by Alexis Hall
The ghost’s fingers were still tight on my throat, so I wrenched my knife out through her chest cavity and kept hacking until she was just fragments of dust and a puddle of goo.
Victory!
Except for the part where I was sitting backwards on an angry unicorn.
The beast reared underneath me, snorting and making horrible, high-pitched noises. I threw myself flat to its back, got my legs round its neck and hung on as tight as I could. I was really glad everybody else was too busy getting killed to see this. If there was ever a time for latent faery princess powers, this was it. I concentrated really fucking hard on wanting the thing to calm the fuck down.
It really didn’t want to. It was nothing but hate and malice wrapped in a horse skin.
Well, I wasn’t going to do anything with my face in its arse. I waited until it had all four feet on the ground and swung myself round.
“Right, you fucker,” I growled in its ear.
It jerked its head back and tried to stab me in the face. Bastard. I caught its blood-slick horn in my left hand, and my mother’s strength surged through me. For once I didn’t mind. This fucker was going down. Digging my other hand into its mane, I twisted its head around. Either it was going to do what I wanted, or I was going to break its fucking neck.
It fought me for a bit, its panicky breath steaming in the air, and then went to its knees. Very carefully, I let it go, and it didn’t freak out and try to kill me again, so I called that a win. I half-heartedly patted its neck, and it rose smoothly to its feet.
Holy shit. I’d got a unicorn. Where was I going to park it in central London?
The rest of the fight wasn’t going so well. Several members of the pack had been injured. There weren’t enough vampires to keep the archers busy, and my technique of getting your horse killed wasn’t scalable. I was going to have to try to take out another ghost, and I had no experience of unicorn-based combat. If I was lucky, I’d be a quick learner.
I set my sights on another of the unicorns and readied my knife. Before I could charge, a flash of silver-grey broke from the woods. The Dowager Marchioness of Safernoc clamped her jaws round one of its legs and tore through bone and tendon. It went to the ground with a shriek, pinning its rider under its flank. The Dowager circled, belly low to the forest floor, then shot forwards again, ripping out the beast’s throat with merciless efficiency. I didn’t wait to see the rest.
I looked for a new target and saw Henry scything through the rest of the ghosts, forcing the unicorns to the ground with his weight, and tearing the riders apart. One of them turned to flee, but the Dowager cut it off and brought it down. The song finally ended.
The woods grew dark and quiet.
I trotted back to the main party on my unicorn, hoping no one would ask too many questions.
“Who’s hurt?” asked Henry.
I realised both he and the Dowager had shifted back into human form and were stark bollock naked. I looked away quickly. I’m just not into casual wang. Or, for that matter, anyone who gets free travel on public transport.
Jumbo eased out from under the hearse, his face losing its wolfish features as he rattled off a list of names and injuries.
“Any fatalities?”
Jumbo shook his head. The wounded were being helped onto the tallyho wagon and the Dowager—back in wolf form, thank God—leapt on to guard them on their way back to the house. The rest of the pack pressed on into the forest with the hearse. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing, but then I saw a glimmer through the trees.
I guessed this was one of the ghost lights I’d carefully avoided following last time, and shouldn’t follow now if I had any sense.
I followed it.
As soon as I left the path, I lost sight of the funeral party, the woods closing round me like a claw. The undergrowth was dense and the trees tangled together, but the unicorn seemed to know what it was doing. It seemed suspiciously keen to carry me to towards certain death. Fucker.
The lights never seemed to get any closer, but they multiplied like stars coming out, leading me to the place where the forest was dying. At first, all I noticed were some withering leaves, but soon the moon shone down through skeletal branches onto a floor littered with dry bones and dust. At last, we came to a ring of dead trees, and my unicorn just wouldn’t move.
I slithered to the ground.
“You’d better wait, you fucker. Or I’ll hunt you down and turn you into magic glue.”
It gave me a look with its dead black eyes that I decided to take as a yes.
Knife in hand, I stepped into the circle of trees. I felt a familiar chill, like stepping into cold water. I’ve walked between worlds before, but you never quite get used to it. I looked over my shoulder to see what I’d got myself into. Behind me was a blasted heath, dead trees scattered on an ashen plane. A vast pale moon hung low in a starless sky, washing the land in light the colour of bone. Well, Toto, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. I was in a fucking faery realm.
In the middle of the grove, a great golden wolf was locked in combat with the most fucked-up animal I’d ever seen. It was a gigantic, corpse-white stag, its flesh blistered and sloughing away to the bone. Its many-tined antlers were honed to points and hung with strips of rotting velvet. I guess when I’d seen it before it had its friendly face on. Faery lords were an extension of their worlds, or maybe the other way round, and everything here was, well, dead and desiccated. I guess Tara had been telling the truth all along. There was no way this thing, or anything that worked for it, had killed her cousin.
As I watched, Tara sprang for the stag’s throat, but it batted her aside, its antlers opening a jagged cut across her flank. She hit the ground, rolled, and came to her feet snarling.
Well, thank God I was here with my very small knife.
Not wanting to get myself immediately killed, I waited for an opening.
The stag lowered its head and charged. Tara held her ground, twisting aside at the last second to strike at its haunches. She brought it down, and I lost track of them in a whirl of dust. The stag threw her off and rose to its feet, its form shifting into something vaguely human. If you count massive, horned dudes with hooves as human. He wore a crown of antlers and held a spear of bone, which he hurled at Tara. It pierced her flank, knocking her down just as she was getting up. The ex-stag reached out his upturned hand, spreading his fingers wide and then curling them inwards. Tara convulsed on the ground as tendrils of silver mist streamed from her wounds towards her attacker. They gathered round his fingers and pooled in the palms of his hands as he shuddered in what seemed to be pleasure.
Fuck. Kate. Do something now.
As usual, I had no fucking clue what was going on, but there was no way it could be good.
I ran forwards, jumped onto his back, and tried to drive the knife between his collarbone and neck. He made a pissed-off noise and flexed his shoulders, at which point his flesh gave way under my fingertips and his entire back peeled away, dumping me on the ground in a pile of flaking skin and ash. At least he wasn’t gooey. He turned on me, twisted one massive finger into my hair, and hauled me to my feet. It really fucking hurt. He clamped his other hand over my mouth and nose. I tried not to panic, but I was out of fucking options. I’d dropped my knife, I couldn’t reach his body. All I could do was claw pathetically at his wrists. And I was feeling weaker by the second, like something I seriously wanted to keep was being sucked out of me.
And then he was gone.
I hit the ground hard, gasping for breath and half-blind. When I felt capable of it, I looked up. Tara had the stag-dude-thing pinned to the ground and was mauling the fuck out of him. I let her get on with that. When she was finished, he was nothing but dust, fragments of bone, and a shattered crown. I crawled to my feet and followed her back to our world. As we approached the edge of the circle, a cold sensation crawled over my skin, and I could see the woods again. The unicorn had buggered off, though. Fucker.
Back under familia
r stars, Tara shifted. It was just my luck. Alone in the woods with a naked, sweaty lingerie model, and I was too beaten up to properly appreciate it. She descended on me.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“I needed to talk to you.” It sounded a bit weak, even to me.
“You could have been killed.”
“So could you.”
“I had the situation under control.” She loomed over me, getting a lot of mileage out of a couple of extra inches of height.
I tipped my head back so I could look her in the eye. “Yeah, getting stabbed like that was a winning strategy.”
“I would have handled it. This is my life, and it is dangerous. I can’t protect my pack with you in the way.”
“I’m so sick of the ‘stay out of my world’ speech. You invited me here. Yes, you saved my life, but I saved yours. Can’t you get over yourself for ten fucking seconds and admit that?” I turned away from her. I’d heard all this before.
Tara grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me round, catching me by the waist as I tried unsuccessfully to pull back. She reached out and twisted a lock of my hair around her finger. I looked down and saw it shone white in the moonlight. “You see,” she said softly, “he could have sucked you dry in seconds. I don’t want anyone hurt on my account.”
In a moment of horrified vanity, I checked the rest of my hair, but it was okay. God, what if it had grabbed my boob or something? “I’m fine. But, listen, about the murder. I really don’t think the mages had anything to do with it.”
Tara’s eyes flashed angrily. “There will be retaliation. Blood demands blood.”
“Seriously, the mages had nothing to do with your cousin. One of them attacked Julian, and Nimue is handling it. And I really, really don’t think it was a mage that killed Andrew.”
“I cannot put my faith in the Witch Queen. Somebody conjured something that killed one of my people. If it was not one of her court, it was still one of her kind.”
Oh, this was not going well. I’d just about managed to keep Julian from going all blood on the walls, and, although I was about sixty percent certain I could use the same technique on Tara, it would be the last nail in the coffin of my professionalism.
“It’s not worth starting a war,” I insisted.
“Yes. It is. And I will not discuss this further.”
She let me go and turned to leave, so I caught her by the arm. “Well, I’m not finished talking about it.”
She snapped back around and slammed me into a tree. Her body was burning hot. “When I say a conversation is over, it is over. Do not lay hands on me again. You are no longer amusing, Kate Kane.”
My mother was probably having a field day. I marshalled her strength and shoved Tara away from me. She flew backwards, transforming in mid-air and landing on all fours. I didn’t think wolves could look surprised.
“I’m not your fucking sex toy.” I stomped into the woods with great dignity.
Tara overtook me in two bounds and shifted back into human form. “You have no idea where you’re going.”
“Away from you is good for now.”
“We’ve subdued the spirits for the moment, but these woods are still dangerous. And you still have no idea where you’re going.”
I kept stomping, dragging the tatters of my dress through briars and fuck knows what else. Suddenly I felt a finger tracing a line across my bare shoulder.
“Is being my sex toy really such a bad thing?” asked Tara huskily.
My pride said yes, it was. Other parts of me had other ideas. I accidentally stopped stomping.
She slid one hand round my waist, pulling me back against her very naked body. Her heart pounded a hunter’s rhythm along my spine. Her other hand cupped my chin, drawing my head around, as she leaned over my shoulder. Her hair spilled across my arm. Her breath warmed my skin.
Just say no, Kate. Just say no.
“There’s a power in you, Kate Kane,” whispered Tara against my lips. “You smell of dark woods and wild places.”
Tara smelled of blood and sweat and excitement. Ngh. I needed a way out of this. One that didn’t involve fucking a werewolf. Maybe.
“I thought it was cheap cigarettes and dirty sex,” I said, preserving my modesty with witty repartee.
“I can help you, yah.”
“With the dirty sex?”
“That too.”
The hand round my waist dipped lower. Quite a bit lower.
Come on, Kate. You’re at a funeral. And you have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror tomorrow.
I caught her by the wrist. “Buy a vibrator.”
She kissed the corner of my mouth. “The chase has barely begun, Kate Kane. One day you’ll beg me to fuck you.”
It was the kind of line you could only get away with if you were an alpha werewolf.
I pulled out of her arms. “You’ve got a long way to go before that’ll happen. Now come on, let’s bury your cousin.”
She didn’t really have an answer to that, so she led me through the woods to the foot of a small hill covered in white stones. The rest of the funeral party—at least the ones that were still reasonably intact—were waiting with the hearse. Tara handed me over to Jumbo and climbed to the top of the hill, where she addressed us.
“Brothers, sisters, friends. In this place we have laid our dead to rest for ten centuries. Now we send Andrew to join our ancestors in whatever world awaits us next.”
In subdued silence, they took Andrew’s body from the hearse and carried it up the hill. They laid it beside Tara, who lifted a large white rock and placed it at his head. And then, one by one, the rest of the funeral party came and added their own stones to the cairn until Andrew’s body disappeared into the hill.
My sleeping patterns were fucked again. By the time I drove back to London, it was four in the morning. I did my now-customary face-plant and woke up at noon, with the weird realisation that there was nothing I was meant to be doing. Technically, I’d put myself back on the case, but progress had stalled. The Prince of Coins probably wasn’t involved, but it would take a while for Lucy to confirm that. And I’d ruled out both the Vane-Tempest clan and their whacky supernatural neighbours. That left me with a grand total of zero suspects and zero leads. I could just about pin it on the Dowager or Kauri if I tried really hard, but while I was hardly a beacon of professional ethics, I drew the line at fitting people up. Maybe I would have to accept that I wasn’t going to get this to make sense.
That was when I realised I had no reason to get out of bed. I tried to think of this as a win. I’d sort of closed a case, and nobody was dead who hadn’t already been dead when I started. But then there was the war I’d accidentally started between the mages and the werewolves. I told myself there was nothing I could do about that.
I decided very firmly that I was going to get up and do things and, to my surprise, I did. I peeled off the ruins of my dress and had a shower (this was almost getting to be a regular thing). I tended to my not-very-sexy wounds. The old ones looked like they’d heal up fine, but the white streak in my hair was freaking me out. Tara’s my life is dangerous bullshit was infuriatingly unattractive, but thinking about it, that thing had come really fucking close to actually killing me. I went to get dressed and noticed I hadn’t done any laundry for weeks. It was officially dress-down Monday. I dug the pair of jeans I’d worn least recently out of the bottom of the basket and grabbed the very last T-shirt from the back of the drawer. It turned out to be one of Eve’s. At least it was black, but it had a stick man on the front above the slogan “Stand back, I’m going to try science.”
Well, it hadn’t worked for us.
But today was my day for being a grown-up and doing laundry, not feeling sorry for myself.
This turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected, because I’d run out of those washing tablet things.
It was time for a list.
A couple of hours later, I’d bought cleaning supp
lies, put my laundry on, stuck all my old bottles in the recycling, changed the bin liner, Skyped my dad, picked up an email from Lucy confirming that it would, indeed, take a while to get anything from the documents I’d sent her but she thought it all looked kosher, cleaned a bunch of crap, and was ready to think about being a go-getting young professional.
I’d let a lot of things slide since Archer died. I needed to find someone to redo the website. Eve had designed it years ago when she was a nerd-for-hire, and I was pretty sure things have moved on since 2006. Wasn’t I supposed to be tweeting? I am on a stakeout #donttellanybody. And then there was Archer’s name on the door. This one I’d been deliberately putting off, which was stupid and sentimental but, you know what, fuck it. I was going to leave it up there. It was the least I could do for him. Beep.
Shit. My phone. I’d left it under the pile of clothes last night, and now it was whining that it was low on battery. I went to plug it in and I saw I had a missed call from an unknown number.
Huh.
I checked my messages. Julian’s voice poured over me like hot fudge sauce on an ice-cream sundae. “Hello, sweeting, I’m just thinking about you. If you want to know what I’m thinking, call me back.”
Perhaps I’d totally misread the situation. Perhaps I hadn’t given Julian’s attention span enough credit. But I’d kind of assumed it was a one-off, and now I was confused. Did this mean we were dating? She had taken me for pudding, but I’d thought that was about getting into my pants. It had, after all, worked. But then she had told me half her life story while my pants were clearly accessible, and that had been . . . sweet.
I had a don’t date vampires policy for a reason.
On the other hand—now that I knew it was an option—I really wanted to see her again.
No, wait, this was crazy. She was an eight-hundred-year-old vampire. For all I knew, she had ex-girlfriends stacked under her floorboards like Lego bricks. Maybe it was her hobby: “Hi, there’s this murder I want you to investigate, can I buy you pudding, look at my lesbian sexpile, let’s shag, let’s shag more, now I will kill you.” And it’s not like I had a great track record with relationships, either.