Gavin Smith - The Age of Scorpio

‘I’m not in control of this. You are. How much do you want to get cut? Are you trying to show me your skull?’

‘Please, my face…’ He was crying.

Your face , Beth thought angrily, and the clothes, the easy smiles and expensive aftershave, the nice car . All props so he could use people, profit from them. She leaned down close to his ear, intimate.

‘I’m going to cut it off.’ She thought she meant it. More importantly so did he.

‘I remember her. She was a party girl. She wanted to do it all but she didn’t have any money, just her looks. Look, she was cool with it. She did some films. Is that what this was about? Did you see her on the Internet or something? Look, I’m sorry but it’s a free country. She had a choice!’ He was sounding desperate.

‘The hooking?’ she asked. She was surprised to see him turn even paler. Somewhere at the back of her head a sane voice was asking why she was doing this. She wasn’t going to hear anything good, anything that would help, and her sister would still be dead.

‘Look, I know it sounds bad—’

‘Sounds?’ Beth hissed.

‘Look, she wanted the money; I knew the people. She made her own decision. All I did was make sure that she was okay. I looked after her…’

‘Like the big brother she never had?’

‘She wasn’t standing on street corners. It was upmarket clients, reasonable. She was treated nice.’

Beth wanted to hurt him. Despite his words he knew that he had played his part in what Talia had become. She also knew that she was lashing out. Talia was capable of making her own choices.

‘She was in demand,’ Arbogast said before realising that this might not be the best thing to say in the circumstances. Beth concentrated all her attention on him again.

‘Why?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘She was really pretty, you know. She had the whole goth thing going…’

Beth didn’t doubt that Arbogast was an excellent liar under normal circumstances, but she didn’t think this was his normal power relationship with the opposite sex. He was hiding something.

‘Tell me.’

‘Look, you’ve got to underst—’

She grabbed him painfully by the mouth again. She could hear him trying to beg through her clenched fingers. She put the knife back into the wound she had made and started to twist the blade. She tried not to think whether her great-grandfather would have approved or not.

‘Please,’ he was sobbing. ‘Blood…’

‘Like this?’ She showed him the knife again and he shrank away from her.

‘Bloodletting. She and her goth friends were into the vampire thing. They would drink blood from each other. Some of my clients wanted to live that fantasy out… some of the specials… but…’

‘What?’

‘There were stories, rumours about her, that people saw things when they drank her blood.’

Confused at first, then angry again. She hurt him some more.

‘Do I look like I’m fucking around, you cockless little bastard!’

‘No, no, no.’ Begging. ‘Please… She came back bad a few times, hurt, you know, they took too much. They wanted her blood, I wouldn’t tell you this… I couldn’t make it up.’

She could see he wasn’t lying. Her anger was as much because she couldn’t understand. She had no frame of reference to process this, and people get angry and frightened when they can’t understand things.

‘Did you ever do it?’ Beth demanded. He stared at her terrified through the tears. He nodded. ‘And?’

Running, foot on the balcony, into space, travelling forward but in a backwards somersault. Land on the roof of the next building. Nice and smooth, like in PK Killer. Not just a case of augmented speed, strength, agility, but having neurally rewired yourself to remove the fear and inhibitions.

He threw himself off the roof, grabbing his knees, tumbling sideways. He dropped two storeys and grabbed the balcony rail. He pulled himself up with enough force to leap over the rail and onto the balcony. Upper body strength without tears , he thought smiling. His clan joined him.

‘It was like space, you know, like in a film. It was beautiful. Like heaven. I think I heard God. He was angry.’

Beth stared at him.

‘What the fuck am I doing?’ Beth said out loud. The anger just drained from her. Talia was gone. All she was doing was trying to put balm on that. Cheapening her sister’s death with violence and strangeness. She rubbed her face. Talia was gone. She was starting to feel it. She had often hated her but she was family. She felt tears behind her eyes. She turned away from Arbogast. He couldn’t see that. She left him on the floor in his own blood. She didn’t even bother with a parting threat.

It took a moment for fear and self-pity to be replaced by anger and self-pity. Arbogast managed to get to his feet despite the pain. He had to see what she had done to his face.

The door to the balcony opened. They were twelve storeys up. It didn’t make sense: nobody could have been on the balcony. Dark urban wear, hooded sweatshirts, expensive trainers and monster masks.

The one in the front, flayed skin mask, held a phone in one hand; his other hand was cupped. It looked like it was full of glitter. He held the phone out. Arbogast saw a picture of Talia and dearly wished that he had never even met the fucking emo bitch.

‘Look, I know people, right. She’s fucking dead.’ Every time he spoke it felt like his face would split open; more blood coursed from the wound Beth had made. ‘I think she and her friends were trying to cook meth or something. They blew themselves up.’

Flayed skin stared at him. Then he lifted up his cupped hand and blew glitter all over Arbogast. King Jeremy decided it looked as cool as he’d thought it would. He’d seen it in a comic book.

The sun had gone down some time ago but the night was still warm. He had decided to look over Arbogast’s building, justifying it to himself as lazy reconnaissance. Actually he had just fancied a cup of tea. Du Bois was sitting outside a cafe opposite the luxury flats where Arbogast lived. He was wondering why, in Britain, he could get just about every type of coffee possible, including some he felt were patently ridiculous, but finding a good cup of tea was becoming harder and harder.

Arbogast’s picture was on his phone screen. He could have had it appear in his vision but he was of an age that made him very uncomfortable with that kind of thing. Using the phone to externalise things might have been unnecessary but it helped him feel more human.

He saw the woman leave the building. Leather jacket, combat trousers, boots, all looked well worn. Her long hair was tied back into a ponytail, sides shaved. She had a Celtic knotwork symbol painted on the back of her leather jacket.

She looked out of place. Du Bois decided to take a picture of her. The phone’s intelligent graphics software cleaned up the blurry image and ran it through facial recognition software far in advance of what was available to the public. The search was slowed only by having to use police and government databases.

He found the girl. Du Bois read about her. Her sister. Her conviction. That she had beaten someone to death for what he’d done to her sister.

‘Shit.’ He ran towards the apartment.

Du Bois stood in Arbogast’s open-plan lounge. It was mostly white. The sofa had been white. Bits of it still were. Not the bits where Arbogast was sitting, apparently unable to move, though not restrained, his face cut up. Trying to chew off his own fingers. There was no way the girl had done this , du Bois thought; someone else had been there. Someone had slaved him. Someone with access to S- or L-tech.

‘That would make me the ghost of Christmas future then,’ he said. Arbogast was staring at him, eyes full of pain and desperation, but he couldn’t say much as teeth cracked on bone.