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

by Andrew Macmillan

  Henry was stuck between the monsters outside and the one in here. He nodded. He couldn’t go anywhere anyway; his head was pounding.

  ‘I’ll be back. You keep the lights off and lie down. If it’s a full concussion, it’ll knock you out if you’re not careful.’ Cole left.

  The dark of the room finally coaxed the adrenaline from his terrified body, leaving only unconsciousness.

  *

  Henry woke sweating. The darkness warped everything. Howls followed him from his dreams, where shark-mouthed men with human eyes had hunted him on four legs through empty streets. He was shaking. Sweating, despite the clinging cold. His head still thumped, but at least his limbs moved with some coordination.

  He reached up carefully, touching a throbbing egg-shaped lump on the back of his skull. The last twenty-four hours sat in his memory, waving at him like a hated neighbour. Then the thinking started. God, why did he have to think so much about everything? Over and over, his brain chewed problems like food that gave no nourishment, feeding him more empty questions.

  Who the fuck was Henry Millar anyway? A snivelling coward at a monsters’ buffet, if the afternoon had been any clue. The terror at having to deal with any of it shrank him into the couch. Such a nice couch. It held him, like someone must have held him at some point. Who were his parents? Were they looking for him? Someone must have been looking. He imagined them, who they were. He imagined how sad they must have felt, how worried. His brain watched him blankly, offering nothing.

  The only people he knew were Lucy and the two Toms. The Toms were always aloof and silent, glaring at him when they thought he wasn’t looking. But Lucy, she had been softer. She was frightened when he talked to her, but she had tried to help him. She had a kid. She wasn’t a monster; she was a mother. Cole’s word on anyone’s character had become rubbish the minute he … What had he done? He hadn’t changed. He’d sort of swollen.

  The memory flamed, hot and disorganised. Holes in his recollection were filled with images and flashes. It didn’t fit on a shelf, tidy with the rest of his newly acquired memories. The flashes kept falling out. Bits of the fight, his helplessness as those things talked about eating him. Cold sweat poured from him. His heart thumped.

  Where was Cole anyway? Suddenly the dark held things that watched back. He fought the urge to lie still. He couldn’t stay here, to be caught and eaten. He’d had enough of that for one day. He had to get the fuck up. Maybe Cole was back already and sleeping in the bedroom? He had to check. Each movement brought complaint from his stomach and a wince of pain from the second head he had growing from his regular one. With a heave, he stood, oscillating like an arrow hitting a target. But he stood. Fuck them all, he stood!

  The ground was littered with dangerous debris. Cole’s weapon rack was splintered, its contents spilled on the floor, ready to enhance any fall with a slow puncturing death, but Henry had to hope that Cole was back in the flat. In the world of monsters, it was best to go with the one who gave him beer and ice for his head. Plus, if Cole wasn’t back? It wasn’t worth thinking about. His feet moved carefully.

  The door to Cole’s bedroom was open, the room empty, save for the lump of remains that was mercifully hidden in shadow.

  ‘Cole?’ Henry crept in, looking for any sign of the man. Maybe there would be a gun lying in here. Could he even use a gun? It couldn’t be that hard. On top of the chest of drawers was a tumble of shotgun shells, but no shotguns. And also a note. Andrew’s address. Henry clutched it, noticing at the same time the deformed lump on the floor beside the bed. What if the lump got back up? Terror backed Henry out of the room.

  ‘Cole?’ The flat was a silent graveyard. He wasn’t here; there was no spark of occupation. They had got him. The Cipactli were probably eating Cole right now. Or they had already eaten him, and they were creeping toward Henry. He glanced around, lump on the head forgotten until it reminded him sharply. Every creak and rattle of the flat hid a cannibal mid-hunt.

  He found his way back to the couch over the huge improvised weapon-caltrops and gripped his curved knife. Cole wasn’t back. He was probably a dead man. It might be better to just end it himself, but Henry knew he couldn’t. Not that anyone would miss him. Lucy might. Lucy would. She was soft-hearted. He could see it about her. She was trapped, slave to a vampire. Who knew what Andrew did to her?

  Henry had asked her about her kid once. She’d panicked and run from the room. And there was her missing arm. There was a story there, Henry was sure. Andrew was picking desperate people to enslave. Henry couldn’t leave Lucy to that fate. And he couldn’t lie around this graveyard either, waiting to fill a menu. He was going to save her from all this terrifying mess.

  He couldn’t walk to Andrew’s. Outside. Alone. With no sense of the streets. If he could find money, he could get a taxi. That was something else he remembered how to do. He searched, enjoying his returning strength. He didn’t look for long. A small table in the bedroom held keys, and there was a much-too-large jacket by the nightstand. The jacket had a wad of crumpled twenty-pound notes in the pocket – perfect for a night fleeing the town. There was no food in the flat, so he just packed his knife. He looked for another weapon among the debris, but they were all too huge and scary.

  Get Lucy, get out of the city. Her kid could come too. He’d save them all from this wreckage. For the first time in his memory, Henry Millar felt a smile warm his lips.

  Chapter 11

  Cole had jumped out of his main-door flat’s back window and entered the tenement building via the communal garden door, then climbed the tenement stairs to find the best vantage point. Now he crouched in an opened stair window, two storeys up. On the street below was a squat, white van. It sat, innocently dirt-ridden. There was movement inside. Someone – something – on the passenger side and probably a driver Cole couldn’t see.

  His blood sang with the power of the Murk, covered by a wallpaper of guilt. The way he could be separated so easily and made into something other. Millar’s terror at being in the same room as him stung like an old wound.

  But who was Cole kidding? He was other. The oily pyre of black magic burned fumes of destruction in his guts. His teeth ground out the electric sensations of violence, paused in mid-flow.

  Instinct guided him. His parasite’s instinct. He couldn’t feel It move anymore; their struggle forgotten as they drew the same breath. Killing was what Cole was for.

  Sniffing, searching, the long, bloody snout outside. Looking for him. Looking for her.

  The memory invaded, blocking the world out for a moment. He squeezed his eyes to get rid of it. Focus. He pulled shaky breath into his lungs, his heart suddenly racing. He was the armiger. The weapon of humanity. He turned the power of nightmare back on the nightmares. They should be afraid of him, not the other way around.

  His eyes above his bloodied teeth, so familiar.

  Gods be damned. He rubbed his eyes, blinking memory away. A savage tension bent his body. It willed him on with a call to violent action. He’d do anything to push those memories, shaken loose, back down again. The Cipactli had come and destroyed years of forgetting with their magic. Details – long buried – flashed back from the past, from when he’d been trapped in a room with his little sister, all those years ago.

  She’d clung to him and cried his name for help. There had only been a thin, fake-wood door to keep them safe. Cole had punched and kicked and spat his whole life to forget how he’d failed her – the one he was meant to protect.

  Now he fought to protect anyone who deserved it, hoping one day it would make up for his failure and give him peace. It never did. Today, he’d been frozen and carried away by ghosts. He’d not seen a Cipactli since his father fell.

  The ground swallowed him whole while she cried for his help, abandoning her as their father came through the door.

  Cole’s stomach lurched with adrenaline. Below him was his target. He siphoned, his legs kicking with the power of a horse. He sailed through the air, the rational
part of him wondering what he would do when he landed. It knew, reaching up from his guts to guide him.

  The van crunched beneath him as he landed, buckling the roof. The bone-jarring sensation of deep impact rattled his legs. His fist-knives were in his hands, and he siphoned more magic. Black oil sheathed his knives, growing them until they extended out into needle-spiked tips, haloed in a burned-green mist. His arm punched down, through the van roof. His fist-knives, now many times larger, lanced through the metal of the van, shearing straight through and finding blood, hot and living. He could taste it in his mouth.

  These weapons were new, and he stared for a moment, mesmerised. It was as though his hands had always been that way, hidden in their prison of flesh and fingers.

  The Cipactli inside the van howled, their noises edible. Their heat, their heartbeats and the empty spaces inside their body cavities were as clear and plain to him through the van roof as if he watched them through a window.

  The Cipactli passenger was leaning against the van window, trying to escape. Cole lanced his fists down again, expecting the sweet flow of blood, but passenger Cipactli had found the door handle and fell out of the van, onto the street.

  The Cipactli’s glamour was the face of an unfamiliar man; the spell shimmered with a blue haze. Through the magic surrounding the Cipactli’s face, a muzzle glimmered, a murder weapon in a drain. The memory of Cole’s sister tried to carry him away at the sight of that muzzle, but he was safe in the bloody arms of killing.

  The passenger Cipactli let out a keen and scrambled to its feet, taking off down Iona Street. The van Cole knelt on gunned its engine. The urgency of the passenger’s escape would rob him of the pleasure of revenge – the only death Cipactli were fit for was the slow and agonising kind.

  The engine coughed as he raised his gauntlet, aiming at the driver’s wet heart. But his years of experience spoke plainly to him. The Cipactli would return to his nest. A wounded animal always found home. There may be more of them in the city. It moved in waves inside his guts. Then, in a flash like X-ray, he saw it – a shining blue splinter that he had dislodged inside the driver when his fist-knives had struck home. He could feel a connection to the splinter, a faint pull toward the part of him now left behind. The driver could be found again; he had been marked out for death.

  The van’s wheels spun as Cole jumped from the roof. The van tore down the street, a rabbit from a trap. The passenger Cipactli was already a good way along Iona Street, heading for Leith Walk. It looked through Cole’s eyes. Cole could feel vibrations begin to flood in from all around, mapping out his surroundings like sonar. His senses stretched along the city streets, the flood of information worryingly familiar in its qualia.

  A universe opened before his eyes, a new way to sense, like a missing dimension. This was like the sensing ability he used to track monsters, but much more powerful. It whispered of a home that waited for him, among the blackened, oily power below. He ran, following the Cipactli, his legs taking the yards in open strides that settled into an easy lope.

  Natalia’s protection flared inside his guts; his parasite’s heat was a warning, nearly lost among the signals flooding in from a city that was mapped by its own motion. It roared. If he couldn’t stay grounded, It would wear his body. The grimy question he’d spent his whole life ignoring imposed itself. Just what was the thing that lived within him? It fitted none of the definitions of bottom-feeding scum he’d ever heard of. The distance between him and the Cipactli closed.

  The Cipactli loped, cresting the end of Iona Street and turning right onto the wide thoroughfare of Leith Walk. Cole pressed on, legs pumping methodically, as though they belonged to a machine with firing pistons. He could have run for miles; It could have run for miles. He could feel Its elation in his guts, like watching a feeding spider frolic.

  He scanned the crowd on Leith Walk. There was the Cipactli’s glamour, a hundred yards away and glowing blue, heading downhill toward the north of the city.

  Cole followed, the buildings pressing in close. There were few places to hide. His training had him ducking into shop doorways to avoid the Cipactli’s attempts to find him in the crowd. As Cole shadowed, an adolescent impulsiveness jarred with his seasoned mind. It was bleeding through. It lacked patience. The iron plates of Nat’s blessed magic in his gut could only protect him so long. The more he siphoned and allowed It to grow within him, the more It would bleed through.

  His aura should have been rolling off him in waves and yet people passed without a care in the world. Why it was different this time, he didn’t know. He couldn’t care. He needed violence now the memories had been shaken loose. His sister’s shade waited for him in the calm time. He needed this kill. For him and for her.

  The Cipactli turned off the Walk into a quieter side street. Lorne Street. It was time to get bloody. His adrenaline spiked; all the training in the world could never replace the real thing. The triumph, the sheer naked superiority of cutting something that was trying its level best to kill him was a feeling that could never be replicated.

  He turned into the side street flanked by flats, his prey only a few metres ahead. The Cipactli passed an alleyway as it moved along Lorne Street. The alley was short, running next to a block of flats, and stopped at a dead end. The perfect spot for murder. Cole siphoned, his legs pushing, air streaming past him as he catapulted upward, passing first-floor windows.

  The Cipactli glanced back toward the Walk, and for a delicious moment, Cole was poised in the air above it, unseen, soaring down. He landed full-force on its back and shoulders, collapsing them both to the ground instantly. His fist-knives grew into shadow gauntlets which encased his hands as he punched down, skewering the Cipactli through its middle.

  He picked the Cipactli up and threw it into the quiet, dead-end alley where the creature could be devoured in peace. It landed with a soft whimper, sending delicious shivers down Cole’s spine, saliva erupting in his mouth. The spit was helpful to dissolve the harder bone, he realised.

  The Cipactli lay, bleeding slowly, crippled by a sucking chest wound. Cole could see the singing vibrations of its heart slowing to a pleasurable thrum. He knelt beside the Cipactli. Puncture there, willed his parasite. The rest would follow.

  Their father found his sister, alone in the room. She screamed as he ate her. Cole fought to surface from the cold earth where his parasite had dragged him under, keeping him safe.

  All Cole felt was relief. Relief it wasn’t him and fear he would be next, even as his sister screamed. Shame folded that loathsome truth into his heart, scribbled in the ink of his sister’s blood, for him to hold forever in private despair.

  He grasped his head in both hands, the concrete of the pavement scraping his knees. As he tried to shake the memory away, his gut flared, burning bright and hot and jolting, knocking him to the ground. The concrete grated his skin as searing pain bent his back, curling him around his gut. The iron plates of Natalia’s protection scalded, burning him. He dropped his fist-knives. His hands were no longer coated in their sticky murder-shadow. He grabbed for his whisky, unlatching the flask and drinking deep. The burn of the alcohol was life returning. Inside, It suddenly kicked and thrashed as the whisky poured down. It was a creature being branded, tortured and chained. Drowned in alcohol.

  He lay next to the whimpering Cipactli. Chill sweat coated him. He lingered on the ground while the burning in his gut reduced, and It shrank back in its cage. This Cipactli was no immovable object, yet Cole had been a single revolting action away from the Fall.

  He pulled himself to sitting, looking around. He prayed the glamour was hiding him from others’ eyes. He was a liability. They all knew it: the Coalition, the lodges, the mages. If any of them saw the state of him right now, he’d be executed on the spot.

  As It shrank, the loss of the keen-edged vibration from the city stung with a hollow emptiness. An emptiness Cole filled with loathing. What? Was he missing It? It had just taken his face out for a test drive. He was a fuckin
g disgrace to his sister’s memory and to himself.

  He needed to pull his head on straight. Unlicensed scum were in his city. Good men and women would be dying deaths no one deserved. The Cipactli beside him spluttered, somehow still alive. The Cipactli’s tiny, black eyes were filled with fear. Cole’s fist-knife was in its throat before he could draw another breath.

  As Cole cut, the whisky warming his guts suddenly voided, heaving onto the pavement. He retched until there was nothing left. This was a new low. He’d been on his own for about thirty hours. No Nat or Nessie, no one to hold his hand. What a state. At this rate he’d be fallen by the weekend.

  Pathetic. He had a job to do; people were relying on him. And there he was, sat on the pavement stewing in self-pity. He had a Cipactli nest to find. The pull from the splinter lodged in the driver was very faint, but as he rejoined Leith Walk, he could see a vague blue haze on the horizon. Somewhere to the north of the city. That made sense. The Cipactli would want to be close enough to the food supply, but the north of the city had plenty of discreet, dark boltholes for them to return to. They’d be on or near the industrial estate. That was a lot of ground to cover, but if they were there, Cole would find them.

  The whisky flask drained in one long pull, scorching his empty stomach. He’d killed three of the Cipactli already. A quick resupply of whisky, and he’d get on with some good old-fashioned hunting. He’d bury himself in the job and get shit done.

  Nessie was counting on him, and the Cipactli had to have something to do with Andrew Ancroft. They had come looking for Henry Millar. They were going to disappear Millar’s body. Cole wiped his mouth. He’d need to get the Coalition to come and get rid of the Cipactli corpse. After a phone call, he would hunt the Cipactli, find the link to Andrew, take it to the Council, free Nessie and then get on with the hateful gig of figuring out what was going on with the missing vampires. It was going to be a long night.