“By tapping the power that burned the world down?” Julian asked.
Astra whipped round to face him. Rob breathed for what felt like the first time in minutes. He could hear the restless sounds of Astra’s men. He pulled his hands back.
“This power is ours.” Astra stalked closer to him. “We need it to defend ourselves.”
“That’s what they said last time,” Julian said. “And ten thousand years later, we’re still recovering.”
From the rage that crackled across Astra’s face, Rob thought she was about to order Julian shot. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Astra, slow down. This isn’t the way. If we work together, all of us, we can–”
She struck his hand away. Her face as she stared at him went through several different expressions, including disgust and anger. But it was that first look of disappointment, from a face identical to Zoe’s, that cut him.
“Tom,” Astra said. “Call him.”
Tom pulled out a phone. Rob took a half-step closer to Julian as Tom found a number and hit dial. Julian’s boots crunched on the snow as he put his back to Rob.
“It’s me,” Tom said. “She’s asking.” A pause. “He says they’re ready.”
Astra ignored Rob as though he wasn’t there. Her expression was one of loathing as she focused on Julian. “Which one went where?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rob asked.
Contempt dripped from her words. “If you’d made the Blackwood here tell you everything, the way you should have, you’d know.”
“Of course,” Julian said. “You need one of them in particular. The other won’t do.” His smile was hard. “This wasn’t the grave of a single creature, Rob. When the magician families dug the grave up, they discovered two of them lay here. They died together, buried in lava while they fought. The magician families took them both. Astra and her friends hope to trace them from here, but I’m sure they’d like to know which trail to follow. If they follow the wrong one, security will be raised around the one they do want.”
Earlier, Julian had said Cuthbert Whitlock had found one of them here. Maybe that was the truth, maybe Cuthbert hadn’t known otherwise, but it was a selective telling of the truth he hadn’t expected from Julian. He hadn’t thought Julian could keep the information that the grave was empty from him either.
He swallowed, told himself that later was the time for them to have it out. “Astra, come on. What you wanted isn’t here. It’s time to find another way.”
Astra’s men raised their weapons again. Guess I’m not one of us after all, Rob thought.
Astra pushed her hood back. Her hair was held up by a long pin, all but a few strands that had come loose. She reached up and pulled the pin out. Her hair floated free, as though the wind caressed her.
“Last chance,” Astra said. “If I have to ask again, it will hurt.”
“That’s not the most frightening pin I’ve ever seen,” Julian said.
Astra pressed the needle against her fingertip hard enough to draw blood. The wind brought Rob the scent of it. His skin and flesh and bones shivered at the coppery smell.
The drop of her blood fell on the snow.
Rob smelled magic, electric, alarmingly strong. He felt a wave of air hit him like a thump of sound too low for even him to hear. Above and behind Astra, ghost electricity crackled and stuttered.
A shape appeared.
A man, naked but for a cloth around his waist. His skin was covered in tiny writing Rob couldn’t make out in the blue-white light coming from him.
Rob had never seen him before, alive or dead, but he remembered the description. “Is that–?”
“Savraith,” Julian said. “The wizard. So that’s how you got through the maze. You made a ghost of the wizard. You absolute idiots.”
Astra lifted one arm. The ghost of Savraith did the same.
Rob figured things were about to go pear-shaped.
Julian spoke an indistinct word. His satchel flew off the shoulder of the man holding it. The man’s shout of alarm was echoed by the others. Fingers squeezed on triggers.
The crack of gunfire. The first bullets flew.
One struck Rob in the shoulder. Two more stitched their way up his left side. Hot bursts of pain. Shock taking away control of his body. The impacts twisted him to his left.
The monster got free.
It tore out through his human skin. His bones snapped and lengthened. His flesh bulged up and out. The clothes he wore split along their seams. Senses shifted – sounds became sharp, scents even sharper. He heard the tiny metallic snap of his wrist-chain breaking.
The monster came out howling.
He disembowelled one of Astra’s men in the first seconds. The man died with a gurgling sound, his intestines spilling red and purple onto the white snow. The blood-smell drenched Rob’s senses. Excited him. Urged him to kill more.
Electricity arced out from the ghost’s hand. It glanced off Julian as though he were surrounded by a bubble. Julian grunted, like he’d been punched in the gut.
Rob swung towards Astra. She spoke and he heard Zoe’s voice. No Astra’s voice Astra not Zoe. Lightning slammed into him. He staggered. Pain far beyond the gunshots, far beyond the tearing of the change. He fell to his knees.
“Rob!” Julian punched his arm into the air. Twists of paper flew from his hand, like pigeons released from a cage. “Down!” They flashed with blue fire.
Rob shut his eyes and covered his head with his hands.
The world filled with light.
He tumbled down the mountainside, locked in battle with his foe.
Claws and teeth and fire. They snapped and tore at each other. They had fought in the air, now they rolled on the ground. Around them, the mountain belched fire, woken from its uneasy slumber by their thrashing power.
Neither he nor his enemy held to a single shape. They shifted and shifted, changing limbs and wings and tails and claws, each striving for an advantage over the other.
They called on the air to change and pull at them, for the clouds to attend and rake them with lightning.
They demanded the earth change – even stone would change for them. The earth’s plates pulled and the crack between them widened. The liquid fire below the world’s skin bled forth.
They commanded the sea to change and great waves struck the stony shore, hissing steam, scalding flesh and scales and carapace.
They fought. They fell. So consumed by hate, by hate hardened over aeons, that they did not notice as the earth itself sought to swallow them. To end their destruction with the very destruction they had caused.
Rob lifted his head.
The sights and sounds and scents he expected floated back to him. He was in the snow-filled bowl in the centre of the maze. He could smell his own blood. He could smell a lot of someone else’s.
The air was filled with screams. Not just those of Astra and her men, who were rolling around on the ground, crying and gibbering. Screams in his head. As though the happy buzz he’d felt before had turned to madness.
Julian was on his knees, rooting through his satchel. He came up with his pistol. Blood leaked from his nose.
The ghost of Savraith was gone. Astra writhed on the snow, her hands clapped over her ears. Her feet kicked at the ground behind her, as though to push something away.
Rob stood. He wasn’t steady, but he could move. He grabbed Julian under the arm with one paw and pulled him towards the gap in the rocks through which they’d first entered the grave-site. Julian’s steps were unsteady too, but he didn’t fall.
Back in the maze, Rob said, “So that scribbled over everything, yeah?” His voice sounded funny, like his ears needed to pop. “They can’t read the traces at the grave-site?”
“It got the job done. You’re holding my gun arm.”
Rob checked behind them before he let Julian stand on his own. “You reckon Tom Calder can follow us through this by scent?”
Julian wiped at the blood on his upper li
p, smearing it across his cheek. “Let’s assume he can.”
The last of the light in the west was fading. Rob could see all right in the dark, but from the way he moved Julian couldn’t and Rob guessed he wasn’t feeling up to doing his night-sight magic trick again. Taking Julian’s arm, he hoped the maze spat them out near their car.
It wasn’t long before he heard a howl from behind them. Long, high, angry. Tom Calder, letting Rob know he was on the hunt.
“You get that vision when your spell went off?” Rob asked.
“What vision?”
He was taking more and more of Julian’s weight. “Ask you again later.”
Rob could tell when they reached the edge of the maze. Directions made sense again. The smell of the sea came from his left, carried to him by a biting cold wind. That meant the road was to the right. He was able to put his back to the wind and forge up the slope.
“Hang in there, matey,” Rob said. He had Julian’s arm over his shoulders.
“I’m okay,” he replied, though he wasn’t.
He found the road. The long strip of bitumen, the snow guttered by the tyres of passing cars and trucks, was a welcome sight. “Which way, you think?”
“I don’t–”
Tom Calder burst out of the darkness. He was a half-changed thing, a human-shape covered in fur, with a wolf’s face. He ran on two legs, but dropped to four to leap. Rob shoved Julian aside and met Tom’s charge.
They slammed together. Tom’s claws tore Rob’s right eye. He roared in pain as his vision dissolved into red.
Rob pushed away, lashing out blindly. Tom struck him again, knocking him on his back. He grappled and Rob’s vision came back in time to see Tom straining to bring his teeth to Rob’s throat.
Rob pulled his leg up between them and pushed. Tom lost his grip, bounced off to the side. Rob rolled and took a solid kick to the side of the head. He saw stars.
Shots rang out.
The flashes blinded Rob again but he wasn’t hit. Tom shrieked in pain. Rob recognised that sound. Silver. Got shot with silver. Tom’s footsteps fled into the red-soaked dark.
“Rob?” Julian’s voice.
The world was still spinning. For a few seconds, Rob thought he’d puke. “That you shooting?”
“Winged him,” Julian said. “Silver shot. He won’t come back, but he might send his friends this way if they catch up.”
“Bloody marvellous.” Rob knelt on the road, one hand pressed to his torn eye. “Guess we’d better pick a direction and move.”
They helped each other stand. Rob wasn’t sure who was the worse off. The mountains were a dark shape above and Rob wished he’d thought to note some landmarks on the way in.
Then he heard the snap of feathers and the unmistakeable sound of a body changing shape. He caught a familiar scent.
“Hemming?” he called out. “That you?”
“Do not shoot me,” Hemming replied. “Things have gone pear-shaped, have they not? You two are a mess.”
“Can you get us to the car?” Julian asked.
Hemming came out of the dark, close enough for Rob to see. Their battered state did not appear to ruffle him.
“Yes,” he said. “More are coming. I hope you can run.”
Chapter 20 - Alice
Alice took the underways to her meeting with the representative of the vampire court.
London’s vampires had long recognised the need to be able to move without exposing themselves to sunlight. There existed a cab service that specialised in serving vampires, but they didn’t want to rely on it entirely. No vampire wanted to be stuck in traffic while the sun was up.
The ground below the city was already riddled with underground passages. Some were in use, like the Tube network; or the government tunnels that spread out from Churchill’s Bunker; or the secret facilities maintained by those who lived in the shadow world. Others had fallen partially or completely out of use. There were forgotten Tube stations, rivers paved over and re-routed through sewer tunnels, a subterranean postal service.
The tunnels of the underways had been created by a vampire sorcerer, so reclusive amongst Alice’s kind as to be almost a myth. The stone halls and corridors wound through a twilight realm somehow separate from the tunnels below London, yet intersecting them at key points. Snarling bat faces watched from the keystones of every archway, ready to scream at any intruders and summon the network’s fearsome security measures.
The underways were maintained by a small organisation of human witches and warlocks that specialised in altering spaces. It was a marvellous kind of magic and in the 1970s, Alice had hooked up with a young man experienced in it, just to learn more about it. The young warlock claimed the organisation had no contact with the vampire sorcerer. She doubted that could be true, but she’d never worked any other answer out of him.
At a particular junction, she took a key from the pocket of her leather jacket. The bow of the key was made of worked curves of metal. To Alice, the pattern appeared different every time she looked at it. She slid the key into a small hole in a blank wall.
A door appeared. It opened, revealing the interior of a modern elevator. The control panel had only one button.
Alice used the ride upwards to put herself in the right frame of mind. There was a time when she would have been on her way to a duel with short blades or bare claws, but dealings in the modern vampire world tended to consist of polite verbal sparring matches. Many considered a victory in a courteous little meeting as rewarding as winning a duel to the death.
Alice had considered herself reformed for more than a hundred and fifty years. But she still preferred the duels.
She had been restless too often of late. Drinking the blood of Yadrim, an ancient, true vampire, had unsettled her. She’d adapted to the modern world of peace, but Yadrim’s blood had awakened in her a need for violence unlike anything she’d experienced since first being turned.
Killing Cordillan and slaughtering half of London’s vampire elite had sated that need for a time. But it had started to come back, just like the thirst always did. Joining Fiona’s hunt for Sorcha had, at first, offered another release. The unsatisfying end had left her twitchy with frustration.
She needed to put all that aside when she met the representative of the vampire court. She didn’t want to begin a war with every vampire in Britain.
A vampire in a tailored black suit met her when the elevator doors opened. That he wasn’t human was a sign of respect to her and a reminder she was moving in higher circles. They cared so much about their little status symbols at that level.
He showed her through a lobby of richly-coloured wood panelling and soft yellow lights. Another attendant, also a vampire, opened a wide door for her. Alice strolled into one of the places where rival vampires met to discuss their differences.
The room was large enough for a banquet, but only a small round table for two had been set there. Closed shutters hid a kitchen to her left – her enhanced senses detected no one in there, waiting to ambush her. A stage for live music sat to her right, empty but for a microphone stand without a microphone. A wide wall of tinted windows faced her, its glass specially and expensively treated to render sunlight almost harmless. The setting sun’s light was pulling away from the rooftops of Covent Garden.
The vampire who the court had sent to make peace with her stood at the window, her back to Alice. She was showing off, demonstrating she wasn’t afraid of or weakened by the sunlight. Either a crude gesture or an insult, Alice wasn’t sure.
Both possibilities fled from her mind when she recognised the vampire’s scent.
Lady Christina Denton turned away from the window. Her long dark hair hung around her face in perfect straight curtains. She let Alice have a long moment to recover from her surprise, a grand condescension that sparked Alice’s anger.
Careful, Alice said to herself. Her self-control wasn’t all it could be these days.
Lady Christina raised a slender arm towards
the table and its two chairs. “Shall we sit?”
Alice took a wide, circular route towards the table, keeping it between her and Christina. Their hands touched the backs of their chairs at the same time.
“You don’t feel that threatened by me, do you?” Christina asked. “Many consider you the strongest vampire warrior alive in Britain today, a champion straight out of the histories of our pre-treaty wars.”
“Old habits,” Alice said. “When approaching a vampire whom you fought on your last meeting, watch for a sword in front and dagger in the back.”
“Quaint,” Christina said. She pulled her chair out and sat.
She was one of the few – one of the very few – who could disregard the vampire obsession of status that came with age. Age brought strength for their kind, but Christina was different. She was a third of Alice’s age, but when they’d fought they’d been equally matched.
Like the maker of the underways, Christina was a vampire sorceress.
Alice sat as well. She wished she had her sword with her.
They were alone in the banquet room, as per tradition. They regarded each other without blinking. The court had made the invitation and as their representative, Christina was supposed to speak first. She drew the silence out.
“You don’t like these little status games, do you?” Christina asked. “They don’t appeal to your nature. And I suppose you never encountered such things in your mortal life.”
“Imagine the loss I feel,” Alice replied.
“You are perhaps wondering why I am the court’s representative.”
Alice let her weight rest against the back of her chair. “You mean after taking part in nearly destroying the city out there in Bromley-by-Bow? After the grovelling you forced the court into before the magicians and their Shadow Council?”
“Yes, that.”
Alice let them think she was just the rough peasant girl turned warrior. That she had no skill with the subtle games modern vampires played.
Alice understood it, she just despised it. But she didn’t like younger vampires like Christina thinking they had the right to look down at her.
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