All Rotting Meat

by Maleham , Eve

  ‘I’m not a fanatic,’ Kojo said, ‘and I know Rebirth has flaws, but I think it’s the best possible option for the world to take. Change needs to happen.’

  ‘I’m not going to debate this with you,’ Banes said, ‘but I think, right now, I can see something that you can’t. I’ve got good instincts about these things, you know that, and you can run away with me as well, if you want.’

  ‘I’m not going to,’ Kojo said.

  ‘I know,’ Banes said, ‘but when you change your mind, look for me.’

  ‘And how will I do that?’ Kojo asked. Banes leaned down and tapped the side of the cat carrier.

  ‘Clue’s on the cat.’

  Kojo frowned and picked up the carrier. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked as he opened it up and Midnight walked out onto his lap. ‘He is really cute,’ Kojo said, stroking the cat’s head and peering at the collar, where Banes had etched coordinates onto the metal tag. He looked up at Banes. ‘Is this where you’ll be?’

  ‘It leads to one of my safe houses,’ Banes said. ‘I may have moved on by the time you get there, but I’ll leave trail for you to follow.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Kojo said, as he stroked the cat. ‘This is odd, Banes – us being on different sides.’

  ‘Are we on sides?’ he asked.

  ‘You’re against Rebirth, and I’m in favour of it,’ Kojo said, ‘and our ideal ending is for the other to change their mind.’

  Banes sighed. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do here, Kojo,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to stay in a place where I am in acute danger for any ideological reason which I don’t believe in.’

  ‘I don’t know either, Banes,’ Kojo said. ‘I had this idea in my head of you committing to a cause with me.’

  ‘Why do you care for Rebirth?’ Banes asked.

  ‘There’s an honesty about it,’ Kojo said. ‘My life as a human was hellish, and it was hellish solely so that others would benefit from what my suffering produced, and nothing has changed since then. I was a fucking slave, Banes. I was born belonging to someone else. I wasn’t a person to them, I was never a human to them. And there are still slaves, people are still forced to suffer for the trivial comfort of others. There’s no helping humans, so we may as well eat them.’

  ‘You can do that without Rebirth,’ he said.

  ‘I think it’s time for their role as the dominant species on this planet to change,’ Kojo said, ‘their lives are too short for any collective learning and growth to happen, which is why I joined Rebirth. And you? Why are you so against them?’

  ‘I don’t think that the world needs changing in this way,’ Banes said. ‘Changes that humans bring – they’re mostly flickering, and the longer I live, the shorter they seem to last before they evolve into something else new, for better or for worse. But a change ushered in by vampires has the potential to last for centuries, if not thousands of years, and I don’t want to have to live through that.’

  Kojo sighed. ‘It’s been nearly three centuries; I guess that we would have to disagree about something sooner or later.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Banes said, leaning back on the sofa. A silence passed over them.

  ‘So,’ Kojo said, ‘do you know when you’ll run?’

  ‘Soon,’ Banes said, ‘when the time feels right. Perhaps in a few days, no more than a fortnight. You’ll see me around until then, but one day, I just won’t show up.’

  ‘I’m sorry that it has to be this way,’ Kojo said, ‘but I’ll still come looking for you.’

  Banes gave a weak grin and got to his feet.

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he said, pulling Kojo into a tight hug and breathing in his comforting scent of clean cotton sheets and toffee, feeling his soft, warm skin against his own.

  He kissed him, first dropping a kiss onto the top of his head, breathing in the smell of Kojo’s hair, and then on his lips, his fingers running over Kojo’s jaw, behind his ears, bringing their faces closer.

  ‘I love you,’ Banes whispered. ‘Please, for the love of God, stay safe.’

  ‘You too,’ Kojo said. ‘I love you, too.’

  Slowly, Banes let his hands fall back away from Kojo.

  ‘If it was just you, then I would stay,’ he said, looking at Kojo as he stood in the middle of his lounge; his small frame and slender limbs, his heavy mop of dreadlocks, the way his skin was ever so slightly lighter across his cheekbones, his thick eyelashes, his slightly slanted and acutely conscious near-black eyes. ‘Fuck, you make it hard to leave.’

  Banes left, breaking out into a run the moment Kojo’s front door shut behind him, and turned sharply away from his house, with tears threatening to sting his eyes. He sprinted across Hyde Park and only slowed once he arrived at Marble Arch, the streets crawling with the nightlife traffic. He took a detour on the way back to his flat, biting down into the neck of a homeless woman in Soho and an inebriated man in Camden Town. Banes arrived back, just as he felt a burning in his eyes and a wetness against his cheeks, and reached for a bottle of paint stripper.

  He was on the second bottle, when he noticed that a postcard had been slid under his door while he had been out. Tycho Feigrey expected him to come for drinks at his apartment the following night.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Let’s Hurt Together

  Tycho’s apartment was out towards Paddington, and Banes had to push against the crowds of morning commuters to get to the towering, redbrick house, which stood in a formidable row of identical buildings. He was directed to the very top floor, where the attic space of the original building had been converted into flats.

  He only knocked once before Tycho’s door opened. His eyes flickered over Banes’s body; Banes hadn’t showered, and had spent the night sitting on his apartment floor, drinking paint stripper and vodka, and smoking weed. He had splashed some water on his face and roughly brushed his dishevelled hair into a loosely passable state, before picking a new shirt and dabbing on some aftershave, before he set off to meet Tycho.

  ‘Hi,’ Banes said. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  ‘You too,’ Tycho said. His eyes seemed to gleam, and he looked more alive than Banes had seen him in a long time.

  He stepped through into his flat. The place was modest, full of sloping ceilings and small corners; frugality decorated and furnished. There was an awkwardly long pause as Banes made his way through the short hallway and into the open plan living room. Tycho hovered around the door.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’ he asked. ‘You looked tired.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Banes said, taking a seat on the sofa as Tycho walked over to the kitchen, which had been wedged into a nook against the slanted ceiling. ‘I’ll take whatever you’ve got.’

  Banes glanced around while Tycho fetched the drinks; the flat seemed to be a comfortable enough place to live in, though it had a lonely impression stamped on it. The walls were lined with bookshelves, containing books spanning across several languages; Banes scanned through the titles and saw that they were mostly all about military history. Aside from the basic three-piece suite surrounding a coffee table, there was very little else. His eyes fell on two, beautifully crafted, ornate swords, hung in a frame on the wall. One was made entirely of wood, and the other had a metal blade.

  ‘Is that a sword from Dreyrigr?’ Banes asked, leaning back in his seat. He hadn’t seen one of Dreyrigr’s swords in centuries. He mostly remembered them as being something his parents and oldest brother owned.

  ‘Yeah,’ Tycho said, placing a tray consisting of two glasses and a half-full decanter down on the coffee table. ‘Do you want to see it?’

  ‘Sure,’ Banes said. ‘Were these ones yours?’

  Tycho shook his head as he reached up to carefully taken down the frame.

  ‘Sadly, I lost mine, but both of these are from the same makers, so it’s nearly as good.’

  ‘I remember my oldest brother Dae being given a pair on his twentieth birthday,’ Banes said, ‘even though we didn’t
celebrate birthdays and I never got anything for mine. I was really jealous of that.’

  ‘Dae was a respected warrior,’ Tycho said, ‘the swords would have had a practical use.’

  Banes gave him a wry smile as he leaned forwards and poured himself a drink; it was scotch, and the taste of Cecilia’s office came back.

  ‘He’s long been dead, Tycho, you don’t have to defend him.’

  Tycho flushed, ‘I meant that the swords weren’t given to him out of sentiment.’

  ‘Thanks for trying,’ Banes grinned into his glass.

  Tycho placed the frame out on the sofa between the two of them, and gently removed them. Banes could see that the blade of the wooden sword had a faint, reddish-brown colouring running down it.

  ‘One to kill vampires, and the other to kill humans,’ Banes said. ‘There’s still blood on there. May I?’

  ‘Sure,’ Tycho nodded, as Banes gingerly lifted the wooden sword, gripping the hilt firmly as he pointed it away and took a few strikes at the air. The weight felt long-lost.

  ‘First time I ever maimed anyone was with a sword like this,’ Banes said. ‘Verr’s wife was a bitch, so I cut her leg, and she ended up walking with a limp for years. I remember when I was very small, Thane and I would steal our mother’s swords, and take turns running at each other with them to see who would flinch first. Where on earth did you find those?’

  ‘Rebirth has a small group of historians,’ Tycho said, returning the sword to its frame. ‘It is a very small team, but they’ve been collecting whatever remnants of Dreyrigr they can find. Most are in storage for safety, but I couldn’t resist having these ones for myself.’

  ‘Does Cecilia know I’m here?’ he asked.

  Tycho shrugged as he took a seat on the sofa next to Banes. ‘She may, but we’ve been having trouble getting into each other’s residences. There aren’t any recording devices here, though, I promise. How is your arm, by the way?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Banes said. ‘Some scarring.’

  ‘That’s to be expected,’ Tycho said, ‘and I’m sorry about it.’

  ‘Why did you call me over, Tycho?’

  ‘To talk,’ he said.

  ‘To talk about what?’ Banes asked. ‘We never talk.’

  ‘A file recently came to my attention,’ Tycho said, ‘from Malik Faizan – I believe you know him. As you are aware, we are currently undergoing the process of culling the humans who may pose a low-level threat to us. We have a structure for the order in which humans will be killed, and when they will be killed, and Faizan has pushed this particular file up the queue. Nothing too out of the ordinary on the part of the file; a moderately medium-low level hunter. However, the human slated for termination on this file is particularly interesting to me.’

  ‘How come?’ Banes asked, an icy sensation creeping across his stomach.

  ‘The hunter is a woman called Khalida Natakarn,’ Tycho said, as Banes’s insides froze over. ‘Now, she isn’t particularly interesting, herself. In fact, she’s probably done us a favour, in that all the vampires she’s known to have killed were in that ridiculous Vlad group. However, what is interesting about her, is that she is the daughter of the human who caused the death of Yin Luan’s brother…’

  ‘I’ve heard the story,’ Banes said. ‘Luan put Clarence in the group guarding Yin Yunru, Clarence was busy fucking the man’s daughter, and let Yunru wander off, who was then incapacitated by him. A year later, Luan exacted his revenge, but Clarence was still fucking the daughter, so she and her sister escaped.’

  Tycho nodded, excitement brewing in his eyes. ‘Crude language, but yes. But Khalida Natakarn is the sister.’

  Banes gulped back his entire glass of scotch. ‘What are you doing, Tycho?’

  ‘Khalida Natakarn is currently living with her boyfriend,’ Tycho said, his eyes piercing into Banes’s, ‘a man called Cain Faye, who works as a schoolteacher – but that’s not his real identity.’

  ‘What is it, then?’ Banes asked.

  ‘Faye isn’t the name he was born with,’ Tycho said. ‘His real name is Marr, and he is the biological son of Arthur and Priscilla Marr – Cecilia and Clarence’s adoptive parents. He was born in eighteen-ninety-six.’

  ‘And Khalida isn’t aware that he’s a vampire?’ Banes asked, pouring himself another scotch. Of course she wasn’t.

  ‘Apparently not,’ Tycho said, ‘and as far as I am aware, neither Cecilia or Clarence knows that their brother is in a relationship with a hunter, which is good news for me, and for us,’ he added. ‘Having such an embarrassment of a brother and a hunter for a sister-in-law is something Cecilia cannot recover from. Cain Marr isn’t just distancing from us though; he used to travel with his siblings up until just two decades ago, when he accompanied Clarence on a trip to Brunei, and later, Malaysia.’

  Banes took another drink of scotch.

  ‘Cain, though neither a member of Rebirth, nor the Blood Thieves, supported his brother throughout the scandal, up until the massacre. I questioned Clarence about this for clarity’s sake; according to him, Cain ran away that night and went into hiding. They had apparently argued about working with the Blood Thieves, and, of course, you know that Clarence played a part in saving the sisters from the massacre while Cain fled. Interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘Very,’ Banes said. ‘So, what’s your plan?’

  ‘Instead of killing him, I want Cain brought in alive,’ Tycho said. ‘We can kill Natakarn and give her body to the kitchens, but I want Cain.’

  ‘And you’re going to do what with him?’ Banes asked.

  ‘At the very least, demote Cecilia,’ Tycho said. ‘I can’t afford to lose Clarence just yet, as his job at the moment is pivotal, but her career in Rebirth cannot survive this.’

  Banes furrowed his brow. ‘Are you sure that wouldn’t harm Rebirth?’ he asked. ‘It’s not like you to be petty, but this sounds like it’ll have a major effect on Rebirth’s running.’

  Tycho gave a slow, careful nod. ‘If Cecilia knows what is best for Rebirth, then this shouldn’t have too much of an effect on Rebirth’s operations. If I had a sibling who was a traitor, and a hunter as future in-law, she would destroy me, and we both know it. We’ll both find ourselves thrown out or killed if we let her continue. Devotion is a virtue, but to ignore self-preservation is reckless.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Banes said, raising his glass a fraction towards Tycho before taking a drink. There was a faint sparkle in Tycho’s eyes.

  ‘Yes, well, part of the reason I called you here was not simply to confide in you. I want you and May to be the ones to detain Cain Marr. Natakarn works nights, so she’ll be seized outside her workplace and brought here separately. I shall give further, detailed instructions to May.’

  ‘Why us?’ Banes asked.

  ‘You have as much to gain from this as I do,’ Tycho said, ‘and I know that Rosemary is capable of this, and I trust her.’

  ‘Do you trust me, as well?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Tycho said, giving him an odd, bemused look.

  ‘You never used to.’

  Tycho shrugged a single, mechanical jerk of his shoulders.

  ‘Things have changed, Banes. Do you trust me?’

  ‘I’ve got to, haven’t I?’ Banes said. ‘You’re my leader, after all.’

  Tycho gave a faint smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And you think that Cecilia really wants us dead?’ he asked.

  Tycho took a drink. ‘She certainly wants you dead. It’ll be a while before she gets around to killing me, though.’

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ Banes muttered.

  ‘In the meantime, she’ll want to demote me, and slowly strip away any influence I hold over Rebirth,’ Tycho said, ‘which is what I want for her. Ultimately, we’re just trying to beat each other to the punch.’

  ‘And you’re sure that this is worth it?’ Banes asked. ‘At this point, it’s not just your life on the line, here.’

 
; ‘For a country governed by us?’ Tycho said. ‘Banes, this is the natural order finally being re-established. Of course it’s worth any risks we take.’

  ‘But you were almost killed in the last attempt,’ Banes said, ‘then you went missing for nearly a century. What happened to you, Tycho?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘What matters is right here, and now.’

  ‘You said that you trusted me,’ Banes said, staring Tycho straight in the eye.

  ‘I do,’ Tycho said.

  ‘Cecilia says you had black eye,’ Banes said. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘It’s no-one’s business,’ he said, flatly.

  ‘But, it is,’ Banes said, ‘for me, at least. Tycho, I’ve been burned over this, and now I have Cecilia breathing down my neck. If this is affecting you, if your judgement is clouded by this, then I at least have a right to know about it now. And if you continue to just refuse to talk about what happened, then I’m left to assume that it’s true.’

  ‘I am your commander, Banes,’ Tycho said, a hint of warning flashing in his eyes. ‘If I tell you not to think a certain way, then those thoughts should perish. End of discussion.’

  ‘No,’ Banes said, leaning across to grab his arm, ‘you can’t say that just after you casually mention that Cecilia wants me dead in a move to depose you. This is what you owe me, Tycho.’

  ‘I don’t owe you anything,’ Tycho said, yanking his arm back away from Banes. ‘You joined Rebirth on your own violation, and in the course of time, we will be asking people to make a far greater sacrifice than a simple burn.’

  ‘You’ll feel better if you talk about it,’ Banes said, a tone of irritation entering his voice, ‘or, at least, if you admit to whatever happened to you happened, then perhaps you can live with it.’

  ‘I’m not under any illusion about my past,’ Tycho said.

  ‘You can tell me,’ Banes said. ‘That’s what you brought me into Rebirth for in the first place, isn’t it? You allowed me into Rebirth, and had me drawn out and tortured, just so I’d be there. You wanted someone you could rely on; a sympathetic ear, a fucking shoulder to cry on, and now that I’m here, you don’t want to know.’