Stray Souls (Magicals Anonymous) (37 page)

“Ed-Eddie Parks fled.”

“Redundant. The summoning circle failed to bind and compel Greydawn, and I removed their Christmas bonuses. If Eddie wishes to seek employment elsewhere, then that is an acceptable reallocation of human resources.”

“The summoners are dead. They’re all dead. Dog is in the streets. The Midnight Mayor—”

He moves so fast she can hardly see, but he’s there by her side in a second, and, God, it’s fingers he runs over her cheek, fingers not claws,
fingers…

“Tell me about your fear,” he breathes, so soft now, curious and
quiet. “It is a feeling but it causes a physical change, yes? Your heart–it beats faster. Your face is red. Your breath comes quickly. This is a hormonal response to feeling? Your mind tells you that you are in danger and so your blood moves faster in preparation for a fight? Tell me, if you experience joy, how does your body alter?”

The woman half-closed her eyes, ran a leather tongue over sandy lips. “We can still find her,” she pleaded. “We’ll find Greydawn. The Friendlies… the shamans…”

“The Friendlies and the shamans are united!” roars Mr Ruislip, his anger a too-hot wave of breath in her face. “The Midnight Mayor has joined them, the builders are slain, and now they will come, and when they are all dead I will be no closer to my objective! All I ask is a very simple thing and yet you fail again!”

His fingers move.

It is a tiny gesture, a flick that might swat away a fly.

The woman sways.

She feels the blood from her neck run down and seep into her shirt. Feels the hot pulse of it draining away from her veins, the lightness in her skull as gravity takes over where the heart can no longer reach. She tries to speak, but air cannot pass through what is left of her throat. She falls, her blood a scarlet spray up the nearest wall.

Claws, not fingers, then.

Mr Ruislip turns away.

There is a phrase he has heard, uttered by humans in seeming jest, but meant to disguise some other feeling. How he despises it when mortals do that–layer one sentiment beneath the hollowness of another.

What was it?

“If you want something done, do it yourself,” he murmurs. It’s said so often in jest, but what it really means, what it so often disguises, is rage.

They had persuaded Mrs Rafaat back inside the hall.

Dog had padded quietly after her, and now sat, a shaggy, panting monster at his small mistress’s feet, examining the members of Magicals Anonymous with a beady, bloody stare. Whenever his gaze turned to the barely conscious form of Eddie Parks, his lips curled back in rage, and only a gentle pat on the head and a cajoling “Who’s a naughty doggy?” from Mrs Rafaat appeared to quell Dog’s otherwise unrestrained loathing. Eddie Parks quaked at Dog’s stare, and turned away only to find a clipboard and a biro hovering in front of his nose.

“Hi,” exclaimed Kevin. “So, I just lost like, disgusting amounts of blood tonight, and I was wondering… what’s your rhesus type?”

Rhys passed Mrs Rafaat another cup of tea, his hand shaking as Dog’s great head turned to examine the brew. The druid had always worried that animals never liked him, and now his anxiety made him feel quite faint.

“Thank you, dear,” murmured Mrs Rafaat. “It’s been a very stressful night.”

Sharon was examining the wreckage of the hall, aghast. Whatever heightened state of non-drumming-based spiritual enlightenment she’d reached a few minutes before, it was fading fast against the onslaught of practical considerations. “Oh shit,” she muttered. “Am I gonna have to pay for all this?”

“I’m sure they’ve got insurance,” offered Ms Somchit. The black-clad
Alderman was cradling her mug of herbal tea like someone whose happiness is proportional to their share of tannin.

“Yeah, but I haven’t!” wailed the shaman. “And where are we gonna have meetings now?”

I know a lovely gasometer–spacious, warm, fascinating acoustics?
suggested Sally from her perch.

Edna, meanwhile, couldn’t stop looking with horrified fascination at Dog and Mrs Rafaat. Kevin nudged her conspiratorially. While Eddie Parks’s hand trembled its way down a health questionnaire, the vampire had tried to disguise the bloody hole in his shirt with a tactfully draped tea cloth, albeit in vain.

“Uh, babes?” he murmured. “You’re kind of staring at the nice lady with the giant monstrous killing machine, and that’s like, not really polite.”

Edna forced her features into something more composed and shuffled uneasily towards Mrs Rafaat. Dog sniffed as she approached but, at a pat on the head from Mrs Rafaat, sank back down on his haunches.

“Um… my lady?” hazarded Edna. “Ma’am? I’m Edna. I’m uh… I’m your high priestess.”

“Are you?” snuffled Mrs Rafaat, whom the evening’s events had now made rather teary. “That’s very nice of you, dear, but I’m afraid I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You
are
Greydawn, aren’t you?” demanded Chris the exorcist. “I mean, you’re who all this fuss is about?”

“That’s what people tell me,” she sighed. “But really, I don’t know. Everyone seems to think my little puppy here–” she fondled behind Dog’s ear, provoking a potent whine of appreciation “–is somehow mystical and… well… anti-social. But I keep explaining he’s just my little diddums.”

Edna’s gaze turned to the bloodied face of Mrs Rafaat’s little did-dums. She took a step back, her throat pulsing as she swallowed. “Uh… well, I just wanted to say what an honour it is, ma’am, and I, uh… Thanks for all your hard work.” She retreated, desperate to take her eyes off Dog but not quite able to do so.

In a corner of the wrecked hall, Sammy, Swift and Sharon were huddled in urgent conference on the problem of Greydawn–namely, that Mrs Rafaat didn’t seem to realise she
was
Greydawn.

“She’s human,” murmured Sharon. “I mean, isn’t that it? She’s human
and
she’s Greydawn. But mostly she’s just human. Like, I look at you,” pointing at Swift, “and I can see you’re a sorcerer and other shit too. And I look at Rhys over there, and I can see he’s got like, these major psychological issues with his allergies and stuff, but is also a druid… but I look at Mrs Rafaat and she’s just… Mrs Rafaat.”

“On the other hand,” Sharon mused, “I kind of doubt Dog would let anyone other than Greydawn give his tummy a rub. And if Burns and Stoke tried to capture Greydawn, and if Dog has been killing the summoning team involved in that, then I guess it’s not a huge leap to say that something clearly went crappy last time Burns and Stoke tried to bind and compel Our Lady of 4 a.m., and so… and
so…”
Sharon spoke with the care of someone double-checking every logical twist before even thinking of uttering her thoughts out loud “… maybe Mrs Rafaat is the side effect of what went wrong?”

“What, you think the Lady’s mortal form is some Indian bird from Wembley?” demanded Sammy.

For once Swift’s face was not a picture of discontent. “Speaking as someone who has been at the centre of many mystical cock-ups, I can think of several ways in which—”

“But why Mrs Rafaat?” interjected Sharon. “Why’d she become
this
woman?”

Swift hesitated, then grumbled, “I have no idea.” His eyes surveyed the room and fixed on the cowering shape of Eddie Parks. “Why don’t we ask?”

Hi, I’m Eddie…

(Hello, Eddie)

… please don’t let the monster hurt me.

I got into magic at uni when I puked up in my hall of residence’s cabal. They were well secret, but I was well pissed and I thought it was my door I was opening, but it was theirs and they were in the middle of this ritual thing and I’d had a few, and I guess you could say…

Anyway, they said they could curse me, or I could join, and I figured yeah, looks cool, I’ll do it! I’m not very good at magic–I get the words muddled and forget if I’m moving the sigil from left to right or right to left, but I do okay, you know? But it doesn’t really pay, and I’ve always wanted money. I mean, not just for the sake of having money, but because it’s there, someone’s gotta have it, and if I have a choice between being the guy who’s happy and the guy who’s not, I’ll take happy any day. And so thank you, yes, very much, for a Christmas bonus, you know? People talk about greed like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not–there’s always gonna be rich people and there’s always gonna be poor, and all greed is a conscious decision of which end of the ladder you’re gonna fall. I think that’s admirable, actually; I think that’s something to make you proud.

I joined Burns and Stoke seven years back. They were good times
on the market, and I’d forgotten most of the magic stuff anyway because it wasn’t worth shit next to knowing where the derivatives market was gonna go. I knew there were a few others in the department who dabbled, you know, but it was all regulated and we had this deal with Harlun and Phelps, who everyone knew was
seriously
into the magic shit–no major financial gain through mystical means unless it was run by the Bank of England first. And getting anything by those tossers is practically impossible, so we just ignored it. Didn’t need it, you know?

Then it all kicked off–Lehmans, Northern Rock, the Eurozone debt crisis, Greece, Spain, Italy–and we hadn’t been too stupid, you know, we’d spread our bets and taken our positions carefully. But in that climate it didn’t matter where you were at because everything, all of it, stank. And it’s fucking stupid, yeah, because the government will bail out the banks when it’s like, little people’s money and that, but they won’t raise a finger when the real fat cats, the guys who drive everything, when they’re gonna burn. And so there we were, and we were all eyeing up our favourite pencils and the knick-knacks on our desks and wondering how much stationery we could sneak out of the cupboard before the entire thing went down, when
he
turned up.

Mr Ruislip.

I don’t know where he came from, but one day I was called into a meeting and he was just there, sat at the head of the table. And he said:

“Good afternoon, Mr Parks. I hear you have some mild skills with magic. Kindly remain in the office after work today. I will see you at 8.45 p.m. precisely.”

And that was it.

I turned up at 8.45 like the guy said, and there were like, a dozen other guys there including my boss, Gavin McGafferty, who even I thought was an arse, and I work in finance. And Mr Ruislip walked in just as the second hand hit the button and said:

“Gentlemen, you have been requested to remain behind as you have some moderate skill with summoning magics. I am not expecting wonders from you, yet, but from now on please consider your Tuesday and Thursday evenings to be within office working hours. And if you could each see to purchasing a box of latex gloves, that would be appreciated.”

And he got us… doing things.

Spells I’d never heard of.

Big spells too, like… proper bindings, and compelling. We’d go to buildings all across the city, every Tuesday and Thursday night, and we’d make the summoning circle and we’d pull these… creatures out of the walls and floors. I guess you had to call them spirits, but they were all twisted shapes on the air, or odd bends of light, or shrieks with no bodies.

I was kind of freaked out at first. We were pulling out the souls of a place, but we always bought the building we were gonna perform the spell in, because that made it easier, because Mr Ruislip said if you held the deed of ownership in your hands then the binding would sit better on the stones. And he was right.

I got really good at it, in fact; though I didn’t see why we were bothering until, one day, McGafferty said,

“You’re a fucking stupid little arse, Parks, and I’m only gonna fucking show you this once so you can piss off and shut up, okay?”

And he took me downstairs, I mean right downstairs, lower than the lift went, to the basement of the building, past locks and doors and men with fucking guns–I mean,
guns,
can you believe it?–and into this giant vault thing. And at the bottom of this vault there was this great black hole, this spinning, whirling black pit. And I’m not much good at magic, but I could taste it, hear it on the air, and I looked into this thing and thought, shit, that’s it, they’ve opened up a portal into hell. But it wasn’t like that, it was a… a prison. They’d made a prison in a pit under the building and in it they trapped all the spirits we’d been summoning from the buildings, hurled them all together. And McGafferty said:

“These fucking ghouly-ghosts are old, old as the fucking streets. And they’ve changed with the times and they’ve become powerful with the times, and even the smallest little shit-rag spirit sucked from a fucking stupid laundrette has power. And we’ve got them now; we’ve got ’em and we can make ’em work for us, the way nature should be.”

He told me that they had spells to suck the power out of the spirits, and spells to make them dance and obey, spells of summoning and control; that he himself had sent the soul of an Internet café flying round the world to steal data from a Hong Kong computer and made
two point three million that day. Or the spirit of an abandoned fire station which he’d dispatched to burn the warehouse of a company he’d bet against. Or the soul of a nursery school which he’d sent to sing lullabies into a trader’s brain so he bid up, up, up, when he should have just sold.

“Usually these beasties just sit around in the city and do shit,” he explained, “like the ‘soul’ isn’t a fucking commodity! Fuck that, I say to you, fuck that! This is the twenty-first century! Time for the fucking soul to earn its way.”

That’s what we did.

We made magic a commodity. That’s kind of what we do, I guess.

And I was okay with it. Jesus, I know you’re gonna hate me now, but I was okay with it because I was selling high and buying low, and it didn’t matter what the real value of the product was because if it went too high I could just wave my fingers and tweak it back, and if it went too low, no worries! Click my heels and problem solved. It was great, I mean really, really great–it was what magic should’ve been, no sweat, no consequences. So when Mr Ruislip called us into his office I was on top of the world. I was like, “Yeah, screw you!” and “Rock on, universe!”–only not to his face, of course–but that’s how it felt, you know?