The Magpye: Circus by CW Lynch Read Free Book Online Page B

plan.
It's time to move that up a gear, don't you think?"
    King strode out of the office, leaving Taylor behind. He
stalked down the corridor. The King family mansion had been
completely redecorated and remodelled to his exacting
specifications. Every heirloom and antique had been packaged,
indexed, and shipped to storage. Every portrait and photograph too.
There was nothing in the building, save the bricks and mortar, more
than a year old. It was a statement in modernity, homage to
progress. The King mansion had been dragged , kicking and
screaming , into the now. Except that the past
was still out there, hammering at the doors, clawing at the
windows. The past wouldn't leave Cane King alone.
    King rapped hard on the door of
one of the many guest suites and waited.
    "In my own damn house..." he
muttered, waiting impatiently to be admitted. Finally, with a soft
click, the door opened. Cane took a breath. Calling in the
specialist was one thing. Meeting her face to face, that was the
final threshold. Once he crossed it, he knew he could not return,
not entirely. She would have her price.
    "Come in, Cane."
    Cane pushed the door and walked
in, stopping short when he saw the corpses on the floor. Emaciated,
desiccated, they gave off no odour, their grey skin like paper over
their still bones. They looked impossibly ancient, little more than
husks, empty cocoons long abandoned by any life. They were dressed
smartly, and Cane knew that he recognised at least one of the
suits.
    "My apologies for the mess, Mr.
Taylor was good enough to send me some of your men. They have left
me feeling quite invigorated."
    Grace Faraway was standing in
front of a full length mirror, admiring her naked body. Her dark
skin was covered in tattoos, a trace work of strange symbols that
seemed to shift whenever Cane looked at them, as if they held
secrets they guarded jealously from him. Shorter than Cane, Grace's
lithe figure was somehow otherworldy, its proportions all slightly
off. She should have been beautiful, alluring, but there was an
inherent wrongness to her that Cane couldn't ignore. She turned to
face him, her nakedness masked by a swirling of tattoos.
    "Put something on, witch," said
Cane flatly "And you owe me three men."
    Cane had seen magic before. His father had been able to do
things, strange and magical things, and had told Cane stories about
his grandfather and his great - grandfather and the
things they had been able to do too. As a child, Cane had assumed
they were just parlour tricks and stories to send him off to sleep.
He hadn't believed it.
    As he'd grown older though, the evidence was harder to
ignore. The King family were steeped in magic, in the occult, and
most of all in the dead. His father held s é ances,
entertained mystics and psychics of all flavours and denominations.
Cane had quickly learnt that these were no garden-variety
charlatans either. They were the real thing; powerful and terrible
and haunted by knowledge that was beyond other men. Some nights,
the house echoed to their screams. The King family were steeped in
magic and in the occult indeed, but most of all it was steeped in
the dead. In the mansion, there were endless rooms given over to
the dead. Kept as shrines, their former occupants' belongings were
left in place as if they might return at any moment. In every
hallway and on every staircase there were portraits, one King after
another, a bloodline that seemed almost endless, stretching away
from Cane into the dark past. He hated it. He felt belittled by it,
as if his every achievement was being measured against those of his
forebears, dead judges casting their verdict on him. That was why,
the first chance he had, he'd expunged every trace of them from the
house.
    Grace, however, had been harder
to get rid of. She was family.
    "A girl has to eat," Grace
replied, affecting a coy tone of voice as she shrugged on a gown.
"Your food here is so... flat. Lifeless."
    She stalked across the room,
stepping over