‘No one knows how Malik al-Khan did it,’ Darius had told me, wide-eyed with hero worship, ‘I mean, he weren’t there, and no one saw or felt a thing. Then he does this big appearing act on Tower Hill with her head in one hand and her heart in the other. He took half an hour to walk to the Challenge ring—they had a ’copter up filming him all the way. Elizabetta’s head was still screaming at him, right up ’til he stood on the dais and threw her head in the air and it exploded into ashes. ’Course, no one challenged him after that.’
‘So why aren’t you worried about speaking to me?’ I asked, my thoughts swinging between stunned, impressed, and wondering uneasily if Malik’s show was all just smoke and mirrors, or if he really was that powerful.
‘I’m Blue Heart blood,’ Darius said, ‘but I’m not part of any blood-family, ’cos Rio gave me the Gift, but she never did the Oath of Fealty part of the ceremony.’
Rio, his sponsor, had given him the Gift for her own nefarious purposes, then dumped him, and since baby vamps are dependent on their masters for top-up feeds to keep their new vamp bodies alive, Darius’ immortal future was looking short and bleak—until a sorcerer took a fancy to him and turned him into a fang-pet.
The same sorcerer whose soul I’d eaten.
‘So I never swore an Oath then’—he swept a hand through his tawny hair—‘and I’ve never swore one to anyone else since, not even the sorcerer. No one owns me now, no one can tell me what to do any more, not even Malik al-Khan, which means I can talk to you, and he can’t do anything, ’cos I never swore I wouldn’t talk to you.’
Vamp rules and regs: they live and die by them. ‘I’m au-ton-o-mous!’ He drew the word out proudly.
Not only had Darius’ stint with the sorcerer resulted in him bypassing the dependant baby vamp stage, it also gave him some backbone. Before that he’d been a ‘yes’ guy, verging on ‘victim’. Now he was proud of standing up to the one vamp everyone else was running scared of, and I was proud of him too. I silently vowed to make sure he didn’t lose his head over it like the original William Wallace.
But the next time I checked up on Darius, after Christmas, was when things got complicated. Whatever magic the sorcerer had used to keep Darius’ Gift alive had worn off, and with only six months on his vampire clock, he was too young to survive on just human blood, so he’d fallen into bloodlust. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on which way you look at it—the Moth-girls in the blood-house where Darius lived had bound him in heavy chains before he’d attacked anyone. As he wasn’t a danger to humans, none of the other vamps could legitimately rescind his Gift, but since he didn’t have a master to rescue him, and the Moths couldn’t find one to take him on, all that meant was he got the chance to die slowly in agony.
One personal blood donation later, and Darius was almost back to his old self. Turns out, my sidhe blood is as good as a master vamp’s, judging by the quick results. So now Darius is my fang-pet, and regular donations of my blood are keeping him alive and well; hence the three bags of blood sloshing around in my backpack, his usual weekly allowance. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’ve spent eleven years making sure I don’t end up a vamp’s blood-slave, my will subjugated by 3V to my master’s. Now, I might not be the slave, but I was still tied to a vamp by my blood. Having a fang-pet isn’t something I want to last for eternity, but so far I haven’t found a solution.
And I wasn’t going to, standing here worrying about going in to see him—although it wasn’t actually Darius I was worried about seeing.
I told myself to stop being a coward, and started walking back down to the Coffin Club entrance.
The club’s the only place where curious Joe Public can see vampires in their ‘dead as the day is long’ state, tackily laid out in all their pseudo-heroic funeral finery, in glass coffins, no less. Whichever vamp came up with the idea had to have a really warped sense of humour, since—despite the myths—vamps have never slept in coffins, glass or otherwise. And back in the eighties they haemorrhaged a hefty fortune on legal expertise and behind-the-scenes manoeuvring in order to regain their ‘human’ rights by proving they sleep the day away in a sort of light-induced hibernation—as opposed to actually being dead.
But thanks to a revival of the classic Hammer Horrors, sleeping in coffins is the new black when it comes to the vamps’ money- and blood-spinning industry. And the vamps love a theme, so the coffin shapes outlined on the double entrance doors, the chrome coffin handles and the neon-red coffin-shaped lights were just the start of the ad nauseam décor that swamped the club. I’d heard even the toilets had coffin-shaped porcelain loos—not that I’d checked. The only things not coffin-shaped were the small white diamond-shaped bell pushes that decorated the doors like name plaques, which is sort of what they were, since the Coffin Club is run by White Diamond blood.
My father’s blood-family.
Predictably, my heart had done the whole ‘dropping into my boots’ thing when Darius had told me where his new job, and new home were; I so didn’t need the memories. It had taken me a good ten minutes to put my hand on one of the diamond bell pushes the first time I’d dropped his blood allowance off, even though I hadn’t found a single familiar face from the past when I’d checked the club’s website. After that, I started making my blood-donation trips at midday. No point tempting fang, is there?
I hitched my backpack higher and with my pulse pounding in my ears, I pressed the bell and looked up into the security camera, waiting until the buzzer sounded and the door clicked open.
Chapter Nineteen
The entrance foyer was done up in twisted funeral-parlour chic: black-panelled wood, thick black carpet, artistically arranged white lilies exuding their overly sweet scent, and plush white velvet seats. A multitude of tiny UV spotlights—the reason why everything I wore, including my underwear, was black—dispelled the gloom slightly and picked out the white velvet ropes that marked a glowing zigzag path to the ticket booth.
A pair of long-haired Irish wolfhounds sat with their ears pricked forwards, pink tongues lolling out the sides of their mouths as they stared at me out of disconcertingly pale blue eyes; the UV spots tinted their grey-white coats silver. I gave the dogs a wide berth. Not that I don’t like dogs, but like everyone else, I’d heard the rumours: they were either vamps, or controlled by the vamps. After all, having a load of comatose suckers lying around in glitzy coffins with only humans to defend them is just asking for trouble from some of the more militant pro-humans groups. Even after several visits I still didn’t know which of the doggy rumours were true.
I headed into the zigzag ropes, checking out the life-sized coffin-shaped screens for a glimpse of Darius as they flashed pictures of the club’s vamps ‘lying in state’. He wasn’t being featured, which meant he was in his room. I reached the ticket booth—coffin-shaped, of course—to find Gareth, the club’s human manager, sitting slumped inside, idly flicking through a magazine: Bite Monthly. He was dressed as usual in the club’s undertaker uniform, with his black-banded top hat sitting on the shelf behind him. The dour outfit didn’t go with his blond surfer-boy good looks.