had been locked from the inside. It was an open and shut case, no pun intended. But not according to the persistent psychic thrum emerging from the file, tugging at me while the other cases — except Zezi’s — r
emained silent.

  I leafed through the file again and re-read all of the notes. It did not help. Feeling annoyed that such a supposedly clear-cut case of murder by bloodthirsty vampire was eating at me but offering me no fresh insight, I slammed the case file shut and opened up one of the other ones. I had not given the rest enough attention, and I might as well read them thoroughly before giving up on them. Soon enough I found my mind wandering. I wished I could talk to this Steffane Ronin and put my mind at rest. Although why I would want to speak to a vampire was beyond me.

  Half an hour later the sound of a bell ringing drew me out of my reverie. I hurried out of the hidden section of magical goods at the back of the store and into the store’s front section where we kept the everyday human pawnshop items.

  A man in a cowboy hat was standing by the counter waiting for me. “Howdy,” he said.

  “Howdy back atcha.”

  “You Diana Bellona?” he asked.

  I hated it when somebody I did not know asked for me by name. It no longer made me feel afraid, but it still felt intrusive. This guy was in his late twenties and was wearing the whole cowboy shebang; stetson, plaid shirt, fringed jacket, faded jeans, boots with spurs, and a belt with a big old shiny buckle. It should have looked like a ridiculous get-up since we were in London, but it sat well on him. It helped that he had one of those faces that was weatherbeaten and affable and easy to like.

  “What’s it to ya, pardner?” I asked with a smirk.

  He grinned appreciatively and tipped his hat to me. “Boss man wants to see you, ma’am.”

  “I assume this is your boss man, rather than my boss man.”

  “Sure thing ma’am.”

  “And who are you?”

  “Just the driver, ma’am.”

  “The question is do I want to see your boss man?”

  “He certainly thinks so ma’am. I’m to take you the prison right away. Car’s outside.”

  “The prison. That explains everything. I’ll be with you right away.” I pointed my finger at him and then at the door, making it clear I wanted him to leave.

  He stayed standing where he was. He shoved a hand into his jeans pocket, pulled out a slip of paper, and slid it across the counter towards me. “Boss man told me to give you this. Said you’d know what it was about.”

  I was about to slide it right back across to him when I saw what was written on it. A name that made me pause. The cowboy was wrong. I had no idea what this was about, but I wanted to know and badly. Because this itch had been scratching me all day and it was high time I put it to rest.

  I stabbed the name with my forefinger. “Is this your boss man?” I asked.

  “Sure thing, ma’am. He says he’s been waiting for you.”

  Chapter 5

  DIANA

  I told the cowboy that I was working and that he should come back later. He said he’d wait. And he did, because when I shut up the shop in the evening, there he was parked up outside in a powder-pink, open-top Cadillac cabriolet.

  I whistled in appreciation. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  He grinned when he saw it was me. He had been lounging in the back seat, his feet up, reading a paperback. He threw the book into the front passenger seat and bounded out of the car in one swift movement to open the back door for me.

  “It’s the boss’s car, ma’am. I drive what he tells me to drive.”

  It was just as well that it was mid-August in London and we were enjoying a brief spell of hot weather. I wondered what he drove the rest of the year. The sense I got from him was that he was exactly what he seemed to be. A guy who had had his struggles in life and was now interested in an easy life even if it meant working for the bad guys. This guy was at total ease with himself. The almost-music emanating from him was just the usual background hum of someone who was maybe not entirely innocent of all wrong-doing, but was not particularly dangerous either. He wasn’t about to pull a knife on me. I could pretty much trust him. So I ignored the door he was holding open and got into the front passenger seat. He shrugged and joined me.

  As he started up the car, I asked, “So what’s a nice cowboy like you doing working for a villainous vampire like Steffane Ronin?”

  He shrugged. “He pays well.”

  “What’s your name? Or do you go by cowboy all the time?”

  “Cowboy suits me just fine.”

  I looked pointedly at his manicured hands. “Some cowboy.”

  He grinned a big toothy grin. “Perk of the job, ma’am. A man can’t live the hard life forever.”

  As he drove, I took the time to sit back and think. Was this cowboy really taking me to see Steffane Ronin? And how the hell did Ronin know that I wanted to see him? And why the hell did I even want to see him? He was a killer. Just because his case had been tickling at my subconscious didn’t mean I needed to go digging around in it. I could just imagine what Storm would say if he knew what I was up to. He would be seriously unimpressed at the very least.

  This made me giggle. Perhaps he deserved to be unimpressed.

  The thing was that saying could no to seeing Ronin was going to get me nowhere, and saying yes might actually get me somewhere. Listening to the weird tickling of my psychic subconscious was the one thing that I really knew how to do. It always had landed me where I was supposed to be. Not listening to it would be like not drinking water when I was thirsty. Pointless, and eventually painful. The Ronin case might only be a nagging itch now, but give it time and left untended it would become full-on nightmares and insomnia. Past experience had taught me this.

  And heck, perhaps this Ronin case was how I was finally going to douse my deadly little desire. Maybe this Ronin guy deserved a killing by a supposed Angel of Death.

  Cheered at the thought, I sat back to enjoy the ride. But this open top car malarkey was not all it was made out to be. My long hair in its loose bun came loose the moment we hit an empty patch of road and the cowboy put his foot on the gas. The wind whipped through it tangling it all up, no matter how often I tucked it back into the neck of my jacket. By the time we had arrived at the prison, which was on the outskirts of London, my hair was thoroughly snarled. I looped it back up in a messy bun again as I followed the cowboy into the prison.

  This was a special prison for otherkind only, and Steffane Ronin was being kept in a wing specifically designed for vampires. I had to go through a metal detector and be eyed up by a grumpy mage and then be patted down by a female security officer before they let me through. The cowboy was not allowed in, so I had to go alone. I followed a pair of beefy guards down several dim corridors before coming to a door. One guard handed me a pair of weird looking goggles and told me to put them on.

  “Do not make eye-contact with the prisoner at any time,” he warned me sternly. “And do not take these off.”

  “Sure thing. What are they? Some sort of magical anti-mesmerism glasses?”

  “Supposedly,” said the guard.

  “No such thing,” said the other in disgust. An undercurrent of fear was coming off this one, as if he was fully aware that he was working in a place surrounded by monsters and the idea of what one of them would do to him if it got free was constantly nag at him. This guy was a stress-pot.

  “Stay outside the circle at all times. Do not approach the prisoner. Do not touch the prisoner. Keep the alarm button in reach and press it the second you need help.”

  “Much good it’ll do ya,” muttered the stress-pot.

  “I’d prefer if you armed me with a cross bow,” I told the first guard with a grin. “The type that shoots stakes.”

  He grinned back. “Tell me about it. Why are you here to see this one anyway?”

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  The guard shrugged. “Your funeral.”

  He opened the door to let me in. The room inside was completely dark, but I didn’t need the help of the glasses to see. The room was ten feet square. At its center was the circle that the guard mentioned —
it was made of sigils carved permanently and deeply into the stone floor. They were highlighted by the faint glow that they were emitting.

  In the middle of the circle was a metal monstrosity of a chair that was welded into the ground. And sitting on it, shackled with chains, was a dark-haired man with glittering eyes. A thick metal belt around his naked torso held him attached to the back of the chair. His wrists and forearms were shackled to the chair’s arms. He had been staring at the ground and sitting as still as a corpse. But then he looked up directly at me and I saw that cruel edge to his features that I had seen in my dream.

  Suddenly I remembered who he reminded me of; one of my favorite actors — Joaquin Phoenix — when he was young and playing some evil Roman emperor. I’d been spending my evenings binge watching movies and tv shows, trying to distract myself from my itch to go out and kill something.