Shadows & Dreams

by Alexis Hall

  I slipped the sanctified steel knife out of its sheath and inched forwards, pressing myself flat to the wall.

  The stairway was lined with family pictures, photographs of adorable children in various flavours of school uniform. I wish people wouldn’t do that. It’s like they say to each other well, darling, if we get horribly killed, at least the person who finds us will feel really bad about it.

  But who knows. Perhaps they were all fine. Maybe they’d just had an attack of really aggressive woodworm.

  I eased open the first door I came to and peered into an empty living room. The TV was on, playing the looping music of a video game pause screen. The controller on its wire was sitting in the middle of the floor. Out of sheer force of habit, I looked up. Nothing horrible dropped on me from the ceiling.

  Well, that was good.

  I edged back out of the living room and moved across to the opposite door. All I could see through the bubbled glass was a lot of red. Either they had terrible taste in interior design or their taste in interior design was no longer a problem.

  Knife ready, I got back as far as I could and slid the door open.

  The wreckage of a charming suburban family dinner and a charming suburban family lay scattered around the room. Among the blood, the bodies, and the carnage, four ragged, unhealthy-looking people lolled like overfed cats. They were all wearing hospital pyjamas and stared at me with cold, inhuman eyes, but on each one, I could see jarring reminders of their previous lives. Three of them wore wedding rings, one of them had a crucifix hanging round her neck, and one of them had the remains of a cast on his arm, covered in messages, cartoons, and pictures of dicks.

  So, vampire army it is, then.

  Well, fuck.

  Fledgling vampires are really unpredictable. The transformation affects everyone differently. Some people wind up really sick and out of it, and even worse off than when they were human. Others get a shit-tonne of strength, speed, and anger straight off the bat. Vampires usually nurse their progeny through the change very carefully so that stuff like this doesn’t happen. I normally wouldn’t have a chance in hell against four vampires, not without using more of my mother’s power than I could safely come back from. But, if I was lucky, these guys would be sluggish from feeding, and they looked pretty fucked anyway.

  I ducked out of the doorway and grabbed my gold knife as well. I didn’t want them to surround me, but I didn’t want to get backed into a corner either. Basically, I was getting out of there. If everything went well, I’d get away. If it didn’t, at least I’d be fighting them on open ground.

  They unfolded with an eerie, disjointed grace and started gliding slowly towards me. Four legs or two, living or undead, predators all work the same: don’t run, that just makes them chase you. Back away slowly, get something between you and them, and get ready to hit them when they come in. I retreated over the ruins of the front door, crunching on bits of glass and trying not to trip on the shattered wood. At least here only two of them could come for me at once.

  Two of them came for me at once.

  They were half-lost in an animalistic frenzy and seemed pretty committed to ripping my face off. I let them run onto my knives. I got one in the neck with the gold blade, and it went down, screaming and hissing. I tried to pull back, but it twisted the knife out of my hand as it fell. I was one for one, but I’d lost the only weapon that could really hurt them. The second was already on me, and I buried my steel dagger hilt-deep in its chest. It didn’t even slow down, and we tumbled backwards through the door.

  I landed on my back with a vampire straddling my chest. I caught the flash of its fangs in the moonlight as it snapped its head around to bite me. Tucking my chin in, I nutted it. There was a crunch of cartilage and a spray of blood, but I didn’t have long to feel smug about it because it yanked my head back and came in for round two. I couldn’t see much with my face full of vampire, but I had a horrible feeling its mates were about to join the party.

  It was at times like this that I really appreciated having the option to draw on an ancient wellspring of psychotic faery magic. I reached out to my mother in the Deepwild. She was crouched on top of something helpless, all white teeth and hunger. The air was thick with the sour tang of blood and fear. There was part of me that kind of liked it. Power coursed through me, and I was just reaching up to bat the thing away, when it suddenly shot into the air, arms and legs flailing like an out-of-control puppet.

  I rolled to my feet. My senses were hunter-sharp, which is how I saw the dark figure crouched on the roof. It smelled of steel and sulphur and something familiar I couldn’t quite place.

  The last two vampires came through the door, moving fast. I was ready for them, but so was the thing on the roof. It raised an arm. A dart sliced through the air. And one of the creatures collapsed on the driveway. Another swift movement. A second dart. And the last vampire was down.

  The part of me that was my mother was not pleased to have the lost the kill or the territory. The part of me that was Kate was pleased to be alive but well aware that mysterious ninja assassins aren’t fond of witnesses. I stayed back and stayed wary.

  The figure rappelled off the roof and came towards me.

  The instinct to rip its heart out was just about controllable.

  She was wearing some kind of armoured, black-on-black bodysuit, the sort with fancy gauntlets and fancier gadgets. Her long dark hair was flowing down her back and she was talking into a microphone that was so flash I couldn’t see it.

  “Situation contained. Minimum three bodies. Proceed.”

  As she came closer, the dark glasses snapped back from her eyes and folded into her headset.

  “Hi, Kate,” said Eve.

  I forced down my mother’s power and struggled back to myself. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  A black van had pulled up a couple of doors down, and teams of people in black fatigues were fanning out down the street and bundling up the bodies.

  “Wow.” Eve flicked back her hair. “I save your life and all I get is this lousy T-shirt.”

  “I had it covered.”

  “From underneath?”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “And so do I.”

  That was the sort of thing people said right before they died horribly. “You do not know what you’re doing. Look at you. You look like fucking Batman.” Eve seemed momentarily pleased. “That’s not a compliment,” I clarified. And Eve actually pouted. “This isn’t a fucking video game. You’ll get yourself killed.” I gestured at the interchangeable minions who were cutting down the vampire who was still dangling from a satellite dish, strangely docile. “You’ll get these people killed.”

  Eve pointed at the ruins of the nice suburban family home. “People are already getting killed. At least I’m doing something about it.”

  I should have seen this coming. “So this is it? This is your Master Plan? Dress up like a tosser and shoot the undead?”

  For a second, she seemed genuinely wounded. Eve had wanted a costume like this for as long as I’d known her, and if she’d been going to a fancy dress party instead of hunting actual bloodthirsty monsters, I’d have been able to admit she looked pretty good in it.

  “Well, we can’t all be born with superpowers,” she snapped.

  “You know what, I’ll fucking trade you. You can have the crazy mother and the predatory hunger you can barely control. I’ll have the dot-com billions and the flashy toys.”

  Eve folded her arms. “Oh yes, because you are so tormented and bear a burden so terrible that no one else can understand. You told me about all this supernatural shit. What did you think I was going to do? Ignore it and hope I didn’t wind up an after-dinner snack or a pawn in a game that nobody would let me play?”

  I was breathing way too hard for someone just having a conversation. “I told you to ke
ep you safe, not so you could turn London into a giant first-person shooter.”

  “Jesus Christ, Kate, will you listen to yourself? It’s not your job to keep me safe and—” She stopped and put her fingers to her ear. “Acknowledged. Wrap it up, we’re moving out. There’s been another hit in Golders Green.”

  “What? What’s going on? How are you tracking this?”

  She was already walking away from me. Again. “I told you, Kate, I know what I’m doing, and in case you haven’t noticed, this city is going to shit.”

  The clean-up crew were stuffing things into evidence bags and piling back into the van.

  “Hey, that’s mine,” I yelled, as one of them pulled my golden dagger out of a vampire corpse and transferred it into a ziplock.

  “Let her have it, Steve,” said Eve. “She sulks if she doesn’t have something pointy to play with.”

  Steve handed me the dagger, and I stuck it back in its sheath. Those things aren’t cheap.

  Once the van was loaded and all her people were inside, Eve swung herself into the back and shut the doors behind her. She sped off into the night, leaving me behind on the kerb. Which was kind of the story of my life.

  So I went home.

  Elise was still staking out Hugh’s girlfriend leaving the flat cold, dark, and empty. I’d got used to living alone since Eve had finished with me, but I’d kind of got used to Elise as well, so it was weird not having her around. I poured myself a drink, slumped onto the sofa, and watched Downton Abbey on ITV Catch-up. I had no idea what was going on. There was a war and a stately home and Maggie Smith. My lifestyle isn’t really set up for following TV shows, but Dad and Jenny were really into it, and I thought it’d give us something to talk about when I went back for Christmas.

  All in all, it had been a bit of a shitty day.

  I’d just been rescued from an army of slavering vampires by one ex-girlfriend, after discovering that another ex-girlfriend had broken out of prison. I’d damn near sacrificed my life to protect my current girlfriend, only to find out she didn’t want me to and that it probably wouldn’t work anyway. I’d say it had been a mistake getting out of bed, but I’d also nearly died in my sleep. While investigating some weird magic dream shit for yet another ex-girlfriend.

  There was a moral here somewhere, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

  I had another drink. I was very tempted to go to bed and call it a day, but I wasn’t totally convinced I’d wake up again. This probably needed sorting out. Now.

  I knew a couple of ways to reach Nimue, but most of them involved leaving the house, which I wasn’t really in the mood to do. If I wanted to stay on my sofa, I’d have to rely on one of her lieutenants to get me in contact. Picking up my phone, I dialled the number of a call centre in Hackney. I let the automated voice finish talking and spoke into the hold music. “I need to speak to the Guardian of the Watchtower of the East.”

  There was a click.

  “Evenin’,” said the Guardian of the Watchtower of the East. “What can I do you for?”

  “I need to talk to Nimue. I’m worried if I go to sleep I might die.”

  “Aww, that’s rough, babe.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The line went dead.

  I guess that was that. I hung up and put the TV back on. Nim doesn’t like to be rushed, but she’s never let me down when I’ve needed her. Soon, it began to rain. I lay back on my sofa, closed my eyes, and listened to the droplets thudding softly on the windowpanes.

  A little while later, there was a knock on the door. The buzzer hadn’t gone, so it was either Nimue or a very polite assassin. I took a knife just in case and slipped on the security chain before I opened the door.

  Nim was standing outside in jeans and a hoodie, completely dry. She looked at the chain and then at the knife. “Um, hi?”

  “It’s been that kind of day.”

  I disarmed myself and let her inside.

  “Mind if I put the kettle on?” she asked.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  She went into the kitchen and started getting the tea things together. “Wow, I can actually find things in here. What have you done with the real Kate Kane?”

  “Don’t blame me, blame Elise.”

  “You’ve even taken the saucepans out the overhead cupboard.”

  “Not you as well.”

  Nim handed me a mug of tea. I took a sip, and it was just how I like it, strong and sweet. If you added psychotic and emotionally unavailable to that, it would also cover my taste in women. We went into the living room.

  Slipping off her trainers, Nimue curled onto the end of the sofa. “So, what’s going on?”

  I plonked myself down on the other end and stared miserably into my tea. “Corin’s out, there are a bunch of vampires who want to execute me, there’s an undead army rampaging around North London, Eve’s involved somehow. It’s all gone to shit.”

  Nim scooted across the space between us and put a comforting arm around my shoulder. “That sucks.”

  “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  We sat in silence for a bit.

  “I spoke with the Council last month,” Nim told me finally. “They thought I had a hand in the death of the Prince of Swords. They only asked me about Maeve. I kept you out of it.”

  “I shouldn’t have got you into it.”

  “I’m the Witch Queen of London, I’m in it up to my neck anyway. If I’d known they’d come after you, I’d have put you under my protection.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  She didn’t push it. She never had. “So,” she said instead, “tell me about the dreams?”

  “I followed the darkness to a graveyard, and when I went in, it was like something was crushing me. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t breathe.” I paused. “And this is where you say, ‘It’s okay, you can’t get hurt in a dream.’”

  Nim said nothing.

  “Well, fuck.”

  “Sorry, Kate.”

  “Right.”

  There was another long silence. Nim felt so warm resting against me. So, well, human.

  “So what happens now?” I asked. “I like you and I care about you, and I know we made a deal, but I’m not mad keen on choking to death in my sleep because you sent me after something I don’t understand.”

  Nim drew away and sat cross-legged on the sofa facing me. “I’m sorry, I should have prepared you better, but I didn’t know what we were dealing with either.”

  “But you know now, right?”

  “I can’t be sure. I’ve got some ideas, though.” She tucked her hands into her sleeves. “It’s probably a vampire, probably an old one, probably the same one that’s causing all the attacks. Unless it’s just a gigantic coincidence or a deliberate trick.”

  “That makes sense of a lot of things, but isn’t it a problem for the Council?”

  “It’s the Council’s problem, and it’s my problem, and those two problems are different.” This was one of those moments it was hard to remember that Nimue was one of the most powerful beings in London. Tucked up on my sofa, she just looked like a girl I used to date. “It’s a problem for the Council,” she continued, “because it’s a threat to their power and the stability of their society. It’s a problem for me because people are dying in my city.” But now, when I met her eyes, I saw the shimmering reflection of streetlights and rivers and towers. “I don’t want to put you in danger, but you’re one person and you can make a difference to dozens or hundreds.”

  Here lies Kate Kane. She made a difference to dozens. Beloved daughter. Sorely missed.

  “I’m not very comforted by that,” I said.

  “Neither am I.”

  I gave her a look. “But you’d do it anyway?”

  “I have to.
”

  It seemed I couldn’t turn around these days without somebody trying to sacrifice me for one thing or another. I guess it was going to be one of those weeks. At least Nim would feel bad about it. Probably. I sighed. “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  “You always have a choice, but there’ll always be a price. Though you may not be the one to pay it.”

  I really hated it when Nim got her gnomic on. “Just try not to get me killed, okay?”

  Her hand closed lightly over mine for a moment. “I promise I’ll protect you however I can for as long as I can.”

  “Uh, thanks,” I said awkwardly. That could have meant everything or nothing, and knowing Nim, it probably meant both. “So, how’s this going to work?”

  “Tonight, we go to the Dream together.”

  “When you say together...”

  “It’ll help if I’m close to you physically.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  She laughed. “I’m sure you can manage to keep your hands off me.”

  “It’s not that.” Meeting my ex-girlfriend in my dreams most nights already felt uncomfortably like cheating. Snuggling up to her as well was less like unforeseen consequence of a supernatural bargain and more like taking the piss. On the other hand, I really, really didn’t want to choke to death in my sleep. “Look, is this a long-term thing? I’m not wild about needing a babysitter, plus it’ll be really hard to explain to Julian.”

  Nim looked away, picking at the frayed bits at the bottom of her jeans. “I can’t be sure, but if you can take me to where you were before, I should be able to handle it from there. You shouldn’t have to come back.”

  “What about you? I have no idea what that was, but it was pretty fucking nasty.”

  “I’ve been Queen of London for six years. This is what I do.”

  “Do you think you’ll be able to kill it?”

  “No.” She glanced up. “But I can learn about it. And the more I know, the better I can fight it. The Dream is the city, and if we find its heart in the Dream, then we find its heart in the world.”