He shivered. Fingers crossed Sir Alec never asked that of him. Because he was pretty sure he couldn’t bear it… and in saying no, he’d likely cause a lot of strife.
But that was borrowing trouble, and he had more than enough already. He’d been standing here for over half an hour, and not a soul had walked by. Time to break into Abel Bestwick’s sad little home and see what useful information the man had left lying about.
Only please, please, don’t let him be lying about. I’ve seen enough dead bodies to last me three lifetimes.
Doing his best not to look furtive, Gerald crossed the narrow lane to number 45b. To be on the safe side, Sir Alec had given him a master de-warder that would get him past any thaumaturgical security safeguards Bestwick had left in place. He started to fish it out of his pocket, then hesitated.
I wonder.
Pretending he was a regular kind of visitor, he knocked on Abel Bestwick’s badly painted, ill-fitting, rust-hinged front door. And as he knocked, he let slip his etheretic shield-only to realise, with a sickened twist of his guts, that he had no need of his peculiar talents. The abrupt ending of Bestwick’s message to Sir Alec wasn’t, as they’d hoped, due to Splotze’s frustratingly erratic etheretic field. No. Someone-he couldn’t tell who-had already smashed through Bestwick’s security, with enough bludgeoning thaumaturgic force to shred the warding hex and leave it in fading tatters.
Bugger.
Cautiously, Gerald let himself into Bestwick’s unlit lodging, closed the door behind him and sealed it with a hex he knew for a fact not even Monk could disable. And then, screwing his eyes shut, he dropped his shield entirely and took a deep breath.
Don’t be here, don’t be here…
He coughed in the darkness, tasting the stale air, feeling a tickle of dust, smelling mould from something fruity. But that was fine. That was wonderful. He couldn’t smell the stench of death. And he had no sense of company, either. He was alone. Opening his eyes, he groped by the front door for the gas lamp igniter, found it, and flicked it on. After a moment, and the slightest whiff of gas, the lamps caught alight and lifted Bestwick’s lodging out of shadow.
The shoebox of a front room was a wrecked mess.
“Damn,” he said softly, looking at the smashed and splintered remains of an old, battered table, two equally old and battered dining chairs, a faded armchair and a tall, possibly fifth-hand bookcase. The books it had contained were gutted, their ripped pages tossed about like early wedding confetti.
Dried blood stained the old blue carpet a darker, rusty brown.
Skirting the sickening evidence of violence, he picked his way through the debris of Abel Bestwick’s life to the even smaller shoebox of a bedroom. There he found a splintered wooden truckle bed, its straw mattress slashed and spilling its dry, grey guts. The sheets were ripped, the blanket reduced to fraying ribbons, the single, ungenerous pillow disembowelled like the mattress. Ruined, too, Abel Bestwick’s meagre wardrobe of clothes. Not even his smalls had been spared, knifed to ribbons and dust cloths and strewn across the floor.
The shutter on the bedroom window was loose. Pushing it open, just a little, Gerald saw a smear of blood down the outer wall. Did that mean Bestwick had made his escape this way? It seemed a fair assumption, since he wasn’t here.
Well done, Abel.
Every drawer in the cramped coldwater kitchen had been upended, knives and forks and spoons and a spatula tossed onto the miserly bench. Shards of mismatched crockery and a drinking glass cracked and splintered underfoot. That meant he almost missed Abel Bestwick’s wrecked crystal ball. It was the damaged thaumics that caught at him as he was turning away. Turning back, carefully crouching, he poked at the burned, crushed crystal. So who’d done this, then? Bestwick or his attacker?
But before he could even begin to work it out, he felt a rotten twist in the erratic ether, felt his darkly enhanced potentia burn hot and hurting in sudden alarm. And then, before he could react, before he could save himself, run, the wickedly hidden entrapment hex he’d unwittingly triggered unfurled its poisonous tendrils with whipcrack speed to wrap him in a tight and lethal embrace.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered, stunned. “Oh, bloody, bloody hell.”
Holding his breath, he pushed as hard as he dared against the constricting hex. Indifferent to his rogue potentia, the hex pushed back. Pain seared every nerve.
“Bugger!” he swore, blinking away a scarlet mist. The pain eased, but not enough. Heat surged. Sweat prickled. His heart battered its cage of ribs. With a groaning effort he tried to see the hex’s matrix, tried to unravel the tangle of strands. The hex resisted, tightening its hold, smearing his vision. Somehow it could blind whomever it held prisoner.
Damn. Damn, damn, damn…
He groaned again. “Hell’s bells, Monk. Why aren’t you ever around when I need you?”
CHAPTER NINE
“Monk! Hey Monk! Come to the phone, it’s for you!”
Up to his aching eyeballs in randomly oscillating counter-intuitive tetrathaumicles, Monk cursed.
“Damn. It’s not Bailey, is it?”
“I don’t know who it is.”
“Then can’t you take a message?”
“Do I look like your secretary?” Walthorpe demanded, indignant. There was a heavy thumping of heels as he marched back to his cubicle. “Take it yourself.”
“D’you mind?” Dalrymple demanded from the other side of Research and Development’s cramped particle experiments lab. “I can’t hear myself think with you two bellowing back and forth like bloody fishmongers.”
“Don’t blame me,” Walthorpe protested. “Markham’s the one who won’t answer the telephone.”
As Monk opened his mouth to refute that calumny, his carefully constructed containment field overloaded and the oscillating counter-intuitive tetrathaumicles sparked and spat and died in a nasty shrivelling cloud of expended thaumic energy.
“Bollocks!” He kicked the nearest bit of bench. “That’s nineteen hours of work gone up in smoke!”
“Never mind,” said Walthorpe. “At least it gives you time to answer the telephone.”
Monk cursed again, then stamped out of his smelly cubicle to the lab telephone on its rickety desk beside the triple-sealed door. With a glare back at Walthorpe’s cubicle, he snatched up the receiver.
“What?”
“And a very good afternoon to you, too, Mister Markham,” a cool, self-contained voice said in his ear.
Bugger. “Oh. Sir Alec. Sorry.”
“I need to see you, Mister Markham,” said Sir Alec, indifferent to apology. “Now would be a good time.”
Monk bit his tongue. A good time for who? Not him. He was so far behind on his current project he’d need a miracle of temporal thaumaturgics to finish it on deadline.
“Right now? Are you sure?”
A pause, and then a faint sigh. “Quite.”
Oh. “Yes. All right. Only-”
Sir Alec disconnected the call.
Staring at the humming receiver, Monk fought down a surge of unease. What the hell? Why was he being yanked away from R amp;D in broad daylight with a call to a telephone number Sir Alec had no business using?
Lord, please don’t let anything have happened to Bibbie. Or Melissande. Or Gerald.
This was the first time he’d been stranded alone with all three of them to worry about. He didn’t like it. And when this mission was done with he was going to say so, very loudly, until somebody promised it wouldn’t happen again. Because if it did, hell, if it turned into a regular occurrence, then being friends and relations with those three was going to take years off his life.