Angel Falls (Cassandra Bick Chronicles Book 3)

by Sinclair, Tracey

  Laclos nodded at Val, coolly impressed. His own crew’s reactions had been a lot slower, possibly because they were still traumatised – only Leon and Mariko had moved to stop Mika, the rest had ducked and cowered as the sword split the air. Jonesy and I had both jumped, but Cain’s face hadn’t changed: clearly his wife impaling strangers was just in a day’s work for him. For a moment, the only sound in the room was Mika, a mewling, crying whimper as he tried to work the sword free, desperately turning his face from Laclos’ unforgiving gaze as the vampire walked towards him. He looked small, suddenly, a terrified child, but when Laclos stooped to speak to him, the vampire sounded almost jovial, even if this was plainly and entirely fake.

  ‘My lord, I really do have the most terrible taste in men, don’t I?’ he mused. ‘That is… what, four of my recent male lovers who have tried to have me killed?’ he turned to Val, smiling. ‘Of course, in fairness, I did have a female lover who tried to decapitate me and another who set me on fire, so my record is not spotless on that account, either, but that was centuries ago.’

  ‘Wow, it’s almost like you’re incredibly annoying, or something,’ Cain muttered, but Laclos ignored him.

  ‘Really, one would think I am not a delight to be around!’ He folded himself down to Mika’s eye level, all humour and lightness gone.

  ‘I bring you to me and I have you taken home by car. And yet your scent was all over the tunnel to my home. Would you care to explain that fact?’

  ‘I didn’t…’ Mika began, tears streaming down his face. Laclos reached out and, almost idly, laid a hand on the hilt of the sword, his fingers tracing the ornate carvings there as if admiring the craftsmanship. But then he pushed down, ever so slightly, and Mika let out a hiss of pain as the wound in his shoulder was enlarged.

  ‘Laclos…’ I moved to stop him, but Cain put out an arm to bar my way, his face cold.

  ‘You kept promising to turn me!’ Mika wept, agony and fear overriding all pride now. ‘And you didn’t!’

  Something – hurt, confusion – flashed in Laclos’ eyes for a second.

  ‘You are 24 years old. You have barely experienced a human life and yet you wish to throw it away?’

  But Mika, snivelling now, debased, didn’t need to explain: it was clear what the vampires had promised him, even if it was also clear what it had cost him to accept it. I thought of the young man I’d seen in Laclos’ bed, casually dismissed by his lover as docile and petulant. Not for the first time, I thought that a whole load of our problems could’ve been prevented if we’d just sent Laclos on a people management and sensitivity course.

  ‘Where are they?’ Laclos hissed, dark eyes narrowed. When Mika didn’t reply, Laclos grabbed the sword and twisted.

  ‘Laclos, stop it!’ I cried, ignoring Cain’s restraint. Laclos said nothing – he didn’t even acknowledge I had spoken – but he stepped back. I felt Jonesy tense beside me: he might not have much sympathy for the traitor, but I doubted he would stand by and let a human being be tortured or killed. But it was also clear we were the only ones in the room who had a problem with this, and we were sorely outnumbered.

  ‘You must have put arrangements in place so that they could fulfil their part of the bargain,’ Laclos snarled. ‘You must have a way of contacting them. I assure you, child, if you think you are protected by the vestiges of whatever affection I once had for you, you are much mistaken. I did not shed a tear when the man who shared my bed for almost a millennium was slain. I will have forgotten your very existence before your corpse cools.’

  ‘They… they gave me a number.’ Mika dug his phone out of his pocket with bloody, trembling hands, holding it out towards Laclos as if he were warding off evil. Laclos, without looking, took it and carelessly tossed it to Leon.

  ‘Code?’ Leon asked, tapping the screen, and Mika stuttered out a number. Leon nodded coolly at Laclos as he scrolled down, holding out the screen so Laclos could see whatever incriminating evidence was there. I couldn’t make out what they were seeing, but it clearly sealed the deal for Laclos, whose face closed like a shop on Sundays. Mika saw his expression harden, and started to cry again.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I love you, I just wanted us… I thought we could be together forever. They promised they wouldn’t hurt you. I was trying to keep you safe.’

  ‘And what of my family?’ Laclos roared, suddenly furious. ‘What of your friends? What of their safety?’

  Mika flinched, weeping, and Laclos reached forward and, in one smooth movement, drew the sword easily from the wall and swung it in a low arc towards Mika’s throat, even as Jonesy and I both lunged forwards to try and save him.

  ‘Laclos.’

  Cain’s voice was low, calm, and though I hadn’t seen him move, he was standing beside the vampire, one hand on his wrist. And while he seemed to be exerting no pressure whatsoever, he had stayed the swing short of its target. Laclos wheeled on him, angrily.

  ‘This is not your business, hunter!’

  Cain looked unmoved by his outburst.

  ‘You owe me.’

  ‘And you would have me pay my debt with this?’ Laclos looked astonished.

  ‘That’s what I am.’

  I saw Laclos flounder as he struggled to understand this. That Cain, ruthless Cain who could watch a hundred foes killed in battle, who cared nothing for most of the Others in this world, whose attitude to collateral damage was elastic, to say the least – that this deadly, dangerous man couldn’t stand by and let even this traitorous human be killed in cold blood. For a moment, Laclos seemed like he was going to argue. He looked past Cain to Val, and the pair of them exchanged a disturbingly conspiratorial glance, as if united in their disdain for the foolish squeamishness of this human-loving creature. But then Laclos lowered the sword, tossing it over his shoulder with a worrying casualness, though Val stepped forward and caught it as smoothly as if they had choreographed the routine. Ruthless cruelty aside, the woman had moves.

  Casting Mika a final look of disgust, Laclos turned back to Leon.

  ‘Give him some blood to heal him – not from you, from one of the others – and keep him secure. And,’ he added, with a bitter glance at Cain. ‘Ensure he is comfortable.’

  ‘I don’t care if he’s comfortable,’ Cain said, mildly, as Leon dragged the weeping young man to his feet and hauled him out of the room, nodding to one of the other vampires – the blood donor, I presumed – to follow him. Mika’s pleas for forgiveness echoed in the air.

  I stared at Laclos, horrified. Even in his madness, I had never seen him this cold, and I wondered at the face he had shown his enemies, and how terrifying that must have been. Then he straightened up and smiled, all graciousness, stretching out his arms in that now-familiar messianic pose, fingernails glistening as they caught the light.

  ‘So,’ he announced, happily. ‘At least now we have a plan.’

  Chapter 21

  So, we had a plan – or, more accurately, the vague stirrings of a plan – but it wasn’t one that filled me with confidence. Nor, when I called Medea, who I insisted we bring along – as much because I wanted her moral support (emphasis on moral, given the ruthlessness that now surrounded me) as for whatever assistance she could offer – did she seem overly thrilled by it. Sure, on paper we were the stronger side, but we’d been down this route before, and never emerged unscathed. I felt there were too many uncertainties in the loyalties and structure of our little band to allow for anything like confidence. I grimly recalled that barely a year ago we launched a similar attack, which resulted in a vampire sorcerer blowing up the building we were in and left a crater in the middle of Canary Wharf – so I was hoping for the sake of my city as much as for us we could avoid any more falling masonry.

  But nobody was listening to me. After a brief chat with Cain out on the balcony that the rest of us weren’t invited to – which I tried to see as the vampire tendency to talk to the power in the room rather than a personal slight, though I struggled a bit to reassure myself that
was the real reason – Laclos was conferring with his minions, leaving the rest of us to mill about aimlessly. All except Val, who had decided she was better placed outside, on guard, though possibly this was just to avoid being around all the ‘undead vermin’.

  ‘You should eat.’ Cain appeared by my side, his tone gruff. I looked at him blankly as he pulled an energy bar from the depths of his holdall.

  ‘Laclos drank from you. It doesn’t matter how… elated that makes you feel. You’ve lost blood and you should compensate. You should eat before we go.’

  Touched – but a little thrown – by this thoughtfulness, I took the proffered bar and nodded to his bag.

  ‘Since when did you carry snacks?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I like food. It helps.’

  Then, before I could formulate anything like a thank you – or ask him what he and Laclos had needed privacy to discuss out there on the balcony – he walked away to speak to Jonesy. Without Katie and Medea there, and with Cain clearly in no mood to chat to me, I felt a little left out, and sat there pretending to do something important on my phone as I ate my energy bar. Laclos pulled away from his huddle, and announced to the room.

  ‘I have decided.’

  Cain reacted to that pretty much like you’d expect.

  ‘And if we disagree?’ he asked mildly, in the way that a man with a bag full of automatic weapons and literally god-only-knows-what power at his fingertips can afford to be mild. Laclos inclined his head.

  ‘That is your right. But we need to end this, and we need to end it soon. I do not wish to start a war, so whoever was behind the attack on my lair – I don’t think Mika knows more than he has said – it is obvious that Josephine is acting as negotiator in this truce. I have contacted her, and arranged a parlay. I would of course like you and your companions to be with us, since it is always better to negotiate from a position of strength.’

  Because it wasn’t like that had ever gone wrong before.

  ‘Sure,’ Cain shrugged, clearly speaking for his little team. ‘Count us in.’

  Chapter 22

  One thing you can always rely on from a vampire is drama, so it seemed fitting that the meeting had been arranged in an old theatre. We waited until Mariko had fetched Medea then our little convoy of cars took off. Clearly I was out of favour, because Cain rode with Val and Jonesy, and suggested that Medea and I stayed with Mariko, while Laclos, Leon and Mika took a separate car, an assorted gaggle of vampires following us, with more due to join us from their hotel. It wasn’t the whole of Laclos’ crew – there was no sign of Nell, the woman I’d seen Laclos instruct last night, and a few semi-familiar faces were missing, but it was a decent show of strength. Mika seemed recovered, but his uncontrollable sobbing had only been stopped with mild compulsion. I pushed aside the ungenerous thought that if he’d been compelled from the start none of this would have happened, horrified by how speedily I’d been ready to barter away someone’s agency for my own convenience. We were all armed – Medea wasn’t thrilled at Cain giving her a stake and a syringe of dead man’s blood, but he insisted she had a weapon, and equally wasn’t going to give her a gun she wasn’t trained to use. (I must admit I’d thought dead man’s blood as vamp stopper was a figment of Supernatural, but apparently not: Cain explained at some length why it worked to shut down their systems – something about their immune systems going into overdrive to rid themselves of this ‘false friend’, that seemed like a nutrient but wasn’t, but I ended up just nodding along: it wasn’t like this mattered to me, since I was unlikely to stockpile it for future use. I had enough issues having ‘live’ blood in my fridge. But it did show once again that one of the perils of dealing with a species where most of your information comes from fiction is apparently that you sometimes dismiss things that are actually true. I was starting to worry about how little I really understood about the world I had chosen to move in). In theory, we were a formidable force for a peace talk, but I had my doubts about how strong Laclos’ traumatised little troupe were, reeling from the shock of Mika’s betrayal on top of everything else. My Sense hurt just to look at them, and I was more worried about how they would handle the confrontation than how I would, which is never a comforting thought.

  ***

  Our destination was an old theatre in the heart of the city. A beautiful old building, it had been left in disrepair for years and was only just starting to be restored. While it still put on shows in some of its smaller rooms, the main hall was currently closed for structural repair, so we could host our meeting there without tripping over stage props but with the theatrical trappings vampires loved so much. The appointment was made for midnight, to allow the building to clear and also because midnight appeals to the vampire desire for drama. While I loved this place – I had actually used it when it was fully open for Dark Dates party nights – I wasn’t thrilled that we were utilising the one bit of it that had been closed off for not being safe while they repaired the roof and overhauled the very structure. It would just be my luck to survive all of this and get killed by a chunk of falling masonry.

  Although we weren’t far from the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, once our little convoy turned off the main road, things got a lot quieter. This was a part of London where whatever happened, people would be keen not to notice. I knew this because only recently Cain and I had fought a pack of werewolves not far from this spot. It was becoming a little depressing that I had a mental map of London built around supernatural battles – ‘ooh, here’s where I got jumped by the demon!’ Away from the metal and glass office buildings and the rich guys' yachts moored at St Katharine’s Dock, we were in one of the poorer parts of London, the kind of streets where the corner gable on a street of terraced houses is a convenience store whose windows are furnished with metal shutters, and every other streetlight was broken or off.

  The main entrance to the theatre was set down a side street, but what few people realised – what I hoped the vampires didn’t know – was that it actually extended much further than it seemed. I’d been on one of the management’s fundraising tours, and knew that they owned half the street, several buildings knocked together haphazardly over the years and developed randomly as the role of the building and the fortunes of its owners had fluctuated. Inside this gave the place a bit of a Hogwarts effect, a rabbit warren of small rooms on different levels. You’d climb a rickety wooden staircase from one second floor flat only to realise, after ascending a dozen stairs, you’d reached a room that was also on the second floor; but that made it perfect for our purposes. While Laclos and his vampires would take the front entrance and do what was expected – fan out inside to check for a trap – my disparate little band had stopped at the street entrance, at a building not owned by the theatre, where we hoped we wouldn’t be seen. Clearly used for little more than storage, its security was no match for Cain’s efforts, and we made our way unhindered to the second floor. We watched Cain pause at intervals, straining towards the wall – I suspected his hearing was good, but not quite vampire quality – then he stopped, indicating a patch of brick.

  ‘This’ll do.’

  ‘You got some plastique in that holdall?’ Jonesy asked, nodding to the bag Cain held, which I was starting to suspect had some kind of Hermione Granger spell on it, and he would at any minute produce from its depths a tank, or maybe just a pony. But Cain simply smiled and stepped out of the way, and Val, with a nod of acknowledgement, stepped forward. And then she cut a hole in a brick wall with her sword.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Medea, voicing my thoughts, as the blade cut through brick like butter and Val casually kicked the rubble aside, clearing us a path. The plan was, while Laclos’ vampires positioned themselves on the upper levels around the stage so the meeting couldn’t be ambushed, we’d make sure there was a clear escape route, before joining Laclos in the main hall as very visible back up. While I had no idea how the rest of the plan was working out, our bit seemed to be going smoothly. We didn’t enco
unter anyone until we were well inside the building, and those we found there were easily subdued with dead man’s blood, which would incapacitate them rather than kill them, as we hoped to keep the body count low to avoid any further excuse for escalation. For a moment, I thought we might actually have a chance with this. Things might finally be going our way.

  Yes, you can laugh. Go on, I’ll wait. Because it’s clear I hadn’t been paying attention.

  Chapter 23

  I’d known as soon as we entered the building that my Sense would be of little use. Already strained by so many things – Medea’s offness, the other angels, Laclos’ blood contamination – and in a building this old and full of supernaturals, it felt so oppressive I wished I could switch it off entirely, since it was so muddled it was sending me mixed signals, skittering in alarm from even my own team. I could make out the presence of vampires scattered throughout the building – pinpricks of light in the dark – but these were few and far between, dimmed into insignificance by the glowing blaze of power that emanated from the main hall.

  ***

  Although we’d been stealthy in our entrance, we knew that we were expected. Laclos and a couple of his crew were waiting for us at the foot of the stairs, a stunned-looking, still trembling Mika held firmly by a stern-faced male vampire, and with a nod of acknowledgement, we threw open the doors to the theatre and walked inside.