The Magpye: Circus Read online

  The circus grew closer, spinning around them. A wind blew though the group, strong enough to knock Wally Wu from his feet. Sprawled on the floor, he was suddenly dragged to the edge of the shadow by some invisible force. He screamed, digging his fingers into the dirt to slow himself down.

  "Grab him!" shouted Malcolm, as Dorothy's burly hand took a hold of Wally's. With a grunt, he pulled him back into the circle.

  "What the hell was that?" asked Dorothy.

  "It was hell itself," replied Magpye. "Wally's hell, to be precise. That's all that's out there. That's what I saved you from, but Hell is a hungry place and it wants you all."

  A shudder ran through the ground beneath their feet. In places, the shadow had faded away and was being replaced by the dirt grass of the circus. People jumped left and right, desperate to stay inside the shadow.

  "What does it matter who wants to go back more?" asked Able desperately, "We just have to go, now!"

  The wind picked up, sounding a long and low moan as it beat against the invisible protection of the shadow.

  "It matters because of who is going to be in control when you go back," said Marv, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. Beyond the shadows there was more gunfire, louder this time and no longer in slow motion. Hell was coming. "It matters because of who you are, Able. None of this, none of it at all, was your fault. You have to remember that."

  "They came for me!"

  "They came for me too!"

  The wind suddenly dropped. The world outside froze in an instant, a tableau of flame against which silhouettes of murderers danced. There was silence for a moment, even amongst the ghosts. Nobody moved, nobody breathed, except for Magpye who noisily ran its tongue over its lips.

  "I don't understand," said Able quietly.

  "I introduced your mother to Adam King," said Marv, his voice low. "Adam was obsessed with magic, he came to me through a… mutual friend. He fell in love with the circus, all its secrets and its history. Then he met your mother, and he fell in love with her. My friend, she was in deep with the Kings. She wanred me that Cane King wanted me dead for bringing his brother into this life. We'd worked so hard to keep you a secret from him, from all of them, we didn't even think that they could really be coming for you."

  "That's why you ran?"

  "That's why I ran."

  "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" asked Able.

  "I was afraid," confessed Marv. "For all of us, really. How could I tell you, with your memory in pieces, your head full of ghosts?"

  "Ghosts who would hold you responsible," muttered Dorothy, earning himself a sharp dig in the ribs from Magda.

  "So instead you let me go out into the night with no idea who or what I was really fighting?" continued Able. "You let me find out who my real father was at the same time that I was being beaten to death?"

  Marv couldn't answer. There were no answers. He was a charlatan, a huckster, as good with words as any conman or grifter. As a magician, hell, you had to be better than all of them put together. But not this time. No back doors, no trick hatches. No escapes.

  "I'm sorry," he said simply.

  A slow hand clap shattered the moment. All eyes turned towards Magpye.

  "Very touching," said the creature. "I take it we're all going to hug now and stay in hell?"

  "No," said Marv. "You're taking us back, but you're going to give Able his memories back at the same time. All of them."

  The creature's eyes narrowed.

  "I'm wagering it's not so easy to control someone who knows their own mind," Marv continued. "Able deserves that chance."

  Beyond the shadows, the world spun back into life and, in an instant, was moving faster than ever before. Marv could feel it closing in on all of them, like being spun around inside a blender and waiting to hit the wall. He kept his eyes on Magpye. Marv might not have had magic, but he'd never needed it to win a hand of poker.

  The world snapped suddenly to darkness and a feeling like being plunged into an ice bath hit each and every one of them.

  "Done," said Magpye.

  NEW INK

  Cane King stepped out of the shower and padded softly out of his capacious en-suite bathroom into his stately bedroom. One thing that the King mansion had not lost in his remodelling of it was a commitment to luxury.

  Stretching, he towelled off his torso and let the expensive carpets soak up the rest. Hot water and steam had washed away his nephew's blood, but the dark stain of the Ink remained. His wounds weren't even scars now, the Ink stitching and remoulding his flesh with a precision that no surgeon could ever have matched, and bruises that had been livid and purple when he had left the paper mill had now simply vanished. He was a man remade, inside and out.

  All that had remained as he had stepped naked into the shower were the tattoos.

  He had seen the markings before, on Grace, although they had been different then as well. The Ink moved in the same way under his skin as it had under hers, a dark and liquid thing that flowed and oozed with his own movements, like a patch of oil trapped between plates of glass, but the patterns it made in Cane King's flesh were not the same as it had once painted on Grace Faraway. He sensed that the patterns and shapes were somehow a language, impossibly ancient and beyond any human knowledge, but a language never the less. It was the Ink's story, and his own, mixed with talismans and sigils of primordial power. After a lifetime of denying his family's magical heritage, he had literally become magic.

  The irony was not lost on him.

  And so as Cane had washed, as he let the hot water roll down his body and remove any last trace of his nephew or his brother, he had come to an accord with the thing. Cane King was public property after all, a television persona and a business figurehead. A face alive with mysterious tattoos was going to be bad for business and so the Ink had agreed to confine itself to the parts of his body ordinarily concealed by clothing. In return, Cane would take the Ink out into the world and let it tell a story the like of which it had not told in a long time.

  Hiding for now, then no more hiding ever again. That was the deal.

  Cane King was going to drag his family and its magic into the 21st century, and nothing would ever be the same after that. A globalised crime network was one thing. A globalised crime network with the power of the Ink at its heart was something else entirely. In a curious way, Cane knew that he had his brother to thank for what would come next, and what would come next would be the whole world.

  Looking at himself in a full length mirror, Cane watched as the Ink retreated, becoming a dark mass of tight and overlapping symbols on his chest. His new and secret heart, almost blacker than the one that already beat in his chest.

  Pulling on a pair of silk shorts and a crisp, fresh white shirt, he summoned Jack Taylor from the adjoining room. Taylor hadn't had time to clean up, his light suit was torn and bloody. He'd patched his own wounds up as best he could. He's so fragile now, thought Cane, compared to me.

  "It's done?" he asked simply.

  "They all went into the pit, just like you wanted."

  Cane detected the undercurrent of displeasure and disagreement in Taylor's voice and ignored it. The days of him handling Taylor like an unexploded bomb were long gone. Taylor wasn't the most dangerous man in the room anymore, not by a long chalk.

  "Good," replied King. "Because I have another job for you. Something really up your street."

  "And what's that, Mr. King?"

  "I want the heads of the other families," said King. "Bring them to me."

  He waited, watched Taylor's mind work for a few seconds. This was normally the moment when he questioned him, probed his logic for a weakness. It was a fencing match that had been going on a long time. Cane wanted to see if Taylor realised that the balance of their relationship had changed. "Yes, Mr. King," was Taylor's only response. Thrust, parry, and the two men pulled back with neither having given too much away.

  Cane watched as Taylor walked away. He had suddenly become very smal
l and insignificant. He was just a little orphan boy who had learnt to be cruel and then grown into a man who had made cruelty a profession. "Clarity" he called it, the ability to see the world for the cess-pit that it was and respond accordingly. He saw himself as special, something different and above the rest of humanity. He was rare, certainly, a perfectly distilled product of a welfare system that brutalised and neglected children like Taylor, but he was by no means unique in Cane's eyes.

  Cane King was unique now. Cane King had the Ink.

  It didn't matter what cess-pit world Taylor saw with absolute clarity; Cane King saw the world that was coming tomorrow and he saw himself at the very top of it.

  "Jack," Cane called after his lieutenant, stopping the man mid-stride. "I did mean just their heads."

  Jack Taylor didn't turn around.

  "Yes, Mr. King."

  GET ME GARRITY

  Owen White sat and waited. He'd sweated suspects before in interview rooms just like this one, and he knew the drill well. Metal chairs, chained to the floor, a metal desk with enough scratches and grooves on it to be suspicious. One door and bare walls except for the two way mirror that faced him. Overhead, a sodium strip light buzzed and flickered, the sound of dead flies haunting the light.

  The medics had been and gone. A splint on his leg, a patch and a bandage over the ragged, blood encrusted hole where his eye used to be. Bandages around his ribs, doing their best to hold everything in place, and a sling for one arm. Pain killers, injections, antibiotics. Not a word spoken. Owen White wondered how many other cops they'd patched up like this, and how many suspects too. Silently, efficiently, they had turned him from a jumble of human pieces in a torn and bloody suit to something resembling a person, never asking what had happened, never asking if he was OK, never asking anything at all.

  Only in this city. Only in this precinct.

  And so Owen White had nothing to do now but sit, wait, and feel the painkillers slowly turn his body into a giant numb shell around him. He knew that everything still hurt, hurt like hell, but for the moment the pain was held at bay behind an invisible wall of narcotics. It didn't help. Whatever part of his brain had the job of registering pain was telling him that something very bad had happened to him, that things were very, very broken, inside and out.

  White knew that there would be cops behind the two way mirror, looking in at him right now. He stared with his one good eye and tried to fix a defiant look on his face. A smashed and crippled cop stared back at him with something that looked a lot like his own face.

  Behind the two way mirror, Mick Garrity bit down on a doughnut.

  "How the hell did he get here?"

  "Cab," replied a fresh-faced uniformed cop.

  "Fuck me…"

  "Driver complained like hell about the blood, but White flashed his shield and the guy brought him straight here."

  "Why here, why not a hospital?"

  The uniformed cop shuffled nervously.

  "Spit it out Johnson," said Garrity through the final mouthful of doughnut. The young cop looked surprised that Garrity knew his name, but he shouldn't have been. Garrity knew everyone's name, and usually much more than that.

  "He said he wanted to see you, sir."

  "Fuck…" said Garrity, and picked up another doughnut from the box. When he bit down on it, a globule of jam slithered out into the wiry stubble that sat on his many chins. "Fuckity fuck fuck."

  Swallowing the last of the doughnut like a python gorging on a piglet, Garrity dusted sugar off his sweaty shirt and straightened his tie before heading around to the interview room door. There were others waiting, eager for a peek at the show. Garrity was under no illusions that White had had some supporters here. Not every cop was a dirty as the rest and some of them were only dirty because they had to be. Had they hoped that White would be their great redeemer, come to save them from the likes of Garrity? Maybe. If they had, they hadn't let their hopes spur them into action and that little shard of cowardice had kept them alive. This was Cane King's city and this precinct house, along with every other to the city's edge, was the exclusive personal fiefdom of Mike Garrity. If anyone needed reminding of that, Owen White would be that reminder now.

  "Everyone out," he said, his voice low and menacing. "This is between me and him. You want a free show, go to a strip joint."

  Garrity twisted the handle on the door hard, and went in. From the corner of his beady eyes he saw the cops creeping in behind the mirror as he closed the door. There was no better way to get a cop to look than to tell him not to, dirty or no.

  Now all he had to do was give them a show.

  ***

  Owen White looked up.

  "Garrity."

  "What the fuck happened to you, White?"

  "Don't play games, Garrity. You know what happened to me. You tipped off Cane, or maybe he told you to tip us off in the first place. Either way it was a trap."

  "I never said it was going to be easy, White. You go up against Cane, it's always a trap."

  "You didn't say he'd have a fucking army there."

  Garrity bit his tongue. He wanted to tell White that it hadn't been an army that been the problem, it had been Jack Taylor, but that would mean admitting that Jack Taylor was just as dangerous as everyone thought he was, and maybe even more. Garrity thought White and his team were stupid for coming to the city in the first place, but there was no denying that at least some of them had been as hard as they come. Garrity didn't need his guys thinking that there was a bigger dog in the yard than him, especially a dog called Taylor.

  "Low lives," said Garrity. "Don't put your guy's problems on me. You go to fight, take fighters."

  "Like you?" asked White.

  "Not every fight is face to face, White. Sometimes you got to be the guy who waits around the corner with the baseball bat in the dark. Sometimes, you've got to be the guy who walks up to someone's door in the middle of the night and puts a gun in his mouth before he's woken up. And you know why? Because those are the fights you can win in this city. Charging in there like Desert Storm? I'm amazed even one of you got out."

  White let out a painful lungful of air. He wanted to stand up and tear Garrity to pieces for his part in what had happened to his team, but he didn't have the strength. Even if he had, was Garrity really the one to blame? He was a convenient face, sure, and Owen White had punched a few of those in his time, but Garrity wasn't the one at the heart of it all. Neither was Cane King.

  No, Owen White knew who was really to blame for what had happened and was staring back at him from the two way mirror.

  White was smart enough to know that he had been walking his team into a trap. He was smart enough to know that a dirty cop like Garrity only thrived by never, ever, biting the hand that fed him. No, no-one had tricked Owen White into this. The truth was far simpler than that. The truth was that White had known it was a trap and he hadn't cared. None of them had. Even Rosa, who calculated the odds on everything, profiled every person she met, had rolled the dice with him on this one. They knew the odds, and they thought they could beat them. They'd banked on Magpye, their little secret weapon, the man who did impossible things. Impossible things like walk into one of Cane King's operations and put cuffs on him, or a bullet in him, whichever came easier.

  "I tried to tell you," said Garrity. His voice was soft, a tone White had never heard him use before. No threats this time, no vitriol. No tugging of the heart strings or calling him out. Mick Garrity was talking man to man, cop to cop. "I tried to tell you what it would take for you to survive here, and you didn't listen. You could have walked a line, White. Cleaned up a little here, a little there, and turned a blind eye when you needed to. Stopped the worst, let them have the rest. You could have found a balance."

  "A balance isn't justice."

  "Of course it is. That's the only thing it is. You think we're all dirty here and sure, we're none of us angels, but that isn't the whole story. This city, it eats guys like you and shits you out as som
ething you don't even recognise in the mirror. You can't be a white knight in this town."

  White chuckled, then coughed violently. Laughter, in his case, wasn't any kind of medicine. "White Knight" - that had been his mother's pet name for him, before she'd died. She'd been his rock and his moral compass. He'd always wondered what he'd become without her. Now he knew.

  In the mirror, Owen White saw someone that he didn't recognise. He saw a cop who had gotten his friends killed. He saw a cop who had thrown the rulebook out of the window for a shot at revenge. He saw a cop who had gunned men down just because they were between him and the man he blamed for everything. He saw a cop who had put his faith in a lunatic in a mask to save lives and bring order to a city out of control. He saw a cop who had done all that and been the only one to survive it. Smashed, broken, bloodied, but alive. Alive when he didn't deserve to be, alive instead of all of his friends. Alive, but not the same as before. Someone, something else. Whatever sort of thing can do all that.

  Owen White sat and waited. He sat and waited for the real him to catch up and tell him what the hell to do.

  "It's time to come in, Owen," said Garrity.

  "Sure," replied White. "Why not? Where do we start?"

  "We get you patched up," said Garrity. He offered White his hand and the detective took it, putting his weight onto Garrity and standing awkwardly on his splinted leg. "We get you some rest, then we talk about where to start."

  Together, they limped slowly towards towards the door. Garrity, the keeper of secrets, and his new, but broken, friend.

  "You don't got a girl, do you Owen?"

  "You know I don't."

  "Well, let me see to that too," said Garrity. "Someone to take care of you."

  "Sure," replied White. "What have I got to lose?"

  Garrity paused at the door long enough for the cops who hadn't been watching and listening behind the mirror to scurry back to their desks and find some work to pretend to be doing. He'd given them a show alright, and he'd gotten a new chess piece for his army into the bargain. Garrity knew all about revenge, he'd taken a lot of it in his time in a variety of creative and painful ways, and he knew that Owen White wasn't going to give up on Cane King or Jack Taylor that easily. But now, whatever dirt White dug up was going to go to Garrity first and, right now, he felt the need for a little extra leverage.