Deep In the Woods

by Chris Marie Green

  He went to the ornate stairway.

  “Costin,” Dawn said. “This isn’t like last time with an Underground. Or the time before. You’re not the same.”

  He slowed his steps. He didn’t like being reminded that Jonah’s vampire body had locked in Costin’s essence, which had always been able to emerge, full force, to knock out previous Underground masters. “Haven’t you wanted me to test what I can do outside these walls?” He hadn’t turned to look at her. “Haven’t you questioned whether I have what it takes to continue my quest?”

  She nodded, unable to speak. Her voice seemed too laden to get out of her body. She’d doubted his courage ever since they’d tracked this Underground to London. So why was she trying to hold him back from proving himself now?

  He was a warrior entrusted with a duty so significant that she was nothing next to it, and she suspected not only that he was going to emphasize that to her—and maybe to himself—but that he had no other choice. This was why he’d been saved by The Whisper, who’d offered him redemption if Costin would conquer the dragon and his ilk.

  She couldn’t and wouldn’t stop him. Besides, she remembered all too clearly what disobeying Costin had brought back in L.A., when she’d screwed things up so badly that she’d turned him into what he hated the most.

  Out of anyone, Costin would know what he was doing. Who the hell was she to know better?

  “Blood,” she said softly. “You’ll need my blood before you go. You’ll be stronger with it.”

  “Yes.” She thought she heard a hint of regret, anger at his weakness, and thankfulness in his voice, all at the same time. “I will be stronger with you in me.”

  As he left, she trailed up the stairs after him, hearing the vague ticking of every clock in the house counting down to when she’d have to let him go again.

  FOUR

  LONDON BABYLON, CUSTODE MONITOR ROOM

  FAR under the earth, where the walls seemed to close in and rip at the skin with their darkness, a custode named Lilly was sitting at the monitors that allowed the keepers who were linked to this Underground to watch over London. She’d been here for hours, mainly to search the bank of tellys for Claudia—or “Claudius” or “Mrs. Jones” or whichever identity the old cow had assumed tonight. The vampire had simply gone off the Underground’s radar after escaping the clutches of the younger creatures, who had attacked their elder, ousting her from the community.

  The ruckus had all been due to Lilly, and she didn’t regret orchestrating Claudia’s banishment for even an instant. She would have loved to have done it herself, but for the vow she had taken upon activation into this holiest of holy positions.

  She had promised no harm to the Underground.

  Yet Lilly hadn’t harmed the community in the least by encouraging others to go after Claudia. It had been more a “beneficial maintenance maneuver,” and all Lilly had needed to do was utilize her tuner on one of the girls: Della, a budding, feral girl in her mid-teens who would make the finest of soldiers for the dragon.

  The tuner had implanted vivid stories—paranoia-inducing true nightmares of the vampires’ pasts—that had urged Della to share the tales with the rest of the higher vampire schoolgirls. Based on those visions, plus a suspicion that Claudia had been up to no good with their school chums who had gone missing over the years, the group had decided to attack the vampire who Lilly believed was the primary reason this Underground had gone to such crap. Claudia had a cancerous influence on the main master vampire, Mihas, who had once been quite the soldier himself, serving the dragon and their country with a blood- hungry ferocity that seemed to have disappeared with all Claudia’s soft indulgences.

  She had never been a good co-master, and Lilly was somewhat relieved that the vampire had disappeared into the London night without even a summons for custode aid.

  Even so, Lilly had turned to these monitor screens, which were mainly connected to the CCTV surveillance cameras round London, to track Claudia. Not that the vampire would have the stones to return and exact revenge on the Underground—she would never betray Mihas like that, Lilly suspected—but the custode wished to keep tabs on the community’s security, and Claudia bore watching.

  Concurrently, Lilly had been surveying the Underground itself, with the recruited lower-class girls lounging about their common areas and Mihas still engaged in one of his fantasy rooms with the group of upper-crust Queenshill schoolgirls who had decided to seduce him, no doubt intent on taking his attention off the missing Claudia. They were the same girls who had so fiercely thrown the co-master out of the Underground, and they had been at Mihas since last night.

  On a screen reflecting the goings-on in the “pirate suite,” with its timber and silks and mock ship cabin details, Lilly saw how the girls kept Mihas willingly captive, kissing and biting, using their tongues and giggles. In spite of youthful appearances, most of the vampires were actually far beyond a tender age, having been turned decades ago, and their experience showed. Lilly couldn’t help but notice that the newest class of schoolgirl vampires—the truly teenaged Della, Noreen, and Polly—had not entered the sexual, bloody fray, although Mihas kept gesturing to them.

  Smart birds, Lilly thought. They were withholding. She knew that, since Claudia had been the one to raise them in her own sub-Underground, Mihas had not yet tasted of this freshest crop. Their blood would be a treat for him, unlike the older, already used schoolgirls, or even the other young vampire recruits from the streets who didn’t have Queenshill breeding.

  As if these other viewings weren’t enough to keep Lilly occupied, she turned her attention to a third: a monitor showing recorded images from Highgate Cemetery, which was terribly near the main Underground. Recently, she had been constantly checking the footage to see if there had been any suspicious activity, if there had been any troublemakers like the ones who had engaged the schoolgirls in a conflict on the Queenshill campus only a few nights ago.

  She especially kept her gaze peeled for the woman with the long, dark brown braid whom Lilly had encountered in Southwark, in a flat above a pub. Lilly had intended to detain and question her, but unfortunately the interview had never come to pass, since the woman had managed to stave off Lilly, impressing her with mind powers in the form of mental punches, plus trained fighting skills. But this didn’t mean Lilly wasn’t going to find the woman again.

  She smiled, recalling when she’d impulsively kissed her opponent. Lilly was definitely going to find her, and she would bet heavily that it would be in Southwark.

  But, at the moment, the custode was primarily playing a hunch about the cemetery, and she directed most of her attention toward it. She suspected that if the mind-powered woman’s group did equate to trouble, they would be skulking about near the main Underground, just as they had on the Queenshill campus, which had housed Claudia’s sub-Underground before the vampires had needed to desert it.

  As she worked, a groan sounded from a corner of the cavelike room.

  “Up and about?” she said to her older brother, Nigel. Last night, he had attempted to interfere with Claudia’s ouster, and he had even almost put a stop to Lilly’s best-laid plans to clean out the Underground, starting with that particular vampire. But Lilly had knocked Nigel out with the judicious use of pressure points. Afterward, she’d used her tuner to persuade him into an uninterrupted rest for the night. Poor dear had needed it after what he’d been through.

  She could hear her brother standing, then gaining his bearings, yet she kept on with her labors. Due to the tuner, he wouldn’t recall a lick of what had transpired since his mind had been wiped of any superficial memories regarding their confrontation. Hopefully, he would remember what had occurred with Claudia, but nothing beyond that. In fact, she had tuned him to believe upon awakening that he had been sleeping in his quarters and had only just sauntered into this monitor room.

  And, indeed, he muttered, “Claudia?”

  “She’s off and away, remember?” Then Lilly smoothly added a
lie. “I went after her whilst you stayed behind and minded the monitors. Both of us couldn’t go running off. One of us always remains here to protect.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Good. He wasn’t questioning. The mind-tune had worked.

  Lilly paused the Highgate recording and spun around in her chair. Nigel was in the shadows and, for a moment, with his face muted, she imagined that he was her other brother, Charles, who had been mysteriously killed on the job, causing her to be activated, though she was merely a female. Yet, she had been the only available Meratoliage within this generation who had been of age to serve and protect these vampires.

  At the thought of Charles, whose body had never been discovered, an ache stretched through the right side of Lilly’s chest, where her heart beat. The unusual positioning was an anomaly that every member of the family endured owing to the Meratoliages having been selectively bred for over a century to fit this honorable job. Black-art hearts were their blessing and curse, killing quite a few valuable males at a young age. Her own father had been cast aside from active duty because of coronary weakness, and he had resented it, especially when Lilly had been called to duty.

  When Nigel stepped away from the shadows, her heart stopped aching, her chest actually chilling at the sight of him: the sandy hair, combed back from a face with light green eyes, a tilted patrician nose, a slight overbite. He was a male mirror of her.

  The air quivered, digging into Lilly, just as it always did so far down in this Underground.

  Nigel’s gaze rested on the monitor showcasing Mihas and his girls, and the tips of his mouth turned down.

  “He still has no idea why his darlings turned on Claudia,” he said.

  “I accessed earlier audio from when the girls first approached him last night, when they told him that Claudia suddenly attacked Noreen and they responded in kind. He didn’t entirely buy their explanation, I gather, but if I know Mihas, I would say that he believes he’s got plenty of time to care later, after he’s had his fill.”

  “Did you discover the reason the girls did attack Claudia?”

  “I assume they somehow fit the pieces together and discovered that she was selectively feeding on and killing their classmates. I’m not certain that they suspect Mihas knows about this, but I’d like to tune the girls so they never realize he was involved. If they already do suspect, they haven’t told him, and it needs to stay that way. It would come to no good if they knew that Mihas had been a party to Claudia’s hobbies.”

  “They need to stay subservient, just as all proper soldiers do.”

  “Yes. But even if they suspect, Mihas seems to have them in his thrall right now.” Lilly paused, just now realizing that the main master’s greatest talent might rest in his charisma. It had certainly swayed Claudia, along with the rest of the girls. It occurred to Lilly that, perhaps, even she might have been slightly fascinated by the main master’s charms, as well. Not appreciating the thought of that, she added, “We can begin our tuning after Mihas has finished amusing himself. The girls haven’t allowed him a moment away since Claudia left.”

  Nigel nodded. “We can’t be too careful. We’ve tuned the girls before when they’ve shown too much adolescent overexcitement. I see no problem in doing it again.”

  With every passing second, Lilly relaxed all the more, delighted that she’d already become so proficient at tuning, even if she had only recently been activated to take Charles’s place.

  “As long as Mihas doesn’t know we’re tuning them, we’ll be fine,” she said. Up until recently, as the masters had increasingly shown a reliance on the custodes, the keepers had worked independently. They had been created to serve a higher purpose than merely guarding the homes of an individual blood brother, who hailed from a group that, in general, had grown complacent and lazy over the years. When the dragon had commanded his progeny to go forth and populate, he had never guessed that his best men would fail him by pursuing their own base desires and straying from his directive.

  Lilly didn’t add to Nigel that she planned to correct this course and make Mihas into the perfect soldier again. He had once been quite a destructive terror, and now that Claudia was out, true rehabilitation could begin. Every male custode up until Nigel hadn’t seen how the dragon’s mandates had been degraded, and it had taken her, a mere woman by Meratoliage standards, to bring about some much required change.

  “I’ve never seen anyone assert his manhood the way Mihas does,” Nigel said, leaning closer to the pirate room monitor.

  “If your mistress was such a scold, you, too, would be quite taken with the younger ones.”

  He switched his focus to the Highgate recording while she continued talking, catching him up on her present purposes: minding Mihas, and searching throughout London for Claudia and those troublemakers from Queenshill.

  “So, as you see, I’ve got my work ahead of me,” she finished, leaning back in the chair, propping her ankle just above her knee. “There’s much to do besides sitting here and watching these screens.”

  “For instance . . . ?”

  “I’d like to take up where my patrol in Southwark left off the other night. After I encountered that woman in the flat . . .”

  Nigel keenly observed her.

  She met his curiosity with her own head-on gaze.

  “This woman,” he said. “If I didn’t know better, I would think she’s taken precedence over all else, Lilly.”

  “Rubbish.” As she faced the screens again, she felt a flush come over her skin. But the monitors’ glare would hide it. “That woman was in the flat for a reason. I’d like to investigate who lives there, discover a link. Perhaps it would lead us to where we might find the entire group.”

  “Haven’t we been over this before?” He sounded more confused than argumentative.

  Clearly, the tuner mind wipe hadn’t erased his stance on the troublemakers, who had aroused enough suspicion with their appearance on the Queenshill campus to keep Lilly very interested. Nigel hadn’t believed them to be such a problem, whereas she felt they could very well be.

  “I had a thought,” she said. “What if Charles was killed while he was on the path of this group? What if he went to Billiter Street after realizing the burial ground had drawn their attention? Then, what if he tried to lure one of them for questioning?”

  “He was headed for Billiter during his patrol . . .”

  Plus, she mentally added, the cameras were clouded in that area on that night. It was a stunning detail, one that Lilly thought to be a signature of the attackers.

  Neither of them said anything more until a bit later, when something on the recorded Highgate Cemetery footage indeed caught Lilly’s attention.

  One of the panels . . . clouding.

  Just as so many other views had been clouded, from Billiter Street, where Charles may have died, to the Queenshill campus, where that group had confronted the girl vampires, to Southwark, where Lilly had tangled with the mind-powered woman. . . .

  “They were at the cemetery,” Lilly said, rising from the chair. Her heart was pounding now. Hours and hours of observing old tape, and it had finally paid off. “Look. They’ve been to Highgate, and that’s too near the Underground for my comfort.”

  Nigel punched a command into the keyboard, bringing up a larger view of the clouded panel. Then he pushed away from the console.

  She didn’t know if he was angry because she had been correct in her assumptions about the group and he had been wrong, or if he was adrenalized because these interlopers had wandered too close to where the main Underground waited, accessible through tunnels branching out from the village of Highgate.

  Then Nigel sat down in the seat she had vacated, tacitly conveying that he was giving her control.

  Bless that mind wipe.

  “Go to Southwark,” he said. “I’ll keep watch here.”

  “Try to access information about whoever lets that flat above the Bull and Cock Pub, as well, Nigel. Contact me when you
have something.”

  Without even taking the time to gloat, she snatched her mask and goggles from their hanging spot near the door, then accessed the button to open it. As it swooshed aside, Lilly walked, then ran, toward one of the Underground’s exits, her wrong-sided heart pounding.

  She was going to find them.

  What she didn’t acknowledge, however, was that she was even more excited about finding that woman again.

  FIVE

  LONDON BABYLON, “THE PIRATE SUITE”

  DELLA stood by the wall, half hiding behind a sheer lilac curtain draped from the rock ceiling. Next to her, Noreen and Polly hung back, as well, all of them dressed in a uniform that signified their circle of friendship: white shirts, slim red ties, long skirts with boots.

  And all of them were keeping their distance from Wolfie and the other Queenshill schoolgirls on the bed.

  The three were the only classmates remaining from what had started as a group of seven handpicked vampires who composed the newest Underground class. Little had they known that Mrs. Jones—or Claudia or “the cat” as they had called her—had chosen the lot of them for her own benefit, picking them off one by one every six months to stock her youth-infusing blood rituals.

  And Claudia had been feeding off her charges for years. She hated the girls because of how her vampire lover felt about his darlings, and her rituals must have been all the sweeter for that reason alone. As far as the survivors knew, Wolfie hadn’t even known about the atrocities.

  At least, that was what they were hoping, though Della often wondered. . . .

  Polly, with her strawberry blond bob and athletic, loose-limbed stance, tapped in to a mind-link so she might communicate with her two classmates. How far away do you think the cat is now? She had been asking the same question ever since the girls had attacked Claudia last night.