Chapter 3
Chapter
Three
When I woke up alone the following morning, a shaft of summer sunlight had landed on my face and was tickling my eyelids. I’d known that Thane was spending the night at his current flat and that She Who Commands Werewolves would be with him. He had his own work to do and I liked my personal space.
What I hadn’t expected was the absence of my own furry crew.
I rolled over and checked the time on my small wind-up alarm clock.
As soon as I registered that it was almost nine, I sat bolt upright.
I never usually slept this late – the cats never ever allowed me to sleep this late.
Something had to be desperately wrong for them to abandon their snuggly positions around me and their daily desperation for breakfast.
I was out of bed in a heartbeat, pulling on an old-T-shirt and some loose jogging bottoms. I flipped open the chest in the corner and grabbed my favourite curved dagger.
I hesitated over a gun and a few spell pouches but decided I couldn’t dally any longer.
Gripping the dagger tightly in my right hand, I edged to the bedroom door and peered out.
There was no sign of the cats; there was no sign of anything. The narrow hallway looked exactly as I’d left it. I slowed my breathing and listened. There were no untoward creaks, no sounds at all.
I licked my lips then carefully sniffed the air to scent anything new or out of place.
Your average Joe would be shocked at how their own natural body odour could give them away – that was something Montgomery hadn’t covered in his surveillance lessons.
Then again, he’d also repeated several times that it was against the law to enter a property uninvited and we were never to do so.
Unfortunately, it was hard to kill someone in their bed if you didn’t go into their house first, so it was one of many illegal activities of which I had intimate knowledge.
There were no strange smells in my house.
I adjusted my grip on the dagger and tiptoed out of the bedroom.
My house was unwarded; I saw no reason to go to the expense of putting magical barriers in place when I was more than capable of mounting my own defences against home intrusions.
With five cats, I certainly hadn’t installed booby traps in the way that Thane had often done.
What happened now was down to me and me alone.
I checked the kitchen: all clear. I slid into the living room.
The window was open to allow the cats to come and go as they wished, but it wasn’t wide enough to allow a human-sized creature to enter.
Nothing was off kilter so I nipped into the bathroom, the messy back room that held all my gear, and the hallway cupboard.
Nothing, nothing, nothing. But neither were there any cats. Not a whisker.
I padded towards the front door. I wasn’t afraid, not yet, but I was aware that adrenaline was pulsing through my system and making me tense.
If I didn’t find my damned cats soon, all hell would break loose.
If somebody had dared to harm them, I would hunt them to the ends of the earth; if somebody had tried to catnap them, I would kidnap them in turn. And worse.
I drew myself up, aware of every gram of my cat-lady rage, then reached for the door handle, pushed it down and flung open the door.
My body sagged as six pairs of feline eyes swivelled in my direction then flicked away again. Every single one of my furry little bastards was in the garden – and they weren’t alone. The handsome silver Maine Coon from yesterday had returned and he appeared to be holding court.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ I hissed. ‘I thought something terrible had happened!’
She Who Loves Sunbeams blinked and pulled herself away from the group to pad towards me. She wound around my ankles and glanced up, apology vibrating in her anxious purr. She was joined a moment later by three of the others; only She Without An Ear and the Maine Coon stayed where they were.
Feeling like a nagging, over-protective mother, I glared at them. ‘Breakfast time!’ I said loudly.
She Without An Ear flicked me a look of contemptuous pity that I probably deserved then she rose, gave the Maine Coon a delicate lick and slowly returned to the house.
I waited until she was inside before I fixed the silver cat with a stern look.
Maybe he wasn’t fully feral after all. ‘If you want breakfast too, you can come in.’
He didn’t move a muscle. Although he didn’t look directly at me, I knew he was very aware of my presence but he wasn’t giving me anything. There wasn’t even an indication of his name, which was usually the easiest thing to glean from any cat, feral or otherwise.
I took a step towards him and he growled once before vanishing into the supposed safety of the rose bush. Hmm. I waited another moment or two but he remained hidden.
I loosened my hold on my dagger and went back inside. The cats sat in the hallway and watched me. ‘Alright.’ I folded my arms. ‘What can you tell me about him?’
All five of them gazed innocently up at me.
‘She Who Loves Sunbeams?’
Her whiskers quivered but otherwise she didn’t respond.
‘She Without An Ear? You obviously like that silver boy and…’ The tabby cat interrupted me with a soft hiss. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘He’s not a boy.’ Calling the Maine Coon a man felt inappropriate, though. ‘What can you tell me about that silver … cat?’
All I received was a long stare of typical feline derision. Oh well. I’d tried.
I put down five bowls of kibble, lacing each one with some of the expensive cat caviar that Thane had made the mistake of leaving behind in one of my cupboards, then I took another bowl outside.
There was no sign of the Maine Coon but I placed the bowl down by the rose bush; doubtless he’d reappear soon enough.
I suspected I’d be seeing a great deal more of that handsome silver demon in the near future.
I waved a friendly good morning to my next-door neighbour Dave, who was scowling at me through his window, then ambled inside. Vampires were naturally nocturnal and I wasn’t due to enter the Understream until much later, so the day was mine to spend as I wished.
I grinned. Oh, the hard, hard life of an early retiree.
I presented myself at the clocktower on the fringes of the Glebe a little after eight o’clock in the evening.
According to Alan, there were no direct entrances to the Understream in Danksville itself, though I doubted that was true.
It was more likely that the vampires didn’t want me to know the location of the nearest doorways, but I had no reason to argue and I didn’t mind the walk.
The sun wasn’t due to set for another hour and the air was warm despite the breeze rolling in from the nearby River Tweed.
It was true that occasional whiffs of something unpleasant and rotting reached my nostrils but that was par for the course in this neighbourhood.
It simply meant that I walked a little faster.
The clocktower had been constructed by the Church of the Masked God around thirty years earlier.
At the time people had declared it an ugly monstrosity, and it was certainly remarkably phallic in appearance; it didn’t help that the clock face was purple or that the stonework on the outside looked like bulging veins from a distance.
Despite that, locals had grown to embrace the building and view it with deep affection.
When the Church of the Masked God had proposed tearing it down in favour of building a grander tower, there had been loud protests.
I wondered if some of those protestors had included vampires. If the clocktower contained an entrance to the Understream, they would want it to remain untouched. Either way, I was rather fond of it myself – even if its nickname was the mildly crude ‘The Tadger’, Scottish slang for a penis.
There was a wooden door on the north side of the clocktower that I’d never given much thought to before now.
If I had noticed it, I’d have assumed it was for an horologist to gain entrance to maintain the clock’s workings.
Usually it was secured by a magicked padlock that Alan had told me was warded to deter trespassers, but this night it had been left unlocked.
‘That’s because you’re special, Kit,’ I muttered under my breath.
I grinned with a tinge of self-consciousness, then gently pushed open the door to reveal the narrow, darkened interior.
I cast a glance behind me to make sure nobody was nearby to witness my entry before I ducked my head to avoid hitting the door frame and walked inside.
Closing the door behind me, I reached into my rucksack and pulled out the glass bottle I’d put into it earlier. When I tapped it, there was a pleasing clinking sound; a moment later the bottle started to glow as the dancing witchlights inside it woke up.
Their light wasn’t particularly strong but it was more than enough for my needs, and it would help my eyes adjust to the dimness that I would encounter once I was in the Understream.
There was little to see inside the clocktower.
I ignored the narrow winding staircase that led upwards and focused on the floorboards.
If I hadn’t known better I’d have ignored them because they merely looked like scuffed wooden planks.
I knelt down, brushed my fingertips across their surface and, when I concentrated, I felt the faint hum of contained magic.
The vamps took the secrecy of the Understream very seriously.
I straightened up and thudded my heel against the wood. The resulting sound wasn’t one of a hollow space. Impressive; they’d thought of everything when they’d concealed this entrance.