Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (33 page)

“Yeah, but…”

“… he wasn’t telling us what we…”

“… wanted to know, yeah?”

“We had to…”

“… get our answers…”

“Arses!”

“… and our answers…”

“… led us to you.”

“Really?” Somehow, in all the turmoil, Sharon was still standing on her plastic chair, and now, as she digested this information, she radiated
warmth and general encouragement. “And why, specifically, do you think we’re connected to Greydawn? Why Magicals Anonymous?”

The builders shrugged: one gave a great shoulder-lift of a gesture, another a crooked lurch of his shoulders, a third rolled his arms slightly back, the last stuck his elbows out. But there was no mistaking the unity of purpose, thought and meaning in their movements.

“Cos you gave shelter to the Friendlies,” one said, indicating Edna.

“Cos you broke into Burns and Stoke,” one added, tugging at his trousers, which had sagged to reveal his bum crack.

“Cos you got conspiring with the Midnight Mayor.”

“Cos you’re the only shaman in town…”

“Bitch.”

“Slut.”

“Babes.”

“… and that makes you Greydawn’s friend…”

“… but our enemy.”

“So, yeah, you see…”

“… it’s nothing personal.”

“Though you got a
great
arse.”

“It’s cash…”

“Taxman bastards!”

“… in hand.”

“Job done.”

Sally shuffled in the rafters overhead; Sammy the goblin’s eyes glowed with malicious glee at unpleasant imaginings only he could see. Sharon nodded, considering everything the builders had said.

“So,” she concluded, “is your beef just with me or with all of Magicals Anonymous?”

Another shrug rippled through the four men.

“Know what,” one said.

“End of the day,” another concluded.

“You gotta be thorough…”

“… to get the job done.”

Sharon beamed.

“Fantastic,” she murmured. “Thank you, gentlemen. I think that was all we wanted to hear. We appreciate your free and frank testimony, and may I say on behalf of everyone at Magicals Anonymous…” there
was a gleam in Sharon’s eye, a tension in her body and a weight in her voice that Rhys had never heard before “… hello, murderers.”

It occurred to the builders, perhaps for the first time, that the inhabitants of the room were staring at them, and not all of the eyes doing the staring were quite human. Sally shifted her whiteboard and pen to one side, and as her wings flexed beneath her robes, there was a definite impression of talon, not finger, hanging above their heads. Kevin bit his bottom lip and there were fangs doing the biting; the sound of Gretel scratching her head was of trollish bone rubbing on trollish bone, and the builders realised, as one (for was there any other way?), that Gretel the troll was not a nice hamburger-munching member of the species, but rather a bridge lurker bred in Dartford to haunt the Crossing, battle-scarred by victorious conflict with toll-jumping lorries and speeding trucks.

The four builders looked at her, looked at each other and, as one, moved. One grabbed the mousy-haired woman called Jess by the throat and dragged her over the back of her chair; it thumped to the floor beneath her tangled kicking feet. Another caught Mrs Rafaat by the arm as the old woman tried to escape, and pulled her in front of himself like a human shield. The other two fell into line behind them. Beneath their feet the floor was already warping, the boards creaking and cracking as the building began to hum around them.

“Now, see here.”

“We’re only doing…”

“… what we’re fucking paid to.”

“Fuck it!”

“So you don’t come in here…”

“… talking rules and regs…”

“… until you’ve…”

“Arses!”

“… learned a little respect.”

“Babes.”

“Darlin’.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Yeah?”

They were edging towards the door, the floor splintering beneath them, thin cracks spreading through every pane of window glass. Four
builders who knew how to destroy the buildings they were in, pulling their two hostages with them.

Sharon said, “Did you just call me ‘sweetheart’?”

“Oh G-God I don’t feel s-so…” stammered Jess.

“It’s not like I called you ‘rosebud’ or ‘pretty-pants’!” the shaman raged, arms folded, still standing on her wobbly plastic chair.

“Yeah, but…”

“… you’re a girl!”

“There’s differences, innit?”

“Gender differences and that.”

“So don’t go all like…”

“… indignant.”

“Girls like different things!”

Jess was visibly shaking now, her fingers clutching at the arm across her throat. “I’m really not…” she gabbled. “Oh G-God, I think I’m going to…”

“Don’t give me that!” exploded Sharon. She hopped off the chair and marched towards the retreating builders. “I mean, patronising shite is patronising shite.”

“I really think I’m g-going t-to…” stammered Jess.

“It’s not like I called you ‘dandelion’ or ‘my little cauliflower’ or anything like that. And just because I’m a shaman, and Jess there she turns into…”

There was a moment of polymorphic uncertainty.

A certain chilliness bit the air.

Where Jess had cringed, pulled back against the heaving mass of a builder’s chest, now there were pigeons.

A lot of pigeons.

About the same mass of pigeons, in fact, as, an instant before, there’d been the mass of Jess.

The birds flocked up and out across the room, great clouds of white and grey feathers spinning down to the floor, beaks stabbing and yellow eyes flashing, a whirlwind of beaten air and puffy flashing chests. The builder who’d been holding Jess yelped and covered his eyes with his hands as the great mess of airborne vermin spilt out around him. And as his companion tightened his arm across Mrs Rafaat’s throat, something dropped from the rafters. Like the pigeons,
it was mostly grey and possessed wings, but there the resemblance ended.

Sally drew back her lips to reveal that beneath an affable smile there glinted the silver-white teeth of a banshee. She dropped teeth first from the roof, her wings tucked back into her body and the long talons of her legs swinging down and out to grapple with the builder. Great gouts of blood spurted from the arm that held Mrs Rafaat, even as Mr Roding, with more presence of mind than most, grabbed the startled woman by the arm and pulled her free. She gave a little “Oh!” before stumbling over the outstretched leg of a cowering exorcist and falling, palms first, on top of Mr Roding.

There was a blur of talon and claw, a beating of great leathery wings and a wail as Sally’s mouth came up from the top of the builder’s head, bringing with it a mess of blood and scalp. This time, as the builder screamed, so did the other three, every head going back, every mouth contorting in an expression of pain–all the same expression, all the same pain.

One staggered against the wall, which warped and buckled at his touch; he recovered just enough to pull out from his jacket an impossible crowbar rusted with more than water, flecked with a blackness that stank of salt and meat. With a roar he slammed it down into the floor of the hall. Where the crowbar hit, the floor cracked, a great rushing gape that shattered the floorboards and split the poured concrete beneath, delving a chasm clean across the room as the members of Magicals Anonymous shrieked, screamed and clattered out of the way.

Sharon saw Sammy vanish into the grey place of the spirit walk. Then a pop-fizz caught her attention. Turning, she saw Ms Somchit, the diminutive black-clad Alderman, rising from her chair; scarlet fire was flicking from her fingertips and a metallic silver sheen spreading over her skin, and there was a depth to her eyes and a spikiness along her back that hadn’t been there before. The pigeons–what Sharon guessed she still had to think of as Jess–were circling wildly in the rafters, while the builder who’d held Jess coughed and spluttered, spitting feather and dust onto the floor. Sally was still clinging gamely on to her builder, while the one with the crowbar was drawing it back for another earth-splitting smash. He raised it, his face twisted in fury, and as it reached the very height of its swing something blond flashed in
front of him, too fast to perceive, and for a moment the builder froze. A bright red line spread across his throat. He swayed as the blood began to spill from the tear across his neck, the crowbar still held aloft, ready to strike. His eyes swivelled to the source of his distress, which exclaimed:

“Oh my
God,
there’s blood
everywhere.
That is so
gross!”

Kevin hopped from foot to foot, staring at his own hands in an ecstasy of hygienic distress. This gave the fourth builder the opportunity to come up behind him, draw his arm back and drive the sharpened end of his crowbar through to the centre of the vampire’s chest.

Kevin’s mouth fell open. He looked down, saw the bloody point of the metal sticking out from his sternum, put his hands to his face and screamed.

“Oh my God! I need sterile wipes!”

Behind him the builder’s face twitched with satisfaction until a very large, very round, rather furry fingertip tapped him on the shoulder. He looked round, and then up, and then up a little further.

“You’re not very well mannered,” grumbled Gretel. And, with the casual momentum no creature but a troll can muster, much like the easy-going inevitability of a double-decker bus, she pushed her fist into the builder’s face.

Rhys dived for the ground as the builder sailed through the air with an expression of surprise and confusion on his face, before he slammed into the wall with a crack of breaking bones.

In the stunned silence that followed, Rhys heard a voice proclaim:

“Oi, runny-nose! We need to get ’em separated, okay?”

He couldn’t see Sammy the Elbow, but he doubted that, even in these heightened emotional circumstances, anyone else would address him as “runny-nose”.

“Everyone!” shouted Sharon. “The builders are the same individual, the same thing! We need to separate them. Everyone move!”

No one did.

Then Gretel, with a shrug of “Okay then,” reached out and picked up the still-startled form of the nearest builder. Blood had run down his fluorescent jacket from the tear in his throat, but the wound itself was already beginning to heal. She shuffled over to the door, found it too
small for both herself and her burden, then, with another shrug, walked through anyway, taking with her a significant piece of wall.

Others followed suit. Sally leapt clear of the builder she’d seized in time for a blast of flame from Ms Somchit to land squarely on his chest and knock him off his feet. As he landed, Sally was there again, digging her talons into his wrists, while Ms Somchit took hold of his feet, reluctantly joined by Chris the exorcist and Mr Roding the necromancer. With Sally flapping vigorously and Ms Somchit pushing from the other end, they dragged him out into the night. Gretel was already striding away towards Farringdon Road so, with a cry of “To the public park!” from Ms Somchit, the four and their stunned charge turned in the opposite direction, heaving their burden down the sleeping street.

“Oh dear, strong man, please?” quavered Mrs Rafaat back in the hall, looking down at the builder to whom Gretel had so pointedly explained the rules of polite social interaction. His limbs were splayed at strange angles, but even as Rhys watched, they began to creak and click, snapping back into place with the sound of bone-on-bone.

“Hurry up!” barked Sammy. “We gotta get ’em far enough away from each other that they ain’t themselves no more!”

Rhys realised, with a shudder of reluctance, that both the glare of Sammy and the hopeful stare of Mrs Rafaat were locked on him. Gingerly he crawled over to the builder, whose head still wouldn’t turn but whose furious eyes swerved towards him. Rhys thought he could see vertebrae locking and unlocking in his neck as they tried to reassemble in some human–or at least humanesque–form. Weakened by revulsion, Rhys nonetheless grabbed the builder under the arms as Mrs Rafaat took hold of his feet. The two tried lifting him; the two failed.

“Bloody hell,” whined the goblin, and then he was there, by Rhys’s side. For a naive moment the druid thought the goblin intended to help, instead Sammy clapped his hands together and exclaimed, “All right, team! On a count of three! One… two… heave!”

They heaved, the builder shifted a few inches.

Something cold settled on the air next to Rhys. He looked up. It was the freezer elemental, the air falling in white clouds around him, a greenish tint to the ice on his face, the thin pipes of his veins visible beneath the frost on his skin and, just audible, the gentle whirr of his
compressor-heart. He leaned down and slipped a pair of frozen hands under the builder’s arm. Rhys took the other arm even as the builder’s eyes started wide at the touch of the elemental. Ice crystals began to form on the underside of the man’s arm, then spread, blooming like petals in spring. There was a final cry from Sammy of “Come on, you soggy-blankets!” and the three of them hauled the builder out through the door.

That left one.

One, Sharon realised, who was already climbing to his feet, wiping pigeon feathers from his hair. His face was wild with rage, his fluorescent jacket torn by pigeon claws; bits of feather were hanging off his clothes, and his boots were stained with dubious white streaks. His eyes found Sharon, and he snarled:

“You’re gonna…”

And stopped.

Halfway down the Farringdon Road, a builder carried across the back of an ambling troll whispered:

“… fucking die…”

On the leafy edge of Spa Fields, another, clutched in the claws of a banshee, whimpered:

“… you stupid…”

And in the backstreets of Islington, beneath the branches of a weeping willow in Wilmington Square, a third murmured:

“… bitch,” before the ice from an elemental’s touch turned his lips grey-blue and smothered all sound.

In St Christopher’s Hall the remaining builder hesitated. He was surprised, alarmed even, not to hear the usual call of his kin, the synergy of voices completing his own words. For a second longer his mouth worked in astonishment.