Ravenfall

by Narrelle M. Harris

  With only one arm wrapped around his charge, James told him to hold on, but he need hardly have bothered. Michael had wound his arms tight around him and held fast as their combined weight pulled them down, while James kept a fierce one-handed grip on the hilt of the sword.

  They hit the water fountain and James jerked around to take the brunt of the landing on his back, Michael’s weight crushing into his chest.

  For a moment they both lay there, Michael breathing heavily against James’s neck, James carefully wriggling his toes and making sure his skeleton was intact.

  James opened his eyes wide to look up at the gallery.

  Gabriel gazed down at them, face pale, his mouth open in shock and showing off his faux fangs; the whole accentuating his Victorian Vampire persona. Relief and outrage vied for the upper hand.

  Outrage won.

  Gabriel looked across to the eastern gallery again, and whatever he saw made his lips draw back in a snarl. Nearby, people backed away as though the fangs were real. The rage certainly was.

  Gabriel broke into a run, darting into a side corridor leading to the east wing.

  James sat up abruptly, shoved Michael aside and dragged himself to his feet. His warning ‘no!’ was too late, as Gabriel disappeared into the building after Cael West.

  ‘I’m fine. Go, after, him,’ Michael urged him between heaving breaths.

  James sheathed the cutlass and leapt up fifteen straight feet to the nearest rope on the rent sail. He swarmed up it like an old salt, using his body to pull at the rope and build up sway, then swung over to the gallery.

  Below and around him, he heard applause. God. They think it’s a floor show.

  He drew the sword again – it was less conspicuous in this context than his gun – and followed West’s and Gabriel’s scents through the darkened passages, past smashed lamps and light switches pulled from the walls, out into the cold night air on a long balcony.

  ‘I’d hold still if I were you, Doctor Sharpe.’ James held still.

  West was on the balcony, teeth extended, expression triumphant. He held Gabriel pinned against his chest, hard nails pressed against the artist’s exposed throat. James’s hand twitched towards the gun in his sash. The grip on Gabriel’s throat tightened. James held his empty hand out from his side, but he didn’t drop the cutlass. He and West both knew Gabriel would be dead before James could reach them.

  ‘Looks like I win,’ grinned West.

  ‘Hurt him and I’ll tear you limb from limb,’ James promised him, dark and cold, every bit the hunter. ‘You’ll think Grimshaw had a picnic, when I’m done with you.’

  ‘Oh, listen to you. Doctor Death. Found your thirst again, have you?’ West pressed his face to Gabriel’s and licked the pale cheek. Gabriel flinched. ‘Tasty, you are. I bet your little doctor hasn’t told you about his first time, has he? About the welcome ambush I created just for him, and how I made him the fiend he is today. He woke up so thirsty and wild, our Jim, and there was that poor wounded Tommy in the Taliban compound, screaming for his mummy, when he wasn’t screaming for his legs. And there was all that blood.’

  James’s teeth clenched and he couldn’t meet Gabriel’s eye. Then he could look nowhere else. Gabriel’s green, green eyes, wide and on the verge of panic. Staring at him.

  James stared back. He wanted to say something. I’m sorry, or I didn’t know what I was doing, or I didn’t kill him, not really, but he couldn’t make a sound.

  The story he’d never been brave enough to tell Gabriel stuck in his throat.

  Our unit was on patrol, and Major Fucking West joined us out of nowhere for the trip back to base. West did that kind of shit all the time. Nobody ever knew what he was up to, and nobody liked him. The next thing, there’s an ambush and we’re running for cover in a bombed out village. I got stuck with West in an abandoned hut, and then this, this, this monster, this bastard, this fucking bastard is biting me, and he’s too strong and he and he and then he…

  I died screaming and I woke up ten minutes later, this undead thing. West was gone and while I was dead, I’d missed Taylor coming in, stepping on the IED West had laid at the door. That lad was screaming and sobbing and blood was pulsing out where his legs shouldae been and I didn’t recognise anything or anyone. All I knew was the smell of the blood. I didnae even know mae name. I didnae remember that I was at war, that I was a doctor, or that I used tae be human. I crawled to where the blood pumped out and opened mae mouth tae let it in. I didnae even have tae bite. Instead of helping him, I drank blood like an animal, off the floor.

  ‘I bet he didn’t tell you,’ West continued, ‘about crawling in the dirt and gulping down that fountain of blood like it was champagne, eh Sharpe? The smell of all that blood was glorious, wasn’t it? And you were so thirsty. You were funny to watch from outside the hut. Like a terrier at a rat, you were, like a pig, on your hands and knees with your snout in the trough.’

  James remembered it. He remembered the thirst, and the shame that came after it was temporarily quenched. Newly dead, newly awake, raw with an insatiable need he didn’t understand and couldn’t control. The beast in his veins roaring so loud it drowned out everything he was. The taste of blood and the thick drench of it on his hands, the sticky, slick wet of it running down his chin and his chest and…

  Later, when he realised, he thought, Corporal Taylor wouldn’t have lived anyway. There was no help for that lad or for any of the patrol, all dead, between Major West’s guns and his teeth, and his laughter as he hunted them all down.

  James, soaked in blood, tried to flee. He stumbled, dazed, through the carnage and the crossfire towards the trucks. Bullets tore through his arm and the holes healed right up; a piece of shrapnel cut open his face and moments later the wound was gone. He opened his eyes at last to silence; to the stink of blood and West standing there, telling him, ‘Cheer up, Sharpe. I’ll look after you.’

  James was still confused, still so thirsty, and West had taken him away, driving through the shrubs, talking the whole time, about dying and being undead, about what it would mean for him now. West told him about thirst and the will to live and he was James’s sire, that West owned him now, and would make sure he had enough to drink.

  ‘I’ve been wanting a doctor on my team, and you’ll fit the bill nicely,’ West told him near the end. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll eat again soon. How did you like your first meal?’

  Through the thirst, James knew. Taylor wouldn’t have lived anyway.

  But that didn’t matter a damn.

  ‘You were stupid at the house, after,’ grinned West, now, here on the balcony. ‘All those kiddies, dead, because you tried to be noble.’

  In that house of corpses and wasted blood, James had tried to cry for what he’d done, what he’d become. But he couldn’t, because his body didn’t make tears any more.

  Instead, he swore he belonged to nobody; that West had made him, but he didn’t own him. And then he tried to stake West.

  West, wounded, fled. James staggered back to his murdered patrol. He waited with the corpses until a new patrol came out to see what had happened to them. James, unable to say, covered in other people’s blood, was taken back to the base in a state of shock, it seemed, from which he never recovered. He puzzled his doctors, and frantically faked medical results until they discharged him and sent him home.

  ‘Did you tell your pretty boyfriend all of that, Sharpe? Does Dare let you kiss him with that killer’s mouth of yours?’

  The look James gave Gabriel was despairing; resigned to loss.

  And the look Gabriel gave back to him was defiant, and beseeching, and… humane. James didn’t know what to make of it, because nobody sane could have heard that story and still loved him.

  James adjusted his grip on the cutlass and tried to work through his options. Then a smell struck the back of his nose, a reeking taste in his mouth, harsh and terrible, like ammonia.

  ‘Alreet, pet. What you
up to here, then?’ The red-haired man sauntered onto the balcony, watching them all with his cold coal eyes.

  ‘Niall,’ West grinned, ‘Got a present for you.’

  Niall with the Geordie accent cast a dismissive look over the tableau. ‘Not a present I really want, Cael, ya wazzock. I want t’other brother.’

  ‘We’ll get him,’ West said confidently. ‘But I thought–’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ said Niall drily. ‘You don’t do it very well.’

  ‘Now look here, Frazer,’ West began to sneer.

  ‘Nee, ya daft fucker.’ Niall Frazer’s laconic Geordie drawl was suddenly thicker; hard and unyielding. ‘You look. We were here for the older one, and this one’s not a bleedin’ gift. Divvint give us grief. Go wrong with me, West, and you’ll know aaall about it.’

  West cocked his head. ‘I meant the other one. The doctor, there. He’s a vampire too. I made him for you a while back, only he didn’t want to come in with us, then.’

  ‘Well, I divvint want him comin’ in with us now. I divvint need a doctor and I definitely divvint need another vampire.’

  ‘What about him?’ West pressed his nails against Gabriel’s throat. A trickle of blood dribbled from under West’s forefinger. ‘If you want, I can fang him up for you.’

  ‘I just said I divvint need another vampire,’ Frazer scowled. ‘I’ve got you and your lot. Do as ya telt, quit blathering and spit him out.’

  ‘What for? We got the brother here, didn’t we?’

  Frazer’s mouth pursed sourly. ‘Dare the Elder opposed my approach more energetically than I supposed he might. Still, a scratch might be enough. I can let him simmer. But I might need that one for later.’

  Frazer grinned suddenly at James and James recoiled at the rows of pointed teeth on display below the gleaming coal-black eyes.

  ‘Sorry, forgot myself, pet.’ Frazer slipped a hand into his pocket, withdrew it with a piece of gum held delicately between his fingers. He unwrapped it, popped it into his mouth, began to chew.

  James could smell the herbal scent of the gum, part of a scent indelibly associated with Frazer now. He inhaled slowly, trying to identify the components.

  Frazer grinned again, and his teeth were more normal. More human.

  ‘A pinch of foxglove,’ he said, teeth showing as he chewed open- mouthed. ‘A little elderberry. Foxglove has digitalis in it, did you know?’ He wandered towards James, unconcerned. ‘They say fairies used to give it to foxes so we could sneak into chicken coops.’ He paused in front of James, and his eyes were almost human again. ‘Works a treat for posh parties, too. Lovely, helpful fairies. Probably scared the foxes would bite their wings off.’

  He snapped his teeth close enough to James’s eyes that James felt the draft against his lashes. ‘Genealogy’s a hobby for bores, don’t you think? Blathering on about roots and forebears and bastard bairns and whose mam married who and shite. But it’s not so bad. You never know if they’ll find nobility lurking at the roots. Or a fox spirit.’

  Chew chew. Grin grin.

  ‘Niall.’

  ‘Leave him, Cael. We’ve bigger game to hunt.’ He finished on a hard, teeth-baring T, sharp as the crunch of bone.

  ‘Niall,’ West whined.

  ‘Goin’ now,’ interrupted Frazer. ‘Don’t make me stake you, pet.’ He stared hard at West, then grinned. ‘Don’t I let you have any fun, Cael? Go on then, pet. I can get at Dare another way. Have at the little fucker, and take out the nebby doctor while you’re at it.’

  West grinned. He snarled and bared his teeth. He pulled tight on Gabriel’s throat to expose the pulse of his carotid artery.

  ‘Gabriel!’ James raised the cutlass in rage, in desperation, as West lunged, bit hard, and blood welled from the wound…

  …and Gabriel twisted his arms, not trying to free himself, but angling, one arm down to West’s thigh, the other up against his Adam’s apple, and his wrists flexed hard.

  The snick and crunch of one release mechanism came, then the second, and West’s howl of agony rent the air as he stumbled away. Silver-plated blades, dipped in garlic and holy water, pierced his throat and his leg. Gabriel was half dragged with him while he twisted his wrists again, trying to get the firing mechanism untangled. West snarled his rage and lunged as James’s cutlass whistled down, across, slicing as it was designed to do, through bone and muscle and gristle.

  Gabriel heaved in a breath, got the blades to unlock from their harnesses and turned his face away as the cutlass blade whizzed past his neck with an inch to spare. He held that breath as West’s body and snarling face froze, crumbled and wafted around Gabriel like ash. The blades clattered to the floor.

  James had raised the cutlass for a pass at Frazer next, but his new target had dashed aside. Frazer perched on the balustrade, his wiry frame balanced like an acrobat. He’d spat out the gum and his eyes were glowing, his teeth lengthening again.

  ‘I wasn’t finished with my vampire,’ he snarled at them. ‘I had plans for him.’

  James dropped the cutlass and snatched for the service pistol tucked into his sash. He fumbled with all the cloth in the way, then got a firm grip.

  Frazer grinned, his tongue lolling out the side of his mouth. ‘Good luck to you with that, pet.’

  As James fired, Frazer’s small body folded up, like fleshly origami, and where a man had been, a fox leapt into the night. A moment later, James’s keen vision saw a large fox running hell for leather down the drive. He thought he detected a slight limp in its gait. He hoped so.

  James flung the gun down beside the blades in the ash. He knelt by Gabriel, who had sagged to the cold stone, ash smeared over his face and clothes and hair.

  ‘Gabriel.’

  ‘Release mechanism,’ gasped Gabriel, ‘needs work.’ His throat was streaked in ash and blood. A tiny fountain of it pulsed rhythmically from the wound. The artery had been nicked. Would tear soon, under the pressure. ‘Go on then,’ he murmured, ‘Fix it.’

  James swallowed hard.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Jamie,’ Gabriel admonished him. His vampire teeth were incongruous in his pale but very human face. ‘West couldn’t possibly tell me anything I don’t already know about you. Not any of the important stuff.’

  The look Gabriel gave him was steady, despite the shock from the attack and his pain. It was grounding; accepting. I know what you are, said that gaze, And you’re not a monster. You’re my friend, and I love you and I trust you.

  ‘This may feel weird,’ said James. Gabriel tried to laugh at that, then winced.

  James lowered his mouth to the wound that West’s teeth had made in the pale skin, and he licked. Licked again. He let the saliva pool in his mouth, a natural response to the smell and taste of the blood, then let the spit dribble into the wound. His professional medical instincts rebelled at the technique, but he knew this would work. A vampire bite was the harm and the cure in one.

  James waited until the pool of saliva sank into the wound and the blood ceased to bubble and flow. He bent to lick at it again, then drew away to check on the progress.

  ‘Don’t waste any,’ murmured Gabriel.

  ‘Don’t be a prat.’

  ‘I give it freely.’

  ‘You’re bleeding all over my rental costume freely, you mean.’

  ‘Better you should drink it, then.’

  James bent again to lick and suck the blood away from the now- healed skin of Gabriel’s throat. He wiped the back of his hand over his chin, and then licked that blood away too.

  The soft sound of someone clearing their throat had James sitting suddenly upright and looking guiltily into the shadows.

  Michael limped out of them.

  ‘Don’t look like that, Doctor Sharpe, I could see perfectly well you weren’t biting him. My people saw a fox running from the building. I assume that was West’s associate.’

  ‘Aye. His name’s Niall Frazer.’

  ‘And We
st?’

  James gestured at the fine ash sprinkled around them.

  ‘A shame. We could have used the information he had.’

  ‘He tried to kill Gabriel.’

  ‘Then you made the right choice.’ Michael glanced at his hand, which he’d bandaged in a white handkerchief. Blood spots showed the two lines where Frazer’s claws had scratched him. ‘I don’t suppose you know what kind of creature Frazer is.’

  ‘Foxth thpirit,’ said Gabriel as he tried to sit up. He frowned at the return of the lisp and shoved trembling fingers in his mouth to wrench out the fake fangs. James helped to steady him.

  ‘Not a werefox? That is heartening, though obviously, he might be lying. Foxes do.’ Michael stuffed the injured hand in his pocket then peered at the empty sheaths he could see under Gabriel’s cape. ‘That was clever.’

  ‘Yes, we are,’ agreed Gabriel.

  James helped Gabriel to stand and lean against the balustrade. Gabriel’s hands were still shaking, so James unfastened the cloak and used it to gather up Gabriel’s poisonous blades before retrieving his cutlass and the gun.

  Gabriel squinted at his brother, as though he was having trouble focusing. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘You’d best be off,’ said Michael. ‘I’ll see to things here.’

  ‘I can look at that hand, if you like,’ James offered.

  Michael reluctantly withdrew the injured hand from his pocket and allowed James to unwrap the bloodied handkerchief. The skin underneath it was unblemished.

  ‘That does not bode well,’ said Michael.

  ‘It really doesn’t,’ agreed James.

  What does it mean?’ Gabriel wanted to know.

  ‘Only supernatural wounds heal so quickly,’ Michael replied in a tone of studied neutrality. ‘Vampire saliva is one thing, and quite useful, but this. I don’t know what it means that a scratch from a fox spirit has already healed.’ He pushed the offending hand back into his pocket, ‘Oh well. I have Bureau resources at my disposal. I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough.’

  ‘Do you want them to know about that?’ asked James.