The Four Realms (25 page)

"Look," he said nervously.
 
"All I know is that the empire brought in a couple of their top people.
 
I'm talking about Crimsons, you know, Imperial Guard, elite of the elite.
 
Dunno why or for how long, all I got asked for is to find a place for them to hole up."

"And where was that?" Joseph asked.

"Are you crazy?
 
You pay them a call like you did Larry and me, they're not gonna hesitate to make you disappear."

"We'll be the judge of that," Maureen said.
 
"Where?"

The elf sighed.

"OK, but I didn't tell you.
 
The empire don't pay much for what little I feed them, but I'd like to keep that income.
 
Just outside the city to the East, there's a farm, called Mullens.
 
It's tucked away a bit from the main road, but that was kinda the idea.
 
Run by a centaur named Xenig.
 
He's got no love for the humans but he ain't exactly the Empire's biggest fan.
 
He's looking after them."

"And what are they here for?"
 
Joseph asked.
 
"Must be important to send out the Imperial Guard."

The elf scoffed.
 
"Like they'd tell me.
 
It's not like my lifestyle is exactly approved by the Crimsons.
 
Heck, they're probably some of the biggest religious whackos in the whole empire.
 
They just got me to set up contact with Xenig and kept me as far away as possible."

Joseph stood up.
 
"Well thank you Brommi, it's been most entertaining."

"Yeah, well, don't come back.
 
I lost my fuck for the night."
 
As soon as he said it, he flashed Maureen a worried look, before returning his gaze to Joseph.
 
"An elf's gotta eat."

Maureen wondered if this was some coded wording for Brommi expecting to be paid for the information, but if it was Joseph either ignored it or was ignorant of it.

Maureen said nothing as they left the club, only throwing Larry McNally a glare as he emerged from the toilets as she walked past.
 
Whatever he was currently thinking, he elected to keep to himself.
 
Probably best, she thought.

They walked out into the street, the last recesses of night now banished by the sun, and made their way along it.

They'd gone some way before Joseph darted into a side alley, Maureen following.

"Oh my God," his serious face exploding into laughter.
 
"What did you do to Larry McNally?"

"I warned him not to keep swearing," Maureen stated.

"You do realise he's well connected to the New Salisbury underworld?"

Maureen shrugged.
 
"I refuse to be intimidated anymore."
 
Besides she thought, by the end of the day she'd be back in her house, far away from where anyone could find her.

"You want to go back home?"
 
Joseph asked.

"No.
 
I want to go find that farmhouse."

"Now?"

"There's no time like the present, Joseph."

"You realise if there are Imperial Guards in there, they're not going to worry about killing a little old lady and a troll to keep whatever they're up to a secret?"

"It had crossed my mind, Joseph, yes."

She was feeling invulnerable right now and she knew that was a dangerous emotion to have.
 
She tried to calm herself by taking a few deep breaths, but the urge to carry on persisted.
 
Whether it was out of wanting justice for Ernest or just her thrill seeking, she didn't know; probably a bit of both.

Whatever her reasons, she wanted to get to the bottom of this, find out why Ernest had been murdered, possibly even bring his killer - or killers - to justice.

"OK, we'll go if you want," Joseph said after a bit of thought.
 
"But we need to be careful."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - The Minibus

"Come on, Cassidy,” said Darwin.
 
"Keep up."

He couldn't help but throw glances over his shoulder, expecting to see the man at the door running after him.
 
To be fair, Cassidy could sense the urgency and was doing her best to keep pace.

They needed to get far away and fast.
 
What they needed was a car.
 
The problem with that idea was that Darwin couldn't drive, and he was pretty sure that Cassidy couldn't either.
 
Great, so not only did he have to steal something he didn't know how to drive and do it without the owners finding out, he also needed to do it before Mr East's friends caught up with him.

He tried to tell himself he was being paranoid, that it was just the men come to read the meter or something, but there had been that one that tried to sneak round the back, that explosion.
 
No, Darwin
, he told himself,
this is very much real.
 
They've found you and are on your heels
.

How had they followed him here to Nanny Voodoo's?
 
Was she all right?
 
Had the explosion been her doing magic?
 
Let's see Cassidy scoff about women and magic in this realm now
.
 
His mind was racing, as they darted along roads, down little footpaths that ran through the estate.
 
He scanned around everywhere for something they could steal: a car, a moped, heck, even a mountain bike.

"Cass, I know you're out of favour with them above, but really, we could use a little divine inspiration right now," he gasped.

Normally she would have smiled or her eyes twinkled at such a comment, but not at the moment.
 
The facade was gone for now and those eyes that looked back at him were old and solemn and sad.
 
Shame, he thought, her scattiness, her humour, calmed him, kept his head level, and allowed him to think.

Car, Darwin told himself.
 
Car.
 
The road they were running down all had BMWs or Audis parked on the drives.
 
Good luck getting past the anti-theft devices
, he thought to himself mockingly.
 
But there was something parked in a drive at the end of the cul-de-sac onto which they'd just emerged.
 
He started running toward it.

It was an old minibus, old enough that the design looked dated.
 
The name of the local scout troop was badly painted on the side.
 
Not only was it about the only vehicle on the estate it would be possible to break into, but it occurred to Darwin that it was big enough to ferry his people from where they were congregating in Walthamstow to wherever they decided they would then go.
 
If he turned up with a minibus, that would impress them.
 
They'd thank him, call him a hero, treat him as one of their own.

"We're taking this," he decreed to Cassidy.

"Really?" she asked.
 
"I mean, if you were looking for the world's slowest escape vehicle, I s'pose..."

Darwin tried the driver's door.
 
It opened.
 
He waited a second for the sound of any alarm.
 
None came.

"Get in," he said, glad that the owners had deemed the vehicle so worthless they'd not bothered locking it.
 
Now if only they'd left the ignition key.
 
He searched the sun visors, checked the glove box, but he was out of luck.
 
It had been too much to hope for.

"Pop the bonnet," Cassidy said.
 
Darwin noticed that she wasn't in the passenger seat as he'd instructed but standing by the open driver's side door.

"What you doing?" he asked as he did as instructed.

Cassidy ran round to the front of the vehicle and started playing with the engine.
 
"Just never ask me how I know this stuff, OK?"

Before Darwin could answer the minibus spluttered into life.
 
He reached for the accelerator and nudged it slightly to help the engine along.
 
Cassidy slammed the bonnet shut and ran round to the driver's side.

"Budge over!" she said.

"But..." he started to protest.

"Can you drive?"

"No, but..."

"Then budge over!"

Darwin did as he was told, as Cassidy got in and closed the driver's side door with a slam.

"Hold on," she said with a smirk.

The minibus swerved backward onto the road.
 
Fast enough to almost cause Darwin to fall into Cassidy's lap but not fast enough to cause the wheels to squeal.
 
They didn't, after all, want to alert the entire neighbourhood to their theft.

Cassidy yanked the gear stick into first and they shot off at a speed that felt spritely given the age of the vehicle.

"Do you know the way out of the estate?" she asked.

"No," Darwin replied fumbling with his seatbelt.

"Great."

Over the years Darwin had seen many different facets to Cassidy's personality.
 
There was Cassidy the girl, two left feet and quirky remarks, the personality that Darwin knew the best.
 
Then there was Cassidy the fallen angel, solemn wise and rarely shown as if it was part of a world she was trying to forget.
 
But this Cassidy that now roared round the streets, trying to make their escape was different, a facet of her he'd never seen before.

"Where did you learn to drive?" he asked.

"It's not important," she replied, her voice tinged with a little sadness.

"Cass, come on.
 
No secrets, remember?"
 
Darwin had never felt that Cassidy had been entirely honest with him, deflecting the questions asked.
 
But he'd never minded as it didn't make him feel so bad about deflecting her questions about him.

Cassidy sighed and pulled at the neck of her T-Shirt, exposing part of her shoulder and what looked like a circular scar?

"You were shot?
 
Jesus, Cassidy what the hell did you do to piss off Heaven."

"Not me, bozo," she said, pulling into yet another random road in an effort to find their way out of this maze.
 
"The original Cassidy.
 
She wasn't a particularly nice person."

"You have all her memories?"

"It's still her brain."

"That's a bit freaky if you ask me."

She flashed him a smile.
 
"I didn't," she said with a wink.

They emerged onto a road beside the beach, although high banks to their right obscured their view of the sea, even from their elevated position in the minibus.

"We're out," Darwin said excitedly.

A long flat stretch of road in front of her, Cassidy accelerated, able to pick up a bit more speed.

Darwin saw them first.
 
The two men from Nanny Voodoo's house darting out of a footpath onto the road ahead.
 
He recognised the one with the scraggily beard as the one he'd spoken to, and assumed the smartly dressed one was the one whose silhouette he'd seen going round the back.
 
He looked remarkably like Mr East.
 
Could he have survived the fall into the gateway?
 
He wasn't sure what had happened at Nanny Voodoo's but they were cut and bloody.
 

The bearded man, hand tucked into his jacket, hesitated but the other man, the one who looked the spitting image of Mr East, jumped out in front of the minibus as if he expected to stop it.
 
Even if Cassidy had slammed on the brakes she would not have stopped in time.

Given he did so just a few metres in front of the speeding vehicle, Cassidy didn't even have time to react.
 
She hit him passenger's side and screamed as he exploded into a mass of red, black and tentacles.

"Keep driving,” Darwin screamed, as bits of flesh and cephalopod fell off the bonnet and windscreen.

"But, we need to go back for Nanny Voodoo."
 
Cassidy was now crying.

"She's gone.
 
Keep driving."

He hated himself for saying it, as if in doing so he'd killed any hope of her still being alive.
 
But if he hadn't, he would have been telling Cassidy to turn round and go back.
 
It was taking everything he had to stop telling her to do so.
 
He had to assume that if both of the people from the front door were here, either there were more people at Nanny Voodoo's, or Nanny Voodoo was no longer around.
 
Either way, he couldn't help her.
 
She hadn't helped them escape, only for them to waste the opportunity by getting themselves killed.
 
No, they had to go on, get away from here, get to the other vampires, and get the hell out of this realm.
 
That didn't make him feel any less of a bastard though.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - The Farmhouse

On the West side of New Salisbury, the city had long exceeded the limits of the old city walls.
 
Its proximity to the harbour had meant that it had been simple fishermen who were the first to build their homes on the flood plains outside of the city.
 
But as their numbers grew, so did the number of commercial premises, until it looked no different to the streets on the inside of the wall.

On the East side it was a different story.
 
There the walls had managed to contain urban sprawl, such that it was possible to leave by the East gate, cross the bridge and find yourself in the countryside.
 
It was here that Maureen and Joseph walked along roads, as the morning sun beat down and reflected back up at them from the chalk underfoot.