He hadn’t thought Jacob possessed enough information to put even this much of the puzzle together. Jacob was one of the last people Julian wanted to figure it out.
“Yeah, I can see from the look on your face I’m heading in the right direction.” Jacob settled back against his pillows. “What’s Crispin want? To raise one of them? To tap one of them, the way the Hargraves do?”
Julian shook his head. “Get well soon, Jacob.”
He started for the door, but Jacob wasn’t done. “You know what Crispin is, right?”
“A failed werewolf of the Krag dynasty,” Julian said. “Nice try.” He made it to the doorway.
“And the rest of his crew? You know about them?”
Julian stopped with his hand on the door-frame.
“No? They’re all like him. Either they belong to werewolf dynasties but got told they wouldn’t be turned, or got bit but didn’t turn. Some of them even did turn but they’re barely werewolves, just half-turned freaks. That’s a lot of resentment to tap into. I wonder what Crispin promised them?”
Julian realised he hadn’t thought it that far through. He’d assumed the power itself was the objective. He hadn’t considered what they’d do with it, beyond knowing that possessing such power would be catastrophic.
He felt it then, the old pull of the future he and Jacob were meant to have had, the two of them plus Mitch. He remembered how their minds had worked together, finding new angles, overcoming problems, opening doorways everyone else thought closed.
But as Jacob had said, they weren’t friends any more.
He started to leave again, but Jacob’s voice snagged him one more time. “Shit Julian, you’re really sticking to your guns on this one. I’m impressed. You’re all but sweating desperation but you won’t budge.”
He turned in the doorway. “Blackwoods and our secrets, remember?”
“Maybe we can settle this some other way.”
“I’m listening.”
Jacob raised both hands towards the cup on the table at the end of his bed. The room lights flickered once as he lifted it with his gift and pulled it through the air towards him. Julian waited, struggling to keep his impatience from his face, wary of what new trap Jacob would set for him.
Jacob used both hands to drink from the cup again. “Tell me why you’re so uncomfortable here.”
Again, an unexpected angle of attack. “My guilty conscience, remember? I put you in this hospital.”
“And I watched you put a bullet through Mitch’s skull without even hesitating in Bromley,” Jacob said. “You’re not easy to read, Julian, but I know your tells. Why does being in a hospital make you uncomfortable? It didn’t before.”
Julian’s fingers curled at his side, where his sword would have hung had he been wearing it. When he spoke, his voice came out in frozen shards. “If I tell you, then you’ll find the answers to my questions?”
“That’s the deal.”
Julian turned to the corridor. He could hear the sounds of televisions coming from other rooms along the hallway, bubbling away with evening reality TV shows. Voices from the nurses’ station in the other direction murmured beneath it. At the far end of the corridor was a sign that read LIFTS, with an arrow pointing around the corner.
A snatch of text from a book in the Blackwood library whispered in his mind. The power that ended the world twice.
He crossed Jacob’s room, not looking at him, and stood at the window. The building opposite was of a similar vintage to the hospital and almost as tall. Together they made a deep gorge of the street that ran between them. He saw the red and white lights of traffic stopping and starting far below.
Jacob didn’t speak. He knew he had him.
“I was a soldier while I was away,” Julian said. “A soldier warlock for a place called Khadios. Or maybe it translates better as battle mage. Battle mages fulfil a number of roles in war, but their primary role is to be embedded in a group of – well, let’s call them conventional soldiers. You’re embedded in a squad or company of conventional soldiers in the field.
“I was hospitalised once during that time. In a mental hospital.”
He noticed from the corner of his eye that the TV had stopped changing channel. Jacob wasn’t paying it attention.
“There is a duty you can pull, a particularly tough one. You only rotate into it for three months and then you get mandatory leave with a psych evaluation. The duty is to stand as battle mage for a company of vampires.”
He heard Jacob move where he sat in his bed. Julian kept facing out of the window.
“They toughen your mind up at Khadios as part of your – well, again we don’t quite have a word for it. Induction, I suppose is the best word. They’re as good at fixing minds as we are at fixing bodies. They reinforce your mind so you can handle war.
“But I never told them about Mitch. So my psychic reinforcements were built on a shaky foundation.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. He didn’t want Jacob to see them if they betrayed him.
“I still handled the three months well enough,” he said. “I was a little ragged round the edges, as you might expect. But war is unpredictable. We were cut off from reinforcements. My duty lasted five months instead of three.”
He turned around and leaned his back against the window glass. A part of his mind screamed that the glass would give way and he’d plunge to the street far below. He turned his gaze to the door to the room’s bathroom rather than Jacob.
“Your job, you see, when you take this duty, is very specific. You have the usual responsibilities as a company battle mage, but you get an extra one with a vampire company and this is the only one you’re really expected to fulfil. You see, vampires live on one thing and one thing only.”
The trembling wanted to spread from his hands. He kept his voice drained of emotion. “At the end of a fight, if the situation allows for it, the company commander will approach the battle mage and ask permission to feed on the enemy survivors. They will have left a few of the enemy alive, again if the situation allows for it. It is the company battle mage’s job to say yes often enough to keep the vampires strong and combat-capable.”
He remembered a pale face framed in dark metal and a pair of bright blue eyes. Behind him, others, their eyes mostly blue but a few that rare amber, standing with inhuman stillness in their dark armour, listening to their commander ask the question. Poised over their moaning captives. Waiting for his reply.
“For the last few weeks,” Julian said, “the last four weeks I think, I said yes every time.”
Another siren wailed up from the street. Julian pushed away from the window and paced slowly across the room. “I had a rationale for it. Something about the hypocrisy of using vampires in war but thinking that by putting rules around it you still held the moral high ground. I was nuts, of course. Quite out of my mind.
“The company commander was smart. He reported the situation as soon as possible. They were having a lot of fun but he knew if he didn’t, he and his company would never be allowed on a battlefield again. So they sent a Khadian Mercykiller to retrieve me. Mercykillers are sent out when a battle mage becomes unstable. Capture if possible, kill if necessary.” Julian shrugged. “I didn’t put up a fight. I was just glad it was over.”
Two voices spoke in hushed tones just outside Jacob’s room, from the direction of the nurse’s station, so Julian couldn’t see them. The conversation ended with a beep from what could have been a pager. One of the voices spoke and then Julian heard footsteps hurrying away.
“They put me in a kind of medical trance and shunted my mind into a dreamscape,” Julian said. “One built by oneiromancers specifically for medical recuperation. They fixed me up. I was back in the field a few weeks later for the start of the Sarpei Continuance Purge.”
He made himself turn to see what expression Jacob wore. Horror might have pleased him, understanding would have been an insult. But whatever Jacob’s reaction to the story
was, he showed nothing of it. His face was set in a mask of stone.
“Satisfied?” Julian asked.
Jacob pulled the tablet on his lap closer. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
Julian called his satchel to his hand and slung it over his shoulder. He left without another word.
He had a lift to himself as he descended towards the ground floor. That was when he let himself start shaking.
Chapter 12 – Rob
Zoe laughed. Rob, who was becoming less and less able to tear his gaze away from her, nearly bowled over an old man in a trenchcoat waiting at a pedestrian crossing.
He caught the man before he could fall over. “Sorry about that, matey.” The old man blinked, seeming befuddled by Rob.
“Quick, let’s run for it,” Rob stage-whispered to Zoe. And she laughed again.
The night was going well. The night was only twenty minutes old so far, the twenty minutes since they’d left the office together, but Rob would have sworn they’d been the happiest twenty minutes of his life. Zoe’s scent was clear sea air. Her eyes were blue or green or grey depending on how they caught the light. A narrow lock of dark hair near her temple had escaped the clip that held the rest of her hair back and it curled across her cheek. Rob had no idea why, but he was obsessed by it.
“Down here, I think,” Rob said as they reached a street corner.
“Oh good,” Zoe said. “I’m freezing.” She was wrapped tight in a scarf and coat, with woollen mittens on her hands.
“Yeah, it is a bit nippy,” Rob said. “I’ve even zipped my coat up. There it is. That sign down there.”
“I see it.”
One of the guys in the office had suggested a pub a short distance out of Hammersmith’s high street. Rob had liked the idea of getting away from the pubs where you had to shout to speak, at least for the start of the evening. He had in mind a place with a decent week-night pub band if Zoe wanted a change of scene later.
From the outside, the pub looked like a house that had been extended several times. It sat on a quiet street of semi-detached houses and old apartment buildings and there was a park further down the street, with a wall of trees shrouding its interior. Rob opened the door for Zoe and her smile as she passed him was all he could have hoped for.
Inside, the pub was perfect, a big low space with the bar in the middle. The ceiling was supported by heavy beams of dark wood. Most of the seating was in booths and the lighting was low, with small electric lights masquerading as candles on the tables. He made a mental note to thank the person who’d recommended the place.
He bought drinks for them both and they sat in the privacy of a booth, picking over the menu together. He decided on a steak after running his gaze down the menu once, but said, “I could always go for a vegetarian option. They got couscous here somewhere?”
“You?” she asked. “A vegetarian?”
“Hell yeah. I could murder a good lettuce right now.”
It was a stupid joke but she laughed. She was, he could only conclude, having fun. She was out with him and having fun. He felt happy. He felt normal. He didn’t feel like a monster, like a beast held always in check, counting days to keep up with the cycle of the moon. He felt like a guy on a night out with a pretty girl.
“What?” she asked.
He realised he’d been staring at her with a silly grin on his face. “Know what you want? I’ll go order.”
“Steak. Rare.”
“One rare steak and one bowl of rabbit food, coming right up.” He slid out of his seat.
“I dare you to order a salad.”
“Only if it comes with a roast rabbit on the side.”
She poked her tongue out at him.
He ordered from the bar. The scent of someone familiar tickled his nose as he brought his card to the reader, but he could still catch her scent, so it barely registered to his conscious mind.
They talked about how they’d come to London. “I’ve been here almost a year now,” she said. “I wanted some actual job prospects, you know? Greece’s economy is always about to blow up or fall apart. That and I wanted some independence from my family.”
Rob sipped his beer. He’d barely drunk a quarter of it. “You want to make it on your own then?”
“That too, but mostly it’s that back home my family is so in my life, you know? I feel like other people make all my decisions for me.”
“I’m kind of the opposite. My mum lives for TV soaps and the less I see of my dad the better.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Has its up-sides. Meant there wasn’t much holding me in Manchester. Thank God for that.” He spun his glass on its coaster. “I don’t really know how to ask this question. How’d you get into, you know, our world?”
“Family, of course.” Her smile was wry. “Always family. We go back a long way. Supposedly we can trace our ancestry back to werewolves in the Byzantine Empire.”
“You – you’re–”
She shook her head. “I was supposed to be, but no. The ceremony was interrupted and I – I didn’t turn.”
“I don’t get it. You wanted to–” He felt himself begin to babble and grabbed on tight before he said the wrong thing. Zoe watched with concern as he took a gulp of his beer while he got his head together. “Sorry, that one caught me off-guard. This is all still pretty new to me.”
He thought he saw a hunger in her sea-green eyes. “You got turned in an attack, didn’t you? In the wild?” He nodded. “I’m sorry Rob, I didn’t realise.”
He mustered a smile. “I think the term is ‘stray’.”
She reached over and put her hand on his arm. “That’s not a nice way of putting it.”
“So I hear.” He put his hand over hers. Her skin was warm and smooth. He realised he would tell her the whole story and he marvelled because it would be okay. “I don’t really know how it works in the – with the families, or whatever they’re called. A ceremony?”
She sat back, shifting her shoulders as though her back itched. “They make a big deal out of it. I mean really, it comes down to one moment, doesn’t it? But there’s a dedication ceremony the night before and all these things you have to do during the day. The mystics conducting the ceremony give you about a dozen different potions to drink and each one’s worse than the one before. You know a mystic assists?”
He’d been told that in Europe witches and warlocks were called mystics. Except in France, though he couldn’t remember what the French called them instead. “To increase the chances it’ll work, yeah. Must be a scary day, knowing that if it doesn’t work you’ll probably – probably not make it.”
“Die, you mean,” she said. “Yeah, it’s scary. Maybe all the fanfare is to keep you distracted. Not that it works.” She slid a dinner knife back and forth across the table top. “And then there’s the ceremony itself. My grandma was going to do it. We’ve always been close.”
He couldn’t even imagine wanting it. He barely remembered his own turning. The sudden terror of the monster leaping from the dark, the ripping pain in his shoulder from its teeth. The day in the cage in the house in the outback, sweating more from fear than from the fierce Australian heat. And then that night, as the moon rose, the stunning pain as his body began to do things a human body was not meant to do.
“Are you all right? We can talk about something else.”
Zoe’s voice shook him out of the black memories. “No, that’s okay. I want to hear it. Your Nan was going to – to do it? What happened?” He could smell her unease. “I mean, unless you don’t want to tell it.”
“No, I want to.” Her fingers closed around the dinner knife so hard her knuckles turned white. “We have this thing on the continent you don’t have here. They’re called the Covenant. Vampire hunters, witch hunters – and werewolf hunters. They found us and stormed the ceremony right as my grandma was turning me. They killed the mystics running the ceremony, killed my – my grandma –”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She blinked back angry tears. “They told me the magic went wild. I’m lucky to have survived, really.”
He’d always worried about giving himself away as a monster in public, but he’d never had a face or name to put on his fear of discovery. “Never heard of this Covenant lot.” He forced a lighter tone. “Not that I know much about what’s going on, really.”
“The magician families here hold them off,” Zoe said. “But it can’t last. The Shadow Council is more bark than bite – oh bollocks, I didn’t mean that.”
Rob tried not to laugh, but the struggle was written on his face. Zoe saw it and tried to keep her own features composed. They both dissolved into laughter.
One of the bar staff brought their meals over and made a cheerful fuss over them both ordering the meat rare. Rob stabbed a chip with his fork and crunched on it while considering how to attack his steak.
“Doesn’t your friend Julian fill you in on stuff in our world?” Zoe asked. She went straight for the steak on her own plate, he noticed.
“Oh sure,” Rob said. “But sometimes it’s better not to ask, in case he tells you something that’ll keep you up at night. Like how you should never let anyone put your image on coins–”
Her brow wrinkled. “On coins?”
“Yeah, that used to be a thing. Mostly American, but it happened over here too. They were called hobo nickels or something. He says that if a witch or warlock gets hold of one of these coins with your face on it they can–”
The skeleton of a squirrel dropped onto the table in front of him. It checked him out with one eye socket, grabbed one of his chips and sprang onto the top of the partition between their booth and the next one, before bounding out of sight.
“What the fuck?” Rob said. He winced. “Uh, did you see that?”
Zoe had a fork-load of steak halfway to her mouth. “The squirrel?”
“Oh that fuck,” he said and winced again. He scratched behind his ear. “The people at the next table aren’t screaming. What do you think?”
“That we’re the only ones who saw it?”
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