A duo of cooks having a smoke outside the back of their kitchen swore at us as we peeled down the lane and out onto a less congested street. One of them kicked a rock at us, but it bounced harmlessly away.
He brought us to an underground garage in a neighborhood I didn't know, a black metal gate sliding aside to let us pass as some tag attached to the bike flashed a green light at a receiver. I wondered how careful he'd been. If he'd somehow made it difficult for DeShawn, or Emeline, to track us down. Seamus knew his way around the mazes of the digital world, but evasion in the flesh was another story altogether. But he had found me, hadn't he? And I had been the one foolishly following my feet back to that hostel, one of the few places I knew of in the city. I had to trust him.
He parked the bike, and I followed him to a rundown lift, the doors and floor vibrating alarmingly as it kerplunked its way up to the seventh floor. The door opened to a hallway painted some color that couldn't decide if it wanted to be blue or grey, the floor gritty with dust under my feet. Gods, I needed a shower.
Seamus hesitated outside a door marked 86B, his key held halfway out to the knob. "I, uh, didn't have a chance to clean up or anything. I mean, I haven't been back much since we all migrated over to Adelia—I mean Emeline's—place."
"Seamus. I woke up in a sewer."
"Right. Right."
He unlocked the door and swept it open, fumbling for a light switch. Furniture that might have been pilfered from that alleyway we'd cut down broke up a wood-floored sitting room. A ragged, navy blue couch faced a wall with a television far too large for the space, a half dozen boxes lit up with small lights crammed on a shelf under the screen.
He had made some effort toward the possibility of guests in the form of a small, round wooden table with a scrap of a tablecloth flung over it and two mismatched chairs. All of that was an obvious afterthought. The only thing that mattered in this flat was the vast glass desk that faced the only window.
Thin, sage green curtains were pulled against the daylight, but three of the largest monitors I'd ever seen blocked half the window. One stood proud in the center, while the other two flanked it like outstretched wings. Seamus dropped his helmet on a narrow kitchen counter and shuffled into the kitchen, some deep-bred instinct forcing him to reach out and grab the kettle, taking it to the sink to fill with water. I cracked a smile. Tea wouldn't do me much good, but the ritual would soothe his nerves. Carefully, I sat on one of the chairs, placing my weight so it wouldn't creak.
"I can sleep on the couch," he said, placing the kettle on the stove. "The bed's all yours. That's been cleaned, at least. I mean, a while ago, but I haven't slept in it since."
"I am not so injured I need to sleep."
He eyed me intensely. "You sure about that?"
The hiss of the kettle saved me, distracting him with the need to fix the tea. He almost dropped a saucer as his phone let out a sharp chime.
"Whoa," he said, fumbling the screen around.
"What is it?"
"Talia. She says they lost track of Sonia. Not even DeShawn can find her." He looked up at me, brows arched high.
"She's the only one who has any idea where Ragnar is..." I frowned, tracing an old coffee stain on the tablecloth with one finger. "Her blood was spilled in the garden. If can get a taste of it, I can find her."
Twenty-one: Tea for Two
Seamus set the teacups onto their saucers a little too heavily, rattling the already chipped porcelain. He was working hard to keep his face smooth and neutral, but every other line in his body screamed tension. I smiled at him, raising my cup to him before taking a sip, giving him time to put together whatever he would say.
He settled on the blunt. "You can't just go talk to Sonia."
"I don't see why not? With her blood, I can find her easily enough."
"I mean, yes, technically, you can." He stiffened, twisting the cup back and forth on the saucer. "But don't you have to ask her permission first? I mean, I know she's not on the side of good, here, but she is mortal and I thought... With your oath..."
I stared into the depths of my teacup, unable to meet his gaze. Yes, I wanted to find Ragnar, and the logical thing to do would be to ask the single person who may know where he was. And the only sure way to find her in any timely manner was to taste her blood. Logical. But logical was not always correct. I should have seen that. I should have realized that to taste her blood without consent—never mind that she was working against me—put me over the line of my morals. Made me no different from my nightwalker cousins. Sunstriders asked consent, always. No exceptions.
I reached up to rub my temple by my mote-stricken eye. Was it pressing me into thinking like a nightwalker, as well as using their powers? If so, I could no longer trust my instincts. I swallowed around a dry throat.
"You're right. I should have realized..."
I trailed off, clenching the teacup. Seamus reached across the table and covered my hand with his. "I know you mean well, Mags, but this is why you can't just walk off. Why you can't work alone. Your kin swore themselves to the Sun Guard so they wouldn't lose sight of their humanity, I think. I mean, Emeline probably knows some boring historical rendition of it all, but at the core I think your people knew that if they stayed too far from humans, that they would lose sight of their own humanity. You can't remember, right? What it was like to be mortal?"
I shook my head, letting my hand relax in Seamus's warm grasp. "No. I know the facts of what I was, when I was mortal. A dancer of Greek heritage working primarily in France before I traveled to London and was reborn. I had a sister, and parents I presume, but their memories are little more than haze, all but meaningless. All that matters to me—to my fellow sunstriders as well—is what happens after we're turned. Everything else washes away.
"And for me..." I trailed off, watching our hands, wondering if what I was about to say might break the fragile friendship growing between us. "The oubliette did its work. The Venefica's magic may have restored to me the moment of my... choice. But I find empty hallways in my mind, sometimes, when I reach for memories. Even though I know I love Roisin—for I feel that, always—I cannot remember many of the moments we shared."
"So remember us. Remember Talia and Maeve and Adelia. Remember me, Mags. That's what we're here for, to be your anchors."
"Emeline, too?"
He grimaced and looked away. "She's in a hard spot right now. The veil is broken, DeShawn is taking control, and she has reports that her strongest soldier has been corrupted by nightwalker power."
To hear it put so plainly slammed me in the chest. I bent over, breathing deep, closing my eyes against the rising tide of shame. "I deserve the oubliette. I can trust you, but I cannot be trusted myself."
His hand slipped away from mine and then he was kneeling in front of me, one hand on my arm and the other on my knee. Not forcing me to look up, not forcing me to do anything at all. Just there. Solid. Warm. Mortal, and caring.
"You don't deserve the oubliette. It's what the protocol calls for, I know, and that's a hard thing to argue against, but you're not a danger to humanity, Mags. You're not a danger to me."
I flicked my eyes open and looked at him from under my lashes, hair obscuring half my face, hiding the slightly unnatural width to my jaw.
I let my fangs descend and asked, "How can you be so sure?"
His hand moved from my arm to my cheek, his palm warm, his thumb cupping my jaw right along the line where the bone had expanded to allow my fangs to grow in. His warmth seeped into me, balancing out the chill of my dead flesh until I could almost pretend that I'd reached some kind of internal equilibrium. Like I was in the space between night and dawn again, reduced in power, but somehow more whole.
We have the dawn...
"I'm changing," I whispered.
He smiled, a rough expression that crinkled up the corners of those too-green eyes. "Get over yourself, girl. We're all changing. I blew up a candle yesterday, remember?"
I barked a
laugh and he grinned at me, catching my laughter and returning it in a warm chuckle. "See? Nightwalkers don't have a sense of humor. You're fine. We're fine. And we will figure this out together."
I took his hand away from my face and cradled it between my cold, dead fingers. He interlaced his fingers with mine and squeezed. My heart jumped.
"Thank you."
His body canted forward, head uplifting, as he parted his lips to say something—then thought better of it and stood quickly, dropping my hands. He gave his throat a rough clear and patted his pockets as if he were looking for something.
"Not being able to reach Sonia doesn't mean we're without leads, though." The words spilled out of him in a rush and he shuffled around the table, sitting behind his teacup once more like it was a wall between us. I wondered if I had frightened him after all. As much as he wanted to be okay with this new world, it would be hard to swallow, even to someone like him who had been drawn to it in the first place.
"What do you mean?"
"Before Sonia disappeared, she was in regular contact with a doctor at Tower Bridge Hospital. I'd bet anything that guy will know where to find his patient."
"He's not just going to tell us."
"No, but I can fake credentials and a text history to make me look like her concerned brother. I can do this.
"You're not going after him without me."
"You're crashing at my place, Mags. You can't just tell me no. And anyway, it's not like you won't be with me. I'll need a reason to get into the hospital and poke around the halls to find him."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "You want me to impersonate a patient?"
"It's not like you'll have to try all that hard." He gave me a once-over, sweeping me from shredded feet to matted hair. "No offense, but you look like you need an A&E visit. Wait. You have a heartbeat, right?"
I raised both brows at him. "Do you think the blood I ingest just... pools in my stomach?"
"You're supernatural. No offense, but I don't know how any of that..." He waved a hand at me. "... works."
"I can have a heartbeat." I stretched my arm across the table, palm up, and he placed three fingers over the vein in my wrist. His brow furrowed, and he tapped my skin like he was checking to see if there was any tea left in the pot.
"That is... slow."
"Oh. My apologies." It took a bit of concentration, as my body was already strained to its far ends, but I increased my pulse. He went ghost-white.
"Too fast."
I grimaced. "Give me your hand."
He obliged, stretching his other arm across the table, and I laid my fingers over his wrist, listening to the steady whump-thump of his heart. Around seventy beats per minute, I decided, and slowly brought my own rate down to approximate his.
"Better?"
He looked like he'd swallowed a bug. "Yeah. But... Don't do that again. Seriously creepy."
I shifted on the chair. "Sorry."
"Not that you're creepy, shit, I didn't mean... Uh."
"Seamus. A lot of what we sunstriders do is for the comfort of mortals. It's all right. I understand."
"It was still kinda a shitty thing for me to say, though."
"I won't argue that."
He smiled sheepishly and drained the dregs of his teacup. "A heartbeat isn't enough to get you to pass muster, though. When I'd heard you'd gone missing, I stopped by a costume shop on the way to the hostel. Hold on a sec."
He crossed to his bike jacket and rummaged in the pocket, pulling out a slim rectangular parcel wrapped in a brown paper shopping bag. It crinkled as he removed a plastic case and sat it on the table between us.
"Colored contacts," he said and flipped open the lid, revealing two small lenses with mahogany-brown irises. "Darkest I could find without getting into obvious costume colors. They're not prescription, so they shouldn't change your vision at all—maybe tint it a little, I've never worn them myself—but they should be enough to cover up the gold. Not that it should be covered up, it's just, with the veil broken, we don't want to draw too much attention to you."
"These are brilliant. Thank you."
"Now finish your tea. We want to get there while he's frazzled, and with the chaos on the streets right now, he's bound to be run ragged."
"Now that is devious."
He shrugged. "Can't be a saint all the time."
Twenty-two: Just a Jab
Nothing had ever looked more like a war zone to me than the accident and emergency waiting room at London Bridge. Mortals—and they must be mortals, despite their appearance—crowded the pale green box of a room in various stages of disarray. Blood and broken bones, bruises and worse, were on full display, only the most dire of cases being seen to with any urgency. Catching sight of the thousand-yard stare on all the nurses' faces, I couldn't tell which group was worse off: the staff, or the patients.
Seamus, arm threaded solicitously through mine, approached a counter and leaned forward to smile anxiously at the exhausted woman on the other side.
"My wife," he said, drawing a start out of me, "Maggie Canavan. She was walking home from the park near Somerset and was chased by one of those damned drug fiends. It's been all over the blasted news and the police have done nothing about it! She escaped, but her feet are all torn up and she really should be looked at."
The receptionist squinted at me. I tried my best to look pale and feeble.
She shoved a clipboard with a stack of papers and a pen shaped like a flower at Seamus. "Fill out these forms. Someone will see you shortly."
'Shortly' was, obviously, a lie. I forced a pain-stretched smile at her and shuffled after Seamus to one of the beige plastic chairs
"Wife?"
"So they'll let me go back with you."
He tipped the clipboard toward me, revealing a row of nine smiley faces in various states of pleasure or agony. "What would you say your pain level is?"
"Irritated."
"Sorry, not an option."
I rolled my eyes at him as he lied his way through the form, trying to focus my senses to see if there were any hints in the chaos. Nothing appeared out of place, but then I had no idea what would be unusual in this setting. Based on the number of chairs crammed full, it was safe to assume that this was an unusually large amount of people. Many had the glassy-eyed stare of those who had been up all night, or maybe that was just the effect of shock.
Beneath the blood and the bile, I caught the scent of something... Something old, and moldering. Ghoul. None of the people in this room were ghouls, I was sure of that, but as I cataloged the people waiting, I began to notice that an unusual number of the injuries appeared to be bite marks.
A male doctor in green scrubs approached me and squinted down at me. "Ma'am, I'm Dr. Arun Padhi. You reported running from a blood addict. Did you come into contact with the addict?"
Glancing around the room at the way those I suspected of being attacked shifted, as if they were trying to conceal their own experiences, gave me all the information I needed.
"Yes. He bit me, here." I tugged the collar of my t-shirt aside so he could see the remnants of the wound Lucien had left me. It had mostly puckered closed, but the black veins remained radiating around the bumpy flesh.
"Christ," the man swore, tugging on a fresh pair of blue gloves from his pocket. He shot over his shoulder at the receptionist. "I told you to check for bite wounds."
She shrugged and went back to clicking at the computer. The doctor sighed and turned back to me.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we have to get you a rabies vaccination, just in case."
"A what?"
Seamus pat my knee. "Don't worry, dear, I've heard they're not as intense as they used to be."
What in the hell was rabies? Seamus clearly wanted me to calm down and go along with things, so I nodded, pretending to be weak and a little befuddled. "If you say so."
"Can you walk?" the doctor asked.
I glanced at my shredded feet. Seamus had loaned—well, given, there
was no way he'd want these back—his house slippers to me so I wouldn't track blood all over the place. We'd avoided bandages, hoping their appearance would get me seen faster.
"I can manage." I put on a brave smile and trundled to my feet, letting Seamus and the doctor take my weight by supporting each arm.
"It's not far," the doctor said, "but we can get you a wheelchair. Hold on—"
"No no, it's no trouble."
"Stiff upper lip," he said, and chuckled to himself.
He swiped a card to open the door to the back, and the smell hit me the second we were through. Blood, yes, and sweat too, but the stink of ghoul was heavy back here. Some people, it seemed, were seeking medical attention instead of finding themselves in the crèches. I didn't know what good that would do—maybe, if they treated them as if they were detoxing from any other drug, the ghouls might survive with their minds intact. Such a thing was difficult to manage, even for the Sun Guard.
The doctor slid me into a wheelchair and took up position at the bars. "Just a quick jab, to make sure you didn't catch anything, but then I'm afraid you will have to wait awhile to have your feet seen to. We're a little overwhelmed at the moment."
He took off at a brisk pace, taking the corners at sharp angles while Seamus trotted along behind us. A quick trip to the second floor on the lift, and the scent of ghoul increased. It was shut away behind closed doors, but thicker all the same
"What's going on out there?" I asked, and it wasn't too difficult to sound overwhelmed.
"Haven't a clue, if I'm being honest. Some sort of outbreak—mass hysteria caused by that new drug, I bet. Have you had your hepatitis boosters?"
"She has," Seamus cut in.
"Good. Don't worry, ma'am. It's probably nothing." He snorted. "Damned World Health Organization thinks we're dealing with an outbreak, but the pathologists haven't isolated a scrap of anything suspicious. Here we are."
He nudged aside a long green curtain and wheeled me into a room lined in clear plastic. With short, efficient movements he transferred me from the wheelchair to another chair that could be lowered into a bed, then turned around to rummage in a drawer.
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