‘You mean Tycho Feigrey?’ Bessie asked, raising an eyebrow as she placed a wooden bowl of spiced and dried meat bits on the desk.
‘Who else?’ Banes said. ‘I heard he was killed ages ago in the Blood Coup.’
Bessie giggled. ‘You know that was only ever a rumour, Banes,’ she said, as she took her seat behind her desk.
‘Then, he must have been the only one to survive that,’ he said.
‘Are you happy that he’s alive, then?’ she asked, sipping her tea.
Banes shrugged. ‘Depends, what is he up to?’
‘You’ll have to ask him yourself,’ she said.
‘Then, where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
Banes scoffed. ‘C’mon, Bess, you know just about every vampire in Britain.’
‘Tycho’s hardly been the sharing type,’ she said. ‘I just know that he’s alive and that he is somewhere in the UK. So, how did you work things out with Ling?’
‘Why do you care so much?’ he asked, picking out a few bits of meat.
‘For future reference,’ she said. ‘Not many people get on her bad side and get to say that it’s been taken care of, I want to know how you did it. Did you kill her?’
‘I sorted it out,’ he said.
‘If you want to keep coy, then you’re free to get your meat from somewhere else,’ she said, ‘and summer is on the way. So, if I go to that house of hers in Limehouse, I’ll find her alive and well?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine – I killed her.’
Bessie raised an eyebrow. ‘And how in the world did you do that?’
‘Easy,’ he said, ‘the human way. I broke into her house in the middle of the day and stabbed her a bunch of times with a stake.’
‘And you won that fight?’ she asked, her eyes wide.
‘I told you,’ he grinned, ‘you’ve got to stop being so surprised that I’m alive.’
‘Well, you are quite something,’ she said.
‘Now, your turn,’ he said. ‘Why are so you short on meat? Things are easy for us here, there shouldn’t be any shortages.’
‘I told you,’ she said, taking a sip of tea, ‘a new client base.’
Banes sighed and ran his hand through his hair, ‘look, I’m asking as a favour for Candice Prieto.’
Bessie rolled her eyes, ‘for heaven’s sake call her by her vampire name.’
They stared at each other for a second before Banes relented. ‘I’m asking as favour for Caedis Tenebrae.’
Bessie pursed her lips, her expression darkening, ‘you can tell her that while she’s busy playing make-belief in the desert we’re busy not being traitors to our kind.’
Banes took a sigh of tea as he got to his feet, ‘well, it was nice catching up, Bessie.’
Her face instantly softened, ‘don’t be like that, Banes. I’ll tell you what, I’ve got some steaks and some proper cuts for you. But only because I’m soft for those from Dreyrigr.’
‘You weren’t exactly soft to me at the time,’ he said.
She playfully waved her hand, ‘it was a different time, Banes,’ she said, smiling, ‘a different culture. Now, the few of us who are still around have to stick together.’
‘Well,’ he shifted in his seat, ‘thank you. I’d appreciate it.’
He handed over two-hundred pounds to Bessie for two steaks, a human ribcage, offal, a dozen fingers, some human jerky, black pudding, and two jars of dripping. He took a taxi back to his flat, breathing out as Baxon and Sons disappeared into the city.
Once he was back to his flat, he pushed most of the meat into the freezer before turning to the cupboard under the skin where he kept a canister of petrol. He tucked the canister into a rucksack and set off for Ling’s house.
Her house was as he remembered it – crooked and rotting. The street was utterly deserted, and he could see lights burning from the homeless camps in the half-finished apartment building. The snow was beginning to settle and the night air was iron cold against his skin as he leapt over the fence to the back door.
He paused as he entered the kitchen. There was the fluttering of fruit flies from food that had been left to decay on the table, and silence. He moved through the house, seeing her manic carvings and graffiti on the walls, and suppressed a shiver. The odour of putrid meat caught in the back of his throat and drenched into his skin as he climbed up to the attic. As he put his foot on the wooden floorboards, flies rose up around him. There was a still, trapped heat in the room of stale, filthy air.
Ling’s body was on the floor, puffy, bloated and distorted. He could see the stab wound in her chest, covered in squirming, wet maggots. Reddish foam had bubbled around her mouth and her sunken, glassy eyes. He pulled out the petrol, placed it on the floor at her feet, and turned to explore the attic. He had no way of knowing what was a fake replica, and what was a genuine relic that Ling had smuggled out of China, but he settled on a set of vases, a jade cup, a pair of tiny, silk slippers, golden hairpins, a statue of a peacock, and a full jewellery box.
‘Fuck it,’ he muttered, as he wrapped everything up in tissue paper, pushing aside the nagging feeling that there was something more valuable just over in the next box.
He made sure that everything was safe in his rucksack before opening the canister and pouring the petrol over her corpse, aiming it around the hole in her chest and covering her body, spreading a trail around to the ladder into the attic.
He glanced at his watch; he still had a few hours before Kojo would arrive. With one last glance at the rotting meat that was once Zhu Ling, he secured the rucksack close to his back, and climbed down from the attic. He dug around in his pocket for a lighter and lit it, holding it up to the hatch and tossing it up into a puddle of petrol. The heat instantly hit his hand; he yanked it back, as, with a sudden flare of light, flames engulfed the attic. He would have liked to have seen the building burn, and Ling’s body perish within in, but the fire was catching fast. He shot back down out of the house, and leapt over the fence just as smoke began to curl up from the broken roof tiles, pitch black against the nights orange sky.
Banes arrived back in his flat, smelling of dead things and petrol, thankful that the way up was empty of all people. He sighed, running his hand through his hair as he brewed himself a strong, black coffee; in hindsight, he was fairly sure that the slippers he had taken were fake, but there was a fair chance the rest of it would earn him some money. He took a long shower to wash the smell off him, taking care to apply the aftershave he knew Kojo liked, and put on Depeche Mode t-shirt he had brought at a concert that he and Kojo had attended years ago.
It was early morning when there was a ring of the intercom.
‘Hey!’ Kojo said, as Banes opened the door for him. Banes smiled as he felt Kojo’s lips on his, and wrapped his arms tight around Kojo’s slender soft body, breathing in his comforting smell of clean cotton sheets and toffee. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you too,’ Banes said, running his hand along Kojo’s heavy mop of long dark dreadlocks studded with rings. His hand came to rest on Kojo’s shoulder as he guided him through into his flat. Kojo was small, his head barely coming up to Banes’s shoulder. He was over two-hundred years old but looked like he had barely broken into his twenties, exaggerated by his round treacle black eyes and his smooth, dark brown skin. He noticed that Kojo was wearing his typical fashion, something he liked to call student chic.
‘I’ve heard you fucked up in America,’ Kojo said, smiling.
Banes shrugged. ‘Not as badly as everyone’s saying. It’s a shame that you didn’t join me; you’d have liked it.’
‘Would I have?’ he asked, moving into the flat.
‘I brought us some steak,’ Banes said, ‘from Bessie’s.’
‘That must have been costly,’ Kojo said. ‘Glad I’m worth all of this.’
‘Of course, you’re worth it,’ Banes grinned. He had put up a dining table against the window and placed a single red tulip in a vase,
along with a dozen lit candles. Against the backdrop falling snow outside it was an extremely cosy scene. ‘I wanted to have a special meal together, but Bessie was surprisingly lacking.’
‘Perhaps she was just holding back,’ Kojo said, taking a seat on his sofa. ‘You know what she’s like. I’d shop somewhere else if there was another human butcher’s here.’
‘Do you want something to drink?’ he asked. ‘A cocktail? I did buy some wine for the steak, too.’
Kojo raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ll start with a cosmopolitan. What wine did you get?’
‘I’m not telling you,’ Banes said, ‘you’ll figure it out anyway.’
‘Honestly,’ Kojo said, twisting his body to see Banes in the kitchen, ‘I cannot stand that woman. Who takes gossip as a form of payment anyway?’
‘Benkowski does,’ he said, ‘but she had barely anything out on display anyway.’
‘Well,’ Kojo said, ‘things are changing here. You’ve been away for a while, Banes.’
‘What things?’ he asked.
Kojo smiled. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me what America was like, then?’
‘Nice change of subject,’ Banes smiled. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Let’s wait until the main course,’ Kojo said. ‘So, how was America?’
‘I didn’t fuck up as badly as everyone thinks,’ he said, pouring gin into a shaker. ‘I just made the tactical decision to leave.’
‘Very quickly,’ Kojo said, ‘with a dozen dead behind you and hunters after you. And a man’s decapitated head on a park bench.’
‘It was seven dead,’ he said, as he poured out Kojo’s drink.
‘I heard there was thirteen dead,’ Kojo said with a sly grin.
‘Seven which I was directly responsible for.’
Kojo laughed, ‘so, what were you involved in? It was drugs, wasn’t it?’
‘Just your typical small-time syndicate,’ Banes said, pouring himself a vodka. ‘Started off as mostly white-collar stuff in Minnesota, mostly money laundering and territory expansion which turned bloody, before moving off to California, where things shifted onto drugs. Then everything just spiralled way out of control.’
‘What happened?’ Kojo said as Banes returned, carrying their drinks on a tray, along with a bowl of olives and meat nibbles.
‘Well, there were a few business problems,’ he said. ‘Some of my associates were getting too greedy and interrupting the flow of things, which, of course, caused some disagreements among the rest of us. Then everything seemed to explode at once. And, to be fair,’ he said, taking a long drink, ‘they tried to kill me first. They ended up shooting me a lot, all at once, which would have killed me if I was a human. So, I just decided to take matters into my own hands and try to return the favour and take all their money. At which point a group of hunters partnered with my former associates and I decided to leave the country.’
‘And you’re sure that they won’t come after you?’ Kojo asked.
Banes shrugged. ‘I was using a completely unique alias, and interacting with an entirely new group of fairly young humans. They had no way of knowing my true name, where I came from, or where I was going. It was getting out of there which was the hard part.’
‘God, you’re so bloody nonchalant about it,’ Kojo said, ‘I’m surprised that you’re still alive.’
‘You’re the second person to say that to me tonight,’ he said. ‘But you know me, I’ll survive no matter what. I did have a little bit of help from Cindy though.’
‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘Good,’ Banes said. ‘Yeah, she’s doing really well. She’s got an ideal human life now.’
‘I’m glad,’ Kojo said.
‘So, what have you been up to?’ Banes asked. ‘Are you getting rich, or studying, or both?’
‘Taking a break from all of that at the moment,’ Kojo said. ‘I’ve got money I can live off quite comfortably.’
‘I thought you were in tech, or something like that?’
‘That bubble burst, Banes,’ Kojo sighed, reaching forward for an olive. ‘And another opportunity presented itself to me.’
‘What opportunity?’ he asked.
‘It’s a rather unique job,’ Kojo said.
‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ Banes said. ‘Cindy said that there was something going on in London, something called Rebirth. Apparently Tycho Feigrey’s involved.’
‘Cindy’s well-informed then,’ Kojo said.
‘She said she’d been scouted by some guy called Clarence Marr and Rosemary May,’ he said. ‘They were from Rebirth wanting contacts and investors.’
Kojo took a sip, ‘news is travelling then.’
‘What’s going on here?’ Banes said, reaching his arm around Kojo’s narrow shoulders.
‘Things are changing in this country, Banes,’ Kojo said, running his finger around the rim of his glass. ‘Some of us have become tired with how humans are running the country, and we’ve been tired for a long time now. We want to eat and we want to eat freely. Look at Cindy, she’s a very powerful woman in the human world and she’s scared.’
‘She’s cautious,’ Banes said.
‘We’re apex predators, we shouldn’t have to be cautious,’ Kojo said. ‘She’s scared because she’s alone.’
‘There are vampires in America,’ Banes said.
‘Yeah, there are loads of us there,’ Kojo said. ‘America is fucking easy nowadays, the whole world is easy. So many humans are moving around and running away, they can vanish so easily. But she’s alone. There isn’t any organised structure. Look what happened to you, scrapping by and once the hunters decide to come after you that’s it you’ve got to leave. And the vampires who already live in the country will turn on you without a moments hesitation. We need unity between our kind.’
Banes raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know you followed any particular ideology when it came to that sort of thing.’
‘It’s different for you,’ Kojo said. ‘You can disappear into the background when humanity becomes its worst – I never get the chance. Over two-hundred-and-fifty years of humanity’s pettiness and prejudice, because I’m black, and I’m gay. And they think so fucking short-term because they lead small lives. Let’s destroy the planet; we’ll be dead before anything really fucked up happens. Let’s slow any actual social progress down; we’ll be dead before we will have to adjust our attitudes. Honestly, Banes, decades and centuries of just waiting for humans to correct themselves, while they pass their problems and issues onto their children to deal with, who then pass it onto theirs, who pass it onto theirs. It’s enough to drive you mad.’
‘So,’ Banes said, ‘what does Rebirth want then?’
‘A united, structured organisation of vampires in the UK,’ Kojo said. ‘Focused on vampiric matters and guiding the human race as well. We have a symbiotic relationship with each other, we’ll ensure their species survival by managing their government so that they don’t make stupid short-term decisions.’
‘And eating them,’ Banes said.
‘Yeah,’ Kojo said. ‘But humans are perfectly happy to kill and injure each other all the time. Like, everyone is fine having a nine-year-old Yemeni schoolgirl ripped apart with bullets, but apparently wanting to make use of the corpse is obscene. Never understood it.’
Banes chewed on some meat, ‘you really believe in this, don’t you?’
‘I think it’s the best choice we have,’ Kojo said.
‘Vampires taking over the British government?’
Kojo smiled, ‘if it works then it works. Besides, we’re almost there anyway.’
Banes kissed the top of his head. ‘I understand you,’ he said, ‘but vampires coming together isn’t a perfect recipe for a utopia. I mean, look at the Blood Thieves…hell, look at Dreyrigr. They were elitist bastards, and the city fell to ruin.’
Kojo grinned. ‘I can never take you seriously on Dreyrigr. You’re so biased.’
‘I am not.’
&
nbsp; ‘You were kicked out by your family for stealing,’ Kojo said. ‘You were the one at fault.’
‘The entire system was at fault,’ Banes said. ‘You’re lucky that by the time I bit you, it had already collapsed in on itself.’
‘I’ve seen the ruins,’ Kojo said. ‘It’s still fairly impressive.’
‘But you weren’t there,’ Banes said. ‘I wasn’t just kicked out for stealing either, you revisionist. I was thrown into exile because I was too human-friendly, and I was an enemy of the culture, and I was a traitor to my clan and my family.’
‘And for stealing.’
‘Yes,’ Banes said, pouring himself a drink of straight vodka. ‘But also because Dreyrigr was full of supremacist sociopaths even by vampire standards. And now I know Tycho’s involved too, I’m surprised anyone can trust him again after the Blood Coup.’
‘He’s not just him though,’ Kojo said. Do you know Cecilia Marr or her brother Clarence?’
Banes shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells.’
‘Their parents were Deafol and Aglaecwif Dreor,’ Kojo said.
‘Yeah, I remember them,’ Banes said, mentally recalling what Cindy had said to him, ‘but I know that they were killed in the Blood Coup.’
‘They were,’ Kojo said, ‘but Aglaecwif gave birth to twins while in prison, who were adopted by a human couple. Now that Cecilia is working with Tycho as co-commander and she trusts him.’
‘Christ,’ Banes said, getting to his feet and walking across to the kitchen. ‘How is Tycho doing anyway?’
‘You should ask him yourself,’ Kojo said. ‘I can get you a meeting with him. No commitment, just a chat.’
Banes scoffed as he took the steaks out of the fridge, ‘it’s like you’re trying to sell me something.’
‘I’m a recruiter,’ Kojo said, leaning back on the sofa. ‘That’s my job.’
Banes winced, ‘Jesus Christ, you’ve gone corporate.’
‘It’s easier for you,’ Kojo said. ‘We have difference experiences of the world.’
‘I know,’ Banes said, placing a pan over the stove, adding a thick chunk of butter, and turning on the heat as high as it could go. ‘But a few years ago you didn’t give a fuck about anything like this, you just wanted to get rich, eat and drink, and tell everyone else to fuck off.’
All Rotting Meat Page 8