by Emma Mills
‘So what now?’ I asked, curling into the side of Daniel’s body.
‘It’s a pretty shitty time to be made a vampire!’ Sadie drawled.
‘I’ll go and find Sebastian,’ Eva said. ‘You guys stay here.’
‘I’ll come too. If it’s curfew within the hour I don’t want you stuck out there on your own,’ Daniel said quietly.
Eva shook her head.
‘You need to stay here,’ she said, looking across pointedly at Sadie who was again picking her nails and looking bored. ‘I’ll be fine. I’ll stay over in my flat at the club. I’ll see you in the morning. Call if there’s any trouble.’
We stayed up all night, watching as fresh news of worldwide vampire attacks broke over and over again. The vampire attacks were spiralling and the Guard was overwhelmed. No sooner had they arrived at one location than the fight had moved on. New vampires were joining the cause with every passing hour. At four am Pierre and his gang of twenty vampires had stormed Number Ten. Twenty vamps were all it took to slaughter the entire staff in residence and the police guard. All of it was televised and streamed live. Once the street was quiet and the bodies had been dragged off screen Pierre left the house and stood outside the famous door, surrounded by his vampires, to address the world.
‘I will be brief, as I have no doubt I will be interrupted within minutes,’ he said. ‘Let this be heard by the vampires of the world. Stand up and join us. To all witches hampered by the Council’s rules of what is black or white magic… join us and be free. To all Weres, this is an open invitation to be part of the New Order. You no longer need to hide from the Council or humankind. Let’s make new rules, new laws… a new world order! To the Council, we are willing to negotiate, but on the understanding that this cannot be changed. Time will not be turned back. It will not be stopped. We shall rise. We shall conquer. We shall rule!’
The feed cut back to the BBC centre, leaving the viewers with a close-up of his Hollywood-perfect face.
‘Wow! That’s pretty powerful stuff,’ I said quietly.
Daniel nodded and Brittany sighed.
‘Just think of all the dark witches that will come crawling out of the shadows now,’ she said.
‘We should call Susannah and see what’s going on in the States,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘While you do that I’m going to check in with Eva and Sebastian,’ Daniel said, leaving the room.
‘Do you want anything?’ I asked Sadie, before following Brittany out of the room.
‘From you?’ she sneered. ‘Unlikely. What is it you’re supposed to be teaching me anyway? Because so far all I’ve done is sit watching the news and drink some god awful substitute for the food I’m supposed to be drinking. Why don’t you take me out and show me how to feed properly, without killing some poor, worthless waste of time? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be showing me?’
‘Sadie, you know we can’t go out now. If the neighbours had any idea who lived in this house…’ I paused, remembering who this girl was and who made her. ‘Look, once the Council regains control and sorts all this mess out I’ll start taking you out. For now we need to stay in.’
‘Of course, I understand. Do you have any knitting needles and wool I could borrow while I wait then?’ she said, her tone honey sweet.
‘What?’ I asked, totally falling for her ridiculous request.
She shook her head slowly.
‘You really are pathetic, aren’t you?’ she drawled.
I left the room, forcing my hand to slow down as it left the door knob so it wouldn’t slam into the frame.
I raced up the stairs and flopped onto Daniel’s bed, pulling his pillow over my face and screaming into it, biting down on the cloth and squeezing my hands into fists. Once I felt the tension leave my body I released the pillow and tucked it behind my head, grinning at Daniel who was staring down at me, one hand holding his phone to his ear, his kissable lips turning into a smile.
‘I think Jess is finding Sadie a little demanding,’ he said into the phone, his eyes twinkling.
I groaned and rolled over onto my tummy.
‘Just my luck to be given the world’s most difficult newborn,’ I mumbled into the pillow.
‘She thinks she has been given the world’s most difficult newborn,’ he said with a laugh.
‘I know. Shall I tell her or do you want to?’ he said.
‘What?’ I muttered.
‘Eva says to tell you that we have both felt your pain and understand,’ he said.
‘Oh! Wow, really? Who was that then? You never mentioned…’ I watched his face crease up as he dissolved into laughter. I could hear Eva laughing her head off down the phone. ‘Oh shut-up!’ I added, getting their joke. ‘I was never this bad!’
‘Oh, you were worse,’ he said. ‘The girl who wouldn’t do anything we asked of her. The girl who ran off to find her boyfriend. The girl who tracked down her best friend, ran off to London and basically did the opposite to almost everything I taught her.’
I grinned.
‘Almost… but not everything,’ I whispered.
‘They gave Sadie to you because you were masterless, just as she is…’
‘You were my master,’ I said.
‘I made you, but you never had a master, Jess. You know that.’
I bit my lip. He was right, but I had never realised that it was how he saw it too.
‘Sadie has a master,’ I said, refusing to liken her to me.
‘But he isn’t here to control her, and he didn’t make the connection when she awoke,’ he pressed.
I sighed.
‘Fine, but she hates me.’
‘She hates being confused, and unlike you she woke knowing exactly what she had become and what she needs to eat,’ Daniel said.
I nodded.
‘Okay, I’ll go talk to her. What are Sebastian and Eva going to do about the new Prime Minister?’ I asked, swinging my legs off the bed.
‘Sebastian’s not impressed. We can’t understand how the Council have let it get this far. There’s a crisis meeting in York later this morning. I’ll have to attend. It will give you time to get to know…’
A loud electrical crack followed by an indignant scream ripped through the air, interrupting us and sending me flying to the door. Before Brittany had even made it to her bedroom door I was down the stairs and pulling Sadie off the cracked Victorian floor tiles.
‘You tried to sneak out,’ I accused, slamming her body back into the wood-panelled wall.
‘Obviously,’ she retorted, snarling like an animal. ‘What do you expect?’
‘I expect you to have the intelligence to realise I would secure our doors against you,’ I spat back.
‘I know you don’t want me here and that’s fine, because I don’t want to be here either. What is it to you if one more vampire goes to London and joins Pierre? I’m hardly important to anything, am I? The Council will probably find me first anyway, but at least I’d have given it a shot.’
‘You don’t want to join him Sadie,’ I said. ‘He’s crazy…’
‘He doesn’t look it,’ she said quietly. ‘It looks like he just wants to stand up for vampires… for us! Why should we have to hide? It’s not the fifteen hundreds anymore.’
‘Look, the Council will eventually sort this out and then we can go back to normal. Then I’ll be able to show you how to feed without killing people… in Sebastian’s bar. It’s that simple…’
‘I don’t want to. I want Pierre to show me. I need him.’
She slipped from my grip and dodged around me, darting for the door once more. I watched, and again she was thrown halfway down the hall as she tried to pull open the door. She barely caught her breath before she slammed herself against it, again and again.
‘Sadie, it won’t open. I put a spell on it,’ I said quietly.
She stood in the hallway, her eyes blazing, fangs fully extended.
‘Jess?’ Brittany called down the st
airs. ‘Susannah wants to know what the hell is going on? And do we need her?’
‘No, we’re fine. Update me later,’ I called back, not taking my eyes off Sadie, who had begun circling me.
She flew at me and I was ready. Her full weight knocked me back, but I pulled her down with me in a maelstrom of fists and fangs. I rolled on top of her and pulled my fist back. The doorbell rang, its sudden peel shocking us both into frozen silence as Daniel raced down the stairs, three at a time, Brittany on his heels. He glared at us both as we scrambled to our feet. Sadie made a run for the door, but just in time I grabbed her round the waist and with Brittany’s quick spell casting we managed to bundle her into the back living room.
‘Silence,’ I muttered as we released her and slammed the door. Sadie’s mouth froze in an O of surprise, her fangs still extended. Her eyes blazed and darted to the door. Brittany had drawn a chalk circle round the furious girl and she made a high-pitched keening noise as she attempted to escape it.
‘Shh!’ I whispered. ‘The next level spell will hurt you. We don’t want to do it, but we will if you make a single noise.
Brittany pulled out her elm wand. It was actually just a stick she’d found on the forest floor at the back of my Aunt’s house, but she said it helped her to concentrate her magic. It also served to freak vampires out who didn’t realise that we could perform magic just as well without a wand. Sadie fell quiet and sat cross-legged on the floor in her circle. We heard Daniel open the front door, his voice feigning sleepiness.
‘Hi… is everything okay? You live next door, right?’ he asked.
‘Who is it?’ whispered Brittany, knowing I’d be able to hear everything.
‘The neighbour, I think,’ I said.
‘We heard a crash… and what sounded like a scream,’ a male voice said.
‘Oh, really? I didn’t hear anything. We were all in bed,’ Daniel said. ‘It’s five o’clock in the morning… maybe it came from your other side?’
‘I don’t think so,’ the man said. ‘Weird stuff always comes from this house,’ he added.
There was a pause.
‘What’s going on?’ Brittany asked again.
I shook my head.
‘They’re suspicious,’ I whispered.
Sadie let out a small whimper. She could smell his blood. The draft was blowing it down the hall and under our door. Her eyes flicked to the door and back to us.
‘Shh!’ He’ll be gone soon’, I whispered.’
‘My girlfriend said she saw that guy who’s always hanging around your house being carried across your lawn on New Year’s Eve. She said he was covered in blood! Students move in and out of the houses on this street, but you lot are always here… and the pretty dark-haired one, she’s the only one that ever changes. I’ve been here seven years in Med school and your girlfriend still looks like a fresher!’
Daniel started laughing.
‘Are you serious? You’re a Med student?’ he asked.
There was a pause.
‘Well you should know better than to buy into scaremongering news stories, but seeing as you have obviously been listening to everything the media are telling you, hadn’t you better run back home? It isn’t dawn yet and you are breaking the curfew.’
‘We don’t trust you. But seeing as you have never hurt any of us we thought we’d give you a warning. We’re going to report you all to the helpline at ten o’ clock this morning. You’ve got until then to leave. We don’t want vampires living on our street,’ the man said, his words slurring slightly.
‘I suggest you sober up first,’ Daniel said, slamming the door.
Seconds later he was opening our door. He looked at Sadie on the floor, then at me.
‘We’ve got trouble,’ he said.
‘I heard,’ I said, lifting the silence from Sadie.
‘I could smell him,’ she said, her eyes pained.
‘We all could,’ I said.
‘Speak for yourself. I couldn’t,’ Brittany said.
I smiled at her.
‘How do you do it? How do you live among them and not just… kill them all?’ Sadie whispered.
‘It gets easier,’ Daniel said. ‘Let me get you another blood pack. That will help ease the burning.’ He left the room and shortly returned with another mug.
‘Daniel, no!’ I exclaimed, intercepting the mug just as his hand was about to cross the chalk circle. ‘Sadie, we are going to let you out, okay, but you still can’t leave the house so don’t try anything.’
Sadie rolled her eyes and shrugged, while Brittany and I held our right hands over the chalk, sucking the power back from the circle and into our bodies. Brittany lent down and blew gently on it, dislodging the final vestiges of power.
‘Now you can hand her the blood,’ I said, but Sadie couldn’t wait. She leapt almost into Daniel’s arms and snatched the mug from his hands, slurping the dark red liquid down in three gulps.
‘Now that was kind of what I expected from you in those early days,’ he said, gently dislodging the girl with a smile.
I frowned.
‘Sorry to disappoint,’ I said and left him with Sadie looking into his face adoringly. Sebastian should have given her to him, not me!
I walked into the kitchen and helped myself to a blood pack from the hidden fridge. Obviously Sebastian wasn’t going to get the café up and running anytime soon and it was not a good time to go out hunting so…
‘Jess, I didn’t mean it like that,’ Daniel said, following me to the microwave.
‘I know.’
‘I wouldn’t want you any other way,’ he said quietly, sweeping a lock of my hair away from my face and tucking it behind my ear.
‘How can you say that? You’d have loved it if I’d jumped straight into bed with you and done everything you said, followed you around like a little puppy…’
‘Maybe initially, but vampire relationships aren’t real. They are based solely on that blood bond and once it begins to fade away so does the attachment. Our attachment is real. It was formed through love and respect. I respect you Jess… and I’m slightly scared of you,’ he added with a laugh.
I grinned and he pulled me into his arms. I tilted my head up for a kiss.
‘So what are we going to do about the neighbours?’ I asked. ‘Are you going to call Sebastian?’
He shook his head.
‘No, he’ll be going to York, as will I.’
I frowned, confused.
‘We’re not moving out. We’re staying right here and I trust you and Brittany to come up with some spell to either make them forget or change their minds. I’ll update Eva and Sebastian in York and you can always call Luke or Leo if you run into trouble… they’ll get here faster than we can.’
I nodded slowly. This was the first time Daniel had not attempted to take over and shield me.
‘The only way we are going to fight this is if we trust each other and work together. I should have confided in you when I was in London. I’m sorry Jess.’
I reached up and pulled his face down to meet mine.
‘We’ll sort it,’ I whispered, between kisses.
‘Okay, and Jess… be careful with the girl. She’s not like you. She won’t be able to stop herself yet.’
I nodded.
‘Right, I’m going to get off now.’
‘You can’t, it’s still curfew,’ I said.
‘I’m a vampire. I can do what I want, right?’ he said, with a lopsided smile. ‘Sebastian’s arranged a safe place for us to feed before we leave.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I pouted. ‘Meanwhile I have to drink this.’
‘It can remind you of the old days,’ he said with a smirk. ‘Stay safe.’
He left me with a final kiss and disappeared into the long winter night. Dawn wouldn’t be for another two hours at least.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Brittany asked, as I walked back into the room with yet another mug of blood for Sadie.
‘My plan is t
o feed her so full of blood that she’ll be happy watching TV for the next twenty four hours and refrain from throwing herself at the door every hour,’ I answered.
Sadie smirked and took the mug, which I had filled with two sachets, and I leaned back into the sofa, passing her the TV remote.
‘Meanwhile Daniel has left us to sort out the neighbours. His suggestions were to either make them conveniently forget or set Sadie on them…’
‘What?’ Brittany’s and Sadie’s mouths fell open. I giggled.
‘Okay, maybe not the latter option, although it would solve two problems in one.’
‘I’d be happy to help,’ Sadie said smoothly.
We ignored her.
‘So I had a think while you were out there,’ Brittany said. ‘I have a plan.’
Chapter Fifteen
Brittany’s initial plan had been to somehow intercept their phone line, redirect it to ours and take the call ourselves, pretending to be the helpline. Whilst I liked her enthusiasm I wasn’t sure about our joint technical ability, plus it was more than likely that they didn’t even have a landline and would use mobiles.
‘I think it would be safer altering his memory,’ I said, after we had skimmed through all our magic theory books and had a long phone call with Saffy, investigating whether we could intercept their phones magically.
‘But you hate doing that,’ Brittany said quietly. ‘That’s why I’ve spent the last two hours trying to come up with an alternative.’
‘I know and I appreciate it, but let’s face it, the memory option is our best bet.’
‘But if he thinks you’re a vampire he’s hardly going to just let you walk on in there, is he?’
‘Hmm!’
‘And what are you going to do about the other two flatmates?’
‘Good point… maybe we should use magic. How about if we try and replicate the memory bubble the Council used over part of London?’
‘Can we do that?’ Brittany asked.
‘I don’t see why not. It’s what the angels would do if Daniel called them in.’
‘No, I mean do we have the skill to actually pull it off, dummy!’
‘I’d feel more confident with Susannah here, but we haven’t got time, as we need to do this in the next hour. We both know the theory, so it’s really just a matter of concentrating our energy. That’s the only reason it’s a level six spell, because it will drain us dry.’
