The Magpye: Circus (16 page)

"Except one," said Nutt,
pulling back the hammer on his pistol.

He heard the ominous clunk of a
shotgun being primed and felt the hard nose of the thing in the
small of his back. He'd been so focussed on Taylor he hadn't heard
whoever it was coming up behind him. Taylor closed the remaining
distance and put his gun up against Nutt's temple.

"And it makes me the guy who
kept you talking long enough for that fat fuck Mick Garrity to put
a shotgun in your back."

Nutt closed his eyes. The last
thing he heard was the ghost of Lee Grice, telling him he should
have stayed a bad cop.

Cane King awoke in the perfect
darkness of the Ink.

His first thoughts were of the
fall. He remembered the pain, the searing pain, as his body was
smashed and split and torn and ripped by the unyielding metal of
the printing presses as the fell. He remembered the final impact, a
shock-wave that had sent him spiralling into darkness.

This darkness, the perfect
darkness of the Ink.

It was warm here. He felt like he was floating in a warm
ocean, but with no light he could not be sure where the horizon was
or for how far the darkness stretched. He breathed the liquid
darkness, understanding only that he
could
and that
he
should.
Light was not the only thing absent
here. In the perfect darkness there was no doubt, no questions.
Cane King understood everything.

"Grace Faraway is dead."

The endless, perfect dark
offered no answer. It did not need to.

"You're it, the thing that
lived inside her. That lived under her skin."

Again, there was no answer.
There were no questions here.

"You are inside me now."

A pulse rippled through the
obsidian ocean, then another, then another. Weak, at first, then
growing strong. Cane King recognised the rhythmic beating of his
own heart.

"You are fixing me."

"You are making
me
better," said a
voice that was both Cane's and that of the Ink.

And if the Ink had a face of
its own it would have smiled. It was going to like it here.

Adam King came to a halt at his
brother's body. He watched, transfixed, as the pool of blood and
fluids underneath the body were slowly sucked back inside, borne on
the back of a dark and viscous liquid that seemed to be a part of
Cane and yet utterly alien to his body. The wide gashes in his
flesh closed like flowers at sunset, folding together perfectly.
Where they joined, the same strange black fluid bubbled briefly,
sealing the join and leaving behind only the tiniest trace of
itself in a tracery of swirling black tattoos. Adam winced as he
heard bones cracking back into place and an otherworldly creaking
of bone reforming and meshing at a speed that defied all science.
He watched as his brother's detached jaw bone clicked into place
and new, fresh teeth pushed their way through his gums coated in a
film of dark liquid.

"What
is
it?" asked Able, but the ghosts had
no answer, and the barriers around Adam King's mind remained in
place even now. Able thought he sensed something from the
interloper, a stray fragment of thought or memory leeching through
the walls. Adam knew what it was that he was looking at, and he was
afraid.

With a trembling hand, Adam
drew one of Malcolm's pistols and fired.

The bullet hit Cane King's
chest in an eruption of blood and black. The bullet wound gaped for
a moment, then vanished, new flesh crowding in to fill the void.
Another swirl of black on Cane's King skin was the only remnant.
Adam fired again, and again, and again, always with the same
result. Eruption, convulsion, blood… and then the dark matter that
had claimed Cane King remade his flesh, restored his blood and
bones.

"He can't hurt him…" whispered
Able.

"He should run," said the ghost
of Wally Wu. Ever the coward, he had somehow found the courage to
be the first to speak, if only to council retreat.

"He won't," said Able.

"Then we'll die," replied Wally
sadly. "Again."

Cane King's eyes opened.

"Son of a bitch," said Taylor,
scrapping a mush that had been Nutt's intestines off his suit. "You
nearly shot me."

"So did he," replied Garrity
curtly, kicking the dead cop. The shotgun had almost cut him in
two. "You're lucky I was here."

"Why the fuck
are
you here?" asked
Taylor. "King's pissed you know. Wants your head for this
fuck-up."

"Not my fuck up," grumbled Garrity, fixing Taylor in his
dark, piggy eyes. "You asked me to get them here, I got them here.
This was your
show, you and
Cane and that weirdo bitch of his."

"Your intel was wrong," said
Taylor, finally getting the last of the worst of Nutt's bowel off
his shirt. "You told us they were in pieces, but they came in all
guns blazing. And this vigilante guy? Nowhere to be seen."

"Maybe it was one of them after
all," replied Garrity. "Maybe this guy. He was supposed to be a
real hard case."

"You say that now. You told us
he was broken."

"Well excuse me for not knowing
exactly
how he
would take the news that his partner had been cut up to snack-sized
pieces. It's not like that happens every day."

"No," said Taylor, "I suppose
it doesn't."

"You sound sad about that."

"Maybe I am," said Taylor,
smiling at Garrity. It was a strange smile, the smile of a creature
that understands how to move its facial muscles in order to create
the shape of a smile, but that has no idea what that shape means.
"Wouldn't that be something?"

"You're a fucking psycho,
Taylor. One day that's gonna bite you in your psycho ass."

"You still haven't told me why
you're here."

"One of my guys did a drive by.
Told me you had a little war going on down here."

"And you thought you'd drop by
to make the most of it?"

"Saved your ass, didn't I?"

Taylor didn't answer. He had to
give Garrity credit, he would have done the same thing in his
shoes. A firefight-cum-cluster-fuck like this, bodies dropping
everywhere, one more wouldn't make a difference - even if it was
Taylor's. It wasn't Garrity who had saved Taylor's life. No, Taylor
owed his life to the dead cop on the floor.

"Sounds like I owe you," said
Taylor.

"Sounds like."

"Get out of here, Garrity. Lie
low for a while and I'll keep you out of King's cross-hairs."

"I'm not afraid of King,"
bristled Garrity, "Or you. Don't forget who runs the cops in this
town, Taylor. Right now, by the looks of things here, my guys
outnumber the Kingsmen two to one. Don't make me miss my
badge."

The two men stood and stared at
each for a moment. Another stand-off, this time with guns lowered
but no less deadly for it. Taylor knew that Garrity was right. He
didn't credit him with the intellect to have orchestrated it, but
the fat dirty cop was too sharp to miss the obvious opportunity.
Cane was still King, but Garrity was suddenly the general of the
biggest army in the city.

The stalemate was broken by the
echo of gun shots from somewhere downstairs, the sound bouncing up
the spiral staircase.

"You look like shit, Taylor,"
said Garrity. He turned away, unsure whether this meant that he had
won or lost the battle of wills with Taylor. "Try not to get shot
again."

Taylor watched as Garrity's
corpulent frame ambled away, his shotgun swinging by his side, and
licked his lips at the thought of cutting the fat man open and
showing him the inside of his own skin.

Cane King leapt to his feet as
Adam King swung the Magpye's long handled fire axe down. The old,
rusted blade clanged against the concrete floor, a tiny shower of
sparks flying up. Adam lost his grip on the axe handle and the
weapon spun out of his grasp across the floor.

Bent forward, Adam felt the
hard tip of Cane's elbow slam into the back of his neck. Above the
armoured collar of the coat, the mask offered little protection and
the force of the blow sent Adam down to his knees.

A kick swiftly followed, but
Cane's expensive leather shoes connected only with one of the metal
plates that were stitched in the Magpye's coat. A momentary respite
for both men, as Adam struggled to his feet and Cane regained his
balance.

Adam pulled one of Malcolm's
pistols out of its holster and levelled the barrel at Cane.

Cane grinned. His face was a
tracery of dark ink, the creature that lived now beneath his skin
cycling through forms and shapes and patterns in search of the
perfect match between it and its new host.

"You could never shoot, Adam,"
Cane said. "I hope you've got some help in there."

"You know who I am?"

"Look at my
face
," growled Cane.
"Of course I know who you are. Grace might not have been able to
hurt you, but we both know that
this
is different.
This is King vs. King now. To the death."

"As it's always been," said
Adam grimly.

Keeping his gun trained on
Cane, Adam reached behind his head with his free hand and unzipped
the Magpye's mask. He felt the cool air on his face as he let if
fall to the floor but also, somehow, the whispered breeze of
something leaving, as if an invisible creature had passed close
enough to let its breath touch his cheek. The mask looked up at him
from the floor, its dead glass eyes the eyes of some other
creature. More than just a false face, that was true face of the
creature called the Magpye. Somewhere deep in the dark waters of
dead men's memories that swirled around the barricades on Adam
King's mind, a dark shape stirred in anger.

"So, who the fuck are you
supposed to be then?" said Cane, turning his lip in disgust.

Adam realised that he hadn't
looked at his own son's face since he had stepped into his body
earlier than evening. The thought had never occurred to him. He was
Adam King, regardless of the face he wore. Still, family was family
and Able deserved to meet his uncle - even if Cane was about to
die.

"You're looking at my son,
Cane. I called him Able. Rather apt, don't you think?"

"I never understood our family's obsession with biblical
names," replied Cane. "Especially given the nature of the family
business. I appreciate the irony though. Tonight Cane gets to kill
Adam
and
Able."

"I don't think so," replied Adam. "You might have stumbled
into Grace's powers, but you never took the interest I took in the
other side of our family history. So relentlessly
modern
, weren't you Cane? Always telling us how you were going to
drag us into the twenty-first century. Well, here are. We're in
your precious twenty-first century and what has it brought us? I'm
a ghost, you're a newly minted magician, and we're about to do what
our family
really
do best… fight to the death for
power and control."

Cane lifted his hands and
watched as The Ink swirled on them like oil on water. Magicians
buried their ancient knowledge in patterns and here he was, with
all that knowledge suddenly at his fingertips. He felt like a blind
man, suddenly shown a rainbow. He could feel the Ink in his mind,
not a voice so much that talked to him, but a narration. The Ink
told him a story, his story, and Cane liked the sound of it.

"Your death," Cane replied
flatly. "The Ink has already told me. This is the part of the story
where you die for the second and last time."

Adam pulled the second of
Malcolm's pistols and levelled it at Cane.

"I don't think so. I spent my life studying the power that
ran through our family, preparing to inherit my birthright. You
have no idea what that power is that's inside you right now,
whereas I've had a lifetime of preparation for mine. Believe me,
brother, when you finally taste the power it is
so
much
more than you can imagine. You tried to kill me once before, I
don't think you'll do any better this time."

Cane didn't blink, didn't move.
He simply stared at the boy who spoke with his brother's voice, a
scrawny half-dead looking thing with alabaster skin and milky white
eyes. A walking corpse, with the voice of a ghost. Grace had been
taken by surprise, and her blood covenant with the Kings meant that
her magic could never harm one of them. That was why Cane had sent
his Kingsmen to the circus that night instead of her, to burn it to
the ground and kill everyone in it. He wanted his brother out of
the way and wanted any trace of the bastard he'd sired wiped from
the face of the planet as well.

And yet, here they both were.
If you wanted a job done properly, Cane realised, you had to do it
yourself. Apparently, that included murdering your brother and
nephew.

"Let's see," was Cane's only
response as he hurled himself bodily at Adam.

Floating in the cool waters of
memory, Able held his breath. He had dreamt of his moment, of being
face to face with Cane King. He had imagined his hands around
Cane's throat, his blade in his heart. He had imagined throwing him
from the top of the highest building in the city, watching his body
tumble through the air until he hit the ground and burst like an
overripe fruit. He'd shared the dreams with his ghosts and they had
shared their own with him. All of them had come up with such
creative ways to murder, revenges so personal and intimate that
Able had feared the ideas that ghosts didn't share.