Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  “It was just a game to you, Alice. I knew that even then. You’re not going to pretend it was something else, are you?”

  “It was a game,” she said, bristling at his dismissal, “until you changed the rules.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He pulled off his shirt and took a plain white t-shirt from a drawer. Alice was distracted for a moment by the sight of his bare chest and the scars down his side.

  She looked up at his face again when it appeared through the shirt. “Don’t you remember? You gave me this.”

  She took the chain around her neck and lifted it over her head. The black ring came out from beneath her shirt and she held it out to him.

  His gaze fixed on it and she saw the wings of an old nightmare beating in his eyes. The hard mask cracked and he looked suddenly very tired.

  Two nights before he vanished from the face of the world, Julian came to her.

  “I need you to take this,” he said. “I need you to keep it safe for me.”

  He put something in her hand. It felt cool and at its touch the night came alive around her, gaining a dimension even her vampire senses did not detect. She opened her hand and saw it was his warlock’s ring.

  She was too shocked to hide her surprise. “You can’t give me this. It’s beyond priceless. Your family –”

  “They don’t matter.” He took her by the shoulders. “I can’t have this right now. If I do –” He struggled to find words. He had a new secret and didn’t know how to explain it. “I refuse to be responsible for what will happen.”

  “What’s wrong?” For the first time she saw how scared he was. But there was also a determination in him. Whatever had frightened him, he intended to face it. Some part of the boy she had been drawn to was gone and would never return.

  “The lives of a great many people depend on you doing this for me, Alice,” he said. Almost as an afterthought he added, “And my own.”

  “I’ll take it if you want,” she said, still shaken. “But tell me what’s happening?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t. And there’s one more thing I need you to do.”

  She watched Julian raise his hand so the ring rested on his palm. His birthright, he had called it, though with a twist to his mouth. It was one of only five and it could not be taken by force, only given freely. Everyone believed they were the source of the Blackwoods’ power and possessing one for four years had given Alice no reason to think otherwise.

  “Others have given me gifts, but never like this,” she said. “This is your family’s wealth and status. It is your personal power. It is your inheritance and your future and you gave it to me.”

  He pulled himself out of some memory returned his attention to her.

  “But it meant more than that, didn’t it?” she asked. “It was something more important to you than your life. You trusted me with it. Me, a vampire. I’m a predator and you’re my prey and you trusted me with this.”

  “I trusted you not to feed on me.”

  “Not the same thing,” she said. “In a world of shadow treaties, that hardly even counts. But this? This isn’t just some lover’s token. You changed the rules, Julian. You gave me what I wanted.”

  “You wanted trust? I thought it was just …” He searched her face. “Oh.”

  “And then you left and your family –” Her voice was rigid. “No word of farewell. Nothing to say where you’d gone or if you were even alive.” Her fingernails began to extend and she fought to hold her anger at bay. “Your family overpowered me and questioned me. They thought I’d killed you. Do you know what that did to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  But that was all he said.

  There was pain in his eyes but she watched him crush it, push it down, harden his heart to it. He wasn’t going to answer for what he’d done. He wasn’t going to come back to her.

  But then he put his warlock’s ring in her hand and closed her fingers around it. He held his hands around hers and she was aware of the warm vitality of his flesh, the texture of his skin, the pulse of his heart at his wrist and the electric scent of his magic woven through him.

  A phone rang downstairs and shattered the moment.

  Julian let his hands fall to his side and a self-mocking smile turned up one corner of his mouth. Then he blinked. “Rob.”

  The phone stopped ringing. There was a loud bang. Rob’s startled cry of pain plunged downwards into a roar. It was answered by a shrill, human scream.

  Julian darted for the door.

  The phone rang and Rob nearly lost it. He sprang to his feet and crushed the beer can in his hand. Beer slopped over his wrist and he barely noticed.

  He wasn’t doing well. It was the full moon, the full full moon. He didn’t have his bracelet. Intoxicating scents filled the house: his own, Kevin’s fading smell, Julian, the ghosts of Thai food microwaved in the kitchen. He wanted to race outside and run, run down the street, through the night, run and run until he found some place to howl at the moon.

  But most of all there was the scent of the vampire.

  Cold and dead, it raised his hackles like nothing else ever had. It felt like his chest had become a war drum and that scent was pounding on it. He had not felt like this when he faced Kevin. It had to be the full moon.

  The human, rational part of him knew he should be safely locked away in Mrs Prashad’s basement. But the human, rational part of him couldn’t leave the house while a vampire snuggled up to Julian. And it was everything the human, rational part of him could do to stop himself from running up there, grabbing her and tearing her apart with his claws.

  It had to be the full moon. He’d had this under control for so long. Years of hard work were unravelling in his head.

  When the phone rang, he nearly attacked it.

  But it was just the house phone, the old landline. It just about never rang and why would it? Everyone he knew called him on his mobile.

  He put the can of beer down, wiped his hand on his jeans and picked up the receiver.

  It exploded in his hand.

  The change ripped through Rob and he lost it. The monster took over in a rush of old night and he bulged upwards, his shoulders tearing out of his shirt, until his head brushed the ceiling. The claws on his feet dug into the carpet. He felt like a huge beast and the living room like a tiny cage.

  There was a new scent. It was burnt around the edges by electricity but it was a woman’s scent. She sprawled on the carpet in front of him. A red-headed woman in a lab coat stained with blood.

  Prey.

  She saw him and screamed.

  Chapter 28 – Friday Night

  Rob grabbed the woman and pinned her to the floor.

  The ring on her finger flashed green and the light almost knocked Rob unconscious. He shook the effect off, snatched her hand with one large paw and slammed it to the floor. His lips peeled back from his long, sharp teeth. He leaned close to her. He let the prey-smell of her fill his senses – fear-sweat and blood-heat. The woman made noises that he failed to recognise as words.

  Rob.

  He raised his head. Julian stood in the doorway to the hall, hands held palms-up. At first Rob sensed prey, but no. They had fought alongside each other.

  Rob. Julian’s voice was in his head, cutting through all the black noise.

  A vampire stood behind Julian. She tilted her head to one side, fascinated by what she saw. Her scent set a growl rumbling deep in Rob’s chest. The black noise grew louder.

  Rob. Look down, Rob. You’re hurting her.

  He looked at the woman beneath him. Scrawny little weak thing. She was struggling but her strength was nothing compared to his.

  This is your nightmare, isn’t it Rob? To wake up after the full moon and find you’ve killed.

  He breathed hard and fast. Her scent made him so badly want to feed.

  It’s the full moon. This is as hard as it ever gets. Rob, if you can beat it now, you can beat it every time. All
you have to do is pull back. That’s all. Just do that.

  The black noise was loud, but he took his weight off the woman. He straightened, just that, nothing else, and she dragged herself out from under him.

  He took big, long breaths. He felt a touch on his arm and tensed, but it was Julian.

  “Back with us, Rob?”

  He growled.

  “Not all the way, huh? Want to change back, Rob? In your own time.”

  He didn’t think he could, not tonight and not without having killed. But he had already held himself back from killing the woman, hadn’t he?

  It was hard, very hard. But he kept at it until his flesh changed and he was shaped like a human again, kneeling in the middle of the lounge room.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  “Well done,” Julian said.

  He glared at the red-headed woman. “She came out of the fucking phone. It blew up in my hand.”

  “Yes, neat trick, that.” Julian rose to his feet. “So what brings you here, Evelyn?”

  “Who are you?” Fiona demanded. “And where is this? Is this Trafalgar Square?”

  “I am called Savraith,” said the man with writing all over his skin. “Yes, this is Trafalgar Square.”

  They were in the middle of the square. The fountains bubbled and chuckled, making the air damp and cold. Of the people who milled about in every direction, none appeared to have noticed their abrupt arrival and Fiona had the feeling their eyes were sliding off without seeing her. She sensed power in the four plinths and high above, in Nelson’s Column, she finally found the source of the strange lines of light spreading out across London. But when she realised the bronze lions at the column’s foot were looking at her, she scrunched her eyes shut.

  “I do not intend to harm you,” Savraith said.

  Her shadow stretched across the concrete paving tiles. Some help you are. She remembered the boy in her dream saying there might be some circumstances under which she could command it. She hoped this was one of those times.

  “Can we get to the part where you tell me what you want with me?” she said. “Are you Smith? Are you the one who erased my memories?”

  “I am not.”

  She didn’t know whether to be more worried or less, but either way she was disappointed.

  “I see what has been done to you,” he said. “All those lives, cut and sectioned into fragments of a person. You are but a part of your true self.”

  Fiona felt her blood run cold. “What do you mean, ‘all those lives’?”

  “You do not know?”

  “I know I used to be Lucy Wilson,” she said.

  He considered that for a few seconds and held out a hand covered in writing. “I will show you.”

  She stared hard at his hand, wondering what danger might be hidden within him. Everyone she had met since she looked in that mirror had been dangerous, either in what they were or what they knew. But every other lead she had followed so far had only led to more questions.

  She took his hand.

  Lucy Wilson appeared to her left, awkward and fourteen, dressed as she had seen her in the dream of London. But then to her right appeared another girl, eight years old and skinny as a rake. Her name was Genevieve Bouchard and she was Fiona too. To Lucy’s left a five year old girl in pigtails appeared, Samantha Grey, her round face filled with childish solemnity. She too was Fiona. Beside Genevieve, sitting on the floor, was a two year old girl named Penny Reid, who stared at Fiona with the astonished gaze of a toddler – she was Fiona as well.

  She snatched her hand back from Savraith, but the other girls didn’t vanish. “No.”

  “You have had many lives,” Savraith said. “You have been erased and rewritten, over and over again.”

  “No!”

  “The person you are right now,” he said, “the person you think you are, she does not really exist.”

  Rob plucked at the ruins of his t-shirt, wrinkled his nose at the woman who’d exploded out of the phone and said, “Right then, who are you?” His voice was still coarse around the edges.

  “She’s the daughter of the spider of London,” the vampire said from the doorway.

  His shoulders and neck tensed. “Listen whoever you are. Right now I’m still about a donkey’s fart shy of becoming unpleasant again. You’re really getting on my nerves. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure, it’s just the whole bloodsucking fiend thing. I mean this from the bottom of my heart when I say shut it. Just shut it.”

  She puffed up with anger. He felt the monster inside him start to claw against his control in response.

  “Alice,” Julian said. “Please. It’s the full moon.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, glowered at Rob and said nothing.

  “Thanks.” Rob turned again to the red-headed woman, who stood tall and made an effort not to appear shaken by Rob’s attempt to kill her. “Back to you, lady. Who are you and what are you on about, jumping out of a guy’s phone and giving him a big-arse surprise?”

  “My name is Evelyn.” Her voice barely trembled. “Evelyn Hargrave. I’ve come here for your help. Something terrible is happening and I believe you’re the only ones who can stop it.”

  Rob flat-out didn’t know what to think of that. When he turned to Julian for a hint, all he got was a shrug in return.

  “There’s blood on your clothes,” Rob said. “What happened to you?”

  If the blood bothered her, it didn’t show. She had her composure back and could have been made of ice. “The wizard, the one who they called down in Paris, he has taken my father’s facility.”

  A cold wave went through Rob. “Paris?”

  “Last night,” Evelyn said. “After the two of you left.”

  “They called down a wizard?” Julian asked. “What for?”

  “They thought he was dead,” Evelyn said. “They aimed to lock him in a casket and use him as a focus for magic on a grand scale. But they got it wrong. He’s loose now. He came to London and burned his way through our defences like they were made of paper. Our facility is his to control.”

  “Well, I’m at sea,” Rob said.

  “Most witches and warlocks use rings like the one Evelyn is wearing to control and focus their magic,” Julian said. “The stone isn’t an ordinary gem. Those people in Paris with Gordon Bainbridge, they meant to use the corpse of a dead wizard in the same way, just on a larger scale.” He shook his head. “But there’s dead and dead, when it comes to wizards.”

  Rob had to admit the gem set in the ring on Evelyn’s finger caught the light in a weird way. He remembered the flash of green light that burst from it and nearly knocked him out.

  “I take it we wouldn’t be having this discussion if the guy was nothing but old bones,” Rob said.

  “He’s incarnated himself in living flesh again,” Evelyn said. “He was covered in writing. My father and I knew about such beings, of course. We’ve worked hard to keep them from crossing into our world, or to deal with them if they succeed in crossing, but I’ve never seen one like this.”

  “He had writing all over his skin?” Julian said.

  “Mean something?” Rob asked.

  For a change, Julian looked worried. “Three wizards went looking for enlightenment, or so the story goes. When they returned they conquered a place called Teleoch. They take turns ruling it, one alive and two dead. They turned ten thousand of Teleoch’s population into vampires, stuffed them in tubes and overwrote their minds, all so they could build a dream world on top of them, to live in while they’re dead. The rest of the population exists to feed the vampires.”

  “Sounds like not finding enlightenment pissed them right off,” Rob said.

  “Oh, they found it,” Julian muttered.

  “He means to use our facility,” Evelyn said. “I don’t know what for, but it hardly matters. Any disruption of the facility’s functions could have disastrous effects on London, not to mention Britain itself.”

  “Like what?” Rob asked.


  “In 1928,” Evelyn said, “a man named Edward Denton led a ritual that was meant to raise all the dead in London who had died of the plague. They would rise with their diseases enhanced by magic and scour the British population in a matter of weeks, maybe even days.”

  “What plague?” Rob asked.

  “Every plague,” Evelyn said. “Do you know how many people have died and been buried in London over the centuries from disease? Thousands – millions. The Great Plague of 1665, rounds of the Black Death in the Fourteenth Century, waves of cholera and typhoid through London from Roman to Victorian times, the sweating sickness in Tudor times, the Spanish Flu after World War One – in two thousand years we’ve had every disease there is. There are plague pits all over the city, never mind the individual graves in old churchyards.”

  “So glad I moved here,” Rob said. “Since I don’t remember being taught at school about the dead rising in London, I take it he was stopped.”

  “Denton completed the ritual,” Evelyn said. “My father, at great personal cost, managed to stall it. Yet he needed a permanent solution, something that would hold the plague ritual at bay forever. He built the facility beneath Trafalgar Square, connected it to London’s power grid and found a spell focus sufficient to the task, which he controlled with ghost electricity. We’ve been there ever since.”

  “What, really?” Rob said. “Right there under Trafalgar Square, where they have all those riots and shows and whatnot?”

  “Really,” Evelyn said. “And if the wizard shuts it down to use the power for his own purposes, the plague ritual will be free to wreak havoc across the country.”

  The next question to cross Rob’s mind was to ask where her father was, since he’d solved the problem once before, but the blood on her clothes made him think it was better to skip that question.

  “Why us?” he asked.

  “After your victories last night, you have to ask?” Evelyn said.

  “You know about all that?”

  “Everyone knows,” she said.

  Rob had spent a year trying to blend in. He felt uncomfortably exposed.