Date: 2020-11-16T18:30:00+00:00

Smoke & Ashes

Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator IV

Alexis Hall

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Smoke & Ashes

Copyright © 2020 by Alexis Hall

Edited by: Courtney Miller-Callihan

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Series Reading Order

About Smoke & Ashes

Smoke & Ashes

Prologue

1. Breakfast & Bad News

2. Buses & Contacts

3. Agents & Estates

4. Poems & Clues

5. Sex & Eliot

6. Mornings & Emojis

7. Death & Flowers

8. The King & the Queen

9. Mornings & Messages

10. Tens & Queens

11. Wine & Prophecy

12. Sofas & Otherwise

13. Blood & Spite

14. Tea & the Hunt

15. Trails & Blood

16. Me & Ed

17. Me & the Client

18. Hearth & Home

19. Visions & Leads

20. Scotch & My Ex

21. Me & Julian

22. Cold & Dark

23. Snow & Sunlight

24. Me & my Mother

25. Me & Tara

26. Plans & Actions

27. Ice & Beasts

28. Running & Standing

29. Reflections & Realisations

30. Hills & Motorways

31. Knights & Maidens

32. Promises & Mercies

33. Rushes & Lions

34. Blood & Silver

35. Smoke & Ashes

36. Water & Stone

Epilogue

Dear Reader

About the Author

Also by Alexis Hall

Series Reading Order

Iron & Velvet

Shadows & Dreams

Fire & Water

Smoke & Ashes

Time & Tide (coming 2021)

About Smoke & Ashes

I like my whiskey like I like my women: stretching a metaphor way too far.

A couple of years ago I screwed up so badly that everybody I remotely cared about wound up dead, nearly dead, or just plain betraying me. Some days, I’m sober enough to care.

My list of “things I really don’t need right now” starts with a condescending octogenarian werewolf having a go at me for banging a Marchioness. As for where it ends, try the disembodied spirit of my ex-girlfriend stalking me in my dreams, a vindictive wizard-vampire from the first century on a vengeance crusade, being hired by the magical twin of my disanimated best friend and, oh yes, having to find the actual Holy Grail.

If I was a better person, I’d take this opportunity to put my life together. I’d find a way to fix everything I broke, save everybody I let down, and maybe pay a certain vampire back for leaving me to die. But I’m not a better person. I’m a hard-drinking half-faery train wreck on legs and if I hated myself less I might even say I liked it that way.

Smoke & Ashes

By Alexis Hall

Prologue

Choices & Regrets

My name’s Kate Kane and my world has turned to shit.

A little while ago—a year? Two years? Fuck, has it been three? I knew exactly two good people. One was a weird living statue who hung out in my flat and made me coffee even though she couldn’t drink it herself. The other was the mystical queen of London. They’re both dead now. Or in places between life and death where the difference doesn’t mean a damn and they still can’t talk or move or laugh or tell me to stop being so goddamned self-indulgent so, yeah. Dead or near as makes no odds.

This is normally the bit where I’d explain that I’m a half-faery PI with a string of exes, most of them either dangerous or annoying, a history of ruining people I care about, a psychotic mother who does guest spots in my head, and a lovable band of quirky hangers-on who I haven’t quite managed to get killed yet.

But just when my life had looked like it was getting on track, this cockney fuckstain called Arty King showed up and made a pretty good go of burning down everything that mattered to me, then this smug vampire fuckstain called Sebastian Douglas destroyed the rest. I wound up chained to a wall with my blood slowly draining out so that fuckstain number two could make his bid for immortality—well, immortality plus on account of he was already a vampire—and the only person who didn’t show up to rescue me was my actual goddamned girlfriend.

Fucking Julian Saint-Ger-fucking-main left me to die because apparently when you’re an eight-hundred-year-old-vampire you accept the brutal murder of your lovers as one of those things that happen, and you don’t stick your neck out for anybody because if you do, you won’t live to be eight hundred and one.

Most days I try to hate her for it. Some days I succeed.

Oh, I also shanked a granny. And while of all the people who got pointlessly slaughtered in the war for the soul of the city she was probably the one who most deserved it, I still have nightmares. I mean, I don’t want to come across like I’ve got this strict moral code or anything, but I really thought butchering some guy’s nan was on my “I would definitely never do that” list.

So, yeah. That’s who I am.

My name’s Kate Kane. I’m fucking poison.

1

Breakfast & Bad News

I awoke to the sound of cockerels. Actual motherfucking cockerels. I stirred, swearing under my breath. Rolling over, I found a naked werewolf stretched out beside me. I’d been fucking Tara Vane-Tempest on and off ever since I split with Julian back when everything went to shit. I say I’d been fucking her, but it was probably more accurate to say she’d been fucking me. Tara was not the kind of woman who consented to being the fuckee in the relationship. It was probably an alpha thing.

“Good morning, Kate Kane.” She was too damned awake too damned early. “Sleep well?”

She knew I hadn’t, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because she was well aware that I’d not slept properly since I’d let my best friend get turned into a hunk of inanimate rock, and secondly because it’s hard to get a good night’s rest when a shapeshifting lingerie model is going full all-the-better-to-eat-you-with on your willingly helpless body.

“Pretty well,” I replied. “I had four hours where I was too unconscious to hate myself so I’m calling that a win.”

“Someday this relentless misery is going to become unattractive.”

“Yeah, well”—I shrugged—“as an empowered twenty-first century woman I’m not relentlessly miserable for other people, I’m relentlessly miserable for me.”

Tara got out of bed in a fluid, animal motion that made me wish she’d get back into it, the sheets sliding away from her body like water off a nymph in one of those old paintings where you could show all the tits you wanted as long as you pretended it was art. She wrapped herself in a peach silk dressing-gown and pulled on a discreet rope that I knew from prior experience was hooked up to a Downton-esque system of bells somewhere in the servants’ quarters. Somehow, despite my common-as-pigshit roots, I was regularly getting my brains banged out by a woman who never quite got the memo about the feudal system.

“It is way too early for breakfast,” I told her.

“I have duties to attend to.”

Ugh, spare me. “I know, I know. We walk the boundaries between the worlds because otherwise everything goes to hell everywhere, always, something like that?”

“Roughly. And it’s worse now than it was.” That was underselling it. Between the drink and the hating myself I was less tied into the country’s uncanny underworld than I used to be, but I’d still been able to tell that the epic wizard battle screwed things up big time, especially since there’d been no clear winner. Tara perched on the end of the bed. She always looked like she was posing for a catalogue shoot, even when she was talking about serious mystical something-or-other. “I know that the witch-queen was your friend, but she rather fucked us on that one.”

She didn’t get to talk about Nim. “It wasn’t her fault.”

“No, she came from a long line of interfering humans who should have left alone what they didn’t understand.” I was pretty sure that was her grandmother talking. “Although”—she gave me a look that was softer than her usual intense, predatory gaze—“I suppose she was better than many of them. Which isn’t saying much.”

There was a polite knock at the door and Tara opened it to receive a silver tray laden with the kind of things you ate for breakfast if you were super rich, super posh, and a werewolf. Which meant a French press full of immaculately brewed fresh-ground coffee, a reasonable selection of continental pastries, and steak so rare a good vet could probably still have saved it.

She laid the tray on the bed between us, mostly out of politeness. It had been months since I’d eaten anything solid before noon and didn’t fancy starting now. Still, I poured myself a coffee and spent about ten seconds pretending that this was going to be the day I actually got up at a reasonable time and did something productive. Huddling back against the headboard with my drink, I watched Tara eat breakfast. I’d mostly given up trying to learn new things lately on account of how everything was going to be awful forever anyway so why bother, but I was learning quite a lot about Tara Vane-Tempest. Being a shapeshifting guardian of reality caught eternally between two worlds meant that she was guaranteed to be a mess of contradictions. In public she was this flawless icon of the British aristocracy, all poise and composure and using the right fork. Behind closed doors she was something completely different.

Ignoring the pastries entirely, she picked up one of the succulent, flawlessly seasoned steaks with her bare hands and tore into it with her teeth. Blood dribbled down her lips and fingers, and if I hadn’t been feeling so—I think the medical term is “shitty”—I’d have jumped her there and then. Sex and food both really brought out Tara’s animal side and, while I was more into her whole droit de seigneur bit than I liked to admit , it was when the wolf joined the party that things got properly interesting. The metaphorical wolf. Don’t get me wrong, I know some people are into fur, but I prefer my women strictly bipedal.

By the time I was about halfway through my coffee, Tara had finished her breakfast and, with the casual disregard of a woman who knows the sheets are being cleaned by somebody else, prowled towards me, leaving bloody fingerprints all over the bedclothes which turned out not to be a major problem since they were soon covered over by the remains of the French press. I had just about enough time to put my cup down before she was on top of me—sexy wolf ladies were all well and good but there was no sense in wasting perfectly drinkable Jamaica Blue Mountain.

“I thought you had duties to attend to.” Not that I was complaining.

She arched her body so that her face was millimetres from mine. I could practically taste the blood on her mouth already. “There’s still time. I get up early for a reason.”

I tried to kiss her, but she brought a hand to my neck and pinned me down. Her eyes flashed yellow and lupine. I struggled hard enough to make it worth her while. Something sharp grazed my throat—a claw tracing the pulse-line of my carotid artery. Okay, maybe I was kind of into the literal wolf thing as well, as long as she stayed closer to claws-and-fangs and well away from wet-nose-and-tail.

She brought her lips next to my ear. Her breath was hotter than it had any right to be, and her skin brushing against mine was the enjoyable flavour of torture. “You know what I want,” she whispered, nipping at me with her strong, sharp teeth.

I did. I’d known since day one. Tara Vane-Tempest never gave up a chase and never lost a battle. She’d hold on no matter what until she had it all. “Please,” I whispered back. “Please.”

That was all it took, and she gave me everything at once. Pinning me down with all the passion and urgency that, there and then, I needed so very badly to be a part of. She overwhelmed me, her mouth sometimes soft sometimes savage, her hands here gentle, there clawing. Her skin tasted of dark, wild places and she smelled of blood, sweat, and soil. She made me forget, and forgetting was what I was here for.

The knock at the door came at the worst possible moment. Tara stopped dead, sat bolt upright and whipped her head around. She hadn’t been expecting an interruption, and she responded swiftly and decisively to the unexpected. “What?” she demanded.

“Put the girl down and get dressed.” Henry’s voice came through the door. He was one of the nicer werewolves and had personally saved my life on more than one occasion, but right about then I’d have cheerfully sent a couple of silver bullets in his direction. “We need you.”

Tara was off me way faster than was flattering. I got that her pack came first but—well, that was sort of the problem. “We’re in the middle of something,” I yelled.

“You’ll live,” replied Henry with what I had to admit was more patience than I’d have shown to somebody asking me to put my sacred duty on hold while she fucked my cousin. “This is urgent. There have been developments.”

Tara was already dressed which, given the bewildering size of her wardrobe, I thought must have been some kind of top-secret side effect of werewolf powers. For somebody who’d been on top of me less than ninety seconds ago she was looking almost offensively put together in a sheer black gown and killer heels that pushed her stature from tall to towering. She opened the door. “Here. What is it?”

“Tuffy. She didn’t come back from the borderlands. Neither did anybody who went with her.”

If I was a better person, I’d have felt bad. I’d met Tuffy and Smudge a couple of times and, admittedly, a lot of those times they’d been very much not on my side, but I didn’t want either of them to disappear or get ripped apart. But I wasn’t a better person, so I was still resentful about being left only partially laid. “Fuck, I’m sorry.” I tried to sound sincere and I think I mostly managed it. “Go do your pack thing. I’ll be here when you get back.”

Tara cast me a haughty look over her shoulder. She was in full alpha mode, which I found unhelpfully sexy given the circumstances. “This will take some time. I advise you not to wait for me.”

I curled up in the breakfast-stained ruin of the bedsheets. “Oh I won’t be waiting for you. I just have very little going on in my life right now.”

To my mild surprise, she took a step back inside the room, closed the door on Henry, and turned to face me. “I have been indulgent, Kate Kane…” okay Kate, she’s angry, stop finding it hot “…and perhaps I have been short-sighted. If my pack is in danger, then I will need a warrior, not a self-pitying drunk.”

That was unfair. Not inaccurate, exactly, but unfair. “You weren’t complaining last night. Or the night before. Or five fucking minutes ago.”

She was standing over me. Christ, wolves could move fast when they wanted to—not as fast as vampires, who could do the whole bamf-I-am-the-darkness thing—but still much quicker that I was comfortable with for something that might be trying to kill me. “Do not test me,” she growled. “For years I have been warned against associating with you. I have ignored those warnings because I know you can be better.”

“Oh spare me the I believe in you more than you do yourself bullshit. You’re a horny wolf-domme and whatever you may tell yourself, you like your women on their knees.”

She cupped a hand around my jaw. Her eyes faded to yellow again. I wasn’t sure if it was meant as a threat. “True. But I prefer it if they can get back up when they have to. There’s no sport if there’s no chase, and there’s no chase in someone who won’t fight back. You used to fight back, Kate Kane.”

I slapped her hand away. “What can I say, I guess you beat me.”

“But you didn’t have to stay beaten.” She leaned very close, gazing into my eyes like she was looking for some bullshit spark of self-respect or whatever.

I grabbed her by the hair and kissed her aggressively. Honestly, I was a bit surprised that she kissed me back, but she did—at least for a moment. “If you’re going to make that into some big put-your-past-behind-you moment,” I told her, “I’m going to fucking punch you.”

She smiled. “You’re your own woman,” she said. “I might need you soon. Whether you meet that need is up to you.” And with that, she left me to go do important werewolf stuff. Why did I always wind up with women who had actual things going on in their lives?

I fell back onto the bed which, despite everything it had been through in the last half hour, was still absurdly comfy in the way only something designed for the very rich could be. Tara hadn’t been entirely wrong. I was wallowing. But I felt I had legitimate cause to wallow what with all the many, many deaths that were following me around. Sighing, I tried to at least finish what Tara had started before she got distracted by something she genuinely cared about.

Aaaand it wasn’t happening. Great. Probably a good sign you needed to get your life in order right the fuck now was when you couldn’t even get up the energy to wank properly.

2

Buses & Contacts

For a handful of minutes, I tried to make myself comfortable in the wreckage of the bed. Somewhere at the back of my mind, I wondered what was going on with the werewolves. If this had been a normal house I’d probably have been able to hear whatever they were talking about, because posh people talk loud and I have pretty good hearing on account of my mother being a primal spirit of the hunt. But this wasn’t a normal house. It was the kind of house that had wings, and whatever secret discussions Tara was having were probably going on across the border into a different county.

With an effort of will that I wished somebody had seen and could be proud of me for, I sat up. My foot clattered against the breakfast tray that was still lying upended on the bed, and with an attack of something vaguely approximating virtue I got up and cleared it away. The sheets were an unsleepable-in mess, but I figured I’d at least saved some maid and/or footman from having to risk cutting her and/or his hands on the wreck Tara and I had made of the crockery. Perhaps one day I’d be in a relationship that didn’t have collateral damage. But I hoped not.

I dressed. I’d steadfastly resisted keeping a change of clothes at Safernoc because that made the whole arrangement too relationshippy, but Tara had done what I should have known she’d do, and bought me one anyway. Which was infuriating, slightly hot in a problematically controlling way, and maybe kinda sorta for the best because I was there most days lately and Tara tended to subject my wardrobe to more than the usual amount of wear and tear. Suited but not booted—I wasn’t quite rude enough to wear my DMs while I mooched around the bedroom of a woman I was banging—I sat down on the edge of the bed and began the heartburn-inducing ritual of checking my phone. I tried to avoid it wherever possible, because while the steady stream of where are yous and we’re worrieds had finally ebbed to a trickle, there was basically nobody I wanted to hear from.

On this particular morning I had a “just checking in” from Eve, a “your minutes have refreshed” from my phone company, a “please call me” from Ashriel, who could profoundly go fuck himself, a “you don’t know me but I think I might have some information you’re looking for” from some random, and a “please rate your order from the Happy Wok Chinese Takeaway” from some website I’d ordered food from.

I hit delete a bunch of times, then realised that one of them might have been important. Shit. How did you un-get-rid-of stuff again? I eventually found the undo button and sat there looking at a series of messages from a total stranger.

You don’t know me, but I think I might have some information you’re looking for.

My name is Dr Nicola Bright, and I’m emeritus professor of theology at University College London.

Contact me if you want to know more about the Book of Living Fire.

Well that was … something. The Book of Living Fire was the best translation I’d managed to get for the title of a book that Hephaestion—the animated statue who as far as I could tell still worked for the Prince of Wands—had smuggled to me after his master destroyed my best friend. I’d never quite worked out why he’d done it other than lithological solidarity. Then again, maybe that was enough. I’d hoped the book would hold the key to saving Elise, but I’d not been able to make head or tail of it, and nor had any of Eve’s people, back when I’d still been talking to her instead of ducking her calls and drinking. I vaguely remembered her reaching out to the academic community for information, although I’d hoped that anybody who had information would come to Eve rather than to me.

Thinking about it, that raised an interesting point.

How did you find this number? I texted back. Not that it would have been that hard to get hold of—mine was the kind of business where clients needed to be able to get through to you outside office hours, so it was a work number as much as a personal one. But I was a bit surprised that a presumably busy academic had bothered to do the legwork to track it down. Then again, it did say emeritus professor, which I think meant she was off duty or something, so maybe she had a lot of time on her hands.

There was no reply, probably because emeritus professors didn’t get up as early as werewolves, but I still felt like I’d done something at least a bit productive. I snuck a guilty look at the bed. I could probably get away with another twenty minutes if I wanted to. After all, I’d still be getting up at what most people thought was a sensible time.

Except that wouldn’t be how it worked. I’d lie down, spend an hour beating myself over the head with how badly I’d fucked everything up, and then somehow lose track of wakefulness and it’d be three again. Probably eating something was a good idea. I fished the least crushed croissant from the mess of the sheets, pried the butter dish off the floor, and had what passed for breakfast.

I was coming quickly to the conclusion that I’d done all I could in Tara’s bedroom. At least, I’d done all I could alone in Tara’s bedroom, so I set off into the bowels of Safernoc Hall. I was never sure what the etiquette was at times like this—when I’d been a kid the polite thing to do would be to make sure I tracked down my hostess first and gave her a polite thank you for having me, but I didn’t think that had quite the same connotations in the current circumstances. And while I was at least a bit curious about what exactly had gone on, and whether Tuffy had got lost in some otherworldly labyrinth or if she’d been torn apart by a hell-beast from beyond oblivion, I suspected that the pack wouldn’t appreciate my intruding. “Hi, I’m fucking your alpha and have a history of getting her to make incredibly questionable decisions” isn’t a good opener.

In the end I left a note with a servant who probably had a weirdly specific title like deputy under-valet in charge of cutlery or something. I hesitated far too long about what to write and wound up with something like Going into work. Trying to be less of a fuckup. Thanks for kicking me out of bed.

Once I was in the grounds—Safernoc has serious grounds, like proper spooky haunted castle grounds—I began the long, slow walk back to somewhere I could get a bus. I’d almost entirely stopped driving because the car had been Elise’s thing. Plus staying strictly on public transport meant I could feel slightly less irresponsible about being pissed by lunchtime. Of course the downside of having a regular fuck date with the type of person who lives in a massive country estate, and giving up on using your own wheels, is that you’re stuck relying on the kinds of routes that run once an hour if you’re lucky. Waiting by a bus-stop in a quaint little village that was probably called Much Pissing on the Meadow or something, I checked my phone again to see if I had any more updates from people wanting to know why I was being such an arsehole all of a sudden. And by all of a sudden I meant for at least a year and a half.

There weren’t, but there was a reply from Nicola Bright. I guess emeritus professors got up earlier than I thought.

Academic rumour mill was the message. I wasn’t sure that counted as an answer. But it was followed up with. And your number is on your professional website. I’ve been looking for a copy of the Book of Living Fire my whole career.

The problem with my line of work was that everything read as ominous. You got a text like “I’ve been looking for a copy of the Book of Living Fire my whole career” and you automatically tacked on “because when I watched my lover die at the age of twenty-three I swore I would have them back if I had to tear down the sky itself, and that book is part of my secret master plan to invade hell with an army of robots.”

How come? I replied as casually as I could.

I don’t want to bore you with details, but it represents an interesting example of evolving conceptions of the soul in classical thought.

She was right. The details were boring. I sent her the address of my office, such as it was, and my business hours, such as they were. When the bus arrived I was feeling pretty damned good about myself. Yes, this wasn’t strictly paying work, it was a side hustle driven by a vortex of guilt and shame that was slowly swallowing me, but it was still a big tick in the productivity box.

The route back from the middle of nowhere by thing-you-don’t-drive-yourself was a total shitter, so even though I’d got up at ridiculous-o-clock I wound up getting into my office well after ten. Part of that was because as well as avoiding the car I was also trying to avoid the tube. Once you realised how easy it was for a wizard to hijack the entire underground into a mythologically resonant proxy for the underworld, you felt safer being able to see the sky.

To say that business had been slow recently would be—well, accurate. On account of how slow it had been. Of course since my original partner had died way too long ago and my new partner-assistant-sidekick-best-friend was in a state of indefinite suspended animation, I had literally nobody to blame but myself. True, it’s not like the economy was exactly rosy right now what with everything that was going on in the world, but if I was being really, really, super honest and self-scrutinising, the dip in billable hours probably had at least a little bit to do with my wacky habit of showing up at noon, passing out drunk on my desk, or staying away from work for weeks on end because I couldn’t see the point in carrying on with anything even spitting distance from normal any more.

I flipped the old-fashioned open/closed sign on the window, which still read Kane and Archer, meaning it was now two fatal cockups out of date. Then I sat at my desk and for about one point three minutes allowed myself to feel proud of the fact that I’d got into work before noon for once. Of course my pride drained away like coffee grouts down a sink when I realised that now I was actually in work I was still just sitting around and—before I could finish the thought there was a sharp rap on the door. Shit, this wasn’t a client was it? I didn’t realise I was still allowed to have those.

The silhouette on the other side of the frosted glass looked familiar somehow—although with the classical figure and the lighting, it might have been that I could let myself pretend she was Lauren Bacall.

Turned out that wasn’t it. The door opened to reveal a raven-headed goddess who looked like what you’d get if a lonely weirdo carved his perfect woman out of marble then defied all the laws of gods and men to bring her to life. And when I say she looked like that, I mean that was exactly what she was. And for a moment which could seriously, seriously go fuck itself I forgot that Elise had sisters—all variations on the same girl that this arsehole wizard called Russel had been creating then discarding since who knew when—and wondered what the hell had brought her back to me. Except no, that wasn’t how it worked. This was the Gods or the Universe or Fate or whatever screwing with my head.

“Fuck.” I said. I was staring. I was definitely staring. And I knew I should stop but I couldn’t. “Sorry, I should be able to do this by now, but which one are you?”

She looked blank. “Which what am I?”

“Never mind.” I knew about five variations on the Elise model running around the city, and since the rest had all met each other, this must have been the eldest. The one who’d got engaged to an estate agent from Brentford. “How can I help you?”

There was this nervous air about her, like she wanted to say something but was scared to. “I had your name from a friend,” she told me. “He said you were—that you were open minded about unusual cases.”

“Your friend was right.”

“My husband has gone missing.” I couldn’t help staring at her—the Elises were all different if you looked closely, and this one was by far the most natural-seeming. She sat down in the chair opposite me where any of her sisters would have stood for preference, especially if they were upset. “The police say that there is nothing they can do as he’s an adult and can make his own decisions, but I worry that something”—she gave me the big eyes—“something terrible might have happened.”

This was getting rough. Once I’d realised that Elise had started out in life as some guy’s creepy magic fuckbot, I’d tried really, really hard not to sexualise her. That had got harder when I met Beth, the one who was basically an evil dominatrix enforcer, but I’d still mostly managed. Now another identical woman was sitting opposite me doing the full help me Mr Spade bit and it was sending my mind to some very awkward places even without the reminding-me-of-a-woman-I-got-killed element. “And why do you think that?”

“It’s hard to explain.” She glanced at her hands, which were folded decorously across her knees. “You see, I worry that something may have happened to him because of me.”

I made a “go on” kind of noise.

“You may find this hard to believe, Miss Kane. But I’m—I’m not human.”

Yeah. No shit.

3

Agents & Estates

I decided against telling the client that I probably knew more about her than she did about herself. It would have felt cheap. Instead I let her tell me her story, which was less horrific than Elise’s by an order of wasn’t-thrown-in-an-actual-dump. From what she said, I was certain she’d been Russel’s first girl. For a start he’d called her Galatea, meaning she now went by the somewhat odd name of Galatea Brown. Then there was the way he’d got rid of her. Instead of trying to sell her or destroy her like he had with the others, he’d abandoned her one day in the middle of London and hoped that would fix everything. She’d wandered around Lambeth for a long time—not needing to eat or drink made it more bearable but having no friends or home or any idea what the fuck was happening to you while you stood on the street and hoped somebody would take you in seemed like it would still be fucking nightmarish—before finally meeting this dude called Edward Brown. He’d picked her up, helped her find somewhere to stay, generally done the gentleman routine. I say gentleman, but since she wound up ambiguously married and subsequently abandoned for the second time in her short life, I wasn’t sure the guy got a pass ulterior-motive wise.

“Eventually I moved into his flat with him,” she explained. “He had been very good to me and he made me happy. He never pushed me about where I had come from. I think he thought I’d escaped from some manner of criminal organisation, and he was very protective of me. We had trouble getting a marriage license because I have no formal identification, but he spoke to some people and arranged it somehow. I am a real legal person now, or I pass for one.”

I made a mental note to check up on that—legal reality was a tricky thing and I didn’t totally trust Eddie Baby to have been straight with her. “Any idea who these people he spoke to were?”

“No. He did it all through his work, and I never found out how.”

Not super helpful, but the work was a possible lead. “And have you any other ideas about what might have happened?”

She reached inside her purse for a piece of paper. “He left me this, pinned to the fridge with a magnet.”

It read I’m sorry. Don’t look for me. I wasn’t sure if that was suspicious or just shitty. I mean he’d basically ditched his wife by post-it. “What do you think it means?”

“I worry that he’s in danger. That something magical from my past or some criminal he had to work with to arrange my papers came and took him.”

This was a tough one. On the one hand it was a paying gig. On the other, I was way too close. And if I did find Galatea’s husband, and he did turn out to not want her any more, and all this stuff about the past catching up with them was nothing but a story she was using to make herself feel better, what then? “I’ll look into it,” I said.

“Thank you. I—I have money.”

“I’d hope you would. This ain’t no charity lady.” I did the last bit in a bad Bogart voice, which confused her.

“How do I…? That is, how much do I…?” Oh this was getting unbearable. I had to get this dame out of my office before I lost it.

“We’ll sort that out when I find your husband. Until then I’ll stay in touch. Give your details to my … give me your details, and we can sort out the fine print later. You’re clearly still in a bad place.”

She rose with that same brought-to-life-by-angel-fire grace I remembered Elise having. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”

“I’m really not. Believe me.”

I took down a couple of other bits of information—her address and phone number, mostly. It turned out she didn’t know that much about her husband’s life outside their home, which was odd. And, though I hated to think it, another point on the side of his being a bad guy. Whether that meant the normal cheating love-rat kind of bad guy or the more complicated secretly a vampire or a gangster or a vampire gangster kind of bad guy, I wasn’t going to speculate. Basically I had his name, and the fact that he was an estate agent, and that he probably worked somewhere in Brentford. Still, I’d worked with less.

Once she was gone I sat back at my desk, stared blankly at a spreadsheet I’d forgotten how to update, and cried. This was unfair. Right when I thought I’d got all the other last things I needed cleaned up and dealt with, the universe had to come along with its fucked in the head sense of humour and give me a new last thing I needed. It was bad enough knowing that my as-good-as-dead best friend had a bunch of spooky doubles running around without the one spooky double who didn’t know about all the other spooky doubles turning up in my office.

And what sort of man doesn’t tell his own fucking wife where he fucking works. Stupid question; probably the same sort of man who marries an animated statue with no past in the first place. Because sure, maybe he was being all noble and trusting and shit, but I’ve never gone far wrong betting against human decency and it was likely that he just cared more about the fact that she was hot, vulnerable, and would do him than about little details like where she came from or if she’d ever been trafficked into sexual slavery.

Fuck it, maybe I was projecting. I liked to think that I would have taken Elise in even if she hadn’t been absurdly easy on the eyes and I hadn’t been essentially forced into it by a swarm of sentient rats. But, honestly, I couldn’t have sworn to it in court.

Anyway. Job. Whoever the guy was, I’d been hired to find him. Edward Brown was about as common a name as you could get—hell it was so common that the wikipedia disambiguation page for men called Edward Brown listed other disambiguation pages that disambiguated searches for men with names a bit like Edward Brown. Add that to a vague idea about his job and where he had, until recently, lived, and I at least had somewhere to start. And how many estate agents could there be in Brentford anyway?

I checked.

That many, huh?

Ringing every estate agent in a major London borough and asking if they have an employee with a completely ordinary name was about the coolest and most exciting thing I’d done on the job in at least six months. And it was cooler and more exciting when after only three hours of calling, holding, checking if people had the authority to give information, worrying about GDPR and holding some more, I finally got an answer.

“Ed Brown?” said the woman on the other end of the line. “Yes, he used to. But he handed in his notice last month.”

“Any idea where he went?”

“I’m not sure I can—”

“Give that information over the phone to a total stranger. I get it. Look I’ve got a license, I’m a real PI, you can look me up.”

There was an ominous sound of keystrokes from the other end of the line “Doing that right now. Wow, your website is really out-of-date.”

“Yeah, I’ve been busy.”

“This looks unbelievably suss.”

“We’re a small business, we don’t have the resources to—”

“I’m sorry but there are a whole bunch of red flags here. I’m going to have to talk to my manager.”

Well shit. “Don’t you da—” Too late. I was cut off by some plinky classical music. Opening a new browser tab, I fired up Google maps and tried to work out if it would be quicker to go to Brentford in person than to sit on the phone listening to a piano concerto more or less indefinitely. 53 minutes on the Piccadilly Line. Almost tempting.

After a wait that could easily have got me to Ravenscourt Park if I’d left there and then, the lady came back. “So my boss says we can’t give out details of former employees because—”

“Please don’t say because of GDPR.”

“Because of GDPR.”

“Between you and me, does anybody at your company know what that actually is, or are they just using it as an excuse to get out of answering questions they don’t want to answer?”

That at least made her laugh. “Please don’t get me started. It’s been a nightmare.”

“And I suppose I’d get the same answer if I showed up in person?”

“Afraid so. Sorry, Kate.”

Okay, desperation gambit time. “You did know the guy, though. Didn’t you.”

“I should get off this line.”

“That’s fair, that’s fair. But—and I’m aware this is clutching at straws—would you be at all open to having the information seduced out of you by a middle-aged lesbian whose job sounds about three times sexier in theory than it is in practice?”

“Well when you say it like that, how can I refuse?”

“People normally find a—hang on did that work?”

“What can I say, you got me curious. I’m off work at five, there’s a fairly decent gastropub near the office. Wear something PI-like.”

I was beginning to feel like I’d been played. “You’re not seriously expecting me to seduce you, are you?”

“Why don’t we see how it goes? I’ll see you there.”

She hung up, and a couple of seconds later my phone buzzed with an unknown number. I wrote this down from our call logs. Which technically violates GDPR but hey, in for a penny, in for a pound.

This lady was going to be trouble. I hoped she’d wind up being the right sort of trouble.

What with the travel and the being on hold, it was close to the end of working hours already, so I finished up what little I could work out how to do in the office and set out for Brentford. The bus was going to be a non-starter at this time of day, so I swallowed my pride and my fear of being drawn literally into hell, and got on the damned Tube at Covent Garden.

It was proper rush hour, so the platform was packed, and I edged my way along to the end like they always tell you to do on the announcements. In theory, one of the things I love about London is being smack in the heart of the joyful chaos of life in a thriving metropolis. Then again in theory—I don’t know, I’m not a scientist—but probably there’s loads of stuff that’s true in theory that isn’t true when you test it out. Like was there something about bumblebees? Anyway in real life the joyful chaos of the thriving metropolis was hot and crowded and awful and inconvenient. I missed one train because it was physically impossible to cram any more human bodies onto it, and as it was roaring away from the platform I could have sworn I heard a sound like sixty dogs barking in the tunnel behind it. Then again, it was the Tube, I’d heard weirder sounds.

I managed to fit on the next train and by the time we got to Hyde Park Corner I’d even managed to get myself a seat. From there it was standard underground operating procedure—you keep facing straight ahead, you on no account talk to anybody in case they turn out to be an axe murderer or think you’re an axe murderer. You may look at your phone, a newspaper, or at the nothing outside. I went with the nothing.

As we chickety-canned past Knightsbridge and South Kensington, I found myself surreptitiously examining the reflections of other passengers in the windows. This was kind of the only socially acceptable way of paying any attention to other passengers at all, and I was sure that at least some of them were doing the same. Every time we went through a station they’d get all transparent and ghostly, and then once we hit the tunnels everything would be a mirror again.

Just as we left Baron’s Court, I caught sight of an older man in a Transport for London jacket staring back at me—I recognised him at once as Jacob, the magician who had once been Nimue’s agent in the west, and more generally on the underground. Like a depressing number of other people, he’d been sort-of-not-exactly-killed in the battle for the soul of the city, sealing himself up beneath British Museum to stop an evil Satan granny unleashing an army of demons onto the tube. And now he was watching me from a window. From the position of his reflection, he should have been sitting right beside me, but he definitely wasn’t—that honour was held by a skinny hipster reading a Kindle—and from his expression something portentous was going down.

Not that he had any way of telling me what exactly. Hell, from where I was sitting I couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Maybe I should have made more of an effort to reach out to him but what was I going to do, wave at his reflection? Of the people whose fates I’d been beating myself up for he’d been squarely in the middle of the list—not completely my fault, not completely not—but he was definitely on it. His image vanished around South Ealing, and I got off soon afterwards feeling five kinds of shitty for six different reasons.

4

Poems & Clues

The pub I was heading to turned out to be this cute little building with green enamel on the brickwork and a blue plaque that said some artist had apparently stayed there back in the 1780s. I swung open the front door and looked for somebody who might have been an unexpectedly flirtatious estate agent. Probably not the couple by the window, or the guy with the kid. C’mon, Kate, you’re a professional thing investigator, investigate a thing.

A blonde woman in a tasteful but understated suit jacket waved at me from one corner. She wore dark-rimmed glasses and had her hair loose to a little below shoulder length. I’d have put her at somewhere between forty and fifty. “Are you Kate Kane?” she asked when I sidled over to her.

“That’s me.”

“When I said wear something PI-like I didn’t realise you’d take it quite so seriously.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to explain to her that this was just how I dressed. “This is just how I dress,” I said. Oh yeah, like that.

She gave me a minx-ish look from behind her glasses. “Go on then,” she said with a half-smile. “Seduce me.”

“I maybe thought we’d eat first?” Food was starting to feel like a really good idea. I’d had half a squashed croissant all day. And there was me thinking that gnawing feeling was the guilt and self-loathing.

I gave my new companion the once over. No ring, so probably not married, not that it meant much in this day and age. “And so you know,” I added, “if you’re a random straight woman having some kind of mid-life thing then … then I’m completely okay with that.”

She plucked a slice of bread from one of those baskets that restaurants put out without you asking and I’m always too paranoid to touch in case they charge you a million pounds for the privilege. “What if I stay mysterious and inscrutable for now?”

“Could I get a name at least, or do you want to be the alluring Madam X?”

“Penelope.”

“Like the Thunderbird?” Classy, Kate. Classy. There was probably a classical allusion you could have made there that would make you sound totally sophisticated and erudite instead of like the sixth-form dropout you are.

“Oh yes, my parents were enormous Gerry Anderson fans. They nearly called me Virgil.”

“Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Brains.”

“True. I recommend the moules mariniere, by the way. They specialise in seafood, I hope that’s okay.”

It took me a moment to get my head back in the game. “We’re talking dinner again, right?”

“Unless you’ve changed your mind and want to cut straight to the seduction.”

I glanced at the menu. “Well we could always split the difference and go straight for the oysters.” Once, long ago, there was an oysterer’s daughter. Fucking Julian—she needed to stay out of my head while I was working-slash-on-the-pull.

“So what did you want to know about Edward?” The look in Penelope’s eyes was almost shy, and despite my finely honed detective’s instincts I couldn’t quite work out whether she was messing around with this whole come seduce me thing or if she actually meant it.

“Whatever you can tell me would help. Mostly I just want to know where he is.”

“I’m not sure there’s a lot to say. He was … ordinary.” A waiter came by and we ordered drinks and a couple of plates of moules. When in doubt get the same as your date, that way you’ll both look equally stupid eating it. “Nice enough. Worked well and made good commissions. He never came in stinking of weed or alcohol if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“And never had any strange people showing up asking questions about him.”

“Only you.” She smiled at me. Fuck, I really, really hoped she didn’t turn out to be straight. When this was over I was going into a garage and getting my gaydar checked.

“Guess I walked into that one. Did you ever meet his wife?”

“No. I knew he was married, but only from the usual wife talk you get in the office. You know—got to get going or the Mrs will kill me—that kind of thing. We weren’t close.”

“Kids?” While I was ninety-nine percent sure Elise and her sisters couldn’t have children, it was always good to rule out the secret second family as quickly as possible. It saved a lot of trouble in the long run.

“I don’t think so. He might have said they were trying at one point.”

Okay, still turning up a big pile of nothing. I’d have felt frustrated except the job was about ninety percent big piles of nothing, ten percent people trying to kill you. Besides, if you were going to get nowhere, you could at least get nowhere over moules mariniere with a hot estate agent. “All right,” I tried. “Sixty-four thousand dollar question: do you know where he went.”

She nodded. “Maidenhead. I remember because of the poem.”

“The poem?” There was an ever increasing chance that this broad was too classy for me even if she actually was into girls.

“Slough?” To my surprise and tentative delight, I thought I recognised her expression. It was the expression that said have I fucked this up by saying something weird. I knew it well. “By Sir John Betjeman? Ricky Gervais famously recites a bit of it in The Office? There’s a bit about going to Maidenhead in it.”

The waiter showed up with two glasses of what I assumed were a well-chosen white wine and two bowls of mussels. “So are you a big fan of poetry, or a big fan of early 2000s sitcoms?”

“A bit of both. But I did read English at university.”

Oh. “Cool. So, um, to be straight with you, I fucked up my A-levels then did a BTEC in private investigation so the chances of my being able to hold up my end of this conversation are pretty much zero.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“No, no, it’s cool, I was just explaining. Poetry me.”

“Poetry you?”

“Yeah, hit me with some verse.”

She gave me what I thought was a challenging smile. “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”

“Fortunately, I’m not a man. And that’s not a proper poem.”

“It is, actually.” I had the uneasy feeling that I’d walked into a trap. “It’s called News Item. Dorothy Parker.”

I thought I vaguely knew the name as somebody fabulous and twenties-ish but could remember exactly zero of what she’d written. “What else did she do.”

“An awful lot in the same vein. She was … a bitter sort of wonderful.” Penelope picked delicately through her moules. I was definitely outclassed here—I was never going to be able to look that sexy eating buttery shellfish. “She also said scratch a lover, find a foe.”

“Sounds like my kind of girl.”

“I thought she might be.”

I dug into my moules and took a much deeper swig of my wine than I’d been planning to. “I bet asking you about your favourite poem-slash-poet is, like, a total rookie move, isn’t it? It’d be like somebody asking me about my favourite—I dunno—way of solving crimes or something.”

“I thought your favourite way of solving crimes was to seduce information out of estate agents?”

“I have to admit, it is up there.”

“But you’re right.” She finished her wine and laid her cutlery neatly on the edge of her plate. “I don’t have a favourite poem-slash-poet. Although I am very fond of The Waste Land.”

The silence just sat there for a moment. “You’re going to make me admit I’ve never heard of it, aren’t you?”

“Oh absolutely, you’re cute when you’re embarrassed. And you’ve almost certainly heard some of it: April is the cruellest month, Fear death by water, and so on.”

None of that sounded familiar. “I mean, the death by water thing is good advice in general.”

“I don’t think it’s especially intended as a how-to guide. It’s more of a heap of broken images.”

“Can you recite it to me?”

“It’s long, I couldn’t do it from memory, but I’ve got a slim volume of Eliot back at my place if you wanted to hear it.”

I pulled a slightly perplexed face. “Couldn’t you just find it online? I figure that and porn are what the internet is for.”

“I could.” She leaned forward and made a noise that was a mixture between a sigh and a laugh. “Or we could have a look for it back at my place.”

Oh. Oh. I almost choked on my moules. “Sorry I—I didn’t think you were going to go through with the whole seduction thing.”

“You thought I was a bored straight woman looking to kill an otherwise dull evening by stringing you along for a couple of hours?” She didn’t seem angry exactly, but she had a bit of a you’ve let me down, you’ve let the school down, vibe to her.

“No. Yeah. A bit. Sorry.”

She slumped. I felt shitty that I’d made her slump. “Look. This obviously wasn’t what I was planning on doing when I woke up this morning, and I’m sure divorced estate agent isn’t anywhere near the top of your list of sexual fantasies, and if you feel—I don’t know—fetishised or taken for granted or anything like that then please forget I said anything. I’m making this up as I go along, and I probably got carried away, but when you walked through that door I thought I’d won the fucking lottery because I honestly do think you’re hot as hell and I really, really want to take you home right now.”

I … I could work with that. A little voice at the back of my mind said that this was going to be a bad idea and that we were both in way the wrong place emotionally for hooking up to make anything even resembling sense. But who the hell was I to judge her choices? And while I should probably have been more cautious about my own, given how my life was going, having a one-night stand with a forty-something divorcee from Brentford was probably the healthiest thing I’d done in about six years. Of course there was still Tara to be thinking about but we’d never quite pinned down whatever the hell it was we were doing and she’d always struck me as the sort who thought monogamy was a strictly one-sided deal. I wasn’t a fan of one-sided deals.

Twelve minutes later we were in a cab on the way to her place.

“So … what happened with your wife?” I thought it was best to get the elephants out of the room as soon as possible.

“Husband. And before you say anything, if you make me give you the bisexuals exist speech we are stopping this taxi right now and you’re walking back to Bow Street.”

That was me told. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have made assumptions.”

“Don’t worry about it. I get that you’re still worried that I’m playing tourist here, and you’re not totally wrong. It’s just that it’s the casual-sex-with-a-private-investigator part that’s new to me. Not the going-to-bed-with-a-woman part.”

“Good to know. And. Well. You don’t have to go to bed with me if you don’t want to.”

“I know. But we’ll see how it goes.”

The journey was short, and we stopped outside an almost terrifyingly normal semi-detached house. It was one of those pretty pre-war jobs with bay windows and a neat little front garden. A brick-arched porch led up to the front door and on the other side of that was an achingly homey hallway with soft grey walls and stripped floorboards. This was a place that people had tried to make a life in.

“So …” I drew out the syllable to give myself thinking time. “I think you were going to read me a poem?”

She nodded. “I know this sounds like a line. But I do actually keep it in the bedroom.”

I let her lead me upstairs. This was turning into a very strange day.

5

Sex & Eliot

I was beginning to get a little bit creeped out. Housing-wise I’d spent the past few years bouncing between my very, very batcheloretty flat in Muswell Hill, Julian’s absurd range of high-end pleasure palaces, and most recently the crumbling Gothic splendour of Safernoc Hall. The last time I’d gone into an honest to goodness family home, it had been because the family in question had been torn apart by a pack of feral vampires.

Also, my PI senses were tingling. “I don’t want to kill the mood,” I said as Penelope settled herself—a little self-consciously, I thought—onto the edge of the bed and kicked off her heels. “But it feels like this place is a bit too big for just you and your husband.”

To my surprise, she looked almost scared. She took a deep breath. “This isn’t what you were expecting, I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s …”

She swiped through her phone and showed it to me. On the screen was a picture of a boy and a girl, smiling in that slightly resentful way teenagers got when you insisted on photographing them. “David and Leah. Fourteen and Sixteen. They’re with their father for the evening, which makes tonight one of the few nights I get to myself.”

“And you wanted to spend it with me?” I didn’t mean to sound quite that shocked.

She shifted uncomfortably. “I know you said your job wasn’t as exciting and mysterious as it sounded. But I’m sure you’ve got far better things to do with your time than hang out with a forty-six-year-old divorced woman with two kids.”

“You know what? I really don’t.” That earned me a slightly confused look. “Sorry, that came out much more faint-praisey than I intended.”

She took her phone back and put it down on the bed beside her. “It’s fine.”

“I mean”—I sat down next to her and, somewhat belatedly, took my hat off—“and if you find this insulting then please slap me or something, but I think you might be a literal MILF.”

That made her laugh. It was still kind of an uncertain laugh, but it felt like progress. “I suppose that depends.”

“Depends on what?”

She looked up into my eyes, hers wide and blue behind her glasses. “On whether you’d like to fuck me.”

Before I could answer she was kissing me, hesitant at first but bolder when—I don’t know, when whatever terrible thing I guess she was worried might happen didn’t happen. There was something strange and frail about it, her lips soft and human. I’d got so used to being with women who were immortal, or the embodiment of cosmic truths, or half unstoppable predator that there was something almost intoxicating about the sheer person-ness of her. I tried not to let her remind me of Eve, and it was strangely easy—that had been so long ago now it felt almost like it had happened to a different person.

With a passion that surprised even me, I manoeuvred her onto her back and ripped her blouse open with what might have been a very slightly supernaturally enhanced level of strength. She gasped and for a second I backed off. “Was that too—shit, I’m sorry, I’ll pay for it.”

She laughed again. More confident this time. “Just surprised, that’s all. I don’t normally lose clothing that way.” Wriggling underneath me, she got into a half sitting position and with somewhat less disregard for property damage than I was used to in a lover, took off her jacket and what was left of her top. “Right, carry on.”

For a moment I couldn’t. All I could do was stare at her body. Her skin was like an essay about a life lived. There was the ghost of a burn mark above her wrist, which probably came from getting something out the oven too quickly. Her shoulders were flecked with freckles from the sun, and her eyes traced with lines from laughing. A triangle of moles sat just above her left breast like a constellation I’d never learned the name of. I wanted to taste every inch of her. “You are … you are so fucking beautiful.”

She smiled again, each time stronger than the last, and began unbuttoning my shirt with slender, dextrous fingers. And she breathed words against my lips, strange words about April and lilacs and rain on a dead land.

I stopped thinking. With teamwork inspired by mutual urgency, we stripped each other naked and fell on the bed in a mess of touching and testing and seeking and wanting. It was strange having to re-learn what it was like to be with a person who didn’t have a wellspring of supernatural power backing them up. You couldn’t push as hard, you had to react more, feel her responses more carefully. And oh did she respond. There were a whole bunch of times I thought I’d honestly broken the lady, only to have her rise up and pull me back to her. She fucked with a sincere, mortal yearning that I couldn’t help but be drawn to.

It took a while, but eventually exhaustion overcame enthusiasm and she lay on her back, panting, one arm crooked over her eyes as if she was trying to dab lying down.

“That was…” she began.

“I hope it was what you…” I tried.

“Uh-huh. I still … I’m not normally that much of a screamer.”

I reached out to stroke her stomach, and she shifted almost self-consciously. “I can’t say I minded.”

“I feel—fuck. That was—I don’t even.”

On the one hand, this was all very flattering. On the other, I wasn’t used to getting a reaction quite this intense. I like to think I’m pretty good in bed, but I don’t normally literally blow people’s minds.

“I feel like a virgin sacrifice to a pagan goddess.” She turned to look at me. There were almost tears in her eyes. “I—I still can’t believe you’re real.”

I looked at her—all the naked beautiful remarkable humanity of her. That was going to be the problem, wasn’t it? I wasn’t real, and she was. I could touch ordinary, every now and then, but I was a half-faery who’d been to hell, sworn fealty to an otherworldly queen, and been the lover of the vampire prince of pleasure. I could visit this world but I couldn’t live in it. I didn’t know what to say.

She ran her hands over my face, down my neck, across my breasts and my body. “It’s like—God it’s like I never want to stop touching you.” She laughed. “Christ on a bike, I’ve just fucked Artemis.”

And I’ve just fucked an estate agent from Brentwood. And it felt so good, and so right, and so perfect and so … small. Suddenly I was convinced I should be anywhere else but should be and was going to be were different things. Shit I wished I wasn’t so terrified of making decisions. “Should I …? How do you …? I can go.”

Her hand snapped back. “Do you want to?”

If you knew me, lady, you’d know I have no idea what I want. “No. It’s—it seems like you might want to keep this in the fantasy space. A get up tomorrow, go to work like it never happened deal.”

She flipped onto her back and covered her face with her hands, emitting a sound that was a mixture between a sigh and a groan. “Fuuuuuuuck. I fucking fucked that up, didn’t I. Can you please forget I called you a goddess? It was stupid, and cheesy, and way too intense.”

“It’s cool.” I wished I could have thought of something more eloquent than it’s cool. “It was the sex talking. Believe me, I’ve been there.”

“Then will you stay? I’d like to wake up with you. I’d like to have some proof this wasn’t a dream.”

Which was ironic in a way. Most days I would have been glad of proof that it was. “Of course. And thank you. For your help with the case and for”—I made an inarticulate gesture that strove to encompass her, dinner, the bed, and everything else that had happened that evening—“for all of it.” I kissed her again, and she moved against me like—like nothing, like a woman in a bed kissing somebody she wanted badly to be kissed by. “Besides,” I added when we stopped for breath, “you still owe me that poem.”

She pulled away and retrieved her glasses from where they’d fallen during the—y’know—fucking and put them back on. Then she sat with her bare back against the cold wood of the headboard for a minute and gazed at me. “Wait a moment,” she said. “I really want to look at you with these on for a bit.”

That made me super self-conscious. I scrabbled for the sheets but got into an unhelpful tangle. “I’m not sure I do well in good lighting or with close scrutiny.”

She actually rolled her actual eyes at me. “Oh please. I know I said I’d cool it with the goddess talk, but you’ve got a body like a renaissance painting of Diana. Now stop being coy and let me see you.”

“Fine,” I humphed, sitting up with a sheet around my waist in something I hoped passed for a classical pose. “These are my tits, enjoy them.”

“Oh, I am, believe me.” She reached onto the side table and picked up a slim blue book with nothing on the cover but the words T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems. “Um, before I start, I should say that when you asked me what my favourite poem was, I made the mistake of telling you the truth. And I’m now wishing I’d picked something sexier. If you’re expecting this to get erotic any time soon you’ll be very disappointed.”

I crawled across the bed towards her and lay my head in her lap. “It’s cool. Poems that try to be sexy never manage it anyway. Like the one with the flea that we had to do in school.”

Seemingly without thinking about it, she reached down and started stroking my hair. “Part one,” she read. “The Burial of the Dead.”

“Hang on,” I murmured, “this thing is in chapters? How the hell long is it?”

“I did say it wouldn’t be particularly erotic.”

“You didn’t say it would be long.”

“Shhh, just listen a while.” And she read.

There was something magical about hearing a poem read by a person who plainly loved it. I let her voice wash over me, and drifted away to sleep.

* * *

I opened my eyes in the Dream of an Unreal City. By the riverside, a woman in green sat at a folding table dealing tarot onto a black tablecloth.

“Nim?”

She looked up. Not Nimue, not quite. I’d never quite worked out what the relationship between the green lady and my friend was—sides of the same coin or something. I was pretty sure she was flat-out evil, but that hadn’t stopped me striking a bargain with her in a failed effort to save Nim’s life. “It’s been a while.”

“I didn’t know if you could still—if she could still—my dreams have been quiet.”

She turned a card on the table in front of her. The three of wands—I hoped this wasn’t going to involve homework. “She can’t. I can. I have always been stronger.”

“You told me that if I worked with you she’d be safe.”

“And she is. She lives when she would otherwise have died.”

I looked out over the water—boats sailed past on what I thought might have been the Thames, but it was nowhere on the river that I knew. We stood in the shadow of a dream of London Bridge. “I suppose you want something.”

“I want you to bring her back.” She turned another card. The Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, I was going to have to start looking this stuff up in the morning. “You are tied to her. Call it destiny, call it loyalty. Call it love if you wish.”

“If I could bring her back,” I pointed out, “I would have done it already.” Somewhere in the distance I heard a sound like sixty hounds barking in the chase.

The green lady rose from her card-table. She was like Nimue in every way except that her hair and eyes were the colour of the deep ocean, or the colour you might imagine the deep ocean to be, and that mattered more. She came closer to me, and closer—personal space had never been a big thing with her—bringing her lips to my ear, laying a gently intrusive hand on my hip. “Wit you well, Kate Kane, that you are she that shall sit in the Siege Perilous, and achieve the Sangreal.”

Hurry up please. It’s time.

I woke up.

6

Mornings & Emojis

Penelope the divorced estate agent’s alarm clock was beeping at a frequency that seemed precisely calculated to feel like you were having a thin kitchen skewer stabbed into your brain just behind the eye sockets. She shifted beside me, rolled over and bit me on the shoulder.

“Ow! Seriously what the? Ow.”

She gave me what I thought was an inappropriately flirtatious smile for a woman who’d just technically committed assault and battery. “I wanted to make sure you were real.”

“By biting me?”

“I thought I should try using all my senses.”

I caught myself wondering how much time was left before she had to go to work. “And?”

“This is going to sound weird and like I read far too much poetry, but you taste like—I don’t know—something deep and wild and ancient. It’s …” She slid herself closer. “It’s hard to keep away from.”

It was early enough that we weren’t strictly into the cold light of day yet, but I was becoming increasingly confident that she absolutely should keep away from it. I didn’t quite realise that my mother’s hold over me had got strong enough that you could literally taste it. Still, Penelope was right there, and while I liked to pretend that a night’s sleep led me to make better decisions, it very seldom did. I kissed her.

She didn’t have quite the extreme reaction she’d had the night before—there was always a rush to first contact you could never quite recapture, but she sank into it all the same, pressing herself against me and giving me her fragile, mortal fire.

“I thought you’d have turned to leaves by now,” she told me when she finally broke away. “I’m glad you stayed, though. If I’d woken to find you gone, I’d have always thought I dreamed you.”

I sat up. This whole thing had a coming-to-an-end vibe I didn’t much like but was beginning to see was absolutely necessary. It had been fun. In a life where I was less fucked up and she was less liable to get killed by anything in my world it could have worked. But this was almost certainly going to be a one time deal. “You can dream better, I’m sure.”

“I doubt that. You were—it was—I’ll remember this for a long time.”

So would I, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. “This doesn’t have to—I mean—we could do it again some time.”

“Maybe.” She looked almost sad for a moment, then she turned away and started to fetch fresh clothes from the wardrobe. It would have been irresponsible of me to try to rip them off her again and, unusually, I decided against irresponsible.

“I enjoyed—I had—this was good. Thank you.”

She adjusted her skirt and began buttoning up a new blouse. “Don’t. It was”—she blushed, so deeply I almost felt flattered—“it was my pleasure. Very much my pleasure.”

“But you don’t want to…?”

She retrieved her jacket from the floor, came back to the bed and kissed me again—I could still taste the night before on her lips and she touched me with such passion and hunger that I felt almost shocked. “I don’t think”—she walked away again—“that is, I hardly know you, Kate Kane, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who’ll be my plus one to the company Christmas party or pick my kids up from school if I’m late on a viewing. You showed me how to fly last night, and I probably can’t explain quite how badly I needed it. But I know where the sun is, and I’d rather keep my wings.”

Picking up her bag from the floor, she came back to the bed and kissed me one last time. Then, with a final lingering glance, she went to work. For about eighteen minutes I toyed with the idea of just waiting around to see if she still felt the same when she got back. But while the best-case scenario of that plan looked enticing, the worst-case scenario involved restraining orders and police cars. Plus there was at least some chance her kids would be home before she was and I did not want to explain to a pair of teenagers why a strange naked woman was wandering around their lovely family home.

I also wasn’t sure I wanted to explain to myself why I’d been naked in that last hypothetical.

I dressed, briefly considered leaving a note but realised I didn’t have a pen, or any paper, and stealing somebody else’s property in order to leave them a thanks for the one-night-stand card was probably at the very least mixed etiquette. So I left the house, and left Brentford. I felt weirdly like crying.

Now things were no longer case-critical I could take the slower overland route back to the centre of town. It meant I was crowded onto buses alongside the sorts of people who travelled on buses—so weirdos who believed that travelling by tube put you at risk of being haunted by visions of dead wizards—but the anonymity of public transport gave me space to think.

I was sliding fast into one of those too-much-to-do-not-enough-to-do spaces where there was a whole lot going on but not a great many ways I could affect any of it. At some point I needed to repeat my so far 100% successful call-every-estate-agent strategy in Maidenhead. Which would be a faff, and probably wouldn’t end anything like as well as it had this time, but would at least help me help Galatea find what had happened to her husband, although my experience of missing spouses was that the client never liked the answer, since it was almost always “dead”, “cheating” or in particularly depressing cases “dead and cheating”. Then there was operation fix Elise, which basically involved sitting around and waiting for Dr Bright to text back. And we capped it all off with my seemingly never-ending problem of being sent mystical visions by magical women who wanted me to do vague but symbolically important things that they could never quite be bothered to explain the details of.

About halfway through Chiswick, my phone buzzed.

I had a dream. You died.

Then.

:sad emoji::sad emoji::sad emoji:

I hadn’t heard from Sofia in a while. Last I’d heard she’d done a lot better in her A-Levels than I did under similar circumstances—I guess she was just smarter than me—and was now well into a five-year medical degree at Imperial. Of course she was also still technically the reincarnation of the Delphic Oracle and so I tended to take it seriously when she dreamed about things.

Dead how? Then in an effort to seem down with the kids I searched for a suitable pictorial representative of my emotional state and settled on a slightly befuddled-looking blue elephant.

Stabbed. Or drowned. A bit unclear. Why did you send me an elephant? :confused emoji:

Oh joy. How can it be unclear?! Stabbing and drowning are very different. What’s wrong with the elephant? :penguin emoji:

A woman in a black dress held you under a lake. Then you were dead on the shore and stuck full of swords. It was weird. :worried emoji:

Then a moment later. And I know I’m nearly twenty now, but you should probably be careful about sending me random emojis because half of them mean sex stuff.

Shit. Wait, which ones mean sex stuff?

Lots of them. Use your imagination.

I have a really dirty imagination. That won’t help.

If it looks like a penis or a pair of breasts, it’s probably sex stuff.

I was kind of pleased that Sofia had grown up enough that she could type the word penis into a text message perfectly comfortably. Then again she was a medic now, she’d probably been slicing them off cadavers since fresher’s week. You are no help.

You realise you’ve spent more time asking me about sex emojis than about how I foretold your death.

She had a point. Although, to be honest, she’d known me long enough I couldn’t imagine she was terribly surprised. People try to kill me all the time. I don’t often accidentally sext teenagers.

Enough time passed without a reply that I panicked slightly. It was the penguin, wasn’t it. Do penguins mean cunnilingus?

:confused face::confused face::confused face:

Then

I suppose they do now?

Here lies Kate Kane. Was in a hole. Didn’t stop digging. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.

Tell you what. Let’s go back to talking about me dying. I’ll feel way better.

Good idea.

I waited for a moment, but nothing else was forthcoming. So—anything else?

Just what I’ve told you. Black dress. Water. Swords. I made a note in my dream journal.

You have a dream journal?

My dreams are messages about the future from the God of the Sun. Of course I have a dream journal.

She had a point. Again. It still sounded a bit teenagery to me but then she was still technically a teenager, so she had me coming and going.

Am I the only one who’s in danger? I tried.

I don’t know.

That was vague. Vague was seldom good when it came to prophecies. Of course it was also usually all you got. It seemed that consulting the oracle had taken me about as far as it was going to.

Or maybe not. A thought struck me.

Sofia, have you ever tried doing the prophecy thing deliberately?

:scared emoji: What do you mean?

I mean someone asks you a question and you talk to the gods or destiny or whatever

Out of habit, I split it into two texts. And then you say something cryptic and ironic that they can look back at later and be all oh right she was talking about MY empire.

There was nothing for a moment. The bus stopped and I had to get up to let somebody off. Then Sofia sent: Try asking me something.

I thought about it. There was a lot I wanted to know. There was also a lot I absolutely didn’t want to know. I tried for something low-risk. How can I save Elise.

Another long pause. Two more bus-stops passed and I had to give up my seat for an old man with a walking stick.

Finally Sofia got back with: Nothing. Sorry.

Perhaps we need to get you high.

You’ve already sent me a suggestive penguin, now you’re trying to push drugs on me?

I really thought you’d stop being able to play the “help you’re corrupting my innocence” card when you turned eighteen.

:shy emoji:

Don’t come all blushing face with me, young lady.

:tongue-sticking-out emoji:

Then

It’s good to hear from you. I’d been worried.

Fuck me in the ear with a rusty egg whisk. How downhill had my life gone that a psychic teenager with an on-again-off-again vampire boyfriend and all the pressures of actual real life medical school had enough space to be concerned about me? I’m fine.

I know you can take care of yourself. It’s just you usually don’t.

It was beyond humiliating that she was the one giving me life advice. I liked to think I’d been a non-terrible influence on her, if only as a kind of negative example, but I wished I could at least sometimes pretend I was more of a grown-up than she was. I’m doing better, I think. How’s Patrick?

Another pause. Out of the picture for now. It was getting weird with him still being all highschool and me having clinics to do.

How do you feel about that? See me being completely neutral about the girl I was quite fond of in a completely platonic and slightly older-sisterly way finally dumping the guy I’d been hoping she’d dump for literally years.

Strange. I miss him and I still care about him. But I need to focus on me for now.

And Samuel?

Gone back to being god of the sun.

Then.

We don’t have normal exes, do we?

Nope. Welcome to the life of the magical destiny girl. Fifteen years from now you’ll find yourself in bed with an estate agent wondering what life would have been like if you’d made different choices.

The bus finally arrived at Bow Street, or at least close enough to Bow Street that I could walk it. That seems oddly specific was Sofia’s reply.

Long story.

How long?

I thought about it. Not that long. I went to bed with an estate agent and it made me wonder what life would have been like if I’d made different choices.

:confused face:

Then

Estate agent?

Estate agents are people too. I made my way upstairs to my office, and was alarmed to see the main door—the one with the frosted glass and the Kane & Archer sign I really should have got around to replacing—swinging open. Hold on think I might have a break-in.

I sidled closer, wishing I’d brought a weapon, but I’d got far more lax about going armed since I stopped caring if I lived or died. Much as I hated to do it, I reached for my mother’s power, trying to touch as little of it as I could. The senses always came first and easiest, and they were all I needed for now. My eyes sharpened and the scents on the breeze took on new and dangerous characters. The walls were tamed stone, the air smelled of wild pursuits and the faintest trace of a very expensive perfume. I stalked closer and pushed the door open.

Tara Vane-Tempest was lounging with her feet on my desk, displaying much more of her legs than I could cope with while also keeping in control of my mother’s instinct to chase and catch and kill. “You didn’t think I’d wait outside did you?” she drawled.

I banished my mother’s power as quickly as I could, not liking how hard that was getting these days, and glanced back at my phone to see six messages from Sofia, all variants on “what’s happening” and “are you dead.”

False alarm, I texted back. Just a small outbreak of werewolf.

Then I sent her a wolf emoji. Then, The wolf is not intended to be sexual.

“You broke my fucking door.”

“I’ll replace it.” She swung herself into a standing position with a poise and elegance that should have been impossible in that much flowing red silk. “Where did you go last night? I know it wasn’t home—you’ve not been home in months.”

“I’m not your pet. True I’ve been staying in your house, eating your food, and generally leeching off you for quite a long time now, but that makes me a loser, not property.”

She crossed the office and got well, well inside my personal space. Boundaries, for Tara Vane-Tempest, were very much things that happened to other people. She sniffed me. One of these days I had to think hard about my policy of sleeping with women who could track by scent. It got creepy fast. “My my,” she breathed. “You did have a good time last night. I can still smell it on you, although I doubt you’ve showered.”

“It wasn’t really a showering kind of arrangement.” Not that I’d especially prioritised making the option available.

“I don’t expect fidelity.” She was doing that full-alpha-werewolf thing that I always had a difficult time resisting. “But I do expect courtesy. You said you would wait for me yesterday. You didn’t.”

This was getting at least a little bit unfair. “You told me to get off my arse and start trying to be useful, and I did. Sorry going back to my job and my life inconvenienced you, but if you’d wanted me to lie around naked and attending on your pleasure all day, you did in fact have that option.”

She was still very, very close to me, in a way that was fast moving from sexy into threatening. I tried backing away but she moved forwards. Wolves: don’t run, it only encourages them. “A member of my pack was murdered. More are missing. You solve murders for a living. I had hoped you would finally prove yourself to be of some use.”

Oh. “You wanted to hire me?”

“I wanted you to be on my side when it counted. Something bad is happening, and I think you can be of assistance.” Fuck, it never rains but it pours. I added werewolf problems to my list of shit people expected me to know how to deal with. She turned away and lowered herself gracefully into the chair that clients were actually meant to sit in. “If you would prefer this to be a professional arrangement, I can pay you. I’d hoped you’d see it as helping a friend.”

It had never occurred to me that Tara Vane-Tempest thought of me as a friend before. I’d thought she mostly saw me as a slightly annoying woman she wanted to fuck so she could score points off Julian Saint-Germain. Then again, she had saved my life a couple of times, and I knew some of her family didn’t like her keeping me around, so she must have—crap did I have to add taking Tara for granted to my long list of things to feel bad about?

“I don’t need your money,” I said. It was a lie. I very much needed her money. And I’d meant it in the nice I’m doing this because I like you way but from how she bristled I don’t think that’s how she took it. I decided to cut my losses. “Tell me what happened.”

7

Death & Flowers

It took Tara a while to get around to explaining what had gone on after I’d left her. She paced the room like a caged animal and refused to meet my eyes for a good five minutes. There was something about seeing her like this—her guard halfway down but still not quite willing to let herself ask for help—that was scarier than when she was just plain threatening to rip my throat out.

“Was it that bad?” I asked, then immediately wished I hadn’t.

She stopped in front of the desk and stared at me for a long moment. It was like she could barely form the words. Eventually she managed exactly one: “Skinned.”

“Alive or dead.” I wished I hadn’t asked that either.

“I don’t know.” Her eyes went yellow, and her fingernails lengthened into claws. Claws that she dug into the back of my chair but hey, furniture was cheap. Well, the furniture I bought was cheap.

“Where?” That question was safer, I hoped.

“On the edge of the Place of Ice and Darkness, the realm of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter.”

That was worrying. I’d never had any particular contact with that particular Faery Lord, but his-her child—the Merchant of Dreams—had been, well, not an ally exactly, but a help at times. Of course they weren’t necessarily involved in everything their mother-father did any more than I was involved in everything that went on in the Deepwild, but they were likely to know something, or be able to sense it at least. “I never thought that the King-Queen was the tearing apart type. That’s more my mother’s style.”

“Which is one of many things that concern me.”

“You think she’s involved?”

Tara shook her head. “No, I think something else is. I know you believe I’m too suspicious of mortal sorcerers, but this stinks of witchcraft. A bargain with a faery creature, hunting a werewolf for her skin. This is human magic of the bloody kind.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Come to Safernoc. See what you can find. We will need to take vengeance for this. Terrible vengeance.”

I wasn’t going to argue. Tara had come through for me when I needed her and I had to do the same. Even if that meant taking a case that didn’t pay and was apparently going to start with me looking at a flayed corpse.

Quietly, because subdued didn’t begin to describe the mood, we went outside and Tara called the car around. Since she’d busted my front door it meant I was leaving all my important documentation where anyone could nick it but what were they going to do? Steal my debts? And if somebody went to the office looking for information the joke was on them. If I couldn’t sort through my filing system a burglar had no chance. Which, now I thought about, it felt shitty because Elise had left my books in good shape but a couple of years of having to sort this stuff out on my own had added the basic administration of my own damned business to the list of things I’d ruined.

Travel with Julian had been all limousines all the way, because she’d been a motherfucking vampire prince and she wanted the world to know it. Tara, on the other hand, had a fondness for the classics, so we were chauffeured to Safernoc in a lovingly maintained Aston Martin DB5. This being Tara, I half-expected her to jump me in the back seat, but instead she lay her head against my shoulder and took my hand in hers.

“I’m sorry about your door,” she said. “I was angry. Last night was difficult for me, and I didn’t like that I was alone.” She turned her face towards me, midway between vulnerable and accusing. “I like even less that you were with a human.”

With Julian I’d got used to having a partner for whom sexual jealousy was an almost total non-issue. Then again, she did spend most of her evening surrounded by half-naked women making come-bite-me eyes, so it would have been mega hypocritical. Tara was different—territorial. And also kinda werewolf-racist. “I know you’ve been through some shit,” I said. “But if you’re going to object to my lovers can you not do it on the basis of species.”

“Lovers is it now?” Her fingers threaded through mine much more gently than she was speaking. “I was hoping you’d at least just think of her as somebody you fucked.”

“I’m not into labels.”

“Grandmama’s right. You make me weak.”

I put my arm around her, which maybe wasn’t the best way to challenge that particular complaint. “You’re not weak, Tara. You just need help with something.”

“I’m supposed to defend my pack. If I can’t, what good am I?”

“Defending people doesn’t mean nothing bad can ever happen to them. You’re a werewolf, not a god. And even if you were, I’ve met an actual god and he came close to losing everything to Sebastian Douglas. This world is full of stuff that can mess you up really, really badly. You’ve saved a lot of people from a lot of shit.”

I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was shaking. Whether it was in fear, anger, or something else entirely, I didn’t know. “They skinned her, Kate Kane. It’s the worst thing you can do to one of my kind.”

“And you’ll find who did it, and you’ll do whatever heinous shit you need to do to settle the score.”

“We don’t even know where to begin.”

I squeezed her hand. “Which is why you brought me in. I don’t have a lot of talents, but finding out who did stuff is how I pay my bills. And it’s true I’ve been a bit lax on the whole bill-paying front lately, but the point still stands. We’ve got this.”

She shuffled down and put her head on my lap. It was terrible road safety but unless we were hit by a truck full of silver bullets she was safe enough. “Will you see her again?” she asked.

“No. She was—it was—I think it was one of those ships in the night deals.” The words fear death by water crept into my head uninvited.

The car pulled out of London and wound slowly through the countryside.

I wasn’t looking forward to the bit that was coming next. I’d seen my fair share of dead bodies, human and otherwise, but they’d all had their skin on. We didn’t talk for the rest of the journey, but I stroked Tara’s hair and she seemed to find that soothing in a way that I chose to interpret as more human and less canine. Not that it mattered right then. For the first time in our relationship it unequivocally wasn’t a sex thing.

We decarred in the forest-shadowed car park at Safernoc Hall, with its slightly-too-on-the-nose fountain with the howling wolves, and walked up to the ancestrally imposing front door, which was already being held open by a small army of servants. As we approached the building, Tara’s bearing shifted from “this is falling apart and I can’t even” to “queen of all I survey”. She made the switch so suddenly and instinctively it was almost jarring, but that was … the deal. Being a hereditary werewolf-aristocrat came with its perks, but space to be vulnerable wasn’t one of them.

With a curt nod at the staff, Tara led me through the house and out the back door into a large and well-maintained garden. Crossing that, she brought me into a frankly excessive conservatory that climbed high with the sorts of fairytale bowers you got at the Chelsea Flower Show. I’d been to a werewolf funeral before and knew how this was going to work—they’d leave her in state before bringing her body to a cairn of stones in the deep woods, chasing the darkness away in a sacred hunt. At the moment, though, for all the pretty surroundings and the ritual, she was just evidence.

Tuffy’s body lay on a bier beside a large lily-strewn ornamental pond. It was ringed with green branches—oak and elm and yew, the ground around her scattered with hyacinth petals. I stared at those petals for a long time, not wanting to raise my eyes and look at the corpse. Tara didn’t give herself that luxury. She walked over to Tuffy’s side and stared her straight in the eye. I got my shit together and joined her. This was going to get ugly. Because—look, I was never Tuffy’s biggest fan but nobody deserved that kind of thing and I’m not exactly comfortable going deep into flayed-corpse detail.

“Fair warning,” I said. “I’m going to need to touch her.”

Tara nodded.

I crouched down and got as close to the dead woman as I could stomach. It was hard to kill a full werewolf—they healed wicked fast unless you cut them with silver, they could still fight you even half bled out, and they could go without food or air or water for a really, really long time. Which meant whatever did this had come prepared, or done something incredibly brutal.

I felt for puncture wounds or broken bones, the raw-meat texture of exposed muscle making me seriously want to gag, and only the fear of letting Tara down stopping me. It was nasty work, but it didn’t take long to find something conclusive—a thin, deep wound just breaking the breastbone and, if my guess about the angle was correct, piercing the heart.

“She’d have been dead when … y’know.” I said. “I know it’s not much comfort but I don’t think she’d have suffered.”

“I want to know who did this.” Tara’s eyes were yellow again, but I thought I could also see tears misting at their corners.

There were no other wounds—and that in itself told me something. Fighting a werewolf was messy and killing one in a single shot meant you had to either be unbelievably lucky or unbelievably good. “I’m going to need to turn her over,” I said reluctantly. “She was stabbed, but I think I’m looking at the exit not the entrance.”

Wordlessly, Tara walked around to her packmate’s head, and I took the feet. We turned the body as gently as we could, and I tracked the line of the wound to where I thought the attack should have come in. Soon enough I found it, a wider wound driven in through the spine, with a force that said something supernatural had moved quickly and decisively. There was a vague professional comfort in knowing I’d been right, but set against the circumstances it was pretty minimal. We turned her face up the moment I was done, and Tara put the body back into the closest she could get to a restful position.

The next bit was going to be harder. Well, harder in some ways. I opened my mind to the Deepwild again and let my senses sharpen. Somewhere I heard my mother laughing—thinking about it, a skinned corpse on a bed of leaves was probably in the opening verse of her version of My Favourite Things. There was an overwhelming smell of blood and death and flowers, which knocked me back a moment, but pushing through it, I started checking for any traces the attackers might have left behind. I tried her mouth first—she was a werewolf and if she’d been defending herself at all it would have been fangs not fists. There was definitely blood on her teeth—I swabbed up a sample of it and sealed it in an evidence bag. I did the same with her fingernails. More blood. With the flaying it could have been hers but I didn’t think so, or at least not completely.

“I might have what I need,” I said.

“If you’re going to need to pay for a laboratory,” Tara told me, looking at my samples, “then money is no object.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think this is the kind of thing a lab would be able to help with.”

“Then what are you going to do?” She led me out of the conservatory into the crisp autumn air.

“Something that might look a bit weird and disrespectful.” I took the first swab out of its bag, let my mother’s power flow a little stronger, and very cautiously licked it. The taste of blood made my mother sit up and take notice fucking sharpish, but I’d braced myself for this, and whether it was the years of practice or the preservative effect of pickling my brain with alcohol for the past year or so, I found fighting her off easier than it had been. Still, the flavour of it, even that minute trace mixed with wolf-spit and mourning, ran through my body like a shot of neat absinthe. My hunter’s instincts rose and the voice of my heritage told me I had tasted a predator. Blood on blood on blood. “Vampire,” I said. I pocketed the teeth-sample and tried the one from the claws. The same—that reduced-down fortified tang of stolen life and centuries of darkness and murder. “She fought one. There may have been others and…” I rolled the sensation around my mouth like I was on some poncy wine course. “This is familiar. This is somebody I know.”

Tara growled that horrible bestial growl which reminded me that she was more animal than human on a bad day. “If it’s Julian Saint-Germain, she will die for it. Slowly.”

I put a hand on her arm. “No. I’d—I’d know if it was Julian, she’s … distinctive.” Wine and rose-leaves, eyes like lapis lazuli. One day she’d be out of my head.

“Douglas?”

That was more possible, but it felt wrong somehow. The Prince of Wands was an ancient being of terrifying power but he would have tasted different, like dust and stone and closed doors and secrets. “Give me a moment.” I shut my eyes and let the sense-memory take me. Every vampire’s blood was unique, a rich red distillation of everything they were, everything that drove them, and everything that had driven their progenitor, and their progenitor’s progenitor back down the centuries to whatever accident of dying had founded the bloodline in the first place.

This one was a creature of dark passion, hot hunger, jealousy that burned like quicklime. It was driven by love of a sort, but a love that came from the cold and the night.

“Fuck me. Patrick?”

“That child?” Tara’s voice was filled with a rage you only saw in mobsters and serial killers. “He would not dare.”

She was right, he wouldn’t. Although technically he wasn’t a child, he just acted like one. But for all I thought he was an unbearable little wankstain, he wasn’t the sort to go around murdering werewolves. He certainly wasn’t the kind to do something that felt so occult. If it didn’t have a problematically vulnerable teenager attached, he usually wasn’t interested. “It’s not just that he wouldn’t dare he … wouldn’t.” A thought hit me. “Oh my god, it’s her.”

“Her?”

“His—vampires have a lot of words for it: sire, creator, philetor. The vampire who made him. Yelena was her name. You said yourself there was witchcraft involved here, and I think she was a witch when she was alive. She’s … kinda like Patrick, only older, smarter, a girl, and she can do magic.”

Tara looked unconvinced. “And what would she want with me and mine?”

“I don’t know, and honestly I’m a little bit scared to find out.”

She nodded. “Come.”

I followed her across the grounds and into the dark of the wood. Next stop, the scene of the crime.

8

The King & the Queen

As we approached the edge of the deep forest, the strange borderland between here and not here that the wolves of Safernoc were sworn to guard, Tara shrugged off her dress and shifted into the form of a gargantuan golden wolf. I placed a hand on her back, feeling her muscles shift under her fur as she padded through the undergrowth. I wasn’t sure if I was doing it for my comfort or hers.

It was still only a little past noon, but between the canopy and the pervading sense of supernatural menace, the woods were soon night-time dark. Then there was that ice-water chill that you got when you passed out of the normal world, and I was standing under a full hunter’s moon in a land of snow and shadows. Tara set her nose to the ground and started searching out a scent. I could have joined her: tracking by a combination of smell and occult predator’s instinct is one of the many weird gifts I can thank my mum for, but drawing on her power while in the realm of a completely different faery lord was probably asking for trouble. I’d once discovered, more or less by accident, that I had the power to annexe bits of other faeries’ realms on behalf of the Deepwild, and it was something I was keen to avoid doing unless I really meant to.

At last we came to a bloodstain on the snow. It stood out starkly in the moonlight, the only spot in the entire realm that wasn’t pure black and white. “Here.” Tara was back in human form. Seeing her naked in the cold made me want to wrap my coat around her for reasons that were absolutely one hundred percent to do with gallantry. Not that the weather seemed to bother her—clearly I could add sub zero temperatures to the list of things that didn’t stop werewolves.

“This where you found the body?”

“Insofar as where has any meaning in a place like this, yes.”

There was that. Crime scene analysis was hard enough for the police with their clean-rooms and their luminol. It was tougher for us independents, and when the scene in question was a snowbound metaphor in a faery-dominated pocket reality, there wasn’t a whole lot anybody was likely to get from conventional methods. Still I walked over to the bloodstain where Tara was crouching and gave it the once over. The snow was disturbed past the point of usefulness. But then it would have been, the pack would have had to recover the body, after all, and you couldn’t do that without leaving footprints.

Still I could make out the extent of the bloodshed, and extent was the word. The spot where the body had been found was still soaked through a day later, even a light smattering of fresh snowfall not able to cover the wads of red ice that were packed into the ground. She’d probably been skinned where she’d fallen.

“What was her name?” I asked. I’d known Tuffy—by sight at least, and honestly to no better than a fifty-fifty guess—for years but I’d never known what she was really called.

“Tabitha Fford-Larson.”

I wasn’t going to ask how you went from that to “Tuffy” but then maybe “Tabby” had sounded too feline. The site of the death wasn’t going to tell me much—there’d been werewolves standing all around it and they’d obliterated anything I could have usefully learned from the immediate scene. But further out the snow was less trampled, and while it had drifted and flurried, obscuring a lot of the marks that I could have used to do the full Sherlock Holmes bit, I did manage to find something interesting: Two sets of footprints, nearly covered over, leading away from the scene. One of them, when I brushed the fresh snow aside to look at the older hardpack beneath, bloody.

“She had two attackers,” I called over my shoulder. “One was with the body, the other”—I traced the un-blooded footprints back to the shadow of a tree on the edge of a clearing—“stood there. Watching most likely.”

“Why would they watch while their ally was fighting a werewolf? Tabitha wasn’t the strongest of us, but she was more than a match for an ordinary vampire.”

Had Yelena been an ordinary vampire? When we’d last met she’d seemed like a terrifying force of nature driven by hatred and envy. Then again, when we’d last met I’d been seventeen and deeply sexually confused. Looking back I couldn’t remember her doing that much to suggest she had any kind of special powers. Well, no more special than a vaguely witchy vibe but she was nowhere near Sebastian Douglas levels of I-have-spent-lifetimes-mastering-secrets-man-was-never-meant-to-know. I was damned sure Julian could have taken her, and I wasn’t sure I’d have fancied her chances against any of the Vane-Tempest pack. “You don’t have to touch somebody to help them in a fight. Vampires—if it was a second vampire—have a whole mess of tricks to play with.”

“You have a theory.”

“Standing on the sidelines watching, and then making one decisive strike from behind when you go for the kill? I know the MO. I might be wrong. I hope I’m wrong.”

Tara didn’t look scared. Which was good because I was shitting myself. “You think it was Douglas.”

“It’s what that fucker does every time.”

Barely breaking her stride, Tara dropped to all fours and went wolf again, searching the ground where the other attacker had been standing. After a few moments she shifted back, kneeling in the snow with a look of deep frustration. “Nothing. Too much ice and shadow, and vampires don’t sweat or breathe. It makes them much harder to follow.”

I took my coat off and laid it over her shoulders. “Give me a moment.”

“What’s this all about?” She looked at her newly acquired article of clothing.

“We’re standing in snow. You’re naked. I know it can’t kill you but it can’t be nice either. Besides it—it felt like I should make a supportive gesture. If you’re feeling all patronised I’ll take it back.”

She drew it slightly tighter around herself. “No, it’s—thank you.”

“Actually I might want it back anyway. It’s fucking freezing out here.”

Her smile was a whole lot less predatory than it normally was. “You forget the first rule of any bargain struck in faeryland—no takesie-backsies.”

“Can I at least have it when you go furry again?”

“We’ll see.”

Something struck me. “What was that you said about bargains in faeryland?”

“No takesie-backsies?”

“Well, yes. But it was the bargain thing that I was thinking about. If Yelena was here, if Douglas was with her, they can’t have got through without the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter knowing about it.”

Thrusting her hands into my coat pockets, Tara leaned back against one of the gnarled grey trees that I wasn’t completely certain weren’t humans transformed into plants for welching on their debts to the King-Queen. “Unless you’ve got his-her number in here somewhere”—she pulled a hand out with two old bus tickets and a Werther’s Original that had probably been in there since Bruce Forsyth was still doing Strictly—“I’m not sure how that helps.”

I tried to give her a flirtatious smile, but all the emotions coupled with the biting cold made it into more of a grimace. “If I did something totally reckless and dangerous, would you consider it exciting and a little bit sexy, or just really annoying?”

She stepped hurriedly towards me, my coat flapping around her in a way that I was pretty sure meant it wasn’t doing its job properly. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t even—”

“Too late.” I blinked, tasted blood, reached for something cool and dark and violent and my mother’s laughter rang in my ears. Then a chill wind brought me to my knees and when I looked up, shaking the bloodlust from my lips and the hunter’s mark from my eyes, there was a man in the shadow of the tree.

He wore a cloak made of utter darkness, and his black hair flowed around him like an ink waterfall. His face looked like it was carved out of marble and his eyes were onyx set with stars. “You bring war in your wake, hunter-thing.”

Breathing wasn’t happening easily right now, but I managed to gasp out something along the lines of: “Got. Your. Attention. Though.”

“My Lord.” Tara bowed her head courteously. “Forgive the intrusion. My pack has been grievously wronged and we thought you may know who had wronged us.”

The King of Shadows stepped forward. As the moonlight touched him his hair turned white and his cloak became a gown of the palest silver. Her lips gleamed like sapphires and her eyes were ice flecked with mirror-dust. “And what do you offer me in return for this knowledge?” asked the Queen of Winter.

Chances were, she wouldn’t accept my coat.

“What would you ask?” Tara had settled back into the pack-alpha space. Shit, I hoped I hadn’t screwed her on this one.

I’d screwed her on this one, hadn’t I? “Wait a minute,” I said. “This was my idea, if anybody’s making dodgy faery bargains it’s me.”

The Queen of Winter turned her imperious gaze in my direction. “I do not make bargains, child.” She swept past me and pressed her back against the tree, the shadows transforming her once more. “But if I did”—he gave me a cruel smile—“I doubt you would have much to offer.”

“Come into the light,” I insisted.

“Come into the dark.”

Okay, that was what we called an impasse. “Look, I know how these things work. You’ll ask me for something seemingly innocent and then I get home and discover you’ve taken my daughter instead.”

“You don’t have a daughter.” I wasn’t going to ask how he knew that.

“Tell me if Sebastian Douglas was behind this.”

Tara took me by the elbow. “We should go, Kate. We have nothing to trade, and he isn’t going to tell you anything for free.”

“He was,” said the King of Shadows.

With only a slightly smug look on my face, I gave Tara a nod.

“He joined forces with an old servant of mine,” he continued. “To take vengeance against those who defied him.”

My smug look vanished. There was one place I’d tried really hard to stop my mind going and this was it. If Douglas was doing this to punish the wolves for standing up to him, then—“Fuck, this is all my fault.”

“He’s playing mind games with you.” Tara’s yanking at my elbow got more insistent. “He wants something.”

The King of Shadows stepped into the light, inches from me, and the Queen of Winter stared down as I stood trying my hardest not to tremble. “You bring ruin, little one,” she said. “What would you give me to make it stop?”

I like to think that she was using some kind of faery mind control on me, and it wasn’t only that I’ve always been a sucker for a woman in a sparkly dress, but I was this close to saying “anything” when Tara’s golden-furred wolf-form barrelled past me and knocked the Queen of Winter back into the darkness. I felt something cold and calculating fall away from what I tentatively called my mind and backed the fuck up. It was good to know I could count on Tara to take the straightforward approach to telepathic bullshit but, still, she was in no state to take a faery lord one on one. If we were lucky, all we needed to do was buy ourselves enough time to make an escape. If we were unlucky we were fucked. For the second time I decided to risk starting a subsidiary war amongst the fair folk and called on the Deepwild, throwing myself onto the King of Shadows and digging my fingers as best I could into the amorphous, shifting mass of darkness he called a body.

He flowed past me, a pale hand closing around my throat and raising me up, my eyes coming level with his. “You offend your host, creature of the wild.”

I headbutted him and ran, Tara running beside me. I noticed that she’d left my fucking coat behind but I wasn’t going to hold that against her given that she’d probably just saved me from spending eternity as a bauble in the collection of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter. We kept going flat out until we felt the cold-water rush of passing between worlds, and maintained a frankly intense pace all the way back to Safernoc Hall.

It wasn’t until we were safely back in Tara’s room that she returned to her human shape and the two of us collapsed onto the bed exhausted and, from where I was standing at least, only about three steps this side of completely fucking terrified. Despite the very naked, exercise-flushed, heavily-breathing lycanthropic lingerie model beside me, I stared fixedly at the ceiling. Then I covered my face and thought hard about crying but didn’t quite manage it.

“I fucked everything up,” I told the insides of my hands. “Nim, Elise, most of Nim’s court, fucking Henry fucking Percy, even fucking Tuffy fucking Fford fucking whatever the fuck. The Queen was right. I ruin whatever I touch.”

I felt strong fingers closing around my wrist. Strong fingers and an edge of claw. Tara twisted my arms away from my face and pinned them to the bed above my head. I was about to tell her I wasn’t in the mood for kinky shit, but the look on her face said that she wasn’t either. “I will not have this, Kate Kane.” She leaned over me in a way that somehow managed to be assertive without being aggressive. “I didn’t bring my pack to fight the Prince of Wands because I wanted to save your attractive but frequently infuriating hide. I did it because it had to be done. And when you make it all about yourself and your guilt and your regrets, you shame me and you shame the memory of those who fought alongside me.”

Crying finally happened. “I know. And I know saying I’m sorry is doing the thing you’ve just told me to stop doing. I’m trying to be better.”

“We all are.” She lowered her head towards me, kissing the tears from the corners of my eyes and the sorries from my lips.

She let my hands free and I put my arms around her, drawing her close enough to feel her heart still pounding in her chest. “Why are you…? I don’t deserve this.”

“Kate”—she pulled back a moment and gave me a sharp look—“what did I just say?”

“Not about me?”

“Not about you. Think of it as lending me your coat again.”

I wasn’t sure how I was meant to take that. So I deflected. “I still want it back, you know.”

“I’ll buy you a new one. Tomorrow.” She kissed me again, with a tenderness I honestly hadn’t realised she was capable of, and then she curled up in my arms, and I held her until we both fell asleep.

9

Mornings & Messages

In an unreal city, I stood on an island in a river and gazed out over dark and sluggish water. A familiar, wounded man stood beside me, silver-haired and bleeding.

“Fisher?”

“I am not really here.” He didn’t look at me. Instead he stood staring at the boats that sailed past. I saw he had a staff in one hand, a pair of serpents twined around it.

“Neither am I.”

“You are. This is your place, not mine. Your mistress is sleeping and the time soon comes when she must be woken.”

“I don’t know how.”

He kept gazing out over the river—was this the docklands, or a version of the docklands? I saw a hospital on the other bank, its facade floodlit in the night, a splendour of white and gold. “You know. You have always known.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“It isn’t meant to.” He reached inside his bloodstained jacket and drew out a single playing card. The ten of spades. “This is yours.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted it. “I’ve kind of got a lot on right now.”

“Nothing more important than this. You will seek the blessed castle and retrieve the Sangreal. You will heal the land and awaken the one who is sleeping.”

“Before or after I stop the Prince of Wands from murdering everybody I care about who he hasn’t murdered already?”

“It is one and the same.”

The cock crowed.

* * *

Tara had barely moved in the night, and my arm had gone to sleep underneath her. I wriggled myself free and thought seriously about actually getting up. I was normally a big fan of staying in bed as long as I could possibly manage, especially if I had company. But now the spooky dreams were back sleep had lost its attraction, and Tara had enough on her mind that I’d have felt bad asking if she fancied fucking me senseless before she got on with her very important werewolf duties.

“I might need to go into town,” I told her.

She rolled around to face me. Something about supernatural beings meant that they didn’t look anywhere near as messed up and sloppy in the morning as regular humans. “I understand.” Her hand came to rest on my cheek and she breathed soft against my lips. “There will be a council of war, to which you will not be invited.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be around this evening. It’ll depend on what happens. I need to warn some people about the Prince of Wands, ring a bunch more estate agents, and also maybe find the holy grail.”

She kissed me. There wasn’t exactly sadness in it, but she was still clearly coming from a complicated place. “Then it sounds like you have a busy day ahead. I’d like it if you came back, but I’ll understand if you don’t.”

“And you’ll be okay?”

She hooked her very long, very supple legs around me and drew me towards her. “I’ll miss having you near me.” Her hand slid under the shirt I was suddenly painfully aware I’d slept in. “I’ll miss touching you.” She kissed me again—this was getting more like the Tara I was used to. “I’ll miss your taste in my mouth and your scent on my skin. But I don’t want your loyalty, Kate Kane. Just your trust.”

I was suddenly much, much less convinced by that it would be inappropriate to beg her to fuck you idea. “I trust you,” I told her. And I did. Which was weird because I trusted basically nobody. I hadn’t even entirely trusted Julian, although I’d hoped she’d have my back anyway. Boy had I been wrong on that one. But for all Tara Vane-Tempest had her flaws, for all she was a domineering, controlling, arrogant ball of primal instinct wrapped in a couture frock, she’d never lied to me. She’d never let me down.

“Good.” She sat up sharply and swept back her hair. While I appreciated the view of her body the gesture gave me, I’d been enjoying the bit where she was lying down with her hands on me. “Then when you next visit, we can build on that.”

Yeah, she was back on form. “Oh come on you can’t be all my mouth my skin one minute and then all kay thanks bye the next.”

“Sorry, remind me which one of us is running around the city fucking anything in a skirt?”

I literally facepalmed. “I banged one estate agent.”

“As I understand it you’d only met one estate agent.” She was already dressing and ringing for breakfast. “I’m not sure you get credit for only having sex with one other woman in the twenty-four hours you were out from under my roof.”

Okay, she had a point. And now I was looking more closely I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t been right the first time. She was making a good show of it but I doubted that either of us wanted to be getting that level of physical while Tabitha’s flayed corpse was still in the garden. “You’ll call if you need me?” It was half a question, half a promise that I wouldn’t flake. “For business stuff, not sex stuff. Well—you could also call me for sex stuff—but I am actually on your side on this one.”

Tara had changed into a sparkling white gown that made her look like royalty is supposed to look, instead of how it looks in real life, which is some variant of bald, scruffy, gawky, drunk on gin, or surprisingly similar to Emperor Palpatine. “You’d better be, since everybody on the other side seems to want to torture you to death.” She sat on the bed beside me and took my hand. “But thank you. I’m choosing to believe you’d be with me even if it wasn’t in your naked self-interest.”

The serving person arrived with the tray. I still wasn’t completely sure that steak so rare it should have been on the IUCN Red List was quite the breakfast-of-champions Tara seemed to think it was, but I was definitely appreciating the bacon, the eggs, and the pastry. I was also appreciating her, and not just in a wanted-her-to-tear-my-clothes-off-and-eat-raw-meat-off-my-naked-body way. But in a she-was-a-nice-person-to-have-breakfast-with way.

“I would never have the guts to eat meat that bloody in a dress that white.”

Tara licked a variety of juices from her lips and fingers in a gesture that was too indefinably classy to be pornographic but too unabashedly sensual to be entirely safe-for-work. “I’ve had practice.”

“And also you don’t have to do your own laundry.”

“Also that, although Mrs Duckworth can be quite scornful if she feels you’ve soiled your garments unduly.”

I could see that. It couldn’t be much fun to spend your professional life scrubbing blood and female ejaculate out of a series of expensive gowns. “You know I’m very tempted to wipe my hands on you.”

She smiled. “Such an act would warrant severe punishment.”

“And you think that makes it less tempting?”

“Do you remember we have an actual dungeon.”

I leaned back. “You know, I think the difference between an actual dungeon and a sex dungeon is mostly attitude.”

“That’s a very testable proposition.”

I shifted on the bed, lost track of what my foot was doing, and kicked the cafetière over. Tara sprang out the way of the flying coffee with the speed and agility of, well, of somebody who was secretly a mystically empowered wolf-lady charged with watching the boundaries between worlds.

“Shit!” I tried to mop it up, then realised I was just rubbing coffee and bacon grease into the bedsheets. “That was an accident, I swear. If I was trying to get your clothes off I’d have been way suaver about it.”

Tara raised an eyebrow. Her dress was still immaculate. “Somehow, I doubt that. Mrs Duckworth will be livid. And I am definitely chaining you up next time I see you.”

If only all my crockery-related accidents had that kind of outcome. We finished cleaning up the mess as best we could, and Tara kissed me goodbye and went to gather her pack. When she was gone, I dug out the change of clothes that had once again miraculously appeared in Tara’s wardrobe, adding my old somewhat battered outfit to the pile of wreckage that the mysterious Mrs Duckworth would presumably somehow set right.

There was an element of strategy to how slowly I dealt with the aftermath of breakfast. Tara was going to be summoning her pack together and I wanted to wait until they were all assembled and out of my way before I made a break for freedom. I say “they”. I mean “the dowager marchioness”. She basically hated me, especially hated me having anything to do with Tara, and was likely to especially especially hate me now that one of her own had been horribly murdered as part of a gigantic supernatural feud which she almost certainly blamed me for. Hell, I blamed me for it, and I wasn’t a sour old toff with a heart full of spite and condescension.

When I was sure the coast was clear, I made a bolt for the main door, where I was slightly surprised to find that Tara had arranged for a driver to meet me with the car. She could be surprisingly thoughtful like that, although I suppose it was easy to be generous when you had a small army of people whose only job was to cater to your every whim.

Still, sweet of her.

I took the relative calm and more-than-relative comfort of the drive back to Bow Street to catch up on what I laughably called my correspondence. Which basically meant texting people.

I’d had another “seriously, are you okay” message from Eve and this time I broke the habit of, well, not a lifetime but at least several months, and replied to it. Yeah, more or less. Then: Look, sorry I’ve been so shitty. Then: Thanks for your help with the Elise thing. I’ve met this professor lady who looks like she might help.

After that I sent a quick message to Sofia to the effect that Patrick’s last-ex-but-one was in town and that if she was going by her previous form she’d be keen to turn Sofia into a teenager-skin hat. Then I gritted my teeth and sent a similar message to Patrick. The next step was slightly trickier, because if the wibbly dream meetings were anything to go by I was going to need to drop in on Nimue sooner rather than later, and I’d been doing my best impression of an abject fucking coward on that front for well over a year. In my defence, I was drunk for most of it.

Gabriel and Michelle were the only two members of Nim’s old court that I was even halfway sure were still alive, I reached out to them both with a sheepish Hi, I know I’ve been useless but I’ve started having dreams again and I think I should probably see Nim. I was tempted to follow it with I am a gigantic fuckup, I’d ask you to forgive me but it would be meaningless, but felt that might have edged just slightly onto the side of being too much self-flagellation.

The replies I got were, variously:

Of course, and I understand. She’s at London Bridge Hospital.

Thank you. :scared emoji: Also I think Patrick has left me for good this time.

We can’t stop you but this doesn’t make us friends. Cross us and I burn you.

Leave me, Katharine. I am done with your lies.

So … some of that was positive? It didn’t seem like I’d exactly be welcome at the hospital but I checked its website and they took visitors until 10pm and, well, I wouldn’t have seen the hospital in my dreams unless there was something to be gained by going there. And it was the hospital from my dreams, white-and-gold lights and everything, a Google image search confirmed it. Still, dropping in on a group of wizards who hated me was a job I was very much inclined to put off until the evening, which left me a whole day to fill.

Tara’s car dropped me off at the office. The door of said office was still hanging open but as far as I could tell nobody had been through my stuff. That was the nice thing about having a failing business, nobody could be bothered to rob you. I rang a locksmith and explained the problem, he told me that if the door had been kicked in I’d probably need a new frame as well as a new lock, but that since they were a general security firm he’d be able to get somebody out today to look at it.

Then I settled in to ring around every fucking estate agent in fucking Maidenhead, trying to work out which one had hired Edward Brown. About halfway through the job, I got a reply from Eve. It just said: Professor lady?

10

Tens & Queens

So it turned out that ringing every estate agent in a town of 73,000 people took longer than I thought it would, but I managed to get most of them to at least tell me that they didn’t have an Edward Brown working for them. That narrowed the field down to three places that insisted on a policy of not discussing their staffing, of which one was the Maidenhead branch of the same firm that he’d worked for in Brentford, so I felt pretty confident there, leads-wise. Although not so confident that I thought I could schlep all the way out there, find out what the shit was up with the guy, and get back to town in time to see Nim, make sure Sofia hadn’t been murdered by a hate-fuelled witch-vampire working for a master manipulator with two millennia of scheming under his belt, and then catch a ride back to Safernoc in time to see if Tara had been serious about the dungeon.

Not that I was totally sure I wanted her to be serious about the dungeon. I’d been down there before and for all my bravado it was a nasty place to be chained up in. Then again, the right company would probably have made the world of difference.

To my unbelievable shame, the hospital where Nim had been lying ever since she and Arty King did the mutual-embrace-of-death thing on each other was all of forty minutes’ walk from my office. I crossed Waterloo Bridge and took what would have been a pleasant late-afternoon stroll up the waterfront if it hadn’t got to the point where I was incapable of watching a boat go down the Thames without assuming it was some kind of deep and meaningful metaphor for a primordial vision quest that I was spectacularly fucking up.

Outside a modern concrete building which claimed to be a pub but was clearly actually a bar which is a whole different vibe with way more tapas and way less atmosphere, I stopped for a moment by a lichen-covered wall and stared at the river flowing under Blackfriars bridge. Of course I said “bar” but basically it was a bunch of low tables where—once it got to more that time of the evening—people would be sitting and drinking overpriced beer under a perma-grey London sky. Right now, the tables had exactly one inhabitant, an old woman in a grey anorak and fingerless gloves. I knew without looking that she’d be dealing cards in front of her. I looked anyway.

Sighing, I went up to her. “Okay,” I said. “What have you got to tell me?”

“Why don’t you sit down.”

I sat down. “Should I ask who you are?”

“A famous clairvoyant,” she replied. “But not as the likes of you would know about.”

“The likes of me?” Was I sitting down with a homophobic fortune teller?

“You in your high tower, watching from the windows and never coming down into the muck with the rest of us. You what thinks you know but knows nothing.”

I rubbed my temples. “And which of the many, many weird creatures that seems to live in my dreams are you, exactly?”

“My but you do ask a lot of questions.”

“Funnily enough I don’t get many answers.”

“Perhaps you’re asking the wrong thing.”

Quite a large part of me wanted to get the hell up and walk the hell away. “Just read my damned fortune.”

She turned over a card. It showed a body lying face down on a riverbank, ten swords sticking haphazardly into its back. “An ending,” she said. “Sudden and inevitable, although perhaps unlooked-for.”

Great.

Another card. A woman on a wooden throne, still at the water’s edge, an ornate chalice in her hand and pebbles strewn at her feet. “A lady of situations,” said the fortune teller.

“Yeah, pretty much all my ladies are ladies of situations.”

A final card. A man facing out over the sea, a staff in his hand and two more beside him. “A journey underway. A land in ruin that must be healed.”

I sighed. “Is that it?”

“I can only show you the signs. It is for you to act on them.”

“Thanks, this has been spectacularly unhelpful.”

The old lady gave me a worryingly knowing smile. “The fates help those who help themselves.”

Well, at least she hadn’t told me to fear death by water. I pressed on, passing under the sleek, steel tubes of the Millennium Bridge, which had probably seemed incredibly futuristic when they were designing it in the ‘90s but had now dated much like the word Millennium had, past incongruous urban greenery and joyless signs prohibiting busking, because obviously the trendy, artsy atmosphere of the South Bank would be ruined if people could play music on it.

The weird thing about London—well, one of the many weird things about London—was that it was terrifyingly enormous in some ways and incredibly tiny in others. It was so sprawling that when you looked at satellite pictures of England it smeared grey-brown across the whole South-East like a skidmark on the crotch of the country, but if you walked for twenty minutes through the middle of it you’d pass almost every famous landmark in the whole place. You could stand outside Shakespeare’s Globe and look at St Paul’s across the river. You could lean on the side of London Bridge, look out across the water and see the bridge that you always thought was London Bridge because it’s the one with the big towers, but which is actually Tower Bridge because of course it is. The giveaway, and stop me if this gets complicated, is the towers.

When I finally got to the hospital where Nim was … staying? … resting? … in a coma? … I honestly wasn’t sure I had the right address. It was one of those incredibly private-healthcarey places that looks like a hotel from the outside and charges accordingly. It wasn’t until I was rocking up at reception that I realised I had no idea what name she’d be booked under. I didn’t think it was likely she’d be down as Nimue, but then I also didn’t think she’d be under her real name either, whatever that was. Then again, maybe this place was posh enough that people booked in under mononyms all the time. Like Lorde, only less from New Zealand.

The reception desk was manned by a respectable-looking bespectacled man with slightly greying hair. “Yes?” I was probably imagining the what’s the likes of you doing here tone, but then to be fair to the guy I had just wandered in off the street and obviously had zero clue what was going on.

“I’m looking for a woman you might have here long-term?” I tried. “Comatose? Would have come in from somewhere in Bromley a couple of years back—might be missing an eye.”

He surveyed me suspiciously. Which was fair, I did kind of look like I was a hitman coming to finish the job. Although if I was, I’d have been mega behind schedule. “Name?”

“Mine or hers?”

“Both.”

“Kane. Kate Kane. Is me. And she’s …” This was going to sound monumentally implausible but fuck it. “She goes by Nimue?”

The man got a glazed look and nodded. “Upstairs,” he said. “Follow the birdsong and the scent of apple blossom.”

Nim, Nim, Nim. Couldn’t you even get hospitalised like a normal person? I followed the corridor around to a lift, and was only slightly surprised when tendrils of white mist spilled out of it. In a roundabout way that explained how she was paying for all this—if she was still exerting enough magical influence to make weather happen inside a hospital, she could probably make their systems overlook little things like bills, at least as long as the symbolism added up.

On the top floor the air really did smell of apple blossom and I really could hear birds singing just ahead of me. Occasionally I’d see a patient or a member of staff going to or from a different room, seemingly oblivious to all the weirdness happening around them. Was I hallucinating? I didn’t think I’d ever hallucinated before, and this wasn’t a good time to be starting. It was bad enough having people poking about in my dreams, without the dreams they were poking about in spilling through into my actual eyes when I was actually awake.

Nimue’s had to be the last room. That’s how it was with her—the top of the tower, the end of the line, forever and always. If she hadn’t been such a basically decent person she’d have been insufferable. I eased the door open and slipped inside.

I hadn’t been ready to see her. In some ways it was better than I’d expected—nobody did serene quite like Nimue—but the whole left side of her face was ruined where Arty King had struck at her, and I was one thousand percent certain she was down an eye underneath those bandages. For some unfathomable reason, the hospital had left her lying in this awkward, unnatural position with her hands folded behind her back and one leg crooked underneath the other.

Michelle, the Warden of the Watchtower of the South and Nim’s lieutenant in charge of murdering people’s heads off, looked up at me from a wooden hospital chair. “Hey.”

“Hey.” I pulled up another of the room’s relatively generous supply of chairs and sat down. There was a silence whose length was matched only by its awkwardness.

“Why now?”

“Dreams.”

“Figures.”

“Figures how?” Actions were definitely more Michelle’s bag than words, but I needed information.

She cast a wary glance at the door, then at Nimue’s peacefully—not sleeping, the phrase that kept coming to mind was more like suspended—body. “Gabriel’s been reading the signs for months. You know what crisis used to mean?”

“Apart from a really bad thing?”

“Not originally. It was medical. Ancient Greek medical. Crisis was when you got to where you either get better”—she held out one hand as if showing half a set of scales—“or you die.” She held out the other to balance it.

“You think Nim’s in a crisis? The technical sort, I mean?”

She glowered. If we hadn’t been sitting mere feet away from the comatose body of a woman I’d kinda-maybe-sorta-loved in a complicated way, I’d have been far more struck by how sexy her glower was. I do like a woman who looks like she wants to break all your limbs. “No, I think her spirit’s calling to a fallen knight through the oneiric darkness because everything is totally fine.”

Fallen knight didn’t strike me as a totally fair description, but I let it slide. I’d never wanted to be anybody’s knight in the first place. “It’s not her that’s calling me. Not completely.”

“Green Lady?” I wasn’t sure how much Michelle knew about Nimue’s dark reflection, but clearly enough to get the colour right at least.

I nodded.

“Not sure if that’s better or worse.”

“I’m thinking worse? She’s basically like Nim’s evil twin.”

“Sort of.” Michelle gave the most non-committal gesture I’ve ever seen a human make. “But evil’s not a thing.”

“Try taking that line with somebody who hasn’t been to actual Hell.”

“Crappy isn’t the same as evil. Point is the Green Lady isn’t Nimue’s evil side, she’s her other side.”

“Yeah, the side that’s not not evil.”

Another one of those movements too casual to even be shrugs. “She’s like a reversed Tarot card. Not Nimue’s exact opposite, not the bad version. Just another point of view.”

“Oh, not you as well.” I slumped back in my chair hard enough that I was briefly worried I’d break it, but private hospitals had sturdy furniture. “Why is everybody trying to read my cards lately?”

Michelle flexed her fingers, making her knuckles crack. “Because you’re on a mystical vision quest to heal the witch-queen of London and stop the country sliding into waste and ruin?”

“Oh yeah. Right.” I looked at her. “So … know how I might go about doing that?”

“Find the castle, win the grail.”

This shit was getting a bit too real for me. “Can I make it extra specially clear that we’re talking about the same thing here? Because I’m a PI. I find cheating spouses, not the actual Holy Grail.”

“You’ll do it, Kate. Nimue chose you for it.”

Okay, that was beginning to sound very slightly creepy. “What do you mean chose me?”

“This day was always coming, sooner or later.”

“If you say anything that sounds remotely like ‘every step has led you here’ I am going to punch you so hard.”

Threats didn’t work on Michelle. Playing with fire was kind of her whole bag. “Do your job, Kate. You’re an investigator. Investigate.”

“And that’s it? You can’t even tell me where to begin?”

She held out her right hand and a thin pilum of fire flowed into existence between her encircled fingers. “Do I look like a seer?”

Fair point. But I knew somebody who did. “And I’m guessing this is important. Like drop-everything-make-this-your-first-priority-whatever-happens important?”

She nodded.

Well great. At least if I was lucky the Prince of Wands would kill me before I had to put too much work into figuring out what the hell was going on. I got up and took one last look at Nimue, hanging between life and death like—well you can pick your metaphor but between them a mystical queen on a descent to the underworld and a thirty-something woman in a coma covered all the bases.

I nodded what I hoped was an appropriately curt goodbye to Michelle, and left the hospital. Fishing my phone out of my pocket, I noticed I had another text from the enigmatic Dr Bright. It read: I would be free to consult with you tomorrow evening, if that is agreeable.

I fired back a quick Works for me then followed it up with: Probably a weird question, but how much do you know about the Holy Grail?”

There was no immediate reply, not that I was expecting one. I had rather more success with pinging Sofia a text to say: Sorry about Patrick. I think I might need your help with something. Mind if I stop by sometime soon?

It turned out she was free that evening. Since she was now a proper student, I wasn’t sure if that meant she was too much of a slacker to be committed to studying or too sensible to be out partying. Probably it meant both, which also meant she was once again in a much healthier and more stable place than I was. She texted me her address, although I tormented her by persisting in calling it her deets, and I set out for her place. It was, of course, fucking miles away, because London prices were awful. Still, I’d made the arrangement now, and I wasn’t shelling out for an hour-long cab ride when I only had one paying case on the go, so I braved the Central line to North Acton.

I was still hearing the dogs.

11

Wine & Prophecy

It turned out Sofia was living in a—well it was the sort of place you should probably experience living in for a couple of years in your twenties and then get the hell out of as soon as you develop a real income. I mean, my flat wasn’t great, but these days I generally tried to avoid living anywhere around a boarded up industrial lot or a set of vacant warehouses.

Not being entirely sure what Sofia’s flat number was, I texted her that I’d arrived, and she popped up at the door wearing a set of checked lounge pants, a baggy tee-shirt and a pair of fuzzy booties with pandas on them. Also her hair had gone pink. Well, I assumed she’d dyed it pink rather than waking up like that one day, but I still hadn’t quite been ready for the transformation. When I’d last had a proper sit-down with her she’d been finishing her A-Levels and this was almost like a completely different person.

“You haven’t had anything … pierced have you?”

She smiled at me in a way I didn’t want to think of as knowing. “Nothing you’d be able to see.” I must have looked too shocked to follow her inside, because she clarified slightly too hastily. “No. No I haven’t had anything pierced. It’s just the hair.”

“Oh. Well it looks very nice on you.” I was pretty sure I visibly relaxed.

We went upstairs to a much nicer than I was expecting flat on the third floor. I say nicer than I was expecting but Sofia was never not going to live somewhere at least reasonably well cared for. She had that trick of giving a fuck what her home looked like that I’d never managed to get the hang of. She took me through to a fairly spacious and not-too-tippified kitchen-diner-sitting-room-shared-space thing. There was another girl sitting at the dining table, and this one definitely did have piercings. She’d gone a similar brightly-coloured-hair route to Sofia, although she’d opted for blue rather than pink which made the two of them look a little bit like his ‘n’ hers toothbrushes. And she wore a flatteringly but distractingly tight tee-shirt with Love Will Tear Us Apart emblazoned on it, and while I appreciated the Joy Division shoutout it was a slightly unfortunate phrase to have scribed on your breasts.

“Flick, Kate, Kate, Flick.”

We gave slightly laconic waves at each other.

Sofia, meanwhile, went straight to the kitcheny corner of the all-purpose living space and started rifling through cupboards. “Tea, coffee?”

“If by coffee you mean instant coffee, then tea. Otherwise coffee.”

She made three cups of tea and plonked them down on the table. On coasters on the table. Who even has coasters? Apart from quite a lot of people probably. “I asked Flick to sit in because she lives here and she’s been helping me out with all my complicated life stuff.”

“By which you mean.”

Flick-with-the-blue-hair waved a dismissive hand. “Everything magical is real. Sofia’s an oracle but doesn’t know how to control it. People keep trying to murder her or force her into creepy metaphor-marriages. Her ex is a vampire. Her other ex is god of the sun. Y’know, usual undergrad bullshit.”

“You seem weirdly okay with all that,” I offered.

“Well the way I see it, the existence or otherwise of werewolves has surprisingly little impact on my daily life.”

“Good attitude.”

She flashed a smile at me. “I try.”

“So are you and Patrick…” I tried to express it as delicately as I could. “Are you definitely fully ex now? This isn’t a stay away from me you are too pure and innocent thing?”

“I think it’s really over.” She looked—not exactly sad, maybe a bit nostalgic? “He texted me yesterday to say he had a new girlfriend and that I should not try to come between them.” There was a touch of bitterness in her voice. “I don’t know why he thought I would.”

“He can’t help it,” I explained. What masochistic impulse compelled me to defend him, I don’t know, but defend him I did. Half-arsedly, admittedly. “It’s how he’s wired. Being a vampire makes you young and sexy and powerful forever, but it’s still basically a curse.”

Sofia nodded. “I also think he didn’t like my new hair.”

“So have you tried getting back with—Samuel or Apollo or whatever the fuck he’s calling himself these days?”

“No. Say what you like about Patrick, but at least he never lied to me about what he was. Besides, there’s this whole difficult situation where I’m cosmically his wife anyway, and that makes everything a bit…”

“Creepy as fuck.” That was Flick. I was beginning to think I approved of Flick.

“It’s all for the best. I’ve got a lot of work to do and it’s been nice to have some time to think about me. A break from boys is probably what I need.”

I took a sip of my tea. “For what it’s worth, I can highly recommend girls.”

“Tried that.” Flick gave an exaggerated sigh. “She’s worryingly heterosexual. I’ve told her that she’s nineteen and it’s the twenty-first century and so she’s legally required to be at least bicurious, but she keeps insisting she’s strictly dudes-only.”

Sofia blushed at that. I was glad she hadn’t completely given up being awkward around these topics. Not that I wasn’t keen for her to be all comfortable with her sexuality and shit, it’s just, y’know, they grow up so fast these days. “It’s not my fault,” she insisted. “Some people are straight: get over it.”

If I was better at my job I’d probably have had a better sense of the dynamic between these two. They seemed comfortable with each other, and I got the impression that Flick would have talked a lot less about wanting to do her housemate if it had been something that either of them thought was a real possibility. Of course right now we had other problems to worry about. “The thing is,” I said. “While I won’t pretend not to be glad Patrick is out your life for good, it might have happened at the worst possible time.”

“Because of his ex?”

“Because of his ex. If it was only her, she’d probably go straight for him and his new obsession, but Sebastian Douglas is pulling the strings and that puts you and me slap bang in the crosshairs. And I don’t want to come over all condescending and overprotective, but you’re about ninety-nine percent an ordinary human and that makes you super easy to break.”

Flick took her friend’s hand. “We’ll get through this. I’ve got your back.”

“And I’m glad Sofia’s not alone,” I said. “But Yelena doesn’t fuck about, and while Douglas does fuck about it’s not in a way that makes him easier to stop. I don’t want to freak you out, but honestly, the biggest advantage to having you around is that if Yelena discovers Sofia is living with somebody she cares about, she will definitely want to torture you to death in front of her. And that could buy us time.”

That earned me a look from Flick. “You were, like, in a whole other building when they were handing the tact out, weren’t you?”

“Just being honest. There’s a good chance that this does not end well for you. If there was ever a time to get out, it would be now.”

She squeezed Sofia’s hand a little tighter. “I kind of feel that would be a shitty thing to do.”

I felt a momentary pang of anger that this completely mortal chick was happy to face an unknown but psychotic vampire for somebody she wasn’t even screwing while my girlfriend had hung me out to dry like a pair of socks.

“This”—Sofia’s voice had a noticeable tremor to it—“this is the bit where you tell me you’ve got a plan, right?”

I didn’t. Or maybe it would be better to say I had several. Technically this was my best opportunity to get another lead on the whole cryptic vision quest/save reality/resurrect Nimue thing, but while that was the big picture it wasn’t likely to come looking for Sofia with murder in its eyes. “Short term,” I tried, “I can stick with you, and if Yelena attacks she’ll at least find somebody she can’t instantly eviscerate. Longer term we need to either get you some protection or work out how to get you in control of your weird my-magic-husband-is-god-of-the-sun powers as soon as possible.”

“Which we do … how?”

“Fucked if I know. I still think getting you high might actually work.”

She gave me a stern look. “You are not getting me high.”

“Not even a little bit?” Okay, I should probably stop with this line of questioning because it was beginning to look a bit sexual-groomingy.

“I mean”—she had that sincere expression she got when she was trying to be helpful while also being firmly convinced that I was a sucking vortex of self-destruction who would drag her down with me. Which to be fair I often was—“I think we’ve got some wine?”

Should I have been worried how up for that I was? What, after all, could go wrong if I spent the evening getting drunk with two undergraduates. Apart from everything. “I’m not sure that has quite the same sacred oracle vibe.”

“Well, no,” Flick was already up and rooting through the fridge. “But it does sound like a pretty good plan for an evening. And we could light some incense, get some candles, make a whole big thing out of it.”

I eyed her suspiciously. “Do you have incense and candles?”

“Please, I’m twenty, have blue hair and listen to post-punk bands from the ‘70s, in what world would I not have incense?”

A worryingly short time later I was sitting in a mostly dark kitchen-diner, drinking Sainsbury’s Lambrusco Rosato out of chipped mugs with two girls a shade over half my age. This was not going to look good in court.

It didn’t take very much wine at all for Sofia to noticeably loosen up. “Right.” She set a half-burned-out tea-light in front of herself and fumbled with my lighter. “Let’s do this.”

“What exactly are we expecting to happen?” Flick was cradling a mug that I suspected she’d stolen from the student union, and looking justifiably suspicious.

“Best case scenario,” I said, “she starts giving off sunlight that makes it impossible for vampires to bite her. Second best case scenario we get some useful information.”

“Worst case scenario?” Flick topped up her wine.

“Well, we’re playing with divine power that none of us understand, so I’m not sure there’s really a floor here.”

Sofia finally managed to get the candle lit. She laid her hands flat on the table and stared into it in a way that looked surprisingly like she knew what she was doing, although there was a good chance she was going off movies.

“Feel anything?” I asked.

“Slightly warm, but that might just be the wine.”

Flick raised an eyebrow. “Babe, you’ve had like half a mug.”

“It’s a big mug.”

“It’s a normal sized mug.”

This was getting a bit off-topic. “Okay, even if it’s the genuinely negligible amount of alcohol, warm is still a sun thing, so let’s focus on the warmth. Maybe it’d help if you shut your eyes?”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.” I had to hand it to Flick, at least she appreciated a classic.

Sofia did in fact shut her eyes.

“See anything?”

“Only after-images.”

I felt a sudden closeness as Flick sidled around the table towards me. “If she goes into a trance, let’s draw on her face.”

I was much too classy to respond to that. “Okay, you’ve done this before. All you need to do is get back into the same frame of mind you were in then.” Of course that frame of mind had been in the middle of an arcane blood ritual designed to usurp the throne of the sun with an ancient vampire priestess about to eat her, but maybe she could get close.

She sat in silence for a while. I was almost convinced that I could also feel the room getting warmer, but like with Sofia, it might have been the wine talking.

“Anything?” I asked.

The candle flared, and the air chilled. I smelled a sweet scent that I didn’t think was the incense, which had been old and slightly insipid.

Something, then.

“Felicity?” Sofia’s voice was quiet, her eyes still closed. I was fairly sure this hadn’t gone terribly wrong yet, but only fairly.

“Still here, babe.” She reached out a hand and Sofia took it cautiously.

“I’m scared.”

I didn’t want my job to involve pushing teenagers into terrifying supernatural experiences, but if she could get a grip on whatever weird magic powers she’d been gifted-slash-cursed with she’d be safer in the long run.

“Keep it together, you’re doing really well.”

“I don’t know—” Her head snapped back and a golden sunlight brightness washed out from somewhere in the region of her heart. The light only lasted a moment but when it was gone the room was bathed in a summer’s-day warmth and Sofia sat across from us with a new, slightly strange confidence.

“Ho. Ly. Shit.” I’d suspected that Flick’s up-to-this-point blasé attitude had come from her not having to actually confront the reality of this kind of thing. It’s easy to shrug off magical crap when it’s described to you, it’s harder when you see it burst out of your friend’s body.

“Ask,” she said—her voice was distant, definitely still Sofia but also … not Sofia. “And be answered.”

“What the fuck just happened?” That was Flick. I hoped we didn’t get a limited number of questions.

“The priestess is a vessel. For power and wisdom. Beyond containing.”

“She’s not a vessel, she’s my friend.”

I nudged her. There was a time for sassing deities, and this wasn’t it. “How do I protect Sofia and everybody else from the Prince of Wands?”

“Trust in the sun. Look to the moon. Search for the sea.”

When would I learn that consulting cryptic prophets never, never helped. “Okay, and—and sorry in advance, Flick, because this is going to sound incredibly fucking out of left field—how do I find the Holy Grail?”

“It has had many keepers. You have known some but not others. The bright one will light your way.”

Perhaps I was getting desperate, but I was starting to think this might be making something perilously close to sense. “All right. Last question. How do I save Elise?”

“At a cost.”

Well that figured.

12

Sofas & Otherwise

The candle died and Sofia slumped in her seat. Flick was on her feet, round the table, and picking her up before I had a chance to say something supportive. Although admittedly that probably said as much about my ability to say nice things as her ability to move quickly.

“Did it work?” asked Sofia. She looked noticeably drained. I hoped that this had been worth it.

“I think so,” I told her. “We got some cryptic information and you went all false dawn again, which is a trick I’m hoping you’ll be able to repeat when Yelena comes around to eat you. Which I’m honestly expecting any time in the next now.”

“I can’t believe my flatmate is a legit prophet.” Flick seemed genuinely slightly starstruck. “Damn, I should have asked you if I’d look good with a lip ring.”

Sofia patted her gently on the cheek. “You know I think you look pretty as you are.”

“I’m not going for pretty, I’m going for hot. It’s completely different.”

I shouldn’t have had an opinion on this one, but there was a definite right answer here. “As a rule,” I said. “Bottom lip: go for it. Top lip: be careful you don’t wind up looking like you’ve forgotten to wipe your nose.”

“I think I might go to bed.” Sofia got to her feet a little unsteadily. “I—I hope it isn’t so tiring every time. If I need to do this to survive a vampire attack, I’m worried I won’t be much good.”

I wasn’t sure, but I figured it was best to be reassuring. “You told me to trust in the sun. I think that prophet-you thought you were safe, and I’m inclined to believe her. Besides, I can only speak for my own uncontrollable mystical powers here, but I did find they came easier as I got more used to them.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was very small again. “That’s good to know. I still feel quite…”

“Vulnerable?”

She nodded.

“I’m not going to lie. You are. I’ll stick around tonight if that’s okay, in case we get a sudden attack when you’re at your weakest, and in the morning I’ll—I don’t know—I’ll make some calls. There’s bound to be somebody who can cover you while we get you vampire ready.”

“I don’t want to put you to trouble.” She really didn’t. Too nice for her own good, that was her problem. “I’m sure we’ll be fine if you want to go home.”

“No, it’s okay. You’d be doing me a favour. I’d have to rush to catch the last Tube and…” I wasn’t sure I wanted to finish that sentence.

“And going home to an empty flat reminds you too much of Elise?” Sometimes, Sofia walked that funny boundary between empathetic and tactless. I think it was because she was one of those weird people who isn’t terrified to talk about feelings.

“Pretty much.”

“I miss her too. I’ll get you some blankets and make up the sofa. You’re welcome here for—well, actually, I think there’s a policy that you can’t have a guest for more than two nights but I think we can probably make an exception.”

Flick gave her a look of mingled shock and admiration. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you suggest breaking a rule of any kind.”

“That’s not true.” Sometimes, Sofia gave very good pout. “I missed two entire lectures last April.”

“You had food poisoning.”

“I could still have made it in.”

“If you’re going to claim that you were well enough to go to lectures the same morning you vomited in my lap I’m going to be cross.”

“I was really, really sorry about that.”

They carried on not-exactly bickering while Sofia went to what I suspected was a legit grown-up linen cupboard because, yet again, still-technically-a-teenager girl had a more organised life than I did, and came back with armfuls of blankets and pillows.

“The sofa’s not the best,” explained Sofia apologetically. “Sometimes it’s better if you put the cushions on the floor instead? Nobody should bother you—we do technically have another housemate but he’s always with his girlfriend in a different flat.”

“I’ll manage. I’d have said my sleeping on floors days were long behind me, but the truth is that it’s this or pass out on the desk at my office.”

Sofia hugged me. “Please promise you’ll start taking care of yourself one day.”

“I’ll try.” To my surprise, I meant it. There was something about Sofia that brought out the mawkish side in me. “Now go to bed, you’re clearly shattered.”

She went to bed, leaving Flick to help me set up some kind of sleeping arrangement. The sofa was a two-seater which would have been non-ideal even if I hadn’t been shading amazonian, height-wise. We tried pulling the seats off the armchairs and shuffling the furniture around, but it didn’t help and I was beginning to feel bad about the mess I was making of their otherwise quite pleasant student lodgings.

“You know,” Flick looked oddly hesitant. “We don’t have to set this up if you don’t want to.”

I sighed in relief. “If you’ve got an air mattress kicking around somewhere that would be helpful right about now.” I normally hated air mattresses, but loose chair seats were about the worst thing you could possibly try to sleep on.

“Actually, I was going to suggest you could stay in my room.”

“That’s kind of you. Are you going out for the evening?”

“No…” She gave me a look that I couldn’t decide if I should be reading as amused or condescending. “I mean, if you wanted you could stay in my room. In my bed. With me.”

Ah.

Fuck.

Possibly wrong choice of expletive.

“Okay.” She frowned. “I wasn’t necessarily expecting a god yes take me now but I was hoping for you to maybe say something?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times. Was it me, or was it suddenly hot in there. “No, it’s not—it’s—that is to say you’re very…” stop looking at her breasts, stop looking at her breasts, stop looking at her breasts. “It’s just Sofia is a bit like the little sister I never had and…”

She sidled forward in a way I was really confused to see from somebody born around the turn of the millennium and took my hands. “I’ve got sisters,” she said. “And one of the absolute best perks of having them is that you get to perv on their friends.”

“Yeah, your use of the word perv isn’t exactly making me feel more comfortable here.”

“Look.” She laced her fingers through mine, like we were playing mercy in the playground. And I had to step away from the schoolyard imagery, it wasn’t helping. “You want to stay here to protect Sofia. And you don’t want to sleep on our crappy sofa. And I’m an adult who can make her own choices. And you clearly find me attractive. So what’s the problem?”

I shook my head. “Did I, like, roll in catnip for lesbians this week or something?”

“Well I don’t identify as a lesbian, but seriously, Kate, you’re a hot older woman with purple eyes and Marlene Dietrich cheekbones who solves crimes and fights vampires and who has personally saved my best friend’s life more than once. Catnip is about the word for it.”

“This is a bad idea. My last casual hookup was with a woman whose kids were closer to your age than I am.”

She shrugged. “I kinda like that you don’t buy into the prevailing cultural narrative that denies the sexual agency of women over forty.”

“Are you”—I examined her expression very, very closely. For purely investigative reasons—“are you trying to woke me into bed?”

“Is it working?”

“No.” I mean, okay, maybe a little bit. Around the edges. But that was less to do with the politics and more to do with the … all the rest.

She backed off. “I’ll tell you what. If you don’t want to do anything I understand, but if you’re as much of an old lady as you claim, sleeping on the sofa will put your back out. Come to my room and we can share a bed like two mature, sensible people.”

It did sound better than trying to get the cushions in order. I let her take me through to her bedroom, which was quite a decent size for student digs, scattered with books that had titles like What is Mathematical Analysis? and Groups: A Path to Geometry alongside a reasonable selection of prominently displayed sex toys of the entry-level variety. I laid down on the bed, which wasn’t the sleeping-in-a-cloud perfection I’d got used to at Safernoc, but was several steps better than a sofa, floor, or pool of my own vomit. I got myself comfortable.

Just as I was adjusting my daywear into a configuration I could comfortably sleep in while preserving some element of modesty, I realised I’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book.

“You have no intention of going straight to sleep, do you?”

Flick, who while I’d been averting my eyes and adjusting my underwear had slipped into something resembling appropriately platonic nightwear—an oversized tee-shirt with a picture of Robert Smith on the front and, I couldn’t help but notice, kind of nothing on her bottom half—gave me two seconds of the faux-innocent look, then sat down at a surprisingly respectful distance from me. I updated my mental instructions to don’t look at her breasts or legs. “Listen,” she said. “I happen to think you’re being silly with this whole Don’t Stand So Close to Me bit, but I’d never want to do anything that made you uncomfortable.” She inched closer. “Not too uncomfortable anyway. And obviously if you changed your mind and decided you were cool to fuck me until my eyes bleed, that’d be awesome. But I won’t push it.”

I peered at her. “Until your eyes what?”

“Call it a colourful metaphor.”

“It’s a fucking disturbing metaphor.”

She stretched out on the bed next to me. For something not-at-all form-fitting, the tee-shirt highlighted her curves surprisingly well. “That’s how I like it.”

While I was trying to get comfortable, Flick got up and switched the lights off before bounding back into bed with an enthusiasm which bordered on kittenish.

She nuzzled me. “For what it’s worth, I’m still counting this as a win.”

“Yeah?” I had to admit, it would have been a pretty nice setup if not for the crushing guilt and frustrating need to exercise self-restraint.

“I got you into bed, didn’t I?”

She had. It was a bit embarrassing how much of my time lately I was spending getting schooled by people who could barely vote. I shut my eyes and did my best to sleep. It was surprisingly easy to let myself drift off, even if I did occasionally find myself having very inappropriate thoughts about the technically-not-a-teenager lying next to me.

“Bit of a weird question,” she whispered in the dark. “Do you mind if I wank?”

“Points for boldness.”

I felt her shrug beside me. “Don’t ask, don’t get. It’s just that this is turning out to be a bit harder than I thought it would and I’m having trouble sleeping.”

I knew exactly what she meant. “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks. And, you know, feel free if you want to.”

I kept my eyes as firmly closed and my voice as quiet as I could possibly manage. “Thanks back, but I think if we were both—y’know.”

“Then we might as well…”

“Yeah.”

I felt her moving beside me and heard a few soft sounds of her hand working under the sheets. Then I heard her stifling faint murmurs of pleasure. I should have stayed on the sofa because this was getting un-fucking-fair.

“You okay over there?” I asked.

The only answer she seemed able to manage was a short but insistent mm-hmm.

I was this close to asking her if she needed a hand when the screaming started.

13

Blood & Spite

It was coming from outside and while on some level I knew that running towards the screams was a habit I needed to get out of, I was very much the one with the qualifications here.

Outside, the lights in the corridor were flickering, and the shadows were longer and deeper than they had any right to be in any building built after 1472. Sofia’s flat was on a long corridor with a variety of other student lodgings, some single rooms, some shared spaces like hers and Flick’s. The door to one of these swung ominously open.

I heard footsteps behind me and spun around, but it was just the flatmates.

“What is it?” asked Sofia. She was wearing actual pyjamas because of course she was wearing actual pyjamas. They were dark blue and slightly too long in the arms, and adorable in a sincerely non-sexual way.

“Don’t know yet, but I’m leaning towards something very bad. Stay here.”

I crept into the corridor. There was a slightly unseasonal chill in the air, especially noticeable after the, I suppose, equally unseasonal warmth that Sofia’s Apollonian adventures had conjured in her sitting room. The screams had stopped, which I thought was probably a bad sign. Letting my senses sharpen, I was caught at once by the smell of blood—definitely a bad sign then.

What with the misery, drunkenness, and general desire to disappear into a hole in the ground and never come out, I’d got a bit out of my habit of always going armed in case I had to fight a terrifying supernatural monster with a single very specific vulnerability. It was a habit I was going to have to get back into. Still I pressed cautiously inside and found myself in a flat that was a mirror-image of Sofia’s. It was a bit messier, partially because I suspected that most students wouldn’t be anywhere near as house-proud as she was, and partly because there had clearly been a very short, very bloody fight here.

I followed the trail of spatter and wreckage through to something that looked chillingly like the sitting room we’d been drinking and oracling in. Three corpses were strewn on the sofa. And there was Yelena, lying across them like she was shooting a spread for FHM’s 100 Sexiest Serial Killers.

She looked up at me with sultry hatred. “I was expecting somebody else.”

“So is this a kill all your friends thing?” I asked. “Or do you just have a shitty sense of direction?”

“I always said I would take everything from you, as you took everything from me.” Yelena uncoiled from the corpse pile. She wore a wolfskin across her shoulders, and her whole body had blood smeared across it like chocolate sauce in a particular kind of arthouse movie. Then there was the human heart in her left hand. Subtle, ‘Lena, subtle.

I sighed. “By everything you mean Patrick?”

“He was mine for over a century.” She prowled towards me and I was struck by how young she seemed. When we’d last nearly two decades ago, she’d looked like the girls I hadn’t quite realised I was fancying at school. And she still did, which was confusing as shit. “Until you took him from me.”

“Yeah, but that was at least two girlfriends ago. You’re well behind the curve on this one.”

I heard a gasp from behind me. Which part of stay here had they not understood? I very pointedly did not turn around—if there was ever a moment for a vampire to pull a high-speed neck-snapping this would have been it.

“Sofia.” Yelena made to approach her but I put myself firmly in the way. “And you brought a friend. How nice.”

“Who are…” Sofia’s voice was soft to the point of vanishing. “What did you do to Marc and Nigel?”

Instead of answering, Yelena casually tossed the heart past me. From the shriek, and the sound of something wet hitting the floor, I guessed neither of them caught it. Probably a good call for about nine different reasons.

Right, this was getting past what I could put up with. “Leave now,” I said. “Or I swear I will—”

“You’ll what?” Yelena looked up at me with something that was almost amusement. “Kill me? I know you’ve grown a little since we last met, but I’ve always had power you don’t understand, Katharine.”

Something started moving in the darkness at the edge of the room. The King of Shadows had said—or at least strongly implied—that Yelena had been one of his creatures in life, and I’d known for a while that she had this creepy witchcraft schtick she could fall back on if the superhuman strength, speed, and cruelty weren’t enough.

Fuck it, let’s see what she’s got. I took a swing at her. I was pretty sure the attack caught her by surprise because there was no way seventeen-year-old me would ever have dared go for a vampire unarmed. Or at all, for that matter.

She dodged with that annoying speed and grace that vampires had and caught me by the wrist. I realised about half a second too late that letting an undead witch with blood on her hands get that blood on your skin was probably a bad idea. She said three words in a language I didn’t recognise and I felt a stabbing cold cut right through the guts of me, like my whole body had an ice-cream headache. Then she shoved me aside and went straight for Flick.

Here lies Kate Kane. Froze to death while failing to protect a teenager she nearly shagged. Total fuckup. Not especially missed.

I looked up from my pile of frozen agony on the floor to see Yelena drawing Flick into that I will kill you in an inappropriately sexualised manner embrace that vampires seemed to learn on day one of monster school. Fuck.

That was when Sofia went nova. She reached out to her friend in a way I found almost touching in its sincerity, then almost blinding as a burst of sunlight flooded out from her and chased the shadows from the room. Yelena recoiled and the bone-deep cold that had been holding me down began to fade rapidly.

The vampire retreated to the window, cowed but unrepentant. “Your Hellenic patron can’t protect you forever, and we will come for you and yours. Count on it.”

I was almost back up to full not-incapacitated-by-dark-magic-ness, and I wasn’t going to get a better chance to finish this. I threw myself across the room at Yelena, but she didn’t engage. Instead she drew the pelt around her shoulders, taking on the form of a gigantic black wolf and bounded through the window, shattering glass as she went. If I’d been less shaken or more reckless, I’d have gone after her, but her power would only increase as she got further from Sofia’s Aura of Loveliness and I didn’t know if shapeshifting was the only trick her stolen werewolf skin would let her bring to the party.

And yes, I’m very proud of myself for not taking the get yourself killed for no reason option. Thank you for asking.

Flick and Sofia were holding each other and crying so openly and sincerely that I felt distinctly uncomfortable intruding, but it was about to get really, really important for none of us to be here and even more important that none of us have blood on our clothes.

I steered the two of them back into Sofia’s flat, where they sat at the kitchen table—I doubted they’d want to take the sofa after what they’d seen on a basically identical piece of furniture—shaking. I wasn’t sure which of them I was more concerned about. It was true Sofia had less of a tough-girl vibe but Flick had seen way less of this shit, and a psychopath with the body of a teenager throwing a human heart at you was a hell of an introduction. Right then she looked very young and very scared and I was very, very glad I hadn’t fucked her.

“I’m going to call the police,” I explained. “Which is going to be complicated because the person who did this is probably working with the Prince of Wands, and his entire job is to make this sort of mess go away, and he can also control minds. So if you get asked any questions don’t lie, but don’t say anything you don’t have to, and trust nobody. Especially if they’re wearing a suspicious-looking scarf or their eyes are all glazed over.”

I got what I thought were nods of agreement, although in their position I’d have been half-listening at best. Part of me wondered if leaving the cops out of this would be the best plan, because I wouldn’t have put it past Sebastian Douglas to actively try to fit Sofia up for murder, especially if he knew that she was still doing the glowy thing that would keep her relatively safe from vampires. Then again, if he was, I didn’t think the corpses of three eviscerated young men were the way to go—even with vampiric poking you’d have a hell of a time convincing a jury that Sofia was the hearts-out-with-the-bare-hands type.

The cops showed up commendably fast on account of massacres getting their attention pretty damned quickly, and the rest of the night was the usual round of long interviews and awkward questions, mostly directed at me because I was the person who looked least like she belonged in a student let in North Acton. The sheer bloody violence of the scene worked out to our advantage, because it was very unlikely the police would get from “suspicious lady PI” to “three mangled co-eds” without some serious mental gymnastics they were not about to be doing.

We all gave our statements and our details and agreed not to skip the country, and then that was that. It was also about three in the morning, but I made us all caffeinated beverages anyway because I suspected nobody was going to be sleeping well that night.

“What happens now?” Sofia was sitting in Flick’s lap and staring at the table like she had at the candle.

“Long term or short term?”

“Either.”

“Short term you go to bed. Long term we’ll think about it.”

Flick gave me a slightly awkward look. “You can stay in my room, if you like,” she said. “I think I’ll be in with this one for the rest of the evening.”

Sofia glanced at the unslept-on sofa, then over her shoulder at Flick, then at me. “Kate,” her eyes widened. “You didn’t?”

“Y’know,” I said. “I actually didn’t.”

“And if she had it would have been kind of on me.” Flick pulled an apologetic face.

“You’re both impossible. I should never have introduced you.” Sofia sipped her tea and went silent again. I think the opportunity to be shocked at my behaviour helped calm her down a bit. It was something familiar in a world that was getting increasingly … not that. Then again, now she’d gone full oracle, this was where she lived. She was probably going to have to get used to burying people.

Leaving her own tea untouched, Flick laid her head against her friend’s shoulder. “Not to come across as selfish or anything, but is she going to come back? And when she does is she going to try to kill me again?”

“Very likely.” I said. “On both counts. If we’re lucky she’ll realise that Patrick has a new girlfriend and move on to her instead.”

Flick didn’t seem reassured by this. “Okay, to be a bit less selfish for a moment, doesn’t that mean a different completely innocent girl getting tormented and murdered?”

“She’ll have Patrick to protect her.” My own tea was getting cold but I wasn’t in the mood for it anyway. “And while he’s a dick, protecting people he’s obsessing over is the one thing he’s really, really good at. It’s literally his superpower.”

Sofia wriggled in Flick’s arms. “I still think we should warn them.”

“I warned Patrick,” I told her. “He naturally thought I was trying to get him back, which should have tipped me off there was a new girl in his life. He’d just about stopped pulling that shit while he was with you, but I swear he does a complete emotional reset every time he gets into a fresh relationship.” Or, thinking about it, perhaps he got into a fresh relationship every time he did a complete emotional reset. Vampires had a tendency to fall back on old ways a lot on account of being, y’know, dead.

“I suppose he’d think the same about me, now?” Sofia looked a little crestfallen at that. The car crash that was dating Patrick Knight was still fresh for her, and her experience with him had been, from what I could tell, significantly less unhealthy than mine was.

“Very likely. It’s not his fault, it’s how he’s made—Yelena’s the same. My money’s on it being a bloodline thing.”

“Umm.” Flick waved a hand. “Back to being selfish girl for a moment. I’m not sure we addressed the what-if-she-tries-to-kill-me-again issue?”

We hadn’t. “Stay by Sofia. I think her whole”—I waved my hands in a way that I hoped expressed an inexplicable power tied inextricably to daylight itself—“will protect you for now. I’ll make some calls tomorrow and see if I can arrange something more permanent, but you may have to lie low until…”

“Until?” Flick seemed upset and I couldn’t blame her. It was a bad word to end a sentence on.

“Until we can fix this. Somehow.” Which probably meant taking out Yelena, which was hard enough, and the Prince of Wands, which was so difficult that Julian had left me to die rather than even think about trying it.

There wasn’t much more to be said, so we finished or threw away our tea as the mood took us, and tried to catch as much sleep as we could in the face of the night’s distractions. Having Flick’s bed to myself was, I hated to admit, far more comfortable than sharing it with somebody I was trying hard not to touch. It still smelled of her in a way I found strangely reassuring. She seemed like a good person. I hoped nobody ripped her heart out.

14

Tea & the Hunt

In an unreal city, a great black wolf watched my dreams. Was it her, or was I conjuring a phantom of her?

“Yelena?”

The wolf remained silent, watching me with beady red eyes. Its skin hung a little strangely and I thought if I looked closely I could see the scars from where it had been cut from Tabitha’s body.

“So we’re clear, I’m going to fucking kill you.”

The wolf did not seem overly impressed.

“Come for me all you like, but leave Sofia out of this.”

It padded forwards, growling.

Okay, maybe I’d been a bit hasty with the come for me all you like bit. I was never quite sure what the die in dreams/die in real life rule was—the Morrigan had definitely nearly killed me, but she’d been a special case on account of being older than dirt and psychic as balls. Then again this was a vampire with powers borrowed from a fae lord and stolen from a werewolf, so bets were seriously off.

Sitting on a red rock by the side of the river was the fortune teller from the South Bank. She held a card between her hands that showed a woman on a wooden throne, and between that woman’s hands a single pentacle.

“You aren’t by any chance here to help me out?” I asked.

“I’m a clairvoyant, dear. I watch. Besides, I’m too far away to help you now.”

Yelena came closer. She wasn’t breathing the way a living wolf would—beneath all the stolen skin and transformations she remained a vampire.

Hurry up please, it’s time.

The beast sprang, and I awoke.

* * *

Right. So as well as being drawn in my dreams to weird people who wanted to show me weird things, I also had Yelena stalking me. If I was lucky that meant she wasn’t coming after anybody else, but when had I ever been lucky? Besides, Yelena had always struck me as the sort to go in for equal opportunities torment.

It was still early. I couldn’t have had more than four hours sleep, but I was beginning to think sleep was overrated anyway. At least if I was awake I had marginally more control over who showed up in my head.

Ugh. Stuff. I was developing one of those long, awkward to-do lists where everything was nebulous enough that you could keep working at it forever but concrete enough that you couldn’t pretend it was a problem for another day.

I retrieved my phone from amongst the clothes I had shed last night while trying to get comfortable in a bed full of nope, and looked up Tara’s number. She didn’t have her mobile on her that often for reasons of paws and/or nudity but hopefully she’d just have been getting up and having her customary continental breakfast with side of dead cow.

She picked up after three rings.

“Good morning, Kate Kane.” She shouldn’t have been sounding that sexy that early in the morning. “Whose bed are you crawling out of today?”

“Um—a twenty-year-old maths student’s, if you must know.”

I heard her laugh. There was something weirdly stirring about Tara’s laugh, at once posh and passionate. “My my, you have done well for yourself.”

“Actually it was strangely platonic.”

“You’re not learning loyalty in your old age are you?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. If she’d been about five years older I’d have—”

“—still been her senior by a clear decade?”

Thanks, Tara. Always knew how to make me feel good about myself. “Thanks. But in a way she is kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Why, Kate Kane,” there was a low chuckle from the end of the line. “Are you suggesting we share the girl?”

“What? Fuck. No. Yelena came to Sofia’s halls last night and killed a bunch of guys. She’s going to keep doing it until she’s destroyed everything that she, or I, or Patrick, or the new girlfriend that Patrick has, or anybody who pissed off the Prince of Wands”—I took a deep breath, that had been a much longer list than I’d expected going on—“cares about.”

“And your failed conquest?”

“Is, like, Sofia’s best friend or something. She’s in proper real mortal danger, Sofia probably is too. They need protection, protecting people is your whole thing. I’d be grateful if you helped them out and I’d be even more grateful if you did it without fucking either of them.”

“Worried I’ll beat your high score?”

I felt an unexpected flash of insecurity. “Are you screwing around on me?”

“You’re screwing around on me. And I’m the Marchioness of Safernoc.”

“Yeah, but I’m a monumental trainwreck, you shouldn’t expect better.”

There was a slightly odd silence down the phone line. I know it was technically impossible to hear a smirk, but I swear I could hear her smirking. “You’re not telling me you want to be exclusive are you?”

Given how close I’d come to banging a girl who was only not-a-teenager in the most technical sense, that sounded mega hypocritical. Then again, I wasn’t totally sure I was happy with the idea of Tara sleeping with other women. Or men, come to think of it. If I’m honest, I wasn’t totally sure what she was into and I’d been slightly too self-obsessed to ask. “Well, no, because that would make us sound like we were in high school in the fifties.”

Tara made an unreadable noise that I thought was probably indifference but wanted to believe was disappointment. Then she smoothly changed the subject. “I’ll take them in. Grandmama will hate it, but there’s nothing she can do, and if this Yelena is after them, they might make good bait.”

I sat up and began pulling my socks on. “Sorry, perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. As a personal favour to me, could you please not have sex with either of them or get them killed.”

“They’ll be safe in my”—she paused suggestively—“hands.”

“Thanks. While they’re with you, I’m going to have a serious go at hunting Yelena and her handler down by daylight.”

“We’ve tried that, but it’s been difficult. I suspect that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter is hiding them.”

“I figured as much. There’s still some angles I can run.”

“Do what you feel you have to,” she said. “But watch your back.”

“I will.” I’d been about to say I always do but that was a gigantic lie and we both knew it. “And—y’know,” I tried instead. “Don’t you get killed either.”

“I’ve avoided it so far.”

We outlined the last few details for Operation Hide Flick and Sofia—I’d pass on her contact information in case they needed to change plans, we’d use a codeword in case the Prince of Wands got up to any sustained fuckery (I suggested wheelbarrow), and she’d send a car for the girls some time that afternoon so they could be at Safernoc before the sun went down. I was about 98% certain they’d be okay during daylight, especially since as far as I could tell they also had the direct protection of Apollo, but at night bets went off fast.

That done, I texted Dr Bright with a Really sorry, something urgent has come up last minute, tomorrow? And Patrick with a I know you’ve got a new girlfriend so don’t want to hear this, but Yelena is back and she will come for everything you care about. I’m sure you’ll think I’m on her side now but I’m not. I got no reply to either before making my way through to the sitting room, where Sofia was already up and dressed and making tea. Flick was also up in the most nominal sense, in that she was in the same tee-shirt and underwear combo she’d gone to bed in, clearly hadn’t brushed her hair, and was slumped over the table with a look that said give me caffeine or give me death.

Sofia threw me a cheery “Good morning.”

I came back with a slightly less cheery “You’ll be picked up this afternoon by a werewolf in a fancy car who’ll take you to Safernoc Hall. You’ll be safe there, and more importantly you’ll be far enough away from other people that nobody is going to get their heart ripped out for your benefit.”

Flick’s head lifted an inch or so from where it was resting. “Wow, you do not fuck about, do you?”

“Not where my friends’ lives are involved, no.”

Sofia actually clapped. “I’m not sure you’ve ever admitted we were friends before.”

“Sorry, let me rephrase: not where the lives of the girl my ex was obsessed with while she was creepily underage and her housemate who made an ill-advised attempt to bang me are involved, no.”

She giggled. “Too late. We’re friends and you can’t take it back.”

“I know I’m supposed to be the adult here, but I fucking hate you sometimes.”

“And for the record,” Flick raised a hand without looking up from the table. “I don’t think it was ill-advised. I think you’ve just got hang-ups.”

“Pretty sure my hang-ups are what made it ill-advised.”

Sofia pressed a mug of tea into my hands. “So what are you going to be doing while we’re hiding with the wolves?”

That bit was easy. “I’m going to hunt Yelena down, and I’m going to kill her.”

“Do you think it will be that simple?”

I shrugged. “Probably not. But if I don’t try I won’t know. If she’s with Sebastian Douglas that gets trickier. Even without his stolen god-abilities I don’t think I could take him. But by daylight it should be manageable. Her powers turn off when the sun rises, my mother’s don’t.”

“I don’t like this,” Sofia’s voice was a mixture of concern and censure. “It seems like it could go wrong very easily.”

I sauntered over to the work bench and began perusing the kitchenware. “It probably could, but I’m not sure what other choice we’ve got. Mind if I borrow?” I lifted a steel-handled carving knife out of a knife block.

“Probably a stupid question,” began Flick. “But what for?”

“Well I’d rather not try to rip her to pieces with my bare hands. That sort of thing gets old fast.”

Sofia was looking increasingly agitated. “Did I mention how much I don’t like this?”

“You did. But a killer vampire is out to destroy you, so, y’know, there’s compromises. Oh, and I’d recommend moving your dad as well. If Lisbeth’s still with him she might give him a fighting chance”—Lisbeth had been another of Elise’s “sisters” and so she had invulnerability on her side—“but he’d probably be safer somewhere he’s not a total sitting duck.”

I still hadn’t got a definitive yes-or-no on stealing their carving knife, so I wrapped it in as much newspaper and kitchen towel as I could find and stashed it in my inside coat pocket. Then I gave the girls my most casual “Later” and set out to look for Yelena.

The crime scene had been cordoned off by the police, but they’d left while we were catching our four hours of sleep, which meant I could go through and contaminate it with impunity. I’d have felt bad except that it wasn’t like they’d be able to arrest the killer. Even if she hadn’t been working with the guy who’d spent the past millennium making sure vampires don’t get arrested for stuff, she didn’t seem the type to come quietly. I picked my way past those little numbered triangles that marked where the cops had found important bits of evidence, and around the still largely undisturbed wreckage in the sitting room, to the window. There I shut my eyes and opened my mind to my mother’s realm. Tara had been right that vampires were hard to track by scent, but my strange heritage let me follow something different, something more primordial. It was channelled through the regular senses, of course, but the things I smelled and tasted on the hunt weren’t stray molecules floating in the air, they were ideas. And ideas stuck around a good long while.

I smelled death, and anger, and jealousy as green and as stubborn as crabgrass. I had her scent, and it went out the window. Not worrying too much about being seen—I’d be gone long before anybody had the wherewithal to call the cops—I reached for the power of the Deepwild, and I jumped.

15

Trails & Blood

The strength I had to draw from the Deepwild to survive the four-storey drop in pursuit of Yelena’s trail was more than I’d tapped into in a while—I’d been trying to be more careful since my mother had literally taken over my body that one time—but you had to follow the scent from its source, and the source was four floors up so there we were.

I landed with a jolt and my head snapped forward with the taste of blood in my mouth. My quarry was dead, but in death she had found a way to tie herself to the living world with stolen blood and stolen life and now wearing a stolen skin. She had run in the shape of a wolf through what my rapidly fading humanity remembered were streets, along the wide black paths where the machines ran too quick, too quick, a thing should not be so quick. Past iron walls and wastelands, dead ground choked with dust and metal and metal dust.

A quieter place now, living in a human sense of living, though the free and the wild was still trapped behind barriers of stone, ripped from its home and carried far far far from its native soils. Trees with nowhere to sink their roots and everywhere the black paths where the machines ran (what did they want, that they went so quickly and so loud) I passed a place of wild tame green and still I could taste the blood and the death and the skin she stole and the shadows she stole it with. She would go back to the night. She would always go back to the night.

Uphill. I followed her uphill. Through narrow ways where nothing grew and trees were stone and all was red rock and shadows beneath the rock and glass looking back at me from the shadows. Trees stood forth from the rock, bare in the autumn and alone.

Uphill and ever uphill. A twist of steel across the wide black machine-path. Up again and further out and into paths lined with trees cut in angles like some strange green torture. The world grows greener and I follow the scent at last down paths still black and then at last a metal door lets me into the wood—cut up and carved out and built through and taken by the world-things that come from this strange imprisoned place. I follow the trail of the dead thing in the stolen skin away from the path and into high wood and old wood and the wood of long hunts and bloody nights. I follow her to a quiet place, still water and over the water arches of red stone, shadows beneath. The trail ends in water.

I prowl the edge of the still pond, seeking a scent and finding none. Here she came and here she disappeared. Perhaps she flew, but she wore the skin of a wolf, and wolves do not fly. I had to—there was a word, for when a thing was not known but could be known, was not understood but could be understood.

Think.

I still tasted blood, still felt the essence of my quarry in the air, but her name came back to me, and my purpose. I knew this place. Crouching down by the water I stared at my reflection and tried to remember that I was a person from this world, not an immortal creature of primal hunger from a space beyond.

After a moment, I remembered who I was and where I was. This was the viaduct pond on Hampstead Heath, I was sure of it. I’d been here a couple of times with Nim back in the day—the view over the city from Parliament Hill is so famous it’s protected by law. Yelena had come here too, and she had vanished. If my instincts were right, and while they usually weren’t most of the time, they usually were on questions like “just how fucked am I at the moment?”, there would be a gate to the Place of Ice and Darkness in the arches beneath the viaduct. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was to swim into a faery realm—you never knew what the water would be like on the other side, and given where I suspected that path led, there was a good chance that I’d come out into the cold and dark and be entombed in ice forever. A vampire could cope with that, especially one who was expecting help when she got through. I really couldn’t.

It also meant the sun wouldn’t do me any good. Even if the King-Queen’s realm was accessible in daylight—faery gates, it might amaze you to learn, didn’t have terribly consistent rules—the Place of Ice and Darkness was, well, the clue was kind of in the name. No sun meant no sunrise meant no mystical symbol of whatever the fuck that was a symbol of robbing the vampires of their powers. And there was no way I was fighting my stalker ex from hell’s stalker ex from hell and a two thousand year old vampire who’d come within spitting distance of godhood and possibly a faery lord I’d both insulted and physically attacked, all at once, and on their home turf.

It was time for plan B.

Plan B, as it stood, was fairly sketchy. It was looking a whole lot like my enemies were working with the backing of a powerful faery lord, and the lord in question had a kid running a pawn shop in town. Of course the fae weren’t exactly the types to be doting parents but, as I’d learned when Sebastian Douglas tried to use me to eat my mother, that didn’t have to matter.

I tromped down off the heath, taking a moment to appreciate the skyline—because sometimes it was worth giving yourself a moment to remember why anything at all was worth bothering with—and then got on the three different fucking buses you needed to reach Seven Dials without going on the underground.

I pushed open the door a bit more forcefully than I’d intended, making the pawnbroker fix me with a disapproving look.

“In a hurry today?” they asked. This was the Merchant of Dreams. I had the impression they were way older than they looked, which wasn’t necessarily surprising. If there was anybody in London who could buy your youth for the price of a sunbeam, it was the Merchant. Trading in abstract concepts was, like, their entire job.

“I need to kill a faery lord, and you’re going to help me.”

They smiled. “Nothing is free, my dear. And what you’re asking is likely to come at the steepest possible price.”

“Your patron”—it was the Merchant’s preferred term for the otherworldly entity that had been either their mother, their father, or quite possibly both—“is sheltering a vindictive magic vampire who seems pretty damned keen on killing a bunch of people just to hurt somebody I care about. Also me. Also Patrick.”

“That seems like a vampire problem. I am simply a go-between. A striker of bargains and a granter of wishes.”

“Fine, then I wish you would be slightly more helpful.” I regretted it instantly. Words had real power for the fae-blooded, wishes doubly so.

“Oh, my dear.” The Merchant shook their head sadly. “You really should have phrased that better.”

“Don’t suppose I get to take it back?”

“I fear not. And you didn’t specify who you wished me to be helpful to.”

A sudden gust of wind slammed the door closed, and the steel shutters rolled down across the windows. But that on its own wouldn’t quite account for how dark and how cold it had got all of a sudden. “You don’t have to do this.”

“We both know that isn’t true at all.”

I tried to run, but something was draining my strength and making it hard to even move my legs. The Merchant had drawn a long sliver of black wood from beneath their desk. That did not look like it was designed to go anywhere good. “Ever consider that you might be making a massive mistake here?”

“That’s what you’ve never understood, Kate Kane. Our kind don’t make mistakes. We live bound by rules and laws as old as time, and we act as we must, in accordance with our natures.” They pressed the wooden shard against my throat, and I felt a pricking that meant it was drawing blood.

Time to act in accordance with my nature.

I’d been far closer to my mother today than I had in a long while, and I was almost shocked how easily her power came to me. Perhaps it helped that the Merchant’s shop itself was on the edge of the cold and dark, perhaps it helped that I was extremely fucking angry.

Whatever force had been keeping me in place couldn’t cope with the rage of the Deepwild, and I was easily able to break free of its grip and spring forward, brushing the wooden spike aside like it was a sprig of bracken. The Merchant of Dreams was a trickster and a trader, their business was bargains and lies and traps—there was little they could do against a huntress on the chase. I struck them full in the chest and they fell, cracking awkwardly against the counter and gasping for air. Somehow, they still had that smug, I-know-something-you-don’t-know look in their eyes.

My mother’s voice said now was the moment for the kill, and while I normally tried to resist her, something this time was urging me on. I went for the throat.

The Merchant got their arm up just in time and my teeth closed around their wrist. I tasted blood—that hot copper taste but mingled deep beneath it with something old and cold and still. I smelled the mouldering scent of deep forests and heard the sound of water running. The shadows that had been creeping into the room faded and the chill ebbed out of the air.

Somewhere in an overgrown corner of my heart, the spirit of the hunt still told me to finish the job, to strike and be done, but another more conscious part of me was very much aware that I was in a crowded part of London, kneeling on top of a genderqueer shopkeeper with blood in my mouth.

I backed off. “Shit.”

“You did as you must.” The Merchant climbed to their feet, straightened their suit, and returned to the other side of the counter. “As did I.”

“You know, I’m really not comfortable with this we are but servants to our nature deal.”

“In spite of all evidence to the contrary, it seems.” They bent down and retrieved a slightly dusty first aid box from the floor. “Your blood is your mother’s, as mine is my patron’s.”

I’d hung out with vampires for long enough to be heartily sick of blood talk but painfully aware that it probably meant something. I still had that taste in my mouth of cold metal and dark winters. “You knew I’d attack you.” If I’m honest, it was half a question. But you didn’t ask questions of the Merchant unless you wanted to pay for answers. Of course sometimes the answer was the price in itself.

“You made a wish, and I was bound to respond. And you were bound to respond to that response.”

My eyes narrowed. “What’s your game?”

Which, of course, was a question. The Merchant smiled enigmatically. They’d have answered for a nominal payment—they only cared that they got paid, not how much, it was a faery magic thing. Still I wasn’t about to get further into that mystical bargain bullshit than I had to.

“Forget it, I don’t need an answer to that one.”

Winding a bandage around their wrist, the Merchant gave me a polite nod. “I hope that your friends remain safe, Miss Kane. Although I am forbidden to bargain for their safety against the interests of my patron.”

“I don’t like any of this.”

“Learn to. It will make your life far more bearable. And if you can’t learn to like it, at least learn to understand it. Lives may depend on how well you know yourself.”

That wasn’t happening. Knowing myself was flat bottom of my list of priorities. People who knew me got hurt, and I’d be a sucker to join them. “It’s been weird as always,” I told the Merchant. “Pleasure not doing business with you.”

“Any time.” There was that enigmatic smile again. “And you’re welcome.” They waved me goodbye, making the, I thought, rather cheap decision to use their injured hand for the gesture, despite it obviously still needing some quite serious attention.

I stepped out into the crisp air of the late morning. All this getting up early malarkey had to stop. I’d already arranged a werewolf bodyguard for two undergrads, taken a five mile run in pursuit of a shapeshifting vampire, and bitten a changeling. On any normal day it would be half-past three and I could safely start drinking myself to sleep. Instead I had plenty of time to make—ugh—progress on jobs that actually needed doing. I thought about un-cancelling Dr Bright but I worried that would make me look flaky. Well, flakier.

Which meant I had almost a full day to fill, and only one paying job to work on.

Sigh.

It was time to go to look for an estate agent. Again.

16

Me & Ed

I was about 90% certain that I’d find Ed Brown at the Maidenhead branch of the place he’d been working in Brentford—the man didn’t strike me as the master criminal type, and if he’d just been looking to skip out on the naïve statue lady he was married to, relocating within the same company would be the easiest option.

Their office was situated in what my vague recollection of GCSE geography told me was probably the Central Business District, and I popped in on basically no pretext. There were three besuited individuals inside—two men, one woman—who I figured were probably the agents of the estates. I sat down across from one of the guys.

“Hi,” I tried to look nonchalant, which I usually achieved by the strategic not giving of fucks. “You Ed Brown?”

He wasn’t, but a guy at the back of the office who was busy chatting to another client looked around in the way people instinctively do when you say their names. Well that was easy.

“Sorry, no,” said the man who now no longer interested me. “Did you speak to Ed on the phone?”

“Not exactly. That him?” I indicated back-of-the-room guy.

“What’s this about?”

There were two options here. The subtle one, and the other one. “I’m a private investigator. His wife’s looking for him.” The guy who was definitely Ed Brown went pale and started hurrying his customer along. “I’ve already seen you, Ed,” I called out. “There’s zero point running.”

“I think I might have to ask you to leave.” Not-Ed gave me what I think he thought was a stern look.

“I mean, you can. But then I might start having to explain why I’m here and I’m guessing Eddie Baby would rather I didn’t.”

He was still trying to play the stern card. “I must insist you not make a scene.”

“No scenes here.” I got up. “I seem to recall seeing a pub across from the Poundstretcher. If you’re smart, Ed, you’ll come see me there as soon as you get the chance. Later.”

Tipping my hat at the various staff members, I left. I could have hung around outside to catch Mr Brown on his way out, but that would be asking for a restraining order. If he knew what side his bread was buttered he’d come and have a quiet word. I had a feeling that this wasn’t criminal, unless he’d done something stupid like marrying two women at once, which I wasn’t entirely putting past him. Chances were, it was just shitty behaviour, which was always the worst news to have to bring back to a client. “Sorry, your husband is mixed up with a gang of international drug dealers” or “sorry, your husband fell through a gateway into the kingdom of the Troll Queen” were hard to hear but at least they gave a tiny bit of validation. Everything would have been fine if it hadn’t been for that one unexpected thing that came and shook up your perfect little world. “Sorry, your husband was such a massive prick that he stuck you with a situation where you literally had to hire a detective to get you out of it” was … grubby.

I ordered myself a pint and found a table by the door. It probably wasn’t the most professional decision in the world to be drinking on the job, but then it also wasn’t the most professional decision in the world to be sleeping in your office or with whoever would have you. Or, for that matter, to be spending most of your working day dealing with vision-quests and murderous vampires. But we played the hands we were dealt.

My level of drunkenness was still within acceptable levels when Edward Brown appeared a couple of hours later. In the circumstances I felt I’d shown admirable restraint.

He sat somewhat resentfully opposite me. Leaving aside my general distaste at his actions and my, y’know, homosexuality, he wasn’t a completely unattractive man. His hair was slightly receding, but he managed to pull it off with a sort of Prince William vibe, and despite clearly knowing he was in some sort of trouble, he carried himself with the unconscious confidence that you needed to do well as a professional seller of very expensive things.

“So,” he said. It took a certain amount of courage to speak first in a situation like this. You had to give him credit for that. Minimal credit, admittedly. “You’re here for my wife.”

“Yup.”

“I never meant it to end up like this.”

“They never do.”

He looked down at the table. This wasn’t going to be a happy conversation for either of us.

“Go grab a drink,” I told him. “I’ll still be here when you get back.”

He went and grabbed a drink, again making the wise choice not to try and do a runner. “I don’t know where to begin,” he said when he returned.

“Okay, let’s start with the basics. First of all, just to make sure we’re on the same page here, when you say my wife you mean Galatea, not some other woman you’ve got stashed in a semi-detached in Slough?”

He nodded.

“And is your marriage legal?”

That one rattled him. But he probably knew I’d spoken to her. He shook his head.

“Because you got her fake papers, or because you never intended to marry her to begin with?”

“The first one. Legally she didn’t seem to exist, so I had a friend fix it. In the eyes of the law, our marriage might have been a fraud. In my eyes it wasn’t.”

I didn’t know if that made it better or worse. “And is there another woman?”

He didn’t respond to that one, which was basically confirmation on its own.

“How long?”

“A year?”

“And how long were you married?”

“Two years. Two and a half. Engaged for a while before that—the papers took time to sort out.”

This was getting to be a variant on the oldest story in the world. Well, I suppose technically the oldest story in the world was the one that went “then a big rock came out of the sky and all the dinosaurs were gone” but this was still on the list. “Okay,” I said. “Let me run a scenario by you, and you can steer me right if I miss anything or say anything you think is off base.”

He gave me an expectant look.

“You meet this girl, she’s beautiful and mysterious and did I mention beautiful. Also she’s, like, extremely accommodating sexually. How am I doing so far?”

“I’d rather you didn’t speculate about my sex life.”

“That wasn’t a no. Point is she makes you feel things you’ve never felt before—she’s basically your dream woman. The kind of woman you thought only existed on television. Pretty soon you decide you’re in love or what passes for it, and to your amazement she feels the same. It’s like your birthday and Christmas all at once.”

Silence. I’d probably been a bit unfair, but unfair wasn’t the same as inaccurate.

“A few months later you ask her to marry you and she says yes. You start to realise that some of the things that made this girl so fresh and exciting might actually be problems, maybe even dangerous problems. She doesn’t seem to have parents or a family or really any past at all. You probably come up with some theories, maybe she was a mail order bride who got lost in the post, maybe she’s in witness protection and they couldn’t be bothered with a cover story, maybe she’s an angel sent from heaven to suck your dick and do your laundry.”

“That’s rather harsh.”

It was, wasn’t it? I didn’t know this guy, I had no idea what his relationship with Galatea had been like. And if I was being honest with myself I was partly projecting. I’d had the advantage of being given at least some of Elise’s backstory by the Multitude—the sentient rat consciousness that was London’s best informed, probably most altruistic, and definitely absolute creepiest information broker—and I’d still had to work hard not to think of her as a cross between a washing machine and a RealDoll. I knew there were times when I’d taken her for granted.

Like that time I let her face down Sebastian Douglas for me and then let her die.

“Are you okay?” asked Ed Brown. I wasn’t sure if he was concerned that I’d gone off into a misery trance, or if he just wanted to get this fucking over with. I wouldn’t have blamed him either way.

“Sorry, drifted off. Been drinking for two hours. Anyway, you’re beginning to have suspicions but at this stage in the game they still add to the excitement of it all. You like the idea that maybe she has a shady past and maybe you’re saving her from it. You talk to whoever you need to talk to and get her a passport and a birth certificate, or something that looks like them. You’re married and for a while it’s good, but soon you start to notice little things. The way she’ll sometimes sit there without blinking for a little bit too long. The way she wakes up in the morning looking like she’s just stepped out of a salon. The way nothing seems to hurt her, physically at least, and she only eats when you’re watching her. Maybe you’re being paranoid but you start to think that when you’re in bed together she isn’t really asleep. Sure, her eyes are closed but she’s as alert and as active as ever. She starts to scare you.”

Again there was no answer. Again it was all the answer I needed.

“You’ve never told her where your office is because she’s never asked and—no offence Ed—your job doesn’t excite you enough that you’d bring it up. And now you’re relieved because you’re beginning to see work as a refuge. You’re making excuses to stay away from home and when you are home you begin to feel trapped with this strange, perfect creature that only wants to please you. You know it’s ungrateful but you can’t help yourself. That’s when you meet somebody else. Probably on legitimate business, maybe even on a visit to this office, because my guess is that you came here for her.”

There was another long silence, then he took a deep breath. “That’s—some of that was quite spooky.”

I shrugged. “It’s more common than you’d think.”

“I still loved her.” There was a pleading tone in his voice. Unfortunately I wasn’t the one who could forgive him. “But things had started to be so strange. I’d wanted children and she’d said she did too but it was like—like she was going through the motions. And once I’d noticed it about that, I started to notice it about everything else. I began to have strange, impossible ideas, like she was something else pretending to be my wife. I had therapy for a while, but the feeling didn’t go away.”

It wouldn’t have. He’d basically been right. “This is where my job gets complicated. Technically your whole marriage is legally fraud, and you can get gaol time for that, but my client doesn’t care. All she wants is to know what happened to you.”

“I couldn’t tell her,” he said. “I didn’t—I’m not going to say I didn’t want to hurt her, because I know this hurt her more. But I …” He almost seemed to shrink in his seat. He’d hardly touched his beer. “I didn’t know what would happen. I suddenly realised that I’d been married to this—I don’t know. I thought she might have that dark triad thing, you know? It would have explained why she was so charming but also so distant.”

I wanted to hate this guy, but I could see how he’d got there. Being married to a magic sex robot must have been incredible for all of five minutes, then a total mindfuck. “She won’t hurt you,” I said. “You don’t have to go back to her but you need to talk to her. It can be by phone if it’s easier. It might be easier for her as well.” Because she won’t have to pretend to emote. I didn’t say that part out loud.

“And what will you do?”

“I’ll go back to London. I’ll give you until—let’s say—seven to sort this out yourself. Then I have to tell her what I know. I won’t tell her where you are, but I’ll explain why you left. She’ll accept it, but it’ll be a lot worse coming from me.”

He took a long draught of his previously untouched pint. “It doesn’t look like I have much choice. But you’re right. I owe her this.” There was a moment’s silence, then he added. “I’m still paying for the flat, you know.”

“I’d fucking well hope so. If you’d kicked her out on the street this conversation would have ended very differently.”

There wasn’t a lot more to be said. I left him to the other half of his beer and set off for the station. On the way I texted Galatea to let her know she should be expecting a call and that I’d be dropping by later to see how it went. It would have been better to ring her up and actually speak to her, but I wasn’t sure I could face it.

Here lies Kate Kane. Fucking hypocrite.

17

Me & the Client

I swung by the office to check everything was still in what I laughably called “order” and to make sure no supernatural beings had busted in again while I was away. They hadn’t, which I almost took as an insult. Nothing said “slow inevitable slide towards irrelevance” like the point that mysterious creatures from the shadowy depths of the collective unconscious stop showing up where you work and try to hire and/or bang you.

Once I felt I’d given Eddie Baby an appropriate amount of time to do the decent thing and tell his wife why he’d run out on her, I hopped on a bus to Brentford and went to make sure she was okay. That and give her the bill. Because unlike about half the women in my life, I didn’t have mysteriously limitless resources.

When Galatea opened the door she looked—well there were no two ways about it, she looked like she was made of stone. She was still person-coloured but she’d gone back to that way Elise used to be when we first met where she only moved when she thought about it and didn’t think about it that often.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hello.”

“He’s called then.”

One nod, sharp and precise. Then she turned silently and led me inside.

Everything about her was eerily unchanged from the last time we’d met. Then again she didn’t need to eat or sleep or sit down or touch much of anything, so it wasn’t like she’d need to fix her hair or redo her makeup. Even her clothes were the same—Elise had changed outfits fairly regularly as she’d experimented with her identity, but Galatea clearly hadn’t considered the option.

I lowered myself onto the sofa, and she sat beside me. There was something I found weirdly upsetting about the gesture—if she was anything like Elise she’d have preferred to stand and it didn’t look like she used the furniture while she was alone, so she was clearly doing it for my benefit.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

She was motionless for a long time. “It was painful,” she admitted at last. “I’d thought I was doing well. I’d thought we were happy.”

“You were, for a while.” I didn’t know if that was true, but it seemed like what she needed to hear.

“He said he would let me keep the flat. That I could continue to draw money from our accounts, although I have few expenses. I thought that was kind of him.”

I wasn’t sure I did. It felt more like the bare fucking minimum to me, but I wasn’t about to go there. “Did he say anything else?” There were a couple of things I was angling for here, but I didn’t want to bring either of them up if I didn’t have to.

“He said there was—that there was somebody else. That was easier in a way. I wouldn’t have liked to think that he would rather be alone than be with me.”

There was a melancholy logic to that. And part of me wondered whether it wasn’t the loneliness that bothered her more than losing the specific guy. She’d been created to be a companion after all—I say companion, the less polite term would be fucktoy—it couldn’t have been easy for her to get used to the idea of living by herself.

“Did he”—this was going to be delicate and I was bad at delicate—“say anything about … about the state of your marriage going forwards.”

“Do you mean did he ask me for a divorce?”

“Yeah.”

Another moment of absolute stillness. “He said it would make things too complicated. Because of my—unusual status. His new partner isn’t especially keen to be married, so there isn’t any pressure there. I believe we will carry on as we are. Legally, at least.”

“And what about you?”

I thought the question confused her, but she made no outward sign of any emotion of any kind. “What about me?”

“Do you want to stay married to him?”

“I hadn’t given the matter much thought. Somehow it feels of little consequence. I’m not sure I’d want to marry again, not when it involves putting the person I would be marrying in legal jeopardy.”

She was probably right in a sense. The whole marriage gambit had been reckless from the start, and to give Mr Ed his due, there was no especial reason for him to do it unless he genuinely cared about her. “It’s not just a practical issue, though. I mean, I’m not at all qualified to talk about this because the longest relationship I’ve ever had is with my Netflix account, but if you wanted to step back and say no, this is over that would be—that would be a thing you could do.”

“No.” Once again I had no clue what she was feeling. “No, I think this is … enough. I regret how this ended, but it’s part of who I am now.”

That made sense. And to be honest she probably had far bigger problems than whether a piece of paper based on fraudulent information said she was technically still legally tied to an estate agent in Maidenhead. “So”—I tried—“what are you going to do now?”

She didn’t make any reply. She sat there frozen in a way that made me really, really, really uncomfortable.

I scooched over and put an arm around her. Like Elise, she’d learned to fake breathing fairly unconsciously so people didn’t get totally weirded out but, like Elise, she’d stop when she was upset. She was warm, and soft—whatever magic animated her covered up that particular feature of the whole “carved of solid marble” thing—but totally unyielding. My hand came to rest on her arm and it was like putting it on the arm of a chair. “It’ll be okay,” I said. Not that it necessarily would. Not that I necessarily knew what okay meant. For either of us.

“I am not sure,” she said at last. “What my purpose is.”

“Join the club.”

“I was created to be loved.” Her head still hadn’t moved. Neither had any other part of her. “If I cannot be, then what am I?”

“Hey.” I cupped a hand under her chin and guided her face around so that she could see me. “We won’t have any of that. You’re…” Shit I sucked at pep talks. A strong independent woman was so insipid and cliché it was practically a parody of inspirational. Beautiful was exactly the wrong message to be sending her right now. Immortal and nearly indestructible was true but a long way from what she wanted to hear. “Look, I barely know you, kid. But you remind me a lot of somebody I knew, and she was—she was—I’m not sure I’ve even got words for it. She was kind and weird and sweet and sometimes shy and sometimes totally the opposite of shy and she had this surprisingly sardonic sense of humour where you couldn’t tell if she was half as naive as you thought she was.”

She was starting to fake being alive again, which I took as a good sign. “You say was. Is she…”

“I don’t know. It’s complicated. But she’s not with me anymore, and she might not ever be again.”

“It sounds as if you loved her very much.”

That wasn’t language I’d used before. Not consciously at least. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I did.”

“Do you think”—Galatea blinked surprisingly naturally, as if she was considering something—“do you think you could love me?”

I was just trying to work out the most appropriate way to say that she shouldn’t judge herself by what other people thought of her when ... she kissed me. I hadn’t drunk that much while I was waiting for Edward. And I wasn’t feeling as lonely or as melancholy as I had been two weeks ago. And I’d more or less been fine to spend last night getting wound up by a hot coed and then doing nothing about it. But put it all together with the stress and the exhaustion and the not wanting to let Galatea down and her looking so much like somebody I missed so much and for a split second it seemed like a good idea to go with it.

So I went with it. She sank back onto the couch, letting me lean over her and into her and—and this was wrong. Seriously fucking wrong. I jumped up and pulled away from her like she’d been suddenly electrified. I could still taste her on my lips, though, a strange almost dusty taste like a temple to a dead goddess. “That was—I shouldn’t. Fuck, I’m sorry.”

She looked up at me from the sofa. She didn’t have a hair out of place. “Did I do something wrong?” Her eyes were wide and confused and imploring. “Am I insufficient?”

Jesus fucking Christ this was the last thing I needed. “Shit, no. You’re—you’re more than sufficient, you’re—honestly you’re out of my league and you’re out of your ex’s league as well, if you want my opinion. But that whole”—shit I was bad at this—“okay, sit down. I’ll explain.”

“I’m already sitting down.”

“Fair point.” I sat beside her and took her hand. “I think what I’m trying to say is stay sitting and don’t offer yourself to me sexually again, because I’m not sure I could take it.”

“I did not mean to displease you.”

I squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back in a way that felt more natural than it had a few minutes ago. “You don’t have to worry about pleasing me. You don’t have to worry about pleasing anyone. That’s kind of—okay, the thing is, I haven’t been totally honest with you.”

She cocked her head quizzically, but didn’t ask me what I meant.

I told her anyway. I explained what I knew about her past, the parts she knew herself, and the parts she didn’t. I told her about Elise, and about the others. She took it well, I thought. Then again she was unreadable unless she wanted to be read so what did I know?

“Would I be able to meet them?” she asked.

“Maybe. Two of them run this nightclub in North London called the Undertow, but they’re not—they’re not a lot like you. They’ve both worked for some pretty shady guys and that’s made them pretty shady themselves.”

“Shady?”

“Cold. Ruthless. I think they’re building a small criminal empire.”

This seemed to bother her a lot more than the more abstract idea of her having come in a pack of five.

“What about the others?”

“Well Elise is—y’know. And Lisbeth is more like you, but that means she’s—not sure how to put it—passing? She’s living with a friend’s dad pretending to be human. You could maybe claim to be her twin sister or something. Or I could arrange for you to meet her without meeting him, but I don’t think it’d be fair on anybody for you to stay with them, if that’s what you’re after.”

She looked down, not quite ashamed but at least abashed. “I—I do not think I do well on my own.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” A tiny tiny part of me resented quite how responsible I felt for Russel’s whole line of identikit playthings, but fuck me if they didn’t deserve to have somebody looking out for them. “I’d say you could stay with me—”

Her eyes lit up.

“—hold on. I’d say you could stay with me except that I think it would be a terrible idea.”

“I shouldn’t have tried to kiss you. I thought it was what you wanted.”

I sighed. “It’s not you. It’s me. And I’d be the worst person in the world if I said I couldn’t be around you because I’d be tempted to take advantage of your—your position. But right now I can’t even look after myself, let alone you.”

She brightened again. “I could look after you.”

“It’s not—that is you—you remind me too much of her. And I can’t.”

There was something about the way Galatea was looking at me that made me uncomfortable. “I’m confused.” She said. “You said that Elise wasn’t your lover, but you lived with her and you clearly miss her greatly.”

I shrugged. “I’ve had a lot of lovers. I’ve not had a lot of friends.” Besides, it was like the song said—you didn’t know what you had until it was gone. Of course, ironically Elise really liked parking lots.

The answer seemed to satisfy her. Then again, faking satisfaction was one of the skills that all the Elise-alikes would have needed to learn early. “Thank you for finding Edward for me.”

“Sorry it didn’t work out. Like I say, I think he cared. He just didn’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I understand either.”

“Then you’re in good company. Neither do I, neither do the other seven billion of us. You’ve got my number. Call me if there’s anything you need. Really, anything.”

“I believe I should also speak to you at some point about the bill for your services.”

She should. And I needed the money, but I’d basically broken this woman’s world and couldn’t quite bring myself to charge her for the privilege. At least not right at that moment. “No rush. You’ve got your own shit to get in order, like I’ve got mine.” Leaving her on the sofa, I stood up, threw my coat on, and fished the invoice out of my pocket. “Look at it when you feel ready, but take whatever time you have to.”

She picked it up but didn’t unfold it. “Have a safe evening.”

“I’ll try, but no promises. Mostly though, I think I’m going home.”

I did.

18

Hearth & Home

The flat was cold, with a weird smell from the bin or the sink or possibly both. Going literally months without sleeping in my own bed hadn’t exactly been a deliberate policy, and so I hadn’t set things up for it. I didn’t want to think about how much mould had grown in the half-cups of coffee and never-quite-finished sandwiches that were probably scattered all over the whole damned place.

Well, most of the place. For the first time since her not-exactly-death, I went into Elise’s room.

It was pristine. Her bed was made—as far as I knew she’d made it the first night she got here and it hadn’t been unmade since because she never actually slept in it. I’d occasionally pointed out to her that she’d have more space if we got rid of it, but she said she thought it tied the room together, and that a bedroom should have a bed in it.

What, precisely, she felt it tied together I could never be sure of. I paid Elise for working for me—not a huge amount admittedly, basically minimum wage, but since she also got to live in my home rent-free and had zero physical needs, I thought it was pretty generous all things considered. Her whole income had been disposable income, and she disposed of it according to a series of whims I’d never properly been able to understand. She’d had a phase of building model aeroplanes, had bought one of those incredibly elaborate dollhouses some people were into and done it up in immaculate detail. She owned a truly remarkable and strangely eclectic wardrobe of clothes that ranged from the demure to the outlandish. A chest of drawers in one corner was completely filled with objects whose texture she found interesting. Different grades of sandpaper, rocks with holes in, silk and soapstone, a koosh ball. I’d never worked out what Elise’s relationship with touch was. As near as I could tell she didn’t feel pain, but she must have felt something because she took an almost-childlike joy in subtleties of texture and variations in temperature. She’d been quite unabashedly sensual, I realised. Even if her sensuality hadn’t come across as ordinarily sexy.

I allowed myself a good few minutes of wallow, then went back into the sitting room. Definite mould. Definite weird smell.

Fuck it, Tesco's was open ‘til eleven. I went for cleaning products.

I got back home a bit under an hour later with bags full of all-purpose cleaner, mould and mildew remover, and that odour spray stuff that you use when you have to admit that the situation has got so bad all you can do is cover up the worst of the stench. Not being sure where to start I took everything that looked throw-awayable and threw it away. Then I took my full-to-bursting bin bag down to the big communal bins outside. Then it was a matter of spraying everything to within an inch of its life, scrubbing the shit out of anything that looked like it might actually be growing, and filling the whole place with a nauseating floral scent that was marginally better than the faint smell of decay it was masking.

It was a haphazard, poorly planned affair, and about halfway through I found myself crashed down on the sofa wearing a pair of marigold gloves and crying my eyes out for no fucking reason.

I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder, and looking around I saw a woman in green sitting beside me.

I slapped her arm away. “Can you not give me one fucking moment to have a feel without popping back up like the otherworldly equivalent of undercooked chicken and telling me I’m supposed to be doing something woobly and mystical. And then not telling me how.”

She glared at me. Her too-green eyes looked weird as hell in Nimue’s face. “You’re at your worst when you’re defensive.”

“You’re invading my fucking house. And my fucking dreams. I’ve got the right to be as defensive as I damned well want.”

In a rush of emerald sequins and unsettling magic, she rose and stood in front of me, looking down with that imperious expression that Nim only got when it was super, super important. “The Queen of London will die forever if you do not act. You have a duty and you are abandoning it to bathe in self-pity in this”—she made a sweeping gesture that covered my entire flat—“parody of a home.”

“I’ve not been bathing.” That was kind of true but not what I wanted to be saying. “I’ve been getting my shit in order so I can be of some use in whatever apocalyptic showdown you’re trying to prepare me for.” That was probably an overgenerous way of expressing it, but I’ve been doing a bare minimum of tidying so I can feel like less of a fuckup didn’t have the same defiant edge. Plus the whole speech would have gone somewhat better without the yellow rubber gloves.

“And how well has that worked for you?” Nobody and nothing could sneer quite as well as the ephemeral manifestation of the dark side of the living conduit of the soul of a city.

I looked around at my sitting room, which now contained 80% fewer old coffee cups but 600% more bits of screwed up paper towel and hastily discarded bottles of surface cleanser. “It’s a work in progress.”

“You have permitted yourself to become distracted.” She caught me by my hair and pulled me to my feet. For somebody who I was fairly sure only existed in my head I was getting a bit concerned at how manifested-in-the-real-world she was getting. “The living statues do not matter. The wolves do not matter. The oracle does not matter. All of these trivialities are keeping you from your pursuit of the castle and the resurrection.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, one of those trivialities was covering my bills and the other two were the direct result of Sebastian Douglas trying to kill me.”

“The Prince of Wands is not your enemy.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I must have got confused because of that time he chained me to a wall and tried to drain all my blood out.”

“Find the castle of the Sangreal. Nothing else matters.”

And before I could come up with a devastatingly cutting and appropriate reply she was gone. She’d probably never been here in the first place. Either way it had harshed my cleaning buzz. I knew that in the overall scheme of things getting my flat in order wasn’t quite up there with raising Nim, stopping the Prince of Wands yet again, or keeping Yelena from murdering everyone I knew, importance-wise, but I’d really thought it was part of turning a corner.

Fuck it. I was going to bed. Except that would have meant giving a small army of magic ladies free rein to roam around in my subconscious. That was probably something I should be taking a look at one of these days, but I honestly wasn’t sure how I was meant to.

I was about fifty-fifty on whether getting totally passing-out drunk would make it harder or easier for people to come and bother me in my dreams, and in a fit of maturity, I decided it wouldn’t. I’d been going way lighter on the booze recently and while it would be an exaggeration to say I was feeling the benefit, I was starting to enjoy knowing what mornings felt like. I went into my half-cleaned kitchen and made myself a cup of Bovril. It wasn’t a magic prophylactic against psychic invasion, but it did make me feel better. Then I sat in my bed drinking beef tea and staring at the wall.

Blah.

Fuck.

I reached onto the floor where I’d sensibly hung up my jacket and fished out my phone. Probably it would be a bad idea to call Tara at this time of the evening. She had her own shit going on and it was unfair of me to drag her into my flat-related insecurities. Then again, fuck it, she was a big girl and she could always hang up if it was a problem. I called her.

“You didn’t tell me,” she purred down the line the moment she picked up, “that the blue one would be quite such a handful.”

“Did she try to shag you?”

“She very nearly succeeded. I’ve had a lot going on and would have appreciated the diversion.”

A tiny part of me was sad that it wasn’t just me Flick had tried it on with. It was nice to feel special, after all. “I don’t know who’s worse, you or her.”

“Come now, you’re clearly worse than either of us.”

I’d have protested, but having come within a heartbeat of fucking the magically identical quasi-sister of my effectively dead best friend, I had very few legs to stand on. “Point.”

“So why have you called? Did whoever’s bed you were trying to crawl into think better of it?”

“Actually, I thought better of it. Long story. I’m at home right now.”

She gave a laugh that I only found slightly mocking. “Are you telling me that you’ve not only turned down casual sex two nights in a row but are also going to sleep in your own bed like an ordinary human being? Kate Kane, what has happened to you?”

“I’ve grown as a person.”

“That, I find very unlikely.” She was quiet for a moment, although I could still hear her breathing. “You know, I could send a car if you wanted?”

Tempting. Very tempting. “I—and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I’ll pass.”

“You’re not going off me are you?” Tara didn’t do insecurity, so it sounded more like a come-on than like somebody fishing for compliments.

“No I just—I’ve been distracting myself. And don’t get me wrong you’ve been a fucking amazing distraction and I’ll come and get distracted again soon, but things might be about to get chaotic, and I think it’d be good to try and get my shit at least a little bit together before it does.”

“Don’t wait too long, darling. I’m not a patient woman.” Another pointed silence, then. “By the way, your oracle tells me that you went hunting the witch-creature. Did you find her?”

“Sort of. I found out which entrance to the Cold and Dark she seems to be using, so we can probably follow her if we have to.”

“If we have to?” The amusement was gone from Tara’s voice. “She killed one of my own and several more of my pack are still missing. Did you think tracking her down was optional.”

Okay, that had been a poor choice of words. “I more meant it felt like a really obvious trap. The door she’s using is over water, which is fine for somebody who doesn’t need to breathe. A lot less fine for you or me. Plus there’s still the Prince of Wands to think about.”

“I sometimes feel that you give that man too much credit. He was powerful at our last confrontation because he had stolen the power of a god. Without that he’s just another vampire.”

Maybe she was right. After all, I’d only ever fought him when he was in full now-you-shall-see-my-true-power mode. Then again. “My long-term girlfriend left me to die rather than stand up to him. Say what you like about Julian, but she wasn’t stupid and she wasn’t a coward.” I couldn’t quite believe that Tara was making me defend the ex who’d let Sebastian Douglas bleed me into a bowl, but here I was. “The Prince of Wands is dangerous and I don’t know what he’s up to, and that makes him more dangerous.”

“Perhaps,” Tara still had her serious voice on, “although if you have a means to find the woman who killed Tabitha, we should pursue it.”

“Sure. I—give me a bit to get sorted out at this end. There’s still stuff I need to do.”

“Such as?”

I kind of wished she hadn’t asked that. “I don’t know. I’ve been seeing things lately. Having dreams. Somebody out there wants something from me and I’m getting the feeling they won’t let me rest until I start confronting it.”

I heard an intake of breath on the other end of the line. I swear I’d never known anybody who breathed as expressively as Tara—it must have been a werewolf perk. “This is starting to sound dangerous. Are you sure you should be alone?”

“Most of my life is dangerous. And unless you can get into my dreams, I think I’ll be alone for the bits that matter anyway. I called you because I—I don’t know. I guess I felt like I needed a pep talk or something.”

“A pep talk?” Her tone was withering.

“Sorry, things keep coming out wrong today. I mean I wanted to know somebody was on my side. Because I’m not going to lie, all the people with hotlines into my head have been getting a bit scary lately.”

“I’m on your side, Kate Kane.” There was something deeply reassuring about hearing it. It wasn’t something Julian had ever said, which I suppose in a way was honest of her. “Even if this is something you need to do alone.”

I put down my Bovril, wormed under my bedclothes and shut my eyes. “Thanks. And it is, but if you’d carry on talking for a while I think it’d help.”

“What would you like me to say?”

I could already feel myself drifting off. It had been a long day, and Bovril had that effect on me. “Anything you like. Just let me know you’re there.”

Silence, and the sound of her breathing. It would have been enough, honestly. “Very well,” she said. “Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother…”

“If this is what I think it is, you’ve got a major irony problem.”

“Hush, or I shall come and blow your house down.”

“That’s a different story.”

“I’m beginning to see why your last girlfriend left you to die.”

That should have hurt more than it did. I took it as a sign I was healing, or coming as close to it as I could manage. “Wow. Low.”

“Well it was your fault for being difficult. Shall I continue?”

“Do. I’ll be good, I promise.”

“Once she gave her a little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else. So she was always called 'little red-cap.'”

It wasn’t quite the version of the story I was used to, and part of me thought it was an odd pick since it wasn’t exactly wolf-friendly, but I wasn’t complaining. Tara’s voice washed over me like that pretentious hot chocolate you pay far too much for in Whittard’s, and I drifted off to sleep.

19

Visions & Leads

In an unreal city, trees grew through the pavements and I heard the barking of dogs on the wind. This was no street that I recognised, an alley filled with rats and the peeling paper of old theatre posters curling from walls.

I walked towards the barking of the dogs. Somewhere in another world I heard the edges of a voice telling me a story.

Through the trees and down the road, past the sign of a boarded-up pub and a row of rusted-out cars all abandoned in the forest-street, I saw a giraffe walking serenely away from me. Cautiously, I followed it.

The creature loped through the woodland, along the side of a motorway now cracked and pitted and all but impassable. I followed it to a flyover where thick ivy wound up concrete pillars and a great grey ash rose from the road below to split the road above, dust and asphalt raining down the canopy and mingling with its roots.

A swing hung from the overpass, one of those overgrown floral ones you sometimes saw in fancy houses. It was a strange swing, made of thin red cords that didn’t look like they could really take anybody’s weight. Nimue sat in it, smiling.

“It’s good to see you.”

I wasn’t sure how I should play this. The giraffe was throwing me off my game. “You too,” I tried. Then I went for: “Look I don’t mean to be rude, but what the fuck is happening here? I’ve had her with the green eyes showing up in my front room and weird old women waving playing cards at me, and now there’s dogs barking in my ears and I’m following a large hoofed mammal through a weird forest apocalypse to find you sitting here like the creepy child in a Victorian ghost story. I know this is all magic shit, but it got three steps too weird for me about nine steps ago.”

By some trick of dream-logic, or some magic of Nimue’s, there was a chessboard between us resting on the weathered stump of a pillar. “Shall we play?” despite her tone, I didn’t think it was a suggestion.

If I hadn’t been bizarrely pleased to see her despite the circumstances, I’d have slapped her. “In what world is that an answer?”

“In what world are we?”

“Nim, you know I fucking love you in so many ways. But I kind of hate you right now.”

But I didn’t really have a choice. She played white, moving her queen’s pawn to the fourth rank. I mirrored her—I suck at chess and my usual strategy is to copy what the other person does for as long as possible.

She brought up her queen’s bishop’s pawn to threaten mine. It stood there alone and undefended—I’d be able to take it easily but perhaps that was exactly what she wanted.

“Is this a trap?” I asked.

“A sacrifice.”

I really, really didn’t get chess. “I don’t understand.”

“Sometimes you must lose a little to gain much. A pawn for the centre of the board. An eye for wisdom. A life for a throne.”

“None of those seem worth it.”

“Perhaps. But appearances deceive.”

“You still haven’t told me what’s going on.”

“I have told you everything you need to be told.”

I took the pawn, and she smiled.

“The right move,” she said. “But too late. You killed the queen of coins and now she thwarts me. You listened to the queen of wands, but forgot that her card was reversed.”

That seemed deeply unfair. “So what do you want me to do? You must want me to do something.”

“Spear me to an ash-tree,” she replied. “Save a thief in my stead. Cut me apart and scatter me in the sea. Cast me back into the lake where I was found.”

None of that sounded like anything I could live with. “I can’t.”

She reached out a hand and caressed my cheek. The look in her eyes was hauntingly compassionate. “I know. And I’m sorry.”

The giraffe broke off at a run and I followed it. The motorway curved upwards and upwards and ever upwards, stopping at a cliff-edge of broken tarmac and shattered concrete. I stared out over a gulf of mist-shrouded water and saw a castle amidst a lake.

And then the giraffe was gone, and the strange old woman sat next to me, cards between her hands. The ten of spades. The ace of hearts. The devil and the moon.

“Nimue said I’d killed you,” I told her.

“You did.” She flicked a card between her hands. The five of diamonds.

I looked closely at her. Had I seen her somewhere before? The face was unfamiliar, but we were in dreams and faces were easily changed. Eyes were less so. I looked at her eyes.

“Vera King?”

She flipped the Queen of Diamonds. “The same. You stuck me good, little girl. Hardly any of me left now.”

“So you’re just here to fuck with me?”

She shook her head. “My, but you would never have made a sorceress. You think so narrowly.”

I sat down on the edge of the asphalt cliff. “What then?”

“I’m stuck, my dear, stuck between worlds. But the devil don’t have me yet, and I can cling to that.”

“And you’re talking to me because?”

She cackled. Proper Witch-of-the-West cackled. “Your fine lady had a plan. The queen’s gambit—a pawn for the board, but you refused it.”

“You know between the cards and the chess I’m getting deeply tired of game-related metaphors.”

“A pity, because you shall get little else. We are both pawns, my dear, in a game your queen plays with her own self. A far-sighted little Tireseas she was, and she saw that one day she might become a thing that we all should fear.”

“I swear if you don’t start making more sense I’m going to kill you all over again.”

She tsked as only a granny can. “Such anger, and still so young—relatively speaking. You stand at a crossroads.” The two of spades. “Your lady will live or die, rise or fall, ascend or perish according to what you do next.”

“She seems to want me to kill her.”

Vera King smiled. “So kill her. And good riddance.”

“But then she’ll be dead.”

“Death is a transition, child.”

“Yes. To being dead.”

She gathered her cards and stood, shaking her head. “My Arty should have killed you all. Then we would never have had this bother. Kill her or heal her. But don’t do nothing. Doing nothing invites chaos.”

“Why are you helping me? If you are helping me.”

She threw a card face down at my feet. “I got no choice, dear. You’re the one who killed me, after all. And I take some pleasure in watching you fail.”

I wasn’t sure if she was worse dead or alive. I stooped and turned over the card. The ace of hearts. Before I could pick it up, a hand closed around mine and plucked the card from my fingers.

Looking up, I saw that Vera King had gone, and in her place was a girl, passing fair and young, her golden hair unbound and a faint smile on her lips.

* * *

The sunlight through the curtains woke me at last—oh right, I didn’t have other people’s alarm clocks or actual fucking cockerels getting me up this time. Checking my phone, I found a text from Nicola Bright. Will be at your office circa 1.30 if convenient.

It wasn’t hugely. It was nearly noon already because seriously man, fuck sleep patterns. Still, an hour and a bit was just about enough time to get into the office and if I didn’t catch up with the professor now she might decide I was too unreliable to be worth it. And they said sleeping in your clothes never paid off.

To be honest, I was glad of the distraction. Having made the very mature and positive decision to do something about Nimue if I possibly could, only to wind up chasing a sodding giraffe and playing three moves of chess against my ex, I was feeling a bit symbolismed out for the day.

Vision quests could officially go fuck themselves.

There was a bus direct from my flat to my office—it had been one of the things that appealed when I’d first been looking at it—and so I managed to get in without having to risk the Tube. I’d been down there once without incident but there was no sense in pushing it, especially since this whole vision quest seemed about to go full descent-into-the-underworld. I arrived with a whole eight minutes to spare, pleased to discover that the door-fixing-person had been in my absence, and used the time productively getting the worst of the mess cleaned up, hiding the more obvious stashes of empty bottles, and making sure I definitely had the fucking book that I was supposed to be showing her.

I fired off a brief text to Eve. Professor coming to office, if you’ve found anything out about her, now would be a good time to tell me. She’d been curious about the mysterious Professor Bright ever since I’d mentioned her during my last check in.

It came as precisely zero surprise to me when the professor emeritus arrived bang on half one. People who put the word circa in their texts were far too anal to ever be circa about anything.

She looked younger than I expected given her title, I’d have put her as fifties rather than sixties, and well-preserved fifties at that, her hair barely greying and her eyes carrying a kind of wicked brightness that I’d fallen for way too many times from way too many women. There was something about her that weirdly reminded me of Corin Black, the doe-eyed femme fatale who’d killed Archer and come close to killing me on multiple occasions. Assuming, of couse, she managed to make it to that age which, honestly, I thought she probably would—Corin lived a dangerous life, but it was mostly dangerous for other people.

“Nicola Bright,” she said, extending a hand.

I shook it. “Kate Kane. You’re here about the book?”

“That’s right. Look, I know it’s not exactly the done thing anymore but do you mind if I smoke?”

I thought it might technically have been illegal but since I now had zero employees I doubted how much that mattered. “Sure.”

She drew a packet of filterless cigarettes from the pocket of her tastefully selected jacket. “Want one?”

“Sure.”

Before I knew what was going on she was lighting it for me, making the type of eye contact that usually meant trouble. I could see two tiny little flames dancing in her pupils. Oh come on a little voice seemed to be saying in the back of my mind. You’ve been good for two whole days, if you get a chance with this one you should definitely go for it.

“So how did you come by it?” she asked. “The book, I mean.”

“Long story.”

“And not one you’d care to go into?” She blew out an actual smoke ring. I knew it killed you, I knew it smelled awful, but I defied anybody to sit for five minutes in a room with Nicola Bright and not admit that, when you got right down to it, smoking was cool.

“If that’s okay.”

She shrugged. “It’s the text that interests me, not how you acquired it. Of course it will need to be authenticated to make sure it’s a genuine historical artefact but I’m not about to ask you for proof of purchase.”

“Authenticated?”

“Oh, you know. Paper analysed, ink spectographed, language checked over for modernisms. You’d be amazed how many forged copies of ancient quasi-magical tomes I look at.”

I wasn’t completely sure I would. “And you’re a theologian?”

“Theologian and folklorist. Isn’t it all mythology, when everything’s said and done?” She flashed me a conspiratorial smile. “But don’t tell my colleagues I said that. Theology as a discipline has a tendency to attract true believers. Although admittedly it tends to make atheists out of a reasonable number of them.”

“You’re not religious, then?” I had to admit, she didn’t look the type.

There was a short silence while she took another drag on her cigarette, the tip flaring a dazzling red. “Not anymore. Strictly entre nous, I used to be something of a god-botherer, but I soon saw the error of my ways. You?”

“I think”—this was going to be a tricky one to answer honestly—“I think there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s hard to explain if there isn’t something.”

“Not an unreasonable position.” She had a contemplative look in her eyes. “Anyway, I know why I’m interested in the book—it’s a unique historical artefact and I’d be utterly remiss if I passed up the opportunity to examine it. Why are you interested?” From the way she looked at me, it was like she’d asked a deeply incisive personal question. Which she had, but I wasn’t quite sure if she realised that or if she was just getting her flirt on.

“It’s complicated.” How the fuck was I going to answer this? There was no chance in hell I could sell oh I happen to have a well-developed academic interest in obscure occult texts. I was so clearly not the type. Maybe the truth was the best option. Or a variant of it, at least. “I had a friend who I lost. I was hoping that this would—that it would give me some answers.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re looking in strange places.”

“She was a strange person.” I fished out my copy—well, the copy that Hephaestion had stolen for me—of the Book of Living Fire, which I’d been keeping away from the cigarettes for reasons of antique. “So … here it is.”

Dr Bright picked it up with a tentative, academic curiosity and began leafing carefully through the pages. “It certainly seems authentic,” she said. “I’m a little confused, though, about what you want me to do with it. I’d be more than happy to take it off your hands, but your original advertisement suggested you wanted something more specific.”

I wished I’d thought this out ahead of time. Telling a perfectly respectable fellow of UCL that I wanted her help performing a magical ritual to reanimate my friend the statue was a lot harder now I found myself having to try it. “Well …” That’s it, Kate, stall for time, you’re being totally cool and not making anybody suspicious in any way. “The one I’m trying to—to connect with here. She was a … Hellenic neopagan.” Was that a thing? I thought that was a thing. Of course lying to a folklorist about her area of expertise was probably one of my least clever ideas. “There was a ... a”—don’t say ritual, don’t say ritual—“a sort of ritual that she wanted me to do. But it involved the book, and I can’t read it.”

To say that Nicola Bright looked suspicious was an insult to suspicious-looking people. Or maybe it was a compliment to them. She looked very suspicious, is what I mean. “Well,” she said. “I think I can help you.” I’m sure I imagined the gleam in her eyes.

“Oh good.”

She tucked the book into a technical-looking bag that was probably designed to protect it from dust mites or something, and slipped that into a briefcase. “A pleasure to meet you, Kate.” She held out her hand again.

“And you, Dr Bright.”

“Please, my friends call me Nick.” She seemed to think of something. “Oh, one of your texts mentioned the holy grail?”

I’d forgotten I asked her about that. “Yeah. Just because it overlaps a bit with what you do. So … umm … know anything about it?”

“Your friend again? Was she a pan Celtic Hellenist neopagan?”

“Something like that. Syncretic, y’know.”

“That’s quite common in NRMs.”

“NRMs?”

“New Religious Movements. It’s what we say instead of neopagans, it’s a bit less”—she waved a hand—“judgemental. Has less of a persecuted by the early church vibe to it.”

You learned something new every day. Usually it wasn’t anything at all useful, but still. “So, do you?”

“More than you can possibly imagine,” she smiled. “Most of it contradictory.”

“Anything would help.”

She leaned back in the chair. “Well it’s not strictly biblical. It’s first mentioned around 1190 where it’s linked to Percival. The connection to the last supper and the crucifixion comes only a few years later. Then of course it’s a recurring motif in all the later Arthurian canon: the vulgate cycle, the post-vulgate cycle, Malory. Of course in recent years—I say recent but perhaps I’m showing my age—there was rather renewed interest in the topic thanks to that Da Vinci book.”

“And you wouldn’t know”—this was going to turn out even more awkward than the ritually-re-awakening-a-statue question—“where one might hypothetically start looking for it?”

“Your friend…” The professor laughed, almost cruelly “…seems to have set you a number of very peculiar tasks.”

I didn’t answer that.

“I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine. You’re straying perilously close to the world of conspiracy theory—you may as well go chasing the Templars or the Order of St Agrippina.”

That was familiar. “Hold on, order of who?”

“St Agrippina? It’s an old bit of mytho-history. Supposedly there used to be an order of nuns working out of the Vatican, dedicated to the eradication of supernatural threats. It’s got all your usual hallmarks, hidden rituals, secret initiations. They’ve been tied to a fringe end of the grail mythology for years.”

Well fuck. “You’re right,” I said. “That does sound like a dead end.”

“Sorry I couldn’t be more use.”

In a fit of uncharacteristic politeness, I got the door for her. “Don’t worry, you’ve been—it’s been helpful.”

“I’ll speak to you soon, Kate.”

“See ya, Nick.” I was way more comfortable with Doctor Bright, but it seemed rude to be formal when you’d been asked to be familiar.

The moment she left I went for my emergency scotch. Turned out I had a lead on the grail after all. Fucking Julian Saint-Ger-fucking-main.

20

Scotch & My Ex

I probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much before I showed up at the Velvet. But I did. Fucking sue me.

Normally—by which I mean always—I’d have expected to find Ashriel on the door, but he wasn’t there tonight. His place had been taken by a well-muscled woman in a denim-on-denim combo that shouldn’t have worked but did. I tried skipping the queue anyway.

“Where’s Ash?” I asked.

“Gone. Been gone more than a year now.”

Well how time flies. “I need to see Julian.”

She did not look impressed.

“It’s important.”

She still did not look impressed. Ignoring me completely, she waved a couple more clubgoers into the building.

“We used to date.”

“How much d’you think that narrows it down?”

Probably not hugely. “I’m Kate,” I tried belatedly. “Kate Kane?”

“Oh, right. Then you can definitely fuck off.”

“Who even are you?” I asked.

“I’m the lady who’s minding this door.” Another few guests filed in past me. “You want to queue, you can queue.”

My mind wasn’t working its quickest right then. Blame the visions, the alcohol and—actually it was only those two things but they added up to a fair bit. I was aware that there was a good chance this person was a vampire, and that if she was, I thought I would probably be morally okay about shoving her through a plate glass window and walking in anyway. But if she wasn’t, I’d probably go to prison for malicious wounding. Also I wasn’t totally sure that it’s okay to randomly assault people if they’re vampires was a rule at all, morality-wise.

I queued.

It wasn’t that late—Dr Nick’s visit had taken me into mid-to-late afternoon, and while the process of fortifying myself to speak to my ex for the first time since I’d dumped her arse over the whole letting-some-prick-exsanguinate-me snafu had taken a reasonable amount of time, it hadn’t taken me past midnight. So the queue was short-ish. It’s just that short-ish wasn’t what I was aiming for. Also I really needed a piss.

The Velvet didn’t have a cover charge, probably because it didn’t entirely make sense to make people pay for entry to a place you mostly used as a supply of warm bodies and fresh blood, which was good because I would have lost my fucking shit if I’d been asked to pony up hard cash to tell my former girlfriend how fucking—I mean, to ask her about the holy grail. Which was what I was there for.

Julian held court on a balcony at the top of a spiral staircase behind a velvet rope. Tonight it seemed that it was being guarded by a pretty young woman in a cocktail dress. Not the sort you’d usually expect to be working as a bouncer, but then this one almost certainly was a vampire, and maybe Julian had decided to make her gallery of sapphic delights look a bit less intimidating from the ground.

“Okay,” I told the guard, having to shout a bit over the music, “here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to say I’m here for Julian. You’re going to say she doesn’t want to see me. I’m going to insist and either we get in an unpleasant fight that you might not win as easily as you think, or I make a gigantic fuckawful scene until her ladyship comes down from the pleasure-dome and talks to me. Don’t you want to skip all the trouble and let me up?”

She sighed. Then stopped breathing. Definitely a vampire. And it was good to know I wasn’t quite pissed enough that I didn’t notice that sort of thing. Although I was beginning to think I’d forgotten my house keys. “What do you want, Kate?”

“You know me?”

“I’ve seen you around.”

She’d probably been promoted from the kittens, which was what Julian somewhat patronisingly called her entourage. “Didn’t she used to use you as a footstool?”

“Sometimes.” There was a lasciviousness to her smile that reminded me too much of her boss.

“Look. If you’ve been around a while you must know the drill by now. Terrible danger, can’t explain, you’re my only hope blah blah.”

The promoted kitten folded her arms. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I took a step back. Having finally been home and briefly been sober I had managed to revisit my always carry daggers policy, but looking at this girl the whole fine-to-beat-up-vampires policy was starting to seem shaky. She couldn’t have been much past her mid-twenties, even taking the immortality into account, and while that raised some slightly iffy questions about Julian’s decision to transform her into a bloodsucking undead monstrosity, I did not at all like the optics of whaling on a twenty-something club kid in a minidress. “Juliaaaaan,” I tried instead, leaning my head back and yelling as best I could over the intense background noise. “Juliaaan I need to talk to yooooou.”

“Okay, you really need to go.” The tiny bouncer came forward to take me gently by the arm, and I took the opportunity to try and dash past her and up the stairs. My mother’s blood gives me an uncanny, almost Dianic grace which sometimes takes people unawares, and to give myself all due credit I did move pretty quickly.

But I was also very, very pissed. And spiral staircases are more complicated than they look. I collapsed onto the iron steps with a mixture of a thunk and a clang. I’d like to say that the iron was to blame and it was interfering with my faery heritage, but if I was being honest it was almost certainly the scotch. The guard flew past me in a billow of shadows and mist, and stood a few steps up from where I was kneeling.

“This is starting to get pathetic.”

I tried to pull myself upright, but the only thing I had to hang onto was her, and that seemed like it would end badly. So I sat where I was and started shouting again. “Juliaaaaan, pleeeeeaaaaase. It’s not about yooooouu. It’s about the holy graaaaaail.”

“What the fuck is happening here?” The bouncer from the front door appeared to have abandoned her post to come and check on me. It was progress of a sort.

“Something about the holy grail?”

“Take her to the back?”

The two of them grabbed me and manhandled me through a back door into a storeroom. The one from the stairs sat on a box and waited with me while the one from the door went back for further instructions.

“Could I at least use your toilet?” I asked.

She glared at me. It seemed I’d missed that particular boat. We sat and waited in silence.

We didn’t have to wait long. The door swung open and Julian appeared. And I’d been wrong earlier, I shouldn’t have drunk less, I should’ve drunk much, much more. She hadn’t changed because of course she hadn’t—that was the deal with her whole species—she still looked like Tinkerbell cosplaying as Nelson. I could tell she was angry from the way she was glaring at me, and from the way I’d deliberately been trying to make her angry.

“What the fuck, Kate?”

I wagged a finger at her. “Now now, is that how you speak to a guest?”

“You’re not a guest. You stormed into my place of business and demanded to see me.”

The wagging continued. “Well is that how you speak to somebody who storms into your place of business and demands to see you?”

“Get up.”

“Make me.”

The guard in the cocktail dress grabbed me by the hair and hauled me halfway to my feet. Not all the way, I was a fair bit taller than her, but far enough that the point was made.

“Ow! I meant that rhetorically.” She let go and I straightened.

Folding her arms, Julian fixed me with those eyes that I’d once found it so easy to get lost in. “Do you have any conception of how difficult you’re being?”

“Oh I’m sorry. Maybe you should chain me to a wall and cut my veins open. Except your friend already did that.”

“Sebastian Douglas is not my friend.”

“You know, I think that makes it worse. If he’d been your friend then at least you’d have screwed me out of loyalty instead of cowardice.”

I knew she was pissed off because she didn’t even make a joke about screwing. “Wanting to avoid the anger of a dangerous, vindictive man who plays his vengeance out over centuries isn’t cowardice. It’s caution. And we have had this conversation already.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry I’m repeating myself. Next time you leave me to die I’ll be sure to get over it quicker.”

“Did you just come here to berate me?” She was still glaring. Good. She could glare until her face fell off. “Or was there something you actually needed?”

“I spoke to a woman who said your secret band of ninja nuns used to know about the holy grail.”

“Your woman said wrong.”

My head was beginning to pound. Should have drunk more water. “Okay, she didn’t say that exactly, but she said they were the same kind of weirdo conspiracy theory nonsense and that if I wanted to find something I should start there.”

“We’re done here. Put her outside.”

I held up my hands. “Don’t bother, I know when I’m not wanted.” It was mostly all the time. “Back door, I take it?”

Julian said nothing. She left me to stagger out into the alley where I’d found a dead werewolf years ago when we first met. Given the literal hell I’d been through since, I felt almost nostalgic.

I wasn’t sure what I’d thought would happen. It wasn’t like she was about to say oh yes, the holy grail, I keep it on a shelf in the back room, let me get it for you. Then again, she did call herself the fucking Prince of Cups, and she kept an ornate silver chalice in her little sex palace upstairs, and the dodgy shell company she worked through was called the Calix group.

Yeah, she knew something.

I thought about going back in, but the door I’d come out of was the fire-exit kind that you open with a push bar on the inside and can’t open from outside. Which meant I’d have to loop all the way back to the front and come back in, and I thought that would end badly.

Maybe I could come back tomorrow.

The Velvet was in that bit of London that has far more back alleys and sex shops than you need within two streets of each other. Which made it a great place to hang out but also a great place to find yourself alone in the dark and not entirely sure where you were going. Mostly it was the alleys, some of it was the drink. Damn you, alcohol, pretending to be my friend then making me take a blind turn past a shop that was still trying to sell X-rated movies despite Pornhub having been a thing for more than a decade.

All of which meant that I wound up on my own, somewhere with no windows, and in nothing like a fit state to defend myself, when I was jumped by an angry vampire in a wolfskin.

Yelena dropped on me from directly overhead. I was able to fling myself sideways at the last second but it was close to midnight, she was a lot faster and a lot stronger than I could cope with, especially half-cut. I stumbled, she caught me, and I wound up with my face pressed against a rain-stippled poster advertising an LGBTQ+ rock festival.

“I thought this might be more difficult,” she whispered in my ear.

I was far too wankered to be thinking straight. My mother’s power waited just out of reach in the Deepwild, but it would take focus to draw on it and, even if I could, and even if I thought being drunk in charge of the wild hunt was a remotely good idea, I didn’t think I’d be able to do much with it. Yelena would still be about as strong as me, and she had my arms locked firmly behind my back already. “Guess I’ve always been a disappointment,” I replied. When in doubt, backchat.

“Tell me where Patrick is, and I’ll kill you quickly.”

“That sounds like a terrible deal. And please get it through your skull that I dumped him more than a decade ago.”

It was about then that she broke my arm. Joke was on her though, I’d pre-emptively self-medicated. Still hurt like fuck of course. “I will take you apart piece by—” There was a rush of night and she was off me. I turned and sank to the ground, still fumbling for what I could find of my mother’s strength to fend off the now-dull-now-stabbing pain an inch or two above my right elbow.

What with the shock of being ambushed and the fact I still hadn’t managed to get to the loo, I wasn’t in a position to follow much of what happened next. A fight between vampires, when they got into it, was just blurs moving against blurs, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to keep up.

At last they stopped, and I saw Julian with a set of claw-marks down her cheek, standing over Yelena who was lying cat-like on the floor half-beaten, half ready to spring, and still managing to look faintly horny, which was a trait vampires got a lot if they steered into a certain flavour of bloodlust.

Julian brushed dust from her now rather tattered epaulettes. “Well this has been fun. But you’re on my territory and I will thank you to leave. I assume you’re with the Prince of Wands, so tell him we still have no quarrel, but he needs to keep his lapdog on a shorter leash.”

“How dare you…”

“I dare”—Julian stepped forward boldly, her boots clicking on the cobbles—“because I am the motherfucking Prince of motherfucking Cups, and you have strayed into my domain. It is only out of courtesy that I am not sending you back to your master in several small boxes.”

Yelena actually hissed. Vampires. I was beginning to remember why I’d had that policy against dating them.

“Oh by the way, sweeting”—I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or offended to realise she was talking to Yelena rather than to me—“did I hear right that you’re looking for the Knight boy?”

Again, no answer, just a low animal sound so disturbing even I couldn’t quite find it sexy.

“I’ll take that as a yes. He was Sebastian’s creature for years. If he has been unmolested thus far, it’s because the Prince of Wands still has use for him. Perhaps you should run home and tell him you’re not satisfied with that arrangement.” She folded her hands gently behind her back. “Perhaps now.”

Yelena took the—well I’d say hint, but it was about as subtle as a mutton vindaloo—and fled into the night, not literally licking her wounds, but coming pretty damned close.

“As for you,” Julian turned those too-blue eyes on me. “Fuck me you are a mess. Come on, we’ll get you—something. You clearly need it.”

I staggered to my feet, and she led me back to the Velvet. I wasn’t sure if I was more relieved or humiliated that she’d pulled me out the fire. Mostly I was in pain. In pain, and badly needing a piss.

21

Me & Julian

It was like old times. Apart from the broken arm, and the fact that I probably wasn’t getting laid. Probably. Although given Julian’s … well … entire personality it wouldn’t necessarily have been out of the question.

A bad idea, mind. A really bad idea.

Stay in the moment, Kate.

I was laying on the chaise longue on the upper floor of the Velvet with Julian standing a little way away. She’d dismissed the kittens, but the vampire in the minidress whose name I still didn’t know was hanging out at the top of the stair. What she thought I’d try with a busted arm I wasn't sure.

“What am I going to do with you?” Julian mused, mostly to herself. In another life, it would have been a cue for some playful banter. Now she seemed genuinely sad.

“I honestly don’t know. Why did you bail me out back there?”

“It’s inappropriate to hunt on another vampire’s territory. She needed to be reminded.”

“Even if it means offending the Prince of Wands.”

That earned me a sharp look. “Sebastian Douglas is a creature of rules. The law was on our side tonight. He won’t object.”

“There’s no our here, Julian. And where was your law when he was trying to murder me to death?”

“On his side. Try to keep up.”

I tried to move from reclining to sitting, and immediately regretted it. “I’m slowly beginning to realise how much I hate basically all vampires. I mean, seriously, isn’t there one of you that isn’t an amoral, emotionally dysfunctional spatter of watery shit?”

“We’re undead creatures of the night who sustain our cursed existences by stealing the very living essence of the humans we will never be again. Does it surprise you that we’re all basically pricks?”

I made another attempt to sit up, more successful this time although I still felt faintly nauseous. “So what now.”

“I’ve told you I don’t know.” There was something strange about the way she looked at me. I would have liked to think that on some level it was because she regretted what had happened between us. Julian seemed like the kind of person who’d never regret anything, but I’d known her long enough and well enough to suspect that maybe the opposite was true: she regretted so much that one more terrible thing was so much noise.

Holding my arm very, very still because making any effort to move it made me want to pass out, I shuffled over to the end of the chaise longue and picked up the chalice that had been sitting on the side table for as long as I could remember. “If this turns out to be the fucking grail,” I said, “I am going to be monumentally pissed off.”

“Just a cup,” she replied. “A nice one, but purely representational.”

“Still, you know about the real thing, don’t you? Is that part of why you went for the cups motif in the first place?”

She perched herself on the end of the chaise. “That, and because it’s largely the party suit.”

“And?”

“It’s not one object.” She was still giving me that unreadable look. “In fact it’s not always an object at all. There’s a chalice in Genoa, another one in Valencia. Then some say it’s the philosopher’s stone or the blood of the Merovingian kings. Why do you want to know?”

I shook my head, not quite in despair, not quite not in despair. “Mage stuff. The visions, you know.”

“I suspect you no longer want my advice, but I’d find wherever that little witch is recuperating and smother her in her sleep.”

“You’re the third person to tell me that.”

“Who were the first two?”

“The little witch and a dead Satanist.”

“Well they were right. You’ll be free when she’s gone.”

I put my head in my hands then immediately regretted it. This would be a lesson for me: never fight an obsessive mass-murdering vampire seductresses while drunk. “Killing is your lot’s answer for everything, isn’t it?”

She stretched out. “It does solve a surprising number of problems if applied creatively.”

I was too busy nursing a broken bone to reply. In a way it was comforting that Julian hadn’t changed much—then again I’d been a far smaller part of her life than she’d been of mine. I didn’t want to do the maths but she was something like twenty or thirty times my age. The year or so she’d spent with me must have felt like a one-night stand from her immortal perspective. “What was it you said to Yelena about Patrick?” I asked instead. “You said he was Sebastian’s creature. I know he worked for him for a bit, that he was his guy inside the police and all that. Is there more to it?”

“They’re a funny bloodline, Patrick’s lot.”

“The Knights?”

“He’s adopted, you’ll remember. Yelena turned him, and from what I recall Diego de Flores turned her. Obsessed with her, you see. With that difficult witch-hunter/witch dynamic that can become so troubling so quickly.”

I remembered Diego quite bitterly as a man who’d made a spirited attempt to condemn me to death. “So, what, Patrick’s a creep because he’s descended from a medieval uber-creep?”

“Something like that. He’s responsible for his own actions ultimately, as we all are, and becoming a vampire only ever brings out things that were part of us all along. But I doubt I’d have embraced this particular side of myself so fully if I hadn’t been turned by a colossal pervert.” She looked almost small for a moment. “It’s quite worrying when you stop to think of it. Perhaps all I am is Anacletus in a prettier shell.”

I wasn’t in the mood for making her feel better. Despite her timely intervention earlier in the evening I was still pretty sore about the whole left-to-die bit. “Which has what to do with Sebastian, exactly?”

“Nobody has an eye for an asset like the Prince of Wands. Patrick has a sense for a certain type of person. Surely it didn’t escape your notice that his last two obsessions were both girls with untapped supernatural power, power that wound up being directly useful to Sebastian in his machinations?”

Deciding I was going to have to ride out the pain, I turned to her. “You mean he’s like a magical sniffer dog?”

“With a problematic undertone of ephebophilia, yes.”

“So you think he still needs Patrick for something?”

She nodded.

“He’s got a new girlfriend, you know.”

“Patrick?” One of Julian’s eyebrows arched. “How interesting.”

This was getting frustrating. “What’s going on, Julian?”

I got the big eyes treatment. Fuck, I’d missed the big eyes treatment. “I honestly don’t know, sweeting.”

“And stop calling me that.”

“Sorry, force of habit. But I really don’t. I knew Sebastian had sent Yelena after you—she’s old enough, dangerous enough, and unsubtle enough that people notice when she moves around. That business with the hearts…” She tsked. “Points for style I suppose, but hardly in keeping with the allegedly clandestine nature of our existence.”

I got a sudden very cold feeling. It was partly the broken arm, but it was mostly the nauseating wave of realisation. “He’s distracting us again, isn’t he? He’s got something else planned.”

“What did I always tell you about Sebastian?” She gave me a strangely sincere, strangely sorrowful look. “Just when you think you’ve worked out what he’ll do next, it turns out he’s already done it.”

I needed to find Patrick. Fishing in my left inside pocket with my left hand, I managed to work my phone out and unlock it. I had like eight missed calls from an unknown number. That was what happened when people tried to ring me while I was drunk, hallucinating, or having a vampire try to murder me. “Sorry,” I said, then immediately regretted it. I was very far from wanting to apologise to Julian Saint-Germain for anything still. “I mean, there’s some calls I should be making.”

“Pretend I’m not here.” She shot me a sly grin. “I shan’t even breathe.”

I rang back the unknown number.

“Kate, is that you?” I didn’t recognise the voice.

“Yes,” I replied cautiously. “Who am I speaking to?”

“It’s Flick. I’m under a desk at Safernoc. Sofia’s outside doing the sunlight thing but it’s not helping. Something’s here and she told me to call you but you didn’t answer and I don’t know if we still need you or it's too late or—”

I recognised this. It was blind panic. “Breathe,” I told her. “Let the people with the magic powers do the fighting. Stay wherever you can go that’s as safe as you can get. Safernoc is all thick walls and strong doors, I’m sure there are a lot of places to hide.”

“Sofia said we needed you. She said you’d know what to do.”

I didn’t, but now seemed like a bad time to break her illusions. “What’s happening?”

“Something came out of the woods. I didn’t get a good look at it, but everybody seemed worried.”

This was beginning to look bad. “Okay. Tell you what, keep your phone close—do you have battery?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’m going to hang up and see if I can get to where you are. Keep doing what you’re doing, staying safe is the most important thing. If Sofia comes back and wants to speak to me, I’ll be here. I’m sorry I didn’t pick up earlier.”

She made a soft, affirmative noise. “Hurry,” she said. “Please.”

Well fuck. “I assume you heard all of that.”

“The question you should be asking yourself is whether this is another distraction.”

I stared at her. Between the pain, her saving me from Yelena, and what I was sure was a deliberate effort to dick with my head, my feelings towards her were approaching maximum ambivalence. “Just get me a car.”

“Commanding,” she gave me an approving smile. “I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoyed that.”

I made an emphatic gesture that was a very, very bad idea with a broken arm, and almost fell over. “Fucking hell, Julian. Help me or throw me out or, I don’t know, fucking kill me where I’m standing because right now you’re just pissing me off.”

Her deep blue eyes met mine. There was something almost gentle about her expression. “As you wish. But we need to do this properly. Hannah”—she signalled minidress-vampire—“get this one’s arm splinted. Then send for the limousine.” She gave me a dazzling, headfucking smile. “Never let it be said I do nothing for you.”

I sat quietly while Hannah the Vampire fixed up my arm. I wasn’t quite sure why Julian made sure so many of her minions had rudimentary medical training, but perhaps it was a sensible precaution when you were superhumanly strong, driven by bloodlust, and had a deep fondness for kink.

“By the way,” I figured I should distract myself while my arm was being prodded and it was chat to Julian or nothing. “What happened to Ash?”

“He left.” She looked genuinely bummed about it. “Around the same time you did, and for approximately the same reasons.”

I’d never worked out what the thing was between Ashriel and Elise—nearest I could tell they each liked the fact that the other one didn’t want to fuck them, which they both would have found quite a novel experience—but I had a sudden and probably alcohol-induced pang of regret for not reaching out to him more after she went. His life was hard enough what with the whole deal demons had where they needed to drain other people of their joy and happiness or else suffer unending torment always, forever. Plus immortals didn’t face bereavement that often, for obvious reasons, so they tended not to handle it well.

I pencilled another entry onto my list of reasons I am a shitty person who doesn’t deserve to have good people in her life.

Saying goodbye to Julian was awkward. There was still a tiny part of me that felt I should be kissing her, and another part that wanted to ram a golden spike through her eye and watch the alchemical sunlight liquefy her brain.

In the end I went with, “Later.”

“Don’t get killed.”

She was still the last person who got to give me that advice.

22

Cold & Dark

It was weird being in Julian’s limo again, but I wasn’t going to let a little detail like seething bitterness get in the way of my ride. On top of being a basically lazy and selfish person, I needed to get to Safernoc as quickly as possible because, as a rule, people didn’t ring you up saying “help help, we’re under attack” unless things had got super bad.

My arm was still hurting like hell, which on reflection was probably going to limit my ability to be much practical use in any kind of fight, much less the sort that required you to ring for emergency relief. Still operating my phone wrong-handed I fired off a few messages to Flick but got no response, which I took to mean she was keeping her head down, rather than that she was dead of mysterious entity. I also caught brief sight of a somewhat belated reply from Eve on the Nicola Bright situation to the effect that she was a bit concerned but her government contacts were being cagey. I filed that under “later”.

As the car sped through the late-night traffic, I had this weird dissonance in my head where it felt betrayal-ey to be thinking about anything that wasn’t whatever the hell disaster was going on at Safernoc, but at the same time I was stuck in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven vehicle for at least another hour and I might as well try to be useful. Well, useful-ish.

I texted Patrick.

I wasn’t expecting to get anything back, so I went long-form. Having come of age in the days of strict character limits when skipping punctuation and using maddening abbreviations had actually been useful, I couldn’t quite get used to the fact that you could now send somebody a text the length of a short wikipedia article if you wanted to. But I tried anyway.

Patrick, I typed, I know you won’t believe this, and I don’t have any details, but whoever your new girlfriend is, she might be in more danger than we thought. The Prince of Wands used you to get to me and he used you to get to Sofia. He’s got plans for the new girl, I’m sure of it.

I hit send. Then followed it up with. I’m serious, Patrick.

That had been almost as painful as getting a limb snapped by an angry vampire. It had also exhausted my list of tasks I could productively do via electronic device from the rear of a moving limousine. Which left me alone with my thoughts. And I fucking hated my thoughts.

Everything was still such a tangle right now. Getting the Ed Brown case off my docket meant I was without paying work yet again and had dropped the only relatively straightforward thing from my to-do list. Yelena, the Prince of Wands, the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter, and whatever the fuck was happening with Nim and the visions and the hallucinations and the fucking tarot nonsense, were all this gigantic messy blur of supernatural gah that was making less and less sense by the day. I was getting sick of messy blurs of supernatural gah.

The night grew darker as we turned off the motorway and into the A-roads and then the little country lanes that led to the ancestral seat of the Vane-Tempests. A lot darker, now I thought about it. And some of that was probably tree-cover and some of it was probably getting away from the relentless streams of headlights and streetlights that lined the main roads, but there was something else—an almost tangible malevolence, like a haunted wood in a fairytale. I felt briefly bad for the driver, who as far as I knew was just some schmoe who worked for Julian and had no clue about the nightmare that was, in all likelihood, about two minutes up the road.

I pressed the little intercom button. We were close enough now that I could walk the rest without it being too much of a problem and staying off the main drag would probably be a good idea. “You might want to stop here,” I suggested. “It’s a long way back to London and these roads get tricky late at night. I’ll be fine, you get back home.”

“If you’re sure, Miss Kane.” The driver’s voice seemed at once uncertain and relieved. I was glad I hadn’t been the only one sensing the general creeptastic vibe—I’d been known to get a little paranoid about mystical bullshit. Then again I always thought paranoid was a big upgrade from dead.

The driver very much did not need additional encouragement to leave me in the dust, turn the limo around, and hightail it back to the Velvet. It was probably for the best all in all—another mortal to worry about would only have made things more awkward—but it did mean that I was now on foot by the side of a very poorly lit road, with my arm in a rudimentary sling and a night of supernatural horrors closing in all around me.

I told myself I’d been in worse situations, and I had. Then again, I thought that probably said more about how crappy my life had been up until that point, rather than being any kind of silver lining to my objectively cloudy present situation.

There was nothing for it. With the trees arching up on either side of the road like claws and the stars and moon blotted out behind what I hoped against all probability was a completely ordinary overcast sky, I walked on.

Before long I decided to get off the road proper and a little deeper into the woods. The choice of strategy was partly because the posh berks who lived around these parts tended to think speed limits were strictly optional, and it would have been deeply embarrassing for even this half-arsed rescue attempt to end with my getting run over by some prick in a Beamer. But mostly it was because I suspected the roads would be watched, and while where faeries were concerned trees weren’t exactly mega-trustworthy either, at least I knew I could run and hide in the woods if the situation got out of hand.

Besides, something in the chill of the forest called out to me—not something I was especially comfortable listening to, but right about now something was a metric shit-ton better than nothing.

The woods around Safernoc Hall were a strange, enchanted place that bordered a whole mess of ever-shifting faery realms. The Realm of the Pale Stag—a creature of desolation and withering and autumnal decay, responsible for the white streak in my hair—was one, the Cold and the Dark another. I’d have been amazed if my mother didn’t have access to it somewhere, because it was a howley wolfey hunty place and she was a howley wolfey hunty lady.

I pushed on through the darkness, letting instinct guide me as much as memory. Maybe it was adrenaline, or maybe it was residual faery magic impulses, but my arm was beginning to bother me less and my head was starting to feel clearer. Through the trees, I saw a shadow moving in parallel with me. I stopped and it stopped too. I quickened my pace and it quickened.

I walked towards it.

The thing was large, though details were hard to make out in what was fast becoming near-total darkness. At first I thought it might have been one of the wolves, but it seemed bigger, more the size of a large horse. I fumbled on my phone light, and saw something gleaming pale between the trees.

Fuck. Not the unicorn.

It walked slowly towards me, head bowed, which given the giant fucking spike it was pointing at me could either have been a gesture of submission or a threat. Last time we’d met I’d managed to get it, or something like it, more or less on side by pulling faery princess rank. But there’d been a lot of vodka under the bridge since then.

Still, I approached it. Just very, very, very carefully. Horses were bad enough, horses with fucking spears coming out of their faces should have been nightmare fuel to any reasonable person. It knelt down in the undergrowth in front of me, and tucking my phone back into my pocket I gently stroked its neck.

“There we are,” I whispered. “There’s a good half-ton of spite, muscle, and anger.” Cautiously, in case it changed its mind, I swung myself onto its back, and it got to its feet. Well, this officially made me the cavalry. All one of me. Riding a unicorn was more a question of intent than technique, or at least it was if you were me and had to use your status as otherworldly pseudo-royalty to compensate for not knowing what the fuck you were doing. I did my best to guide it towards Safernoc Hall, insofar as I knew where that was.

Snow began to fall. It was so, so not the season for it. Which meant that something intensely spooky was happening. I urged the unicorn on and it carried me through thinning woodlands towards the vast gardens of Safernoc. And while the trees grew sparser the snow grew heavier, so that by the time we’d broken out of the woods and into the grounds of the manor, I could scarcely see for the blizzard and the darkness and the strange shapes that roiled in the clouds overhead.

Shit. I really wasn’t sure how I was supposed to fight the weather.

Except that the snow wasn’t the only thing attacking the hall. Strange, wraithlike images formed in the air—insubstantial but definitely humanoid, forming a chill white army that surged uphill towards the house where in the distance I could make out the shapes of wolves holding the line and a tiny bright point of light that I thought must be Sofia.

I stopped dead. I could have spurred the unicorn on and charged into the back of the blizzard-ghosts. And I might even have been able to push through but then where would I be? Surrounded by evil blizzard faeries with a broken arm and a small iron dagger trying to fend off what looked a lot like the full weight of the Cold and the Dark.

Okay, Kate. Think. Thinking is what makes you different from animals and dead people. This whole place had been a nexus of mystical wibble for centuries, which meant if this was happening now something had changed. And if something had changed it was because someone changed it.

Sebastian fucking Douglas.

I scanned the snowbound blur that was the grounds of Safernoc Hall for any sign of the little bastard but came up short. Of course his tendency to wear all white against what was rapidly turning into a white background wouldn’t have helped.

Then I caught a scent in the wind, a taste in my mouth. Not Douglas, I’d never bitten Douglas, much as he might have deserved it. A taste of copper and ice, the blood of the Merchant of Dreams. The Merchant was a slippery fucker, but I didn’t think they were here in person. Still, blood had power and as I’d discovered with near fatal consequences when the Prince of Wands had tried to climb to heaven over my corpse, us changelings could proxy for our parents perfectly well.

I steered the unicorn towards the scent. Sure, I was basically steering into a head-on collision with either a faery lord, a millennia-ancient vampire, or both, but fuck it. You only live once.

Here lies Kate Kane. Only lived once. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.

The blizzard closed in around me and taloned, elfin-looking creatures swiped at me with claws made of ice. I cut back with an iron dagger and was pleased to see that despite being made of swirling snow and darkness the things still went down when you stuck sharp objects in them. And even with the weather, the unicorn seemed confident in its footing, following my unconscious commands towards the source of that sweet-sharp tang of blood on the air.

Then it went out from underneath me, and—oh yeah, broken arm, fuck—I landed heavily in the snow, my dagger spinning out my hand which was at least better than it winding up lodged in my head.

Struggling to look up, I tried to make out what had taken down the unicorn. I saw it thrashing on the ground while two great white beasts tore into its flesh with savage, bloody jaws.

Werewolves.

One of them turned its head towards me, and I saw that its eyes had been stabbed through with what looked like the shards of a broken mirror. That explained what had happened to the missing wolves. Maybe Tabitha had got off easy.

The creature padded towards me. It was breathing, but its breath left no vapours in the air—cold then, and ice-cold rather than corpse-cold. Fuck, faeries were dicks. Who did that to a person?

I tasted blood and frost again, and I heard the crunch of snow under neat, precise footsteps.

Turning my head, I saw the Prince of Wands, his white linen suit dusted with snow, his hands folded neatly over a silver-topped cane. His eyes had changed, one stained black now, the other mirror-bright. Deep down, though, I was sure he was the same arsehole he’d always been.

“Miss Kane.” He gave me his most patronising smile. “I had hoped that Yelena would have dealt with you already. I see I shall have to reprimand her.”

He raised his hand, and an unseen force lifted me to my feet. My arm was fucking killing me and I was starting to wish I hadn’t got quite so drunk and suddenly I was really, really fucking angry.

Somewhere in the Deepwild, my mother began to pay attention.

23

Snow & Sunlight

The new magic contact lenses didn’t make the Prince of Wands look any less smug.

“I’ll be honest,” I told him. “I almost wanted to be wrong about this. It can’t be Sebastian Douglas, I thought. He wouldn’t be so sloppy.”

He smiled. It wasn’t a cruel smile, which was by far the cruellest thing about it. “Oh, bless you, you’re trying to bait me. What’s the idea, you insult my intelligence, and my fragile ego trembles under the assault and I’m just forced to tell you everything I’m planning before I walk away and leave you in a perilous situation from which you can miraculously escape?”

Fuck. Yeah, that had been the plan.

“Pitiful, even for you.”

And he could still read minds. Fucking brilliant. “Okay, how about this. I’ll tell you what I think you’re planning and you can laugh at all the bits where I’ve guessed wrong or where I’ve guessed right but can’t do anything about it.”

“Do you ever tire of hearing yourself talk, Miss Kane?”

Nice to know he wasn’t the least bit afraid to sound like a giant fucking hypocrite. “Between listening to me and listening to you, I’ll pick listening to me.”

“Then speak. But do remember that these dogs will do exactly as I say and while, as I’m sure you’ve realised, it is far from my intention to kill you any time in the foreseeable future, you would be truly amazed what I can keep you alive through.”

The wolves snarled at my feet. Yeah, I was acutely aware how long I’d be able to live with monsters chewing on my legs, and it was way longer than I would have liked. “Okay.” I tried to stare him down, but it wasn’t happening. “Let’s do this.” I shut my eyes a second and tried to put my thoughts in order. What was his endgame, other than revenge? “You know that your reputation depends on you doing the bloody vengeance thing against anybody who crosses you. This is far more aggressive than you normally get but that’s because normally you’re fucking with vampires so you can take your time, but you needed Tara and me to pay before old age came along and did your job for you, and so you had to get apocalyptic fast.”

He wasn’t showing me any signs so far. But I was sure I was on the right track. “Killing us wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to make us realise we’d lost everything. For Tara that meant destroying Safernoc as completely as you could manage. Giving it to a faery lord would have fit your sense of poetry but—I don’t know, Sebastian, I think working with another power must have galled you, just a little. This”—I did my best to indicate the storm around us despite my whole body being held in place by sheer force of his will—“this looks to me a whole lot like borrowed power. And I don’t think you’re a man who likes borrowing power. Maybe you’re working an angle and you’ll come out of this one with the upper hand, but I think you know that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter is getting more out of this deal than you are, and I’m betting that hurts.”

He made the faintest of gestures with his free hand, and my arm twisted in a way it wasn’t meant to twist. It fucking caned, but I’d got to him.

“When you think about it, you’re practically his-her minion here.”

That was too much. He threw me away from him with a pulse of telekinetic force which sent me ploughing into a snowdrift. I reckoned I’d bought myself about three and a half seconds to do something before Sebastian Douglas could pick me up again. It was a classic fight-or-flight situation and I picked flight. If I was lucky he’d lose me in the blizzard and even if I was unlucky I was hoping that coming after me would distract him long enough that Tara and her family could start turning the tide up at the house. Of course if Sebastian was only a conduit, his full attention might not have been necessary, but somehow I didn’t imagine he’d make himself a channel for a source of otherworldly power he couldn’t at least mostly control.

Either the high winds and blinding snow proved too much for him to track me through, or the bastard made the sensible strategic decision like the immortal Machiavel he was and kept his attention focused on bringing the cold and the dark to Safernoc Hall. Fucker.

Still, that bought me enough time to scramble through the blizzard—I’d lost my dagger, which made the snow-wraiths a pisser to deal with but I found that as long as I kept my head down, stayed moving, and didn’t mind getting the occasional deep laceration across my spine I was mostly okay.

I finally made it up a short flight of annoyingly slippery steps to the rear entrance of Safernoc Hall, where for the moment things seemed to be stable. White wolves circled a few dozen feet away, and the creatures from the snow swirled in the air, but the patio was bathed in an incongruous sunlight and a pack of werewolves—the golden one definitely Tara, others recognisable as Henry and the Dowager Marchioness—were beating back whatever creatures managed to brave the warmth and the brightness.

Sofia stood in the opening of a pair of French windows, sunbeams rippling from her in waves. I was impressed—the girl had come a long way since she’d saved me from the snake lady a few years ago—but I was also seriously fucking worried. Judging by the number of calls I’d missed, this fight had been going on for literally hours, and even with a god on her side Sofia was going to need to sleep sometime. Besides, channelling that much raw celestial power couldn’t have been good for her.

I limped to her side just in time to see the sunlight gutter. It only went out for a moment but as it did the snow and wind and—oh yeah, giant fucking monsters—surged closer, forcing the wolves back for a moment. If we lived through this, I was going to become a morning person and never take the sun for granted again.

“Kate?” Her voice was painfully weak. This was bad. Like, we’re-all-going-to-die level bad.

“Don’t say anything. Carry on doing what you’re doing. Pretend I’m not here.”

“I’m glad you came.”

“Which part of don’t say anything did you miss? Right now there’s only you and your weird sunlight between us and the bad guys.”

Tara broke back from the melee and shifted into the shape that could talk in sentences. I did my best to ignore the nudity. My best wasn’t particularly effective. “Tell me you know what’s happening here,” she said. Her tone was as much commanding as pleading, but as much pleading as commanding. I had a strange urge to put my arms around her. I mean, strange in the sense that it was about her emotional state, rather than her state of undress. I settled for taking her hand, which I thought would be less awkward given the circumstances.

“Prince of Wands,” I said. “I think he drank the blood of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter. Honestly, I’m not sure who’s playing who in that relationship and I’m not sure it matters. Either way, add it up with a thousand years of studying creepy blood magic and it means he’s got a blizzard full of nightmares in his back pocket. It also means if we can take him down we can stop this.”

The light guttered again and a white wolf burst through the front ranks, coming dangerously close to mauling Sofia before Tara—who could shift forms in a heartbeat if it came to it—hit her from the side and bore her away. Then the sun was back and winter retreated.

Tara shifted back to human shape, seemingly entirely so she could give me a sceptical look. “We’ll never find him in these conditions.”

“I can deal with that.” Out of context, it sounded borderline hubristic. “I’ve tasted the blood of the king-queen—don’t ask—the problem won’t be finding him. It’ll be stopping him.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Sofia. She was still glowing. “Take me with you. He’s still a vampire, shouldn’t I—that is, shouldn’t it…”

It would work. It would definitely work. If I could get a glowing child across a battlefield full of faery monstrosities and then beat up a guy who even with his vampirism toned down was still an extremely talented wizard with a heart full of borrowed faery magic while I still had one broken arm. Fuck it, worth a shot.

“One minute.” I ducked inside. Sure, I’d dropped the iron dagger in the snow but the one nice thing about fighting faeries is that iron was much easier to get hold of than silver or metal blessed by fully paid up exorcists. And Safernoc was the kind of place stuffed with real actual fireplaces with real actual pokers.

Emerging a few moments later, I found Tara and Sofia standing side-by-side waiting for me.

“I’m coming too,” said the blonde, naked one.

“Somebody’s going to need to protect the house.” The wind was definitely getting louder, and the wolves were definitely getting bolder.

“The pack will handle it. I’m not sending the two of you out there alone.”

I didn’t make the obvious point that if the two of us were out there we wouldn’t be alone, because neither one of us really counted. Sofia had one trick and she could barely control it, and I was down a limb. “Fine. Come on.”

“You’re not giving the orders here, Kate Kane.” Tara gave me a stern look. “Sofia, kill the light, we’ll need to take them by surprise if this is to work at all. When I turn, climb on my back”—another glance, somewhat less stern this time—“not you, Kate. You’re going to lead us to Douglas.” She let out an inhuman howling which seemed to communicate something to the wolf-pack, which immediately fell back into a defensive circle. Then she shifted, and Sofia went dark, and we ran like fuck.

The moment the sunlight was gone the blizzard slammed in on us. Wind-beasts and mirror-wolves fell on our little group of defenders and at the same time Tara sprang forward to punch us a path through into the grounds. Suddenly realising how very cold, very tired, and very much in pain I was, I reached just a little for my mother’s strength and found it coming easily. Surprisingly easily given that I was holding iron. There was something about the taste of another faery lord’s blood in my mouth that excited my mother in a way I couldn’t help but find worrying.

We pushed forward with surprising speed, and despite the snow and the wind and the cold I could taste the prince of wands and his new otherworldly patron as if he was in front of me. The poker swiped through the blizzard-things and crashed down on the skull of a wolf that tried to take me from the flank. I let instinct take over, let the Deepwild take over. Running at the head of a pack of hounds was right and natural and what I sought to kill I would kill.

I was conscious of Tara beside me, the weight of a teenage seeress clinging to her back having surprisingly little effect on her ability to bring down anything that stood in her way. My mother’s influence took a moment to admire the power and the wildness of her.

We pressed on.

The Prince of Wands stood at the heart of a maelstrom of ice and winds and darkness, the two wolves who had been guarding him still resting alert by his side. Their heads whipped around as we approached and they bounded forward to intercept us. Sofia slid to the ground as Tara crashed into one of them, and I did my best to handle the other, trusting my mother’s instinct to strike and hunt and catch and kill.

Turning with a grandiosity that made me want to ram a poker through his head, which was convenient because that’s exactly what I was intending to do, Sebastian Douglas swept his arm in a wide arc and blue fire erupted in a circle around us. Fuck. I’d forgotten that little trick. With a burst of strength from the Deepwild, I kicked my wolf away and advanced on him. He raised his hand and I felt that wall of weaponised will pressing against me, though my mother’s power let me match it for a while at least.

Then Sofia got to her feet, and there was light.

24

Me & my Mother

Despite being bathed in the one thing that could rob him of a sizeable chunk of his powers and facing down an alpha werewolf and—okay, me, but I’m not nobody in this situation—Sebastian Douglas continued to look infuriatingly smug.

“Tell me,”—he gave me another one of his creepy insulting smiles—“how certain are you that I’m too weak to snap the child’s neck like a twig?”

I wasn’t totally certain, and judging from the way she’d put herself bodily between Sofia and the Prince of Wands, Tara wasn’t either.

“You’re talking a lot for somebody who’s so sure of his ability to slaughter us all.”

“I’m used to taking my time. Immortality does that to one.”

I was really, really unsure what the balance of power was here. It was me, Tara, and Sofia versus Sebastian, his borrowed magic, and two messed-up werewolves. It was the wolves in particular that were making me nervous—the ones by the house were staying clear of the sunlight, but that didn’t entirely make sense to me. Vampires obviously had solar issues, and I could see the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter finding the full weight of a summer’s day a bit of a pisser, but werewolves were very much all-weather monsters.

Then again, these weren’t exactly werewolves anymore. On a hunch I looked more closely at the glass shards piercing their eyes. I might have been imagining it, but I thought they were melting. Not quickly enough to help, but definitely melting. Unfortunately, time was against us.

“Yeah,” I said, “I see that. But I’m afraid in this case I’m going to have to hurry you.” And yes, I’d have been able to act faster if I hadn’t taken the time to banter with him first, but I was sick of letting that fucker have the last word. I reached for whatever power I could gather and went straight for Sebastian Douglas, hoping that my mother would leave me enough control to keep my focus on him instead of just killing whatever seemed tastiest.

The wolves sprang, but not at me. They’d be going for Sofia and there wasn’t a lot I could do to stop them. Either Tara had her covered, or she didn’t. My vision narrowed and I tasted the blood of the cold and the dark on my tongue. I’d been worried that my mother would be distracted, but I needn’t have been—in her strange symbolic worldview Douglas was her only enemy. The embodiment of a rival power, a chance for victory and dominance.

Blue fire rushed towards me, but I threw myself into the snow and came up on hands and knees. Somewhere far away I was dimly aware of a pain in my arm, but it didn’t matter right then. What mattered was the hunt. What mattered was the kill. I had an iron spike in my hand and, unusually, my mother seemed to see the value of it.

The light went out, and the storm closed in. The part of me that still cared about anything but spitting Sebastian Douglas and eating his heart was wondering whether Sofia was okay, but that part of me was shrinking fast. I turned and through the blizzard I saw Tara standing over Sofia’s huddled body while the two wolves circled. Then I felt the invisible grip of the Prince of Wands taking hold.

“Noble.” He stepped out of the darkness from somewhere I was sure he hadn’t been before. “But doomed.” With a gentle flexing of his fingers, he directed whatever fucked up vampire-wizard-arsehole telekinesis he was so fond of using to start pulling me in all directions at once. I felt a straining and a tearing in my limbs and my neck.

I tasted blood. He was strong but I knew with a sudden and startling certainty that in a place like this he was not quite so strong as the primal might of the Old Powers.

Closing my eyes a moment, I let my mother take over.

I have not forgotten, usurper.

A dead magic holds me, but I am life and fury and it is nothing. I move and the corpse-thing knows a moment of panic. This is his fear, beyond all things, the chaos that I am, the uncontrollable untameable wild. He has made himself replete with the blood of my rival, but I have tasted that blood and know its savour.

There is iron in my hand, and though it offends me I wield it as a spear, for the huntress must take what weapons she can and the quarry now is a thing of my kind.

A burst of sunlight. One of the younger gods turns his eyes to the world a moment. It does not concern me. The corpse-witch-thing tried to steal my power, the queen-and-king of ice-and-shadow has corrupted my wolves. They shall both pay with life and bone and pain.

He is still quick, even in light, but I am quicker. He is cunning, but I am more cunning, and he is hampered by thoughts and ideas and dreams while I know only the true and the pure and the free and what is.

Flames come, but they barely char. Deep in the pale fire is a death-sickness that tries to drain my strength but that knows not what strength I possess. A traitor-wolf falls on me from behind and I catch it with one hand. The arm is weakened, a wound from another world—bone and flesh respond.

The fire comes once more. Though he lacks instinct he understands distraction. I cast the animal aside and turn again on the corpse-witch. The sunlight fades—perhaps when I am done here I shall eat the heart of the seeress, that her light might be preserved and strengthen me—and the vampire moves with a quickness that would astound a lesser hunter.

I strike. The iron spear does not harm the corpse or disperse his cold blue fire, but the power of my rival fades at once. The storm ceases. The wind-servants vanish. The wolves still lurk but the hunt turns in my favour.

The corpse hesitates. Too much of mind and not enough of heart or viscera in him. The hesitation is fatal and I spring, bearing him down, my hands digging into his throat and his face. And all is blood and joy and the kill.

He slips from my grasp. He still has the tricks of the walking dead, and he is as darkness a moment. The night is generous to his kind. The white wolves turn and flee back to the woods and I find myself alone on tamed grass and melting snow. The prophetess lies bleeding, and I advance on her. Blood should not be wasted. Nor flesh. Nor life. I run my tongue along my teeth, sharp in anticipation.

One wolf has not fled. Not corrupted like the others. Large and golden and beautiful. Once she would have been mine, but that was long ago and there have been such betrayals since. She stands above the little priestess and snarls. She knows me for what I am, though I wear my daughter’s skin.

I lunge for her, taking her by the neck as I would any errant hound and she turns in my grasp and claws at me. Other beasts are coming now from the hill above—more wolves, though many are hurt and some fallen. I am stronger than the golden creature, but she has a fire and a frenzy to her that I cannot help but admire.

Teeth close about my legs and I fall. The golden wolf changes and becomes something smaller, weaker, less wonderful and more frail. Her packmates are around me. They underestimate—

“Tara?”

My child speaks through our mouth.

“Kate. We won. Now get it together.”

She assaults me where I am weak. In words and thoughts. My daughter fights for control and digs our hands into the soil. The wolves circle, and I feel the wild calling to me.

I felt the wild calling to me. The wolves were circling. My hands were dug into the soil, but I was myself again. Mostly. I could still taste blood and Sofia was still looking much more edible than I was comfortable with. “It’s okay,” I tried. The dowager marchioness—the silver-furred wolf with the cold blue eyes—was giving me a sceptical look that was surprisingly nuanced coming from a canine. “She’s gone. Mostly.”

My arm was killing me again, as now was my leg which the pack had needed to maul pretty badly to bring my mother down. That was the downside of having a near-unstoppable killing machine a thought’s breadth from your innermost soul. Really handy for taking out your enemies. Really unconcerned about collateral damage.

Tara helped me to my feet and I knew I was in major trouble health-wise because the only thing I wanted her to do to me right then was put me somewhere warm and dose me up with painkillers. Another of the wolves picked up Sofia and we all limped back to the hall. The pack installed the two fragile humans (or I suppose mostly-humans, in my case) in the red drawing room—presumably so the blood wouldn’t clash with the decor—and went to get changed.

Just about conscious through my various injuries and recent possession, I tried to work out quite how badly Sofia was hurt. Of course she’d done a lot of channelling sunlight so for all I knew she had the equivalent of third-degree burns on her soul, but physically she seemed—I don’t know, mostly okay, I think? There was a nasty tear running down her left arm that looked like it was bleeding a fair bit, but nothing had been bitten off or ripped out and for having gone up against two werewolves, a storm full of ice monsters, and the Prince of Wands, that wasn’t bad going.

“You okay?” I asked. It was a feeble question if I was honest.

She made a kind of nhm noise for her only reply. It was about what I’d been expecting.

The room gradually began to fill up with people—Flick was the first to arrive and went straight to Sofia’s side with the attentive uselessness of somebody whose emotional investment far outstripped their practical experience. Still she did a good job of keeping pressure on the bleeding arm until another of the werewolves—at some point I needed to learn to recognise members of the pack who weren’t Tara, the dowager, or Henry—could provide some more substantial first aid.

Things began to settle down as Tara entered, looking almost serene in a gown of blood-red velvet. “We have survived,” she told her packmates. “But the assault revealed how vulnerable we truly are.”

“You have been complacent.” The dowager’s voice cut across the room. “Allowing our borders to grow wild and our defences to be weakened while you debase yourself with humans.”

Ouch. She was playing the debasement card. Tell us what you really think, granny. “Hey.” I waved a hand. “Not technically human.” Okay, that probably wasn’t helping.

“With humans,” she continued, “who interfere in our deliberations and who know nothing of protocol or solemnity.”

Tara crossed the floor with an animal speed and grace that in a less injured condition I’d have found deeply sexy. “We are facing a threat that is new to us, as well you know. Question my leadership before the pack again, and I will disembowel you.”

The dowager averted her eyes. I had a feeling that the old lady had a whole bunch of tricks up her sleeve and I was very, very glad that leadership in werewolf society was based almost entirely on one’s ability to win a straight fight.

From by the fire, Henry raised a hand. “Who were the wolves?” he asked. I suspected he knew the answer, but I suspect that he also didn’t want to know it. “The ones that came with the storm?”

“They were ours, Henry.” Tara’s tone was measured but resolute. “Changed, but I recognised them as I am sure you did. Camilla, Genevieve, Antonia, and Jemima at least. All lost in the Cold and Dark. All turned.”

The dowager marchioness was giving her granddaughter what I believe the young people are calling the stink eye, but was at least keeping her own counsel for now.

“Can they be turned back?” asked Henry. From the look on his face, he was clearly expecting the answer to be “no”.

“I think she can do it,” I jerked my head in Sofia’s direction, realising slightly too late that I was dropping her in it.

Flick looked up from where she’d been kneeling. “She nearly got killed helping you out tonight. You can’t expect her to do it again.”

“Do not tell me what I can and cannot do.” Tara’s eyes bled yellow and Flick shrank into the corner—I’d say this for the girl, her instincts were on point.

Hoping that my contribution to this whole discussion was coming out net positive, I stuck my oar back in. “I don’t think you’d need to send her out—y’know—hunting. But when I saw the wolves—”

“Camilla and Antonia,” Tara said. “They have names, and you will use them.”

“When I saw Camilla and Antonia sitting by the Prince of Wands, the glass in their eyes was melting in the sunlight. It was slow and this is all way outside what I’m confident making guesses about, but from what I know about faery bullshit is chances are you melt the glass you break the spell.”

“And what”—the dowager’s tone was just this side of mocking—“do you imagine would happen to their eyes if you melted the glass out of them?”

It was probably meant as an insult. I thought about it anyway. “I won’t lie, there’s a good chance they’d lose them.”

“And what use are blind wolves?” I was beginning to remember quite how much I hated this woman.

Tara turned back to her grandmother with a look that bordered on contempt. “They are family. And you dishonour us all by even suggesting…”

“A wolf who can no longer hunt is not a wolf. Your coddling of the weak”—here she shot a none-too-subtle glance at Henry—“is what has landed us in this situation.”

Much as I hated to admit it, what had landed them in this situation was that Tara had come to rescue me from the Prince of Wands and he’d taken it so personally he’d decided to systematically dismantle everything the Vane-Tempests had been protecting for the best part of a millennium.

Be that as it may, Tara was clearly through taking shit from her grandmama. Moving back across the sitting room like some fury out of—I dunno, a Greek thing that you didn’t learn about if you went to a state school—she raked a single claw down the face of the dowager marchioness, tracing a thin line of blood from cheekbone to chin.

The old lady looked up, her eyes steel-cold and defiant. “If you think impetuousness is a substitute for will, you are sorely mistaken.”

There wasn’t much point continuing the discussion after that. Tara dismissed the pack, including her grandmother, arranged for Sofia to be taken somewhere relatively safe and restful, and then turned her attention to me.

“So I take it we’re passing on those chains,” I told her once we were alone.

“Stop trying to be funny.”

I staggered to my feet, half-regretted it at once, but made my way over to her anyway. “Sorry—I—it’s just how I deal.”

“I know.” She brushed the back of her hand down my cheek. “And you were … helpful tonight. Against the storm.”

“You came through for me. What kind of a shitty person would I be if I didn’t do the same for you?” To be fair, my track record in this regard was fifty-fifty at best, but I was trying to be a less awful person.

She glided closer, her hands coming to rest on my hips. “I can have a room made up for you if you—with your injuries.”

That would have been the sensible thing. I had a broken arm for fuck’s sake. And tooth marks in my thigh. “No, I feel like you need the company. Fuck, so do I.”

“Thank you.”

She leaned in and kissed me with a gentleness I was still finding surprising. Then she led me to bed.

25

Me & Tara

Tara arranged for a servant to retie the splint on my arm and to do something about the bleeding from my leg. Then she helped me to undress because honestly this sleeping in my clothes malarkey was getting unhelpful, and we both slid somewhat awkwardly under her absurd-thread-count covers. For an exercise involving that much nudity it was remarkably unsexual, and I was struggling not to find it at least a little bit romantic.

Because that was not what I needed. I’d come to Tara after finishing with Julian because I’d been pretty sure she could always be relied upon to fuck me until I was numb everywhere that mattered and too out my mind on endorphins to hate myself. I hadn’t come looking for somebody to take care of me or protect me or stand up for me or give a shit if I was hurt.

“Is this—is this okay for you?”

She traced her fingertips down the inside of my good arm. “Is what okay?”

“Well, when we first met it was all one day you’ll beg me to fuck you and now it’s more one day I’ll gently tuck you under the covers and make you feel safe and warm while you wait for your broken arm to heal. I figured you were mostly in this so you could use me as your filthy mortal sex toy.”

She laughed. It was a melancholy sort of laugh, the sort you gave when—well—when you’d had a blazing row tinged with real physical violence with your actual grandmother over whether the lives of your blind family members were worth saving. “I have plenty of sex toys, Kate Kane. Living and inanimate. And you shouldn’t flatter yourself that you’re quite so good in bed that I’d have done everything I’ve done out of sheer carnal temptation.”

“You aren’t about to tell me you’re in love with me are you?”

She arched an eyebrow. “You do understand that there can be a middle ground between I want to fuck you then discard you and I want to bear your children?”

“I know. I’m sorry. Relationships are like the opposite of my forte.”

“Your piano?”

I screwed up my nose at her. “Come again?”

“Piano. The opposite of forte. You must have studied music at school?”

“Yeah, if by studied music you mean pissed around on Casio keyboards for a half-hour a week.”

She looked genuinely abashed. “I’m sorry, it wasn’t my intent to make you self-conscious.”

“Seriously, Tara, if the fact that you’re about eight million times posher than me made me even slightly insecure, I’d have bailed a long time ago.”

That earned me a suspicious look. “Would you?”

“Well, no. But only because I really, really like having sex with you.”

She took my good hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “Thank you, I value you as well.”

“So…” I squirmed a little uncomfortably. “What are your plans for—you know—Camilla and Antonia and the others?”

She was still holding my hand very close to her face, and I could feel her breath warm on my fingers. “I don’t know. Grandmama wasn’t entirely wrong. If they won’t be able to see they won’t be able to hunt, and perhaps it would be foolish to risk more of our pack just to bring back four wolves who can no longer do their duty.”

There was a chilling logic to that, but I was a world of not here for chilling logic. “I don’t know. Don’t get me wrong, this does seem to have I am a trap written all over it. But”—I turned towards her, tweaked my bad arm and immediately remembered why I’d been lying so still up until that moment—“I don’t think Sebastian Douglas is as in control as he has been before. The guy is more than two thousand years old—he’s slippery as a greased python and so ruthless that your granny would look at him and say gosh, that man is a little bit ruthless for my tastes—but he’s not at all used to dealing with things that change fast. I think if we hit him quickly it might surprise him. He’d have a way out, because he always has a way out, but you might at least save your people.”

“I don’t know if I can ask the pack to follow me into the Cold and Dark without a plan.”

I shrugged, then winced. Okay, another gesture off limits. Great. “Then we make a plan. And if you don’t want to take your wolves in then we can go together, you and me. Not that I’m sure I’ll be that much help what with the broken arm and tendency to go totally berserk if I draw on too much power, and I think my mother wants to either have sex with you or kill and eat you. But, those tiny details aside, I’ve got your back.”

She kissed my hand again. “Thank you.” Then she turned it over and gently brushed the tip of her tongue against my palm.

I shivered. “Okay stop that, because right now your mouth’s writing cheques that my moderate-to-severe injuries can’t cash.”

She kissed my wrist, and began working her way up my arm. “Are you sure?” And my, what big eyes she had.

“I’m sure.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. But operation be mature and make positive decisions was going pretty okay at the moment and I was sure saying not at all, do me hard, please was not a mature or positive decision.

Carefully, almost too carefully, she curled up next to me, her fingers tracing lazy meandering patterns over the parts of me that were still okay with being touched, which wasn’t a huge number of them with everything I’d been through lately. I couldn’t decide if it was lovely and comforting and a little bit that R-word that I’m not mentioning, or if it was just total fucking torture. I settled on the side of comforting.

And let myself drift gently to sleep.

* * *

A forgetful snow fell on the dream of a forest. Blood and shadows tanged in my mouth and a pale woman in white stood bathed in cold, winter’s sunlight.

“What is it now?” I was hoping I’d hit the cap on strangers showing up in my head, but here we were with a new one.

“I come to negotiate peace.”

“Great. Give the wolves back and we’ll call it even.”

“The wolves were payment for a different bargain.”

I was beginning to see where the Merchant got it from. “With Douglas?”

The Queen of Winter nodded.

“They weren’t his to give.”

“That is a matter of perspective.”

Faery bargains were a mystery to me. It’d probably have been safer to learn more about them but seriously fuck that noise. “Okay, but either way aren’t they yours now, and so can’t you give them back if you want to?”

“I do not want to.”

“Well, if you want peace with Safernoc.” I shrugged in a “whaddya gonna do” kind of a way.

The light shifted and the vision shifted with it. “I do not want peace with Safernoc,” said the King of Shadows.

“Is this a divided-against-yourself thing? Because that’s going to make negotiations messy.”

He shook his head. “I want peace with the Deepwild.”

Ah. That made a difference.

“All you need to do,” he continued, “is remain neutral in my battle with the wolves of Safernoc Hall. They have not been your mother’s creatures in centuries and you have no claim on them now.”

I had no idea what my mother had to do with any of this, but I thought it was best not to say so. “And what do I get in return?”

“The vampire.”

I wasn’t falling for that one. “Which vampire. There are two.”

He smiled. I wasn’t sure if he’d been trying to trap me with that one, or if he just appreciated the attention to detail. After all, that was supposed to be where the devils were. “The Prince of Wands. He will come for you when he is done with your allies. You defied him and he does not like to be defied.”

“Yeah, kinda knew that already. I’ve got a plan.” I didn’t, but I liked to think that keep running and hope it all works out mostly okay was a reasonable substitute for one.

“He is old.” The King of Shadows walked in a half-circle around me, drawing closer and stepping back into the light. “I am older,” said the Queen of Winter. “He knows power but does not know it so well as he believes.”

I turned to face her. She was all up in my grill at this point and I wasn’t happy about that but I also wasn’t backing down. Her breath on my face was like the wind off the north sea. “I think I’m beginning to get what’s happening here.”

“Enlighten me.” Her tone was frost on a windowpane, ice cracking beneath your feet.

Odds were I’d get one chance to pivot this, because I had a crappy hand and my best option here was to hope she was bluffing as hard as I was. “You’re a primordial being of ice and darkness and were making dark pacts with unsuspecting mortals before Sebastian Douglas was even born. But your kind have weakened over the years and his have grown stronger. You’ve backed away into the dark forests while he’s spent centuries gathering power and knowledge and secrets.” I took a deep breath. Not that I probably needed to because, y’know, dreaming, but the instinct was hard to break. “If I had to make a guess—and it is just a guess, I won’t pretend it’s not—neither of you is quite sure who has the upper hand here, and because you’re both complete arseholes neither of you like not knowing. You’re both expecting a showdown when the wolves are dealt with, and you’re both hoping you can screw the other before they screw you.”

She stepped back, shadows falling across her. “An interesting suggestion,” said the King of Shadows. “But no mortal gets the better of me.”

“Sebastian Douglas isn’t mortal.”

“There was a time before him, there will be a time after. He is mortal enough.”

I gave him my most I call bullshit look. “You know I’ve killed one of your lot too, right?” That might have been the wrong thing to say, but fuck it felt good to say it. I mean, yeah, I’d had the advantage of a now-shattered magic sword and an ancient warrior-vampire backing me up, but I knew first hand that the King-Queen wasn’t indestructible.

“Which is why I’ve come to bargain with you. You have power. I ask only that you turn that power away from me and towards one who will do you far more harm in future.”

When he put it like that, it did sound reasonable. “And all you ask in return is that I sell out my friends.”

“If you believe the wolves are your friends, you are a greater fool than I could possibly have imagined.”

“That’s on your imagination. I’ve got a lot more fool left in the tank.”

He stared at me over steepled fingers. “I would not have there be war between the shadow and the wood.”

“Then give back Camilla and Antonia and the rest. Otherwise I’m going to have to side with the pack on this.”

The King of Shadows looked sincerely regretful. “You have made an ill choice,” he said. “And I shall see that you regret it sorely.”

“I keep doing shit that gets people I care about killed horribly. Regretting things sorely is not new territory for me”

He turned away and walked off into the dreams of the snowbound woods. The Queen of Winter stopped in a beam of moonlight and looked back at me. “Fear death by water, Kate Kane.”

Somewhere in the distance, a cock was crowing.

I needed to hurry up. It was time.

26

Plans & Actions

I explained to Tara about my dreams over the usual steak-and-coffee breakfast. And, as ever, I leaned more on the coffee and she leaned more on the steak.

“I’m not sure I’m happy about our enemies courting you while you’re sleeping in my bed.” Her blood-reddened lips curled into what I hoped was an ironic smile.

“Hey, I don’t like it any more than you do.”

“You may be underestimating quite how little I like it.”

“Same, with knobs on. It’s my head they’re in here.”

Apparently done with the meat at last, she nibbled delicately at some kind of pastry. “And you’re certain that the King-Queen and the Prince of Wands will turn on each other?”

“Pretty much unavoidable given what utter shits they both are. But they’re too paranoid by half to let their guards down while still fighting you lot.”

She set the tray to one side and stretched out on the bed a moment. “Still, we might be able to accelerate matters. An alliance with no trust is a fragile thing.”

“Maybe.” I wasn’t completely sure. I didn’t have the world’s deepest insight into faery psychology, or vampire psychology for that matter, but I had more experience than Tara did. “The trouble is I don’t think it’s an alliance exactly. It’s more like a deal with the devil. Except I suspect both sides think they’re the devil in the arrangement.” On reflection, that probably wasn’t a great recipe for long term cooperation either, but I didn’t want to get Tara’s hopes up about the playing-both-sides strategy.

With a resigned sigh, Tara rose and dressed. Gold today. She was going to have to sell her grandmother on an idea she’d hate, which meant she needed an air of authority. She looked unbelievable in, like, a very literal sense. There was always something about Tara that I actually couldn’t believe—that to-the-manner-born vibe which said that whatever she did was right and wherever she stood was where she was meant to be. I felt a little bit like a class traitor for being so into it.

I got myself dressed as well in the slightly cleaner outfit that once again the laundry goblins at Safernoc had got ready for me while I was out doing other things, and then we went down to the White Drawing Room, where Henry, Sofia, Flick, and the Dowager Marchioness were already waiting for us.

“I hope it has not escaped your attention,” observed the old lady as we entered, “that fully half the people in this room are outsiders.”

“Allies, grandmother,” said Henry. “Something we have perhaps overlooked for too long.”

She responded to this with a contemptuous look. “Interlopers, leeches, and malingerers.” Her gaze came to rest quite pointedly on Flick. “What was she doing while our home was under attack? Hiding in the upstairs rooms and crying? I’d thought your generation was bad enough”—with a pointed gesture she indicated Henry and Tara—“but it seems there were deeper depths left to plumb.”

“Enough.” Tara’s voice was soft but it carried. “Felicity is here because she is in danger, and she is in danger because her friend fought beside us on the borders when the Prince of Wands was about to tear down the walls of reality and make a mockery of our very duty and purpose.”

The dowager marchioness met her granddaughter’s gaze without flinching. “A battle that you chose, of course, for reasons that had nothing to do with any of our present company.”

Much as I hated her, she did have something of a point. I couldn’t very well be grateful to Tara for having my back in a crisis and also insist that her having my back in a crisis hadn’t on some level compromised her judgement, duty-wise.

“Kate came to our aid last night,” Tara insisted. “And she will help us bring our people back from the Cold and the Dark.”

“Are you still committed to the foolish notion of rescuing people who have already proven themselves unable to do what is needed of them?”

Tara’s lips, still a little bloody from breakfast, grew thin. “I shall not abandon our own. And surely, grandmama, you will admit that there can be few flaws in such a strategy. Either I will bring our sisters back from the clutches of the enemy, or I will die. Either way, you should be able to count a victory.”

“I do not wish you dead, child.” The dowager’s expression didn’t soften, exactly, but it settled into a more nuanced bitterness. “I wish you to see reason.”

I was beginning to tune out of the conversation. There was only so much of an elderly werewolf telling me I was worthless and a distraction I could take. Besides, while I was absolutely onside with supporting Tara in operation don’t-leave-our-family-members-as-faery-mindslaves, it was still only one thing on my list of priorities for the next week or so. Although unless the dowager was a whole lot more murderous than I was giving her credit for, I’d at least managed to bundle protecting Sofia and probably thwarting the Prince of Wands in with the wolf stuff. There was just that pesky finding-the-holy-grail-to-save-one-of-my-oldest-friends issue I needed to be taking care of.

Then again, we were talking about a millennia-ancient magic cup. It’s not like it was going anywhere.

“I think our best bet,” I told the assembled werewolves, only one of whom was looking at me like she resented my breathing the same air as her, “is if Tara, Sofia, and I go to London.”

This time it was Flick who interrupted. “You can’t make her fight monsters again, not straight away.”

“I’ll be okay.” Sofia took her friend’s hand. “They’ll look after me.”

“There’s two of them, and Kate’s clearly fucked. No offence, Kate.”

“None taken.” I clearly was. “But I wasn’t planning for her to fight anything. Our best hope of catching our enemies unawares is if we find a way into the Cold and Dark that isn’t the one on your doorstep. There’s a couple of entrances in London I know about and we should be able to get in one of them. But if I’m right, and Sofia’s kooky bride-of-Apollo schtick will fix your packmates, I’d rather we do it as close as possible to the place we go in, instead of having to drag four werewolves back to Safernoc while an evil faery lord is still controlling their minds.”

“I should come with you.” That was Henry. “There are at least four of us in there, plus two vampires, plus the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter. Outnumbered doesn’t begin to describe it.”

“We need you here,” replied Tara. “They might attack while I’m away.”

Or you might not come back. Nobody wanted to say it, and nobody needed to.

The dowager rose to her feet. Slowly, but not stiffly. “Then I’ll come. And”—Tara was about to open her mouth but the old woman raised a hand to silence her which, unusually, she accepted—“before you tell me not to, you know this is how it must be. We are never at our strongest fighting alone, and for all the power that this one”—she eyed me suspiciously—“undoubtedly has in her veins she is not family. I would not have you risk anybody else on this fool’s errand but of us all I am by far the most expendable.”

That was—I wasn’t sure what that was. I still thought the old lady was evil, but I hadn’t been super wild about going back into faerie with little-to-no backup, and wolves did fight far more effectively in groups.

After a moment of consideration, Tara nodded. “You will come with us. And so will you.” This last comment was addressed to Flick. “Sofia might need somebody to watch out for her while we’re elsewhere, and I doubt you’d be happy leaving her in any case.”

Flick nodded vigorously.

“Then it’s decided. We leave at once—there will be no daylight in the Cold and Dark, but at least we can retreat if we become overwhelmed.”

On the one hand, it was good to know that Tara had her head firmly enough in the game that she’d thought about what we’d do if we wound up having to run the hell away. On the other hand, it wasn’t a great sign that running the hell away was so likely as an outcome. And “overwhelmed” was never a good phrase to be throwing around. It was a short step from there to “overrun” or “outclassed” and a tiny little hop from that to “just plain dead.”

Well, we did what we could with the cards we’d been dealt.

Tara arranged for a small convoy of cars—we wouldn’t quite all fit in one, and if we did manage to rescue four werewolves we wouldn’t be able to make the return trip in two either—which met us out front. From there it was an early morning drive through deceptively idyllic woodlands and picturesque country lanes. At least until we got into the outskirts of the city at which point it rapidly turned into warehouses and tower blocks.

We left the convoy, along with Flick and Sofia, in a carpark off the A502, which is exactly the kind of glamorous and sexy thing that you do when you’re a private investigator slash not-exactly-professional monster hunter slash faery princess. With a probably disproportionate sense of smugness, I also remembered to leave my phone in the car so that it wouldn’t get trashed diving into ponds. I’d had this handset a full fourteen months, and I wasn’t about to give up on it now. Then we tromped off onto the heath.

Although a lot of it is technically “ancient woodland”, Hampstead Heath isn’t exactly the depths of the Black Forest and it didn’t take us that long to hike the half mile up to the bridge with the portal to faerie. Honestly, it was almost disappointing, I mean I was fairly sure that going on a vital mission of mercy with a pair of werewolves from an ancient bloodline of mystical defenders of Albion shouldn’t have involved a short walk up a mostly paved road past a picnic area and a set of well-signposted public toilets.

We got to the pond, and I skirted the edges feeling for an entrance with whatever uncanny senses you used to feel for eerie portals to other realities. I caught it, a glimpse of deeper shadow against shadow in the arches under the red brick of the viaduct.

“There,” I pointed.

Tara and the dowager both nodded. They were probably even more used to spotting these sorts of things than I was—ancient sacred birthright and all that. Then they stripped. I’d kind have thought they might wait until we were in faerie proper to do that, what with this being a fairly popular tourist spot, but then again their clothes would be safer on this side of the gate and it’d be better for them to be able to go full wolf as soon as possible once we were through.

Fuck it. I dived in. They followed me, and the three of us swam towards the doorway. I clung to a naïve hope that nobody was filming this.

As we passed under the arch I saw nothing but brick, and with a grim sense of inevitability I realised that our path into the Cold and Dark almost certainly lay underwater. Because of course it did. Because faeries were arseholes. I held my breath and porpoised down. I couldn’t see a fucking inch. Pondwater in London was not famous for its crystal clarity. There were probably all sorts of unpleasant things in here, most of them beginning with words like “discarded” or “used”.

Navigating by instinct and what I vaguely remembered from my failed biology A-level was technically called thermoception, I swam towards where the water was coldest. I was fast learning that my three least favourite activities were swimming in filthy, freezing water, swimming in clothes, and swimming in clothes through filthy, freezing water, with a broken arm.

I was beginning to doubt the advisability of this plan.

Walking into a faery realm is usually like plunging into an ice-cold lake, but since I’d already done that today I needed to find a new way to tell when I’d made it through to the other side. Turned out it was pretty obvious. I got this sick, rollercoaster feeling and down became up (graviception, my biology A-level informed me). My fingertips on my one good arm brushed something solid and frozen, and I saw faint bluish light filtering through what was unmistakably a thick sheet of ice between me and breathable air.

Fuck.

27

Ice & Beasts

Here lies Kate Kane. Should have seen this one coming. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.

Right. Fuck. Okay. Right. Get it together, Kate. You can deal with this. Fuck that is some thick ice. Do we turn around? We should probably turn around. Or maybe go get Sofia and see if the magic daylight thing works on foot-thick permafrost.

Shit, I was going to drown.

Yelena had come through here, which meant there must have been a way up. Except she didn’t need to breathe, which was quite a serious advantage given our present situation. Trying to keep my cool far harder than I had ever tried to keep anything, I inched along the underside of the ice feeling for any point of weakness. I was going numb in the extremities which somehow didn’t seem to be doing anything for the pain in my arm, which was only getting worse.

Although I always figured I’d die young, I thought I’d at least go out fighting something or fucking something. Not trapped in the cold and the dark and running out of breath way faster than was helpful. I doubted even my mother could get me out of this one, the ice was too thick to break through and it wasn’t like I’d be able to get a grip on it no matter how strong I was.

Tara appeared beside me, the dowager beside her. We shared quick looks of mutual how-fucked-are-we-ness, but then she and her grandmother exchanged a few sharp glances and opaque gestures, and they moved quickly away from me, spreading out at sixty degrees from each other to cover the ice more efficiently. Hoping I’d read their strategy right, I set out in the direction neither of them had covered.

It didn’t help. I just found more ice and more water and no air or hope of escape.

Then a naked elderly woman tugged at my leg, and I turned. The dowager swam quickly away from me—for somebody of her advanced years she had impressive lung capacity, but then I guess werewolves aged well. We swam to Tara, who was already hauling herself up through a narrow hole in the ice—I say hole, it was more a crack, barely big enough for a relatively svelte person to wriggle through with significant effort. That was fine for Tara, and the dowager was basically a skeleton covered in skin and gristle, but I wasn’t quite so physically suited to slipping through narrow fissures as they were, and while I managed to get my head above water, the rest was tough. I abandoned my jacket as a bad job and with two werewolves yanking me from above combined with the—for the moment at least— convenient tendency of ice to slip, melt, and give way under pressure I managed to emerge at last, panting and freezing and soaking and fantastically pissed about the whole broken arm thing, onto the surface of a frozen lake deep in the Cold and Dark.

“Whose stupid idea was this?” I asked nobody in particular, lying on my back on the ice and staring up into frigid, alien stars.

To her credit, Tara didn’t take the obvious bait and remind me that it had been mine. “I’d rather not talk long,” she said. “I’ll be much warmer as a wolf. We should be able to track the pack from here. You follow.” Then she shifted, along with her grandmother, and I was shivering in an unnatural winter beside two great wolves, one gold and the other silver. The pair of them set off at once and I did my best to follow. They were fairly good at keeping to a deal-withable pace, especially since tracking by scent across this much snow and ice couldn’t have been easy. Still they seemed to have a good idea of where they were going—family called out to you, it seemed—and it wasn’t long before we found the woods clearing and saw a glittering black-and-white castle in a valley between two hills.

That looked worryingly heart-of-the-realm-like. I’d hoped that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had left his-her wolves in Yelena’s custody, meaning if we were lucky we’d be able to kill two birds with one stone. Instead it looked like he-she was keeping them close. I suppose there had been no good options here—either we faced a faery lord, an evil vampire lady who was obsessed with my ex, or an evil vampire dude who was obsessed with destroying me in the most personal way possible, or some combination of the three. That was, like, a textbook lose-lose-lose.

We hunkered down on the edge of the woods and did whatever the more mystical version of casing the joint was. The palace had this impossible delicacy about it that you might reasonably expect from a place built out of ice, shadows, and metaphors. I couldn’t see any guards, but then we were still a fair way away and to say things in faerie weren’t always what they seemed would be a bit like saying the sun wasn’t always dark. I was nervous about drawing on my mother’s power while we were here, because as best I could understand that would be the equivalent of sending up a flare to the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter saying “hey, we’re here, come and turn the full might of your realm against us.” But that meant I was stuck relying on my regular human eyes. And it turned out regular human eyes sucked.

Tara went bipedal a moment. “They’re in there. I can smell them, even from here. Wolf, but not wolf. There are other creatures too, creatures made of frost and the night.”

Not the most comforting thing to hear. “Could you say how many creatures?”

“Everything here is one. It’s hard to say exactly where the King-Queen ends and his-her realm begins.”

That figured. I didn’t have a clear sense of how my mum’s power worked but from everything I’d experienced it was clear she was the Deepwild in a fundamental sense. She was the hunter and the prey and the woods the hunt ran through, she was the rivers and the rain. Yeah, I was beginning to think that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter wasn’t something we could fight. It’d be like trying to fight an idea.

Then again, fighting ideas was what I’d spent a good chunk of the last few years doing while I was sort-of-kind-of-okay-basically-definitely working for Nimue’s court, so maybe it wasn’t as outlandish a concept as all that.

The wolves became wolves again and we slunk down into the valley. We were downwind of the castle, which would help warn Tara and the dowager of anything that might be coming for us and which might have also given us the element of surprise. But the whole I-am-the-land thing made that fairly unlikely.

The run-up to the palace was an open expanse of clear, glittering snow, and there wasn’t much we could do to stop ourselves standing out against it like soup stains on formalwear. As we drew closer to the vast, sweeping staircase that led up to the main gate, we saw that the land around us was dotted with ice sculptures. Frighteningly lifelike ice sculptures, most of them showing people in various postures of distress or despair. The Merchant of Dreams had once described a different part of this place as a debtor’s prison. I was beginning to suspect that this was another one.

Faeries could officially go fuck themeslves.

We proceeded cautiously, because anything that looked vaguely humanoid in a faery realm, and most things that didn’t look vaguely humanoid, were very likely to come alive and attack you. To my tremendous relief, the statues stayed resolutely statues. There was still a good chance they were people, of course, but at least they were people who I wasn’t going to have to smash into tiny splintery pieces.

Then the wolves stopped dead, their fur bristling and their eyes bright. Something was moving white against the white of the snow. Four pale beasts, shards of glass gleaming in their eyes. There was no way they hadn’t seen us.

What came next was a strange, animal dance. Swift-moving hunters fanning out across the frozen ground in an effort to outflank their enemies. Maths was against us here, because four would always be able to cover more ground than three. Tara and the dowager seemed to realise this, because they quickly moved into a more defensive formation, all of us back to back to back inching forward while the stolen wolves closed in on all sides.

I was wearing a wet shirt in the snow with a broken arm and about to get jumped on by an average of one and one third werewolves. There was no world in which this ended well. Calling on my mother was a bad idea for so many reasons. Then again, this was looking an awful lot like an “or die” kinda deal.

The wolves sprang. And two hundred and fifty pounds of slavering shapeshifter bearing down on me got rid of basically all my misgivings. I reached. And I got nothing. Fuck. This close to the heart of the Cold and Dark, the Deepwild was further away than I’d counted on it being. Where there should have been the free, rushing pulse of my mother’s realm there was only the chill and the shade of shadows and winter.

I fell under a weight of fur and claws and breath like a blizzard. Covering my face with my broken arm was the least bad option I had available, since it freed up my other hand to stab with the iron dagger I’d retrieved from the grounds of Safernoc and somehow managed to keep with me through all the ice and the nearly drowning and the failed attempts at being sneaky. Iron did jack shit to werewolves, but a spike was a spike and I was vaguely hoping that it would neutralise some of the King-Queen’s power, like it had when I stuck Sebastian Douglas.

Bringing the weapon up as hard as I could, I rammed it into the wolf’s collarbone just as it was doing its best to turn my injured arm into a missing one. Its blood sprayed across me still warm, unlike its breath. Out of some frankly yicky instinct that I entirely blamed on my heritage, I licked it from my lips, and tasted power. The King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had said the werewolves once belonged to my mother. On some primal level they were of the wild, as I was. I rode the taste of blood down hunter’s trails and wolf-dens into the very depths of the forest and I found a strength that came from hunger and passion and the chase.

Letting go of the dagger, I took the wolf by the back of its head and moved my arm deeper into its jaws, making it snarl and twist away. The way of the wild was pure. You were hunter or you were prey. The little lord-lady of this place did not understand, with his-her contracts and bargains, oaths and promises. But some rights could never be signed away, some compacts never broken. There was one law that mattered, and it was red and sharp and bold.

I stood in the red-spattered snow and the beast cowered before me.

“Submit.” My voice was my own in part, but not in whole. Somewhere, far away, through the screaming and the wind, through the nightmares and the chill of the dark, my mother laughed on a bed of bones.

To my very real surprise and my mother’s joy, the wolf shrank back on its haunches, and then transformed into a woman with glass in her eyes and blood on her cheeks. She sat on her knees with her head bowed. There was something strange about the scent of her—her mind was still not her own, but her blood responded to the old laws. My mother’s voice told me to kill her. As an example to the others. For having the temerity to oppose us. For her weakness. Another and thankfully louder voice said that this was a person with a name—looking at her I thought it was the other half of Tuffy and Smudge—who we were here to rescue. It wasn’t what my mother wanted, but since she was close to being objectively evil, that didn’t especially bother me.

That still left three more wolves—scratch that, two more. Tara and her granny had double-teamed one as she came in—umm, in a violence way, not in a sex way—and were now turning to the ones that remained. Watching werewolves fight in a group was always a spooky experience. I’d never been one for teamwork of any kind, being very much a do my own thing, blaze my own trail, get all my friends brutally murdered, kind of girl. Still, watching the wolves move, watching them read each other’s movements and anticipate each other’s needs like they were one mind in two bodies made me almost wish I’d learned to be better at sharing. If I hadn’t been looking at my sort-of girlfriend and her grandma, I’d have wondered what it was like when two of them fucked.

The downed wolf was stirring. The problem fighting supernatural beings was that they were often impossible to permanently disable unless you happened to know their one outlandishly specific weakness. Well that or chop them up into little bits, which worked on most things. I strode towards it with more confidence than I probably should have had and caught it by the scruff of the neck. Fortunately for operation don’t get horribly mauled, whatever echoes of the Deepwild I’d tapped into with Smudge’s blood were still with me, and I could bear her to the ground with—well, not with ease, but without getting too badly shredded.

“Submit,” I told her. And she did. Okay, that was getting spooky. I turned back to the melee, where Tara and the dowager were still two-on-two with the remaining wolves. I pounced on one and managed to hold her back for long enough that the two of them were able to bring down the other. With all four of the rescuees subdued, I made the titanic error of starting to feel good about our chances.

Which was when the wind started to howl, the snow started to come down in buckets, and the fucking ice statues started moving.

28

Running & Standing

It was me, Tara, the dowager and four half-incapacitated, semi-faery-controlled werewolves against what I suspected was about a hundred and thirty animated ice sculptures which I also suspected were real people who’d had the wrong side of a faery bargain.

Which, incidentally, was basically why I hated faeries. Vampires were evil, but they had a pretty simple MO—they vaahnt to suuuck your blaaahd and they’ll do whatever it takes to get to where they can do it. Even demons, which are probably number two on my list of preternatural entities the cosmos could really do without no offence, Ash, had a fundamental honesty about them that you had to respect. Their deal was clear: you get what you want now, I get to ruin your life and torture you forever. At least they didn’t pretend to be the good guy. But the fae were all ooh we’re so authentic and primeval, don’t you feel like we represent a primordial innocence that’s been stripped away by a millennia of so-called progress, come dance with us and stick it to The Man.

Except, actually, they were pricks. The sorts of pricks who’d not only turn you into a statue of living ice for eternity if you pissed them off, but also press-gang you into fighting intruders.

At least the ice statues were fragile, which made them easy enough to deal with. Though when a weeping man lunged for me with hands made of hoarfrost and the tears still visibly sculpted onto his frozen face, and I reacted by slamming what was effectively an ice-pick into his head and shattering it like emergency glass, I felt fucking terrible about myself. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of thinking that was going to get me killed because it was definitely just me, Tara, and the dowager running defence here. Whatever spooky faery shit I’d done to the two werewolves, and whatever presumably equivalent pack-alpha shit Tara and the dowager had done to the others, they seemed to have enough control of themselves that they were broadly in line with being rescued, but not so much that they were any use at all in a fight.

We pushed through the mob of ice-people until we hit the treeline, and then we ran like fuck. The snow became hail and then a freezing rain that fell as water but turned at once to ice when it hit the ground or the trees or your body.

Coming at last to the edge of the lake we half, ran half slipped, half—and yes I know that’s three halves but cut me some slack here—skated across the surface looking for the way out. Except the trouble with ice is it all looks the same even when it isn’t snowing. And cracks in it freeze over even when there isn’t a malicious faery lord puppeteering the whole process like an evil Jim Henson.

The six wolves scrabbled at the ice-sheet with their claws, but it didn’t seem to be making a dent. What we really needed was a hairdryer, but wouldn’t you know it I didn’t think to bring mine with me. Or ever own one, come to think of it. I slammed the iron dagger into the surface of the lake, hoping largely in vain that since it was technically faery ice it would have faery weaknesses. And it—well—it might have helped a bit? There were a couple of chips in it now at least, but the situation was looking perilously close to fucking hopeless.

I was beginning to have the frightening suspicion that this was a job for my mother.

We were further from the heart of the Cold and Dark now, which meant there was more chance of my being able to reach the Deepwild. I focused on the wolf’s blood in my mouth, on the parts of this place that were like my mother’s realm, the trees and the earth beneath the snow, the water beneath the ice. Somewhere very far in the distance I heard a heartbeat. No power came, no strength apart from what I had already, but a taste caught on my tongue and a scent cut through the air. The land was the king and the queen was the land.

I walked a few paces away from where the wolves were scrabbling, and drew my dagger. Then I searched for that frost-and-shadow power I’d felt the first time I’d tried to reach for the Deepwild and, finding it, I plunged the blade hard into the ice at my feet.

The wind screamed. Blood oozed from the lake where the point of the weapon had cracked the surface. Somewhere, somebody was very angry. Somewhere my mother laughed. Somewhere much closer, my broken arm protested loudly at the amount of shit I was putting it through.

“Kate.” Tara had come back to her human body in an instant, and for a fraction of a second the part of me that was in a place of hunters and prey, of weak and strong, wondered if I could make her kneel the way I had the others. “What the fuck did you just do?”

I was half here and half elsewhere, half myself and half another being entirely, but I tried to answer. “Started a war.”

Ice shattered across the lake and the splintered shards resolved themselves upwards into the shape of a woman in a silver gown. There was the thinnest trace of red on her left cheek. I really had not done that much damage to her.

“Does this action have your mother’s approval?” asked the Queen of Winter.

“It’s violent, reckless, and pointless. So my money’s on yes.”

She stepped closer—there were no shadows on the open lake, so chances were we wouldn’t be seeing the King any time soon. “Neither of us profit by enmity.”

“No, but my mum and I have one big personality trait in common. We both hate it when people fuck with our stuff.”

“I have not trespassed on your territory, or your mother’s.”

“Yeah, I think she disagrees. She wants her wolves back.”

For somebody with mirrors for eyes, the Queen of Winter could be surprisingly expressive. “They have not been hers for centuries.”

“Because of course you faeries are famous for letting shit like that go, aren’t you?”

“You tread a dangerous path.”

I couldn’t quite resist the obvious. “On thin ice, am I? Way I see it, if we don’t get out of here I’m dead anyway. I might as well go out fighting, and when I fight my mum fights, and when she fights things get hellaciously fucking bloody.”

For quite a long moment I thought that she wasn’t going to go for it. After all, if I fought I’d probably get killed, and killing the—as far as I knew—only daughter of the Queen of the Wild Hunt would have been a heck of a coup. Then again, I didn’t think mum would have cared that much, whereas spreading a bit of chaos in a corner of the cosmos that currently had a bit less chaos in it than it might otherwise have was right up her alley. Umm, grove.

“Very well,” she said at last. “Take the wolves and go. But do not return here. Cross me again and you will find me in less forgiving a mood.”

I had zero doubt of that. For the ruler of a land bound in perpetual snow and ice, the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had surprisingly little chill.

The Queen turned away, snow flurrying about her as she went. The ice beneath us cracked, and a paranoid part of me wondered if this was just a very elaborate way of killing us fast enough that I couldn’t, for want of a less schoolyard phrase, tell my mum. We crashed down through the rapidly unfreezing surface of the lake, and I swam as hard as I could for the wolves. The water was dark, and now the danger had passed the mix of adrenaline, endorphins and borrowed faery power was ebbing away quickly, leaving me cold and in pain and bleeding in quite a lot of places, trying to find a magic hole back to the real world alongside six werewolves, four of them still with spikes of glass in their eyes. I caught sight of Tara’s golden fur through the murk and did my best to swim towards her. Then a chill came over me and the world did that flippy down-is-up thing I was only this second remembering it’d done on the way in.

A few struggling, panting, and excruciatingly long seconds later I was under what, in autumn in Britain, passed for sunlight, flopping onto the bank of a pond on Hampstead Heath, with six large wolves beside me and a couple of teenagers filming me on their phones.

On the plus side, I was dressed. On the downside, I was wearing a very wet white shirt. Well piss.

“Will you fuck off,” I yelled. “Can’t a woman walk her dogs in peace?”

“These are all yours?” asked one of the teenagers, incredulously.

There was no reason at all that I needed to defend myself to these people. “Yes,” I said. “I’m an eccentric millionaire and I have a large collection of wolfhounds.”

“Some of them look ill.”

“You know it’s illegal for you to be filming this?”

“Is it?” The kid looked genuinely worried.

“Data protection.” It was a lie, but he didn’t need to know that. “Now sod off and let me dry out on my own.”

They sodded. Given that it was, by my best guess because my watch was fucked and my phone was still in the car, early afternoon it made sense for the wolves to stay wolves. I retrieved their clothes—those of them that had clothes—from the side of the pond where they’d been left mercifully unmolested by passing ramblers. Then we walked the half-mile back to where Flick, Sofia, and a medium-sized army of chauffeurs were waiting for us.

We bundled the rescue-wolves into the back of one of the cars, where they shifted back to their human forms to save space. At this point it was kind of down to Sofia, which I hoped wasn’t too much of a headfuck for her, because from what I could remember of being nineteen, I wouldn’t have been confident having complete responsibility for somebody else’s life and free will dropped in my lap.

“How do I do this?” She looked up at me very, very uncertain.

There wasn’t much I could do but shrug. “I don’t know. It’s sort of instinct, at least for me. Whatever you do when the glowy thing happens, do the same, but maybe focus it a bit more.”

“That’s … unhelpful.”

“Don’t blame me, blame Apollo. Maybe it would be better if you thought of it more as a medical procedure? What would you do if somebody came to you with regular glass in their eyes?”

She pulled a still not helping face. “I’d send them to somebody much better qualified.” Still, she got on with it, kneeling by the car door because there wasn’t room for four wolves and her inside the vehicle. She took the first werewolf’s face in her hands, peering at her ruined eyes with what looked like real medical interest.

“Okay,” she said in a surprisingly calm voice for somebody dealing with such an objectively unnatural problem, “let’s take a look at you.”

I had no idea what she was hoping to see, and probably neither did she. There wasn’t a lot that could be done with massive chunks of mirror in the face beyond the obvious, but the ritual of it seemed to help her. And she managed to avoid the more annoying GP questions like does it hurt when I do this. I was beginning to think she’d make a pretty ace doctor in a few years.

With a gentleness that I would actually totally have expected because unlike most of the women I knew, Sofia really did come across as nurturing in quite a traditional way as she examined the mirror-shards. And then, somehow, something seemed to take over, and it was like she’d always known exactly what she was doing. A delicate radiance gathered around her fingertips, and she brushed them gently across the mirror-fragments, which began to melt rapidly, like ice rather than glass, becoming a clear water that ran down the werewolf’s cheeks as though she was crying.

I looked away. She had it in hand, and I’d done enough staring at the victims of faery fuckery for one day-slash-lifetime. Letting myself into one of the other cars—or rather getting the driver to let me in because we were in the world of the posh now and doing things yourself was this weird social taboo—I sat down on the back seat and stared at the ceiling.

Tara slid in next to me. She’d redressed, which I was thankful for—not that I didn’t respect her body confidence, but I was never quite sure where to look.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know quite what will happen with the four of them, but they’re alive, and it seems like they’re free from the King-Queen’s control, at least for now. Of course grandmama may be right; they may be a burden on the pack.”

I put an arm around her instinctively, realising slightly too late that I was still soaking wet and probably ruining her dress. “I know you’ve got the whole ancient warrior people thing going on, but this isn’t Sparta. We’re well past leaving folks to die on hillsides for the greater good. They’re blind, not incompetent.”

“I want to believe you.” She leaned into me. “But so much rests on this.”

“Some does, true. But if you ask me where your grandmother’s wrong—apart from how she’s kind of a flat-out terrible person, no offence—is that she thinks you’re in this alone. I might be stepping out of line, and you can tell me if I am, but the way I see it is, if you think you have a duty to protect England from the forces of the supernatural, you’d want to use whatever support you could get. Even if it came from people who couldn’t turn into monsters on demand.”

She turned her head towards me. “That was a little out of line. These matters are more complex than you credit them with being. But you aren’t entirely wrong. There is an… arrogance to our calling that can lead us to make poor decisions. I only hope that I have not made one by trusting you.”

“That I can help with. I’m an expert on poor decisions.”

“I’m not sure that’s comforting.”

“Yeah, I can see that. But I’m quite sensible where other people are concerned. It’s my own life I can’t cope with. And I’ve got your back, Tara.”

She took my hand again. My good hand. “I want to believe that.” With a curt nod to the driver, we pulled out. And I slowly allowed myself to realise that we might have achieved something. True, the something was solving a problem that only existed in the first place because I’d sucked the Vane-Tempests into a conflict with the Prince of Wands, and true, four basically innocent women had been left with lifelong injuries, but this was a win. A small win, but a win.

Nim was still in a coma, of course, and I still had no idea where the grail was or really what it was, and I was still convinced that Sebastian Douglas had another card to play, but I was taking my victories where I could find them.

29

Reflections & Realisations

After the excitement—and I use the term advisedly, it might have been better to say godawful clusterfuck—of the raid on the Cold and Dark, the evening was subdued. Sofia had managed to bring all four of the werewolves back from whatever prison of ice and shadow they’d been trapped in, and they were now recuperating in various parts of the vast expanse of Safernoc Hall. Smudge—it had been Smudge, although her real name was apparently Genevieve Tempest de Vere—was ensconced in the green drawing room where Tara (in a stunning green gown, because you always dressed for the décor, even in tragedy) had just told her the bad news about Tuffy. She’d taken it well. Stiff upper lip and all that. When you mixed the deeply ingrained stoicism of the British upper classes with the instincts of a race of predatory shapeshifters, you wound up with people who were truly phenomenal at repressing their emotions.

“Well then,” she said, her hands only slightly trembling as she sipped her tea. “There’s that.”

“Did you learn anything while you were there?” Tara went on with the gentleness and compassion of, well, of a two hundred pound furry killing machine, I suppose.

Genevieve shook her head, not so much in a negative way, but in a trying-to-sort-out-her-thoughts way. “Perhaps,” she said. “It’s all muddled. All mixed up.”

“Whatever you can tell us will help.” I’d have said Tara was like a dog with a bone, but that would probably have been insensitive.

“It’s difficult. Time isn’t normal there. Nothing’s normal there. The Queen was in my mind and she wanted me to hunt for her, to come here and kill you all so she could claim the hall for herself.”

Tara looked intrigued. “Just the Queen, not the King?”

“It looked like fairly icy magic,” I explained, partly to spare Genevieve the questioning and partly because I was still high on the novelty of occasionally having useful information. “I think she does the ice stuff and he does the shadow stuff. There might also be a bit of a vibe where he’s more about consensual bargains and she’s more about the kneel-before-me-and-do-my-bidding shit but I’m straying out my lane on that one.”

“But you don’t know why he-she came for us now?” Tara went on.

“Only that she saw an opportunity,” Genevieve looked apologetic. “The Prince of Wands was part of it, but not all of it.”

I looked up from where I was lounging. “What does that mean?” Shit, Kate, leave the girl alone.

“The worlds have been unaligned ever since—”

“Ever since Nimue was put out of commission?”

Genevieve nodded. “The city-kings kept a balance of sorts. Now there isn’t one all sorts of entities are jockeying for power.”

I filed that one mentally under “will get worse before it gets better.” “So things are going to keep going to shit until Nim recovers.”

“Or dies, I think.” She set her tea to one side. “I caught flashes in the Queen’s mind; overheard snatches of her bargains with the Prince of Wands. I feel like they’ll come to blows soon.”

“He-she told me the same,” I added. “They’re not allies here. They teamed up against you guys, but it sounds like that might be passing.”

Tara was still very much in no-bullshit mode. “Why, how, when?”

Before Genevieve had to make another apology for not being more perceptive while kept prisoner, I stepped in with what I knew. “I think the why is mostly that they’re neither the sort of person to brook rivals or get the worst of a deal. As for the how and the when, I think—and sorry in advance if this sounds like I’m making it all about me—I think it might be to do with my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend.”

“Go on.” Tara’s look was a mixture of expectant and sceptical.

This was going to take some explaining. I took a deep breath. “Right, so the Prince of Wands is working with this vampire called Yelena, and Yelena is obsessed with Patrick—that’s my ex. From what I’ve been told it seems like her whole vampire bloodline—her, her creator, Patrick, the lot of them—all have this weird thing where they’re drawn to young people with magical powers like, I dunno, pick your metaphor. Moths and flames, wasps and jam, me and alcohol, whatever.” This was getting rambly, I tried my best to pull it back in a more structured direction. “Between me and Sofia, Patrick is two for two on dating girls with mystical abilities that tie directly into the plans of the Prince of Wands. Now he’s with somebody new and I think there’s a good chance he’s going for the hat trick.”

“And how do you think this relates to the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter?” Tara’s eyebrows arched. She was clearly finding this a bit tenuous.

“No clue. But if what you’ve said is true and the role of city-king is up for grabs, then there’s a good chance Sebastian Douglas is going for it. That is, if a dead man can go for it.” A sudden, inevitable, and depressing thought struck me. “Fuck.”

“What?” It had been a long day and even at the best of times I wasn’t dating Tara because of her endless patience.

“Bear with me. I think I have to make a really important phone call.”

Tara’s voice got that low, menacing, honey-laced-with-chocolate-laced-with-bloody-murder quality it had when she was quite done with my shit. She got it a lot. “If you are deliberately vexing me, Kate Kane, this is far from the best time.”

“No, and I know how this looks but—I think I’ve worked out what this is all about and just for a moment it’s more important I tell Patrick than you.”

I rang and he didn’t answer, so I hung up and rang again. He still didn’t answer, so I tried several more times, while Tara glared at me with rapidly increasing disapproval. After far too much dialling and redialling, the fucker finally picked up.

“Katharine, I don’t know what games you are playing but—”

“Patrick, shut up and listen. What does your new girlfriend look like?”

“That is no concern of yours, Katharine. We are finished.”

As so often happened when talking to Patrick, I wished somebody would invent a phone you could punch people through. “Okay, fine. Just brood silently if I’m right. Is she blonde and kind of celestial looking?”

He brooded silently.

Why were these things never easy? “Patrick,” I said, trying to keep my tone as level as possible. “Please listen to me. I think I’ve seen her in a dream. Can you text me a picture?”

“If this is a trick...”

“It isn’t. I promise. I never hurt Sofia, I’m not trying to hurt this one either. But I want to see her because I need to test a theory.”

My phone buzzed about thirty seconds later, and a picture loaded slowly. Having been around her more-or-less constantly, I hadn’t quite noticed how much Sofia had matured over the years, but looking at Patrick’s new paramour I was suddenly reminded how big the difference was between sixteen and nineteen. Of course both were very far from a hundred and forty.

She was young, like super young, and pretty in a classical blonde-hair-blue eyesy way. She was wearing a slightly oversized tee-shirt with a stylised heart on the front and the words Play With Heart worked into the middle of it in swirly pink writing. I’d definitely seen her in my dreams.

“Do you have it?” I wasn’t sure if he sounded more concerned or more furious. “If there is something I must know in order to protect her, you will tell me at once.”

There was. “Yeah,” I said. “I think—this might sound a bit weird but I’m about ninety-five percent sure she’s the holy grail.”

“What?” It was one half expression of incredulity, one half request for clarification.

I pressed a button and lay my phone on the table. “Okay, Patrick, you’re on speaker, because I want you and the werewolves to hear the rest of this.”

“Thank you so much for including us.” I’d have said Tara’s tone was icy, but given our recent experiences I was saving that adjective for something far nastier.

And Patrick’s was no better. “Tell me what is happening at once,” he insisted, somewhat tinnily over my ageing speakers.

“Okay, here’s the deal. The Prince of Wands wants us all dead, but while he’s come for me and Sofia and the wolves hard as fuck, he’s left you alone.”

“I have evaded him.”

“Let me guess: You’re out of town with the new girl keeping your head down.”

“I have a name, you know.” That was a new voice—apparently Patrick had decided two could play the speaker game.

“Katharine, this is Elaine. Elaine, this is Katharine.”

“Okay,” I went on. “Elaine, you wouldn’t be in a castle of any kind would you?”

“Well my parents have a place in the Lake District but—”

“Do not give away our location. You never know who might be listening.” To give Patrick his due, that was sensible advice.

“You don’t have to, the point is that I think there’s a good chance that two powerful magical beings want to kill you in different ways. I’m betting good money on you being the key to waking up Nimue and restabilising a lot of weird magic stuff that I don’t have time to explain right now. But it means that a powerful faery is going to want to get rid of you so that you can’t do that, and the Prince of Wands is—well, I won’t sugar-coat, it there’s a good chance he’ll want to drain your blood so he can become, like, magic vampire King Arthur or something. Oh, also Yelena is probably going to want to torture you to death for reasons that have basically nothing to do with your magical powers and everything to do with who you’re dating.”

She made a noise that I feel stupid describing as “yeep” but I think it was basically “yeep”. Then Patrick made his usual comforting promises about how he would never allow any harm to come to her which, to be fair, was a promise that he had a remarkably good track record of delivering on, if you didn’t count the emotional damage that came from an age-inappropriate relationship with a total fuckhead.

“I know this is a mess,” I went on, “but our best hope here is to try to work together. I’m not sure because I’m going almost entirely off symbolism and metaphors, but I think I’m supposed to come and find you and bring you to Nimue. And then—I don’t know, but I think then everything will work out.”

“Is that your plan,” Tara seemed to be walking a very narrow line between amused and pissed the fuck off. “Go and find the girl and then hope it all turns out okay?”

I sighed. “I trust Nim. I’ve known her longer than I’ve known basically anybody”—I turned my attention briefly to the phone—“except you, Patrick, obviously but that doesn’t count because I hate you. You said yourself that her being in whatever magical coma equivalent she’s in is what’s making the walls go wobbly. We bring her back, we solve that.”

Tara’s eyes narrowed. “That,” she said, “or we kill her and let her successor take over.”

“I don’t think she’s got a successor. The last pretender to the throne of London was Arty King, and the Prince of Wands took him out. Also, if I’m going to throw somebody near-unlimited mystical power, I’d rather it was somebody I knew wasn’t evil.”

Patrick’s voice crackled over the phone. I had a feeling he wasn’t that close to the handset any more. He was probably comforting his girlfriend. “I dislike this plan, Katharine. But I will suffer it for Elaine’s sake.”

Of course he would. The lamb. “Okay, text me the details. If you’re worried about messages getting intercepted then text half and email the rest. And take care of each other.”

“I always will,” he said portentously, then he hung up.

The moment I put my phone away, Tara rounded on me. “I have not agreed to this strategy.”

“I know.” I wasn’t trying to make this hard on her, it was just hard by default. “But I have to do this. We’d all be safer if you were in on it, but I’ll understand if you don’t want to be.”

She gave me a look that said I don’t appreciate having my hand forced.

“I think she’s right.” I hadn’t expected Genevieve to be on my side here; the lady had a world of her own shit to deal with. “The girl’s voice sounded familiar. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it but… while I was in the ice… it felt familiar somehow. She’s a part of this.”

“I will bring it to the pack,” Tara said. “You will do as you must, I know.” She took my hand and held it, her thumb stroking upwards across my fingers in a way that was quite different from the severe alpha-wolf vibe I was getting from the rest of her body. “When it is done, I will come to you. In the meantime, rest.”

And that was that. I retired to Tara’s room to wait for her, and for the pack to make a decision about whether they were going on a grail hunt with me. Given how abstract and metaphorical all this shit had been so far there was a good chance that I was putting two and two together and getting orange. But what else could it all be? I’d been dispatched on a weird dream-quest to find something that probably didn’t exist and told nothing about where to find it. If there wasn’t some key to the whole thing somewhere in the sorry mess of my life, what was the point of any of it?

My phone buzzed. I had a text and an email from Patrick outlining where precisely in the Lake District he and Elaine were hiding out. I also had a message from Dr Bright. Because oh yes, I had that to deal with too.

Have translated much of the book. Will meet to discuss at your convenience. How does this relate to your friend?

Well fuck. There I was thinking I had everything wrapped in a neat little bow, and an end came loose on me. There was nothing I could do about it now, though. I turned my phone off, tried to ignore the dull pain that was still throbbing in my arm, and shut my eyes. I’d just about drifted off when Tara slipped in beside me. I was curious about what the pack had decided, but not so curious that I couldn’t let it wait until morning. I rolled over onto my good side, and she slipped her arms around me and kissed me gently on the shoulder. We stayed that way until we woke.

30

Hills & Motorways

No dreams that night. Which was either a really good sign—that whatever power was guiding me had decided I was finally on the right track and their work was done—or a really bad one. Honestly I was just happy to wake up in the morning feeling halfway rested. Tara was unusually active, even by her standards, getting up bang on dawn and arranging for some resident medic to re-splint my arm, which was feeling—well I wouldn’t quite say better, but I was getting slowly used to the pain.

“Thanks,” I told her. “Not only for this, I mean—you know for everything. I’ve been fucking insufferable for the past, well, forever. And you don’t have to join me on the stupid grail-quest thing if you don’t want to.”

She sat beside me on the bed helping secure the bandages and adjust the sling. “No, I think it’s important. Like you said, we need to stop being so—single-minded. What you’re doing matters to us as well as to you. I’d like to be part of it.”

While I had a lot of extremely damaging personality flaws, I was at least generally able to take yes for an answer. I stopped talking. We breakfasted as I’d got used to breakfasting, although after Dr Bright’s text last night a tiny part of me was missing Elise’s coffee-and-banana morning routine. Or rather, missing the coffee and guiltily not missing the banana. Because seriously, fuck bananas.

But they are a good source of potassium, Miss Kane.

The four of us—me, Tara, Sofia, and Flick—gathered in the courtyard. I was strongly in favour of Sofia and Flick staying behind but Sofia had made a case that if we were going off on the last stage of a woobly vision quest it made sense to bring the prophet, and where she went, Flick went. Perhaps it was all the grail talk, but the whole mission had a weirdly ominous vibe to it. Like Hugo Weaving was going to pop up any second and be all and you shall be called the Fellowship of Patrick’s Girlfriend or something.

“So—” I began, not entirely sure where to go from there. “This is your last chance to back out. It’s going to be an annoyingly long trip and might be a total waste of everybody’s time. Also we might all get killed.”

Flick gave me a nervous look. She was a good deal less flirty these days and I was definitely putting not fucking her into my good decisions box. “How are we getting there? And where is there exactly?”

“There,” said Tara, “is a house overlooking Lake Windermere. And how is the Shadow.”

The way Flick’s nose wrinkled when she was confused reminded me of Sofia. “Is this a magic thing?”

A sleek black car pulled around from the side of the building, like a ghost from the days when automobile companies still thought it was a good idea to put tiny statues on the hood at ideal pedestrian-impaling height.

“It does have a certain magic to it, yes,” mused Tara as the chauffeur got out and opened the passenger doors for us. Then, to my dismay, she settled in behind the steering wheel.

“Tell me you’re not driving?”

She glanced at me, half hurt, half playful. “This might be dangerous, and I won’t have Henderson risking himself on my account. Besides, it’s been ages since I took the shad out for a spin.”

“Yeah, that’s not filling me with confidence. I’ve seen you behind the wheel. You’re the fucking worst.”

“I’m an excellent driver.”

She was, to be fair. But that was the problem; like most things she was good at, she did it with reckless abandon. “Oh please, I’ve seen seventeen-year-olds with more self-control.”

“Too late. We’re leaving.” We manoeuvred quite sedately out of the courtyard, down the long driveway to the road, and into the narrow tangle of country lanes that made up the approach to Safernoc. It was about here that we started to pick up speed, and I tried to tell myself that it was just the closeness of the trees and that classic car vibe that made it seem like we were going far quicker than we actually were but, no, we were being driven way too quickly by a woman who loved the thrill of the chase and was confident that a devastating road accident probably wouldn’t kill her. I had to seriously reconsider dating near-impervious women or, at the very least, reconsider letting them drive me places.

By the time we hit the M40 she’d stopped pretending speed limits were something she cared about. Probably best if I didn’t think about it. “I don’t suppose”—I craned my head over my shoulder and tried to catch Sofia’s eye. She and Flick were flopped against one another in a platonically supportive bundle on the back seat—“that you have any last minute prophetic insights into how this all might go down, do you?”

“Sorry.” Sofia looked genuinely apologetic. “But that might be a positive. I didn’t get a dire warning saying don’t. Although I’ve been doing a bit of research and a lot of the original Delphic prophecies were ambiguous, so even if I had more control I’m not sure how much good I’d be.”

“You’ve done a lot already.” I wasn’t sure if she was angling for reassurance, but I thought it was best to err on the side of her self-esteem. “You basically saved all our arses when the Prince of Wands attacked.”

Sofia, who I suspected might have been genuinely humble, which I was gradually learning wasn’t quite the same as the crushing self-loathing I used as a substitute, murmured something approximating a don’t mention it, and curled back up.

From there, the trip up to the North-West was fairly uneventful, despite Tara’s utter disregard for road safety, the highway code, or the comfort of her passengers. Travelling by day there wasn’t a huge amount that was likely to ambush us, and bombing along a major roadway at something like ninety miles per hour there wasn’t much that could have. We changed Ms a bunch of times and wound up on the M6 cannoning past Liverpool and into Lancaster.

Taking the motorway through this bit of the country was always weird, because it was this strange mixture of rural idyll and fucking gargantuan chunk, of tarmac. Look ahead and it was all concrete and road bridges and signs saying three miles to services. Look left and it was nothing but fields and open countryside. As we came off the main road, we started hitting the proper national park bit, with all of its rolling hills and grey-red-brown cliff-faces rising up out of the treeline. Perhaps it was my mother’s blood or my father’s northern roots, but there was something about those hills, about the unstoppable vastness of the sky and the stone and the wood that spoke to me in a way that not a lot of things did. It felt kind of right for the grail to be here, if it was anywhere. If the whole Patrick’s-girlfriend-is-an-ancient-metaphor theory was remotely plausible. The whole place had this ancient almost fairytale vibe to it that I didn’t think anywhere else could match. Well, an ancient fairytale vibe, plus a fairly major network of A-roads.

We’d been in the car for a good four hours by the time we got into the Lake District proper, and we went from dual carriageways and concrete barriers to winding lanes with dry stone walls. Despite my general mistrust of Tara’s wheelpersonship this had been suspiciously easy so far. If the Prince of Wands did have plans for Elaine, then there was no way he’d let us get away with waltzing up and snatching her from under his nose.

Unless that was exactly what he wanted us to do.

Unless he wanted us to think that was exactly what he wanted us to do.

Unless he wanted us to think he wanted us to think it was exactly what he wanted us to do and in fact he didn’t want us to think he wanted us to do it because it was what he wanted us to do.

Bleagh. That was the problem with going up against Sebastian Douglas. The guy got in your head like Doctor and the Medics singing Spirit in the Sky. And before you knew it you were second-guessing every thought that crossed your mind.

We followed Patrick’s directions down a few more winding roads and down a little country lane. Yeah, so it turned out that when Elaine said her parents had a “little place in the lake district” she meant a fucking estate in a private woodland overlooking Lake Windermere.

“Oh, how pretty.” Tara seemed less impressed than charmed. Then again, anything short of an actual fucking castle probably looked a bit nouveau-riche to her.

“Yeah, really … millionairey.”

Sofia and Flick stirred in the back seat. “Oh, are we here?” Flick seemed at once pleased to have arrived and peeved to have been woken.

“It looks lovely,” added Sofia, apparently the only person in the car middle class enough to see a second home in a national park and not immediately respond with either condescension or resentment.

We parked the Silver Shadow outside and approached the front door. I knocked, and there was no answer. Of course there fucking wasn’t. We’d left early and even with the nearly five hour trip it was barely afternoon, which meant Patrick was at far less than full vampire power and he’d clearly have instructed Elaine not to open the door during the day when he couldn’t protect her. Despite the fact that all his enemies were nocturnal. Fucking Patrick. Fucking predictable fucking Patrick.

“Elaine,” I tried through the door. “It’s me, Kate. We spoke on the phone?”

Still no answer.

“Jesus Christ, Elaine, I’m not a monster, I’m not a vampire, I’m not some weird sorcerer out to use your blood to open a portal to the netherworld. I’m just me.”

Still nothing. Okay, this was getting eerie.

And to think for one tiny moment I’d let myself believe that we could drive up here and meet some people without the whole thing turning into a mash up of a heist and a vision quest. On the plus side, I will admit that part or me secretly loved how much of my job involved picking locks.

The front door did not exactly pose much of a barrier on account of how it honestly did appear to be a nice couple’s holiday home on Lake Windermere, and not a secret fortress established in ages past against the event of supernatural assault. Inside it was—well, I had to go with Sofia on this one, it was lovely. Tile floors, cosy sitting rooms with comfy armchairs, and big wood-burning fireplaces. It would be an unhelpfully romantic place to hide out with your vampire boyfriend if he thought his jealously obsessed ex was coming to kill you.

There was no sign of a struggle, but that didn’t necessarily mean that there hadn’t been one. With vampiric mind control bullshit “struggle” didn’t have to mean “fight” and quite a lot of monsters knew how to clean up after themselves.

We searched the whole place, which wound up taking a while because the “whole place” turned out to include a boathouse and a converted stable, which added up to a lot of square footage to go over. They seemed to have been staying in separate rooms, which I was glad about because while I try to be right on and sex positive and shit, this girl was legitimately barely legal and that wasn’t something I felt at all comfortable thinking about. Her room still had that awkward transitional feel you got when people were moving out of childhood but weren’t so far removed from it that they should have been doing anything at all in the context of a vampire’s penis. Dolls mostly gone, stuffed toys still very much in evidence, that kind of thing.

We reassembled in the absurdly cosy sitting room and discussed options.

“I can probably track them if I have to,” I said. “But I’d rather not. My mother has been in my head far too much recently.”

“The girl is human,” said Tara. “Easier to follow than a vampire. I should be able to trace her without difficulty. But I’d also rather not until we have a clear sense of what we might be following her into.”

There was a very, very awkward silence. We were all looking at Sofia.

“I’m not sure I can,” she said. “I still don’t know how it works.”

Flick got out of her comfortable armchair and knelt down by Sofia’s comfortable armchair. Wow, this place had a lot of comfortable armchairs. “You’ve done it before. You need to concentrate. Here.” She held up a finger. “Look at this.”

“That’s your finger.”

“I know. I’m improvising.” Fishing her phone out of her pocked, she flicked on the torch and waved it in front of Sofia’s eyes. “Is that better?”

“No!” It was an emphatic no. “Just give me a moment.” Sofia shut her eyes and took several slow, deep breaths. Then she looked up. “So those three knights loved their sister so sore that they brent in love, and so they lay by her, maugre her head.”

That didn’t sound good at all.

“Umm”—Flick looked concerned—“I’m a mathematician, so all the maugre and the brent and stuff is a bit above my pay grade, but that sounds hella rapey.”

I was inclined to agree. “We should probably get moving.”

Tara didn’t say anything but slipped her dress from her shoulders and transformed at once into the shape of the great wolf. And then she was off after the scent, and it was all the rest of us could do to keep up with her.

31

Knights & Maidens

The woods around Lake Windermere would have been a really pretty place for a walk if we hadn’t been in a rush to stop a completely innocent girl getting maugred. I was hopeful—not confident but hopeful—that Sofia’s outburst hadn’t been literal. Things looked a lot happier for Elaine if she’d been speaking figuratively and fighting actual knights would get too fucking weird by half.

Tara led us down a narrow, winding path along a hillside that I was beginning to suspect wasn’t quite in the real world any more. It didn’t have the same chill water vibe as walking into faerie but there was something unpleasantly and familiarly dreamlike about the landscape we were passing into. The floor was strewn with hyacinths out of season, and we ran down twisted trails into copses and valleys and caught glimpses in the distance of a lake shrouded in mist.

Then we came to an I-shit-you-not castle. To be fair, these aren’t quite as unheard of in England—especially the heritagey, national parkey bits of England—as they are in some places, but it was still fucking weird. There were buttresses and everything.

As luck and the almighty power of sod’s law would have it, by the time we reached the gates of the improbable castle the sun was beginning to set. I say sod’s law, but everything that had happened so far had been so completely driven by whatever malevolent arsehole passed for fate around here that I was beginning to think I should shut my eyes and do the magical slightly pagan equivalent of letting Jesus take the wheel.

Tara shifted back to her human shape a moment and approached the door. “This isn’t period,” she said to nobody in particular. “Neo-Gothic if I’m any judge.”

“Please don’t tell me that you’re so posh that you’re throwing shade on a fucking castle for not being classy enough?”

To her credit, she looked a tiny bit abashed. “I was just providing context. We’re not totally outside the normal world here—all the strange mists and flowers are … they’re extras. This is a real place.”

I wasn’t sure that was totally helpful. “So if we break in we could get arrested?”

“I have very good lawyers, and you’d be surprised how seldom the police are keen to keep me in custody.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to speculate too much about that. “Right then. Door?”

“The girl’s definitely been here. I can’t be so certain about the vampire, but the whole place smells wrong. We should be careful.”

Great. Busting into a wrong-smelling fake castle in a national park. What else would I have wanted to do with my evening? The lock here was trickier than the one on Elaine’s parents’ summer house had been, but that was a long way from surprising. This kind of place was probably noticeable enough that people occasionally would try to break into it, and the owners had secured it accordingly. Still I got us past the door without too much trouble, and we found ourselves in a swanky entryway, the floor decked out in that red swirly stone that wasn’t quite marble but wanted you to think it was. Now I was inside I could see where Tara was coming from on the neo-gothic front. The whole place had that trying slightly too hard vibe you got when the Victorians decided that historical things didn’t look historical enough and tried to dress them up to be more like they thought they were meant to be. All a bit too much, in other words.

It was about then that I heard the scream.

The good news was that unless Elaine sounded significantly more masculine in person than she had over the phone, it wasn’t her screaming. The bad news was that probably meant something awful had happened to Patrick. Okay, not really bad news. Inconvenient news.

The noise was coming from below, because if this was a Victorian imitation of what they thought a castle should be, of course it was going to have a dungeon.

We bolted through the sumptuously Gothic interiors and down a flight of steps that led to a mixture of kitchens, servant’s quarters and, yup, looked like a legit dungeon. Seriously, what was it with those? It was decked out in full nineteenth-century grotesque style, complete with one of those cupboards full of spikes that never really existed. At least I assumed it was full of spikes. Right now it was full of Patrick. And looking closely at his chest—yep, also full of spikes. I could see the points poking out through his shirt. Okay that officially wasn’t funny, I hated the guy but I didn’t want him literally impaled.

Yelena was standing next to him, still in a wolfskin and still acting like she was unhealthily into this whole blood and torture routine. She was running her fingers down his body in a way that I had to describe as lascivious even though it made me sound like I was writing a sternly worded letter of complaint in 1874. I was glad that we weren’t dealing with a trio of ambiguously incestuous sex knights, but honestly, I wasn’t sure that an evil vampire with no sense of proportion was much better.

“All right,” I tried. “How about you let him go and we all walk away from this without getting torn apart?”

Turning slowly, Yelena gave me a vindictive smile. “And where would be the fun in that.”

I started running some scenarios in my head. Thinking about it, I was sure she wasn’t here with Sebastian. It was still only a theory but I was almost certain that he wanted Elaine alive, and he’d have known that Yelena would tear out her heart without blinking. Which meant she was going rogue on this one. “How’d you find this place?” I asked, hoping that she’d still have her monologuing instinct.

“The King of Shadows showed me.” I couldn’t decide whether her happiness in answering questions meant that she was letting her guard down or that she legitimately didn’t feel threatened. Probably a bit of both.

“Finally realised Sebastian was playing you, huh?”

That landed. She glared at me with a mixture of fury and problematic sexuality. “Nobody plays me. Nobody plays the King of Shadows. I have always been his ally, nobody else’s.”

“Yeah, that’s what people say when they’ve been played.”

By my side, Tara—back in the shape of a wolf now we were inside and at risk of attack—gave a low growl. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Yelena was still wearing the actual skin of her actual friend, but I felt we should probably make sure we’d got as much as we could out of her before we began with the violence.

“Katharine …” Patrick’s voice was doing that thing that you get in movies where a set of unrelated injuries somehow make you incapable of putting words together at the normal rate. “You must … protect … Elaine.”

Ignoring his ex for a moment, I turned to him. “She’s not with you?”

“She evaded us.” Yelena’s voice was laced with malice and resentment. “I told Patrick that I would keep him alive until he had seen me rip out his lovers’ hearts one by one.” She flicked her attention from me to Sofia, and back to me again. Okay, this was looking like it was about to get fightey.

Also what did she mean “us”?

Fuck.

I moved to put myself in front of Sofia just in time to intercept Yelena’s sudden assault, all claws and darkness and stolen power. Tara joined in which very briefly gave us a two-to-one advantage until something moved in the shadows and I learned exactly who “us” was. Apparently in this context it meant “Yelena and also some full-on faerie knights from the Court of the King of Shadows.”

I fucking hated faerie knights. These three were pale-skinned and dark-haired like their master, wearing black armour and trailing what might have been cloaks or might have been pure darkness. Two of them struck at me and one at Tara—the room was a bit too small for their swords to be practical as weapons, but it was amazing how little comfort that was when a magic shadow elf was swinging three feet of sharp metal at you.

My absolute number one priority was to stop anything hitting the people who didn’t have a nigh-supernatural resilience to physical injury. I grabbed one of the faery knights with my good arm and tried to pin his sword where it couldn’t do any damage, but the jolt of pain that ran through me when his body collided with my still very broken limb completely ruined that plan. All in all, now would have been a very good time for Sofia to go full light-of-noonday.

She went full light-of-noonday.

Yelena and her minions backed off, but it was very much more a cautious thing than an oh no it burns it burns thing. I wondered how long it would take for them to do the calculation that while sunlight could stop the dark power of the vampire and the insidious touch of the King of Shadows, it didn’t do jack against cold steel and Sofia was still basically a mortal girl made out of meat and hope. Probably not long, was my thinking.

Now would have been a great time for a brilliant plan. I did not have a brilliant plan. “Okay.” I gave it one more go. “What if we all stand down, and Patrick goes back to you?” I didn’t have a brilliant plan, but I had a spur-of-the-moment, hastily improvised, probably extraordinarily stupid plan. And I’d take what I could get.

“I would never—” Patrick began. I hoped I wasn’t going to have to kick the iron maiden shut on him.

“Oh come on,” I replied. “Big personal sacrifice so your girlfriend can go free? You live for this shit. Unlive for it. Whatever.”

To my flat astonishment, Yelena seemed to be seriously considering it. “She would never give him up.”

“No. She’d probably track you down and try to get him back. And then you can trap her and rip out her still-beating heart or whatever.”

“Kate!” Now it was apparently Sofia’s turn to object. I couldn’t tell if the interruptions were undermining my case or making it for me. Probably Yelena would buy the idea more if she thought at least some of her enemies weren’t up for it. At least I hoped she would.

“Just being realistic.” I put my one good hand up in a don’t shoot the messenger kind of a way. “I want to end this without anybody getting hurt right now. We can think about later later.”

Yelena sashayed over to where Patrick was still pinioned inside a sodding great metal cabinet. “What do you say, lover? Will you be mine again if it buys your friends a little freedom?”

Come on, Patrick, say yes. It means absolutely nothing. I nudged Tara’s flank with my knee which I hoped she took as a signal to get ready when shit started to go down again.

Weakly, perhaps from reluctance, perhaps because he must have lost a huge amount of blood even without a heartbeat pumping it out of his body, Patrick nodded. Hooking her hands underneath his arms, Yelena lifted him triumphantly down and lowered him to the floor at her feet. If she was anything like him, and she was exactly like him or this wouldn’t have worked, we had about a three second window while she was wrapped up in obsession-haze.

I rushed the nearest knight, going straight for his sword hand and hoping to have him disarmed before he realised what was happening. The sunlight was still holding them back a little, but only a little, and I needed the strength and grace of the Deepwild to have any hope of pulling this off.

“Sofia,” I called out with my last coherent breath before it all went into hunter’s instinct and adrenaline. “Run.”

Partly I didn’t want the responsibility of looking after her. Partly I wasn’t convinced the sunlight would be enough to protect her if it kicked off again. Mostly, I wanted Patrick off the bench.

The moment Flick and Sofia got clear and the light winked out, he rose up with that half-scream-half-roar thing he did when he’d decided, sometimes in the face of all the evidence, that he was called upon to protect his lady. Going from four-on-two with a pair of civilians to look after, to four-on-three with no civilians, made a huge difference. Tara was busy demonstrating to anyone who cared why her people had been chosen to be warrior-guardians of the ways between worlds, and now I didn’t have to worry about collateral damage I could be a bit less cautious about drawing on my mother’s power. Which was good because otherwise fighting with one hand and a tiny dagger against a faery knight with a sword would have gone super poorly. But with the close quarters and the fact that you only needed one solid hit from an iron spike to sincerely fuck up a faery’s day, I managed to take my opponent out in good enough time that I could circle round and back up Tara. She had one of the knights pinned down but even as a wolf she only had one pair of eyes, and a second knight was rearing up behind her, about to bring his sword down on her spine. The weapon was steel, not silver, and werewolves healed fast, but they didn’t heal quite so fast that they could laugh off severed vertebrae.

Taking the no-nonsense approach, I rammed the iron dagger sharply into the knight’s neck and yanked him backwards, wrapping my broken arm around his chest and dragging him away.

With three knights defeated, that left Yelena. She and Patrick had been tearing up a storm the way only seriously bitter exes with a blood-borne need to pursue the objects of their desire through all eternity could. She slammed him back against the iron maiden, not quite skewering him as completely as she had the last time, meaning he had space to throw her into the far wall. I could honestly have watched those two dickheads beating on each other for a very long time, but Tara brought a stop to the whole thing by pouncing heavily on Yelena and bringing her crashing to the floor.

It was about at this point that I realised quite how pissed off at her Tara was, because without a moment’s hesitation, she took Yelena’s head in her jaws and—

“Stop!”

Good old Patrick, you could always rely on him to add to the melodrama.

32

Promises & Mercies

“Is there any special reason,” I asked, “why you don’t want Tara to eat this objectively terrible person?”

“If we kill her, then we are no better than she is.”

I rolled my eyes so hard my face hurt. “Patrick, you’re already no better than she is. You’re both creepy vampires who get way too fixated on people you shouldn’t.”

I heard a snarl from behind me. And the thought occurred to me that if Tara was waiting for my signal then she was being much more consultative about this than usual. Which I hoped was evidence that we’d developed a respectful and mutually supportive relationship, rather than that I’d taken over her mind with my newfound ability to control werewolves.

Yeah, we needed to talk about that at some point.

“She may be able to tell us about Elaine,” Patrick said. And much as I hated to admit it, he had a point.

Also I wasn’t exactly bananas about watching a lady get her head chewed off either. “Okay.” I bent down and got as close to the two sets of fangs—the wolfey ones and the vampirey ones—as I could bear. “Let’s try this. Assuming Tara doesn’t kill you now which, given you’re still wearing bits of her friend, I’d say is fifty-fifty, you stand down and tell us everything you know. And then we’ll work out what we need to do with you. Deal?”

I almost thought she’d be defiant, which would have been a gutsy move given that her actual head was in the actual mouth of an actual werewolf. “Deal,” she said at last.

Tara backed off, shifting fluidly back to bipedal. The moment she had, Yelena made a bolt for the door but between Patrick and an instantly re-furrified werewolf she got all of two paces.

“Can’t blame you for trying,” I said, “but you really don’t want to try again.” Not that she’d be likely to for a while, Tara had gone for the legs this time and werewolf bites were nasty.

Shifting back to her less terrifying—or at least differently terrifying—shape, Tara folded her arms and eyed me warily. “My patience is wearing thin. This woman has transgressed against my pack in the most heinous way possible and I will have justice.”

“You heard the lady,” I tried to give Yelena an intimidating look but even without a broken arm I’d definitely have been the least scary thing in the room. “You’re on borrowed immortality here, give us something good or we have zero reason not to let her eat you.”

Huddled on the floor nursing her extremely damaged limbs, Yelena looked up at me, still a little defiant if I was any judge. “When I realised that the Prince of Wands was sheltering Patrick—”

“You mean when I told you he was sheltering Patrick?”

“When I realised, I approached the King of Shadows and he told me that we had been betrayed, and that both Douglas and Patrick’s new lover needed to die.”

I waved a hand. “To clarify, by new lover you mean the person he’s dating who is basically a child?”

“I would not expect you to understand our love, Katharine.” Patrick’s tone was grave. Why oh why hadn’t I left him in the spikey box?

“Sorry, my fault for interrupting. Get to the part where you wound up in a fake Victorian castle ramming our mutual ex into an iron maiden.”

Rather than doing anything helpful like letting Yelena continue, Patrick picked up the story. “I heard something in the dark outside,” he explained. “I went to investigate and was set upon by the three men you have just dispatched. They brought me here.”

“And what about Elaine?” I asked.

Yelena shot me a resentful look. “We went to the house for her. She was gone.”

“There was no sign of break-in.”

That earned me a condescending head-shake. “I’m a vampire. Locks don’t stop me and I leave no signs of my passing unless I wish to.”

“Yes yes.” I folded my arms, then immediately wished I hadn’t because ow. “You’re terribly spooky and mysterious. But it seems like what you’re basically telling me is that you have no information that’s useful to us. It also seems like you’ve told me that you’re under specific orders to kill somebody we’re here to very much non-kill.”

“It would seem that way.”

“Then I’ve heard enough.” Tara shifted and sprang, jaws swinging closed with brutal, animal finality and—a

“Stop!” And fuck, it was me this time.

Transforming once more and rather pointedly wiping blood from her lips while Yelena lay, wounded but definitely still alive—well, undead—beneath her, Tara turned and glared at me. “This is growing farcical.”

“I know, it’s just…” and what was it just? It wasn’t like I’d not seen people killed before. Hell it wasn’t like I’d not killed anyone before. But maybe that was the problem. Whatever Yelena was, whatever she’d done, right now she wasn’t a threat. And I’d been down the pre-emptive-killing route once already recently and I hadn’t liked where it had led, for me or for anybody else. “I’m—I’m really trying to murder fewer people.”

Aaaaand Tara was close to me again. Uncomfortably close. “It is not murder, it is justice.”

“I get that, but”—I squirmed. This was beginning to look like it would end badly—“it sounds like your grandmother talking again.”

A clawed finger came to rest lightly against my throat. “Be very careful what you say next, Kate Kane.”

“Well…” Funnily enough, an angry werewolf telling you to be careful what you say made it hard to get words out. “The thing is—I mean—things are pretty grim right now and I think that there are quite a lot of problems you can’t solve by chewing people’s faces off.”

“She skinned a member of my pack and wears her hide.” Tara’s eyes bled amber. “The only problem here is that she has yet to die in unbearable pain.”

Okay, that wasn’t entirely getting me where I needed to be. “And who would that help, exactly? It won’t bring Tabitha to life. It won’t give your packmates their eyes back.”

“It will send a message.”

I probably shouldn’t have lost my temper, but I lost my temper. “Fuck a badger, Tara, send a message to who? You think Sebastian Douglas will give a shit? You think the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter will look up from his-her throne for five fucking seconds to hear this one scream? This whole fucking world is full of shitty things that hurt people. Can’t you please try not to be one of them?”

To my genuine surprise, Tara stepped back. She looked from me to Yelena and back to me, her expression not softening exactly, but turning a different kind of wolfish. “And what do you propose I do instead?”

“I don’t know.” This would have been outside my wheelhouse even if there hadn’t been the murdered-her-family issue to deal with. “But she served the Cold and Dark for a long time, surely there’s a way she could be useful to you?”

Yelena looked up. Although she was bloodied and broken down, there was a malicious, almost seductive glint in her eye. “I know many things, werewolf. Things that might advantage you.”

I fought hard against the urge to kick her. “Could you try not to sound totally evil for five seconds?”

“And you expect me to trust this woman?” Tara’s tone was just this side of withering, but In the circumstances I felt I deserved it.

“What if we could make her trustworthy?” I was thinking on my feet here, but between Nim and my admittedly one-sided experience of the fae, I was beginning to come up with a plan.

“Make her trustworthy how?” asked Tara. “She could be dead and I am still not certain I would trust her to rot.”

Cautiously, I made my way to the cellar door, and called for Sofia. There was a sound of footsteps outside as she hurried downstairs with Flick in tow. I tensed—there was still a chance that Yelena could decide to say screw it and go for the squishy fully human people—but she was playing ball so far.

It struck me only a little belatedly that this was probably the first time Patrick and Sofia had been face to face since the official break-up, and that must have been something of a mindfuck for them. “Is everything okay?” she asked. “You all went quiet so we didn’t know if it was safe to come back.”

“No doubt you hoped she had killed me,” observed Patrick. Because of course he did.

Sofia gave him a far more understanding look than I ever managed. “No I didn’t, Patrick. I valued our time together and I’m happy you’re happy.”

He honestly didn’t seem to know how to take that.

“We’re about done,” I translated. “Yelena doesn’t know where Elaine is either. I suspect she might be … genetically elusive.”

Flick gave Yelena the world’s least subtle sidelong glance. “And what are we going to do about…”

“That,” I said, “is where Sofia comes in. You’re technically a priestess, right?”

Sofia gave me a perplexed look, but at least half-nodded. “I think so.”

“Then how about this”—I turned to Yelena—“and before you make your decision remember the alternative is that Tara eats you here and now and not in the fun sexy way.”

Although she was in human form, Tara gave a distinctly wolfish growl.

“Here’s what I’m thinking. You swear before Apollo that you won’t hurt any of us, and that you’ll do whatever it is Tara feels you need to do to make you worth not killing, and then we all walk away from here with all our bits intact. Sound good?”

“It sounds,”—Yelena hesitated, eyeing each of us with a calculating precision—“acceptable.”

“Tara? This work for you?”

She nodded, then stalked forward and looked Yelena in the eye. “Give me the pelt.”

Doing her best to put distance between herself and the angry werewolf, Yelena removed the wolf-skin, which Tara folded reverently and laid to one side.

“Swear by the sun-god,” Tara said, “that you will come with me at once from this place to Safernoc Hall, there to face my judgement. Swear that you will offer no harm to me, to mine, or to any under our protection for so long as you are animate, and that you shall never again serve the interests of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter.”

Being a vampire, Yelena was dead pale already, but she grew paler. “I cannot, not that. I have served the King for centuries, were I to betray him I would suffer unimaginable horrors.”

“Worse,” Tara tilted her head to one side, “than what I can do to you? You strike me as a survivor, Yelena. Survive.”

Yelena lowered her eyes, which I was taking for a yes. There were even chances of this being a trick, because at the end of the day she was a fucking undead monster. I genuinely wasn’t certain how much she cared about hurting Sofia—or me for that matter—now we were out of Patrick’s life and he was so obviously hostile to us, but she’d definitely be looking for an out on the whole “give myself up to werewolf justice” thing. Then again, Tara seemed to think it would work, and she knew way more about this stuff than I did. Very, very reluctantly, I allowed Sofia to shuffle forward.

She stared at Yelena with perfectly understandable hesitation. “How do I do this?”

“Search me. You’re the one with the god in your head.”

“I don’t think he’s in my head but, okay. Kneel, I guess?”

As it happened, Yelena was already kneeling, but she turned with that ostentatious fluidity of movement that vampires had when regular folks would look awkward and shuffly. She bowed her head in what I hoped was a sincere gesture of submission.

“Right, well, then … do you promise not to try to murder us ever again?”

“Yes,” I could practically hear her rolling her eyes.

“Or to hurt us at all. Us or Tara’s werewolf pack? Or any of Patrick’s … umm … future girlfriends?”

“I shall never abandon Elaine,” Patrick insisted.

Yelena sighed. “I do so swear.”

“And everything Tara said? Going to Safernoc and giving up working for the King of Shadows the Queen of Winter, all of those things?”

“Yes,” Yelena’s tone was growing more and more irritable. “I swear to all of those things too. You know there was a time when seeresses had a lot more dignity than this.”

Nothing much happened for about two and a half seconds, then the room was bathed in a gentle sunlight. “Then your word shall be your bond.” Sofia’s voice had gone airy and distant, herself but not herself. “And should you break your oath, your heart shall shatter, your eyes fail, your skin blister with agony, and your mind be shadowed by clouds. Now rise.”

Belatedly, I wondered if Yelena had expected that to work. Perhaps I was projecting but she looked ever so slightly surprised as she rose to her feet. I had to admit to a certain amount of, whaddyacallit, schadenfreude—not only because it was nice to see bad things happen to somebody who’d tried to kill you quite as often as Yelena had tried to kill me, but also because it was kind of refreshing for somebody else to be the one making little-understood bargains with unexpectedly powerful supernatural entities.

“Honestly, I still don’t feel all that safe,” offered Flick.

Smiling, Yelena ran the tip of her tongue across her too-white vampire teeth. “Wise, child.”

I shrugged. “Actually, I reckon we’re good. If you’re smart”—my gaze flicked to Yelena a moment—“and however much I might dislike you, I don’t think you’re not smart, you’ll realise that you’ve flat-out betrayed basically everybody. Which means your best bet probably is Safernoc. At least if they kill you they won’t take a century to do it.”

Yelena’s expression was pure venom, but there wasn’t a lot she could do now. At least, I hoped there wasn’t a lot she could do. I never quite knew how this sort of magic worked. Still, she left without much more complaint and Tara left with her. However strong an oath before Apollo was, there was no way she’d let Yelena out of her sight until the pack had determined how to deal with her.

I hoped we’d made the right call. I certainly liked Tara’s style of leadership more than I liked the dowager’s but it had blown up in her face once or twice already, for mostly me-related reasons, and if it didn’t pan out better this time she’d probably be totally fucked. And then what would happen?

Sadly, and selfishly, there wasn’t time to think about it. Not while there was still the more pressing issue that Elaine was out wandering the Lake District somewhere after dark and there might still be other servants of the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter to contend with. And even if there weren’t any, if Yelena and the knights had been it, she could still fall over a cliff and die.

Then again, we did have a secret weapon.

“So, Patrick,” I tried. “Don’t suppose your deep, abiding, and definitely never-ending connection to Elaine is giving you any indication of where she is right now?”

He made a set of movements that were uncomfortably like sniffing the air. “She is not in danger, and she is not afraid, but she is lost. I should go to her.”

“You do that. Just let us follow you.”

He bolted. Of course he bolted. I bolted after him, leading to this uncomfortably Benny-Hill-like chain of us crocodiling out of the fake castle and into the wilds of the Lake District, with Patrick heading off heedless of pursuit, me keeping up as best I could and the two undergraduates trailing behind.

This was a total recipe for getting lost, ambushed, or injured, but I couldn’t see that many ways around it.

Once or twice I thought I saw a giraffe through the trees. I almost convinced myself it was my imagination.

33

Rushes & Lions

Perhaps it was the dark, perhaps it was the relatively unspoilt countryside of a national park, perhaps it was the eerie silver mist that rolled off the lake, but things were feeling at least twenty percent more vision-questy than they had a few minutes ago.

And that was before the white doe and the four lions.

Patrick stumbled to a halt. “I can no longer feel her,” he said. He seemed genuinely shocked. It must have been weird for him, his my-woman-is-in-danger sense had been part of his whole deal for well over a century. Losing it must have been like going suddenly numb.

“Call it a hunch,” I told him, "but what do you say we follow the pack of heraldic beasts?”

Flick and Sofia brought up the rear, both of them out of breath. “Why,” Flick gasped., “Are there. Lions?”

“I’m about ninety-three percent certain that it’s a holy grail thing.”

That earned me a suspicious look from Patrick. “Elaine is a fragile and innocent girl. Why must you persist in imagining that she is some kind of mystical figure?”

“You mean apart from the fucking lions?” I asked. “And your frankly spotless track record of dating young women with unknown magical powers?”

“Uh, Kate?” Sofia nudged me gently. “The animals are getting away.”

Oh right, the actual quest. Stupid mythic imperatives always getting in the way of a good argument. We set off after them, more slowly now because they were—I almost wanted to say proceeding in state—and there was that woobly, dreamy vibe that so much high-end wizard stuff had going on.

We followed the weird menagerie down into a valley, where the doe lay down on a bed of rushes and the lions gathered around her. Then there was a fading and a shifting and a shimmer in the air, and the doe had become a girl who had to be Elaine, and one of the lions had become a dude I didn’t recognise at all, another had turned into an ox, another an eagle, and the last one had somehow managed to transform into a different lion.

Symbolism could go fuck itself.

“Be ye welcome,” said the unfamiliar dude. “Now wot I well ye—”

“Oh just shut up.” I should probably have been more diplomatic but I was beyond through with this shit. “I’ve had a really long, really strange week. I’ve fought a vampire, stabbed a faery, nearly frozen to death, and been read poetry by a surprisingly hot estate agent. All I want to do now is take this girl back to London so I can use her to hopefully try to bring my friend back from the not-exactly-dead. And I don’t need some prick in a robe talking medieval at me. And I don’t need signs or portents or omens. Now fuck off. Legitimately, seriously, fuck off and take your”—I waved my hands in a way that indicated the whole gathering of … things—“whatever this is with you.”

He gave me an oddly sincere look. “Shall I at least set my—”

Whatever he was about to suggest, I was beyond giving anything like a shit. “No. Get the fuck out of my head, life, and general vicinity.”

With which the guy who used to be a lion, the ox who used to be a lion, the eagle who used to be a lion, and the lion who used to be a lion—which I still didn’t understand at all—disappeared into the mist, leaving Elaine slowly stirring on the floor. I let Patrick go to her, because stopping him would have been borderline impossible.

Since she was all of sixteen, I let her get away with her first words on waking up being “where am I?”

“You are safe, Elaine,” Patrick told her. “Yelena came for us, but she is gone now.”

They embraced for longer than even bordered on necessary.

“So...” I tried. “I’m Kate, these are Sofia and Flick and… I need your help.”

She looked up at me with these blue lamb’s eyes. “But why could you possibly need me?”

“If you’re about to say I’m just an ordinary girl then I swear despite the incredibly poor optics, I will punch you.”

“But I am just an ordinary girl.”

I wimped out on the punching her thing. It would have been really, really problematic. “No, you’re not. You’re—like—the holy grail or something which I know sounds absurd but your boyfriend is a vampire, and you’ve woken up from what I’m guessing was a very confusing dream about lions in the middle of a misty valley with a faery princess and the Delphic oracle.”

Flick waved a hand. “If it helps, I actually am completely normal. Which, I’ll be honest, hasn’t been great for my ego.”

“Anyway,” I went on. “I know this is a lot to take in but the long and short of it is that we need to put you in a car and take you back to London so that you can save a magic queen from a coma she was beaten into by a cockney gangster wizard so that she can get on with maintaining some kind of cosmic balance that is stopping everything going utterly to shit.”

Flick blinked. “Oh.”

“It helps if you don’t think about it. Also I’ve found hard liquor works but—”

“Kate!” Sofia was giving me a disapproving look.

“But as I was just about to say, you’re probably a bit young and I obviously don’t recommend you solve your problems with alcohol because then you’ll wind up bitter and alone and with everybody you care about dead. Like me.”

Patrick helped Elaine to her feet, and we made our way back to Elaine’s parents’ house by a mixture of my hunter’s instincts, Sofia’s sense of direction, and a fair amount of bickering. Once we were inside, Sofia vanished into the kitchen and made a round of teas for those who needed the caffeine-slash-comfort, which was basically everyone, and I crashed down into an armchair and began to seriously reconsider my policy of running around woods and fighting monsters at my time of life, and also my policy of ever getting up ever again.

“So what do we think?” I asked when everybody was settled and those who wanted to be were enteaed. “Do we head off now to keep ahead of the game or rest up overnight so we don’t all die in an ironic car crash.”

“We should leave at once,” Patrick insisted. “This place is no longer secure, and Elaine’s safety is all that matters now.”

Well that was me told. And since nobody else had strong opinions on the subject, we set off as soon as we’d finished our tea. Well, as soon as we’d finished our tea and Sofia and Flick had done the washing up because they—to be fair absolutely rightly—pointed out that leaving dirty cups lying around in a house that would probably be empty until the summer of next year was a major dick move. Anyway, once that minor detail was dealt with it was get in the car and back on the road.

With Tara gone there was only one car for five of us, and since Elaine had to ride beside Patrick because of their intensely true love and unbreakable eternal bond that was definitely more eternal than the eternal bonds he’d had with Yelena, Sofia, or me, I wound up having to squeeze in the back with the undergraduates. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, and Patrick was still playing Claire de fucking Lune on a loop, but what with the five hour drive and the sheer amount of exhausting shit that had happened to me, I managed to fall asleep almost immediately.

* * *

Under a bridge in an unreal city, the Witch-Queen of London sat on her swing of red threads, looking out over the water.

“What shall we ever do?” she asked.

“I’ve found the grail,” I told her. “At least, I think I have. She’s more of a person than a cup.”

“I am waiting,” Nimue said. “Suspended in a place between. Waiting for somebody to touch the scale and tip the balance.”

That had been a total non-sequitur and honestly this was getting more frustrating by the second. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“No,” she said. “It is not.”

I turned and walked away, stalking through overgrown rubble and hoping that fucking giraffe wouldn’t come back. What was it with the weird animals anyway? Stupid magic and its stupid layers of metaphor.

On the wreckage of a red-brick pub I found the woman who had once been Nana King dealing cards and moving little pegs around a cribbage board.

“Fifteen-two,” she said. “Fifteen-four, and one for his nob.”

I didn’t even ask.

“So you found the grail?” Her smile was inviting, cruel.

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing now. Not since you killed me—don’t think I’ve forgotten that, my girl. If young Arty had lived then she’d have been for him, but as it is”—she shrugged—“do what you like with her. You’ll need to spill her blood in a silver bowl if you want to wake your friend. Maybe better to let her die instead.”

I’d foolishly hoped that there wouldn’t be any more magic bullshit to wade through. “And you’re telling me this why?”

She cackled. She’d always been a bit of a cackler. “Because we’re connected now, you and me. I can’t keep nothing from you. Not since you stuck that spike in my heart. Besides, I like to watch you twist.”

“You think I’m twisting?”

“I think you’re spinning like a sparrow on a string, my dear. And how will it go, I wonder? Will you cut the girl open to save your friend? Will you cut down your friend to spare the girl’s blood and the queen’s suffering? Or will you walk away, make the choice that is no choice at all, crawl back into your hole and never come out?”

Those all sounded like shit options. “Man, I wish this was one of those kiss-the-princess type of curses instead of one of those bleed-a-person-into-a-bowl type of curses.”

“Be careful what you wish for. Kisses are promises, and promises can come back to haunt you.”

She had a point. On both counts. “Well, it’s been—something, talking to you. Although, no offence, but I was hoping you’d have been burning in hell by now.”

“That will come,” she replied. “For both of us.”

Great. Then again, she was evil. She was probably trying to psych me out. I walked away.

“Fear death by water, Kate Kane. If you remember nothing else, remember that.”

I did my best to ignore her. I’d managed to avoid drowning so far, after all.

My path turned upwards, over scree and shale and something that might once have been the supports of a bridge across the river that now ran behind me, though I did not remember crossing it.

The green lady stood at the summit, staring past me at the water.

“You are close,” she said. “Very close.”

“An evil old woman told me I’d have to bleed out a child to get this finished.”

Her head tilted a little to one side and she fixed me with her jade-and-jasper eyes. “You get nothing in this world if you will not shed a little blood. And the girl will not be harmed.”

“Oh, good. I’m glad you’re asking me to perform a non-fatal bloodletting.”

“There is always a price to pay,” she replied. “My reflection was far too willing to pay that price herself, and see where it has left her.”

She had a point. Nim had been self-sacrificing to a fault. But the problem with being self-sacrificing is that eventually you wound up getting sacrificed. And that was kind of a crappy deal for the people you left behind. “In her defence, she did mostly manage to avoid carving up teenagers.”

“A small pain, for a great glory.” Words could not quite express how much I disliked the green lady. As a rule, I was very much not a fan of things wearing my friends’ faces, but things that wore my friends’ faces while also being able to make a coherent case for actually being the friend whose face they were wearing, while still also being basically evil, were a whole different level of suss.

I sighed. “You know, you should really learn to quit while you’re ahead. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to do what you want me to do. All this preening is just making me uncomfortable about it.”

Moving forward with a graceful menace, she took my hands. “You’re right. But you need only be strong a little longer. Then all will be well.”

I wasn’t sure that was helping. I felt a touch on my arm, and as the city fell apart I realised that somebody was rocking me awake.

“Hurry up, please.” whispered Nimue’s voice as the world faded around me. “It’s time.”

34

Blood & Silver

I woke up in the back seat of Patrick’s Volvo S60R outside London Bridge hospital. It was well after midnight, which meant we were nowhere near visiting hours, but given how mysterious and misty it had got last time, I didn’t think that would be a major cause for concern.

For a weird moment I intensely wished that Tara was there. This was all beginning to feel final and it would have been nice to see her before whatever was about to go down went down. I could have texted, but she’d be unlikely to have her phone on her and, anyway, she was probably neck deep in werewolf bullshit by now.

Flick and Sofia were still asleep beside me, and I didn’t think it was fair to wake them, so I leaned over the front seat, whispered to Elaine that it was time, and slipped out of the car. She and Patrick followed me through the main doors of the hospital, and while we made a weird looking party I was hoping that the ambient magic would stop us getting too many awkward glances. Certainly it seemed to work on the receptionist—still on duty despite the hour—who when I told them who I was here to see, they got that same faraway look as they had last time and waved the three of us through without a thought.

Once we were in the hospital proper I decided I couldn’t put off the bleeding issue any longer. “So…” I began. “You know how I said that the Prince of Wands might want to drain your blood to turn himself into magic vampire King Arthur?”

“Yes?” She didn’t look exactly thrilled.

“Well… turns out I wasn’t totally joking. I think your blood might be the key to all this.”

Patrick had me pinned to a wall with a hand around my throat faster than—well about as fast as he always reacted to things he thought threatened his girlfriends. “I knew you planned to betray us,” he snarled.

“Okay,” I tried. “Normally I’d be calling you out for being an overprotective wanker right now but that’s actually perfectly fair. I don’t need to kill her, or even hurt her very much…”

His grip tightened. “Very much?”

“Can you please just let me go,” I managed. “I don’t want this to turn into a fist fight in a hospital.”

“I will not let you harm her.”

Again, he was bizarrely close to being in the right here and that was making me very uncomfortable. “And I won’t, I promise, let me explain.”

He put me down and backed very slightly off. “Speak.”

Prick. “I had a dream last night, and I was told that to wake Nimue I have to spill some of Elaine’s blood into a silver bowl. We’re in a hospital so I’m sure I’ll be able to do it harmlessly”—getting a silver bowl might be a bit more of a challenge, now I thought of it, but that was a side issue—“and I am all about being safe, sane, and consensual so if she’s not up for it, that’s fine. We can find another way. I’m sure.” I wasn’t, particularly, but it felt like the thing to say.

Elaine was doing lamb’s eyes again. I couldn’t tell if the fact that she looked so young I genuinely couldn’t find her attractive was a sign that I was getting more responsible, or just getting old. “But she’s dying?”

“In a coma. But sort of a magic coma. And at the moment my options are you bleed in a bowl, or she stays like this forever and the nation unravels into mystical chaos, or she dies.”

Elaine blinked. “Then I’ll do it. Promise me it won’t hurt too badly.”

“It shouldn’t do. Then again I might be working off the wrong baseline here. I mean, I’ve been running around with a broken arm for, like, three days.” Thinking about it, maybe I ought to get that looked at sooner rather than later. Okay, later rather than much, much later.

Patrick seemed this close to being all no, I shall not allow it, but either he’d mellowed or I was being unfair to him.

“Right then,” I went on. “So … we have to find a silver bowl? Fuck I hate magic.”

After about twenty minutes of wandering aimlessly around the hospital hoping that the weird definitely-no-witch-queens-here spell that Nim’s unconscious body or detached spirit or whatever was laying over the place would stop us getting escorted off the premises by security, I decided our best plan would be to head upstairs and ask the mages. If anybody would know where something so pointlessly fucking weird and arbitrary was, it’d be a wizard.

Nimue was still lying in what I thought might technically have been in state, in an upstairs room with Michelle watching over her body. She eyed Patrick and Elaine suspiciously as we entered.

“The fuck are these?” she asked.

“He’s some dickhead from a long time ago. She’s the holy grail, don’t ask. Apparently we need to get her blood into a silver bowl.”

Michelle’s eyes darted from me to Elaine, back to Nim, and to me again. “And where do you expect to get one of them at this time of night?”

Okay, so maybe operation ask a magician wasn’t quite the flawless plan I thought it was. “Come on, a place this swanky they must be swimming in them.”

“Oh yes, first thing they come in and check on. IV bag, sheets, vital signs, have we made sure there’s a fucking great bowl made of pure silver in here.”

“Not helping, Michelle.”

“Wasn’t trying to. You’re supposed to be Galahad. Go rustle up a dish.”

Fine. There had to be a way to swing this. I refused to believe that destiny or the universe or Nim’s mystical will, or whatever was making this whole thing happen, would drag me all the way up the country and all the way back again with a terrified girl in tow only to have me fall down at the end for the want of a piece of tableware.

I set out back into the hospital. Come on, Nim, I found myself whispering—I hoped this didn’t count as prayer, I liked Nimue a lot but I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with her being my actual god—you must have a plan here. Okay, yeah, that was sounding distinctly prayerey. Trying not to dwell on the theological implications of my internal monologue, I meandered aimlessly through the hospital, trusting that some force or some chance would bring me to roughly the right place.

My possibly-guided-possibly-random wanderings led me to haematology. Perhaps I just had blood on the brain, but it seemed logical to me that if I was looking for an appropriate vessel to bleed a person into, I should probably look in the ward that was all about bleeding.

There was definitely something off about the place—every bed was occupied and all of them by young attractive women in various states of unconsciousness. A painting on the far wall showed a dead-looking woman being loaded onto a ship by what appeared to be a bunch of knights. I blanked it all out and looked around for anything appropriately silver and bowl-like.

On a low table I saw something that seemed to fit the bill—a shallow silver basin currently filled with brightly-coloured boiled sweets. I emptied the contents onto the side—it was kind of antisocial of me, in that I was probably making unnecessary work for a cleaner, but I was on a sacred mission here. Then I pocketed one of the yellow ones, because you never know when you might fancy a lemon sherbet.

I hurried back up to Nimue’s room. Well, I say hurried. I more moved as in a dream because that was very much the vibe of the evening. I set the eerie blood-magic dish down beside the bed, and looked somewhat expectantly at Michelle.

“What?”

“Well you’re the magician. I thought you’d do the …” I tried to mime bleeding an innocent girl into a ceremonial vessel but I wasn’t sure what the right gestures would even look like.

Michelle reached out a hand, and a flame danced into life in her palm. “Still all I do.”

“I always thought that the whole pilgrim on the burning road thing meant you had a whole philosophy that went with the fireballs?”

“Nope. We just burn shit. It ain’t fancy but it gets the job done.”

I gave her a cut me some slack here look. “Oh, come on, you must be better qualified to do this than me.”

“Sorry. I don’t fuck with blood magic. It’s creepy.”

From the expression on Elaine’s face, this conversation was filling her with the opposite of confidence.

“Fine.” I gave my most exasperated of sighs. “Tell me you at least have a knife I can borrow.” I’d have used one of my daggers, but I’d only got the gold and iron ones with me, and neither kept anything like the edge I’d want to use.

Michelle, true to what I assumed was form although I didn’t really know her that well, Crocodile Dundeed a problematically intimidating blade from somewhere about her person, spun it about to face hilt-first and handed it to me.

Elaine made an actual whimper.

“You can still back out,” I told her. “I appreciate that this shit has just got way realer than you probably signed up for.”

She shook her head. “No. No, I want to help.”

“Okay. Then I guess give me your arm. This will probably hurt a bit.”

“You don’t have a clue what you’re doing, do you?” The voice was gentle but mocking. Looking around I saw Sebastian Douglas lounging in the doorway, Hephaestion hovering behind him. His eyes were back to normal at least. I filed that under mercies, comma, small.

Holding the knife ready, I tried for as much defiance as I could muster. “You’re too late.”

“Child, you don’t even know what I’m waiting for.”

Elaine scurried to my side and in a frankly unwarranted display of trust, presented me with her bare arm. Without taking my eyes off Sebastian, I drew the knife as carefully as I could across her skin, being super, super careful not to go anywhere near anything that looked like an artery.

I wasn’t sure how much blood I was going to need, but I’d kept the cut fairly shallow. There was enough to form a veneer across the bottom of the bowl, and I hoped that was all it was going to take, because I wasn’t about to ask this kid for any more.

Douglas still wasn’t moving. Patrick, Michelle, and I all stood tense as harp strings waiting for him to try something.

He didn’t try anything. Elaine ran back into Patrick’s arms and he folded himself around her like body armour.

Still keeping my attention firmly fixed on the Prince of Wands, although given the time of night he could certainly act faster than I had any hope of reacting, I moved myself to stand by Nimue’s head. Michelle got out of her chair at last, putting herself between me and Sebastian, and he didn’t try to stop her.

If this doesn’t work, I told Nim in my mind, I am going to be so fucking pissed off with you. I dipped my fingers in the shallow bowl of fresh child blood. Yeah, no way this was going wrong at all. Then, letting instinct guide me, I anointed her on the forehead.

Perhaps I was imagining it, but I thought I saw her eyelid flicker.

“In case you were wondering,” said Sebastian Douglas in a maddeningly conversational tone. “That was what I was waiting for.”

And then he acted. Fast.

35

Smoke & Ashes

The good news was that without the stolen power of Apollo, Sebastian Douglas was far weaker than he had been the last time we fought.

The bad news was that he was still a two-thousand-year old vampire with an unparalleled knowledge of sorcery who somehow always managed to have the drop on us despite announcing his presence well in advance.

Michelle, as she freely and accurately admitted, had basically one way of dealing with a threat. But the torrent of flames she hurled at the Prince of Wands guttered out a good three feet from him, which suggested he’d probably warded himself before he got here because the motherfucker did his motherfucking homework. Patrick threw himself into the fray with the wild abandon of an angry bloodsucker, and got about halfway across the room before a telekinetic strike pitched him through a closed window. That left Elaine, very sensibly keeping her head down in the corner.

Then there was me. Sebastian Douglas wasn’t one to get his hands dirty, but for old friends he appeared willing to make an exception. He caught me around the throat with a strength that would have been unexpected if I hadn’t long since lost the ability to be surprised by anything he did, and flung me into the arms of his waiting servant. Hephaestion wrapped me in a fairly restrained but utterly unbreakable bear-hug. I’d been attacked by living statues before and they were a pain in the arse. Near-as-hell impervious and a lot quicker than they had any right to be, your only real hope was to stay away from them and that ship had now sailed entirely.

With an entire room full of his enemies neutralised in basically zero seconds, the Prince of Wands walked calmly to Nimue’s bedside and looked down at her. About the only thing that stopped the look in his eyes from being creepy beyond creepy was the knowledge that it was very much power-lust rather than lust-lust.

“Touch her and you fucking die.” Michelle sounded passably menacing for somebody who had so recently demonstrated her utter inability to harm the person she was threatening.

“I am already dead,” he replied, half to her and half to himself. “Had your friend not thwarted my ambition to ascend the discarded stair, I would now be something quite other, and no threat to any of you. But she did, and I am not, and so I must console myself with the power that resides in your mistress.”

Nim was definitely stirring. The Prince of Wands caught her by the hair and hauled her to her feet, tubes and needles tearing free from her body as she rose from the bed. I thrashed in Hephaestion’s grip but could do nothing. Instead I watched helplessly as he pulled her in with that mockery of tenderness that vampires did when they were going to drain absolutely all of your fucking blood.

I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Then I heard a noise like sixty dogs barking, like the rush of an oncoming train, like the roar of the sea.

Then what was left of the windows exploded, and a force like the wind or the tide tore through the room. It scattered medical equipment and vases of flowers and ripped the Prince of Wands away from Nimue and pinned him to a wall like a leaf.

Lightning cracked outside, rain lashed from nowhere, and Nimue stood in an emerald gown, framed in a halo of city-light.

Sebastian Douglas spoke a secret word, and the room was a blaze of blue fire for all of a moment before Nimue, with the barest motion of her hand, extinguished it.

“Impossible.” And I thought for a moment that I heard fear in his voice.

Nimue walked towards him. Outside a storm howled, and where her feet fell spring water welled through the floor and lilies grew. “So much knowledge,” she said—her voice was distant, and colder than I had ever heard it. “So little understanding.”

Despite the strange deep-sea current that still whipped the room, Sebastian managed by some vast exertion of will and blood to hurl himself one last time at the Witch-Queen of London, his fingers grasping like claws and his fangs bared like a wild beast. For all his scheming and his scholarship, it seemed, he was just a vampire in the end.

Nimue raised a hand before him and the current caught him again, hurling him backwards and stripping flesh from bone in a vortex of arcane fury that I really, really, really did not ever want to find myself on the wrong side of.

In seconds it was over. Two millennia of power and fear stripped away to nothing. A bleached skull in a handful of dust. Pearls glinting in the eye sockets. I felt Hephaestion’s grip loosen about me, and he ran forward, falling to his knees beside what was left of his master. I nearly collapsed myself from the mix of fear, exhaustion, and confusion.

Nimue turned, a shimmer of starlight and majesty. Her left eye socket was still a ruin of scar tissue, but her right gleamed green in the dark.

I was beginning to suspect that something very, very bad had happened.

Michelle stepped forwards at once and fell to one knee.

“’Chel,” I said. “I don’t think that’s Nimue.”

Nim, or the Green Lady, or whoever the hell it was who gazed at me. I couldn’t quite tell if she was saying I am saddened that you do not recognise me, your old friend or I am pissed off that you are giving the game away. “I am your queen,” she said. “And you will bow before me.”

Yeah, I was doubling down on not Nim. “A world of not happening.”

The wind was still surging around me, and I felt her pulling me in like a whirlpool. “I do not recall offering you a choice.”

I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that I still had Michelle’s knife in my hand. I was also painfully aware that Elaine was still cowering in the corner. The psychic sea-swell of Nimue’s command dragged me to my knees in front of her, and I bowed my head. This was so many flavours of not good. I had one chance at this and if I fucked it up I’d probably wind up a little pile of bleached bones like the Prince of Wands.

Doing my best not to think about it, because I’d be frankly fucking amazed if she couldn’t read my mind, I thrust the knife upwards, aiming for her heart. I had a nauseating flashback to the way I’d skewered Nana King, but I didn’t see what else I could do.

Nim met my blade halfway with her open hand, letting the whole knife run through her palm and spattering me with blood that mingled with the rain that was still peppering the room. It was a pretty baller move, but it seemed to cost her. The weird mystical eddies that had been holding me in place let up long enough that I could jump to my feet, shove Michelle aside as respectfully as I could, and get myself and Elaine the fuck out.

I sprinted across the floor, grabbed Elaine by the waist, and ran for the window. Nim had taken a room with a view of the river, and if I could clear the quite-wide-now-I-looked-at-it paved area between us and the water, we’d at least live for longer than it took us to drop four stories.

Bracing myself on the windowsill, I summoned as much of my mother’s power as I could without wanting to eat the person I was carrying, and launched myself out into the storm. Wind whipped my face as if trying its hardest to push me back to land. Spread out below me, I saw the lights of boats on the river, sailing past serene and unconcerned. The rain lashed down in violent streams that stabbed into my back like swords as I fell towards the black-and-gold water of the Thames.

We plunged down, the city vanishing above us like some unreal thing, a dream of another world.

The current caught us and pulled us down.

I clung to Elaine, although there was little I could do for her. My arm was still broken, and I’ve always been an okay swimmer at best. Now and then I managed to kick my way towards the surface and gulp in a few breaths of air, hoping that Elaine could do the same. But always the water sucked us down again, as if it was directed by some malicious will. Which, I mean, it definitely was.

I’d seen glimpses of Nimue’s power over the years, but I was beginning to realise that they’d been just that—glimpses. What I’d seen her turn on the Prince of Wands was something else. And now I was caught in the grip of her disdain, in a city whose very air and water responded to her most casual thought.

In other words: I was fucked.

Then suddenly I felt something pulling me upwards. No, not me. Us. In fact not even us, Elaine. The unselfish thing to do would be to let go and allow whatever was rescuing her—and who was I kidding it was definitely Patrick—to rescue her while I fended for myself in the river. But there were some hard limits to my unselfishness, and I wasn’t getting drowned to make a point.

Patrick dragged us to shore on a muddy bank just past Tower Bridge.

“Katharine.” He looked at me accusingly. “How dare you try to drown an innocent girl.”

I lay on my back staring up at the sky, rain still stinging my face. “I can not be fucked with you right now.”

“She saved me, Patrick,” Elaine explained, her head laid delicately against his chest. “Everything was so confusing and frightening, but she saved me.”

If we were counting I’d kind of been the one who led her into danger in the first place. Then again, Yelena would probably have killed them both eight hours ago if I hadn’t shown up so we might have been very much in a po-tay-to po-tah-to situation. “See. Take her away and keep her safe, Patrick. I’m going to lie on this nice comfy mud for a bit.”

He apparently didn’t need to be told twice. The two of them vanished into the night.

Which left me alone in the dirt, soaking wet with a broken arm. I wondered for a moment whether, if I opened my mouth, I’d drown like a turkey in the rain. If turkeys did drown in the rain, which they probably didn’t.

How spectacularly had I fucked this up? Pretty fucking spectacularly was my feeling. But what had been the alternative? Let Nimue lose the battle for the city? Let her die? Kill her myself? I wasn’t exactly what you’d call a moral philosopher, but I wasn’t sure how you were meant to game out the implications of your friends turning into supervillains. Was I supposed to stick by her anyway? Was I supposed to try to be a force for good on the inside?

Trying to stab her in the heart with a giant fucking combat knife had probably been the wrong call however you sliced it.

The more I thought about it, the more lie here on a mud bank sounded like a promising strategy.

It was a strategy that I was able to keep up for about another hour before I got moved on by the police. They were quite nice about it all told, a pleasant uniformed officer who looked way too young to be in charge of arresting people let me off with a caution for loitering and saw me safe onto the night bus. From there it was a gentle stagger home to my tragically empty flat. I threw myself face down onto the bed without bothering to take my shoes off and then rolled over at once as my weight pressed down onto my bad arm.

Fuck. Just. Fuck. Things were… Fuck. And I couldn’t even. Fuck.

I shut my eyes and cried myself to sleep.

36

Water & Stone

I woke up in about six different kinds of pain. There were the injuries, the fact that I’d slept in a funny position, and—oh yeah—the bit where I’d gone on an entire fucked up vision quest to save one of my oldest friends and she’d paid me back by going full psychopath.

Figuring that I probably needed to be contactable, I slipped the sim card out of my water/storm/battle with faeries/magical confrontation damaged handset into the backup I’d kept ready against its inevitable demise. It had been a good run, but I definitely needed to start adding wear and tear on electronics to my list of expenses. It buzzed the moment I switched it on because I’d acquired a fair few messages overnight. The first three were from Tara, the first saying Yelena is in the dungeon, the second, which seemed to be from later the same evening read Thinking of you, let me know if it works and the third said Sofia arrived this morning with her friend. She said she dreamed of a terrible storm. Tell me you’re okay. Please call.

I should probably have got on that. The next message was more professional, coming from Nicola Bright and reading Have translated pertinent elements of text, suggest meeting today 11 if convenient.

It wasn’t convenient. What I really wanted to be doing today at eleven was lying in bed screaming at the ceiling. But that would be zero help to anybody, and while I was pretty comfortable being zero help to anybody right then, it was probably terrible for my mental health. I fired a text back.

11 works for me. See you then.

Then I rang Tara.

“Kate?” I could tell she was concerned because she didn’t use my full name. “What happened?”

“Long story, but the gist is that Nimue’s gone proper all-shall-love-me-and-despair.”

“What?”

“Sorry, ex-girlfriend was big into Lord of the Rings. I mean, she’s kind of embraced the evil side of monarchy—you know, bow before me or be destroyed. She killed Sebastian Douglas and, don’t get me wrong, couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, but it was fucking nasty and I’ve never seen her do anything like that before.”

Tara was quiet a moment. “Sometimes difficult things need to be done.”

“Believe me, nobody knew that better than Nim, but that was the trouble; her idea of difficult things needing to be done was sacrificing herself for the good of the world. Not shredding a guy’s flesh away with magic wind.”

“I’ll admit there’s a different scent in the air. The pack are worried.”

“They should be. How’s your gran taking it?”

There was a pause. Fuck, was she that surprised that I’d actually asked her about herself instead of just going on about my own problems? “Well enough. She accepts that the matter of the Witch-Queen needed to be resolved one way or the other. Her preferred solution would have been to kill her, of course. And I think she’ll advocate that position still more strongly now.”

“Yeah, she might not be wrong on that either. I love Nim but the thought of what she might do if she’s decided to stop holding back seriously freaks me out. What about Yelena?”

“On that matter, grandmama was even more discontented. But I believe the prisoner will prove her worth. And if she does not, she will be destroyed, and we will have our vengeance. It will be better that it happens where all the pack can witness it.”

That should have been at least a little bit chilling, but given how things had been going recently my emotional thermometer had lost a lot of its sensitivity. “I’m still not sure what the hell I’m going to do about Nim.”

“You’ll find a way, Kate Kane. You always do.”

“Yeah, I hope so. And thanks for, y’know, giving a shit.”

“It’s against my better judgement, I assure you. And better advice.”

That was fair. I was a terrible person to get involved with, as evidenced by the fact that one of my closest friends was still a statue and another had been in a coma right up until the point where my attempt to save her had instead literally turned her evil. We said our goodbyes and I got changed into something less soaked in river-water and slept in—thinking about it, I’d need to take a look at my sheets sometime soon as well—and set out to meet Dr Bright at the office.

My complete lack of desire to take this meeting despite the fact that it could, theoretically, lead to one of my closest friends getting her actual life back was partly my usual selfishness, and partly a consequence of my still having no idea how I was going to explain to a perfectly ordinary academic why I wanted her help incanting a magic spell around a statue.

Ah well. Bridges, crossings, all that jazz.

I got into the office about half ten which, given everything I’d been through lately, qualified as damned together of me. And it left me with just enough time to stick some coffee on so I could look all settled in and knowing-what-I-was-doingey when she arrived.

It was still raining, I noticed. The weather forecast hadn’t said anything about rain.

Dr Bright arrived at eleven sharp, sat down in the chair opposite me, and offered me a cigarette, which I took gratefully and she lit without being asked.

“So,” she began, “tell me about your friend.”

I wasn’t in the mood for spinning complex lies, but I did my best. “Not a lot to say. She had some kooky religious beliefs, and while I didn’t agree with them I think it’s still important to honour them.”

“And you wouldn’t”—Dr Bright’s eyes met mine with a wicked glint—“in any sense be intending to transform a statue into a living woman and take her as your lover?”

I’d love to say my poker face was flawless, but in truth it was pretty fucking flawful. “That would be skeevy and impossible.”

“Perhaps my studies have skewed my perceptions.” Dr Bright was looking strangely amused. I hoped that was a good sign, although I had to admit I wasn’t quite sure how it could be. “But I tend to think that few things are impossible. Either way the text is exact—it seeks to recreate the magic of Pygmalion and transform a statue of a person into a living human being, or a close facsimile of one.” She eyed me with evident suspicion. “It seems strange that your friend would ask you to do something so specific.”

I tried my best to look casual. “Maybe she didn’t realise what it was for. She was kind of ditzy. New age type, you know?”

“But you still want to try it?”

“Yeah. You know. For her. Last wishes and all that.”

“Then we’ll need the statue. I can arrange the rest of the … paraphernalia.”

This was beginning to sound almost too easy. “Thanks. What do I—that is, do you want something for helping me out like this? It feels a bit above and beyond if I’m honest.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble. Maybe one day you’ll be in a position to do me a favour in return.”

“Not likely—academia is about a million miles from my scene.”

“Well then.” She smiled in a way I still wanted to describe as wicked. “It’ll have to be my good deed for the day.”

It didn’t take me that long to arrange for access to Elise. Eve had been keeping her in a warehouse on the docklands under close guard and with a couple of phone calls I was able to get access, albeit supervised. So I arranged with Dr Bright that we’d meet back up that afternoon once she’d had a chance to pick up whatever bits and pieces she needed to pick up, and killed the rest of the morning pretending to sort out my office when in fact I was just staring into space, angsting and waiting.

I arrived well early at the warehouse because patience was very, very low on my list of strengths, and was pleased to find that Eve had opted not to show up in person. Not that it would have been bad to see her in general. But that this whole fucking awful sequence of events had been too much, and I didn’t want the closest I’d ever had to a bona fide love of my life hanging around while I was trying to bring back the closest I’d had in years to a friend.

Which meant in the end it wound up being me, two anonymous goons, and the doctor stuck in a thankfully bright and airy warehouse space in Canary Wharf, with Elise’s disanimated body standing in a shaft of grainy sunlight.

“If I might ask, where did you get the statue from?” Dr Bright’s question was natural, especially for an academic, but I wasn’t sure how to answer it.

“It’s my friend’s,” I explained. “I think she used to … she used to go out with a sculptor.” It was creepily close to being true, if by my friend’s you mean actually her and if by go out with you meant was the mystically created sex slave of.

“It’s very lifelike. Now, would you like to perform the ritual, or shall I?” She gave me a smile that read as a little cold. “That is, what would your friend have preferred?”

I almost thought she was baiting me. If it turned out that this woman was a weird magic junkie looking for any excuse to perform rites of unspeakable power and pedigree, I was going to be incredibly ticked off. “I think she’d have wanted it done properly. And my guess is you can do that better than me, on account of how you’ve got the book.”

Doctor Bright nodded. Reading from the text in a language I still didn’t understand—I should look into night classes or something—she walked around Elise’s statue with her hand outstretched in a way that eerily reminded me of when I’d watched Russel creating Lisbeth. If she wasn’t secretly completely aware of what she was doing, then I couldn’t imagine what the fuck she thought was going on, because at this point the cover story I’d given her was fitting about as well as that one jacket I’d accidentally stuck through a hot wash and a full tumble dry. Which is to say it wasn’t fitting at all, and it was covered in tiny bits of bobbly fluff.

As the rite progressed, the circles Dr Bright was describing grew narrower, and before long she was in touching distance of Elise. I knew that this was how the ritual worked, but even so I was starting to get a little bit freaked out. There was something about this whole scenario that was beginning to feel decidedly uncomfortable, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

Of course maybe I was projecting or transferring or whatever it was when you got freaked out about one thing but were really freaked out about something else. Just because my last attempt to save one of my friends from a terrible fate had backfired horribly, it didn’t mean this one would.

The ritual drew to a close with Dr Bright stepping up to Elise, making a few final incantations, and kissing her on the lips.

I was slightly shocked but immensely relieved to see the doctor leap back in surprise as Elise turned from stone to flesh, or to the illusion of flesh.

“That … was not anticipated,” she stammered.

Elise stumbled like the little mermaid, and I dashed forward to catch her, yet again remembering too late that doing those kinds of things with a broken arm was a poor life choice.

She looked up into my eyes and for a horrible, horrible moment I thought she might have forgotten me. “Miss Kane,” she exclaimed. “You are alive.” She righted herself and began giving me the once-over. “But you seem to have fared poorly in the battle. You are quite in pieces.”

Quite in pieces didn’t cover it. In the time she’d been gone I’d—fuck. What had I done? I was way drunker most of the time than I should have been, way more inclined to sleep in my clothes and in my office or with whoever would have me. Sure I was injured but more than that I was a fucking miserable out-of-control mess and seeing Elise again made it clear how far I’d let myself slip. “Yeah,” I told her “I’ve not been eating the bananas either.”

Her look of dismay at this news was so familiar I burst into tears. And out of whatever passed for instinct for a person made entirely out of stone and stolen fire, she hugged me. “We are not where we were, are we?” she said after a little while. “I think perhaps some time has passed?”

I explained. And it was harder than I thought it would be. Losing her had been bad enough, getting her back and then having to explain how I’d lost her and what a shitty job I’d made of un-losing her, or of baseline taking care of myself while she was gone, was more than I could even. I choked through it, in the end, and thought she took it well, but then she’d always been stronger than I was. “Then I got a message from Dr Bright here saying she could help,” I managed, sputtering my way towards an embarrassingly phlegmy conclusion, “and we put you back together. And that’s kind of it.”

Elise took the doctor’s hand and shook it. “I am most gratified, Dr Bright.”

“Not at all.” For somebody who’d accidentally brought a statue to life with magic, she was doing surprisingly well. “And please, call me Nick. It’s been … instructive.”

When Nicola Bright had gone, I led Elise out into the rain and we stood on the pier at Canary Wharf watching the grey-brown waters of the Thames dance and churn in the storm.

“I confess myself worried,” she observed. “Miss Nimue has always been an ally, and with Miss Saint-Germain no longer to be relied upon, I worry that we are rather alone.”

I put an arm around her. It felt good but weird but good to know she was in my life again. “Not totally alone. Eve’s still around. And Tara is …” actually what was Tara? She was on my side, definitely, maybe more so than Julian had been because Julian was a fundamentally selfish creature and incapable of changing. But I didn’t want to put a label on what me and Tara had, if it even made sense to talk about us having a what at all. “She’s with us too, I think. And maybe we’re overthinking it anyway. It’s not like anything’s happening. Apart from the rain.” I shrugged. “And I’ve always liked rain.”

“I believe all will be well.” She patted me gently on the arm, and I winced. “But I must insist we bring you to a hospital at once,” she said. “You have left this far too long without treatment.”

I sighed. “You’re right. I don’t know how I ever managed to get along without you.”

She insisted on hailing a cab immediately, and with the rain drumming on the roof like improv jazz, I let myself be carried away into the city. I leaned my head against Elise’s shoulder and shut my eyes. Yes, I probably should have got the arm thing sorted out sooner, and yes it was probably unhealthy to be relying on a magic statue who was younger than most Netflix original series to force me to act like a grownup, but it worked. And bringing her back had worked. Which meant despite all the utter bullshit and the creepy visions and the fuckups on fuckups on fuckups, I’d done one unambiguously good thing.

And I could live with that.

Epilogue

Home & Dry

It had rained for a solid week after Nimue came back. I’d have said it was hard rain, but not only was that a horrible cliché but I had a weird feeling Eve had once told me it came from an episode of Star Trek. Either way it chucked it down—cue a bunch of hand-wringing from the Met Office and a whole lot of talk about climate change.

Things had got back to normal at casa de Kate surprisingly quickly. Elise was resilient as only a being made of a resistant material could be. She started making me eat bananas again, but I was so glad to have her back I couldn’t resent it even a little bit.

Tara had been around a lot more than I’d expected. She was too posh to ever completely make sense in my flat but it was nice not to have to drag myself out to Safernoc every time I wanted to see her. I thought she’d eventually get used to the lack of servants.

I was making coffee with my arm in a cast and steadfastly refusing to let anybody help me because I liked the feeling of independence, when there was an unexpected knock at the front door. Unexpected partly because we had a buzzer, so anybody who knocked at our door had already bypassed at least one layer of security, but mostly because the only people who might have any reason to visit me were already there.

Except Ashriel.

I found him standing on the landing looking dashingly dishevelled as only an incubus who’s just come in from the rain can.

“Hi,” he said.

I very nearly slammed the door in his face, but since he’d formally walked out on Julian, holding him responsible for her screwing me over went from petty to downright dickish. “Hey.”

“So I heard that—that she was back?”

I nodded. “Elise. Demon for you.”

I’d never worked out what the hell had been going on between those two and it really wasn’t my place to ask. I took Tara through to the bedroom and gave them space to talk.

“I’m not sure I trust him,” Tara said as she laid down beside me doing her best not to look too disgusted with the terrible state of the bedlinen and poor quality of the mattress. “Whatever they may say, he’s a demon first and foremost.”

I shrugged. “He’s had my back more than once. And from what I’ve seen of Hell he pays a hefty price for cutting out the soul-sucking, so I figure he deserves at least a little bit of credit for that.”

“Grandmama would disapprove strongly. But thinking about it that might be a point in his favour.”

We cut the conversation after that. I’ve never been the most talkative sort and besides, there were far better things to do with a hot werewolf than lie around speculating about your friends’ personal lives.

When we were done, and we were sure as we could be that they were done, we made our way back out into the living room. Elise and Ashriel were standing that awkward distance apart that you stood from someone when you didn’t want to look like you were encroaching on their personal space or like you were entirely repulsed by them.

“Good chat?” I asked.

“Inconclusive,” Elise replied. Which was kind of her all over. “We have agreed that we would both like to see more of one another as the saying has it. But we also agree that things should probably progress slowly due to the variety of factors at play.”

“Mostly, Elise was just telling me how you brought her back,” Ashriel explained. “Which—well—how did you?”

I flopped down onto the sofa. “Hephaestion gave me a copy of the Book of Living Fire, some professor got in touch and said she could translate it.”

“How serendipitous.” He didn’t seem to want to let this go.

“Yeah, but I’m a big believer in the gift-horse-mouth rule.”

Ashriel folded his arms rather more sternly than I’d expected. “Ask the Trojans how well that one worked out for them. Who was the professor?”

“Someone called Dr Bright. Does it matter?”

Ashriel’s eyes shifted from come-to-bed to oh-no-you-fucking-didn’t “Nicola Bright? Call me Nick? Always smoking in a way that looks far sexier than it should in the twenty-first century?”

He was going somewhere with this, but for my own sanity I was going to avoid thinking about it for as long as possible. “That’s the one.”

“Always has a light?”

He was definitely going somewhere with this. “Fuck.”

“Afraid so.” Ashriel looked surprisingly calm. “I wasn’t sure but I had word she was in town.”

I facepalmed. “Shit. Balls. Do you know why she’s interested in me, or in Elise?”

“I’m afraid not.” He gave me what I thought was an inappropriately cheeky smile. “Working out her game is, I’m told, legendarily difficult. There’s even a song about it.”

“The cigarettes should really have given it away.” I eyerolled at myself. “Fuck.”

“I’m sure you’re both enjoying being cryptic,” Tara sat down next to me and stretched her legs across me territorially. “But what, precisely, should the cigarettes have given away?”

“You know what they used to call matches in the First World War?” I asked her.

“I’m the leader of a pack of wolves, Kate, not a secondary school history teacher.”

Elise looked worried. I was glad she hadn’t backslid on the whole showing emotion thing. “I’m afraid I also fail to comprehend the reference, Miss Kane”.

I didn’t want to say it aloud. I also didn’t have much choice. “Lucifers.”

And she did say she was going to ask me for a favour at some point.

Well fuck.

Dear Reader

Thank you so much for reading Smoke & Ashes. If you enjoyed it, please do think about recommending it to someone else. Or maybe to someone you don't like very much if you didn't.

If Smoke & Ashes is the first Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator book you've picked up, and you have a particular interest in reading more books about a disaster lesbian and her supernaturally powerful ladyfriends, you might also like the rest of the series—Iron & Velvet, Shadows & Dreams, and Fire & Water.

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About the Author

Alexis Hall was born in 1764 and sustains his unnatural existence by the usual methods of drinking blood, avoiding sunlight, and brooding. He writes fiction from deep within a crumbling mansion with one wrist pressed to his forehead.

For more information:

www.quicunquevult.com

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