Chapter Twenty-Three
Grant
Quinn joins us on the corner near the club, and I don’t like the frown on his face. “Yeah, he’s not in there.”
Margot throws her hands up in the air and even Rachel looks annoyed. “What do you mean, he’s not there? He’s in there every night.”
“Is there anywhere else he could be?” Asher asks. He might sound patient to them, but there’s an edge to his voice; he doesn’t like that tone being aimed at his mate. Can’t blame him. Don’t think I’d be best pleased if someone was talking to Vlad like that, either.
“No,” Margot says quickly, then frowns, clearly thinking it through.
She pulls the book she showed us yesterday out of her back pocket and flicks through the pages.
“No. We’ve literally never seen him anywhere else.
No one we’ve talked to has told us about another place he could be living or anything like that. ”
“Did you attempt to stake out the club?”
“Yeah, after—” Margot shakes her head. “Later on, I guess.”
“And by then, Eirian was probably already here,” Asher grumbles. “If she’s working closely with him, then that might be wherever Jakob lives. She won’t want to risk being discovered.”
“So what do we do now?” Margot asks.
“We need to search,” Vlad says. “Eirian can hide her own magic, but she appears to have many fae at her disposal, and she may not be extending that privilege to the vampires. If we get close enough, we should be able to sense it.”
He includes me in that look, not just Asher. I bite my lip to suppress my grin. It’s bad. I know we’re on a serious job with incredibly serious consequences, but I can’t stop thinking about earlier tonight and his hands on me and—
Quinn nudges my foot with his. When I look up into his face, he raises his eyebrows. Right. Okay. Focus. Easier said than fucking done, quite frankly.
“So we go in pairs?” Margot seems eager to be on the move.
“No,” Vlad says. “Threes. Eirian is powerful, and we need to be prepared to come across her, too.”
I see the logic in it. There’s still every chance she’ll be coming after me, which puts whoever is with me at risk—and if we have to have one person with magic in every group, then the only other supernatural I’d be with would be Quinn, and I can’t imagine Vlad or Asher agreeing to that.
“I’ll go with you two,” Rachel says, looking at Asher and Quinn.
I open my mouth and close it again. Margot looks just as bewildered; we haven’t even talked about who’ll go with who yet.
Still, she seems to have made the decision for us. “Very well,” Vlad says. “Margot?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
“We’ll cover the east of the city,” Asher says.
Vlad only nods in reply, and Rachel doesn’t look at me or Margot as she follows Asher and Quinn away. Margot shoves her hands in her pockets and frowns after them, then at me.
“She’s just… going through it, you know?”
“Yeah, I know.” Doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt me, too. I mean, I get it. I’m in the wrong and I haven’t even really had a chance to apologise for that. She deserves an apology. But this job comes first. Should come first.
“This way,” Vlad says, and we both trail down the street after him. It’s awkward, the three of us walking together. I don’t want to leave Margot behind us because what if something happens? I don’t think Vlad will appreciate maybe having to make small talk, though she doesn’t seem too into that.
So I wander along awkwardly instead, my power pushing out to taste the air around us. There’s a general hint of magic in the air, but that could even be from us being here, so I pay it little mind.
“What’s it like then?” Margot asks. We’ve been walking for fifteen minutes or so, and every so often I reach out and nudge Vlad, directing him to go one way or the other.
“What’s what like?”
“Being a vampire.”
I sense Vlad’s sudden interest in the conversation, the bond between us tightening, just a little. Funny. I figure he knows so much about me—knows everything about me—but we’ve kept so many truths from each other that maybe he doesn’t know that much at all.
I don’t mind that. We know enough to be familiar with each other; enough that I know when he said he loves me, he meant it, and that this is it for us for the rest of our lives. The rest of it will come with time.
“It’s fucking cool,” I say and can’t help the way I flush when she looks at me. “I mean, it’s not like the alternative—Well. Rachel wasn’t kidding about the car. And now? I’m fast. I’m strong. I’ve got a group of people who—”
I cut myself off when Margot’s eyebrows draw together. I get it. She probably doesn’t want to hear about my new family any more than Rachel would. Why should I be living a good life when I left everyone here to wonder what had happened to me?
I shove my hands into the pockets of my shorts, mood gone glum. After a moment, Margot sighs.
“Sorry,” she mutters.
I shake my head. “No, you—It’s fine. Just, there are worse things, you know?
I’m the one who fucked up in not letting everyone know here, but I’m not really sure what I was supposed to do.
I didn’t know there were vampires in Margate or people who knew about them.
By the time I even really thought about it, it had been months. ”
Not that I didn’t think about my family in all that time.
But Vlad spent the first few months hovering over me because the expected bloodlust never came.
Then he was all anxious about introducing me to the Huntsman, and whether he would even survive that confrontation—not that he told me that at the time, of course; that was something I worked out with hindsight.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine…” Margot blows out a breath and offers me a tentative smile. “Not like there’s an easy excuse, is there?”
“No.”
Perhaps I could have pushed harder, come back. Say that I was injured, that I didn’t know who I was for a while… Something. Anything.
I didn’t want to. My heart skips a beat, and pain threatens to choke me.
Six months in and I didn’t want to leave Vlad at all.
It felt like he’d be so lonely without me there because as much as he was looking out for me, I was looking after him too, at least by ensuring he interacted with one other person per day.
“What happened with the vampires here?” I ask because there’s no way to articulate all that, not to Margot. To Vlad, later. He’ll want to hear it, I think.
“I mean, I guess they’ve been here all along,” Margot replies with a little shrug. “But we never knew. I never knew. Like we said, things got weird about thirteen years ago. After you—”
“After I was turned.”
“Yeah. Coincidence, I guess?”
“Most likely,” Vlad says from up ahead, voice flat. “The most likely explanation for the mass movement of those vampires is the mage wars.”
“Mage wars?” Margot asks, then shakes her head, tossing the thought aside.
“No, whatever. I was working at a pub back then. And at night, we’d get all these…
people. For a while, people started disappearing, too.
Some of the newcomers, some tourists, some people from here. Then it all settled down.”
“Teething problems,” I say, nodding, because I can’t help myself. Margot glares but doesn’t comment on that.
“It was a couple of years later that I found out what was going on. I was still working at the same pub, and one night, one of those strange guys got me outside, which was weird in and of itself because, you know, I’m not into men, so I was about to scream, but then Rachel…
She just appeared. Whacked the guy with some wood she found lying on the ground.
Didn’t kill him, of course, just shocked some sense into him ’cause he ran off, but then I was visited by another guy the next night who was mega creepy, but aside from some veiled threats, he just kind of checked if I was okay. ”
“This guy wasn’t Jakob?”
“No. I think he was around then, but he wasn’t one of the top dogs. Not even close. The guy who came to see me, I think he left a few months ago.”
Vlad glances back at me. Chased off by the fae or freaked out enough to run. Either way, he’s not here.
“How’d you both figure out they were vampires?”
“Oh, I saw his teeth,” Margot says. “The guy who attacked me, I mean. Tried telling myself I’d been seeing things, but Rachel already knew. She had some names. A couple had recently been elected as councillors and she’d been keeping track.”
“Why?”
Margot is silent for a moment. “I think she needed something to do. People to save.”
“It seems as though you have taken the more active role now,” Vlad says.
“No, not really.” Margot looks at me again. “You threw her off her game. All we were gonna do was tell you to leave.”
“I know.”
“This way,” Vlad says.
I frown. I can’t sense any fae magic, but then I look up and realise that’s not what he’s after.
There’s a woman across the street. She’s just ducked out of a nearby pub, and she jerks her head up, making eye contact with Vlad.
Vampire.
All I can sense is her death magic, though, and not a trace of Eirian or any other fae at all. Her gaze darts up the street, then back at us, and her shoulders slump all at once like she knows there’s no point in running.
“Her name’s Helen,” Margot murmurs. “I’ve not spoken to her. She works for the council. Manager of some department; I can’t remember which, but she works night shifts.”
“And recently?”
“She’s not been turning in for work.”
Vlad nods and crosses the road. I trot after him, Margot right on my heels. Helen scowls, wrapping her jacket more tightly around her torso.
“May we speak with you for a moment?” Vlad asks.
She looks between the three of us, eyes flaring with recognition when they land on Margot.
Margot might not have spoken to her, but Helen has some idea who she is, anyway.
This close, Helen looks to be in her early forties, though her energy feels to me like she’s been a vampire for almost a century.
“Do I have a choice?”
Vlad smiles. It’s not overly pleasant. “No, not really.”
Helen sighs but follows as Vlad leads us all down the street and around the corner.
There is an alley where we can stand out of sight, and he gives me a significant look, but he doesn’t need to.
My magic is already feeling for anyone who might be nearby—there are people in the houses, of course, but if we speak quietly enough, they won’t hear us—as well as raising wards around our little group.
We’ll be as safe as we can be. I’ll make sure of that.
And Vlad goes straight in for the kill. “What can you tell us about the vampire Jakob?”
Helen looks at me dispassionately, then back at Vlad. “That he’ll be more interested in your boy than you.”
A muscle in Vlad’s jaw ticks. “That is not what I am enquiring about. What do you know of him? Where might we find him if he is not at the club?”
“How should I know?”
“Because you are one of a handful of vampires left in this city and considering that Jakob is working with someone far more powerful than you or me, I can only presume that he has allowed you to stay.”
Two spots of colour appear on Helen’s pale cheeks. Right on the money, then.
“That’s not why.”
“Oh no? Why, then?”
“I just haven’t managed to leave yet.” Helen crosses her arms over her chest. “There were more of us months ago. Before he introduced us to her.”
“Introduced?”
Helen studies Vlad for a moment. “You’re from London?”
“Not the clan, but yes.”
“You know the clan, though?”
“Yes.”
“We had something like that here. Not so formal as theirs seems to be, but we could all work together. No one was fighting for territory. In the past few years, some vampires have gone back to where they were before the wars began, but we mostly like it here. There’s a large enough population to sustain us, and in the summer, they’re transient enough that we don’t raise suspicion. ”
Margot snorts. Helen glares at her.
“And a few months ago?”
“We hold our own kind of town meetings. Vampires and their attendants only. Jakob brought her with him three months ago. I don’t know what she is, but that power—” Helen shivers. “We all felt it. Some of the elders looked worried as soon as they saw her.”
“What did they say?”
“Jakob said she wanted to work with us. Do some research on vampires. They shut him down straight away. Not a chance.”
“And then?”
“And then two of our elders turned up dead. The next night, two more. She’d wiped them all out by the end of the week.”
“How do you know it was her?” I ask.
“She came and told us.”
I shiver. I can imagine it, though I’ve only met her twice. She wouldn’t care that she was telling a room full of vampires she’d killed the people they considered their leaders.
“Where might Jakob be?” Vlad asks Helen, impatience wearing his voice thin.
“He has a couple of houses. One near the club, but I don’t imagine he’ll be staying there because everyone knows about it.”
“The other?”
Helen studies all three of us for a moment. “Are you going to kill him?”
“If necessary,” Vlad says, which I think means yes. Sure, all creatures can fall under the sway of the fae—some more easily than others—but I looked into Jakob’s face and saw the truth. He’s a predator in all meanings of the word. He’s not safe to be left out alone.
Helen nods all the same and gives us an address. “He might not be there. He could well have other places I don’t know about.”
“It is good enough,” Vlad says. “You should be careful out here.”
“So should you,” Helen replies. She gives us a final distrustful look before she slips past us and walks away.
Margot sighs and leans back against the nearest building. “Now what? Do we go straight after him?”
“We should call Asher,” I say. “That address is over in the area they’re searching. If Jakob is there, Eirian might be with him.”
“Yes, all right. Let me just—” Vlad doesn’t finish the sentence because his phone rings before he can even fish it out of his pocket.