Bound (13 page)

Alex drew a deep breath. ‘Or perhaps I would have enough strength to be rid of it.’

Joseph’s laugh was derisive. ‘The Eld were the most prevailing Kin of their age, working together to banish Uthentia, and the act destroyed them and the Darak and still didn’t quite finish the job. Even with the whole stone, you’re more than arrogant to think you could finish what they couldn’t.’

Alex refused to be intimidated. ‘Even so, I plan to try.’

‘Your prerogative. Your balls truly are pure cast iron, I’ll give you that.’

Isiah leaned forward again, his face serious. ‘Alex, if you become too powerful, and are controlled by this Uthentia as Joseph suggests, you could be a liability to the world.’

‘So?’ Alex wanted control back.

‘So? So there are people and agencies that would stop you. Forcefully.’

‘Like you?’

Isiah smiled. ‘No. This whole thing is a little outside my jurisdiction. But someone would.’

Alex frowned. ‘Shame there aren’t any
agencies
out there that would think to help me.’

‘Perhaps there are,’ Petra said.

Isiah looked sharply at her. ‘Petra?’

She returned his look icily. He laughed and shrugged. ‘I’m busy right now.’ She indicated Isiah. ‘
We’re
busy. But I’ll ask my people to assist you. We have unrivalled resources for research. Perhaps we can help you track down the pieces of the stone.’

Joseph sat up. ‘Wait a minute! You can’t help him.’

Petra gave the Clan Lord a withering look. ‘We have to give him every chance to escape this.’

‘It can’t be done!’

Petra shook her head. ‘If we thought that way, we’d never help anyone. People would never have achieved anything. He deserves the chance to save himself. If we stand for anything, it’s compassion and learning. By helping him we could learn a lot about this thing that has tainted the world for so long. Perhaps finding the pieces will give him what he needs.’

Isiah looked exasperated. ‘To do what?’

‘That’s up to him. It might kill him, it might cause chaos, it might mean he needs to be stopped or even killed. But right now he’s a young man, scared and in trouble. We should help him. He might find a way out, and we stand to learn a lot.’

Isiah shook his head and squeezed Petra’s hand. ‘Your biggest flaw is also your greatest strength. Your compassion will be the end of us all one day!’

She laughed. ‘Screw you.’

Joseph slumped back in his chair. ‘I’m amazed that shard has shown up,’ he said. ‘If it actually is part of the Darak. The chances of him ever uncovering the other pieces are less than slim.’

‘There you go then,’ Petra said. ‘No harm in offering him a bit of hope.’

Alex felt like a tiny child in a room full of adults, discussing things he had no hope of understanding. These people seemed to think it some kind of game. A potentially dangerous game, but one they considered entertaining more than threatening. ‘I want to try,’ he said, the sentiment sounding lame even to his own ears.

‘Of course,’ Petra said with a smile. ‘Free will is the single most important thing we are bound to protect. It may create a mess that we or others might have to clean up later, but right now it’s your decision. All I ask is that you share everything you can with us.’

Joseph stood decisively. ‘Right. Enough. Alex, get dressed. Take your book and your stone and leave my home. You’ve been given ample courtesy and I want those things gone before they cause any more havoc. Silhouette, you are always welcome here, this is your Den. But not with him.’

Silhouette nodded. ‘Thank you, Joseph.’

Alex stood, discarded the light cotton trousers and pulled his own clothes on. ‘Yes, thank you. Really, I appreciate it more than you could imagine.’

Joseph laughed, though there was no humour in it. ‘Whatever. You’re a remarkable human, but you’re doomed. It’s very sad, but there you go.’ He leaned close to Silhouette and whispered in her ear. She looked at the floor, nodded once. Joseph turned to Isiah and Petra. ‘Shall we?’

Isiah and Petra stood, following Joseph across the room as Alex and Silhouette headed for the door. ‘I’ll send someone to talk to you,’ Petra called out. ‘They’ll find you shortly.’

‘How will they find me? Even I don’t know where I’m going.’

‘They’ll find you, if you let them. Be open.’

Alex frowned, confused. ‘Thank you.’ As he opened the door, Isiah called his name. He looked back. ‘Yes?’

‘Have you read it?’

‘What?’

‘The book you have. Or that has you, more accurately. Have you read it?’

In all the mayhem, that hadn’t occurred to him, which suddenly seemed very strange. ‘Actually, no. I’ve just been trying to get rid of it.’

Isiah smiled. ‘Know your enemy, Alex.’

They left the room. As Alex and Silhouette walked through the Den, the eyes of the Kin burning into them with mixed fascination and hatred, Alex asked, ‘What did Joseph say to you then, right before we left?’

Silhouette looked sour. ‘He was just reminding me that I’m Kin.’

The Subcontractor lurked outside the big house in Wandsworth for several hours, hidden. He watched a few Kin come and go and wondered what his quarry were up to. And why Hood had such an interest in them. But he knew better than to try to infiltrate a Den. Even he had limits. It was a long time before they finally emerged and he saw them for the first time. The man was young, tall, well built without being bulky. He moved like a well-trained athlete. He had short hair, jeans, a green army surplus jacket with big pockets and black cross-trainers on his feet. All very practical. The female was lovely and lithe, oozing sexuality. She dressed for action too, short lace-up boots and jeans, a small leather jacket over a tight T-shirt that accentuated her curves. What was she doing with a human?

The Subcontractor stayed hidden, taking deep draughts of their physical and psychic scents, locking them in for future tracking. The day had waned and the pair looked tired. He followed them to a hotel not far from the Den. They checked in and disappeared up into the building.

The Subcontractor slipped away to report back to Hood.

Alex sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the root of all his woes. The title, which he now understood, meant nothing. Just the names of two problems that had hooked themselves into him and wouldn’t let go. As Alex stared, the words slipped and slid on the old leather cover. He could feel the personality of the book in his hands, its mirth. He let his vision open, deciphered the new configuration of arcane symbols.

Uthentia’s Legacy
.

He made a noise of annoyance. Silhouette hopped onto the bed, slipped her legs around him from behind and looked over his shoulder. ‘What is it?’

‘This thing is playing with me.’

‘Really?’

‘The title just changed.
Uthentia’s Legacy
.’ He felt a surge of excitement at Silhouette’s sudden closeness.

She rested her chin. ‘It’s evil.’

Alex dropped the book on the bed beside him. ‘I know that now. And I’m trapped with it. Aren’t you scared?’

‘No, not really. No offence, but it’s stuck to
you
. I don’t think it can or will be any threat to me while you’re still alive.’

‘So you’re enjoying watching me suffer then?’ His tone was angry.

‘Hey, fuck you! I’m the one who’s been kind to you. Been
helping
you.’ She stiffened, hurt.

He reached up one hand to her cheek, desperate not to scare away the only thing left in his life he could consider good. He wouldn’t help himself by letting his anger out at her. ‘I’m sorry.’ She relaxed, resting her chin again. ‘I’m sorry, Sil. I’m just scared.’

‘I know.’

‘Why
are
you helping me?’

‘I like you.’

‘Why?’

Silhouette sighed. ‘My people don’t understand me, but I like humans. I find you all so fascinating and clever and funny and intriguing. The Kin have grown to see you lot as nothing but sport and food. They resent your numbers, always forcing them to live in the shadows. But I’ve never understood that. Humans are amazing.’

Alex laughed. ‘You’re very charitable.’

‘And people like you, the ones with power, are a lot more like Kin than most of my kind would admit.’

‘But you still feed on us.’ Alex stared at his hands, trying to figure out how he felt about Silhouette. She was alluring, incredible, but a monster.

‘We do, but we don’t have to all the time. Not like you need food. I try to only feed on bad people. And only when I really have to. We can go a long time without feeding. And we can subsist on other things in the meantime.’

‘Like what?’

‘A nice rare steak. Nothing compares to human flesh and blood, but we don’t have to gorge like you lot three times a day.’

Alex shook his head. Could he really accept her eating habits?

‘Is it really so different from eating any other animal?’ she asked, as if reading his mind. ‘Humans are animal. Flesh is flesh. I can’t help what I am.’

There was a simple, undeniable logic to her statement. ‘I suppose so,’ Alex said quietly. ‘Besides, right now I really need a friend and, like you said, you’re the only one being nice to me. But I still don’t really understand why.’

She sighed. ‘My mother was human.’

‘Really?’

‘Like Joseph said, Kin have Fey blood. But we’ve all got human blood too, and that ties us to this realm. Over centuries, millennia, the Kin have grown into themselves. Most Kin are Kin born; two Kin fuck and a little Kin comes along. But once in a while a Fey son of a bitch rapes a human and makes a brand-new Kin. That’s how come I’m here.’

Alex frowned. ‘So you’re a first-generation Kin?’

‘Exactly. Rare among my own kind. And I grew up with a human mother. I didn’t even know I was Kin until I hit puberty and all this weird shit started happening. Weirder than regular puberty anyway.’

‘How did you cope?’

‘Joseph. He found me one night, figured me out. He liked me and took me under his wing. For all his talk of hating humans, he’s been close to a few in his time, including my mother. But, you know, he has a reputation to protect.’ She smiled, lost in reverie. ‘He showed us into his Den and took care of us. Of course, my mother grew old and died a long time ago, but I guess I’ve always been closer to humans than most Kin because of her. And for that, the majority of Kin hate me.’

‘You lot are some fucked-up individuals.’

She laughed. ‘You think?’

Alex tried to imagine the implications. Sil’s history made fairy tales sound dull. But she was right — she couldn’t help what she was.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

‘What?’

‘Well, while we’re getting all deep and meaningful, what’s your story? What made you?’

Alex felt the old hurt turn its knife in his guts. ‘I don’t like to talk about it.’

Sil wrapped him in her arms. ‘Wow, you really have some pain inside.’ She kissed his neck. ‘You can tell me.’

Alex sighed. ‘My parents were killed by a drug-fucked psycho who ploughed them down in the street in a stolen car. He was running from the police and they were just leaving the cinema.’ Alex took a shuddering breath, emotion flooding up. ‘Wiped out in an instant. I was home with a babysitter when the police came to the house.’

Sil squeezed him tighter. ‘Shit.’

Now he was talking, the floodgates were open. He wanted to tell her everything, though didn’t know why. ‘I was only six. The police had no idea I was awake, listening from my room, so I got all the gory details I wasn’t supposed to hear. That fucking junkie took everything from me. I went from one foster home to another and I fought everyone. I was angry, belligerent, mean. I was an arsehole. Then I found my Sifu and something I could direct my anger into. He taught me ways to control and channel my hurt. It helps.’

Silhouette rested her head against his. ‘And you’ve been fighting ever since, huh?’

‘I guess so.’

She kissed him again. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too.’ The pain burned deep in his gut.

They sat in silence for some time. Eventually Silhouette relaxed her hold on him. ‘So, you gonna read that book?’

Alex sucked in a breath, picked up the grimoire. He thumbed through, letting the dense arcane script flitter by in a blur.
Know your enemy
, Isiah had said. There was wisdom in that.
Never pass up an opportunity to learn about your opponent. No information, however seemingly insignificant, is ever useless.

He turned to the front and looked at the first page. The characters swam in magesign, blurring and shifting. He concentrated, letting his eyes and mind penetrate beyond the physical text, looked deep. Like reading the intent in a person’s shades, he gleaned the meaning from the eldritch letters. It seemed different to the passage he had read in Peacock’s shop. The words swelled in his consciousness,
The mind of a power beyond this universe swims and sings above and outside you, within and beneath this. Your life is wrapped in the fronds of a creation palm, older than life and bigger than intellect, playing, dancing, singing, ecstasy.

Alex looked up with a sound of discomfort. ‘Fuck me.’

Silhouette slipped her arms around his waist. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s like reading madness.’

‘What does it say?’

He shook his head. ‘I’m not entirely sure.’ He looked again, picking his way through the shifting lettering,
Power is universe alive and allowed, power is always outside the grasp and underneath the mind. Power is yours when power is taken. Your desire will lead you to power, and power in the universe is yours.

Silhouette ran the back of one finger across his brow, smoothing out the frown. ‘You okay?’

Alex closed the book. ‘I can feel some meaning. I
think
it’s talking to me. It’s not like a normal book, that’s written and can be read. I think it’s communicating directly with me, in a kind of bookish way.’ He made a wry face, apologetic that he couldn’t explain it better.

‘And what’s it saying?’

‘I think it’s telling me to pursue this stone. That I should try to get it.’

Silhouette stroked his brow again. ‘I hear a but in there somewhere.’

Alex barked a humourless laugh. ‘But. But it seems to think that the power of the stone will be for me. I can’t help but think that means just for it. How can I trust anything this thing tells me?’

‘You can’t. It’ll play with you and tease you, it’ll try to get you to do awful things and try to engineer some kind of destructive and spectacular death for you when it’s ready to move on. That’s what I got from what Joseph told us. But you have to try to resist the urges it puts on you and take the reins for yourself. I think you have a chance with this.’

‘What kind of a chance do I have? I’m a fucking ant in the cosmos! In the last few days I’ve discovered there are vampires that aren’t really vampires, gargoyles attacked me and I had to fight a shapeshifter. I’m a fighter. I fight for money. I fight
humans
for money and that’s that. How can I fight this?’

Silhouette slipped around him, sitting on his lap, her legs locked behind. She took his face in her hands. ‘I was damned impressed with the way you fought Ataro.’ Her eyes smouldered. ‘The others are right when they talk about your potential. You’re a very impressive human. Your vision is just the start of your abilities. I think you have it in you to face this.’

‘What if I don’t?’

She pulled one hand away and slapped him across the cheek, hard enough to shock him. ‘Then you die, Iron Balls. But so what? You don’t fight, this thing will drive you mad and kill you. If you do, you might die, but at least you’ll die fighting. Those are your options.’

He stared into her icy blue eyes. She was right. He had very few choices. It really did boil down to give up or brawl. And he didn’t have it in his nature to give up on anything. If he had to fight, he needed all the weapons at his disposal, every advantage he could find. The tiny shard of stone around his neck drenched him with a kind of power he wouldn’t have believed a week ago. If he could find the rest, surely there was nothing he couldn’t do. The battle didn’t end until you were out cold on the floor.

‘So I guess we just have to wait until Petra’s people contact me,’ he said. ‘See what clues they can give me and start trying to find a way out of this.’

She smiled at him. ‘I guess so.’

He threw the book across the room, far away from the bed. ‘So, what shall we do while we wait?’

She leaned back, that half-smile pulling at her lips, starting a fire in his groin. ‘Well, I don’t know. What shall we do?’

Alex put a hand behind her head and pulled her to him. She came willingly and they kissed, hard and urgent.

Ms Sparks did nothing to hide her anger, knuckles white around the mobile phone. ‘What do you mean, Butler’s dead? How?’

The voice on the other end trembled. ‘Well, pretty much ripped to pieces, ma’am. Him and his whole crew.’

‘By whom?’ Sparks demanded. ‘And why?’

‘They must have found something too big for them to handle, ma’am. Beyond that, I have no idea.’

Sparks revelled in the man’s fear, as much terrified by reporting to
her
as he was by what he had seen. But it was small consolation. Her initiative in sending crews to all of Peacock’s known associates had almost paid off, obviously, but she’d ended up with less than nothing, a crew dead. Whoever killed the bookseller seemed more dangerous than she had suspected. She would have to think carefully about whether or not she told Hood. While he appreciated her proactive approach most of the time, it’s what made her such a valued PA, when things went badly he was … less than appreciative, and enthusiastic about laying blame.

‘Search the place for any clues, however small,’ she snapped down the phone. ‘Then get back here without delay!’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She hung up and took a moment to compose herself, then pushed open one side of a garishly carved dark wood double door.

Mr Hood, behind an enormous mahogany desk in an ostentatiously decorated office, acknowledged her. Glass cabinets stood around the room containing all manner of arcana, crystal balls and ancient scrolls, leatherbound books and shrunken heads, strange coins and yellowing bones. A larger than lifesize painting of the man himself hung behind the desk, dominating the room with a condescending smile. Hood, wearing the same expression, reclined in a huge wing-backed chair. The Subcontractor occupied one of two leather chairs opposite. Ms Sparks perched on one end of the desk, legs crossed, and began filing her nails, her long, straight hair half hiding her face.

‘You found them?’ Hood asked.

The Subcontractor smiled, a baring of teeth with nothing friendly about it. ‘Of course. They’re quite an interesting pair.’

Sparks breathed a soft sigh of relief. No need to report her failure.

‘A pair?’ Hood said.

‘Yes. A human male and a female Kin.’

Hood raised his eyebrows, stroking one finger along his livery lips. ‘Really? And which of them killed Peacock?’

‘The human.’

‘Ah.’

They sat in silence for a while. Hood liked to make himself seem as important as possible, but the Subcontractor seemed to have no interest in such games. He waited for Hood to ask more.

Eventually Hood spoke. ‘So, why do you think they killed Peacock?’

The Subcontractor shrugged. ‘Impossible to say. I didn’t know the man and have no idea what they might have argued about. Maybe for sport. The human is colluding with Kin, after all, and they don’t need an excuse to kill.’

‘You don’t sympathise with that kind?’ Hood asked, a smile tugging at his lips.

The Subcontractor sighed. ‘I’m not one of them, so don’t try to lump me with those freaks. Stop fishing. We have an understanding and I’d hate to have to stop working for you. You pay well.’

‘No one walks away from me.’

The Subcontractor stood, turned to leave. ‘You’re far from my only source of income.’ He started towards the door.

‘Sit down, sit down. No need to be so touchy.’

He turned back to Hood, eyes narrowed. ‘What do you want?’

Hood smiled. ‘Postulate, if you will. Any ideas why this strange pair might have killed Peacock?’