‘That’s never going to work,’ Howard said, still chuckling. ‘It will take more than an army of crusty old corpses to conquer the country.’

  ‘I think they’re planning on finding other types of soldiers. They already reached out to you for an alliance and Anya tried to recruit me earlier. As ridiculous as this sounds I wouldn’t underestimate them,’ I warned. Anya had been pretty powerful herself. She’d contained me in a neat little barrier-box spell.

  In the end, Howard and Shirley arranged a meeting to discuss how to handle the new threat. I declined to attend. It wasn’t really my problem and I didn’t have time for it. My priority was the Ambrotos Dagger.

  The food arrived and we ate in silence. I thought about what the hell I was supposed to do next as I shoved eggs and bacon into my mouth. I had no leads. I had nothing. The dagger could’ve been taken anywhere in the world. If I had even the slightest clue as to who might have taken it, then I would have at least a flicker of hope. But a few days was not enough time to track it down.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a greasy-haired man who came over to the table. He grabbed a chair from a nearby table and seated himself at the end of our booth. He looked vaguely familiar.

  ‘Have you served me in a shop or something? I feel like we’ve met,’ I told him. I pushed my plate away. The filthy look he was giving me indicated that I wasn’t going to get the chance to finish eating it.

  ‘Do I look like a shopkeeper to you?’ he said, snarling in a very canine-like way.

  ‘You look like a junky,’ Lydia told him brazenly. His eyes widened and he glared at her with utter loathing.

  ‘I’m going to tear your tongue out for that remark,’ he told her. He raised a hand as if to cast a spell and then froze. I waited a moment for him to say or do something but he just stayed exactly as he was; a perfectly hideous statue. Then I realised that Lydia had used her ability to freeze him.

  ‘I have got to learn how to do that,’ I said in awe. Even as I spoke I could see that he was gradually starting to regain movement, albeit agonisingly slowly. ‘Can you unfreeze just his head so I can ask him what he wants?’ I asked Lydia. She screwed her face up and looked at me like I was an idiot.

  ‘Of course I can’t. It’s all or nothing,’ she told me impatiently.

  ‘All then,’ I said. I prepared myself and the moment she released him I slapped a barrier spell around the booth, blocking him out. Magic whipped out of his fingers, collided with the barrier and then dissipated.

  ‘Got that out of your system?’ I asked him patronisingly. He was not amused. ‘What do you want?’

  He drew his lips back to reveal his teeth which he kept in better condition than his hair. ‘Revenge,’ he hissed. ‘Do you really not remember me from Nick’s house? I worked for him.’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’ I slapped my thigh as the realisation hit me. ‘I knew I recognised you from somewhere. You’re Ben.’ He was one of Nick’s top warlocks.

  ‘Well, since you killed Nick everything went pear-shaped for us warlocks. Warlockry is illegal now under the Supernatural Act.’

  ‘Well, it’s not like it was legal before. I mean, you murder people to take their powers. That’s always been a crime,’ I informed him. He could hardly blame me for the choices he’d made.

  ‘But now if they catch us they cart us off to some research place. Friends of mine have been taken and never seen again.’ There was a touch of sadness as he spoke. The poor evil warlock had lost his friends.

  ‘Diddums,’ I said with no empathy whatsoever. ‘You and your friends worked for the most evil warlock who ever lived. You all did atrocious things. I wouldn’t shed a tear if the whole pack of you got locked up and experimented on.’

  ‘Why don’t you just go and get your friends back?’ asked Lydia. Another valid point. When Nick had been leading the warlocks he would not have accepted his people being imprisoned. He would have stormed the prison, or research facility right away. He would’ve left nothing but blood.

  ‘The facility is defended. The walls are full of iron. Magic doesn’t work in there,’ he said. He seemed ashamed to admit a weakness.

  ‘How awful it must be to be thwarted by something as simple as a piece of metal,’ Lydia mocked. I assumed that iron did not affect Nephilim.

  ‘That sounds like a place well worth avoiding,’ I told Ben. ‘Now if you’ll leave us to finish our lunch…’

  ‘No. That won’t be happening.’ He whistled loudly and several other people approached from around the pub. They made their way over to us slowly. Looks of menace hung on their faces. Ben hadn’t just come to deliver a sob story. ‘We cannot get our friends back, but we can kill the man who’s responsible for their capture. We all thought you were dead. We’re so happy you’re not.’ He stood up and kicked his chair out of the way as he backed up from the table. My barrier spell was still in place but it would never hold against all of them. We would have to fight our way out of here.

  I noticed that everybody else in the pub was fleeing to safety. Some people straight up left, whilst others just hid in corners where they thought they’d be safe. They obviously hadn’t seen many sorcery battles.

  I looked at the warlocks. Five of them. The odds weren’t impossible. ‘Can you freeze them?’ I asked Lydia.

  ‘I doubt it would hold,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘Alight then. Looks like we’ll have to fight them properly then. I’ll take the big one, you take the four smaller ones,’ I told her.

  ‘They’re all the same size,’ she said, but she did allow a small grin to light up her face. She had a nice smile, it made her whole face more radiant. It was a nice change from the disgruntled expression that seemed to be her default setting.

  ‘Fine. We’ll share them out evenly then,’ I said sullenly. ‘Ready?’ She nodded. I didn’t feel ready but I doubted I ever would.

  I dropped the barrier.

  Ben hit me with a blast of magic that sent me sprawling to the back of the booth, my head bounced off the wall and a wave of pain fuzzied my senses. He even looked surprised that he’d managed to get me. If he’d expected to hit me then maybe he would have hit me with a more lethal spell. Luckily, he didn’t,

  Another spell just missed Lydia as she practically flew out of the booth. Her foot booted Ben right in the face and he went cartwheeling through the back doors and landed somewhere in the beer garden. The four remaining warlocks kept their distance now that they’d seen how lethal she was. They stood back waiting for an attack from her.

  I grabbed hold of the table and pulled myself up. As I shuffled my way out of the cramped booth one of the warlocks attacked me with a spell which I caught with a hastily erected barrier. Whatever it had been crackled viciously against my defences and I knew it was deadly.

  I came to stand next to Lydia and we faced the four warlocks who stood in a semicircle around us. Then Lydia vanished into thin air. She reappeared behind a female warlock who she promptly punched in the back of the head. The warlock collapsed before she knew what was going on.

  ‘And then there were three,’ I said. I called to a nearby table and summoned it through the air. One warlock managed to duck but the other was crushed between the table and the wall. I saw Lydia go flying past me as a spell barrelled her off her feet. I lashed out with a chain of purple light that tore the flesh right off one of the remaining warlocks’ face. She screamed and fled, no longer so eager to fight me and far more concerned with what was left of her face. I turned back to the others and saw that Ben had now returned. He was standing with the one remaining warlock who was about a foot taller than he was.

  ‘They’re not all the same size,’ I told Lydia. She was climbing back to her feet. Blood was trickling down from a cut beneath her hair. She was too groggy to reply, and I suspected too groggy to fight as well. She fell into the booth and closed her eyes. ‘Shit,’ I muttered.

  ‘Why don’t you surrender,’ Ben said. “Do that and your girlfriend can live,’ he offered.

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ I growled. The accusation was an insult to Ashley and I would not stand for it.

  The doors to the pub crashed open and a giant figure blocked out the light from the sun. Zeke had arrived at long last. Ben and his friend turned in time to see Zeke thrust both of his hands out from his body aggressively. A blast of power hurtled across the pub and the two warlocks folded like paper. Their unconscious bodies hit the floor hard. The fallout from the spell knocked me back a bit but luckily I was not the target.

  I rushed over to Lydia and pushed her hair back so I could see the wound. It was a nasty gash but it looked far less than fatal. ‘Can you heal?’ I asked her.

  ‘Eventually,’ she replied weakly. ‘It was a spell.’

  ‘No shit,’ I said, relishing in my chance to hit her with some sarcasm. She smiled feebly as I got to work trying to heal her. She was too weak to heal herself. Threads of magic knitted the flesh back together. I poured healing power into her cranium, flushing out any curses that might be lingering. Within a minute or two she was more or less back to her normal self, with just an ache left to remind her of her battle wound.

  ‘Good thing I arrived. Looked like you two were about to return to Malek,’ he said.

  I gave him one of my most sardonic smiles as I got to work on the warlocks. I grabbed the nearest one by the wrist and concentrated.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Taking their magic,’ I told him. ‘I could do with a boost and they definitely shouldn’t be left with it.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ was all he said. He clearly did not approve. I worked on the warlocks whilst he continued to speak. The whole time he refused to look at me as if not seeing it would somehow make it more tolerable.

  ‘So, it turned out I was right. One of the sorcerers did see something and they were paid a very large amount of money to say nothing. Enough to pay off their mortgage.’

  I dropped the arm of the warlock I’d just finished siphoning and looked at Zeke. Hope had ignited inside me like a tornado. ‘Where’s the dagger?’ I said eagerly.

  ‘A government agency took it. Apparently, there is some supernatural research centre and they took it there,’ Zeke said. ‘He didn’t know where the centre was.’

  ‘He does,’ I said, pointing down at Ben. It looked like we were going to have to go marching into the building made of iron after all. Terrific.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I took the magic from all the sorcerers except for Ben. The power increase was phenomenal. I was about six times more powerful than I had been before and I knew I could hold a lot more power before I hit my threshold. I think I’d had the power of about fifty sorcerers before I’d died. I’d even held Clara’s magic and she was one of the most powerful sorcerers I’d ever met. So I could hold a whole lot more magic before it burst out of me again.

  We waited for Ben to wake up and then offered him a deal.

  ‘Take us to the research centre and I won’t steal your magic,’ I told him. He was more than willing to agree. I also made him promise not to try and kill me again.

  ‘Where is it?’ Zeke asked. He was looking at Ben with disgust. I mentioned before how Zeke felt about warlocks. To him, warlocks were like a cancer to the noble sorcerers. I found his prejudice a tad irksome, but he was kind of right. I was the only exception, though not to him.

  ‘The place is huge, the size of a town. They built it directly underneath a town,’ said Ben. He was rubbing the back of his head where I assumed he’d been hurt. He was lucky that was all he got.

  ‘Which town?’ said Zeke. I had a feeling I knew what he was going to say and the dread was starting to set in. Only an idiot would build anything directly underneath the town I was thinking of but I just knew I was right. Then Ben opened his mouth and said the word I did not want to hear.

  ‘Cedarstone.’

  I sighed loudly. I mean really loudly. More of a groan actually. ‘When will people learn to stay away from that fucking place!’ I shouted. I dropped my head on the table and instantly regretted it as a fresh burst of pain attacked me.

  ‘The town is full of magic. It makes sense that they would want to try and access that,’ said Zeke coolly.

  ‘That’s the reason everybody should stay the hell away,’ I argued.

  ‘I don’t disagree. But from a research point of view, it opens a lot of possibilities. Plus it stops anybody else from going after it.’ That bit was true, I supposed.

  ‘So how do we get the dagger out of there?’ I asked. Ben immediately snorted at me.

  ‘If you go in there you’ll never come out again,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re laughing about it. You’re coming in with us,’ I said, fixing him with a malicious glare.

  ‘Oh, hell no!’ He shook his head vehemently and tried to get up but Lydia grabbed his shoulder and forced him back into his seat.

  ‘We need to get out of here. The police will be coming,’ Zeke warned. In the old days, I could’ve had a fight in Muggs and Bobby would’ve dealt with it in house. It was a strange new world I was in now.

  We hauled Ben out of the pub, warning him that if he tried anything we’d kill him and be done with him. His only value was taking us to the facility and we could find it without him if we had to. He wisely chose to behave himself.

  ‘You left your truck here?’ I said to Zeke as we exited the pub and I saw his obscene travelling home parked on the curb right outside. It was strictly no parking on Maidstone High Street even for a normal vehicle, Zeke’s monstrosity was something else entirely.

  ‘It’s not a truck, it’s a motor home. And it’s enchanted so I don’t get tickets,’ he informed me. He pulled open the door and motioned for us to get inside.

  ‘There’s no anti-ticket spell,’ I said dismissively as I climbed aboard his abode.

  ‘It’s a simple cloaking spell.’ He climbed in last and slammed the rickety door behind him. Despite the hugeness of the motorhome it still looked tiny when Zeke was crammed inside.

  ‘If you can cloak something this big I need to learn the spell.’

  ‘You already know the spell. You simply lack the skill to perform it.’ He pulled open the tiny fridge and produced a can of Dr. Pepper. ‘Anybody?’ We all declined. It looked like Ben was going to say yes but then thought better of taking a drink from his captors. It wasn’t like we’d bother poisoning him when we could just blast him to death with magic. Zeke tipped his head back and dropped the fizzy drink down his neck like he was pouring it into a bucket. It was a true spectacle to behold. He gulped it down greedily without stopping to take a breath even once. Having finished, he crumpled the can and tossed it into the nearby bin. I opened my mouth to make a comment about what I’d just seen but before I could even get a word out a burp flew out of his mouth. It wasn’t your average burp either. It was a lip-quivering, wall-shaking belch that stretched on longer than the lifetime of the average dog. Slight exaggeration, but it was a long belch, okay?

  ‘You. Are. Nasty,’ said Lydia, her nose wrinkled in revulsion.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Zeke said, ignoring Lydia’s comment. He pushed his way to the front of the vehicle and dropped himself heavily into the driver’s seat. A few moments later we were trundling up the road towards Lydia’s house.

  Once home, we brainstormed. The plan we came up with was a simple one. We’d steal uniforms from members of the security team at the research centre and pretend Ben was our prisoner. We’d enter the complex under that pretence and find the dagger. Honestly, it was an awful plan. But it was all we could come up with. Lydia wasn’t affected by iron so she’d be our only source of power.

  ‘We’re all going to get stuck in there,’ Ben said. ‘I’m not doing it.’

  ‘Then you’re gonna lose you magic,’ Lydia threatened him with far more aggression than was necessary.

  I left the room thinking about how awful our plan really was. As much as I tried, I could not think of a better one. If only we could tap into the power in Cedarstone, then we’d be unstoppable. No amount of iron could inhibit that magic. But last time I’d touched that magic it had killed me and I had no desire to go back to Malek. Not without that dagger anyway.

  ‘Oi!’ Lydia said as she walked into the room. ‘Call for you.’ She handed over her mobile and then returned to the living room.

  ‘Eddie, it’s Howard,’ said the master vampire.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be sleeping?’ I joked. Well, it wasn’t entirely a joke. The sun was still out and would be for a long time yet.

  ‘I should. But I’m a bit too busy for sleeping these days. Thanks for the heads up about the necromancers. Shirley and I have decided to dig up all the graveyards and burn the dead. It’s extreme but if they really are trying to build an army, this is the best way to stop them.’ He paused to allow me to reply. It took me a few minutes to think of a response to the news he’d just given me.

  ‘I understand the necessity for this but I don’t think the police will see it your way. They’ll react harshly,’ I warned him. The humans wouldn’t see it as an act for the greater good. Necromancers, vampires, and sorcerers were all part of the same camp to them. If one species acted out they were all responsible.

  ‘I know. Which leads me to the real reason I called. The police are after you. An officer at Maidstone Cemetery recognised you. They haven’t confirmed that you’re alive yet, they’ve put an APB out on somebody who looks like you. They’ve been very careful not to name you to the lower ranks. They don’t want to spread panic about a man coming back from the dead. Even though the town is filling up with zombies. They think you’re responsible for the grave robbing,’ he said grimly.

  ‘Great. It's always nice to be blamed for things,’ I grumbled. ‘Thanks for letting me know, anyway.’

  ‘No problem. You’ve helped me out twice now. Speaking of which, Joshua will not be causing either of us any further bother. Me and mine have got your back, Eddie.’

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78