CHAPTER 1
CASH ON DELIVERY
Pain. All he could think about was the pain.
Pain in his wrists, where the nylon ropes rubbed his skin raw. Pain in his knees, where the joints were stretched to their limit. Pain in the base of his skull, where some ugly bastard had beaned him with a crescent wrench.
Pain in his nose, as the car stopped with a jerk and his face connected with the inside of the trunk.
“Motherfucker!” hissed Robin Whittaker, son of Goodfellow. Well, he tried to hiss. The tube sock stuffed in his mouth didn’t do much for conversation.
The engine stopped. He heard the front door open, then footsteps. Sounded like the driver was stepping over hard concrete. Okay, that was good to know. The first hour of the drive had been over mostly dirt and gravel. But concrete was good. Concrete most likely meant the city. Whittaker knew the city. If he could talk his way away from whoever had cold-cocked him and stuffed him in this car, he could disappear into the rain and get himself somewhere safe before morning came. And he was pretty sure he could talk himself to safety, once he got rid of this damn sock.
To be fair, it wasn’t like he hadn’t been expecting this. Actually, it was kind of nice to finally get it over with. He’d been looking over his shoulder for almost a year now, just waiting for someone to jump out of the shadows and drag him off the street. Never get involved with demons, he said to himself. Bad for business and bad for your heath. Same goes for zombies, psychics, and fuckin’ wizards.
This time last year, the imp called R.G. Whittaker had been one of the high rollers of the Vancouver underworld. He had a stake in just about every mortal and supernatural racket in the city, and not a single shady deal went down that he didn’t know about. All it had taken was for one deal to go south, and before you knew it, the price on his head was higher than the GDP of some small countries.
The trunk opened suddenly and a hand on Whittaker’s shoulder rolled him over. He groaned behind the tube sock and shut his eyes at the sudden burst of light. “Wake up, smart mouth,” growled the driver.
Two hands seized the lapels of his Savile Row suit and pulled him out of the car. The sock muffled a yowl of pain as he landed hard on the pavement and choked him as he tried to take in a breath. Then the driver yanked the sock out of his mouth and thumped him on the back.
“Easy. Don’t want you going belly-up before I get you to the buyer.”
Whittaker sucked in a grateful breath and blinked. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that they were in an underground parkade. No clue where. If you’d seen one underground parkade in Metro Vancouver, you’d seen ‘em all. He recognized the driver, though. Shaved head, twice-broken nose, and a mud-spattered Canadian tuxedo stretched over a stocky wall of muscle. It could only be—
“Ted!” Whittaker exclaimed. “Ted Purdy! Oh man, are you a sight for sore eyes!” He flashed his best used-car-salesman smile and tried to pull himself up to look at his captor—not easy, with his hands and feet tied into a tight ball at the small of his back. “Been a while, hasn’t it? Don’t think I’ve seen you since they nailed you for that B&E in Coal Harbour! What have you been up to, pal? Still working security for Sai—”
Ted Purdy drove one muddy steel-toed boot into the imp’s stomach and hissed, “Shut it.”
Whittaker coughed and threw up a little on the concrete. “Jesus, Ted,” he croaked. “A kick like that, you should’ve played for the fuckin’ Whitecaps.”
Purdy smirked. “That wouldn’t pay half as well as this.” He hoisted all of Whittaker’s rail-thin four feet and eleven inches up over his shoulder and carried the imp like a sack of potatoes across the parkade. It was hard to keep track of the time what with the whole “being stuffed in a trunk” thing, but by Whittaker’s mental math, it was probably going on two or three in the morning. The lot was mostly empty, and Purdy didn’t say a word as he hauled Whittaker over to a dark back corner of the parkade, where a full-sized black delivery van was parked almost six inches over the line. Purdy set Whittaker down, thumped three times on the van’s back door, and gave a sharp whistle.
The door opened and the van groaned on its axles as a massive creature with stone-grey skin, a flat nose, and no neck seemed to melt out of the black shadows within, looming over Whittaker like a refrigerator with bad breath. A Pacific mountain troll. That was good. That was real good. Mountain trolls were some of the dumbest motherfuckers out there. If Purdy was going to leave him with Mr. Big and Tall here, then Whittaker could probably weasel out of this mess inside an hour.
Two more figures emerged from the van’s dark interior and flanked Mr. Big and Tall. Short, withered creatures with pot bellies, wide mouths, and large hands that ended in long, black-taloned fingers. One of the creatures wore a bright red Che Guevara beret, while the other sported a baseball hat with an American political slogan on it. Redcaps. That was less good. Redcaps were a lot smarter than trolls, hostile to just about everyone they met, and resilient as all get out. It would be a lot harder for Whittaker to talk his way out of a redcap’s bony clutches. But still, he’d dealt with worse.
Mr. Big and Tall retrieved a large, weather-beaten briefcase from the back of the van and handed it off to Ted Purdy. Purdy opened it, extracted a thick gold coin the size of an eyeglass lens, and gave a satisfied nod.
“As we agreed,” hissed the redcap in the beret. “Half your share now, and half when the bounty is paid.”
Mr. Big and Tall undid the short length of rope connecting Whittaker’s wrists and ankles. The imp unfolded with a little whimper of relief, and then his brain kicked into overdrive. There had to be something he could say to get himself out of this.
“Give you any trouble?” the other redcap asked in a croaking, reedy voice.
Ted Purdy shook his head and set the closed briefcase at his feet. “Little asshole never even saw me. I got up behind him in a blind alley and then it was goodnight, Irene.”
“Kind of a punk way for R.G. Whittaker to go out,” hissed the redcap in the MAGA hat. “How do you know he’s not going to pull something?”
Purdy smiled. Among the races collectively referred to as the Fair Folk, imps were particularly adept at the magic of teleportation and illusion. It was a useful defence mechanism when your adult males maxed out at five foot zilch. The only catch was, the Fair Folk couldn’t work their magic in the presence of iron. It stopped them cold, as surely as kryptonite did the big guy in the red underoos. A pair of solid iron manacles clamped to Whittaker’s wrists just below the ropes meant he wasn’t going anywhere. “It was a custom job,” Purdy bragged. “But when I told the smith who it was for, he gave me a fuckin’ 20% discount!”
The troll barked out a laugh. “No shit!” He tapped Whittaker with one toe and growled, “Guess ya ain’t got many friends left on either side of the Elsewhere, do ya, Whittaker?”
“Guess not,” Whittaker chuckled, doing his best to play along. “Obviously plenty of enemies, though. I can’t remember the last time I had this warm a welcome. And what a collection of personalities! Half-breed, troll, redcap: this is like a ‘walks into a bar’ joke waiting to happen! I’m flattered, boys, I really am. I mean, three natural enemies burying the hatchet just for the sake of little ol’ me? Almost brings a tear to my eye.”
The Che Guevara redcap’s eyes nearly rolled out of their sockets. “Do me a favour and shut him up,” he growled at Purdy.
As Purdy rolled up the sock and aimed it at Whittaker’s mouth, the imp raised his voice. “So, is this your racket? Deliver me to the big muckamuck in Vael Ardenne, split the bounty, and then yuk it up while I get my head stuck on a pole? That seems pretty small-time for a crew like this. Come on: what are you boys really after? ‘Cause it sure ain’t the money! If it were—and this is just from me to you, Ted—if it were just the money, you wouldn’t have settled for just half up front! Not with a couple of redcaps in the mix!”
The MAGAt redcap gave Whittaker a kick and snapped, “Cork him! Now!”
Whittaker sucked in a breath and groaned, “Come on, Ted. You know the stories. You know what redcaps are like with cash. Trust me, if you don’t get payment in full right this second, you are never seeing the rest of your cut!”
The MAGAt kicked him again and pointed an angry finger at Purdy. “I told you to shut him up, you stupid skunk!”
Purdy dropped the sock and made a fist. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
“You heard me.”
Whittaker looked between them for a second and grinned. “Oh, I get it. Yeah, this is a respect thing, isn’t it, Teddy? That’s why you need these yahoos! Auberon’s retainers would make hamburger out of your mortal ass if you tried to collect the bounty yourself. But who knows? If you let the Gruesome Threesome make the handoff in the Otherlands, then maybe word gets out that you ‘helped’ with the operation. Maybe you can finally sit at the big boys’ table instead of being spat at by every dwarf, sprite, and hobgoblin who passes you by on the street!” He gave a short, sharp laugh. “Good fuckin’ luck with that if you’re dealing with these assholes! I’ll bet you dollars to donuts they’ve already worked out the quickest way for you to have a fatal accident tonight.”
Purdy glared suspiciously at the redcaps. The creatures bared their teeth and flexed their long, groping fingers. The mountain troll cracked his knuckles.
“Don’t listen to him,” said Che Guevara.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” said the MAGAt.
“You know… the little asshole might have a point,” Purdy muttered. “Do any of you realize how hard it is to pin down an imp? I had to track this bastard’s movements for four days before I could get in close enough to take him out. I got a discount on the restraints, but they still cost a fair chunk of change. And I had to drive across two bridges to get him from there to here. That’s a hell of a lot of gas money. Maybe I do deserve a little more for my trouble.”
“Watch yourself, Purdy,” said Che Guevara. “You don’t want to make this harder than it has to be. We made a deal. You’ll get the rest of your money.”
“Lotta ways out of a deal like that,” murmured Whittaker. “They promised you’d get your money, Ted, but did they promise your brakes would still be working when you drove outta here?”
The MAGAt bent down and grabbed Whittaker by his lapels. “That’s it! If you won’t shut him up, I will! Give it here!” He held out his hand for the tube sock. When Purdy hesitated, the redcap snapped, “Are you deaf, skunk? I said give it to me!”
Purdy kept his voice low, but Whittaker could hear the rage bubbling to the surface. “I already told you, I do not like that word.”
“That’s what you are, isn’t it?” hissed the MAGAt. “That’s all you’ll ever be. A low-rent thug for hire and an oath-breaking, good-for-nothing, half-blood skunk.”
Purdy drew a pistol from the waistband of his jeans. “Say that to my face,” he hissed. “Say that word to me one more fucking time.”
The MAGAt dropped Whittaker roughly and bared his teeth. As Che Guevara tried to calm his counterpart down and Mr. Big and Tall reached for the gun, Whittaker started to wriggle away like an inchworm, all but forgotten, and put all his attention toward his manacles.
He worked himself into a sitting position and stretched until he could get his wrists beneath his legs and, eventually, out in front of him. He had just got them to his knees when something landed on top of the van with a hollow metallic thud. The roof buckled and the parkade went silent as everyone looked to the source of the noise.
A long, low black shape on four legs was perched on the roof, staring down at Ted Purdy and the Gruesome Threesome. Its features were hazy and indistinct, concealed beneath a layer of what appeared to be living shadow. In the middle of what must have been its face, two cold blue points of light glowed like stars. Its lips peeled back to reveal rows of snow-white teeth, nothing at all like the crowded, carrion-chewing needles of the redcaps. These were the ripping daggers of an alpha predator. At the end of each leg, Whittaker saw three claws of similar proportion exuding a vapour like dry ice.
The shape howled, and sparks burst from under the hood of the van. The ceiling lights exploded in a shower of glass and Ted Purdy aimed his gun into the falling darkness. The shape lunged at him. There was a spray of arterial blood, a scream, and a thud. Purdy’s piece and shooting arm hung from the shape’s mouth, and after a few seconds of noisy chewing, they disappeared completely.
The redcaps tripped over each other to be the first one back into the safety of the van. Mr. Big and Tall grabbed the shape around the middle and hauled it off the pile of meat that used to be Ted Purdy. The shape growled and slithered out of Mr. Big and Tall’s grip, fixed its cold blue eyes on him, and sank its icy claws into the soft meat of his belly. The redcaps screamed and locked themselves in the van as the shape unspooled Mr. Big and Tall’s intestines like a string of sausages.
Only Whittaker held his tongue. While the shape chowed down on Mr. Big and Tall, Whittaker got his hands in front of him as quietly as he could and reached for his tie. He wasn’t an idiot. He’d been handcuffed like this before. That was why every single tie pin he owned was hand-cut into a lockpick. He worried the heavy iron manacles against the length of silk at his neck and worked it up out of his waistcoat. As the shape raked its claws against the van’s back doors, Whittaker bit down on the head of his tie pin and drew it out with his teeth, then jammed it into the lock on the right cuff. He nearly swallowed it as the shape bashed the door in with his head, leaped into the van, and ate the redcaps alive. His shirt was damp with sweat, his mouth dry and filled with the silvery tang of his tie pin. He worked it around until the lock went click and the iron manacle fell heavily from his hand. Then he set to work on the other side. As the shape finished with the redcaps and jumped back out of the van, its sleek black body now flecked all over with red, the second manacle gave way. Whittaker scooted out of the iron’s effective range, keeping one eye on the shape. His ankles were still tied, but he could deal with that later. As the shape came sprinting toward him, its teeth shining in the darkness, Whittaker snapped his fingers. The air made a whip-crack noise as he disappeared from the shape’s path, leaving only his tie pin and his fetters behind. A second crack followed a second later, as he appeared over Ted Purdy’s body and picked up the briefcase full of coins. One more crack echoed off the cold concrete, and the imp made good his escape.