by Jaye Wells
He shook his head. “Okay then, why don’t you tell me why we’re meeting way out here?”
Heaving a deep sigh, I pulled my weapon. David’s eyes widened as I aimed the custom-made pistol between them.
His eyes pivoted from the gun to me. I hoped he didn’t notice the slight tremor in my hands.
“I should have known when you called me,” he said. “You never do that.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me why?” His calm unsettled me.
“I know why.” He crossed his arms and regarded me closely. “The question is, do you?”
My eye twitched. “I know enough. How could you betray the Dominae?”
He didn’t flinch. “One of these days your blind obedience to the Dominae is going to be your downfall.”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t waste your final words on another lecture.”
He lunged before the last word left my lips. He plowed into me, knocking the breath out of my chest and the gun from my hand. We landed in a tangle of limbs on the fresh grave. Dirt and fists flew as we each struggled to gain advantage. He grabbed my hair and whacked my head into the dirt. Soil tunneled up my nose and rage blurred my vision.
My hands curled into claws and dug into his eyes. Distracted by pain, he covered them with his palms. Gaining the advantage fueled my adrenaline as I flipped him onto his back. My knees straddled his hips, and I belted him in the nose with the base of my hand. Blood spurted from his nostrils, streaking his lips and chin.
“Bitch!” Like an animal, he sank his fangs into the fleshy part of my palm. I shrieked, backhanding him across the cheek with my uninjured hand. He growled and shoved me. I flew back several feet, landing on my ass with a thud.
Before I could catch my breath, his weight pinned me down again. Only this time, my gun stared back at me with its unblinking eye.
“How does it feel, Sabina?” His face was close to mine as he whispered. His breath stunk of blood and fury. “How does it feel to be on the other end of the gun?”
“It sucks, actually.” Despite my tough talk, my heart hammered against my ribs. I glanced to the right and saw the shovel I’d used earlier lying about five feet away. “Listen—”
“Shut up.” His eyes were wild. “You know what the worst part is? I came here tonight to come clean with you. Was going to warn you about the Dominae and Clovis—”
“Warn me?”
David jammed the cold steel into my skull—tattooing me with his rage. “That’s the irony isn’t it? Do you even know what’s at stake here?” He cocked the hammer. Obviously, the question had been rhetorical.
One second, two, ticked by before the sound of flapping wings and a loud hoot filled the clearing. David glanced away, distracted. I punched him in the throat. He fell back, gasping and sputtering. I hauled ass to the shovel.
Time slowed. Spinning, I slashed the shovel in a wide arc. A bullet ricocheted off the metal, causing a spark. David pulled himself up to shoot again, but I lunged forward, swinging like Babe Ruth. The metal hit David’s skull with a sickening thud. He collapsed in a heap.
He wouldn’t stay down long. I grabbed the gun from his limp hand and aimed it at his chest.
I was about to pull the trigger when his eyes crept open. “Sabina.”
He lay on the ground, covered in blood and dirt. The goose egg on his forehead was already losing its mass. Knowledge of the inevitable filled his gaze. I paused, watching him.
At one time, I’d looked up to this male, counted him as a friend. And now he’d betrayed everything I held sacred by selling out to the enemy. I hated him for his treachery. I hated the Dominae for choosing me as executioner. But most of all, I hated myself for what I was about to do.
He raised a hand toward me—imploring me to listen. My insides felt coated in acid as I watched him struggle to sit up.
“Don’t trust—”
His final words were lost in the gun’s blast. David’s body exploded into flames, caused by the metaphysical friction of his soul leaving his flesh.
My whole body spasmed. The heat from the fire couldn’t stop the shaking in my limbs. Collapsing to the dirt, I wiped a quivering hand down my face.
The gun felt like a branding iron in my hand. I dropped it, but my hand still throbbed. A moment later, I changed my mind and picked it up again. Pulling out the clip, I removed one of the bullets. Holding one up for inspection, I wondered what David felt when the casing exploded and a dose of the toxic juice robbed him of his immortality.
I glanced over at the smoldering pile that was once my friend. Had he suffered? Or did death bring instant relief from the burdens of immortality? Or had I just damned his soul to a worse fate? I shook myself. His work here was done. Mine wasn’t.
My shirt was caked with smears of soot, dirt, and drying blood—David’s blood mixed with mine. I sucked in a lungful of air, hoping to ease the tightness in my chest.
The fire had died, leaving a charred, smoking mass of ash and bone. Great, I thought, now I have to dig another grave.
I used the shovel to pull myself up. A blur of white flew through the clearing. The owl called out again before flying over the trees. I stilled, wondering if I was hearing things. It called again and this time I was sure it screeched, “Sabina.”
Maybe the smoke and fatigue were playing tricks on me. Maybe it had really said my name. I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t have time to worry about that. I had a body to bury.
As I dug in, my eyes started to sting. I tried to convince myself it was merely a reaction to the smoke, but a voice in my head whispered “guilt.” With ruthless determination, I shoved my conscience down, compressing it into a tiny knot and shoving it into a dark corner of myself. Maybe later I’d pull it out and examine it. Or maybe not.
Good assassins dispose of problems without remorse. Even if the problem was a friend.
introducing
If you enjoyed
DEADLY SPELLS
look out for
GOD SAVE THE QUEEN
Book 1 of the Immortal Empire
by Kate Locke
Queen Victoria rules with an immortal fist.
The undead matriarch of a Britain where the aristocracy is made up of werewolves and vampires, where goblins live underground and mothers know better than to let their children out after dark. A world where being nobility means being infected with the plague (side effects include undeath), hysteria is the popular affliction of the day, and leeches are considered a delicacy. And a world where technology lives side by side with magic. The year is 2012.
Xandra Vardan is a member of the elite Royal Guard, and it is her duty to protect the aristocracy. But when her sister goes missing, Xandra will set out on a path that undermines everything she believed in and uncover a conspiracy that threatens to topple the empire. And she is the key—the prize in a very dangerous struggle.
CHAPTER 1
POMEGRANATES FULL AND FINE
London, 175 years into the reign of Her Ensanguined Majesty Queen Victoria
I hate goblins.
And when I say hate, I mean they bloody terrify me. I’d rather French-kiss a human with a mouth full of silver fillings than pick my way through the debris and rubble that used to be Down Street station, searching for the entrance to the plague den.
It was eerily quiet underground. The bustle of cobbleside was little more than a distant clatter down here. The roll of carriages, the clack of horse hooves from the Mayfair traffic was faint, occasionally completely drowned out by the roar of ancient locomotives raging through the subterranean tunnels carrying a barrage of smells in their bone-jangling wake.
Dirt. Decay. Stone. Blood.
I picked my way around a discarded shopping trolley, and tried to avoid looking at a large paw print in the dust. One of them had been here recently—the drops of blood surrounding the print were still fresh enough for me to smell the coppery tang. Human.
As I descended the stairs to platform level, my palms skimmed over the remaining
chipped and pitted cream and maroon tiles that covered the walls—a grim reminder that this… mausoleum was once a thriving hub of urban transportation.
The light of my torch caught an entire set of paw prints, and the jagged pits at the end where claws had dug into the steps. I swallowed, throat dry.
Of course they ventured up this far—the busted sconces were proof. They couldn’t always sit around and wait for some stupid human to come to them—they had to hunt. Still, the sight of those prints and the lingering scent of human blood made my chest tight.
I wasn’t a coward. My being here was proof of that—and perhaps proof positive of my lack of intelligence. Everyone—aristocrat, half-blood and human—was afraid of goblins. You’d be mental not to be. They were fast and ferocious and didn’t seem to have any sense of morality holding them back. If aristos were fully plagued, then goblins were overly so, though such a thing wasn’t really possible. Technically they were aristocrats, but no one would ever dare call them such. To do so was as much an insult to them as to aristos. They were mutations, and terribly proud of it.
Images flashed in my head, memories that played out like disjointed snippets from a film: fur, gnashing fangs, yellow eyes—and blood. That was all I remembered of the day I was attacked by a gob right here in this very station. My history class from the Academy had come here on a field trip. The gobs stayed away from us because of the treaty. At least they were supposed to stay away, but one didn’t listen, and it picked me.
If it hadn’t been for Church, I would have died that day. That was when I realised goblins weren’t stories told to children to make us behave. It was also the day I realised that if I didn’t do everything in my ability to prove them wrong, people would think I was defective somehow—weak—because a goblin tried to take me.
I hadn’t set foot in Down Street station since then. If it weren’t for my sister Dede’s disappearance I wouldn’t have gone down there at all.
Avery and Val thought I was overreacting. Dede had taken off on us before, so it was hardly shocking that she wasn’t answering her rotary or that the message box on said gadget was full. But in the past she had called me to let me know she was safe. She always called me.
I had exhausted every other avenue. It was as though Dede had fallen off the face of the earth. I was desperate, and there was only one option left—goblins. Gobs knew everything that happened in London, despite rarely venturing above ground. Somehow they had found a way to spy on the entire city, and no one seemed to know just what that was. I reckon anyone who had the bollocks to ask didn’t live long enough to share it with the rest of us.
It was dark, not because the city didn’t run electric lines down here any more—they did—but because the lights had been smashed. The beam from my small hand-held torch caught the grimy glitter of the remains of at least half a dozen bulbs on the ground amongst the refuse.
The bones of a human hand lay surrounded by the shards, cupping the jagged edges in a dull, dry palm.
I reached for the .50 British Bulldog normally holstered snugly against my ribs, but it wasn’t there. I’d left it at home. Walking into the plague den with a firearm was considered an act of aggression unless one was there on the official—which I wasn’t. Aggression was the last thing—next to fear—you wanted to show in front of one goblin, let alone an entire plague. It was like wearing a sign reading DINNER around your neck.
It didn’t matter that I had plagued blood as well. I was only a half-blood, the result of a vampire aristocrat—the term that had come to be synonymous with someone of noble descent who was also plagued—and a human courtesan doing the hot and sweaty. Science considered goblins the ultimate birth defect, but in reality they were the result of gene snobbery. The Prometheus Protein in vamps—caused by centuries of Black Plague exposure—didn’t play well with the mutation that caused others to become weres. If the proteins from both species mixed the outcome was a goblin, though some had been born to parents with the same strain. Hell, there were even two documented cases of goblins being born to human parents both of whom carried dormant plagued genes, but that was very rare, as goblins sometimes tried to eat their way out of the womb. No human could survive that.
In fact, no one had much of a chance of surviving a goblin attack. And that was why I had my lonsdaelite dagger tucked into a secret sheath inside my corset. Harder than diamond and easily concealed, it was my “go to” weapon of choice. It was sharp, light and didn’t set off machines designed to detect metal or catch the attention of beings with a keen enough sense of smell to sniff out things like blades and pistols.
The dagger was also one of the few things my mother had left me when she… went away.
I wound my way down the staircase to the abandoned platform. It was warm, the air heavy with humidity and neglect, stinking of machine and decay. As easy as it was to access the tunnels, I wasn’t surprised to note that mine were the only humanoid prints to be seen in the layers of dust. Back in 1932, a bunch of humans had used this very station to invade and burn Mayfair—the aristo neighbourhood—during the Great Insurrection. Their intent had been to destroy the aristocracy, or at least cripple it, and take control of the Kingdom. The history books say that fewer than half of those humans who went into Down Street station made it out alive.
Maybe goblins were useful after all.
I hopped off the platform on to the track, watching my step so I didn’t trip over anything—like a body. They hadn’t ripped up the line because there weren’t any crews mental enough to brave becoming goblin chow, no matter how good the pay. The light of my torch caught a rough hole in the wall just up ahead. I crouched down, back to the wall as I eased closer. The scent of old blood clung to the dust and brick. This had to be the door to the plague den.
Turn around. Don’t do this.
Gritting my teeth against the trembling in my veins, I slipped my left leg, followed by my torso and finally my right half, through the hole. When I straightened, I found myself standing on a narrow landing at the top of a long, steep set of rough-hewn stairs that led deeper into the dark. Water dripped from a rusty pipe near my head, dampening the stone.
As I descended the stairs—my heart hammering, sweat beading around my hairline—I caught a whiff of that particular perfume that could only be described as goblinesque: fur, smoke and earth. It could have been vaguely comforting if it hadn’t scared the shit out of me.
I reached the bottom. In the beam from my torch I could see bits of broken pottery scattered across the scarred and pitted stone floor. Similar pieces were embedded in the wall. Probably Roman, but my knowledge of history was sadly lacking. The goblins had been doing a bit of housekeeping—there were fresh bricks mortared into parts of the wall, and someone had created a fresco near the ancient archway. I could be wrong, but it looked as though it had been painted in blood.
Cobbleside the sun was long set, but there were street lights, moonlight. Down here it was almost pitch black except for the dim torches flickering on the rough walls. My night vision was perfect, but I didn’t want to think about what might happen if some devilish goblin decided to play hide and seek in the dark.
I tried not to imagine what that one would have done to me.
I took a breath and ducked through the archway into the main vestibule of the plague’s lair. There were more sconces in here, so I tucked my hand torch into the leather bag slung across my torso. My surroundings were deceptively cosy and welcoming, as though any moment someone might press a pint into my hand or ask me to dance.
I’ll say this about the nasty little bastards—they knew how to throw a party. Music flowed through the catacombs from some unknown source—a lively fiddle accompanied by a piano. Conversation and raucous laughter—both of which sounded a lot like barking—filled the fusty air. Probably a hundred goblins were gathered in this open area, dancing, talking and drinking. They were doing other things as well, but I tried to ignore them. It wouldn’t do for me to start screaming.
&nbs
p; A few of them looked at me with curiosity in their piercing yellow eyes, turning their heads as they caught my scent. I tensed, waiting for an attack, but it didn’t come. It wouldn’t either, not when I was so close to an exit, and they were curious to find out what could have brought a halvie this far into their territory.
Goblins looked a lot like werewolves, only shorter and smaller—wiry. They were bipedal, but could run on all fours if the occasion called for additional speed. Their faces were a disconcerting mix of canine and humanoid, but their teeth were all predator—exactly what you might expect from a walking nightmare.
I’d made it maybe another four strides into this bustling netherworld when one of the creatures stuck a tray of produce in my face, trying to entice me to eat. Grapes the size of walnuts, bruise-purple and glistening in the torchlight, were thrust beneath my nose. Pomegranates the colour of blood, bleeding sweet-tart juice, filled the platter as well, and apples—pale flesh glistening with a delicate blush. There were more, but those were the ones that tempted me the most. I could almost taste them, feel the syrup running down my chin. Berry-stained fingers clutched and pinched at me, smearing sticky delight on my skin and clothes as I pressed forward.
“Eat, pretty,” rasped the vaguely soft cruel voice. “Just a taste. A wee little nibble for our sweet lady.”
Our? Not bloody fucking likely. I couldn’t tell if my tormentor was male or female. The body hair didn’t help either. It was effective camouflage unless you happened upon a male goblin in an amorous state. Generally they tried to affect some kind of identity for themselves—a little vanity so non-goblins could tell them apart. This one had both of its ears pierced several times, delicate chains weaving in and out of the holes like golden stitches.
I shook my head, but didn’t open my mouth to vocalise my refusal. An open mouth was an invitation to a goblin to stick something in it. If you were lucky, it was only food, but once you tasted their poison you were lost. Goblins were known for their drugs—mostly their opium. They enticed weak humans with a cheap and euphoric high, and the promise of more. Goblins didn’t want human money as payment. They wanted information. They wanted flesh. There were already several customers providing entertainment for tonight’s bash. I pushed away whatever pity I felt for them—everyone knew what happened when you trafficked with goblins.