Exile

by Peter M. Ball

  “It’s bad.” Langford flexed her thin fingers, adjusted her grip on the coffee mug. “Exactly the kind of club you and Roark go after. Mortals enticed in for the Other to prey upon, lots of people given a shit-load of money to keep the deaths hush-hush. No questions asked about what the Other do there, assuming they’re discrete. Your demon friends wanting it taken down would surprise me, if it wasn’t for the personal connection to the mistress of the house.”

  “I doubt her death will close things,” I said. “Not for long, anyway.”

  Langford closed her eyes and pondered. “Otto would be a hard woman to replace,” she said. “She’s got a decade’s experience handling the fey, always eager to deal with the minor players. Lots of people trust her to keep the club neutral; the moment that changes, they look for safer options. No one will depend on Sabbath to do that, even if they suspect that Otto’s in his pocket.”

  “Is she?”

  “Is she what?”

  “Working for Sabbath?”

  “Who knows?” Langford considered her coffee, raised the paper cup to her lips. “You operate in Broadbeach and you’re doing some kind of arrangement with Sabbath and his crew. How deep the deal goes is anyone’s guess, but the illusion of minimal interference they’ve created is convincing.”

  She drank, stopped. Looked me in the eye. “If you’re asking me if she deserves to die, that’s something I can’t tell you.”

  “Yeah.” I sipped my coffee, not tasting it; tried to swallow too much hot liquid. It hurt as it went down, muscles contorting to keep my breathing clear. Langford thumped my back as I coughed and spluttered. I waved her off, wiped my mouth with my sleeve. “Shit,” I said. “I remember why I hate it here.”

  Langford waited, letting me process. She finished her coffee, dumped the empty cups into a nearby bin. Sunlight bloodied the horizon.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s your move, trigger. We using your connection as a tool to get close, or your excuse to walk away?”

  “Neither,” I said. “Business as usual. We start surveillance, pull together a plan. We’ve got thirty-days, and we either know it’s worth doing by the end of that. If not, Sabbath’s reneging on our deal and things get complicated.”

  “You think that’s likely?”

  “No,” I said. “Sabbath’s smarter than that. If he’s got her on the list, he’s confident she’d be a target if it weren’t for our history. He swore that all his targets would deserve what they had coming.”

  “Yeah?” Langford snorted and rubbed her hands together, trying to generate some warmth. “By whose standards?”

  “Mine,” I said. “He was real damn careful about that one. Odds are, he’s had this idea up his sleeve from the moment I arrived.”

  SURVEILANCE

  There were ravens on the power-lines outside the Oasis complex. Two of them, sitting wing-to-wing, positioned so their dark eyes could scan the street. I crouched by tinted windowpane and Langford lay on her belly beside me, binoculars pressed to her face. I pointed out the corvids. “How long have they been there?”

  Langford followed the line of my finger. “The birds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Few hours, maybe.” The binoculars refocused on the front door of the Hell Bar.

  “How many hours we talking?”

  “Two? Three? I don’t know.” We were twenty days into surveillance, and my presence grated on her nerves. Langford wanted to ignore me, do her damn job, and bail out before things got crazy. Having me in the room increased the odds of something going wrong.

  The ravens bothered me. “There’s a big difference between two hours and three.”

  Langford abandoned the binoculars, flicked me an angry glare. “They’re crows, trigger. More of them have been there, on and off.”

  “That just makes it worse.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Roark spent a damn month ensuring I could recognize the difference, before we attempted the job down in Adelaide. Those guys are too big, and the curve happens towards the end of the beak,” I said. “On a crow, you’d see it starting halfway down. Tail feathers would be the same length, less wedge, more fan.”

  She looked through the binoculars, then nodded, dreadlocks bobbing. “All right,” she said. “I’ll give you that. Doesn’t mean they’re trouble.”

  “Given the circumstances, I wouldn’t rely on that,” I said.

  “Fine. I’ll pay attention to ‘em, if you’re worried about it.” Langford made a show of looking at her watch. “Twelve oh-nine. Your girl arrives in a couple of minutes, and we haven’t got her process for bypassing the wards on the bar yet. You want to keep arguing about the damn birds?”

  “I’m inclined to think about it,” I said.

  Langford snorted exasperated air into the still room. “And if they are familiars for whatever cult you’re running from, how does it change your deal with Sabbath?”

  “Well…”

  Langford raised an eyebrow at me, but I had nowhere to go. She pressed her eyes against the binoculars again, attention focused on the bar.

  I left her to it, went to the small kitchenette to make us some shitty instant coffee. Three weeks of surveillance on Nora Otto hadn’t altered my feelings about the job. The residents heading into the Hell Bar weren’t exactly the company I’d keep, but I’d be willing to bet Langford could name a dozen Other with similar reps and called them friend. Even Roark allied himself with dangerous Other, tolerating all kinds of creatures we’d have killed in other circumstances.

  That’s how it goes once you’ve seen Gloom. Nothing is ever really safe anymore.

  “She’s here,” Langford said. “Usual park, down by the Surf Club.’’

  I left the steaming mugs of coffee on the bench and walked back to the window. Watched as Nora Otto exited her beat-up Daihatsu and crossed the road. She moved with short, clipped steps, her gait limited by the leather skirt she wore to the bar like a uniform. Langford clicked her tongue at the choice. “Your girl has terrible fashion sense.”

  “Depends.”

  “Yeah? On what?”

  “Whether the skirt’s a statement,” I said. “A fuck you to the creatures of the night, who naturally expect every mortal to run.”

  “If that’s the case, she’d pair it with heels,” Langford said. “Not steel-toed Docs.”

  The part of me that still thought with a teenager’s hormones wanted to make a counter-argument. People noticed Nora Otto when she walked, and it wasn’t just the short hemline that snared attention. She paired the leather skirt with a professional jacket, midway between corporate and punk. In the sixteen years I’d been away, she’d grown into a lithe, pale woman with a shock of dark curls and a full-sleeve of tattoos covering her right arm.

  Nora approached the front door of the Hell Bar, slid the keys into the lock. Langford shushed me, focused on trying to make out the things Nora said or did to bypass the wards. Hell Bar’s security didn’t look overly tough. Two entrances; one to the main club, another to the beer garden. More access via the loading dock on the bottom floor of the Oasis center that the bar suckled against like a lungfish on a shark. The bouncers were regulation issue; big guys, all shoulders, in dark shirts and slacks.

  You could kid yourself into thinking it’d be an easy job until Nora showed up, pausing in front of the double-doors to whisper to herself and spill a pinch of salt across the threshold of her joint. Langford made notes in the ragged moleskin where things got puzzled out.

  The bar opened and Nora disappeared inside. Langford logged the time, every staff member she interacted with. The ravens did the same.

  “Keep an eye on ‘em, eh?” I said, nodding to the birds.

  “Ah-huh.” Langford didn’t look up from her scribble. She chewed on a pencil and frowned.

  “I mean it,” I said. “They could be—”

  Langford glanced up, her expression set. “You want to back out on the job, trigger, say the word and I’ll leave all this
glamor behind.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not about backing out.”

  “Course not,” Langford said. “You’re just the kind of unprofessional fucker who gets up your partners ass for the fun of it, then?”

  I opened my mouth to argue. Shut it again, right smart. “Fine,” I said. “I’m making tea. You want something?”

  Langford nodded and went back to her notes, getting lost in the work. After leaving the black coffee at her elbow, I retreated to the couch and dug my copy of Persuasion out of my pack.

  * * *

  Langford stopped giving me shit about the ravens when they didn’t leave. They were still perched on the wire on Saturday night, surveilling the Hell Bar like black feathered cops on a stakeout. I’d come to my senses and cleared out of the apartment, headed back to the safe house to sleep and prepare, but Langford called me a little after nine o’clock and asked me to check something out.

  The Hell Bar was a different beast on a Saturday night. It attracted a younger crowd: jeans, ragged t-shirts, hairstyles that caused bosses and parents alike to lament the provocative choices of the young. Less polished than your standard club crowd on the Coast, a little wilder around the edges. The DJ’s music bled across the mall, a mixture of old-school metal and punk.

  Langford let me into the apartment, pushed the binoculars into my chest. “End of the mall,” she said. “Below your goddamn birds. You aren’t going to miss him.”

  I looked. Found the sorcerer right where she said he’d be, loitering in the shadows just outside the street lights, eyes closed as he smoked a cigarette and communed with the birds on a wire above him. I recognized him on sight. Mid-thirties. Bearded. Tight black t-shirt over a Gold Coast tan. The asshole from the Hard Rock, except this time he wasn’t playing it subtle.

  “Showed up with a team of five about an hour ago,” Langford said. “He’s been sending his boys into the club, one by one, slipping ‘em past the bouncers. I crosschecked details with the log—they’re working to infiltrate.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “He tried to take a piece out of me, back when I first arrived.”

  “Right. Fuck.” Langford scrubbed both hands along her face, trying to rub away the exhaustion. Her mind ticked over, sorting through possible the reasons the sorcerer could be here. None were good news.

  I stood, pulled the SIG from its holster. “Tell me about his crew.”

  Langford started as she realized what I had planned. “The fuck I will,” she said.

  “He’s scouted the place,” I said. “He’s sent his boys in. Letting him kill or capture Otto isn’t going to do shit for keeping me on Sabbath’s good side. Tell me about the guys inside.”

  “Five. Younger blokes. They wear those t-shirts like it’s a uniform, jackets a little too heavy for the weather,” Langford said. “All of them did the salt thing, while they waited in line, so they know enough to bypass a ward.”

  “You figure they succeeded?”

  “Bouncers let ‘em in.” Langford surveyed the street. “He’s waiting for something.”

  “Right.” I checked the safety on the SIG and slipped it into the holster. “Best you pull out. I think this job’s off.”

  Langford hesitated, glancing at the window. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And what’s your plan, going in without a sorcerer to back you up?”

  “Figured I’d have a word with our friend with the beard.”

  “You sure that’s smart?”

  “Not at all. But I don’t like the coincidence, eh?”

  She nodded, and I returned the nod on my way out of the apartment. I used the fire-door and descended two stairs at a time. My footsteps echoed against the concrete walls, and the stairwell reeked of urine and stale nicotine. I hit the ground floor and stepped out into the lobby, kept my pace steady as I crossed the street.

  The sorcerer stood beside a gray SUV, a cigarette hanging from his lips. He glared the club with a terrible focus, never blinking, and I could feel the slight tug of something happening inside as I got close. His flunkies, taking a position in dark corners, tethering themselves to the Gloom. Dangerous to do, but they were attempting to be subtle, getting themselves all set up before the boss-man followed them in.

  I came around on his blind side, threading along the back of the parking lot. Made it within three car lengths before one of the ravens cawed a warning. The sorcerer turned, cigarette held between two fingers. Spotted me hovering beside a red hatchback with faded paintwork.

  I eased out of the cover, SIG in hand. No point trying to hide once you’ve been identified.

  “Last time I ran into you, my friend messed up your arm,” I said. “Trust me when I tell you, I’m a better shot.”

  He snorted and flicked his cigarette aside. Stepped away from SUV, both hands exposed. “So, you’d be Keith Murphy,” he said. “Don’t worry. I know your rep, sir.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “As it should be,” the sorcerer said. “I prefer to work low-key.”

  “Humor me. Give me a name.”

  “Well.” He smirked at me, fingers open. “Call me Thirteen.”

  “I’ve called people dumber things.”

  “I’m sure you have.” He glanced down at the SIG. “That’s a beautiful firearm. How long do you think you can wave it around before somebody freaks out and cops show up?”

  “I dunno. It’s nice and dark ‘round here.” I edged a little closer, lowered the gun. “Put your hands down, Thirteen. I don’t need to look like I’m mugging you.”

  “I’d prefer to keep them up. A better chance someone will notice and all that jazz.” He grinned at me, all confident. “Unless you’d elect to shoot me, just to get me to comply.”

  I kept the SIG trained on him, covered the space between us. “It’s tempting,” I said. “Real tempting.”

  Then I kicked him between the legs, let the pain do its job. Thirteen doubled over, hands dropping to clutch at his damaged privates. I grabbed a hank of his greasy hair, used it to haul him upright and jab the barrel of my pistol into the hollow of his throat.

  “You’ve got five men inside that club. I can already feel them tethering. Do you want to tell me what they’re doing, or do we skip to the part where this gets messy.”

  Thirteen grimaced. “You aren’t this stupid, Murphy.”

  “People keep telling me that. I’m not sure where they got the idea,” I said. “Roark’s the smart one. I don’t know shit about you, or which curses you’ve set up to chase me when after you’re dead. Don’t rightly care, either. What I do is plug people until they stop moving.”

  “Idiot,” Thirteen said, and I felt something cold and sharp stick into my neck. Pain burned through my muscles, jammed them tight. One of Thirteen’s flunkies stepped into my field of vision, a grin plastered over his face. He held up a silver needle, point beaded with thin tendrils of shadow that writhed around the metal. A simple paralytic spell, a rookie sorcerer’s trick.

  I’d gotten overconfident and paid the price for it.

  “To answer your question, Mister Murphy, we were sitting on the bar in the hopes you’d show up. Local whispers say you and Nora Otto have a history, and our other attempts to track you proved ineffective.” Thirteen straightened, took a tentative step, favoring his groin. “A desperate ploy but we needed to find you.”

  My jaw ached from the effort of trying to talk back. Thirteen grinned at me, let his flunky lever the SIG from my frozen fingers. “We need the soul of Michael Wotan,” he said. “You don’t understand what his death has set in motion.”

  His flunky handed over my gun and rifled through my pockets, searching for the soul cage or some clue of where I’d hidden it. There wasn’t much to find beyond the keycard for the apartment we’d used in the stakeout, and the small bundle of cash to cover cabs and incidental expenses. The flunky gave everything over, and Thirteen’s smile wilted on
the vine.

  “I’m not sure what he’s done, but I’d advise you to step aside.” A low voice, soft and feminine, speaking from a point somewhere behind my head. I recognized it straight away. Sixteen years hadn’t changed it that much. “I don’t doubt he earned it, whatever you’ve got planned, but I guarantee you, he’s pissed me off worse.”

  Thirteen arranged his face into a pleasant grin. “Miss Otto,” he said. “We’re not looking to interfere in your business.”

  “Five punk sorcerers come into my bar, disrupt the wards and start juicing up in the shadows like they’re aiming to cause trouble. Forgive me if I don’t take you at your word.” Nora stepped forward, just inside my field of vision. Still wearing her leather skirt, a vintage Pistol’s t-shirt with a blazer over the top, a discrete .32 nestled in her hand. “I’d consider it as a kindness if you gave Keith back his voice now.”

  The flunky put his body between Thirteen and Nora Otto’s gun. “You don’t understand,” he said. “The killer must—”

  Nora whipped the gun across the flunky’s nose. The weapon blurred, split the skin open. The flunky dropped hard, fingers going to his face, the silver needle bouncing off the bitumen. My jaw twitched. Muscles unclenched, aching from the prolonged effort. It was all I could do to keep on my feet.

  Thirteen had a phone in his hand, pulled from his pocket while Nora dealt with the flunky. He held it in a tight grip, thumb hovering over the keypad. “I don’t think you comprehend the depths of shit that await you,” he said. “I have need of Mister Murphy. I cannot allow you to interrupt us.”

  “And yet, I’ve got the gun,” Nora said. “And I doubt you’ve got any hoodoo that’ll save you.”

  I tried to warn her, but my throat wasn’t up to it. The best I managed was a deranged croak. Thirteen smiled. Nora saw the phone. She fired as he mashed his thumb against the keypad.

  The bar exploded outwards, dark flames filling the night with a wash of hot air. It wasn’t entirely natural. It wasn’t entirely magic. Part of me respected that, even as the blast wave knocked us all to the ground.