Dead Tired

A Warlocks of Whitehall Novella

By Steve K Peacock

Published by Magister Books

Copyright © Steve K Peacock

One

1am was rapidly approaching and Millicent Thatcher was having a very personal conversation with a club toilet. It had started innocuously enough – the swirling nightmare of an evening’s nightlife that her immune system had long been screaming at her to finally lay to rest once and for all – but it was the third Pernod-soaked joint that had been her undoing.

She’d been halfway through dispelling the poison, as it were, when she’d first spotted the ghost, the untied laces of his shoes peering out from the next booth. He was sobbing quietly, in stark contrast to her more confident and commanding sobs, but it was loud enough to get her attention. Draping an arm over the seat, she lolled her head towards the wall and slammed her fist on it.

‘You all right in there, spooky boy?’

The shoe twitched. ‘Not really. Bloody dead, aren’t I?’

‘That’s good. It sucks when I have to explain that to people. They never get it.’

‘Wait, what?’ he said. ‘Hang on…’

Millie swallowed and tried to stand up. No go. ‘Oh, you noticed. You’re a smart bugger.’

‘You know I’m a ghost.’

She tried again, this time making it to her feet. ‘Yep. I know things, me. A real boffin. Know all about ghosts and spooky shit.’

Stumbling out of her stall, she composed herself and pushed open the door to the ghost’s stall. He was sat hunched over on the seat, head in hands, indistinguishable from a living human apart from the chilling tingle of magic in the air around him. She cleared her throat, and he lifted his head.

‘No offence,’ he said. ‘But yeah, you look like someone who would be into ghosts. I like the hair.’

Jesus, he was only a baby; seventeen at a guess. ‘Got to look the part. Makes it easier to get the proper sad spooks to pay attention.’

‘Are you going to help me?’

‘Bit presumptuous of you.’

‘Please?’ he said. There was a tremble in his voice. ‘I just woke up like this and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do. You know enough to know I’m a ghost, so I figure—’

Millie winced. The Pernod was taking its revenge. ‘You figured I knew all that stuff because I’m a ghost groupie and help you shuffle off into the eternal night? That about right?’

‘Well… I guess…’

‘Shut your face,’ she said and pulled the moist remains of her joint from the back pocket of her jeans. ‘And close your eyes. I’m going to vomit and I don’t want you seeing.’

To her surprise, he did as he was asked. Nice kid, had manners, probably didn’t deserve to be haunting a dingy nightclub shittoire.

Putting the joint between her lips, she rubbed her palms together and willed a little power into them. They grew warm instantly and a pins-and-needles sensation took hold in the fingertips of her left hand. She flexed her fingers a few times while the numbness passed into a chilling feeling of absence, then grabbed the boy hard on the forehead, her fingers clawed and rigid. With her spare hand, a lighter hovered near the cigarette.

She whispered under her breath. ‘Three. Two. One.’

And then a freight train hit her.

Her eyes burned in her skull, and she could feel the capillaries popping one by one, filling her vision with blood. Tears came next, stinging and blurring everything, setting the stage for the new images to carve themselves out of the negative space – the abstract wisps of dead memories, his memories. They floated and swam through her vision in an uncertain order until she managed to reach out and grab one as it tried to flee, pulled it back, coaxed it into showing her what she needed to see.

Show me how you died.

It trembled against her command for a moment, then shifted into something clear. He had been sitting down, in a bedroom or maybe a hotel, his hands chained behind his back. In front of him, perched on the end of a bed with a gun in her hand, a woman with fiery red hair and a scowl that could cut glass was staring at him.

‘Pay attention,’ she said. ‘Are you paying attention?’

He nodded. ‘Yes. I am. I promise. Please!’

Voices sounded different in memories, that was something Millie had learned quickly enough, and it was tricky getting a read of them during playback anyway. And yet, this wasn’t the same voice; it wasn’t the boy’s voice. She was in someone else’s memory.

‘Remember this for me, okay?’ the woman said. ‘My name is Kaitlyn van Ives and I’m looking for Millicent Thatcher. I need to speak with her urgently. Have you got that?’

Another nod. ‘Yes, but I don’t—’

‘Friday, 8pm, under the railway bridge behind the water treatment plant. Repeat that back to me.’

‘I… I… Friday… 8pm… bridge… water treatment plant.’

Kaitlyn nodded. ‘Good job.’

She stood up, pointed the gun at his head, and pulled the trigger.

Millie slammed back to reality, her eyes full of stars and at least three different migraines vying for pride of place inside her head. Swearing, she backed out of the stall and up against the far wall, lighting her joint and taking one long, disgusting puff. It dragged her back to a semblance of composure, dulling the pain enough for her to stay standing.

‘Not your memories,’ she said, polishing off the last of the cigarette. ‘How’d you get them in your brain?’

‘I don’t know! It’s just been playing over and over in my mind. I can feel the bullet, but I know that’s not me. I don’t know that woman. But it just keeps playing!’

‘You’ve been dealt a bad hand, kid,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry for that. I’ll help you find a measure of peace, just give me a minute.’

The boy was flat out whimpering now, spectral tears rolling off his cheeks and evaporating before they could hit the floor. This was a cruelty that cut her to the quick, and as invitations went it was certainly one she couldn’t stand to ignore. Whatever this van Ives woman wanted, she was going to get a firm smack in the face first.

Pocketing the lighter, she pulled a worn nail file from the same pocket and carved a rune into the stall door. Once it was done, she ran the edge of the file over her finger, cutting it and drawing a small drop of blood that she squeezed into the freshly etched grooves in the wood. There was a gust of wind, a flash of light, and the boy was gone.

Millie flushed the remains of her horrible cigarette and ran dirty fingers through dirtier hair. Kaitlyn van Ives, she’d heard that name before, but where? It was scratching around back there, rubbing up against something in her mind, but what was…

Oh, wait…

The bloody Bane of Whitehall.

Public enemy number one was calling her out. There was no way that was going to end well.

*

There hadn’t been much time for lessons on street smarts during her apprenticeship, but then she doubted there would have been much Wingard could have taught her. His laces were so straight they put rulers to shame, and he wouldn’t crack open anything alcoholic if it hadn’t been aged ten years and cost more than a car. In this, and perhaps this alone, she had been his mentor, and her first lesson had been if you want to do something shady, do it somewhere with shade.

Not many places in a city with more shade than a railway bridge.

Millie did her best to prepare for any outcome, but she was uncomfortably aware of the futility of trying too hard here. She’d stayed off Whitehall’s radar for the last couple of years, that was true, but it was hard to believe that was as the result of any real talent in being a sneaky sod – she just fucked about and hoped for the best. Besides, she was hardly a major player, all she did was kick the odd ghost up the arse and send them on their way.

Kaitlyn van Ives was a professional, everyone in the community had heard of her. She didn’t kick arses, she kicked in teeth, crushed bollocks, generally made a grade-A, five-star bloody buggering nuisance of herself and lived to tell the tale every single time. She was a force of nature; if she wanted to hurt Millie, there wasn’t much that could be done to stop that.

Still, she had a few tricks.

She had been waiting under the bridge for the better part of two hours at this point, and there was still another half hour or so before the meeting was supposed to start. The plan, such as it was, had been to show up early enough to catch van Ives off guard if the woman had planned to set up an ambush, but it had seemed that Millie didn’t warrant such an extravagant plan. As a result, she had taken to laying a small one of her own.

Runes, that was her forte. Carefully concealed around the meeting place – hidden among the trash and detritus, scored into the moist brick of the bridge arches, whittled out of the discarded wooden pallets that seemed to spontaneously burst into existence in these forgotten back-streets – quick and dirty runes were humming, quietly awaiting her permission to kick up a right fuss.

Job done, she swigged from a half-empty bottle of something with enough of a kick to keep her awake and settled in. If she truly was about to meet the most dangerous free mage in the country, she wanted to burn off some of these nerves. Couldn’t go embarrassing herself immediately.

Ten minutes early, Kaitlyn van Ives stepped out of the shadows in the direction of the water treatment plant, taking a slow but purposeful stride over the waste ground between the two of them. She stopped twenty paces away and held up her palms, showing they were empty.

‘I appreciate the respect, Ms Thatcher, of you taking the time to prepare for me,’ she said. Her voice was loud but calm. ‘I hope you will take an equal level of respect from my choosing to leave your wards intact.’

Millie’s fingers tensed and went grasping in her pockets for a vice – booze, tobacco, all force of habit. ‘Strictly speaking, they’re—’

‘Vanaheim misdirection runes. A favourite of magical featherweights, and I’m not saying that to insult you. A needle in the right hands can do more damage than a sledgehammer.’

‘Then you clocked them on the way in, not exactly a surprise.’

‘Game recognises game, Ms Thatcher.’

Her fingers finally found something, a battered and empty Zippo lighter. She began to flick it open and closed again in her pocket. ‘Okay, look, you’ve lost me here. You shot a man in the face to get my attention and I don’t really understand why anyone would go to that level of trouble. Just hit me up on Tinder or something, I’m not picky.’

‘I did get your attention though, didn’t I?’

Millie’s eyes bulged. ‘Well, yeah! You shot a man in the face.’

‘A bad guy. Government. That’s not really important though. Jump to the question you really want to ask.’

‘Jesus, you’re very bossy, but fine. How did his last moments end up pasted into the brain of some other spooky boy?’

‘No idea.’

‘Yeah, but—’

Van Ives finally let her arms drop and started to walk closer. ‘Seriously, no idea. That’s why I’ve been looking for you.’

‘Not buying it. No-one looks for me.’

The gap between them had been halved now, and van Ives slowed. ‘Then I’m the first. Whoop-de-doo, get used to it. I want to hire you.’

‘Where did you get the idea that I was in the market for job offers?’

‘Everyone is if the price is right. Besides, it’s an easy job for someone with your skills. I’d do it myself, but I never could get a handle on the whole necromancy thing, and the people I work with, well—’

‘Found the local wandering bedsheets a bit less friendly than advertised?’

‘Something like that.’

Millie felt her shoulders slacken and the pain she had barely noticed in her back faded away. ‘Yeah, I’m not surprised. They take issue with the whole necromancy thing.’

‘They seem to like you though.’

‘I’m not a necromancer, sweetheart,’ she said. Her blood was up now, the bravado has shaken itself loose and was bubbling up. She wasn’t in danger, which meant she didn’t need to play the good girl anymore. ‘Necromancers talk to the dead. The dead talk to me. I’m a real people person.’

Van Ives ran a hand through her red hair, brushing it out of her eyes and letting loose a laugh. ‘Alright, I’ve given you a bit of a compliment, sure, but don’t let it go to your head. You work in the Cross Keys pub and live off the tips those drunk boomers throw your way because you remind them of that one friend their daughter has, the one with the provocative Instagram. You don’t get to play the big dog here.’

Setting her jaw, Millie pulled herself to her full height which, despite her boots, was still a full head shorter than van Ives. ‘I get by. And, actually, I think I do get to ride my bloody high horse here because you clearly need me for something – something you can’t get done – but you’re quite happy to dance around the bloody maypole and string me along to, what, make yourself feel big and get a rise out of me? Nah, mate, that doesn’t wash with me, no matter how dangerous you are.’

Her momentum was up now, and there was no hitting the brakes on that thundering locomotive. If she slowed down for even a moment she would have time to think about how unbelievably foolish it was to antagonise van Ives, but she was cruising on pure bravado now. All she needed to do was latch onto that one key point and ride it down to the grave: Kaitlyn van Ives needed her.

The muscles in the older woman’s cheeks tensed, her teeth grinding. ‘At least you aren’t a pushover. Too many mages have gone soft since the war, opting for the quiet life.’

‘Yeah, I’m one of them.’

‘Nah,’ van Ives said. ‘You’ve just been fortunate enough to slip through the cracks so far, one of nature’s weeds. If you were after a quiet life, you wouldn’t go out every night looking for ghosts to send on their merry way and I wouldn’t have heard about you.’

‘Okay, fine, whatever,’ the fire in her belly was starting to wane, she had to throw some more fuel on. ‘But can we get to something that even vaguely resembles the point? Are all you underground types vague as fuck?’

Van Ives chuckled. ‘We’re all underground types nowadays, kid. But sure, we’ll brass tacks this. Ten thousand pounds for your services. And a favour to be called in at a moment of your choosing. I’m sure one of those will indicate that I am taking this seriously.’

‘Cash?’

‘Cash.’

‘I don’t touch the stuff,’ Millie said with a wry smile. ‘Give it to me in untraceable crypto.’

‘You really are pushing it now, kid. You might be the only game in town, but I’m not playing here. You’ll take your payment in cash or bloody chocolate coins for all I care, but you are going to do this job for me and I am going to pay you.’

‘You haven’t even said what the bloody job is! Christ!’

Van Ives closed her eyes and took a long and belaboured breath. ‘Ghosts are being really bloody weird.’

‘They don’t often behave as you’d expect, that’s a pretty solid rule.’

‘You wanted to hear the job?’ van Ives said, raising a finger. ‘Shut up and let me give you the details.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’ve been losing operatives from my cell, pretty skilled ones at that. At first, we figured it was Whitehall finally come knocking, but the MOs don’t match; doors aren’t getting kicked in, the black bag squads aren’t turning up at half-past-insomniac o’clock, and our sources on the inside can’t place them in the system. They go quiet for a few days and then, when we check on them, we find a cold corpse in their safehouse.’

‘Are you telling me you’ve got a locked room mystery?’

‘Several, actually. Except, you know, this time it’s definitely ghosts and not just some smart arse with a Rube Goldberg fixation.’

‘How do you know it’s ghosts that are doing the killing?’

Van Ives’ expression turned stony, and she peered over her shoulder. Her hands had balled into tight fists. ‘Because they are coming for me.’

‘What do—’ Millie began but stopped. She could see her breath.

It was the height of summer, and even the famously changeable nature of British weather had done little to bring the temperature down. Yet, there was a chill in the air now, sharp and dry, siphoning away the moisture. A bad sign, to be sure, but it could have been worse.

‘Okay,’ Millie continued. ‘I believe you. You’ve got one angry spectre after you to bring the chills so fast.’

Van Ives, for her part, was lithe and mobile now. Her head was snapping left and right, faint magic crackling in her palm. ‘I worked that out already. Give me your experience here, tell me what I need to know.’

‘What do you mean, need to know?’

‘To fight this!’

‘You don’t fight ghosts,’ Millie said, her hand creeping into the satchel tight tied to the small of her back. ‘You listen, you soothe, you calm them. Fighting just makes them worse. Rage burns hot in the living, but it’s ice cold in the dead.’

The temperature was still dropping; Millie could feel frost forming on the tips of her hair and the desiccated grass under her feet was giving off a wintery crunch with each step now. It wouldn’t be long now; the gravity of their rage would drag their form out of the icy mist like a collapsing star tearing apart a nebula. She just needed to find the right spot.

Van Ives was crackling with power, her hair whipping in a non-existent wind. ‘All I can say is that this particular ghost hasn’t been very communicative so far. No change there.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Used to work with him, that’s all,’ van Ives said. ‘He’s my ex.’

‘Jesus,’ Millie said. Her hands closed around something in her satchel. ‘There’s a lot to unpack there, huh?’

Two

Crystals of ice started to form in the air about twenty feet from Millie, beautiful fractals knitting together in seconds. It took less than five seconds for them to expand into the form of a man; his eyes were hollow and his mouth a perfect howling void, though he hung in the air without making a sound.

Millie took a step forward slowly, arm outstretched, eyes locked on the apparition. ‘Yo, would you have described your beau here as a violent sort, Ms van Ives?’

‘Not especially,’ the reply came from her left. The woman was out of her field of view now, and she was not keen to take her eyes off the ghost to check exactly how close she was. ‘But he was an active member of my cell. Violence happens.’

With the subtle creep of a glacier, the ghost began to turn his head towards van Ives. Millie snapped her fingers, drawing his attention back to her. ‘Over here, big lad. Keep it all focused on me, there’s a good dead’un. You’re not out for blood, right?’

The ghost’s head flopped to one side, considering her. Blue lips slid over black teeth, but again no words escaped.

Van Ives spoke up again, her voice a little quieter this time. ‘What do you need?’

‘Name. His.’ Millie demanded.

‘Cameron.’

Millie took another step forward, arm still in front of her. Cameron’s ghost turned his head gently to follow her palm. ‘All right, Cameron, mate. I’m Millie, and it’s my woefully underpaid and entirely underappreciated job to see you off to whatever comes next. Now, to do that, I need you to work with me, yeah? Don’t look at her, she’s not part of this. Focus on me.’

He floated closer, his legs going through the motions despite being a good six inches above the ground. The movement was slow and ragged as if the air was thick and cut into him like broken glass. His empty eye sockets were boring into her now.

Gingerly, she pulled a bag from her satchel, the same one her hands had found moments ago, and held it out to her side.

‘What’s this?’ van Ives asked.

‘Read the label, it’s a honking great bag of salt.’ Millie said, giving the bag a little shake until van Ives took it from her. ‘Your boyfriend here – yes, that’s right, big man, I’m talking about you but not to you so wait your turn – is not the man you remember.’

‘No shit.’

‘What I mean – easy now, big lad – is that there’s no soul in there so temper his base impulses. No eyes, no soul; GCSE level ghost shit stuff. That’s not a problem if he’s a big old teddy bear kind of a guy, but if he has it in him to kill…’

‘Dangerous, got it,’ van Ives said, her words accompanied by the sound of her hands tightening around the bag. ‘But the salt?’

‘He goes for one of us, throw a handful of that in his face. But only if he goes for us. He’s all emotion and no stimulus, rage and fury doesn’t work on its own. Don’t give him a reason and we should be fine.’

She was proud of herself for making it seem as though she knew what she was talking about – it was easy to sound smart when you could quote the bloody textbook verbatim. But the theory was sound, and it had sort of worked on other ghosts in the past…

Though, those ones still had their souls.

Cameron floated another step closer, and still his mouth was trying to force words out to no effect. Any rage that had been in him now had turned into something else, something between sadness and misery, making his face look like an eery theatrical mask. He was pleading, she realised.

‘Oh, mate, you can’t talk, can you?’ she said. ‘Whoever took your eyes took your voice too. That’s cruel. That’s deliberate. You want to unburden yourself, but you can’t, that about right? Don’t suppose you know BSL do you?’

With care to keep a measured pace, she signed out a greeting for him. His brow started to knit together, concentrating on her movements, head nodding gently in time with the end of each symbol. When she finished, his gaze remained locked on her hands as the brows continued to knit, to furrow, to grind toward a frown.

Millie took a step backwards. ‘Well, shit. Suppose that was too much to hope for.’

‘Problem?’ van Ives said.

‘I think his death-addled ghost-brain just thought I was trying to work some mumbo-jumbo on him. Wouldn’t have been a problem if he was deaf, or the education system wasn’t designed to turn kids into grist for the bourgeois mill. Just saying, more people should know sign language.’

Cameron turned his gaze up, first at Millie and then across, faster now, towards van Ives. Millie let herself look, just in time to see the mage take a half-step back, shifting her weight towards the flight end of the reaction spectrum. A thin, spectral hand came up, then a second, and he started towards her.

With a level of skill that seemed almost practiced, van Ives tore the top off the bag and threw a handful of salt at Cameron. The granules passed through him and scattered onto the ground, doing little to slow his advance. Seeing this, van Ives took another step back, then another, maintaining her distance.

‘Are you sure you’re a professional?’

‘What has the underground been telling you, mate?’ Millie said. She was on her knees now, a small stick in her hand, carving something into the salt where it lay. ‘It’s not like I’m leaving business cards in phone boxes. I made no promises.’

Van Ives scowled and drew further back. Millie could feel the electric tingle of power being called as the mage began preparing to protect herself, giving that power form, moulding it, shaping it into some manner of weapon. The air pressure changed as she released the spell, a ball of roiling lilac energy that zipped and span in haphazard orbits around the woman before slamming into the floor. She tried again, this time the orb taking a different chaotic path and impacting on the side of the railway bridge. A third attempt ended a similar way, the sphere evaporating a pile of refuse on its way to dissipate against the wall of an abandoned portacabin.

‘I forgot about the damn runes,’ van Ives hissed to herself. ‘Shit.’

Cameron reached for her, but van Ives threw herself backwards and rolled over a stack of splintered pallets. She grunted as she landed on her feet, but kept going, drawing Cameron further away from Millie with each step.

Millie put the final flourish on her work of art, then stood up and lit a cigarette. ‘Lure him round this way when you have a moment, mate.’

Without even a nod, van Ives shifted direction back towards Millie, rolling under Cameron’s arms and coming up in a sprint. He was moving faster now, as though he was defrosting each second, some dead machine with its pistons pumping slowly, and ironically, to life. He lolloped behind her, a foul mockery of a sprint.

As the mage reached her, Millie grabbed her hand. ‘Behind me. And watch the head.’

Shoving the woman behind her, Millie stubbed the cigarette out in her palm. The ash still burning, she flipped her hand and slammed it down onto the symbol she had been carving. There was a burst of light that scorched her eyes and then darkness.

*

The coffee was black, the beans had been scorched. The smell gripped the back of her throat and dragged her back to reality, kicking but not screaming. Her throat was too dry to scream.

She took a long gulp of the grainy drink and blinked her eyes open. Across the table from her, Kaitlyn van Ives was tracing out runes on a stack of napkins. ‘Welcome back.’

‘Worked then?’ Millie said.

Van Ives didn’t look up. ‘A bit of warning would have been nice; I’ve got this bloody starburst etched across my vision.’

‘It’ll pass. Thanks for not leaving me in the dirt.’

‘You sent the murderous ghost of my ex packing, I wasn’t going to leave you drooling on yourself in the mud. Besides, I still need to pay you.’

Millie flexed her palm. The burn stung and was going to blister soon. ‘So, that’s it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘I can’t believe I’m going to say this,’ Millie said with a sigh. ‘But no, probably not.’

‘Do we have some professional ethics creeping in here?’ van Ives said, finally looking up. ‘Let me make it easy for you – show me how to draw that rune and you can run along safe and sound. Seemed effective enough.’

‘Sure, if you like burning yourself out for the next couple of hours and waking up in your own piss.’

‘You didn’t—’

‘No, not this time,’ Millie said. ‘But it’s been known to happen. There’s tiers of exertion and… Look, it doesn’t matter. The runes are treating the symptom anyway, you want to be safe then I have to shut down the cause.’

‘And how do you propose to do that?’

Millie went to answer, but something about van Ives’ expression stopped her short. Fried as she was right now, she could still detect when someone was trying to test her. The interview was still on, it seemed; all that had changed was the location.

She cleared her throat and pulled one of the napkins from the stack and snatched van Ives’ pen. ‘I need to see the first death in the series. I’ve got to check out the safehouse and talk to the dead guy. Got to find out how he wound up dead, then hopefully trace that back to some reason why all the dead’uns are getting murdery. Then I have to try and work out how you shooting some G-man in the face led to his memories winding up transplanted into a spooky boy across town with no seeming connection to him at all. And then—’

‘You think there’s a connection then?’

The rune was almost drawing itself now. ‘Be pretty bloody disappointing if there wasn’t, don’t you think?’

Van Ives smiled. It looked wrong on her face, as if she had needed a lot of practice in front of a mirror to perfect this approximation of a friendly expression. It seemed genuine, though. ‘I knew I was right about you. I’ll give you all the details you need.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that. You saved my life, for one thing, and you seem to know your stuff. You’ve got the job.’

A tiny blossom of pride bloomed inside Millie, but she crushed it out. Half an hour ago she hadn’t even wanted the job, and now this van Ives woman had her all giddy at the opportunity. How had that happened? She would have to keep a closer watch on how the woman talked to her.

Finishing the rune, she slid the napkin across the table to her. ‘For self-defence. You’ll get maybe two uses out of this. Napkins aren’t durable things, but don’t go trying to replicate the design.’

‘I know how runes work, I’m not an amateur.’

‘No,’ Millie said. ‘You’re a heavyweight. I’m going to full-on doubt you’ve had to learn the sort of dexterity needed to make runes work properly. So don’t mess around. Needs a small blood sacrifice to know to target dead things. Understand?’

With a nod, van Ives slid the napkin into her jacket. ‘You’re very rude, you know.’

‘I’ve been told. So, where am I starting?’

‘Upstairs,’ van Ives said, standing up. ‘This whole building is a front. I suppose you haven’t had time yet to think about how weird it is that there was a diner open so late at night?’

Millie looked around. It was weird, but it was true she hadn’t had time to question it. Taking it all in now, she could see obvious signs that the place was not as it had seemed. There was an ever-present veneer of oil in typical London greasy spoons – a working kitchen essentially being in the dining area meant that inside half an hour anything in the room took on the smell and texture of grilling meat. But here, there was none of that. It was dusty, dry, not the oppressive moistness of a working kitchen left quiet for a night.

And, of course, it was night. Were many places still open at night these days? She had thought the rise of 24/7 big chain grunge-palaces had pushed them all out of that space. But, hey, what did she know; Millie Thatcher was a lot of things, but an expert on high street economics was not one of them.

‘So, what, you just own an empty greasy spoon in the middle of London, and no-one bats an eye?’

‘That’s not really the issue here, is it?’ van Ives said, halfway to the door. ‘You’ll find the entrance to the back room in the far corner, you have to twist the decaf coffee pot anti-clockwise to unlock it. One of our guys was really into secret doors, try not to think too much about it. I’ll call you tomorrow for an update.’

Millie frowned. ‘Hang on. If you had my number, why didn’t you just call me? Why execute a load of dudes?’

‘And end up in your voicemail begging for attention? No thanks. Besides, it needed doing anyway. I just efficiently pooled a couple of jobs together. Catch you later.’

Kaitlyn van Ives swept out into the darkness, leaving Millie alone with her thoughts, a headache, and one very poor cup of coffee. She downed it in one go, picked some grit from her teeth, and pushed herself to her feet. She had had worse hangovers and still gotten through the day, nothing about this one was going to slow her down.

The decaf pot was not a very subtle secret – for one thing, the pot itself and the hotplate it sat on were clearly one moulded piece of plastic – but she conceded that from a distance it played its part well. Perhaps the thinking was that if someone was already inside the building, then there was no point maintaining the illusion. It turned with a rusty stiffness that required her to use both hands to get it going, but the mechanism eased up a little once it was moving. A half rotation was all that was needed to trigger a loud click as a section of nearby wall popped inwards a little. Millie pushed and it swung inwards.

The room on the other side was positively palatial compared to the dusty diner. The far wall was taken up almost entirely by a television, a blinking LED indicating it was set on standby even now. A pair of leather recliners with thick cushions and drink holders were arranged in front of it, one tipped over backwards and the other neatly folded away. There were no windows in the room, but a pair of faux frames had been inlaid into the walls that housed neither television nor secret door, beautiful countryside scenes backlit with daylight bulbs. In one corner, a router blinked impassively while, in another, a cache of weapons and documents had been spilled across the floor.

Bullet casings tinkled around her feet as she moved further in.

At first, she didn’t see the body; he was nestled so perfectly into the shadow of one of the chairs that, from the door, it was all but impossible to distinguish him. Just a few steps in, however, and she clocked him instantly. They hadn’t even bothered to close his eyes.

Despite her calling, Millie had not been around corpses overmuch. Ghosts, sure, and even one particularly unsettling run in with a zombie, but actual corpses were surprisingly rare. At least this one didn’t have any of the stomach-turning disgusting shit that would eventually show up. He was cold and in rigour, but otherwise there was little to differentiate him from one of the living. No obvious cause of death…

But if this was the first death in the chain, hadn’t van Ives said that this had been going on for weeks? He was remarkably well preserved.

There was a mechanical click from behind her and the door swung gently closed – a timer to ensure the saferoom wasn’t exposed for too long. As it slid into place, she saw the deadbolt on the back, melted through and blackened. They had been forced to break in, backing up the locked room mystery setup.

When is a murder not a murder? When it’s done by a ghost.

She searched the body. There wasn’t much there besides a deceptively well-chiselled set of abs and a handgun laying at the small of his back. His right hand had been twisted in such a way that she would have guessed he had dropped it on the way down, but she wouldn’t have gone on record saying as much. Matched up with all the bullet casings, though. The way she figured it, he’d fallen into some sort of fight-or-flight programming, drawn his gun and tried shooting the ghost. Clearly it had not been effective.

No bullet holes in the walls, though…

With little reverence, she hurled the gun across the room and into the corner with the rest of the partisan paraphernalia. It clattered off a rugged plastic case. Next, she lay his body out flat and moved the chairs back. Unfolding him was difficult, and his dead eyes seemed to lock on her as she struggled to position his frozen limbs. When that was done, she sat cross-legged at his head and pulled a penknife from her back pocket, snapping out the longest blade.

Millie had gone in hard on van Ives when she had called her a necromancer, and while a fair deal of that reaction was driven by the truth, there was a not insignificant part of it that had come from shame. Wingard had taught her a lot – he was an excellent teacher and had a singular talent when it had come to pointing her in the direction of the sort of magic that would come to be her passion – but he had also been very conservative in when she could learn things.

No magic is inherently evil, he would say, but if you put a tool in a man’s hand his mind will naturally turn to the task of finding all possible uses for it. Some of those will be bad.

It had been a bit of a heavy-handed lesson for her taste, but Wingard had taken it seriously enough that the scolding she had gotten for straying from their curriculum had been enough to sour their relationship for the best part of a month.

And all she had been doing then was reading about necromancy.

Since Whitehall took him, she had been relegated to teaching herself, and had been drawn back to those forbidden topics. This was her first opportunity to put any of those techniques into practice, and Wingard’s voice was in the back of her head, asking her if she really needed this to move her investigation onward.

It was her opinion that she bloody well did, and that he should shut up.

Taking the knife, she began carving a symbol into the dead man’s forehead. The design was all intersecting lines, the precision of which was made more difficult by the way the skin would move under the blade. Still, within a minute she had more or less perfectly etched the design in full, smears of dark, lifeless blood coating the blade. She wiped it on her sleeve – now for the minute sacrifice to flick the switch.

She pressed the point of the blade into the tip of her finger, the same finger she had used what seemed like a billion years ago for the blood to send the toilet ghost on his way and let the blood drip down onto the carving.

The dead man’s eyes swivelled up, his pupils narrowing to pinpricks as a ragged gust of cold air spread into his empty chest. Millie grabbed his head tightly in her hands and stared down at him.

‘This shell lives,’ he said. His voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. ‘Thank you.’

A thick knot formed in Millie’s throat, making it hard to get the words out. ‘Not exactly. It’s just a sort of temporary thing.’

The dead man’s expression turned dark. ‘I see. An interrogation. This shell understands. It will take solace in what little life it has been afforded. Ask your questions.’

Her fingers were digging harder into the sides of his head now, though he wasn’t pushing back. The books had said that he would, but perhaps that came later, when it was time to put him back in his box. For now, keeping control was the most important.

‘I need to understand what happened here.’

‘Death.’

‘I kinda need something more specific, mate.’

Dry flesh cracked as the dead man smiled grimly. ‘I am not inclined to be specific. My existence began when you breathed a weak gasp of life into this discarded shell and will end when you withdraw it. I choose to delay that eventuality for as long as possible.’

‘If you co-operate then perhaps—’

‘Hold your dishonest tongue. I know little, but the rotting meat of this shell holds memories, knowledge, through which I can recognise disingenuity. You have your purpose, and I have mine. There is no room for lies here.’

Millie nodded. What could she say to that? ‘If you’re not willing to be specific then maybe, you know, at least a little less vague?’

‘As it pleases my executioner,’ he said. ‘Death herself appeared before him, clad in the image of kin. She reaped, her bushels falling from their basket, overfull as it was, and scattered upon the floor. The rats came next, scuttling and skittering, gnawing at the rotting harvest.’

She blinked. ‘Fucking what? What does that even mean?’

‘It means what it means.’

Millie frowned. There had been nothing in the literature about bloody unhelpfully cryptic nonsense. She didn’t have the patience or the temperament to unpick that nonsense. Still, what choice did she really have?

She wished she had more magical muscle to hand. There would be no end of spells she could have used if she had learned the hows and the whys – conjure an image of the last thing a corpse saw, read the magical aura of a crime scene, things like that – but Wingard had never gotten around to those lessons. On some days, ones like today, she would get angry when thinking about that, then get sad for doing so. An unhelpful cycle of messed up feelings, but she’d come to accept them now – it was who she was, a small angry fuck up.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘So, he was killed by kin. He knew his killer, that much van Ives told me. This isn’t the new information. The whole bit with the rats though…’

‘Skittering, chittering, nibbling, and gibbering. Tearing at the harvest, tainting it.’

‘Is that supposed to be helpful.’

The corpse flashed her a toothy smile. ‘Created on a whim and thus I am whimsy.’

‘Great, okay, thanks. Let’s just walk through this, strip the poetics right out,’ she said. A hand came off the corpse’s head, intent on punctuating her words. Quickly, she remembered herself and returned it. ‘Something that at least looked like someone he knew came and killed him, probably another ghost. We know that. But the next bit, the bushels and shit, that implies that, what, there’s nowhere for them to go? What happens when there’s nowhere for the dead to go?’

The corpse clacked his teeth. ‘Rats.’

It had never occurred to her to really think about where people went when they died. Millie had fallen out of any semblance of a religion long before she came into her rudimentary magic, and learning all the ghost business had, for a while, made her think she knew all the answers in that regard. Ghosts just sort of go away when you banish them, that’s how it worked. But they had to be going somewhere, and if they weren’t, then perhaps that could go some way into explaining why they are getting all murdery.

‘Thanks for your help.’

‘Time to snuff the flame?’

She nodded. ‘Sorry.’

‘The spark shone in this shell for a time, that is enough.’

Pulling the penknife again, Millie carved a cross through the rune and the corpse deflated once more, back to a silent husk. She remembered to close his eyes this time, affording him what little respect the dead deserved.

As she got up, her attention was drawn to the gun.

No bullet holes.

Awkwardly, she crossed the room to the gun and picked it up again, working the slide to pop out a round. The action was stiffer than she expected, and despite its rugged construction she had the overwhelming urge to treat it like it was made of porcelain.

Millie knew about as much about guns as anyone who enjoyed the burgeoning cinematic trend of haggard B-list actors screening their mid-life crises for all the world to see, so she knew the basic construction of a bullet. Hot lead, not cold glass, was the order of the day. And yet, in place of the bullet itself, this round had a glass reservoir full of…

‘Rock salt,’ she muttered, turning back towards the corpse. ‘Someone’s been talking to the Goths, I see. No wonder you’re dead.’

Dropping the gun again, Millie pocketed the round. That gave her two reasons to go see them.

Three

The Goths liked to call themselves witches, but they had no right to use the term. They were the sort of people that had ingested too many paperbacks that bleated on about the healing power of crystals and how spitting in your crush’s sock and burying it under the threshold of their house will make them fall in love with you.

However, their worst sin, the one that made Millie hate them to the deepest, darkest core of her being, was that they were right.

Not all the time, of course. A lot of their beliefs were nothing but exploitative mass market dross, pre-packaged personality to make someone seem interesting, but there were enough nuggets in there if you knew how to sift.

And sift they did, carving out a respectable business to the petty dabblers of the city. When is a magic shop not a magic shop? When the Goths are the ones running it. Knock-off touristy hokum that wouldn’t turn Whitehall’s head, masking just enough actual magical shit to turn hers. It was an annoyingly smart way to do business, though Millie was still unsure whether that was their intention from the outset or not.

They all had the look of someone who bought into their own bullshit, after all.

It was raining heavily by the time Millie arrived at the shop, just another in the long line of little annoyances that the universe threw her way daily. Her boots squelched as she stepped through the door, and that was enough noise to draw the attention of the three women clustered around a small table in the centre of the room.

‘Young Millicent Thatcher comes to darken our door once again, sisters,’ said one. This one, Ida, was a good year or two younger than Millie. ‘A lecture we’ve earned, have we?’

The second, Chanterelle, raised a hand. ‘Nay, she’s here for a boon. There’s a steel in her eyes, sisters.’

Millie rolled her eyes. ‘Who says fucking nay these days, honestly?’

‘The same people what say boon with a straight face,’ said the third sister, Esoterica. ‘Them’s that like the pageantry a little too much. Rein it in, babes, you’ll make the moody bitch worse and then she’ll be here longer.’

‘Ew,’ Ida said, dropping the act. ‘She’ll scare all the customers away.’

‘Yes, the hordes of customers,’ Millie said, looking around the empty shop. ‘My resting bitch face does have that effect.’

Esoterica stood up slowly. Her outfit was more reserved than that of her sisters – while they championed the Lydia Deetz school of always looking like a moody teenager, Esoterica had confidently sashayed into the alluring blacks and stark lines of the subculture as it was today. Slender, tall, perfectly coiffed black hair that matched a cold complexion, she looked every bit the part the other two were struggling to portray. She was the least irritating of the three sisters to Millie, in no small part because she knew when to switch off the patter.

Although that ridiculous name she had chosen for herself did undercut this more than a little.

‘It’s dead tonight, babes. I just want you out because all this,’ she waved her hands in the air in front of Millie. ‘This negative energy? That can’t piss off soon enough.’

‘Trust me, I don’t really want to be in this bazaar of bollocks for long either,’ Millie said. She fondled the bullet in her pocket. ‘Thing is, I found one of your backroom specials on a dead guy and we need to have a chat about that.’

‘You’re not a bloody cop,’ Chanterelle said. ‘Where do you get off coming in here like you have any authority over us?’

Esoterica waved her off. ‘Babes, it’s fine. Millicent isn’t here to accuse us of anything untoward, right?’

‘Right,’ Millie said.

‘She’s going to say please and everything and then I’ll take her in the back and give her what she needs.’ This was followed with a wink that caused something unwelcome to stir in the pit of Millie’s stomach.

‘Fine. Please can we talk about this bullet that I found at a murder scene?’

Holding it between thumb and forefinger, Millie pulled the bullet from her pocket and showed it to the Goths. The two still sat at the table craned their necks to get their heads closer, but Esoterica snatched it straight from her hand.

‘Not the murder weapon then, so the victim was the one what had this?’

‘That’s right,’ Millie said. ‘I know what killed him, I just need some context on everything. That and one other thing.’

Esoterica beamed. ‘Well, I never! You want a round on The Machine? Let your freak flag fly, we can certainly arrange that.’

‘One thing at a time. The bullet?’

With a sniff, Esoterica walked to the back corner of the room and pulled a ledger from under a stack of books. She slammed it down on the table and leafed through the pages. When she found the page she was looking for, she slid a thin pen from inside the binding and twisted the nib. The nib retracted, replaced by a small blacklight bulb. She shone it on the paper.

‘Nothing, nothing, nothing… We’ve had a bit of a drought lately when it comes to people deserving of a backroom special. Ah, here we go, Nate Carrollson. Came in looking for ways to protect himself from ghosts, but he didn’t want any of the amulets.’

Millie snorted. ‘Probably because he knew that ghosts don’t give a shit about whether you’ve got a camphor puck around your neck.’

Ida slammed her hands on the table and started to stand, but again Esoterica waved her off. ‘Don’t let her get to you, babes. If we start sniping at each other about who has the most claim to this little underworld of magic, we’ll be here all night. This grumpy little snob is just trying to get a rise out of us. Wants to feel all in charge before she asks us to be nice to her.’

Slowly, Ida sat back down. ‘Well, she’s being rude.’

‘It’s how I was raised,’ Millie said. ‘Now, on topic, please? See, I said please that time too.’

Esoterica smiled with her eyes and brushed back a lock of hair. ‘It was noted, babes. But yes, your man bought these here because he said a pretty bad ghost was coming for him.’

‘So, he knew he was a target.’

‘He didn’t seem like the sort to plan ahead if that’s what you’re asking. He was pretty flush with terror, like he was between life-or-death situations. We get more than a few of those sorts show up.’

‘Sure, I bet you do. Did he say anything else?’

‘We don’t interrogate our customers, babes. But he did say that something was wrong, that’s why he needed the stuff.’

‘No shit.’

‘Extra wrong, smart arse. Said he just needed to stay safe until his friends came for him and he was going to lay low.’

Curious. Van Ives hadn’t said anything about this, and it felt like something she should have, all things considered. Perhaps she didn’t know, Carrollson hadn’t had time to report in. But then, he knew enough about ghosts to know that he needed specialised equipment to fight them off; van Ives had made it sound like she and her cell were completely over their head here, but apparently not so much that they didn’t know where to shop in an emergency.

‘So, about the second thing I’m here for,’ Millie said.

‘The Machine,’ Esoterica said, her eyes lighting up.

‘Don’t call it that.’

‘Well, we’ve never been able to settle on a name that didn’t make it sound all sterile, babes.’

‘I need—’ Millie faltered. She took a breath and tried again. ‘I need to talk to Her, and I’d like to come out the other side still kicking.’

‘Easy peasy trachea squeezy, babes. Sixty quid.’

‘Cash on delivery.’

‘Babes,’ Esoterica said, stretching out the word. ‘We can’t guarantee you an audience, you know that.’

‘Mate, the delivery is the whole me not dying thing. I’ll take my chances with the rest.’

‘She doesn’t trust us,’ Chanterelle said. ‘Won’t even pay us upfront because she thinks we’ll let her die. That’s rude.’

‘Putting the rude in prudent, I like to think,’ Millie shot back.

‘I like that one,’ Esoterica said. ‘The rude in prudent. We can do cash on delivery. Follow me.’

There was a curtain hanging over a doorway at the side of the room, and Esoterica wafted through it like a dark breeze. Millie followed her into the back, a small hallway with a thick fire door at the end. Esoterica slid back a bolt and pushed the door inwards.

The Goths had claimed ownership of The Machine since the end of the Dark Times. They had bought it at auction, some mage hadn’t shown up in time to pay his bill on account of being stuffed into a Whitehall black site, but the sisters liked to say they had been bequeathed it by mystical forces. It had had a reputation among the actual magical community for years before, however, as an invention of one Lucien De Sade.

Wingard had hated De Sade and, as a result, had made sure that Millie had known every single detail of the man so as to better protect herself. A sex magician of the worst kind, he had experimented with all manner of spells and apparatus so as to best extract power from the unfortunate he press-ganged into his servitude. The Machine had been designed to amplify a supplicant’s magical output, Wingard had said, through a process that De Sade referred to as ecstatic anguish.

At least, that was the plan. What it actually did was slowly and deliberately choke vulnerable young mages to death. This was, for Millie’s purposes, much more useful.

The Machine had the room to itself. It was a humble looking thing, a hospital gurney with tubes and wires splaying from it like the roots of a sterile plant. More medical devices were arranged around it, fanning out to provide a broad range of monitors and beeps.

Esoterica started to flip switches and the devices lit up. ‘Jacket and boots off and then up on the bed please. Oh, jewellery too. Drop that in the kidney dish over there.’

All things considered, Millie appreciated the professionalism. There were a great many things about the Goths that annoyed her, but they knew when to turn that off. Or at least Esoterica did. The woman’s entire demeanour had changed now, from low-key cheeky to focused and business-like. She was in the process of tying up her luscious locks as Millie slipped her boots off.

Everything stripped and stowed, Millie lay down on the gurney and turned to Esoterica. ‘Now what?’

‘Now I hand you the in-flight safety card, babes, and give you a moment to read it. Unless you’re an auditory learner?’

‘Reading is fine.’

‘Good.’

She handed her a laminated sheet of A4 card, festooned with colourful and simple pictures.

‘Not everyone who comes to see Her can read English,’ Esoterica said, spotting Millie’s reaction. ‘Plus, it just feels nice, right?’

Scanning the sheet, Millie took in the important points: no bitching about it ending earlier than she’d like, no spells, no early exits, no lawsuits. They all seemed fair. She handed the card back and closed her eyes.

Esoterica said nothing and she set to work strapping Millie into The Machine. Thick straps were fastened at the ankles and wrists, and then the rubbery collar around her neck. With a gentle hand, Millie’s chin was tilted upwards, giving Esoterica just a little more room to ensure the collar was positioned then, finally, the medical sensors could be attached.

‘How many people have you run through here?’ Millie said.

‘Enough that you knew to come to us,’ Esoterica said. She was placing a sticky pad onto Millie’s chest. ‘Not so many that we have a reputation. It’s a balancing act. You comfy?’

‘Not really.’

Esoterica smiled and crouched down next to her ear. ‘Good, it helps the experience if you feel uneasy. Still, I’m going to spoil that a little. My sisters and I don’t get on with you, babes, and I get the impression that’s pretty mutual.’

‘You’re posers.’

‘Successful posers, don’t do us dirty. But I’ll take that as a yes. Take this to heart though: whatever our personal or professional or whatever our differences are, when you’re in this chair I will keep you safe. Understand?’

‘Think I’d strap myself into this thing if I thought any different?’

‘Depends on how much you want the answers you’re after. But hey, this is routine. Now lie back and think of England.’

‘Gross.’

Millie took a deep breath and waited for things to get weird.

A switch clicked on one side of her, and the subtle whine of an air compressor kicked in. The collar on her neck began to expand at an uncomfortably slow speed, crinkling as it filled with air. The scent of the rubber grew thicker in her nose, the influx of air warming the material. Alarms started sounding in her mind, but she pushed them to one side; this was all according to plan.

Soon, the collar started pressing on her throat, gently closing it off. Her breaths grew shallow and strained, her body working against her mind to try to keep things running smoothly, masking her gasp and thrash against her bonds. Panic set in, a desperate and chaotic need to rip the thing from her neck, to gulp down that cold air in lungfuls. The straps held tight, however, and all her thrashing accomplished was to burn off what little oxygen she had left.

The fight drained out of her, and it took the panic with it. In its place, contentment and joy washed over her as the world turned fluffy and blurry and then, at last, faded away.

Millie Thatcher died.

Sort of.

With a start, she found herself in a busy office. Harried and hurried people were darting across a black marble floor, sorting papers from one teetering stack to another, their shoes squeaking. They were all but coloured streaks, but from time to time they would slow just enough for her to get a look at their faces; they were all the same person, a young woman with a button nose and hair like starlight.

A gap opened in the throng, providing a path through to the centre. A spotlight cracked on, bathing the gap with perfect whiteness. Sat cross-legged on the floor and illuminated by the light, the same woman smiled and beckoned Millie closer.

Weaving between the blurs, Millie joined her and sat on the floor across from her. Up close, the woman’s hair wasn’t just like starlight, it was starlight – glittering golds and reds cradled by a black and blue nebula that swam down to her shoulders. Her eyes were similarly black, white dwarf stars burning where the pupils should have been. All of this was heavily undercut by her warm and waifish smile, making her feel like an old friend.

‘I don’t think we have an appointment yet, Millie,’ the woman said. ‘Is Millie all right? Not Millicent?’

‘Never Millicent, thanks,’ Millie said. ‘And, um, sorry to barge in like this.’

‘Well, just don’t make a habit of it. Things are a bit busy over here as you might have guessed.’

‘That’s actually why I’m here.’

The woman leaned forwards a little, elbows on her boots. ‘I know. I’m very excited that you’re looking into this! Do you want to ask the questions, or shall I just give you the answers? You’re on a literal deadline right now, I guess. Near death experiences have a very strict time limit before they just become death experiences, as delightful as I try to be to be near.’

‘I didn’t expect you to be so—’

‘Gregarious and chatty?’ the woman interrupted. ‘I’m whatever I need to be for whoever I need to be there for. For you, semi-cute gothpunk with a motormouth – that’s the Death for you, apparently. Personally, I like this form.’

‘So, I guess, why are you so busy?’

‘Two people die every second, that’s 120 per minute. That’s a lot of work for me, especially when I don’t have anywhere to put them. It’s all hands on deck here, as you can see.’

‘Damn, the little corpse man was right.’

Death rocked backwards, stretching out her torso. ‘Yep. See, normally my sister handles the sorting. I’m Death, she’s Dead. I collect, she stores. But, thing is, she’s gone AWOL so I’m out here doing both jobs. I’m lacking in bandwidth, so things are getting a bit… screwy.’

‘You mean the murderous ghosts?’ Millie said. ‘That’s why I came to see you.’

Death waved her hand. ‘Nah, those spooky boys and girls aren’t directly to do with this. See, Dead is supposed to keep all the souls safe, like a big morbid bank vault. Without her around, the souls are sort of glomming onto each other, making their own vaults. But if Dead is Fort Knox, these ad hoc buggers are the shoe box under your bed. Your murder ghosts are the result of someone stealing your shoebox and rooting around inside.’

‘Ghost heists?’

‘Nothing so grand or cool. Maybe they’re saving that for the next universe-threatening crisis. Nah, this is small fry but important enough for you to deal with. No offence.’

‘You don’t want me to find your sister? That seems like the real issue here.’

Death smiled, her gaze drifting upwards. ‘I’ve already got a guy working that case. You’ve got your own thing to deal with, right? That Kaitlyn van Ives is one to watch, at least for me. Did you know she ripped a vampire’s head off? Makes you wonder why she’s so scared of a little ghost, huh? Anyway, you’re street-level, so tracking down the soul shoebox thief is the sort of street-level stuff you should be worried about.’

Millie frowned. She wanted to take that as an insult, but something about the way Death sounded didn’t let her do so, like she was hardwired to take everything the woman said in exactly the right way. Hell, maybe she was; it would certainly make it easier to drag people off the mortal coil if they couldn’t help but trust you, she supposed.

‘Is there anything useful you can tell me?’

Death slapped a hand on her chest in mock surprise. ‘Ouch! There’s that Millie Thatcher forked tongue.’

‘I didn’t mean—’

Death waved her off. ‘I know what you meant. It’s annoying to be told just the vague shit when people like me could just skip you to the end of the story. I could give you all the answers, and you know that. And I know you know that. And you know I know you… Look, point is, I know it’s annoying. I could give you the speech about how there are rules and yadda yadda, but the truth of it is that people like me, we don’t want things to be too easy for you.’

‘Even when it would really help with sorting out this ghost shit?’

‘My entire existence is ghost shit. You put out one fire and I’ve still got a whole forest burning away somewhere. Besides, I am helping. You just have to listen better.’

Again, Millie frowned. A faint buzzing had started in her ears, creeping across nerves and tickling at synapses. ‘Do you get off on being obtuse?’

‘Funny, isn’t it, how clients never tell the whole story, isn’t it? They tell you exactly what they think you need to know, even when they know it’s not the whole truth.’

‘You’re not a client.’

‘Sure I am. I have your business card right here.’ With a flourish like a stage magician, Death plucked a small square of white card from out of the air.

‘I don’t have a business card.’

‘You do here,’ Death said. ‘And stop getting so fixated on small shit. Pay attention to what I’m telling you.’

Millie’s eyes rolled back in her head for a moment, her vision blurring and flaring. Death flicked the card away and leant in a little closer, studying the young woman. She reached out, a cold hand cradling Millie’s cheek, the sensation piercing the fog.

‘No time,’ Death said. ‘Looks like it’s time to pull the plug. Try to remember what I said. Use that brain you pretend you don’t have. Tatty bye.’

With a smile that reminded Millie of childhood summers, Death drew back her hand and struck her across the face with the force of a heavyweight boxer. Millie’s head snapped back, her eyes unfocused and, she was sure, spinning like a cartoon. When the twinkly lights left her vision, a different face was staring back at her.

‘Welcome back, babes,’ Esoterica said, all business. ‘There’s a towel and some wet wipes on the stool next to you. Take your time but do bloody clean up after yourself before you leave, yeah?’

Millie’s head was swimming. The thoughts were coming slow and at such a crawl they barely fit together by the time they arrived, jigsaw pieces rammed through a screen door. Christ, she couldn’t even form decent metaphors, that’s how bad it was. There were hot pokers drilling into her temples, and a lump in her throat that stabbed at her each time she swallowed.

‘Clean up?’ she said, the words a croaked whisper.

Esoterica turned away, busying herself with the dials and readouts on the device next to the chair. ‘People have different… reactions to being choked to near death. Leave the equipment as you would hope to find it.’

Trying not to put too much thought into that particular statement, Millie dragged herself up and out of the seat. With an unsteady hand, she picked up the towel.

Four

Millie had bought an overpriced concoction from the Goths on the way out and was already regretting it. The overpriced honey-milk-burdock flavoured goo was actually helping with the pain in her throat and having a decent effect on the splitting headache that was still thumping away in her temples, which was really the final insult. How dare those charlatans sell something useful.

She held the flask in both hands and leant on her knees. The park was only fifteen minutes’ walk from the Goths’ shop, but it was as far as she could go before she needed a rest. The bench – dedicated to some local do-gooder who had died in the nineties – was nicely shaded by an oak in sore need of a tree surgeon. She felt a certain kinship with the manky old tree.

Once the oxygen had remembered how to reach the important parts of her brain again, she had found the hidden nuggets of wisdom in Death’s words easily. Maybe she was smart, or perhaps Death had just been unsubtly shoving the revelation down her throat. Millie had gone back and forth on which was most likely a few times.

Of course, van Ives was hiding something from her. Why wouldn’t she? The woman was public enemy number one, even if she had wanted to be forthcoming – which, again, why would she? – surely that was a personality trait that you had to cull if you wanted to stay one step ahead of the warlocks. Doubly so if you wanted to be a visible pain in their authoritarian arseholes at the same time.

But that didn’t exactly help her, now did it? Knowing someone was a lying rat meant nothing without being able to work around the lie. And she couldn’t do that without…

What was it Death had said about van Ives? Something about her ripping the head off a vampire?

Wingard had told her very little about vampires – we’ll deal with more local dangers first, before we look into the exotic – but he had taken the time to disabuse her of any lingering teenage romanticism brought about from the very sexy vampire novels that had clogged the public consciousness during her youth. Anyone who could overpower a vampire and rip its head off should have no trouble staring down a ghost. It wasn’t even as though Kaitlyn van Ives wasn’t known to be a consummate badass already, Millie had just let that sit by the wayside under the flattery of being recruited for her limited skills.

Christ, dealing with people was exhausting. Ghosts were better. Way more straightforward.

She took another gulp of the horrible but helpful drink. It coated the back of her throat nicely.

There were too many loose ends there for her to stitch this all together. Even if she could work out what omissions or outright lies van Ives had told her, she would still need to get her head around the whole murderous ghost-shoebox-battery-weapon thing, and that was completely new to her. She could focus on that first, though – no reason to believe that Death had been lying about that.

Finishing the drink, she got back to her feet. Time to search out a ghost.

For a city the size of London, finding ghosts was surprisingly easy. The amateurs and the YouTube enthusiasts made it look difficult by listening to people who were still very much alive – empty and abandoned places will always feel spooky, especially with the dark bricks and muted plaster of older city buildings. You want to find where the dead hang out, you talk to the dead.

A lot of the time, this meant Millie would just stumble upon ghosts, other times it meant finding the gaps in what the living would talk about. In this case, it had been a bit of both. A few months back, she had been drawn to a pub that seemingly moved around the city, luring in the young and the stupid to drain them of their life. A properly haunted building like that was rare, and even after sending the residents on their way it had been hard to completely shift. Every few weeks, the pub would make itself known again, luring in some ghostly clientele. Keeping the place from reaching critical mass had become a sort of second job for her, but it had its uses.

Chief among which was the ability to gather intel.

Today, the Dircks’ Head pub was parked between a Turkish barber and a row of old ATMs from a bank that had long since ceased to exist; a nondescript lacquered door with a small semi-circular frosted window that had not been there before, peering from between the bricks. Millie always seemed to know where it was these days, a talent she had decided not to interrogate too fully just yet.

Inside, the place was just enough dust to seem old without copious cobwebs ruining the cosy ambience. It had the old wooden booths and burgundy upholstery of all slightly outdated establishments, aesthetic shorthand for JD Wetherspoon can eat a basket of spiders, we’re for locals only.

Locals was a somewhat loose term, Millie had discovered. On her first visit, the place had been packed to the gills with the ghosts of coal miners from Yorkshire, sallow men and beefy boys with hacking coughs. Since then, the place had been poaching people from all over. It seemed that for whatever force was steering the Dircks’ Head, local merely meant dead.

It was slim pickings today, though. One booth was occupied by a pair of 80s yuppies, their stark suits and big hair demanding more attention than they were worth. At the bar, a woman with diamond earrings and a skirt so tight it made Millie nervous was sipping absinthe from a martini glass. Millie always started at the bar and worked outwards, but there was something else about this particular woman that drew her in.

She was quietly arguing with herself.

Dying messed with heads in a lot of ways, but rarely subtly. If people were going to start beating themselves up, they were not usually shy about it. Millie took a stool next to the woman, a cloudy pint already waiting for her; the pub’s attempt at pleading for her to not make a scene.

Up close, the woman was even more stunning and thoroughly out of place. If she had been alive, Millie would have assumed the woman was lost or stepping out on her husband, getting a tourist’s taste of the life of common people. In death, the Dircks’ Head had odd tastes.

‘I didn’t know this place served absinthe,’ Millie said. The foam on the top of her pint had a little skull drawn in it – cute.

‘Apparently it serves everything,’ the woman said in a voice that could cut glass. It was the sort of voice that took an army of dialect coaches working around the clock to achieve. ‘And, it seems, everyone as well.’

Millie smirked. Posh wanker in life, posh wanker in death. So, the world continues to turn. ‘I’m looking for some information.’

The woman took a long sip of her drink, though when she removed the glass from her lips the amount of liquid remained the same. ‘Anything I knew in life I have taken great pains to obliterate with this marvellously brutal drink in the time since.’

‘I’m not really interested in your life if I’m honest. It’s the post-death stuff I’m after.’

Her expression changed and she dropped her voice. ‘The headaches?’

‘Headaches?’

She took another long sip. ‘I was led to believe that one of the few benefits of my condition would be the freedom from pain and suffering. But the headaches… They are becoming too much.’

Millie rolled up her sleeves; the doctor was in. ‘That’s curious. Never known a ghost to feel pain.’

‘Well, I certainly—’ the woman began. In the middle of the sentence her head snapped to the side as though trying to make out a whisper somewhere behind her, then she winced and turned back to Millie. ‘Excuse me. I am reminded that I haven’t properly introduced myself. Anastasia Moreau.’

Millie shook her hand, Moreau’s wrist limp and aptly lifeless. ‘Millie Thatcher.’

‘Charmed.’ Another wince, longer this time. ‘Not now.’

‘Excuse me?’

Moreau blinked a couple of times. ‘Nothing. It’s nothing. It’s… the headaches. Sometimes I hear voices in them. Lord, why am I telling you this?’

‘I’ve got one of those faces.’

With a sniff, Moreau looked Millie up and down. It made something shiver in the base of the young woman’s back, a gentle tingle as the ghost’s eyes gave her the once over. They locked on her hair and narrowed slightly. ‘Indeed.’

For her part, Millie was enjoying watching the woman. The conversation wasn’t important really – it wasn’t as though she expected some random ghost to know anything about the weird metaphysical nonsense that was going on – but observation was telling her a lot. Yet another remnant of Wingard’s tutelage.

‘May I?’ Millie said, holding up a hand.

‘If you must,’ Moreau said before finishing her drink. The glass was full again by the time it reached the bar.

Millie folded her fingers into a succession of runic patterns, almost faster than the eye could see, and felt an ounce of power flare into her fingertips. She placed her thumb and pinkie finger on either side of Moreau’s forehead, her middle finger dead centre, and curled the other two fingers into her palm to complete the spell. Closing her eyes, she took a breath.

In truth, she had no idea if this would even work. This was a spell she used on the rare occasion she ran into a possession the Vatican hadn’t already gobbled up, a bit of magical probing to find the spooky bugger who had set up home in some unfortunate sod’s soul. Ghosts were significantly more soul than human though, so it stood to reason something would happen.

As soon as she made the connection, however, she felt them instantly.

So many distinct energies whirling around inside Moreau, it was beautiful in a way. They ebbed and danced and wove around, displacing what Millie reasoned was the essence of Moreau herself, the foundation colour. It was like dropping ink in water; the colours running and spreading into thin cloudy strands. Even as she watched, new energies burst into being, joining the morass and playing their part in muddying the waters even more.

‘This must be agony,’ she said.

Moreau snorted. ‘Must be.’

Reaching deeper, Millie caressed one of the interloping strands of energy. It shied from her touch, bending around her like grass in the wind, forcing her to push more forcefully to take hold. In her grip it fought back, pushing a pins and needles sensation back into her, making her extremities tingle and prick at her senses. But she needed a closer look, she needed to understand this phenomenon better. Perhaps, if she was careful…

Slowly, she began to pull on the strand. She hoped that she could pull the thread loose like de-threading a rope – a gentle pressure to coax it between the twists of the other energies, but not so much that it catches. At first this seemed to work, the energy smoothly working its way loose, but the more she pulled the tighter it began to cling on. There were even thinner threads of energy, she noticed, a lattice of shimmering nothingness that crept through even the smallest spaces between the threads. As she pulled, they grew taut and whatever they were latched onto started to cause Moreau immense pain.

Millie had missed the screaming, so engrossed in her task, and only realised it when Moreau pushed her back with a single forceful shove. The ghost was crying, yet her eyes seemed dull and foggy for a moment. What were those things doing in there?

It took a moment for the pair of them to compose themselves – Millie to regain feeling in her hands and feet and Moreau to wipe away the tears – but neither was overly keen to continue their conversation. Instead, Millie took a sip of the cloudy pint and let her thoughts wander out of her mouth.

‘Several ghosts all in one place, overlapping,’ she said. ‘A sort of soul batter, not a battery. All whisked up, made fluffy, until it’s impossible to see where one ends and another begins.’

‘What did you see?’ Moreau asked. ‘What’s happening to me?’

Millie ignored her. ‘You can’t unbake a cake. But you can’t make a cake if you don’t whisk the ingredients. Soul whisk? All the ghosts overlapping, they aren’t merging properly, but you can’t separate them either, not without leaving something behind.’

A puzzle piece clonked heavily into place, and she fell into silence for a moment. The eyes had been the catalyst there, the nudge she needed. The ghost of van Ives’ ex had been a soulless husk, a murderous wraith let loose on her, and now Millie knew how he had come to be.

Someone had plucked him from the soul batter, ripping essence from soul. Worst of all, it wasn’t even hard – Millie had little in the way of power and yet she would have been able to replicate the feat if she had pulled just a little harder.

This was going to need a more professional-sounding name than bloody soul batter.

She took another look around the room. The other ghosts were thoroughly ignoring the scene still, completely devoted to their drinks or their conversation.

‘I need to check something,’ she said, rising from her stool. ‘I’ll be back for you in a minute.’

‘Back for me? Whatever do you mean?’

Again, Millie ignored the ghost. What were the odds that she would find one of the afflicted ghosts so quickly? That was certainly a helpful coincidence, to run into one immediately. Or was it? There was a suspicion taking root in her mind now.

Slapping out the runic hand gestures over and over again, she began a circuit of the pub, reading the energies of every ghost present. Most paid her little to no attention, choosing to barely register her presence at all. The pair of 80s arseholes took notice long enough to fail at flirting with her but forgot her just as quickly as she moved away.

There were about eight ghosts in the pub at first glance. Not a single one of them was pure, each had at least one passenger lurking deep in their essence. It was impossible to count how many.

Millie started to think that Death had somewhat undersold the issue to her. It was the start of an epidemic. Hell, maybe even a pandemic.

All the ghosts were merging, little by little. There was no way that could be good.

Returning to the bar, Millie sucked down what was left of her pint. Again, the glass was full before she finished putting it down, a different design etched into the foam – a sad face. The pub knew it had been caught hoarding, and it knew what that meant Millie was about to do.

She fished around in her pocket for her pen knife but found her phone instead. It buzzed at her and she pulled it out; fifteen missed calls, all from van Ives. Curious timing, but at least the woman had managed to wait until Millie had something to go on. Well, judging by the timestamps she hadn’t so much waited as been ignored, but that was probably fine.

The phone buzzed in her palm once more, a text message. It could wait.

Placing the phone down next to her pint, Millie found her pen knife and set about carving the necessary runes into the wood of the bar top yet again. It was always the same spot, and though the strange magics of the pub would repair the damage over time, she was sure that the wood was wearing down a little faster in that spot.

Moreau watched her work. ‘Ah, you’re a wizard. That explains things.’

‘Not quite,’ Millie said, her eyes narrowing. ‘You know about this stuff?’

‘Benefits of having a cousin as a cabinet undersecretary. You hear a lot of tall tales, didn’t put much stock in them until I died. Hard to argue against any outlandish nonsense nowadays, I suppose.’

‘Yeah, well, my talents only go so far as making you lot a bit more mouthy and shoving you to the next rung of the immortal coil.’

‘You’re not what I imagined the reaper would look like, but I suppose you’ll do. Chop chop.’

The ghost downed her absinthe yet again, but it didn’t refill this time. She placed the glass down gingerly and locked eyes with Millie. The young woman had bristled at the ghost’s demanding tone but seeing her now even she couldn’t misread the intentions – perhaps Moreau didn’t know the actualities of what was happening to her, but she knew enough to be scared. That fear was enough to push this proud woman to accept oblivion on her own terms rather than any others.

She may have reached that conclusion a lot sooner if she knew the specifics of her condition, Millie thought.

One more time, the blade pierced the tip of her finger, and she dropped her energy into the spell. Again, a bright flash, a tangy static in the air, then silence.

Millie pulled a beaten-up box of plasters from another sagging pocket and sealed off the wound, downing her second pint for a measure of anaesthesia. The pub refused to refill it – sulking again, as it tended to do in times like this – but she was done here anyway. She knew enough to be going on with.

The notification light on her phone blinked up at her, reminding her of van Ives’ latest text. A couple of taps and a swipe opened it; an address and three letters.

SOS.

Five

The address was outside the city centre, out in the ring of smaller towns that had been subsumed into London as the urban sprawl had, well, sprawled its way down the Thames. This meant that it was not the mostly timely response to an SOS – a bus, two trains, and a taxi.

The taxi dropped her off at the end of the road, a bloated cul-de-sac of middle-class starter homes and finely mown lawns. Ordinarily, a woman like Millie strolling into one of these places would set the curtains twitching – the neighbourhood watch would peg her as a criminal on the prowl, or a wayward daughter coming home to make a scene – but she caught none of that as she walked down to the address van Ives had texted her.

The house sat atop a little mound that set it above the road, a detail adored by the sort of Englishmen who truly wished their homes were actual castles. It put the front door slightly above eye height, drawing her attention quickly. It was ajar, swaying ever so gently whenever the rising breeze licked at it.

Carefully, she walked up the drive and listened at the door. Silence. She pushed it open and stepped inside.

As outside, the interior of the house was still and dead, lacking the ambient energy of a lived-in home. The first door off the main hallway was the lounge.

‘Fuck me...’

Millie’s exclamation had been mostly under her breath, but Kaitlyn van Ives had heard it. ‘Yeah, exactly.’

Van Ives was sat in a small armchair, the formerly cream fabric yellowed with age, her elbows on her knees and her normally unruly red hair tied into a bun. In front of her, a man and a woman lay dead on the carpet, faces contorted in fear. It was only then that she tasted the same chill in the air she had encountered at the railway bridge.

‘Your ex do this?’

Van Ives nodded. ‘I assume so. You’re the expert; you tell me.’

Crouching down, Millie put the beck of her hand against the dead man’s cheek, nudging his lolling head to one side. ‘Well, I can conclusively conclude they are properly dead. In my professional opinion. Such as it is.’

‘Save our souls.’

‘What?’

Something had changed in van Ives. Her eyes hadn’t left the faces of the dead couple for even a second and her voice was flat. ‘That’s what SOS is supposed to mean, I think. You said Cameron’s soul was gone.’

‘Yeah! I’ve got a theory about that now, actually!’

‘Can you save theirs?’

‘I mean, I only talk to the dead. You want them breathing again, you need someone with a very different skillset.’

Van Ives pushed her thumbs into her eyes and exhaled slowly. ‘Never mind. Whoever is doing this… I’m going to hurt them. I need you to up your game, Thatcher. I know this is a bit more than you usually can manage, but you need to get your shit together.’

‘Hey, now, hang on—’

‘Maybe it’s a confidence thing,’ van Ives continued, talking over her. ‘Or motivation? Is money not enough? Threats then. Because someone is paying for this, and they are going to do so soon.’

‘Listen, I—’

‘Enough excuses!’ van Ives roared. ‘You failed them; do you understand that? They are dead because of your actions, or inactions. So, the question is whether it was incompetence or active malice…’

Millie took a step back. ‘Malice? What are you talking about? You called me here, I don’t even know these people!’

That was when she saw it, the crimson power crackling across van Ives’ knuckles. The woman’s fingers had been gripping at the arms of the chair tighter and tighter, charring the sturdy fabric as she drew in more power. It made the hair on the back of Millie’s neck prickle and rise, set her heart pumping. She had never seen proper magic before.

She didn’t like it.

Seething now, van Ives looked every bit the Bane of Whitehall. She got up slowly and, despite her trim stature, somehow made herself fill the room. Her anger made the room seem darker, Millie thought, until she spotted the light lensing in the woman’s fist – drawing in her power was, quite literally, draining the light from the room. She moved towards Millie, taking a wide step over the corpses, and the younger woman fell backwards onto her rear.

‘Then how did he find them?’ she roared again. Then she stopped and looked down at her hand as if it was the very first time she had seen it. ‘I don’t… What am I… Sorry. I’m so sorry.’

Van Ives released the power from her grasp, dispelling the energy. The room lit up a little again and Millie found that she had been holding her breath. She decided to let things play out a little more before she changed that.

Kaitlyn van Ives returned to the armchair, walking around the corpses this time, and slumped back into it, face dark. Her palms scratched over the scorch marks and Millie thought she caught an ounce of sheepishness in the woman’s face.

After a moment, Millie got back to her feet. ‘Hey, so, what the actual fuck was that? Huh? Jesus Christ.’

‘It takes a lot of work, being an ice queen,’ van Ives said. ‘There’s never enough armour for every angle.’

‘Are you going to elaborate or what?’

She waved a hand over the corpses. ‘These are my foster parents.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s not that bad, I was only with them a month or so a long time ago. Barely made an impression really.’

‘Yeah, because going all Ringbearer Galadriel on me definitely screams no big deal.’

Van Ives opened her mouth to respond and then closed it. Instead, a conciliatory nod told Millie that she had made her point. ‘There’s a lot of compartmentalising in this job, do you understand? Every comrade has to be fundamentally expendable, and you need to be able to jettison your feelings for them and keep going or the enemy will use that against you.’

‘And yet—’

‘Please, don’t interrupt,’ van Ives said, raising a hand. ‘I can take my lumps for that… outburst. But you’re not in control here, don’t let my moment of weakness go to your head.’

Millie gritted her teeth. ‘Fine.’

‘Sometimes, the people who fight with me die. It’s horrible, but it’s always a possibility and one you can prepare for. But this…’

‘You thought they were safe.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think about them at all, haven’t for over ten years. I was in and out so fast, they’re a footnote. What sort of person goes that deep when targeting someone? It doesn’t make sense. It cut me where I wasn’t defending, that’s all.’

She had a point there. Looking at them now, where they lived and, it seemed, the kind of people they were, there was no reason for Cameron or whoever was pulling his strings to go after them. They weren’t part of the underground, no magic or Whitehall ties, and only the barest of connections to van Ives. While she was hardly a tactical genius, she was struggling to see what going after them achieved.

‘Yeah, it doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘Maybe it ain’t supposed to.’

‘They’re targeting me, they wouldn’t do something like this at random. It’s a message.’

A message. A message. ‘Oh, hang on, I’m having a thought here. They are sending you a message.’

‘They must really hate me,’ van Ives said. She was staring at the corpses again. ‘They’re going to salt the earth behind me, kill everyone who has ever even met me.’

‘That’s morbid.’

‘It’s effective is what it is. A terror campaign puts people off associating with you. Going so deep means that they want to isolate me from as many people as possible. That’s a Whitehall move.’

Millie shook her head. ‘I know that the warlocks are like bogeymen in rubber heels, but this doesn’t seem like their bag.’

‘And what do you know of their bag?’

The young woman’s cheeks turned pink. ‘Er, not much in sort of, you know, direct terms…’

‘That’s what I thought.’

‘But I do know about the ghost stuff,’ she said, finding her stride again. ‘It’s just so extra. Why not just send a hitman round to shoot your foster parents? Same effect, considerably less energy required. You don’t use a rocket engine to cook a bloody egg.’

‘Whitehall can be decidedly extra when they want to, but I take your point. Unless the method is part of the message, like a show of power.’

‘I think we’re looking at this all wrong. It is a message. They’re not trying to kill you; they’re trying to talk to you.’

The room fell silent as van Ives stared at Millie. ‘How could you possibly come to that conclusion?’

‘I feel like they would just come for you directly if they wanted you dead, yeah?’

‘Which they did.’

Millie shook her head. ‘They did once. Your soulless ex-squeeze wasn’t even that aggressive at first. Maybe we misread him, or he just sucks at whole post-mortem booty calls. From what I’ve seen, your view of the world can get pretty warped once you’re, you know, not a part of it anymore.’

‘They certainly have my attention.’

There was something here, Millie knew it, but putting it into words was proving difficult. Was she deducing things now? God, this would have made Wingard absolutely insufferable; all his lessons and pressuring had been in an effort to unlock her potential, and now she was discovering she may have actually had some.

This whole thinking about things business had never been overly important before – she didn’t have to look hard to find the ghosts – but she had to admit she was enjoying it a little now. It felt good to be active, to have momentum. In fact, she had been to more places in one day than she had in the past year.

She felt like she knew what she was talking about, which was a first.

‘What if we let them talk?’

‘How do you mean?’

Millie crossed her arms. This was where things started to fray a little in her head, but she had to push on. ‘You said they found a gap in your armour, and maybe you’re right, but what if the reason they managed that is because they’ve been gathering intelligence?’

‘Doing ghost recon?’

‘Yeah,’ Millie said. ‘If they think you’ve been ignoring the message, maybe they are looking for a more fitting messenger. Ghosts are kind of doing this thing right now where they’re all glomming together into little blobs of spooky essence – it’s a whole thing. Maybe they’re talking to each other and sharing information.’

Van Ives’ eyes flared again. ‘Killing my people just to find a way to talk to me? Is this guy a bloody incel or something?’

‘I’m going to guess you don’t always keep the best company. Know any killers, do you?’

‘Several.’

‘Want to ask our hit-spook who it was that hired him?’

‘Absolutely. What do you need?’

‘Time,’ Millie said, surveying the room. ‘Time and space. Not in a, like, sci-fi way. Can you help me clear the floor?’

Together, the pair started pushing back the furniture and, with as much respect as they were able, moving the bodies until a big enough patch of carpet was clear. Next, Millie searched the kitchen for a knife sturdy enough to slash the carpet and cut out a large circle a couple of metres in diameter. She cut deep, enough to score a matching circle into the floorboards beneath which she went over a second time to make sure it had no gaps. Carpet out the way, she traded the kitchen knife for her pocketknife and started on the detailing.

This was going to take some time, and she could feel van Ives staring at her as she worked. Each tiny little rune had to be perfect or the spell would be completely unpredictable. The more runes, the more chance for variation. Each rune was a command, a law, reacting in concert with the others around it. The simpler the better.

But this wasn’t going to be a simple spell. Sure, given the magical muscle to whip up a holding circle with a piece of chalk and a grunt, putting this together would have been easy. Millie Thatcher wasn’t that sort of wizard, though. She needed her tools, a little bit of control and order in her workings. The runes gave her that, a constant. Putting each rune in the wood made them real, built her up, and told her she knew what she was doing.

Which she was well aware she absolutely did not. This was a ridiculous plan born of someone trying so desperately to impress someone important that she was willing to do something dumb and potentially dangerous just to look cool.

So that was a personality trait she still hadn’t grown out of then. Cool.

Carving the runes and designs took several hours in the end. It was too complicated a design to do entirely from memory so the deeper into it she went the slower the work became as she had to calculate the connections of each inscription. By the time the outer ring was completed Van Ives had started pacing. This didn’t help matters either, but it was preferable to the focused observation from before; having someone second-guessing her work at this point would slow her down even more.

If Millie had set herself a deadline it would have been sundown, which came and went a good hour before she was finished. Still, when the work was finally done, she took a step back and admired her work.

It was a complicated spiral of stark lines and delicate scrawl, intertwined around each other to such a degree that it was impossible to see where each started and ended. Every stroke of the knife had a purpose, and it buoyed her to see that she could read it even now. She had not been sure it would work until it was finished, but she let the optimism creep in now.

‘Et voila,’ Millie said, snapping the knife shut. ‘One spirit trap, made to order.’

Van Ives paced a full circuit of the trap and hunkered down next to it. ‘How does it work?’

‘It’s magic, innit.’

‘Indulge me.’

Again, there was a flare in van Ives’ eyes. If this was what it meant to be a magical heavyweight, Millie was happy to be well below that level. ‘I mean, it’s a trap for spirits. Like your typical magic circle, you get something inside it and the spells and stuff put up a wall. This is better than that though, more specialised. Only works on ghosts, but it works well. In theory.’

‘Better than a magic circle?’

Millie shrugged. ‘In theory. I’ve never had cause to craft one before. I’m all about sending ghosts packing, not keeping them around. But it’s simple enough if you know your runes. If I’ve got the pattern down right, easy peasy and much more permanent.’

‘And if you’ve got it wrong?’ van Ives was squinting at a rune at the five o’clock position.

‘Shit goes bad and we get an angry ghost all up in our business. Which, to be fair, you’ve already got so we don’t lose anything.’

Van Ives stood up and brushed her hands. There was a small smile on her face, but she looked far from happy. ‘Now what, we just wait?’

‘Pretty much,’ Millie said. ‘We just have to hope that whoever is trying to have a creepy chat with you is going to make the most of his new intel. Makes sense he would at the earliest convenience, yeah?’

‘You wait for an opportune moment. Going off half-cocked gets more people hurt than is necessary. You collect, you collate, you strategise. You use what you know as a scalpel, not a hammer.’

‘Mate, I know enough to make a fist. That’s about as far as I go in this analogy. I’m street level.’

‘What?’ van Ives frowned.

‘It doesn’t matter. But sure, maybe we make you a more enticing target. Bait the trap a little.’

With a nod, van Ives stepped into the centre of the circle and snapped her fingers. The air thrummed as tiny lights no bigger than pinpricks started to blink into existence around her. They danced and swirled like fireflies, lighting up her face. ‘How about this? The reality television of magic spells; looks pretty, does nothing, draws attention.’

‘Honestly, we’re off the edge of the page here. Might work, I guess? Ghosts are normally drawn to places, not people. Then again, they drew you to a place so I can’t imagine they will make you wait long if my theory is correct. How did they get you here?’

One of the lights flew into van Ives hair, flickering in such a way to make it look like fire. She pulled the tie from the bun and let her hair fall naturally again. ‘Unhealthy paranoia. I remember the people who… I pay my debts is the thing, and I keep track of the people I owe. My tech guy taps government lines to keep us safe, that includes the police. The neighbours were worried and that was enough for me to come running.’

‘So other people in your organisation know about your ties here?’

‘Not really. The watchlist is long and it’s not as if you need to be dear to a member of the cause to get on there, just significant for some reason. It’s not a secret, but it’s not like I tell people my life story. They were on there as a tiny precaution, nothing more.’

A breeze caressed Millie’s cheek, brushing her hair across her face. ‘It’s starting. I can feel the chill.’

Instantly, van Ives was all business. The lights were gone, and she was in that familiar fighting stance. ‘Quick, tell me what I need to know.’

‘Get the ghost past the outer ring and you’re done. Also get out of the ring yourself at that point, it won’t completely paralyse them, anything inside the trap is fair game.’

Within seconds, Millie could see ice forming on the inside of the windows and her breath turned into vapour in the air. This was a stronger, faster chill than before with Cameron; it had more purpose, was more thoroughly dialled in. Again, she reached for the salt in her satchel though she was starting to run low. It wouldn’t be needed; the trap would hold.

The ghosts manifested with a shrill scream that poisoned the air, leaving an echo that rang around the room. They climbed from the wall, their passing breaking off small shards of plasterboard and peppering the carpet. With a lurch, they pulled themselves free and stared at van Ives with their dark voids.

If seeing the empty ghosts of her foster parents upset the woman, Millie couldn’t see any sign of it. Seeing the bodies had clearly upset her, but the ghosts barely moved the needle when it came to reactions. She beckoned them closer, determination etched on every line on her face, luring them in. Mouths open and arms reaching forward, they followed her lead, stepping blindly into the trap. A ripple of blue light washed around the edge of the circle, locking them in.

It was simple and without ceremony, but it worked. No flash, no sizzle, just results. That was why she liked runes – they had enough character to them that they didn’t need to show off.

The pair brushed up against the edge of the trap, still trying to follow van Ives as she stepped back and further away. Their features flattened and squished as they pressed up to the invisible wall, their feet scraping soundlessly over the floor as they kept trying to find purchase. It was not a desperate act, but mindless and insistent. Van Ives circled them, and they tried to follow, faces sliding over the metaphysical surface.

‘Well, this is better than the last time,’ van Ives said. ‘But I don’t see how we’re going to get anything out of them. There’s nothing in there.’

‘There’s enough in there for them to recognise you. Try talking to them.’

Van Ives frowned but got a little closer to the edge of the trap. ‘Mark? Lauren? Do you recognise me?’

The blank faces were already staring at her, but Millie was sure she saw a shift in their attention when van Ives spoke. It was an almost imperceptible tilt of the head, very much like a puppy except not nearly as adorable.

‘It’s working,’ Millie said. ‘Keep going.’

Van Ives stepped closer. ‘Who’s doing this to you?’

‘Not doing…’ The voice came form the direction of the ghosts, but it didn’t fit their mouths. It was a louder and discordant sound, just shy of a cacophony but certainly more than two voices in unison. ‘Not doing not doing not doing… Done.’

‘Okay, yeah,’ Millie said, taking van Ives by the shoulder and pulling her back a step. ‘Not a great sign when they talk like that.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘No idea, never seen it before. Doesn’t seem like it would be a good sign though, does it?’

‘Done to us,’ the ghosts continued. ‘Done to us done to us done to us for you. For Katie. Little angry Katie.’

The colour drained from van Ives’ face. ‘How could this possibly be for me?’

The ghosts shimmered and rippled like a bad television set. ‘Aid you save you help you protect you.’

‘They were trying to get a message to you,’ Millie said. ‘Huh.’

‘They could stand to be a little clearer. If people are dying for this message, it better be important.’

‘It is it is it is it is,’ the ghosts continued, voices echoing. Then, suddenly, they were gone and, in their place, stood a young man with blonde ringlets and tired eyes. ‘It is. God, that’s hard. Hi, boss.’

‘Lucas?’

‘Been a while.’

‘You’ve been dead.’

Lucas shrugged. ‘I’m aware. Look, I don’t think I can hold this much longer. I need you to listen.’

Millie’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t been expecting lucidity at this point, but then Moreau had been lucid. If it was the same condition, and she had no reason to suspect otherwise, Lucas was clearly in an advanced stage.

‘You died a year ago,’ van Ives said. ‘Why now?’

‘Warlocks got me outside Solihull,’ Lucas said. He was wincing. ‘Spent a long time lost in my own head. I tried talking to you, but you wouldn’t hear me.’

Millie raised a hand. ‘Hi! Yeah, so, being dead can be a bit disorienting, plus most people don’t want to see the dead. You have to try really hard for most to notice you.’

‘I’ve been trying,’ Lucas said. His voice distorted, more voices pushing through for a moment. ‘It’s hard, so hard. I wanted to warn you, boss. We’re losing. Whitehall are into some bad shit, really bad. Worse than we knew. The vampires—’

‘I know,’ van Ives said. ‘We’ve been working with someone on that front. We’re going to bring them down, Lucas. Just like we always talked about.’

‘You can’t. We can’t. But that’s fine, what I wanted to tell you was I found a solution! We can hide and they’ll never find us.’

‘We don’t hide, you know that. We fight.’

‘We lose!’ Lucas shouted, again his voice distorting. His teeth were grinding. ‘Eventually we lose. Whitehall are too far gone; you can’t fight that and win. But we can move past them. It’s safe here.’

‘Oh, wow,’ Millie said. ‘I see where this is going. Honestly, this is a new one on me.’

Van Ives shot her a look. ‘What?’

‘Your boy Lucas here,’ Millie said, giving him a wave. ‘He’s gone native. He likes being a spooky bugger, thinks it keeps him safe from the warlocks.’

With a snarl, van Ives rounded on Lucas. ‘You’ve been killing our comrades to keep them safe?’

‘They didn’t understand either until they were here,’ Lucas said. ‘But it’s the only safe place. They can’t touch us here, not unless we want them to. And now, something is different. They’re all here, in me. We’re together, boss. It’s… it’s indescribable.’

‘We’ve officially reached loony ghost nutter levels here,’ Millie said. ‘Neatly wraps up the whole spectral hitmen stuff though, right?’

Silently, van Ives turned away and put her face in her palms. Millie recognised that action, hiding tears that were for her alone; she’d been there more than once herself. If she had been braver, Millie knew she would have had to take the initiative here and banished Lucas and his roommates without a word. That would have been a kindness really, saving van Ives from seeing the end of the conversation, the part where Lucas would become really unhinged.

It didn’t take a psychological genius to see Lucas’ view of the world was skewed as hell. Maybe he had a point if Whitehall were as dangerous as he was saying, but she knew a lot more about the dead than most people. If he liked his situation, he wasn’t seeing clearly.

But there was no telling him that, and no benefit to telling van Ives. Lucas was too far gone to want to hear anything about the mind fog, the dream-like veil that takes all ghosts sooner or later. The dementia of the grave, eroding a person until just a few core concepts remain, repeating mindlessly on loop. It was the fate of all ghosts if left unchecked, but why bother telling people that? The living rarely want to be dead for the fun of it, and the dead can’t do anything about it.

‘Get rid of him,’ van Ives said without looking up. ‘Get rid of them all.’

‘Come on, boss,’ Lucas said. ‘Think about this! It’s a good plan.’

‘It’s not a plan! It’s little more than suicidal surrender! It’s—’

Millie interrupted the argument before it could really get going. She had been idly doodling the necessary rune on her palm while Lucas and van Ives had been chatting, meaning it didn’t take her long to put on the finishing touches and trigger the spell. The flash of light was brighter this time than even that in the Dircks’ Head, and it was accompanied by a crack of thunder so loud she worried it may have blown out her eardrum.

When her vision came back, Lucas was still in the trap. He didn’t look pleased.

‘We don’t want won’t want can’t want to go. Not without boss without Katie without The Bane,’ he said. His voice was cacophonic again, his appearance shaking and jerking seemingly at random. No, not random, parts of his roommates were coming through – an arm, a trouser leg, an ear – a visual melange to match the voice.

‘Thatcher,’ van Ives said. She was backing away, red energy dancing across her knuckles. ‘Maybe you should get behind me.’

She didn’t need to be told twice; Millie was behind van Ives inside a second. ‘That’s never happened before. I don’t know—’

‘Then work it out. You’re the expert, intuit something.’

‘That’s not how this works!’

The Lucas thing was pressing itself against the walls of the trap now, even flatter than the ghosts of van Ives’ foster parents had been. His eyes were growing dimmer and dimmer, an inky blackness dragging them inwards.

Van Ives raised her hand, she didn’t need telling the trap wasn’t going to hold now. ‘Yes, it is. Tell me what’s happening. Walk me through it. Sounding boards work. Give me the rundown.’

‘Uh, I… Sure? I guess? Okay… Okay…’ Millie took a breath and tried to concentrate. ‘Banishing always works unless… Oh! Unless the ghost is very strong willed. That’s why you talk to them and chill them out if you can first, get them to accept it.’

‘And Lucas was far from accepting anything,’ van Ives said.

The air pressure was rising as the Lucas thing pressed harder against the side of the trap. Millie couldn’t see or hear anything changing, but she could feel the trap buckling against him. The sheer determination to do that was frightening.

‘There’s more than just him in there,’ Millie continued. ‘Several wills working together, I guess that counts as strong willed enough to mess with the banishing. If we can’t banish him, have to think the trap won’t hold him either.’

‘Can we reason with him?’

Millie shook her head. ‘No. I think we messed up. It might not have banished him, but we jolted him enough that he lost his grip, the others are too entwined with him now. We shook up the bottle, it’s all one colour now. I think we’ve driven him feral.’

There was a spike in air pressure as the trap failed, an entire floorboard disintegrating into jagged splinters and breaking the circle. Lucas was out like a rabid wolf, lurching for van Ives and Millie with inhuman speed. Van Ives let loose a crackling bolt of magic at Lucas, but he had that scouted, he rolled to the side and it obliterated a section of wall behind him.

He didn’t see the follow-up coming, though.

As Lucas was mid-roll, van Ives’ other hand had slid into the small of her back and drawn a sawn-off shotgun from her waistband. By the time he finished his dodge she had it squarely aimed at his face. It roared when she pulled the trigger, blasting him back across the room. With a flick of the wrist, she flipped the gun open and ejected the spent shells, racking in two fresh ones.

‘Salt rounds,’ van Ives said. ‘A bit more oomph than a handful of the stuff.’

‘The Goths sell you that?’

‘Yes, actually.’

‘Figures,’ Millie said. This wasn’t the time to complain, but even if it had been she was already too annoyed by how cool the display had been.

Van Ives aimed and fired again, forcing Lucas to back up once more. Again, she racked in a pair of new shells. ‘I’m buying you time to think here, so bloody do it! It’s not like I can fit many of these shells in these jeans.’

‘I… this is a lot of pressure.’

Another blast, this time it only winged Lucas. He was getting closer. ‘Strip it down. Simple solutions. But fast. Simple but fast.’

Millie’s stomach roiled and tensed. It was supposed to be fight or flight, not flight or vomit. But she could do this, she just had to get out of her own way.

Strip it down.

Problem: Lucas and the other ghosts in his head were too strong to banish. Too many of them in one place meant their wills were too powerful.

Solution: Make them weaker. Easy peasy. Just wrestle a powerful ghost with all your muscles.

Except she didn’t need to do that, did she?

‘I’ve got a great plan,’ she said, dropping to the ground and snapping open her knife. ‘When I tell you, stamp your heel down as hard as you can. Try not to move until then.’

Another shotgun blast. The shells clattered down to the floor next to Millie’s face. ‘Work fast. On my last shells here.’

The knife was dull after carving the trap, but it had enough of an edge to whittle out this last little rune. And to draw enough blood to smear on the hell of van Ives’ boot. Now for the real plan.

She waited for the final roar of the shotgun and came around from behind van Ives in time to intercept Lucas. Fingers folded, she thrust her hand onto the Lucas thing’s forehead, her limited magic connecting her with his energies as she had with Moreau. In a split second she was under the bonnet and into his inner workings.

It was a mess in there. Millie found it impossible to tell how many ghosts were sharing with Lucas, but their energies were so entangled now that she wasn’t even sure sharing was the right term. They had subsumed each other almost completely, with the barest of strands of individuality left.

But she only needed one.

Reaching in, she grabbed a strand and pulled, harder and less gently than with Moreau. There was resistance as it caught on the fibrous morass, but it took only a little effort to break that and start to pull it free. She could feel bonds breaking and snapping, but without the soul ties woven throughout the energy it was quick work. With one last gasp of exertion, she wrenched the energy free and threw it out into the world.

From the outside, it looked like she had slapped Lucas on the forehead and a second ghost had shot out the back of his skull like a rocket. He staggered back but Millie kept her hand in place, drawing out another, then another, expelling ghost after ghost until the room was full of confused spectres and Lucas was as alone as she could manage.

Her power exhausted, she let her hand drop and smiled. ‘Man, how cool am I?’

Lucas looked around in shock, took in the scene around him, and then plunged his arm into her chest. He squeezed and she could feel his fingers around her heart as he lifted her up, the other ghosts getting to their senses and clustering around, staring her in the face.

Then, mercifully, the sound of heel striking wood, a bright flash, and then falling.

Six

‘I figured that was the signal.’

Millie had woken up with van Ives carefully hoisting her onto a nearby sofa. She had her fingers to Millie’s wrist, counting her pulse.

‘I’m guessing it worked?’ Millie said. There was a pain in her chest that was radiating out with each heartbeat – she could feel her veins.

Van Ives finished counting and placed Millie’s hand onto her own chest. ‘We’re still here. Smart plan, if a little on the desperate side.’

‘I wasn’t sure it would work.’

‘Last lesson,’ van Ives said. ‘Always have a contingency, assume your plan won’t work. If you want to get above street level, you’re going to want to start thinking that way.’

Millie sat up. It was a mistake. ‘Who says I want to get above the street?’

‘No-one, but you can’t deny that was fun, right?’

‘Fun?!’

Van Ives laughed and it was genuine this time, warm and just a shade adorable. ‘Well, either way, I think we can safely say you’ve fulfilled your contract. You’ll have your money by the end of the week.’

The more she breathed, the more the pain started to subside. That had to be a good sign. She let it sink down to a dull ache before she tried to stand up. ‘So that’s it? We’re done?’

‘Pretty much,’ van Ives said. ‘Nothing else left to do, is there?’

‘Well, there is the whole murderous collection of super ghosts thing.’

‘You sent them packing. It’s done.’

‘But your boy isn’t the only one. There’s lots of them, it’s spreading. He was the worst I’ve seen, sure, but if there are more like him out there…’

Van Ives threw up her hands. ‘Not to sound insensitive, but that’s not my problem right now. This needed dealing with because it was in the way of what I do. That done, I’m back to work. You want to investigate this, that’s up to you. Might give you a bit more of a purpose than trolling pubs and clubs for dead guys though. Think on it.’

With that, the woman turned and made for the door. She stopped in the doorway, running her hand over the wood.

‘What?’ Millie said.

‘Hm?’ van Ives said. ‘Oh, nothing. See you round, Thatcher. Thanks for the help.’

Millie let her go, she didn’t really have the heart – she hated herself for that pun, but it was medicinal – for conversation now anyway. She just wanted to go home, sleep for about a week, drink a lot of cheap beer, and then do the adult thing and start looking into this.

She sat in the house for an hour before she finally left, trying to decide between calling and ambulance or taking a nap in a dead couple’s bed. Ultimately, she decided on neither and called a taxi to take her home. Her overdraft could handle the strain until van Ives’ money came through.

The taxi got her home fast and didn’t charge her extra for the drool she left on the window from napping during the journey. She paid the driver and went inside, popped a couple of painkillers, and took herself to bed.

Her head had barely touched the pillow when her phone rang. She didn’t recognise the number, but she could guess who it was.

She answered.

‘Sorry,’ said van Ives from the other end of the phone. ‘I meant to give you your space, but I’ve got a situation.’

‘Another one?’ Millie said, putting the phone on speaker and rolling over.

‘It’s not ghost related, but if you’re looking to move up in the world it might give you an in.’

‘I just want to sleep.’

‘You can sleep when you’re dead,’ van Ives said, and Millie could hear the smile. ‘Hear me out.’

‘God, fine! Go on, but please hurry up. I’m so tired.’

Van Ives chuckled. ‘This will put a bit of a spring in your step. How’d you like to join me and some friends for the most important heist in British history?’

Thanks For Reading

I hope you enjoyed the book (if you made it this far then I’m going to assume you at least didn’t hate it), and I’m very thankful for you taking the time to read through Millie Thatcher’s first little adventure.

If you enjoyed it, or even if you didn’t, please consider writing a little review. Writers can’t grow without feedback, and pretty much every comment received will give me something to work on in the future. This is especially useful for series like this one; I want to make sure I’m giving you what you want to read, after all!

So, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads if you want, and if you’re interested in keeping up to date with what I’m doing and future releases you can find me at @stevetheblack on twitter or even sign up to my newsletter from my website at stevekpeacock.com (you even get a free Warlocks of Whitehall novella for doing so!)

The WARLOCKS OF WHITEHALL series

Lore and Order

Hair of the Dog

Red Peace

Other books by Steve K Peacock

Diplomancer

Cold Dawn

Ghosts on the Wind