by Hall, Alexis
It was official: the vampires had gone to ground.
So I went home, left Corin sitting on my sofa looking small, and phoned the office on my landline. I knew I still had one of those for a reason.
“Miss Kane, I have been worried.”
“Sorry, I’ve been in a faery closet and a werewolf dungeon.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Business. What did I miss?”
“I believe the situation has escalated considerably. There have been several more violent incidents since you left, and I am now seeing reports of savage dog attacks. I assume this is in some way linked to your incarceration.”
“The werewolves have stuck their noses in. I think they’ve decided to clean up the city.”
“There have been several high-profile altercations between the various factions which the newspapers are describing as a sudden upsurge in gang-related violence. I believe the situation has, as they say, gone to shit in a shoebox.”
“Has anyone tried to reach me?”
“No, Miss Kane.”
I sighed. Everything I’d done for the last couple of weeks was beginning to look a lot like a waste of time. Even if Henry Percy was behind it all and even if I could find him and even if he had the thing the Morrígan was looking for, that didn’t mean I could get it off him or get it to her or do any of that while the entire supernatural population of the Southeast was at each other’s throats.
It was like that film with the planes in the war. I couldn’t do anything about the mess until I could get through to someone on the Council, but I couldn’t get through to the Council because everything was such a mess.
When in doubt, do the job in front of you.
“Elise,” I said. “I need you to find out everything you can about a vampire wizard named Henry Percy. He’s a smug git, so I think he’s probably one of the ones who hides in plain sight. He’s got a house in Northumberland called Trismegistus Hall, but I need to know where he stays in London.”
“Certainly, Miss Kane. And may I enquire about your activities?”
I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
“I was kind of going to have a shower.”
“And after that? I do not mean to be presumptuous, but the events of the last two days have reminded me that it is prudent that we keep one another informed of our whereabouts.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Things happened kind of fast, and I wasn’t thinking.”
“I understand. But, given your track record, we should plan better for kidnappings.”
“It’s only been twice.”
“In the last three months, Miss Kane. I feel that is on the high side of average. And, if you’ll permit me, you have not answered my question.”
I thought for a moment. Whatever was going down, Tara would probably be at the centre of it, but I had no way of finding her, and if I didn’t, she’d probably get herself killed. I needed backup, but there wasn’t any.
Unless . . . “I’m going to see my ex.”
“Could you narrow it down a little, Miss Kane?”
“I’m going to see Eve.”
I hung up and went to wash off two days of dungeon living. I should probably have been a bit less aggressive about telling Eve to get out of my world because I was going to look pretty silly going back there now and asking for her help. But she did say she was working on a way to track vampires, so maybe she could do werewolves as well.
I was scrubbing the ming out my hair when there was a timid knock on the bathroom door.
“Uh, I’m kind of in the shower,” I called out.
And, of course, Corin crept in anyway.
“Um, I’m in the shower.”
“I’m so sorry, Kate. It’s just you’ve been so kind to me, and I . . . I haven’t thanked you as I should.”
I’d been thanked by Corin before. It would be a really bad idea to go there again. “You don’t have to thank me.”
“I know, but I want to.” Her fingers gently drew aside the shower curtain. A spray of water droplets glistened on her neck and turned interesting bits of her blouse transparent.
“Look, I’m seeing someone.”
“I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have. I’m just so very alone.” She perched on the side of the bath, looking distraught and slightly damp. The water gathered on her hair and left silver trails across her collarbones. “Oh, Kate, what’s to become of me?”
She was playing me, and I knew she was playing me, but that never stopped it working. I touched one of her slender, trembling shoulders. “I’ll make sure you’re safe.”
Her hand came up to cover mine. “I know you will. I don’t deserve you, really I don’t.”
I had to get rid of her. I had to get rid of her right now.
Corin swung round and stepped gracefully into the shower. “I understand,” she whispered, looking all wet and vulnerable, “if you don’t want me in that way anymore.”
I just knew she was going to press herself against me, and she’d be slender and silky and yielding in all the right places, so I grabbed her by the wrists. It didn’t help. She made a little noise, somewhere between a whimper and a sigh, and tilted her face up to mine. Droplets of water shimmered on her parting lips.
I accidentally kissed her.
Well, fuck.
It felt so wrong, it felt so right; I kissed an untrustworthy, manipulative, pathologically deceitful murderess, and I liked it.
I jerked back. “Get the hell out.”
There was no way I was doing this again. It was ending, and it was ending now.
She gazed at me with those big innocent eyes. “Kate, I-I’m so sorry . . .”
I clambered out of the shower, dragging Corin behind me. She struggled just enough for it to kind of turn me on. You had to hand it to her, she was good at what she did. I pulled her dripping down the hall and into the living room, holding her by one wrist as I rang the police from my landline. It was seeing more use in the last couple of weeks than it had in the last year.
“Kate,” she whimpered, “don’t.”
“I’m not playing this game again. You helped me out and I’m grateful, but you still killed my partner and you’re going down for it.”
She wriggled helplessly. “If you send me back there, I’ll die.”
A voice at the other end of the line asked me what service I required. “Police.”
Corin twisted out of my grip and dived behind my sofa. When she stood up again, she had her bag over her shoulder and a pistol pointed at my heart. “Please don’t do that.” Her voice was trembling, but her hands weren’t.
I very carefully hung up the phone. “Guess I should have searched that bag, huh?”
“I’m sorry, Kate. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I . . . I never wanted to hurt anybody.”
“You’re pointing a gun at me. You can drop the act.”
She looked genuinely confused and slightly hurt. “I don’t know what you mean. I care about you. I’ll always care about. I just can’t go back to that terrible place. Don’t try to come after me.”
She circled round to the door and backed out of the room. I heard my front door open and close. Chasing after her naked sounded like a good way to get shot and look stupid, so I called the cops again. I was just telling them that a dangerous criminal was leaving my flat when an engine revved outside. I ran to the window, phone in hand, just in time to see Tara’s car speeding away.
That hadn’t gone great, and it had come this close to going really, really badly. Putting aside the fact that I could have been shot, there were no two ways about it: I was a shitty girlfriend. All it took was a pretty face, two days in a dungeon, a daring escape, and an experienced seductress in a see-through blouse, and I was anybody’s.
I’d have to do something special for Julian to make up for it.
Like maybe stopping a crazy vampire from eating her city. That, or flowers.
I squelched back to the bathroom, towelled myself off, and put on a clean su
it. I rang Eve from the landline. Fortunately, her number was still on speed dial.
“Kate?”
I took a deep breath. “I need your help.”
Eve may have been an overambitious workaholic who had to be the smartest person in the room, but at least she wasn’t a gloater. “What’s up?”
“You said you could track vampires.”
“I said I was working on a way to track vampires.”
“Look, it’s too complicated to explain over the phone, but everything’s going to hell. I think I can fix it, but I need your resources.”
“You always think you can fix it.”
“We’re still here, aren’t we?”
“Just about. Kaykay, I’ll clear my schedule, but I want in on the action.”
“The action is probably going to be an enormous clusterfuck bloodbath between every vampire in London and every werewolf in the Southeast.”
“Then I definitely want in.”
I wanted to give her the this isn’t a game speech again, but it hadn’t gone down well the last time, and since I’d just asked for help, I didn’t have a leg to stand on.
“On my way.”
I swung by the office to check in properly with Elise and grab the spare mobile and the car. Efficient as ever, she’d dug up the London address of Henry Percy. He’d made her job easy by living completely openly under his original name and, indeed, opening his house to the public as a tourist attraction for six months of the year. Thank God for cocky vampires.
An hour later, I was standing with Eve in a bright white elevator hurtling down into her actual-I-shit-you-not top secret underground lair.
“You told me you didn’t have one of these.”
Eve grinned. “Yes, but you knew I was lying.”
We went through yet another retinal scanner and stepped out into a vast gleaming mezzanine, like a shopping mall for science, full of busy-looking people in lab coats or fatigues or, occasionally, both. I’d been expecting something basically like this, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the scale of it. I knew Eve had been successful, but I didn’t know she’d been full-on Zuckerberg.
“What the fuck?”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got to admit, this is pretty fricking awesome.”
“What do you do with all this stuff?”
She bounced a bit. “Science.”
“Is any of this actually legal?”
“I’m not stupid. There’s an understanding. Legally, this is just a large private security firm.”
At that moment, there was a friendly chime and a soft voice announced, “Response team to psionics, response team to psionics.” This was followed by a scramble of activity.
“Uh, is that bad?” I asked.
“It’s all perfectly routine, Kate. This way.”
I followed Eve through a set of swishy doors into supervillain central. It was a circular room right at the heart of the facility. The walls were a shifting montage of images and data, and the only item of furniture was, well, I guess you could call it a chair: an elliptical steel shell on a swivelling base, with a high-backed leather seat and buttons on the arm rests. Eve hopped into it with more glee than dignity. I just stood there.
“Welcome to Project Daedalus.”
“Eve, you are fucking nuts.”
“Yet still the most normal person you’ve dated this century.”
She had a point.
“Look,” I said. “I need to track a werewolf. Actually, I need to track a lot of werewolves.”
“The system isn’t set up for that. It’s still a prototype. I’ve got people on the ground though, and there have been a lot of wild dog attacks in the past couple of days.”
“I need to find Tara Vane-Tempest.”
Eve blinked. “The lingerie model? What do you think I am, Gossip Girl? Have you tried Twitter?”
“She’s an Alpha werewolf, and I need to stop her before she gets a lot of people killed.”
“Seriously?” Eve typed frantically into one of the keyboards embedded in the armrests of her chair. “That explains a lot.”
“Can you help or not?”
A map of London flickered across the walls. “I can plot a trajectory based on incident reports. It’ll show us where they’ve been, and might be able to predict where they’re going. I can cross-reference that with vampire movements, but it’ll take a while to recalibrate, and we’ll have to wait until sundown for a better read on the vampires.”
“Great. Call me when you’ve got something.”
There was a long silence.
“I don’t work for you, Kate. I’ll help you, but I want to know what’s going on.”
I sighed and told her everything. It felt weird to be talking to Eve about this stuff again. When we first got together, we talked about everything when we weren’t fucking or when Eve wasn’t trying to get me to play D&D. And then she got successful, which meant she got busy, which meant I got busy, which meant she got busier, which meant I got pissed off, and the talking was the first thing to go.
Eve raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of carnage for a vase.”
“When all you’ve got is a ravening vampire army, every problem starts to look like a lack of wanton slaughter.”
“And you really think if we give the Morrígan this . . . what . . . item of home furnishing, she’ll go away again?”
I shrugged. “Old vampires don’t think like the rest of us. And it’s basically all I’ve got right now.”
“Cool, where do we start?”
“We don’t start anywhere. You stay here and get me Tara. I’ll handle the rest.”
She literally double facepalmed. “You know, for about ten seconds, I thought you weren’t going to be a dick about this. You’re in my office, asking for my help, using my resources. You don’t get to say what our next move is.”
And there was me thinking we’d never be fighting about money again, but this wasn’t the time for a domestic. Besides, if Eve wanted to get herself killed, it wasn’t my problem. Not anymore.
“Okay, if you want to tag along while I break into the house of an insane vampire wizard, then be my guest.”
“I’m not tagging along, Kate. I’m coming with you. Now give me ten minutes to suit up.”
“I am not going out in broad daylight with you dressed as Batman.”
“I’ll wear a coat. It’ll be fine.”
It was not fine. Eve pressed a button and the seat descended through the floor. I put my head in my hands, and when she emerged, she was wearing the same suit of body armour I’d seen her in a few nights ago, except this time, she’d topped it off with a floor-length, black leather trench coat. It did look pretty hot. It did not look inconspicuous.
Ignoring my protests, she led me out of the office and down again to an even more underground car park, where she had a flotilla of nondescript black vehicles. A squad of five identically dressed minions was waiting by a large-ish van.
“They are not coming with us. This is a quick B&E job, not the Normandy Landings.”
“They’re just backup, Kate; we don’t know what we’re getting into.”
It was just typical of Eve to muscle into my operation with her fancy ideas like thinking ahead and not getting horribly killed. I shut up, hopped in the van, and we headed off.
“So what’s the plan?” asked Eve.
“Get in, get the thing, get out.”
“That’s the plan? That’s your plan?”
I shrugged.
Eve sighed, hit a button, and a screen flipped up on the dashboard.
“Right, where did you say this place was?”
“It’s called Syon Park. It’s near Kew Gardens or something.”
“We’re breaking into a stately home?”
“Yeah, I’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
A couple of satellite images flashed up on screen, alongside a friendly-looking website welcoming visitors to Syon Park.
“Kaykay, looks like the park’s open, b
ut the house is closed. I think our best bet might be walking in the front door.”
I gave her a look. “That’s the plan? That’s your plan?”
“Well, you didn’t give me much to go on. It looks like there’s a garden centre next to the stable block. We might be able to get in through there.”
“You’re not dressed like someone about to buy a ficus.”
“No, but I’m dressed like someone who can kick your ass if you don’t shut up about my wardrobe.”
I shut up about her wardrobe.
“You know,” she went on, “if this place is open to the public, they’ll probably have CCTV. I can try to do something about it, but it’ll take a while.”
“I’m slightly more worried about giant tentacle monsters. Nobody’s going to be watching the footage live, and I don’t think Henry Percy is going to try and prosecute us for stealing his magic pot.”
“Why not? I thought vampires were all about playing the system.”
“Not if they’ve basically declared war on their entire government.”
“Cool.”
I peered out the van’s tinted windows to see if we were nearly there yet. We were threading through bad traffic on the Chiswick High Street, past tatty off licences and dodgy pubs. It didn’t look like the kind of place you’d stick your giant wizard palace. We pulled up in the car park of a Majestic Wine Warehouse, and Eve and I jumped out. Eve buttoned up her coat and turned up the collar. On the one hand, it meant you couldn’t see most of her armour. On the other hand, it made her look like Inspector Gadget. If he was hot. And a girl.
It was still a couple of hours before sunset, so hopefully Percy was keeping a low profile if he was around at all. But it did mean that we were basically breaking into his house under cover of daylight.
“Oh, we are so fucked,” I muttered.
“We’ll be fine. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“We’ll be captured and slowly tortured to death by a crazy vampire wizard.”
