Page 68 of Smoke & Ashes
She was, to be fair. But that was the problem; like most things she was good at, she did it with reckless abandon. “Oh please, I’ve seen seventeen-year-olds with more self-control.”
“Too late. We’re leaving.” We manoeuvred quite sedately out of the courtyard, down the long driveway to the road, and into the narrow tangle of country lanes that made up the approach to Safernoc. It was about here that we started to pick up speed, and I tried to tell myself that it was just the closeness of the trees and that classic car vibe that made it seem like we were going far quicker than we actually were but, no, we were being driven way too quickly by a woman who loved the thrill of the chase and was confident that a devastating road accident probably wouldn’t kill her. I had to seriously reconsider dating near-impervious women or, at the very least, reconsider letting them drive me places.
By the time we hit the M40 she’d stopped pretending speed limits were something she cared about. Probably best if I didn’t think about it. “I don’t suppose”—I craned my head over my shoulder and tried to catch Sofia’s eye. She and Flick were flopped against one another in a platonically supportive bundle on the back seat—“that you have any last minute prophetic insights into how this all might go down, do you?”
“Sorry.” Sofia looked genuinely apologetic. “But that might be a positive. I didn’t get a dire warning sayingdon’t. Although I’ve been doing a bit of research and a lot of the original Delphic prophecies were ambiguous, so even if I had more control I’m not sure how much good I’d be.”
“You’ve done a lot already.” I wasn’t sure if she was angling for reassurance, but I thought it was best to err on the side of her self-esteem. “You basically saved all our arses when the Prince of Wands attacked.”
Sofia, who I suspected might have been genuinely humble, which I was gradually learning wasn’t quite the same as the crushing self-loathing I used as a substitute, murmured something approximating adon’t mention it, and curled back up.
From there, the trip up to the North-West was fairly uneventful, despite Tara’s utter disregard for road safety, the highway code, or the comfort of her passengers. Travelling by day there wasn’t a huge amount that was likely to ambush us, and bombing along a major roadway at something like ninety miles per hour there wasn’t much that could have. We changed Ms a bunch of times and wound up on the M6 cannoning past Liverpool and into Lancaster.
Taking the motorway through this bit of the country was always weird, because it was this strange mixture of rural idyll and fucking gargantuan chunk, of tarmac. Look ahead and it was all concrete and road bridges and signs saying three miles to services. Look left and it was nothing but fields and open countryside. As we came off the main road, we started hitting the proper national park bit, with all of its rolling hills and grey-red-brown cliff-faces rising up out of the treeline. Perhaps it was my mother’s blood or my father’s northern roots, but there was something about those hills, about the unstoppable vastness of the sky and the stone and the wood that spoke to me in a way that not a lot of things did. It felt kind of right for the grail to be here, if it was anywhere. If the whole Patrick’s-girlfriend-is-an-ancient-metaphor theory was remotely plausible. The whole place had this ancient almost fairytale vibe to it that I didn’t think anywhere else could match. Well, an ancient fairytale vibe, plus a fairly major network of A-roads.
We’d been in the car for a good four hours by the time we got into the Lake District proper, and we went from dual carriageways and concrete barriers to winding lanes with dry stone walls. Despite my general mistrust of Tara’s wheelpersonship this had been suspiciously easy so far. If the Prince of Wands did have plans for Elaine, then there was no way he’d let us get away with waltzing up and snatching her from under his nose.
Unless that was exactly what he wanted us to do.
Unless he wanted us tothinkthat was exactly what he wanted us to do.
Unless he wanted us to think he wanted us to think it was exactly what he wanted us to do and in fact he didn’t want us to think he wanted us to do it because itwaswhat he wanted us to do.
Bleagh. That was the problem with going up against Sebastian Douglas. The guy got in your head like Doctor and the Medics singingSpirit in the Sky. And before you knew it you were second-guessing every thought that crossed your mind.
We followed Patrick’s directions down a few more winding roads and down a little country lane. Yeah, so it turned out that when Elaine said her parents had a “little place in the lake district” she meant a fucking estate in a private woodland overlooking Lake Windermere.
“Oh, how pretty.” Tara seemed less impressed than charmed. Then again, anything short of an actual fucking castle probably looked a bit nouveau-riche to her.
“Yeah, really … millionairey.”
Sofia and Flick stirred in the back seat. “Oh, are we here?” Flick seemed at once pleased to have arrived and peeved to have been woken.
“It looks lovely,” added Sofia, apparently the only person in the car middle class enough to see a second home in a national park and not immediately respond with either condescension or resentment.
We parked the Silver Shadow outside and approached the front door. I knocked, and there was no answer. Of course there fucking wasn’t. We’d left early and even with the nearly five hour trip it was barely afternoon, which meant Patrick was at far less than full vampire power and he’d clearly have instructed Elaine not to open the door during the day when he couldn’t protect her. Despite the fact that all his enemies were nocturnal. Fucking Patrick. Fucking predictable fucking Patrick.
“Elaine,” I tried through the door. “It’s me, Kate. We spoke on the phone?”
Still no answer.
“Jesus Christ, Elaine, I’m not a monster, I’m not a vampire, I’m not some weird sorcerer out to use your blood to open a portal to the netherworld. I’m just me.”
Still nothing. Okay, this was getting eerie.
And to think for one tiny moment I’d let myself believe that we could drive up here and meet some peoplewithoutthe whole thing turning into a mash up of a heist and a vision quest. On the plus side, I will admit that part or me secretly loved how much of my job involved picking locks.
The front door did not exactly pose much of a barrier on account of how it honestly did appear to be a nice couple’s holiday home on Lake Windermere, and not a secret fortress established in ages past against the event of supernatural assault. Inside it was—well, I had to go with Sofia on this one, it was lovely. Tile floors, cosy sitting rooms with comfy armchairs, and big wood-burning fireplaces. It would be an unhelpfully romantic place to hide out with your vampire boyfriend if he thought his jealously obsessed ex was coming to kill you.
There was no sign of a struggle, but that didn’t necessarily mean that there hadn’t been one. With vampiric mind control bullshit “struggle” didn’t have to mean “fight” and quite a lot of monsters knew how to clean up after themselves.
We searched the whole place, which wound up taking a while because the “whole place” turned out to include a boathouse and a converted stable, which added up to a lot of square footage to go over. They seemed to have been staying in separate rooms, which I was glad about because while I try to be right on and sex positive and shit, this girl was legitimately barely legal and that wasn’t something I felt at all comfortable thinking about. Her room still had that awkward transitional feel you got when people were moving out of childhood but weren’t so far removed from it that they should have been doing anything at all in the context of a vampire’s penis. Dolls mostly gone, stuffed toys still very much in evidence, that kind of thing.
We reassembled in the absurdly cosy sitting room and discussed options.
“I can probably track them if I have to,” I said. “But I’d rather not. My mother has been in my head far too much recently.”
“The girl is human,” said Tara. “Easier to follow than a vampire. I should be able to trace her without difficulty. But I’dalsorather not until we have a clear sense of what we might be following her into.”
