Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  Jacob took a car key from his pocket. “You know how to drive?” Everyone in America knew how to drive, or so Jacob thought, but it struck him as a reasonable question to ask of the man-shaped thing standing in front of him.

  “I know.”

  “I’ve sorted out a rental for you. I’ll give you the details on the drive over.”

  Jacob’s own car was parked illegally in the quick drop-off zone. He had invested in a crystal resonance device years ago that projected a discouragement field around his car. Traffic cops, parking wardens and even car thieves saw it, but without thinking about it they left it alone. The little device was worth the very many pennies it had cost him.

  Miss Koh didn’t even try to get in the front passenger seat. Jacob swung into the driver’s seat and watched Anthony lever himself in on the passenger side. He moved as though he had to consider each individual action.

  Jacob had a folder prepared. “This is Robert Cromwell.” He passed a photo over. Xethe had taken it from the London Underground video feeds, using records of Cromwell’s fare card to narrow down a time and station. “According to Greg Ferguson’s files, he was invited along to the last meeting but his remains weren’t found at the scene by the police. He’s a werewolf, so he’s easily capable of doing what was done. He has no affiliations with the London werewolf packs for some reason, so you won’t have any trouble with them for killing him.”

  Anthony held the photo up and looked at it for three of Jacob’s racing heartbeats. His head swung back to Jacob and his arm stayed where it was.

  Jacob pushed the word weird out of his mind and pulled out a road map of south-east England he’d bought that morning. He had already folded it to display the areas Jacob wanted to show and the route from Birmingham to Dover was highlighted.

  “Cromwell will be making this journey tonight,” Jacob said.

  “This is prediction?” Anthony asked.

  “Yes. Highly reliable. Most of the factors resolved last night. The few that remain will resolve between five and six this evening but mostly have to do with small variations in timing. Cromwell will be in an Odd’s Transport van that looks like this.” He pulled another photo from the folder and passed it over, but Anthony’s hidden gaze was fixed on the map. “He’s picking a cargo up in Birmingham and driving it to Dover, then catching the ferry across to Calais and driving on to the Paris outskirts.”

  Anthony dropped the photo of Cromwell. He placed his finger on the map where the M1 motorway passed Northampton. “He will be here,” he said.

  The proximity of Anthony’s flesh made Jacob’s skin feel clammy and hot, but that wasn’t what really unnerved him. To single out that place, Anthony must see in more than just the present.

  “Yeah, we believe he may stop there,” Jacob said. Catherine had given him that over the phone. “It isn’t a certainty though. If you’re looking to set an ambush, all we know for sure are sites in Birmingham and the Channel ferry stops. You want to avoid the end-point in Paris. Too many witnesses.”

  “He will be here,” Anthony said. He drew his hand back and Jacob was disgusted with himself for the whimpering relief he felt.

  “One other detail.” Jacob pulled out two more photos, though not of Robert Cromwell. One had also been taken from the London Underground video feed while the other looked like a school graduation photo. The school photo was clearer, but the person in it was visibly younger.

  “This is Julian Blackwood,” Jacob said. “He’ll be driving. He’s a warlock and not to be underestimated. He’s not involved in the killing of the Fergusons, but he’ll be in your way.”

  Anthony didn’t move to take the photos. Jacob hesitated. His mouth twitched with questions but he forced them down and put the photos back in the folder.

  “Anything else you need from me?” Jacob asked.

  “No.”

  “I’ll take you to your rental.”

  He drove out to the rental place on the Northern Perimeter Road and watched Anthony make his way over to the car Jacob had paid for earlier in the day. Just the way Anthony moved made a reflex deep in the animal part of his brain try to pull his eyes away. He watched until the car started and pulled out, just to be sure Anthony really could drive.

  He glanced at the empty seat beside him, then looked over his shoulder at Miss Koh. “Going to stay back there then?”

  Miss Koh looked slightly ill. “Do you really know what you’ve got yourself mixed up with?”

  Jacob put his car in gear and made for the car park exit. A little of that smug feeling was back and why shouldn’t it be? The Reverend’s assassin would kill Julian just for being there and leave the cargo he and Cromwell were transporting lying about to be picked up. Three birds with one stone and at no extra cost.

  But why was Anthony so sure they would stop at that motorway service station near Northampton? Even Catherine could only give him about a three in four chance on that one. Good enough to put a team on if you had the resources, but not if you had only sent one guy.

  “You didn’t tell him about the cargo,” Miss Koh said as they reached the M4.

  “That’s no business of his. I doubt he’ll even be interested in it.”

  “You’re going to try and guess what that thing thinks?”

  Jacob pushed the question out of his mind and ran through a mental list of odd job boys, people like the Archie guy Julian killed at Hammersmith Station, who could be at the motorway service station that night with a van.

  Alice stood in an empty room with a floor made of glass. Below the floor there was a second layer of glass, separated from the first by less than a foot of space for soundproofing purposes, and a series of eight smaller rooms in what had once been a cellar. It still looked like a cellar, but one of Alice’s house-mates had converted it into a hunting ground.

  The cellar was completely dark. It had no light sources and the glass was one-way, to keep out any light from the viewing room above.

  Alice hadn’t been told the name of the woman stumbling around in the darkness below her feet. Sometimes she liked to know them because it drew her into the process, in a way, and she missed that feeling. It had been a long time since she had allowed herself to hunt.

  Billy perched on an old wooden box on the other side of the cellar from the woman. He tapped a plank from another broken box against a metal pole. The noise visibly kicked the woman’s fear up two or three more notches. Billy delicately licked his other hand – he had already blooded her, sweeping by her almost too quietly for her to hear and slicing her cheek with his nails.

  The door to the glass-floored room opened and Damon stepped clumsily into the darkness. He whispered and snapped his fingers and the room filled with green light. It was dim to a human’s senses, but bright to Alice.

  “You’re up early,” Damon said. “It’s still a couple of hours until sundown.”

  He sounded peeved. His real name was Donald Green but he didn’t think that suited a warlock of, as he liked to think of it, the dark arts. He had grown more and more proprietary of late. She had enjoyed that game once or twice before with stronger men, but Damon was too small-minded for it to be any fun.

  And she wasn’t in the mood.

  He came up behind her and slid his hands around her waist. The green light that hovered near his hand swung around in front of her.

  “You’re blocking my view,” Alice said.

  The light winked out. “Is Billy down there? Doesn’t he ever get tired of playing the same old game?”

  “No,” Alice said, feeling too bored to explain.

  The woman found the spade, one of many props Billy had arranged around the cellar. She hefted it and turned in the direction she thought Billy’s tapping sound came from. Through the microphones in the cellar and the speakers in the glass-floored room, Alice heard her scream, “Where are you? What is this?”

  “Has he just started? They’re usually crying more when it’s been going on for a while.” He liked to think he was immune to f
ear, Damon did, which Alice had at first found intriguing, but really he was just an asshole, which wasn’t intriguing at all.

  He tried to get her attention by lifting his hand and conjuring small, dancing green flames. “Stop that.” She slapped his hand – gently, because it took very little of her strength to shatter human bones. But Damon still grunted in pain.

  “Is she like the rest, Billy’s latest toy?” Damon asked. “Another yummy mummy or sexy school teacher? That boy has some unresolved mother issues, I think.”

  “Call him a boy to his face and find out for yourself,” Alice said. Billy was frozen forever at the age of twelve.

  Damon snorted. “You’d protect me.”

  Alice was silent.

  His voice hitched up angrily. “Anyway, I can handle a vampire.”

  Alice turned around and his arms fell away from her. She was, to his eyes, an impression of pale skin and white-blonde hair in the darkness. His scent changed to fear and a sense of outrage, because he thought himself entitled to being unafraid of her.

  Before she could decide what to do about him, Vivien’s thoughts reached her. There is a problem. You must come.

  She glanced downwards and saw from the tilt of his head that Billy had also heard the summons. He looked up through the darkness and the layers of glass to where he, with his incredibly acute senses, knew her to be. He shrugged. Billy dropped the piece of wood, strode over to the woman, dodged the spade and knocked her out with a soft blow to the back of her neck.

  He looked up at Alice again. Game paused.

  The entire house was awake. Vivien had sent the human servants to rouse the house’s other two vampire occupants and call them to the parlour. Zarina, who still looked half asleep, had brought one of her boys with her and they sprawled elegantly on one of the parlour’s plush couches. Rooster hulked against a cabinet of old books, his thick arms folded across his bare, slab-muscled chest.

  They were her allies in the games of status the vampires played amongst themselves. They manoeuvred and schemed and betrayed and, once in a long while, engaged in well-attended duels. They used wealth as markers, most of them, though some few understood power was the true marker. For vampires, peace was an anathema. Denied the warfare that was common before the shadow treaty, they resorted to near-bloodless games instead. Vivien was the leader of Alice’s group. It was the modern fashion to call themselves a coterie, but sometimes Alice wished it was still fitting to call themselves a war band.

  Alice perched on one of the free couches and Damon dropped down next to her, shooting the rest of the room a wary look.

  “The school girl thing again, Alice?” Zarina asked, taking in Alice’s clothes. “I thought you swore off that.”

  “I never swear off anything for long,” Alice said. Being permanently seventeen, it was one of the games she could play. When she was in the mood.

  “You look bored though. Time to show your boy there the metal spiky broom? I know you’re not into girls, but that Fiona is just your kind of strange.”

  “Isn’t a spiky metal broom called a rake?” Billy asked as he hopped into the room. He sat cross-legged on one of the couches and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “I have a rake downstairs if you want one, Alice.”

  Zarina pouted. “I’m sure it’s filthy with dust.”

  “It’s supposed to be dusty, it’s a cellar,” Billy said. “I wish you’d let me have rats. Do you know how hard they scream when a rat runs over them?” He rocked with laughter.

  They smelled Vivien before he entered the room. They smelled the blood and charred flesh he brought with him, along with another familiar scent. Alice was already on her feet by the time the door from the lift opened. Rooster had unfolded his arms and his cord-like jaw muscles rippled as he clenched his teeth.

  Vivien, tall and sombre, pushed a wheelchair in front of him. The faceless, shrivelled vampire in the chair would have been unrecognisable had the others not known his scent.

  “Dean!” Billy cried.

  “Fuck me,” Rooster said. “What the fuck happened?”

  Vivien put a hand on Dean’s shoulder. “He dialled the emergency number. They could only identify him by caller ID.”

  Alice stepped closer and crouched in front of him. Dean was barely conscious. The medics of the vampires’ emergency service had shoved a plastic tube through the ruin of his face and down his throat. The tube snaked around to a blood bag hanging from a hook on the wheelchair.

  “It’s a gunshot wound,” Alice said. “I can smell the gunpowder.”

  “He hasn’t been coherent, but I’ve been able to read his recent memories,” Vivien said. “The gun was his own. He went to avenge the death of his first child.”

  “He found the fuckers who did it?” Rooster asked.

  “Kevin’s flatmate killed him. A werewolf.”

  Alice frowned. “Who missed that, and how?”

  “We all make mistakes, Alice,” Vivien said. He squeezed Dean’s shoulder.

  “What happened to the gun?” Alice asked.

  “The police have it, but I have made arrangements.”

  “Who cares about all that?” Billy asked. “A werewolf killed one of our kind. They owe us blood!”

  Vivien nodded. “I will speak to the council tonight. We will have what is ours. There is more, however.” He fixed his bright blue eyes on Alice. “When Dean confronted the werewolf, Julian Blackwood was there.”

  Alice felt her fingers tingling as her nails became talons. In her mouth her teeth sharpened into fangs.

  She heard Vivien say, “Someone Alice used to know.” She blinked and realised she’d missed something. She saw Damon sitting up straight and scowling at her.

  “Who’s the werewolf?” Rooster asked.

  “His name is Robert Cromwell,” Vivien said. “I haven’t heard the name, but perhaps one of –”

  Alice laughed. “We don’t need to go to the council to kill him. The London packs won’t mind.”

  “Why not?” Vivien asked.

  Alice bared her teeth. “He isn’t a werewolf.”

  Chapter 13 – Rob and Julian, Thursday

  Rob was only a few hours away from the first night of the full moon. His senses were singing.

  It was always like this during the day at this time of month. He felt like his eyes were open twice as wide as normal and his ears had telescoped outward into dishes the size of dinner plates. His nose twitched and flared with every shift in the scents around him.

  It was hard to concentrate. Even the dulling effect of his iron wrist chain didn’t help much.

  Standing in the tea room, he ate three bananas he’d been saving for near the end of the day. He had eaten a lot again today. Taking a serious injury did that to him, though not with the same ravenous urgency of changing into the wolf. The side of his chest and his shoulder were still stiff and he knew that beneath his shirt his skin was still pink and raw, but he had almost recovered from Dean’s silver bullet.

  A few people in the office who left at five were chatting as they rinsed out coffee mugs and collected empty food containers from the fridge. Jenny puttered around describing a lemon drizzle cake, which was apparently a real thing, and judging by the interest Graham from IT showed Jenny would bring one in soon.

  Nobody mentioned Dean.

  Rob had spent three quarters of the day chewing his knuckles and waiting for last night to find a way to blow up in his face. Maybe the police would turn up and ask him to assist him in their inquiries. Sure, a vampire going to the cops was a stupid idea but he’d imagined it three times so far today. Maybe Vincent Argyle would call him into the office because yes, Dean drank human blood but his clients were all very happy with him and that was what mattered to an equal opportunity employer like Odd’s Transport.

  Dean had called in sick, or at least it was assumed Dean had called in sick. Nobody had given it a great deal of thought. Everyone caught the ’flu now and then, didn’t they?

  Rob was us
ed to living a double life, so much so that it had just about become routine. Three nights a month he locked himself in Mrs Prashad’s basement and if he hadn’t changed during the month, he changed then. The rest of the time he kept his iron wrist chain on and he was largely just one of the herd, with a really good sense of smell and with a lot of tricks for anger management.

  Fighting vampires to the death every night though, or almost being sacrificed to a giant floating eye, that was new. It amazed him all over again that he could have a night like that and then the next day everything would be plain-old normal. Couldn’t everyone see how on edge he was? Couldn’t they smell the anxiety in his scent and the blood that it took frantic scrubbing to get out of his skin and nails?

  Nope, they talked about lemon drizzle cakes and complained about the trouble they had had getting into the office that morning because the Northern Line was down again. Yesterday Jolene the receptionist had witnessed his confrontation in the foyer with Dean, who was not-so-coincidentally absent today, and who had seen Rob just about lose his cool and change right there in front of the lift. She had merely nodded to him in greeting when he arrived this morning.

  On his way back to his desk it occurred to him that if he could conceal all this from the people he worked with every day, what might some of them be hiding in their own out-of-hours lives?

  He poked his head into Julian’s cubicle. He was on the phone, speaking into it in a tone of icy calm that discouraged interruption. Rob listened until he heard Julian say Mrs Udowa’s name, whistled to himself and left Julian to it. She was a tough one, Mrs Udowa. Rob had handled her account during his first six months and learned that she was a trial-by-fire in the office. Rob had coped by talking fast and turning on all the charm he could.

  He was almost back at his desk when his own phone rang. “Mr Bainbridge? How’s –”

  “Where the hell is that ponce, Dean?” Gordon Bainbridge roared.

  Rob reeled across the aisle and grabbed hold of a cubicle partition to keep from landing on the floor. At this time of the month he could hear every tap of a keyboard in the office if he listened. Mr Bainbridge’s normal speaking voice by itself was almost too much for him.