Page 48 of Smoke & Ashes
“Ow! I meant that rhetorically.” She let go and I straightened.
Folding her arms, Julian fixed me with those eyes that I’d once found it so easy to get lost in. “Do you have any conception of how difficult you’re being?”
“Oh I’m sorry. Maybe you should chain me to a wall and cut my veins open. Except your friend already did that.”
“Sebastian Douglas is not my friend.”
“You know, I think that makes it worse. If he’d been your friend then at least you’d have screwed me out of loyalty instead of cowardice.”
I knew she was pissed off because she didn’t even make a joke about screwing. “Wanting to avoid the anger of a dangerous, vindictive man who plays his vengeance out over centuries isn’t cowardice. It’s caution. And we have had this conversation already.”
“Oh, I’m sosorryI’m repeating myself. Next time you leave me to die I’ll be sure to get over it quicker.”
“Did you just come here to berate me?” She was still glaring. Good. She could glare until her face fell off. “Or was there something you actually needed?”
“I spoke to a woman who said your secret band of ninja nuns used to know about the holy grail.”
“Your woman said wrong.”
My head was beginning to pound. Should have drunk more water. “Okay, she didn’t say that exactly, but she said they were the same kind of weirdo conspiracy theory nonsense and that if I wanted to find something I should start there.”
“We’re done here. Put her outside.”
I held up my hands. “Don’t bother, I know when I’m not wanted.” It was mostly all the time. “Back door, I take it?”
Julian said nothing. She left me to stagger out into the alley where I’d found a dead werewolf years ago when we first met. Given the literal hell I’d been through since, I felt almost nostalgic.
I wasn’t sure what I’d thought would happen. It wasn’t like she was about to sayoh yes, the holy grail, I keep it on a shelf in the back room, let me get it for you. Then again, she did call herself the fucking Prince of Cups, and she kept an ornate silver chalice in her little sex palace upstairs, and the dodgy shell company she worked through was called the Calix group.
Yeah, she knew something.
I thought about going back in, but the door I’d come out of was the fire-exit kind that you open with a push bar on the inside and can’t open from outside. Which meant I’d have to loop all the way back to the front and come back in, and I thought that would end badly.
Maybe I could come back tomorrow.
The Velvet was in that bit of London that has far more back alleys and sex shops than you need within two streets of each other. Which made it a great place to hang out but also a great place to find yourself alone in the dark and not entirely sure where you were going. Mostly it was the alleys, some of it was the drink. Damn you, alcohol, pretending to be my friend then making me take a blind turn past a shop that was still trying to sell X-rated movies despite Pornhub having been a thing for more than a decade.
All of which meant that I wound up on my own, somewhere with no windows, and in nothing like a fit state to defend myself, when I was jumped by an angry vampire in a wolfskin.
Yelena dropped on me from directly overhead. I was able to fling myself sideways at the last second but it was close to midnight, she was a lot faster and a lot stronger than I could cope with, especially half-cut. I stumbled, she caught me, and I wound up with my face pressed against a rain-stippled poster advertising an LGBTQ+ rock festival.
“I thought this might be more difficult,” she whispered in my ear.
I was far too wankered to be thinking straight. My mother’s power waited just out of reach in the Deepwild, but it would take focus to draw on it and, even if I could, and even if I thought being drunk in charge of the wild hunt was a remotely good idea, I didn’t think I’d be able to do much with it. Yelena would still be about as strong as me, and she had my arms locked firmly behind my back already. “Guess I’ve always been a disappointment,” I replied. When in doubt, backchat.
“Tell me where Patrick is, and I’ll kill you quickly.”
“That sounds like a terrible deal. And please get it through your skull that I dumped him more than a decade ago.”
It was about then that she broke my arm. Joke was on her though, I’d pre-emptively self-medicated. Still hurt like fuck of course. “I will take you apart piece by—” There was a rush of night and she was off me. I turned and sank to the ground, still fumbling for what I could find of my mother’s strength to fend off the now-dull-now-stabbing pain an inch or two above my right elbow.
What with the shock of being ambushed and the fact I still hadn’t managed to get to the loo, I wasn’t in a position to follow much of what happened next. A fight between vampires, when they got into it, was just blurs moving against blurs, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to keep up.
At last they stopped, and I saw Julian with a set of claw-marks down her cheek, standing over Yelena who was lying cat-like on the floor half-beaten, half ready to spring, and still managing to look faintly horny, which was a trait vampires got a lot if they steered into a certain flavour of bloodlust.
Julian brushed dust from her now rather tattered epaulettes. “Well this has been fun. But you’re on my territory and I will thank you to leave. I assume you’re with the Prince of Wands, so tell him we still have no quarrel, but he needs to keep his lapdog on a shorter leash.”
“How dare you…”
