by Emma Mills
‘That and the slightly grey morality surrounding it,’ Brittany said.
‘Yeah, that too, but beggars can’t be choosers and we are definitely beggars right now!’
‘Beggars?’ Sadie eyed us from the sofa. ‘Isn’t that another word for pathetic, stinking tramp?’ she smiled sweetly.
‘Right, well if we are going to do this, I’m going to meditate, and you should too,’ Brittany said, turning her back on Sadie. ‘We need to draw on as much earth energy as possible. Do you think we should…’ Pausing she pulled out the chalk from her pocket and looked back at Sadie, who was scowling at us.
‘Do you ever do anything other than eye-roll?’ I asked her.
‘Apparently not, when I live with you two losers,’ she drawled. ‘And you don’t need to get your preschool chalks out again. I’ll stay here like a good little vampire.’
‘God, give me strength,’ I muttered, as I followed Brittany out of the room.
‘God washed his hands of you when you grew some fangs… shame you didn’t grow the attitude to go with it, instead of just staying path-e-tic!’ Sadie shouted after me.
I narrowed my eyes and turned back. I’d show her some attitude!
‘Come on, we haven’t got long enough. We’ll teach the bitch some manners when we’re done,’ Brittany whispered, pulling me away.
‘I can hear you… I’m a vampire!’ Sadie shouted again.
‘Good, so you’ll know not to push us any further, else I might just decapitate you myself,’ I said.
‘Hmm, your boyfriend would be so proud of you then, wouldn’t he, Jessica? You know what he told me in the car? He said how you were so-o special because you had kept your soul. I wonder what he’d think of you if you proved that you were just as callous as the rest of them?’
I curled my fingers into my fist so hard I could feel them breaking the skin. I gritted my teeth, welcoming the anger flowing through my veins.
‘I want to kill her Brit,’ I said, a few moments later when we were safely ensconced in my room. I want to kill her re-eally slowly.’
‘Well, sit your arse down on the floor and concentrate on all your angry energy. Use it. Suck it up,’ Brittany said, sitting cross-legged in the lap of an enormous stuffed bear Daniel had brought me back from a trip years before.
‘Why do you get the bear?’ I asked.
‘I have a bad back, and you have a teenage vampire back, so I win,’ she said. ‘Now shh, and concentrate.’
‘The security ward is working, isn’t it?’ I whispered, forty-five minutes later.
Brittany nodded, her eyes drowsy.
‘It’s just very quiet down there,’ I said.
Brittany shrugged.
‘I might have whispered a sedation spell whilst you were throwing insults back and forth,’ she said with a shrug.
‘I didn’t think it worked on vampires?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t normally, but I guess it’s the combined effect of her having a bellyful of blood, being a sleepy newborn and my spell.’
‘Well let’s get our spell done before she wakes up,’ I said, jumping up from the floor and cracking my fingers. ‘I feel so energised I could power half of Manchester.’
‘Do you think we need to do it from the sky… like, above the house?’ Brittany asked after we had skimmed through the spell basics again in my Book of Shadows.
I nodded.
‘That’s how the Council does it, isn’t it? I think we should fly up towards the ley line and then hover nearer their rooftop. It will be like when we created the security ward for this house…’
‘Except we’re changing their memories, instead of creating a giant intruder alarm,’ she added quietly.
I nodded.
‘Let’s get it over with.’
We opened my window and I crawled out, balancing on the narrow ledge as easily as a bird.
‘Come on,’ I beckoned to Brittany. ‘Hold onto me and I’ll jump us up to the roof. It will be safer there to fly up.’
Brittany climbed out, squeezing her eyes shut.
‘I don’t like this. I much prefer to fly up from ground level,’ she complained.
‘Yes, but we’re more likely to get spotted in the middle of the lawn and we don’t want to go and wake the sleeping monster either. Stop being a mardy-pants and hang on!’
I grabbed her and half leapt, half crawled up the side of the house, landing us safely on the back of the roof.
‘When you do things like that I wonder how on earth we are best friends… I mean, you are totally a vampire… like a real vampyre-vampire!’
‘Well, duh, what an astute observation… you ninny! Does it make you feel happier when I do this?’ I said, flexing my knees and flying up into the ley lines above our heads.
She laughed and flew up after me.
‘Yes, very much so. Please refrain from freakish vampire-related behaviour.’
We smiled at each other and floated over the neighbour’s house, staying well hidden in the low morning mist.
‘It would be easier if we stood on his roof,’ Brittany said, looking down on the house some fifty feet below us. ‘It’s hard to concentrate on floating and on the spell at the same time.’
We looked about us, but the street was empty.
‘Okay, but we need to stay right back. We should be fairly well hidden if we stay on the far slope, behind the chimney,’ I said, as we lowered ourselves down.
I grabbed her hands and we faced each other, placing our palms together, pooling our energy. The magic crackled around us and the clouds began to condense above our heads, attracted to the electricity. We chanted the words slowly, moving our hands apart and sweeping them around, indicating the north, south, east and west sides of the house. Any occupants, once inside the house, would forget any desire to call the helpline. They wouldn’t think about their neighbours again, even when they watched the news.
‘You will not believe the news. You will have no worries and will find all talk about vampires and witches amusing,’ Brittany said at the end of the spell.
‘You will also be protected within this house from any supernatural creature or dark magic,’ I added, feeling guilty and wanting to offer something in return.
Brittany pulled a face but couldn’t speak until we finished the spell. I drew a chalk pentagram on their roof, fixing the spell to the building and its occupants. It was done.
‘Why did you say that? Now you won’t ever be able to step inside their house,’ she queried.
‘Well we don’t need to and it only seems fair, seeing as we have taken away their ability to call the helpline, that they should be protected as well,’ I said, just as we felt our own security ward crackle into action.
‘Someone’s broken in,’ I said, leaping across the roof tiles to the edge nearest Daniel’s garden.
‘Or someone’s broken out,’ Brittany said, as the shadow of a girl darted across the lawn and leapt on top of another figure hiding in the treeline.
‘Oh damn-blast… it’s Sadie! We mustn’t have locked my window,’ I said, leaping off the roof into an overhanging tree and then running along the strongest branch before leaping into another tree, and then another, this one on our garden side. I made a final leap down onto the ground and ran at full-speed across the length of the lawn to where Sadie had already plunged her teeth deep into the jugular of the guy from next door.
‘Sadie, get off him,’ I ordered, but of course I had zero control over her. Only her master could influence her actions directly.
She looked up at me and snarled, blood dripping down her chin as it spurted out of his artery and into her mouth. I flung myself at her, dislodging her from his neck and throwing us both across the ground, slamming her into a tree that groaned under our weight.
‘Stop it now, Sadie,’ I ordered, using all my remaining strength to pin her to the floor. ‘Listen to me. If you kill him the Council will kill you. That will be it, all over.’
We both looked over
to where he was lying in a pool of blood, unconscious. Brittany had reached him and had placed her hands over his neck, healing the wound and clotting the blood.
‘You need to be taught. You can’t just rip their necks open like that. If you do it carefully the blood clots on its own and the fang marks disappear… but this… Sadie, no!’
She was wrestling in my arms as Brittany, who was now as pale as me, dragged him further out of sight of any prying eyes and into the shrubs. Sadie was refusing to calm down, the fresh blood in her body firing her newborn instinct to kill, the pool of blood soaking into the grass and intoxicating her. My strength was seeping away. I knew I had minutes left before she’d overpower me. I chanted the words to Brittany’s sticky spell. The first time it didn’t hold; I didn’t have enough magic. I straddled the furious girl and let my bare feet touch the ground on either side, feeling the earth magic flow back into my body. I concentrated again. This time it worked. The magic held her as tightly as a flea on flypaper. I rolled off her, exhausted, and stumbled over to Brittany.
‘Do you have Devon’s phone number?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘He gave it to me on New Year’s Eve,’ she said quietly.
‘Call him. He can take him into the hospital for a transfusion. He’ll know what to do. I’ll wait here, and I just hope to God no one saw anything,’ I said, looking up through the trees at the neighbour’s house.
‘What was he doing here in our garden, anyway? Do you think he saw us on his roof?’
I shrugged.
‘He was obviously spying, but who knows what he saw before she attacked him,’ I said.
‘I’ll go and call Devon.’
I nodded and watched as she set off across the garden.
‘Call Luke as well. I’ll need some help clearing up this mess and we’ll have to report it to the Council,’ I said glumly.
Luke arrived minutes before Devon and, as the man was still unconscious and we didn’t know what he had seen, we decided it would be safer to erase his recent memories, regardless. Both Brittany and I were completely out of energy so we watched as he placed his hands on our neighbour’s forehead and closed his eyes. The man’s frantic breathing slowed and his chest rose and fell peacefully.
‘I need to take him,’ Devon said quietly.
‘I’ll help carry him to the car and then I’ll come back,’ Luke said to me.
I nodded.
‘Thanks, Devon.’
He nodded, his eyes haunted and shocked.
‘This is the type of thing Sebastian protects humans from,’ I said. ‘If Pierre gets his way, you will lose this protection. Vampires can’t be given a free pass.’
He nodded once and lifted the man’s legs. Luke took his shoulders and they quickly carried him along the edge of the garden and disappeared.
‘We’re not going to tell the Council,’ Luke said, once we had manhandled Sadie back into the kitchen.
I grimaced over another mug of warmed blood, while Brittany cooked a full English for her and Luke. We both needed to recover our energy loss and eating was the quickest way. We had told Luke the full story and waited for his verdict.
‘I need to tell them,’ I answered. ‘I completely failed the first time they trusted me with something major.’
‘You didn’t. You got there and stopped her before she killed. That’s all they’re bothered about… deaths, and he’ll be fine. They gave you a lethal newborn vampire who isn’t even yours, so you have no control over her. They probably expected you to fail…’
‘What? Are you serious?’ I asked, my anger levels rising again.
‘Well… maybe not, but maybe they wanted a reason for you to go back and work under their wings. Maybe they thought this would scare you off…’ Luke hesitated, watching my face fall.
‘Look, it was more like they’ve got too much on their hands right now, so they thought ‘Hey-ho, Jess keeps bothering us for a job, so let’s give her this,’ Brittany added, turning round from the frying pan.
‘That smells disgusting,’ Sadie spat from the other end of the table, where we had restrained her.
‘Like you even get a point of view, now or for the next hundred years,’ Brittany retorted.
I smirked, even though privately I had to agree with Sadie. Ever since I’d become a vampire the smell of frying bacon had become one of my most detested scents. There was something just so wrong about it. I looked across at the girl and wondered what to do.
‘Why were you in my room anyway?’ I asked her.
‘Look, I told you already. The guy woke me up by knocking on the door. I could smell him. It wasn’t my damn fault. You were supposed to stop him coming round here. So anyway, I watched from behind the curtains and I saw him sneak round the back. I ran through to the kitchen to see where you had gone and I saw him climb over the back gate into the garden, so I thought I’d better get you and let you know. You shouldn’t have left the window open,’ she accused.
‘I didn’t,’ I said.
‘Well, it wasn’t locked. It pushed open really easily,’ she said, pouting.
‘You broke the hinge,’ I accused, cocking my eyebrow.
She shrugged.
‘And now you’ve tasted the real thing… what do you think?’ I asked quietly.
‘Now I know just how pathetic you really were to refuse to feed from humans for however long Daniel said. I want more and you won’t be able to stop me,’ she said.
‘And there’s your answer,’ I said, turning to Luke. ‘She’s dangerous. She can’t be trusted and we have a responsibility to tell the Council.’
‘They’ll kill you. Is that what you want, Sadie?’ Luke asked.
She did the famous eye-roll and accompanied it with a sigh.
‘I think you care,’ Luke continued. ‘I think you’re secretly glad Jess stopped you killing that man. It’s natural after having a taste of fresh blood that you only want that, but right now, with everything that’s going on, it’s just not feasible, or safe.’
‘Who cares what’s safe? Daniel said Sebastian had set up somewhere for them to feed this morning, so why can’t I? She obviously has freakish tastes and finds it nostalgic drinking that shite, but not me.’
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ I asked. ‘Haven’t you seen me grimacing? I don’t like this anymore than you do. I just happen to give a shit about what’s going on around us right now.’
‘Well I don’t! Pierre was right, vampires are the superior race, so why shouldn’t we take what we need when we want it?’ she said.
‘Okay, let’s say we’re not even thinking about the moral reasons of killing whoever we wanted. If all vampires drained every human they felt like feeding from, we’d soon be out of a food source.’
‘There’s not that many vampires, there can’t be,’ she said.
‘Oh, you’d be surprised. They’re in every country, in every corner of the globe,’ Luke said. ‘It goes back to the days of our origin… darkness and light, good and evil, angels and vampires. Vampires in theory can live for eternity, whereas humans die after seventy or so years. Vampires can reproduce with their blood… you do the math,’ Luke said.
Sadie paused and bit her lip.
‘I don’t get it. I don’t believe you. It’s just what they tell you to keep you in your place,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘You don’t have to believe it,’ Luke said. ‘You either toe the line or you die. It’s up to you.’
‘I wasn’t talking about killing people when I said about Sebastian’s feeding place… I just don’t see why they can feed properly and we can’t… and for what it’s worth I am glad I didn’t kill that guy.’
It was one of those moments where you all look at each other and wonder whether you fell through some invisible portal into a parallel dimension. No one really knew what to say.
‘Oh!’ I ended up exclaiming, noticing Brittany turn quickly away to hide a smile.
‘What?’ Sadie snarled, daring us to congratulate
her. ‘Obviously I’d still probably wind up killing someone if you let me out there, so you’d best get that magic zapper back up and running,’ she said. ‘But it would be really great if I could just go and lie in my room while you decide whether to report me or not!’
‘Er… sure,’ I said. ‘Brittany will sort you out. I’ll just go and check the ward’s working properly.’
Chapter Sixteen
Over the month that followed the world began to fall apart. The next door neighbour was released from hospital and sent home. Devon had told the hospital he had found him nearer town but, with the messy neck wound, blood loss and daily news, there was no escaping the truth and he was clearly suspicious. At the same time every day now Jess saw him standing on the pavement staring at their house, an hour after curfew had lifted and bang in the middle of rush hour. Every morning he would stand looking at their windows, messing with his phone as if he was going to call the helpline, but every morning he would go back inside the house and nothing would happen until the following morning when he would return to his spot outside their house.
‘I think you should go out there and speak to him,’ Sadie said, one particularly bright morning. ‘He’s giving me the creeps.’
‘More like the munchies,’ Brittany said, smiling into her mug of coffee.
Things with Sadie had improved ever since Sebastian had agreed to me taking her to the club every other day to feed. It turned out that the vampires weren’t the only ones struggling with the military regulations. Over a hundred of the groupies had turned up, alone or in small groups, begging him to find a way to open the café. He hadn’t opened it as it was too risky, but he had devised a system. It was underground and secret. There were vampire bodyguards on the doors plus a series of passwords and codes for both vampires and more especially groupies. He had even got the Council’s permission. No risks were being taken. It was a hassle, but it was better than drinking bottled blood.
Due to the blood shortage, there was a strict feeding allowance based on age. Younger vampires, who were much more of a threat if they didn’t satisfy their cravings, were fed first. Unfortunately for me Sebastian knew only too well that out of all his vampires I was the least likely to kill for blood; consequently Sadie got to feed every other day. So far I had only been given a ticket twice… in three weeks!