Serafina and the Silent Vampire

CHAPTER Nineteen


“My God,” Jilly said. “There must be a hundred of them.”

She and Jack stood at either side of Sera and Melanie, who’d taken their places at the table under the window. Elspeth stood silently behind, while Tam stood in the doorway, from where he could also see the front door.

“What are they doing?” Jack asked uneasily.

“Just talking, I think… Shite.”

Sera jumped as Blair’s allies leapt out of the trees. She recognized Phil—that had to be him with his inevitable bottle. She reached out with one hand and grasped Melanie’s.

“Now?” Mel asked. Her voice was hoarse.

“Soon.”

Melanie slipped the elastic band over her left wrist to hold the rowan twigs in place. Then she took the bone in her left hand and buried it in the tray of earth. Her other hand gripped Sera’s convulsively.

Sera saw Phil casually pass the bottle. It even crossed her mind that his wits were too addled to appreciate their danger. But then, as if Blair had ignited it by thought, the bottle went up in flames, and Phil hurled it into the crowd of banking vampires.

And the voice that even now could set her very bones on fire spoke inside her head with the calm triumph of total belief. Now’s your moment, Serafina. Begin.

“Now, Mel,” she whispered.

Melanie’s breath shuddered, but when she began to intone the words, her voice was clear and firm. Sera concentrated on it, drew her energy into herself. Every emotion, positive and negative, all her love and affection, desire, disappointment, anger, even fear, she thought into pure energy and sent it shooting down her arm into Melanie’s fingers.

Mel jerked but didn’t let go. Her voice grew louder, and the link between them, now it was established, kept drawing the energy from Sera. As it flowed into Melanie, she felt herself contract, reached out for more energy, for the emotion and fears and hopes of the others. Their thoughts too became her energy and were sucked out of her into Melanie.

She’d done the easy part, with people she knew. She focused her eyes on the window once more, became aware of the melee of flying bodies and screaming voices. Searching for another link, a consciousness to ground her there, she found Blair, fighting and spinning in the maelstrom, and she let the curious happiness of his presence wash through her. She reached through him for his lust and his rage and was thrown backward in her chair so hard she nearly lost Melanie’s hand.

Somewhere, she knew the doorbell was ringing, but she couldn’t concentrate on that. Instead, she felt Blair in her mind, calming her so that she could bear the force of his energy, accept it, and pass it on. Through him she seemed to expand, to feel the vampires’ energy in general terms: hate and violence, the sheer love of violence, enough to break her heart. But she held firm, united with Mel’s hand and Mel’s voice, as her friend leached energy from her like a vampire sucking blood.

****

She was a natural, Blair thought proudly as he tore at a vampire’s throat and hurled his body at another before it exploded into dust. He’d already summoned his second rank of vampires, wild Davie well to the fore, so there wasn’t one of them not fighting to supply Sera with the energy necessary to destroy their master. It was a neat, pleasing plan, and it was working to perfection.

Or at least, he thought it was until he saw Smith.

The sorcerer, Sera’s father, stood aloof from the fighting. No one even troubled to try to attack him. Blair had told everyone there was no point. So Smith stood to one side, watching the battle with growing anxiety, a wooden stake in either hand which, presumably, he meant to use on any vampires not his own. Although, in the darkness and carnage of this battle, Blair had no idea how he would identify friend from enemy.

But Smith was psychic, and he was sensitive. He could feel the magic happening around him. Blair saw him scanning the park, then actually close his eyes as if he were trying to find the source by psychic means. And then, slowly, he turned and lifted his gaze toward the tenements overlooking the park.

“Sera!” he screamed.

Blair laughed. He wished it was vocal so that it would echo around the park instead of just inside the minds of his friends and Smith and Arthur and the few vampires present capable of hearing him.

With Smith’s cry, Arthur seemed to catch on too. He disengaged and swung around to follow Smith’s gaze. Then he was talking, snarling out orders, and suddenly, Blair was beset by vampires, as if as one they’d left off their other opponents and turned on him. He killed or felled the first few, but when they leapt on his back and hurled themselves into him from all sides, he knew he had to go under, however hard he fought.

As he fell under the sheer mass, he saw Arthur dragging Ella by the hand. They leapt up above the trees and over the wall to the road, heading, unmistakably, for Jilly’s flat. And several vampires, the few who weren’t crushing Blair to death or engaging with his allies, raced after them in support.

****

Off duty but still eternally inquisitive, Alex McGowan had been waiting in his car opposite Jillian Kerr’s flat in Royal Park Terrace when the noise began. Curious, he got out of his car and ran along the road until he could find a place to peer over the wall into the park. It looked like a gang fight. And yet the only sounds were the slapping of skin, the cracking of bones, the rushing and occasional thud of feet on grass. These gangs were fighting in bizarre silence.

McGowan already had his phone out to call for assistance when a figure caught his eye.

Blair. Unmistakably, the man he’d first seen waiting for Sera MacBride in Muirhouse, and then, later, lounging on her sofa. If he was her bodyguard, he was a damned good one, leaping through the air like a circus act and kicking with enough force to kill.

Shite, he’d been right to be alarmed by the presence of Andy Kerr. Wherever that little weasel turned up, there was always trouble. Alex couldn’t begin to understand what the connection was with Sera or with the Fountainbridge fire, but he was sure there was one. And presumably whoever Blair was fighting was threatening Sera and her friends.

Alex slid back down the wall and spoke rapidly into his phone, reporting the major disturbance even as he ran back along the street to Jilly’s flat. The buzzer was answered surprisingly quickly by a posh, male voice.

“Police,” Alex snapped.

The door released immediately, and he ran upstairs three at a time. A large man filled one of the flat doors.

“Looking for Jillian Kerr’s flat,” Alex said curtly.

“Jilly’s busy,” the large man said. “Can you come back later?”

“No, I bloody can’t,” Alex said impatiently and pushed past the big man. Or at least he tried to push past, but in fact he might as well have been shoving at a twelve-ton rock for all the man moved. Worse, he was sure they both knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on legally and would be crucified if any case came to court out of this. But instinct was propelling him forward, insisting he find out what the hell was going on here. And perhaps there was guilt too, because he’d set out to persecute Sera MacBride and now found himself wanting desperately to protect her.

So he and the big man stood chest to chest, glaring at each other, neither budging an inch.

“Tam. Just let him in,” another male voice said urgently. It sounded like the posh one who had answered the buzzer. “He can wait in the kitchen for Jilly. Oh, it’s you.”

Alex had been recognized by Sera’s other assistant, Jack Urquhart.

Jack grinned as Tam moved reluctantly to one side. “Sorry. They don’t call him ‘the Tank’ for nothing.”

“What’s going on?” Alex demanded. “Do you know there’s a huge fight in the park across the road?”

Jack nodded. He didn’t appear shocked.

“Is Sera MacBride here too?” Or was she, God help her, in the park itself?

“Yes, she’s busy,” Jack said hastily, “but she won’t be long.”

For the first time, as his panting breath calmed down, Alex became aware of a loud voice close by—not shouting, precisely, more—declaiming. “What the…?”

He strode in the direction of the noise, nimbly avoiding the simultaneous lunges of Tam and Jack, and found himself in a living room. In a very strange world.

Jilly herself and the receptionist from Serafina’s stood side by side, confronting him. They weren’t doing the chanting, but it was definitely in this room. Alex leapt sideways. So did they, to cover whatever they were hiding, but it was too late.

He’d already seen Sera holding hands with another woman, who was declaiming in Shakespearean tones. Both women’s attention seemed to be riveted on the window, through which even Alex could see the fight in the park.

Alex was familiar with the “someone walking over his grave” feeling. But he’d never before felt as if someone stamped on it and jumped up and down. Wild, impossible ideas filled his head, not least of which was that the women were connected to what was happening in the park.

“Shite,” he whispered. “Are they—causing that? What the hell’s going on?”

He lunged forward, but Jilly leapt into his path once more. Her face was white, determined, and desperate.

The older woman actually caught his arm and held on with surprising strength. “Wait,” she said urgently. “It’s nearly over.”

“What is, for God’s sake? Stop this now!”

“Tam!” Jilly yelled, grabbing his other arm. Between them, the women were strong enough to hold him back, but not for long. Tam, however, was a different story, so while the insane chanting continued as if approaching some kind of crescendo, Alex shoved with all his strength in the hope of getting past the women before Tam yanked him back again.

He’d just broken free when there was a terrific crash of glass and splintering wood. It came from another room, and even as Alex froze, Tam skidded to a halt on the wooden floor and dashed back the way he’d come. Jack was in front of him.

“Use the stakes, Tam!” Jilly yelled.

Alex hesitated. The receptionist, Elspeth, was staring at him, her eyes pleading and deathly serious. “Please,” she said. “Help us protect them. It’s our only chance.”

“Protect who?” Totally at sea, Alex couldn’t even pretend to understand.

“Sera and Melanie.”

“Elspeth, what’s wrong with her?” Jilly cried, suddenly. She was crouching beside Sera, staring at her boss’s face while, Alex noticed, not getting in the way of the window. Alex moved toward her while Elspeth moved hastily to the other side. A shout and some crashing came from the room next door.

The other woman, Melanie, was still chanting, growing impossibly loud. Her voice sent shivers down Alex’s spine yet seemed to lift him upward with some powerful emotion he didn’t understand or want to. But it was Sera’s face that held him. White and wide-eyed, she stared at the window with such concentration that her normally vital face had lost all expression. And yet tears trickled down either side of her face.

“She’s crying,” Elspeth said. A huge bump came from the room next door, vibrating the floor under Alex’s feet.

“But why?” Jilly said. “Is she in pain?”

Elspeth turned and gazed out the window at the fight below. Much of the carnage seemed to have calmed into a ridiculous pile of men. Even as Alex watched, more jumped on the top. For the first time, he noticed that their movements were—wrong. They ran too fast, jumped too high. He felt as if he were watching a nightmare.

Elspeth said, “I think Blair’s under there.”

“F*ck,” said Jilly. “Will he—die?”

“She thinks so. Jilly, is that your door?” Elspeth jumped away in sudden fright.

Alex didn’t blame her. Three men seemed to catapult into the room. Elspeth and Jilly both snatched something from the desk. Alex thought at first they were knives, then saw they were just thick wooden sticks, sharpened to a dangerous point. What the hell? Wishing he had his police baton with him, he advanced with his fists curled.

“Police,” he shouted. “Who are you and what do you want?”

The men smiled. All three of them wore Halloween vampire teeth.

Jilly leapt past him in a flying kick that took the first man in the chest, knocking him over. The second grabbed her by the front of her shirt as she landed, and she stabbed him with her sharp stick.

“No!” Alex shouted in horror. But it was too late. He saw the blood spurt and then, for no reason, it was gone.

I’m dreaming. I have to be. None of this is possible.

But it seemed he couldn’t wake up. The third intruder lunged at Jilly, and Elspeth jumped on his back, her stick raised. The first one, whom Jilly had kicked over, lunged at Alex, knocking him to the floor and snarling at him like some kind of wild animal, trying to bite at his throat with gnashing, slavering teeth.

Alex shoved at the man’s face and caught sight of Sera above him. Her gaze flickered to him and away. Melanie’s voice filled the room, vibrated Alex’s very bones, and stopped.

She fell forward over the desk, and Sera, her hand free, picked something off the desk and in one impossibly graceful movement, she leant from her chair and stabbed his snarling attacker with a sharp stick.

Alex found he was wrestling with nothing. And Sera had gone. He twisted desperately, only to see her actually standing on the table by the window, both hands above her head on the glass. Whether it was the weirdness of the night’s events or some trick of the light, she seemed to be surrounded by a white halo, like a shimmering light bulb.

Alex staggered to his feet, staring from her to what held her attention below. The massive heap of people suddenly sprang apart, hurling bodies in all directions. And Sera fell off the table.

****

Since Blair didn’t need to breathe, the weight of the vampires was not too much of an issue. Unfortunately, they did break one of his arms, which hurt like hell and made staking them much harder. He felt the sting of their teeth like gnat’s bites wherever they managed to make contact, and he knew this would, in time weaken him enough for them to kill him. Plus, he couldn’t move his legs or his body, and his left arm didn’t have the space to stab with force. He bit through clothing to flesh and sucked hard until the owner disintegrated. In the instant’s space thus achieved, he managed to get his stake into another just before his teeth found more flesh.

He had to use the stake more like a screwdriver, so it was slow going. Between his teeth and the stake, he estimated this would take him an hour or so—if he lasted that long—time Sera didn’t have. Arthur and his allies were over there now, and even if Melanie managed to finish the spell and release them from Smith’s control, it wouldn’t save them from vampire blood lust.

“Working from the top,” Sebastian’s voice said in his head. “You are still alive down there?”

“Too slow,” Blair said curtly. “Someone has to get to that flat, protect the humans inside, and make sure the spell is completed.”

“We’re all pretty engaged here,” Sebastian said dryly. Then, “What the…? Wow, your girl—”

Without warning, the weight flew off him. Or at least enough of it did. With one massive heave of his body, he rose through the rest, shaking vampires off him like a dog shaking off water. It hurt his broken arm, so he placed it in a healing position before staking the nearest vampire with his left hand.

But something had changed. The vampires looked dazed. They stood still, as if wondering why they were fighting. Vampires enjoyed a good fight, as a rule, but these ones seemed to recognize, finally, that their opponents were stronger. They still had the advantage of numbers, of course, but that didn’t guarantee individual survival, and it seemed they were no longer thinking as one.

Blair began to smile.

The vampires had realized they were hungry for human, not vampire, blood. And there was only one human in the park. Blair’s senses sought and found Nicholas Smith. Not in the park after all, but entering Jilly’s flat.

****

Sera stared at the ceiling. She wondered where she was, where all the noise was coming from. There was shouting close by, and from outside, she could hear the wail of police sirens.

In fact, there was a policeman’s ginger head right in front of her face. PC McGowan.

Sera sat bolt upright, clutching her head. “F*ck! Blair! Mel!” She looked around her wildly.

“They’re fine, but we have intruders,” McGowan said with a weird kind of formality. “You need to sit still for a minute while I go and help.”

And the policeman ran out of the room. Sera pulled herself up by hanging on to the table edge. She felt very wobbly, almost dizzy. Mel lay slumped across the table, but a quick, anxious feel of her pulse told Sera the witch was merely sleeping off her labors. As she deserved to, because the spell had worked. She’d known, even before she leapt on the table to try to save Blair, that it had worked.

From the window now, she saw vampires streaming away out of the park. A few seemed still to be having a punch-up with Blair’s friends, who turned a few to dust and shooed the rest away. She saw Jason Bell, his shirt torn and flapping in the breeze, just standing there looking around him. But she couldn’t see Blair.

Something ached deep inside her. She thought it would go on a long time. But she couldn’t pay attention to it now. There was still a fight going on in the house. She drew in a shaky but determined breath and strode across the room as fast as her trembling legs would carry her.

Across the hall, in the bedroom, encircled by Jack, Tam, Jilly, Elspeth, and PC McGowan, stood the vampire Arthur, holding Ella in front of him like a shield. The vampiress hissed at the circle, yet behind her aggression, she seemed almost bewildered. Blood oozed from a wound in Arthur’s shoulder and from several all over Ella’s body, but they moved too fast for the humans to pin down. Sera had the feeling this had been going on a long time. It was a bit of a stalemate. But she supposed she could help finish it.

As she took a step nearer, urgent knocking sounded at the front door.

“Sera!” whispered a voice she knew only too well. “Sera, they’ve turned on me! Let me in! Save me!”

Nicholas Smith, begging to be saved from his own vampires.

I did that.

“Sera, please!”

She walked toward the front door. “I should let them kill you,” she said, reaching for the handle. “Since you didn’t trouble to teach them not to murder.”

She twisted the handle, and the door flew open under his boot. Nicholas Smith, his face murderous, strode in and reached for her throat.

It was so totally, stupidly unexpected that he’d seized her before she could move. She staggered back, away from him, but she couldn’t escape his squeezing hands. She twisted in his hold, kicking, punching, scratching. She drew blood, but she couldn’t make him release her. His face was purple with exertion, his eyes hard and cruel and absolutely furious.

I did that.

“Yes, you f*cking did,” he screamed in her mind. “I’d have given you everything, and that’s exactly what you took from me.”

Choking, she tried to bang on the bedroom door for help, but everyone was too busy closing in on Arthur and Ella, who surely couldn’t escape this time. Jilly lunged at Arthur’s back, but he whirled just in time, and Jilly’s stake plunged straight into Ella’s heart. The vampiress exploded into dust.

As Jilly leapt back out of Arthur’s reach, the others stepped forward, close enough to touch him now, and he couldn’t grab all of them at once. But as he flexed his knees, Sera knew he could still jump over their heads, and it would all begin again.

By which time, her father would have killed her.

“He’s going to jump!” Jack shouted, just as another figure leapt through the broken window.

Perhaps she was losing consciousness, because it looked like Blair, all leather biking trousers and sexy muscle. He shoved PC McGowan out of the way, seized Arthur in the very act of jumping, and staked him without pause.

He strode through the dust of the disintegrated vampire, his handsome face without humanity or compassion of any kind as he zoomed in on Sera and Smith.

Smith laughed. “You can’t touch me. You still can’t touch me.”

Wake up, Mel, she pleaded silently, uselessly. Undo this one too…

Cruelty too pure even to be hatred seemed to spit from Blair’s eyes. He didn’t speak. He just lowered his head, keeping his gaze riveted on Smith’s, and surged forward like a charging bull.

It looked like a slow-motion film, all the more bizarre because of the contrast to his normal inhuman speed of movement. Sera felt Smith’s fingers loosen in surprise. Then they tightened again as he dragged her back. But they’d hit the wall, and Blair kept following. His fist came up, huge and powerful, but shaking with effort as it ploughed slowly onward and kept coming.

Suddenly, Smith’s fingers relaxed, and Sera gasped in the air her lungs so desperately needed, but she didn’t feel the pain, only astonishment as Blair’s fist connected with her father’s face.

It lacked the force of a real punch, but it was still enough to drive Smith’s head back against the wall. Blair seized Sera in one arm, dragging her out of the way. His other hand closed around Smith’s throat and squeezed.

Smith’s mind screamed the same words repeatedly: “How did you do that? How did you do that?”

Blair said, “Because I want to.”

And at that, Sera was able to think again, to grab at Blair’s murderous hand. “No! Don’t kill him!”

“He was killing you,” Blair said without pity.

“Blair, he’s my father! Please!”

Slowly, without relaxing his grip, Blair turned his gaze on her. Everyone had clustered out of the bedroom, staring. But no one spoke up for Smith.

The terrifying cruelty in Blair’s eyes seemed to soften as he gazed at her. Now they looked merely angry. Without glancing at Smith, he said, “You’re lucky my arm was broken,” and dropped him.

Smith fell to the floor.

McGowan said, “The police are here.”

And Sera realized that more feet were pounding up the stairs to Jilly’s flat. She tried to speak, but no sound came out, perhaps because she’d been half strangled. Or perhaps because she’d been swept up into Blair’s arms and was flying across the bedroom and out of the window.