Because of this, Margeaux was careful about who she trusted and what went on in her city. The word on the street was that if you were a vampire passing through, you asked for her permission to stay and earn your living. She didn't object to that living being earned by nefarious means per se. It just had to be low key and she had to have a cut. The moment she suspected that a vampire might cause trouble or attract unwanted attention, they were out. Her rules meant that the vampire population of Brussels operated discreetly and safely.
She had been particularly vigilant in recent months. The summer had shone a spotlight on her that was unwelcome. A gang of vampires had descended into Belgium, thievery and fraud their main trade, and a lack of self-control and consistency in back story that concerned her. She had been right to usher them on. Within weeks, they had moved to Antwerp, wreaking havoc on their way. She was convinced they were responsible for the massacre of a young family in an outlying community, although she couldn't prove it. But her network of associates were rarely wrong. When they told her they were responsible for attacking a young couple, then assaulting two brothers, killing one of them in the process, she believed them.
The older vampire families did not take kindly to members of their kind making such public displays of their existence. Although mass cullings hadn't happened for centuries, they still used enforcers to eradicate vampires who didn't keep to the rules of discretion. The older families had amassed wealth and power; the rash behaviour of younger vampires could put all of that at risk.
Margeaux had little to fear from her own behaviour, but she understood that evidence of wrongdoing could be found almost anywhere if you looked hard enough. She had designed a good life for herself and had no intention of putting it at risk. Her network of police informers, fences and low-level criminals provided her news and rumours of anything that might interest her. This was how she had learned about the whole seedy affair and of the murdered young Irish man, his brother lying in hospital and the young girl who seemed to be at the heart of it all. All parties had appeared to have dispersed, which was a welcome relief. If they moved on to somewhere else, they were at least someone else's problem to worry about.
That should have been an end to her woes, but alas it was not the case. She had recognised one of the vampires immediately, but as he had chosen not to accept her invitation to leave his kin and remain in Brussels with her, she had dismissed his presence with little further thought.
The vampire was Kasper Andersen, a Danish vampire sired by her friend, Charles Ferrers. She had never met him in person, but recognised him from sketches and photographs that Ferrers had shared with her on a brief visit to Brussels on his way back to England. It had always been clear to her that Kasper was more Ferrers’ type than she was, but she was still fond of her old hunting partner. Although Kasper had deserted her friend many years earlier, she felt she had an obligation to tell him she'd seen Kasper. But she and Ferrers had lost touch and finding a way to reach him would take time. Her efforts were cut short by his rather surprising call to her.
Back in England, Ferrers was making enquiries about the same set of incidences. For what reason, she couldn't be sure exactly, but she had been forced to tell him about Kasper. It would have been cruel not to. Ferrers hadn't responded to the news in any way, but he always had been a creature of cold control and sharp wit than of emotion. She missed his company. He was one of the few men who told her exactly what he thought. That didn't mean that there was nothing to fear from him of course. He had been one of the most renowned vampire enforcers. She knew that if she did anything wrong, he would kill her if commanded to by the right people. He might have retired, but if one of the oldest, most powerful families called you and asked you to do a job, he couldn’t refuse. Refusal would mean death.
Now a new threat was being posed - rumours of a manuscript that might put all vampire kind at risk. One of her fences had given her the heads up; his people knew people who had been offered a most desirable artefact from the East. It was the stuff of urban legend, of myth, but when the vampire had heard about it, he went straight to Margeaux.
"Are you sure?" Margeaux had asked the elderly vampire.
"Yes Madame," he had said trembling. "I don't know if it's real of course; there's no provenance to speak of. But the network is saying that it's been stolen from the Byzantines, a rare historic piece."
"Is it here, in Brussels? In Belgium even?"
"No, the last word of it is in Constantinople but someone needs to sell it, to move it on quickly. Anything old that's not being sold on the market usually reeks of something stolen. I don't know what it is, but it’s changed hands a few times. Someone recognised some of the text - vampire symbols." Vampires often used sigils and other secret signs to recognise their businesses or safe houses. It wasn't unusual to see them on historic texts or documents.
"Well, keep me apprised of the situation,” Margeaux had told him, handing him over a wedge of cash for a Ming vase he had procured for her. “I suspect it won't find its way here, but I would like to be certain."
"Yes Madame. We have certainly had enough trouble in these parts for a while."
"Indeed. C'est la vie." The vampire shrugged his shoulders in agreement. "Please, do take some blood on your way out."
Margeaux had an arrangement with a local phlebotomist at the hospital. She liked to have a supply for guests. The antique dealer-come-fence took a small vial of O Negative and slipped it into his breast pocket. He bowed in her direction, before quietly leaving her boudoir.
Bethel was a bustling metropolis compared to Bethesda, the sleepy village on the edge of the valleys where I lived and had grown up. Residents of Bethel thought Bethesda was a suburb of Bethel. Residents of Bethesda had a different idea on that subject.
Of course, Bethel was neither bustling nor a metropolis. Even if you were to include the residents of Bethesda and the other outlying locations, its population was little more than one hundred and fifty thousand.
It was a dirty old town, flanked on one side by the estuary and a massive steelworks, and the edges of the South Wales valleys on the other. Within ten miles of either side, you could be standing in water or on mountains.
But Bethel had served my family well. My grandparents had owned three shops in the diminishing town centre, inherited from a distant relative. They'd worked hard to build them up and they further added to their modest empire by buying up properties in the recession and then letting them out. My mother had inherited the shops on their passing, and we jointly inherited the residential properties. Trade was sufficient to cover the running costs of our small hardware store, newsagent and a childrenswear-come-craft shop. This was mostly facilitated by us actually owning the buildings. Mum was toying with the idea of closing the hardware shop down and renting the space out. The big Do-it-Yourself chains were killing us, but my grandfather had worked full time in the shop and there were a lot of memories there.
Bethesda, although subsumed into Bethel's boundaries long before even my mother or I was born, was countrified by comparison. It was nestled between two roads, affectionately known as "top road" and "bottom road,” which converged at each end. One end, where my family home sat, led into the valleys and the smaller communities that lived there. The other end, with a slightly newer council estate, led into Bethel. It was peaceful and reassuring. Why a vampire had decided to rock up there, heaven alone knew.
Given Mickey's absence from my life and his unexpected return, I thought it best to avoid bumping into my mother for a while. I knew she'd keep her opinions to herself, but I didn't want her to feel like I was keeping anything from her. I needed time to think about what I was going to tell her about Mickey and if I was going to introduce them. I had to establish how long he was going to be there. No point worrying her if he'd be off again in a day or two.
We bombed passed my Mum's house in my VW Golf as fast as I could without breaking the speed limit or crashing into one of the double-parked vehicles lining the narrow
street. The house was set back from the road, down a little gravel path which ran from the gate to the front door. Even with 20-20 vision, I doubt she'd have seen Mickey in the car, but I didn't want to chance it. Like I say, it wasn't that I was ashamed of Mickey as such, or indeed of my own conduct, but his sudden arrival would have definitely concerned her. I wasn’t sure what had gone down between her and my father, but I knew he took off without a word and her unspoken anxiety over my love life was understandable. As far as she was concerned, I'd never had a boyfriend, which was pretty close to the truth actually, and that was the way I wanted to keep it for now. I didn't even know if Mickey was my boyfriend. We'd had sex and in my book that made you more than mates, but what did I know?
I had to come up with a good explanation for Mickey's sudden arrival before I introduced him to my mother, if I even did that at all. I couldn't exactly tell her that vampires existed, that Mickey had almost been killed by one; and, oh yeah, that had almost happened to me a few times, but now they'd murdered his brother, he'd rocked up to warn me that they were going to kill me too. We'd agreed in Antwerp to keep our knowledge of the supernatural world to ourselves, for good reason. We didn't know who we could trust or who would believe us. Why burden other people with that knowledge if they couldn't do anything about it? Perhaps our decision was wrong; perhaps if we hadn't kept quiet Sean would be alive, but we couldn't change that now.
Within half an hour we were making our way across Bethel, whizzing past all the hairdressers and discount shops. I pulled into the decrepit multi-storey car park, unleashed my seat belt and yanked up the handbrake.
Mickey scanned around. "Well, this is very..."
"Yes, very," I replied definitively. "C'mon."
Having escaped the dingy concrete bunker of a car park, we made our way up to the high street, taking a right at the kebab shop and up to the council offices.
The Guildhall had originally been the seat of Bethel Council but had been usurped by a modern, four-storey glass building on a business park near the motorway. The only corporate activities undertaken under its roof now was the registry office, a small tourist information centre and the family information centre. The upper floors had been converted into banqueting suites, available to hire for private functions and corporate events.
It had been a while since I'd had cause to go the Guildhall and I admit that it surprised me a little; it was bigger and more elaborately decorated than I remembered it. The marbled atrium housed a large, wooden reception desk covered in beautiful carvings of trees, fruit and wildlife. It was staffed by a middle-aged lady and with large plastic rimmed glasses, wearing a frilly cream blouse and a hideous green jacket which screamed uniform. The room was filled with display boards adorned with photographs of the vampire corpse, (ahem, I mean Iron Age man) and newspaper cuttings.
"Jesus, that's what they look like when they're then dead then," Mickey said, analysing a photo of a half a dozen students in muddy trousers dusting down the rubbery old corpse. It resembled a tarpaulin, painted in clay. You would have to be pretty up close to trace its lines, lumps and bumps to form something resembling human.
"Apparently so. Like I said last night, this one was worse for wear when he turned up at my place; this could be atypical, but I can't be certain." Although we'd both been close to two dead, definitely dead, vampires, we'd not been exposed to them for long. My first experience was this one. I'd left it for dead on my kitchen floor and a few hours later, after I'd given in to exhaustion, it had already started to decompose into this mummified mess. For all I knew, it would eventually crumble altogether. The students would have a hard time explaining that. "It's gross isn't it?"
"Yeah, you can say that again." Mickey peered at the photograph a little more closely. "Where are the feet?"
I shrugged my shoulders. Scavengers appeared to have made off with both feet, something akin to a lower leg and one of the creature's hands. It was difficult to ascertain the exact details of what was there and what was missing, especially when you considered that it didn't much resemble a body to start with.
Mickey wanted to know if I'd noticed anything distinctive about the vampire before I killed it - clothing, speech, movement; but I couldn't offer up anything other than that it had seemed as if it were high on drugs and spoke in English. Though it was quiet and mostly hissed its words at me, there could have been an accent in there but I couldn't be sure. I decided not to tell Mickey the last bit - I left out everything after English. Although I couldn't give him any guarantees, there was no point letting him worry that this may be one of the vampires which killed Sean.
I slipped my arm through Mickey's. "Let's get out of here; this isn't going to tell us much of anything."
I nodded in the direction of the exit. Mickey followed my lead. I wasn't sure where I was heading as I led Mickey through the dirty old town centre. Given his grief and the macabre reason for his sudden reappearance in my life, it seemed inappropriate to suggest sightseeing or anything resembling a "day out".
I stopped at an ATM to get cash I didn't need to buy myself some thinking time. Mickey provided a further reprieve when he declared that he was quite hungry and asked if there was anywhere non-kebab related where we could get anything to eat. The short answer was yes and we went for a burger in a seventies theme bar which was a few doors down. At least food could fill any awkward gaps in conversation, I conceded.
Over a greasy mountain of beef, bacon and processed cheese, we tried to make sense of recent events.
First, we knew that we'd stumbled across a gang of vamps working together in Antwerp. They seemed to feed together, seemed to rob together - hell, even vampires must incur expenses after all. We'd survived, but two of the vampires had been killed in the process - one by Mickey with a mole wrench, another with a shotgun by Mickey's boss Maggie.
These events had resulted in the second thing that we knew. The same gang had returned a few weeks later, attacked Mickey and killed his brother Sean. We didn't know why they had left Mickey alive. Nor did we know why they were looking for me. Had they assumed I would be there and simply wanted to finish us both off for revenge? Or were their reasons more sinister? I felt the latter possibility was more unlikely - after all, I hadn't even killed one of them. They possibly just wanted revenge on the both of us, maybe even Maggie, which made me worry about her and wonder if she was alright. Mickey assured me that he'd spoken to her recently and all was well. The vampires seemed to have moved on.
Thirdly, I'd come across vampires in Coventry - unsurprising, if they actually were everywhere, why wouldn't they be in Coventry? When I returned to the UK from my Belgian holiday, a small group of them, led by the rather aristocratic Charles Ferrers, was operating on my doorstep. It was quite likely that they'd been there for a while, but, given I didn't know vampires existed before, I was just blissfully ignorant. Ferrers had turned my neighbour, Richard, into a vampire and had expressed an unhealthy and unwelcome interest in me. He hadn't turned up yet and, after a couple of months, I thought it was unlikely that he would, but the vampire I had slain in my kitchen was pretty wild-looking. He could have been a new vampire, abandoned and out of control. Could Ferrers have made another new-born vampire and sent it after me? Mickey and I hated to admit it, but from what I had described of Ferrers, and what I knew from my own interactions with him, he didn't seem to think highly of that type of behaviour.
As I ate my increasingly cold and limp fries, I realised that Mickey's eyes were fighting back tears. When all was said and done, we had no idea if I was in any real danger and what was going to happen next. If that wasn't enough to worry about, he had the intolerable burden of guilt and grief to contend with.
I dropped my floppy chip onto my plate, reached across the sticky table and squeezed his hand. I swallowed the urge to ask how long I'd have him for.
"It's going to be okay." I wasn't sure if that was the appropriate thing to say. How could anything be okay when Sean's cold body lay in the ground?
&nbs
p; Mickey let his hand rest in mine for a moment before withdrawing it and dried his eyes with the cuff of his grey hooded top. "I don't want to lose anyone else."
"Sean was a lovely lad. I can't imagine what you're going through Michael. I wish I could take the pain away from you... from your family. But you're not going to lose me, I promise you that."
My heart swelled in my chest as the empathy consumed me.
Mickey shook off his grief, straightened his back and pressed himself into the chair. He was trying to be strong... for me, for himself, for his family.
"Me too," he replied, but not clearly to which statement. "I wish I could stay here longer with you."
Of course, the dreaded farewell speech.
"Mammy's a mess right now. I told her I wouldn't be taking off for long. I said I just needed to clear my head."
I nodded and attempted what I hoped was a reassuring smile, to let him know that I understood. While I wanted him with me, I loved the fact that he valued his family so highly, and while he hadn't said it, I knew he'd need them to get through that dark time. Although my guts felt like they were being ripped out of me, my feelings were stronger for him because of the reasons he was leaving.
"You should be with them," I told him honestly. “It's where you’re needed. Look, if any vampires were proactively after me, they'd have found me by now. We can't stop our lives because one vamp breaks into my house because he fancies a midnight snack. It's a one off - it could have happened to anyone. The odds of it happening again are so slim it's not even worth worrying about. You need to be at home, they need you more than I do. I'm not going anywhere, come back any time you like."
Sophie Morgan (Book 2): Death in the Family Page 3