The Magpye: Circus (14 page)

After all, he was a King.

Locked out of his body, Able
watched through Adam's eyes as he walked through the charnel house
the mill had become. There was so much blood, so many ghosts. Able
had never been in the presence of spirits that were so fresh. The
presence of every one of them felt like an open wound on the
surface of the world through which a howling maelstrom could be
heard, threatening to pull Able through into whatever lay beyond.
So much blood, so much screaming. All of Able's ghosts came into
his mind full formed, but these new things were raw and skinless,
peeled by their sudden and agonising deaths. Ghosts, like men, were
born into the world bloody and howling.

"Adam King was your first
ghost, don't you remember?"

Dorothy's voice. Able felt
relieved to hear from his old friend again.

"No," answered Able. "I
honestly never thought about it. I barely remember anything from
before… you know. Most of the time I feel like I woke up with you
all already in my head one morning, and we've been doing this ever
since."

"No, it was nothing like that,"
replied Dorothy. "Try to remember. Try to remember who he is."

"Why does it matter?" asked Able. "He's in control now. I'm
not like you, Dorothy, or the others. I can't
do
anything. I'm useless. It's just dumb luck that we all
ended up in my body. I don't even get to drive most of the time.
Adam's going to keep me out forever and I'm going to fade away to
nothing. I can feel it. I've no memories to hold onto, nothing to
stop my just… sinking away. The Kings win after
all
.
"

"You've got all the memories
you need," replied Dorothy calmly. Able felt a pressure, something
pushing down on him in the strange incorporeal space he occupied.
Impossibly, he felt cold and wet, felt his dead heart pounding in a
chest he didn't have.

"What is this?" he asked, his
ghost voice shrill and panicked.

"Try to relax," said Dorothy.
"It's just a memory. It's one of yours. We need you to see it,
because we want you to understand."

"Understand what?" asked
Able.

"How we're going to beat Adam
King."

***

Able blinked, and suddenly was
somewhere else. He was outside, it was night and it was raining. It
was raining and he was running, running hard. Running from
something, but he had no idea from what.

All he knew was that he was
running. Running for his life.

Gravestones rose up in front of
him, forcing him to cut left and right, costing him valuable
seconds. The smaller ones he leapt over, the hot breath of the
thing behind him lending desperate strength to his limbs.

His every breath was pain, his
lungs a furnace in his chest, but he ran on.

The gravestones became tighter
packed, and larger, slowly giving way to monuments and mausoleums.
The graveyard seemed to go on forever, but in the distance Able
could see lights. Bright, glaring, lights that turned the muddy
brown and dirty greys of a rain-washed graveyard into stark black
and white. Silhouetted against the white light he could see people
and he instinctively adjusted his headlong trajectory to run
towards them.

People. He would be safe with
people, wouldn't he?

Either that, or he'd get them
all killed.

He found himself hurtling
headlong into the pool of harsh white light, and realised it was
too late to change his mind.

"What the hell?"

The shapes turned towards him,
their faces moving into focus as his milk-white eyes, tuned for
darkness, grew accustomed to the light.

"Holy shit, turn that camera
around, we've found him!"

"No way, he's fucking *real*
.
"

Able skidded to a halt, falling
backwards as the unblinking glass eyes of television cameras were
shoved into his face. On his back, he scrambled desperately to get
away, to escape back to the shadows, but the lights were turned to
focus on him and there was no escape from their incandescent
stare.

"Look at his eyes! Is he
blind?"

"Running around out here at
night, I don't think so! He must be some kind of albino or
something."

"Hey Marv, get over here!
Someone, get Marv' over here. We've got to get this on film. We've
caught the freaking Ghoul!"

Pushing his way through the
crowd of silhouettes, a figure bulkier than the others. A shape
that somehow Able recognised.

"No, get away, get back all of
you," Able spluttered. "He's right behind me, he'll kill you
all!"

"What the hell? Is there
someone else out there?"

The larger shape pushed through and spoke in a voice more
commanding, somehow more *real*
,
than all the
others.

"Turn those damn lights down
and put the camera away. There's no such thing as the Ghoul and
whoever this is you're scaring the hell out of him!"

Strong hands under Able's arms,
lifting him up.

"It's all right son, I've got
you."

The lights, one by one, turned
their shining eyes elsewhere. The lidless orbs of the camera lens
dipped, almost ashamedly, to the floor.

"Can you tell me your name,
son? Do you know where you are?"

The memory flooded over Able.
This was the first time he had said his own name out loud, the
first time he had even *known* it since… before. Before was the
other dream, the slaughter in the circus, the death of his mother
and his friends and everything he knew. This memory, instead, was a
start. This was a birth.

The ghost of Able Quirk held
its phantom's breath and waited for the memory to speak.

"My name…" said a voice, weak
from not being used, "My name is Able Quirk."

"Able… Quirk?"

The supportive hands vanished
from underneath Able, sending him down to one knee. The shadowy
figure took a step back into the edge of a pool of light.

"Son, do you know who I
am?"

Able looked up, his eyes
blinking once more as he looked from the darkness into light.

Standing in front of him,
larger than life itself, was Marv the Magnificent.

Taylor had leapt into the
bullet's path just in time.

Searing hot, it had passed
through his shoulder, glancing off bone and exiting before slicing
off the top of Cane King's ear. They fell together, Taylor and
King, landing on top of Owen White. Taylor gritted his teeth and
buried the pain. He'd been shot twice tonight, it wasn't going to
happen a third time.

Calmly, he rolled off Cane King
and crawled on his belly across to the window. He felt the wound on
his side open up and was forced to bury more pain.

"Sniper
,
" he said, his voice
retaining its strange monotone quality despite the circumstances.
"Firing from the other side of the building, I think."

Cane had crawled towards the
door, finding refuge behind an old desk. He was clutching his split
ear, blood running down the side of his face and between his
fingers.

"I thought you'd got them all?"
he growled. "Who the fuck is this now?"

"Nutt," replied Taylor.
"Ex-Tactical turned detective. Garrity said he was a wreck after
what we did to his partner."

"Garrity's wreck just shot my
fucking ear off!"

Taylor tore a length of
material from his shirt and used it to tie a tourniquet around his
shoulder. "I can see that, Mr. King," was his only reply.

From the other side of the
mill, Nutt had watched Taylor flash across his scope a split second
after he'd pulled the trigger. He knew he shouldn't have used the
laser sight, but he'd wanted to give White a chance to get out of
the line of fire. Another mistake, like the mistake that had gotten
Grice killed. Another mistake, like pulling back and letting White
take charge of this operation, which was a mistake which had gotten
them all killed.

Taylor was impossibly fast
though. Faster than a bullet. Nutt filed the information away, just
in case. Little pieces of information like that could save your
life.

"Fuck," grunted Nutt, assessing
the situation as simply as he could.

His first day training with
firearms, his instructor had told the class that there was only one
fundamental truth to working tactical operations - sometimes they
went wrong. Bad. South. Screwed. Fucked up. He said the mark of a
good tactical officer was how he dealt with that when it happened.
The mark of a great tactical officer was that he also walked away
from it.

This operation? It had gone as
far South as anything Nutt had ever known, and that could mean only
one thing. It was time for the other thing that his instructor had
told him, about what to do when things went so bad that you knew
you weren't walking away.

"Take as many of them with you
as you can, buy the next guy a chance."

Ditching his rifle, Nutt pulled
a sub-machine gun and a pistol out of his canvas hold-all. Based on
this sweep of the building, it was just down to him, Taylor, King,
and whatever was left of Owen White. This was going to get close,
bloody, and personal. At least, that was the plan.

***

Owen White lay on his back, a
mass of broken pieces held together only by pain and their past
association to each other.

He didn't want King to be
right, but there was a tiny part of him that wanted to stop
fighting now, and it was starting to convince the rest of him that
it was right. He'd never be a cop again, not after tonight. One
eye, a busted leg, a dead squad and a pile of bodies he'd need to
account for. If he was lucky he'd die here tonight and not in some
hell-hole prison where being an ex-cop was like having a target on
your back for the rest of your life. He listened to King and Taylor
discuss his fate, unsure of what to hope for.

"You want me to kill him, Mr.
King?"

"No," replied King. "He's
finished, he's more use to us alive. A message for any other hero
cops thinking about breezing into town. Go and take care of this
Nutt, I'm going to find Grace and get out of here."

"You want me to call Garrity?"
asked Taylor, "We're going to have some clean-up to do."

"No, not Garrity," replied
King, venom in his voice. "Garrity's intel nearly got us all killed
tonight, and I'm down God knows how many men thanks to these
cop-fucks. No, I'll speak to Mr. Garrity alone and at length some
time in the near future. Just make sure Detective White here finds
his way to a very public station house, and then give Paddy Keane a
call. He's a dab hand with a box of matches and the insurance on
this place can pay for some new shoes that don't stink of pig."

White closed his eyes. So, that
was it.

Game over.

"I remember
…" said
Able. I was lost, living rough in the cemetery. Marv found
me.

*"He'd come back to the city
after he heard what had happened to the circus,"* replied Dorothy.
"He was making a TV show. 'Paranormal Cities'."

"He told me. They'd heard the
bodies were being disturbed in the cemetery. Corpses were being…
eaten. They came looking for something the press were calling The
Ghoul."

*"Sound like anyone you
know?"*

"I was… eating them?" asked
Able. His voice, even inside his own head, trembled.

*"You were surviving. No one
can judge you for that. It was before you understood what you
were."*

"Who says I understand what I
am?" asked Able glibly.

Another memory flared into
life, a flashbulb bursting inside Able's mind, cutting the
conversation short.

***

Able opened his eyes in another
new place. His head was fuzzy, the memory felt hazy, as if
everything was being seen through a soft, warm, fog. He was lying
down on an uncomfortable bed, his limbs disobeying all instructions
from him to rise.

"Don't try to get up."

It was Marv's voice. Deep,
comforting, assured. A voice that always sounded like what it was
telling you was right.

"I gave you something to help
you to calm down, but it knocked you clean out. Last time I buy
drugs from a sound engineer."

"I slept?" asked Able, his
voice slurring, his mouth full of fuzz.

"Like the dead," said Marv. "No
pun intended."

"Where are we?"

"My trailer, why?"

"We have to move. He'll find us
here. We're all… we're all in… great danger."

Able crashed off the small bed
onto the floor, his limbs finally obeying his instructions but
lacking the strength to complete them. Marv's hands lifted him back
up, helping him sit.

A cup of water, held to his
lips.

"What is it?"

"Just water, this time," said
Marv. "Now tell me who's after you."

"My father," said Able,
breathless between mouthfuls of water urgently swallowed. "My
father, Adam King."

***

"Adam King… was my father?"

"Yes, son. And, please, believe
me when I tell you that none of us wanted you to find out like
this."

"But you all knew?! You knew I
was a fucking King?!"

"No, son, I promise. Those of
us that knew, he hid himself from us somehow. Whatever memories we
had of him were as lost to us as yours are to you. We only
remembered him, who and what he was, when he revealed himself
tonight."

"I still don't understand how
we're going to beat him."

"Think about it Able. This
power, this thing you call 'The Magpye'? It's a **birthright**.
You're Adam's son. His power passed to you when he died. He can
only control The Magpye if you *let him*."