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

by Andrew Macmillan

  That was not the sort of chat he needed from Millar right then. If the kid couldn’t figure this out, they were all going to die horribly. ‘The trigger for you stabbing me is when I come at you, pal. And Henry, you stab me, you better fucking kill me, understand? If I’m half conscious, and I wake up and you’ve knifed me, I’ll shove that dagger directions you can’t dream of, got it?’ Yeah, Henry had got it. Well done, Cole. Great way to talk Henry into knifing you good and proper.

  He breathed, ignoring the black flakes falling from the sky. Millar leafed through his notes. ‘What do you mean, its trail is leaking?’ It was time for them to move, so Cole stood.

  ‘Usually, I can feel the most powerful vampires like a gravity well, or something. Sometimes, I see it over their heads, sort of like a whirlpool. But with this thing? It’s like all the bad shit it’s ever done is leaking out of it. I could hear screams and voices when I sensed it properly. And it must be huge. I mean aircraft-carrier-sized.’ Which didn’t make any sense. Even if the thing was invisible, something that huge wouldn’t just leave tracks, it would topple buildings.

  The shuffle of files followed Cole. ‘Come on, kid.’ They began the slow trek back up toward Lorne Street. Cole waved his empty flask at Millar. ‘We should stop for more of this.’

  ‘Did it come from the Pit?’ Millar’s cogs were turning.

  ‘To be honest, I have no idea. I thought it was only beast vampires down there. But who knows? This thing is different though. Whether it’s from the Pit or not, it shouldn’t be invisible, and it shouldn’t be careful with the city populace. It should be a wrecking ball.’

  The trail of the thing he followed stank. At least he wouldn’t have to sense again to follow whatever it was.

  They reached a shop and entered. Millar spoke in a whisper. ‘Cole, look.’

  Kid grabbed the local newspaper. Front page, the city police – the ordinary police – were making an appeal for people to stop making emergency calls in the event that they heard a lot of voices screaming. Authorities were baffled as to the cause. The leading theory was that a group of teenagers with a recording and a car were driving around disturbing the peace.

  The report sounded a lot like their monster. Had the Council mentioned the civilian authorities were being affected? Were they even aware? Cole tried to remember, but there was nothing like trying not to kill every fucker in the room to really get in the way of recalling information.

  ‘Millar, you hear the Council say anything about this?’ Henry shook his head.

  Cole conducted the transaction, bought the paper with the whisky, and they left the shop. They carried on, up the short distance to the dreaded Lorne Street. Millar read the rest of the article while they walked.

  ‘You think this thing in the paper is being caused by the leaking vampire-thing, Cole?’

  Cole glanced at Henry. ‘The city-wide glamour is meant to hide everything from the city, so I doubt it’s our vampire-thing. Still, it sounds a lot like it.’

  ‘Any way to work out where and when the reports have been coming in to the police? We could cross-match the newspaper reports with the times in our witness reports?’

  Look for patterns – that was one of Nessie’s mottoes. ‘Nessie has some contacts in the civilian police.’

  A few more yards passed expectantly. Millar’s face was tilted up at him. Heat rose in Cole’s gut.

  ‘What? Do I have any contacts in the police? What do you think, pal? Does that seem like my kind of thing to you?’

  The kid’s face fell.

  ‘The monitoring and investigation stuff wasn’t my part of my job. I’m the muscle. I break heads, and I’m fucking great at it. All this patient work, I left to the people who were good at that. Nat, Nessie and me, we were a team.’

  Millar’s shrug said he doubted it. Adrenaline oozed in slowly. Breathe – he had to calm down. His parasite lurked behind every casual loss of control right now.

  Following this vampire trail, or whatever it was, played his nerves like drums. The cage formed in his mind. It sat inside, smirking. It had his number. Just wait, the fuck-up will lose it; the time will come to wear him. Everyone knew it, his whole life.

  Millar nodded at him. ‘Different skills, man. I get that. You are really good at all that, I guess.’

  Cole searched the kid’s face for signs of mockery, but Henry was sincere. Pain filled his chest, uncomfortable as a rock pumping through his heart.

  ‘Gee, thanks. You approve, do you?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Millar’s face was incredulous; that was more like it. Kid was getting way too close all of a sudden. ‘I don’t need your fucking approval, man. Bloody hippy shit. I don’t have contacts, and I don’t give a shit about all that. That’s for others to look out for.’ Sharp pulls of whisky replaced the prison already wavering in his mind.

  ‘Whatever, man. Such a tough guy.’ He couldn’t make out Millar’s tone, but the whisky was kicking in, finally taking the edge off.

  They reached their destination. Lorne Street looked completely normal, but to Cole’s sight, it was obvious their leaking vampire-god had passed through there. The weird pain it had discharged hurt his mouth and climbed into his face like an infection.

  ‘It’s been here, recently.’ Cole tracked it, the screams echoing and drawing him down the street.

  Millar followed behind, looking at the reports, oblivious. ‘I’d bet the noises all over the city are this thing. We can’t know that for sure – I’m not insulting you, man – just saying, we can’t know. But Lisa Smith heard it, and the reports sound word for word like what she heard. The reports of the noise started about four days ago.’

  The vampire trail turned right, at the corner of the first tenement. The exact side alley where Cole had killed the Cipactli, and nearly lost his fight with It. The trail went straight into the wall at the end of the tiny blind alley. The air was suddenly very cold, cutting through his clothes like slivers of dry ice. The green life and scorched soot of a vampire’s trail hung heaviest on the wall itself, as though the stone had absorbed the thing’s passing, like a fingerprint.

  As far as Cole knew, there was only one way to disappear through a wall. Portals.

  ‘End of the road, Millar.’

  The kid looked at him.

  ‘It went through that wall. We can’t walk through walls.’

  Millar thought. ‘Couldn’t there be a portal-thingy there?’

  Maybe he could ignore Millar. An aircraft-carrier-sized vampire really would be an immovable object. Cole needed more time; he couldn’t face something like that the way he was. They’d just have to find more clues.

  If they found a portal, Millar would probably suggest something idiotic like, let’s go in … Civilians!

  ‘Nah, end of the road, Millar. How many more disappearances to check out?’

  Henry tucked the files under his arm. ‘Eh, shouldn’t we have a look? If the vampire-thing went through a portal, we could try to follow?’

  ‘Millar, the Ways doesn’t work like that, pal. We need to know where it went to follow it.’

  Henry paced. ‘But, if it’s using the portals to get around the city, doesn’t that tell us something? Isn’t that important? Besides, what else do you think we’ll find by visiting the rest of the abduction sites?’

  Cole could feel It listening. He drank whisky in silence.

  Millar continued. ‘You said yourself, you need to find the thing that’s not the Cipactli and is disappearing vampires, and here it is. It went through that wall. Couldn’t you track it through a portal? Or, if not and there is a portal here, couldn’t we go to the other portal places and see if we can pick its trail up there?’

  ‘Millar! Put a sock in it!’ The kid was like a dog with a bone. What was worse, a dog who happened to be right. ‘Fine, I’ll look for a fucking portal.’ Cole wasn’t sure if he could track anything through the portals. It seemed unlikely. There was no registered portal on Lorne Street, as far as he knew. If
they did find one, it could be a broken connection. That list grew every year. No one knew what happened to the people who disappeared in there. Or it could be wild. Nat had tried not to tell him about wild portals once. She knew how he felt about regular portals as it was. He’d asked Nessie and regretted it ever since. They could go anywhere: the middle of a volcano, a trench in the ocean. And that was just the ones that connected to places on earth. There were far worse places to end up.

  He put the whisky flask back in his jacket and searched the wall. Bloody ridiculous. He ran his fingers along the bricks and saw no telltale raised air, hovering like a button. He was about to turn when his hand passed over a stone right in the middle of the wall.

  It leapt in his gut, banging his mind-prison. He snapped his walls around It, sinking to one knee. Millar was by his side in a moment. ‘You okay?’

  Cole stood, brushing Millar’s hand off. The brick had a tiny discolouration, a black flake inside the stone. Cole looked up. No black flakes falling like snow, but the mark in the brick looked just like one. It spun in excited motions. He could see a shape in the discolouration, like one of the carved runes he had seen Myriad mages use, but black and fluid. It twisted into unnatural combinations of lines. It was magic of the Murk. Black magic.

  He reached for it, and the smallest spark of black magic, like a static jolt from clothing, leapt from his hand. The wall dissolved into a rapidly growing black hole. Instead of the usual runes of the Ways, this portal was surrounded by black lines that moved like living things. The hole that opened shone with a burned-green corona. They both gasped.

  ‘Millar, back up, nice and easy.’

  Cole backed away from the wall. Millar was awed by his side. ‘That doesn’t look like the nice portal at Andrew’s. What is it, Cole?’

  He had no fucking idea. It was all sorts of bad news, there was no doubt. ‘Henry, we can’t be dealing with this; it’s above our paygrade.’

  Millar looked at him. ‘That’s where the vampire went?’

  It was. It had to be. He nodded. ‘Shouldn’t we, y’know, go after it?’

  Civilians!

  ‘Millar, I’m not getting into a black-magic portal that – as far as I know – no one else knows about. I don’t even know if the Council knows these things can exist. I’ve never heard of anything like it.’

  Millar sounded annoyed. ‘Yeah, but Cole, it’s not like the Council can spare us any help, and meantime, whatever’s going on here is just going to keep getting worse. There’s got to be an explanation. Someone’s behind all this; it’s all too similar not to be connected. And from what I’ve seen of your world so far, I don’t think the endgame will be to bring fluffy bunnies and rainbows for all.’

  The dregs of the bottle vanished. Kid risked dying, but a fate worse than death might wait for Cole on the other side of that portal. Besides, they still didn’t know where the vampire had gone. If this portal functioned like the Myriad ones, then they had to know the destination in order to arrive there. Otherwise they would just be taken to a random exit, if they were lucky. Portals couldn’t be made without at least one twin; Natalia had told him.

  ‘Millar, we still don’t know where the vampire trail has gone. We don’t know where to think of, to guide us through the portal. And I’m not going through any black-magic portal without a clue where I’m coming out.’

  Henry kept arguing. ‘But can’t you think of the vampire trail? Wouldn’t that get you to where it is?’ He wasn’t getting that, if that was possible, it was just about the worst idea for everyone.

  But what choice did they have? Who knew, maybe if he thought about the trail, he could follow it? He knew so little of how his powers worked and less about how they interacted with other powers. Millar looked animated. Idiot kid.

  If they went through and found a god-sized vampire, Cole would fall, for sure. And Henry didn’t have it in him to flick the switch. Kid needed to feel less bloody congenial toward him.

  ‘Cole?’

  The new bottle’s lid made that satisfying crunch when the metal seal popped. He drank deep.

  ‘You can count on me, Cole, if it all goes wrong.’ No, he couldn’t. The kid had seen combat once. From the safety of the floor in Cole’s flat. It was another thing entirely to kill someone. Particularly someone who you felt … whatever it was that Henry felt for Cole. Uncomfortable, good feelings that there was no space for. It was sink or swim time.

  ‘Then you’re ready, Millar? To take a life? To push that knife into my body as I come to murder you? You think you’re ready for that?’

  Black flakes fell, wallowing and fat on the air. Cole advanced. Millar lost colour in his face. The wand appeared, the knife too.

  Cole looked at the scared boy. He was used to suicidal gambits, desperate fights and long odds. Went with the job. But the kid? Soft. Full of naive ideas about rescuing everyone. Probably thought he could rescue Cole. Probably was dying to go jumping into a black-magic portal to rescue Lucy. There wasn’t space for it. People would die. Nessie, Nat. The people living in the city. All of them, sacrificed on the altar of Henry Millar’s amiable world view.

  The pyre in him burned, stoked. It thrived. He herded Millar into the corner next to the portal. ‘Come on then! You ready to murder, eh?’ The kid wilted. Cole slapped him on the head. ‘People are going to die, Millar – everyone in the city, all because you’re too weak to stop me.’

  He slapped again. Millar flung his arm up. ‘You ready to protect them? Think you can take me?’ Black ropes of power coiled up from the concrete. It exulted in his guts. Millar crumbled. Cole jabbed him in the ribs.

  ‘Fuck off, Cole, fuck off!’

  Cole’s shin bone kicked against the boy’s leg, crumpling him further. ‘What you going to do, Henry? The city’s going to burn! You going to let me push you around, eh?’

  The kid slid to the side, trying to get out of the corner.

  ‘That’s great, Millar, just you curl up. I’ll go and eat Lucy’s other arm.’

  Henry bellowed and lashed out, kicking and screaming. The knife flashed in toward him. Cole didn’t have to dodge; Millar hadn’t been aiming for him, not really.

  The boy’s knuckles grazed his face. ‘Fuck you, fuck you!’ The attack was clumsy with fury and lacked intent to hurt.

  ‘I’m going to kill your clapped-out vampire-junkie, Millar. I’m going to feed her to more Cipactli.’

  The wand swung up. Cole grabbed it and disarmed Millar, tripping him.

  ‘I’ve got your fucking wand, pal – what you going to do now?’

  Millar’s knife flashed for his leg, moving him back. That was better.

  ‘I’m going to kill her, and when I do, I’ll tell her it’s because you weren’t man enough to protect her.’

  Millar stood and threw himself forward, gouging, biting, kicking. In a blur, his limbs came on, and his knife plunged into Cole’s jacket as Cole spun away. The blade bit in a few inches. The kid drew the blade back out, ready to keep going.

  Cole grabbed him bodily, holding Henry’s knife wrist and crushing him to his chest, folding his other arm, pinning him in a steel bearhug. ‘I’m sorry, kid, I’m sorry. It’s over. You did it. You did good. You’ve got to be ready. There’s too much at stake. I can’t hold your hand.

  ‘If we find the vampire-thing, and I fall, you hit that button, Henry, or I promise all those things I said will happen.’ The kid kept kicking. Cole let him. Free shots all round. The pain was penance.

  He hoped the kid would understand later. For now, the only thing that mattered was Henry Millar would use that kill switch when the time came.

  Chapter 21

  The transition through the black-magic portal was similar to a Myriad portal, except instead of being torn apart, Cole bled out life, dying, reduced to nothing, before life flooded back in, reanimating his body. He was spat out to a welter of information.

  It was everywhere. This place he lay in was a sea of power. Not the usual black of his magic, instead
it was spoiled white and fizzing on his skin. He felt the corruption, even while his senses rioted after the transition through the portal. He couldn’t get his mind-prison up in time.

  It birthed, swelling up his back, in his arms, down into his feet. His face peeled back in a smile not his own. With his mind locked out of his body, he felt every movement. The breathing of his lungs, the ground underfoot. His mind was in exile.

  ‘Dude, that was awful. I thought I died! Where are we?’

  Cole fought as It pushed him back, further and further. The corruption of this place he stood in clung to his skin like droplets of oily blood, and It could feed from every direction at once.

  His parasite was quicksand, drawing him down, away from control of his body. It forced him out of his limbs. He screamed, throatless, and It swept him from his nervous system. Experience shrank to ice panic as he felt the walls of Its will push in around and hold him.

  Numb, deaf and blank-faced, he screamed and ranted, raking on the walls of Its prison with hands that were now only a memory. It rounded on Millar.

  The kid was completely unprepared. Cole’s body hadn’t ripped apart or distended. He hoped his aura would warn Millar, but as he watched his own hands grab for the wand, Millar just looked at him, puzzled.

  Millar reacted a moment too late, fear dawning on his face, jerking back, but It knocked Millar’s wand clear as he drew it. Cole was stuck, watching through his own eyes, It wearing his form. And he could feel It – as It really was – for the first time. It was a molten splinter from the core of the world. It was pure aggression, like a wounded mother defending her last young.

  Millar stumbled away when It stalked forward. It had Cole caged. He had taught It how to lock him away and brought It here, where It fed on the ambient corruption of this strange place. He’d spent his life looking outside for his immovable object, always scanning the horizon for threat. The whole time, he had been driving forward to this moment. He had primed It with his fighting and his rage. His hatred had nourished It, teaching It how to destroy as It had kept old wounds open and bleeding in return. No one had told him. No one had known, was the likely truth. He was his own immovable object.