Ravenfall

by Narrelle M. Harris

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You’re flesh and blood like anyone. Being ex-military won’t help you. Thinking he’s your friend won’t save you.’

  Being dead already might. But he didn’t say that. ‘I’ll keep it in mind, then. But it doesn’t mean what you think it does.’

  She shook her head. Slowly, like every bone ached, she stood and scrubbed her face with her hands until the tears and despair were gone, and only the distrust and rage were left.

  ‘I have to go. The DI needs me.’

  James stepped back to give her space. ‘What about the daughter?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The daughter. You described everyone else. Where’s the daughter?’

  Datta scowled. ‘Leave it.’

  ‘Not in her room?’

  ‘No,’ she snapped, ‘She’s not in her room. She’s in the dark. Surrounded by blood and eyes. And she’s dead. Like the rest of them. I’m going to get there too late.’

  At James’s searching look, her scowl twisted into an expression that betrayed her despair again. ‘That’s what I see. Eyes and red and darkness and she stops breathing. She’s five years old and she stops breathing before I find her.’

  James met her despair with a challenge. ‘Let’s go find her alive, then. Prove your dream a liar.’

  ‘They haven’t lied before.’

  ‘They haven’t met me before.’

  Sceptical, yet desperate for hope to hang onto, Datta clenched her jaw, drew herself up tall, and walked down the street into her nightmare.

  DI Bakare started in on her immediately with, ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Sorry sir,’ said Sergeant Datta tersely. ‘I was held up and then I bumped into Doctor Sharpe. Any developments?’

  ‘Still trying to find the daughter, Penny,’ said Bakare wearily from where he stood beside the body of a young boy in the hallway. The child’s throat had been slashed. The DI glared at James. ‘This isn’t a sightseeing tour.’

  ‘I’m a doctor. I caught the basics from the Sergeant and thought if you found the girl I might be of use.’

  Bakare conceded the point. ‘It’s an ugly crime scene.’

  ‘I’m an Afghanistan veteran,’ said James, ‘I think I can handle it.’

  ‘All right, but keep back. Don’t want the crime scene contaminated.’

  ‘So what’s going on? You’re sure the girl wasn’t taken?’

  ‘Sure as we can be without witnesses, but we have to keep looking,’ said Bakare.

  Datta flinched, then squared her shoulders and scanned the scene.

  ‘There’s a ladder lying across the back garden, broken like it was dropped from a height, but it’s too short to reach the first storey from outside,’ said Bakare. He led them to the back of the house where a middle-aged man was sprawled in a pool of coagulating blood from multiple stab wounds. Exactly as Datta had predicted.

  ‘Could the ladder have been used inside the house and thrown out the window?’ said Datta.

  ‘Perhaps – but by who, and why?’

  ‘Is the mother upstairs?’ she asked.

  Bakare gave her a piercing look. ‘Yes.’

  Datta went upstairs, her DI and James at her heels, like she was walking to her own execution.

  On the second level, a short corridor led to three bedrooms: the master bedroom, the boy’s room at the front of the house, and the girl’s bedroom at the back.

  Bakare and Datta examined the body of the dead woman in the back room. Her throat was slashed, the blood soaked into the bedclothes. Wonder Woman duvet. It pooled onto the floor and the thick mess of it spread around a doll’s house and into the feet of a teddy bear. Big plush teddy bear.

  The smell of it was thick. James was glad he’d eaten well recently. It made his teeth itch.

  Datta was practically quivering with rage, her teeth clenched. James could hear them grinding.

  Bakare strode past it all to examine the window and study the sill, the handles, the tangled teddy-bear mobile that dangled from the curtain rod. He squinted into the garden; at the broken ladder below. He looked around the room and up at the ceiling.

  ‘What?’ James was puzzled but alert.

  Bakare picked his way past them to peer in the wardrobe but was unsurprised to find it yielded nothing of interest. Then he stepped back into the hall and looked up at the high ceiling.

  ‘Datta!’

  James and the Sergeant joined the DI, who showed them the hatch in the ceiling – the kind that usually led to an attic. It was too high to be reached under normal circumstances. As James watched, Datta strode two steps into the hall and examined the wall beside the stair.

  ‘Think you can get up there if I give you a hand, Sergeant?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Datta looked as though she would be ill.

  James cocked his head and listened. Rustling. Maybe rats.

  Maybe not rats.

  ‘Here,’ said James. ‘Let me.’

  To hell with witnesses. Whatever else was up there, Datta’s dreamed darkness was part of it. He pulled his tie off and folded it into his pocket, removed his suit coat, which he left folded on the floor, and undid his top buttons. From a standing start, James leapt up and knocked the hatch open, hanging onto the edge with his fingers. He began to pull himself up into the space. It was an impressive physical feat to anyone watching, if they didn’t know he was a vampire.

  ‘The ladder used to rest here,’ Bakare explained, fingers brushing over the section of paintwork that had been rubbed thin by the ladder. ‘Positioned to easily use it to get up there.’

  James leaned down through the hatch and offered his hand to Datta. She took it, not daring to hope, and with his easy, unnatural strength, he pulled her up into the dark and the dust with him.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked James, releasing Tavisa’s hand. He was trying to listen, but there were too many noises. All those beating hearts, all those heavy breaths. A muddle. ‘What did you see in your dream?’

  ‘Eyes. Eyes and red.’

  ‘What do you mean by ‘red’?’

  ‘Blood,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said James. He could smell no spilled blood up here. ‘You’d have said blood if that’s what you meant. Blood is what red makes you think of. What do you actually mean?’ James, with his uncanny vision, was scouring the attic space, which was full of junk. Boxes and old furniture, bags of clothes, suitcases, a seamstress’s model, an old exercise bike.

  ‘I said blood.’ Datta’s voice was hard.

  ‘But then you said red,’ James replied, ‘Eyes and red you said.’ He listened for breathing, for heartbeats. There were many small, rapid heartbeats further up in the roof. Rats, probably. In this room it was harder to hear. Datta’s. Something else, maybe. Muffled. Too fast.

  ‘Hurry,’ James said. ‘We’re running out of time.’

  ‘The red is… soft,’ Datta bit out. ‘Soft and silky. It flows. And it’s very, very red. Scarlet.’

  ‘Blood isn’t soft and silky,’ said James. ‘It’s wet and sticky, especially when it’s coagulating. It’s not scarlet either. Bright red when oxygenated, dark red, more carmine, without oxygen. What did it smell like? Did it taste like anything? Copper? Was it sweet?’

  Datta grimaced disgust at him, but tried to remember. ‘A bit sweet and it…. It smelled like lavender.’

  ‘Lavender? Not cedar as well, by any chance? Or cloves or cinnamon?’

  Datta’s nose wrinkled at the dream-memory of scent. ‘Very faintly.’

  ‘My Granda used spices instead of mothballs. I think we’re looking for a storage box or a trunk. Large enough for a child to fit into.’

  James could hear it now, separated from Datta’s own rapidly thumping pulse. The breaths were coming more harshly, and he could see a trunk in the darkness, behind a pile of suitcases.

  ‘Here!’ James started towards the trunk. ‘You can see in the dust where everyt
hing’s been moved!’

  The two of them were throwing things out of the way, Datta not answering Bakare’s demands from below to know ‘what the hell is going on?’

  They reached the huge wooden trunk, stained and dented, old and heavy. From its seam, where the lid met the body, a scrap of scarlet cloth had escaped.

  James threw the heavy lid open with ease. Inside the trunk, a pale face pointed up at them, surrounded by abandoned soft toys and old clothes for dress-ups, including a scarlet ball gown. The girl looked like a painting of the death of innocence.

  Datta’s sharp cry was desolate as James pulled the child out of her hiding place. She was tiny in his arms as he laid her on the floor.

  ‘She has a pulse,’ he declared, ensuring the girl’s airways were clear before beginning CPR.

  Datta stumbled, a fist shoved in her mouth to stop her own cries.

  James breathed into the girl’s lungs a second time, a third, a fourth, and on the fifth, there was a cough. A cry. James pressed fingers to the child’s throat, even though he already knew her pulse was getting stronger.

  The little girl opened her eyes, saw James, and screamed.

  ‘It’s okay honey,’ said Datta, crawling forward to her. ‘Penny. Sweetheart, it’s okay.’

  Penny’s frightened gaze went to the sergeant and in the next moment, the five year old lunged away from James and fell into Tavisa Datta’s arms.

  James sat back on his haunches then leaned over to shout at those below: ‘We’ve got the girl. She’s alive.’

  Datta had scooped the crying child into her arms and was rocking her back and forth, saying over and over, ‘You’re all right. You’re all right, Penny. We found you in time. We found you. I found you.’ The two of them, woman and child, cried through the ending of their terror together.

  Penny Donal’s auntie had been fetched, and she travelled with the girl in the ambulance as Datta and Bakare finished fitting together their theory.

  The location of Mrs Donal’s body in her daughter’s bedroom indicated that she was the one who had taken the girl into the attic and hidden her in the trunk. She’d taken the precaution then of throwing the ladder into the garden through the bedroom window. Probably she had already found her son’s body and had been frantic to keep Penny from harm. She can’t have realised the lid would be too heavy for the girl to lift herself; or else thought she could persuade the killer to leave them alone. Perhaps she hadn’t thought it through at all. She hadn’t had much time.

  Bakare peered past the ladder-scratched window sill into the garden, where Mr Donal’s savaged body lay, not far from the broken ladder. ‘Maybe if she hadn’t thrown it, the killer wouldn’t have realised she was up here and come to cut her throat.’

  James stood as far from Mrs Donal’s body as he could get and put his coat back on. The smell of the blood was getting to him. He was keeping his fangs sheathed with effort, and his hands were beginning to shake.

  ‘You okay, Sharpe?’ Bakare peered at him.

  ‘Been better,’ he said, jamming his hands into his pockets. This could have nothing to do with the other killings, he was sure. No scent of vampire anywhere. Only the blood. All the blood. All the wasted blood.

  He shook his head to clear it. ‘I should head home.’ He started for the bedroom door, almost flinching as he passed by Mrs Donal’s body and the blood-soaked bed.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bakare kindly, mistaking James’s reaction, ‘We’ll have this bastard soon. Donal was known to us – small time drug dealer. He’s been playing with the big boys, and it looks like the big boys didn’t like his game.’

  ‘We’ll get him,’ Datta said earnestly to James as she followed him down the stairs. He edged past the boy as well, and once in the street took deep breaths to clear his nose and head of the scent. He could still smell it, but it wasn’t as bad outside.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  James opened his screwed-shut eyes to see Datta regarding him with concern.

  ‘Too much blood,’ he said without thinking.

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed, but she smiled at him. Smiled. James had never seen her smile before.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Well. Take care, anyway, and thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome. I told you, those dreams don’t tell the whole story.’

  Datta grimaced. ‘I like to think not. I joined the force because of those dreams, you know. Thinking I could make a difference. Until today, I never have. Perhaps I can again.’

  ‘I’m sure you can. You weren’t wrong in what you saw. You weren’t right either.’

  ‘I suppose. But be careful.’

  ‘I don’t need to be careful of Gabriel,’ said James, exasperated.

  ‘There’s something out there,’ she said darkly. ‘It involves him, and it doesn’t look good for you.’

  ‘For either of us, I suspect. But I’ll be careful of whatever’s coming. Your dreams aren’t inevitable. We simply have to work out what they mean.’

  Gabriel was waiting when he got home, having returned from one of his sporadic days at the art supplies factory. He took one look at James and prepared a mug of warmed pig’s blood for him, tea for himself, and sat them both at the table.

  James’s hands slowly lost their tremor as he sipped and told Gabriel about the murders and, more importantly for them, Datta’s precognitive dreams – the driving force behind her antipathy towards Gabriel.

  ‘She started having that dream before you and I even met,’ said James.

  ‘I could never kill you.’

  ‘You could, you know, if you had to. Our research…’

  Gabriel scowled fiercely. ‘I wouldn’t, then. And in any case, if I killed you now, you’d be dust, not sitting next to a corpse in the street looking tragic.’

  ‘There is that,’ James conceded, his hand resting on Gabriel’s.

  ‘She thinks she perceives me as dead because she’s seen me dead in a dream. She’s no idea she’s seeing me as I am.’

  Gabriel turned his hand palm-up and clasped James’s in his own. ‘I wonder what that dream’s really showing her.’

  ‘That’s the million pound question, isn’t it?’ James squeezed Gabriel’s hand gently.

  As they finished their respective beverages, they continued to hold hands like it was the most natural thing in the world.

  Chapter Twelve

  James didn’t need much rest, but on the third day of preparations, when Gabriel had to go out for more garlic, James took the opportunity to lie dormant for a few hours. He’d been ingesting blood more regularly and needed time to efficiently metabolise it. He locked up the flat, lay on his bed and closed his eyes.

  It was dark when he opened his eyes again, stirred by a faint notion that something wasn’t right.

  That something was Gabriel’s continued absence from the flat, hours after he should have returned home.

  James tried to convince himself he was being alarmist. Gabriel’s a grown man. He’ll be fine. Probably met a friend on the way to the grocer.

  Or Cael West has killed him.

  Although his body didn’t produce any burst of adrenalin, his brain remembered what alarm felt like, and James found himself panicking anyway.

  If you’ve touched Gabriel, West, you gobshite, I will hack you limb from limb, like you did to Mordecai Grimshaw. Granda’s voice of encouragement was notably absent, and had been ever since the incident at Grimshaw’s house. I will turn you to ash a piece at a time, you fucker, if you even think of hurting him.

  James decided he was fine with being alarmist. He’d apologise for making a tit of himself later if he had to. He grabbed his coat and keys and ran out the door.

  He headed towards the grocer first, at a purely human speed, senses alert.

  It was a grey day, the diffuse light gleaming off pale grey clouds from horizon to horizon. All the waterways of London were on the breeze; the bilgy swill of t
he dockyards, the dankness of the rivers trapped underground as their run-off spilled from narrow tunnels into the Thames; the whiff of Crossness Sewage Works; the salt tang of the distant Channel. The dampness in the air carried all kinds of smells, and obscured others. Hanging in it was the tantalising insinuation that Gabriel had passed this way, so faint he began to fear he was imagining it.

  James stopped and asked an old man sitting, smoking, on a low brick wall if he’d seen ‘a tall bloke, skinny, messy hair, green eyes. Good looking. Smells like paint.’

  The old fellow gave him a piercing stare then a sly grin and pointed with the cigarette between his knuckles. ‘Your boyfriend met some blokes down there,’ he said, gesturing towards a narrow alley alongside the minimart. ‘Hope he ain’t cheatin’ on ya. Though mebbe he’s earning a bit o’ cash on the side for the rent.’

  James didn’t dignify that comment with more than a half-animal snarl. In his shock, the man dropped his cigarette in his lap, making him leap up and dust the embers from his crotch.

  There was nothing in the alley, narrow and squeezed in between high brick walls. The place smelled of piss and mud and fresh blood.

  Fuck.

  With a quick glance to ensure no-one was watching, James crouched, sniffing. When he found the few drops of blood, he sprawled on the stones, getting nearer to the source of the scent. He loomed over the blood spatter, less like an animal and more like an insect, balanced on the toes of his shoes and the tips of his fingers, practically licking the filthy cobblestones under his face.

  He sniffed deeply, filtering out the stink of the refuse, of piss and vomit and decay. His tongue ghosted over the spots of blood amongst the debris. Some of it was unknown but human, the rest was definitely Gabriel’s. He’d know the taste of it anywhere. Another flavour tainted his tongue as well – a sedative in Gabriel’s blood.

  Of the other scents, nothing reeked of Cael West. That was something, at least.

  James knew it wasn’t appropriate to go about town killing everyone who threatened Gabriel. But so help him, if the bastards who’d taken Gabriel had harmed him, they’d wish they hadn’t been born. They’d certainly wish they didn’t know how bones could look so white when sticking out of their own fucking skin.