Delilah Des Anges - Pass The Parcel

Copyright Delilah Des Anges 2007-2010
Written & typeset by Delilah Des Anges, edited by Megan Fennell Cover illustration by Delilah Des Anges

Interior illustrations by Delilah Des Anges, Rotem Shuval, Kevin Hill, Megan Fennell and Elisa Faraday

ISBN #: 978-1-4461-9647-2

All rights reserved

Other Books written by this author and published by House of D: Know Your Words
(with Al Kennedy and Amy Kreines) Shots in the Dark
Kissing Carrion
(Illustrated by G K Blekkenhorst) Hamilton

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 9

CHAPTER 2 47

CHAPTER 3 91

CHAPTER 4 133

CHAPTER 5 175

CHAPTER 6 219

CHAPTER 7 291

CHAPTER 8 339

CHAPTER 9 381

CHAPTER 10 429

CHAPTER 11 479

CHAPTER 12 521

CHAPTER 13 569

To Lindsay, for making it possible, and to London, for inspiring it

PAGE ONE...

Stories rarely start neatly, all at the same time. They have ragged edges that interlock, overlap, and clash with each other, and sometimes they affect each other in ways that no one can predict or explain; a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and the hurricane fails to come: instead there is a revolution.

This story starts there.
It also starts in an alleyway outside a nightclub, where a thief is being trained.

It starts in the store room of a comic shop, where an immigrant worker is receiving someone else's mail.

It starts in a cafe doorway, where a man makes a deal with a being the dominant species characterise as 'daemon'.

It starts with a teenage boy saving up for surgery, with two businessmen fighting for control of the market, with a man who is not what he seems, with a trio of monsters who are less than they appear, with an ordinary woman trying hard to lead an ordinary life, with a heartbroken boy trying his best to be icy calm.

It starts with ethereal beings skilled in manipulation, with tribes, clans, hunters, entrepreneurs, lovers, fighters, landlords, liars, taxi drivers, politicians, magicians, leaders, fathers, traitors, hitmen and sales clerks. It starts with deceptions already enacted; it starts with lies uncovered and long-forgotten. It starts in the middle, because no story can ever, ever start at The Beginning.

Most of all, thought, it starts or some of it starts in London.

Section 1.1

ifteen feet above the rain-slippery surface of the street was a spot where iron joists collided, criss-crossed and passed on to the adjacent walls, hidden from casual view by half a fire-damaged billboard advertising an environmentallyfriendly shaving foam. It was secluded, this perilous perch between one abandoned redbrick building and the fire-gutted remains of another, not only by virtue of being the last place any casual observer would think to look, but also through the combined factors of time (three in the morning, the hour when the clouds above the city were at their most unappealingly muddy orange) and the geographic location (nowhere near a pub or club or brothel or even the cheapest and roughest residential homes).

The air was just warm enough to make Mikey's woollen hat uncomfortable and itchy to wear but not quite warm enough to actually take it off and risk the painful reddening of the tops of his ears; it was wet enough to make his hair, which protruded thick and brown from the front and sides of his cap, frizz up something ugly .

"You did better that time," Aaron assured him, his foot braced against the old pitted metal of a diagonal joist, hands deep in the front pocket of his paint-speckled hoodie, his back apparently supported by air molecules. "You got to remember to get up after you roll, though, or you're just going to end up stuck."

"Do I really have to do all this shit?" Mikey complained, rubbing the back of his neck more as a gesture than as a genuine attempt to assuage the ache. The movement swung him off-balance, and for a moment his back slid over the old metal and he groped for a rivet to catch himself on, threw his unimpressive weight into desperate reverse, just about regaining his equilibrium before he could plunge into the weed-spotted detritus below.

Aaron's eyebrows were visibly arched despite the darkness and the thick shadow cast by the low set of the bill of his baseball cap. "No," he said with sarcasm so heavy that if he'd dropped it, it could have driven through the paved street and into the sewers below. "Because you really want to end up in the fuckin' police station the first time you seriously try, don't you?"

" No ," Mikey sighed, rubbing his sore neck muscles a little more circumspectly this time. "I'm just sayin' "

"Are we gearing up to have the pick-pocketing conversation a-bloody-gain?" Aaron asked. There was a warning edge in his light voice as his fingers curled around a rope-thin vertical pole to steady himself. "Let's do that, shall we?"

"No, no," Mikey said hastily, wiping ambient not-quite-rain from his forehead and cursing the way his teeth chattered in the muggy air. Close weather shouldn't be cold weather, the whole thing was fucked up and unfair. "We're good. I got that. Totally makes all the sense. We're book."

Across on the opposite beam Aaron said softly, "Don't believe we are on the same page, Mikeyboy. Why aren't I training you to pick pockets again?"
"Too dangerous," Mikey said dully, clawing and squeezing at his trapezium with a now-wet hand, the dampness on his skin only bearable because it was colder than his sweat, and less sticky.
"Too dangerous because," Aaron prompted, swinging in a gut-wrenching arc around the vertical bar with one hand, his feet dangling over the wreckage unsupported for one choke-inducing moment. He seemed quite at ease with the movement fine one to talk about things being too dangerous, Mikey thought with the sourness of the unwillingly concerned.
"The probability of being caught by a mark is high and not outweighed by the probability of scoring a worthy enough return," Mikey intoned, playing host to a slight tremor as a night breeze stole under his coat and teased his skin.
This was the frustrating part, of course. Plenty of things about running away from home, from Hastings and his perpetually preoccupied mother, had not been as he was expecting them to be; he'd found quickly that Michael Verentis was bafflingly nothing like as catastrophically badass as the bedroom mirror had previously confirmed, for one. He'd had to pawn his really book smartphone on day two because it turned out that hostels costs money and doorways were full of barking mental piss-scented drunks. Shit like that had ceased to be an issue when he met Aaron and later Dusty and it wasn't, he thought hastily, like he wasn't grateful.
It was just that there was so much maths involved in a life of crime and he hadn't really put that in mind when he adopted the idea of being a trainee thief. Aaron was superkeen on percentages, ratios, gradients and probabilities and Mikey'd been a consistent " E " Student in maths when he'd actually bothered to turn up and he'd say it totally wasn't fair but most of the time all this calculating shit still beat all hell out of bloody school . Apart from anything else he hadn't had his backside handed to him in the physical sense since he left.
Aaron watched Mikey massaging the back of his scrawny neck awkwardly and said in a much kinder, softer tone, "You want to take a few for oh-two?"
For a moment Mikey wrestled with the urge to shrug off the offer and macho it out like a big boy, and with the equal and opposite urge to nod with pathetic gratitude and prove he was still a skinny twit who couldn't get anything right or finish anything he started. In the end he settled for saying, "Get on, Fagin, we're good," which was neither one thing nor another.
For a breath or two Aaron frowned over the void between them, and Mikey waited. It took Aaron Statham a while to get pop culture references, Mikey'd noticed, sometimes whole days getting between the remark and the reply, and they tended to throw his brain out of gear while they were being processed.