Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

“You don’t understand at all.” Miss Saint-Germain’s attention seemed to drift towards the skylight. “He is ancient, devious and merciless. Even if you defeat him today, he will come for you tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. Forever.”

  “But you will still help us?”

  Once again, she made no reply.

  “What of Miss Kane?” I asked. “She cares for you more than she admits.”

  I was not certain whether I had said the right thing or the wrong thing because Miss Saint-Germain put her head in her hands. “I know. And I want to help.”

  “Then help. Please.”

  She was utterly still for a very long time.

  “Miss Saint-Germain?”

  The Prince of Cups was a strange being. Although her outward form was all fragility and delicacy, beneath I saw her essence shifting like serpents around silver. “I can’t.”

  That was not the response I had expected. “In the strictest sense, you most certainly can.”

  A vampire is a corpse inhabited by an immortal will, and never was I so aware of this fact than in this moment. Miss Saint-Germain sat in her throne like a dead woman, all semblance of life leached from her skin and her blue eyes as empty as the sky. “I have lived eight hundred years,” she said. “I have danced with Anne Boleyn. I watched from the top of the White Tower while the city burned in 1666. I saw Robespierre go to the guillotine and fled Venice the day before it fell to Napoleon. When the bombs dropped on London I stalked the streets feeding where I willed, and one night I rescued a child from the rubble of a bombed-out slum and watched her grow and age and live and die, all from the shadows. I have been more people and done more things than your mind can readily encompass, and I will not throw all that away for a mortal.”

  I wished to respond, but could think of no response that would be of value. In my limited experience, when a person has decided to discard you there is little you can say to change their mind.

  I left, hoping Miss Kane would not be too disappointed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Choices & Sacrifices

  The sun beat down on the Dream of a city. Far, far away I saw nine women bearing Nimue’s body across a lake. Somewhere, the woods were cool and green, but here and now, something had a grip on my mind, and I was trapped in a cage of iron and gold.

  A man robed in sunlight stood before me. Sebastian. The man in the mask.

  “You are so fucking dead,” I told him.

  He smiled. I decided right there that I was going to murder him in the face once for every time he smiled. “I am. I have been for more than two millennia. But soon I will be something else entirely.”

  “Where even are we?”

  “Somewhere. Nowhere. The Dream.”

  “Where in the real world, dickblanket?”

  His eyes gleamed in his own personal sunbeams. “This is the real world. I think if I had to identify your single greatest mistake, it would be that. The world in which you have lived your entire life is, in essence, an irrelevance. Which is ironic, because you have also lived your entire life on the edge of another world—one so much grander and more beautiful than the material dross on which you have wasted your focus and attention.”

  Yeah, that was all well and good, but I still had no idea where my body was. And whatever smug wizard bullshit Sebastian Douglas might spout, I was pretty attached to my body. It did basically all of my favourite things. “So you’re going to kill me?”

  “Only incidentally.”

  “Oh that’s a big comfort.” I really needed to wake up. C’mon Kate. You know it’s a dream, you know you’re unconscious. Just open your eyes.

  “It makes a significant ethical difference. Not that mortal ethics have ever been my primary concern, but I would view it as an instance of Aquinas’s doctrine of the double effect. Your death is an unfortunate consequence of actions necessary for my ascension.”

  Wake up. Wake up right now. “And you haven’t considered, maybe, not becoming a god?”

  “What would that achieve? The mortal world is a wretched pit of violence and horror, and I will remain part of it no longer.”

  Seriously. Wake up. You can do it. “And you don’t think all the murdering you’ve been doing might have been part of the problem?”

  “You have always walked a fine line between entertaining and tiresome. It gladdens me that I shall no longer need to tolerate it.”

  Okay, maybe you can’t do it. Maybe you just need some time. “This is why you’ve been so keen that I don’t get killed, isn’t it?”

  “You seemed the most appropriate subject. The Merchant of Dreams would have been an acceptable backup, but I confess that the extent to which you waste your potential has always offended me.”

  I bit my lip. Okay, not my lip, the Dream of my lip, or the memory of my lip, but either way the pain was something to hold on to. Something physical, or that seemed physical. Somewhere that wasn’t here, I felt the sharp pressure of my teeth and tasted the inside of my own mouth. It wasn’t much, but I took it.

  “Isn’t this normally the point,” asked Sebastian, “at which you come back with a defiant but ultimately futile retort?”

  On the other side of the Dream, there was metal at my wrists and the stifling midsummer air on my skin.

  * * *

  My eyes flickered open. I was chained to a wall. Iron chains. Obviously. Really couldn’t catch a break here. Directly in front of me, a sort of wide golden vat sat ominously. Yeah, that was a blood-catching bowl, no two ways about it. The horrid, gleaming dagger lying next to it was also a bit of a giveaway.

  The Prince of Wands himself was nowhere to be seen, but I wasn’t alone. The slight, dark-haired young man I’d sometimes seen attending him—Hephaestion, I think? Cut me some slack here, I’m bad enough with names when I’m not tied up and about to be sacrificed—anyway, he was here too.

  “Hey,” I tried. “I don’t suppose you’d get me down, would you?”

  You’d think he’d maybe have cracked a smile, but he didn’t even blink. “I am afraid I cannot do that. The master has some business to attend to, after which he will expect to find you in your current position.”

  “What sort of business?”

  “That is not for me to say, or for you to know.”

  Well, that was helpful. I looked around for anything that I might be able to use to get out of there. Honestly I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find—a casually discarded hacksaw that I could hold in my mouth? The problem with being tied to a solid object was that it really limited your options. I struggled against the chains, but that was a bust too. Terrifying wellsprings of preternatural power granting superhuman strength and agility: you never really appreciate them until they’re gone.

  Nothing in the room gave me much of an impression of where I was or how I was going to get out. It didn’t look like the big, fancy ritual chamber that Percy—or Sebastian, now I thought about it—had set up under that manor we’d burned down. It was more basic, stone walls and a wood floor, almost rustic. Some kind of farmhouse? I shut my eyes again, hoping that I wasn’t just giving myself a one-way ticket to Sebastian Douglas’s private dream world. There really wasn’t much to go on, but I focused on what I could hear and feel. The air smelled relatively fresh, which meant I wasn’t underground, or not a long way underground. The stone behind me was cool which, with the weather, suggested it was relatively thick, or at least not facing the sun. That or it was nighttime.

  Yeah, this was perilously close to no information at all.

  I really hoped it was nighttime. It didn’t seem like daylight was a problem for Sebastian anymore and there was still a non-zero chance of Julian pulling me out of the fire at the last minute. Not that I was super sold on “wait around to get saved” as an escape plan, but it was nice to think it was there as a fallback. The room was quiet, mostly. Hephaestio
n had a surprisingly soft tread for somebody who, if I understood correctly, was made of the same heavy marble as Elise. I couldn’t hear cars outside, so we were either a long way from a road or a long way from anywhere.

  Then I realised that I could hear something. I could hear wolves.

  Maybe I was imagining it. Maybe it was a heady mix of hope and heatstroke, but I was sure I heard a howling in the distance. Perhaps that was the “business” Sebastian had to deal with. I couldn’t imagine the werewolves taking kindly to an egotistical vampire transforming himself into a god in their back garden. And I also couldn’t quite imagine Tara passing up the opportunity to put me in a situation where I might bang her out of gratitude. Not that I would. Partly because, y’know, relationship with possessive murdering vampire lady, and partly because I honestly have never been that into rescue fantasies. At least not this way around.

  The howling had gone. Perhaps I’d imagined it. Perhaps they’d just got quieter as they’d got closer. And if they had, and if they really were here to sort all this out for me, then a tiny, irrational part of my brain resented the hell out of it. I like to think I’m a pretty together person all told, once you get past the drinking, the terrible taste in women, and the primordial connection to the ancient spirit of the hunt. But I do prefer to sort out my own shit myself. Maybe it’s a holdover from my time with Patrick, but I was not at all looking forward to owing my life to Tara Vane-Tempest.

  Still better than death, mind.

  I opened my eyes. “Hey, Hephaestion?”

  “Yes?”

  “If this place was in the middle of a full-on werewolf attack, you’d tell me, right?”

  If the question had thrown him, he showed no sign of it. “No, I fear I would not.”

  Figured. As long as they weren’t slitting open my pulse points and bleeding me out into a giant mixing bowl, I suppose I was still technically in the lead. “How about at least telling me where we are?”

  He did that head-cock thing that Elise and her sisters all lapsed into when they couldn’t think of a more natural gesture. “Carterhaugh.”

  Fuck. They’d taken me to fucking Scotland. I had to admit, I hadn’t been expecting it. “Well, that’s random and highly specific.”

  “It is necessary for the proper working of the ritual.”

  That made no sense. Dad was originally from around here somewhere, but he had nothing to do with this surely. And anyway he’d left a little while before I was... Oh wait, maybe it did make sense. “This about my mother, isn’t it?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  He didn’t have to. The woods around here were where my dad had run into her back in the late seventies. I’d never had much inclination to go looking, but I was pretty sure that if I wanted to take a long walk in the Deepwild, it’d be a good place to start. “Wow, I’d at least thought I was getting sacrificed for me. But he’s just using me as a stand-in for my mum, isn’t he?”

  “I am not privy to the master’s secrets.”

  “Fine. Whatever you say.” I shut my eyes again and reached out with my thoughts. It was a bad idea, but what the hell. Alright, you scheming fuckburger, what’s the deal? Where are you, because I am ninety-five percent sure that you can hear me.

  In true Star Wars style, I felt a presence. You realise that the next stage of this operation goes very badly for you. I would enjoy imprisonment while you can.

  You know my friends are probably coming for me right now. I really hoped that was true. Although, honestly, friends was a stretch. But “a loose collection of randoms, most of whom I’ve slept with” didn’t have quite the same ring.

  It would be an abysmal cliché to say I was counting on it. But rest assured that I have indeed prepared for that eventuality.

  Don’t suppose you feel like telling me exactly what those preparations were? And maybe also how to get around them, and how to get out of this place?

  I do—he stopped mid-sentence. Or mid-thought. Or whatever. I heard the howling again, and other sounds I couldn’t place, but which sounded worryingly like gunshots.

  Something wrong? I tried to think it in a mocking tone.

  “Nothing I cannot accommodate.” He was in front of me now. I hated how fucking quick vampires were. He retrieved the dagger from next to the evil sacrifice bowl. “The rite is more properly performed at midday, but your allies have proven more persistent than I expected.”

  The badass thing to do in this situation would have been to kick the vat into his head and then throttle him with my legs, but the meticulous little shit had apparently had the foresight to chain my ankles as well as my wrists. Unless the fucker got improbably close to my teeth, my options for messing up his smug face were looking kind of limited.

  He drew the knife across my skin. I felt my mother’s power flowing through me, and then out of me into that golden bowl. From inside his still-never-so-much-as-fucking-creased linen suit, he produced the Tears of Hypnos. Slowly, like the house chef on a cooking show from hell, he began to let the strange, rainbow-coloured fluid trickle into the basin. Watching an evil wizard-vampire mix your blood with a vial of distilled dream-essence is an experience that shouldn’t be on anybody’s bucket list. I’m sure it all adds to life’s rich tapestry, but there was a reason tapestry went out of fashion after Bayeux.

  He bent down and dipped his fingers in the swirl of blood- and mystical-arsehattery. With his other hand he pulled something from inside his shirt—a tiny talisman made of bone and briars—and faffed with it in a way that felt magic, anointy and worrying.

  “Should I ask?”

  He gave me one of his smug, enigmatic looks. Not that he had many looks that weren’t smug or enigmatic. “A contingency.”

  I tensed in the chains, hoping to catch hold of at least some part of my mother’s strength as it passed through my body and out of my veins. No such luck. Well, balls. If there had ever been a time for me to discover a previously unrealised reserve of unnatural power, it would have been now.

  “If it is any consolation,” Sebastian said, “this is not going quickly enough for either of us.”

  Somewhere very close by a door crashed open. Fuck, I hoped this was the cavalry. A pack of wolves and a band of heavily armed SWAT-types burst in. The moment they did, a wall of blue flames erupted in the middle of the room, cutting them off from us, and shifting patterns of silver runes appeared on the floor. The wolves stopped dead, snarling but showing a sensible level of caution. The soldiers, not having the benefit of millennia-long ancestral tradition of doing battle against supernatural foes, and putting way too much faith in their body armour, rushed forward.

  It did not go well for them. Corpsefire burns you and rots you at the same time, which is a really fucking nasty way to die. The survivors pulled back, rifles raised. And, while I appreciated the thought, I wasn’t sure that high velocity bullets were the right tactical choice against an enemy that was human sized, immortal, incredibly fast and standing right in front of the person you were trying to rescue. At least, I hoped they were trying to rescue me. This might have been a no survivors no witnesses deal.

  Sebastian sighed. “Did you really think that preventing my ascension would come down to kicking my door in and jumping on me? You may test my wards if you wish but I assure you they are quite impenetrable and, as you see, entirely lethal.”

  I just hung there and bled. Perhaps the most annoying thing about this situation was that because, as far as I could tell, all Sebastian had to do now was wait for me to die, stopping to deliver an actual supervillain monologue wasn’t even going to hurt his plans. Bastard.

  “I must admit, brother—” The honestly pretty unexpected figure of Halfdan the Shaper (last spotted threatening to murder me unless I got out of Northumberland) appeared in the doorway. “You’ve thought of almost everything.”

  “It’s true I didn’t think you’d dare show yourse
lf.” I couldn’t see Sebastian’s face but the back of his head looked really sneery. “Although that is your error rather than mine.”

  The Prince of Wands extended a hand and a gout of blue fire billowed up around the Shaper. Then it was gone, leaving Halfdan standing unharmed with a smirk he’d been practising for a full millennium.

  Great. I was chained to a wall in the middle of an ancient vampire smug-off. At least I could take a tiny amount of satisfaction in the knowledge that for about an eighth of a second Sebastian Douglas was on the back foot.

  “Percy,” he said, in a tone that was half-realisation, half-threat.

  Right on the cue, the Wizard Earl of Northumberland appeared, frantically incanting. He looked rough as hell, partly on account of the whole burning building thing which, in retrospect, I felt kind of bad for, and partly because he had that “all my will and spirit are committed to a mystical conflict I shall inevitably lose” air that wizards got when they were doing heinously draining magical crap.

  “You of all people”—the Prince of Wands turned to his ex-minion—“should know the penalty for defiance.”

  The next thirty seconds must have been really exciting and dramatic if you were capable of perceiving a quasi-metaphorical arcane battle unfolding at the speed of thought in the ephemeral neverspace between dreams and reality. In the real world, it kind of looked like two guys standing fifteen feet apart staring at each other and whispering gibberish. The flames guttered out, the silver runes vanished, the Prince of Wands staggered back the slightest of steps, and Henry Percy dropped to his knees.

  Sebastian made one of those animalistic vampire noises that weren’t usually his style. “Your suffering will be immeasurable.”

  “I just—” Percy didn’t even look up. “I don’t care anymore.”

  The Prince of Wands screamed something in a language that felt ancient and primal and Percy’s body was consumed in a tower of golden flames. Before I even had time to feel sorry for the guy the werewolves and the SWAT team charged forward. Sebastian met them halfway, all wild eyes and sharp fangs and a nimbus of stolen divinity. What happened next was fast and horrible to watch. I’d seen him fight before, but only when he’d been more concerned with keeping his secrets than destroying his enemies. When he wasn’t holding back, he was a very different creature. Bursts of telekinetic force shook the room, scattering people and wolves like unwanted Lego figures, and at the same time, he tore at his opponents with teeth and claws. Werewolves heal fast, but dudes with guns don’t, and I really didn’t want to think too hard about the mess this was making of some broadly innocent mercenaries.