Immortal Make

by Sean Cunningham

  “No, not at all,” Alice said. “I opened up a lot of vacancies when I slaughtered half the court in that Paddington hotel. All that experience and strength lost. They must be desperate to avoid the appearance of weakness. You are, after all, the only witch in Britain in a century who has kept her talents when becoming a vampire. They’d have been desperate to give you a position.”

  “I must admit, I was prepared to fight much harder to spare myself whatever punishment they had in mind for me.” Christina smiled enough to show the tips of her fangs. “Imagine my surprise when they all but begged me to join.”

  “And now you want me,” Alice said.

  “Lady Isabella wants you.” Christina’s blue eyes sparkled with derision. “I don’t think you can be trusted.”

  “That’s how the vampire court runs, all right. Trust. Not a hint of backstabbing, lying, manipulation, blackmail or back-room deals.”

  “I mean because you’ve changed sides. You’re with the magicians now.” She lifted her hand.

  Alice wore a ring on a chain around her neck, beneath her shirt. She felt it turn to ice against her cool skin.

  Julian’s warlock ring.

  More than that, a Blackwood’s ring.

  Alice sprang to her feet. Her chair flew backwards and knocked over the microphone stand on the empty stage. One hand went to the ring. She felt her flesh change. The ridges of her bones sharpened. The claws on her fingers lengthened. Her eyes turned from bright blue to burning amber.

  Christina stood as well. She almost hid her alarm at how fast Alice moved. Almost.

  “You’re not with us,” Christina said. Her fingernails were lengthening too. “When war comes, you’ll side with them.”

  “There isn’t going to be a war,” Alice sneered. “I’ve listened to vampires swear to make war on the magicians and the werewolves for more than a century. They never have.”

  “The others have never been this weak.” Christina’s long black coat shifted. It lost some of its shape, began coiling at the edges. Alice felt the prickle of her readied magic. “The werewolves are split in two.”

  “The magicians–”

  “Haven’t you heard?” From Christina’s triumphant expression, she had come to the part where she slid her dagger into Alice’s heart. “The consortium that controls their precious gemstones, the ones that amplify their magic? They’re not handing out gems any more.”

  Alice frowned. “So what? The magicians still all have–”

  “No.” Christina was a pale blur between wings of darkness. “The Emerald Consortium has been leasing the rings for decades, not selling them. And now they’ve started to cancel those leases.”

  “Why?”

  Christina shrugged. Her shape rippled. “Who knows? Maybe they don’t like the way Crispin Chalk became a member of the Shadow Council. It doesn’t really matter. The magicians lean too much on their rings. Without them, they’ll be weaker than they’ve been since before the time of the Dragon.”

  “You were one of them once,” Alice said. It slipped out before she could stop herself. Their kind made such a show of cutting their ties with their mortal lives, of becoming creatures who stood apart, that any such appeal was foolish. But Christina’s history made it worse.

  Genuine anger hissed in Christina’s voice. “I was one of them. And they turned on me for the sins of my father. They drove me into the vampires’ embrace.”

  “Poor little girl.” Alice knew she shouldn’t provoke a fight, but Christina was clawing away her control. “Is that what this is? Your revenge on the magicians? Have you spent the last century in a big sulk, imagining the day you’d get even? Your father was a maniac. Almost a hundred years and we still live under the threat of his madness.”

  Christina’s face was a smudge of pale rage in her indistinct form. For the first time, it occurred to Alice how different they both were from other vampires, each in her own way.

  “Carlton.” Christina spoke as though through a mouth clotted with blood. “Come here.”

  She must have used magic to project her voice. The door opened and in came the second vampire, the one stationed just outside the meeting room. Alice saw him hesitate at the sight of them, each twisted and monstrous. But he crossed to Christina’s side at a brisk pace.

  “I want you to look at Alice, Carlton,” Christina said. “I want you to really see her.”

  Carlton faced Alice. His unblinking gaze tracked across the strange ridges of her bones, the way her nose had become a blunt snout, her ears large and ragged.

  Christina’s arm whipped out of her darkness. Alice saw a flash of metal. She tensed.

  The sword blade sliced Carlton’s head clean from his shoulders.

  He fell with twin thumps. The room filled with the smell of his cold blood. Crimson spread slowly into the carpet. Alice sensed the trap.

  Christina held up the sword. “Recognise this?”

  Alice felt her vampire nature taking a harder hold on her. It demanded violent retribution. “How did you get that out of my armoury?”

  “Your little wards and locks were no real challenge. Not to me.” She tossed the sword to Alice. “You have no place in the vampire court. You will have no part in the new order we will establish across this country.”

  Alice swept her sword in an arc, reminding herself of its feel. She readied herself to attack.

  “Run. Run back to your warlock pet.” Christina floated off the floor. The dark, shifting wings of her shape lifted and spread more than six feet to either side of her. “Tell him he doesn’t have long.”

  More vampires in suits burst through the doorway. Christina must have summoned them with a subvocalised spell. They saw Alice standing over their dead comrade with a bloody sword in her hand.

  She could fight them. They were young, easily killed. She wanted to kill them.

  But Christina was another matter.

  She couldn’t fight them all alone.

  Alice turned and ran. She hit the window. It shattered into a thousand shards.

  The sun had set. Though the sky was not yet full dark, it was dark enough for her to catch the wind.

  Alice flew, imagining she could hear Christina’s laughter following her.

  Chapter 21 - Fiona

  Fiona paced back and forth across the loft in Flat 2 Hawthorn House. Her feet were clad only in black socks and her steps were quick and light.

  “Ping-pong balls, Jess,” she said. “It was right there in front of me the whole time and I didn’t see it.”

  Jessica sat on the loft’s couch. Her hands were in her lap and her head swivelled back and forth, following Fiona’s movements, like a spectator at a tennis match. Mr Beak sat beside her on the arm of the couch, wings hunched, the crystal of one eye tracking Fiona back and forth. Mr Shell squatted on the floor in his usual place, politely silent.

  “The ping-pong ball! In my hand!” Fiona waved her hand. Her fingers were curled around nothing. “And we were inside it!”

  “Has she lost her mind?” Mr Beak asked, trying to whisper out the side of his beak.

  “I don’t know,” Jessica replied. “Sounds like fun though.”

  Fiona reached the dark window, spun around and paced back. “And the bullet! You remember the bullet, Jess. In Bromley-by-Bow. Maybe you don’t, come to think of it. You were fighting off Lady Christina and the other Red Sisters.”

  Jessica grinned at Mr Beak. “That’s my favourite battle we’ve been in so far.”

  Fiona didn’t hear her. “A bullet fired from within a dream, from a gun that’s a concept created from a rune or whatever it is on a piece of paper in my pocket. The bullet went into the real world and hit Rob in the shoulder. Remember? No, that’s right, Red Sisters. But think about what that means.” She smacked her right hand into her left palm. “Ow.”

  “What does it mean?” Jessica asked.

  Fiona stopped by the pile of boxes at the other end of the loft. “It means I haven’t been thinking things through.
Oh Jess, it feels like my head is full of fireworks.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a good thing for a meat brain,” Mr Beak said.

  “The barge,” Fiona said, pacing again. She remembered times in dreams when she’d seen the barge. It floated above a grey wasteland she knew to be Riesarch, the world she didn’t remember, the place where she’d been born. She heard the creak of its ancient rigging as it drifted towards her. She saw the helmsman come to the rail, the one who could be her twin. “He knows, Jess. He knows how I came to be here, why I was sent away. He knows everything.” She raised her fists. “And he has to answer me now.”

  Jessica’s brow wrinkled. “This barge is a boy?”

  “What? No, I mean the person on the barge.” Fiona chewed on a nail. She’d never found her way into that dream under her own power, but she didn’t think she had to. The barge and the shattered landscape had always intruded on other dreams of its own accord. “I bet I can pull it into one of the dreamscapes Julian gave me. I bet I can.”

  “So, what happens then?” Jessica asked. “When you’ve got your answers?”

  A slight quaver in Jessica’s voice pulled her back from her own thoughts. Jessica’s eyes were big and worried.

  She sat on the couch beside Jessica and took her hands. “I’m not leaving, if that’s what you’re worried about. Riesarch is destroyed. There’s no place to go back to.”

  Jessica shrugged and dropped her gaze to her knees. “Maybe there are other survivors somewhere. Maybe they kept your real self on a thumb drive or whatever.”

  Fiona put her arm around Jessica’s shoulders and pulled her close. “This is my real self. I’m still your sister, whatever I find out about myself.”

  But she wondered if Jessica’s fear had any merit. She remembered the pull she’d felt when her twin brother – or whatever he was – had faced her for the first time. Whether it was destiny or fate or purpose, it had pulled her like a compass needle is pulled towards north.

  What if the secret behind all her previous lives consumed her?

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Fiona said.

  A knock sounded at the window. It made them both jump. Mr Beak squawked in terror.

  “I believe it is the vampire, Miss Alice,” Mr Shell said.

  The light from the loft lit up her pale face and hair. Alice hung in the dark too lightly, as though the breeze might blow her away. Fiona crossed to the window, twisted the latch and pulled it open. December air flooded into the loft.

  “Alice? Are you all right? Do you want to–”

  Fiona realised she’d never invited Alice in before and that as long as she never did, Alice could not enter. They were friends, though it was a strange friendship when one party was a three century-old seventeen year-old. But Alice was a vampire under everything else and Fiona didn’t want a vampire to have access to the home where her little sister slept.

  Alice noticed the hesitation. Her lips curved in a wry smile. She pushed away from the window and drifted slowly into the dark.

  Fiona remembered the reason why Julian had finally decided to help her learn magic.

  “Please come in, Alice.”

  Alice stopped in mid-air. Fiona noticed a tension run out of her. Something’s wrong. She’s had a hard day. Or night, rather. Alice slid forward and Fiona stepped back to let her float into the loft.

  “You’re letting all the warm air out,” Jessica said. Her face was set in a scowl and her hands were shoved into her armpits.

  “So we are,” Alice said, smiling. She closed and latched the window. Her smile faded as she faced Fiona again. “I promise I’ll never bite you, or your sister, or your mother.”

  Fiona took Alice’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Her skin was ice. “Thanks.”

  “Fiona was just talking about ping-pong balls,” Jessica said.

  “It’s been a mind-expanding day,” Fiona said. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have enough seats up here to–”

  “This will do,” Alice said. She sat on the edge of the coffee table, next to Jessica’s pink laptop.

  Fiona had never seen Alice look so uncomfortable, not even when she spoke to Rob. “I haven’t had a chance to apologise.” When she saw Alice’s blank expression, she added, “For putting you in danger when we chased Sorcha.”

  Alice’s smile bared her fangs. “Don’t apologise. The hunt, the thrill of being the unseen pursuer – I don’t get to enjoy that enough these days.”

  “It didn’t end the way I had in mind,” Fiona said.

  “No.” A flash of irritation crossed her features.

  “Are you all right, Alice? You seem a little more tense than usual. Have you come here for something?”

  She turned to stare at the corner. “I came here to see Julian.”

  “He told me that he and Rob are in Iceland for the weekend.”

  Alice ran her fingers through her hair. “I know, I know. For some reason too important to tell me.”

  Fiona noticed Alice’s ear was more pointed than usual. She remembered the monstrous, winged thing that had dropped out of the sky one evening as they were all arriving home, that had turned out to be Alice in her true vampire form.

  Do you really trust her? the sneaky voice in her mind asked.

  Fiona told the sneaky voice that she absolutely did.

  “The vampire court sent someone to meet me,” Alice said. “But it was a trap. It was Christina Denton. She’s turned them against me, all of them. I want to fight, but I can’t fight her and them. Not by myself. So I’m here.” She was still staring at the corner.

  It had never occurred to Fiona that Alice might have nowhere else to go. Fiona had always imagined she had a whole other life with others of her kind, one that Fiona never saw and never wanted to.

  But her old gang, or coven, or whatever they called themselves, Rob and Julian had wiped out in a motorway battle. Alice had since decimated the elite ranks of London’s vampires. It must have made her many enemies and left her few friends.

  She took Alice’s hand. It still felt like a thin glove over an ice block. “You’re always welcome here.”

  Alice took Fiona’s hand in both of hers. “And you may always call on me for aid. I’m a warrior, Fiona. If you or your sister is in danger, never hesitate to call on me.”

  “I’m covered,” Jessica said. “I’ve got my guys.”

  “Hey, send her in instead, I’m good with it,” Mr Beak said.

  “I hate to break the moment,” Fiona said, “but your hands are freezing.”

  Alice laughed and sat back. Her pale features grew serious. “You should both know that the vampires are planning to move against the rest of the shadow world. The court has changed and the new members will want to cement their positions with victories. They see the magicians as weaker than ever. This is their chance to conquer, maybe even rule.”

  Fiona glanced towards her shadow. The monster hiding there was still but attentive. “What’s changed?”

  “You know of the Emerald Consortium? They control distribution of the green gemstones witches and warlocks wear. They’ve stopped handing the gems out and have terminated the leases on others.”

  Fiona frowned. “They lease the gems? What kind of idiots agreed to that?”

  “I don’t know. In the original shadow treaty, the consortium agreed to sell them. They must have changed the deal later.” Alice reached into her shirt and pulled out a black ring on a chain. “These are the symbols of magician power, but the source of much of their true strength as well. Most witches and warlocks are not used to performing magic without them.”

  Fiona thought of the focusing mandala Julian had given her, that appeared as a ring in dreams. Of how much it had helped her. If the same was true for witches and warlocks, she wouldn’t want someone to be able to take it away from her at will.

  The black ring lay in Alice’s pale palm, drinking in the light. Fiona resisted the urge to touch it. She had a much better idea of its value than before and she knew
what having it must mean to Alice. It was so unlike the rings British witches and warlocks wore, but she could feel the power in it. She understood why the rings were symbols.

  An idea began to form in her mind. “Those gems, they all come from the crystal skeleton in Norway, don’t they?”

  “The green ones do,” Jessica said. “The blue and amber ones come from other places.” She jumped to her feet, grinning from ear to ear. “Are you thinking what I hope you’re thinking?”

  Fiona answered with a smile of her own, then turned to Alice. “How would you feel about a quick trip to Norway?”

  Jessica laughed with delight. As she ran for the stairs she called out, “Put on every piece of warm clothing you own!”

  The cold air bit into Fiona’s exposed cheeks the moment the teleport light faded. She shivered and adjusted her collar.

  She forgot the cold a heartbeat later.

  Fiona, Alice, Jessica and her two automatons stood in an amphitheatre-shaped hollow on a mountainside. It was deep in the Arctic night and the ground was hidden by thick snow. Around them, half-buried, were what appeared to be several portable buildings, their windows dark.

  Despite the night, Fiona could see because the air was full of lights like blue fireflies.

  They were soundless. They drifted about in random patterns, coming together in swirling vortexes and spinning apart to float alone. Fiona lifted her gloved hand to touch one. It passed straight through.

  An alarming thought came to her.

  She had no shadow.

  “Beautiful,” Alice said. Her girlish face was lifted in wonder. She wore the same leather jacket and jeans she’d been in when she arrived at Hawthorn House.

  “Drat,” Jessica said. She had donned her pink-rimmed veracity glasses. “I can’t touch them. How am I supposed to grab one for study?”

  Mr Beak launched into the air with a rattle of glass feathers. “Incoming!”

  Two werewolves came bounding out of the night.

  Fiona reached for her bag. She had brought with her the notepad Julian had given her. Alice hissed and took up position between Fiona and the werewolves. Her unliving flesh crackled and creaked as it changed. The werewolves snarled as they charged, all teeth and claws and flashing yellow eyes.