Sanctified: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Branded Book 1)

by David Bussell

  The floor was piled high with dead bodies.

  Carpeted with them, wall to wall.

  Like a game of Twister gone horribly wrong

  Eaves. A whole crowd of them, slaughtered like cattle. No, not like cattle. Cattle were treated better than this. These bodies were torn up and broken. Carved up and snapped. Slaughtered in horrible, unthinkable ways.

  The ones on their backs stared skywards, blue-lipped and blank-eyed, the floor beneath them rusted red with their blood. The smell was horrific, and had already attracted a swarm of buzzing, fat-bellied flies that meandered lazily about the carcasses.

  ‘What happened?’ I gasped.

  ‘I don’t know,’ cried the eaves. ‘I came home and found them like this. Please help.’

  How in God’s name were we meant to do that?

  I was staring down at the floor, hand clamped over my mouth, when I saw something twitch among the bodies. ‘There, what is that?’ I asked, my blood curdling.

  A small arm poked between the mess of corpses, its pudgy little hand splayed and clawing at the air. A high-pitched wail followed.

  ‘My baby!’ screamed the eaves, and dropped to her knees to dig between the bodies and scoop out the infant.

  A baby girl. Alive. I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. Somehow, something had survived this slaughter. A living creature left lying on the meat market floor, spared the butcher’s cleaver.

  ‘I’ll call an ambulance,’ I said, digging around for my phone.

  ‘No,’ said Vizael. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I replied, turning to the blood-soaked baby. ‘She needs to be checked over.’

  I may have had a first aid certificate, but my training fell woefully short of this.

  Vizael approached the mother. ‘Give her here,’ he told her. ‘For her own sake.’

  The eaves resisted at first, eyes streaming, drawing the baby tight to her bosom, then her head slumped as she arrived at some sort of understanding. She handed over the child.

  ‘Be kind to her,’ she said, as Gendith led the woman away to somewhere private.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  Viz wore a grave expression as he cradled the baby in his arms. ‘They left the baby alive to send a message.’

  She looked so sweet. Pudgy hands, dimpled cheeks, like a little girl's best doll – the kind you don't play with. ‘What kind of message?’ I asked, leaning in to get a better look at the child.

  ‘Careful,’ said Viz, and I immediately found out why.

  The baby’s face transformed in an instant.

  Her skin turned almost translucent, like some cave-dwelling creature, and shrank tight to her tiny skull. Eyes like two ink spots glared out from cavernous sockets, and she opened her mouth to reveal a mess of fangs, two of which projected further from her gums than the rest.

  I managed to pull back just in time as she lunged and snapped at my neck. Her fangs grazed my throat and snapped together with an awful sound that put my own on teeth edge.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Viz wrestled the baby to the ground, placing a hand on her chest and pinning her to the floorboards. ‘This is what they do, Abbey. The vampires. They kill, they maim, and they turn good people into them.’

  ‘There has to be some way to fix her though, right? To make her better?’

  The baby hammered her fists on the floor, screeching like torn metal.

  Viz used his free hand to reach for his ivory-handed walking stick, then snatched it up, gave it a twist, and drew a slim blade from its shaft. ‘It’s too late. There’s nothing that can be done for this one,’ he said, eyes watering, ‘but we can help others. With you on our side, we can stop this from ever happening again.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked, certain that I already knew the answer, but hoping beyond hope that I didn’t.

  ‘You should turn away for this part,’ he said.

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I finally got how this was about more than just me. I’d been told it from the start, but only now was I really hearing it. I was a part of this, and that meant bearing witness to all of it, no matter how ugly. No matter how terrible.

  Viz pushed the blade through the baby’s heart and she turned brittle and black, then crumbled to dust.

  Who could do that to a baby? Infect her and leave her in a pile of dead bodies, knowing we’d have to kill her ourselves? I felt a searing hatred bloom in my chest.

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked, my jaw aching from how hard I was gritting my teeth.

  Viz wiped away some tears and slotted the blade back into his cane. ‘We spend a day recuperating,’ he said. ‘After that, we take you out into the field.’

  I looked down at the small pile of ash that had once been an innocent infant. I nodded. The hunt was about to begin.

  12

  I made it into work the next morning after another, shall we say, tense evening with Neil. He knew I was hiding something from him and needled at me non-stop about it. Not that I could blame him, or get angry about it. He was right to be suspicious, right to be worried, and I was wrong to snap at him every time he tried to broach the subject. But hey, what else could I do? It’s not like he’d believe the truth if I told him. He’d just think I’d gone loopy like Mum.

  I was tired. So tired I felt like I was wearing a lead-lined coat. All I wanted was a bit of peace and quiet, a chance to collect my thoughts. Instead, what I got was the temp, tiptoeing over to my desk with her head cocked to one side.

  ‘Are you alright, Abbey?’

  There she went knowing my name again. The nerve of that woman. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, with an edge that made it very obvious I wasn’t.

  ‘I feel you, babe,’ she replied. ‘I saw it too.’

  ‘Saw what?’ I asked, stiffening.

  ‘Bake Off,’ she replied. ‘You’re upset about Tom getting the boot, right?’

  My shoulders sagged. ‘Yeah, that’s it. Because of Tim and everything.’

  It was surreal. There we were talking TV, and just hours before I’d been knee-deep in gore and fighting off a vampire baby. My days had become divided, split in two between the mundane and the horrific. I’d always hoped for a different kind of life, but did it have to be this different? At least, couldn’t there be, I don’t know, zero vampire babies?

  ‘This isn’t about Bake Off, is it?’ said the temp, sensing that my turmoil might amount to more than a contestant being eliminated from a cake-based reality show. ‘What is it? Boyfriend stuff?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, reflexively. I guess I must have needed to talk about it, because it all came out after that.

  I told her how I hadn’t been able to spend any time with Neil lately, then I told her about last night.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘We had a fight.’

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She cocked her head to the other side, willing me to go on.

  I sighed and did just that, only in a coded way. ‘Well, I was off sick yesterday...’

  ‘Gary mentioned.’

  ‘I’m sure he did. Anyway, I’d had a really shitty day, and all I wanted was get some sleep, but Neil wanted to talk.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how we hadn’t been spending any time with each other.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘So what did you tell him?’

  ‘I asked him if it could wait until the morning, but he wasn’t having it.’

  The temp chewed on the end of her pen. ‘What did he say when you told him you didn’t want to talk?’

  ‘He said I was tired of him. Said I was trying to run our relationship into the ground.’

  He knew something was up—the dubious absences, the erratic behaviour, the phony gifts—and he’d added them all together to spell out “CHEATER”. I wanted to tell him he was being daft, but I had nothing better to offer, and his guess was better than the truth.
>
  ‘Do you think it’ll work out between you two?’ she asked.

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ I replied, feeling defeated.

  ‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ she said, ‘but if it all goes tits up, don’t worry, I know a bloke who’s just your type.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yeah, he's a total goth-looking weirdo, just like you!’

  ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘You’re so completely welcome!’ she replied, and there was no hint of sarcasm there, the simple thing really meant it.

  The temp’s forehead wrinkled. ‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand, Abbey.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Where have you been spending all your evenings?’

  Ah yes, that. I was groping around in the back of my brain for something to say when our mouth-breathing supervisor elbowed his way into the proceedings.

  ‘Alright, ladies, let’s break up the knitting circle, shall we?’ said Gary.

  Saved by the very annoying bell.

  The temp bowed her head and scampered away to her desk.

  Gary turned to me. ‘I’m not paying you to sit around and chat all day,’ he said, hanging over me like an unwelcome scrotum.

  ‘I was multi-tasking,’ I told him, and I was: I was at work, and at the same time I was doing bugger all. That’s two jobs for the price of one.

  Gary continued to glare, so I placed my hands on my keyboard, jogged the space bar to magic away the screensaver, and tapped out a few random keystrokes. I did it to trick him into believing that I was working, but it was also meant as a testament to his awesome management skills. Gary values delegation as his greatest asset, and there’s no denying that when it came to passing the buck, Gary was Number One. The best of the best. Then again, Charles Manson was pretty good at delegation too, and no one gave him a Christmas bonus for it.

  ‘What’s that about?’ Gary asked, looking down at the missing fingernail on my right hand. ‘You’re coming into work beaten up now, are you, Beckett? What, did you do, join a fight club?’

  I balled my hand into a fist. If a missing fingernail was enough to get him in a tizzy, imagine if he’d seen the cattle brand on the other side of my mitt.

  ‘Get it together, Beckett,’ he said, ‘because if you don’t sort yourself out soon, I’m giving your post to someone else.’ He shot me a hard stare. ‘I’ve got people lining up to do this job.’

  I was about to answer him back—perhaps to point out the unlikelihood of there being a queue outside, begging to work for minimum wage under the supervision of a jumped-up jobsworth with a Napoleon complex—but kept my mouth shut. Though I’d have given just about anything to quit that shitty job, Neil and I wouldn’t survive without my puny income. I had enough problems dealing with a vampire uprising, without having to eat out of a fucking food bank.

  13

  I arrived home that evening expecting the worst. I’d sent Neil a text to let him know that I’d be home on time, but hadn’t gotten a reply. Not even an emoji. Not even a poop emoji.

  When I pushed open the door to the flat, I was braced for an ice-cold reception, but what I got was just the opposite. The smell of cooking tickled my nostrils; of hot bread and garlic and sweet, life-giving cheese.

  ‘Hi, hon,’ said Neil, appearing from the kitchen wearing a greasy apron. It was illustrated with a pair of twenty-sided dice where boobs would be, along with the tagline, Yeah, They’re Natural. He bounded over and gave me a bear hug.

  ‘What’s all this?’ I asked, feet dangling above the ground.

  ‘I felt bad about last night. I’m sorry, that was out of order, what I said.’ He set me back on the hallway floor. ‘Just lately… it sort of feels like we’ve been drifting apart, and I guess I started to think the worst.’

  I couldn’t say I blamed him. If the situation were reversed and he started disappearing every night and coming home with weaksauce excuses, I’d have given him more than a talking to. I’d have had his nuts off.

  Then there’s Neil’s lifestyle, sitting around at home all day, going stir crazy while I gallivanted about town. It’s bad enough for the guy at the best of times, without me playing hide and seek on him. Is it any wonder he got it into his head that I’d been shopping around for another man? I’d played right into the worst of his insecurities. Neil, the way he saw himself when his moods were at their blackest: the poor, sick weakling with rubber tubes up his nose, trapped at home while the world moved on without him. Left to rot while the love of his life banged some side piece behind his back.

  I felt more than a little terrible. I went to make my apologies, but Neil cut me off.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ he said, and escorted me to the kitchen. There, on the dining table, was a feast fit for a queen. ‘I cooked all your favourites.’

  And he had. Lately he’d been exploring his inner chef and had become obsessed with one of those meal kit services. You know the type; you sign up and they send you boxes of raw ingredients you’re meant to cook yourself. Airfix dinners, I call them. Lucky for me, he’d thrown all that out and gone with the classics.

  ‘Pizza baguettes and Alphabites, Madame,’ he said, sweeping a hand across the table to show off his culinary masterwork. ‘And for dessert, Sara Lee’s finest Double Chocolate Gateau.’

  My mouth began watering immediately. Forget about dinner in a box, this was the real deal. Pizza toppings on a half-loaf of French bread and fluffy chips shaped like letters, followed by a defrosted chocolate cake.

  Neil had obviously been busy. No wonder he missed my text message.

  He gestured for me to take a seat then laid a square of kitchen towel on my lap and poured me a glass of box wine.

  After that, he sat down opposite me and we had a long-overdue catch up. We talked, we laughed, we stuffed our fat faces. When I circled back to the fact I’d been so distant lately, he brushed it off like it was nothing.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I was overreacting. Anyway, it’s not like I’ve been all that available lately either, sat at my desk writing all the time.’

  ‘Oh, that reminds me, I finished reading your latest.’

  I’d managed to polish off the last few chapters during a lunch break.

  ‘So… what did you think?’ he asked, tentatively.

  ‘You know, I think I actually loved it,’ I said, and meant it.

  I always knew Neil was a good writer, but I’d felt a certain detachment from his books before. Wizards and werewolves… I mean, what did any of that stuff have to do with me? Of course, now I understood. Now I found myself wrapped up in vampires and angels and impossible magic portals, it all made sense. I finally got it.

  ‘What did you like most about it?’ Neil asked, leaning closer, elbows on the table.

  ‘I liked all of it,’ I replied, ‘but the bit that got me the most was the fight at the end. You know, when the werewolf and the warlock combined their powers to defeat the demon overlord. That was badass.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, nodding enthusiastically, ‘you mean when Azzerad the warlock uses transmutation magic to enlarge Dirk’s wolf paws, and then off he goes, tearing through Darkblaze's demonic shock troops like a hot knife through butter? They have a name for that move, you know. They call it the Combine Harvester.’

  That beautiful, sweet nerd. I leant across the dining table and planted a kiss on his mouth. As we parted, Neil’s brow creased with concern.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, seeing the tears streaming down my face.

  He was right to be concerned. I’d never been much of a crier. Not now, not ever. One of my other nicknames at school—and I had plenty—was even less kind than the one about my weight. “The cyborg”, they called me, in reference to my general lack of emotionality. They liked the name so much that when a bunch of us girls went on a camping trip, they started referring to my waking up as, “Coming online”. The shits.

  Something about the sweetness Neil was showing me just tu
rned on the waterworks though. For someone to be that kind after the way I’d treated him...

  ‘I’m fine,’ I told Neil. ‘Just happy.’

  I took his hand in mine and watched him trace a finger along the brand on my palm.

  ‘I think I’m growing to like this, you know,’ he said. ‘Makes you look like a character from one of my books.’

  Yeah, it did. More than he knew.

  I swiped away the tears and smiled. After everything I’d been through—after being attacked, after seeing those dead bodies, after watching Vizael put down that poor baby—a bit of loving normality was exactly what I needed. Because now I knew that there were monsters out there. Monsters that wanted nothing less than to rise up and wipe out humankind. And for the first time since this all started, here in my little oasis, I felt safe. Level. Ordinary.

  If only for one evening.

  14

  I woke early the next morning, knuckled the sleep from my eyes, and headed out to Vizael and Gendith’s base to prepare for my first hunt.

  It was a Saturday, so I didn’t need to make excuses at the office. When Neil asked what I was doing up so early, I told him I was attending a self-defence class I had a Groupon for (which was about as close as I could get to the truth without lying completely).

  I crossed the flyover on my way to the train station, and was heading down the concrete steps to street level when I ran into a familiar figure. The moment I saw him, my heart started racing so fast that I felt the pulse in my neck. There he was, the skinny human statue in the pinstripe suit, same place as he was before, only now he gripped a tuft of my hair in his slim white hand.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, offering the thinnest of smiles. I instinctively went for my dagger, but he held up his hands in surrender. ‘Easy, tiger. I didn’t come here to fight.’

  ‘Then you should have stayed in your coffin,’ I replied, tugging open the zip of my backpack and reaching inside, trying to sound braver than I felt.

  ‘You’re embarrassing yourself,’ he chuckled, and as he said it, a passerby came up the steps heading in the other direction: a woman in her forties, accompanied by a little girl.