Wolf in Shadow-eARC (22 page)

“So?” Karla asked.

“You always had a way with humans,” Max replied, “but this time you’ve surpassed yourself. Subverting the entire Commission is truly impressive, my darling.”

It was an insight of how Jameson’s relationship with Karla must look to other daemons. They could not conceive of how she had been bound to him, so they would assume that it must be all Karla’s doing. They thought she must be running some complicated plot. The fact that they could not work out what she was up to merely proved how subtle and cunning she was.

Karla looked bored. “And you’ve always been a windbag. Any chance of you coming to the point?”

Max sighed. “You are a bit of a mystery, Karla. I heard you had sunk into the madness of the blood fugue. No one comes back from that, but you did. How is that?”

Karla grinned humourlessly. “You are nearly as old as me. Why haven’t you succumbed to the madness?”

“Good question. I’ve always thought that it was because I have a purpose. I am the last of the Protectors,” Max said.

Karla laughed. “A purpose with no purpose.”

“What’s a Protector?” Jameson asked.

“They were a pact of my kind that expelled one of the ancient daemon lineages from the world,” Karla replied.

“What did you fight over?” Jameson asked.

“Humans,” Karla replied. “They fed on humans and would have used you all up. We could not permit that.”

Of course not, Jameson thought, stupid question. Why do shepherds protect sheep from wolves? The idea that suckers could have pacts was worrying. He had not thought them capable of such organizational skills.

“Quite right,” Max said. “What a boring world it would be without humans, boring and hungry.”

“Don’t worry about it, Maxy. It’s you that’s the endangered species, not us,” Jameson said, with a sneer.

Max snarled, displaying long canine teeth. “Keep your pet under control, Karla, or I will have to discipline him myself.”

“You can try.” Jameson moved his gun hand slightly to draw attention to his bolt pistol.

“You wanted to talk, Max,” Karla reminded him.

“So I did.” The easy smile was back on Max’s face. “Your pet is not entirely wrong. We are an endangered species, but then, so are humans. The Sith are back.”

Karla sucked in her breath. “Impossible. The Protectors hunted down every last one and sealed in the survivors. They can’t get back. Unless . . .”

“Unless some idiot on this side of the barrier opens a hole,” Max finished for her.

“What the fuck are the Sith?” Jameson said. “And I will shoot the first sucker that mentions
Star Wars
.”

“What is this
Star Wars
?” Max asked. “Snow White mentioned them.”

“Snow White? As in Grimms’ Fairy Tales?” Jameson asked, utterly confused by the direction the conversation was taking.

“You’d know her as Rhian,” Max replied.

Jameson looked blank, unenlightened by the explanation.

“How interesting, I assumed she was one of yours,” Max said.

Jameson quickly smiled as it was a firm rule that you never gave anything away to a daemon. They had no concept of idle curiosity. Everything they said or did was directed to their personal goals.

“I find it difficult to believe that you’ve never heard of
Star Wars
,” Jameson said skeptically. “Where have you been for the last four decades?”

“I was—resting,” Max said. “Until the Sith, that is.”

“What are the damned Sith?” Jameson asked, again.

“The Daoine Sith, Elves, Fairies, the fair folk, the Lords and Ladies,” Karla replied. “You people have lots of names for them.”

“But fairies are just a myth,” Jameson said.

“So are vampires,” Max replied, showing his teeth.

“Okay, point taken, myths can have cores of truth, but fairies and elves are harmless,” Jameson said.

The three suckers laughed at him, like adults amused at the naive credulity of a small child. Jameson felt a pang of jealousy that Karla was siding with her kind against him. Karla picked up the emotion immediately and turned to him.

“Humans have erased the real memory of the Sith from their collective memory. They were too awful, so you sanitized them with fairy tales.” Karla said. “They fed on your pain and terror. Look up some of the old Irish myths about the Sidhe or the
Svartálfar
in the Scandinavian Edda and you will find echoes of the true nature of the Sith.”

“Never mind the history lesson,” Max said. “The Sith are back because someone in London is opening holes in the barrier for them.”

“We noticed the holes,” Jameson said.

“At the moment the gates are unstable and soon shut, but the problem is getting worse. If they get a permanent gate it will take a major war to expel them, like the one that brought down the human empire.”

“Rome,” Karla said in answer to Jameson’s unspoken query.

“So what you are saying is that we are in deep shit,” said Jameson, summing up.

“As deep as the ocean, little man. I need the help of the Commission to seal off the Sith. I need human magic.”

“Yah, suckers don’t do magic,” Jameson said, thoughtfully.

“Sith do,” Max said.

“I can’t quite remember, it’s been too long, but wasn’t it a human who created the barrier?” Karla asked.

“The sorcerer Merlin,” Max said. “He was a Sith-human hybrid.”

“Sith breed with humans?” Jameson asked incredulously. Sex between humans and daemons was hardly unknown, he was living proof of that, but hybrid issue was something else.

“They can,” Max replied. “It helps them consolidate their position. Full Sith can only tolerate the world for short periods, but hybrids are immune.”

He took a deep breath as if what he was about to say next would be physically painful.

“So, I want a blood pact with you, Karla. I need the magic of your Commission witches.”

“I’ll think about it,” Karla said.

Max nodded, as if he had not expected an immediate decision.

“Talking about immunity, I’d be curious to know how you protect yourself from the Sun. Word is that you’ve been seen out in the real world in daylight,” Max said.

“Really,” Karla replied.

“Really, and don’t give me any rubbish about suntan cream or pills. Like that hasn’t been tried and failed. It’s something unique, something new, something to do with him?” Max gestured at Jameson.

“You are boring me now, Max,” Karla said. “How do we get home from here?”

“You go that way,” Max said, pointing to a path through the trees.

Rhian felt as if she were living in two overlapping worlds. Here she was, walking to work along the same old mundane London streets, filled with the same old mundane London people. A Rastafarian, dreadlocks held up in a red, gold, and green woollen cap, walked past with a rhythmic gait. He nodded and clicked his fingers to a beat only he perceived. The whiff of holy ganja trailed him. A lycra-covered cyclist shot past, moving faster than the cars. Across the street two heavily made up women in sensible business suits tapped their feet and checked their watches. A sign in the small front garden of the terraced house behind announced that it was for sale, so they were estate agents waiting for a client. Given the state of the economy, it was a buyers’ market. He would be as late as he wished or he might not turn up at all.

The Sun had set earlier. The streets were still lit by the long northern twilight, but darkness pooled around walls and cars. The evening street was symbolic of the second shadow London that had enveloped Rhian since she found Morgana’s brooch. A London of wolves, vampires, and witches who made real magic. A place where one false move could drop you into an Otherworld. A city where reality was a thin skin on a viscous pool of potential dangers.

Sometimes, she thought that she had never come round from the attack that had killed James. That she was really lying in a hospital bed full of tubes and wires like a character from
Life on Mars
. Maybe this was all a dream. Would she vanish when the doctors finally gave up on her and pulled the plug, or would her soul move on? To Heaven or Hell? Maybe she was already in Hell; it hurt too damn much to be Heaven.

She arrived early for her shift at the pub, as she needed to fill in her time sheet. Old Fred and Willie the Dog sat on barstools in their usual corner. They sipped interminable half pints of bitter. Sheila manned the bar—or should that be womanned? Rhian never could remember which bits of political correctness were currently in vogue. Her life flew below the radar of middle-class fads and fashions.

Sheila nodded to her when she swung up the countertop to enter the bar, but carried on cleaning glasses. It was considered a point of honor to clean up before one left, and Sheila’s shift was nearly over. Rhian went into the small back office and rummaged.

“Sheila, where are the time sheets?” she asked.

“No idea,” Sheila replied. “You had better ask Gary. He’s upstairs in his flat.”

Rhian mounted the stairs two at a time. They were narrow and steep, like you find in old buildings. At the top, she knocked on the door separating Gary’s flat from the public areas. After a short interval, he appeared, and she explained why she was there.

“Oh right, time sheets, I think I have some more somewhere,” Gary said vaguely.

She followed him up onto a landing where he opened the door to a small room and snapped on a light. The bulb hung naked on an old-fashioned cloth-covered electric cable. Stacks of cardboard boxes sat on unpainted wooden floorboards. The wall plaster had fallen away completely in places, exposing wooden batons. The latch on the wooden window was broken, the rope sash hanging down. The window had been nailed permanently shut. Rhian doubted if it could be lifted, even without the nails, as it was thickly painted over.

“This is one of the unliveable rooms,” Gary said, somewhat defensively. “But it is dry, so I store stuff in it.”

The room did smell a bit musty, but not damp. He carried on searching, shuffling boxes around. While waiting, Rhian was aware of a strange swishing noise coming from another room. It stopped abruptly with a crash.

“Oh no,” Gary said, and dashed out.

Rhian followed him into the next room, wondering why he was so alarmed. A large table on trestles filled the space. Models covered it, creating a miniature English scene: a village pub and a church, a canal, a small town, trees, and rolling green hills. There was even a small grass airfield with a little yellow biplane. She walked, fascinated, around the complicated model railway.

The little people had old-fashioned clothes, and the policeman had a bicycle. The cars were black boxes on spindly wheels or open sports cars, like an Agatha Christie story in miniature. That old duck in her garden must be Miss Marple and the rotund man on the platform must be Poirot—or possibly the Fat Controller. Though she could not see Thomas the Tank Engine anywhere. Even Frankie’s Mildred would be too modern for this diorama.

Rhian giggled, unable to help herself.

Gary appeared from behind the table holding a steam train and carriages like a mother holds her new baby.

“It’s okay, I think,” Gary said. “I set the speed too high and it came off the table, but it is the Flying Scotsman. I suppose I shouldn’t have left her running unattended.”

“Do you have a whistle and a peaked cap?” Rhian asked solemnly.

Gary colored.

“I suppose this does look like a strange hobby for a grown man,” he said.

“No stranger than other grown men’s hobbies,” Rhian said soothingly. “I knew a man who fought battles between miniature elves and dwarves.”

“Now that’s just silly,” Gary said with a grin.

“Then there’s stamp collecting, angling, flying toy planes, train spotting, slot cars, coin collecting, football, ferret racing, sword collecting, darts, ham radio, gun collecting, ufology, putting ships in bottles, paintball, metal detecting, beer mat collecting . . .”

“Okay, I get the picture,” said Gary, with a lopsided grin. “Men are weird, childish, and collect strange things.”

“Model railways are pretty tame stuff compared to extreme ironing,” Rhian said. “I think it’s the male competitive instinct. Ask a man to iron a shirt and you get nothing but foot dragging, but tell him its extreme ironing and challenge him to do it hanging upside down from Tower Bridge, and the poor sap can’t wait.”

“And the difference between men and boys is the cost of the toys,” Gary said.

They both laughed.

“I think model railways are cute, and it’s not likely to hurt anybody,” Rhian said in a conciliatory sort of way, remembering that Gary was her boss.

“I’m not so sure about that. This place has 1930s wiring, so one wrong move and
phut
,” Gary said, drawing a finger across his throat. “Have you noticed that the light switches are made of Bakelite?”

“What’s Bakelite?” Rhian asked, examining a switch. It was dark brown and bulky but otherwise unremarkable.

“Never mind, they stopped making it before you were born, Hell, before I was born.”

“That must have been a long time ago, then,” Rhian said, straight faced.

Gary looked at her suspiciously but forewent further comment.

Rhian took over from the taciturn Sheila and dropped back into the reassuringly unexciting business of barmaiding. After some debate, and a rigorous and extensive search through their pockets, Willie the Dog and Old Fred stumped up the readies for two more halves of ordinary bitter. A trickle of students passed in and out of the pub on their way between the college and digs.

“Would you like to come out with me?” a student asked, pocketing his change.

Rhian lifted her eyes from the till and looked at him. Actually, he wasn’t unhandsome if you disregarded the acne. It was nice to get a direct approach rather than a stupid chat-up line. She cocked her head one side and considered his request, thinking about Frankie’s advice. Maybe she should take him up on his offer? It was just an invitation for a drink, not a marriage proposal, but she couldn’t see where the relationship could go. Sooner or later he would meet the wolf.

“Thanks, but I am not quite ready for a relationship. I only split from my last boyfriend recently.”