Angel Falls (Cassandra Bick Chronicles Book 3) (23 page)

***

I wondered whether Cain’s presence was necessary – it was full daylight after all, and though vampires occasionally used human messengers, we’d seen no evidence of these from our evil trio. But then the door opened and a man walked in. Not an unheard of event – we were open to walk-ins, as many of our clients were too nervous or embarrassed to make an appointment, and I regularly caught sight of people pacing up and down outside, working up the nerve to come in. But this guy strode in with a sense of purpose, looking like he owned the place – in fact, he had the air of a man who looked like he owned every room he entered – which made it all the more amusing when he took one look at Cain, turned on his heels and left at full speed without a word. Cain silently detached himself from the wall and headed out after him, seemingly in no rush. Medea and I exchanged glances, and our curiosity was further piqued when Cain came back 10 minutes later and we studiously tried not to notice him surreptitiously wiping blood off his knuckles onto his jeans.

‘Wrong address,’ he shrugged, topping up his coffee. A hunter, I assumed, who’d heard of our connection with Laclos and expected us to be easy pickings for information. Suddenly I wasn’t mad at Cain for insisting he came with us.

We must have looked a cheery bunch, because when Jonesy arrived an hour or so later, he let out a low whistle.

‘So, I’m guessing from the look on your faces there’s no sign of a plan? Unless you’re all sitting round waiting for tall, blonde and Viking to show?’

I started at that. I hadn’t even thought to ask where Val was, though Medea gave a small shake of her head, and I realised she had no idea either. And if Cain knew, he was neither concerned nor inclined to share. Jonesy held out a bag of pastries, offering to Medea first – a peace offering, maybe – and she accepted one with a wry smile, obvious she knew what he was doing. Cain and I fell on them gratefully; I’d been sorry for the last hour I hadn’t finished that croissant, and Cain was always happy to see food.

‘My wife is out shaking a few sources,’ he said, between mouthfuls. I tried not to wonder why he’d called her when he was out of my sight, since that was the only way he could know, unless they had some kind of immortals’ telepathy going on, which would really piss me off. ‘But mainly it’s a waiting game till dark. I guess we need to think about where in London – or at least near it – you could stage a vampire execution.’

‘Damn,’ Jonesy muttered. ‘And here’s me left my
Lonely Planet Guide to Handy Execution Sites
in England
back in the car.’

Cain gave him a ‘not helping’ look – which was nice, as I was usually the one on the receiving end of that – and turned to me and Medea.

‘You’re the party organisers. Any suggestions?’

‘My parties don’t usually end in ritual murder,’ I pointed out, though in fact my last few parties hadn’t been that far off. This was why business was tough.

‘Uh, guys…’ Medea said, frowning at her computer.

‘But the principles are the same,’ Cain argued. ‘Somewhere vamp-friendly but discreet enough. They’d need to pretend it’s a normal party or… I dunno. A show, maybe? At least we’re too early for Guy Fawkes, or I could see them doing the old trick of sticking him on top of a bonfire.’

‘The old trick…?’ I echoed, horrified.

‘Uh,
guys,’
Medea repeated.

‘I suppose I could look through my venues guide – I keep a file of all the places I’ve used, and considered using,’ I conceded. ‘See if anywhere pops out…’

‘Oi! Sassenachs!’ Medea snapped, furiously, so loud and Scottish that we all turned to her, astonished.

‘I’m not actually Engl…’ Jonesy began, but then he took one look at her face and trailed into silence.

Satisfied she had our attention, she indicated her computer screen.

‘I don’t think we need to worry about finding out where Laclos is being executed,’ she said, her voice heavy with disbelief. ‘I think we just got an invitation.’

***

‘This has to be a joke, right? I mean, they can’t actually be going to do this…’ Jonesy was voicing what we all thought, as we stared over Medea’s shoulder at her screen. The invite – sent to Medea’s email at Dark Dates – looked innocuous enough, the sort of thing a business like ours receives on a regular basis. Now everyone wants their entertainment to be immersive and interactive, plenty of places do it – you can go to the London Dungeon after dark and do sleepovers at the Natural History Museum, take Jack the Ripper walks through Whitechapel or Plague Tours round Tower Hill – so why not this? And in almost the same place where only a few years ago crowds had gathered to watch some American magician do absolutely nothing but stay in a glass box, the sender promised the next step up: Laclos the Conjuror would be doing his ‘vanishing vampire’ trick – buy your ticket to see him disintegrate at dawn! After a sufficient amount of late night canapés and cocktails, obviously, all in iconic surroundings. And in a nice nod to irony, 20% of the night’s profits would be going to a blood cancer charity.

‘But this is insane!’ I protested. ‘And it’s two nights away! How can you organise something like this in a couple of days? There’s venue bookings, council permissions, caterers…’

Cain shrugged.

‘I once saw Lac… a vampire pull off a sold out Edinburgh Fringe show in a matter of hours. You’d be amazed what you can achieve if you take the brakes off the compulsion.’

‘But this is a national landmark!’

Because their plan was as outrageous as it was genius. They would be using, as their location, Tower Bridge. Tower Bridge, the iconic, fancy looking bridge that non-Brits always think is London Bridge – because it’s far prettier and looks more historical, whereas London Bridge is bland and boring and bookended by Boots the Chemist and bike shops. Even if you’ve never been to London, you’d know it from a hundred different movies, from
Sherlock Holmes
to
The Mummy
, and the fact that it raises its bascules to let boats through means it’s always a popular choice for chase scenes keen to insert a bit of that ‘but the bridge is lifting!’ tension. It wasn’t new to events, nor stunts – only a few years ago the bridge had been opened at some ungodly hour of the morning to allow a motorbike rider to jump the gap as it rose, and like many London landmarks, it boosted its coffers by hosting corporate events and parties. It had also recently fitted a glass floor to one of the walkways, so that you could look down on the bridge below from 200 feet high (this being Britain, it wasn’t without teething problems – someone, of course, dropped a bottle of beer on it in its opening week and cracked the glass). But I could imagine it would be an ideal vantage point to, for instance, observe a suspended glass box in which a man was made to disappear. The bridge had the infrastructure for such things – during the London Olympics the Olympic rings had been suspended from one of its walkways – so I couldn’t see this providing a logistical challenge to vampires who could compel who they wanted to help. I had no idea how the vampires would watch – tinted glass? Remote observation? Human helpers? – but no one would be able to argue that Laclos was alive if he was reduced to ashes in plain sight, especially if the human world was talking about this impressive new magic trick.

‘It seems so… elaborate,’ Medea frowned. ‘Like a James Bond villain set up.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Jonesy. ‘There’s definitely an air of “please come stage a daring rescue” about it.’

‘Of course it’s a trap,’ Cain shrugged, clearly unbothered by this prospect. ‘Draw out any remaining Laclos supporters – either get rid of them or force ‘em to watch. Remove the figurehead and most vampires will fall in line. London’s been at peace for years, and vampires are like any other rich people – they like the status quo. And I’m pretty sure that’s what they’re banking on. We – or anyone – storm in and stage a rescue, we’re all over the news tomorrow and then it’s game over for everyone. The very fact that they’re doing this in such plain sight makes it that much harder to counter it.’

‘Shit.’ I frowned, because he was right.

Medea had turned back to her computer.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked her.

‘What do you think I’m doing? I’m buying tickets.’

‘So,’ I said, with a certain degree of smugness. ‘Bet taking out the bad guys in the privacy of a deserted old building seems like a lost opportunity now, eh?’

Cain gave me a look that said while he had an answer to that question, he was diplomatically choosing not to share it. We were in More London, on the south bank of the river Thames, not far from the foot of Tower Bridge. Standing at the base of the big, shiny Mayoral headquarters building, Jonesy, Cain and I had a perfect view of the bridge – but, alas, this proximity just made the damn thing look more impenetrable, not less. It’s a beautiful structure, sure, and on a postcard or in a movie, it looks positively pretty – but up close it’s also a fuck-off hunk of stone and steel, a giant testament to masonry and engineering smack in a heavily populated, tourist-friendly part of London. True, a lot of the buildings around here were office blocks, so might be emptier at night, and traffic at dawn was likely to be sparse, but that still left plenty of potential witnesses even if you didn’t count the people actually invited to the show.

Jonesy looked from me to Cain.

‘How committed are you to saving this guy again?’ he frowned. ‘I mean, I’ve seen you pull some stone cold shit without blinking…’ Cain’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Jonesy let that sentence hang.

‘Nobody said you have to stick around for it,’ Cain shrugged, mildly.

‘I’m not planning to bail, I’m just…’ he was interrupted from that thought as Cain held out his arm, and a bird the size of a large dog landed on his wrist, enormous wings flapping.

‘Ah. Here’s our recon.’

***

Luckily, the south banks of the Thames (as opposed to the actual South Bank of the Thames – sorry, foreigners, I know this is why people hate us), are often used for promotional events. There’s a decent amount of green space – by London standards – and the combination of that and the scenic backdrop makes it a popular choice for photoshoots and marketing stunts. I’ve seen cars frozen in giant glass blocks, a camel race and, on the day of the royal engagement, a crowd of Kate ‘n’ Wills lookalikes assembled, if I recall, to promote some dating agency. So the sight of a rough looking guy with what seemed to be a very large owl on his arm got only a few passing glances, though I saw a few phones raised for photos, to which Katie raised her wings in a dramatic move that handily obscured Cain’s face, and the tourists wandered off happily, convinced they’d seen a promo for Harry Potter World or something. Once he was sure he wasn’t being observed, Cain stepped sharply under the bridge, disappearing into one of the nooks and crannies that abound near there, from the steps of the bridge to the cobbled streets of Shad Thames. When he came back, he was birdless, and Katie was walking beside him, rearranging hastily pulled on scrubs: she was working at the nearby hospital, so was heading straight back to work after this. She looked mildly grumpy, but I couldn’t blame her – not many friends would spend their only break on a 10-hour shift flying over London for you.

***

‘Not sure what you expected me to see,’ she said, cricking her neck as she talked. Like most shifters, Katie could assume almost any animal whose mass was reasonably comparable to hers without much effort (there were, apparently, limits to smaller animals, and either that or shifting to something significantly larger took a lot of effort to hold) but she favoured large mammals, so her transformation from bird back to human was accompanied by a lot of painful-sounding clicks and stretches, as she eased out the aches of an unfamiliar shape. ‘I mean, there’s nothing unusual that I can tell. The walkways have glass windows, and there are some windows in the buttresses, though I imagine inside those would be the place to hide when the sun came out as they have a lot of stone walls.’

‘And the exits from the towers come out under the bridge, so you could decant to a car or van pretty easily,’ I mused, looking up. I wasn’t sure what I’d hoped she would see – a giant glass cage with handy escape routes clearly marked?

I’d spent much of the morning doing my own research. Normally, as an events organiser, I would have called up and asked for a tour, under the pretence that I wanted to hire out the venue. But they had turned me down, claiming short notice – though the woman on the phone sounded suspiciously compelled, since even the busiest venue will usually try and accommodate a potential client. So I’d been forced to rely on the lazy girl’s friend, the internet, but that hadn’t made for comforting reading. The structure, built over a period of eight years, was what was called a suspension and bascule bridge (to my shame, I had to look up what that meant, since I thought a bascule was something to do with the French Revolution). The bascules were, in fact, the parts of the bridge that were raised to allow tall ships to pass under it (which I had previously – classily – always thought of simply as ‘the lifty bits’), and which weighed a handy thousand tons each. The most striking features were of course the two towers themselves – these stood over 200ft high, linked by two parallel walkways, equally 200ft in length. Despite being a busy commuter route for both vehicles and people, the whole thing was now run as the Tower Bridge Experience – the ‘experience’ bit presumably added to justify the entrance fee charged tourists who wanted to look around, or climb up onto the walkways. In fairness, the people running this seemed to have done a great job. As well as an exhibition charting the history of the bridge, there were a series of spaces inside you could hire for events: Engine Rooms, North Tower, and, most spectacularly of all, the enclosed walkways, which were easily wide enough to accommodate tables for dining if need be. All of them had plenty of windows. Laclos’ event took place on a Saturday night, so that, presumably, human guests wouldn’t be put off by the fact it would eat into the following morning. This meant at least we didn’t have to worry about rush hour traffic – 40,000 people crossed the bridge daily – but the gap between dawn and the start of the day proper at this time of year wasn’t a long one, which meant the window for a rescue was pretty narrow.

For the vampires, it was a perfect spot. Unless you had access to a helicopter and whatever launch codes stopped an unauthorised vehicle flying over London from getting shot out of the sky (or you were Spider-man and could scale the towers unaided), a rescue from outside was out of the question, and the vampires themselves would be in control of the narrow, easily guarded entrances to the towers and, from there, onto the walkways. These were also no doubt equipped with the usual security measures major landmarks came with these days – metal detectors and bag searches being
de rigueur
– which would make smuggling weapons in next to impossible. So, all in all, a fantastic venue for them, not so great for us.

***

I thanked Katie, who headed back to work, trying to look supportive and also ignoring the fact that Jonesy – who obviously found the whole idea of shifters a bit of a freak out – was trying not to openly goggle at her. I turned back to Cain, who was regarding the bridge with an almost wistful expression.

‘You know, back in the 1900s, nobody used the walkways. They were mainly frequented by prostitutes and criminals – pickpockets and the like – so the respectable folk stayed away. Vampires used to hunt up there. They’d quite often throw their victims over the side, and pretend they were suicides.’

Jonesy stared at him. I think he was really finding it quite tough to accept the reality of what his old hunting buddy actually was.

‘Maybe they’re going back to their roots?’

***

We mooched around a little longer, before realising staring at a monument wasn’t getting us anywhere. Cain kissed me goodbye, checked I had my gun – this is what passes for romance in my life – before heading off with Jonesy to do huntery things I wasn’t allowed in on. I headed disconsolately back to the flat, assuming in daylight and with Laclos captured, I’d be safe enough alone. At home, I fed and cuddled the cat, and, I admit it, had a bit of a cry. I was tired and stressed and it was looking more and more like in less than 48 hours Laclos would be dead and Cain would be gone, and the new rulers of London’s underworld would be people I’d only recently pointed a gun at. I felt, for the first time since all those years ago when I lost my closest friends in a fire, utterly hopeless, so I did what I had not done since I was a small child, a thing I never thought I’d do again. I prayed.