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

by David Bussell

  ‘I have to go back,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To get Neil. They still have his—’

  Lauden wouldn’t let me say it. ‘Will they give him back so easily?’ He could see the state of me. See that I’d had to fight my way out of there.

  ‘I don’t care, I’m getting him back.’

  I still couldn’t believe Neil was really gone. After everything we’d been through together, after all the ups and downs of our relationship, this is how it had ended. I knew we wouldn’t last forever—the deteriorating medical condition he suffered made sure of that—but to have him taken away from me so young… it made me angry beyond words.

  Lauden backed away as the brand glowed, leaking blue light between my fingers. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘They want an attack dog? They're going to get an attack dog.’

  I was going to make them pay for what they did, worse than I had any vampire.

  ‘You shouldn’t do anything rash,’ said Lauden. ‘Angels aren’t to be trifled with. Celestials are very powerful. They could kill you.’

  ‘Tell that to Gendith, I just kicked the toffee out of her. Next time I see her I’m sending that bitch to heaven where she belongs.’

  Is that what happened to dead angels? It seemed like cheating to me; to be banished from a place, only to be rewarded with free re-entry upon dying. Maybe they just ceased to be when they died, like I assumed I would until I found out God existed and paradise was a real place.

  ‘You’re grieving,’ said Lauden. ‘Stay here and spend the night in my spare room. I won’t lie to you and tell you that everything will be better in the morning, but you’ll be able to think more clearly then. What do you say?’

  I wanted to argue, but I had nothing left in me to argue with. I was dead on my feet and emotionally wrung out. Paper thin. I sighed and nodded.

  ‘I’ll show you the way,’ said Lauden, as he led me out of the drawing room and up an impressive wooden staircase, the kind that forked off in two directions at the top.

  He guided me into a spare room that was bigger than the footprint of my entire flat. All I saw as I stumbled into the dimly-lit chamber was a bed like a drift of snow; feathery, white, and irresistibly soft.

  ‘Lauden?’ I said, and he paused, turning back to me in the doorway.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thanks. Thank you.’

  He smiled and nodded. ‘See, not so bad for a scary monster, eh? Get some rest.’

  I tipped my weary head towards the bed’s pillows and was out before my head made contact.

  When I woke up I didn’t know where I was. Not right away. All I knew was that I wasn’t at the gas tower anymore, not by a long shot. The place I was in now screamed luxury, or at least whispered it softly across a cool, crisp pillow. The silken bed sheet I was lying beneath clung to me, smooth and light as a billowing cloud. Where was I? Where was this room with its polished oak furniture and its curtains like a wedding dress; expensive ivory cloth with lace at its edges. Was this paradise? Had I died and gone to heaven?

  Heaven… angels… betrayal... Neil.

  The events of yesterday lined up in my head like some twisted word association game, and all at once I knew where I was and how I’d come to be there. I sat up and propped my back against the bed’s hand-carved headboard. Scanning the room, I saw my phone on a bedside table. How did it get there? I checked my surroundings some more, saw my coat hung over the back of a chair, my dagger dangling from its harness, my shoes tucked underneath, and realised that someone had undressed me and put me to bed. Not in an ungentlemanly way—I wasn’t showing any major skin—just enough to make me comfortable.

  I reached for my phone to check the time. Turning it on brought up an image of Neil on my home screen. In the photo he was sat in a wheelchair, wearing a grey suit and a bald cap. It was the summer we’d gone to San Diego together, when his book had won us tickets to Comic Con. He was dressed as Professor X, a costume he’d chosen because it allowed him to get about without using too much lung-power, and also because the chair provided a handy hiding place for his oxygen tank. That was Neil, goofy, but practical. I enlarged the image to get a better look at him, and saw his smile. I have my whole life ahead of me, that smile said.

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked. I was already on my feet and pulling on my shoes.

  Lauden stepped in just as I was strapping into my harness. He looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, which surprised me given that he wasn’t meant to be a daytime creature. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  I punched my dagger into its holster and fastened the clasp. ‘What am I doing?’ I said. ‘Painting this thing blue with angel blood, that’s what I’m doing.’

  ‘I think that’s a bad idea.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do. Nobody does that, not anymore.’

  I pulled on my jacket and started for the bedroom door, but Lauden stopped me.

  ‘Okay, if you can’t be talked out of it, at least let me come with you,’ he said.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Someone should be watching your back. And if an angel won’t do it, maybe a vampire can.’

  ‘Do what you like,’ I replied. ‘Just don’t get in my way.’

  I watched the gas tower from across the canal, flat on my stomach, spying through a pair of long-range binoculars. The binoculars were Lauden’s, as was the insistence that we keep our distance. We were lying together on the roof of a bird-shit-covered, soon-to-be-demolished council block, the best vantage point we could find to snoop on the industrial park without being seen.

  ‘Looks like you had quite the fight,’ he said, noting the gaping hole in the tower’s side.

  ‘Next time I won’t piss around,’ I said, eyes on the prize.

  ‘I understand you want revenge—of course you do—but you won’t beat them, not on home ground, and least of all at this time of day when they can turn every ray of sunshine into a weapon.’

  I handed him back his binoculars. ‘For a bloke who dresses like a J Crew model, you seem to know an awful lot about war.’

  ‘How else do you think I survived this long when my kind are under constant attack? You’ve got to be on your toes, every day, every minute. The moment your guard drops, a witches’ familiar shoves a stake through your heart.’

  ‘Or a Nightstalker.’

  Lauden smiled, just a little. ‘Right.’ He put the field glasses to his eyes and peered through the lenses. I watched him as he surveilled the tower with hawk-like intensity.

  He jerked his head to the right suddenly. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Movement.’

  ‘Is it them?’

  I didn’t bother waiting for an answer – instead, I snatched the binoculars from him and pressed them to my face. Two figures had emerged from behind one of the park’s dilapidated buildings and were heading in the direction of the gas tower. It was Viz and Gen. They were dragging along an old hand truck, the kind warehouse workers used to move stock pallets around. The truck rattled as it bounced over cracked tarmac, empty.

  ‘I don’t get it. What were they unloading?’

  I tried to get a read of the angels’ expressions but they were too far away to make sense of their features. I continued to watch as they reached the tower and dumped the hand truck, parking it next to an old Workmate bench. Propped up against the side of the bench were planks of wood, cut to various lengths. On top of it I saw a hammer, a box of nails and a cutting saw. Someone had been doing some carpentry, but what were they building?

  Then it dawned on me. A coffin. They’d built a coffin.

  ‘Neil’s dead because of them, and now they’ve buried the evidence.’

  They’d disposed of my boyfriend’s body without ceremony, and all while I was half a mile away, an uninvited guest, forced to watch through a set of binoculars.

  I tossed the glasses from the roof and heard them smash on the ground below. I turned to Lauden, and throug
h my tears, I saw something unexpected. I saw that I wasn’t the only one crying. Lauden was crying too. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked, digging my fists into my hips.

  ‘We shared a bond. Neil had Clan blood in him when he was taken from us. That made him family.’ There was real pain in his voice. ‘Should I not cry when family dies?’

  We? Us? Family?

  As someone who’d never really had anyone looking out for them, it was hard to comprehend the basic concept of family, let alone the idea of caring for someone you didn’t even know. In any other circumstances I’d have found Lauden’s display of grief gross—the crocodile tears of someone on Facebook mourning a celebrity they only knew from the telly—but I actually found it comforting. In all the time I’d spent with the angels I was never once made to feel like kin. We weren’t bonded by blood, we were soldiers, thrown together by chance and bound by lies. The angels never cared about me, not like Lauden did. Lauden who cared so deeply about family that he could grieve for someone he’d never even met.

  ‘Please don’t attack them,’ Lauden insisted. ‘Not now, not like this. It’s too dangerous. The angels have been waging war for centuries, they’re God’s own holy avengers.’

  ‘No they’re not. God cast them out, remember? Do you understand what that means? A guy who kills first born children just to make a point decided that those two were bad news. You see why I can’t let them live?’

  ‘They’ll kill you, Abbey. With or without that brand, they’ll burn you alive.’

  ‘I can take them.’

  ‘Abbey, if you go down there, there’s nothing I can do to help you. The tower is built on hallowed ground. Once you cross that line, you’re on your own.’

  ‘So what? You think I should just let them get away with Neil’s murder?’

  Lauden stepped towards me, gently placing his hands on my arms. ‘No, I just… I don’t want to see you end up the same way Neil did.’

  I gazed up into his eyes, and for a moment, for a single, solitary second, all the anger melted away. All the fury and the urge to kill disappeared as I felt his touch.

  But just for that moment.

  ‘Okay,’ I said finally, sliding the dagger back into its sheath and pulling away from him. ‘Okay, you win.’

  Lauden’s shoulders sagged and he let out a long sigh. ‘Thank you.’

  I stayed locked on the gas tower, eyes boring into it like a pair of deep sea drills. Lauden might have thought he’d averted a crisis, but all he’d really done was delay the inevitable. I was going back to that tower after sunset, when there was no light left for them to turn into weapons, and I was killing everyone inside.

  26

  Lauden was busy fetching me a glass of wine when I cut and run.

  An hour later I’d navigated the smelly game of Twister that is the London Underground at pub chucking-out time, and found my way back to Bethnal Green. To the other side of the canal. To the gas tower.

  I was considering a plan of attack when it occurred to me that I should do a proper recce of the tower before I went charging in there, sword swinging. Using my Nightstalker x-rays I concentrated on the structure until its walls melted away and revealed the building’s insides.

  Its empty insides.

  As far as I could tell, the base had been vacated. The angels had done a runner, and who did that but the guilty?

  Where had they gone to? Were they laying low, keeping their heads down, knowing I was coming for them? Or had they already moved on? Were they pushing ahead with their mission, slaying vampires, maybe even trying to draft a new Nightstalker, some other chump to rope into their twisted little scheme?

  Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe my powers were playing up and the angels were hunkered up in the tower after all. I had to know. No way I was missing a chance to make them pay for their sins.

  Treading softly, I approached the gas tower and took a peek through the peeled-back panel that acted as its entrance. From the looks of things, the place was empty, but not evacuated, as I’d first assumed. The most telling sign that the angels had yet to clear out was Vizael’s book collection, which sat on bowed shelves, untouched. The old man wouldn’t have left that behind; those dusty tomes were far too valuable to him. So, the angels were undeterred. Despite my promise to end them, they hadn’t budged an inch. This did not make me a sunny bunny.

  I exited the tower and decided to go looking for Neil’s burial place, but I didn’t know where to start. The hand truck the angels had used to move his homemade coffin hadn’t left any visible tracks, and there was too much ground to cover, thousands of square feet dotted with dark, vacant buildings. I spent a while going over the area but didn’t find anything. No freshly dug-up ground, no cross to mark his grave, no nothing. That’s assuming there was even a grave and they hadn’t just dumped his body and set it on fire.

  I turned back to the tower and felt my fist close tighter than an eagle’s talon. Make a fire of your own, my mind screamed. Burn it. Burn it all. I felt the brand glow hot in my hand, spurring me on, demanding justice. The angels weren’t God’s avengers, I was. I was the Nightstalker: His holy sword, the scourge of the wicked.

  I marched across the lot and back into the gas tower, stomping the ground, fist glowing blue. I knew what I had to do. I was going to use the power God gave me, use it to punish the ones who betrayed Him, use it to raze their operation to the ground.

  I reached the centre of the tower and planted my feet. Fury boiled inside of me, hotter than any I’d ever known. I thought back to my fight with Gen, back to when I’d snuffed out her spear with blue fire, and tapped into that same anger. Immediately, my body began to tremble, vibrating at first, then shaking violently like I was riding an old roller coaster, a real bone-shaker. As the anger inside me rose, a spark ignited in my hand, and the brand spewed fire. I had become pure wrath. I pointed my palm ahead of me, aiming it at Viz’s library, blasting it with a jet of scorching blue flames, painting it with perfect hatred.

  At first the fire lapped at the bottom of the bookshelves like a thirsty kitten with a saucer of milk, then the flames caught with a great whoof and burned bright. The blaze quickly became an inferno, igniting the ancient texts, blistering furniture, racing up the walls to the rafters above. The heat coming off the fire should have melted my skin like candle wax, but I remained impervious to its warmth. Instead of running for cover I stood there watching as the tower burned down around me, the flames I’d projected gutting its insides, reducing it to a charred skeleton.

  I stepped from the burning remains of the tower like a phoenix, clothes blackened but body intact. The fire continued to blaze hot and blue, like a bonfire doused in some alien petrol. A column of smoke rose from the pyre, yanked sideways by the wind, carrying dirty grey ash across the canal and off into the city beyond.

  I’d lit a beacon. This was my message to the angels: I was coming for them, and there was nowhere left for them to hide. Not any more. Wherever they ran, I’d find them, and I’d see to it that they burned in the fires of Hell.

  I heard the wail of sirens and took off before the fire brigade showed up.

  I suppose I don’t need to ask where you’ve been?’ said Lauden as I crunched up his pea gravel path and barged past his two henchmen.

  ‘You and me need to talk,’ I replied. ‘Right now.’

  He nodded and dismissed the heavies, who sloped off to their ludicrously small guard house. I stomped up the steps of the mansion’s porch and met Lauden in the threshold.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, his face lined with concern.

  ‘I saw those things in The Crypt,’ I told him. ‘The giant monster babies dressed like Nazis.’

  I examined his face for any trace of guilt, but all I saw was confusion. ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, thrown for a loop, ‘but I have no idea what you’re talking about. Monster babies?’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Lauden. You keep saying the Clan aren’t the bad guys, but how the hell am I supposed to square that with al
l the crazy shit I saw in that bunker? Genetically engineered monsters? That’s pure Bond villain stuff.’

  ‘Listen, I don’t know what this Crypt place is, but it sounds like Wild Blood business to me.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t that convenient? Every time a vamp comes at me with his fangs out, he’s a “Wild Blood”.’ I’d been pushing all of this stuff to the back of my mind since our first conversation, but I couldn’t kid myself any longer. Just because Lauden looked respectable, didn’t mean he wasn’t a monster. If the angels had taught me anything, it was that. ‘I met Judas you know,’ I said. ‘Saw him with my own two eyes. I don’t care how much non-threatening knitwear you drape yourself with, if that’s the man you serve, if that’s who you call family, then you’re no fucking hero.’

  ‘Judas isn’t who you think he is.’

  ‘Get real, will you? A withered old mummy with tubes full of blood sticking out of him? He’s a wrong ‘un and you know it.’

  ‘So you’re going to judge an old man based on his looks? Bit ageist.’

  I couldn’t help but laugh at that. ‘Look, there’s no way Judas isn’t a villain. I mean, come on, the clue’s in the name.’ Maybe Lauden wasn’t a bad guy. Maybe he was just brainwashed; a good man with some wonky ideas. Whatever he was, he was co-signing with the Devil, and he needed to know that.

  ‘Judas isn’t the man the bible makes him out to be. Consider his so-called betrayal of Christ—’

  ‘Ugh, what is this, Sunday school? Because the only reason I ever went there was so my parents could get some free babysitting.’

  ‘Please, forget what you think you know about those old stories and really consider what I’m about to say.’