Who the hell lived in a place like this? Homeless people? Angry punks from an Eighties movie? I must have written the address down wrong, that was the only explanation.
Then I saw a thin crack of light coming from inside the larger of the two gas towers. Someone was home after all.
I considered shouting a hello, but since there was a distinct possibility that I was trespassing, I decided to keep it buttoned. I made my way to the old gas tower and headed for the lone sliver of light. I could see now that one of the panels had been peeled back from the cylindrical wall of the tower to form a makeshift entrance. From the looks of things, someone had decided to break in there and claim squatters rights.
Through the gap, I could see that the structure had been converted into a living space with partition walls, tatty bits of furniture that looked as though they’d been dragged from a skip, and a makeshift roof to protect its inhabitants from the elements. There was even a circular staircase leading up to a mezzanine. I turned sideways to step through the gap, but no sooner had I set foot on the other side, than something hard connected with my face.
The blow knocked me to my knees, and before I could recover, I felt something wrap around my throat. As the spots cleared from my vision, I got a picture of my attacker, or the rough shape of them at least. It was a young woman, dressed in a hoodie, and without getting racial about it, she was black.
The woman whirled around to the back of me, and as we switched positions, the thing around my neck tightened. By this point I was getting pretty fed up with strangers trying to throttle me, so I hooked my fingers under the noose and attempted to free myself. I found it cold and hard to the touch. It wasn’t a noose, it was a chain.
I tried to take in a breath but couldn’t. The chain was too tight, cutting off my air supply, choking me out, wrapping the world in black.
Throwing an arm behind me, I managed to get a hand under my attacker’s hood and grasp a fistful of her afro mane. With the last of the fight I had, I yanked hard and tore the hair out at the root.
The woman screeched, and the chain around my throat went slack. Gulping down a double-helping of air, I twisted around to face my assailant, fists bunched.
Blood ran from her scalp, only it wasn’t red, it was royal blue.
She wiped away the slick of blue blood with the heel of her palm and snarled like a feral cat. In her other hand was a short wooden shaft, at the end of which was a chain terminating in a spiked metal ball.
‘What the fuck is that?’ I croaked. ‘Did something go wrong with your nunchucks?’
‘It’s called a morning star, you cretin,’ hissed the woman, and came at me again, chain-and-stick-thingie swinging.
I didn’t have time to dig around in my backpack for the dagger, so I met her with a fist instead. It was the first real punch I’d ever thrown, and it fell way short of expectations. The punch connected, but as my knuckles made contact with her chin, I felt a shockwave travel up my forearm and explode in my elbow like dynamite.
‘Shit!’
I yelped in pain and the cry ricocheted madly off of the tower’s curved wall.
The woman clicked her jaw back into place, surprised by the force of my punch. ‘Good Lord, girl, are those hands or gorilla feet?’
Before I could respond with a witty comeback, she swung her weapon and smashed me in the gut with the metal end, knocking the air from my lungs. Winded, I wasn’t able to defend myself against her next attack, and she hit me again, catching me hard in the left tit.
‘Ow!’ I clutched at my sore breast, jaw clenched so tight that I thought my teeth might implode. Anger surged through me like poison, slicing, burning, screaming for release.
Kill, kill, kill!
I felt my fingernails digging into my palms, deep enough to draw blood.
‘You bitch,’ I hissed, and the brand flared hot and pulsing blue.
The woman saw the enraged look on my face and her expression turned from triumph to trepidation.
Like a volcano erupting in one ferocious red cascade, I threw myself at her, my hands catching her under her arms like a forklift and hurling her through the air. That’s not poetic license either, I literally picked her up, hoisted her over my head, and sent her on her way.
The woman sailed across the room and slammed into the tower’s outer wall before dropping to the ground like a rock.
Crack!
She lay perfectly still, leaving me to wonder for a moment if the impact had snapped her neck.
‘Shit. Uh, are you okay?’
As I looked down at her crumpled body, I saw something I hadn’t seen before: a nimbus of light floating above her head, just like the one the old man had worn. It was a halo, no mistaking it. Was this woman an angel, too? Because she sure as shit didn’t behave like one.
It was just as I was weighing up the karmic implications of slaughtering one of God’s holy messengers, that the woman groaned and peeled her face from the floor.
Phew.
I figured she must have had enough by this point, but somehow she managed to climb shakily to her feet and throw back her head. ‘I don’t know what you are,’ she said, ‘but when I’m done with you, you’re going to be shitting teeth.’
She snarled and snatched up her flail an unleashed a battle-cry, then—
‘Enough!’ said a new voice.
The old man in the white suit stood framed by the tower’s doorway, propped on his ivory-handled walking stick. It was Vizael, the mysterious owner of the magic dagger. ‘Abbey is here by my invitation,’ he told his fellow angel. ‘No harm will come to her.’
The look on the woman’s face told me that she hadn’t been made aware of any invitation. She shot the old man hate rays then turned her attention back to me, looking me up and down. She grimaced at my living-dead makeup and head-to-toe black ensemble. ‘This is her?’ she asked. ‘She looks more like one of them than they do.’
‘And who the fuck are you, if you don’t mind me asking,’ I fired back.
Since all the punching and strangling had stopped, I had a chance to view her properly now. Though I wasn’t exactly taken with her at this point, I had to admit, she was a sight to behold. Her big Disney eyes and obscenely full lips were married to a flawless bone structure. Her ebony skin was like black silk draped over fine cut glass, and unusually, her eyes were blue; seriously blue, almost sickeningly so, like a summer sky on a perfect, cloudless day. The woman was an absolute stunner. I’m not going to lie, if I swung that way, I definitely would. At least, I would if she wasn’t a total Bitch word.
‘I am the archangel Gendith,’ she replied, puffing out her (of course) ample chest. ‘Bringer of Light, Scourge of the Damned—’
‘—Talker of shit,’ I said, dotting in one last sobriquet. Yes, I did just use the word “sobriquet”. Who needs a university degree, eh?
‘How dare you speak that way to me, mortal,’ she roared, and shoved me hard in my bruised chest.
I was fully ready to lamp the cow. It was girls like her who picked on me at school, and I wasn’t about to go through all that again. Not now, not ever.
I shoved her and she skidded back on her heels, keeping her balance, but losing a couple of feet of ground.
‘I said enough!’ cried Vizael. It came from his lungs in a deep, throaty roar that was totally at odds with his small, wizened frame.
The pair of us froze.
He took a breath and resumed in his usual, avuncular tone. ‘We’re all on the same side here.’
‘You keep saying that,’ I said, ‘but I don’t even know you, and this loony tried to throttle the life out of me, then hit me in the boob.’
‘I apologise for the unfortunate reception, I truly do,’ he replied, with a look of anxious misgiving. ‘Allow me to make proper introductions. Abbey, this is Gendith, a colleague of mine. Gendith, this is Abbey Beckett, the new Nightstalker.’ I saw his colleague’s lip curl at the last part. ‘Welcome to our home,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘Please,
take a seat.’
I wasn’t exactly in a handshake mood at that point, so I declined his hospitality and reached for my backpack. ‘I never agreed to any Nightstalkery stuff, okay?’
‘And yet you are here, as I knew you would be.’
‘Yeah, and now I’m going to go. Here, you can have your dagger back.’ I handed it to him, but he wouldn’t take it.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said.
I couldn’t argue with him there. ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool.’
‘It’s forged in witchfire, you know, and the blade is made from the thirty pieces of silver that Judas was paid to betray Jesus.’
‘Judas? Jesus? Like, from the Bible?’
Gendith snorted and shook her head, ‘You have to be joking with this bitch.’
‘Yes,’ said Vizael, smoothing over his companion’s rudeness. ‘The very same.’
I looked towards the exit, but curiosity got the better of me again. ‘Okay, what does Judas have to do with anything?’
Vizael smiled, a twinkle in his eyes. ‘Judas has everything to do with this. Judas is the vampire master.’
‘Right. Totally. That would have been my first guess.’
He gestured for me to take a seat, and, unable to help myself, I took one. How could I not? Folks have been trying to make sense of the Good Book for thousands of years, and there I was, in the presence of an honest-to-goodness angel, who was ready to spill the beans on life, the universe, and everything.
The two of us sat opposite each other around a small, cracked coffee table.
Viz turned to his companion. ‘Gendith, would you be a lamb and make us a brew?’
His fellow angel mumbled something unkind under her breath before marching off to the part of the tower that had been partitioned off as a kitchen.
Vizael sighed softly and whispered to me. ‘A formidable warrior, but not blessed with much of an understanding of social niceties.’
I found myself smiling back at him. ‘Go on then,’ I said, ‘cough it up.’
The old man sat forward in his chair and his eyes settled into a ten-mile stare. ‘Judas is the father of all vampires,’ he said, ‘cursed by God for betraying his only son and condemned to haunt the earth for all eternity. Condemned to live with his guilt and never be granted the sweet release of death.’
‘Oh yeah? And how’s that working out for you?’
Viz offered a crooked smile. ‘Not too well. Instead of waiting politely for Judgment Day, Judas had other ideas. He created progeny.’
‘Like... kids?’
‘Not exactly. Those he took a liking to—men and women—he made as himself and recruited into his army.’
‘An army of vampires.’
‘Exactly.’
It was a hell of a story, and rife with so much religious treachery that it would have sent Dan Brown running for the nearest box of Kleenex. ‘So why doesn’t God step in and do something?’ I asked.
‘He did,’ Viz replied. ‘He sent me to Earth to destroy Judas.’
I tried to imagine the old man taking on a bible character with a vampire army at his back, but my imagination wasn’t up to the task.
‘I was younger back then of course,’ said Viz, sensing my doubt. ‘This was all the way back in the Fourteenth Century.’
Wow. He really did have some years on the clock. ‘So what happened?’ I asked.
‘I fought Judas and won,’ Viz replied. ‘But it wasn’t enough.’ He looked to his toes. ‘At the end of our battle, the vampire master fell into the Thames, dead. What I didn’t know then was that his body had infected the source of all London’s water.’ He let out a long exhale. ‘Millions perished.’
I thought back to History class, and to the conversation about plague sites that we’d had before. ‘You’re saying Judas was the big germ that started the bubonic plague?’
Viz sighed. ‘All because of me. All my fault. I’ve been living here on Earth ever since, my punishment for failing God.’
‘He really holds a grudge, eh?’
‘Oh, you have no idea.’
‘And now the vamps are everywhere,’ I said. ‘So what’s the Lord Almighty doing to stop them?’
The old man offered a shrug. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. We’re not exactly on speaking terms these days.’
‘So, that’s it, is it? The dead are walking the Earth and God isn’t picking up the phone?’
‘I see things,’ he said. ‘Visions and portents. Whether or not they come from Him directly, I cannot say, but I know them to be true. In any case, my mission endures. I failed once, I will not fail a second time. I cannot.’
I shook my head. None of this made any sense, but there was one thing that had been really bugging me since we’d sat down. ‘You keep going on about a vampire army, so why aren’t I seeing bloodsuckers running about everywhere, flapping around like bats and sinking their fangs into everyone?’
‘You’ve seen what they’re like, Abbey, you’ve met one in the flesh. They aren’t the creatures Bram Stoker wrote about. They don’t sleep in coffins, and they don’t care a whit for crucifixes or cloves of garlic. They’re far more sophisticated than that.’
It’s true that the vampire I’d seen didn’t fit the Halloween costume. When I thought of vampires, I’d always imagined pale, Draculoid men in frilly blouses and Napoleonic jackets. The guy that assaulted me was nothing like that, at least until he popped his chompers and went into monster mode.
Viz fixed me with a hard stare. ‘The Judas Clan aren’t like other vampires, Abbey. They’re far more sinister than anything you’ve read about in a horror novel. Far more powerful.’
‘And there’s a whole army of them? So, what do you do? How do you fight that?’
‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘Not anymore.’ The old man straightened his crooked back and leaned across the table. ‘I don’t have what it takes to defeat a threat like this, Abbey. I’m out to pasture. What humanity needs to win this war is new blood.’
I looked down at the brand on my palm.
‘Why me? What about your angel friend next door? Why not make her the Nightstalker?’
A shadow fell across me as two slopping mugs of tea crashed onto the coffee table.
Gendith stood there with a face of thunder. ‘Good question,’ she said, tartly. ‘As a matter of fact, I’d like to know the answer to that one myself. Go on then, old man, why exactly are you passing me over for this... stick insect?’
Viz looked at her with a cold gleam in his eyes. ‘Behave yourself, Gendith.’
‘No,’ she seethed, ‘answer the question. Tell her how it is that I’ve been training for this moment for ten years, and now she’s the one wearing the brand.’
Ten years? Jesus, she could have gotten three university degrees in that time. No wonder she was pissed off.
‘I didn’t choose her,’ Viz barked back, ‘the dagger did.’
It’s like I was watching the scene from a movie where the hero is struggling with her conscience, only in this version, she wore an angel on both shoulders, and the pair of them had given up dispensing advice and turned rabid on each other.
Gendith folded her arms. ‘The dagger chose her, did it? That’s a good one. Why don’t you tell her exactly how it chose her?’
‘Gendith—’
‘Tell her!’
Viz chewed at his bottom lip. Only once the pregnant pause had reached its third trimester did he finally speak. ‘I left it on a train,’ he confessed.
‘He left it on the train!’ Gendith spat, turning to me. ‘That’s why you got the brand. Not because of some divine right. Not because you were chosen. Because some dotty old codger walked off a train without his briefcase and you got nosey.’
‘That’s not true,’ Viz retorted. ‘It is written—’
‘Written?’ she bleated, and marched over to a heaving bookcase to pluck a dusty old tome from its shelf. ‘Written by your hand. Prophecies and predestinations that only you see.’ She rust
led through Viz’s texts, thrusting his words at him. She landed on a page written in an old man’s spidery scrawl, the heading of which read: The Sanctified One. ‘These words are not sacrosanct,’ she went on. ‘The only way we will stop the Clan is through strength and cunning, and this wench you have dubbed “Nightstalker” has neither.’
‘Guys—’ I said, trying to cut in.
‘There’s more at play here and you know it,’ Viz barked. ‘Fate guided the weapon to Abbey, and the blade chose to Sanctify her.’
‘Guys—’ I tried again.
‘Senile nonsense,’ Gen snorted. From beneath her shirt she plucked a necklace; a string of teeth, all canines, long and sharp. She shook them at Vizael and the sinister grin chattered at him. ‘I should be the Nightstalker and you know it!’
She swept an arm along the rickety bookshelf, sending a row of Viz’s tomes tumbling to the floor in a swirling grey blur of dust.
The old man clambered to his feet. ‘You embarrass me like this and you wonder why you are not fit to wear the brand?’
‘GUYS!’ I screamed, and finally, they shut up. ‘You’re fighting over nothing. I have one shitty boss already, I don’t need two more.’ I stood up from my chair. ‘Find someone else to do your dirty work, because I’m going home.’
‘There is no one else,’ said Viz.
‘Of course there is,’ I replied, throwing up my hands. ‘Call the police. Call the army. Call the frigging coastguard for all I care.’
‘That would create pandemonium,’ he replied. ‘No, ours is a secret war. A battle that won’t be recorded in the history books.’
‘Why not? Why not get the law involved?’
‘Because normals aren’t equipped to fight vampires,’ he said. ‘They’d be peashooters against battleships.’
‘That’s what you call us, is it? “Normals”?’ I shook my head. ‘Jesus, what am I even doing here? Angels and demons and holy weapons? I don't even believe in God!’
‘And He probably doesn’t believe in you either,’ said Viz. ‘So show Him why He should.’
I paused for a moment, but barely. ‘I’m nothing special. I’m not cut out to stop an army of undead bastards. I’m sorry,’ I said, heading for the door. ‘I’m bashed to bits and I’m working on about two hours sleep. I need my bed.’
Sanctified: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Branded Book 1) Page 5