Ace of Spiders Read online

  The guy stayed silent, his hand rattlesnaking into his pocket and withdrawing another knife. All right, Knifey McLoadsofknives. He lunged, and I stepped wobbily around him and ripped the blade from his grasp with my mind, tossing it away into the traffic. At the last minute I realised that it might slash somebody’s tyres and I caught it again and flung it towards the Thames, which was flowing dark green and murky a little way to my left. Now the guy aimed a kick at my head and I jumped backwards, landing right at the front of the vehicle, arms flailing. Balance, balance. I created a tentacle of mental energy, coiled and sprung it like a whip, wrapping it around his ankles and flipping him onto his back. He wasted no time, righting himself quickly and coming at me with a flurry of kicks and punches.

  This isn’t getting either of us anywhere, just fly away!

  I’m not running away.

  I didn’t say run away, I said—

  I threw a punch of my own, which was stupid, because punching is not my thing. He caught the blow with embarrassing ease, performed some kind of martial arts move and twirled me around so that he was behind me with both of my arms locked in an agonising grip. Two more seconds and he was going to break them.

  Remember, dirty is allowed.

  I stamped on his foot as hard as I could and his grip lessened for a second, giving me a window to wriggle free and slam my head back, straight into his face. The crack sounded break-y – good – and I pivoted on the spot and kicked him clumsily but efficiently in the chin. He wobbled but immediately came at me again, his face contorted scarily with rage.

  Now fly, you plank!

  OK.

  I jumped off the bus and flew over to the next lane, alighting gracelessly on a lorry, trying to make it look more like a leap than flight, for the benefit of the million or so CCTV lenses and phone cameras that were no doubt trained on us. We faced each other from our respective vehicles and his face was so full of fury that I really wished I knew what I’d done to piss him off so much.

  Apart from break his nose?

  Well, he did attack me before that.

  Then he did something that was more than a bit stupid. He stepped back, tensed himself up, ran and jumped the gap between the two vehicles, crashing into the side of the lorry, barely managing to keep his grip and avoid falling into the road. It was a big gap to jump and I suddenly wondered whether he was empowered. It didn’t seem likely – why wouldn’t he have used his powers while we were fighting? The fact that he hadn’t quite made it, and was now flailing around trying to pull himself up onto the lorry, also suggested that maybe he wasn’t supernaturally-endowed. Just really good at jumping, then. I stood there stupidly, looking down at him, trying to think of what to do.

  Stamp on his hands! Stamp on his hands, you knob!

  But he could die.

  No, really?

  He might not die . . .

  He probably will.

  And I don’t kill people.

  He’d quite happily kill you. He probably will in a minute if you don’t do something.

  It was tempting. More tempting than I wanted to admit to myself. This joker had just attacked me out of nowhere, pulled a gun and two knives and thrown me into the traffic, and I had no idea who he was.

  Stamp on his hands.

  No. Better idea.

  Better?

  Well. Not worse, maybe.

  I kicked off from the lorry and shot up, grabbing the guy’s ankles with my mind and heading away from the road and over the trees with him held in place beneath me, suspended upside-down. When we were over the river, I stopped and looked down at him. ‘All right. Enough pissing around. Who are you?’

  He didn’t answer, choosing to struggle impotently instead. ‘Do you work for the Angel Group?’

  The look in his eyes told me nothing. ‘Why were you trying to kill me?’

  No answer.

  ‘I’ll drop you in the river.’

  He actually smiled at that. ‘I can swim.’

  Fair play. Not the most threatening of threats anyway. Also, hey, he can talk.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll hold your head under until your face turns blue and your brain seizes up and then I’ll let you float away, and the coast guard can retrieve your waterlogged corpse.’

  For a moment his eyes narrowed, as if he wasn’t sure whether I was bluffing, but he could read me, I could tell, and he simply shook his head with an amused smile. Balls. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll carry you to the sewage works and you can claw your way out of a billion tons of other people’s shit and piss, how about that?’

  The nauseated look on his face was very entertaining, but I could tell he wasn’t going to give me anything. I couldn’t decide what to do. I definitely couldn’t kill him, but I couldn’t just let him go, either. I was tempted to follow through on my sewage works threat but I knew that in the long run, despite being a laugh, it probably wouldn’t help. What the . . .

  Give Eddie a call.

  I took out my phone, making a concerted effort not to think about all the people who were probably watching and snapping away with their own phones, and dialled my cousin’s number. ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Stanly? How’s it going, what are you—’

  ‘Some bloke just tried to kill me.’

  ‘What? Are you—’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I knew it was rude to interrupt, but I needed to get this over with. Plus I had hardly any credit left. According to Kloe, I was the last person in the universe to still be on Pay-As-You-Go. ‘I’m currently dangling him upside-down over the Thames. He’s not talking, and I’m not really sure what to do with him.’

  ‘Um . . .’ A second of muffled conversation. Then: ‘Connor says take him to the shop. We’ll meet you there. I’ll call Skank and let him know.’

  ‘OK. Cheers.’ I hung up. A quick set of mental calculations. 110th Street wasn’t that far, but I couldn’t just parade this guy around while I looked for a taxi. That meant flying, very high, during the day, which was something I absolutely, positively, almost never did.

  But . . . desperate times and all that . . .

  I looked up, tightened my psychic grip on my would-be killer and jetted skyward as fast as I could, riding the familiar rush of oxygen, cold electrical shivers spidering down my spine. To his credit, the guy wasn’t screaming.

  He obviously knows who you are, what you can do.

  Yeah, but being dangled upside-down hundreds of feet above the ground, unsure of whether you’re going to plummet to your doom or not? I’d probably be screaming.

  Well, we’ve learned a lot about ourselves during this whole fiasco haven’t we, Captain I-Would-Totally-Be-Dead-Right-Now-If-It-Wasn’t-For-Blind-Luck?

  Damn you, Hendrix.

  I stopped for a second to take in the view. The city looked small but huge at the same time, miles of skyscrapers and homes and railway lines and snaking, intricate roads. I could see the Gherkin, the Shard, St Paul’s, the breathing green expanse of Hyde Park. Cars and people going about their tiny, insignificant business. I allowed myself a moment of breathless appreciation, because there should always be time for that, before motoring in the direction of 110th Street with my passenger squirming beneath me.

  Chapter Three

  I STAYED HIGH FOR the duration of the flight, then shot groundward. I was aiming to land as quickly as possible and ended up overdoing it slightly, hurtling into the shop’s junk-strewn backyard and landing bumpily, keeping the guy suspended in space – above me at this point, as I didn’t want to pancake him before we’d had a chance to question him. I managed to regain my balance and spun my murderous passenger around several times, very fast, before dumping him head-first into a dustbin. His legs flailed comically as he attempted to right himself, failed spectacularly and collapsed on his side with a clatter and a moan.


  Skank emerged from the shop, looking unpeturbed, which was a specialty of his. ‘Stanly,’ he said, as though we hadn’t seen each other for a couple of days.

  ‘Skank. How’s it going?’

  ‘Same as always.’

  ‘That bad, huh?’

  That got a slight smile. ‘Not as bad as you, by the sounds of things.’

  ‘Not been a great evening so far,’ I said, nodding towards the dude in the bin. ‘Bit of a ball-ache, actually. This clown just tried to kill me.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Skank inspected the undignified pile of man and bin with mild interest, as though I regularly brought assassins round for tea and interrogations, pursed his lips thoughtfully for a second, then reached behind his back and pulled a gun from the waistband of his shorts. He drew back the hammer with a lack of menace that still managed to be pretty menacing, and spoke quietly. ‘Could you go and unlock the cellar while I keep an eye on your wee pal?’

  ‘Sure thang.’ I entered the maze of science fiction and fantasy paraphernalia, observed quizzically by cardboard cut-outs of Buffy, Judge Dredd, Imperial stormtroopers and characters from Adventure Time, retrieved the keys from their brass hook and unlocked the cellar door. I called to Skank to let him know it was open and headed down into the bowels of the shop. Heated by an ancient, ill-tempered boiler that grumbled like a snoozing troll, the space – Skank called it his office, I called it his lair – was a chaotic jumble of rare, framed posters, shelves of ring binders in which he kept important paperwork and other business gubbins, and random bits and pieces: old broken action figures, boxes of variousness, piles of newspapers and magazines tied up with yellowed string. A desk in the middle of the room, with two black swivel chairs on either side of it, held an old typewriter, a pile of paper, a South Park ashtray, a coffee-stained Boba Fett mug and a tin with a cartoon of Bob Marley on it. Wonder what’s in there. Another table held a pair of half-dissected record decks, a pile of tools and several stacks of records. The place smelled of coffee, old smoke and old stuff.

  Skank appeared a few moments later. He had tied the guy’s hands and feet together and was making light work of dragging him down the stairs, and when he got to the bottom he threw him unceremoniously into a chair and set about tying him to it with garden twine. I was starting to feel uneasy. I’d only ever seen Skank the eccentric proprietor, the guy who argued with customers who thought that the 1998 American Godzilla could be considered an official Godzilla film, who was often stoned beyond the capacity for human communication at nine in the morning, and harboured what seemed to me to be an unreasonable dislike of Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor (or ‘that question-mark-wearing buffoon’). Now, standing in front of my bound attacker with a gun in his hand, he was giving me uncomfortable Pulp Fiction vibes. ‘Has he said anything?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Apart from telling me that he can swim.’

  Skank nodded. ‘Fair enough. We’ll skip the waterboarding then.’ He pulled up one of the swivel chairs, sat in it and started to roll a cigarette. ‘You might as well sit down. Eddie and Connor will be here before long.’

  After nearly fifteen minutes of horrifically awkward silence, I heard Eddie and Connor arrive upstairs. They came straight down to the cellar, clearly worried but also definitely ready for any necessary carnage. It made my stomach flip, remembering the last time I’d seen them like that. Eddie came over and looked me up and down, one hand on my shoulder. ‘Jesus, Stanly! Are you all right?’

  I smiled brightly. ‘I’m fine. I took care of him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  I didn’t answer at first. I was looking at Connor. His entire body was tensed, and he had a look in his eyes that I’d seen before, a cool, steely resolve. ‘Got any more guns, Skank?’ he asked, in his measured Irish tone. Hello to you too.

  Skank nodded.

  ‘Cool. Hopefully won’t need them, but where? Just in case?’

  ‘In my other black box.’

  ‘Other? Is that the night-black one, or the jet-black one?’

  ‘The Back in Black one.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s where the Bernard Black one used to be.’

  Connor nodded. ‘OK, I’m with you.’

  ‘What happened, Stanly?’ asked Eddie.

  ‘Um,’ I said. ‘Well, I was just out walking. Ended up on some pedestrian bridge in the middle of town, and suddenly this guy appears from behind me and pulls a gun. Someone screams so I get out of the way, just in time because suddenly, boom, he fires. I managed to knock it out of his hands and we fought, and then he pulled out a knife, which I also managed to get rid of, and then he grabs me and we go right over the edge of the bridge. Landed on a bus.’

  Three sets of eyebrows raised simultaneously and a chuckle found its way up my throat despite my valiant attempts to keep it down. ‘Anyway, yeah, we kept fighting, on top of this moving bus, until I managed to get the better of him. I flew him over to the river, threatened him a bit, got nowhere, rang you. Brought him here.’ I shrugged. ‘And . . . there you go.’

  ‘You did all that in broad daylight?’ said Eddie.

  ‘No, I asked the murderous assassin if we could wait until it got dark, and he said yes, and we waited until it got dark, and then I did it, and then it got light again for some reason.’

  ‘Haha, my aching LOLs.’

  ‘Well, you said it in that disapproving way,’ I said. ‘Your “we can’t let the rest of the world know what we can do, for the good of whatever” voice.’ I could see he wasn’t a fan of this comment, or the peevish high-pitched tone I adopted when doing an impression of him, but I wasn’t feeling particularly delicate. ‘The dude tried to kill me! I was improvising! It’s not like I used my powers to pop down to B&Q and pick up some plywood and a roll of PTFE.’

  Eddie’s brow furrowed. ‘What the hell is PTFE?’

  ‘Polytetrafluoroethylene tape,’ said Skank. ‘Or Plumber’s Tape For Everything.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ahem,’ said Connor. ‘Coming rocketing back to this guy we’ve tied to a chair? You couldn’t get anything out of him?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Skank.

  ‘OK. How d’you reckon we approach this?’

  Skank looked from Connor to Eddie to me. ‘Good cop, bad cop, idealistic rookie cop who can fly, morally ambiguous cop with beard.’

  ‘Cheers. Helpful.’

  Skank shrugged. ‘Asking him politely would be my suggestion. Then improvise based on how cooperative he decides to be.’

  ‘Fair.’ Connor walked forwards. ‘All right, mate. Who are you? And who sent you to kill Stanly?’

  The guy, who had been listening to all of this with an expression halfway between amusement and contempt, remained silent.

  ‘Who are you?’ growled Eddie. ‘Who do you work for?’

  No response.

  ‘I don’t think he’s going to tell us anything,’ said Skank. He put his gun on the floor, pulled his chair forward and leaned in towards the guy. ‘Do you watch Doctor Who?’ he said, conversationally.

  The guy looked taken aback. ‘Uh . . . what?’

  ‘Doctor Who. TV show. Wacky guy in a blue box, travelling in time and space.’

  ‘Yeah, I know what it is.’

  ‘Good,’ said Skank, with a chuckle. ‘Thought maybe you’d been living under a rock!’

  Now the guy actually laughed nervously.

  ‘So do you watch it?’ said Skank.

  ‘When I was a kid I did, yeah.’

  ‘Who was your favourite? I always liked Tom Baker.’

  ‘Yeah, probably him,’ agreed the guy.

  ‘Good choice.’ I glanced at Eddie and Connor, but they didn’t seem phased by what was happening. Am I the only one hearing what’s being said?

  ‘Not a fan of the new ones,’ the guy continued. ‘To
o manic.’

  ‘Fair assessment,’ said Skank. His voice was perfectly measured and calm. ‘You watch much TV these days?’

  The guy shrugged. ‘A little. I like NCIS.’

  ‘Ah. Not a fan of that, to be honest. Generally not one for procedurals or case-of-the-weeks. I like my arcs. How about Buffy? You ever watch that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fair enough. How come?’

  ‘Just not my kind of thing.’

  ‘Each to their own, I suppose. I think it’s brilliant. Part of me wishes it was still on, even though intellectually I know that it would probably have deteriorated to the point of unwatchability by now.’ Skank smiled ruefully. ‘What about comedies? Simpsons? Louie? The Big Bang Theory, insofar as that can be described as a comedy?’

  ‘I like The Simpsons.’

  ‘Well, who doesn’t like The Simpsons?’ Skank smiled. ‘Even if it definitely has deteriorated. At least you didn’t say The Big Bang Theory. I might have had to kill you.’ He laughed.

  The guy laughed too. ‘But you brought it up!’

  ‘Trick question.’ Skank winked. ‘Do you have a favourite Simpsons episode?’

  ‘Too many of them really, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yeah, good point. Favourite character? Got to be Homer, right?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ The guy seemed completely comfortable now. I was baffled, but I’d started to enjoy it. Even Eddie and Connor looked amused. This guy tried to murder you earlier on, and now he’s discussing The Simpsons like we’re all good mates.