Suzanne McLeod - The Cold Kiss of Death

The lift halted, the door gliding open. Blue carpet patterned with small silver hearts stretched down a long, empty corridor lined on one side with steel doors. I gathered the remnants of our clothes as he bade me, then followed him past half a dozen of the doors, my bare feet sinking into the thick carpet, until Malik stopped at one of them. He stilled, then lifted his chin, sniffing the air.

‘It appears we have company waiting for us,’ he said softly. ‘This is not a good sign.’

But before I could ask who, the door slid away into the wall and I had a brief moment of déjà vu. Hannah Ashby, dressed in her vamp-groupie outfit of pumpkin-coloured velvet bustier and black net skirt, stood in the opening.

‘Malik al-Khan, and the ever-delightful—Rosa.’ She arched one perfectly-drawn-in black brow in a conspiratorial fashion. ‘Don’t you think it might be better to enter instead of loitering about in the hallway?’ She gave a low chuckle, then stood back and ushered us past her.

My newly changed vampire senses picked up the base notes of patchouli and sandalwood in Hannah’s perfume, but for some reason the scent had the same effect as walking into the swamp-dragon’s cave. My eyes teared up. I dropped the clothes and clapped my hand over my mouth and nose as I choked on a coughing fit. I felt Malik’s hand at the small of my back as he pushed me into the room. I hurried to the far side, putting as much distance between me and the lung-burning scent as possible.

I slapped my hands over my eyes and concentrated, dialling my vamp body’s reactions down to nothing, cutting out the toxic smell, the slightly raised da daum of Hannah’s heartbeat, and the bitter chemical taste of the perfume that made me feel like I’d been sucking on a vamp junkie stoked up on crack as well as venom. After a couple of seconds, I stopped breathing, my heart stopped beating and the perfume was nothing more than a ghost-memory in my mind.

Dropping my hands, I pressed my fingers into my own sternum, where I could still feel the slight burn in my lungs. ‘What the hell is that perfume you’re wearing?’ I asked, glaring at Hannah.

‘It’s a bespoke perfume created by Roja Dove.’ She smiled, looking delighted. ‘He’s a renowned “nose”, trained at the House of Guerlain. He mixes liquid silver into the jus; I wear it as an added precaution when I want to avoid any confrontations with the club’s vampires.’

Liquid silver? No wonder my lungs were burning up.

Malik was standing just inside the door, his face almost hidden by shadows. His bare chest gleamed pale in the room’s dimmed light, the rose scar under his heart hardly visible, and he looked elegant and composed, despite wearing nothing but his suit trousers. Either Hannah’s perfume didn’t affect him as much, or he’d known what to expect and cut his senses off before taking a whiff of the noxious stuff.

The room itself didn’t manage to live up to Malik’s style. It could have been a lounge in any bland hotel suite, decorated in shades of blue with silver-fronted furniture: except for the floor-to-ceiling glass wall behind me. The glass wall gave a god’s-eye view of the Blue Heart’s dancefloor three floors below, packed with a mass of bodies undulating to a beat that vibrated through the glass, though I couldn’t actually hear anything.

Hannah had positioned herself behind one of two sofas, her hands resting on a familiar vamp’s broad shoulders—Darius, her personal fang-pet. He sat slumped, staring fixedly at me from half-lidded eyes. He was dressed as the last time I’d seen him, in my flat: naked apart from his diamanté Calvin Klein briefs and calf-high boots. Little beads of blood-tinged sweat shone on his forehead and trickled down his flushed romance-model’s chest. He looked like he’d been on a binge-drinking session and wasn’t far off collapsing into a blood-dream—the vamp equivalent of being utterly, totally drunk.

‘Of course, it doesn’t bother too many of the vamps in the club,’ Hannah carried on, ruffling Darius’ tawny waves. ‘Most of them keep themselves offline anyway, unless they’re actually feeding. And while there are plenty of willing donors walking around, once I’ve fed Darius here, I prefer not to worry about anyone else. So the perfume is my way of being safe rather than sorry.’

‘What is your reason for being here, Hannah?’ Malik’s voice was soft, a hint of threat riding along with his question.

I could probably hazard a guess that the answer had something to do with a Fabergé egg, seeing as she knew about my Disguise spell, and no doubt also knew that every other vamp in town was expecting ‘Rosa’ to turn up tonight with Malik and with me missing for the last couple of days, Hannah being here wasn’t really a surprise.

Unfazed, Hannah turned her delighted smile on him. ‘I thought I would do you a favour.’ She tipped Darius’ head back, offering his throat. ‘They plan to refuse you your blood-tithe, although I suspect you already know that. So I thought I’d offer you some provisions.’ She trailed a finger across Darius’ chest, smearing a line in his blood-sweat. ‘He has fed well, as you can see’—gorged was more like it—‘and is willing to do whatever you want, aren’t you Darius?’ She patted his cheek.

‘Yess,’ he slurred, eyes still eerily fixed on mine, his head lolling to the side.

Malik didn’t move, didn’t even blink, but I felt the tension tighten his body. A sudden edge of shared hunger clenched like a fist in my stomach, nearly doubling me over.

‘All I ask is you try not to kill him,’ Hannah added, leaning down to lick Darius’ exposed throat. ‘I find him satisfying in so many ways; I would be so disappointed to lose him.’

‘Leave us then,’ Malik ordered.

She pushed at Darius’ shoulder, urging him up. He staggered to his feet and stumbled towards Malik, who opened his arms, catching the taller vampire to his chest, then in one smooth easy movement, hooked an arm under his knees and lifted him, cradling him like a bride about to be carried over a threshold. Darius might have weighed not much more than his Calvin Klein’s for all the effort Malik seemed to expend.

‘Actually, it’s you who’s going to leave us, Malik. I still have a favour to do for someone else.’ She smiled and lifted a black holdall from behind the sofa and dropped it on the seat. It gave a metallic clank as it landed. ‘Elizabetta wants Rosa to dress appropriately for the ceremony.’

Somehow I knew appropriate wasn’t going to be my kind of thing.

‘Use the bedroom.’ Hannah waved at the other door. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll both be right here when you finish.’

Malik hesitated, then looked at Darius in his arms, his expression turning predatory, and I swallowed against the constriction in my throat; whether it was fear or envy I wasn’t sure.

‘ Be careful of this one, Genevieve, ’ Malik’s voice whispered in my mind. ‘ She is more than she appears .’ The connecting door opened, apparently of its own accord, and I wondered if he had some sort of kinetic ability too. I filed that question away for later.

When the door had closed behind him and his meal, I turned back to a smugly smiling Hannah. And Malik’s warning reminded me that I was in Rosa’s body and I had use only of her vamp senses; all my own abilities with magic were gone. It wasn’t something that had ever bothered me much in the past, but then, I’d never knowingly sparred with a sorcerer before as ‘Rosa’. Now I couldn’t see the magic, and even my unwanted aptitude for seeing ghosts was gone; after Cosette’s recent help, it made me feel oddly vulnerable.