The Bitter Seed of Magic (A Spellcrackers Novel) (22 page)

The Moths descended on me again from out of the gift shop.

‘Darius has Room Eleven.’ Rissa waved an electronic keycard. ‘We ’ave booked him for a private party.’

‘We’ve phoned Yana to let her know, so she’s coming over.’ Viola gave me a big grin.

‘So exciting, isn’t it?’ Lucy jumped up and down. ‘I can’t wait to see him.’

‘Great,’ I smiled, ‘but I’m not into the whole, you know—’ I did the crooked fingers thing next to my neck. Nor was I up for the mini-orgy Darius and the girls were likely to have to celebrate their reunion. ‘So why don’t you all go on and I’ll join you in a bit?’

‘Sure thing, Genny.’ Rissa swiped the keycard and the door opened into a long, carpeted corridor indistinguishable from any cookie-cutter hotel. They all ran off, whooping, towards door number eleven.

Now to find Mad Max.

I walked over to the cloakroom. Usually I waited for the security guard to take my bagged blood and give me a receipt, but this time I hopped up on the counter and swung my legs over. I landed with a soft thud behind it and the coat-check girl jumped up in surprise. ‘Hey, you can’t—’

I reached out and touched her face, entering her mind as easily as driving through an open gate. ‘Hi’ – I checked her name badge – ‘Cheryl. Can I have your keycard, please?’

She reached down, unclipped it from her belt and held it out to me.

‘Thanks,’ I smiled, taking it. ‘That’s great. You just forget about me now, and carry on with whatever you were doing.’ I reversed out of her mind just as easily and let her go.

She sat back down again.

I swiped the card, gave it back, then pushed open the ‘Office’ door. The room inside was a standard security centre doubling as a staffroom. One wall held a row of grey metal lockers; the other wall was banked to the ceiling with TV monitors showing shots of the club above a long bench full of blinking lights and switches. I quickly scanned them: entrance, coffin room, gift shop, the toilets – yep, the loos really were coffin-shaped! – and what had to be the vamps’ private rooms. Sitting bolt-upright in front of the TV screens was the human security guard with his eyes fixed intently on the monitors. A cup of tea was steaming on the bench in front of him.

He ignored me.

But of course. Mad Max was expecting me.

I walked past him to the door on the opposite wall, opened it and strolled inside.

‘Cousin, how nice to see you again.’ Mad Max stood and came round the desk to pull out one of the guest chairs for me. My backpack sat on the other. He gave me a wide beam of a smile and said, ‘Please, come and have a seat.’

As offices go it was pretty basic: desk, grey chairs, grey carpet, grey filing cabinet, a flat-screen LCD – currently showing the cloakroom girl – instead of a window. There was nothing to say vampire, or even well-heeled executive about it, other than Mad Max himself. His bright red Hussar jacket, worn over white shirt and blue trousers and with highly polished black boots made him look like he was playing dress-up, which of course he was.

‘Thanks,’ I said and sat. Of course, there was one thing that said vampire: the three bags of my blood sitting on the desk, one of which was squashed into a clear pint tankard with coffins decorating the outside. A black curly straw was sticking out the top.
Nice
–
all it needed was a paper umbrella!
Next to the bags of blood was my phone.

‘Glamouring a human carries the death penalty, Cousin,’ Max said cheerfully, waving at the cloakroom girl on the screen as he sat opposite me. ‘Or were you not aware of that particular law?’

Ignoring him, his threat, and my blood, for now, I reached for the phone and called Malik, or rather, Sanguine Lifestyles, his 24/7 answering service. A woman’s voice answered with a tentative, ‘Ms Taylor?’

‘Yes, it’s me, and I’m fine,’ I reassured her before she could ask, keeping my gaze fixed on Mad Max who was still beaming his hundred-watt smile my way. ‘Could you repeat the last message you were given, please?’

‘Certainly, Ms Taylor,’ she replied efficiently. ‘Mr Maxim Andrei Zakharin called, and his message was: “
Genevieve Zakharinova has honoured us by becoming a VIP member of our club. Sadly, the excitement was too much for Dear Old Dad, and I think it might take him three days to recover. Genevieve kindly consented to having a family portrait taken to celebrate our reunion
.”’ The woman paused. ‘We received the photo of the gentleman and yourself, Ms Taylor, plus the one—’

A beep sounded, and I stopped listening to the woman as Max’s beaming smile cut out and was replaced by an almost panicked expression. He produced a remote, pointed it at the flat-screen and the picture of the cloakroom girl switched to one of strange, amorphous red and blue shapes shifting around a dark interior. Two red figures were huddled together in one area, and another red figure was merged with the only blue figure. I frowned, puzzled, until it clicked: I was looking at the new state-of-the-art CCTV monitoring system the vamps were touting on all their websites, supposedly designed to keep the humans safe. It showed a computer overlay of enhanced heat signatures, so basically, the red figures were humans, and the vampires, having a lower core body temperature, showed up as blue.

Max jumped up and rushed out of the office, leaving the door swinging.

‘. . . give Mr al-Khan your message along with the others when he checks in,’ the woman’s voice was saying in my ear.

Worry tied a knot in my gut. ‘Thought you said he checked in at sunset?’

‘Normally, yes. Not tonight. Is there anything else I can do for you, Ms Taylor?’

‘Thanks, not just now.’ I cut her off, and stared at the screen.

Now I knew what I was looking at, the figures looked more like people and less like blobs. The red figures were two upright humans huddled together. The other human was on the ground, with the vamp on top, and the blue vamp was slowly turning red—It didn’t take a genius to work out something was badly wrong. Then I saw the flashing number in the screen’s corner.

Room Eleven: Darius’ room.

I looked in horror at my blood on the desk.

Surely Mad Max couldn’t be stupid enough to take it all? Hadn’t he heard what had happened at Christmas, when Darius had gone rabid and fallen into bloodlust?

Fuck!
I grabbed the two unopened bags of blood, knocking the tankard over in my haste, but it didn’t spill. Oddly, the bag was still unbroken. I grabbed that one too, and stuffed them all back into the padded compartment of my backpack. Then I ran after Mad Max.

T
he security guard was rattling away into his radio, and either Mad Max’s original mind-lock was still in force or he was too busy to worry about me. I grabbed the keycard back off the cloakroom girl in passing, vaulted over the counter again and strode towards the vamp who was standing guard in front of doors 1 – 15. She was dressed in a wide grey crinoline and starched nurse’s cap, vaguely circa the Crimean War.

Her eyes widened as she saw me coming.

‘Move, or I’ll make you,’ I warned, knowing I had the unfair advantage. No way was she going to fight back – or even touch me – not with Malik’s decapitation threat standing behind me like a looming shadow.

‘Sorry, can’t do that,’ she said. ‘Orders.’

I swung the backpack, letting its own momentum carry it and it hit her square on the shoulder. I’m nowhere near as strong as a vamp, but compared to a human of the same weight, I’m a superwoman. Add in the bricks—

The vamp stumbled far enough away from the door for me to swipe the keycard down the lock and lunge through it before she had recovered.

My heart pounding, I raced along the carpeted corridor, past grey steel doors with curious faces peering out from their diamond-shaped windows, towards the group of three figures I could see at the end.

Mad Max held his hands up to stop me as I got closer. ‘Cousin, Genevieve,’ he called, ‘we’ve sealed the door. There’s nothing to be done until morning now. I suggest you go back—’

Bastard! He wasn’t supposed to seal the room if there were still humans inside.

This time I didn’t give any warning. I hoisted the backpack in front of me and, praying to any gods that might be listening, I launched myself at him, aiming for his chest with the brick-heavy backpack. I caught a glimpse of his eyes rounding with disbelief just before I barrelled into him, knocking him on his back. I landed on top of him and, yelling, I heaved the backpack up and smashed it down on his head, again and again, like a pile-driver. He shifted beneath me, his hands gripping my thighs, the muscles of his stomach bunching, getting ready to buck me off. Desperate now, I slammed the bag down again, wishing I had something sharper, like a stake, knowing I had to damage him enough that he wasn’t going to be getting up anytime soon—

Someone grabbed the back of my jacket and threw me back along the corridor.

I tried to tuck and roll, but the backpack dragged awkwardly on my arm and instead I landed in an inelegant heap. I scrambled back up to my feet, clutching the backpack, raging with determination and anger. I wasn’t going to let—

I stopped, stunned. Mad Max was still lying on the floor, but now a small figure straddled him – a female, if the long curls of black hair were any indication. The other two vamps were rapidly backing up the corridor away from her and Max, their faces contorted with fear. They reached the end and one banged on the steel door, while the other, his brain obviously slightly less panicked, produced a keycard, swiped it and they both fell into the room beyond the moment the door slid open.

As the door closed, the female figure shook herself, then, in one fast, sinuous movement, she leapt to her feet and twisted to land perfectly on her red leather six-inch-heeled boots without so much as a wobble. A knife protruded from Mad Max’s chest, its bronze handle sticking up like a shiny exclamation point. She put her hands on her curvy hips, took a deep breath she didn’t need, and her waist very obviously cinched in even tighter and her breasts mounded even higher above her red leather corset. Then she cocked her head to one side and stared at me, her eyes reflecting yellow like a cat’s in the blackness of her face.

I grimaced. Vamps can never resist a flashy entrance.

I recognised her, of course: Yana’s new sponsor, Francine, the vampire from Darius’ old blood-house. Up close she looked younger than I remembered, more late teens than early twenties, although vamp-wise she had to be at least a couple of hundred years old if she was capable of taking Mad Max. And with her knife sticking out of him, she was either an opportunist, or an ally. I was hoping for the latter.

My hand tightened on the backpack just in case. ‘So why did they run?’ I jerked my head towards the door the terrified vamps had gone through.

The air wavered round her and for a second a pretty good likeness of Malik stood in her place. Then she was back to being herself again.

‘Impressive illusion,’ I said, and it was. ‘So, are you the new Head of Golden Blade blood?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, her sultry voice matching her sex-on-legs kick-ass red leather outfit.

Ah, so the position was still up for grabs, which probably meant she needed Malik’s backing. Maybe she’d decided assisting me was the best way to get it? I waved towards her and Mad Max. ‘You know, the show’s wasted if you’re not going to help?’ I raised my voice in question.

Moving almost too fast for me to see, she was standing in front of me, the sharp end of a bronze knife hovering steadily under my chin. I held my ground, ignoring my hitching pulse, and flicked a finger against the blade. ‘Nice toy,’ I said.

She smiled, her full lips pulling back to showcase longer-than-normal fangs – another illusion – and the knife flew back and thudded into Mad Max’s chest, perfectly aligned next to its twin. He grunted. I looked around her at his face. The bricks had done their job: it was a battered, blood-covered mess, and when he stared back at me from between already swelling lids, surprisingly, he was very much aware, and oddly speculative.

‘The bronze knife in the heart,’ Francine purred, drawing my attention back to her, ‘she paralyse him. Stop his power.’

‘Good to know,’ I said, stepping past her and over Mad Max to look through the diamond-shaped window in door eleven. It was as bad as I’d hoped it wouldn’t be.

The room was square, maybe twenty feet by twenty, and it looked like a hurricane had passed through recently. Broken bits of metal bed and shredded lumps of mattress littered the carpet, a wooden chest was overturned on its side, and the flat-screen on the wall was smashed.

Darius was in the centre, at the eye of the storm.

The eye-candy romance model with the drool-worthy sixpack was gone; instead, his body had shrunk back to bone. His stomach was concave above his jutting pelvis, and only a few wisps of hair straggled from his scalp. A raised map of blue-black veins corded his leathery-looking skin. He looked like he’d been left to starve. As I watched he twisted and turned from side to side in evident confusion, his lips curled back over all four of his fangs, his arms open wide, fingers clutching at empty space. Rissa and Viola were weaving around him in some sort of shifting pattern, their floating grey outfits and long white-grey hair fluttering as if blown by the wind. As I watched, one would flit past him, trailing a bloody wrist and snagging his attention, then as he lunged for her, the other would do the same, distracting him the other way, only they were moving so fast it looked as if there were more than just the two of them . . .

‘You’re doing something, aren’t you?’ I turned to Francine.

‘I make the illusion of many Moth. Darius do not think with his brain now, but with this.’ She tapped her corseted stomach. ‘The Moth, they bait him with the blood. He does not know which to eat next. It is a trick we use sometimes.’

I turned back to the room and came face to face with Lucy, staring at me through the glass. Startled, I jumped back in fear as my old phobia hit;
stupid to still be afraid of ghosts, even now
. I forced myself back to the small window, swiping at my face as I realised I was doing the crying thing again. My chest constricted with sorrow as Lucy turned and walked straight through the others to the far wall, then stood and pointed down at her still body.