The Magpye: Circus (20 page)

"Some good? Is that what you
call it?" argued Marv. It was a reflex action, born from months of
trying to persuade Able, and Magpye, to walk away from their shared
vendetta.

"We don't have time for that
right now," implored Able. "Don't ask me how I know, but I know
that if we start to live that night again, if this place becomes…
what it was when we all died…"

"We'll be trapped," interjected
Marissa, finishing Able's sentence. "And none of us want that, do
we?" Her eyes were focussed not on Marv, but on Magpye. Marv
stepped aside, turning to face the creature shoulder to shoulder
with his dead friends, lost daughter, and Able. The creature was
smiling again, the same smile Marv had seen before, the smile that
looked like someone lifting the top off a boiled egg full of
poison. Double rows of razor teeth, a writhing, twisted scarlet
tongue and a jaw that seemed to go all the way back to her
ears.

"No we don't," said Magpye, in
a voice that didn't belong in a little girl at all.

From her feet, a new shadow
grew. It spread out at first in the shape of a girl and then
slowly, gradually, it became the shape of a giant bird. It was icy
cold under their feet as it slid under them, the same icy cold that
Marv had felt in the creature's flesh. He reached out his own hand
to take Marissa's, but found her already holding tight to Able.

"I don't know if I'll remember
us, afterwards," he said. There was an uncommon tenderness in his
voice, a tone Marv hadn't heard Able use in either of his two short
and strange lives so far.

"I'll remember you," replied
Marissa. "I did before."

"You didn't say anything…"

"You weren't ready. You are
now."

"This is different," said Able,
and Marv knew that he was referring to him. Until tonight, Marv
realised, all three of them had been living in their own secret
worlds, all orbiting each other but all utterly separate and alien
from the rest. Able, trapped in his own head with the ghosts and
the ancient and vengeful thing called Magpye; Marissa the ghost
that Marv had unknowingly conjured at the cost of his own magic;
and Marv… the culprit, the traitor, the coward. He had lived a life
filled with so many secrets and yet he hadn't been able to see the
biggest lie of all when it was right in front of him. His daughter
was dead. His daughter was dead and it was his fault.

The shadow began to rise up
behind them, bringing with it a cold wind and blotting out the
light from the fires. Marv's fingers twitched. This was old magic,
and it spoke to something deep inside him. Whatever strange twist
in his body or mind that made him a magician was waking up. Old
magic, deep magic, the type that the oldest magicians warned you
never to mess with, and here he was in the heart of it. Old magic,
the kind that never came easy. The kind that never came without a
price.

"Stop!" shouted Marv.

The shadows stopped moving and
the creature called Magpye let out a snake-like hiss.

"What are you doing?" asked
Able. "We have to go, now!"

The shadows began to fall around them like old curtains,
revealing the growing horror of the circus. Dark figures moved
through the smoke
-
filled landscape
that, for the moment, they somehow stood apart from. There was a
flash of gunshots, screams and shouting. The night played out in
slow motion before their very eyes, speeding up as it grew closer,
a juggernaut bearing down on them all.

"Dad?"

"It's too easy, Marissa," said
Marv. "Magpye told me that it didn't want you to die, but I don't
think it wants you to live either."

The creature hissed again. "I
don't give life, silly magician," it said. "But I can take away
death. You think this is the worst afterlife that there is? You
should see the afterlife that they have for betrayers, Marv. You
won't find your precious daughter there."

"I know," said Marv. He took a deep breath and drew himself
up to his full height. He was a magician and even if he didn't have
any magic left he was damned if he wasn't going to try and pull one
last trick. "But I also know that you're not going anywhere without
Able. You need him. You need his bloodline, whether you like it or
not. If
he
stays,
you
stay, and I
think you want that even less than he does."

The circus grew closer,
spinning around them. A wind blew though the group, strong enough
to knock Wally Wu from his feet. Sprawled on the floor, he was
suddenly dragged to the edge of the shadow by some invisible force.
He screamed, digging his fingers into the dirt to slow himself
down.

"Grab him!" shouted Malcolm, as
Dorothy's burly hand took a hold of Wally's. With a grunt, he
pulled him back into the circle.

"What the hell was that?" asked
Dorothy.

"It was hell itself," replied
Magpye. "Wally's hell, to be precise. That's all that's out there.
That's what I saved you from, but Hell is a hungry place and it
wants you all."

A shudder ran through the
ground beneath their feet. In places, the shadow had faded away and
was being replaced by the dirt grass of the circus. People jumped
left and right, desperate to stay inside the shadow.

"What does it matter who wants
to go back more?" asked Able desperately, "We just have to go,
now!"

The wind picked up, sounding a
long and low moan as it beat against the invisible protection of
the shadow.

"It matters because of who is going to be in control when
you go back," said Marv, raising his voice to be heard over the
wind. Beyond the shadows there was more gunfire, louder this time
and no longer in slow motion. Hell was coming. "It matters because
of who
you
are, Able. None of this, none of it
at all, was your fault. You have to remember that."

"They came for me!"

"They came for me too!"

The wind suddenly dropped. The
world outside froze in an instant, a tableau of flame against which
silhouettes of murderers danced. There was silence for a moment,
even amongst the ghosts. Nobody moved, nobody breathed, except for
Magpye who noisily ran its tongue over its lips.

"I don't understand," said Able
quietly.

"I introduced your mother to
Adam King," said Marv, his voice low. "Adam was obsessed with
magic, he came to me through a… mutual friend. He fell in love with
the circus, all its secrets and its history. Then he met your
mother, and he fell in love with her. My friend, she was in deep
with the Kings. She wanred me that Cane King wanted me dead for
bringing his brother into this life. We'd worked so hard to keep
you a secret from him, from all of them, we didn't even think that
they could really be coming for you."

"That's why you ran?"

"That's why I ran."

"Why didn't you tell me
sooner?" asked Able.

"I was afraid," confessed Marv.
"For all of us, really. How could I tell you, with your memory in
pieces, your head full of ghosts?"

"Ghosts who would hold you
responsible," muttered Dorothy, earning himself a sharp dig in the
ribs from Magda.

"So instead you let me go out
into the night with no idea who or what I was really fighting?"
continued Able. "You let me find out who my real father was at the
same time that I was being beaten to death?"

Marv couldn't answer. There
were no answers. He was a charlatan, a huckster, as good with words
as any conman or grifter. As a magician, hell, you had to be better
than all of them put together. But not this time. No back doors, no
trick hatches. No escapes.

"I'm sorry," he said
simply.

A slow hand clap shattered the
moment. All eyes turned towards Magpye.

"Very touching," said the
creature. "I take it we're all going to hug now and stay in
hell?"

"No," said Marv. "You're taking
us back, but you're going to give Able his memories back at the
same time. All of them."

The creature's eyes
narrowed.

"I'm wagering it's not so easy
to control someone who knows their own mind," Marv continued. "Able
deserves that chance."

Beyond the shadows, the world
spun back into life and, in an instant, was moving faster than ever
before. Marv could feel it closing in on all of them, like being
spun around inside a blender and waiting to hit the wall. He kept
his eyes on Magpye. Marv might not have had magic, but he'd never
needed it to win a hand of poker.

The world snapped suddenly to
darkness and a feeling like being plunged into an ice bath hit each
and every one of them.

"Done," said Magpye.

Cane King stepped out of the
shower and padded softly out of his capacious en-suite bathroom
into his stately bedroom. One thing that the King mansion had not
lost in his remodelling of it was a commitment to luxury.

Stretching, he towelled off his
torso and let the expensive carpets soak up the rest. Hot water and
steam had washed away his nephew's blood, but the dark stain of the
Ink remained. His wounds weren't even scars now, the Ink stitching
and remoulding his flesh with a precision that no surgeon could
ever have matched, and bruises that had been livid and purple when
he had left the paper mill had now simply vanished. He was a man
remade, inside and out.

All that had remained as he had
stepped naked into the shower were the tattoos.

He had seen the markings before, on Grace, although they
had been different then as well. The Ink moved in the same way
under his skin as it had under hers, a dark and liquid thing that
flowed and oozed with his own movements, like a patch of oil
trapped between plates of glass, but the patterns it made in Cane
King's flesh were not the same as it had once painted on Grace
Faraway. He sensed that the patterns and shapes were somehow a
language, impossibly ancient and beyond any human knowledge, but a
language never the less. It was the Ink's story, and his own, mixed
with talismans and sigils of primordial power. After a lifetime of
denying his family's magical heritage, he had literally
become
magic.

The irony was not lost on
him.

And so as Cane had washed, as
he let the hot water roll down his body and remove any last trace
of his nephew or his brother, he had come to an accord with the
thing. Cane King was public property after all, a television
persona and a business figurehead. A face alive with mysterious
tattoos was going to be bad for business and so the Ink had agreed
to confine itself to the parts of his body ordinarily concealed by
clothing. In return, Cane would take the Ink out into the world and
let it tell a story the like of which it had not told in a long
time.

Hiding for now, then no more
hiding ever again. That was the deal.

Cane King was going to drag his family
and
its
magic into the 21st century, and nothing would ever be the same
after that. A globalised crime network was one thing. A globalised
crime network with the power of the Ink at its heart was something
else entirely. In a curious way, Cane knew that he had his brother
to thank for what would come next, and what would come next would
be the whole world.

Looking at himself in a full
length mirror, Cane watched as the Ink retreated, becoming a dark
mass of tight and overlapping symbols on his chest. His new and
secret heart, almost blacker than the one that already beat in his
chest.

Pulling on a pair of silk
shorts and a crisp, fresh white shirt, he summoned Jack Taylor from
the adjoining room. Taylor hadn't had time to clean up, his light
suit was torn and bloody. He'd patched his own wounds up as best he
could. He's so fragile now, thought Cane, compared to me.

"It's done?" he asked
simply.

"They all went into the pit,
just like you wanted."

Cane detected the undercurrent
of displeasure and disagreement in Taylor's voice and ignored it.
The days of him handling Taylor like an unexploded bomb were long
gone. Taylor wasn't the most dangerous man in the room anymore, not
by a long chalk.

"Good," replied King. "Because
I have another job for you. Something really up your street."

"And what's that, Mr.
King?"

"I want the heads of the other
families," said King. "Bring them to me."

He waited, watched Taylor's
mind work for a few seconds. This was normally the moment when he
questioned him, probed his logic for a weakness. It was a fencing
match that had been going on a long time. Cane wanted to see if
Taylor realised that the balance of their relationship had changed.
"Yes, Mr. King," was Taylor's only response. Thrust, parry, and the
two men pulled back with neither having given too much away.

Cane watched as Taylor walked
away. He had suddenly become very small and insignificant. He was
just a little orphan boy who had learnt to be cruel and then grown
into a man who had made cruelty a profession. "Clarity" he called
it, the ability to see the world for the cess-pit that it was and
respond accordingly. He saw himself as special, something different
and above the rest of humanity. He was rare, certainly, a perfectly
distilled product of a welfare system that brutalised and neglected
children like Taylor, but he was by no means unique in Cane's
eyes.

Cane King was unique now. Cane
King had the Ink.

It didn't matter what cess-pit
world Taylor saw with absolute clarity; Cane King saw the world
that was coming tomorrow and he saw himself at the very top of
it.

"Jack," Cane called after his lieutenant, stopping the man
mid-stride. "I did mean
just
their
heads."