The Mother’s anger rang in response to Natalia’s disgust. ‘I do what needs to be done. The work has asked sacrifices of all of us!’
The women around the Mother nodded, the group knitting invisibly as if by shared pain. Natalia hadn’t considered what the Order would have had to go through to get to this point, but they couldn’t have come this far only to murder people, surely?
Natalia had to make the wytches see reason. ‘Those people’s innocence is debatable, but so is their guilt. How many were made vampire against their will? Feel sorry for yourselves all you like – you killed those people, and it’s wrong.’
She turned to look at the plain-robed women.
‘I can’t imagine what it’s taken to get here, but you made it. You got here. And the measure of what happens next will determine whether you do good, or something else. If we can’t treat our own people with mercy – even the worst of them – how can we ask for mercy in return? How can we say we are any different from the things that hunt us? Those people are only separated from us by luck.’
The room was silent for a moment, then low conversation filled it. The Mother descended the steps from her throne.
‘Sisters of the Order! Natalia Torres comes before us as an exemplary soul. Mercy she asks, and she fills our hearts and minds with doubt. But she does not know, she cannot know, how we have bled for this chance to save mankind!’
Mixcoatl’s grace, it was like an Oscar award speech. The charisma of the Mother drew all eyes to her.
‘We know the darkness that awaits. We have been shown. We cannot risk any harm to our cause. The vampires cannot live, and we cannot keep them. Make no mistake, Natalia, war is coming. War in which the human race will survive or perish. The men and women we are forced to kill give their lives so that men and women everywhere might stand a chance. The cause is bigger than a few lives.’
A coming war was grim news, but given how the Mother was carrying on, Natalia couldn’t take her word for it. The Mother moved around the wytches, making eye contact with each in turn. A smile here, a touch on the arm there. Something in her movements –the way she held her head or perhaps the timbre of her voice – sparked that unsettling feeling of familiarity again. The Mother had the wytches in the palm of her hand as she spoke.
‘We not only save vampires from their wretchedness, Natalia. We have found a way to raise a champion of humanity, to aid in the coming war! By the Anvil’s power, and the sacrifice of those we unbind, Brude, son of Drust, High King of the Picts, will rise and fight for humanity once again!’
A collective murmur of excitement rolled around the room. How were they raising the dead? That was necromancy.
‘No, sisters! Please, this is madness. War or not, you can’t just kill the people you’re meant to save and raise a spectre to live again!’
Was there a siphon here? Her eyes drifted to the raven-haired woman. Around Natalia the room had hardened. Guilt perhaps, or the need to cling to their justifications. Whatever stupid reason was at play, she had lost them. Looking at the wytches’ faces there was a certainty there. A faith.
A faceless voice called from somewhere. ‘They have to die.’ Another called out. ‘They don’t deserve to live!’ And another. ‘They took my family from me; they lured and killed my son.’ The room jeered, angry and bitter. Oh gods, were all of these women victims of vampires? That didn’t matter; revenge was a dark road. The Order of the Light were supposed to be the good guys.
‘Sisters, listen to yourselves, please, this isn’t right.’
The noise swelled, crashing like waves as the tide of their vengeance washed over her. Natalia had to get out of there. She had to speak to the Coalition, to Nessie. Maybe the Coalition could harness the Anvil and keep the people who were freed safe from harm. Cole would help, even if it would have to be at a distance. He couldn’t come near the Anvil; she was pretty certain of that. ‘I can get help – the Coalition can help us. They can bring supplies, keep the unbound safe.’
The raven-haired woman spoke. ‘The Coalition is a puppet of the Unseen Council.’ She was a metre away, every strand of her weaving subtle menace. Natalia stepped toward the woman to let her see she was not afraid.
‘There are those in the Coalition we can trust. I know them.’ That dangerous smile played on the woman’s face again.
The room quieted as the Mother’s voice cut through the noise.
‘Sisters! Natalia would have us ask the Coalition for help. But where is the Coalition when the monsters born of black magic feed on our own? What do they do about it? They license them. They protect them. They harbour them!’
The raven-haired woman was trying to unnerve Natalia, moving around to her blind spot. She ignored her. The wytches were angry, afraid. It was lost.
‘Mother, please! We can work something out.’
The Mother’s face was porcelain. ‘Join us, sister. Become one of us, swear an oath to me, so we can carry on our mission as one.’ This was definitely standard bad-guy chat.
‘I can’t. I won’t.’ She didn’t have to be with them to give her protection. That was already achieved. Natalia had stayed to find out how the Mother knew about her gift. She should have gone to Cole – it was her duty … but she had to know.
She was running out of options. She couldn’t say their actions were okay. Could she leverage her gift? She couldn’t. How could she threaten something so ruthless? Without her gift, the Mournanvil would pour corruption around the wytches until there was nothing human left of them. They would fall to the undergods, and black mages would rise again, as they had years before she was born. But how far had the wytches’ exposure to the Anvil pushed them already?
She had to come up with a way out of this, but it was too late to pretend.
‘I will go back to my room. I need to consider whether the work we are doing is worth compromising everything I believe in. It honestly might be.’
The tension in the bodies around her amped up. She knew what was coming before it was out the Mother’s mouth.
‘Take her.’
The invocation – her spear key – died on her lips as air left the space around her. She threw herself down, but the room exploded into motion ahead of her, and she was a fraction of a second behind the curve. In a fight, that was an eternity. Her sight darkened, and her ears stung with tinnitus as her limbs crushed to her sides. Dozens of spells struck home. She hated that they would see the tears running down her face.
Chapter 8
Operation Everything but the Kitchen Sink had crammed Cole’s kitbag full to bursting. His last vampire hunt having gone so well meant that overprepared was now the bottom line of acceptable. He armed himself in the peace of his flat. He’d spent the day looking for Natalia and found nothing. He was on his own, unsure what to make of her disappearance, and night was falling. His buckler sat across his forearm. His fist-knife he placed behind the shield’s plate, so it stuck out of the middle toward the enemy. The same place some of his colleagues might prefer a good old-fashioned iron spike.
His fist-knives were modified tecpatl, which had formed the weapons of the Aztec jaguar warriors. They were a gift from Natalia.
His shotgun was tied to his belt as a precaution. It nestled, broken, in the crook of his arm. The thought of it being batted away and having to let it dangle, fully loaded and free to laser across his feet and shins in the middle of a fight, kept him up at night. But the thought of some bottom-feeder casually swatting it from his hand mid-combat, had him waking in cold sweats. This way, he’d always have the gun close to hand. But still, there was never a good time for him to blow his own feet off. In this job, some choices were just bad or worse.
Case in point, his current gig. Assassinating a vampire for a vampire who had dirt on him. He hoisted the kitbag up. Locking it down tight was easy with its weight holding it in place. He’d seen a lot with this bag, and it doubled as back armour, lined with Kevlar and mesh.
It flipped, waking up as he got focused.
It could fuck off. Trouble with having a hammer: everything started looking like a nail. He drank, the whisky burn immediate and pleasant, scorching his empty stomach, scrunching his face. Never eat before a job. The picture of Nessie’s weary face flashed before his eyes. It was time to get the old man off the hook, balance the scales.
According to Andrew, the Ways had a door that led directly to the infamous Henry Millar. Of course, it would be the Ways Cole had to go through. The city’s unreliable system of magical portals was a thing that filled him with dread. Last year, two knights of the Coalition had entered a portal, and no one had seen them since. The city mages insisted it was still a safe way to travel. They said the knights might have deserted. But every year, more connections died and were closed off. Cole would have preferred to crawl over broken bottles, naked, than take the Ways.
The portal would open right into Henry’s room. He would have to jump out of the Ways and go straight into a blistering ambush. Whether it was Cole or Henry being ambushed would be dictated solely by Cole’s recovery time from the obligatory face plant – and subsequent sensory overload – that portal travel always inflicted on him. Portal travel was not an easy experience, at least it never had been for him, and this gave him some serious tactical problems. Apparently, dear Henry didn’t know about the portal, which might buy him some recovery time. That wasn’t a bet he would usually have taken, but he was short on choices.
He would have gone after Henry in the daytime, except the clever bastard had hired security to watch him in the daylight hours. That was something – Cole had never heard of a fledgling with that sort of juice. According to Andrew, Henry was being kept in for the safety of the public. It sounded much more likely dear Henry had some patricide on his mind, and dad had grounded him while he blackmailed a hitman into killing his precious vampire son. Vampires made anyone’s family look like the Waltons.
Cole left his flat and rounded the corner of the building. It was four forty-five. Optimal strike time. Fifteen minutes after sundown. Enough time that the guards should be gone, and Millar should still be groggy. The gable end of Cole’s building sat solid in front of him. He searched for the smudge, like a piece of embossed air above the stone, that marked the activation rune. He found it and pushed the rune – about the size of a remote-control button – with his index finger.
The portal hummed to life, five runes appearing in total, forming a pentagon shape on the stone. The runes flared in clockwise order. In the street, people passing suddenly found other directions to look in. A car alarm erupted across the road as the city-wide glamour spell did its work, hiding the evidence of magic from the mundane population.
In the centre of the pentagon shape, a swallowing hole in the wall opened. In the centre of that new hole, a single shining rune – the guidance rune – appeared, suspended in the middle of nothing at all. He was as ready as he could be. According to Andrew, Henry’s room was twenty feet long and there was an oversized bed in the middle of it. The floor might not be clear, so a dead rush wasn’t a great idea. He’d have to land, recover, assess and strike. Not ideal. He should have had a squad for a job like this. Psycho vampires were the worst. Andrew said he hadn’t trained Henry to use the sorts of weapons that would turn him from killing machine into weapon of mass destruction. Or Andrew was lying, and Cole was about to emerge – disoriented and confused from the portal – in front of a dual wielding vampire-blender. It was possible Henry might have grabbed a gun from his guards, but at least guns didn’t play to a vampire’s abilities in the same way maces or swords did.
Cole’s heart pumped with a hand-shaking beat as his parasite rose. The moments before it kicked off were the worst. Less thought, more do. He grabbed the guidance rune and thought of the address Andrew had given him.
He stepped forward and the hole grew to swallow him. He drowned in a rush like water. It pulled him apart until he was nothing. Not the absence of things that people mean when they say nothing – he was reduced to real nothing – a nothing that has no name because the mind can’t conceive of it. Then the drowning sensations recommenced as he was reconstructed and spat out.
Life flooded back in around him, frightening in its intensity after the deconstruction of the Ways. It was like surfacing from the ocean to find bombs dropping all around. Impact jarred him as he hit the floor, hands out to avoid breaking his nose.
He couldn’t see, his ears roared, his body was heavy. But Cole’s legs had him up and already moving in clumsy, slurring steps. He had to clear the breach and move. The world spun; there was so much light after being eyeless in the portal. His shotgun felt like an impossible weight. Any moment now the vampire would be on him. The room was a haze. He jabbed out with his shield, hoping to connect to the vampire as he imagined it sneaking up on him.
An inhaled breath sounded ahead; the vampire had spotted him. He was going to die like an idiot, half blind and vulnerable as a baby. He fought his brain’s sensory short-circuit. No time to wonder why he wasn’t dead yet. He just had to keep moving, be random. He swung the shield in a batting motion, flailing. The few seconds it took for his head to clear crawled. Finally, his eyes and ears connected to his brain.
There was his target, in the middle of the room, curled up on a bed that could have held an ocean. Henry stared at him. He was a boy, late teens, maybe. Adrenaline let his mind hear nothing more about the him, other than that he was slim built and shouldn’t be psychically powerful. Showed what his brain knew. Why wasn’t the vampire on him? Was this Henry playing with him?
Cole stumbled, trying to throw the him off guard, bracing for the inevitable strike. The vampire would move, super-fast, circle him and hit his back. They were predictable that way. Cole’s body coiled as he lurched the intervening yards between him and his target. He must have looked mental. Maybe that was why his target was just staring at him.
Cole waited for the explosion of motion from Henry that would trigger his own much shorter journey, spinning to lance the fucker as he came up on Cole’s back. People believed the films, but the films had crap-all idea what it was really like to fight something both faster and stronger. How many ten-year-old kids had anyone ever heard about who could kill a bulletproof, fully grown, adult male intent on doing them in? Crass, but that was the comparison.
Cole’s parasite stirred. The great equaliser. Watching him. Waiting to be. Years of never sucking down the free air, and now It was investing in shares of O2. Well, not if Cole could help it. Henry Millar would not be his immovable object. The vampire made noises and slithered across the bed, recoiling from him. Why was Henry so slow?
Cole staggered and thrust the shield on his nearside, trying to keep his pattern of approach random. It was likely Henry’s responses were a charade, while he waited to turn the tables. All Cole had to do was slit the vampire from jaw to gut, and he’d get himself and Nessie out of this mess. And anyhow, killing a vampire was work worth doing.
The anticipation of the fight bloomed. All that was, was. Distance. Timing. Nothing else existed. The world shrank, bubble-wrapping him and his target in delicious isolation. Violence coursed in his muscles. The vampire was now trying to slide away from him, but he shouldn’t shoot; the guards might be within hearing.
As he drew near, it became clear he was going have to get on that ridiculous bed and go after Henry. Ah. That was the play. And while he was floundering about on the mattress like an asshole, the vampire would turn around and fuck him up.
Henry pleaded, ‘No, no, who are you? Don’t hurt me!’ Somewhere outside the bubble-wrap of the fight, his brain observed. Gods, Henry was good. He could hardly detect the vampire under that glamour. He sounded so human. Cole usually saw and heard only the ugly truth from vampires, glamour or not.
‘Drop the sordid shit, vampire. Die with some dignity.’
Henry’s arms covered his head as Cole levelled the shotgun at him. He still shouldn’t shoot. He stopped on the edge of the bed. Henry was fully five feet away, on the other side of
the huge mattress. ‘Think I’m coming on that deathtrap after you? Think I zip up the back?’ If he could feint, maybe he could coax a retaliation strike. He had to get Henry to come to him, to avoid using the shotgun. For that, he had to dictate the action, set the pace and win.
He raised his gun as though aiming to blow Henry’s knees off and, in one fluid motion, turned and struck the space directly behind him with his shield. His arm sailed for too long, extending past the point of effective impact. If the vampire was coming to strike his back, he’d either missed or had telegraphed the feint. Agony would follow. No mistakes in this game.
Nothing happened. A soft whimpering came from the bed. Cole spun round. ‘Quit the games and let’s go!’ He jabbed the shotgun at the vampire like a prod. Henry’s fear was intoxicating, even as it revolted him. The vampire cowered too well. Cole tried to catch a glimmer of the vampire inside the shell of glamour magic. Those tears forming on Henry’s face looked too real. No wonder people were so taken in by vampires.
Cole hesitated. He was a professional. Nessie was counting on him; this was supposed to be a righteous kill. Henry was hauntingly human, but Cole had a job to do. His arm burned with tension as he held the levelled shotgun.
What if the kid was human? There wasn’t room for doubt. Better than him had been killed by uncertainty. His finger slid further along the trigger. Henry Millar was vampire; he deserved what he got. The trigger was cool and light as it depressed toward its terminus. Just a squeeze, and it would be done.
Henry started crying, for real. Something broke. He lowered the gun.
‘Henry Millar?’ Where the hell was Cole going to go with this line of questioning? ‘Hey, Henry, you a vampire? Tell the truth now, so I can blow your head off and feel good about it.’ If he was wrong, the distraction might kill him.
The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Page 10
