The Age of Scorpio

3. Now

He suspected that the drugs and alcohol made the sea of naked bodies in soft red light seem more erotic than the cold harsh reality probably was, but that didn’t matter. It felt good, edgy, exciting, like they were pushing boundaries. Besides, she was beautiful; they complemented each other in both looks and willingness to go forward, to explore. Being inside her felt right, more than just sex. He looked down at her, hair dark, eyes glazed with narcotics and sex, moving against him, guiding him inside her to where she wanted, where he felt good, moaning slightly when he found it.

He’d heard the stories but hadn’t believed them, but what mattered was that she liked edge play. He could see the scars on her neck from the bloodletting. The bullshit about people seeing things after tasting her blood was probably just the effects of blood-drinking while tripping.

As he moved inside her he reached for the razor. Pushing deep into her he held it in front of her looking for consent. She didn’t say no. Best not to spoil their game with words. He used the razor to draw a line in red on her neck.

He considered himself creative. Perhaps that made him more sensitive, perhaps it didn’t. He would never know the latent talent he had and the tiny tear that talent made when her blood sought it out. A single tear of blood ran down his smooth pale cheek, as he became a beacon first. Then a gate as his mind was torn apart. He saw it, briefly, the red burning ghost world.

Then as they came through he felt like he was being torn apart at some base level. His scream echoed in another place. Nothing that heard it cared, or even understood it. It was drowned out by a much louder and all-encompassing scream.

Then there was destruction.

Du Bois hated driving through London almost as much as Londoners hated people driving Range Rovers through the tightly packed streets of the city. He fantasised about killing the taxi driver who had seen him coming, seen him obviously in a hurry and had still pulled out in front of him. Pedestrians scattered as he slewed the big four-by-four onto the pavement. He had not hit any of them, not that it mattered – they would all be dead soon. He did nudge the taxi, the impact barely registered on the armoured Range Rover that du Bois had won from a drug dealer playing baccarat in Monte Carlo.

‘They got all the crèches?’ du Bois asked again. He was talking into the air, but the secure mobile connection easily picked up his words. It was not often he asked for information to be repeated – there was no requirement – but it was not every day you heard the death of hope itself.

‘Each was hit simultaneously worldwide and in orbit.’ It did not matter that Control was discussing near-certain extinction, the female voice was the same, somehow managing to be cold, artificial, distant and sexy at the same time. Normally it had du Bois musing on how things had changed but not today.

‘The souls?’

‘They are all gone, the backups as well. They used a virus, a possible derivation of L-tech.’

‘Then it’s over,’ du Bois said quietly.

‘They may have stolen the souls,’ Control said. That explained the security incident he was on his way to deal with.

‘Which is just so much information without the children. Who was it – the Brass City? The Eggshell?’

‘All information points to it being agents of the Brass City, but we cannot be sure. We would like the souls back, Malcolm.’

Du Bois said nothing. He had to ignore the hopelessness he felt. More than two thousand years of planning, all for nothing. They had failed.

He threw the Range Rover around the corner and had to brake hard, brought up short by a cordon of flashing lights, vehicles and armed men. He could just about make out the building the suspect was supposed to be in. His vision changed to bring it into sharper relief. He watched the members of SCO19, the Metropolitan Police’s specialist firearms unit, hit the front door of the run-down, four-storey building with a battering ram and pile in.

‘Brilliant,’ du Bois muttered to himself. It was the tiniest of consolations but he had decided that whoever was responsible for this fuck-up was going to suffer.

As soon as he climbed out of the Range Rover he felt the blood-screen. It was like walking through preternatural spiderwebs. He hid behind the door of the Range Rover as he did not want the local police to see him self-harm. Du Bois drew the tanto from the sheath in the small of his back. The blade opened his flesh. He barely felt it, the folded steel was so sharp.

Waiting was the worst thing for Hamad. His first out had been blown: the Circle, with their grip on the security services and their command of surveillance technology, had responded too quickly.

He sat cross-legged in the filthy room in the flophouse. In front of him were the two curved daggers. They were older than any existing civilisation and made from materials that most modern scientists would fail to understand, unless of course they were part of the Circle.

The simple white blade, Gentle Sleep, was not the problem: it killed easily, almost sorrowfully. The other blade, the blade of skeletal black metal, Nightmare, was another matter. It lusted for the killing, whispered to Hamad, drew out the dying and made it hurt for every victim.

Hamad had thrown a blood-screen up, and through it Nightmare was aware of everyone within the flophouse and the surrounding buildings, the street, the station. Nightmare wanted all their deaths.

He had been aware of the sirens from the furthermost elements of the blood-screen long before he had heard them. Nightmare had whispered the joy the sirens heralded. Hamad felt like weeping. When would he finally have killed enough?

Chief Inspector Benedict Appleby did not have time to deal with the special-forces cowboy walking towards him. The man wore loose-fitting, dark casual clothes, his sandy-blond hair down to his shoulders, surprisingly clean-shaven, blue eyes and designer leather jacket, but it was his cock-of-the-walk attitude that gave it away.

‘Tell me, Chief Inspector, was one of the group of men you’ve just murdered fucking your wife?’ du Bois asked.

‘What? No!’ Appleby had been so taken aback by the question he had actually answered it.

‘Then why have you sent them all to their certain death?’

‘I think we can handle—’

‘No, you have shown no aptitude for thinking at all. I need to get in there now.’

‘We’re in the middle of an op—’

‘A very public sodomising – yes, I’m aware of that. Do you know what one of these is?’ The man showed Appleby a warrant card. Appleby’s eyes widened.

‘Yes. I mean, that is, I’ve never seen one before but—’

‘This means I can do as I please. Order your men not to interfere with me in any way, understand?’

‘Look, you can’t speak to me like that! I will need to check this.’

Du Bois sighed: the whole point of the warrant card was to avoid situations like this. He pulled out his phone and hit speed dial.

Hamad had wanted to run. He really had. Nightmare had not. Nightmare wanted to stay. He heard the door battered open. Hamad thought about the police officers thundering up the stairs. Their families, their lives, the sum of their experiences up to this moment. Were they loved? Did they have children? Nightmare howled in his head. He was not done killing, it seemed. Not that it mattered any more.

He felt the screen snagged, attacked, changed.

The godsware implants were two slits on his forehead. He opened his eyes. All of them. The Marduk implant showed him the ways through. They made a lie of matter. He fell back through the floor.

Hamad emerged through the ceiling above the stairway halfway through a graceful somersault and landed among the armed police officers on the cramped stairway. He pushed gun barrels away from him, the slightest touch of hand and foot sending the officers tumbling down the stairs. He seemed to flow among them, moving to where they thought him least likely to be. Toying with probability.

Hamad crouched low, his leg kicking out behind him. Gentle Sleep cut through a heavy boot like it did not exist. A nearly sentient poison coursed into the firearms-officer’s body. He died happy as if in the middle of a pleasant dream.

Nightmare just had to open the cheek of one of the officers and the screaming began. There was panic as the terror-stricken officer tried to flee and shoot his way out of his worst nightmare. The black blade drew blood again and again.

Du Bois shook his head, the sound of screaming and gunfire playing in stereo for him. He could hear it clearly echoing down the street and through the radio tap. Appleby had gone white as he listened to his men being murdered.

‘It’s me. I’m at King’s Cross. I’m being obstructed.’ Du Bois offered Appleby the phone. ‘It’s the Home Secretary. He thinks you’re a cunt as well.’ Appleby stared at the phone like he was being handed dog shit.

Du Bois was sprinting towards the house. Knowing that it was too late. He drew the accurised .45, ejected the magazine and replaced it with a new magazine of ammunition that probably cost more than any one of the properties lining the street.

He ran up the steps and into the house. He saw the first body lying in a contorted heap halfway down the stairs. The police officer’s face was a rictus of agony and terror.

Du Bois took a moment to compose himself. His skill set and experience aside, he was facing someone who could appear from anywhere armed with ancient and potent weapons. Still, he was pretty sure that the person he was hunting was long gone. He could already feel the blood-screen collapsing in the local area, no longer multiplying like bacteria, no longer putting up a fight as his own screen consumed it. Du Bois tried desperately to spoof the blood-screen with disguised tracking elements of his own.

Du Bois left the house. He had been right: whoever had done this was long gone. A number of the armed response team had been killed. They had either died blissfully or in pain and fear. The latter outweighed the former. Du Bois knew he should not be surprised. After all, whoever had done this could steal souls and murder hope itself.

Du Bois looked around for someone to blame. He found Appleby quickly and strode towards him. Appleby was sitting on some steps leading to one of the other terraced houses. He was gazing down at the Euston Road unseeing. He looked broken.

‘Was “Don’t enter the building under any circumstances” somehow not emphatic enough for you?’

Appleby looked up, appalled that someone would say something like that at a time like this, further angering du Bois, who saw it as self-pity.

One of Appleby’s subordinates moved towards du Bois, arm outstretched to intercept him. Du Bois grabbed the man’s hand, locked it and then elbowed him in the face, easily knocking him to the ground.

‘Stay down there,’ du Bois spat as he reached Appleby and leaned down. There were more officers running towards him. ‘Tell me—’

‘Sir!’ an armed police officer shouted at him. ‘Get away from the chief inspector.’

Du Bois turned on her. ‘Don’t make me kill you just for some peace and quiet.’ He turned back to Appleby. It was the waste that bothered him the most. ‘Tell me. How does a mental subnormal, incapable of understanding the most elementary of missives, rise to such a high position in the Met?’ Appleby flinched. ‘Are you a Mason or something?’ Appleby turned to look at him, appalled. Shock was rapidly being replaced by anger.

‘I lost men to—’

Du Bois grabbed him, pulling his face closer.

‘Listen to me, you seeping cock-sore. You didn’t fucking lose them; you killed them. You killed them because you are a moron, because you are too fucking stupid and greedy to sit back and think, Hmm, perhaps this position of power and responsibility is too much for my tiny mind to handle. Perhaps I won’t risk murdering people because I’m a simpering lightweight vastly out of my depth and lacking the common sense that God gave shrubbery!’

Du Bois felt a degree of pride as he saw tears form in Appleby’s eyes. He worried that people like Appleby would find ways to rationalise what they had done. Du Bois wanted to drive home the man’s culpability, hopefully help break him so he would not manoeuvre himself into a position of responsibility and influence again. In du Bois’s mind, Appleby’s stupidity made him dangerous. Surrounded by nervous police officers, du Bois stared at the man with cold blue eyes. He wanted to see the breaking point.

Beth knew she was ugly. She knew because the cell-block mums had not tried to rape her. She stared at the hated reflection in the small mirror. She knew she was too squat, too brutish, had too little femininity for the rest of the world. No matter how much you try and get away from other people’s expectations, reject them utterly, you still ended up feeling their looks, judging yourself through their eyes. Still, she had broken enough mirrors and going down for manslaughter had been her seven years of bad luck, let out early for good behaviour. The only thing she did like was the Celtic tattoo creeping up from her neck. That and, mannish or not, she had kept in good shape. Though she wondered if they would let her work on the doors again with her record. She had been working that night after all.

The slamming of a cell door echoed through the prison. She hated that sound. It had become the soundtrack of her life. The first time she had heard it was when she had known that her whole wide world had been shrunk to four ugly institutional walls. Soon she would not have to listen to it any more.

Not very much money, an old-fashioned cassette Walkman – she was almost touched that they had removed the batteries, though she doubted they would have much charge – charity-shop shirt and tie, the para-boots and her pride and joy, her leather jacket. The interlocking knotwork pattern painted on the back. It was a copy of the cover of her favourite album from her favourite band. It was the outside world.

The sound of the outside door closing behind her for the last time. Beth knew that the long inhalation was a cliché. It didn’t matter. Out here the air didn’t smell of hundreds of dangerous women in close proximity.

She had known they would not be there, but some part of her had still hoped. She was pleasantly surprised that the batteries still had some charge and tinny music came out of the cheap headphones. Beth zipped up her jacket and started walking. It was going to be a long walk.

‘Hello?’ Beth called as she entered the house. Beth often knew whether or not someone was in a house when she entered it. This house, nominally her family home, felt empty though the smoke hanging in the air suggested otherwise.

The house had not been redecorated in more than twenty years. It looked like it had not been cleaned in almost as long. In some ways the cramped little house on the Undercliff Road was a microcosm of Bradford. The city had been dealt a death blow in the 80s that it had not managed to recover from.

Beth found her father in the lounge in his chair, smoking, the ashtray next to him overflowing. He had the pipe from the oxygen tank next to the chair up his nose but Beth hoped that it was turned off. She watched the cherry glow as he inhaled shallowly. The resulting cough sounded wet.

‘Dad? It’s me.’

‘Talia?’ It was the sound of pathetic hope in his voice that hurt the most.

‘No, Dad, it’s Beth.’ She moved through the smoke. The curtains were closed in the filthy room. He was living in darkness. The little band of pale sunlight that shone through a gap in the curtains illuminated her father like a corpse. He looked awful and he looked disappointed.

‘When did you get out?’ he asked. Despite the wheezing he still managed to sound disappointed too.

‘Yesterday.’ She had slept in a hedgerow last night. It had been a very long walk. She had taken a bus when she had got to the outskirts of Leeds.

‘Are you staying long?’ he asked.

‘I was hoping to stay until I can get some work and afford a place of my own,’ she said.

‘Not much work for a jailbird. Not much work…’

‘I’ll get something.’

He just nodded. Beth waited, looking for something more – anything. They let the awkward silence grow, then she headed for the door. She turned back.

‘When’s Talia back?’ she asked. It was like watching his face crumple. Tears appeared on his cheek.

‘She’s gone. Left me,’ he said, his voice a wailing rasp.

Beth was by his side, reaching for his hand, but he flinched away from her.

‘You! You did this. You drove her away when you killed her man. What were you thinking?’

Beth stood up slowly. I was thinking that maybe if I left it this time he would beat her so hard he’d finally kill her, Beth thought. Talia, the pretty one, Talia the popular one, Talia the feminine one, Talia the fucking trouble-magnet. Beth took after her dad and Talia took after some lost dark beauty from their family’s genetic past. They had never got on, but Talia was her younger sister so she had looked out for her. Not the easiest of jobs for someone that self-destructive. Beth had lost count of the number of times that someone had come to find her to peel Talia, messed up on drugs or alcohol, off the floor and take her home, or pull her out of some other scrape. Not that she had ever been thanked.

Talia had found Davey with her unerring ability to get involved with the worst guy possible. He was a minor-league dealer with a history of violence against his partners. None of this had mattered to Talia. It had been true love through the bruises. Beth had been pretty sure that Davey was going to kill her that final time. That said, she knew she had lost control. She had not needed to go as far as she did. Even then it had still hurt to see Talia in court testifying against her. Had it not been for that, the sentence might have been suspended.

‘How long?’ Beth asked.

‘Six months.’

‘Where?’

‘Down south somewhere, where they all go.’

This was the way it went in this house, Beth thought: Talia broke her parents’ hearts, back when her mum was alive, and Beth got blamed for it.

‘She was going to leave home eventually anyway,’ she told the old man. She left it unsaid that Talia had never had anything but contempt for them all anyway. She could not wait to get out of there. Talia had just been waiting for a way to sustain her lifestyle with the minimum of actual effort on her behalf.

Beth stood and headed up the stairs.

Beth had the music on too loud. She knew that, but what was he going to do? He couldn’t even shout at her after all. She was doing press-ups, carefully so she didn’t make the needle jump on the old vinyl. She was exercising out of sheer boredom. She had done a lot of this in prison.

Beth heard him making his agonising way up the stairs but she did not go to help and did not turn the music down. Eventually the door to her room opened, and her father, coated in sweat, stood gasping for breath in the doorway. His look expressed what he thought of her activity. This was clearly another thing that good girls were not supposed to do. Like beating her younger sister’s boyfriend to death, she guessed.

He made his way to her bed and sat down. He used the time he needed to recover the ability to speak to gaze around her bedroom disapprovingly at the posters of the various bands she liked on the walls.

‘Go and find her for me,’ he finally rasped.

‘Dad, she’s just moved out. A lot of people do it.’ She had known he wanted her to do this downstairs.

‘No word, nothing,’ he told her. That’s because she doesn’t give a shit about any of us, Beth thought but said nothing. ‘She would have phoned – she’s a good girl.’ He might as well have added ‘and you’re not’, Beth thought. She had heard it anyway.

‘Have you tried phoning her?’ Beth asked.

He shook his head. ‘No number,’ he managed. ‘She said she would call when she got a phone.’

Beth knew for a fact that Talia couldn’t live without her phone. There was no chance she didn’t have one. It just wasn’t important for her to call her father. After all, what use was a poor, broken-down, dying old man?

‘Look, Dad. London’s a big place. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’

Beth was surprised when her father reached forward and grabbed her arm. It felt like a skeleton had grabbed her, but for all that his grip was still strong.

‘What is it with you? Why can you only hurt this family? And believe me, you have no idea how true that is!’ Beth closed her eyes, wondering if this was when her father was going to blame her for her mother’s death, but he let go. She opened her eyes and he was struggling to his feet. He brushed away her attempts at help.

‘Look, I’m not going to London but I’ll phone a few people, okay?’ she told him. He just nodded as he made his way towards the door.

Beth was angry with herself. She was angry because she was concerned despite herself. When she had seen Talia’s pale, spite-filled pretty face from the dock, she had sworn she was never going to help her again. Let her die choking on her own blood and vomit face down in the street somewhere. But after calling around she was starting to share her father’s worries.

Talia had not gone to London; she had gone to Portsmouth. That was good. It was a smaller city and she should be easier to find. She had been in semi-regular contact with her remaining friends in Bradford, those she had not used up, until a few weeks ago. Talia had gone down to meet some goth, or whatever they were called now, a pretty boy called Clark who Beth vaguely knew. She had managed to get his number out of one of Talia’s friends and called him. He had given her a mouthful of abuse and hung up, refusing to answer any more of her calls.

However, another of Beth’s friends, Billy, who also worked the doors, had said that there had been some Internet porn clip doing the rounds recently. He was not alone in thinking that the girl in it looked a lot like Talia. He had not gone into details and Beth had not asked, but he had said awkwardly it was some pretty raw stuff. Billy had been one of those guys more than a little bit in love with her sister but was too nice for Talia to be interested. Billy had gone round to see some more of Talia’s friends in person. It sounded like he had been not quite so nice this time. Two hours later he had phoned Beth back with an address in Portsmouth.

‘I have some money saved from my disability,’ her dad said from the doorway to the living room. She had been sitting on the stairs talking to Billy on the phone.

‘This is it, Dad. This is the last time I try and help her.’

‘Just bring her back to me before I die.’

She doesn’t care! Beth wanted to scream. And you’ve always been dying, haven’t you, Dad? It’s a wonder that Mum beat you to it. The only thing Talia is interested in is using you in her ‘poor me’ stories. Instead Beth just nodded.

In her room Beth packed. Clothes, soap, toothpaste, deodorant, ratty old towel, sleeping bag, all went into the army-surplus kitbag with the Celtic knotwork patterns drawn on it with marker pen. It was not much. Beth knelt in front of her bed staring at the kitbag, trying to make a decision. Finally she reached under the bed and pulled the box out. Opening it, she laid each item on the bed carefully. Brass knuckles, not the ones she had used on Mikey, her old ones that had lived in her pocket when she was working the doors. A pickaxe handle, one end with a bike chain wrapped tightly around it. A Balisong knife, often incorrectly called a butterfly knife. Beth had confiscated it from some kid when she had been working. She had kept it because she recognised a high-quality blade when she saw one. Finally she drew her great-grandfather’s First World War bayonet out of its sheath and looked at the old blade. She had stolen it years ago because nobody else cared about it, and she had not wanted Talia to sell it. The blade needed work, but that was okay – she would take her whetstone with her.

She packed all of them. If Talia had properly done it this time, was in real trouble, then she would have need of them. She was off to try and help her sister again. She was armed. This was how she had ended up in prison.

Beth put her leather jacket on, slung the kitbag over her shoulder and headed down the stairs. She did not even say goodbye. Let him hear the door slam on another daughter, she thought.

She walked out onto wet streets surrounded by grey stone.

McGurk leaned heavily on his cane and looked at the bloody and naked girl lying on top of the rubble, dust still settling on her. He was sure she was still alive: her tits were moving.

‘Well fuck,’ he said, his strong Portsmouth accent unmistakable. He could hear sirens in the distance. ‘Put her in the motor.’

‘Boss?’ Markus asked. A house blowing up was bound to draw the attraction of the police.

McGurk turned to look at Markus, who looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. Total obedience, that’s what it’s all about, McGurk thought as Markus went to pick the girl up. Besides, it was his house and he wanted to know what had happened, and he thought that maybe she was the one Arbogast had told him about, the one he had come to see.

McGurk climbed into the back of the BMW and felt the boot slam.

‘Before the Old Bill shows up, Markus,’ he said, letting just enough impatience creep into his voice to worry the other man.