Turned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Branded Book 2)

by David Bussell

  Turning its attention back to Gen, the vampire hulk made a death metal growl and clasped its hands together, fingers interlocked to form a single fist the size of a wrecking ball. The beast raised the meaty mitt above its head, making ready to smash the angel flat. I had to act fast. The whole of my life dilated into a single thought.

  Take him down.

  With no time to lose, I unleashed the dagger, sending it winging for the hulk’s ugly baby head. The target practice back at the server room must have honed my shot, because a fraction of a second after I loosed the blade I saw one of the amber lights wink out.

  Bam, right in the peeper.

  The hulk stumbled, rocking back on its heels, ready to keel over—

  Then changed its mind and went back to work. The hulk bunched its hands together and made another wrecking ball fist, seemingly unperturbed by the knife sticking out of its ruined orbit. I tried to recall the dagger so I could have another shot at it, but the blade was stuck. No matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t dislodge the weapon from the monster’s thick skull.

  I had no choice, I was going to have to get hands-on with this thing.

  The hulk raised its bunched hands over its head, muscles tensed, ready to pummel Gen into a pancake. As it wound up for the death blow, the brand kicked in, juicing my system, sharpening my senses, making time slow down. The hulk threw its fists at Gen’s skull like a dropped anvil, but I was already in motion, charging the beast with raw, animal hatred.

  My feet left the ground and I felt myself leaping high into the air, my body doing the work, my brain on autopilot. I landed on the hulk’s shoulders and my legs instinctively wrapped around the beast’s bull neck, scissoring it tight. The monster thrashed and bucked, trying to shake me loose, but I held on, thighs taut, refusing to let go. I rained a blistering hail of fists on the hulk’s skull, but it absorbed them like slaps from a little girl. Like we were playing a game of pat-a-cake.

  It didn’t matter how hard the brand worked for me, I wasn’t going to make a dent in this thing, not with my bare hands. I needed a weapon. My weapon. Clinging on for dear life, I reached around to the front of the hulk’s head and seized the dagger’s hilt in my fist. Digging deep, I pulled as hard as I could, wrenched the weapon free, and went at the creature like I was chipping a block of ice. Bits of meat and bone flew from the creature’s head as I stabbed and jabbed. Just the noise of it was sickening, let alone the sight. Finally, the dagger sank into the jelly of its remaining eye and the creature’s arms fell limp by its sides.

  The muscles of the hulk’s neck went slack between my thighs and it spilled forward, carrying me to the ground.

  Boom.

  A mini-earthquake as the knuckle-dragging monster slammed into the deck with the power of a demolished skyscraper. Gen came around with a start as the beast struck the ground by her side. Rolling over, she saw the hacked-up monster lying next to her with a knife sticking out of its eye socket.

  She let out a panicked yelp. ‘Good God.’

  I sat on the hulk’s back, legs crossed, mock-buffing my nails. ‘Morning sleepyhead.’

  ‘What happened?’ Gen groaned.

  ‘Oh, nothing much, I just took out hefty here single-handedly and saved your life. No biggie.’ I stroked my chin. ‘Wait a second, aren’t you supposed to be the guardian angel?’

  I stood up and held out a hand to help her off the floor. I half-expected her to bat it away, but she took it, pulled herself up, and wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, clinching me hard, her breath hot in my ear.

  Well, that certainly came out of nowhere. The “thank you” was surprise enough, but physical contact to go with it? My world was shook.

  Now, you could argue that standing around cuddling while the klaxons wailed and death closed in was a bit of a daft thing to be doing in that moment, but I needed that hug. That simple little gesture was the most affection Gendith had ever shown me. The most affection anyone had shown me since Neil got bitten by a vampire. I hugged Gen back, good and tight.

  ‘Are you smelling my hair?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I replied, trying to make out that I hadn’t been inhaling her scent, which, if you must know, smelled like a little slice of Heaven.

  Gen pushed me away, disengaging from my embrace.

  I coughed awkwardly, decided I’d better get back to work, and went about the grisly task of retrieving my dagger. Reaching down, I plucked the knife from the vampire hulk’s skull and it came free with a sickening squish.

  ‘That’s weird,’ I said crouching low and inspecting the vampire closer, ‘hefty doesn’t have a J on his forehead.’

  ‘That’s because he’s not Clan. Not really. He’s more like a pet, an attack dog, grown from Clan DNA. We call them tanks. They’re strong and tough, but they’re brainless and don’t have the tolerance to sunlight that their masters have, so they can only serve them in darkness.’

  Just then I felt the walkway vibrate under my feet and heard jackbooted heels ringing off metal. More of them were coming. Lots more.

  Gen grabbed me by the wrist. ‘Come on, we have to get out of here.’

  I slammed the sticky blade of my knife back into its sheath and got going. Concrete flashed past us as we doubled back to the shaft, running like hell to keep our distance from the incoming tanks. Heavy footfalls rattled the ground as we ran, spurring us on, driving us like cattle in a thunderstorm. Lungs on fire, I hurtled after Gen, desperate to make it back to the surface, thighs burning as I raced the final leg.

  ‘There,’ Gen shouted.

  I don’t know how we did it, but somehow we managed to make it back to the entrance shaft without running into any more Nazi monster babies.

  ‘Get going,’ said Gen, handing me the rope.

  ‘No, you go,’ I replied, handing it back.

  ‘Don’t argue with me,’ she insisted, thrusting the cord into my hand.

  This little dance was getting us nowhere. Whether Gen was trying to get me out of harm’s way due to some renewed sense of duty I didn’t know. Maybe she felt like she owed me one after I saved her life back there. Or maybe she just wanted to use me as a guinea pig in case the frayed rope snapped on us. All I knew for sure was that there were a bunch of jumbo jackboots marching our way, so rather than continue the argument, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

  ‘Ladies first,’ I said, clipping the rope to Gen’s harness and squeezing the trigger that activated the winch.

  Whoosh.

  Off she went, legs pedalling air as she went whizzing to the surface. I heard a few unsavoury words crackle in my earpiece as she rocketed up the shaft, then she reached the summit, clambered topside, and unhooked herself from the winch.

  ‘Send it down,’ she cried.

  I set the winch in reverse and unspooled the rope, lowering it back into the bunker, thankful that Gen’s weight hadn’t snapped it (of course it hadn’t, the narrow-hipped bitch).

  Crashing noises rumbled through the corridors and ductwork. I checked behind me to see a tank heading in my direction, coming my way with long, loping gaits and murder in its eyes. The rope snaked down out of the darkness and I snatched the metal clasp at its end as fast as I could. With just a few metres of ground left between me and the charging tank, I slapped the clasp on my harness and activated the trigger.

  I’d only made it a few feet into the air when I felt something grab hold of my ankle. The tank had latched on to me, its grip heavier than a trailer hitch. Looking down, I saw the beast’s hideous face leering up at me, another overgrown hulk baby, identical to the one I’d planted a knife in earlier.

  The winch strained under the excess weight, but continued to carry me up the shaft with the tank in tow.

  I heard Gen’s voice in my ear. ‘You have to shake that thing, the rope won’t take it.’

  Sure enough, I heard a sickening creak as the frayed cord unravelled some more, wearing thinner, about to snap.

&n
bsp; ‘Kick him. Stab him. Just do something!’ Gen screamed.

  ‘Just a little further,’ I called back.

  The winch screamed and whined. The rope was down to a thread. I was fifty feet up and hanging on by a prayer.

  Gen barked in my ear. ‘It’s going to give.’

  ‘A little more…’

  And then it happened.

  Brilliant, scalding light, flooding in from the surface.

  The first ray of sunshine lanced into the shaft and struck my passenger like a bolt of lightning. I felt a tremendous flash of heat as flames ripped through the tank’s body and turned it BBQ black. As I rode higher up the shaft and further into the light of day, a horrible scream flew from the beast’s mouth, far too high-pitched for its frame. It was a nightmare sound. The sound of a baby pulling a hot kettle on to itself. I was about to press my hands to my ears to blot it out when the noise stopped abruptly. Looking down, I saw the tank’s jaw unhinge from the crumbling bones of its skull, then the remains of its charred skeleton came apart and went tumbling into the void.

  The whole thing happened in two seconds flat.

  The second after that, the rope gave way.

  I felt my heart rear into my throat.

  I was falling.

  Falling to the bottom of the shaft, where I’d either be killed by the impact, or murdered by the things waiting for me there.

  (I really hoped it was the first one).

  I closed my eyes and readied myself for the end as gravity’s quicksand sucked me down—

  Then I felt something snag me and realised I was dangling mid-air.

  I looked up and saw Gendith hovering above me, her hand hooked into a strap on the back of my harness.

  ‘Now who’s the guardian angel?’ she asked.

  23

  The sun was on its way down by the time we ping-ponged back to base.

  I rocked into the tower with the flash drive pinched between my forefinger and thumb, holding it aloft like something holy. Like something divine. ‘We did it, Viz!’ I screamed as I raced up the tower’s spiral staircase. ‘We found the cure!’ I barged into my bedchamber to find Viz sat by Neil’s cot. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I gushed, waggling the drive. ‘We got the words for the scroll of undoing.’

  The old man turned from Neil’s cot, his face ashen. ‘Sit down, Abbey.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  Then I saw Neil. He looked awful. Even from across the other side of the room, he looked awful. I stumbled over to his bedside and pushed Viz aside, my stomach clenching, fear taking hold of me. He was unconscious, his breaths coming in shallow, unsteady gasps. A cold sweat glistened on his gaunt features. He looked thin, wrung out, like a set of bagpipes that had been squeezed until the tune ran out.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, my head whipping to Viz.

  ‘I’m at a loss,’ he replied. ‘He was fine and then…’

  ‘You told me I had a week to find the cure. It’s only been a couple of days and he looks like he’s at death’s door.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Viz, his face even more lined than usual. ‘He’s on the drip still… the transfusion is being administered exactly as instructed...’

  ‘Does he need blood? I can give him blood—’

  ‘You don’t cure a man of vampirism by giving him blood,’ said Gen, sticking her oar in as always. ‘Besides, look at him, he’s in no state to feed.’

  What was going on? Neil had been so vital the last time I’d seen him. Why this sudden turn for the worse?

  Neil coughed, surprising us all. Bile dribbled from his quivering lips as he turned to face me. ‘Abbey,’ he wheezed, then his eyes rolled back into his skull and he was gone again, lungs rattling as tiny breaths quivered inside of them, small and bird-like. I clamped on to his skeletal hand, afraid to squeeze it too tightly in case it shattered in my grip.

  ‘Well?’ I cried, desperate for the angels to help me, to offer some sort of solution, any sort of solution. ‘What do we do?’

  They looked to one another then back to me, but neither answered.

  ‘Get out of my way,’ I said, knocking the angels aside, heading for the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Gen.

  ‘To see Stella Familiar,’ I shot back. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, giving chase.

  ‘No,’ I said, holding up a hand. ‘I’m tired of being chaperoned.’

  ‘Then leave the flash drive here at least.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘You’ve met Stella. Does she seem like the kind of person who has a computer lying around? Leave the drive here and let me extract the information.’

  Something about the way Gen was acting made me want to cling on to that drive tighter than ever.

  ‘Just sit there with Viz and make sure my boyfriend stays alive. Do you hear me? I’m counting on the two of you.’

  A beat, then she nodded, Viz too.

  I pushed through the door and pounded down the metal stairs, feet ringing against the steps like the peals of an executioner’s bell.

  I managed to navigate the Bermuda Triangle to the London Coven without Stella’s help this time.

  Having slipped through the magical fissure in the blind alley’s brick wall, I arrived at the hideaway’s polished black door and pounded on it with the butt of my dagger.

  ‘Stella? Stella!’ I hollered, feeling like Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar.

  Eventually, the door cracked open and Stella appeared on the other side, dressed in nightclothes. ‘Abbey? What is it?’

  ‘I need your help.’

  ‘Can it wait until the morning? I just got done with a mummy that woke up in the British Museum and threatened to snuff out the sun.’

  By way of an answer I barged past her into the coven.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘I’m sure your business is far more important than mine.’

  I thrust the flash drive at her. ‘I need you to transcribe what’s on this. Right now.’

  ‘Abbey, I need to sleep. I have a whole city to protect, and not just against vampires.’

  The way she said it, it’s like she was a doctor, and I was just a dentist. Sure, you might come to me if you needed a filling done, but if you wanted something doing outside of the mouth, forget about it.

  ‘It’s about Neil,’ I said.

  ‘I appreciate that, but—and I mean this in the nicest way possible—Neil’s only one person. He’s just not my top priority right now.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I seethed. ‘No one ever wants to make Neil a priority.’

  Stella placed a friendly hand on my arm. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea, Abbey. You look shattered.’

  ‘There isn’t time!’ I was crying. Crying with violence. ‘Neil’s on his last legs. I need you to perform the ritual right now.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Her face knotted with concern. ‘We should have days before that’s necessary.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening, okay? All I know is he won’t see sunrise if you don’t help me.’ I stabbed the flash drive at her like a weapon.

  ‘Okay then, forget the tea.’ She took the stick from my hand. ‘Come along.’

  She led me to a small study that contained a simple desk and—much to my surprise, and no doubt, Gen’s—a brand new laptop computer. It didn’t look right, a modern slab of tech in that fossilised, lonely little place.

  Stella caught me eyeballing her computer. ‘Nice, isn’t it? A policeman friend of mine insisted I get one. Something to bring me into the twentieth century, he said.’

  ‘Twenty-first.’

  ‘Of course, yes. I always forget about that one.’

  She flipped the laptop open and it powered up. I expected her to slide the drive into the USB port and get to work, but instead she turned the whole machine on its side and started stabbing at the holes like a horny teenage boy.

  ‘What are you doing?’


  ‘Give me a second,’ she said, one eye closed as she did her best to force the stick into the laptop’s power socket.

  It was horrible to watch. No way was I standing around watching while she pecked away at the keyboard with a single finger. ‘Give it here,’ I huffed as I planted one arse cheek on her chair and yanked the laptop in my direction.

  I pulled up the files. Spreadsheets. Nothing but spreadsheets. I scanned the documents for anything that looked like the words to a ritual, but all I saw were rows of names and addresses.

  ‘What is this?’ I asked. ‘It looks like contact info. That’s not what we went in for.’ I continued to rifle through the documents until there were none left. ‘Where’s the spell?’ My voice was rising with panic. ‘Is it hidden somewhere? Is it encrypted?’

  Stella turned to me. ‘There is no spell on here, Abbey.’

  ‘No. It has to be here somewhere. Gen said it was. She promised me.’

  ‘Well it’s not on there. Maybe she was mistaken.’

  ‘Mistaken?’ I screamed. I stabbed the laptop’s screen with my index finger. ‘What is this? What is this stuff?’

  Stella spoke calmly, like a parent dealing with a toddler about to go from a hissy fit to a full-on wobbler. ‘As far as I can see, what you have there is a long-list of vampire Captains and Generals.’

  I felt an eyelid twitch.

  Captains. Generals. High-ranking Clan members. The kind Gendith said we should be seeking out instead of wasting our time looking for Neil’s cure.

  Anger boiled up inside me. A bait and switch. I’d fallen for a fucking bait and switch. Gen had betrayed me. Both of the angels had. Viz had never spoken with God. There was never a cure. The whole thing was just a smokescreen, a means to keep me distracted from what the angels were really doing: pushing on with their mission to wipe out the Clan. All of the running around I’d done, all of the hope I’d felt… all for nothing, all of it false. They didn’t care about Neil, and they sure as hell didn’t care about me.