The Pale Dreamer: A Bone Season novella (The Bone Season)Kindle

I

THE GRISLY CASE OF ANNE NAYLOR

Scion Citadel of London

9 October 2056

If you were to ask me what I liked most about being an up-and-coming criminal in the year 2056, I would point you to the simple things. Drinking coffee before daybreak in the den, waiting for the capital to stretch itself awake around me. Sitting beneath the blossom tree in the courtyard and leafing through a stack of penny dreadfuls. Listening to blacklisted music.

Strange, I know. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t have done things like that before I worked for Jaxon Hall. Perhaps not the blacklisted music or the penny dreadfuls, but I could have found a tree to read by, or made coffee before daybreak, under other circumstances. They were ordinary moments in my newly extraordinary life – and they, in turn, became extraordinary.

As the only known dreamwalker, I was meant to be extraordinary, too. Jaxon was certain that I was hiding spectacular powers; that I could leave my body, possess other people, and dance them around like mindless puppets if I so desired. But after two full months in his employ – not counting the time before I left school – I still couldn’t do it. Not for want of trying, I should add – I just didn’t know how, and nobody agreed on how to teach me.

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I first learned of the grisly case of Anne Naylor in October 2056, on a Monday afternoon. That morning found me in the study in our den, tackling a mound of paperwork. There was, I had discovered, a surprising amount of paperwork involved in being a criminal.

The den was a three-storey maisonette on Monmouth Street in the small district of Seven Dials. It had three permanent residents – me, Jaxon and Eliza. Nick had his own apartment in Soho, but he often stayed with us.

Since moving in at the end of July, I had come to love the den. It was cluttered and cramped and the boiler was useless, but that made it feel like a home – the opposite of my father’s modern, sterile apartment, which Scion had given him. Jaxon had gifted me my own room and told me to do as I pleased with it, so I had painted it red and filled it with trinkets from the black market, where I hunted for antiques and curios in the evenings.

Thinking of my father let a butterfly loose in my stomach. When I had finally left school, I had moved out straight away, telling my father I was going to live with my boyfriend (who did not exist), having secured a full-time job at an oxygen bar. He hadn’t complained, but I knew he was concerned for me. London posed a constant threat to an Irish girl, and a job in the service industry gave me no power to protect myself. That was why he had wanted me to go to the University, to climb the social ladder. To prove I was a good and valuable denizen.

He would be even more concerned if he knew the truth – that his daughter had chosen to live as a career criminal, and was fraternising with unnaturals.

That his daughter was unnatural.

I tapped my pen against the ledger, gazing out of the window. Jaxon had asked me to establish which clairvoyants in his section had failed to pay their syndicate rent, and how much they owed him for the pleasure of living on his turf. Mind-numbing work, unlike what Eliza and Nick usually got to do. They were always out hunting spirits, dealing with other voyant gangs, or finding inventive ways to make coin – the sort of thing I had envisioned doing when Jaxon had invited me to join the Seven Seals. They had worked for him longer than I had, but I still felt impatient – mostly with myself. I longed for an assignment of consequence; something that would really test me.

Not that I would ever ask for it outright. Jaxon Hall could be courteous, even charming, but he made you work for it. Pressing him at the wrong moment could make me look ungrateful for the work, and I couldn’t lose this job. I had the distinct feeling that if you were exiled from the voyant underworld, you wouldn’t be welcomed back.

I wasn’t about to take that gamble. Now I knew this world existed, I would not risk being banished.

My eyelids were heavy. I glanced up from the figures, massaging the sore base of my neck.

The sun was low and golden. Ensconced in here, it was easy to forget that Scion would have me hanged if they ever learned I was unnatural. That was what they called clairvoyants – people who could sense the æther, the spirit world.

Downstairs, the front door opened. I sat up straighter, adjusting my jersey. Eliza appeared on the landing, flushed and bright-eyed, hair unsettled by the wind.

Eliza Renton was twenty years old and had worked for Jaxon for at least a year. From what I had observed about her – I did a lot of observation between thrilling rounds of paperwork – she was shrewd, resolute, and impeccably streetwise. In the den, however, she could be absent-minded, often dropping things or gazing into the distance. Apparently it was a common trait in trance mediums.

Today she wore a silk dress, the same light green as her eyes, covered by a velvet coat. She had braved the cold to get us lunch, insisting that I deserved a break from the endless coffee runs – but her hands were empty.

‘No caffeine?’ I said. She continued up the stairs, her face set. ‘Eliza?’

‘Jaxon!’

Her granny boots clicked on the stairs at speed. I deserted my post and followed her. Any excuse. By the time I reached the landing on the second floor, Eliza was knocking on the door to Jaxon’s boudoir, as he called it. She was all nervous energy, tilting her weight from one foot to the other.

The door creaked open. Jaxon stood in his lounging robe, his black hair free of the oil he often used to smooth it back.

‘Did you bring that coffee, darling?’

‘I hate myself for saying this,’ Eliza said, ‘but we don’t have time for coffee.’

She slipped past him. I entered next, giving him a wary look. He twirled a burning cigarillo between his fingers.

After six months of knowing him, I still wasn’t sure what to make of Jaxon. He was eccentric and intimidating, with a smirk that promised mayhem and milk-blue eyes that saw through everything. Feared and loved in equal measure, he was the most famous mime-lord in the underworld.

As head of the gang, Jaxon had the best room in the building. Serving as both study and bedroom, it boasted large sash windows, a Victorian desk, a stained-glass lamp, bottles of absinthe, and shelf upon shelf of forbidden books and ornaments. Nick was lying on the chaise longue with his arms folded behind his head.

Nick Nygård was Jaxon’s mollisher, or second-in-command. He was the one who had uprooted me from my ordinary life, introduced me to Jaxon, and welcomed me into the syndicate. He was the one who had first told me I was clairvoyant.

‘Afternoon.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Hey, sötnos.’

He had started calling me that a while ago. It meant sweet nose in Swedish, which I thought was lovely. Nick in general was lovely. Other than my grandparents, who I hadn’t seen in eight years, I didn’t think anyone had ever made such a point of looking out for me.

‘Hey,’ I said.

Eliza threw herself down beside him, shunting his legs off to make room.

‘Jaxon,’ she said, fighting for breath, ‘one of our couriers just caught me at the Garden and asked me to get word to you. He said Didion Waite—’

‘It can’t be too dire if it involves Didion Waite, my dear. He’s a veritable buffoon.’ Jaxon glanced at me. ‘Paige, some tea may be in order.’

Normally I would have asked how many sugars. Instead, two months of frustration pooled behind my ribs and bubbled up to my throat.

‘I’d like to stay,’ I said.

His eyebrows jumped towards his hairline. All the heat inside me froze.

He was going to kick me out. I would have to go back to my father. I would never learn how to use my gift. It would eventually surface, and I would have no idea how to hide or control it. I would end up on the gallows before I turned seventeen. Death by reason of being too proud to make four cups of tea. Death by tea.

‘Eliza,’ Jaxon said, not taking his eyes off me, ‘do continue.’

I quietly allowed myself to breathe.

‘Didion’s poaching spirits again,’ Eliza said. ‘And he’s only gone and found Sarah Metyard.’ Jaxon became very still. ‘He hired someone to bind her, but they bungled it and set her off. She’s on a rampage.’

Jaxon leaned back in his chair and appeared to fix his full attention on a crack in the ceiling.

‘A rogue poltergeist,’ he said. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Didion, what have you got yourself into?’

I sat in silence, waiting. All I knew about Didion Waite was that Jaxon didn’t especially like him.

Jaxon stood abruptly and took the stairs to the garret. Nick and Eliza exchanged weary glances.

I cleared my throat.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but who’s Sarah Metyard?’

Nick smiled at me. ‘I keep forgetting you’ve only been here for a couple of months.’

‘Sorry,’ I said again, flustered. ‘I’ve been studying, but I haven’t got to—’

‘Paige, there are thousands of spirits in London. We’ve had years to commit them to memory.’

He beckoned me over, moving up to make room. Eliza nodded her encouragement, though her smile was a little guarded. I had always suspected she hadn’t wanted there to be any more members of this tight-knit family. I perched on the end of the chaise longue.

‘There are a few different kinds of spirit,’ Eliza said to me. ‘Do you know what a poltergeist is?’

I nodded. ‘A kind of breacher – a spirit that can make contact with the physical world. They’re often created by a violent death, or angry about something that happened to them when they were alive.’

‘That’s it. Poltergeists are extremely dangerous, as they can cause physical harm, even kill the living – but they’re also rare in comparison to other spirits, and very hard to catch, so they sell for a lot of money.’