Dark Rain (2 page)

Cass Mallory stands – in her thick-heeled, silver-buckled motorcycle boots – almost as tall as I do, and I’m six foot two. She was wearing her usual baggy, ripped jeans. A sleeveless white tee-shirt. And a Kevlar jacket over that she sometimes puts on and sometimes doesn’t. It’s not much use against magic, but defends against the claws and fangs that we occasionally find coming at us. She’d got the tattoos on her arms, a scorpion and a broken heart, back when she’d been a teenager. They were both faded now.

You had to wonder why she’d gotten those so early on, vulnerability and deadly violence juxtaposed like that. But then, I knew a few things about her troubled past.

Cass was fully kitted-out as usual, Glock 9mms strapped to both her hips. Fastened to the Harley were a Heckler & Koch assault carbine on one side, and a pump-action shotgun – a brutal looking Mossberg 590 – on the other. She’d inherited her detailed knowledge of ordnance from her pa, who had taught her to shoot at a very early age, back when he’d still been alive. I also knew there were a variety of blades concealed about her person. Not someone who took chances, then, when it came to dealing with the kind of trouble that we regularly address.

She nodded to me as I walked toward her. Back when I first met her, she used to wear her jet black hair almost to her waist. But these days it’s cropped closely to her skull, emphasizing her cheeks and long, square jaw.

Cass believes in going into situations hard and fast and keeping that momentum up until the thing’s resolved. Tells herself she’s doing it because … well, who else would? But the truth is, she’s pretty much like me.  She does it to stop thinking about past events. To try and make things right somehow.

Because she’s lost people that she deeply loved to magic. So have I.

Both of us shared the same dream as well. To bring the town’s curse to an end. That was another of the things that genuinely kept us going.

Those eyes of hers – as black as her hair and burning fiercely – were fixed on mine, and were the only part of her that was moving. She could have been a statue, except statues never blink.

“You took the bus?” she asked me, once I was in earshot. “With this going on?”

She’d gotten over her initial shock, was trying to sound composed, and was making a half-assed job of it. There was too much stiff discomfort in her voice for her to sound in any way convincing.

Now that I was closer to her, I could see she looked exhausted. And it wasn’t physical. Standing there in the dim light, she seemed mentally drained.

“I wasn’t home.” I pulled a tight face at her. “Sorry to have kept you waiting. What’re we looking at here?”

“A bloody mess, literally.” She had to pause before going on. “Almost all these houses had families in them. Moms, pops, even little kids.”

She looked away from me a second, trying to hide the pain and anger in her gaze.

“All of them butchered with equal vigor,” she continued, the words coming out twisted. “Not a shred of mercy shown.”

My head reeled as I took that in. We’d had disasters in the town before, usually caused by magic. Fires. Explosions. Creatures being conjured up, or the conjurers themselves going berserk and lashing out around them. The dark arts can be an unpredictable and deadly thing. But there’d been nothing on a scale like this. I couldn’t even start to imagine who might be responsible.

“Butchered how?” I asked, trying to keep my nerves intact.

It wasn’t easy.

Cassie frowned as though her entire face were trying to draw toward the center. “Either knives or talons.”

My God.

“Why would anyone do that?” I breathed.

Although, living where we did, it might just as easily be a ‘what’ as a ‘who.’

“I’ve not the first idea. There’s not a print that I can find, foot, claw, or paw. No signs of forced entry either.”

“Someone got invited in?”

“I’d seriously doubt that.”

One thing didn’t figure, any way you tried to look at it. I stared around all over again.

“But … why here? What’s special about this place?”

Nothing that either of us could see. Cassie let her shoulders jolt.

Then she drew herself up very straight and asked me if I wanted to take a look.

Not really. But what was the point of coming down here if I didn’t?

The front door of the nearest house was open, blank darkness inside We headed for it. Had to skirt around a little pink tricycle on the driveway, ribbons tied to its handlebars. Cass didn’t even glance down at it. She’d seen it before, and obviously wished she hadn’t.

Her flashlight came back on, revealing faded, stripy wallpaper in the hallway, pink and white. A coat stand, with a baseball jacket hanging from it. A furled umbrella. A rubber plant in a big sepia pot. One of those embroidered
Bless This House
plaques hanging from a wall. Simply an ordinary home of the low-income variety. A TV was still glowing from the living room, although its sound had been switched off.

Cass, I noticed, didn’t follow
me when I went in there. I reached out, found the light switch, flipped it …

God.
I wanted, straight away, to turn it off again. For time eternal.

As I had been told, a family. There had been four of them. And, by the bloodstains on the couch and armchairs, they must have been settled around the set when who-or-what had paid them a visit. It seemed to have happened all at once. They’d had the time to jump to their feet – letting out yells of terror, perhaps – before their new visitor had taken them to pieces.

The worst thing was, apart from the damage and the gore, they looked like they might any moment get back to their feet and start moving around again. Only one thing separates the living from the dead, and that’s intention. Corpses look like people who have plain forgotten what they want to do next.

My breath hissing in my lungs, I inspected the wounds more closely. Whatever had done this definitely wasn’t human. It was far too strong for that. And the weapons it had used … there appeared to be several of them, tightly grouped and each as sharp as scalpels.

The question rose again. If not human, then what? Someone must have created the thing. And I wondered who was crazy enough to work any witchcraft quite as dark as this.

And the same had happened in all the houses on this street, according to Cass. I wondered how long it must have taken. Hadn’t anyone heard screams, been warned?

The sickly charnel-house odor was beginning to overpower me. I couldn’t bear it anymore – my stomach started tightening. I backed out of the room, then squeezed my eyes tightly shut. Moisture was pressing up behind the lids, before much longer.

Although it wasn’t wholly the sights, the smell. A realization had begun to settle over me. As I’d said, we have bad things happen in the Landing all the time. When so many of its inhabitants practice sorcery, it could hardly be otherwise. But something like this, the same awful scene replicated over and over again …

We were facing something different this time. Possibly a whole lot worse than we had ever encountered before.

The thought was like a heavy weight, pressing down on me. I wondered whether I was strong enough to face this, whatever it was.

Cassie seemed to understand. One of her hands went gently to my neck.

“Take it easy, Ross.”

“Right. How?” I muttered.

“Usual drill. Deep breaths.”

I tried a couple, but they didn’t even go down halfway.

“Why’s it always us,” I asked, “who have to deal with all the really lousy stuff?”

Her voice was still troubled, but was trying to sound practical.

“I could have just ridden away. You could have just hung up on me. It’s gotta be someone, mister. What would you rather do, leave it all to the authorities?”

As if to prove her point, two of my old colleagues – Matt Chalker and Davy Quinn – had emerged onto the street when we came out again. They were slumped against a squad car. Had their caps tipped back, their faces white as flour. Their hands were on their hips. And they were staring about them with wide, glassy eyes, like they were trying to imagine they were dreaming all of this.

They’re not bad guys, and not
entirely useless. It takes a lot of guts, let’s face it, to try and serve as a peace officer when the normal rules are all blown to hell. But guys like Matt and Davy – they’re not quick-witted or adaptable enough to deal with the way life here has become.

Because the truth is, there may have always been strange happenings in Raine’s Landing. But they’ve gotten more frequent, the last few years. No one was sure why, but it was undeniable.

It’s a handful of private individuals who really make a difference, these days. Myself. Cass. DuMarr. Willets, when he can be bothered. And, of course, the Little Girl. If anyone can keep a lid on things, it’s us. But the lid just kept on popping up, every time you turned your back.

Matt Chalker finally noticed me, and called out, “Christ, Devries? Do you
believe
any of this?”

Then he went back to his glassy staring, hands still on his hips.

“Is Saul here?” I asked Cass quietly.

And she nodded, her gaze steely by this time. As has already been noted, she doesn’t have an awful lot of time for most cops. But she respects a few, and he was one of them.

“Fifth house on the left.”

So I went across to consult with the Landing’s best and
most reliable detective lieutenant.

TWO

Think of Peter Boyle in
Young Frankenstein
and you’ve pretty much got the measure, physically at least, of Detective Lieutenant Saul Hobart. Everything about him overly large and apparently ungainly. Big thick fingers. Massive feet. Shoulders you could rest a dishwasher on each of, and an enormous, bald domed head with stick-out ears and tightly packed, Chiclet-sized teeth. I am tall, but standing he tops me by several inches, except he’s always slightly hunched.

He wasn’t standing now, however.

He was sitting in the half-light of another living room, not dissimilar to the one I’d left. Same ordinary furniture, same extraordinary carnage.
God Almighty, what on earth had hit this street?
And was gazing at something in his broad palm. His head was bowed. He seemed entirely lost in thought, a saddened, brooding giant.

He was dressed as smartly as a man that size could manage. A charcoal pinstriped suit. A knitted woolen tie of the same color. A crisp white shirt, and a pair of gleaming black shoes the size of miniature kayaks.

The thing in his hand was a plastic doll with a sweetly smiling face, clad in a miniature pink frilly dress. Its owner … I looked quickly round me … wasn’t here. So she had to be upstairs in her bedroom, in her nursery. I already knew that no one had been spared. And so the little girl who owned the dolly, whatever her age might be, wasn’t going to get any older from this point on.

Saul had a wife and three daughters up in Vernon Valley, so this kind of thing had to get to him as badly as me and Cassie.

I struggled to think what to say around awfulness like this. My head was pretty blurred by this time, but that wasn’t the reason that I couldn’t come up with the right words. There were none. There never have been. No language had yet been created to express the feelings that a tragedy like this leaves you with. A rock hard lump formed in my throat.

I felt for the man and his anguish, of course. But Saul had been my superior once. And so I stood there, waiting for him to make the first move.

For a while, I didn’t think that he was going to notice me at all. But then his head came up a little and he greeted me in a voice far hoarser than was normal. There was a heaviness to it that spoke an awful lot about the crushed way that he felt.

“Hey, Ross. Noticed the dyke snooping round earlier. I thought you’d show up.”

Which unstiffened me a little. Hell, he always calls Cass that, although there’s never any perjorative in it. He jumped to that conclusion when he first met her, and has stuck to it ever since. So far as I know, he’s wrong. I understand quite a lot of stuff about the ragged tatters of Cass’s personal life, and it may have run in some unusual directions down the years. But toward her own gender isn’t one of them.

Me, I was trying to breathe through my mouth and not my nose. Trying to keep my gaze away from the ruined bodies on the carpet. These ones hadn’t been sitting down. They’d obviously heard yells from a neighboring house and got up, moving for the window. But had not even reached that. Not even gotten halfway.

Hobart looked so far gone that he wasn’t even taking in the view and odors anymore. And you could hardly blame him.

I stared across at the shabby mantelpiece. Family photos, china cats. A cheap vase with a plastic rose in it. Nothing of significance at all – give this stuff to a thrift shop and they’d throw half of it away. So what had brought the Reaper down on these folks in such a vile, tempestuous fashion?

It’s no use holding in a question, unless you’re around somebody like Willets or the Little Girl. So I asked it out loud.

Saul’s head didn’t lift any further, but he stared up at me through his beetling brows. His eyes looked wet and very distant.

“That’s the thing, ain’t it? Motive? These were all regular citizens, so far as we can tell. Heads-down, mind-your-own-business, get-on-with-your-life types. Hell, we’ve found a few crystals and rune stones, always do, in tool sheds or in bedrooms.”

Most people in town used a little magic now and then, in other words. Most of them but me. I seem to make a habit of being the odd one out.

“But we’re talking minor peccadillo stuff,” Saul was continuing. “There are no adepts here. So what was this about?”

He looked down at the doll again and stroked its nylon hair. Then tucked it very gently in his pocket.

“We’ve about seventy people dead, possibly more. And however rough things have gotten in the Landing, they’ve never been as ugly as this.”

“Cass said no survivors?”

It was a question I asked with a very heavy heart indeed.

“Not that we can tell as yet.”

“How about the neighboring streets?”

“No damage at all. Only this one.”

“Didn’t they realize what was happening? The people on the other streets?”

Hobart’s eyebrows lifted and his expression became a little number.

“That’s the other really weird thing. Nobody claims to have heard anything in the slightest.”

With all this mayhem going on? It seemed to confirm what I had already suspected. There was heavy magic, really powerful stuff, behind this.

“No witnesses, then?”

He shrugged. “None.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

Hobart finally sat fully upright. It was an experience not dissimilar to watching an old sunken ship rising, prow first, from the depths. The gleam in his eyes had turned peculiar and doleful, slightly luminous. And the tautness of his features didn’t slacken by an inch.

“I’m going to make sure everything gets bagged and tagged,” he said. “I’m going to take a good number of trips down to the coroner’s office, I’d guess. I’m going to identify every victim and inform their nearest kin, where that is possible. I’m going to do my job in other words. That might take a while because, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty short-staffed.”

And was that an accusation … did he feel that I’d abandoned him when I had quit the force? Nothing could be further from the truth.

I’d quit because I couldn’t go on the usual way, once my family had disappeared. I had to do something more than simply follow procedure and routine. I needed to take a different course, one with fewer boundaries. But I was still quite firmly on his side.

I was waiting for more than the little speech he’d just delivered. He could see that, and his cheeks got flushed.

“Other than that? I’m mostly going to pray that this was just a one-off. Just the worst example yet of magic that went really badly screwy. Because my family? Live on a street pretty much like this one. And if anything like this happened again, anywhere
near
them …?”

His frame gave a shudder and that haunted look of his grew even worse. And then a hand went to his brow.

“I’m barely functioning, Ross. I know that. Perhaps it might be best if I just found a quiet corner, sat there for a while.”

He took the doll out of his pocket again, and became oblivious to me.

Maybe he was finally losing it. And perhaps he had the right. Seventy people. Damn!

My own head had begun spinning gently again. I was relieved to get back out into the open air.

A small crowd had gathered at the far end of the lane. People from the neighboring streets, a couple of them in their night robes. They’d come wandering cautiously across to find out what was happening. Their faces were indistinct, dim ovals in the flashing red light, their lips pursed and their gazes wide. Their heads kept on bobbing up and down. They were trying to spot something familiar, something they could make sense of. They’d probably had friends here. Their kids had, doubtless, played together.
What was going on?
was their collective thought. Matt and Davy were politely trying to make them keep their distance.

Cass was back in the position that she’d first been, standing by her Harley. In the time that I’d been gone, her features had become so hard they almost had a sheen, like metal. Her mouth was a rigid horizontal slash. Her head kept moving around very slowly, side to side. But there was no suppressing the look in her eyes.

When she saw that I was coming back, she quickly wiped a wrist across her brow. The fire in her gaze returned. She’s like that, most of the time anyway. Faced with adversity, however bad, she usually drops into a no-nonsense, ‘can do’ kind of mode. Solve the problem. Go back home. Save all the doubts and hurt for later.

“They’ve got nothing, huh?” she asked me.

I shook my head. And she grunted with annoyance.

“Freakin’ Mayhemberry P.D.”

“You’re too hard on them.”

“I’m too hard on everybody. That’s ‘cause they deserve it.”

She exhaled, and her lean, muscular body finally relaxed a little.

“So, where do we go from here?”

“There must be people living on this street who weren’t at home this evening. Probably don’t even know what’s happened yet. It would help if we could find them.”

“Oh, they’re gonna love us, ain’t they?”

And wasn’t that the truth.

“They might have some insights. Otherwise? Hobart’s claiming that there are no witnesses. That’s never usually the case – there’s always someone.”

Cass’s full lips puckered. I could see that she was coming round by this stage. Letting all the trauma go and getting back to her acerbic, hard-nosed usual self. It was a relief to see it, since I’ve relied on her for a good while now.

“Legwork? You know how much I hate that? Do you realize how long it’s been since I’ve actually
shot
at anything?”

What was the point of having all that firepower, after all, if you never got to use it?

“Patience, Cass. Your time will come.”

I’d been trying to put the all blood-drenched awfulness out of my mind, till this point. But my face had gone all sweaty again. I ducked it and rubbed at my lip.

When I looked back up at her, Cass was studying me closely, with a rather keener gaze than she’d seemed capable of before.

“There’s something else bothering you, isn’t there?” she asked.

She knew me all too well.

“We’re standing in the middle of a massacre, for God’s sake. Isn’t that enough?”

Cass waited, folding her arms. There
was
something else, and she already knew it. The red lights of the nearby beacons flickered in her eyes.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to voice my worst suspicions yet. But it seemed that I had little choice, unless I lied to her.

I struggled to gather my thoughts properly, difficult under the circumstances. Then …

“I keep on coming back to motive, Cassie. And I might be wrong, but I get this hunch …”

I knew the way that the really strong magicians in the Landing thought and acted, and it wasn’t like this. A brand-new power had been at work tonight.

“First glance? Something simply went on the rampage here. Magic gone wrong, like Saul is claiming. But what if it was deliberate? What would be the point of that?”

I gazed around another time.

“It can’t be personal. Nobody can have a grudge against an entire street. Which leaves us what?” I asked her.

She had become very still again. Then tipped her head to indicate I should go on.

“Could it be whoever did this was seeing how much damage he could inflict? And whether anything could stop him? Flexing his muscles for the very first time?”

“You’re saying we’ve a new adept?”

“It could be that. I’m not quite sure.”

She became deeply puzzled, so I summed the whole thing up.

“I hope I’m wrong. But
if
that’s the case, this is maybe just some kind of trial run, someone testing us. And if it’s that, then I’d imagine he’s going to attack us again.”

Which put a whole other complexion on the issue. Cassie took a little while absorbing what I’d said, her eyes becoming rather solemn.

And then she snapped back to full alertness, obviously deciding that I might be right.

“Okay, then,” she said, with a little more enthusiasm. “Let’s go do that legwork.”

That was her to a tee. Face the problem. Do the job. Stop more innocents suffering the way that she had done.

That’s what we’re really both about.

We’d divided out the streets between us, and were on the point of setting off when another car appeared. It came entirely silently around the corner of Fairmont and headed toward us. Its big round headlamps dazzled us at first. But soon we could make out its outline. Recognized the vehicle immediately. Anyone in town would.

It was a Rolls Royce, a classic 1968 Silver Shadow, its paintwork a bottomless midnight blue. Stenciled across it though – all over the car, in fact – were magical symbols in a variety of colors. There were
ankhs
and pentagrams. Pyramids with staring eyes in them. Spirals of the type you find in ancient deserts, and more hierograms than you could throw a shoe at.