A Life Less Ordinary (27 page)

I nodded. “There were a handful of vampires who took over the organisation and used their powers to create a secure base for themselves,” Master Revels said. “Their headquarters was accidentally bombed during the invasion of Italy in the Second World War and the survivors scattered. Their great defence is that no one really believes in vampires...”

He looked back at the bed and swore aloud. It was empty. I jumped to my feet in shock, realising that the girl had somehow woven a spell around us – us – and used the distraction as a chance to escape. Master Revels was on his feet, holding up one hand as he reached out with his senses, looking for the vampire. A moment later, I saw her, her angelic face contorted with fury as she lashed out at him. He caught her blow on his cane and drew back his hand to throw a spell, but she was gone, moving so quickly that she was a blur.

“This way,” he snapped. I followed him as he ran down the corridor, wondering how many vampire powers the girl was going to be able to access quickly. If she ran outside and just fled for her life, she would be halfway across the city before the sun started to come up...but then, would she be able to find shelter? Vampires couldn’t enter a house without permission from the people inside. “I took a few precautions...”

The interior of the hospital seemed colder somehow, although I told myself that I was imagining it. It was hard to concentrate on probing the building while I was running, but I kept picking up traces of her presence. She seemed to be shimmering in and out of existence, as if she were transforming from human form to mist, all the while remaining within the building. It made me wonder what she was thinking, or even if she was thinking at all. We plunged down the stairs after her, heedless of the danger. Whatever the Thirteen wanted with her, she had to be stopped before she started tearing her way through mundane children.

“Stay alert and keep checking everything,” Master Revels ordered, as we reached the basement. It was colder here, cold enough to make goose bumps rise on my arms, even though it wasn’t as cold as winter. Something touched my nostrils and I winced. I could smell blood. “She’s already found one victim.”

I had a spell prepared in my mind before we turned the corner and looked into the morgue. The girl was sitting on one of the tables, her lips burrowed into the throat of a handsome young man, whose eyes were wide with shock. I saw immediately that he wouldn’t be coming back as a vampire, if only because her jaws were burrowed so tightly within his throat that he would die the moment she pulled away from him. She turned around, the hospital gown tearing as she moved, to stare at us, her red eyes dark and cold. I could see nothing human within her gaze. Her face had warped unnaturally. Blood dripped from around her lips and onto the floor.

“Put him down,” Master Revels said, calmly. I looked at him in surprise and then realised that he was trying to calm her down. It felt like a waste of time, but perhaps it would make capturing and destroying her easier. She moved so quickly. “Is there anything in there that remembers being human? Do you remember your mother, or your father, or your pet dog...?”

Dawn lifted her lips from the young man’s throat, one hand holding his body upright effortlessly. I watched in horror as his head tumbled over and fell towards the ground, spilling blood everywhere. It should have clotted, but there was something in vampire saliva that prevented blood from clotting. It was a very efficient design in its own way. I wished I knew how vampires had come into existence originally, although it was probably some kind of curse. The centaur folk’s mere existence was the result of a particularly nasty curse, way back before the birth of Jesus Christ.

“Food,” she said. There was nothing human in her voice. Her red eyes bored into mine and I felt her mind reaching out, trying to dominate me. My legs trembled, but somehow I held my own and broke the connection. She wasn’t going to get me the same way twice. “I need food.”

“I know you need food,” Master Revels said. I shuddered as I saw her tongue flicking out to lick at the headless corpse. “We can give you food, but we need you to put him down and come with us quietly and...”

She moved like lightning, her hands shifting into claws as she came right at me. I panicked and threw a fireball into her face, but it seemed to have no effect on her. She landed on me and knocked me over backwards, her jaws opening wide and reaching for my throat. I felt raw magic boiling up within me and flaring out, throwing her right across the room. Her form shifted, became a haze of mist, and moved back towards me. I summoned a second spell and threw it right through the mist. There was no effect.

“Here,” Master Revels said. He was holding a tiny container, one of those we had picked up from the Silent Order. A single word and the magic in the jar blossomed loose, reaching out towards the mist and pulling her into the container. I thought that we had her for a second before her physical form suddenly congealed and she came right at us. Master Revels ducked and her claws sliced through the air above his head; I was less lucky. A hand slammed into me and sent me flying across the room. My head banged into one of the tables and I saw stars spinning in front of me.

Dawn span towards me, reaching out for my throat again. A second later, her form glowed with magic and burst apart in flames, ashes falling down on the floor. They mingled with the blood and seemed to spin again and again before finally collapsing into dust. Master Revels didn’t take chances. Muttering spells – as I lay there on the floor, stunned – he swept up all the bloody remains and consigned them to a pocket dimension. Blood could – sometimes – allow a slain vampire to reconstitute itself from nothing. This time, there would be no room for her to reanimate.

My head was still unsteady and I felt sick. I tried to focus my mind enough to perform a healing spell, yet nothing seemed to work properly. Blood seemed to be rushing through my head, blurring my vision...or perhaps I was just imagining it. It was so hard to focus...

I felt soft hands touching my head. I groped for a name. “Cardonel?”

“I’m afraid not,” Master Revels said, dryly. I was too dizzy to flush. “You’re concussed, among other things. Don’t try to cast any spells in that condition. Just relax and let me work on you.”

Slowly, the pain faded away, leaving me shaky, but able to stand upright. He held my arm until my legs agreed to support me, although they kept threatening to go on strike at any moment. I hoped that he hadn’t drawn any conclusions from what I’d said, but it seemed unlikely. I told myself that it was none of his business who I allowed into my bed and tried to push the matter aside.

“You did all right,” Master Revels said, as we staggered together down the Wizard’s Freeway. I hated to think about the hospital staff coming into work and discovering the mess. Somehow I managed to mumble something to that effect. “I’ll ask Dervish to take care of it. He owes me a favour...”

A wave of heat struck us as we stepped back into the magical world. A building was burning, right in front of us. And then there was someone shouting in my ear as a new wave of dizziness ran through me.

“The Rationalists,” he was shouting. His words seemed to rattle around my skull. “Their building is on fire!”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Be quiet,” Master Revels ordered, sharply. My head was still spinning and I could barely think. The heat was tearing away at my mind. “Get her a healing potion, now!”

My mind swam. The next thing I felt was a pair of hands holding me and a vial of some kind being pressed against my lips. I drank and a warm feeling shimmered through my body. A moment later, my head cleared and I opened my eyes. I hadn’t even realised that they were closed. Ahead of us, a building was burning brightly, with strange hints of magic pouring through the fire.

“That was a healing potion with sufficient power to heal death itself,” a voice said. I looked up into the calm face of a middle-aged lady with grey hair and brilliant blue eyes. I liked her on sight, if only because she reminded me of an ideal mother or aunt. “How are you feeling?”

“Much better,” I said. It was true. The aches and pains that had plagued me since the brief battle with the vampire had faded away to nothing. “What are the side effects?”

The aged witch shrugged. “Get some sleep as soon as possible and don’t try to wake up,” she said, dryly. “Let your body recuperate on its own and then wake up. Get plenty of rest and relaxation over the next few days. You should be fine.”

“Thank you,” I said, pulling myself to my feet. I felt better than fine. I hadn’t felt so sharp since...I couldn’t remember ever feeling so good. At the back of my mind, there was a little voice reminding me that feeling so good was probably an effect of the potion, but I ignored it. “That was a very good potion.”

The witch smiled. “My small reputation as a potions brewer is confirmed,” she said. There was an alarmingly loud crackle from the building and I turned to see part of it collapse into the flames. The flames themselves were far from natural. There was something truly eerie about them. “Your master is over there, if you wish to speak to him.”

She pointed one long finger towards Master Revels, who was standing some distance away, his hands clasped behind his back. He was staring up at the fire, his features illuminated oddly in the flickering light. I started to walk over to him, glancing from face to face in the crowd. There was no one that I recognised, but in the fire I could make out just how many of them wore illusions to conceal and protect their inhuman natures. Several of them, I realised with a shudder, were vampires. I wondered if they knew that we had killed one of their own only a few hours ago. Or perhaps they didn’t really care. I had no idea how the vampires organised themselves within the magical world. Maybe the ones who hunted in the mundane world were their renegades.

And besides, the vampires weren’t the weirdest creatures who had come out to watch the fire. There were a group of mermen and mermaids, floating inside spheres of water that surrounded and protected them; werewolves hiding their natures behind illusions, a pair of centaurs watching from the edge of the crowd and a strange-looking little man wearing an Irish costume. There was a woman wearing a veil and I wondered if she was one of Dervish’s people, until I looked and saw her eyes. Whatever she was, she was very definitely not human. I looked away quickly and walked over to Master Revels. He smiled at me – he was relieved, I thought – when he saw that I was walking upright without help.

“If you feel bad, tell me and you can go home to bed,” he said, shortly. I shook my head. I had never seen a large fire in my life and besides, it was bringing all kinds of life out onto the streets. I watched in some astonishment as a gargoyle started to move as the flames threatened to spread further, dropping feathers from its gaping mouth as it clambered down the side of the building and into the night. It, I realised, ate the city’s population of pigeons and seagulls to sustain itself. “Tell me what you make of the fire.”

I turned and looked towards the fire. There was something odd about it, something I knew I ought to recognise, yet I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I could sense magic flaring through the fire, with bursts of raw magic flickering through my awareness – the crowd made noises as the bursts of magic passed over them – and then fading away, only to be renewed seconds later. I leaned backwards and gasped in astonishment as the picture fell into place. The flames themselves were alive. I was staring up at a massive demonic face hidden within the flames.

“A fire demon,” Master Revels said, when I told him. He sounded more excited than I would have expected. I was starting to realise that part of him lived for the challenge of encountering and overcoming new and dangerous threats. “I’ve never seen a fire demon before, not even when I was caught up in the Hellfire War.”

I blinked. “What was the Hellfire War?

“I’ll explain later,” Master Revels said, shaking his head. “The fire demons cannot live on our plane for long, which means that some idiot managed to summon this one and bind it to this location. We know that because if they had failed to bind it to one location, half of this part of the magical world would be on fire by now and it would probably spread into the mundane world. On the other hand, unless they managed to construct the wards just right, it isn’t going to remain bound there forever.”

“And that means that it can escape,” I finished. Master Revels nodded. I’d read about demons getting loose on Earth and countless other worlds in the books and very few of those stories ended well. The demons had no sense of human morals and were terrifyingly powerful. Entire worlds had died because of their antics and several dimensions were demonic kingdoms, in all but name. “How do we send it back to hell?”

“Carefully,” Master Revels said. He reached out and beckoned to someone standing at the other side of the fire. The target of his gaze stepped forward, moving as if he would rather be facing the dentist than Master Revels, and stopped in front of us. He was a short overweight man wearing a stained white lab coat and a pair of eye-protectors. It was a shame that he hadn’t managed to protect his face, for parts of it were marked and scarred. Whatever he had looked like when he had started as a Rationalist – he had to be a Rationalist, no one else would wear lab clothes as a uniform of sorts – he was forever marked now. I could sense strange magic woven into his clothes, providing a form of protection. It was clearly imperfect.

Master Revels ignored his appearance. “So, Calculator,” he said, calmly. “What were you trying to do that brought a fire demon to this world?”

Calculator looked as if he didn’t want to answer any questions, but something in Master Revels’ gaze convinced him to talk. “We weren’t running any experiments,” he said, slowly, as if every word was being forced out of him. There was no Compulsion involved, I realised; Calculator just didn’t want to talk. “There were no experiments in progress when all the alarms started to sound and that...thing appeared in our private world.”

Something clicked in my head. The building was far larger on the inside than on the outside, a common feature of buildings within the magical world. No wonder it was taking so long to burn down, even though it seemed to be completely enveloped in flame. I looked up and saw the eyes of the demon, staring down at the puny humans surrounding it and laughing. There was nothing human – or sane – in those eyes. It seemed to laugh at us, even though it was bound, a chilling reminder that if it broke free it would never be contained again. Whoever had summoned it to our world was mad. A demon might have to keep whatever bargains it made with the human who summoned it to this world, but the devil was always in the small print. You’d have to be a fool to bargain with a demon and expect to come out of the deal ahead, or even alive.