Page 79 of Smoke & Ashes
The bad news was that he was still a two-thousand-year old vampire with an unparalleled knowledge of sorcery who somehow always managed to have the drop on us despite announcing his presence well in advance.
Michelle, as she freely and accurately admitted, had basically one way of dealing with a threat. But the torrent of flames she hurled at the Prince of Wands guttered out a good three feet from him, which suggested he’d probably warded himself before he got here because the motherfucker did his motherfucking homework. Patrick threw himself into the fray with the wild abandon of an angry bloodsucker, and got about halfway across the room before a telekinetic strike pitched him through a closed window. That left Elaine, very sensibly keeping her head down in the corner.
Then there was me. Sebastian Douglas wasn’t one to get his hands dirty, but for old friends he appeared willing to make an exception. He caught me around the throat with a strength that would have been unexpected if I hadn’t long since lost the ability to be surprised by anything he did, and flung me into the arms of his waiting servant. Hephaestion wrapped me in a fairly restrained but utterly unbreakable bear-hug. I’d been attacked by living statues before and they were a pain in the arse. Near-as-hell impervious and a lot quicker than they had any right to be, your only real hope was to stay away from them and that ship had now sailed entirely.
With an entire room full of his enemies neutralised in basically zero seconds, the Prince of Wands walked calmly to Nimue’s bedside and looked down at her. About the only thing that stopped the look in his eyes from being creepy beyond creepy was the knowledge that it was very much power-lust rather than lust-lust.
“Touch her and you fucking die.” Michelle sounded passably menacing for somebody who had so recently demonstrated her utter inability to harm the person she was threatening.
“I am already dead,” he replied, half to her and half to himself. “Had your friend not thwarted my ambition to ascend the discarded stair, I would now be something quite other, and no threat to any of you. But she did, and I am not, and so I must console myself with the power that resides in your mistress.”
Nim was definitely stirring. The Prince of Wands caught her by the hair and hauled her to her feet, tubes and needles tearing free from her body as she rose from the bed. I thrashed in Hephaestion’s grip but could do nothing. Instead I watched helplessly as he pulled her in with that mockery of tenderness that vampires did when they were going to drain absolutely all of your fucking blood.
I tried to scream, but no sound came out. Then I heard a noise like sixty dogs barking, like the rush of an oncoming train, like the roar of the sea.
Then what was left of the windows exploded, and a force like the wind or the tide tore through the room. It scattered medical equipment and vases of flowers and ripped the Prince of Wands away from Nimue and pinned him to a wall like a leaf.
Lightning cracked outside, rain lashed from nowhere, and Nimue stood in an emerald gown, framed in a halo of city-light.
Sebastian Douglas spoke a secret word, and the room was a blaze of blue fire for all of a moment before Nimue, with the barest motion of her hand, extinguished it.
“Impossible.” And I thought for a moment that I heard fear in his voice.
Nimue walked towards him. Outside a storm howled, and where her feet fell spring water welled through the floor and lilies grew. “So much knowledge,” she said—her voice was distant, and colder than I had ever heard it. “So little understanding.”
Despite the strange deep-sea current that still whipped the room, Sebastian managed by some vast exertion of will and blood to hurl himself one last time at the Witch-Queen of London, his fingers grasping like claws and his fangs bared like a wild beast. For all his scheming and his scholarship, it seemed, he was just a vampire in the end.
Nimue raised a hand before him and the current caught him again, hurling him backwards and stripping flesh from bone in a vortex of arcane fury that I really, really, really did not ever want to find myself on the wrong side of.
In seconds it was over. Two millennia of power and fear stripped away to nothing. A bleached skull in a handful of dust. Pearls glinting in the eye sockets. I felt Hephaestion’s grip loosen about me, and he ran forward, falling to his knees beside what was left of his master. I nearly collapsed myself from the mix of fear, exhaustion, and confusion.
Nimue turned, a shimmer of starlight and majesty. Her left eye socket was still a ruin of scar tissue, but her right gleamed green in the dark.
I was beginning to suspect that something very, very bad had happened.
Michelle stepped forwards at once and fell to one knee.
“’Chel,” I said. “I don’t think that’s Nimue.”
Nim, or the Green Lady, or whoever the hell it was who gazed at me. I couldn’t quite tell if she was sayingI am saddened that you do not recognise me, your old friendorI am pissed off that you are giving the game away. “I am your queen,” she said. “And you will bow before me.”
Yeah, I was doubling down onnot Nim. “A world of not happening.”
The wind was still surging around me, and I felt her pulling me in like a whirlpool. “I do not recall offering you a choice.”
I was suddenly and uncomfortably aware that I still had Michelle’s knife in my hand. I was also painfully aware that Elaine was still cowering in the corner. The psychic sea-swell of Nimue’s command dragged me to my knees in front of her, and I bowed my head. This was so many flavours of not good. I had one chance at this and if I fucked it up I’d probably wind up a little pile of bleached bones like the Prince of Wands.
Doing my best not to think about it, because I’d be frankly fucking amazed if she couldn’t read my mind, I thrust the knife upwards, aiming for her heart. I had a nauseating flashback to the way I’d skewered Nana King, but I didn’t see what else I could do.
Nim met my blade halfway with her open hand, letting the whole knife run through her palm and spattering me with blood that mingled with the rain that was still peppering the room. It was a pretty baller move, but it seemed to cost her. The weird mystical eddies that had been holding me in place let up long enough that I could jump to my feet, shove Michelle aside as respectfully as I could, and get myself and Elaine the fuck out.
I sprinted across the floor, grabbed Elaine by the waist, and ran for the window. Nim had taken a room with a view of the river, and if I could clear the quite-wide-now-I-looked-at-it paved area between us and the water, we’d at least live for longer than it took us to drop four stories.
Bracing myself on the windowsill, I summoned as much of my mother’s power as I could without wanting to eat the person I was carrying, and launched myself out into the storm. Wind whipped my face as if trying its hardest to push me back to land. Spread out below me, I saw the lights of boats on the river, sailing past serene and unconcerned. The rain lashed down in violent streams that stabbed into my back like swords as I fell towards the black-and-gold water of the Thames.
We plunged down, the city vanishing above us like some unreal thing, a dream of another world.
The current caught us and pulled us down.
