He bowed to Fiona and swept a hand towards the mirror. “If you will, my dear.”
“If I stand in front of your silly mirror, will you let me go?” Fiona asked.
But Alice didn’t wait. She dragged Fiona to the mirror, positioned her in front of it with a firm grip on her upper arms and looked over her shoulder to see what Fiona saw.
She was peripherally aware that the edges of the glass were marked in a flowing, sprawling script. Its letters shifted like snakes. But that detail would come back to her later, as would the delight on the reflection of Alice’s face.
Fiona looked in the mirror and yelped.
There was a monster on her head.
Chapter 7 – Fiona and Jessica, Tuesday Night
Back at Hawthorn House, Billy watched from a rooftop across the street as Fiona emerged from Flat 2’s front door. She headed off in the direction of the nearest Tube station. She’s on her way.
Thank you, Alice replied. Who else is home?
The mother and the little sister, Billy said.
How will you get in?
The little lost boy act, Billy said. Never fails on mothers.
Let me know what you find. The sense of Alice vanished. Her latest warlock boyfriend, that twit Damon, probably wanted her attention.
Billy pulled off his coat and tucked it into the corner of a heating exhaust stack. Lost and cold was sure to get him in the door – the appearance of it anyway, because the coat was just for show. He wore it because people wondered if they saw him without it in the October night air.
He watched an evening jogger huff past, then dropped down onto the street. It was the work of moments to compose his features into wide-eyed fright. He pressed the doorbell of Flat 2 Hawthorn House.
He could feel the house looking down at him and it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. But that was ridiculous. Houses couldn’t look at you. He made himself stand still and keep his pretend-scared expression in place.
The door opened and Fiona’s mother, Amelia, looked down at him. Her expression shifted from tired irritation to concern. All his senses were open to her and he knew her in a heartbeat. Overworked, underpaid, two failed marriages, most dreams long since given up – and an aching loss of which she was unaware.
“Yes?” Amelia asked.
Her contradictory emotional states nearly shook him out of his act. “I’m lost. I don’t have a phone. Can I come in and call my parents?”
Pity softened her features and he knew he had her. It was always easy with mothers, looking as he did. It helped so much when he hunted.
“Come in,” she said. “The phone’s in the living room.”
He stepped across the threshold and even though he’d fed already that evening, it crossed his mind that he could take some of her blood. His act had softened her up already and his modest ability to mesmerise would take away both her resistance and any memory of him feeding. He pictured himself curled up on her lap, face nuzzling against her neck, fangs lengthening, the pulse beneath her skin calling –
Bolted to the ceiling in the hallway was a mechanical contraption that looked like a rocket launcher. It hung next to the light fitting and was connected to it by a length of copper wire. A psychic effect poked against his forehead, trying to make him unsee it.
There was a crystal bound to the side of it and it thrummed with psychic energy. He stared up at it, baffled. The contraption swivelled around and hinged down to face him.
Billy leapt aside as it spat metal flechettes at him. Despite his speed he wasn’t fast enough. One caught him in the bicep and his whole upper arm filled with pain.
He raced out of the door, leapt from the middle of the street, cleared the cars parked on the far side and landed on the roof from which he’d first surveyed the house. He scrambled over the roof-ridge and took cover on the other side, gripping the edges of the tiles.
His arm was on fire. With shaking fingers he plucked the flechette from his arm and flung it aside. It made a tiny metal sound. He clapped his hand to the wound and waited for it to seal.
But cooling blood still oozed from the wound, long after it should have stopped on its own. He bit his lip and willed the wound to close. It obeyed him, but reluctantly. There was still a fire in his flesh and his whole arm felt weak.
Nervous, an animal abruptly aware it might no longer be at the pinnacle of the food chain, Billy leaned close to the flechette. It was a thin needle of metal. He didn’t know much about metals, but he knew they weren’t supposed to hurt his kind the way this one had hurt him.
He knew he should take it back to Alice and Vivien, but the idea of touching it again terrified him.
Billy looked over the roof-ridge. Amelia stood outside her front door, looking up and down the street. To her slow, human senses he had vanished in a blur. Billy waited until she gave up and went back inside. He heard the door lock.
It didn’t matter. He had permission to enter now. He could find another way in.
A light shone from the loft window. Billy tested the strength of his injured arm and licked the blood from his palm. He dropped to the street, crossed too fast for anyone to see and scrambled up the side of the house. He moved silently across the tiles to the protruding loft window and leaned over the edge of it to look inside.
The room through the window was a combination of storage, living space and work area. Billy paid little attention to the strange devices and apparatus scattered about the place in various states of assembly. His gaze fixed on the back of a girl no more than ten years old. She crouched over something on the floor. Billy saw a screwdriver in her hand.
The window was open a crack, but he had to make sure it made no noise when he pulled it up. He touched the window with his fingertips and whispered a word Alice had taught him, given to her by one of her warlock pets. The rust-flaked hinges were silent as he opened the window.
He slid inside and touched down on the floor, soundless as a killing thought. The room smelled of dust, metal, oil and electrical parts. The girl worked on, oblivious to his presence. She had fitted a giant glove with metal parts around her right hand and she fiddled with the plugs that connected it to what he mistook for an electrical generator.
Billy slipped around the coffee table in front of the sofa.
A giant bronze tortoise to his right, that he had assumed to be a sculpture or toy, lifted its head, focused crystal eyes on him and said, “He is in position, Miss Jessica.”
The girl leapt to her feet and swung around. She thrust the giant glove at him. In her other hand Billy saw she had a grip with a button on top of it.
“Hi,” the girl said. She pressed her thumb on the trigger and the generator whined.
White lightning shot out of the glove and slammed into Billy. It threw him against the wall so fast he wasn’t even aware of moving.
Billy howled in pain. He got up, his whole body shaking. The girl laughed and pressed the trigger button again.
There was a pop and a hiss from her glove.
“Drat!” she said.
Billy bared his fangs. “You’re going to pay for that!”
“I have him, Miss Jessica,” the bronze tortoise said.
A hatch on its shell opened and a glowing coil on a mechanical arm swung out. Billy tried to dive for the window but the coil whooped and another bolt of energy flung him to the floor. He lay there twitching and cursing.
The girl stood over him while she pulled off her glove. “Is this the vampire you saw last night, Mr Shell?”
“It is, Miss Jessica.”
“How do you interrogate a vampire, anyway?”
“I am afraid I have never had the occasion, Miss Jessica.”
The girl grinned at Billy. “Let’s see what we can figure out.”
Fiona stood with her arms folded while the people at the party debated around her. Saying I’m right here you know had done nothing to stop them speaking as if she was just another piece of art. She considered whether or not to start t
apping her foot.
Alice, fascinated by the monster on top of Fiona’s head, kept poking and prodding at her boyfriend, the increasingly sullen and argumentative Damon, to come up with a way of removing it from its perch. Damon responded with lengthy explanations as to why Alice’s ideas were rubbish.
“Can we not shift the matter to dreams?” said a man who looked a lot like Akin Tonno. “In a dream, where the subjective nature of reality is much more prone to conscious manipulation, we might be able to grapple with the creature.”
“You’re assuming killing a dream of the monster would remove the monster.” Damon’s tone for the last fifteen minutes had alternated between lecturing, condescension and disgust. “That’s not going to work unless the dream monster is the monster’s presence in the dream. How will you get that thing in there with you? Do you think it even has a brain to dream with?”
“The dream world is far more linked to the real world than you realise,” Akin’s possible brother said, his spine straightening. “Broaden your mind a little just for once, Damon.”
“Just because you can make up some silly idea doesn’t mean it can work in reality.”
“If we could drug or hypnotise the monster somehow,” Akin said.
Damon snorted. “Drug it? I don’t see a mouth, do you?”
Fiona looked sideways at the mirror. The monster on top of her head was made out of four arms that stood directly upwards, like a tall top hat. Its four long hands covered her eyes and ears. At the top the arms came together into shoulders that melded into one big lump. There was a single eye with a star-shaped iris in the lump. The eye kept swinging this way and that, fixing on first one person and then another. The elbows flexed like a person doing squatting exercises and the fingers drummed without rhythm on her skin.
She could feel nothing of it. She couldn’t even touch it when she grabbed for it.
The mirror wasn’t tall enough to show Fiona’s feet, but Alice claimed another monster was hiding in her shadow. Fiona stood on tiptoes, trying to see it, then scolded herself and dropped onto her heels.
“Why are you all talking about dreams anyway?” Fiona wasn’t happy about simultaneously being the centre of attention and being left out.
“We’re being terribly rude, aren’t we?” Alice took Fiona by the arm and steered her towards a padded couch at the side of the room. “I do apologise. It’s just that I find magic so interesting.”
“Vampires are all about blood, remember?” Fiona said.
Alice lifted her shoulders in a tiny motion. “I used to be all about blood. I spent two hundred years hunting, killing and feeding.”
“You were a wonder,” said the long-haired man with the French accent. His name was Vivien and Fiona was supposed to believe he was a vampire too. “I miss that Alice. She was one of our finest warriors. One day you must tell me where you buried her.”
The air between Alice and Vivien crackled. Fiona tried to edge sideways.
Alice’s grip on her arm tightened and she was all smiles again. “But now – magic. There’s always something new. I’ve never heard of a monster in a person’s shadow before, or of one that can only be seen in a mirror.” She glanced at the top of Fiona’s head and then at her shoes. “You truly have no idea how either of these creatures came to be attached to you?”
“No, but I should very much like to find the person who does,” Fiona said.
“The one in your shadow, clearly, is a protector,” Alice said. “As for the one on your head, it must prevent you from seeing what lies in our world.” She giggled, sounding as young as she looked. “All that supernatural stuff, as you put it.”
Fiona resisted the urge to pat the top of her head again. “You think someone here can get rid of them?”
“Damon is a warlock,” Alice said. “He has too high an opinion of himself, but he is not without ability. He is good at finding things and seeing things far away. Akin’s brother, Marwan, is an oneiromancer. He knows the magic of dreams. In fact, they make a business of it. The Tonno brothers are dream dealers.”
“How can you sell a dream? For that matter, why would you want to buy one?”
“They pay people for their experiences,” Alice said. “Akin let me see them do it once. Marwan extracts the memory from the seller and it becomes a psychic fluid. If you drink it you dream the memory. It’s a lot like living it.”
“Why not just live it for yourself? Oh wait, you’re supposed to be a vampire. You can’t have a summer holiday in Spain. I suppose you burst into flames when the sun comes up.”
Alice’s grip on her arm shifted. “The young ones do.”
“I don’t mind telling you, I’m not convinced this isn’t all some elaborate trick,” Fiona said.
“I can tell.” Alice looked like she was about to get up, but changed her mind. Her enthusiasm for all this magic nonsense she wanted Fiona to believe in quashed her irritation. “We’ll open your eyes to the real world around you, Fiona. It is brighter and darker than you can imagine, with secrets you would scarcely believe.”
“Alice?” Vivien said. “I believe our magicians have agreed upon a solution.”
Fiona allowed Alice to draw her to her feet. “I trust I’m not going to have to prick a thumb or anything?”
There were several frowns from the group, but Alice laughed. “Oh Fiona, don’t offer to bleed in this company.”
“Come and stand here,” Damon said to Fiona. He hesitated slightly at the end and then scowled. Fiona realised he had forgotten her name.
Letting out an irritated breath, she stood in front of the mirror. She threw a glare at the monster on her head. It shifted with what she hoped was uneasiness.
Alice bounced on her toes at the prospect of seeing magic. “What are you going to do?”
“I will exchange the reflection of the creature for the creature itself,” Damon said. He took off his jacket and looked around for somewhere to put it. Akin’s servant, Gerald, stepped up behind him and took it. Damon barely acknowledged him.
“What’s that meant to achieve?” Fiona asked.
“We can see the reflection.” Damon rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. “We may be able to interact with it.”
He moved in behind Fiona, uncomfortably near, close enough that she could feel his breath on her hair. He stretched his arms forward so they brushed her ears and splayed his fingers outwards. With a great deal of care and, it looked like, some difficulty, he folded some fingers, crossed others and bent his thumbs. She noticed the ring on the middle finger of his right hand. It was set with a green gemstone.
She felt his breath change as if he’d spoken, but she didn’t hear his voice.
Everything went dark as hands appeared over her eyes and ears.
She heard the muffled sound of glass shattering and cries of alarm, even as she slapped at the hands on her head. All she managed to do was hit herself. The monster was still insubstantial.
But then it fell into pieces that vanished as they spilled towards the floor. Fiona hunched her shoulders against the rain of debris, but she felt no impact as it tumbled down her.
“Oh,” Akin said. “Oh dear. That mirror was immensely valuable.”
The mirror was destroyed, but it hadn’t simply fallen apart. It had wrenched itself off its hinges and collapsed inwards as if sucked in, breaking into smaller and smaller pieces as it went. When the force pulling it inwards failed it fell to the floor, a jagged ball of crushed glass.
Alice’s gaze jumped from the mirror to Fiona to Damon. “What happened?”
Damon cleared his throat and tried to sound more certain than he looked. “The creature was meant to conceal magic. I suppose it didn’t like being inside a magic mirror.”
Marwan frowned. “You knew this would happen and you didn’t tell us?”
Fiona didn’t listen as the argument started. She was too busy staring at the people around her.
Now she could see them.
Alice was paler than white, colde
r than death but darkly vital. Her eyes shone like naked stars and she wore time like a cloak of endless midnight. All about her was the smell of blood. The thirst for it. The need for it. The love of it.
The two other vampires, Vivien and the black woman whose name she didn’t —
Zarina
— were the same, each in their own way. She saw their nails and their fangs and the violence coiled within them where their hearts should be. She saw their speed, the thrill of the hunt, the ecstasy of the kill.
Zarina bristled. “Did she just pull my name out of my head?”
Light that wasn’t light, light that was everywhere, bent around both Damon and that wasn’t even his name, his real name was Donald and Akin’s brother, Marwan. The light was so much everywhere that she didn’t even notice it until it passed through them, like light through a prism. Marwan was a gateway to worlds beyond the world of waking. Damon was an eye that saw into the chasms of space and time. The gemstones in the rings on their fingers were lenses for directing and focusing that light.
Alice came to stand in front of her. “Fiona?”
“She did,” Zarina said. “She pulled my name out of my head. She can’t just do that. I have psychic defences.”
Fiona backed away from them. On the floor, silver smoke writhed up from the crushed mirror and within it she felt the oozing corpse of the monster that had been on her head. She looked down at her feet and saw her shadow. It was weak in the soft lighting of the parlour, but it was also an inky black pool and a presence watched her from deep within it.
“What’s wrong with her?” Vivien asked.
“Her eyes are open,” Marwan said. “I think, very open.”
She tried to back away from her shadow but it followed her. She tried to get around it, but it moved relative to the sources of light in the room and confused her.
“Fiona.” Alice padded closer, stretching out her hands tipped with talons for rending human flesh. “I think I know what you’re going through. It’s confusing for us vampires when we’re newly turned too. Your skin is on fire and the night is full of sounds and scents that demand your attention. And then there’s the thirst screaming in every fibre of your being.”
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