The Cold Kiss of Death

by Suzanne McLeod

  This time I wasn’t a child.

  This time I wouldn’t run.

  This time I would make him pay.

  Then a hand, colder than my own, took hold of mine and slowly I turned to stare into the dark, cautious eyes of Cosette, the child-ghost.

  ‘This is no longer your time, Genevieve.’ Her voice was soft. ‘You must not stay here any more, it is too perilous.’ She tugged me, anxiety flitting across her face. ‘Come, they are both waiting for you, and there are the others ...’

  Others?

  I turned and followed Cosette as she led me back into the red-blackness ...

  I came awake again with a start, pulse thundering in my ears; my eyes snapped open and I looked up into Malik’s face as he straddled me. His hands were pressed to the cold skin over my heart. I could see stars scattered like pieces of silver across the night sky above him, and the ground shifted sand-soft beneath me.

  ‘Genevieve—’ His voice was rough, as if he’d been calling for some time.

  ‘It was you that night.’ I licked my lips. My voice sounded thready, scared. ‘You bit me that night.’

  ‘Of course.’ A fine line creased between his brows. ‘Who did you think it was?’

  ‘Him. I always thought it was him ...’

  ‘He would not chase you down himself, not when he had me as his tool.’

  Fear exploded into anger. I clenched my fists. ‘You bastard! You left me for dead!’

  An odd expression crossed his face. ‘I did not leave you for dead.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I killed you. As I did tonight. Your heart was still, your blood had settled in your body, your lungs no longer drew breath and your skin was cold and lifeless to the touch. If you had not been sidhe, I doubt you would have revived.’

  I stared at him, my mind reaching for something I couldn’t quite grasp—

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  His frown deepened. ‘Would you have preferred me to have given you back to the Autarch alive?’

  No! my fourteen-year-old voice screamed in my mind.

  He touched a hand to my forehead. ‘Sleep now.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Iawakened for the third time to the quiet burble of water, the scent of clean air, and silk sheets caressing my skin. I huddled tense and wary, listening, but a feeling of calm enveloped me, finally convincing me that I was on my own, and safe - even if I wasn’t entirely sure where I was.

  I squinted out from under my lashes. Everything in the room was round: the bed on which I was lying, and the dais beneath it; the skylight in the domed ceiling that framed the stars piercing the night sky; the porthole windows, behind which darted shoals of tiny fish in neon-bright blues and oranges and yellows. Even the pillows on the bed, the huge vault-style door, and the dive hole set in the thick green-glass floor leading down into the water were round. If I didn’t know better I’d have guessed I was on some sort of movie set instead of Tavish’s bedroom.

  The calm feelings persisted, dampening down my surprise at being here, and a vague notion made me look. A barely discernible net of cool green magic covered the walls and ceiling, shifting softly as if pulled by a peaceful sea. I wondered if it was some sort of Containment spell, but when I reached down to where it gathered by the bed it rippled away, then reformed as I removed my hand. Some sort of Wellbeing or Tranquillity spell, or even a Healing spell, maybe?

  Just what I needed after being skewered with a five-foot-long bronze sword.

  Still, the sword-in-the-chest incident might have been an abrupt ending to our dramatic fealty performance, but one thing was clear: even in the haze of imp-engendered bloodlust I - or rather, Rosa - had given Malik my oath. And that effectively shut the door on any vamp in London - or anywhere else - contacting me. Relief overwhelmed me. No more invitations, no more worrying about paranoid witches demanding I be evicted, no more visits from poor stoked-up Moth-girls. Now they’d have to go through Malik - although hopefully not as literally as Elizabetta had tried to do - and all I needed to worry about now was the pretty vampire himself.

  I shivered; did that mean my life was better or worse?

  The thought brought on the unwanted image of my torn wedding dress; nausea roiled in my stomach and I jerked up, clamping my hands against my mouth to keep from vomiting. The past was gone. It had been a nightmare, nothing more; my mind had equated one trauma involving a sword with another and coupled it with Elizabetta’s talk about the Autarch. That’s all it was, nothing more. Malik wasn’t Bastien, the monster, and I wasn’t marrying him - I wasn’t doing anything with him. And Malik had had more than one opportunity to do me harm, and he hadn’t taken it ...

  A huff of almost hysterical laughter escaped me: that was if I discounted the recent sword-in-the-chest episode, of course. I took a deep breath and let the green magic calm me as I rubbed the cold spot just below my heart where the sword had entered. Nervous, I pulled the sheet down to check my body. It looked normal - and uninjured. I ran my fingers under the base of my sternum, pressing and prodding: nope, definitely no sword holes, not even a pink patch of new skin or a leftover yellowing bruise. I looked as good as new. But then, Malik held the true Gift, and he’d healed me before.

  He’d also killed me before.

  Betrayal sliced through me with as much pain as the sword had. I hugged my knees tight and dropped my head onto them, tears pricking my eyes, aching in my throat. The voice had told me to run that night. I swallowed the tears back. I was not going to cry. But you don’t run from vampires. I’d trusted the voice in my head, trusted Malik’s voice, trusted it meant escape ...

  But Malik had hunted me down like an animal.

  Malik had sunk his fangs in me.

  Malik had infected me with 3V.

  Not the Autarch, as I’d always believed.

  Rage filled me like a tidal wave, surging up and out of me in one long, furious scream. Why the fuck had he? Why hadn’t he just killed me, instead of condemning me to an eternity of needing him, or some other vamp? I punched the bed, ripped at it with my hands, grabbed the pillows and threw them, one after the other until they were all gone, wanting to smash something, wanting to break something, wanting all of it to never have happened. I screamed again; screamed until the tears spilled hot and scalding, and until I slept again, limp and exhausted and numb with grief.

  I lay quiet amongst the shredded sheets and stared up at the fading stars in the pre-dawn sky.

  You don’t run, you don’t struggle; it gets a vamp too excited.

  Maybe Malik hadn’t meant to infect me; maybe he’d just lost control ...

  He had saved me from the Autarch.

  Like some beautiful but deadly guardian angel.

  Gratitude washed over me, muting my anger and soothing my grief, and bringing a curl of need to the confusion swirling inside me. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to offer him my throat, my body or even my heart ...

  Or if I never wanted to see the beautiful vampire again.

  Then as if my thoughts had conjured it, Malik’s not-quite-English voice came faintly through the open doorway: ‘—only way to destroy the imps before one or more could hatch was to kill their host, kelpie.’

  Slowly, I sat up and hugged my knees, and listened for an answer. But none came. The silence stretched, thinning out until the soft slap of the water and the background hum of the magic disappeared and there was nothing but the waiting thud of my pulse. And I finally admitted to myself that ‘not seeing him again’ wasn’t what I wanted. But as for the rest, right now the only thing I was offering him was ...

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, knowing he would hear me.

  ‘Although, next time you decide to kill me,’ I added, a touch more caustically, ‘perhaps you could try a less violent option.’

  ‘I do not intend there to be a next time, Genevieve.’ His words slipped with sorrow and regret into my mind.

  I lay back and returned to contemplating the fading stars above me. The n
et of calming green magic crept up and when I didn’t rebuff it, gently tucked itself around me like a soft, warm blanket.

  ‘Aye, but killing the host body ’twas a chancy thing tae do, vampire.’ Tavish’s burr sounded disapproving. ‘Especially as Genevieve’s soul took its own sweet time coming back.’

  I sighed; at least I’d survived. But had Rosa’s body? She was a vamp, so it was likely, but ... I sent a prayer to whatever god was listening that it/she had, and reminded myself that she was on my problems-to-deal-with list. Still, Malik’s drastic sword-option had solved the Rosa’s body being consumed by imps part of the whole ‘Rosa’ problem.

  ‘Even if the body Genevieve occupied had survived the imps’ physical onslaught,’ Malik said, tension in his voice, ‘it was always possible her mind would have been destroyed. Genevieve was already influenced by Rosa’s persona, and Rosa’s mind was unstable long before the sorcerer’s manipulations.’

  Gotta give Hannah her due, her favours were to die for.

  And thinking of favours, I realised I knew how to solve the Rosa problem. All I had to do was give Malik the info he’d been following me for. I quietly said, ‘Hannah Ashby knows where Rosa’s body is. She’s the one who’s been controlling the spell since the Ancient One died.’

  ‘Thank you, Genevieve,’ Malik’s voice came again in my mind. ‘I will arrange to deal with both the sorcerer and Rosa.’

  Great, two solutions for the price of one. I crossed them off my list and added the Fabergé egg - with a mental footnote that flagged Neil Banner’s dubious interest - though quite what I could do about the Ancient One’s soul the egg contained, I wasn’t yet sure.

  ‘I’ve told you, our bean sidhe’s nae weakling.’ Tavish’s voice held equal measures of pride and concern. ‘You hae only tae look at what she did when the bastard Earl had a go at her and the satyr last month.’

  I frowned: the vampire and the kelpie were chatting together like old friends, or at least old acquaintances. It made for a curious, surprising situation. And they were discussing me as if they’d done it all before, and more than once at that.

  Their voices faded as I chased the thoughts darting back and forth in my mind like the shoals of tiny fish. Tomas’ murder and finding the sidhe responsible slipped through my mental fingers, and the one I caught was Hannah’s big-screen memory of the Earl talking to the Ancient One just before he killed her.

  The prohibition was to end on her twenty-third birthday, but with the witches involved, now she will still be out of my reach.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to the words at the time, but some sort of ‘prohibition’ explained why London’s vamps hadn’t pursued a vulnerable teenage sidhe when the opportunity presented herself on their doorstep. And whilst I’d spent the last ten years being übercareful, all it would have taken was a couple of weeks’ captivity and the venom cravings would’ve been so bad I’d have been begging the nearest vamp to sink his or her fangs in me ...

  Then of course, I’d got the job at Spellcrackers.com just over a year ago, a few days before my twenty-third birthday. I’d been as happy as a blinged-up goblin; not only did the job involve magic, but because it was a witch company, the job came with the witches’ protection. No wonder the Earl had been angry. The prohibition might have ended, but I was still out of his reach.

  And there weren’t many vamps powerful enough to force the Earl - and the rest of London’s blood-families - into a prohibition in the first place, so it wasn’t such a leap that Malik was involved - but why would Malik do such a deal? Especially when he’d told me himself he’d coveted my blood since I was four years old? Why hadn’t he just come after me and snatched me up? I was infected and he’d obviously known where I was all this time.

  I opened my mouth to ask him—then my thoughts snagged on the sidhe queen’s droch guidhe and the fae’s need of a baby-making machine, and I got my answer. London’s fae - presumably through Tavish - had somehow stopped him. But if they had, the surprise of it was that the dryads or some other fae hadn’t decided to kidnap and impregnate me before now.

  A fourteen-year-old sidhe is much easier to control than a twenty-four-year-old.

  But Tavish was one of only four fae I’d spoken to in all the time I’d been in London, and I’d been so concerned about keeping my part-vamp parentage a secret that it had never really struck me as odd. Now, as I thought about it, it was nearly as odd as spending ten years relatively unmolested by vampires.

  Until you added in a flipside to the prohibition.

  With the sidhe queen’s curse hanging over their heads, what, or who, could make London’s fae agree to stay away from me?

  Had to be the queen, of course, since she was ultimately the one calling the shots.

  Suspicion crept on black-tipped claws into my mind. And who was her ambassador? Grianne, my not-so-friendly faerie dogmother—

  I looked up at the dawn-streaked sky.

  —who I was due to meet as the sun was cresting.

  Early birds catching worms, or in this case answers to prohibitions, curses and murders, came to mind.

  I sat up and looked round the room, hoping to find some clothes ...

  Only I wasn’t the only one looking around.

  My pulse jumped and I stilled.

  Someone was watching me from the dive-hole in the glass floor. He - my eyes flicked downwards, yes definitely a he - had his top half in the room, pale-grey scaly forearms flat on the floor, webbed, clawed hands clasped together, while his blue-grey legs and long, whip-like tail floated in the water below. His wide lipless mouth yawned in a grin, showcasing rows of tiny, sharp green teeth, and the opaque membrane covering his eyes slipped up, leaving gleaming black orbs reflecting back the room’s soft green light.

  I lifted the tattered sheet and tucked it under my arms, blinking at him in amazement. What the hell was a naiad doing in Tavish’s bedroom? And even as I asked myself, the answer popped up, pretty much as quickly as the naiad had: the sidhe queen’s stupid curse. I did a quick check through the glass floor of the room to see if there were any more of the naiad’s pals lurking outside in the water, but he seemed to be on his own.

  He nodded at me, the thick fluted fins on either side of his head flaring outwards, then he put his webbed claws flat on the floor and started to push himself up and out of the dive-hole.

  I shot out my hand and said firmly, ‘Hold it right there, fishface. No way do you get to come in unannounced and uninvited.’

  The naiad’s elbows locked and he stopped. ‘Fishface, luv?’ His lipless mouth appeared to have no problem forming the words. ‘What sort of half-assed greeting is that?’

  ‘The only sort you’re going to get when you pop up naked and unwanted in my bedroom,’ I snapped.

  ‘Your bedroom?’ His spiny headcrest lifted up in what looked like surprise. ‘This is the kelpie’s bedroom.’

  ‘Ever heard of possession?’ I said. ‘The kelpie’s not here and I am, therefore it’s currently mine.’ I waved my hand in a ‘get lost’ motion at him. ‘You want to see him, you can go round the front way.’

  ‘There’s a bloody big sand-dune out there, luv. It looks like he’s imported half the bleeding Sahara, and I’m a naiad, not a bleeding camel-toed horse.’ He made a high clicking noise and I realised he was laughing.

  ‘Fine, I’ll remember to tell him that after you’ve made yourself scarce.’

  ‘S’okay, it’s you I’ve come to see anyway.’ He hauled himself out and stood dripping, legs apart, headcrest brushing against the curve of the ceiling, his tail trailing back into the dive-hole. ‘Word has it you’re in the market for a firionnach, bean sidhe, so us naiads had a little game of poker and, lucky for you, luv’ - he thumped his chest with a closed claw - ‘Ricou here plays a mean game of five-card stud.’

  ‘You won me in a poker game?’ I blurted out in affronted disbelief.

  ‘Yep. Bleeding great, ain’t it?’ His mouth did the grin-yawn thing again. ‘So, before all the
official rigmarole with the Lady Meriel, I thought I’d swim over and let you have a look at my credentials.’ He looked down and carefully took hold of himself, one webbed claw around each of his overly excited credentials. ‘There you go, double your money’s worth, luv.’ His fluted face-fins flared proudly. ‘Just to prove I’m full-blood naiad and not some halfling pup.’