I could see him shrugging in my mind’s eye.

  “Blood’s a common magical ingredient. You know that.”

  “Is it common to sneak down alleyways and hand over big wedges of cash for it?”

  The music stopped in the background.

  “No, but I can’t really tell you anything without getting my hands on the blood. There are many things it could be; hell, it could have been some potion that just looked like blood. Despite what the Council would have you believe, the black market is vast and very much thriving.”

  I wrinkled my nose. I’d suspected he’d say as much.

  “Work not going well?”

  “I have enough money to keep me in food for a couple of weeks,” I said cheerfully.

  “Why don’t you look into other work? I could train you to be a hedgewitch or alchemist’s assistant, you have a knack for it.”

  I groaned. That sounded unbearable. I liked working with him, but he was Kane, we always had fun when we hung out.

  He laughed. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Being cooped up inside chopping up herbs and stirring potions is hardly the life of excitement I’d like to be living.”

  “Because hunting redcaps and eating cheap ramen is making you so happy,” he said.

  “I’m helping people,” I said softly.

  “I know, I’m sorry. The politics around here have been exhausting recently. The sun priest is up in arms over something, and the Shadow Blade Coven has been threatening a full-blown war with the Snow Rose Coven, so they’ve been pushing for us to pick a side. Of course, we’re not getting involved, but that doesn’t stop them from pressuring us. Annalese tried to convince our supplier to cut us off, they refused, and so things are starting to escalate. That’s why I’m taking a break and coming to hang out with you for a bit. You’re ok with that, right?”

  “Of course I am, you’re always welcome,” I said without thinking.

  The idea of turning him down didn’t cross my mind. He was my confidante, my favourite person in the world.

  “I don’t know how you stand all that political bullshit,” I said.

  “It’s not so bad. We’re left out of it mostly. We’re too small for anyone to remember we exist. Anyway, I gotta run, catch you soon?”

  “When do you land?”

  “Er… Monday at 7pm.”

  “Great, do you want me to pick you up?”

  “No, I’m good. I’ll pick us up some food. See you soon, Wren.”

  “Take care, Kane.”

  I felt much better for having spoken to him, even though the vial of blood discussion went about how I expected. Hearing his voice brought a smile to my face. It’d be good to have him around again.

  6

  I was settling down with a peanut butter sandwich made with discount bread and an episode of my detective show when my phone rang. I almost jumped out of my skin. I hadn’t been expecting to hear from anyone. A number I didn’t recognise showed; a small thread of hope formed.

  “Wren Kincaid?” a sharp female voice asked.

  “Yes…”

  “I am the head of the Prague branch of enforcers. We’re calling you in for a job.” She sounded as though she were talking through gritted teeth. “You have fifteen minutes to get to our headquarters.”

  I didn’t get a chance to respond. She’d already hung up. I skidded across the floor, my socks not getting enough purchase. I came to a halt when I almost crashed into the door frame and scrambled to pull on my boots. I’d only worked with enforcers once before, but I knew they paid well. I might be able to pay rent on time for a change!

  The headquarters were down near the river. If I ran to the tram stop, then I might be able to get there in time. I shot out of the door and ran down the stairs, not daring risk waiting for the slow lift to get there in time. The tram did its warning ring that the doors were about to close as I burst out the front door. I ran across the road without looking and leapt onto the tram as the doors closed. The people on the tram looked at me with quiet disdain before they went back to expressions of miserable boredom. It didn’t matter, I had a job that was going to pay reasonable money. If this went well, I might be able to secure a longer-term deal. Maybe I was getting ahead of myself, and it wasn’t the best plan what with my hiding my blood magic from the enforcers, but the idea of good steady money was too appealing to rein my daydreams in.

  The enforcers used to be called hunters, back before I was born. Their role was to keep the supernal community in line. A huge ritual had occurred four or five years before I was born that changed everything. I didn’t know all of the details, but I knew it involved a very powerful witch cutting a deal with a high-level demon. There are rumours that they also did a deal with the shadow god, but no one knows for sure. The ritual was completed during a huge battle in the middle of Prague. One of the moon priestesses killed the coven leader. At the time, they thought that meant it was all over, but it turned out that killing her was the final act in the ritual. That’s when everything changed.

  That ritual allowed covens everywhere to do what are called ‘Making’ rituals. They supposedly bring out the supernal essence buried within non-magical people, but I wasn’t convinced. Those who survived the awful blood ritual came out different; they were called ‘made’. The made were somewhere between non-magical people and supernals. They took on some aspects of a supernal. There were made shifters, and they could often shift into their animal form, but they didn’t have the healing of full shifters. Made fae were even more vicious than the born ones. They were dangerous. Not that born fae weren’t.

  I looked out the window and realised that I’d been lost in my head and almost missed my stop. I pushed past a grumpy old man and dove out the doors just before they closed. I shot across the road and ran down past the National Theatre in all its grandeur to the enforcer headquarters. They were bland compared to the Theatre, with all of its gold finery and detailing, but it still struck me as extravagant and overdone, given they were meant to appear a simple office building.

  I walked in through the heavy wooden doors and stepped into a large double-height room with dark wooden floors and plain white walls. It was a simple plain holding room, and while it was tall, it was narrow and shallow, giving it a feeling of closing in around me. Magic filled the air between me and the main room. My bet was that it had two purposes. One, to make sure anyone who walked through it didn’t plan any harm to the enforcers. Two, to see what magic those who passed through it had. In short, I was fucked.

  The receptionist sat at a plain black desk that almost came up to my collarbone. She sat watching me as I tried to look calm and confident. Running away would only make me look more suspicious. She was already narrowing her eyes at me. I couldn’t afford to draw any more negative attention. I put my shoulders back, smiled, pushed my magic deep inside me, and walked over to her. The wall of magic had stung like hundreds of tiny bees, but I hadn’t imploded and there weren’t any alarms going off, so I hoped I was ok.

  “Name and business,” the receptionist said in tired clipped tones.

  “Wren Kincaid, the enforcers rang me.”

  The receptionist looked me up and down slowly. My jeans were still splattered with some of the black gunk, my knee-high boots had seen better days, but my black t-shirt was clean.

  She pursed her lips and looked at me as though I were contagious before she picked up the phone and spoke in rapid-fire Czech. Once she put the phone down, she turned her attention to her computer screen and ignored me entirely. It was in times like those that I missed the overly chatty nature of the Scots.

  After a few minutes, a woman in a knee-length black pencil skirt and very high stiletto heels strutted over to me. I wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing in the enforcer headquarters. She wouldn’t be able to fight a drunk pixie in that outfit, let alone anything worth bringing in enforcers for.

  “Ms. Kincaid, you have been summoned to do a job for the enforcers. Sign this paperwork so we may continue.”

  She thrust some papers at me. I frowned and skimmed them. Thankfully, they’d been put into English; my Czech wasn’t good enough to read a contract in it. In short, the papers meant that they held no responsibility for what happened to me, and I wouldn’t be paid a penny unless the job was proven to have been completed. I signed them and handed them back with a broad smile.

  “We have received reports that a necromancer has raised more than the legal number of active zombies at this cemetery.”

  I fought to stop my face from falling. I’d been looking forward to working alongside enforcers and kicking ass, of doing something to really benefit the city. Instead, I got zombies.

  7

  It was beginning to get dark when I headed back to the tram stop and asked the gods why I couldn’t earn enough to get a motorbike. Parking spots were rarer than unicorns in Prague, but I’d be able to park a motorbike anywhere. It would be much easier than fighting with little old ladies for a place on the trams. The cemetery in question was fifteen minutes away from where I was standing watching the sun begin its descent behind the castle on the other side of the river. At least I’d be paid a good sum, I reminded myself as I felt the familiar pressure of a walking cane against my ankle. I glared at the lady who was trying to trip me so she could get a better seat. She ignored me and pressed the cane tighter. I stepped around it and slipped onto the tram.

  A pair of women who were, at a guess, ten years older than me glared at me for the entire journey. I studiously ignored them. I knew they wanted me to give up my seat. Between my clearly not being Czech and being younger than they, they felt they had a right to the seat. When I got off the tram in front of the large modern mall that sat next to the cemetery, it was entirely dark. People bustled around me and ducked through the red and white barrier between the tram stop and the busy road. I joined them and ran across the road towards the dark cream wall that marked the edge of the cemetery.

  I hadn’t really dealt with zombies before, so I was hoping that would be an interesting challenge - something worthy of a nice pay cheque so I had a little spare money, for a change. I walked down the narrow alley between the mall and the boundary wall of the cemetery before I turned and headed into the cemetery at the first available wrought-iron gate. The cemetery was large, and it would take me hours to walk around the entire thing, so I closed my eyes for a moment and stretched my senses out, trying to feel the dead blood of zombies. It seemed easier to look for that than the necromancer; I had no idea what a necromancer’s song sounded like.

  It took a good deal of effort, but I managed to pinpoint a quiet whispering song that I thought sounded like death. I followed the sound down a number of paths, taking a few turns past some of the more ornate headstones into the older, less well-kempt area of the cemetery. There, I found the zombies and, much like everything else about this job, they were disappointing.

  Instead of being strong and aware like I’d heard they were supposed to be, the zombie before me kept shuffling into the wall of a crypt. It bumped into the wall, backed up a few steps, then tried again. The rattling bag of bones wasn’t a threat to anything but itself. The other five zombies weren’t any better. One of them kept trying to stand and failed as its legs gave way underneath it, another walked in a small circle, and the remaining few just stood staring vacantly in front of them. With a sigh, I began looking around for the necromancer that had raised these shambling zombies.

  The necromancer was sitting leaning against one of the crypts. His hair fell down to his chin in soft waves that covered one of his large, sad, puppy-type eyes. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. I walked over to him, and he looked up at me, his pretty face full of defeat as he did.

  “You’re an enforcer, aren’t you?” he said in a quiet flat tone.

  “I’m with them, yea. You raised too many zombies, you’re in breach of the law.”

  He sighed and pulled his knees to his chest.

  “I didn’t mean to. I only meant to call up one, but when I tried to put him back down again I raised another, instead.”

  “Surely, your master should be able to help you?”

  I was quickly feeling bad for this poor necromancer. He looked pitiful and entirely lost in the world.

  “I don’t have one. Mine up and vanished one day, and no one else will take me on. I was using his grimoire, but I must have translated something wrong.”

  I was going to regret this, but I couldn’t leave the poor soul to mope like that.

  “What language is it in?”

  “German,” he said with a thread of hope.

  “Hand it over. I speak German,” I said with a smile.

  He pulled a large leather-bound book out of a small hole in the wall of the crypt; I had no idea how that worked. I peered at the hole and couldn’t figure it out. There must have been some space-altering magic involved there.

  “Here, this is where something went wrong, I think,” he said as he stood next to me and pointed at a passage written in spidery handwriting.

  “It says you need to call down their spirit and push it to the earth. What did you do?” I asked.

  He squeezed his eyes closed and gave me a thoroughly ashamed look.

  “I pushed their spirit up and called the earth around them,” he said quietly.

  “So, now you can do it right,” I said with an encouraging smile.

  He took a deep breath, and his pretty blue-green eyes took on a dark grey shine. He whispered the words in a thick German accent that sounded entirely unlike the soft French accent he’d been using a moment before. I looked around and saw the zombies slowly returning to the earth beneath them.

  I grinned at him. “See, that wasn’t so hard.”

  He grinned back at me. “Thanks, I really thought you were going to hand me over to the Council.”

  “No worries. Ah, I need some proof that I did get rid of the zombies, any ideas?” I asked as I looked around.

  What constituted proof in a case like this? When you killed a feral lycan or a redcap, you took a piece of them and kept it in a magically enhanced bag so it didn’t turn into the black gunk. There wasn’t anything like that with zombies, though.

  “Photos of the freshly turned graves?” he said.

  I chewed on my bottom lip. “Got any better ideas?”

  “I can give you a finger bone?”

  The fact he said it so casually made the unpleasantness of the idea of much worse.

  “Sure, thanks,” I said.

  “I’m James, by the way,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Wren.”

  “If you ever need a necromancer, just call. I owe you one,” he said as he headed to one of the graves.

  I gave him a smile and a nod. If I needed a necromancer, I’d need one that could at least do the basics.

  8

  James had turned out to be a lot of fun. We talked about what it was like to live on the outskirts of both the supernal and non-magical societies. He shared my love of detective shows, and I had fun hanging out with him while he got the finger bone for me. We swapped numbers, and I tried really hard to not think of the grey lump that sat in the small alchemical bag on my hip. I had a strong stomach, I had to do my job, but that finger was horrifying.

  I walked up to the enforcer headquarters in a good mood. The job had been easy, and I’d made a new contact. The door refused to budge. I tried pulling it, pushing, kicking it, nothing. Finally, a small sprite opened the door. Everything about him had an ethereal quality. The paleness of his skin almost looked translucent under the street light. He was delicate and barely as tall as I was.

  He glared at me before he snapped, “This office is closed to non-enforcers outside of standard office hours. Come back tomorrow at nine,” and slammed the door in my face.

  Well, there went that good mood.

  I’d had as little contact with the bag holding the finger as possible. It was just wrong. I could hear the rasping whisper of its blood singing to me through the bag. It set my teeth on edge. I walked into the enforcer headquarters at 9:02am. The money they were going to pay me had already been mentally spent. I’d put the essential bills aside, so they could be paid on time for a change. Then, I’d get a new pair of boots and maybe a second pair of jeans, too.

  “Hi, I was here yesterday. I completed the zombie job,” I said to the secretary.

  She gave me a cold steely look before she pushed a sheaf of paper and a pen towards me.

  “Fill those in and hand over your proof,” she said before she turned back to her computer.

  There was nowhere to sit, so I leaned on the counter of the receptionist’s desk and filled the multitude of forms in. I wrote down the same information four times on four separate forms. Having finally completed all of them, I dropped the finger bone on top of them and pushed them back to the receptionist.

  She looked through the forms and pointed at a line I’d missed.

  “Fill that in, and what is this?” she said pointing at the finger.

  “The evidence,” I said as I filled in the line.

  “How is that evidence?”

  “It’s from one of the zombies.”

  “That is not good enough.”

  I looked at her.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That is not good enough.”

  “How?”

  She gave a shrug.

  “When I worked with the enforcers in Edinburgh, they had no problems taking similar evidence.”

  “In Czech Republic, we need better evidence.”

  I balled my hands into fists and gave her my calmest tone. “And what evidence would you accept?”

  “That is not for me to decide.”

  “Well, can I have my payment, then?”

  “No evidence, no payment.”

  My fingernails dug into my palms.

  “So, I resolved the zombie problem, and you’re not paying me?”

 

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