Burned (17 page)

‘Alex!’ Anne caught my arm, steadying me. Her grip was surprisingly strong. ‘Careful.’

‘Have you got a phone I can borrow?’

‘You can use mine.’

Anne had an old model iPhone in a black case. I took it and dialled the call-block prefix followed by a number, then put the phone to my ear and let it ring. My legs were still a little shaky and I walked out through the living room and into Anne’s kitchen. Pans were on the stove, there was a tinge of smoke in the air and there was something in the sink that looked like a failed prototype. You can always tell when Luna’s been using the kitchen.

There was a click as the number picked up. ‘Caldera.’

‘It’s Alex.’

‘Alex?’ Caldera’s voice sharpened. ‘Where the hell are you?’

‘Long story.’ There was a knock at Anne’s door. I heard Luna say something, then there were footsteps as someone went to answer it. I checked quickly for danger and found nothing. ‘There was a bit of a hold-up.’

‘No shit you had a hold-up. I told you the briefing was this morning at nine. I’ve left three messages already. What were you doing, getting a lie-in?’

‘You’re in front of your computer, right?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘Log in to the Met Police database and check their incident reports for my street in Camden Town. I think this’ll go faster if you see for yourself.’

There was a pause, and I could faintly hear the click of keys. Voices sounded from Anne’s bedroom. I could tell the instant Caldera pulled up the report. ‘What the
hell
?’

‘I had a spot of trouble.’

‘You’re okay?’

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t mention Anne. Caldera’s basically one of the good guys and I’ve come to trust her, but she and Anne don’t get on. ‘I’m guessing there’s a bit of activity there.’

‘Yeah, you could say that.’ I heard keys click and Caldera’s voice rose half an octave. ‘
Five bodies?
Alex, what the
hell
?’

‘I woke up with a bunch of guys about to shoot me in the head,’ I said testily. ‘I was kind of working from limited options.’

‘I want to know everything that happened. Get your arse over here right now.’

‘I need to do one thing first,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a bunch of items still onsite. Some are the kind that you guys don’t want the normals getting hold of, if you know what I mean. Can you clear me for access?’

‘So you can do what?’

‘Take stuff away,’ I said. ‘Look, I have a lot of personal belongings still there. I don’t want them all going into police impound. Please?’

Keys clicked in the background. ‘This says the place is gutted. I don’t think there’s going to be much left.’

‘The protected stuff will be.’

There was a pause. ‘All right,’ Caldera said after a moment. ‘But you are coming in straight afterwards. No sidetracks. And you’re not leaving until you’ve put in a full report. Clear?’

‘Okay. Are they looking for me?’

‘There’s no arrest warrant, but they’ve made the connection with the explosion two years back. Make sure you steer clear of MI5 until Rain’s had a chance to talk to the liaisons.’

‘I will.’ I paused. ‘Caldera? Thanks.’

‘Just get here in one piece, all right? I don’t want to spend my afternoon picking you off the pavement.’

‘I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’

I returned to the bedroom to discover that the new visitor was Sonder. He and Variam were facing each other, with Luna and Anne watching from the sides. As I entered, Luna and Sonder turned to me.

I looked between everyone. ‘Something wrong?’

There was a slightly longer pause than there should have been. ‘No,’ Luna said. ‘We’re fine.’

I looked at Anne questioningly. ‘Everything’s okay,’ Anne said in her soft voice. ‘Sonder, do you want to sit down?’

‘Uh,’ Sonder said. ‘Sure.’ Variam scowled.

I set Anne’s phone back on the table. ‘I need to go back to my shop.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Luna said.

‘You’re due for your lesson with Chalice.’

‘It can wait—’

‘No, it can’t,’ I said. ‘It’s Tuesday morning and your test is on Friday. Nothing you could do at the shop is more important than you passing that test.’

Luna made a face but didn’t argue. ‘I’m staying with Anne,’ Variam said.

Which would leave Variam and Sonder glaring at each other over Anne’s bedside. Well, with Anne there, I didn’t think Variam was going to do anything stupid. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Luna, let me know how things go. I’ll check in later.’

I own a small farmhouse deep in the country in Wales, at the end of an isolated valley. Over the years I’ve turned it into a bolthole, with a stock of food and emergency equipment. Which was just as well, because right now my equipment list consisted of my armour, the magic items I’d managed to grab last night and not much else. Luckily my wallet had been in the pocket of my trousers, along with my most important gate stones, but my phone and everything else that had been on my bedside table were in all likelihood a smouldering wreck.

I gated to the house in Wales, changed out of my armour, took a shower in near-freezing water that left me shivering (the heating doesn’t work that well), then got a new set of clothes. As I did, I found myself thinking about how long I had left. Four days until my sentence went through. The stress of last night’s attack had driven it out of my head, but now I could feel time pressing again.

The gate stone to my back room in London wasn’t working, which was disappointing but not really a surprise. Gate stones only take you to one location, and the exact layout of that location is attuned to them when they’re created. If the location changes too much, they stop working. I’d been using this gate stone for years, but I wouldn’t be using it any more. I activated one of my few remaining gate stones to travel to a park in Camden, then walked to my house.

You know that whatever’s happened to your home is bad when you see the signs before you even turn down your street. A yellow and blue checked police car was blocking off the end of my road, with a bored-looking police officer standing in front of a line of tape. I’d had some vague ideas of sneaking in, but one look at that made me change my mind. I’d brought along a prepaid phone from my emergency kit and I used it to call Caldera. After a brief delay Caldera told me to wait where I was.

A few minutes later a man appeared from behind the tape, ducked under it, scanned the street until he spotted me, then ambled over in my direction. ‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Who might you be then?’

I took a look at the man. He was in his twenties, with a London accent, and was wearing a POLICE vest with lots of useful-looking gadgets clipped on to it. From a glance through the futures I knew he was who I was waiting for. ‘My name’s Verus.’

The officer nodded. ‘All right.’

‘And how about you?’

‘I’m from SASU.’

‘I thought you guys were called SCD-14 or something.’

‘We got reorganised again.’

For the most part, the police and security services of the United Kingdom are run by normals and for normals, with as little involvement with the magical world as possible. This means that when the two worlds overlap, neither side is particularly well equipped to interact with the other. On these occasions someone has to clean up the mess, and in the London Metropolitan Police, that someone is SCD-14, or SASU, or whatever they’re called at the moment, and their job is to liaise with Light Keepers to keep things orderly. From my perspective, dealing with SASU is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, they’re a lot less likely to panic and call in the armed police to have you shot. On the other hand, they’re considerably harder to fool than normal police, and they have a habit of doing things like not telling you their name.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Can I ask what your orders are?’

‘Officially, I’m supposed to escort you on to the site so that you can retrieve some personal belongings,’ the man said.

‘And unofficially?’

‘Make sure you don’t cause any trouble,’ the man said. ‘Are you going to?’

‘No.’

The man nodded. ‘Come on then.’ We ducked under the
POLICE DO NOT CROSS
tape and walked down my street.

My shop was at the centre of a collection of police and other emergency vehicles, along with a crowd of people in police vests and high-vis jackets, most of whom seemed to be standing around waiting. The shop itself was a blackened, burned-out husk. It was still standing, but I got the impression that it wasn’t by much.

‘Are MI5 here yet?’ I asked the officer.

‘They’re stuck in traffic,’ the officer said. ‘Did you want to talk to them?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Suits me.’

The inside of the shop was worse than the outside. The shop floor was cinders and ash, charred metal skeletons of shelves peeking out from the debris. I took a glance towards what had been the magic item section and saw that it was gone. The forcewall had probably shielded it for a while, but once the wall had dropped, that section must have taken the full brunt of the fire and now there was nothing left but black husks. There had been over a hundred magic items in there. Granted, none had been particularly valuable, but they’d been familiar to me and I’d developed an odd sort of affection for them. All gone now. ‘How many rooms are intact?’ I asked the officer.

‘Just the one above,’ the officer said. ‘Firemen were saying it was reinforced. Only reason the whole place didn’t collapse.’

I nodded. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

The stairs up to the first floor had collapsed, and someone had put a ladder in place to get up to the first floor landing. I climbed it and stepped off carefully over what was left of the banisters. The landing creaked but held.

‘Hey!’ someone called down from above. I looked up to see a man in full-cover plastic gear on the landing above. ‘You’d better not come walking over my corpses!’

‘We’re staying here,’ my companion called as he climbed up behind me.

‘Good,’ the man in the mask called down. ‘Haven’t finished picking out the teeth yet.’ He turned back to the subject of his attention and I got a sickly whiff of burned flesh. I turned away before I got too close a look at what he was doing. I’m not squeamish, but I’ve got my limits.

The door to my safe room was blackened but didn’t seem damaged. ‘Have they had a go at it with a battering ram yet?’ I asked.

‘Didn’t have clearance,’ the SASU officer said. ‘This thing safe?’

‘Mostly.’ It wasn’t, but it would be once I deactivated the wards. I touched the key points and murmured the deactivation commands under my breath, keeping an eye on the defences in my magesight. The wards had taken a beating but weren’t malfunctioning, which was a relief; the last thing I wanted was for them to blow up some random PC who got too close to the door. Once I was sure it was safe I turned the handle and gave the door a shove. The heat had warped the metal and I had to thump it with my shoulder a couple of times before it gave way.

The contents of the safe room were the only part of my house that still looked the same. The heat obviously hadn’t lasted long enough to ignite the contents. ‘Got a torch?’ I asked the policeman.

The policeman pulled out a small Maglite and clicked it on, shining it around the safe room. The white circle of the beam flicked from one item to another. ‘You sure you want to stick around for this?’ I asked the policeman.

The policeman shrugged.

‘Suit yourself.’ I pulled on a pair of leather gloves, then pulled out a black sports bag from where it had been lying underneath the bench. The first item I went for was my mist cloak, hanging on a hook against the far wall. Once it was stowed in the bag I felt a little better. My mist cloak’s not entirely safe, but it’s saved my life enough times that I feel a lot more comfortable having it to hand.

‘What’s that thing?’ the policeman asked.

I glanced around to see that the officer was shining the torch on the scabbarded sword hanging on the wall. The circle of light picked out the crocodile carved into the hilt, and he was staring at it.

‘Bloodsword,’ I said.
Interesting.
The officer had to be a sensitive, if not an adept. That sword isn’t the most powerful imbued item I own, but it’s got the strongest aura, and I doubted he’d picked it out by coincidence. ‘Don’t touch it.’

The officer examined it from a careful distance. ‘What does it do?’

‘Cuts through just about anything, and gives its wielder enhanced strength and speed. It also sends pretty much anyone who picks it up on a murderous rampage.’

‘What do you use it for?’

‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘Frankly, I can’t think of many situations where turning into a psychopathic berserker would really improve things very much.’

‘So why are you keeping hold of it?’

‘So no one else can use it,’ I said. I didn’t mention the other powers it had. That sword is a very nasty piece of work, and I haven’t yet figured out any good solution as to what to do with the thing. Carefully, I took hold of it by the scabbard and lifted it off the hooks. For a moment I could hear a song somewhere at the back of my mind, wordless and voiceless, urging me to stop and listen. I blocked the impulse off and dropped the sword into the bag. The music in the back of my head lingered briefly, then faded.

I added the green egg and the locked darts, putting each in a separate pocket of the sports bag, then started scooping up the lower priority stuff. Once I was done clearing the tables I opened the weapons cabinet and took the MP7 off its hooks.

‘Have you got a licence for that?’ my companion asked.

‘If you’re going to ask me questions about everything here,’ I said, ‘this is going to take a while.’ I added the other handguns, followed by the ammo, the jian and most of the rest of the weapons. The officer stayed silent.

Once I was done I turned back to the tables. They’d been stripped nearly bare, apart from one item lying alone at the centre: a white and blue tube of lacquered wood, carved with flowers. I stared at it, exploring the futures in which I picked it up. Nothing. I rechecked – again nothing. I didn’t move forward. My magic might tell me that the thing was safe, but I still didn’t want to touch it.