by Anne Malcom
Then I darted off. Full speed. Thorne, the ape, was quicker than he looked and almost snatched my waist to stop my exit.
But he was human and I was a vampire.
If only my uterus would get the memo.
Me: You could have elaborated on what, or who, ‘Thorne’ is. You know, part of a race of humans out to exterminate my kind? A heads-up would have been real nice.
Lewis: I did give you a heads-up.
Me: Saying ‘watch out for Thorne’ without any explanation doesn’t count. Your mother should spank you, or if she, likely, has kicked the bucket due to old age, I’ll do it. Though only one of us will enjoy it, and I won’t tell which one.
No reply.
No fun.
I was in desperate need of fun. Which was why I was heading for drinks with Sophie and was going to get her to curse demons while we watched.
Two days since the ‘incident’ in the alleyway with Thorne and his weird sister, and I was frequenting all the bars around town trying to get info on this weirdo sect planning on killing me and everyone else who didn’t toe the line.
It was getting utterly dull.
Hence me texting Sophie and telling her to meet me at the bar.
I ruled out the cursing demons part, for the time being.
She was late. And since I was always fifteen minutes late, and this time she was twenty, she was really late.
I’d already had three cocktails and was toying with taking the human bartender home.
Then the door opened and Hurricane Sophie came in. You’d think a witch would be wearing those criminally long gypsy skirts, too many scarves, with plaited hair and smelling like incense.
Not Sophie.
She looked like she should be trailing after Metallica concerts. She was almost always wearing a band tee, spelled or just altered to be skintight across her huge breasts and showing a hefty amount of midriff. Bottoms were always short and tight. Today it was leather hot pants and thigh-high black boots. A fringed leather jacket, a tumble of blonde hair and a heavy hand with the eyeliner topped it off.
“Sorry,” she breathed, leaning over to drain my drink.
I shrugged. “No problem. I’m totally sure Alice Cooper needed that blowjob.”
She scowled at me.
I grinned at her.
She shook her head and tapped her fingers on the bar. The bartender put two drinks in front of us moments later.
I picked up my cocktail. “It’s so handy having a witch around, especially one who breaks all the utterly dull witchy rules for very important things, such as drinks.”
She sipped her own. “Those rules are archaic, and I’m opposed to any form of authority. Stupid coven council just can’t seem to get that memo. Never mind it’s been a century or so,” she groaned.
“They just can’t handle change, young one,” I said. “Wrinkly old witches who are stuck to the old ways. They need to get progressive. ‘Times, they are a changing,’ to quote Bob Dylan.”
Sophie was young, a baby really. She was only about one hundred and fifty, and had been rebelling against authority for about one hundred and forty years. I’d met her when she was running from a building she’d blown up in London after the witch coven had forbidden her to use her newly discovered pyrotechnic power.
We’d been friends ever since.
Witches weren’t exactly immortal; the coven council, who needed shots of Botox like I needed a warm blood bag, were examples of that. They aged, just at a much, much slower rate. With the help of sparkles and fairy dust, I was sure. The secrets of the witch community were locked up pretty tight. After the disaster that was Salem, they needed it that way.
“They giving you trouble?” I asked.
The council was pretty big on their rules, and the punishments that went with them. Sophie had been able to escape the most severe on account of her lineage and witchy talent, something about birthrights, yawn. But I was thinking the more powerful she got, the more the council would want to chain her up, control it.
A loose cannon was one thing but a loose nuke, which was what Sophie was in the witch world? That could fuck everything up.
Precisely why I liked her.
She nodded. “What’s new? The threat of a cell, binding spells, unimaginable pain if I don’t toe the line.” She smirked. “I’d like to see them try.”
“So would I. Text me when they come to inflict that unimaginable pain,” I said. “Especially if that bitch Hazel is going to be there. I’ve been itching for a reason to rip her throat out since the nineteenth century.”
Hazel and I had history.
Another problem with immortality: you had history with everyone. And in my case, it seemed like all of mine was bad blood.
“You got it. But I have to say I couldn’t officially have anything to do with condoning a vampire killing one of my own. My Miss Congeniality crown would fall right off.”
Sophie was somewhat my counterpart in the witch world. Supernatural societies were old, established, set in their ways. In some ways, humans were more progressive than us, able to accept drastic shifts and changes in society. Mortality did that, I guessed. But difference, changing the status quo, took small increments over centuries.
“We here to troll for guys?” Sophie asked, sucking the cherry out of her glass. “Human bar for once? You haven’t fallen off the wagon, have you?” Her tone was casual but I didn’t miss the slight bite—excuse the pun—to it. She may not have been around for the murder spree of the early seventeenth century, but she’d heard about it in detail after she made me bewitched cocktails in the sixties. My whole tragic past poured right out.
“Still firmly on the wagon. Don’t shoot me with any sparklers out of your fingers just yet,” I answered, glancing down to her silver-drenched hands. “This is about business, actually.”
Sophie raised her brow.
Along with being a rebel of the witch world, she was also a well-known PI for hire in the supernatural one. She did have a distinct advantage using spells, but there were some laws against which spells you could use for commercial gain or something equally boring.
Like Sophie, I didn’t do well with rules.
“Business?” Sophie repeated. “I’m intrigued.”
“That’s me, intriguing and barely breathing.” I finished my drink. “Do the tappy thing,” I ordered when she just looked at me.
She sighed dramatically and did it again.
“I’m looking for you to find someone. I could probably do it, but it’s time-consuming and also I don’t want to. I don’t actually want to be involved in this whole mess, but here I am, so I’m going to delegate as much as possible.”
I already had Scott pushing his friends—yeah, I was surprised he had them too—for information regarding the rebel group and their membership quota. My family were obviously at the top of the list, but I’d wait a while before going to a reunion. They were back in Russia, and I wasn’t in the mood for vodka and depression just yet.
“A certain vampire. And some information,” I told her.
“You’re looking for a vampire? Am I matchmaking?” she teased.
“Careful, witchy. I may have said I was on the wagon but the road suddenly got bumpy and there’s a delicious-looking blood bag in front of me,” I threatened.
She didn’t look at all concerned.
“Actually, can you do that, but in reverse?” I asked suddenly, my mind jumping from the task at hand. Surely it could wait; there wasn’t likely going to be a war this very second.
She frowned at me. “Do what?”
“Make me… unmatch with someone,” I clarified, thinking of the slayer I’d been daydreaming about since the week before, and the alley.
The king may have had an effect on me when I was in his presence, but the slayer haunted me in the dark corners of my mind.
She slammed her glass down with such force it cracked. A couple people stared but she didn’t notice. “You’ve got a crush on someone?”
/> I scowled at her. “I’m almost five hundred years old. I do not get crushes,” I spat the word. “I have an unsavory connection with an equally unsavory character, which I would like that severed before I sever his head in order to break it. I thought this would be a better, less bloody alternative.”
“Right,” she said, sounding far too amused. “Who is he?”
I stared at her. “Can you do it or not?”
She shrugged. “Depends. Species?”
I gritted my teeth. “Human. Slayer to be more precise.”
“Blow me down with a feather,” she breathed. “Slayer? The vampire and the slayer. This is like that show, you know, the one with Sarah Michelle Gellar…. What was it called?”
“If you mention that show, I swear to everything that is unholy that I’ll rip your spine out through your throat,” I promised.
She grinned. “Yeah, like you could.”
“Try me, Hermione. You may have a few little improvements on the base model, but you’re still human,” I snapped. “Now what can you do?”
She waved her hand. “Oh nothing. A spell like that doesn’t even exist. You can’t screw with human, or even inhuman, emotions,” she said, her gaze flickering up and down my body. “I just wanted to know who you were crushing on.”
“So you lied to get that information?”
She nodded.
“I knew there was a reason I liked you,” I said. “But this information leaves this little bubble, you’ll—”
“Become your next brunch. Yeah, I get it. Girlfriends keep secrets. It’s in the vault.” She tapped her head. “Now, which slayer is it? I will say I’m not familiar with them all, since they’re pretty staunch and serious and I stay away from that like I do pastels. But I’m sure I can do some research. Give me a name,” she demanded, pulling out her phone.
I snatched it off her. “This subject is closed. We need to get down to business now.”
She screwed up her face. “You’re no fun.”
“I’m loads of fun,” I argued. “I’m just more fun when I don’t have threats like dismemberment hanging over my head.”
“Dismemberment? Bummer.”
I nodded. “Bummer indeed. You can find a vamp, can’t you?”
She looked offended. “Of course.”
“Vampire by the name of John,” I said.
She waited for a beat, but then I didn’t speak. Her eyes widened. “That’s it, a vampire named John?”
I nodded. “I realize it’s not much to go on.”
Her brow rose. “Isla, it’s nothing to go on.”
“Well, you can try after I tell you more about what he’s involved in. Will that help?”
She sucked her drink down, nodding.
“Good. And now I need some inside intel,” I said, leaning forward. “Of the delicate kind.”
“Will me telling you this information get me a threat of dismemberment of my own?”
“Don’t you always have something like that from the council?”
“Good point,” she said. “Go on.”
I glanced around. We were surrounded by humans, drinking the sorrows of their pitiful lives away. Or sucking down liquids in order to make themselves more attractive to drunken stockbrokers and land themselves an orgasm. They weren’t paying attention to us. They would, I was sure, if Sophie hadn’t cast a glamour over us the moment she sat down. It stopped those orgasm-seeking humans from coming in our direction.
“What do you know about a rebel faction of vampires, witches, demons, werewolves and a variety of the supernatural vying for world domination?” I asked, cutting to the chase.
Her eyes flickered and she was silent for a moment. “What have you got yourself into, Isla?”
“Trouble, of course.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t just trouble. You need to stay far away from this.” Her face was serious.
I frowned. “Everyone’s telling me that. What’s so bad about a bunch of fanatics with a fairytale of an idea? It’s not like they’re actually dangerous.”
Sophie’s eyes bugged out. “Are you serious? Have you been paying attention to anything going on in the supernatural world for the past decade?”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course not. It’s all such a bore.” I narrowed my eyes at her. “When you’ve been around for as long as I have, you learn that it’s all a cycle. It’s useless. I focus on fashion trends, not political immortal ones. By the way, do you like my boots?” I lifted my foot to reveal my spike-heeled lace-ups.
She flickered her eyes to the boots and then back to me. “This isn’t just a bunch of fanatics,” she corrected. “At the beginning of the century, perhaps, but now, with technology and such making it harder to be an immortal in hiding, they’ve gained more unhappy followers with the status quo. To whom the idea of not being a slave to secrecy is more than a little enticing. The promise of a society in which each supernatural race can embrace their baser instincts without rules. It’s a tempting idea.”
I scoffed. “It’s a utopian idea. They’ll always be underlings of someone. How can people who have lived through numerous revolutions and dictatorships not realize that they never end well? Someone’s always at the top and then everyone else is usually at the bottom.”
Sophie shook her head. “Reason and revolution are never in the same narrative. The party speech is pretty convincing if you’re stupid enough to believe that exterminating all ‘race traitors’ and enslaving the human race is actually a possibility.” She sucked on her drink. “Think about it. No rules that we both hate, no secrecy, no politics. We get to just… be.”
I stared at her. “Are you fucking serious? You think this whole thing is a good idea? That killing humans and supernaturals en masse is necessary for some new world order? I thought you actually liked humans.”
“Chill, Isla. I in no way want any part of this crazy war.” She raised her brow at me. “And that’s what this is, a war. It may not be just yet, but the air has that bitter taste to it like during the demon uprisings of the early twentieth century. You can’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”
I rolled my eyes. “Of course I noticed. Ten vampires were killed at a bloodletting bar in London not three days ago. Then in a similar establishment in Prague. Humans going missing in record numbers and the human press citing some endemic disease? Yeah, the world is going to shit. What’s new?”
She placed her hand over mine. “What’s new is I think this one’s going to blanket the world in blood that will stain almost every being in the supernatural community before it’s over.” Her grip tightened almost to the point of pain, which surprised me. Apart from her magical prowess, the little witch was 100 percent human, as breakable and weak as one too.
My question at her suddenly inhuman strength was swallowed when I caught her eyes.
They weren’t hers.
No. The spark, the mischievous glint that lingered in those green orbs had disappeared in the short moments I’d glanced from her face to her hand and back.
They were vacant. And ancient. The chilling depth in those eyes had me flinching.
“Hell,” she declared, her throaty voice replaced by something flat, emotionless. “Hell will rise up from the flames of the underworld and will reside in those who are chosen.” The vacant eyes focused on my frozen face. “The one vampire and the other will intertwine. This will become the point at which the worlds hang on the precipice. Blood. It’s in the blood that life and death are decided.”
Silence descended heavily, like a cloak over the bustling bar. It was like whoever that was—it certainly wasn’t Sophie—had sucked all the noise out.
Then, like an elastic snapping back into place, it returned. The noise, the glint in Sophie’s eyes. Her hand left mine.
She blinked a couple of times and shook her head, as if to clear it.
“What were we talking about again? The slayer whom you want to do naughty things to, ones that don’t include killing?” She grinned mischievousl
y, sucking down the last of her drink.
I gaped at her. “Please for the love of Lucifer tell me you’re playing me right now?”
She tilted her head in confusion. “No, I’m seriously going to put a spell on you to make you reveal the identity of the slayer who has captured your attention.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. “You honestly don’t remember going all Nostradamus and talking about hell, demon fire and the chosen? And maybe the end of the world?”
Her eyes hardened and the grin left her face like I’d pulled the plug on her amusement. “What?”
“You don’t remember,” I surmised, cool unease snaking up my spine. “Okay, this is totally creepy. Not in the good way. Are you possessed?” I leaned forward, peering at her eyes again for the telltale flicker of flame that would signify demon possession.
It was saying a lot that I hoped my friend was possessed by a demon rather than the alternative.
She leaned back. “No, I’m not possessed by a demon,” she snapped.
I frowned. “Yep. We’re not that lucky.”
She raised her brow. “Lucky?” she repeated. “How would me having a slimy asshole in my head be lucky?”
I drained my drink. “Because that would have been relatively easy to deal with. That”—I gestured to her face in a circular motion—“ is not easy to deal with.”
“What exactly did I say?” she commanded.
I dutifully repeated it, word for word.
By the time I’d finished, she was paler than me.
“Fuck,” she whispered, her voice barely audible, even to my ears.
I nodded. “My sentiments exactly. You had no clue you had the sight?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve never had it. But my powers have been changing lately,” she said slowly.
“Changing?” I probed. “Like you deciding to spout out ominous prophecies after a couple of cocktails?”
She shook her head again. “No. This is going to be a first.” Her head snapped up. “This doesn’t go any further.”
