“I’ve been thinking,” I say, “if we’re going to do this, you have to start calling me by my name.”
I don’t know why this seems important. Just—if we’re going to walk into a vampire den together, it seems like we need to get past some of this stuff and actually be allies.
“Snow is your name,” Baz says. “Possibly. Who named you, anyway?”
I look away. It was written on my arm—Simon Snow. Whoever left me at the home must have written it. Maybe it was my mother.
“You have to call me Simon,” I say. “You’ve called me that before.”
He opens his car door and gets in, as if he didn’t hear me—but I know that he did.
“Fine,” Baz says. “Get in the car, Simon.”
I do.
*
It took us almost two hours to find this place—Baz sniffed it out; it was like walking around Covent Garden with a bloodhound.
“Is this it?” I ask. “Are they here?”
He straightens his collar and cuffs. We’re standing outside an old building full of flats, with a row of names next to the doorway and a brass slot for letters. “Stay close,” he whispers, and raps at the door with the back of his fist.
A large man opens the door. He sees Baz, then opens it a bit wider. Another man, standing behind a long bar in the centre of the room, looks over and nods. The doorman motions with his head for us to come in.
I follow Baz into a deep, low-ceilinged room with no overhead lights. The bar runs down the middle, and ornate, private booths line the walls on either side, each booth lit by a hanging yellow lamp.
Everyone sitting along the aisles turns to look at us. A woman near the door drops her glass, and the man next to her catches it.
They don’t look like vampires.
Are they all vampires?
They just look rich. And … grey. But they don’t look beautiful or thin or cheekboney like they do in the films.
It’s Baz they’re checking out, not me. He’s got to be scared, or at least nervous, but he doesn’t look it. I swear he gets less ruffled the more that he’s threatened. (When I’m the one threatening him, that’s infuriating. But it’s kind of cool now.)
Every one of them must be so jealous of him. He’s everything they are, plus magic. Plus he looks the part, like he was born to be some sort of dark king.
Baz stops at the first booth. “Nicodemus,” he says, and he doesn’t even make it a question.
A man with grey hair and skin, and a shimmering grey suit meets Baz’s eyes and nods towards the back of the room—then looks at me and sneers. I wonder if it’s my cross or my scent that’s getting to him. Or maybe he knows who I am. The Mage’s Heir. (The Mage kills vampires; he doesn’t think it’s murder.) (Why hasn’t the Mage killed these vampires?)
I follow Baz through the room, wishing I’d worn all the posh gear he tried to push on me before we left Hampshire. I’m wearing my Watford trousers and one of his Scandinavian jumpers—and I only took the jumper because he said my Watford uniform made me look 12.
Baz is walking so slow, I keep kicking the back of his heels. It’s like he wants everyone here to get their fill of him. (Maybe he’s also trying to hide his limp.) The room gets darker, the deeper we go. I scan the booths for Nicodemus, but I’m not sure I’d recognize him, even if there were enough light. Does he still look like a mean, boy version of Ebb?
We reach the back wall, and I’m ready to turn around, but Baz continues through a doorway I didn’t even see. I follow him down a free-standing spiral staircase with a loose rail. By the time we get to the bottom, I’m dizzy.
Then we’re in the basement, I think. It’s like a cavern—much larger than the room above us, with an even lower ceiling, and dim blue lights set into the floor, like at the cinema.