The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1)

by Andrew Macmillan

  Millar pointed at the broken things in the next room. ‘You’re tramping about destroying shit, man. What if one of the staff are here, hiding? Eh? They’ll run. We’ll lose them. Your lumbering will chase them off.’

  Cole’s face hardened. ‘I’m making sure we don’t get ambushed, then we can investigate in peace. This is exactly what needs to happen, Millar, so wind your fucking neck in.’

  Lumbering-Beast-Man lumbered off, leaving Henry to swallow his self-respect and gaze on miserably while he wilted under the dismissive, pseudo-military, macho-man playbook. Henry had no memory of his past, but he was becoming certain he’d been bullied as a kid.

  Cole moved off, up the main hall staircase. Henry couldn’t stand up for himself; he was pathetic. No wonder Lucy hadn’t come away with him. He stoked his anger, imagining violence on Cole, in front of Lucy. Then she’d see him as the kind of man she needed him to be.

  Henry marched to the bottom of the staircase, where he stood and quivered, breathing shallow, willing his legs to move up the stairs and make the bastard listen. His feet grew roots and tears of frustration stung Henry’s eyes. He slumped, sullen. If he couldn’t stand up to these men of violence, he would forever be a victim. That was him. Victim. The word revolted him. He murmured to the darkness. ‘I have talents. I have things I can do.’ That idiot was up there, probably destroying clues, while he supposedly secured the perimeter. What an arsehole Cole was.

  If Henry couldn’t beat Cole at his own game, he’d choose the fight. Cole had about half a brain cell. The loneliest half a brain cell in the universe. His idea of making a plan had, so far, consisted of an explosion. Great plan, genius. Henry was already growing in the notion he was smart. It was time Lumbering-Beast-Man knew it too. Before the clues were all destroyed, Henry would make some sense of what had happened here. He might even find Lucy into the bargain, and she could tell him what the hell had gone on and, also, how Cole’s reckless destruction had almost chased her off.

  There were several doors off from the ground-floor hallway. Henry’s mind messed with him – anything could be lying in wait. The darkness could bugger off. Henry walked to the closest door on the right, the tiles loud underfoot, and opened it. The dark gulped a set of stairs down. Maybe it was best to let Cole ‘clear’ it. He’d seen enough films. No one should go down a dark staircase alone in a creepy vampire house. But how smug would Cole be if Henry just cowered away until the brave soldier came to protect him? What if Cole found Lucy down there before Henry could get to her? What if Cole was more Lucy’s type? Henry told his brain to shut up.

  The darkness laughed at him, the rickety-looking stairs descending into death or glory. Come on, Millar. Grow a pair, as Cole would say. He stepped forward.

  The journey into the heart of darkness was full of wand waving and bannister clutching as he weight-tested each step. The stairs were probably fine, but there was no point breaking a leg. Damsels were not known for loving a distressed rescuer.

  Henry was definitely not slow down the stairs due to heart palpating terror. Definitely not. Black lumps in his vision ahead reported that his eyes were adjusting, and there was stuff down there – stuff that remained still and appeared to be without legs. Stillness and leglessness were vitally important traits to Henry.

  He pointed the wand at the half-seen lumps all the same. His ears stretched to breaking for the slightest sound. His breath came on like Darth Vader, in spite of his efforts to shut the fuck up. There had to be a light switch somewhere. It was hard to grope around for a switch, grab the bannister and keep his wand pointed at the lumpy dark, but he managed all three with only the smallest stumble.

  He couldn’t tell where the floor was as he made his way down, the soft shapes rising around him. His heart hit his throat when he felt something – a lump under his searching hand. A yelp died on his lips as he recognised the shape of the light switch. A few moments of flickering uncertainty passed when the bulb wheezed to life, blinking strobes of light that made monsters of the mundane. The light settled. Henry was in a basement room. At the far end: a sink, a pile of junk in a trough, a workbench and some tools. Near the bottom of the stairs: some shelves and a pile of crates. His eyes darted, wand extended before him, ready to toast anything that scurried in his direction.

  He needed to look cool – Lucy might be hidden here, watching him. It was effort, getting his breath to slow. Surely his shaking hand was visible? But then again, it was better to look shit-scared and alive than cool and dead.

  At a glance, the basement was empty of people. It was probably some sort of workroom. He moved, exploring the crates, trying to relax his mind from the paralysis brought on by fear.

  ‘Lucy?’ Silence.

  The pile of boxes and crates on the nearest side of the room hid no one. Unease stirred within him. A workroom in the basement. That was normal enough. But in a creepy vampire house, what sort of work needed done? Vampires didn’t eat like they did in the films, sucking blood. Cole had described what they did to feed. It sounded a lot less sexy than the turbo-charged, gorgeous neck-suckers of Hollywood. Though apparently, real vampires’ victims might see the vampires as gorgeous, thanks to what Cole called a glamour, which seemed to be a real-life magical spell.

  Cole had claimed he was immune to illusions, but he had warned Henry that Henry wouldn’t be. Henry wasn’t sure why Cole got special treatment, but it seemed to involve his job, which Cole said was about being neutral and protecting the Armistice. Cole had spat the word neutral like it was an insult.

  He had to focus. He would save the distraction of meandering thought for the next time he tried to sleep – circa next year … unless someone was standing guard. The crates he had searched behind were marked with a company stamp – The Scottish Association of Meat Suppliers – and each crate had a manifest stapled to it. The manifests were dated from a few months ago. The most recent and easily visible manifest was dated for last week. Meat, of a lot of kinds. Pork, beef, chicken. Crates and crates of it. For the staff? The crates could have fed an army, and they were empty.

  Not so odd – things like that were freezer fodder. Andrew was probably stocking up on a two-for-one deal from the meat guys … to treat his hard-working slaves. That sounded likely, given Andrew was a maniacal despot who only cared for himself.

  Around the pile of crates, shelves attached to the wall held old paint tins, tools and things for the garden. A broken fridge sat in the corner behind the stairs Henry had come down, the door missing. The room was long. Pipework and wires ran along the wall, close to the surprisingly high ceiling.

  The room must be sat deep under the house. The air was damp and smelled rusty. The big trough at the other end of the room was full of junk – maybe metal or scraps of something. The long workbench with tools and vices on it filled the portion of the room before the trough.

  As Henry approached the workbench he could see rusty paint had been spilled there. A lot of rusty paint. Drawing closer, he noticed the tools.

  A vice, a hacksaw, some long, flat, heavy blades, and a number of sharp, hooked instruments which no one would want near them in a million years. They sat on the bench amidst long, rubber-looking tubes, soaked in rusty red.

  Henry looked down at the floor by the bench and leapt back, away from the brown–red stains he’d wandered onto. Perhaps he was wrong. Just because this looked bad, didn’t mean anything. He looked around for something else to explain the stains and the tools. That’s when he saw the trough at the end of the room … really saw it.

  What had looked like rods and scrap frames from the other side of the room was too organic now that he could make it out properly. As he looked, he saw a skeletal hand. It waved at him from the pile.

  He went closer. Bones of all thicknesses lay in the trough. There was maybe half a dozen, along with shreds of cloth – clothing, stained brown and red – all separately discarded. Henry’s stomach rocked at the memory of Lucy’s missing arm and Tom – the man he’d hated for his sullen
silence – had disguised his limp. But the limp was plain to anyone watching Tom move. He might have screamed.

  Feet came light and fast down the steps. This new sickness would never leave.

  ‘Millar?’

  His stomach voided. Had Lucy been awake when it was done? Why had Andrew done this?

  ‘Oh, gods.’ Cole put it together. A rough hand clamped Henry’s shoulder as his body tried to lose this new-found truth through physical action, his breath gasping.

  ‘Why would Andrew do this?’ Tears ran, mixing with his confusion. ‘Why?’

  Gentle hands helped him straighten. ‘Look at me, kid. Look at me!’ Cole’s battered face was white-lipped.

  ‘Why, Cole? Why did he do this?’ There couldn’t be a reason; what reason could exist?

  Henry could see the cogs turning in Cole’s head. The man whose world Henry was in could make sense of this for him; he had to. Cole ducked his eyes and scratched his head. Maybe Cole hadn’t heard the question.

  ‘Why?’

  How much had she suffered? It was unimaginable. Cole shook his head, his arms gathering Henry up awkwardly into a steel hug.

  ‘It’s alright, kid. The reason doesn’t matter.’

  Henry was being guided away from the broken parts, but he needed an answer. ‘You don’t get it. I can’t live in a world where this happens, just because. Cole, I can’t do it. Lucy, she was missing an arm, man. What would it be like to have your arm cut off? Can you imagine that?’

  His eyes were too watery, and his breath huffed too much to continue. A seat found him, the stairs taking both of their weight when Cole sat next to him. Cole didn’t crumple next to the scene of lost humanity.

  Henry would have given everything to have been able to live with it, to cope with it. But nothing about Cole’s world made any sense, not if things like this could happen for no reason but badness. ‘I need to know. I have to understand, Cole. I need to know why it was done, y’know?’

  Cole nodded. ‘The Cipactli. This is how they’ve gone under the radar.’

  Dots joined. Millar gasped. ‘Andrew was feeding them parts of people? He fed Lucy’s arm to them?’ Revulsion rose, suddenly burning out sadness.

  ‘I’m sorry, kid, it fits. I wasn’t sure where the bones I found were coming from. Now we know … for some of them, at least.’ The next moments passed as a blur. A savage need to hurt and tear overcame Henry, hatred threatening to burst his chest wide open.

  Nothing would ever be the same. Fury sat just above the deep wound that sadness now carved into the pit of his stomach.

  Andrew Ancroft would suffer for this.

  Chapter 19

  He had left the Rust Bucket at home. Given a choice between facing a slavering, tentacle-faced Murk beast and parking in the city centre, Cole knew which he would prefer. He and Millar were headed for the scene of the very first disappearance hoping for some new clue now they knew the Cipactli had taken most of the vampires.

  From the report Millar had relayed, it sounded like their destination was a standard Cipactli kidnapping. Cole’s senses would rule out extra players or parties at the scene. If nothing else was found, they could move on to the scenes of the extra-weird occurrences afterward.

  He’d sensed nothing of the Cipactli or any other scumbag creature except vampire at Andrew’s place. The intel was wrong. The Cipactli hadn’t taken Andrew. Cole pushed through the clutter of the daytime streets. People, everywhere. Rambling on with their inane drivel. Henry trotted behind him, quiet. Usually he’d say thank the gods for small mercies, but after what the kid had seen in Ancroft’s basement, his silence needed watching.

  Cole had to keep up the pretence he knew what he was doing here. He was out of his depth, but the kid was relying on him, same as everyone else. He pushed doubt away. There was no substitute for just getting on with it.

  He kept a firm hold of his coat. If the shotgun or his miniature arsenal were revealed at any point, the deer would scatter. Here, a couple passed him by, in expensive and suspiciously shiny-looking hiking gear, having an earnest discussion about curtains. There, he passed a group of kids stood around awkwardly, faces in their phones, standing with a vulnerable mask of studied indifference. A group of lads made a big splash on the other side of the street, mistaking themselves for the worst things out and about.

  The people he passed lived a many-layered lie. Not just about the pointlessness of their curtains or whether they pulled a ‘burd’ that night. When the sun went down again, some of them would be taken. Split from the herd and drawn into dark, quiet places. There were worse things in the world than being killed. No amount of booze and light and talking and fucking would save them. They were food. Period. In less than one breath of the planet, they would all be dead. And no one would care or remember any of them a breath later.

  And somewhere out there was something that regarded the predators of the city to also be prey. Something other than the Cipactli. Not all the vampires had been taken by them – the rest had vanished under circumstances that were unusual, to say the least.

  The damage at Andrew’s house had looked suspiciously like Myriad magic. Cole couldn’t sense the Myriad; it was closed to him, but he’d seen enough scorch marks and blown-in doors to know magic when he came across it.

  Andrew’s door shouldn’t have been in so many pieces unless explosives were used, yet there was no residue or blast pattern or scorching to point that way. The black scorches looked like fire and not blasts from things that went boom. The thought that a rogue Myriad mage might be involved in all this was sobering. The Council said they could sense nightstaffs, so it was unlikely to be a corrupted, fallen mage. That thought was even more sobering.

  Cole would be jumping at shadows until they could figure this thing out. He needed the why. The Cipactli weren’t eating the vampires, so where were the bodies? Andrew had been orchestrating the Cipactli, feeding them. It had seemed that Andrew wanted rid of rivals, but that wasn’t the full picture. Who, or what, Andrew was working for was Cole’s sole focus.

  The vampires not taken by the Cipactli had all vanished. Literally, into thin air. The witness testimonies were ominously similar. It had to be connected to Andrew and the Cipactli. But what did the Cipactli and Andrew have to do with the unknown agent that was vanishing the other vampires?

  Whatever the unknown agent was, it should be getting a medal and a handshake. Some tourists – finally looking down at street level – hurried to get out of Cole’s way as he brooded forward. He should have blown the Council up. Black flakes began to fall from the sky.

  It stirred. Nourished. Sucking on his rage like a hated foetus that gave nightmares in return. He patted the whisky bottle in his coat lining, the only protection left to him now against the movements of his parasite and the black ash that had suddenly started falling from the sky whenever Cole’s temper flared. It was poison-crazed, this monster of his. They made a likely pair that way.

  Cole contemplated taking a swig, but one swig habitually led to another, and he needed to be clear-headed. When they got to the first victim’s place, he’d need to do the thing he dreaded the most. Sensing. He needed to be able to kick It from sleep to wear his face. How he was supposed to stop It migrating from there to take over the rest of him after he had siphoned, he had no idea.

  The absence of Natalia’s protection was a hole he had forgotten existed. A hole he hadn’t had to fill since before she became his watcher. Before her armour had sealed his guts, he had filled that emptiness with hard training and childish longing for Natalia. Shame it could never have been, but it had turned out having to kill your significant other one day when they monstered up made being together too monumentally stupid to be romantic.

  Without her protection, his parasite was free to burrow and wind around him, blackening anything It touched. None of the Council or the Coalition understood the alienness of It. They behaved like they could smell the wrongness on him, always watching as he strode by in the corridors of the Co
uncil building or the barracks of their lodges.

  He pushed the thought away, continuing to shoulder through the great herd of humanity before turning off Chambers Street, past the Royal Oak pub. He walked down to Old Infirmary Lane and the flats on Drummond Street. Not every vampire was ancient and rich. These flats were fine, but they weren’t Andrew’s mini-mansion.

  The red brick façade was punctuated by traditional sash and case windows – cold in winter and easily broken. The victim’s flat was conspicuous with its triple glazing and modern window frames on the second floor. Wooden shutters were closed tight. The victim’s name was Eric Vaden. He was a low-level grub Cole hadn’t had much to do with, other than the odd intimidation or scuff up. No one would miss him.

  ‘You got the key?’ Henry looked up, distracted, and searched his pockets, producing a keyring with a sailor woman on it. All the licensed creatures in the city were obliged to give the Council access to their hideaways. The most powerful, like Andrew, would have their own secret boltholes the Council knew nothing about. Grubs like Vaden lacked that kind of clout.

  ‘You read the file, kid?’ Of course Henry hadn’t read the file. The kid had just found out parts of his would-be girlfriend had been fed to monsters, which was exactly why Henry needed to read something. Get his mind out the cage it was stuck in. Henry pulled the file from his bag and began mechanically leafing through it.

  Cole wondered if he should warn the kid. Sensing would be rough for Henry when it came. There was no avoiding it. He had to be sure the Cipactli were working alone, that there wasn’t a backing band in town. The feeling in the pit of his heart was dread. He just had to keep going, always forward.

  ‘Come on, kid. We figure this out, we might just find her.’ He would regret giving that dose of false hope later. Cruel to do it, but he needed Henry’s mind on the case. It put a bit of steel in the kid’s spine. Gods, Henry had really fallen for this Lucy. That was only going to end in tears, and they wouldn’t be hers. She was lost – they all were, the ones that signed up to be tithed.