Turned: An Uncanny Kingdom Urban Fantasy (Branded Book 2) Page 7

  ‘What happened?’ I asked between heaves.

  ‘You were attacked,’ he said, his voice warm and buttery.

  ‘No,’ I started, had a small coughing fit, then continued, ‘shit.’

  I heard a bubbling noise and turned to see the lurker’s head swallowed by the ink black water.

  ‘You killed that thing?’ I asked, returning to my rescuer.

  He nodded humbly, as though tearing a monster’s head off with his bare hands was all in a day’s work. What was he? Was he like me? A protector, a guardian, an instrument forged to combat the forces of evil?

  Before I got to ask any of those questions, he started talking. ‘It’s dangerous being out here on your own,’ he said. ‘There are Uncanny creatures all across this city that are hell-bent on killing the Nightstalker, and they’re going to come at you like iron filings to a magnet. You'll need to grow eyes in the back of your head if you’re going to survive the life you’ve chosen.’

  “Chosen”, wasn’t exactly the word I’d have used, but I let him have it.

  ‘That… thing,’ I said, shivering in the cold, ‘what was it?’

  ‘That was a river hag,’ he explained. ‘They drag their victims into the water so they can drown them and eat their bodies. Not exactly pleasant.’

  ‘River hag? But this is a canal.’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t think you should get too caught up in the semantics,’ he said, 'the hags don’t.’ He turned to me fully, flicking his hair to one side.

  And that’s when I saw it.

  A mark on his forehead.

  The mark of Judas.

  11

  Whipping the dagger from under the folds of my leather jacket, I rounded on the vampire and brought the edge of its blade to his throat.

  ‘Give me one good reason why I shouldn't ventilate you,’ I demanded.

  ‘Well, for one thing, I just saved your life,’ he replied, ‘which would make killing me a bit of a dick move.’

  What the hell was happening? The man on the end of my knife belonged to the Judas Clan, that made me his mortal enemy, yet he’d gone out of his way to dive into a dirty canal and save me from being turned into hag food.

  ‘What is this, a trap?’ I asked, scanning the area and expecting the worst. ‘Are there others out there?’

  Had he rescued me from the depths just so the Clan could have the pleasure of killing me themselves?

  ‘I came alone. Actually, I came to see you, and I didn’t come to fight.’ He pointed across the canal to the industrial park, his finger aimed at our base. ‘If I wanted to harm you, I would have left you to the hag, or snuck into that gas tower and killed you while you slept.’

  ‘I’d like to have seen you try,’ I snorted.

  In a flash, he seized the hand I was using to hold the dagger and whipped me around. By the time I stopped spinning, the weapon was in his hand and pressed against my throat.

  ‘Okay, that’s a pretty good try,’ I admitted.

  I clenched my eyes shut, ready for the end, but the end never came. Unexpectedly, the vampire removed the knife from my jugular, flipped it over so he was holding it by the blade, and presented me with the handle.

  ‘I told you I didn't want to fight.’

  He really was stunning. His skin was flawless and paler than the moon, and I could tell from the way his wet clothes clung to his frame that he had the kind of body that appeared in men's health magazines alongside pictures of protein shakes.

  I rubbed my neck and snatched the dagger from him. ‘Okay, so what do you want?’

  ‘Just to talk. My name is Lauden. Lauden Crowe. I came to you because I wanted to try and make things right between the Nightstalker and the Clan. Or at least to open a dialogue between us.’

  ‘Let me get this right; you turned my boyfriend into a monster and now you want to kiss and make up?’

  He looked to the ground. ‘No, that wasn’t me, or my Clan. We share no affiliation with the people who did that. But that’s what pushed me to put myself in danger and talk to you, face-to-face, before things twisted further out of control. Before there’s no way back.’

  ‘Nice try, mate, but I’d be more inclined to believe you if you didn’t have the exact same forehead decoration as the blokes who kidnapped my boyfriend.’

  I aimed the tip of my dagger at the glowing J on his brow.

  ‘The vampires who did that were Wild Bloods,’ said Lauden. ‘Outcasts from the Clan who just want to cause pain. To kill. They’re animals.’

  ‘And you’re what? Mother Teresa?’

  ‘Compared to the Wild Bloods, yes I am.’

  I wanted to argue, but maybe there was some truth to what he was saying. What if the “Wild Bloods” he was talking about were as representative of his people as the Alt-Right were of mine?

  I looked Lauden up and down and tried to get a read on him. He didn’t dress like the rest of the Clan, done up like city boys, creases in their suits sharp enough to carve mutton. No, the vampire who pulled me from the canal wore jeans, white Converse trainers and a chunky-knit cardigan. Did people who wore cardigans murder people? It was hard to picture. Still, I called bullshit.

  ‘Pull the other one. I’ve run into my fair share of vamps since I picked up this knife, and all of them have been bloodthirsty fuckers. Don’t act like you’re any different.’ As I said it I thought of Carlo, pacing about in his squat and begging for blood like a junkie. Now there was a vampire who wasn’t a monster, but then like Gen said, there’s an exception to every rule.

  ‘And what about Neil?’ I said. ‘He’s the nicest guy I ever met, but he spends one night with your lot and now he's a psycho.’

  ‘Not a psycho,’ said Lauden, ‘just hungry.’

  ‘That right?’ I sniffed.

  ‘When a vampire is born, they wake with an insatiable appetite. They need blood, have to have it, like a babe needs a teat. It’s why we prefer to be around when someone turns, to make sure they feed immediately, so that fervour, that rage, is snuffed out as quickly as possible. That way no one is hurt, and they become manageable.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Then he’s as human as you are. And don’t kid yourself into thinking that my kind are inhuman. Blood pumps through our veins and oxygen flows through our lungs, just as they do yours.’

  ‘That doesn’t make you human. You’re not like me. You’re undead.’

  ‘My kind are undying, meaning immortal. “Undead” is just a corruption, a slur, a word that’s used by your kind to denigrate mine. It’s just fear.’

  I laughed until I had to wave my hand in the air as a flag of apology. ‘So you’re an oppressed people now? What is this shit, Vampire Lives Matter?’

  Lauden kept his composure. ‘We’re not the bogeyman, Abbey. Most of us, at least. The real Clan—not the Wild Bloods you’ve tangled with, but people like me—only want to live in peace with the rest of you. To not have to hide away all of our lives, like we should be ashamed to exist. Nothing more, nothing less. Do we not have the right to live?’

  ‘Listen, you did me a favour when you tore that hag thing’s nut off, and you’re easy enough on the eye, but what you’re saying goes against everything I know.’

  ‘Everything you’ve known since, what, Wednesday?’ He looked down at me with a pair of hazel brown eyes that melted softly into a glorious milky green. ‘All I’m asking is that you don’t tar us all with the same brush. The likes of the Wild Bloods are a noisy, violent minority making us all look bad.’

  I folded my arms. ‘Oh yeah? And what about murdering people? Is that fake news too?’

  ‘We don’t need to murder to feed, but you already know that, don’t you?’

  I rubbed at my wrist, at the bite marks Neil had left me with.

  ‘In any case, we're doing our best to synthesise a substitute blood. Once we have that, there’ll be no reason for anyone to ever fear us again. Just imagine that.’

  The bloke had an answer for everything, but
I was determined to catch him out. ‘If drinking blood is such a hassle, why haven’t you tried to cure yourselves?’

  His face creased. He looked hurt. ‘Of what? Vampirism? Abbey, what we have isn't a disease.’

  ‘Oh no, it’s a real gift.’

  ‘You’re being sarcastic, but yes, it’s a gift in many ways. And with that gift we can make some real changes. We can actually fix some things. Make life a little better.’

  I felt my lips thin. ‘Ta, but we’ve been getting by okay without the fangs, thank you very much.’

  ‘Have you? War, famine, overpopulation, a ludicrous horror-toddler running the free world?’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘If you really want to make some changes around here, you can start by helping me.’

  ‘I think I just did, with the whole river hag thing a few minutes ago.’

  ‘How do I reverse what your “Wild Bloods” did to my boyfriend?’

  ‘You don’t,’ he said, letting out a long exhale. ‘You don’t because there is no way to do so.’

  ‘I know that’s not true. I already heard about a priest geezer in the olden days who went on a quest to make himself better.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard that story too, we all have,’ Lauden replied. ‘Do you know what that quest involved?’

  ‘Let’s pretend I don’t.’

  ‘It involved him submerging himself in a bath of holy water for half an hour.’

  ‘And that cured him?’

  ‘Yes, it cured him of vampirism. And of life in general. He drowned himself.’

  I remembered Gen's comment about putting Neil out of his misery, and considered that the vampire might be telling the truth. ‘I’m going to figure it out. I’m going to fix him.’

  ‘Fix him? He is fixed.’

  ‘He’s a fucking vampire!’

  ‘I’ve been one for a long, long time, and look at me. Do I seem sick to you? Do I strike you as being in pain?’

  He didn’t, quite the opposite in fact. He seemed so alive. I thought about Neil, how his life had been. Struggling with illness. Struggling towards a death that would always come far too early.

  ‘So what’s the story?’ I asked. ‘How long have you been on my tail?’

  ‘I’ve been keeping an eye on you because I think you’re important. You could be the key to bringing an end to all this. To bringing peace at last. And, well, I want, for purely selfish reasons, to make sure you don’t come to any harm.’

  ‘From river hags?’

  ‘In part. And from angels.’

  This just kept getting better and better. ‘Let me get this straight... you’ve been spying on me to make sure I don’t fall foul of God’s holy angels?’

  ‘Look, I realise that my kind haven’t exactly made the best of first impressions, but think about what you’ve seen. All of it. They call themselves angels, but do they really always act like angels?’

  I thought back to Harley Street. Back to the slaughtered chimp. Back to the knife sticking out of that scientist’s chest. Back to Gen, wiping a stripe of blood on his white lab coat.

  ‘Angels are on the side of God,’ I told Lauden, more for my sake than his. ‘So don’t go telling me they’re baddies.’

  ‘No one is saying that, but you should know that there are unlawful people among their ranks, just as there are among mine. And ask yourself this: why is it that I’m here? Why is it that my kind are the only ones trying to bring this war to an end with words instead of death?’

  While I was busy trying to think up a comeback, I saw Lauden looking me over. Looking at the girl beneath the mish-mash of goth threads, the girl decorated with chipped black fingernails and a pentagram necklace she picked up on Carnaby Street. And going by the look in his eye, he rather liked what he saw.

  Sensing that he’d held his gaze for long enough, Lauden coughed and looked away. I held back a smile. There was something sweet about the coyness of him, something human.

  ‘You must be freezing,’ he said, and he was not wrong, my knees were almost audibly knocking. ‘Here, have my coat, I took it off before I dived in the water.’

  He scooped a navy-coloured pea coat from the ground and handed it to me. I thought about turning him down, but the offer was so inviting I couldn’t say no. Lauden might have been a cold-blooded creature of the night, but he seemed so warm. So personable. I wondered for a moment if he was using some special powers to manipulate me, but the brand made me immune to all that. No, what Lauden had was good old-fashioned charm. By contrast, Gen—one of my so-called teammates—was a pure void of charisma. She was so stiff, so inhuman, so robotic in her ways, that I’d come to wonder if she’d even pass the Turing test.

  Lauden shook me from my daydream. ‘The angels didn’t come here to further the cause of humankind, their only mission is to hunt my people to extinction and get back in God’s good graces. There's a word for that: Genocide.’

  ‘You can talk. What happens when you get your way and there’s vampires running around everywhere? What happens to the rest of us then, eh? We’d be cattle.’

  ‘The only people treating you like cattle are the ones who gave you this scar.’ He took my hand in his and turned it over to show me the N seared into my palm. ‘Just because they did this to you, doesn’t mean they own you.’ He looked at me with those dreamy eyes of his. ‘They turned you into their weapon without even asking your permission. That’s not right. You’re more than that.’

  ‘You don’t know. You don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not, but I know some things about the people you’ve decided to call friends.’

  I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, but I had to. ‘Like what?’

  ‘The angels didn’t come here by choice, they were banished here. Let go by God.’

  ‘I already knew that.’

  ‘Yes, but have you considered what that really means? It means they’re fallen angels, and you know who else was a fallen angel?’

  I thought back to Sunday school. ‘Lucifer.’

  He let go of my hand. I hadn’t realised he was still holding it until that moment, but the moment it was gone, I missed it.

  ‘You don’t have to trust me,’ he said.

  ‘Handy, because I really, really don’t.’

  ‘Why would you? But just keep an eye out, and your mind open. Maybe you’ll see things aren’t so black and white. And maybe you’ll start to see there’s a way to end this where we can all live in peace. Where one side doesn’t have to snuff the other out. Take care of yourself, Abbey,’ he said, heading off down the towpath. ‘You can keep the coat.’

  Then he was gone, leaving me standing alone by the canal with plenty to think about.

  I pulled the vampire’s coat tight around my neck and breathed in his scent. I didn’t smell death there. All I smelled was a man.

  12

  He answered, Abbey! He answered my call!’

  If you’re confused reading that line, you can only imagine how I felt hearing it out loud.

  It was only moments ago that I’d snuck back into the gas tower, stripped off my wet clothes and crawled into bed – now I was being shouted at and shaken awake.

  My hand shot out and the dagger was in my fist, blasting from its sheath like a pistol from a gun and firing across the room to reunite with the brand.

  The figure that had been shaking me let go and recoiled. ‘Abbey, it’s me.’

  I knuckled some sleep from my eyes and saw Vizael standing at the foot of my cot. Sunlight streamed in through rusty holes in the tower wall, casting a heavenly corona around him. It was daybreak already. Apparently, more than a few moments had passed since I’d climbed under the covers.

  ‘What is it?’ I grouched, setting the dagger on the bed and letting out a yawn.

  Viz beamed down at me cheerfully. ‘I took your advice and prayed for guidance.’

  I sat bolt upright. ‘And what? The Big Man picked up the phone?’

  ‘Yes!’ he said,
talking fast, his wizened hands flying like panicked birds. ‘After all this time, He listened to my pleas!’

  I was gobsmacked. God had finally stepped up. ‘So what did He say?’

  ‘Words of salvation, Abbey. The roadmap to a cure.’

  All of Lauden’s warnings about the angels went out of my head in an instant. I wrapped the bed sheet around me, scrambled to my feet, and placed my hands on Viz’s shoulders. ‘What is it? What do we need to do?’

  ‘We need to perform a ritual. Science might not be able to cure Neil, but magic can.’

  ‘Okay, okay, a ritual. We can do that. A five-pointed star, some candles, a bit of chanting. No worries.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s a bit more to it than that. First of all, we’ll need outside help to perform the ceremony. Help from a powerful magician.’

  ‘Not a problem. This city’s got magic out the arsehole, right? We can always talk someone into lending a hand. What else?’

  ‘We’ll need certain ingredients too. Common things for the most part: blessed chalk, a censer of sanctified incense, a dais of dogwood. And then... then there's the other thing…’

  I felt a knot form in my stomach. ‘What? What is it?’

  Viz sucked some air between his teeth, the way car mechanics do, right before they slap you with an absolutely eye-watering quote. ‘We need Pope blood.’

  ‘Are you fucking serious?’ I cried. ‘Are you telling me I have to assassinate the Pope?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Viz shot back, wounded at the thought. ‘Any Pope blood will do.’

  ‘Oh, so just any old Pope blood, eh?’ I mimed turning out my pockets. ‘Let me have a quick look… no, nope, no Pope blood here!’

  Viz pumped his palms at me, urging me to calm down. ‘It’s all right, Abbey. Fortunately for us, there is a sample of Pope Leo XIII’s blood right here in London. All you need to do is convince the man who owns the blood to part ways with it.’

  ‘Okay, that doesn’t sound so bad. So who is this guy?’

  Viz placed his hands together in an unconscious prayer. ‘The man you need to speak to is Giles L’Merrier, the most dangerous magician in all of London.’