Poison City (22 page)

I open it to check. No bible. Just a business card for ‘Sexy Solange, mistress of the night’.

I close the drawer with a tired grin. I wonder who used this room last? Bet it was Russells. Dirty bugger.

I fall onto the bed and am asleep within a minute.

Chapter 11

I wake up to the sounds of shouting.

I stare at the ceiling, blinking, trying to make sense of the world.

Trying to shake off the dreams.

They weren’t so bad last night. Still there, but I slept through. Didn’t wake up every hour in a cold sweat.

The shouting is getting louder. I think I hear Armitage’s voice.

Armitage.

Shit.

I scramble out of bed and pull on my shirt. Head through the door and lean over the balcony. It’s Armitage and Ranson. Ranson is standing behind a desk in the office below, looking terrified and furious while Armitage tries her best to pummel him into submission with her rage. The rest of our co-workers are watching this with wide eyes. Most of them are staring at Armitage in wonder.

‘Do I
look
dead to you?’ she screams. ‘Do I? Because I don’t feel dead, you odious piece of shit.’

Anger transforms the fear in Ranson’s face. ‘You can’t talk to me like that! I’ll have you up on charges.’

I grab the elevator and ride it down to the bottom floor.

‘What’s going on?’ I ask, hurrying to Armitage’s side.

Armitage waves at Ranson in disgust. ‘Mr Hopeless-Case here doesn’t want to accept I’m alive.’

‘Oh. Well . . . you’re not. Not exactly.’

‘No. But it doesn’t interfere with my ability to run this unit.’

Ah. Now I understood. If Ranson couldn’t even admit to magic being real, he’s not going to be happy working with a revenant.

‘It’s a clear conflict of interest,’ he says, appealing to me in an incredibly misguided belief that I was on his side.

‘How so?’

‘She’s one of them now. An orisha.’

‘I bloody well am not.’

‘Actually, she’s not.’

We turn around to find Parker approaching with a file stuffed full of printouts. She hands it to Ranson. ‘All the details about the procedure I undertook, background details on revenants etc. She is
not
an orisha. If anything, you would call her physically challenged.’

‘I am
not
physically challenged,’ protests Armitage.

‘Fine. Not
physically
challenged,’ says Parker. ‘Spiritually-challenged? Life-challenged?’

Ranson winces. Something-
challenged
. The word strikes fear into any office manager’s heart. Especially if we’re talking about discrimination.

‘I don’t know about challenged,’ says Armitage. ‘But if you try and fire me because I’m a revenant, I’m pretty sure that’s racist, species-ist, dead-ist, and any other amount of -
ists
I can think of. I might need to have a word with the National Intelligence Co-ordination Committee.’

Ranson frowns. He pages through the file Parker gave him, then glares at Armitage. ‘This isn’t over,’ he says, and stalks away to the elevator.

Armitage turns to face everyone else.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘I’m sure you’re all wondering what’s going on. Let’s just say that reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, and leave it at that. I’m still me and I’m still your boss.’

The crowd broke into a slightly self-conscious cheer. Armitage’s eyes widen in surprise.

‘What the bloody hell is that? Don’t tell me you’re
glad
I’m back. Right. First thing you all need to do is look up Stockholm Syndrome, then get back to work. Move!’

The crowd slowly disperses. Armitage watches them go, then turns her attention to me. ‘Anything on the sin-eaters?’ she asks.

‘Nothing in GHOST. Not even a mention.’

Armitage frowns. ‘That’s odd.’

‘That’s what I thought. I’ve asked Eshu to track back through the database and see if there have been any changes or updates.’

‘You think someone’s deleted it?’ She thinks about this, then shakes her head. ‘No. The database is global. How would they get into it?’

‘Hackers? It might be difficult, but it’s certainly possible.’

‘Fine,’ says Armitage. ‘Let me know if he finds anything. And that word? Any translation?’

‘Nothing. I reckon we should pay a visit to Harry Grimes.’

Armitage’s face twists in distaste. ‘Grimes? Don’t like that man. He’s got too many friends. Never trust a person with a large group of friends.’

‘Well . . . sure. But he also has the largest list of contacts in the country. If anyone knows something about sin-eaters, it’ll be him. And if
not
him, he might know someone who does.’

Armitage chews her lip, then nods. ‘Fine. We’ll have a word with him. Meet me out front in twenty minutes.’

I head back to my desk. The dog is still sleeping. I nudge him with my foot.

‘Heading into Durban. You coming?’

‘Is it hot out?’

I glance at the skylight high above. Blue sky. ‘Looks like it.’

‘Then no. I’m not coming.’

‘Suit yourself,’ I say, and take the elevator back to the accommodation block so I can shower and change.

Durban has many nicknames, but the one that springs to mind as Armitage and I make our way along Grey Street, cooking in the morning sun, is Poison City.

Users huddle in doorways, stand in alleys, swaying like pieces of cloth in a breeze. You know straight away they’re high. There’s an emptiness to their stare, a vacancy of spirit that makes them stand out. Like zombies in a crowd of the living.

The drug of choice used to be Tik, more commonly known as crystal meth, but now it’s Whoonga, a lethal mix of brown heroin, rat poison, and detergents mixed with dagga and tobacco to stretch it out. Twenty bucks a hit, four hits a day, and your life withers away like a slug in a bath of salt.

It’s only eleven in the morning but already the heat is like a physical presence, a weight that rests across my shoulders and back, prickling sweat from every pore despite trying to keep to the shade.

‘How does it . . . you know?’

‘Feel?’

I nod.

‘Like I’m watching myself on a movie screen.’

I frown, not getting it.

‘All my emotions are still here. But it’s like I’m watching them being felt by someone else. Like I’m on the outside looking in. I spoke to Parker and she says that might pass. That revenants are actually the closest you can get to being human without actually, you know, being human.’

‘I
am
sorry,’ I say softly. I glance at her sidelong.

‘For what?’

‘For doing this . . . without permission.’ I hesitate. ‘But I’m not sorry you’re back.’

She grins at me, the old twinkle in her eye. ‘Not getting sappy on me, are you, London?’

I don’t reply. We pass stalls selling Indian spices. I smell cinnamon, curry, and paprika. Heat waves rise off another stall, the sizzle of cooking samoosa growing louder as we approach. My stomach rumbles, but there’s no way I’m buying anything from one of these stalls. I did it once and ended up flat on my back with food poisoning for three days.

‘Besides,’ she casually says, ‘it’s probably for the best.’

‘How so?’

‘At least now my insides won’t spontaneously shift backwards and forwards in time. Seeing as they’re dead.’

It takes me a moment to hear what she just said. I stop walking. She carries on ahead, hands stuffed in her long coat.

‘What?’

She stops and turns. Nods cheerfully. ‘You know how it is. A lifetime of using shinecraft. Comes to us all in the end.’

I remember all the medical equipment in her room. ‘What was wrong with you?’

‘My internal organs. They were . . . taking holidays along my timeline.’

I think about this, then shake my head. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘At night. I’d wake up feeling like I was having a heart attack. Or my joints would seize up and I couldn’t move. Turns out my organs were swapping places with their . . . other selves. I’d get an eighty-year-old heart in my chest, or my kidney suddenly regressed to a five year old’s. Had a lot of health issues when I was a bairn. Doctors never could figure it out. Now I know.’

‘How long had this being going on?

‘About six months. But it didn’t happen every night, like.’

‘How long . . . You know . . . Until . . . ?’ I trail off.

‘How long did I have left?’

I nod.

‘It was getting worse. Lasting longer. My brain took a trip last time. Had Alzheimer’s for a night. Went wandering around in the garden in my nightie. Then there were the demons. But that was a separate thing.’

‘The . . . ?’

‘Demons. They tried to possess me. Like in
The Exorcist
? Apparently the build-up of shinecraft in my body over the years attracted them.’

I just stare at her.

‘I had to get a priest in. Looked nothing like Max Von Sydow, though. Was a bit disappointed in that.’

‘Did he succeed?’

‘No. Got torn apart. Wasn’t strong enough. There were bits of him everywhere. After that, I just tried to handle it on my own.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘What for? It comes to us all in the end. Nothing you could have done.’

She starts walking again.

‘And . . . now?’

‘Seems to be all gone. Demons and time-hopping body organs.’

‘So . . . I actually saved your life?’

She gives me one of her looks. ‘Don’t push it, lad.’

‘Sorry.’

We pass a second-hand shop with a rack of clothes displayed on the sidewalk. A shop assistant sits in a white plastic chair, one hand gripping the rack in case someone decides to make off with it.

‘That’s what this job does to you,’ say Armitage.

I glance at her questioningly.

‘It was brought on by . . . you know. What we do. Magic.’

‘You’re sure?’

She nods. ‘Jaeger said so.’

I mentioned before that using shinecraft is not conducive to a long life? That’s the kind of thing we’ve all got to look forward to.

About twenty feet farther on we turn into a narrow alley between a barber shop selling pay-as-you-go phones and a boarded-up pawn shop.

We stop walking.

There’s a large van parked next to a garage door up ahead. The van is rocking violently, bouncing back and forth as if the Hulk and She Hulk are having some private happy time.

The van doors slam open. Something huge grabs the sides of the vehicle and pulls itself out, crushing the metal beneath its hands. The creature straightens up and stretches as two armed figures appear out of the building to the left.

The huge creature casually backhands them, sending them sailing over the van to slap painfully onto the pitted asphalt beyond.

‘Hey,’ I say. ‘That’s Buno.’

Buno is a
Bungisngis
 – a type of cyclops from the East Indies. This particular cyclops is a repeat offender, in and out of our Division multiple times over the years.

The massive creature blinks its bloodshot eye and focuses on us.

‘Hey there, Buno,’ I say. ‘You were supposed to be in court last week. What happened?’

Buno starts to giggle, high-pitched and unpleasant, then lumbers towards us. His huge mouth is filled with serrated shark teeth and he has two lethal tusks to either side of his upper lip.

Shit. I fumble for my wand. Armitage steps to the side, watching Buno approach with interest.

‘Hurry up, Potter,’ says Armitage encouragingly.

I frown, then clear my mind and summon up the wind. There’s not much around, though. No moisture in the air at all. So I end up sucking the surrounding air in and using it as a battering ram, throwing it into Buno. The force lifts him off his feet and slams him against the alley wall, holding him there.

He doesn’t stop giggling once.

The door at the end of the alley slams open and Harry Grimes runs out with a long pole clutched in his hands. There’s a metal collar on the end of the pole. Grimes pushes it towards Buno and it snaps around his neck. The cyclops immediately stops giggling, hanging slack against the wall.

‘He controlled?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’

I nod and step away, flicking the wand to cancel the summoning. Grimes uses the pole to drag Buno along the alley. We follow after as he guides the cyclops towards the garage.

Harry Grimes. Bail-bondsman to the orisha. He’s a bit of a double-edged sword, is our Harry. See, not all orisha are gods and angels. Most of them are just Tier 1s and 2s. Regular supernaturals, the equivalent of petty criminals, pimps and users stealing for their next fix. And someone has to put up the money to cover their bail (or the orisha equivalent of money. Sometimes gold, sometimes souls, sometimes favours. It can be anything, depending on the judge).