She stumbled as Billy led her down to the garage. Julian’s sword had hurt her badly and the blood had much work left to do. She despised herself for how vulnerable she felt.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“I run errands for Lady Christina,” Billy said, pulling her into the garage. A car waited, its engine running. “I hear things. The word is out on you, Alice. Someone here in the safe house staff ratted you out.” He opened the back door of the car. Alice allowed herself to be pushed inside.
Once he was inside with her, Billy knocked on the window between the front and back seats. It was blacked out, as were the other back windows.
Alice heard the garage door rise, saw sunlight strike the blackout windows. So little got through, but in her weakened state it made her wince in pain.
“Who’s driving?” Alice asked.
“My Wendy,” Billy said. “I haven’t had her for long, but we should be able to trust her. I didn’t get her through one of Christina’s people.”
Child-like vampires often needed an adult to pretend to be their legal guardian. Since the early twentieth century, when the vampire was a boy and the guardian a woman, they’d been called Peters and Wendys.
“You’re putting yourself in danger for me,” Alice said.
He threaded his arm through hers. “You’re my friend, Alice. I’ve got a place you can lie low. It’s kind of a dump, but it’ll do until I can find a way to get you out of the country.”
Flee. It was the smart thing to do. Get out of England for a few decades, until another shift in the vampire court made her exile unnecessary. Those kinds of changes could even be encouraged from afar. Her old blood-brother Vivien, sired like her by the vampire Canton, had been very good at that sort of thing.
She felt adrift. Lost. For so long, she’d known herself. But drinking Yadrim’s blood had changed her. She’d had a reign on her bloodlust for so long, but since Yadrim, she wanted to kill and feed so much more.
And she’d suffered too many defeats lately. Hunting Sorcha with Fiona. Her disastrous meeting with Lady Christina. Even Vivien’s death. He’d been a reliable anchor throughout her long, dark second life.
She’d shrugged off the consequences of killing Cordillan. But the consequences had found her anyway. She should run and hide, let Billy get her out of the country until she could figure out a way to rebuild.
She wrinkled her nose. Once she had been a peerless warrior. Once she had chosen her own way, rules be damned. Whatever changes Yadrim’s blood had made in her, however the world around her had turned against her, she was still that. Through all her remakings over the centuries, she was still herself.
“I don’t run,” she said.
Billy’s brow crinkled in fear. “You can’t face Christina, Alice. She’s too powerful and she’s got the whole court behind her. They’re going to war tonight and you’re on the target list.”
“I don’t run,” Alice said. She felt her fingers tingle as her anger began to wake. “They think I’ve gone over to the magicians. It’s time to show them what side I’m really on. Tell your Wendy to take us to Ealing.”
At school, Jessica’s classmates were in the throes of ecstasy or despair. Their teacher had given them a maths test.
The questions had multiplication and division signs in them. And brackets.
It was going as well as Jessica would have expected. When she sneaked glances around the room, she saw some students lost in their sums, fingers tapping on calculators, pencils scratching rapidly across paper. Others stared at their pages with despair, or lack of interest, and in the case of Rebecca Bagsleyworth a kind of outrage that she should even be confronted with such a task.
Jessica checked the time on the classroom clock. She scribbled another answer. She had already answered all the questions in her head. She was pacing herself.
She ached with all her being to turn the paper over and scrawl out the solution to the most convoluted nonlinear differential equation she could devise, just to witness the expression on Mrs Widdins’ face when she saw it. But Fiona had had a long chat with her – more than one chat, if Jessica was being honest with herself – about not terrifying her teacher with her brain. She could save her brain for the work she did in her lair.
Jessica had counted it a tremendous victory that Fiona had finally used the ‘lair’ word and not nagged her about it for a whole week.
The wall clock ticked. Jessica off-handedly answered another question on her paper. She wrinkled her nose when she noticed the boy opposite her, Eddie Cronker, had given up, typed the number 58008 into his calculator, turned it around and started sniggering.
Jessica’s desk beeped.
Every student’s head lifted. Mrs Widdins rose to her feet and rounded on her, like an anti-aircraft gun tracking incoming bombers. “Whose phone was that? I told everyone to switch their phones to silent.”
“Sorry Mrs Widdins,” Jessica said, pretending to be sorry. “I’ll switch it off now.” In her opinion, the phones to silent rule only mostly applied to her. There were perfectly understandable situations in which it didn’t. She’d configured her phone’s alerts to ignore the silent mode setting when one of those situations occurred.
When Mrs Widdins didn’t tell her off – because Mrs Widdins had a good idea Jessica was a lot smarter than she let on and found her more intimidating than she would ever admit – the rest of the students, some eagerly, some with resignation, returned to their tests. Eddie Cronker cleared his calculator, typed 5318008 and chuckled again.
Jessica lifted her desk lid. Her phone was on top of her books. She tapped the screen and frowned when she saw the message it had received.
It was a door alert. An intruder had entered the secret tunnel that ran from the Russell Square Tube station to her lair.
When Rob opened the front door, a smoking vampire flew at him.
He nearly counter-attacked.
But Rob was in a thoughtful mood. Since he’d risen around midday, he’d spent a lot of time on the couch watching lawn bowls on TV. He’d also eaten all the bacon Julian had bought, which had made him feel a lot better about everything.
So when Alice threw herself across the doorway of Flat 1 Hawthorn House, he had just enough self-restraint to jump aside.
Alice’s leap carried her all the way to the foot of the stairs. She collapsed, shedding the coat she’d held over her head, and rolled on her back. Wisps of smoke rose from her hair.
A car with dark windows sat in the middle of the road, as close to the front door as it could get without smashing other cars out of the way. When it pulled away, Rob shut and locked the door.
“Thanks,” Alice said. She sounded like she’d run all the way from wherever she’d come from. “You got Fiona’s text then?”
Rob hadn’t brought his phone downstairs. “Uh.”
Alice slumped on the stairs. Rob remembered her getting cut last night. He guessed that was why her pallor was grey rather than white.
Alice grabbed the banister and pulled herself to her feet. She moved slowly.
“You, er, you okay?” He had to make himself ask.
“I’ll be fine.”
He could have left it there and gone back to watching the lawn bowls, maybe after checking the kitchen for more food. Instead he said, “Did you know shapeshifters were supposed to be protectors?”
Alice halted and half turned towards him. “Didn’t you?”
“Whatever,” he said and started towards the kitchen.
“Do you know what you were made to defend against?” Alice asked.
He could hear her making an effort, so he said, “No.” Then a grin spread across his face. “Wait. Vampires, right?”
Alice slid down to sit on the stairs. She smiled too. “That’s right. That’s why we hate each other. The ancients carved it into our bones. Millennia of killing each other has only made that hatred stronger.”
“Huh.” Rob scratched behind his ear. “Thing is, I don’t get it.
I’m supposed to protect people, right? But I kind of want to kill people all the time. I mean, that part of me does. And what’s with the full moon? Why would they make me so I lose it for three nights of the month?”
Alice sighed. “The best guesses we have are sabotage. Each side in the ancient war made its supernatural soldiers. Each side tried to sabotage the soldiers of the other side. The shapeshifters were driven mad by the moon. Vampires cannot enter private spaces uninvited. You see?”
“I guess so.” He put his hands on his hips. “Wow.”
“We’re the leftover weapons of a forgotten war,” she said. “We just have to get on as best we can.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“I’ve been around a while,” she said. A flicker of her fascination with magic things lit in her tired face. “Finding out things like this is what I do. You should see my collection of books one day.” She lifted one shoulder. “Actually, I don’t like to show people my books. You can just imagine it.”
“Works for me. You need anything? I’m going to pop out to the shops.”
“I’ll be fine.” She pulled herself to her feet again. “I just need rest.”
He watched her head towards Julian’s room. The slightly crisped scent of her lingered, but he felt a little better with her out of his sight.
As best we can. Rob thought about that until his stomach started rumbling.
Jessica bounced off the teleporter pad in her lair. Her sneakers skidded on the carpet as she cornered into the hallway and sprinted towards the garage.
Beside the garage was a room with a big window where, as near as Jessica could guess, the Royal Cartographers would once have watched their fellows come and go in whatever vehicles they’d possessed. Jessica left the room’s light off so she wouldn’t be seen and jumped onto the bench below the window. She wiped a narrow strip of dust clean from the cloudy glass and studied her intruders.
The grey stone garage was room enough to hold three vehicles. It had been empty when she found it. Wooden doors led to a wide tunnel, giving vehicles access to the surface. A door to the side opened into the passageway that led to the Russell Square Gardens entrance. On the other side there was another door, beyond which was a tunnel to the nearest Tube station.
Her intruders had smashed that door off its hinges. She would be angry about the damage later. The thing that really grabbed her attention was Savraith’s glowing ghost hovering in the middle of the room.
Mr Beak landed on the bench beside her with a rattle of glass feathers. He peeked through the hole in the dust that Jessica had created. “Aw crap. Not that thing again.”
“What have they done to my garage floor?” Jessica asked.
The half-dozen men were all big burly types, all but one skinny guy in a silly robe. A girl – a young woman – stood to one side, with Savraith’s ghost floating above her.
A pile of the damp clay that was London’s soil had been shovelled to the side. Three of the men were in the hole they’d dug, trying to hoist a big black metal box up over the whole’s lip. And onto the garage floor.
“Is that Zoe, boss?” Mr Beak asked. “Or Astra? I’m a bit fuzzy on what happened in Hackney. I thought the important part of being two separate people is the separate bit. What do I know, eh?”
Jessica resisted the urge to make a larger gap in the dust. She didn’t want to be seen until she was ready. She stared harder at the box. “It’s a sarcophagus,” she said. “Like that one in Evelyn’s place – oh.”
Mr Beak hunched his wings. “Oh what? Do we get the hell out of here?”
Jessica scowled. “What? Run away from them in my own lair? No way!” She jumped down off the bench. “Mr Beak, rouse the troops! We’re kicking their bums out of here!”
Zoe stood back as they pushed the sarcophagus up out of the hole and onto the garage floor. She was still linked to the ghost machine back in Essex. Savraith’s ghost hummed through her. But because she was still new to it, she had extended the link to one of the others, who stood beside her, a black robe over his coat and jeans. The symbols on his palms were painted in her blood. A constantly refolding shape of white light was cupped in his hands – a visible manifestation of the spell he held open.
With a last heave, Crispin’s men slid the sarcophagus out of the hole. “Are we sure this is it?” one of them asked.
“We should check inside,” said another. Garry. Hungry to be in charge. Still trying to work out if Zoe would assert herself the way Astra used to.
“We’re not supposed to,” said one of the men in the hole.
“We’ll look right idiots if we take it back and it’s the wrong box.”
They argued more. Zoe moved back to the lip of the hole, careful of her footing now that the stones of the floor had been loosened by their digging. She held her hand out over the hole and pulled a spark of the ghost’s power into herself. “There’s nothing else down there.”
Oh Astra, how you must have loved this power.
“Can’t you, I dunno, open it?” Garry asked, his hand on the sarcophagus. The soil in which it had been buried was clay, but it had all slid off the black metal once it had the chance. “Or look inside? I’m sure Astra could have.”
None of Crispin’s ‘desperate men,’ as she thought of them, had seen her transform yet. Zoe was prepared to wait until then before putting them in their place. Though if she got everything she wanted tonight, she was done with them all. She owed them nothing.
“I can try,” Zoe said.
She put a hand on the sarcophagus surface. It was dry and cold, not even slightly dirty from its century under the stone floor. She pulled in more of the ghost’s power.
The black metal sucked it out of her. Zoe snatched her hand back.
Garry moved closer. “What happened?”
Zoe grinned. “Load it onto the trolley.”
Garry pulled in a deep breath. “Now look–”
She thought she would have to flex her strength after all. An electric zap to the tailbone would put him in his place. She raised a hand towards Garry. His face paled as he realised what was about to happen.
One of the doors to the garage opened.
There was a door in each of the garage’s four walls. One was obviously the vehicle door, another was the one with all the traps they’d battled through on their way from Russell Square Tube station. The door that opened was opposite the vehicle door and there was a big window beside it, too dusty and dark to see through.
A big bronze tortoise trundled in. It stopped at the edge of the raised walkway that ran along three of the garage walls. Hatches on its shell opened and what might have been electrical coils folded out.
They swivelled to face Zoe and her companions.
A brass robot a metre or so tall followed the tortoise. It moved on motorised treads and held a tray for serving drinks. On the tray had been bolted a small, tripod-mounted Gatling gun. It took up position by the tortoise. Three more automatons emerged and lined up with the tortoise. Much like the one with the machine gun on the tray, they were armed with old but quite nasty-looking weapons.
A speaker whined. A high-pitched voice said, “H- (crackle crackle) or I’ll (pop hiss pop) and (crackle squeal) damn th- (zzzzzzzzzztttt)”
“The fuck?” Garry said.
Crispin’s desperate men shuffled their feet. Zoe grinned, putting herself between them and the automatons. “I said, load the sarcophagus onto the trolley.”
“I do apologise,” said the bronze tortoise. “It appears the speaker system’s wiring has corroded. My mistress hasn’t had the opportunity to check it yet. Please hold.”
“No problem,” Zoe said, still grinning. “Can you play any music?” She kicked Garry in the ankle and glared at him. He cringed and gestured the others back to the sarcophagus.
“My mistress asks if you are the – ahem – evil bitch who broke Rob’s heart,” the tortoise said. “I beg your pardon, Madam. My mistress’s sister tries her best to encoura
ge her not to use such language.”
The question struck Zoe in her core. She had pushed aside everything that had come before the killing of her sister. All the pieces of her half-life she had confined to dusty history, never to be thought of again.
Including Rob.
“I’ll explain,” Zoe said. “He’ll forgive me.”
“My mistress says that she will not,” the tortoise said. “Put your hands up and stop trying to remove the sarcophagus from the premises, or we will open fire. I really do suggest you do as she asks, Madam.”
Zoe pulled on Savraith’s ghost. White ghost-light flared bright in the garage.
“Gentlemen, open fire,” said the bronze tortoise.
They fired bullets. Old slugs of forged steel that burst from the barrels of their weapons on tongues of fire. The noise of them slammed back and forth through the garage. Zoe thought Astra would have been deafened by it.
The bullets bounced off the glowing energy shield Zoe raised between her and the automatons.
The tortoise fired bursts of electricity. They crackled as they struck her shield. They almost got through – Zoe had expected only bullets. But she pulled more ghost electricity into herself and adjusted the shield.
The automatons emptied their clips. Their weapons smoked as they finished firing. Zoe could see the ripples in the air as the heat dissipated off the barrels. The tortoise too stopped firing. It turned its head to one side to regard her with a gemstone eye.
Zoe lifted her hands and shoved forward.
A storm of force lifted the automatons off the floor and slammed them against the wall. Two went through the window into the garage, an instant before Zoe’s magic struck it. The brittle old glass shattered into a thousand pieces and bounced off the room’s back wall. The tortoise went through the doorway and tumbled down whatever hallway lay beyond.
Zoe laughed. She spun on her heel to leave and stopped, anger twisting her face. Garry and the others stood watching her with slack jaws.
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