Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (24 page)

Sharon looked at Edna in an emphatic “Help me” manner.

“Um… I’m sure we can try, dear,” suggested Edna. “Tell me, is it nice being a vampire?”

“Nice? It is hard bloody work, pardon my language, that’s what it is. Everyone is always judging, which is so twelfth century.”

“On a different note,” Sharon tried desperately, “how are you at, like, tracking your prey and that?”

Kevin hesitated, suspicion blooming behind the indignation natural to his features. “What kind of prey? Is it NHS-certified?”

“We’re looking for a man called Derek,” offered Rhys. “He’s vanished. And so have half the spirits of the city. And so has Greydawn, She Who Divides the Night From the Day. And there’s this office called Burns and Stoke and the walls say,
Help me
.”

“What’s this got to do with my dentist?” asked Kevin.

“Um… well, see, uh…”

“I can’t be handling untested blood! No idea where it’s been.”

“This is more sort of the fate of the city we’re talking about here.”

“Do I look like I’m a fate-of-the-city kinda guy?” demanded Kevin. “You’re a shaman,” he added, waggling a hand in Sharon’s direction. “You know what to do; you fix it!”

“It doesn’t quite—”

“Aren’t you supposed to be a leader of your tribe?”

“Well, the thing is—”

“And actually, babe, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I was like, expecting way more feathers in your hair, and this whole, like, ‘approachable but ditsy’ thing you’ve got going on, while kinda cute, isn’t really very shaman-like–just saying.”

There was a moment.

A long, quiet moment.

Not just Rhys, but even Edna looked afraid.

The world held its breath.

Kevin began, “Um—”

Then Sharon Li had seized his tartan-pattern shirt with both hands and was pulling so hard his tongue began to flop against his teeth. His feet arched up off the floor until he balanced precariously on tiptoe as she pushed her face towards his and snarled, “Stop. Telling. Me. What. I. Should. Know! Because if I don’t fucking know something it’s because you bastards, you moaning ‘Sharon do this,’ ‘Sharon do that’ wankers, haven’t fucking told me! Do you get that? No one tells me anything, it’s just ‘Sharon save the city.’ I mean, Christ! Burns and Stoke have been buying up buildings which have the souls sucked out of them, a mystery creature howls in the night, the city walls crumble and Our Lady of 4 a.m. vanishes, and you just freak out about your dentist and feathers in my hair! Pull yourself together and get vampiric on this shit!”

It was five minutes later.

Edna held open the bag of Derek, social secretary/high priest of the Friendlies, and said, “Do you think you can find him with this?”

Kevin sniffed. He wore latex gloves over his boney white hands and prodded the contents of the bag with the end of a pristine sharp pencil. “Multitools and greasy bits of tissue–do you know how much bacteria there is in here?” he whined as Edna rattled the bag hopefully.

“Focus,” barked Sharon.

Kevin’s sniff was both literal and pointed.

“Oh, this is so rank,” he exclaimed. “Do you realise that when you smell something, you’re basically just inhaling the thing itself? This Derek did keep clean, didn’t he? No fungal infections, no thrush?”

“He was–
is
–a very nice man!” retorted Edna.

“Have you got his scent?” demanded Sharon.

“Darling, I am not some yappy barking dog.”

“I thought vampires were all supposed to be brooding and cool and shit.”

“Babe, I thought shamans were supposed to know everything and look how wrong we both are.”

Sharon glowered but didn’t reply. Kevin pushed Derek’s old bag away with a curling lip of distaste. He pulled off the latex gloves with a loud snap and dropped them carefully into a yellow plastic bag stamped with a biohazard sign which was stowed neatly in the front pouch of his own large, black bag for future sanitary disposal.

His nose twitched.

He sniffed and sniffed again.

“Well,” he said at last, “I don’t want to crash your party or pop your balloon or anything like that, but I gotta tell you I’m getting a lot of death.”

Edna gave a short sharp cry, immediately stifled beneath her hand.

Kevin sniffed again. “Yep. Once you get through the tasteless incense and the frankly pungent body odours of all assembled–no offence, darlings–your Derek bloke’s scent is coming over distinctly ex.”

“Can you track it?” demanded Sharon.

“Babes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s nothing to track. I’m getting, like, death right here, right in this room, and it’s a bit…
uch,
it’s
very
last week’s roadkill actually. I mean, Jesus.” He fumbled again for his bag and pulled out a pack of white face masks, each in its own sterile wrapping. “Want one?” he asked, slipping the elastic band over his head.

“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Sharon. “You’re supposed to be tracking Derek!”

“Babes, there’s like, serious death in this room and I can’t be doing with that! Do you know what happens to bodies once they start to decay? It’s like, hello, plague and rot and–God,
airborne contaminates
.”

“But, um, excuse me?” hazarded Rhys. “There isn’t anyone dead here. I mean, not to question you, Mr Kevin sir, but there’s just not.”

“Darling, you got the vampire in to do the vampire thing and now you’re like, questioning the expert!” retorted Kevin, hands flapping
indignantly. “You asked me to sniff this Derek’s stuff–I’ve sniffed this Derek’s stuff and, based on the sniffing, I’m telling you he is one dead chicken.”

Edna suppressed a wail. Rhys edged towards her nervously, wondering how best to offer comfort. Sharon looked round Edna’s salon and wondered what Sammy the Elbow would do… When had a goblin become her role model?

“You just hold that thought,” she said and, turning away from Kevin, she walked.

It was easier now, and took only a few paces to find that thin point in reality where she became invisible, and invisible things became clear. Evidently practice was good for something. She slipped into that grey place where the shadows began to move and heard, a long way off, the sound of Kevin’s voice:

“Uh, did anyone else just see her disappear?”

“She does that,” offered Rhys. “It’s a shaman thing.”

Sharon turned, still slowly moving because she couldn’t yet pull off invisibility while immobile. She drifted round the room, sensing that place where she was at one with the city, and the city was at one with her, and thus no one would bother to notice her.

Rhys, looked at from this side of perception, seemed a little brighter to her eye. She circled round him as he vainly tried to comfort Edna; and saw threads of light running through his skin and in his blood, a faint tangled mass just beneath the surface like glowing circuitry. Kevin, on the other hand, was even more obviously vampire than in daily life. The gauntness of his face, the pallor of his skin, the redness in his eye, the protrusion of his teeth, all were enhanced; and as she circled him there was the faintest taste of blood and the overwhelming smell of sterile swabs.

She turned towards the altar, and it was a bright glowing heart in the gloom of the shadow walk. Echoes of the men and women who’d made their offerings to a now-vanished goddess were still drifting round it like eddies in incense. The votive trinkets held memories strong enough to be still faintly visible, and as Sharon’s fingers rolled over them they were

the rolled up newspaper I had in my hand when the man tried to mug me and I hit him over the head at 5.15 on a winter’s morning

         
the sandwich packet that held the last bit of bread in the machine at 3.54 a.m. when I hadn’t eaten for a day and a night

the batteries that powered the torch that kept me safe when the power failed

             
the shard of glass from the broken window of the bus shelter that protected me from the rain as I waited for a night bus in the pouring dark.

They were the memories of the night workers and the dead-hour shifts, of the lonely travellers who’d waited by themselves and, in that time, known that they were not alone.

“That’s what Greydawn is,” said a voice behind her, and she didn’t need to look to know it was Dez. “That’s what they mean when they say she walks beside.”

“Go on then, spirit guide,” sighed Sharon. “Guide me.”

“Watch where you step,” he replied, and she looked down.

The floor beneath her feet was gleaming with an unnatural sheen. She backed away from the centre of the glow, and her feet slopped and slipped as they moved. The concrete by the altar was turning to liquid, a spreading patch of grey thickness, bubbles popping to the surface from beneath her feet. She scrambled back as the surface of the floor began to shift and wobble, and there was something moving beneath it, something round and smooth, something that was covered once with human hair.

She caught her breath and retreated further, bumping into a wall and slamming back into reality hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. Rhys was by her side instantly, the quiet distress of Edna forgotten as Sharon reappeared on the floor–the now solid, mundane floor.

“You all right, Miss Li? You okay?”

“He’s… down
there
,” Sharon rasped, pointing at the solid floor. “I’m sorry. He’s been buried beneath us.”

Four pairs of eyes examined the undisturbed-looking floor. Kevin said, “That is totally gross.”

“He can’t be,” stammered Edna. “We haven’t had any work done to this place for years. I’d know about it! And who’d want to hurt Derek? I don’t see why—”

“Maybe the same people,” suggested Sharon, “who’d want to own all those places where the spirits have vanished. The same guys who buy up shops and factories and homes which then fall dead and rot. Maybe it’s—”

“Burns and Stoke!”

The voice came, not from Sharon nor Rhys nor any of the four assembled there, but rather from a new figure, a man framed in the door of the salon, a man in a badly tailored black suit and white shirt, who smiled radiantly at them all and proclaimed, “But of course yes, and why not? In these difficult times people do require someone to blame. I understand, naturally I understand. These complex human emotions you struggle with–envy, resentment, jealousy–I think I am in the area, yes? They become so… confused in your little minds that we should not be surprised that you–” a finger uncurled, pointing towards Sharon “–you would look at men like us, Burns and Stoke, and say, ‘I do not understand that thing, so why don’t I simply call it evil?’ ” Mr Ruislip smiled, adjusting his tie as he stepped further into the room. “If ‘evil’ is the word we are looking for, of course.”

Thing about being the greatest killers the world has ever known

You know

Tits!

No one can ever know.

Arseholes.

That’s the point, yeah

Yeah

Of being the greatest ever killers

No one

Ever knows

Who we

Are.

No one looks at us.

No one remembers us.

No one asks us any questions.

No one suspects us when the

Wanker!

Blood has dried.

We’re discreet

Considerate

Considerate of our environment

Caring

Community contract community fucking contract bollocks!

How do you know the greatest ever killers the world has ever known?

Lovely pair of

Knockers

On her

Babe!

You know ’em because you never seen them

Before

During

After

And no one can remember what the hell they looked like anyway.

He’s tall.

“Skinny” doesn’t handle it. “Skinny” could imply anything, from vegetarian who hasn’t quite got hold of the protein situation, through to well-exercised young gentleman with a penchant for soup. “Skeletal” might be closer, but that implies bones protruding under flesh, and he has not much flesh for anything to protrude from; and the skin that would do the bulging were there any bulging to be done is so thin you can see the indigo blood pulse through the capillaries beneath it.

He wears a suit.

His hair is thin and pale, his eyes have a fish-like quality suggesting that even in death their gaze would settle on you, personally, through the mortal mists.

He smiles, perfect baby-teeth in a pencil-thin mouth. The smile is the smile of a man who wishes you to know that he has practised the expression long and hard in an attempt to put you at your ease, and if you cannot appreciate it, well then that’s your own damn fault.

And he’s not alone.

This is something of a problem, because the four gentlemen who he is not alone with are…

… difficult to focus on.

Rhys tries and feels something prickly on his forehead, and stops
trying. Then he wonders what he’s stopped trying to do and why it seemed so important at the time. He tries again and thinks for a moment he can see four men in yellow fluorescent jackets; but why do the yellow fluorescent jackets make it so hard to see them? And they are smiling, four different faces…

… but all the same smile.

Then the man in the suit steps forward. As if his body has decided to make the decisions his mind is too rational to manage, Rhys feels a deadly itching at the back of his throat and a chill in the pit of his stomach.

“You must be the Friendlies!” exclaims the man in the suit. “Tell me, is it one of those concepts you people have?
Irony,
is that the one, or is it sarcasm? I never can keep track. Are you friendly in an ironic manner, or do you genuinely take it upon yourselves to emit this one quality above all others?”

Rhys looked to Edna for an answer. Edna looked to Kevin. Kevin shrugged and, inevitably, all eyes turned to Sharon.

Sharon’s face was crimped in concentration. Her eyes ran from the man in the suit to the four–was it four?–who stood behind him. Or possibly around him. Or who maybe weren’t there at all; it was hard to tell.