Maybe – as he looked into the peacock flare of gristly carnage hanging in front of him and realised that it would probably kill him here – he understood that immortality wasn’t all that it had cracked up to be. It was living that counted, and in that moment, Cam felt truly alive.
‘It’s open,’ the little man shouted.
‘You go – I’ll hold it off as long as I can,’ Cam said.
‘Thank you,’ said the police officer. Then she was gone.
The Barghest saw its prey escaping. Its body tangled back up, and the skinned hyena reappeared in seconds. It took a step towards him.
‘Oh, no you don’t,’ Cam said. He dropped the shotgun and held his hand out in front of him in the universal sign for something to stop. He realised even as he did it that it was a faintly ridiculous thing to do, but it felt right.
Something tingled in his shoulder. The Barghest took another step and pain exploded deep in the core of his arm. Cam looked down at the tattoo on his hand. The dragon’s black eyes blinked. That was his only warning before incandescent fire ran up his arm and spewed out of his hand.
White-hot plasma lanced from his palm and hit the Barghest in the mouth. For a second it stood still, silhouetted by the burning radiance. Then it was gone, whipped away by the dragon fire.
Cam closed his fist instinctively, and the flames winked out of existence. The shop was a molten ruin, still too surprised to catch on fire. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered, staring at his hand. The tattoo looked no different than before: still incredibly lifelike, but thankfully, not moving. Smoke alarms went off and water started spraying everywhere.
‘Jesus, Mary, mother of Christ,’ he reiterated.
‘What the hell just happened?’ Cam turned and saw that the police officer was still inside, half crouched as if about to duck under the shutters.
‘Damned if I know,’ Cam said. He picked up his shotgun and quickly reloaded it.
‘What are you?’
Cam smiled, and for the first time, he knew that he could answer. ‘I’m an Elf, my dear. Now, I need to find a friend of mine, and I believe you have him in custody.’
Smashing car windows in Manchester’s city centre should have been a risky proposition, what with the number of people usually wandering around. However, the area around the Mayfield Station was deserted by anything other than corpses, birds and some adventurous rats. The rise of Cú Roí and his army of monsters had pretty much turned the city into a ghost town. Mark felt quite safe throwing a half brick onto an old Hyundai’s back seat.
The crash of the breaking glass broke the silence of the street. Mark didn’t know how the authorities were reacting, but he imagined there would be barricades all over the place. They’d probably say it was a chemical weapon attack – that’d keep most of the looters away and most of the residents inside.
Tabitha stood behind him, one arm wrapped around the obscene swelling of her belly. Too large to be natural, it was covered in thick purple veins. She was having difficulty standing up. She had come along quietly, not asking any questions as he helped drag her out of the pit and guide her to the entrance. The Mayfield Station was abandoned once again, apart from a couple of rotting, half-eaten corpses. Nothing had stopped them leaving.
Leaning into the broken window, Mark unlocked the driver’s door and got in. He was naked as well, and covered in the filth of his own faeces and what passed for Leach’s blood. He wasn’t sure which smelled worse. Mark had toyed with the idea of putting on Leach’s abandoned suit, but couldn’t bring himself to touch anything that had belonged to the abomination. He began to pull at the underside of the steering column.
‘Do you know how to hot-wire it?’ Tabitha asked quietly. She sounded faintly alarmed, as if being in the company of somebody who knew how to steal a car was somehow frightening. Mark felt like laughing. After a second, he realised that actually, he didn’t feel like laughing at all.
The car’s engine stuttered as it turned over. ‘When you get to my age,’ he said, getting out to help lower Tabitha into the back seat, ‘there isn’t very much you can’t do. How are you feeling?’ he asked as she settled herself.
‘Like John Hurt with a really bad case of indigestion,’ she said. Neither of them smiled. ‘How old are you?’ she asked as they began to drive away. Mark could sense she was eager to change the subject. For a second, he hesitated. Then he told her. There were a couple of minutes of silence. ‘You’re nearly two thousand years old?’ she asked eventually.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me,’ she said, so he did. He told her all of it as he drove, not looking at her. Roadblocks had been set up along the way, but the police were only stopping people entering the city; the huge number of angry people trying to get in meant they didn’t seem interested in stopping two people heading out.
‘I have known you for almost two millennia, Tabitha,’ he said as they pulled up outside the mansion. He helped her out of the back seat. ‘I have fought for you, bled for you, killed for you … and I have cried for you. Every fifty years, I cry for you. I have loved you for all that time, and my life is dedicated to yours. I try so hard to save you, and every time I fail. But not this time,’ he said fiercely. ‘Enough is enough, and I don’t care what is in you, or what is after you: I will not let you die this time.’
Naked and filthy, Tabitha wrapped her arms awkwardly around him, her belly a barrier between them. Silently, she kissed him on the lips. She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. ‘We’ll see,’ she said before walking unsteadily towards the front door, her hands supporting her massive stomach.
Mark watched her go, his heart breaking again as he realised that maybe she didn’t want to live anymore. He collected Camulus and followed her. ‘Let’s get cleaned up, and I’ll call a doctor,’ he said as he opened the front door.
When Dow woke next, he found Master Creachmhaoil stood above him. Dow smiled at his old tutor.
‘Hello, Dow. How are you feeling?’
‘Fine,’ Dow said, and realised that it was true. His side still hurt, but the agony had faded into a dull, throbbing ache. ‘I feel good, considering.’ He smiled again. Master Creachmhaoil smiled back. ‘How long?’ Dow asked.
‘You were injured just over sixteen hours ago.’
‘Sixteen hours?’ Dow felt a wash of relief run through his body. He sighed. ‘Then the infection didn’t take? I made it? I’m going to live.’
‘Yes, my boy,’ Master Creachmhaoil said sadly. ‘You will not become one of the Twisted – Grímnir Vafthrúdnir did enough to save you.’
‘I am very lucky,’ Dow said.
‘Well, that’s relative,’ came a hollow voice from somewhere behind him. Dow twisted awkwardly in his sickbed. It was only then, with a rush of consternation, that he realised he was tied down.
‘Why am I bound?’
‘Well, we didn’t know what was going to wake up, my boy,’ Master Creachmhaoil said lightly. ‘To be honest, this would have been a lot easier if you’d woken up dead. So much easier if you had succumbed to the disease.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Dow demanded. He began to struggle against the ropes that bound him. ‘What’s going on, Master Creachmhaoil? Who is that behind me?’
Master Creachmhaoil sat at the edge of Dow’s bed and laid one hand against his cheek in a fatherly manner. ‘You were my best student, my boy. I am so very proud of you.’ His fingers began to stroke Dow’s long hair. ‘You were like the son I never had. It pained me when you chose to go with Manannán Ó Gríobhtha, for I knew this day might come. So much easier if you had submitted to the disease.’
‘Get on with it, Creachmhaoil,’ the hollow voice whispered.
Sighing regretfully, Master Creachmhaoil stood and reached into his robes. He pulled out a short dagger with a leaf-shaped blade. It shone silver.
‘What are you doing?’ Dow shouted, panic threatening. He began to thrash around, desperate to free himself.
‘You have to die, my boy. I do thi
s with a heavy heart, but you know too much, and if you live, you will ask awkward questions about Grímnir. Questions about where he has gone. You are very bright, Dow, and I am certain those questions would eventually lead you to truths that you would struggle to understand. No, it has to be this way. The Court will be told that you succumbed to the disease, and your body was burned. Which is half true.’
Dow stopped struggling, fatalism overwhelming him. He had been betrayed by one of the two men he trusted absolutely. ‘Why?’ he asked with a choke in his voice.
‘Immortality. Our kind are meant to live forever, Dow. I am one thousand and thirty-seven years old. The things I have seen, the knowledge I have … I cannot die. I must not die. I will not die.’ His eyes finally met Dow’s. ‘I am scared of what might come next.’
‘You are scared that nothing comes next,’ said the hollow voice. ‘Get on with it, I am bored.’
Master Creachmhaoil ignored it. ‘I must not die, and therefore, I cannot let our race die. There is a way – I am certain of it – but I need magic. I have the Maiden, but she has done something – hidden her power somewhere. I believe it is in Grímnir Vafthrúdnir. I have them both now.
‘Grímnir Vafthrúdnir walked into the Blind Room of his free will, believing it to be a council chamber. Not too bright, that one. It may explain his obstinacy. So now I have the power, and all I need is the template – the Miracle Child. When I have him, I will redesign our race and we will feed on the humans’ power … we will live. You understand, don’t you Dow?’
‘You’re mad.’
Master Creachmhaoil’s face twisted up with rage. He pushed the edge of the blade savagely against Dow’s throat. ‘I am not mad, boy. I am a visionary. We must evolve, just like Cú Roí evolved.’
‘Cú Roí is a monster.’
‘I do not condone his ethics, but his body – his body is perfect. We must have that.’
‘How do you know this will even work? This is complete madness. The Court cannot have agreed to it.’
‘It is not madness. And, of course, the Court knows nothing of it – they are senile and idiotic.’
‘You risk everything for nothing – we cannot be altered in such a way. We cannot be …’ but even as he said it, Dow realised he was wrong. The truth hit him like a freight train. ‘You deranged fucker,’ he said quietly.
Master Creachmhaoil nodded sagely. ‘As I said, you are very bright. I knew you’d put it together in the end. That is why you cannot live.’
Dow tried to reply but the knife had already sliced into his neck. He tried to breathe but couldn’t; blood from his severed arteries was filling his lungs. Slowly his vision began to fade, but before it did, he saw the shadowy form of a Svartálfar step in front of him.
‘Shame to let good blood go to waste,’ said Damballah with a smile.
‘I must decapitate him,’ he heard Master Creachmhaoil say, as if from a long way away. ‘To make it look right.’
Cold hands fastened around his neck. ‘Leave it to me,’ said the vampire.
A waste ground of dead people and burned-out vehicles surrounded the Beetham Tower. Some kind of fight – more like a battle really, Cam thought to himself – had occurred here, and it looked like a lot of police officers had come off terminally. A number of civilians didn’t seem to have done too well, either. Cam sighed and ducked back behind the abandoned light-goods vehicle he’d been using as cover. Rowan was checking a handgun that he had taken from a dead cop.
He watched the human appraisingly for a moment. He seemed to know what he was doing with the weapon. Cam absently reached up over his shoulder and patted his shotgun to make sure it was still there.
Cam was happy to have Rowan along. Though Cam had never tried before, it turned out that breaking somebody out of police custody was remarkably easy. His rescue of Rowan had gone smoothly. He’d had to knock one idiot out because he already had the maximum number of people possible under his Glamour … and then there had been that very irritated inspector who had tried to stop them just outside of the custody suite … but mostly, it’d gone well. Before they left, Cam had used the Glamour to establish exactly what had happened in the city since the attack at his father’s apartment.
A mesmerised sergeant at the police station had accessed an ancient-looking computer with even more ancient-looking software, and scanned through a list of incidents recorded by members of the public and police officers.
Reading the date-stamped logs, and looking at the areas they had been reported from, it didn’t take Rowan and Cam long to put together a basic picture of what had happened. When Cú Roí and his monsters burst from Mayfield Station in a flood of death, they continued to Piccadilly train station and ripped people to shreds. Those on the platforms above heard their screams and phoned the police. Several of those phone calls ended suddenly; Cam could envision what happened when a Barghest got into a confined space.
From there, the wave of violence gathered momentum, moving through the city in a roughly south-westerly direction. Here the reports became more frenzied. A man on Whitworth Street described a pink tentacled monster impaling people, before the line went suddenly dead. A young child on Portland Street phoned from her mother’s phone to say a man who looked like her doggy had just bitten her mummy, and that her mummy was not moving and had a lot of red. At the library, a woman phoned to whisper that a woman with yellow eyes and a face covered in blood was stalking her through the stacks. Nobody was quite sure what the scream she let loose before hanging up actually meant. Cam could imagine.
Hundreds of calls: people in the Great Northern Warehouse, barricaded into the cinema while great writhing monsters howled their hunger at them; a bunch of civil servants in the town hall watching as a ‘werewolf’ murdered two PCSOs in Albert Square and ate their remains; a homeless man reporting that something huge had just ripped his arm off and carried his girlfriend away; a road worker who was hiding in the hole he had just dug while his colleagues screamed above him; a taxi driver who crashed his car trying to escape a ‘huge, skinned dog thing’, only to find himself cornered by a whole bunch of them … the list went on.
By nine-fifteen the streets were empty. The monsters had disappeared into the huge Beetham Tower on Deansgate. The calls coming from within it, terrified and brief. The police, completely unprepared for Cú Roí’s invasion, had retreated from the square mile of the city centre and set up roadblocks to prevent anybody else going in. They were frantically requesting help from the army, the air force, the navy, the local paintballing club … any bugger with a gun.
Crouching with his back against the side of the lorry outside the building, Cam wondered what they were going to do next. He still hadn’t really had time to process the strange tattoo that covered his arm and could spit fire. Why had the Tattooist chosen him? Rowan would have been a much better choice for such a gift. Then again, Rowan wasn’t of the Courts.
Where had such magic come from, anyway? There wasn’t supposed to be any left. His father might have been able to explain it … thoughts of his father caused Cam to close his eyes tightly. He wasn’t ready to deal with that yet, either.
‘Heads up,’ Rowan hissed. Cam poked his head around the bonnet. A tall naked blonde woman was walking towards the main doors of the tower, dragging another woman by the hair. The captive appeared to be either unconscious or dead.
As the naked woman approached, a huge Barghest emerged from the darkened foyer and growled at her. She growled back, the noise audible even from where Cam and Rowan hid. It was a bestial sound, full of threat and blood. The Barghest backed off, and the naked woman dragged her prize inside.
‘Look who’s with her,’ Rowan said grimly. Sergei was stalking behind the naked woman and her captive.
‘At least we know where he is,’ Cam replied coldly. ‘Did you get a good look at the woman they had?’
‘Yes. It wasn’t Tabby, thank God,’ Rowan said.
‘No – that bitch escaped,’ came a voice from behind
them. Cam stiffened when he heard it. It was the voice of the creature that had murdered his father.
So far, it had been a bad day. Sam’s arm still hadn’t grown back, and his fear when Jones faced him down with that awful weapon in his hands was still fresh in his memory.
After a few days of not having to fear anything – of having absolute certainty that he was inviolable – facing mortality had been a shocking, unmanning sensation. Sam did not like that he felt terror. He did not like it that he had run. He was upset that his immortality was not as complete as he had believed.
In short, like bullies everywhere, he was looking for a little payback, and it didn’t matter who he shit on to get it. As far as Sam was concerned, running into his brother-in-law and his glamour-model sidekick was just a bonus. Sam noted that Rowan’s companion had a shotgun sheathed on his back. Strangely, the pretty boy made no move to draw it.
‘What happened to your arm, Sam?’ Rowan asked as he stepped away from his friend, putting space between them.
Sam said, ‘Mark Jones took it.’ He glanced down at his stump and shrugged. The motion felt lopsided. ‘A minor bother. If anything, it saves me the inconvenience of tying it behind my back to deal with the two of you.’
The other man stared at him. A fierce hatred burned from his violet eyes. ‘You killed my father.’
Sam laughed with genuine humour. ‘My, my – melodramatics. I’ve killed a few men, now. I’ll kill some more. I’m going to kill you.’
‘He wasn’t a man. He was an Elf.’
‘An Elf? Yes, an Elf.’ Sam licked his lips. ‘That was why he tasted so sweet.’
The Elf began to take a step towards the werewolf, but Rowan put out an arm to stop him. ‘Where’s Tabby, Sam? Where’s my sister?’ he asked gently.
‘I’ve been looking for her, believe me.’ This was true. After his reason returned – after the awful fear in his stomach subsided and his remaining hand stopped shaking – he realised that Cú Roí would be very unhappy about losing Mark, Tabby, and Leach. Sam had felt it prudent to find the humans as soon as possible. At least then he could present Leach’s murderer to his Master.
Immortals' Requiem Page 35
