Angel Falls (Cassandra Bick Chronicles Book 3) (8 page)

Partly because it was now getting dark earlier, what had felt like an enormously long night wasn’t actually that late, so with Cain and Laclos gone, there was little I could do. I re-made the bed with the new bedding, browsed online a bit for a new fridge, and Googled local hardware shops and handymen to call tomorrow – you’d think I’d have them on speed dial by now. Then I retired to the sofa with a glass of wine, some biscuits and the
Avengers
DVD, curling up with the cat and allowing myself to be distracted by biceps and snark, trying to ignore the darkness that nagged at me, the thought that no matter how OK Laclos seemed to be, what he’d set in motion would have terrible consequences for us all. And, perhaps more trivial in the larger scheme of things but more troubling in the personal, that sharing blood had shifted something in both of the men I was closest to in ways I didn’t understand and which, for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, scared me.

Then I lost myself in the movie, Joss Whedon-scripted destruction, the only kind that’s fun, and told myself I was being silly. I was just shaken by the night’s events, imagining the worst for no reason. I forgot that the reason I usually did this was because it turned out to be true.

***

Medea was back in the office the next day, despite my assurances that she could take as much time off as she needed. She clearly didn’t want to talk about her magic, and I tried to ignore the sour tang of her aura and the bruise-blue circles under her eyes. Usually she made quite a lot of effort to look smart at work, but today she was dressed casually – by her standards, at least. Her make-up was minimal, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she wore boots and jeans and some sloppy knit jumper that hung loosely on her frame. Admittedly it was a lovely top – made of some metallic fabric that glimmered in the light and complemented her dark skin perfectly – but I’m assuming being depressed doesn’t mean you automatically have ugly clothes, and for a woman who not only took a lot of pride in her appearance but really enjoyed dressing up, it was one step up above PJs in the office.

Luckily, by now we knew one another well enough to be content to work in companionable silence, taking turns to make coffee, occasionally swapping titbits from the news or the answers of stupid Buzzfeed quizzes (I was quite pleased to get Mr Darcy as my literary soulmate, though Medea was less impressed to get Mr Rochester as hers, not only for the obvious reason that she had a far better chance of happiness with Lizzie Bennett – ‘I’m not marrying some wife-hiding colonialist bully’ being her peeved assessment of her results). The vampire side of the business was quiet, since despite the fact most of my clients are from smaller clans, so at the moment unaffected by what was going on, nobody stays immortal for long if they can’t read the way the wind is blowing. A raft of cancellations attested to the fact that the Other community was laying low – a fairly devastating trend if this continued to Halloween, which was not that far away and was usually my busiest time of the year. But the human side was ticking over nicely, including a list of wannabe vamps and pretend donors, who wanted the vampire experience without any of the bloodshed, so we had enough to be getting on with.

But really I was just waiting. I’d arranged to meet Mariko and Leon at a bar near the office just after seven, giving Cain time to go and retrieve Laclos from wherever he had stashed him, presuming he wasn’t under a collapsed ceiling. Cain was saying nothing. He’d stayed behind at my flat for a while to fix my door when I went to work, but then he’d spent most of the day asleep on the couch in my office, trying, I knew, to recharge his batteries, ready for whatever was coming. Because something would be coming, that much was obvious. The young vampire had gone away without the answer he wanted, and if past experience was any guide they’d be sending someone further up the food chain; given the urgency of the situation, it was pretty likely the big guns would be coming out. Which, precisely 20 minutes after sunset, they did.

***

Even though I was half expecting it, when it came the wave of power nearly rocked me out of my seat. Medea looked alarmed, less by the arrival of the three figures at the office than my reaction, which told her they weren’t just a bunch of low-levels. I had said she could leave before dark if she wanted to – without her magic, she was more vulnerable than I was, stripped of a defence she would instinctively rely on – but she had declined, and suddenly I was glad of the company.

We looked up from our laptops as the three vampires came into the reception area. Even without the power surge that affected my Sense, it was impossible not to stare – they were so utterly mismatched it was almost comical, until you thought about how serious things had to be for three such disparate figures to band together. The only male in the group was a huge, ginger bear of a man, with the kind of Celtic colouring that implied he’d probably been as pale in life as he was in death, long hair flowing wild except for a couple of thin plaits lost in its mass, and a beard that would make a hipster proud. He looked like he’d just come away from auditioning for a remake of
Braveheart
, not least because he was wearing full on Highland clan attire: not the fancied up for the wedding version, either, but one of the long, old fashioned kilts that goes round the waist and over the shoulder and is basically one step from being a tartan blanket, albeit slightly bastardised for modern tastes. Indeed, since my Sense put him at pretty close to 700 years old, so well before Scotsmen would wear even this kind of kilt, it was also modernised for his own. This worried me. The last time I’d encountered a vampire who’d favoured this kind of showily historical dress, he’d been pretty traditional in his outlook, too, and hadn’t looked favourably on the integrationist ideals of my business, which had resulted in him expressing his displeasure in the time-honoured vampire fashion of trying to cut my head off. Beside him was a girl who could have been his daughter in terms of colouring, though her hair was more a soft auburn than his own fierce ginger, and she was about a fifth of the size of him, a slip of a thing that huddled behind his hugeness, as if for protection – a lie, since I Sensed she was easily the oldest of the three, though she seemed keen not for anyone to register that. This was made even more interesting by the fact that when they stood in front of the desk, it was the youngest vampire – albeit the most striking – who spoke first.

‘Ms Bick? I am Josephine,’ the woman said, coolly, ignoring the fact that both Medea and I were staring at her, mouths open like guppies. I’m pretty sure she got that a lot. Bloody hell, she was beautiful. If you’d spliced DNA from Alek Wek and Lupita Nyong'o and chucked in some Grace Jones for height and attitude, you’d still get someone who’d take one look at the woman in front of us and give up and go home. Her rich voice was rounded out by the pure-honey accent of French African, suggesting she had come from one of the old French colonies, though her age – I’d put her at around six or seven centuries old – would mean she predated any of the colonists, so in its way, it was as much a ‘modern’ affectation as the Scotsman’s kilt. ‘These are my companions, Alastair and Amalthea.’

‘How… alliterative,’ I managed, because frankly I wasn’t done staring. She was obviously used to this reaction, and, interestingly for a vampire, had made efforts to play down her beauty, as if long used to it being a distraction, although admittedly with that super-groomed form of deceptively casual that takes twice as long to achieve as properly dressing up. I have a white girl’s knowledge of black hair (i.e., none) but couldn’t imagine the glossy halo of natural curls that added a good couple of inches to her height looked that impressive on its own, and her make-up was the subtle ‘barely there’ style that is harder to do well than a face full of slap, the only hint of obvious colour the red-bronze of her lips. Her clothes were clearly expensive: perfectly tailored jeans tucked into butter-soft leather knee-length boots and a silk top that draped so shapelessly yet flatteringly it probably cost the same as my monthly mortgage. If I’d seen her on the street, I would have taken her for some kind of businesswoman – one of those polished New York types who dictate memos at 6am from the treadmill between sips of a no-fat soya latté. She looked like she’d stepped out of the corner office at some steel and glass structure, although possibly the kind of company where they throw you out of a 20
^th
floor window for putting the wrong paper in the photocopier. Wolfram and Hart, maybe. The only thing that wasn’t pared down was her jewellery: tiny gold and diamond studs decorated both the inside of her ear and her lobes, and around her neck she wore a dazzling slab of hammered copper, polished until it shone, so big it could double as a breastplate. It looked both ancient and utterly contemporary at the same time: she could as believably have picked it up last week from a boutique in Hatton Garden as have plucked it off an enemy’s corpse on a battlefield centuries ago. What surprised me most, though, was that she wore bangles; slim bands of gold, brass, wood and beads jangled together on each elegant wrist. Vampires tend not to wear noisy jewellery – they’re creatures of stealth – and these were an obvious message, as carefully curated as the rest of her appearance. If she planned to take you out, she wouldn’t have to sneak up on you to do it. Something in her expression flickered as she saw that I understood that message, and I realised I’d surprised her.

‘Can I help you with something?’ I asked, pleasantly.

‘I believe you style yourself a friend to our kind.’

‘Depends on how friendly they are to me,’ I said, equably.

She didn’t look particularly impressed by that answer, but I have that effect on people. I saw her gaze wash over Medea, Sensed a flutter of lust – that was the effect my colleague tended to have on people. But then there was something else: Confusion? Trepidation? She frowned at the closed door to my office then returned her attention to me, as if not wanting me to notice where she was looking, but I could clearly Sense the effort it took to drag her gaze back in my direction.

‘It would stand you in good stead not to think you need to be clever,’ she said, haughtily, and I shrugged.

‘I’d hate to think all that time at university got me nothing but student loans and a head start on liver failure.’

I sounded snarky, but it was an effort not to quake at the power in the room, huge and hostile and oppressive, even as Amalthea shielded her strength. But then it got worse, the power intensifying, which meant I could relax, because suddenly nobody cared about me. I didn’t have to turn around to know that my office door had opened and that Cain had stirred himself from the sofa he’d spent most of the day napping on. I allowed myself a sly glance – for a start, he’s never hotter than when he’s dishevelled from waking up – and smiled to see him leaning casually against the doorframe, hair ruffled and features softened by sleep, but his green eyes dangerous. There was a gun held at his hip, lowered but plainly visible, all ‘don’t mind me, I’ll just stand here being all armed and mysterious and buzzing against your vampire senses like a saw against taut wire’. I had no idea how a man who had such a visible effect on older vampires could have kept his presence hidden until he wanted it not to be – perhaps in the same way vampires tamp down their power to mask it – but it was clear he’d thrown off the invisibility cloak. The Scotsman looked as ready to charge as if we were waving William Wallace’s head on a stick at him, but Amalthea scooted further behind him, pretending to be scared, though I suspected it was in the hope that her companion’s obvious aggression would let her hide her power from the new arrival, since she had clearly picked up on his. Josephine was a better actress, though the muscles in her neck were corded with the effort of not reacting. I smiled, all jolly, as if now Cain were here the party could really start.

‘Medea, perhaps you’d like to get our guests a drink?’ I suggested lightly, and she gave me an odd look – I didn’t ever treat her so much like an assistant, and it wasn’t something she would normally have acquiesced to, but then I saw her realise that I was gesturing to my drinks cabinet – way back in my office and, crucially, behind Cain. She scooted off like her knickers were on fire, watched by Amalthea, who had twisted to see what she was doing in the other room.

‘Please, have a seat.’ I gestured to the set of chairs we kept here in the outer office, where visitors would wait at reception before I took them through for a private interview. Up till now I’d always thought they were a bit of a waste of money – we rarely had more than one person in at a time – and clearly they were destined to remain unused, as the vampires ignored me and kept standing. Medea came back with a bottle and some glasses on a tray which she set down on the reception desk, pouring carefully. Smart girl: she’d used the silver tray.

‘I assume your friend is old enough?’ I nodded towards Amalthea. I wasn’t sure if they knew anything of my Sensitive nature, but saw no reason to give away my hand. At Josephine’s curt nod I handed Amalthea a glass, taking my opportunity to gawp. I’d never seen a child vampire before: there were very few of them alive, since the old ones were notoriously unstable, and these days it was strictly forbidden to turn anyone under age. I’m guessing in the old days, when a girl was likely to be dead at 14 from poverty, disease or childbirth, turning her into a vampire seemed less heinous, but the effect was uncanny. She was a reasonably pretty girl, although with the slightly unformed looks of one who had been destined to grow into beauty. But the centuries – eight or nine, by my guess – had hardened her features, and I suspected the reason she wore her hair loose, hanging over her eyes, had nothing to do with shyness, and everything to do with disguising the very adult guile that lurked in that gaze. I wondered why Josephine was spokesperson – was it because she looked more professional than Alastair, and they worried I wouldn’t take instructions from a teenager? Or was there something more sinister behind this subversion of the usual vampire hierarchies? Medea handed round the glasses – well, glasses for the vampires, but since we only had three decent glasses in the office (we’d had four, but I’m clumsy) the rest of us drank out of mugs. It probably says a lot about Cain’s aura of innate badassery that he could still look threatening while drinking out of a mug with a picture of the ‘hang in there’ kitty on the front of it. Serving him last – so she could retreat behind him – Medea had her usual WWGWD mug (I still had no idea what that meant, and kept forgetting to ask her). I realised belatedly and with some embarrassment I was using a
True Blood
mug she’d bought me for Christmas a couple of years ago that bore the slogan ‘I like my vampires blonde and Viking’, which felt a bit Aryan Nation when I was talking to a black African woman, so I kept my hand over the slogan while I drank.