The Magpye: Circus (26 page)

The ghosts stirred restlessly
in his mind, argued amongst themselves. It was hard to tell who was
more thirsty for revenge; those who had had the taste of it already
or those who were as yet unbloodied in death. How much of his
hatred and desire for revenge came from them, he wondered? He felt
the guilt, the crushing responsibility, for so many of their
deaths. Perhaps that was why he was so willing to die to avenge
them. Perhaps that was why they were so willing to let him.

All except one, of course.

"Don't listen to her," said
Adam King. "Your place is at the head of the family. Destroy Cane,
take his empire, and you will understand. Dismantle it then, if you
must, but hold it first in the palm of your hand and ask yourself
what you could do with that power."

"At least talk it through with
Marv," said Marissa, interrupting Able's conflicting internal
monologues. "You should at least ask the advice of someone living
if you want to know how to live."

She smiled. Able knew the smile
well. It was his best memory, and it lit up his heart as it seemed
to hers. It could have lit the whole world, if she'd been given the
chance.

"I will, I promise," said Able.
"But I'm going into the city first, there's someone I need to see.
I need to set something right, no matter what happens after
that."

"I understand," said Marissa.
"And for the record, that sounded a lot like Able Quirk
talking."

She closed her eyes and leant
into him. Instinctively he closed his own eyes and leant towards
her. Could a dead man kiss a ghost? Able brushed his lips against
the space in the air where Marissa's lips should have been. He felt
the same electric tingle across his lips. He felt a skip in his
un-beating heart. For a moment all the thoughts in his head, no
matter who they belong to, vanished. There was only the kiss. Only
Marissa. Able wondered if this is what it felt like when souls
touched.

His eyes still closed, he
imagined her leaning back into him. Electricity as her ghostly hand
stroked his cheek. Electricity as his arm curled around into the
small of her back to pull he closer.

He reached forward for her, but
she was already gone.

"Marissa?"

The ghosts were silent as Able
Quirk wept.

Cane stood on the gantry and looked down onto the killing
floor of the abattoir.

Taylor had done as he was told,
bringing together what was left of the city's gangs. It had taken
weeks; some of them had gone to ground, others had skipped town.
Those who had stayed were either loyal or opportunistic. Cane could
work with both. He had killed their bosses, now he would
consolidate them into a single functioning unit under his command.
The blood, the murder, that didn't make a difference. This was good
old fashioned business of the type he understood.

Cane King, the master of the
hostile takeover.

He fiddled with his shirt
collar. The Ink wanted to rise up, to show itself across his face.
It didn't like hiding. It wanted to be seen, wanted to be talked
about. It wanted to be feared, like Cane King was. He forced the
thing down. For now, it would remain his secret. His, and Jack
Taylor's.

Taylor was down on the floor,
moving through the masses like a killer whale through a shoal of
kelp. Cane had already decided what Taylor's punishment would be
for allowing the magician to escape with his nephew, but it wasn't
time for that yet. Besides, he was more interested in how the boy
had survived. Despite all the power of The Ink, Cane had realised
that he wouldn't be complete, wouldn't be a rightful inheritor of
the King's family legacy, until he also had the power of The
Magpye. What The Ink could give, brief moments as a voyeur in
someone else's memories, was a pale imitation of the true mastery
of the dead that could be, should be, Cane's.

Still, ruling over just the
living was acceptable for now.

It pleased King that none of
them dared lift their heads to meet his gaze. He felt like a true
king, or like a god. Master of two worlds, the modern and the
arcane, there was nothing he could not do. He had killed their
bosses, men who they had seen as untouchable, and now he had them
all standing on the cold steel floor of a slaughter house. He was
the bogeyman, free from the confines of the wardrobe, out from
under the bed. The bogeyman, very real and very deadly.

The only problem was, being a
real and very deadly bogeyman meant his cover was blown. There too
many loose ends after the fiasco at the paper-mill. Too many
bodies, too many people asking questions. Garrity and Owen White
were doing their part, concocting a the story about the clean squad
going rogue had held for now, but the whole thing was getting too
big even for Cane and his media empire to contain it.

Gangs at war with cops wasn't a story that made people look
away and whilst Cane
could
make the media say what you wanted, it didn't work if everyone else
was saying something different. Vic Chase had been right about the
heat that this was bringing down.

Cane knew he already had the
solution though.

The solution was The Ink. The solution was a story, a new
story. He'd been thinking too small, thinking like the
old
Cane King, the one who lived in the world of normal, mortal
men. The Ink didn't think like that. The Ink thought
big
and it had shown him what he needed to do. The solution was
a lie so big the whole world would have no choice but to swallow
it.

Cane rapped on the metal
railing of the gantry, and the room below fell silent.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," he
said, "Welcome to the new world."

They looked up as one, all
except Taylor. He had found his way to the bottom of the stairs to
the gantry and was slowly climbing back up. Cane's command over the
room was obvious; the last place Jack Taylor wanted to be was in
the centre of a room full of people who all wanted to prove their
loyalty to their new boss.

"As of now, there are no more
gangs," continued Cane, his voice strong and clear and commanding.
"There are no more families. No more territories. The ground that
you stand on, the ground that you walk on, and everything above and
below belongs to me."

Cane paused. On the killing
floor, nobody spoke, but if you listened very carefully you could
hear a hundred minds working. A hundred minds calculating angles,
looking for escape routes and opportunities. A hundred men and
women brought up street smart and street tough, a hundred men and
women who had fought their way up or been groomed by their bosses,
given and taking dominion of their little fiefdoms. Cane smiled. It
was all just business. The guns and knives didn't make any
difference, they never had.

"This is a kingdom and I will
rule it. There will no new bosses, only Kingsmen under my direct
command."

Another silence, and the
whirring of more minds.

Cane waited. The law of the
boardroom dictated that there was always one person who would ask a
question.

"What do you want us to
do?"

The voice came from near the
middle of the room, a bulky street thug who Cane didn't recognise.
The Ink prickled at Cane's neck and told him the story that went
with the face of the thug. He might need to crack open someone's
skull to read their deep and dark and innermost thoughts, but every
face in this room had a story, and The Ink could read them all. The
thug eye-balled Cane defiantly.

"Sean Cassidy," said Cane, "One
of the late, great Paddy Keane's protégées if I'm not
mistaken?"

"And what if I am?"

The Ink spilled the details in
Cane's mind an instant. You didn't rise above the rank and file of
criminal life if you didn't have a speciality, and Cassidy
certainly did. He liked to burn things. Cane smirked. An arsonist,
just the type of person to throw a match in a powder-keg like this
room.

"Well, Mr. Cassidy, a week from
now, my casino opens uptown. We're having a little celebration, and
you're all invited. You and your box of matches included."

A murmur ran through the
crowd.

"A celebration," continued
Cane, feeling the crowd warm up beneath him. "Of my dominion over
this city. A celebration of crime and perversion in all their
forms. A celebration of you, my Kingsmen."

A cheer went up in one part of
the crowd, quickly echoed in others. Sean Cassidy and his immediate
entourage remained silent.

"Sounds like a bloodbath to
me!" shouted Cassidy, silencing the last of the cheers. "We all
know what happened at your last party, Mr. King. I think perhaps me
and me boys will sit this one out."

Without warning, Cane pulled a
handgun from inside his suit jacket and fired, putting the shot
right between Sean Cassidy's eyes. Cassidy toppled backwards into
the man behind him as Cane shot the men to Cassidy's left and right
as well. Three head-shots, three dead thugs, three bodies on the
floor before anyone else had even reached for their gun.

"Does anyone else
…"
roared King, "Want to sit this one out?"

The assembled thugs, hoodlums, pimps, drug dealers, and
numbers-men offered no answer. Cane watched the ones who had their
hands on their own guns, counted those who might draw on him and
those who might draw
with
him. Just like
any boardroom, he thought to himself. The first shots had been
fired, first blood taken, but no one here wanted a war. Everyone
knew that after the blood, came the money.

"Know this," Cane growled. "If you
run
, there is no
city that you can run to that I do not own. There is no border than
you can cross that I am not already on the other side of. There is
no cop, no federal agent, that you can run to that I don't own or
can't buy. You are in this, right now, whether you want to be or
not. This is the new world, so learn to live in it."

Cane turned his back and left
the gantry, leaving the crowd with this words still hanging above
them in the air like storm clouds. Like all the best threats, it
was all utterly true. He let the metal door clang shut behind him,
then heard it clang again as Taylor followed him into a small
office.

"You've got them all in line,"
said Taylor.

"They're sheep," replied Cane. "They don't know how to be
anything else
but
in line."

"You think he'll come?" asked
Taylor.

"Our missing vigilante?"
replied Cane. "Maybe, maybe not, but that's where you come in."

"You want me to snatch him?"
asked Taylor. "Could be difficult."

"No," replied Cane, "I want him
to come to me. Go and find the magician, take out a little
insurance on my nephew's arrival."

Taylor didn't answer, which
Cane knew meant that Taylor understood, and Marv was in a whole
mess of trouble.

Owen White limped across the
open expanse of his hotel room. He called it "his" hotel room even
though he hadn't paid a bill since he got here and he knew it
wasn't his name on the register. It didn't matter. Food arrived
when he called for it. Drink arrived when he called for it. Girls
arrived whether he called for them or not. To most other men it
would have been a paradise. For Owen White, it was a prison.

He was healing well, at least
physically. He'd begun to adapt to the loss in vision and the
damage to his ankle hadn't been as bad as first supposed. He felt
like he might always have the limp, even if the pain eventually
faded, and he was OK with that. You shouldn't go through something
like he had, shouldn't lose so many people, and just walk away. The
eye patch, the scars, the limp, the heap of painkillers he washed
down with vodka every day, they were all reminders of his
mistakes.

And then, of course, there was
the tattoo. It itched and it made his shoulder twitch, but more
than that it was a reminder too. A reminder that he wasn't a cop
anymore, not a real one anyway. He had the badge, the gun, the
rank. He had the power, more power than ever really. He looked cop
and sounded cop and probably even smelled cop. But he wasn't a cop.
Owen White was a Kingsman, just like Mick Garrity, a man bought and
paid for and branded by his master.

Stripping to the waist, he looked at the tattoo in one of
the mirrored fronts of the wardrobes that ran down one side of the
hotel room. Black and stark, the tattoo was in the shape of an
upside down crown. Cane King, King of the Underworld. There was a
time when White would have laughed at the notion of that type of
criminal; larger than life, hiding in plain sight. When Magpye had
told him, he hadn't believed it. That was a mistake.
Listening to Magpye when he said
he'd be there to help take King down, that was another.

Owen White. Former White
Knight, now dirty cop and the King of Mistakes.

"Nice ink."

White spun around, twisting his
bum leg painfully.

Magpye was standing on the
balcony, the big glass double doors letting the cold night air in.
He looked different. His leather suit was a patchwork, made in a
hurry. He'd painted it, a broad streak of white down his chest
making him look more like his namesake than before, but to White it
just looked like a big fat target. The coat was different too,
another second-hand piece hastily customised White guessed. The
strangest change was the mask. The thing before, the tight mix of
leather and zips and bulging goggle eyes was gone, replaced by some
kind of gas mask. He could see Magpye's eyes through it, and the
reflection of his face in the glass. It was like talking to someone
on the other side of a mirror.