The route back from the middle of nowhere by thing-you-don’t-drive-yourself was a total shitter, so even though I’d got up at ridiculous-o-clock I wound up getting into my office well after ten. Part of that was because as well as avoiding the car I was also trying to avoid the tube. Once you realised how easy it was for a wizard to hijack the entire underground into a mythologically resonant proxy for the underworld, you felt safer being able to see the sky.
To say that business had been slow recently would be—well, accurate. On account of how slow it had been. Of course since my original partner had died way too long ago and my new partner-assistant-sidekick-best-friend was in a state of indefinite suspended animation, I had literally nobody to blame but myself. True, it’s not like the economy was exactly rosy right now what with everything that was going on in the world, but if I was being really, really, super honest and self-scrutinising, the dip in billable hours probably had at least a little bit to do with my wacky habit of showing up at noon, passing out drunk on my desk, or staying away from work for weeks on end because I couldn’t see the point in carrying on with anything even spitting distance from normal any more.
I flipped the old-fashioned open/closed sign on the window, which still read Kane and Archer, meaning it was now two fatal cockups out of date. Then I sat at my desk and for about one point three minutes allowed myself to feel proud of the fact that I’d got into work before noon for once. Of course my pride drained away like coffee grouts down a sink when I realised that now I was actually in work I was still just sitting around and—before I could finish the thought there was a sharp rap on the door. Shit, this wasn’t a client was it? I didn’t realise I was still allowed to have those.
The silhouette on the other side of the frosted glass looked familiar somehow—although with the classical figure and the lighting, it might have been that I could let myself pretend she was Lauren Bacall.
Turned out that wasn’t it. The door opened to reveal a raven-headed goddess who looked like what you’d get if a lonely weirdo carved his perfect woman out of marble then defied all the laws of gods and men to bring her to life. And when I say she looked like that, I mean that was exactly what she was. And for a moment which could seriously, seriously go fuck itself I forgot that Elise had sisters—all variations on the same girl that this arsehole wizard called Russel had been creating then discarding since who knew when—and wondered what the hell had brought her back to me. Except no, that wasn’t how it worked. This was the Gods or the Universe or Fate or whatever screwing with my head.
“Fuck.” I said. I was staring. I was definitely staring. And I knew I should stop but I couldn’t. “Sorry, I should be able to do this by now, but which one are you?”
She looked blank. “Which what am I?”
“Never mind.” I knew about five variations on the Elise model running around the city, and since the rest had all met each other, this must have been the eldest. The one who’d got engaged to an estate agent from Brentford. “How can I help you?”
There was this nervous air about her, like she wanted to say something but was scared to. “I had your name from a friend,” she told me. “He said you were—that you were open minded about unusual cases.”
“Your friend was right.”
“My husband has gone missing.” I couldn’t help staring at her—the Elises were all different if you looked closely, and this one was by far the most natural-seeming. She sat down in the chair opposite me where any of her sisters would have stood for preference, especially if they were upset. “The police say that there is nothing they can do as he’s an adult and can make his own decisions, but I worry that something”—she gave me the big eyes—“something terrible might have happened.”
This was getting rough. Once I’d realised that Elise had started out in life as some guy’s creepy magic fuckbot, I’d tried really, really hard not to sexualise her. That had got harder when I met Beth, the one who was basically an evil dominatrix enforcer, but I’d still mostly managed. Now another identical woman was sitting opposite me doing the full help me Mr Spade bit and it was sending my mind to some very awkward places even without the reminding-me-of-a-woman-I-got-killed element. “And why do you think that?”
“It’s hard to explain.” She glanced at her hands, which were folded decorously across her knees. “You see, I worry that something may have happened to him because of me.”
I made a “go on” kind of noise.
“You may find this hard to believe, Miss Kane. But I’m—I’m not human.”
Yeah. No shit.
3
Agents & Estates
I decided against telling the client that I probably knew more about her than she did about herself. It would have felt cheap. Instead I let her tell me her story, which was less horrific than Elise’s by an order of wasn’t-thrown-in-an-actual-dump. From what she said, I was certain she’d been Russel’s first girl. For a start he’d called her Galatea, meaning she now went by the somewhat odd name of Galatea Brown. Then there was the way he’d got rid of her. Instead of trying to sell her or destroy her like he had with the others, he’d abandoned her one day in the middle of London and hoped that would fix everything. She’d wandered around Lambeth for a long time—not needing to eat or drink made it more bearable but having no friends or home or any idea what the fuck was happening to you while you stood on the street and hoped somebody would take you in seemed like it would still be fucking nightmarish—before finally meeting this dude called Edward Brown. He’d picked her up, helped her find somewhere to stay, generally done the gentleman routine. I say gentleman, but since she wound up ambiguously married and subsequently abandoned for the second time in her short life, I wasn’t sure the guy got a pass ulterior-motive wise.
“Eventually I moved into his flat with him,” she explained. “He had been very good to me and he made me happy. He never pushed me about where I had come from. I think he thought I’d escaped from some manner of criminal organisation, and he was very protective of me. We had trouble getting a marriage license because I have no formal identification, but he spoke to some people and arranged it somehow. I am a real legal person now, or I pass for one.”
I made a mental note to check up on that—legal reality was a tricky thing and I didn’t totally trust Eddie Baby to have been straight with her. “Any idea who these people he spoke to were?”
“No. He did it all through his work, and I never found out how.”
Not super helpful, but the work was a possible lead. “And have you any other ideas about what might have happened?”
She reached inside her purse for a piece of paper. “He left me this, pinned to the fridge with a magnet.”
It read I’m sorry. Don’t look for me. I wasn’t sure if that was suspicious or just shitty. I mean he’d basically ditched his wife by post-it. “What do you think it means?”
“I worry that he’s in danger. That something magical from my past or some criminal he had to work with to arrange my papers came and took him.”