Page 33 of Smoke & Ashes
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 whatmadeit 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.
