by Alexis Hall
Julian looked up like a meerkat. “Kemsit’s here.”
Oh dear.
We started to edge our way between the headstones towards the Morrígan’s tomb. I had no idea where Nim was, but I really hoped she showed up soon, and I really, really hoped she had a plan.
As we approached the main path, I saw Kemsit standing in a teenagery slouch beside a blingy Victorian obelisk. She was still barefoot, still wearing the same torn jeans and faded T-shirt. A browny-gold cat with really big ears sat bolt upright at her feet.
I circled round to get a better look, just in time to see the Morrígan descending from her tomb, tattered wings trailing behind her.
A strange awareness tingled on the back of my neck. I turned and Nim was there. A few flakes of snow spiralled down from the sky and settled on her hair.
Julian glanced from Kemsit to the Morrígan to Nimue and flicked up her brow. “Nice to see you’ve got this so thoroughly under control, Witch Queen.”
Nim shrugged. “I never said it would be easy.”
“You haven’t got a clue, have you?”
“Bicker later,” I snapped. “Now, what’s the plan? There is a plan, isn’t there?”
Nim touched me lightly on the arm. “I need you to take out the creepy child vampire.”
“You know she could kill me instantly right?”
“Can I just point out,” said Julian pissily, “that we’ve just got Kate acquitted for murdering one member of the Council. Are you now proposing she walk up to another and, to put it crudely, lamp her one?”
“I’ll protect her.”
“Her,” I interrupted, “is standing right here. And, to be fair, she’s not keen on the lamping plan either.”
“If these two kick off, a lot of people are going to die,” said Nim. “I just need you to distract the girl while I talk to the Morrígan.”
“Fine.” I threw my hands in the air. “Protect me.”
Nim took a step towards me and pressed her mouth against mine.
“Oh, you are fucking kidding me,” cried Julian. “You’re protecting her with your lips? New plan. Stop kissing my girlfriend right the fuck now. I’m dealing with this.”
We broke apart, and Julian bamfed across the graveyard, putting herself between Kemsit and the Morrígan.
She put her hands on her hips. “I can see you’re about to have a cataclysmic showdown. But could you possibly consider not?”
Kemsit blinked. “No.”
“You are without the authority of the Council. Stand down.”
“No. Now is the moment to act. I will act.”
The Morrígan lifted an arm and a raven landed on her wrist. “You will try. And I will flay the skin from your body and weave your bones into my hair.”
Julian spun round with a kind of for fuck’s sake look on her face. “Will you shut up?”
Kemsit clenched her fist and Julian dropped.
Fuck.
“All right. All right.” I pulled Nim close. “Get protecting.”
Nim put her lips over mine in a way that was definitely nothing like kissing. I felt her breath, cool like the falling snow, and sweet with secrets.
I didn’t stop to ask if it had worked. I just broke away and dashed over to Julian. She was looking pretty fucking dead. But, since she was already dead, hopefully it wouldn’t take.
Kemsit took a few steps forwards, the cat twisting round her ankles. “You are not needed here. Go.”
“You just re-killed my girlfriend.”
“She will recover. Go.”
There was a rustle of feathers as the Morrígan swept towards me from the other side. So, on the one hand, they weren’t fighting each other anymore. On the other, they were fighting me.
Nimue stepped out of the mist behind the Morrígan and tapped her on the shoulder. “I would speak with you, Dread Queen.”
The Morrígan turned slowly, but I didn’t see what happened next because at that point Kemsit grabbed me round the throat.
Well, I wasn’t killed instantly, so something must have been working right. Still, being throttled? Not so great.
“You have become an obstruction.”
I wrapped one hand round her wrist and slammed the other into her elbow. She was old, she was strong, but when you got right down to it, she still had the body of a twelve-year-old. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”
Kemsit pulled her arm free and placed the palm of her hand against my chest. I could feel a weight against my heart, but it carried on beating.
She frowned.
I felt kind of shitty about it, but I backhanded her across the face. She staggered and slipped and landed in an undignified heap on the ground.
There was a yowl from somewhere near my ankles, and the cat leapt at me, hissing and spitting and scrabbling its way up my chest like a really angry mountaineer.
I ripped it off and held it at arm’s length while it wriggled and swiped. Not really sure what to do with it, I chucked it over my shoulder.
Kemsit was already on her feet. She looked vaguely confused. I guess she hadn’t been in an actual fight for a couple of millennia.
“Look,” I said. “I basically can’t hurt you, and you basically can’t hurt me. Shall we just call this a draw?”
“You interfere in things that do not concern you.”
I jerked my thumb over my shoulder. “Actually, she’s interfering, I’m just helping.”
She stared past me at whatever was going on with Nim and the Morrígan. “Who is the mortal?”
“Witch Queen of London.”
“Ah.” She paused. The cat slunk between my legs and crawled into Kemsit’s arms. “That is acceptable.”
Then she turned and walked away.
Okay. I had no idea what had just happened, but it’d turned out a lot better than I’d expected.
I knelt down by Julian and opened up my wrist against her fangs. A shiver of decidedly inappropriate pleasure ran through me, but I grit my teeth and rode it out. Julian stirred slightly, so I glanced up to see what the hell was going on with Nim and the Morrígan.
They stood facing each other, a few feet apart. The air was thick was snow and feathers.
“And why,” asked the Morrígan, “should I not simply tear out your eyes and feed your carcass to my birds?”
Nim tucked her hands into the pocket of her hoodie and shrugged. She looked very small and scarily mortal right now. “I don’t know. Why don’t you?”
The Morrígan swept forwards in a swirl of black feathers and flashing talons. I winced, and by the time I stopped wincing, the Morrígan was on her knees at Nim’s feet, snow dusting her tangled hair and ruined wings.
“What you do in the rest of these isles,” said Nimue softly, “is not my concern, but I am Queen of this city.”
“I was here when the city was nothing but earth, and I shall be when it is nothing but ashes.”
“And then you may return and be Queen over a dead land. But while my city lives, you will sleep.”
“I came only for what is mine.”
The snow was falling thickly now, turning the world silver like in my dreams, and surrounding Nimue in a shifting mantle. “It will be returned to you. And you will return to your rest.”
The Morrígan bowed her head. “I accept.”
There was a swirl in the mist and a roar of engines in the distance. After a minute or two, Michelle and a couple of her gang walked through the gates. As she approached, wings of fire unfurled from her shoulders and flames danced between her hands, forming the shape of a sword. A tall young man with red, waist-length hair was cradling the pot in his arms.
The Morrígan rose to her feet, reached out and took the beaker. For a moment, she was utterly still in the snow, her fingers curling tenderly over its broken surface.
&
nbsp; Then she turned, walked into the tomb, and the doors closed behind her.
Nim’s hands traced a pattern in the air and the chain that had sealed the tomb coiled itself back into place. Then she knelt, took up handful of snow, and blew gently across her palm. The flakes stirred and danced, shimmered silver for a moment in the air and settled over the door. It hardened swiftly into frost, which sparkled like tiny stars, and then faded away.
“Right, pub,” said Michelle.
Nim dusted off her hands. “You coming, Kate?”
I helped a still-shaky Julian to her feet. “I think we’re good.”
The mages disappeared into the mist, leaving me alone—at last—with my vampire girlfriend. Okay, we were in a graveyard, but with the snow and everything, it was quite pretty.
“You know,” she drawled, “if you keep kissing witches, we’re going to have words.”
“It’s just the way it works.”
“Oh, how terribly convenient.”
This probably wasn’t the best time to tell her I’d accidentally kissed Corin. Then again, the last time I’d decided it was a bad time to tell Julian something, it hadn’t worked out so well.
“Um,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Patrick & Sofia
I woke to the taste of wine and rose leaves, the smell of fresh coffee, and Julian hard at work between my legs.
It beat the hell out of an alarm clock.
Afterwards, we lay in a happy pile, and I appreciated the perks of dating the vampire prince of pleasure.
“So,” I asked, “Mercy’s Prince of Swords now, huh?”
Julian stretched her arms lazily over her head. “You can never just enjoy a moment, can you?”
“I like to have an idea what’s going on. It stops me getting, y’know, killed.”
“Well, it hasn’t been formalised yet, but after last night’s performance, I doubt Caradoc will have much support from the Council. He’s older, but he’s never been a thinker.”
“Was Aeglica?”
“No, and look what happened to him.”
I didn’t actually like to think about what happened to Aeglica. As vampires went, he hadn’t been that bad. And I really try to avoid murdering people if I can help it. “What’s going to happen to the Morrígan’s army?”
“They’ll be dealt with quietly.”
“You mean you’re going to kill them all?”
She rolled onto an elbow and gazed at me lazily. “No, we’re going to send them to live on a lovely farm in the country with all the blood they can drink. Yes, of course we’re going to kill them.”
“But they’re people. You can’t just slaughter them because it’s convenient.”
“They’ve been turned, abandoned, and let loose on the city. They haven’t learned to control their bloodlust, and we haven’t got the means to teach them. It’s terribly unfortunate, sweeting, but we don’t have prisons, and we don’t really do rehabilitation.”
“I sent this guy to Acton, and he seems to have sorted him out.”
Julian shrugged. “He could probably save a few but not hundreds, and how would you decide who lives and who dies? It’s the only way, sweeting.” She slithered over and kissed my nose. “But it’s adorable that you care.”
“I’m not sure that opposing mass murder counts as a cute little foible. I might as well have just left it to the werewolves.”
“That was a question of what Pryce would call demarcation.”
I sighed. “Of course he would.”
There was a silence.
Julian turned her big blue eyes up to mine again. “Well, since it means so much to you, I’ll see what I can do. But I’m not promising.”
It probably says something about the state of your love life that your girlfriend promising to try and murder slightly fewer people seems like a really sweet and romantic gesture. “Thanks. I do actually appreciate it.”
“You can make it up to me later.” Julian slid her leg between mine, leaving me in no doubt how exactly she was expecting me to do that.
“Um, the guy I sent off with the Knights. He’s not going to be randomly executed, is he? I went to a lot of trouble to find him.”
“I shouldn’t worry. Acton never lets anyone interfere with his little projects.”
“His sister sort of hired me to find him. I told her he was lying low because Reasons, but I don’t know what happens now he’s, well, dead but still walking around.”
“Oh, it’s fine, darling.” She grinned. “We’ll just kill everybody he’s ever met or cared about.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Kate, we’ve been dealing with this sort of situation for centuries. It’s up to him whether he wants to reintegrate with his family, and if he does, Sebastian’s people will handle it.”
“I’d assumed there’d be some kind of don’t-tell-anybody-ever rule.”
“We tried that, it just caused a lot of unnecessary headaches. If the survival of our species could be jeopardised by one individual telling his sister that we exist, we would have been wiped out long ago.” Julian rolled over me and kissed me deeply. “As much as I’d love to stay with you all day, I should go. The Velvet’s been closed too long already.”
I suppose technically I had a job as well. I didn’t have any work, but I still had a job.
“There’s one more thing,” I said, watching Julian slither interestingly into her tight leather trousers. “Can you take something to the Council for me?”
Julian stopped and gave me a look. “You mean, as well as asking for clemency for a bunch of uncontrollable blood-crazed fledglings?”
“This isn’t a request, it’s information. I think Henry Percy woke the Morrígan.”
“Mad alchemist Henry Percy? Why would he do that?”
“I think...um...he wanted to distract everybody so he could become a god.”
“Well, the man certainly knows how to divert attention. We’ll look into it.”
“And the god thing?”
“I’m not sure the Council has a policy on ascending to godhood. But if he did really wake the Morrígan, we’re going to be very cross indeed.”
Julian finished dressing and left a few minutes later. I had a shower, a coffee, and a banana, not necessarily in that order. Elise was just on her way out to oversee the repairs on my Corsa, so that left me with nothing to do except treat myself to a day off and a Downton Abbey marathon. Or I would have done, if I could work the TiVo.
I was still fiddling with one of the three new remote controls that had shown up in the front room since Elise arrived when the window burst open and Patrick barged in.
“Katharine,” he rasped.
He looked like shit. His skin was pale, his cheeks were gaunt, his eyes were red. Also, his hair was a mess, but that was kind of his look.
“What the fuck?”
He leaned over me and grabbed my arms. “It’s Sofia.”
“Let me guess, you’ve dumped her again.”
“If only I had.” He let go of me for a moment to put a hand tragically to his forehead. “She has been taken.”
“Can’t you just go and get her back?”
Patrick has this creepy ability to tell where his girlfriends are every second of the day out to a radius of several hundred miles.
“Something is keeping us apart.”
“And you think I can help, how?”
He pulled away and stalked up and down my very small apartment. “If you have any feelings left for me at all, you will help me.”
“Patrick, I don’t have any feelings left for you at all. Unless you count irritation and wishing you’d leave me alone.”
He whirled back around and got right up in my grill. “I know I have hurt you, Katharine, but Sofia is blameless in all of this. She is innocent an
d pure like a white dove I—”
“Oh, will you shut up?” As much as I would have loved to tell Patrick to fuck off, it sounded like Sofia was really in trouble, and Patrick’s fetishes aside, I wasn’t going to let an innocent girl get hurt. She’d already told me she was having visions of people trying to kill her, although since she’d thought it was me, they probably weren’t a hundred percent accurate. Unless it was one of those movie things where I go to try to save her and end up killing her with the power of irony. “Look, tell me what happened, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“We were at a ball at her school.”
Wait. He actually took her? He must have grown as a person. I made go on noises.
“I was called away by the Prince of Wands because of the events in Highgate Cemetery. I was gone less than half an hour, but when I returned, she’d been taken, and I could no longer sense her.”
“And you didn’t see anybody?”
Patrick shook his head tormentedly.
Okay, that meant Sofia’s visions were the only clues I had. It was a good job they’d been pretty familiar. “You know she had dreams, right?”
“Of course, she told me everything.”
“About the people trying to kill her?”
His face froze, and he was silent. I took that as a no. I wouldn’t have told him when I was her age either. “She said she dreamed of a man with a golden mask and a house with dragons outside it.”
Patrick posed dramatically. “Then I know where she is.”
“Yeah, yeah, so do I. I was there too, remember? Now get your car and meet me in five minutes.”
“No, Katharine. You have done enough. I must do this alone.”
“Patrick, don’t be such a bellend. You asked for my help and you’re getting it whether you want it or not.”
“I’m not coming back to you, Katharine.” He turned away from me and stretched out one arm in a gesture of anguished rejection. “I love Sofia now.”
“I know you might not believe this, but I actually care more about the life of a seventeen-year-old girl than where you stick your dick.”
Patrick disappeared through my window and a few minutes later his silver Volvo S60R pulled up outside my flat. Annoyingly, I was probably going to wind up fighting a castle full of vampires, I’d given my gold dagger to the girl they’d already kidnapped, and I’d had my magic sword stolen by one of the vampires I was about to be fighting. Which meant we were basically going in armed only with my hand-me-down faery powers and Patrick’s misplaced sense of righteousness. I mean, I suppose the sensible thing to do would have been to take a step back, ring Elise, possibly Julian, and try to get backup, but we were pushed for time, Patrick would probably have driven off without me, and I’ve never been a big fan of sensible anyway.