Page 47 of Smoke & Ashes
It wasn’t that late—Dr Nick’s visit had taken me into mid-to-late afternoon, and while the process of fortifying myself to speak to my ex for the first time since I’d dumped her arse over the whole letting-some-prick-exsanguinate-me snafu had taken a reasonable amount of time, it hadn’t taken me past midnight. So the queue was short-ish. It’s just that short-ish wasn’t what I was aiming for. Also I really needed a piss.
The Velvet didn’t have a cover charge, probably because it didn’t entirely make sense to make people pay for entry to a place you mostly used as a supply of warm bodies and fresh blood, which was good because I would have lost my fucking shit if I’d been asked to pony up hard cash to tell my former girlfriend how fucking—I mean, to ask her about the holy grail. Which was what I was there for.
Julian held court on a balcony at the top of a spiral staircase behind a velvet rope. Tonight it seemed that it was being guarded by a pretty young woman in a cocktail dress. Not the sort you’d usually expect to be working as a bouncer, but then this one almost certainlywasa vampire, and maybe Julian had decided to make her gallery of sapphic delights look a bit less intimidating from the ground.
“Okay,” I told the guard, having to shout a bit over the music, “here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to say I’m here for Julian. You’re going to say she doesn’t want to see me. I’m going to insist and either we get in an unpleasant fight that you might not win as easily as you think, or I make a gigantic fuckawful scene until her ladyship comes down from the pleasure-dome and talks to me. Don’t you want to skip all the trouble and let me up?”
She sighed. Then stopped breathing. Definitely a vampire. And it was good to know I wasn’t quite pissed enough that I didn’t notice that sort of thing. Although Iwasbeginning to think I’d forgotten my house keys. “What do you want, Kate?”
“You know me?”
“I’ve seen you around.”
She’d probably been promoted from the kittens, which was what Julian somewhat patronisingly called her entourage. “Didn’t she used to use you as a footstool?”
“Sometimes.” There was a lasciviousness to her smile that reminded me too much of her boss.
“Look. If you’ve been around a while you must know the drill by now. Terrible danger, can’t explain, you’re my only hope blah blah.”
The promoted kitten folded her arms. “She doesn’t want to see you.”
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I took a step back. Having finally been home and briefly been sober Ihadmanaged to revisit myalways carry daggerspolicy, but looking at this girl the whole fine-to-beat-up-vampires policy was starting to seem shaky. She couldn’t have been much past her mid-twenties, even taking the immortality into account, and while that raised some slightly iffy questions about Julian’s decision to transform her into a bloodsucking undead monstrosity, I did not at all like the optics of whaling on a twenty-something club kid in a minidress. “Juliaaaaan,” I tried instead, leaning my head back and yelling as best I could over the intense background noise. “Juliaaan I need to talk to yooooou.”
“Okay, you really need to go.” The tiny bouncer came forward to take me gently by the arm, and I took the opportunity to try and dash past her and up the stairs. My mother’s blood gives me an uncanny, almost Dianic grace which sometimes takes people unawares, and to give myself all due credit I did move pretty quickly.
But I was also very, very pissed. And spiral staircases are more complicated than they look. I collapsed onto the iron steps with a mixture of a thunk and a clang. I’d like to say that the iron was to blame and it was interfering with my faery heritage, but if I was being honest it was almost certainly the scotch. The guard flew past me in a billow of shadows and mist, and stood a few steps up from where I was kneeling.
“This is starting to get pathetic.”
I tried to pull myself upright, but the only thing I had to hang onto was her, and that seemed like it would end badly. So I sat where I was and started shouting again. “Juliaaaaan, pleeeeeaaaaase. It’s not about yooooouu. It’s about the holy graaaaaail.”
“What the fuck is happening here?” The bouncer from the front door appeared to have abandoned her post to come and check on me. It was progress of a sort.
“Something about the holy grail?”
“Take her to the back?”
The two of them grabbed me and manhandled me through a back door into a storeroom. The one from the stairs sat on a box and waited with me while the one from the door went back for further instructions.
“Could I at least use your toilet?” I asked.
She glared at me. It seemed I’d missed that particular boat. We sat and waited in silence.
We didn’t have to wait long. The door swung open and Julian appeared. And I’d been wrong earlier, I shouldn’t have drunk less, I should’ve drunk much, much more. She hadn’t changed because of course she hadn’t—that was the deal with her whole species—she still looked like Tinkerbell cosplaying as Nelson. I could tell she was angry from the way she was glaring at me, and from the way I’d deliberately been trying to make her angry.
“What the fuck, Kate?”
I wagged a finger at her. “Now now, is that how you speak to a guest?”
“You’re not a guest. You stormed into my place of business and demanded to see me.”
The wagging continued. “Well is that how you speak to somebody who storms into your place of business and demands to see you?”
“Get up.”
“Make me.”
The guard in the cocktail dress grabbed me by the hair and hauled me halfway to my feet. Not all the way, I was a fair bit taller than her, but far enough that the point was made.
