Tales of London #3

Jenna had no plans to leave her bed until the next day or so. When she finally got home, she dropped her leather jacket, stepped out of her pants and took off her bra, all in one long, liquid movement while she was shambling towards her big, warm, wonderful bed, and then fell on the pillows, already sleeping. Naturally, she was furious when her phone went off, waking her up just a couple of hours later. According to the clock on the wall, it wasn't even nine in the morning. Basically dusk.

At first, she pulled the pillow over her head, but the caller didn't give up. Then she toyed with the idea of blowing the damn thing up, but she knew very well who was the only one brave enough to call her so early and so relentlessly and didn't want him to come over in person. So she got up, stretched and made faces as her back cracked, then fished the phone out of yesterday's jeans and answered it.

'Morning, Dad,' Jenna said.

'What the hell did you do again, you stupid girl?!'

'Nobody. Trust me, I tried, but he ran away.'

'Is this some kind of joke to you?' Don Sebastiano asked angrily 'I just got off the phone! Do you have any idea how much I have to pay for the damage you stupid kids caused?'

Jenna shrugged, even though her father couldn't see it. Money was not an issue for the don. Never been. For a moment she was wondering how the Met would know it was them, but then she realised they must have, in fact, got Teodore. The idiot.

'You can bill half of it to Lord Montgomery,' she offered 'His jerks of sons attacked me.'

'I don't care who attacked you!' the don shouted. 'You are a Carvelli, everything you do is reflecting on me! I can't have all this ruckus with just one year before the election!'

Jenna sighed. This again… Her father wanted to be the next Mayor of London, and somehow that meant that she had to become the perfect, well-mannered room decor, being pretty and smiling sweetly at charity events.

'Don't sigh to me, Jenna, or I swear to God…' he took a deep breath and started over 'Anyway. You will regret last night very soon. You and all of the other stupid kids.'

'What do you mean?' she asked, and she did not like the cheerfulness in her father's voice all of a sudden.

'Tomorrow, at six o'clock sharp, you will be at the Commissioner's office. He has a task for you and your little friends, something you can do for the city. That, or prison, it’s your pick, but I strongly advise you to choose cooperation. You can make a name for yourself, and for something other than sleeping around and breaking things, for a change.'

'That's new,’ she said in a surprised voice. ‘Not the slut-shaming, I’m used to that, dad, but the other thing. What kind of task?'

The Commissioner had never summoned her or anyone else to his office after a fight. Sure, he was angry, fined them and sent some vague threats, even threw them in jail for a night, but that was all part of the game. Both the Montgomery and the Carvelli families were way too important and powerful to do anything more, not to mention the donations the families gave to the police force regularly. Would it be possible that they crossed a line this time? Did someone get seriously hurt? But it wasn't even that big of a fight. Just a couple of months ago they managed to till the main road from Camden Town Station to Mornington Crescent Station, a good half of a mile, and no one batted an eye.

'I don't know what kind of task, but I hope something to teach you some respect because looks like I couldn't.' Don Carvelli answered. 'Six. O. Clock. If any of you decides to refuse to help out, you all going to jail for good. Even Montgomery agreed to that.'

And with that, he ended the call.

'What the fuck…?' asked Jenna the empty room. She threw the phone on the bed. Then she sighed again and shook her head. She knew already that going back to sleep is not an option: she was too angry for that. Might as well start the day, she thought and went into the shower. As the almost boiling water fell all over her body, Jenna checked herself, giving extra attention to her tattoos, especially the tiny half-moon on her left shoulder. There were no injuries bad enough to actually care about, only a couple of scratches and one reddish blob on her forearm, where one of Bailey Montgomery's flames kissed her.

She closed the water and stepped out. The mirror was obscure because of the steam, so she used her hand to wipe clean a patch. Big, brown eyes stared back at her, with dark circles under them. Her skin still remembered the sun of the Italian summer but was fading into its natural light olive shade, letting the freckles around her nose slowly reappear. Her hair, usually a big, uncontrollable brown mass, stuck to her head now and poured onto her back, in length it usually couldn't reach because of the stubborn curls. She smiled at her reflection, with an ironic, almost sour half-smile. She liked her lips: they were red and full. Men always said they were made for kissing, and after a couple of drinks they became a little more straightforward about them, but Jenna didn't mind either way; it's not like they were wrong.

She dried herself with a towel then wrapped it around her head and walked back into the living room. It was the kitchen and the bedroom at the same time, the flat being a studio. The bed itself was on a small step, almost like it was on a miniature stage, and Jenna sometimes wanted to put a mirror above it on the ceiling, just for fun. Not like there was someone to have fun with: she couldn't get an undisturbed half an hour in a car, let alone a real relationship. But she was okay with that anyway.

The flat had an awkward shape, almost like a trapeze, narrow at the door and getting wider towards the back wall, where the little stage was. Like so many homes in London, it wasn't intended to be a flat, but then someone saw the opportunity and suddenly there was a new place, ready to let it out for a criminally overpriced rent.

Jenna didn’t spend much time there anyway. Her job required her to leave London regularly, and even when she was there, she mostly just came home to sleep. The flat wasn’t as much a home as a place she kept her stuff. And by keeping them she meant mostly leaving them on the floor. Or chairs. Occasionally at the far end of the bed. She wasn’t what people would call “organised”.

Now she went to the dresser next to her bed, opened a drawer and found nothing because she never put away the clean underwear from the sofa, where she left them ready to be folded. So she grabbed a pair of knickers from there and put them on. Next was the kitchen, which wasn't so much of a real kitchen, more like a counter with a tap, two hot plates, a small fridge and a microwave in the corner next to the door. Jenna never used her kitchen to cook, only to store the takeaways and to make her coffee.

The only thing she actually bought for the flat was her coffee machine, this red, high-tech machine. It was as simple to use as it gets, the girl just filled the tank with water, put a capsule in and pushed the only button. A minute later there was steaming hot, wonderfully dark and textured coffee in her mug, which she always drank without sugar or milk and in big amounts.

Her Italian heritage only went so far, and she didn't have any problem with a slice of leftover barbecue-chicken pizza, straight from the fridge, for breakfast. She knew that her father would have a brain aneurysm from watching his daughter eat like that. She considered sending a video, but then she thought the old man was already on the edge as it was.

After breakfast, it was time to get ready. It wasn't easy, because Jenna couldn't tell when was the last time she did her laundry, and her options were very limited. After a couple of minutes of looking and sniffing to see if the pieces were clean, she had two piles: a huge one for dirty clothes and a very small one for clean ones. She wanted to call it a pile, but in reality, it was a grey, big loosely knitted jumper, a pair of unmatching socks, a black sports bra and her jeans from yesterday which she decided to be still okay despite the faint smell of smoke. The jumper was way too revealing but on the plus side, she didn't have to put on make-up, because nobody would have been looking at her face anyway. And she wore a bra under it after all, so there was no reason for complaint. She put on her big leather jacket and her bracelets and was as ready for the day as she possibly could be.

After yesterday the last place she wanted to go was Camden Town, but she had no choice. At least she managed to avoid the worst of the rush hour, something to be thankful about. The Jones and Sons was only a few minutes from the Camden Town Station by walking, fortunately in the opposite direction from the Market. The office was above a fish and chips shop right on the High Street. Jenna opened the door and up she went on the carpeted stairs in the poorly lit stairwell to the milk-glass door with 'ones and Sons written on it. The "J" fell off a long time ago and no one cared enough to fix it. The whole stairwell smelled like fish.

The office had two rooms. In the bigger one, there were five desks, chairs, a valet, a small bookcase and a kitchen table with a microwave and a coffee machine on it and a mini-fridge under. Thankfully it smelled like coffee in here. The smaller room, that's door was right behind Jenna's desk was a broom closet in its previous life but served as Mr Jones' office in this one. Mr Jones was the son, or maybe grandson of one of the "sons" in the company's name and he was gravely afraid of everything his office meant to deal with. So when his time came to take over the family business, he hired a couple of experienced demon hunters to do the job. At least that was the general idea, but talented hunters were hard to come by, so he had to settle with the ones like Jenna, who although had no experience whatsoever, possessed rare qualities amongst hunters: she was willing to work for Mr Jones and was still alive. The interview lasted three minutes.

All that was years ago, and since then two things became clear: first, Jenna was indeed very good at her job, and second, Mr Jones was just as terrified of her as he was of the things she was hunting. That probably was the only reason that with her usual mentality, Jenna still had a job.

'Nice of you to pop in, Carvelly,' said Khan 'And only two hours late.'

'Give me a break, Khan,' answered Jenna as she took off her jacket and hung it on the valet.

Even if Khan had a first name, nobody knew what that might be, and nobody ever called him other than Khan. Jenna once heard a story, saying that Khan was already here when Mr Jones moved his office into the building in the nineties and simply refused to leave. He was a big, bald Pakistani man with a thick, greying moustache and reading glasses hanging on his neck. He was always first in the morning and last to leave in the evening, and between that, he rarely left the office, but when he did, he proved to be a very efficient hunter. He spent most of his time reading the newspaper and drinking black coffee, though.

'Where are the others?' asked Jenna, looking around the empty room. Khan shrugged.

'Out. Working,' he said, then raised the paper in front of his face, stating that the conversation was over. The front page covered the fire at the Market, but Jenna knew that Khan would have mentioned it if her name was in the news.

She sidled between two desks to reach her own and sat down, giving a disgusted look to the chaos. Papers and notes and pens and old files and books and half a croissant, hard as a rock. One of these days she will really have to clean this mess up, she thought. Probably tomorrow, but most definitely not later than Thursday. Friday, at the latest.

She rearranged the disarray so she could rest her head on the desk, but before she could have gone to sleep, the door behind her opened up. Mr Jones carefully scuffled into the bigger room. He was a small, old man, skinny as a stick, with a slightly bent back. He always wore at least one ugly, knitted cardigan regardless of the weather and what hair he still had was snow white. All these and the big, round glasses made him look like an extremely old tortoise.

'Miss Carvelli, what a nice surprise,' he whispered, like always. Jenna could have thought that he just used sarcasm on her, but she knew that the old man was not brave enough for that.

'Mor…' she checked her phone and saw that it is, in fact, still before noon '...ning, Boss.'

'I was hoping that you could look into this if you are not too busy… When you got the time…' he handed a thin folder to Jenna, then retreated to his office and closed the door. And locked it.

The girl sighed and opened the file. It was about doors opening themselves, a TV changing the channel and that kind of usual stuff, boring but easy.

'Nice chat, Khan, as always,' said Jenna as she grabbed her jacket and left to check out the location. Khan just shook his head and turned the page, not even looking up when the doors closed behind the girl.