Fire & Water

by Alexis Hall

  It was well after dawn by the time we got to London—one of those heavy summer mornings. The Velvet was closed. The fire escape was open. Ashriel caught me by the arm as I was showing myself through the security doors that led up to Julian’s office.

  “Kate, are you okay?”

  I looked around at those intense, hypnotic eyes, that love-me-’til-you-die face that would have let him feed on lust and souls for the rest of eternity if he hadn’t chosen to cut himself off. “Go to hell, Ash.”

  His fingers tightened. “Seriously.”

  “Seriously, go to hell.” I shoved him backwards and went on up the stairs, through the storage room where they kept all their cabaret tat when it wasn’t being used, and into Julian’s office.

  She was there, like usual. Sprawled in her actual honest-to-god throne, like usual. Grinning like a cat, like usual.

  “Sweeting,” she purred. “I’m so glad you haven’t been murdered horribly.”

  “Fuck you, Julian.”

  The grin had gone. “That seems a little harsh.”

  Did it? Did it really? “Harsh? You fucking abandoned me. You left me to fucking die.”

  In the daylight, she couldn’t move as quickly as she might have done, but she still managed to cross the room towards me faster than I could back away. “It was complicated, and I was relatively sure you’d come back in one piece.” She reached up to touch my face, and I pulled back sharply. “You’ve been in worse scrapes, after all.”

  “Worse scrapes. A two-thousand-year-old vampire with magical powers was trying to turn me into his personal stairway to heaven. What worse scrapes have I been in?”

  She gazed up at me. Humility wasn’t her style and neither was regret, but just for a moment there was something in those too-blue eyes. “You’re right, I’m sorry, that was dismissive of me. And I knew you were in real danger, but there was nothing I could do about it.”

  “That’s not what Tara thought. That’s not what Elise thought. Fuck me, Julian, that’s not what even my self-obsessed schlong of an ex or his completely mortal and essentially powerless human girlfriend thought. Pretty much everybody else in my life who wasn’t already neck deep in their own shit came and tried to actually help me.”

  In the sunlight, she looked very small. Perhaps I was imagining it, but it felt colder today than it had been for a while. “I dare say they did not know Sebastian Douglas as well as I do.”

  “You—” I was having real trouble getting the words out. “You fucking coward. When the King of the Court of Love came for you, I made a blood oath to a witch, crawled through a sewer, fought a faery lord, and killed a vampire prince all to get you back.”

  “You always did have a flair for the dramatic.”

  My hand came up but, somehow, I stopped myself. The Palace of Wrath howled its disappointment.

  Julian had gone very still in that forgetting-to-be-human way. “Don’t make an enemy of me, sweeting.”

  “I just can’t believe...” My shoulders slumped. I wasn’t sure what I couldn’t believe. I’d spent so much time telling myself I knew what she was. I guess I’d somehow never thought she’d be that to me.

  “I am eight hundred years old, Kate.” Her voice had that forced calmness that people got when they were trying not to laugh, cry, or scream. “I have buried more lovers than you will ever know, and it has hurt me every time, but I have never let it destroy me. And though you may not want to hear it, I do care for you. I care for you very much.” She looked down. I had no idea what she was feeling but I hoped to fuck it was shame. “The thing is, I care for myself a lot more.”

  I turned my back on her, and saw Ashriel hovering in the doorway. “They didn’t teach you not to eavesdrop in the Palace of Lust, then?”

  “Look, I wanted to say I’m sorry. Elise told us what was going on, and I would have gone with her but I owe Julian a lot and if I’d been there then the whole thing could have blown back on her and so—so it was complicated.”

  This had gone beyond too much. “Well, I’m glad everyone’s sorry and I’m sorry that it’s complicated. But I’m afraid in the real world I wanted to but I didn’t doesn’t count for much. And as for Elise, I’m afraid she’s kind of dead now so, yeah, guess you really fucking blew that one, didn’t you. So. Umm. Fuck you both and goodbye.”

  The look on Ashriel’s face made a tiny, bitter part of me incredibly satisfied in ways I was sure I’d feel bad about much, much later, but right then you could have fit all the shits I gave about him, his boss, and their oh-so-difficult relationship with Sebastian Douglas into a vole’s scrotum. I pushed past him and down the stairs. Down the stairs and out the door. Out the door and out the club and out the world of Julian Saint-Germain.

  It was morning on Midsummer’s Day. A cool breeze blew on my face, and golden sunlight danced on the pavement and glittered off the windows of cars and restaurants and that one red phone box that had somehow survived the rise of the mobile networks. The sky was the perfect shade of just too blue, and all around me, the life of the city played on as if nothing had changed and everything was possible.

  By noon, I was drunk.

  Epilogue

  Ink & Parchment

  I heard later that the werewolves had done a kind of controlled demolition on the Tears of Hypnos, taking the Tears ’n’ Kate Blood cocktail to the borders of the Deepwild and something something boundaries between realities something something who gave a fuck. They took in Hephaestion as well, but if he told them anything useful, they didn’t pass it on to me. Not that I’d expect them to. For a while, I could feel the Prince of Wands in the Deepwild, but he soon vanished into shadow. Because of course he did, the slippery fucker.

  If I’m honest, I don’t remember a lot of what happened in the next few months. I slept late, worked when I couldn’t put the bills off any longer, and spent as much time wasted as I could manage. My life was punctuated by a rotating set of socially mandated visits that put a bit of a crimp on my mission to drink myself into oblivion.

  Sofia would check up on me more often than a teenage girl should really be checking up on a woman in her mid-thirties. She seemed to have recovered remarkably well from discovering the nice normal boy who’d offered her the chance of a life without constant supernatural conflict was actually Apollo. Then again, she’d got over finding out that Patrick was a vampire and that she was some kind of oracle, so I suppose this was all fairly close to being normal relationship drama for her.

  Every week or so, I’d make a plan to visit Nim in the hospital then fail to get around to it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see her, I just couldn’t face speaking to any members of her family or her court. And it wasn’t like there was really anything to visit. She was in one of those should-be-dead comas that pretty much screamed “magical intervention” to anybody who’d seen as much of the world’s weirdness as I had.

  Maybe it was my imagination, but the news—especially the local news—seemed to get steadily shittier as time went on. The weather calmed down a bit now that nobody was fighting for control of the sun, but with the mystical soul of the city up for grabs, there was a good chance of things spiralling out of control. Or not. What did I know, really? After all the pissing about with oaths and magic wars and dreams and actual fucking knife fights, I was pretty much ready to let reality sort itself out.

  I missed Nim, though. Some days. Other days I got this pissy little feeling that every single fucking thing that had happened since who the fuck knew when was part of some crazy witchy master plan and she’d been wanting things to wind up this way all along.

  Eve had told me she’d take care of Elise’s body. I hadn’t gone to see her. It would have felt practically ghoulish. I’d kicked Lisbeth out for pretty much the same reason. It was kind of shitty not to let her stick around while she sorted herself out, but it would honestly have done my head in, and I think Sofia managed to
talk her dad into letting her stay with them for a bit—said she was a friend’s older sister or something. If that girl doesn’t die of niceness poisoning before she’s twenty, I’ll be amazed.

  One evening in September (I think it was September, I’ve mentioned the “spent most of my time wasted” thing, right?) I’d made another abortive attempt at visiting Nim, which ran late, then stopped for a drink on the way back, which ran later, so I wound up stumbling back to my flat at close to midnight. If I’d been more sober, I’d have noticed that my door had been tampered with, but I wasn’t so I didn’t. Nothing struck me as out of the ordinary until I got into the front room and saw Hephaestion waiting for me.

  “I know you can’t feel pain,” I said, “but believe me, I can put a lot of effort into trying.”

  He inclined his head slightly. “I can’t stay long.”

  “Too fucking right you can’t.”

  “I have something for you.”

  “If it’s not Sebastian’s head on a spike, I’m not interested.”

  He didn’t react. He never reacted. Elise had got good at reacting. She’d worked really fucking hard at it. “It’s a book.”

  “Not a big reader.” I eyed up my living room looking for anything that might actually damage a man made of living rock. Nope. Not a damn thing.

  “It belongs to my master. It contains his researches on the animation of the inanimate.”

  “Well, whoop-de-fucking-do. And that helps me how?”

  He placed the book gently on the table. “What you make of it is up to you. But it contains within it the secrets of animating beings such as myself. Or of reanimating them.”

  I was so off my face that it took me a while to work out what he was getting at. Enough of a while that he’d already bowed politely and started walking out the door. “Hang on,” I began, once I’d got my head in the game, “why are you giving this to me?”

  He turned. “I am not. I was never here. It would be unthinkable for me to disobey His Highness in such a way. But if I had, it would have been because although I only met your friend briefly, I valued the way she saw me.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that. “You know your master is an evil shit, right?”

  “Perhaps. But he needs me. Now more than ever.”

  Once he was gone, I looked at the book. It was old. Proper handwritten on bits of dead cow old. At least I hoped it was bits of dead cow. The Prince of Wands didn’t quite seem the bound-in-human-skin sort but there wasn’t much I’d have put past him. Most of it was in a language I couldn’t read, but that wasn’t necessarily a problem. Sure I hadn’t been able to look any of Nim’s followers in the eye since the battle of Camlan Road, but I’d find somebody, or something. And maybe it wouldn’t work, maybe gone was gone for people made of rock, just like for people made of meat. But it had to be worth a try.

  It was kind of the least I could do. And it always paid to have a project.

  * * *

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  Thank you to the usual people I thank for the usual things, and my editor Stephanie Doig for all her work on this book.

  About the Author

  Alexis Hall was born in 1764 and sustains his unnatural existence by the usual methods of drinking blood, avoiding sunlight, and brooding. He writes fiction from deep within a crumbling mansion with one wrist pressed to his forehead.

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  ISBN-13: 9781488057014

  Fire & Water

  Copyright © 2020 by Alexis J. Hall

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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