A Life Less Ordinary (10 page)

I looked up sharply. “You’re talking about sending an innocent man to jail,” I said. “You can’t...”

Master Revels shrugged. “The man we’re talking about kidnapped and raped a little girl seventeen years ago,” he said, flatly. “He is not
innocent
. He deserves far worse than the ten years in prison he was given – which turned out to be seven for good behaviour. Does that make you feel any better about it?”

I honestly didn’t know. I had never been molested as a child. My parents had been boring folks and I had often complained about them, never really understanding how lucky I had been. I understood the sexual impulse – I’d wanted sex myself once I matured and I knew that boys felt the same way – but to involve children? My lip twisted in disgust. I couldn’t imagine using a child for sexual purposes. It was the most disgusting thing I had ever heard, even including the slaves and how elves treated their half-bloods.

“Yes,” I admitted, finally. Some would say that the paedophile had paid his debt to society. The more I thought about it, the more I agreed that he hadn’t done anything of the sort. Still...it bothered me. For all I knew, he hadn’t touched another child since being released from prison. “And what are you going to do with the
real
kidnapper?”

“We have a place for him to go,” Master Revels assured me. “He won’t be threatening anyone again, ever.”

I hoped he was right.

“How often does it happen?” I asked, finally. “How often does someone from the magical world start preying on people in the mundane world?”

“More often than you would think,” Master Revels admitted. “There are people who exist in both worlds and try to maintain links between them, using magic in the mundane world to improve their lives. There are people who regard the mundane folk as barbarians, as somehow less than human, and consider that they have the right to do whatever they like to them. And then there are the people who learn to use magic by accident and cause problems...”

He shrugged. “Luckily for us, most mundane folk are willing to swallow any explanation that doesn’t include magic,” he added. I nodded, remembering glancing at a paper reporting a gas explosion at the museum. The reporter had been quite insistent that nothing untoward had taken place. “Even if the girls do remember what happened to them, no one will actually believe them and they will insist that they were drugged and hallucinating at the time.” He snorted. “They can read all kinds of things into anything, if they try. Can you believe that they believe that a boy who doesn’t wash is actually the victim of child abuse?”

I remembered the small boys I’d known at primary school and snorted. If any of them had washed outside a swimming pool, it was involuntary. I had always thought that boys hated to be clean and preferred to ignore their personal hygiene, at least until they discovered that clean boys got more dates than boys who stank of unwashed hair and filthy clothes.

“Anyway, forget that for now,” Master Revels said, as we pulled up in front of another house. “You can go fetch the last statue and then we will deliver them to their destination.”

***

Night was falling as we reached the home of the paedophile. I had been expecting a monstrous house, perhaps decorated with the skulls of unborn children, but it was surprisingly normal. It was also in a very poor neighbourhood, perhaps because few people would want a paedophile living near them. I found myself wondering if his neighbours knew who and what he was, before deciding that it was unlikely. No father worthy of the name would allow a paedophile to live near his kids, even if it meant going to jail for murder.

Master Revels cast a series of spells into the air, centring them on the bastard’s house. One of them would ensure that no one would see us at work, or call the police before we were done; the others would keep him asleep and neutralise any burglar alarms he happened to have in his house. A quick tap of Master Revels’ cane to the door opened it for us, allowing us to slip into the house and search it quickly. The paedophile himself, an astonishingly fat man with an unpleasant face – or perhaps I was imagining that because I knew what he was – lay on his couch, having drunk himself into an uneasy sleep. He was clearly having a nightmare. I hoped that his sins were catching up with him.

“Down here,” Master Revels said. He’d found the doorway to the basement. It was a small unpleasant room, perfect for holding small prisoners. I could believe that the paedophile had been continuing his work even before I saw the ghosts. There was a young girl, staring up hopelessly into a nightmare given shape and form. There were two small boys clinging to each other...I guessed that all three of them were long dead. I wanted to go upstairs and kill their kidnapper myself, or perhaps feed him to Circe...who knew; perhaps being a pig or a sheep was too merciful for him. I could have turned him into a worm and stepped on him without the slightest shred of remorse. “Get the girls down here and we’ll finish the work.”

It took several trips to bring all the girls down into the basement, but once they were gathered it was easy to restore them to human form. Caught within the spells Master Revels had cast, they fell quickly into sleep, allowing him to drug them with a small needle he’d produced out of his hat. I watched their faces and shivered at the terror they’d felt in their last seconds as humans, even though their kidnapper had clearly used glamour-spells to make the statues more attractive. They deserved so much better than to be treated like that.

“Don’t worry,” Master Revels said, flatly. “They won’t wake up until the police arrive and nor will the new kidnapper. I wonder how he will explain their presence to the police.”

We headed back outside, careful to lock the door behind us, and made a phone call from the nearest call box. The police had to have been on alert, for the moment we mentioned the address they told us to wait for them to arrive. We ignored that, put the phone down and hid under an invisibility spell as three police cars arrived and parked right in front of the bastard’s house. Ten minutes later, the paedophile was under arrest and the girls were on the way to hospital, where they would be reunited with their parents.

“That should be all the loose ends tied up,” Master Revels said, with an evil grin. The handcuffed paedophile was being marched away into a police van, watched by several reporters who had turned up to film the event. “That was a very good day’s work.”

“Excellent,” I agreed. Seeing the ghosts had dispelled all of my doubts. “And now...”

I looked up at him, firmly. “Explanations,” I said.

“As soon as we get home and have a good night’s sleep,” Master Revels said. “All right?”

Chapter Nine

I didn’t sleep comfortably that night.

Tossing and turning in the bed, slipping in and out of sleep, I dreamed of Mr Pygmalion and the paedophile and many other horrors, all blurring together into one terrifying nightmare. When I awoke, the bed was soaked in sweat and I felt tired, as if I hadn’t slept at all. I tried to use a meditation trick I’d been taught to fall asleep again, yet nothing seemed to work. I just couldn’t focus my mind. I kept thinking of the girls and how they could have remained statues for the rest of eternity – how one of them might well remain a statue, unless we found her before her mind blurred into the stone and was gone. Mr Pygmalion had told us that he’d transformed thirty-seven girls in all and despite our best efforts one of them seemed to be missing for good.

Around eight o’clock in the morning, I finally gave up on sleep and stumbled into the shower, cursing my ex-boyfriend under my breath. I could have done with someone holding me as I cried myself to sleep, someone who would have listened and held me as I screamed and never let go of me. I had even considered looking for Master Revels and inviting him to share my bed, before dismissing the idea as a thoroughly stupid and idiotic concept. He was my tutor and I was his apprentice. It wouldn’t be
right
for us to share a bed. Somehow, I found myself thinking of Cardonel. Perhaps he
could
take me out for a night on the town after all.

The warm water from the shower helped to awaken me and I found myself feeling much better as I towelled off and found my dressing gown. I couldn’t be bothered dressing properly, not before breakfast, for eating something always made me feel better. I tied up my hair, pulled the dressing gown tightly around me and walked downstairs to the kitchen. A flutter of wings announced Fiona’s presence as she flew down and landed on my shoulder. I wrapped her up in a hug and held her for a long moment, feeling her heartbeat pounding against my cheek.

“You had a long night,” the tiny dragon said, when I let her go. “You could probably sleep in for a few more hours if you want.”

“I can’t sleep,” I admitted. I knew that there were spells and potions to ensure a proper night’s sleep, but Master Revels had warned me that it was easy to become dependent on them to the point where I literally
couldn’t
sleep without chemical help. I had no wish to spend the rest of my days as an addict. What I needed was a chance to relax and blow off some steam and I wasn’t going to get that from potions. “I had bad dreams.”

“That’s never a good sign,” Fiona said, gravely. “I hope that they were not precognitive dreams.”

I looked up at her scaly face, with the uneasy sense that I was being mocked. “I don’t know,” I said, finally. “What’s going to happen to Mr Pygmalion?”

Fiona twitched. “That’s up to his judges,” she said, “but unless I miss my guess, he will be pushed through the Dimensional Gate into the Dark Continent, where he will spend the rest of his days trying to avoid the Shadow Wraiths that will tear him limb from limb, before eating his soul.”

I blinked. “What on Earth is the Dark Continent?”

“It isn’t on Earth,” Fiona said. “A few hundred years ago, some idiot of a sorcerer managed to open a Gate to a world that had become infested with a creature of living shadow. The shadows tried to get into our world, but luckily for us they cannot survive here for long, not without a human host. It was decided that anyone who broke the law and was too powerful or dangerous to contain in any other way would be pushed through the Gate and into the Dark Continent, from where they would be unable to return.”

“Oh,” I said. It seemed a pretty dire punishment after all. “Who’s going to be judging him?”

“Leave that for the moment,” Master Revels called. I’d had a ghastly night, but he looked as if he’d slept well. He wore his suit and top hat while drinking a large cup of tea. “Come in and have something to eat, then we’ll talk.”

I knew better than to think that he would answer any of my questions before we’d both eaten, so I sat down and allowed his magic to fill my plate. At one time, I would have worried about putting on weight and refused to eat bacon, eggs, sausages and toast, but now I knew better. Besides, he made me sweat it all off during the day. I had never liked to drink tea at all – I had drunk coffee to wake me up in the mornings – but now I was quite used to it. It was, as always, an excellent breakfast. Master Revels had had years to learn his craft. My own magically-produced foods either looked good and tasted funny, or looked awful and tasted good. I hadn’t yet worked out how to balance looks and taste.

“You might want to read the paper this morning.” Master Revels said, as I munched my way through a piece of toast. He opened a mundane newspaper and read from the top. “Police in Livingstone yesterday evening arrested a paedophile and recovered thirty-six girls from his basement. The girls, who had been kidnapped over a period of weeks, were apparently not molested by their captor, although they were drugged in order to prevent them crying out or trying to escape. It is believed that their captor had links to an international ring of child slavers who would have eventually taken the girls out of the country. Further investigations are on-going, but a police spokesperson said that preliminary examinations of the house confirmed the suspicion that three other children met their dooms within its dark walls.”

He looked up at me. “I told you that they’d come up with an explanation for it somehow,” he said, with a grin. “An international ring of child slavers. What total nonsense.”

I shrugged. “You don’t think that people will think that it is possible?”

“Of course it’s
possible
,” Master Revels agreed. “It just happens to be very unlikely.”

He waved his hand at his mug of tea and it refilled itself at once. “Still, all of the loose ends will be tied up soon enough,” he added. “The wanker, who was certainly guilty of murdering at least three other children, will pay the price for his real and imagined crimes. The girls will go back to their homes, none the worse for their experience...and you and I have the satisfaction of knowing that we did a good job and that we get the credit.”

“That paper says that the police are getting the credit,” I said, wryly.

“You know what I mean,” Master Revels added. He stood up, still carrying his cup of tea. “Finish your breakfast and wash up, and then meet me in the study. If you still want explanations, I’ll be happy to give them to you.”

I ate up as quickly as I could, before starting on the washing up. I had asked him, some weeks ago, why he insisted that I do it when he could use magic to do it, but he’d explained that it helped to teach me discipline and patience. Fiona fluttered overhead, stealing the remains of my bacon and chewing on it while I washed, leaving me to wonder what dragons normally ate in the wild. I remembered the far larger dragon I’d seen at the market and shivered. I had a nasty suspicion that the answer was human beings. I finished drying the last of the plates and headed into the study. Master Revels was sitting in his armchair, reading one of the books we’d recovered from the library.

“Take a seat,” he said, absently. He peered down at a piece of text with a magnifying glass. “Do you think that this is meant to be a...”

Fiona cleared her throat. “I think you promised some explanations,” she said, firmly. I blinked in surprise. I had never seen Fiona be so assertive before. “You can try to decipher the book later.”