by Alexis Hall
I didn’t want to look up, and I didn’t want to look down, but I could see flickers of blue flame shooting past us, so I just shut my eyes and hoped it’d sort itself out.
We went whizzing upwards, and then I felt hands dragging me into the relative safety of the helicopter.
I decided it was probably okay to open my eyes.
We were in a smallish cabin with benches along the sides. I crawled onto one and wedged the pot in beside me, next to a couple of dudes in black. Eve was crouched on the floor, talking rapidly into her headset as she scanned the books we’d nicked.
“Any joy?” I asked.
“Not sure, it’s some kind of warding ritual, but magic isn’t really my thing.”
“Warding against what?”
“No clue. I think it says something about concealment here. Probably something to do with the blood. If we knew whose it was, we might be able to work out what it was for.”
“Uh, I’m pretty sure it was his own.”
“Okay, that’s really weird. Why would you want to keep yourself away from something you stole and were keeping in your house?”
I thought back to Jacob. He’d said that vampires could be targeted through their bloodlines, which was how the Kill Everything Ritual was supposed to work. The Kill Everything Ritual that Henry Percy had gone out of his way to stop.
Because he’d raised the Morrígan.
And he was descended from the Morrígan.
Which meant that that the circle wouldn’t just keep him away from the pot, it would stop the Morrígan hunting it down as well.
In fact, that was probably why she hadn’t found it already.
Oh fuck.
I twisted round, looked out of the window, and saw a flock of ravens, black against the city lights below.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Metal & Feathers
A taloned hand burst through the floor.
Eve stared at it for a moment and then signalled her minions to take firing positions.
“Eve, trust me, this is way above their pay grade.”
“Stuck in a helicopter. Can’t really sit this one out. And if we’re going down, we’re all going down fighting.”
With a groaning of metal, a large chunk of the chopper gave way, offering us a charming view of the empty sky, the distant city, and the enraged vampire queen flying directly below us.
I leaned over the gap. “We’ve got your pot. We just want to talk.”
The Morrígan’s hand shot out, grabbed me by the throat, and hauled me through the hole in the floor. My stomach lurched as I realised that my own neck was the only thing between me and the world’s least successful skydive.
Darts whistled past me and sank into the Morrígan’s flesh. She didn’t notice.
I kicked my feet pointlessly against empty air and wrapped both arms around the wrist that held me.
“I will take what is mine.” The Morrígan’s voice cut through the thunder of the helicopter and the shrieking of the ravens. “Then I will kill you all and lay waste to this city.”
I had to admit, I wasn’t exactly negotiating from a position of strength. What was my counter-offer going to be? Let me go and I won’t bruise your thumb with my windpipe?
Times like these, a girl really needed her mum.
The Morrígan’s hand tightened around my throat, her claws beginning to gouge into my skin.
I closed my eyes and opened myself to the Deepwild. Blood and the power of dark places rushed over me. On the topmost branch of the tallest tree in our kingdom, my mother perched and waited, still as stone and moss.
I lashed out at the Morrígan with my mother’s strength. It wasn’t enough. There was a dull red fire behind my eyes.
I struggled, but I needed more. I needed everything.
My mother smiled.
In the other place, my daughter is dying, and she gives herself to me at last.
I open my eyes in that far world of steel and stone.
My body is not to my liking. Too small, too weak, too mortal.
I change it.
The corpse queen looks and sees me for my true self. She bares her fangs and pulls me to her. I feel her teeth in my neck as I drive my fingers through her unliving flesh and wind them in her entrails.
I laugh with the joy of it.
The corpse queen rips at my neck and laps at my blood. I draw out a handful of viscera and cast it free on the wind. I bury my hands in her feathers and tear the wings from her back in a spray of blood and shadow.
We fall together, clawing at each other in an ecstasy of hunger, and crash to earth upon tamed grass and enslaved trees.
The corpse queen scatters in shadows and feathers and mist. I turn my face to the wind and seek the scent of fresh prey.
A human creature lowers herself from the sky machine that follows us.
She speaks. “What the fuck?”
I turn and look at her. “Run.”
“Kate, what’s going on?”
“You will run, and I will catch you, and when I catch you, I will kill you.”
“Oh fuck, you’re her.” She inches slowly backwards. Perhaps she thinks I will not notice. “Listen, Kate, I know you’re in there somewhere.”
“We are one and the same, child.” Somewhere, my daughter screams at me. A petulant tantrum. “Perhaps I will not kill you. You have strong bones; you would make a good hound. Or a deer perhaps, to be hunted and devoured, night after night.”
“I’m not going to run.” She steps forwards.
“It will be quick if you run.”
“Sorry, I don’t negotiate with psychopaths.” She steps forwards again.
As she comes closer, I think of ways to make her pay for her insolence. Perhaps I will peel off her skin and fashion a new sheath for my knife. While she watches. Once she is within arm’s reach, I catch her by the hair and drag her to her knees. She brings up one hand and strikes at my thigh, and I feel the cold, sickening burn of iron pierce the muscle.
I roar at the outrage of it, reach down, and snap her arm. I scent pain and fear. A shadow stirs at the back of my mind. My daughter glares at me with fury in her purple eyes. The shock of iron still sears my blood. She claws at the edges of our mind, and fights for dominion over our weakening flesh.
Unattended, the human strikes me in the chest, knocking the breath from my daughter’s body.
The other place no longer to my liking, I return, for the present, to the Deepwild.
“Jesus, fuck, enough already,” I wheezed. “Stop punching me.”
Eve stopped punching me. “Kate?”
I was kneeling on the cold grass, feeling as shit as I’d felt in a long time. “You fucking stabbed me.”
“You kind of needed it.”
I tried to stand up, but my body felt weird, like when you get in your car and somebody’s fiddled with the driver’s seat. And, if it hadn’t been for Eve’s sudden injection of cold iron, I’d still be a passenger. “I guess I kind of did. Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
I made another attempt to be functional and made it upright. My leg hurt like hell, which was nice, because it matched the rest of me. I held out a hand to help Eve up and noticed that her right arm was hanging limp at her side. I gestured awkwardly. “Was that...me?”
She shook her head. “It was your mother, Kate, not you.”
“In my body. I could have killed you.”
“But you didn’t, and that’s what matters. Now, do you want to stand around angsting, or do you want to save this city?”
“Where’s the damn pot?”
“On its way to HQ. And we should be too.”
I looked round. We were in some sort of park, with a sodding great gold statue sitting in a pointy gothic tower. “Is that the Albert Memorial?”
/> “Looks like.” Eve flicked on her headset. “Send a car to Kensington Gardens.”
Tangled in the grass were a scattering of black feathers. These were probably worth a fortune to the right sort of person, but things the right sort of person is willing to pay for are things the wrong sort of person is willing to kill for. I didn’t need the aggro. I picked up one and stuck it in my inside pocket. I’d have put it in a ziplock bag, but it wouldn’t fit.
Then we limped down to the road to wait for pick up.
“You know,” I said, “we should probably both get to a hospital.”
“There’s a surgical unit back at base. They’ll patch us up.”
Well, at least I wasn’t going to have to make up any interesting stories to explain the stab wound. Slipped while trying to scratch my arse with a kebab skewer. We were both too exhausted and stressed out for chitchat, so we just slumped there in silence until the car arrived.
Back at the Locke Cave, I had my leg stitched up, and Eve got her arm set and splinted. My mother had dealt with most of my glass cuts and other injuries, so I guess I’d handed my body to a crazy faery queen and come out vaguely ahead on the deal. Unless you count nearly killing my ex-girlfriend.
Once I’d got my lollipop and my I was brave at the secret underground medical facility sticker, I was given my pot and escorted back to Eve’s office. She’d shed the Batman costume and was sitting in her chair, with images flickering and flying across the screens around her. Her arm was in a sling, and she had that tight, focused look she always got when she was shaken.
“You okay?”
She spun round. “Fine.”
“This is me you’re talking to. You don’t have to be fine.”
“We broke up. You don’t get to play that card anymore.”
“Giving a shit is not a card.”
“Whatever, Kate. I need you to get that damn vase out of my building. I don’t have the resources to handle another attack of that magnitude.”
Part of me felt that this would be a perfect time to say I told you so, but the part of me that wasn’t an arsehole kept my mouth shut. “I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I’ve worked out what I’m going to do with the pot, and we’ve found Tara. Unless I can talk her down, there’s going to be a whole lot of killing.”
“I’m trying to track her, but they keep on the move. They’re sweeping the city systematically from the centre outwards. I’ve isolated twenty-six confirmed incidents so far.”
“Incidents of what?”
“What do you think? Werewolves eating people. Probably fledging vampires because the older, smarter ones have all gone to ground like you said.”
“And what about Tara?”
“I’ve run face recognition on a crap-tonne of footage, and she’s come up a bunch of times but never in the same place. I know where they’ve been, but I couldn’t put you within a mile of where they’re going.”
Maybe within a mile would be enough. I was pretty certain I could track a pack of wolves with my mother’s power, but if today was anything to go by, I wasn’t at all certain that if I went to the Deepwild again, I’d ever get out. “Don’t they have some kind of base?”
“There’s no evidence of one. They never backtrack. My best guess is they’re either staying on the streets or moving between safe houses. I could follow the money, but that’s going to take time, especially because werewolf property goes back for generations, so half the records will be on paper.”
“Thanks, anyway. It was always a long shot.”
If nothing else, I’d probably distracted the Morrígan for long enough that she wasn’t going to rip Tara’s head off anytime soon. And Julian was nowhere to be seen, which meant she was probably safer than I was, especially since I was wandering around with the thing the unstoppable vampire queen was tearing the city apart to find. In a funny way, it was quite liberating. I’d spent so long juggling all this complicated, political shit that it was nice to have my problems stripped back to staying alive. Assuming I could pull that off, I could probably sort out the Morrígan, and if I was lucky, that would sort out the werewolves as well. Then maybe the Council would leave town. And then maybe I could get five minutes with my girlfriend.
“Look,” said Eve. “I’ll keep working on it, and if anything comes up, I’ll let you know.”
“You remember you dismantled my phone, right?”
“I’ll get someone to give you one before you leave.”
“Okay, thanks.” There was an awkward silence. “And, you know, sorry about your arm and, like, everything.”
“It’s fine. It’s just that...” She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Or maybe there were lots of things I wanted to say, and I didn’t know how to say any of them. I stared at the pot instead. “Have you got any bubble wrap?”
They gave me a phone that was flashier than either of the ones I’d lost this week, helped me wrap my urn, and arranged for a car to take me wherever I needed to go. Which was a bit of a problem, because I didn’t know where that was.
The only person I could think of who’d last more than ten seconds if the Morrígan came calling was Nim, but I’d lost her number and the number of Rachel’s call centre with my other phone, and I didn’t have time to do the ritual that would have put me in touch with her. I’d been to dinner at Gabriel’s years ago, but the guy had three kids—there was no way I was dropping in unannounced with a vase full of murder. I had no idea where Jacob hung out, and it probably involved dead people or trains, but I was pretty sure I knew how to get to Michelle. There was a lesbian metal bar near Clapham Junction called the Duchess of Malfi, and last I’d checked, she was using it as her unofficial HQ.
The car dropped me off at St. John’s Hill, and I casually carried my enormous bundle of crockery up the road and into a pub. It was just as dark, noisy, and full of lesbians as I remembered. It smelled of leather, sweat, and beer, and they were playing something I thought was probably Judas Priest or Megadeth, or one of the other three metal bands I’d heard of.
Michelle was at the bar, fiddling with a Zippo, and nursing a shot of whiskey. I stuck my pot on a spare stool, leaned over, and bellowed in her ear that I was looking for Nim.
Michelle shrugged. “So call her.”
“Lost her number.”
Shooting me a look that said you suck, she tossed back her drink, and took me outside. She dug out a battered packet of Marlboro Reds and offered me one. I wasn’t sure it was the time, but I never say no to free fags. We lit up.
“What’s the deal?”
“I’ve got the thing the Morrígan’s looking for, and she’s already come after it once.”
Michelle took a drag on the cigarette and blew the smoke into the flame of her lighter, where it gathered in a hazy spiral. She whispered Nim’s calling name, and then said: “Kate’s got something for you. We’re at the Duchess.”
She snapped the lighter closed and leaned back against the wall to finish the cigarette.
I did the same. It was that or try to make conversation.
I quite liked Michelle. I thought we probably had a lot in common. Unfortunately, one of those things was being shit in social situations.
Just as I was stamping out the stub, a black cab pulled up and Nim got out. She looked like she hadn’t slept properly in days, which was probably true. I kind of wanted to give her a hug and smooth the tangles from her hair, but I couldn’t do that in front of Michelle. Also, girlfriend.
“What did you do, Kate?” she asked.
“Can you narrow it down a bit?”
“Something hurt the Morrígan. Something hurt her badly.”
“Yeah, that was kind of my mum. I think it’s probably temporary, but I’ve got her pot. She tried to kill me to get it back, but it didn’t take.”
Mich
elle lit up another cigarette. “How does that help us?”
“I’m fuzzy on the details, but like, blah-hundred years ago she agreed to go away in exchange for this thing, but I think the Council had to convince her she couldn’t just take it from them first.”
Nim reached out and took the pot. She peeled away the bubble wrap and ran her fingers gently over the cracked surface beneath.
“Um, just so you know, this thing was in a magic circle that stopped her tracking it. And now it, well, isn’t.”
“This is my city, Kate. If I don’t want something found, it won’t be found.”
“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” Otherwise I’d just got us all killed. I guess I could cross Find the thing off my to-do list. That just left Use the thing to defeat the Morrígan, and I had no clue how to get from one to the other. “So, is this it? Can you beat her now?”
“I don’t know. But this has power over her. I can feel it.”
“Julian said it was buried with the Morrígan five thousand years ago. It’s the only thing she actually wants. But I’ve no idea how we, y’know, use it.”
She met my eyes over the rim of the pot. “I’ll confront her in the Dream and tell her we have what she seeks.”
“And that’ll work, will it?”
“It’ll help. It’s a question of sovereignty. Right now, I have something she wants, and I will give it back to her if she relinquishes her claim on my city. We’ve been fighting each other to a standstill for a while now, and I get the sense she’s lashing out because it’s all she can do.”
This was kind of above my pay grade. “Do you need me for anything?”
“This will go better without the interference of the Council or the wolves.”
“They’re not going to listen to me. We’ll just have to hope they keep each other busy.”
Nim gave me one of her mysterious smiles. “You have more influence than you think.”
“I’ll keep an eye on things, but I can’t make any promises. Call me if you need anything. Shit, I’ve got a new mobile number.”
“That won’t be a problem.”