‘We have to face them in the city,’ I said. ‘At least here we’re on home ground.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
The Arcadian remained unconvinced, arms crossed tightly, refusing to budge, at least until Frank rose to his feet and offered a hand. At first the kid stayed where he was, but Frank’s puppy dog eyes have a way of turning around even the most stubborn of souls.
The fae put out a hand and Frank hauled him to his feet, uniting us as three. It was a moving moment, or at least it would have been had it not been interrupted by the sound of splintering wood coming from the coven’s front door. The kid poked his head into the hallway to see who’d come calling.
‘Who is it?’ I asked, fairly sure it wasn’t the homeowner.
‘The Vengari,’ said the kid, turning to me with a look of grim fatality. ‘They found us.’
Now why did I have to go and disable those security measures?
Chapter Thirty-Five: Out for Blood
Right away I fused with Frank.
‘What are you doing?’ bleated the Arcadian, seeing our numbers dwindle by one. ‘There’s a whole pack of them coming.’
I poked my face out of Frank’s head so I could answer the question. ‘Just play along and act like it’s only me and you here, okay?’
The Vengari were under the mistaken impression that the person they were dealing with was a single, living entity, and I intended to keep it that way. So long as they thought I was a normal and not a ghost packed into a meat man, I’d be harmless in their piggy red eyes. Little did they know I could play Jake-in-the-box and spring from Frank’s body with my fists out when the mood took me. Chances were that still left us outnumbered by quite a margin, but I had the Arcadian on my side now, and he was fighting fit again. Working together and using the element of surprise, we stood a slim chance of tipping the odds in our favour and making it out of the coven alive (well, you know what I mean).
I smelled the Vengari before I saw them, filing into the room arched over like a row of question marks. It was the same Vlad pack who accosted me at the office: three vampire knee-breakers and Enoch, the peerless wanker who had away with Frank’s tongue.
A spastic thump hammered in my chest like the fevered pump of a racing heart. It felt so real, and yet it had to be my imagination playing tricks on me, because the skin of that old drum had worn through a long time ago. I was losing control. We were losing control. Ever since Enoch performed unlicensed oral surgery on Frank—on me—we’d been experiencing connection difficulties, and here it was, happening all over again. We could make fists and disguise our inner disquiet for now, but how long could we be expected to act calm in front of the man who did this to us?
‘Greetings, Your Majesty,’ said Enoch, performing a bow so shallow as to be insulting. ‘And hello again to you, Detective.’
While his lackeys hung back looking hard, Enoch got up in my face, leering at me with that sharp face of his, pale as the chalk cliffs of Dover under the light of a full moon.
‘What did I tell you, Mister Fletcher? You work for the Vengari. And unlike the familiar of the London Coven, we don’t take holidays.’
Baaad maaan, said the voice in my head.
No shit, Frank.
I fought his urge to recoil from Enoch like a dog shrinking from his master’s rolled-up newspaper. Together, we stayed strong. Just about.
‘No sign of your partner… again,’ Enoch remarked. ‘Where is he this time? Getting his hair done?’
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer. The room was quiet but for the gentle crackle of the hearth.
Enoch flashed his fangs. ‘Admit it, there is no other Fletcher is there? It just looks better stencilled onto a window, doesn’t it? Plus you get to bill twice this way.’
I felt a sensation like mites crawling under my skin and resisted the overriding compulsion to scratch at my forearms. I was struggling to hold the reins on Frank’s body. He was starting to twitch, and visibly so. What if we lost it? What if we went into a seizure? What if the body I was occupying spat me out—rejected me like a kidney transplant that didn’t take?
‘No pithy comebacks?’ said Enoch. He slapped his forehead theatrically. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, how rude of me, I forgot I took this…’
From his coat pocket he produced something swathed in a handkerchief, and unwrapped it before my eyes. There it was, Frank’s tongue, dried out and blue.
Inside my skull, Frank expressed a long and pitiful moan.
Having made his point, Enoch took the corners of the hankie and carefully wrapped the organ back up.
‘I’m sure you’re wondering how we found you,’ he went on. This time he didn’t wait for me to respond. ‘It was a deaf eaves who gave you up, Detective. He approached us; didn’t even ask for payment. Said it was personal.’
So the fat-headed dealer had sold me out to the fae and the Vengari. To think I let Stronge talk me out of mashing the sole of my shoe into his bust-up leg. What a waste.
‘It doesn’t matter how you found me,’ said the Arcadian. ‘You’re here now, so let’s go.’
‘He speaks at last!’ scoffed Enoch, his sharp shoulders hitching as he laughed. ‘Thank you for your contribution, Your Highness, but if it’s all the same with you, I think I’ll set the agenda here.’
He pulled his shooter. His mates did, too.
Guuuuns, said Frank.
No flies on you, mate, I replied inside of our collective melon. Though, technically speaking, there often were flies upon Frank’s person, as despite my best efforts, he still gave off a slight whiff of the grave.
Enoch curled a spindly finger around the trigger of his shooter. ‘Don’t bother turning invisible on us, Your Majesty.’ He pulled at the skin beneath one of his albino eyes. ‘We Vengari don’t miss a trick.’
He turned the gun on me and I felt my already gaping grave yawn a few feet wider. Bullets wouldn’t kill me, but a double-tap to the head would take Frank down for sure, then the jig would be up and the vamps would tear into my disembodied ecto-form with their claws. As for the Arcadian, he’d be on his own, and since I doubted the kid had seen a proper fight in his life, I was willing to bet Frank’s left nut that he’d be off out the door a few seconds later with wedding bells ringing in his ears.
That was the theory anyway, except Enoch had other ideas. With a cold grin on his face he gave a nod to a crony with eyes capped by thick, wiry eyebrows. The crony produced a plastic bag from the top pocket of his jacket and carefully unfolded it. It was the kind of bag the cashier gave you when you shopped at a petrol station: transparent and tissue-thin, so insubstantial that it could be carried off by a gust of wind and washed all the way over the horizon. In other words, harmless. Except in the wrong hands.
While Enoch and the vamp with the eyebrows kept their guns trained on me, the other three rushed the Arcadian. The kid managed to take one down with a knife-hand strike to the throat (thoroughly shooting down my theory about his lack of fighting prowess), but the other two overpowered him, kicking in the backs of his legs and wrestling him to his knees.
While the spare vamp kept me pinned in his sights, Enoch took possession of the plastic bag and made his way over to the Arcadian, nice and casual. He took a deep breath and filled the bag with two lungs of air that must have smelled worse than a cracked hellmouth. Then, without fanfare, he dumped the thing over the Arcadian’s head and tightened it around his neck.
The kid fought—Christ, he fought—but he was no match for the Vengari, who kept him riveted in place while the head vamp suffocated the life out of him.
‘Goodnight, sweet prince,’ rasped Enoch as the bag fogged and the Arcadian bucked and thrashed.
The fae’s fingers glowed green and danced the way they did when he used magic to give life to local flora, but there was nothing here for him to animate save for a few jars of lentils in the kitchen and a withered pot plant on the mantelpiece.
There was nothing I could do but watch as the bag shrunk
and the kid breathed a final shuddering gasp, vacuum sealing his face.
What was Enoch doing? How were the Vengari going to march the groom down the aisle and ensure the union went ahead if the fae prince was dead by their hands?
With fingers dug deep into the kid’s windpipe, Enoch shook and he shook until the neck he was throttling turned limp as a chewed rag. The fae went still as his head rolled backwards, eyes showing their whites.
Help, Frank insisted.
Of course I wanted to, but then what? Even if I threw myself from his body and went surging towards Enoch as a ghost, the bullets would soon start flying. My trick was useless against these kinds of odds. I had a card up my sleeve, but it didn’t work with anything in my hand.
‘Boss,’ said the henchman with the nutty eyebrows. ‘Boss!’
Enoch whirled about. ‘What? What is it?’
‘That’s enough. Look at him, he’s out.’
Enoch snarled. For a moment I thought he was going to bury his fangs in the eyebrowed underling’s neck, but he grunted and released his grip on the fae, letting him flop to the ground like a dropped concertina.
‘You’re right,’ said Enoch, climbing to his feet and smoothing down the line of his coat. ‘That’s enough.’
I ran my eyes over the kid, searching for signs of life. It was hard to tell whether he was done for, what with him already being blue in the face, but I could just about make out the shallow rise and fall of his sternum.
Inside my head, Frank sighed with relief.
‘Pick him up,’ Enoch ordered, pointing to the body on the floor.
Two of his men—the ones who’d held the fae in place while he was being smothered—stepped in and took the unconscious Arcadian by the wrists and ankles.
‘Time to go,’ said Enoch. ‘But first...’
He took aim square between my eyes, tightened the trigger—
And blasted a hole through the head of the vamp with the wiry eyebrows.
The bullet exited his body with a stroke of blood that painted the faces of the two henchmen carrying the sleeping fae.
Eyes wide with confusion, they dropped the kid and went for their weapons. They were fast—superhumanly so—but their guns didn’t clear their holsters before their brains were coating the coven walls.
The last Vengari, who managed to get a handle on his pistol despite having taken a karate chop to the throat earlier, fell a half-second later with two exit holes in his skull.
Chapter Thirty-Six: This is Not a Type O
The sound of gunshots rang loud in my ears as I stared in shock at Enoch’s crew, lying about the room like a pile of bullet-riddled sandbags, recycled blood leaking from their heads and forming a crimson continent on the weathered wooden floor.
Whaaaat? said Frank, echoing my sentiments exactly.
Enoch held the gun steady, arm outstretched, calm and unshaken.
‘The Arcadian was never leaving this place,’ he said, lip curled, exposing a single white fang. ‘His life was forfeit the second he left my sister weeping in a wedding gown.’
That explained it. The bride was Enoch’s sibling. This was personal.
What now, I wondered? What happened once the rest of Enoch’s clan found out what he’d done here? I supposed I’d never know.
‘Goodbye, Mister Fletcher,’ said Enoch, plugging a fresh magazine into his pistol and turning its unblinking black eye on me. ‘Better luck in the next life.’
Frank’s body braced tight as piano wire as I prepared to make a Hail Mary lunge at the vampire and knock the gun from his hand. It was a plan that was almost certainly destined to fail, but what choice did I have? It was now or never.
‘Enough!’
To my surprise and Enoch’s, we turned to find the Arcadian struggling to his feet.
‘Well, well,’ said the Vengari. ‘The sleeping beauty awakes.’
The kid brushed himself down. ‘I don’t sleep in dirt,’ he croaked, ‘unlike you filthy coffin-dwellers.’
Enoch was outnumbered now, but that didn’t change the fact that he had a gun. We could swarm him, but one of us would pay the price for it, most likely the kid, who was still in a pretty bad way.
Enoch addressed the fae’s slight. ‘Some of us weren’t born with silver spoons in our mouths, Your Highness.’
‘Just because you don’t live in a palace, doesn’t mean you have to roll around in the filth.’
The vampire offered a razor-blade smile. ‘But Your Highness, I like the filth. I know where I come from, I know who I am, unlike the rest of my clan who would abase themselves to sully their blood with yours. When my sister was given the “honour” of being your bride, I said no, but my protestations went unheard. I was commanded to ensure the marriage went ahead, even after you absconded. Tonight, I right that wrong.’
He aimed his gun at the kid, who laughed in his face.
‘What’s so funny?’ Enoch spat.
‘Don’t you see? You and I are in violent agreement. You want nothing to do with my people, and I would never in a million years marry into your toilet of a family.’
The vampire’s eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Watch your mouth, fae.’
‘Or what? You’ll kill me? Didn’t that ship already sail?’
‘Yes, but there are ways of killing fast and ways of killing slow.’
The kid shrugged off the threat. I had to hand it to him, he was showing some real pluck.
‘Either way is fine by me so long as it means not having to walk down the aisle with your dog-faced troglodyte of a sister.’
Daaaaaaaamn, hooted Frank, reminding me to cut down his intake of Yank sitcoms should we ever make it out of this mess in one piece (well, two pieces).
Enoch’s response to the fae’s put-down was a lot more direct. The vampire moved without moving, crossing the room in the blink of a hummingbird’s eye and knocking the fae to the floor. Suddenly, his gun was pressed to the back of the Arcadian’s slender neck, its stainless steel muzzle causing the fae’s flesh to sizzle like butter in a hot pan.
‘Do it, you inbred relic,’ the kid retorted, face-down on the floorboards, too weak to resist the Vengari’s vice-like hold. ‘Just let my friend go first.’
Friiieend? said Frank.
A bit of an exaggeration, I agreed. Don’t get me wrong, I’d developed a fondness of the kid, but we’d only just met. What was he up to? Was there a plan in play here?
Enoch was equally surprised by the “friend” bit.
‘What do you mean, friend, you fool? He only brought you here so he could condemn you to death.’
The fae shook his head, or shook it as much as he could with a crazed Vengari riding his back.
‘You said it yourself: the familiar isn’t here. Detective Fletcher didn’t bring me to the coven to see me punished, he brought me here for protection.’
Enoch’s eyes lit with malice, and suddenly it wasn’t the Arcadian he was pinning to the floor, it was me. I wanted to lash out—to break free of Frank’s body—but the vampire had me facing the wrong way. I could throw out a blind elbow, but if I fluffed it, Frank was taking a one-way trip to slab city. No, I had to be patient. I’d only get one shot at taking Enoch down. If I was going to strike, it needed to be at the exact right moment.
‘So, you two are bosom buddies, eh?’ growled the Vengari. He gestured to the roaring hearth as he held me down like some vicious bird of prey. ‘That explains this cosy little picture. A couple of sticks and some marshmallows and you’d have yourself a fireside picnic.’
In case it’s not clear, I really didn’t like this bloke.
‘Mister Fletcher is a man of honour,’ said the Arcadian. ‘Something you could never hope to understand.’
‘Oh, I understand. I understand that I’m going to make you watch him die before I put a bullet in your fairy skull.’
I felt the barrel of the Vengari’s gun digging to the back of my head. Frank’s head. We were going to die. Bra-fucking-vo. What a winning plan that was
from the Arcadian. A real corker.
I heard the telltale click of a pistol hammer.
A smirk appeared on the Arcadian’s face. ‘Typical.’
‘What?’ said Enoch. I couldn’t see him, but I could sense the scowl he was wearing.
‘The gun,’ the fae replied. ‘A real vampire would have more class.’
A dry chuckle. ‘Do I not seem real to you, Your Majesty?’
‘The vampires I know would drink his blood under the light of a swollen moon. And you’re going to what... put a bullet in his head? You really are a boorish little brute.’
Enoch’s voice hiked up a few decibels. ‘You want the storybook vampire, do you? The civilised Count, oozing dangerous romance? I’ll show you civilised…’
He rolled me on to my back and closed his claws around my throat. I saw his waxy face lunge at mine and felt twin points gum-deep in my neck. Enoch’s foul, limpet mouth sucked at my jugular, hungry, eager, desperate for blood, determined to syphon every last drop from me. I expected pain but felt none. Quite the opposite in fact. As the blood left my body I felt warm and sleepy, the world around me turning blurry and distant. I’m sure I would have drifted off to sleep and never woken up if it wasn’t for the screaming.
Enoch was howling.
He backpedalled across the room, his wide-open mouth pouring steam like the spout of a boiling kettle. His long, tapered fingers clawed frantically at his shirt, shredding the fabric and exposing his white belly, which bulged and swelled as if something were alive inside of him and trying to force its way out. As the vampire’s scream reached a new, deranged pitch, the tissue of his stomach thinned and gave way, releasing a stench like air escaping a violated tomb. A mess of grey innards slopped out of the bubbling hole in Enoch’s belly with a thick stew of gluey, clotted blood, then his torso folded backwards and he capsized to the floor in two sections.
Deadly Departed: A Supernatural Thriller (Fletcher & Fletcher, Paranormal Investigators Book 2) Page 21
