The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1)

by Andrew Macmillan

  ‘That’s far enough, vampire. Millie, stay close to the door please. I want a witness, just in case.’

  The gargle of Andrew’s breath was like a drowning man inhaling a lungful of water. She couldn’t help but imagine his hollow chest, filling with unhappy air.

  ‘Curious, for if I strike you, the girl will simply be my next victim.’

  Did he have to draw the last word out with quite that level of orgasmic relish?

  ‘You can try, but sunlight and vampires don’t play so well.’

  Andrew’s face stretched in an approximation of some expression or other. ‘You bore me, wytch.’ Direct, then. Perhaps this could be some fun after all.

  ‘Address me by my rank, vampire, and get on with it. I am a Knight of the Coalition.’ She took great pride in holding the title of knight alongside that of mage. It was well-earned through her unusual level of martial training.

  Andrew stalked the room. He wore a striking, rich green, velvet suit with a tie, probably silk, and suede shoes. Nifty, for a dead guy.

  ‘So be it, knight.’ He spat the last word. How did he manage to get spit from those dry ducts? He was circling her, moving closer.

  ‘Keep the circling up, pal, and they’ll be using those fancy shoes to identify your corpse. Can I say corpse to you or is that offensive?’

  Andrew halted and wheezed. ‘Sorry, old habits.’ Lovely. What a charmer. Perhaps he should go for a night on the town.

  The man she’d saved had better be safe. ‘Show me that the man you hold hostage is alive and well, and hurry up, vampire. I don’t have all day.’

  Andrew cocked his head, a birdlike gesture reminiscent of the raptors in Jurassic Park. His arm moved in a blur. She did well not to flinch. A few inches from her face a phone screen appeared. It showed the man sitting on a huge bed, holding today’s newspaper. He looked very confused, and very alive.

  Andrew rasped. ‘It seems you may be of interest to my research.’

  The phone vanished. Straight down to brass tacks.

  She snorted. ‘I doubt that.’

  No way this creep was getting anything from her. Andrew hovered.

  ‘You sensed the Anvil, yes? And yet you are a Myriad mage of notable power, chosen of Mixcoatl, the Aztec god of the hunt, but also patron deity to many of the ancient Mesoamerican cultures.’ Natalia Torres, This Is Your Life! It was a little disturbing how much the vampire knew, but then all those things could be found out easily enough.

  ‘Ooh, you checked the Great Library. Clever boy. Did you find the register yourself or did the nice caretaker help you?’

  The hiss erupting from the vampire might have been a laugh. ‘Tell me, how long have you been able to sense the black magic of the Murk?’

  None of his business: the Mother was doing a great job of torpedoing her lifelong secret.

  ‘Well, in college, I started smoking green, you know? A lot of green, bro.’

  Andrew stood now, watching her, unblinking, unmoving. She tried not to notice his complete stillness. The presence of a living, breathing person could not be faked. Andrew’s stillness was absence, loss and erosion. His mouth became the only moving part of him.

  ‘Your parents had some measure of fame did they not? What an unusual pairing they were. The records weren’t clear, though. Your mother, she was a siphon, yes? A leech?’

  That part of her record was sealed. And also, her mother was no common siphon.

  ‘What of it, vampire? My parents died heroes. Yes, my mother was a sanguinancer, but my father helped her; taught her control. Together they took on Huitzilopochtli himself, and stopped him re-entering the world. They saved us all, including your worthless corpse, so show some fucking respect.’

  There was nowhere to hide from that impassive, unblinking stare. She turned, breathing to calm herself. Gods be damned, he was getting to her. Fucking vampires. She checked her mind quickly, running through the mnemonic defences the Council burned into all mages. The telltale signs of vampire mind manipulation weren’t to be found; this was all just good old-fashioned button-pressing. Even the sealed record didn’t contain most of the detail she had just given Andrew. That information had come from Nessie, but she wasn’t going to let a vampire talk shit about her parents. No way.

  ‘Huitzilopochtli. The Aztec god of war? Interesting. Also, your mother, a sanguinancer? Interesting.’

  ‘Stop saying interesting like that. Shut up about my family or get out of here.’ She sat, sullen.

  The vampire appeared in front of her again, his voice box whistling.

  ‘I only want to understand you. I want to know how it is you are what you are.’

  Wasn’t she the lucky one? ‘I told you, I’m a knight and a mage of the Myriad.’ She waved Andrew away; he stepped back and contorted into what she supposed was meant to look like contemplation.

  ‘Yes, yes you are those things. I think you should know, though, the records I found mention nothing that would make me think your mother was a sanguinancer. There was very little recorded about your family. Odd, given the level of detail the Houses of the Magi usually display.’

  Her head was beginning to ache, she was done with his cat and mouse bullshit. ‘The records were destroyed so Huitzilopochtli’s summoning ritual would be lost along with them, and I’ve already told you too much of things that are none of your business.’ The bridge of her nose felt tight.

  Andrew had crept closer and now loomed over her, arms perpendicular at the elbow, as though he were poised over a buffet. ‘You have been most helpful; I promise you I will dig further. You have a right to know who your parents were.’

  She stood. ‘I know who my parents were, and you will stop – whatever this is – right now. And get away from me, or I’ll fry you.’

  She waved her hand, shooing the lanky creature, who hopped back in jerky movements. He didn’t relent.

  ‘Tell me, how did you become chosen?’

  Her head thumped now. ‘It’s all on record, go and read it. Leave me be, vampire.’

  The vampire had settled again to stillness, a smile on his corpse. ‘You will release your records to me then?’ Technically, he needed her consent. Not that lack of consent seemed to have been an obstacle for his information-gathering so far, but there was little of interest in her official record – so, to get him to leave, she said yes.

  Silence hung for a moment before being punctuated by Andrew’s drowning inhale. ‘Excellent, knight. Tell me one last thing.’

  Anything to get rid of him. ‘What?’

  Andrew raised a finger. ‘Your mother, a siphon. Your father, a mage. I bet he had a gift like yours?’

  Something stuck in her chest.

  ‘And now, following in her parents’ footsteps, Ethan Cole, the armiger, a black-magic siphon. You a mage, with your gift for sensing darkness.’

  ‘Yes, yes – very clever, Columbo. How long did it take to work out the bleeding obvious? Idiot. Now piss off.’

  Andrew blinked. The motion looked absurd among all the palpable inaction of his being. ‘Idiot?’

  Was that anger she saw in him? Two could play the button-pushing game, pal. ‘Yes, you’re an idiot. Thick as mince. Actually, that’s an insult to mince.’ The snort from Millie outside the door could not have been better timed.

  The vampire’s eyes became hooded. ‘Alas, I fear for your dreams of saving the armiger … How well do you know your precious Ethan Cole?’

  Cold ran in her blood. ‘What do you mean?’

  The rasping laugh of Andrew filled the chamber with gurgling, wheezing menace. ‘What do you think Cole would do to keep a loved one, say a knight like you or the Commander, safe from harm?’ The Commander – Nessie; what the fuck had happened?

  Hang on, was this another button-pushing exercise?

  ‘You’re pathetic. You’re no threat to those men; they would eat you for breakfast. I hear the Pit is warm all year round. I’m sure they’d be happy to send you there.’

  Andrew looked far
too carefree as he stalked to the door. ‘I don’t need to threaten Ethan Cole; he’ll see to own his undoing. I wonder, knight. Would he kill a troublesome thing for me – a human – to save someone dear? What do you think?’

  Mixcoatl’s grace. Yes, maybe he would. What had happened? She couldn’t give Andrew the satisfaction.

  ‘No, of course not.’ The words sounded weak, even to her.

  Cole could do a great many things in the right circumstances. And she was stuck here, in Creepville, with what was starting to look like a cult.

  The vampire’s voice grated back to her from outside the room. ‘The boy you saved, so alive today, will find out the limits of Ethan Cole’s mercy soon. Henry was such a gentle soul. I had to starve him for months before he would feed. Oh well, no matter. I am not responsible for what Ethan Cole does.’

  Natalia flew from the room, the power of the gods flowing through her, filling her with dangerous potential. There, a dozen yards away down the hall, the vampire smirked back at her. A line of three wytches stood between them, poised and bristling with their own power. Power they aimed pointedly at her.

  ‘You’ll protect this scumbag?’ Everything was back to front here.

  Their leader – a tall, red-haired woman – spoke. ‘The Mother has promised him safe passage, sister. He cannot be harmed. Please.’

  There was the tiniest glimmer of fear in the woman’s eyes. Natalia’s anger ebbed; it was unthinkable to fight another magic user. They had all been persecuted and hounded long enough through the centuries without lifting their hands to each other on account of scum like Andrew Ancroft.

  ‘You better not hurt that man – Henry. We have a deal. Or I won’t help you, whatever it is you want, you frigging creep.’

  Andrew sauntered away with a dismissive wave. ‘It’s not on my head what Ethan Cole does. And if you want the next set of vampires to rob of their immortality, you will play along, Natalia Torres.’ His smugness burned. The leading wytch bowed, watching Natalia warily as the group receded down the long, sloping hall of the fortress’s main concourse toward the exit.

  Behind, Millie stood. The admiration plastered on the younger woman’s face slapped her as she turned away from Andrew.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. And don’t take shit from anyone, Millie, understand?’

  Millie nodded.

  ‘You and I are going to talk later. But right now, I’m going to see the Mother, and you’re going to take me.’

  She’d put a stop to this nonsense right now. The Mother was due some frank feedback, as Nessie called it. Andrew was about to discover what threating her nearest and dearest would get him. Next, she had to find Cole, help him out of whatever mess he was in. Then he’d get some frank feedback too. Gods, what could Ethan have done?

  Chapter 4

  Sent by the Council to contain the Pit, Commander Hugo Moyotl – or Nessie as he was known to the Scottish natives – paused, close to the hidden mouth of the Pit. All around him was Holyrood Park, under a fresh-fallen night. Cars streamed past along the road some hundred metres away. A few figures hurried along the distant path, dogs in tow. Some ardent souls risked pneumonia for their cardiac health, jogging along past the great hill of Arthur’s Seat which dominated this part of the city. The Pit itself was concealed to all, even to mages as powerful as him. No one had seen it since it was created, to Nessie’s knowledge.

  His heart had skipped the moment the park had come into view. It should have been carnage. He had braced for the worst. Beast vampires were a horror of a bygone age. He’d been very young when he last encountered one, but the terror of the creature’s butchery – in a small Olmec village in pre-colonial Mesoamerica – had never truly left him. There were no guns and no Armistice to stem the slaughter. Taller than the buildings it had trampled, the huge, heavily-muscled quadruped – resembling a scorpion in the way it scuttled with cruel speed after the defenceless people – had hunted with calculated savagery. It had systematically swiped the villagers’ clay huts open, its flat head invading their refuges as it fed with gluttony. The sound of human suffering being drawn out for its own sake carried across the centuries, filling his ears with phantoms.

  But here, there was no carnage. No screams or running civilians. Nessie had lived long enough to know that improbably good news could turn bad extremely quickly. Miracles were seldom what they seemed.

  He would know more once he saw the Guardians. As elemental constructs of rock and fire, they were imbued with a singular purpose. Guard the Pit at all costs. And yet, the bells of the Pit rang. Something had got past the Guardians. Or had gone through them. Eight feet of amorphous, vaguely humanoid rock and magical fire animated with a singular will, for one purpose. If something had gone through them … He pushed the thought away.

  He’d stopped to trace the delicate lines woven into the Pit’s glamour spell from a hundred feet away. The spell was the reason no one had ever seen the Pit mouth: a strange and possibly narcissistic affectation on the part of the Pit’s creators, to make it invisible even to mages with true sight. Any number of beast vampires might be hiding behind it now.

  It was an ancient and independent spell, and like all glamours, it would be of the obfuscation facet of magic. It was so well crafted that even Nessie could barely make out the blue strands that indicated obfuscation magic’s presence. This spell was self-sustained by the ambient magic radiating from the volcanic plug of Arthur’s Seat.

  Right now, Cole would be tracking the escaped vampire across the city. The boy would be alone and up against a creature so savage it had been locked away with all its kind, in the darkness of the Pit, forever. He grasped the wooden carving of the Old Woman hung around his neck and glanced upward.

  ‘Please Cailleach, give the boy a measure of wisdom to match his strength.’

  If the Old Woman of Winter heard his silent plea, he saw no sign of it reflected in the blankness of the sky above.

  He approached the area where the Pit was located with the soldiers of the Edinburgh Coalition flanking him. There was no sign on the ground of a beast vampire, or anything that could have caused the great bell in the Council’s chambers to toll. The men of the Coalition had fanned out, first in perimeter and then looking for tracks and traces. They were skilled in such matters but had found no indication of the vampire’s passing. Beast vampires were huge and should be simple to track.

  Nessie would worry about that later. The more immediate problem for the city was that the men were not drilled for the challenges of facing beast vampires. Nessie himself was unprepared. The creatures of the Pit had been locked away and forgotten for centuries. The Pit was unbreakable; they had all believed it. The Coalition risked its members’ deaths every day to keep the city safe, and now they stood in ignorance of a threat that had been as clear and plain as their own noses. Why had they not given this possibility more thought?

  The men had taken up firing positions around him – firing lanes, Cole called them. They looked professional, their sleek black rifles tracking the empty night before them. Behind the Pit’s glamour, whose form only Nessie could see, death might be watching. If a beast vampire had escaped once, it could happen again. There could be any number of them lurking behind the glamour.

  ‘Sergeant Wells, I need to be touch distance from this foolish glamour to bring it down.’ The pale face of the sergeant in a chain-mail coif peered up at him. Nessie knew men of action well enough – too much time to think was the enemy of courage. Nessie stepped forward.

  ‘Sir,’ Wells responded, grim-faced, keeping pace as he barked a quick command to his men to cover them. He hadn’t expected Wells to come with him to reach the glamour, but he was a welcome guardian. The nature of a soldier’s duty often made exemplary men.

  ‘Let’s go quickly, Sergeant.’

  Behind them he could hear the men change positions. Nessie and the sergeant drew close to the glamour.

  ‘Fifty feet.’

  He hoped the men behind them were good
judges of distance. Would they have the time to take a beast vampire down before it ripped Nessie and the sergeant to shreds? The wind fluttered restlessly; the night could be full of watching eyes.

  The glamour was right in front of them.

  ‘Twenty feet.’

  The sergeant breathed beside Nessie with the forced deliberation of a man enduring the long, slow walk to the gallows. The ground just ahead erupted. A bird burst from the longer grass on the hillside. There were too many civilians around for wild gunfire.

  ‘Hold!’

  For the love of the Old Woman. A murmured shout went up from the assembled men. Damn the business of being in command. Nessie’s heart thrashed loud in his chest; his lungs fought to lurch and heave. He could feel the sergeant’s fear as the man followed stoically. He had to look calm; these soldiers could not see a senior mage afraid. He strode quickly the rest of the way to the glamour and nodded at the sergeant when they finally reached the boundary of the spell. The sergeant braced his rifle in response.

  The texture of the magic was silken smooth. It was a beautiful spell, as these things went. His eyes found the surrounding hill suddenly fascinating, his feet wishing to follow his gaze, yet he couldn’t feel the glamour’s push on his mind, urging his eyes to wander elsewhere; it lacked even that most subtle incongruence which so often accompanied the effects of glamour magic. It was beautiful and garishly idiotic. And possibly screening centuries-old monsters, poised to tear his flesh from his bones and crack his marrow, just to hear him scream before the real feeding – the draining of his life and years – began.

  Such delicate work was easy to disrupt. He tensed, waiting for the agony of claws and the horror of being crushed by jaws too wide to be human. What if the escaped vampire had never left the mouth of the Pit? Not likely, but then it was nowhere else to be seen either.

  ‘Sùil na stoirme.’ He focused his magic through the specific key for the eye of the storm, and the glamour spell was robbed of the magic it had drawn from the hill, grounding it out in the local area. No claws, no gnashing teeth exploded into his body as the spell melted away.