by Hall, Alexis
Things had quieted down again and al-Rashid was agreeing to protect London from the Morrígan and her army of disposable undead psychopaths.
The Prince of Coins turned to Halfdan, who had reappeared as mysteriously as he’d vanished. “I take it we can count on your support.”
He flashed a wide, oddly charming grin. “Actually, I was thinking I’d sit this one out. I hate to be mercenary, but I’m really not sure what’s in it for me.”
“We gave you the North!” growled Caradoc, turning his slowly healing face towards the Regent.
“Yes, you did, and I’ve still got it whether I help you or not.”
The Prince of Wands stepped out of the shadows. “I’m sure you don’t need me to remind you, brother, that our former mistress is not forgiving.”
“That was the problem with the Morrígan. She always took everything so seriously.”
“We also,” continued Pryce, “need to send word to the Scots and Irish princes, and the Lords of Wales.”
“The Morrígan had followers in Ireland,” said Julian.
“All the more reason to tell them.” The Prince of Wands pushed aside the body of a fledgling and reclaimed his seat at the table. “If they know that we know that she has returned, then they will not be tempted to conspire against us out of the false belief that we do not know. Of course, they may already know, but at present, we have no way to know what they know. If we tell them, we will know what they know, and all we will not know is how long they have known it.”
“You must be getting to me, Sebastian,” drawled Julian, “because that almost made sense.”
The meeting looked like it was going to drag on for a bit, and since they’d apparently forgotten I was there, I went for a cigarette. Outside, the moonlight washed over a wasteland. Aeglica’s overgrown garden had withered away. The weeds on the driveway were dust, the grass brittle skeletons. The rose bower where I’d seen him playing chess with Mercy was a ruin of bare thorns.
I’ve smoked in worse places.
After the trial, the slaughter, and the death of an innocent garden, Julian took me back to one of her many shag pads to celebrate what I suppose was technically a victory. I was, after all, still alive, and I hadn’t sold anyone out to stay that way.
“Ah, that sink brings back memories,” said Julian, as the automatic light came on in the kitchen.
“It brings back memories of being attacked by a killer tentacle monster.”
“Oh, you always focus on the negative.”
She pulled open the fridge, which was stocked entirely with champagne and little boxes of expensive chocolates.
“How many girls are you planning to bring back here?” I asked.
“As many as you want, sweeting.”
“Just pour me something.”
Julian grabbed a bottle and popped the cork. “Darling, this is Krug 1988.” Her expression turned dreamy. “A fine year by all accounts. An ineffable penetrating flavour, with remarkable depth and sophistication.”
“Do you want me to drink this or have sex with it?”
Julian grinned, teeth glimmering. “Why choose?”
I caught her up and kissed her. Wine and rose leaves and freedom, and the taste of Julian’s laughter, sweet in my mouth. I’d almost forgotten what it was like, just being with her, without shadows, betrayals, and my imminent execution hanging over us. Yes, she was still a vampire prince and I’d never be her number one priority, but right now, I couldn’t seem to remember why that bothered me. She made me feel good, like being drunk without the comedown, and I needed that. She pressed into me, curling round me like a snake. Her body was cold and fragile, but the arm she slipped round my waist was impossibly strong. And we kissed and kissed forever, the way you only kiss someone when you thought you’d never do it again. We kissed until I couldn’t breathe and Julian was whimpering against my lips.
We broke apart, still standing close, Julian’s cheek resting against mine. I could feel the flutter of her eyelashes.
“I’m glad I didn’t lose you,” she whispered.
I’d been beginning to wonder. She hadn’t exactly moved heaven and earth to save my arse. But she’d spoken up for me at the trial. At the last possible fucking minute, but she had spoken up.
“I’m not that easy to get rid of.”
“You won’t be here forever.”
Here lies Kate Kane, died peacefully in her sleep aged 94. Beloved daughter. Sorely missed.
“I think I’ve got a few years in me yet. And if you keep up the ‘woe is me, I’m immortal’ stuff, I’ll crack this bottle over your head.”
“I know, and I’m so lucky to have you, but I can’t not think about it.”
“So you’re celebrating my unexpected survival by mooping about my inevitable death?”
Julian gave me a little squeeze. “You’re right, I’m being silly. I just realised how close I came to . . .”
She trailed away, and I didn’t fancy asking her to finish the sentence. Close to losing me? Close to sacrificing me? Close to killing me herself?
This was turning into one hell of a celebration.
I snatched the bottle out of her hand and took a swig. Bubbles burst over my tongue like they were all going yay. This really wasn’t a drink for drowning your sorrows, but fuck it, I shouldn’t have had any sorrows. I was alive and in an expensive flat with my hot vampire girlfriend. It wouldn’t last forever, but what does?
“Are you drinking my vintage Krug like it’s a bottle of Beck’s?” asked Julian.
“Yeah, I am. Do you want to make something of it?”
“You’re a complete barbarian.”
“I’m barely getting started. Now cut the emo and do what you’re good at.”
Julian pulled away mischievously. “I’ve been around for eight hundred years, sweeting, I’m good at a lot of things. I can open an oyster, illuminate a manuscript, extemporise a mean sonnet, and fly a biplane.”
“I was kind of hoping you wanted to fuck.”
“You modern girls have no appreciation for poetry.”
I seized her by the cravat and pulled her into another kiss, and then we tumbled onto the kitchen floor in a tangle of limbs and velvet. I just about managed to stop the champagne spilling everywhere. I put the bottle down and started tearing at Julian’s clothes. She’d gone military for the Council, all epaulettes, gold piping, and thigh boots.
“Y’know,” I said, “for a sex vampire, you are fucking murder to get undressed.”
“Anticipation is the quintessence of erotica.”
“Oh, shut up.” I poured the champagne over her mostly naked body.
Julian shrieked and wriggled. “I can’t tell if this is a waste of perfectly good champagne.”
“I think it’s a perfect use of good champagne.”
I pinned her down and kissed her again, wine trickling between our lips, light and golden, mingled with the deep, dark taste of the vampire prince of pleasure.
Julian sighed. Her eyes were so very blue in this light. “I’m inclined to agree.” She tipped her head back, to expose the graceful, vulnerable curve of her throat. I followed the rivulets down her neck, and she shuddered, skin flooding warm beneath my mouth.
I was starting to feel a little light-headed, but I hadn’t drunk nearly enough for it to be the champagne. There were probably things I should have been worrying about, but they could all go fuck themselves. I felt like one of the bubbles that had gathered on Julian’s skin. I drifted across the surface of her body, showering her in light, fleeting kisses, fizzing with lazy desire, and thinking of nothing, living for a moment in Julian, and Julian alone.
I picked up the bottle and spilled more champagne over her torso, letting it run over the planes of her body and pool in the hollows of her hips and collarbone. She was beautiful, gleaming like a nymph in a waterfall. A waterfall that cost two hundred quid a bottle.
“This is fun,” she said, happily.
She arched, catlike, and the liqu
id gathered, swirled and rushed about in little sparkling streams, breaking into tributaries that arrowed interestingly southwards. I bent my head and pursued them with my tongue, chasing the taste of sex and celebration.
I drank champagne from Julian, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to serve it. It glistened on her breasts, gathered in her navel, and left spirals across her ribs as she writhed under me, her hands gliding over my shoulders.
Then my hat fell off and flopped over her face. Julian burst out laughing, batted it away, and wrapped her legs round me. “Maybe you should take your coat off as well. Go crazy.”
“Can’t. Busy.”
I took another drink from the bottle and kissed her in a flurry of bubbles, licking the champagne from her lips.
“Can you actually taste that?” I asked, coming up for air.
“No, but I can taste you.”
“Do I have an ineffable penetrating flavour, with remarkable depth and sophistication?”
“In your own way.”
“What do you mean ‘in my own way’? Is that no? Am I a can of Budweiser?”
Julian reached up a hand and ran her fingertips over my cheek. “No, Kate. It’s complicated and hard to describe. You taste of desire and regret and passion and recrimination and hope and loss and power. It’s strongest in your blood, but I can catch a trace of it on your lips and on your skin.”
“I have no idea what to say to that.”
Julian twined her arms around my neck, pulled me down, and kissed me. Her teeth grazed my tongue, blood, pleasure, and champagne mingling wildly in my mouth, until everything was bubbles and darkness. I shuddered against her, my hands clutching at her hips, my mouth on her mouth, my thoughts slipping away, falling with her into ecstasy, bright and gold and black.
Later, Julian peeled me out of my sticky seriously-in-need-of-dry-cleaning suit and carried me through to the bedroom where—as I’d discovered the last time I was here—she’d inexplicably had a bath installed. At least it wasn’t full of monster guts anymore. She lowered me into a cloud of bubbles and steam and climbed in after me.
“I feel like such a lesbian stereotype,” I said, sleepily.
Julian wriggled between my legs and rested her head against my shoulder. “Sweeting, I’ve been taking baths with my lovers for the past six hundred years. I think I can safely say I was doing it before it was fashionable.”
“You’ll be asking me to move in next.”
“I got through that phase in the seventeenth century. You know how it is, you try to take things too far too fast, and you end up in a midnight duel to the death on the roof of the Bastille.”
“Did you win?”
“Well, it was sort of a draw. It usually is when you’re both immortal.”
“Bad breakup?”
“You could say that.”
I drifted for a while, feeling warm and shagged out. I had dozens of tiny red bite marks running up my arms like I was a really cack-handed heroin addict.
“So, what happens now?” I asked.
“I thought we might wash the champagne off, head to bed, have sex five or six more times, and then you’ll probably need to sleep.”
“I meant with the Morrígan and the army and everything.”
“Oh, that.” Julian twisted round to glower playfully at me. “I was hoping we could take a night off.”
“Sorry, I just got thinking about it.”
“You’re in a bath with me naked between your legs and you’re thinking about another woman. I’m almost insulted.”
I skated my hands across her slick, bubble-dusted skin. “I’m thinking about an insane vampire queen who lives in a graveyard with a bunch of ravens and apparently killed thirty thousand people in the sixteen sixties. I don’t think she really counts as another woman.”
“Really? I’d have thought she was just your type.”
“Are you seriously asking me if I would hit that?”
“I would.” Julian shrugged. “Those cold, piercing eyes. The wild hair. The talons. To say nothing of the wings.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”
“You can always judge a person by how many of their enemies you want to sleep with.”
“Classy.”
Julian grinned and began soaping me down, paying what I thought was an unnecessary amount of attention to certain regions.
“But actually,” I went on, pulling Julian’s head back out of the water, “what is going on? I kind of need to know.”
“You know,” she sighed, “a lot of women would be overjoyed to have a girlfriend who doesn’t need to breathe.”
“Sorry, I’m just worried.”
“You don’t have to worry. The Council has it under control.”
“Is this the sort of under control where she bursts in through the window and has people’s eyes pecked out.”
“Caradoc will be fine.” Julian waved a hand dismissively, splashing soapy water all over the bedroom floor. “We heal fast.”
“Yes, but me and thirty thousand other people don’t.”
“Al-Rashid knows what he’s doing, and we’ll soon have elected a new Prince of Swords. We took her down before, and we can do it again.”
I caught her before she could dive back under. “How did you take her down before? Ashriel told me that Sebastian sold her out somehow.”
Julian really didn’t look like she wanted to talk about this, but she seemed to have accepted I wasn’t letting it go. “He spied for us. The Morrígan would have flayed him alive if she’d suspected, and by that time, she was completely unpredictable. Towards the end, she was killing everyone close to her. As far as we know, there were only two survivors, Sebastian and Halfdan the Shaper. It was a really bad time.”
“I don’t get it. Did she just wake up one morning and decide to go batshit crazy?”
“She’s old, Kate. Very old. The world she lives in is so different from the world she was born in, she can understand nothing except power and death. It happens to all of us if we survive long enough.” She swivelled round and slipped lower in the water as if she was cold.
I kissed the tip of her shoulder. “You’re doing okay.”
“I think so. But the problem is I won’t know when I’m not.” She shook herself, droplets flying off her hair. “Anyway, Sebastian told us who her followers were, who could be trusted and who couldn’t. He helped Thomas Pryce broker the deal with the Shaper that gave us the North. And he gave us the only thing that had power over her.”
“What’s that and can we get it again?”
She traced her fingers idly over my knee. “It was a clay beaker about three-feet tall. History isn’t really my speciality, sweeting, but according to Sebastian, the Morrígan’s people buried their dead with these jars full of, well, I have no idea. Bits of their lives, I assume. It was her last link to the world she came from, but it was broken when she rose as a vampire. Somehow, Sebastian put it back together piece by piece. It must have taken him centuries.”
“What? He managed to build something that had been buried, smashed, and lost five thousand years ago?”
“When Sebastian sets his mind to something, he does it. And he is a magician.”
“Yeah, but to go to all that effort just to take somebody down.”
“We all need a hobby, darling. And for a lot of us, it’s revenge.”
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“We destroyed her armies and her followers, which just left her, but she’d lived so long, she couldn’t be killed. Even by gold. Even in sunlight. But when she learned we had the beaker, she surrendered. It was remarkably peaceful, actually. I think, by that stage, she was tired of fighting, tired of everything really. We kept four pieces of the pot as security and sealed her up underneath a priory on Magpie Lane. We had to move her to Highgate Cemetery in the nineteen hundreds when they rediscovered the crypts.”
“But why has she woken up now?”
Julian shrugged again. �
��She always had the power, but I don’t think she wanted to. I think she was sort of ready to die, or get as close to it as she could manage.” Aeglica had said something like that before he died. “So, what, she just slept it off?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. She tried to take something out of Aeglica’s sword. That was one of the fragments, wasn’t it?”
“Probably. Aeglica always did like to keep things close.”
“Something must have changed. You’ve had these things for four hundred years. She wouldn’t just decide to come after them now.”
“Nothing can have changed.” Julian shifted impatiently against me. “She’s been locked up in a tomb.”
“Someone broke into the tomb. I went to investigate for Nimue, and the lock had been changed.”
Julian’s glanced back at me. “That’s impossible. The Morrígan wouldn’t tolerate trespassers. She was asleep, not dead.”
“It might be impossible, but it’s the only thing that makes sense. Someone went into the tomb, and now the Morrígan is up, awake, and angry. I think someone stole her beaker, and now she’s trying to get it back, starting with the bits she knows you have.”
“I’m sorry to repeat myself, Kate, but that’s impossible.” Her fingers dug a little into my leg. “She’s five thousand years old. You can’t just sneak up on her and take her stuff. It would take extremely powerful magic and an extremely talented thief.”
Huh.
“Look,” I said slowly, “I’m not promising anything, and I might be completely wrong on this, but I know the tomb was broken into, and I think I know who did it. I don’t know how or why but, if I can find her and I can get this thing back, will that help?”
Julian slow-blinked at me. “Yes, Kate, if you can give us the Morrígan’s one weakness, that will help us fight her. But, as much as I respect what you do, I’m not going to pin all my hopes on a hunch.”
“No, that’s fine. But, at least, it’s making sense now.”
“Right, good. Now where were we?” She twisted round again and vanished below the waterline.