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  Short Changes

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  SHORT CHANGES

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  and

  Keris McDonald

  1. Family Business

  3

  2. Care

  12

  3. Not A Cat Person

  17

  4. Coat Like White Fire

  24

  5. Beep!

  28

  6. The God Shark

  30

  7. Reading Between the Lines (with Keris McDonald)

  33

  1

  Short Changes

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  This Collection © Adrian Tchaikovsky 2020 save for ‘Reading Between the Lines’ © Adrian

  Tchaikovsky and Keris McDonald 2013.

  Publication history

  Family Business – first published in The Alchemy Press Book of Urban Mythic, Alchemy

  Press (2013)

  Care – first published in Feast and Famine, Newcon Press (2013)

  Not a Cat Person – first published in Hauntings, Newcon Press (2012)

  Coat Like White Fire – new to this collection

  Beep! – new to this collection

  The God Shark – first published in Feast and Famine, Newcon Press (2013)

  Reading Between the Lines (with Keris McDonald) – first published as a limited edition

  novelette by Jurassic London (2013)

  2

  Short Changes

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Family Business

  Douglas was expecting us. I’m willing to bet he’d had an eye on the door every half-minute

  in case my lads showed up, with his other eye on the back way out. They always think they

  can run.

  It was a poor place he’d chosen to spend his last night in, some wretched pasta dive

  that turned into a card den after dark. He had enough money to play cards, did Douglas, but

  not to pay his debts.

  We caught him between half-minutes, me and my boys. The place went quiet.

  Douglas had been dealt a good hand. He was halfway through sliding some chips forward. He

  stopped: a lean, shaven-headed man in an old suit, aces and eights dropping from nerveless

  fingers.

  He ran. I called the old magic about me.

  “Stop.”

  He stopped. Every eye in the house was on him, because they didn’t want to look at

  me. We cut between the tables like sharks. Douglas was trembling, now, though I’d heard

  some of the things he’d been saying, about him not being afraid. About how old Tarrant

  didn’t scare him, not hardly.

  “Outside.” The trick is in how you say it. A good, clear diction, for the magic to work.

  A click of the ‘t’ and the ‘d’, not a lost letter. Douglas turned and left the back way, just like he’d planned, only in company. In the acid streetlight he stood, shaking. I wondered what

  he’d been hoping to gamble the money together for. A ticket out of town, no doubt. Should

  know better. If he’d been any good with cards he’d not have had to borrow from me in the

  first place.

  “Douglas,” I said. My lads were all around him now, so I let him go by speaking his

  name.

  “Mr Tarrant- I- have the money-“ he got out.

  “But you don’t.” I stood outside the circle of my boys, arms folded. There was a gap,

  in that circle, leading to me. There always was. It’s been a while since anyone tried to take it.

  Six-foot-six and broad and bearded am I, but more than that. The magic leaks out of me, I

  know: the magic that commands. I remember, six years before, when some mad-eyed junkie

  tried it on me, rushing me with a knife. I told him to stop and he stopped, the point inches

  from me. Plenty of witnesses to that one, and to the price I took out of his hide.

  “Do you know what we call your kind, in the trade?” I asked him. When I’m not

  using the magic I have a very pleasant voice, soft and low and rich. I could sing Sinatra and

  charm the birds off the trees, but what tyrant ever charmed where he could command.

  Douglas was displaying his ignorance, so I told him, “We call your kind ‘lemons’,

  Doug. It’s because I squeeze you and squeeze you, but all I get is bitter.”

  He said something. It might have been, “Please.”

  “Thirty thousand quid’s a lot of juice, Douglas the Lemon,” I told him, and lucky for

  him I was Tarrant, and not my brother Winston, whose names stuck when he gave them.

  “Mr Tarrant,” he said, but I knew my own name, here on this side of the fence, and no

  need for some walking dead man to remind me. “Just a week,” he croaked on. “You gave

  Jimmy Sarker a week. Come on, Mr Tarrant.”

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  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Jimmy Sarker was a lemon like you, Doug. He used his week to fly to Spain,” I said

  reasonably. “Which forced my boys to mail him back home in a number of shoeboxes. Since

  then we’ve changed the way we cut lemon wedges. It’s cheaper on postage.” I nodded to my

  boys, and Douglas at last began to scream. I heard the radio in the pasta place turned up, loud

  enough to drown him.

  We drowned him. You can do it, if you know which arteries to cut. My lads were

  good at it now. I didn’t get a drop on me.

  “Good work,” I told my boys, when it was done. “You two wrap him and dump him.

  Then…” No pressing business tonight, so why not? “Let’s get inside and see how Dougie’s

  luck would have run, shall we?” And we’d better come out ahead, or the owner would be

  explaining to me why someone on my hit list was playing at his joint without him tipping me

  the nod.

  It was about an hour later, with Douglas safely out of mind, when I heard it. I stood

  up, cards still in hand. It had been a long, long time. Memories rushed in: the war; the

  silenced voices, suddenly, mid-cry; my family, those that hadn’t made it. The Call. The Call

  to Arms.

  I started for the door. The lads were jumping up all over, reaching into the coats,

  knowing there was trouble but not what. I waved them down. “Stay here,” I told them. Some

  of them protested. “Stay here,” I commanded, and that did it. I left.

  By that time, I had an idea where it was. I hailed a taxi. “Embankment,” I said, and

  Embankment he took me to. I walked upriver until I saw it.

  A handful of bystanders. An ambulance. Not so surprising for London in the small

  hours. I’d have walked right past, if not for the Call. The paramedics were standing round

  uselessly, come too late. A handful of drunks, insomniacs and homegoing party girls were

  standing to stare. One figure stood alone, a thin, pale man with sandy hair and gaunt cheeks.

  He wore army surplus and a long, stained coat. He could have been any tramp from any city

  in the world, but I knew him. Even in the Old Country, Trevor had never been much to look

  at.

  “Traveller,” I said, and, “Tyrant,” he replied.

  There was a pause. We had never been enemies, never been friends. Our paths had not

  crossed often enough, back on the other side of the fence. I suppose that made him as close to

&n
bsp; an ally as I was ever likely to get. I was never interested in popularity contests.

  After the pause had, in my opinion, ended, I said, “I hope you didn’t call me here just

  to talk about old times.” Just because he wasn’t an enemy doesn’t mean I liked him.

  “I didn’t call you,” he said. “I called everyone.” He nodded at something on the

  ground. Somehow I had overlooked the body, amongst the onlookers. Their very focus on it

  had drawn the eye away to themselves. A body, saturated, pooling river water on the

  pavement, dumped here at the head of the steps they had dragged it up. The Thames’ latest

  victim. I hunched closer to see the face.

  “No…”

  “Yes.” Trevor was at my side. In this we were brothers. The cold shock that went

  through me came from a world away, another time.

  Pallid, dirty, a young man whose hair had been golden but was now murky, long and

  tangled like water weeds. Thin, frail, he looked starved: I could see the skull through the skin.

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  Short Changes

  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The sunken eyes were closed, at least. It was Winston, my brother, as Trevor was my brother.

  Winston was dead.

  It had been over a decade since I had lost family. I did not have so very much family

  left to lose. Many of them were my enemies. Many of them hated me, and were hated right

  back, but that didn’t stop them being family. I had never liked Winston, but I liked him being

  dead a good deal less.

  The crowd moved. Another brother had arrived. He was still in uniform, and that

  helped: a big, handsome man who straight away started moving people along, speaking to

  them, convincing them. He shone. The people couldn’t see it, but he glowed with his own

  light: about his head was the glittering radiance of an invisible crown. They did not see it

  with their eyes, but their minds did. Every word from him was reassurance and authority. He

  spoke to the paramedics, and they packed up their ambulance and left the body there. I could

  have done the same, but they would have remembered me for it. I command, Lorne inspires.

  We’re natural opposites. Before the war we’d tried to kill each other a dozen times. That was

  then, before blood became too precious to waste.

  He shot me a dark look, but I had all the dark looks in the world, and I didn’t need to

  borrow any from him.

  “You,” he said. “You did this. You killed the Wishbringer.” There was such

  conviction in his blunt, stupid face. I swear he used his powers on his own reflection,

  sometimes.

  “I called. I was here first,” Trevor said. “He’s just arrived, like you.”

  “How did this happen?” Lorne asked, still not letting me off the hook. He had the

  weak, baffled eyes of a man for whom the world must move only a slight distance to become

  too complicated for him to understand. Just as well our magics fell out the way they did, or

  his stupidity’d have ordered whole armies to their doom.

  “Is it the Other?” I said what was on all our minds.

  “No way of knowing,” said Trevor.

  Lorne was shaking his head. “Surely we’d know. Surely we’d know if they’d found

  us. We’d feel the fence break, surely.”

  “If they were that knowable we’d never have had to run from them,” I said, looking at

  Winston’s sad, hollow, dead face.

  “We must do something,” Lorne stated. His crown of lordly might sparkled and shone

  impotently. He could have destroyed me long ago if he wasn’t such a moron.

  “We must have a wake,” Trevor pointed out. “Everyone will come. We’ll see if

  anyone else is missing, or if anyone has felt anything. There are those better placed to know

  than any of us.”

  Lorne nodded sagely, making the crown dance. His turned his eyes on me again.

  “And if I find that you have anything to do with this,” he warned me. “I shall not rest-“

  “I’m sure,” I cut him off. “Whatever.” He ground his teeth in frustrated anger and

  grief, and then turned and stormed away, stalking into the dark, a golden man in a crown of

  lights dwindling into insignificance under the streetlamps until nothing was left but the hat,

  like a dying firework.

  5

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  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I headed back to reclaim my lads. They did so worry about me, when I went off.

  Looking back I saw Trevor, the Traveller of Worlds, walking alone along the Embankment

  with the body of the Wishbringer in his arms.

  The Call had gone out, and we would all answer. Only Lorne and I had been close enough to

  reach the scene, but they turned up over a week, one by one, until the whole family was in

  town. The witless Londoners went about their business, perhaps with more headaches, more

  bad dreams. To me it was as though there was a storm always about to break. It had been ten

  years since all seventeen of us had been in one place. Not since the War. Not since we ran

  from the Others, since we jumped the fence. I spent most of the week out of town so as not to

  bump into anyone unexpectedly.

  We let Lorne make the arrangements. It kept him out from under my feet and made

  him feel useful. He got us a place in Temple, one of those old Masonic-looking buildings

  with coats of arms on the walls. No doubt he felt it was something like home. It was nothing

  like home, not for me, not for pretty much everyone.

  They all dragged in, singly or in small groups, according to their nature. They had

  been catching up, those who cared for company. Winston’s wake had become the social event

  of the decade. When I arrived they were mostly there. I saw brother Warren’s broad-

  shouldered bulk in one corner, a can in his hand, cropped hair and scarred face. I’d heard he’d

  been in the Middle East, or maybe somewhere in Africa, propping up a tinpot dictator or

  brawling over oil. I almost liked Warren. He was so refreshingly unjudgemental.

  Sarah was there, in her dark glasses. She had looked over the body, Trevor told me,

  but said nothing. No mystic pronouncements, no warnings of the Other, like those warnings

  we had all ignored before the War. Now she sat, looking washed-out and old, stroking one of

  her cats, holding onto it to make sure it stayed with her. The cat would rather have

  investigated sister Anthea, who was standing in a corner looked more like a strung-out hippy

  than ever. Sleeping in ditches and up trees, and with the stinking animals she was so fond of.

  They had laid Winston out in state, like the Old Country. They had washed him, and

  combed his hair until it was golden again, and dressed him in blue and white, that had always

  been his colours. With his hands crossed over his chest he looked beautiful again, the youth

  for whom dreams came true on request, best loved of all of us: unselfish, gentle, generous,

  dead. If I had been of a mind I could have watched for who grieved and who stayed back,

  who shed real tears for the loss of our brother, and who had simply turned up for the booze. I

  wasn’t of a mind. I didn’t grieve. Winston had never granted any of my wishes, after all.

  Besides, Lorne was standing by the body like a huge imbecilic honour guard, and I didn’t

  want a scene.

  I knew when Tessa was at my elbow: she was impossible to overlook. I turned on my

  best smile for
her, and she swapped it for one of her own, no more sincere. She was like

  Warren. We understood each other.

  “My dear,” she said. “How dreadful it is. Our poor Winston.” She had never much

  liked him either.

  “Indeed,” I rumbled. She was still a feast for the eyes, the Breaker of Hearts. She had

  adjusted well, I’d heard, here where it wasn’t de rigeur for men to fight duels over her. She

  6

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  Adrian Tchaikovsky

  had other ways of leading them into ruin. I could chart her career in high-profile suicides and

  stock market crashes. “How’s the minister?”

  “Which one?” she asked, bored as always with her current lover. It was the chase,

  with her. I could appreciate that. “You know I can barely tell them apart. Cars and shares and

  credit cards. Not like you.” She gave me one of her top of the line smiles. “It’s almost worth

  poor Winston dying just to get to see you again.”

  “Never again,” I told her, still smiling. “We tried that once. Let’s give it a wide

  berth.”