The Cold Kiss of Death

Chapter Twenty-Seven

An angel smiled down at me out of a cool silver-gilt mist that twinkled with rainbow lights blurring in and out of focus. A silver halo hovered above the long curls of her pale-gold hair, and a bridal confection of silk, satin and lace wrapped her slender form. The air smelled of cinnamon, and oranges and sweetened vanilla. She held a star-tipped wand in one small hand, and offered her other hand to me. I stared at it, oddly bemused. Her fingernails were painted different colours: blue, green, yellow, red and black. They didn’t go with the rest of Angel. Was I dreaming, or hallucinating? Maybe I’d died and heaven really was just like the Christmas cards. I squeezed my eyes shut. But when I opened them she was still there, still smiling, still holding out her hand. I peered through the mist, trying to discern if the filmy image at her back was actually wings or not. Her delicate face creased in a frown as she turned and looked behind her.

‘Am I dead?’ I asked, my voice croaking like a strangled frog’s.

She turned back to me, bewilderment making her look even younger. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. The rainbow lights slowly stopped blinking and faded away. ‘Do you feel dead?’

I thought about it. It felt like my hands had been ripped off. I held them up in front of my face, vaguely concerned. Nope, still attached, though as scratched and bloody as if I’d fought my way out of a thorn thicket. If I squinted, I still had the right number of fingers. My throat felt like I’d swallowed a cactus, and when I touched it, my fingers came away sticky with blood and bits of green flaky stuff, while my head felt like a bad-tempered troll had stomped on it and turned it into squashed mush. But compared to the spiky pain in my ribs, all that was a minor torment. I decided if I was dead, I hurt too much for this to be heaven; so it was more likely the other place.

‘But they don’t have angels in hell, do they?’ I murmured, or rather, croaked again.

Her expression turned mutinous and she wrinkled her nose. ‘Angels bite you if you misbehave.’

I blinked. Not quite the answer I was expecting.

She bent at the waist and ran a strand of my hair through her fingers. ‘Your hair looks like dragon’s breath, all pretty golds and coppers. Can you spin it into smoke?’

Her eyes came into focus, beautiful pale-gold eyes with vertical cat-like pupils, and I realised she wasn’t an angel, but something I’d never seen before—at least, not without a mirror.

She was sidhe.

The mush in my mind started to rearrange itself into something more lucid.

Was this the sidhe? Tomas’ murderer? She had to be; there couldn’t be two of them in London, that would be too much of a coincidence. Only the eyes I stared into were as wide and guileless as a child’s—but she was sidhe fae, and while she might look to be in her late teens, she could be anything from that to—well, centuries old.

But not only were her eyes blank; her mind wasn’t at home behind them either.

‘No, I can’t spin it into smoke,’ I said slowly.

She pursed her lips in disappointment as she straightened. ‘Cecily can, and she can make pictures in the smoke, like the moon and the sun and the stars and even mountains and castles.’ She formed the shapes with her hands as she spoke.

I struggled to my feet, my hand clamped to my right side. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘No names, no shame, us dames are all the same,’ she trilled in a high falsetto, and grasping the long silk skirts of her dress she curtseyed before dancing away through the mist.

‘Fine,’ I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose, trying to banish my headache. What had Grianne said? Something about being careful with her when I found her ...

I sighed; I was beginning to see what she meant. I lifted my head and looked around, trying to work out where I’d ended up.

The silver mist was dissipating, leaving only a fine haze in the air, and I realised I hadn’t gone anywhere; I was still on the third floor of my building, only now I was standing in the middle of the landing, my jeans half round my hips and my stomach covered with bloody scratches like my hands. I winced at the pain in my side as I zipped up my jeans. The landing looked the same as before I’d cracked the magic—well, almost, if you ignored the jagged opening that now replaced the doorway leading into Witch Wilcox’s flat. And the wood shavings that blanketed the landing and stairs.

There were a couple of mounds under the sawdust, which I took to be the dryads laid out by the purple anemone Back-off spell. I looked down the stairs: yep, two more mounds, a.k.a. Bandana and Red Turban, and at the bottom of the stairs I could just make out the top of Shorty’s Panama, covered with its own sprinkling of wood shavings.

It was a lot of sawdust: more than one wooden door and frame could account for, so I guessed some of it had come from the dryads themselves. But cracking the magic—which had to be why I looked like I’d been pulled through a thorn-hedge backwards and frontwards—didn’t look like it had killed them, for their bodies hadn’t faded away to nothing. But I didn’t plan on playing Florence Nightingale; Bandana had been calling for reinforcements and I wanted Angel out of here before they or the police arrived. Any injuries the dryads had, they fucking well deserved.

I turned back to Angel, who was giggling with excitement as she lifted handfuls of the shavings and threw them into the air and pointed her wand at them; they didn’t fall to the ground, just spun around her in dizzying circles, like bees round a honey pot.

Time for her to go home. I wiped my scratched hands on my T-shirt, cleaning off the blood, then, careful of my ribs, I unzipped my jacket pocket and pulled out the smooth haematite stone Grianne had given me. It hummed as I held it in my palm, and I felt the faint noise vibrating down my spine. I waved to Angel, trying to catch her attention, and she lifted her voluminous skirts and skipped over to me, kicking up shavings to add to those already flying through the air.

I gave her a coaxing smile, the same one I’d offer a child. ‘Would you like to go and see Cecily?’ I asked, reasonably sure that Cecily must be some sort of carer, or keeper.

‘Yes!’ she cried, clapping her hands together, a big beam of a smile on her face, then, just as I was congratulating myself on an easy success, she dashed past me back into Witch Wilcox’s flat.

I sighed and followed her through the jagged opening into a short, windowless corridor. The metallic scent of old blood hit me, pricking goosebumps over my skin, and I hurried past two closed doors and stumbled into a living room.

Except the ‘living’ part was now a misnomer.

Daylight filtered around the half-drawn curtains. All the furniture was pushed back against the walls and a multitude of dirty-white candles had burnt down to misshapen blobs of wax. The air in the room was thick and heavy, as if something unseen lurked there. A shudder crawled down my spine. In the centre of the room was a large expanse of blue plastic with a circle marked out in red sand. Inside the circle lay a naked body, diminished by old age.

I took a careful step forward and then another until the toes of my trainers were just short of the red sand. The stench of blood mixed with the sour smell of sulphur and death-expelled bodily excretions hit the back of my throat, making me gag. A gaping wound ran from just under the breastbone to the crotch. I wasn’t going to check, but I was betting the heart and other internal organs had been removed.

Witch Wilcox wasn’t going to be campaigning to get me evicted any more.

I clenched my fists; the silver pebble buzzed anxiously against my palm. I might not have liked the old woman or her obsessive paranoia, but all of me wished she was still around to complain. At least then she wouldn’t be dead.

‘Can we go and see Cecily now?’ Angel appeared from a door on the other side of the room and skipped around the outside of the circle. Her dress pulled itself in and away, even though she didn’t seem to notice anything odd—but then, she’d seen it before. She stopped in front of me and smiled happily. ‘I want to show her my new books.’ She held up half-a-dozen children’s comics: Cinderella smiled merrily at me from the cover of her Christmas Spectacular, complete with rainbow twinkling lights, meringue bride’s dress, and silver halo. Now I knew where Angel’s outfit came from.

I opened my mouth to ask something, but stopped as Angel looked over my shoulder, her pale-gold eyes widening, her pupils dilating in fear, her bottom lip quivering.

‘Genevieve.’ The woman’s dulcet voice made me flinch as I recognised it. ‘I had hoped you two wouldn’t meet until much later, but que sera, sera.’

Fuck, she was just who I didn’t need right now!

I grabbed Angel’s hand, dropped Grianne’s shiny pebble into her palm and closed her fingers round it. ‘Travel safe,’ I murmured as she disappeared in a bright blinding blaze of silver-grey light.

Typical Grianne: flashy and efficient as ever.

And no doubt Angel was safely back in the Fair Lands before I’d even had time to blink.

I turned, still a little blinded by the dazzle, and said calmly, ‘Hello, Hannah.’ Obviously Malik hadn’t had time to deal with her yet—that whole ‘vamps don’t do daylight’ thing has its disadvantages—and just as obviously, Hannah had replaced the vamp-groupie look with a Chanel-inspired navy and white suit. She was also standing in the doorway, blocking my escape route. But though she might be a sorcerer, physically, she was still only human. A human I could take. Her magic? I wasn’t so sure about that.

‘Figured you’d turn up sooner or later after seeing your sorcerer’s handiwork here,’ I said drily.

‘I’m impressed, Genevieve.’ Her perfectly outlined lips smiled, but the expression in her coffee-brown eyes was more about smiting me on the spot. ‘I wasn’t aware you were capable of Transportation spells.’

I shrugged. ‘You learn something new every day.’

‘Ah. Well, it must be time for your next lesson then.’ She stepped aside. ‘Joseph?’

Malik’s doctor friend stepped into the room, his owl-like eyes blinking rapidly. He lifted his arm and aimed a gun straight at me...

Oh shit.

... and a sharp pain pricked my chest. I looked down to see a steel dart embedded in the swell of my left breast, then there were three darts, then too many to count as the world fractured around me into tiny unrecognisable pieces and I felt myself falling ...