The Bitter Seed of Magic

Chapter Eighteen

‘Sure you want to get out ’ere, luv?’ The taxi driver took my money with a morose expression. ‘Them vamps, they ain’t like regular people. One of me mates, ’is kid got mixed up wiv ’em and ’e ended up in rehab at that ’OPE clinic. An’ I gotta tell you too, luv, that you don’t get no human cab drivers after dark ’ere in Sucker Town, just them Gold Goblin cabs. Regulations, innit.’

Sucker Town: home to the B-, C- and Scary-list London vamps, venom-junkies and blood-groupies, not to mention the occasional marauding fang-gang. Of course, between the licensing laws, the Beater goblin security force and the local vamps wanting to cash in on the same tourist money the mainstream city centre clubs were raking in, the place isn’t as dangerous as it used to be, even six or seven months ago. And thanks to Malik giving me his protection, I was now probably safer in Sucker Town—which the rest of the fae avoid like vamps shun sunlight—than in any other part of London.

I gave the taxi driver a wry smile, tucked my cap in my backpack, and hitched it on my shoulder. ‘I’m sure. But thanks for the concern.’

‘Suit yerself, luv, yer funeral,’ he called even more glumly as he drove off, leaving a fug of exhaust fumes in his wake.

‘Everyone’s a comedian,’ I murmured and turned round to face the entrance of Sucker Town’s newest, hottest vampire establishment: the Coffin Club.

I looked up at the sun, half disappeared behind the row of warehouses, and at the shadows creeping over from the other side of the quiet industrial park, and an anxious itch crawled down my spine. Instead of going in the club, I walked along the side of the building past the life-sized posters advertising the club’s vamps until I came to Darius, the vamp I’d come to see. Except he wasn’t called Darius any more, not officially, anyway, but William, as in William Wallace. In the poster he was dressed in full kilt and regalia (minus the blue face paint). He looked great, but then, the tall, tawny-haired vamp had always looked like he’d just stepped off the front of a romance novel, even when he’d been a human blood-pet.

Darius and his Moth-girl girlfriend, Sharon, had come to my rescue on All Hallows’ Eve during the demon attack. Darius survived, but sadly Sharon didn’t—but as she died, she had asked me to watch over him. I owed them both, big time, so it was an unspoken promise I was determined to keep.

Trouble was, watching over him had got complicated—and not in the way I’d thought it would. The first time I’d checked up on him, a couple of weeks after the attack, I’d come loaded up with so many defensive spells that I glowed brighter than the Christmas lights in Regent Street. Malik might have given me his protection, but even so, not taking precautions is just plain stupid. I expected the vamps to stalk me like cats scenting a mouse; instead, every one I came across tripped over their own feet and shoved each other out of the road in their panic to run away. I knew it wasn’t the spells scaring them off—vamps can’t see magic—which left me curious about exactly what Malik had done.

Darius had filled me in. Turned out, at sunset on Guy Fawkes’ Night, Elizabetta, head of the Golden Blade blood, had called together all four of London’s blood-families to witness her ascension to Oligarch and Head Fang of London’s High Table (I’d killed the last one a month earlier, so the position was vacant). Standing on the dais in the Challenge ring, surrounded by her bladesmen, Elizabetta had held her five-foot-long bronze sword aloft, then shouted for any who would oppose her to come forward. Right at the very end of the required minute’s expectant silence, just as she started to smile in triumph, her chest erupted in a spray of blood and bone, leaving a fist-sized empty hole where her heart had been; her head ripped itself from her neck, Exorcist-style, zoomed fifty feet straight up into the night sky and vanished; then her body combusted in white-hot flames. Within minutes her burning ashes were scattered by a nonexistent wind.

‘No one knows how Malik al-Khan did it,’ Darius had told me, wide-eyed with hero worship, ‘I mean, he weren’t there, and no one saw or felt a thing. Then he does this big appearing act on Tower Hill with her head in one hand and her heart in the other. He took half an hour to walk to the Challenge ring—they had a ’copter up filming him all the way. Elizabetta’s head was still screaming at him, right up ’til he stood on the dais and threw her head in the air and it exploded into ashes. ’Course, no one challenged him after that.’

‘So why aren’t you worried about speaking to me?’ I asked, my thoughts swinging between stunned, impressed, and wondering uneasily if Malik’s show was all just smoke and mirrors, or if he really was that powerful.

‘I’m Blue Heart blood,’ Darius said, ‘but I’m not part of any blood-family, ’cos Rio gave me the Gift, but she never did the Oath of Fealty part of the ceremony.’

Rio, his sponsor, had given him the Gift for her own nefarious purposes, then dumped him, and since baby vamps are dependent on their masters for top-up feeds to keep their new vamp bodies alive, Darius’ immortal future was looking short and bleak—until a sorcerer took a fancy to him and turned him into a fang-pet.

The same sorcerer whose soul I’d eaten.

‘So I never swore an Oath then’—he swept a hand through his tawny hair—‘and I’ve never swore one to anyone else since, not even the sorcerer. No one owns me now, no one can tell me what to do any more, not even Malik al-Khan, which means I can talk to you, and he can’t do anything, ’cos I never swore I wouldn’t talk to you.’

Vamp rules and regs: they live and die by them. ‘I’m au-ton-o-mous!’ He drew the word out proudly.

Not only had Darius’ stint with the sorcerer resulted in him bypassing the dependant baby vamp stage, it also gave him some backbone. Before that he’d been a ‘yes’ guy, verging on ‘victim’. Now he was proud of standing up to the one vamp everyone else was running scared of, and I was proud of him too. I silently vowed to make sure he didn’t lose his head over it like the original William Wallace.

But the next time I checked up on Darius, after Christmas, was when things got complicated. Whatever magic the sorcerer had used to keep Darius’ Gift alive had worn off, and with only six months on his vampire clock, he was too young to survive on just human blood, so he’d fallen into bloodlust. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on which way you look at it—the Moth-girls in the blood-house where Darius lived had bound him in heavy chains before he’d attacked anyone. As he wasn’t a danger to humans, none of the other vamps could legitimately rescind his Gift, but since he didn’t have a master to rescue him, and the Moths couldn’t find one to take him on, all that meant was he got the chance to die slowly in agony.

One personal blood donation later, and Darius was almost back to his old self. Turns out, my sidhe blood is as good as a master vamp’s, judging by the quick results. So now Darius is my fang-pet, and regular donations of my blood are keeping him alive and well; hence the three bags of blood sloshing around in my backpack, his usual weekly allowance. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’ve spent eleven years making sure I don’t end up a vamp’s blood-slave, my will subjugated by 3V to my master’s. Now, I might not be the slave, but I was still tied to a vamp by my blood. Having a fang-pet isn’t something I want to last for eternity, but so far I haven’t found a solution.

And I wasn’t going to, standing here worrying about going in to see him—although it wasn’t actually Darius I was worried about seeing.

I told myself to stop being a coward, and started walking back down to the Coffin Club entrance.

The club’s the only place where curious Joe Public can see vampires in their ‘dead as the day is long’ state, tackily laid out in all their pseudo-heroic funeral finery, in glass coffins, no less. Whichever vamp came up with the idea had to have a really warped sense of humour, since—despite the myths—vamps have never slept in coffins, glass or otherwise. And back in the eighties they haemorrhaged a hefty fortune on legal expertise and behind-the-scenes manoeuvring in order to regain their ‘human’ rights by proving they sleep the day away in a sort of light-induced hibernation—as opposed to actually being dead.

But thanks to a revival of the classic Hammer Horrors, sleeping in coffins is the new black when it comes to the vamps’ money- and blood-spinning industry. And the vamps love a theme, so the coffin shapes outlined on the double entrance doors, the chrome coffin handles and the neon-red coffin-shaped lights were just the start of the ad nauseam décor that swamped the club. I’d heard even the toilets had coffin-shaped porcelain loos—not that I’d checked. The only things not coffin-shaped were the small white diamond-shaped bell pushes that decorated the doors like name plaques, which is sort of what they were, since the Coffin Club is run by White Diamond blood.

My father’s blood-family.

Predictably, my heart had done the whole ‘dropping into my boots’ thing when Darius had told me where his new job, and new home were; I so didn’t need the memories. It had taken me a good ten minutes to put my hand on one of the diamond bell pushes the first time I’d dropped his blood allowance off, even though I hadn’t found a single familiar face from the past when I’d checked the club’s website. After that, I started making my blood-donation trips at midday. No point tempting fang, is there?

I hitched my backpack higher and with my pulse pounding in my ears, I pressed the bell and looked up into the security camera, waiting until the buzzer sounded and the door clicked open.