The Magpye: Circus (19 page)

Anyone else would doubt what
they were seeing, write it off as their own imagination, but not
Jack Taylor. He never, ever, saw anything that wasn't there and
he'd seen enough around King's house and businesses to know that
there was far more to be seen in the world than most people
realised. Taylor wasn't afraid of magic. He could see it for it
was. And he wanted it.

So, the shadows were hiding
something. Fine. Taylor would find out what it was, sooner or
later.

***

"Are you going to stand there
all day or are you going to help me with this body?"

"Sorry, Mr. King. You looked
like you needed a moment alone."

"I just killed my nephew and my
brother," replied King, hopping nimbly to his feet. "What I need is
a drink, a shower, and a change of clothes. Maybe dinner at
Pierre's. Do you think they're still open?"

"I'm sure they'll make an
exception for you Mr. King." replied Taylor. He didn't react to the
revelation that the masked vigilante that had plagued their
organisation was related to King or that he somehow had managed to
kill two people but leave only one body. Taylor would understand
that too, sooner or later. "A car is on its way," he continued.
"Paddy Keane and his boys are on their way too."

"He knows what to do?"

"Of course."

King looked down at the body at
his feet. Devoid of life now, he wasn't sure if it was more his
brother, Adam, or the nephew he had never known, Able, who stared
back up at him with dead, white eyes. Whoever, whatever, he had
been, it was over now. King had a new story to write, a story being
whispered to him by the Ink.

"I want you to get this body
out of here, before Keane and his idiots arrive."

"Sir?"

"No matter what he did, who he
thought he was, he's still a King. I don't want him burning up here
with no one saying a word over him."

"Of course," said Taylor. Cane
King, the sentimentalist. Even dead, his family were his great
weakness. Taylor suspected that that was why he had been so afraid
of the clean squad, the cops that no-one could get to. King's
family had given him strength, given him a legacy, but it was his
greatest weakness too. Taylor wondered if there were any cousins or
uncles out there, waiting to come squirming out of the woodwork of
the family tree.

"Move the cops too," continued
Cane. "We've had too much heat in this city for too long. Someone
will coming look for those missing detectives, I don't want any
trace of them being found here."

"The pit then, Mr. King?" asked
Taylor.

"Where else?"

"And what about Detective
White? He's still alive."

"Call him a cab."

Able walked amongst his friends
through the rapidly darkening circus. Clouds of smoke were moving
overhead and the smell of burning was unmistakable now. There was
heat everywhere, the heat of fires that burned as yet unseen, and
from somewhere distant Able could hear screaming.

"What's happening?"

Marissa took his hands in hers,
her face etched with sadness.

"Memories," she said softly.
"There are so many memories of that night, they're overwhelming
everything else."

"So this is it?" asked Able.
"This is what our afterlife is? That night, over and over
again?"

"That night forever," replied
Marissa. "I'm so sorry, Able."

***

At Marv's caravan, Marv watched
as something moved in the rubble. Burnt out, the caravan had
collapsed in on itself like a piece of overripe and blackened
fruit. Beneath its collapsed sides however, something was moving.
Something was alive.

He took a step forward, but
found his wrist suddenly in the cold iron grip of the Magpye.

"Just watch," said the
creature. Marv noticed that even in the half-light that had fallen
over the circus, the Magpye still cast a longer and darker shadow
than anything else. A little something of the creature that hid in
the shell of a little girl was bleeding out in that shadow, and the
hairs on the back of Marv's neck stood up on end when he saw. Magic
could be lost, but a magician was something you always were, no
matter what.

The debris shifted again, a
sheet of metal sliding back, taking others with it as it crashed to
the ground. A door, an impossible door, opened from the floor of
the ruin. The door was soot-stained and dirty, but Marv knew it at
once.

"My magic box?"

"Your magic box," replied
Magpye. "The womb into which I was born dead and Able fell from
life to undeath."

Marv watched as a body, limp
and lifeless, was slowly pushed upwards from inside the box. Part
of the head was missing and the jaw was hanging on to only one side
of what was left of the skull. As the arms and upper torso flopped
into view, Marv registered the gunshot wounds. Too many to have
been inflicted by anyone who could see their target, Marv deduced
that whoever it was had been shot through the walls of the caravan.
One leg, than another, and the body was finally ejected.

"That's not Able," said
Marv.

"No," replied the Magpye.
"That's Adam King, Able's father."

"He died in the circus?" asked
Marv, not expecting an answer. "That explains…"

"Everything," said Magpye.
"Adam died protecting his son from his own brother's hired guns and
passed on his birthright in the process."

"You mean you?"

"I mean me. Adam King's death
was all the chance I needed. I freed myself from the line of the
Kings and was reborn in Able Quirk."

Together, the old magician and the little
girl
,
who was anything but
,
watched as
Able slowly climbed out of the box, pushing the corpse of Adam King
away.

"Does he know?" asked Marv.

"He does."

"How long?"

"Just before he died," said
Magpye. "For the second time."

Shivering, soaked with the
blood of his father, Able climbed up and over the body of this
father, then took his first tentative steps into the world. His
eyes were the same dead eyes that Marv had grown accustomed to. As
he watched, Able's flesh took on the cadaverous pallor Marv
recognised as Able stripped off his blood soaked clothing and
dropped it carelessly onto the grass. He looked right past Marv and
the Magpye, his dead eyes blind to them.

"This is how I found him," said
Marv. "Confused, frightened. He doesn't know where he is, even who
he is."

Looking down, Marv saw that
Magpye was smiling. It was a sick smile, too wide for the child's
face that the creature was wearing, splitting her face almost in
two and revealing double rows of tiny needle-like teeth.

In front of them, Able tripped
and fell headlong onto the bloodied corpse of his father. Face to
face, the two dead things looked at each other.

Only one moved.

Screaming, Able scrambled away
from the body and ran.

Marv watched as the Magpye's
shadow tore itself from Magpye and raced after Able, enveloping him
in shadow so that he vanished from sight.

"They were surrounded," said
the Magpye, unable to disguise the relish in its voice. "Adam was
shot, again and again. He shielded Able, shoved him into your magic
box. The last thing he did was pull it down over them before he
died. Inside the box, Able listened as they set fire to the caravan
around him, all the while his father's still warm body was bleeding
out on top of him. What little King blood he might have lacked, he
had received that day in spades."

"And the box?"

"It did for them what it had
done for you a thousand times," replied Magpye. "It let them
escape."

"Marv?"

Marv turned, started to hear
Able behind him. Beyond him, the last of the circus was burning to
the ground.

Taylor hated The Pit.

It wasn't the stench, a paper face mask was enough to hold
it at bay whilst he ferried the bodies of the cops from the back of
his van to the pit's dark, gaping maw. It wasn't the bodies either,
Taylor had seen plenty of those, and the pit was deep enough
that
,
other than for the smack of dead flesh
landing
,
you could be forgiven for believing the thing
was bottomless anyway. No, it was nothing about the pit itself that
made Taylor hate it. It was what it represented. It was a loose
end, and Taylor hated loose ends.

Pitching the second half of
Officer Nutt over the crumbling brick mouth of the pit, Taylor
wondered how many bodies there really were down there. The pit was
a wet and stinking thing, its inner walls slick with a deep red
viscous ooze that seemed to bleed from the brickwork itself. It was
a like a wound, as if you could wound a place in a way that
wouldn't ever heal.

Taylor had dumped a lot of
bodies here on orders from King, but the pit's depth and appetite
seemed to be endless. A mass grave, hidden under an old
slaughterhouse in the heart of the city. It was ridiculous but,
just like King, the thing was somehow able to hide in plain
sight.

He heard that there were some
Kingsmen who wouldn't come here, even some that said you could go
mad by staring into the pit. Taylor had stared deep into the pit
and all he saw was a growing pile of stinking, festering evidence
that could bite them all in the ass if it was discovered. Having
cops and politicians in your pocket only went so far, and Taylor
was confident that a mass grave was crossing the line.

And now Cane King had him dumping not only the bodies of a
bunch of federally empowered, front page new detectives into the
pit, but also the body of his nearest and dearest. When Taylor was
in charge, things would be different.
King had been raised to believe he was untouchable,
another explanation Taylor supposed for why Cane had gone out of
his way to destroy these reputably untouchable cops. To Taylor, it
was just another belief that was becoming a
weakness
. King craved the
limelight, the theatricality of it all, and he courted disaster
more passionately and ardently with every move. He said he wanted
to bring his family into the 21st century but, to Taylor's eye at
least, it was nothing but trappings. The tools changed, but the
strategy remained the same. The 21st century just made things
faster and cheaper than ever before, including change
itself.

Cane King was changed
undoubtedly and, whilst it wasn't for the better in Taylor's
opinion, it could be to his advantage. Taylor knew, with the
absolute clarity that had guided him his whole life, that his time
was coming.

Until then though, there was
nothing for it. The pit was dangerous to them all. The pit would
have to be watched.

And fed.

"Able
…"

Able, Dorothy, Malcolm, Marissa
and the others all stood and stared at Marv, and at Magpye. Behind
them, the circus was bursting into flame a piece at a time. Each
small eruption brought with it a shard of memory, a blade of shadow
and smoke and fire and horror. The world was turning into stained
glass and, chunk by chunk, the mosaic was changing before Marv's
eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice vanished. His
eyes were locked on Marissa.

He had always believed she was
beautiful, what father didn't think that of his daughter? But in
this unreal place her strange and ethereal beauty seemed somehow
magnified. Even against the backdrop of flame and ruin, she was a
gleaming light to him. She was, he reasoned, not herself. She was
as he remembered her, and therefore more beautiful than it was
possible for anyone to truly be. The knowledge that she was really
gone hit Marv like a hammer blow for the second time. Tears welled
up in his eyes and his throat closed, forbidding speech. After all,
just what was there to say? He had seen what had happened to Able
that night with his own eyes. Somewhere in these fractured memories
that were stabbing through into the world around them, the real
Marissa was dying.

It was Malcolm who broke the
silence.

"Good to see you, Marv," he
said coldly. "Face to face, as it were." He gave Marv the
particular look that he sometimes gave him, a special
acknowledgement passed between two men who both had very secret
lives and pasts that they wanted to remain just that - secret.
Marv, the magician, hiding in plain sight as a circus conjurer and
escape artist. Malcolm, the sharp shooter, hiding a past that made
him very good with guns and very keen to use them.

"It's good… to hear your voice," said Marv. "Honestly, you
make Able sound weird. With either accent." He laughed nervously.
For the first time, Marv was facing the people that he had
abandoned to their fates when he had fled the circus, believing
Grace Faraway's lie that Cane King was sending his men after him.
At the time he'd justified it to himself as the only way he could
protect them but, in truth, Marv knew that he had only one instinct
and that was always,
always
to save
himself. Being a father hadn't changed that, until it was too
late.

Next to Malcolm, Wally Wu
shuffled his feet. He turned around as another part of the world
exploded, replaced by a nightmare chunk of fire and mayhem. "Get on
with it," he hissed.

"We're in trouble here, Marv,"
said Malcolm. "We need the little girl there."

His finger pointed at Magpye,
who had found a place to lurk behind Marv.

"You want to go back," said
Marv.

"If we don't," said Able, "All
we have is this. At least we have a chance to do some good, all
crammed together in my head."