by Izzy Shows
“Blair, you’re starting to worry me.” I heard Finn’s voice and forced myself to listen to what was going on around me.
Sight. There were two dead bodies in front of me, each separated from their heads in a grotesque fashion.
Smell. Their decaying remains assaulted my nose.
Touch. The concrete was cold beneath my feet.
Taste. Blood was in my mouth, metallic, from how hard I’d been biting down on my cheek. I hadn’t realised I’d been doing that.
Sound. Finn’s voice was the steady baseline for me to come back to.
I identified the sources around me, allowing them to bring me back to reality, allowing them to pull me out of the memory and into the horrible moment I was living through.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice quiet. “I just can’t do that again. I told you, there’s no point in it. We already know we’re dealing with more than one person. I don’t have the energy to perform that twice back to back anyway.”
And I knew that this time it would be even more gruesome than the last, it would be so much worse. Because there was no way a vampire had charmed two people, interested in one another, to come here and be killed. The vampire would have laid in wait, positioned themselves inside the warehouse and once the trap had sprung, once the kids were inside and focused on one another and so oblivious to the world around them because why wouldn’t they feel safe. Then the attack would come, bloody and violent and full of the thrilling fight that the vampire would have enjoyed. I knew it, deep down in my heart, and I wasn’t willing to live through that just because Finn wanted to confirm for some bloody reason that this had been a different vampire than the last.
“I get it, I suppose. I just…it’s driving me crazy that we have no idea what we’re doing or where we’re going on this.”
“We’re not completely dead in the water, Finn. We’ve got someone on the inside helping us out, and I’ll talk to her and see if she has any leads, anything at all.”
“You have someone on the inside? What does that mean?” Krista asked, taking a step closer to the two of us. She kept her voice down, thankfully. We were the only ones fully inside the warehouse, the rest of the crew that had come were waiting outside on Finn’s orders. He had anticipated that I would be doing magic, that much was obvious now.
I turned and looked at her, wanting to tell her that it wasn’t any of her business and that this was between Finn and me. I wasn’t a part of the police force; I didn’t owe them anything. But they were paying me, I was a consultant, and I needed to remember that.
“Are you sure you want to know? I mean, are you really sure, have you thought that through? Not everyone can live with knowing everything.” I knew that I sounded dramatic, but it was the truth. Knowing that we were working with a vampire might cause her to question her morals, might make her question Finn’s leadership. There was a real possibility that she wouldn’t feel comfortable continuing in her line of work, and who knows where she would go after that.
“Krista, it’s not something you need to know,” Finn interjected, shaking his head at me.
OK, got it. No sharing the information then.
She had a stubborn look on her face, like she was going to insist on being told about it, but she stepped back into the line without another word. Police leadership is weird.
“I’m sorry, Blair,” Finn said, dropping his voice so that only I could hear him. “About snapping at you so much. I’m so worried, about the people, about not being able to catch these vampires. I must keep my people safe. I don’t mean to take that out on you.”
“I get it, Finn, I do,” I said, looking at him with a small, sad, shake of my head. “I want to keep them safe too. I’m scared. But I know if we stick together, we’ll get through this.”
I looked back at the bodies on the ground.
I’m so sorry I failed you.
20
“It’s OK to feel confused,” Emily said, her eyes as gentle as her smile.
I sat across from her in her adorable Olde English cottage, drinking tea and soaking up the warmth and comfort from the tea and her words. I couldn’t quite meet her eyes, aware of the flush on my cheeks. She was a beautiful woman, with golden brown skin and emerald eyes, her head crowned with a red cloud of tight curls. Her kindness embarrassed me, almost as much as my reaction to her presence.
The first time we’d met I’d been aware of her beauty, but overwhelmed by the mission in front of me. Over the past year as I’d spent more and more time with her, I’d only grown more aware of her effect on me. It wasn’t just how beautiful she was, it was her compassion for everyone she interacted with, it was her impressive intellect, it was the way she carried herself with complete conviction in her place in the world.
I had come to her today because the grief and guilt had taken me again and she was the only person who could understand what I was going through. She had gone through it all with me. I squeezed my eyes shut to fight back the flashback that threatened me, of my shredded back pressed against her armour, leaning against her to borrow her strength and get me through the fight.
“You survived a horrible ordeal, one that you were never prepared to go through. While you feel relieved and thankful to survive, you lost someone that had become more important to you than anyone before in such a short amount of time. You’re bound to feel guilty for that, and I hope you can see that it is not a confirmation of your worst fears. No one is leaving you.” She reached out with one hand to clasp mine, her eyes gazing into mine with so much empathy that I felt my colour increase.
“How do you do that?” I asked. “How do you just…get it?”
She smiled, patting my hand. “This is not a new experience for me.”
I wanted to ask what she meant, what she might have gone through to find something in her story that would resonate with me and fix the guilt that gnawed at me. I knew it didn’t work that way, nothing she said would provide the magical balm for the feelings that beat at me. I didn’t want her to have to examine such feelings again either, she seemed so at peace with whatever she’d gone through.
“You don’t…you don’t feel it for this though, do you? Not for what you did?” I winced at the way the words came out; I had never developed that knack for tact that everyone else seemed to grasp naturally. At least Emily forgave my lacking social skills.
“The Lord sent me there as condemnation for Deacon, but I am still human. The taking of a human life…” She shuddered, a delicate motion at odds with the strength within her. “To smite someone takes a toll on my soul, but I can deal with it through the strength the Lord provides me, and the assistance of those who share my faith.”
Emily had been the one to deal the final blow to Deacon. My magic had eradicated the army of undead, Aidan had broken the circle as his last act in life before Deacon slit his throat, and Emily had destroyed Deacon. A part of me was glad it hadn’t been me, and a larger part felt so much guilt for even thinking that.
“I wish I could believe like you do,” I said with a sigh. “It would be so much easier if I could just believe a higher power was at work.” I had never been able to convince myself of that, it just didn’t seem plausible, but it seemed so much easier for those who gave up all control to their superheroes.
She smiled, not offended in the least. “I have faith that one day you will be able to see. It’s OK if that day is not today, everyone has their own path.”
My smile was a little tighter than hers, but I let it go.
“So, what have you been up to? I haven’t seen you in a month, I miss you,” I said.
“I miss you too! You have to come around more,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you.” Her eyes brightened before she lowered them for a moment, a blush rising to her cheeks.
I blinked, surprised. “I’ll try better in the future. You can visit me too, you know,” I said, smiling at her so that she knew it wasn’t meant maliciously.
“I’ll do that,” she said, the reply
quiet, subdued. “Things have been very nice lately, I have a full client list at work, and the Lord has been merciful and not called on me in some time. Perhaps that means it is coming soon, but all I can do is wait for Him to guide me.” Emily is a marketing consultant when she wasn’t suiting up to slay the undead. How crazy was that? Her life could be so normal and then suddenly so medieval; I didn’t know how she handled the dichotomy. I was barely keeping it together working one side of it the whole time.
“That’s great! I’m glad to hear things have been mellow for you. I’d hate to think you were leaving me out of a fight,” I said, winking at her.
She laughed. “I can hardly call you away to the Americas or Africa if He sends me there, now can I?”
“Emily, you can call me wherever you need to. I wouldn’t hesitate to jump on a raft and float across the Atlantic if you needed me to,” I said, and I meant every word of it. I owed her for so much that I would never be able to repay, she was the reason I had crawled out of there alive, she had practically dragged me through the crowd of undead that had wanted to pull me over—literally doing so once. I had gone down, and without her there to yank me to my feet, I would have been zombie chow. “By the way, speaking about calling you places, is He giving you any hints about vampires terrorising London? Or could you do anything without him telling you to?”
I could use help on this one, but I didn’t want to beg.
She shook her head. “Without His guidance, my hands are tied. Nothing works without Him, and I would not disobey Him. The fact that He has not commanded me would be an indicator that He does not want me to be involved, to become so would be a contradiction of His will. I am sorry, Blair, I wish I could help you.”
“Why would he care about a necromancer tearing things up but not vampires? The vampires have killed more innocents than the necromancer gang ever did.” I was a little miffed about that, but not at Emily. Never at Emily.
“They were stealing the souls that belonged in either Heaven or Hell. It was a violation of the natural order. Unfortunately, death on its own does not constitute a violation of that nature.”
“I feel like vampires on their own should constitute a violation of nature,” I said, sourly.
She chuckled. “I would agree with you on that, but they are a melding of different creatures. Their existence is that of a union between species, which on its own is evolution. God would not stand in the way of that, even if it goes against what He would prefer for our World.”
Bah. Gods sucked, no matter which way you spun it. They never want to help unless it does something for them at some point or another. I understood that, but I knew that Emily didn’t see it that way—when you deal with the faithful, they can only see their Gods doing what is right. They never see any faults. Take a sick kid, for example. Kid gets sick, must be the will of God. Kid gets better, also the will of God. If the kid didn’t get better though, that would still be the will of God. It didn’t make any sense to me that a God would throw things like that up to a coin flip, but apparently, that’s how decisions are made.
Maybe other people don’t see it that way, though.
“On to a happier topic, perhaps?” She inclined her head, smiling. “I have heard that you’ve been doing great things for the community. Of course, these rumors never seem to have your name attached to them, I always have to do some digging to figure out if the person described is you or not.” She furrowed her brow. “Why would you keep your name a mystery?”
I shrugged. “It’s better this way. The less people know about me, the less likely it is that someone will set out for a revenge killing. And people are more likely to respect an unnamed protector than they are some mage who hasn’t gone through any of the Order’s regulations—not to mention if it gets out that I’m doing any of this and the Order finds out, they could decide to come and kill me at any moment. I don’t know what their rules are, but I’m sure I broke some of them at some point in the past year and a half.”
“One would think the Order would smile on someone protecting London in the wake of one of their owns death,” she said, frowning. “I do not understand this Order. I wish I knew someone who was a part of it, that I could ask them questions and ascertain if they are a true threat to you.”
“Probably best that you don’t. If you were to sniff around, they’d figure out why, and then one things leads to another and I’ve been reported for unlicenced magic use or whatever it is they call it.” I shook my head. “No, it’s better to fly under the radar. No one even knows that I was there at Tyburn Tree.”
“But they know I was there,” she pointed out. “How is it that they know of me but not of you?”
“Because you’re badass, Emily,” I said with a laugh. “You and that sword, no one would dare to mess with you.”
“If they knew what you did, they would respect you. I have never seen magic use of the sort that you had, I still do not comprehend how you were able to do what you did.” She was still frowning.
I managed not to grimace or wince or anything, averting my gaze for only a moment. Somehow, my use of demon provided power had slipped past Emily, and I knew it needed to stay that way. A paladin of the Lord was not going to smile on her little mage friend consorting with demons and making pacts.
Right on schedule, the mark under my cuff began to itch and burn—it did that whenever I was around Emily for a prolonged period, as if it knew what she was and what she did and that it was not welcome in the room. I wished, for the thousandth time, that there was a way to undo what I had done. I didn’t know how it would change me, which was why I had opted not to use it again.
“I don’t know the details of it either,” I told her, not quite a lie as I didn’t know the details of it, I just knew the broad surface of how I had got the power. I wasn’t even sure how I had activated it, it had just been there when I needed it.
“It is a blessing that you were able to achieve something like that, we would not have made it out with our lives otherwise.”
“We seem to have come full circle,” I pointed out with a nervous laugh—I didn’t like where the conversation was headed, and it only made the mark burn more when she had called it a blessing.
“True enough. Oh, I’ve been reading a book I’d love to tell you about, if you have the time. I know you’re busy and that you came here for a specific reason, but since it is difficult to talk about, perhaps it would soothe you if we talked about something else?”
I smiled, settling in. “What’s the book about?”
“Magic,” she said with a devious grin.
21
I walked home from Emily’s feeling a bit better, more rejuvenated than I’d been when I’d first visited. Still, I found my hands kept going to the wands at my thighs, nervously touching them to make sure that they were still there. The sun had set and every time someone’s shoulder brushed past me on the busy street I flinched, recoiling from the contact as if each one of them was a vampire about to attack me. I felt the hyperawareness inside of me, every breath I took brought in new information about the night, its tastes and smells, the sounds of each conversation I walked by assaulting me as I went. To say it was difficult was an understatement, it was almost killing me.
I turned down a quieter side street, never mind that it headed towards the Thames and not the outskirts of town where I lived now. Walking home from anywhere was an absolute pain, but it helped to calm my mind most of the time whenever I was anxious or needed a moment to think about a case. I needed the calm today, but it wasn’t coming to me, not with all the people on the busy street.
This was better.
I took in a long breath of the night air, letting it wash over me and bring me some of that calm I so desperately needed. The world may not be on the ticking clock it was last time I was this stressed, but that didn’t stop it from being the same magnitude of stress. I had vampires running around my town, killing whenever they wanted to, and I never knew when the next bomb was going to go off
. I never knew when the next kill would take place, or if I was going to be able to stop it this time.
I was so sick of running clean up on this operation, getting to scenes after the fact and not charging in and figuring out what needed doing. That was what I was used to, that was what I knew how to do. I felt my nails biting into my palms and realised that I was clenching my fists; I took in a breath and let it out through my nose, forcing my muscles to release and fighting for the calm.
I’d always had a problem with my temper, my anger, my frustration, that wasn’t new to me. Not entirely. The past year and a half, though, it felt like it had worsened. I didn’t know if that was the mark affecting me, or if it was just the job.
Mal would be able to tell me, and I doubted he would lie to me about it. I couldn’t avoid him forever, I was just…scared? Could I admit that I was scared? I didn’t want to get too close to him, he was a demon and the power he’d provided to me was dangerous. He was dangerous. Not just to the world, but to me personally. A demon was the last thing I needed to have around right now, especially with the vampire attacks going on. I would have to face him sooner or later, though. He had reached out several times, so far radio silence on my end.
Something told me he wouldn’t put up with that for much longer.
I blew out a breath, shoving my hands into my pockets to keep them away from my wands. This was not going the way I wanted.
“Wizard.”
The word broke me out of the fog my mind had been living in like a splash of ice cold water on a hot day. I jerked my head up, and realised there was no one around me but a trio of sketchy looking figures standing a way down the street. I knew they were a threat the moment I laid eyes on them, my hands jerked out of their pockets as fast as they could and I had one gripping my fire wand in seconds. I felt my heart rate speed, breath quicken, and the rush of adrenaline course through me.
