The Bloodshade Encounters & The Songspinner (Shadeborn Book 2) Read online

  “We can’t let him live,” she said to Yannick, almost pleading, “not after what Baptiste has done. He has broken the code.”

  The hideous, burned face of the vampire lord was solemn and thoughtful.

  “As you almost did, years ago, before this creature stopped you,” he replied to Elise.

  Lemarick felt the hesitation in her grip on him.

  “I… I did not know that they were shades at the time,” she mumbled. “Now, I trust the code. We must never feed upon the blood of the shadeborn. It is an abomination.”

  There was something far more important than a simple feeding going on now, but Lemarick was too preoccupied by his other realisation to concentrate on Elise’s words. His eyes watched Yannick’s thoughtful form absently, his mind flushed with new hope. If vampires didn’t usually drain the blood of shades, then Edvard and Ugarte were probably still alive.

  Yannick’s neck snapped in two before he could utter a single word in reply.

  As the vampire lord’s body crumpled to the ground, Lemarick felt Elise being forced away from the space behind him. He got to his feet as she flew into the wall, watching in relief as Edvard’s steady hand controlled her every move. Ed looked down on Yannick’s body with disgust, a fierceness in his form that Lemarick hadn’t seen since their first encounter with the lord over a century ago.

  “He ruined my orchestra,” Ed mused bitterly.

  Elise struggled against her invisible bonds, but to no avail. Ugarte came to help Lemarick stand, moving him to face the starlight that she too could sense streaming down from the roof. The injured shade stood in its dim glow, basking for a moment more before considerable chunks of the ceiling started to fly away from the gap. He offered a smile to Ugarte as she focused hard on the spot, dismantling more of the roof to give him a greater chance of regaining his strength.

  “I daresay your opening night will not be received in the way it was intended,” Lemarick said with a dry rasp in his voice.

  “They say all publicity is good publicity,” Ed replied, but he was frowning all the same. “What do we do with these two?” he asked, looking between Baptiste and Elise.

  “We take them to our elders,” Ugarte replied. “It is not for us to decide their fates.”

  She was looking at Yannick’s broken neck as she spoke this last. Lemarick sensed that she and Ed weren’t going to have a very pleasant conversation about the impulsive killing of the vampire lord later that evening. Edvard Schoonjans didn’t kill, as a rule, but there was a part of his bloodline that still favoured such barbaric means of problem-solving, and a shade could never fully escape his blood. Lemarick faced the hole in the roof once more, breathing deep and feeling the glow of the starlight as the shademagic returned to his veins. The rush of renewed strength forced a grateful smile to his lips.

  A sudden flash illuminated the theatre, blinding Lemarick as impossible rays of daylight blazed into the space all around him. It took him a moment to register the sound of smashing glass before the memory of Living Daylight came to his mind. The hanging bats started to swarm once more, impervious to the light but enraged by its presence. Lemarick fumbled in the momentary chaos, feeling around for Baptiste’s unconscious body on the stage.

  He didn’t find it.

  “Thank you for destroying my lord, Monsieur,” Baptiste said with a chuckle from somewhere nearby. “I thought it was about time I became a free hunter again.”

  In the moment when Lemarick’s eyes adjusted, the sunlight fell away, leaving the bats to scurry out of the hole in the roof. Elise screamed in agony from her place against the wall, falling to a crumpled heap and clutching at her once-beautiful face, now burned to cinders by the stinging light from Baptiste’s familiar potions. He was a hunter through and through, solitary and even willing to harm those who had given him eternal life.

  Lemarick expected to hear the sounds of Ed’s power raging as he rushed to attack Baptiste, but instead the exuberant shade was perfectly still, a look of abject fear on his young face. Lemarick’s eyes finally found Baptiste standing atop the body pile in the orchestra pit, and he understood why Ed had not moved in for a swift attack. Baptiste held Ugarte in his strong arms, with a blade at her throat. The blade was marked in runes from an ancient tongue and every inch of its metal section was coated in a fine layer of enchanted earth. Another shadehunter weapon, and now it was threatening to end Ugarte’s life.

  This was the moment when Lemarick Novel said “Enough.”

  The Name Of Novel

  “Enough?” Baptiste asked, his face a mixture of amusement and rage, “You think you have a right to stop me Monsieur, when it was you that left me to die and be reborn as the beast I hate the most?”

  Every word was true. Lemarick was the reason that Baptiste had fallen victim to Yannick’s bite. Had he known then that the bite would be one of transformation, Lemarick might have been kind enough to decapitate Baptiste’s body and prevent him from rising to existence again. As it was, Lemarick could do nothing to assuage his guilt at the sight of the pain and conflict in the hunter’s eyes, but no-one would stop him from saving Ugarte’s life.

  “Protect yourselves,” Lemarick warned his friends.

  Even as the words left his lips, the foundations of the opera house began to quake. Drawing every ounce of power that he could from the stars above, Lemarick channelled all his strength into the space beneath the orchestra pit, splitting the ground in two and shaking Baptiste and the body pile. In the hunter’s hesitation, Ugarte found her moment to escape, flying in a jet of air to Edvard’s arms, where he cradled her fiercely. But Lemarick didn’t intend to stop there.

  The Populaire was full of bodies, both human and non. This kind of revelation would be bad enough coming from the panic-stricken mouths of those who had escaped the opera house moments ago. If bodies were found that confirmed their wild stories to be the truth, then every shade in Paris would be in danger as hunters like Baptiste came travelling in from all directions. The only solution was to bury the Populaire in the wake of a natural disaster, using every element in the shade’s arsenal to quake the earth beneath their feet.

  Lemarick, Ed and Ugarte rose into the air as the walls of the opera house began to cave in. Baptiste tried to flee within the wreckage, turning left, right and centre as plaster and wood came splintering down in all directions, threatening to crush him. For a moment, Lemarick watched the terrified hunter gleefully as the sheer power of his feat coursed through his veins, but then a solitary moment of clarity interrupted his wrath. He lifted Baptiste clean out of the building, raising him to the same height at which he floated. The hunter hung in the air like a panicked doll, watching as the theatre came down in ruins all around him.

  Lemarick retreated to the rooftop of the next building as he continued his tirade on the Populaire, forcing its gilded halls and brickwork to collapse deep into the ground. He pushed his powers to the limit to force the building downwards, until he found his ultimate target: the old remains of the gypsum mines under the hill. When the remaining earth broke through, the opera house ruins connected with the tunnels and sank with a sudden and violent force, becoming completely invisible at surface level. A white cloud of dust rose in the night sky as gypsum powder and smashed plaster collided.

  The Populaire was no more.

  “Always on rooftops,” Ed said, shaking his head at his friend.

  Ugarte was still trembling in his arms some twenty paces away from where Lemarick stood. Baptiste, battered from his time in the wreckage, was clinging to an overhanging balustrade where Lemarick had dumped him during the destruction. Lemarick stood above him as the hunter struggled to climb back onto the safety of the rooftop and Baptiste paused as he met the shade’s eyes.

  “Would you like some assistance, Monsieur?” Lemarick asked without a hint of joviality.

  In a flip of gravity, Baptiste was off the railing and slammed hard into the flat roof. Lemarick rounded on him with wild grace, the wind kicking up at his back
as he put his foot on the hunter’s chest.

  “I have come to a decision about you,” Lemarick began with a snarl. “I am going to let you live.”

  Now was not the moment to admit it aloud, but Baptiste was right about Lemarick’s guilt for his situation. The dead eyes of that hunter had haunted Lemarick for years after he failed to save the human Baptiste. Sparing the vampire form of his life wasn’t quite the same thing, but it was as close as Lemarick could come to righting that particular wrong in his past.

  “But hear this,” Lemarick continued, closing in so he was hovering above the hunter’s face, the heel of his boot pressing at Baptiste’s neck.

  “You will live to tell the tale of what happened here,” the shade explained, “and you will tell every last one of your kind about the man they call Novel. My name is destruction to you all, from this moment forth. Do we have an agreement?”

  Lemarick let Baptiste rise and the hunter rubbed his throat until speech returned.

  “We do, Monsieur,” he replied.

  Baptiste Du Nord rose in a sudden, hazy cloud of darkness. Seconds later the sound of swooping wings overhead signalled his departure. Lemarick watched the bat fly away in the starlight as he felt a new surge of power rising in his blood. Ed and Ugarte came to join him at his side of the roof.

  “You buried my instruments, you scoundrel,” Ed said, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

  Lemarick waved a hand. “I’ll help you rebuild them,” he replied. “I have some ideas for considerable improvements to the design.”

  Ugarte suddenly gave a gasp, her hand rising to cover her mouth.

  “Lemarick,” she breathed, “Your hair.”

  His hands flew into his locks and pushed the longest strands forwards, feeling around for some sort of difference.

  “What about it?” he demanded.

  Ed gave him a proper look-over, letting out a laughing kind of sigh.

  “It’s bright white, old chap,” he chuckled. “You’re finally showing your age.”

  “White?” Lemarick asked, horrified and feeling his scalp all over again.

  Ugarte gave him a thoughtful look.

  “I think you’ve found your glamour,” she surmised. “Mother will be pleased.”

  PIKETON, the present day

  Teeth

  Lily stood at the precipice to the theatre’s catacombs, peering down the stone staircase into the unfathomable depths below. She turned to Lawrence with a quirked brow, chewing on her lip a little.

  “You’re sure they went down here?” she asked him once again.

  The voodoo boy rolled his dark eyes. “About five minutes ago,” he assured her, “I think it’s the monthly foundation check.”

  As her eyes adjusted to the darkness at the foot of the staircase, she saw the opening of several passageways below. Lily began to point, but a shout from behind her caused both she and Lawrence to crane their heads. Poppa Seward was only just visible in the hallway behind the giant box he was trying to shift.

  “Poppa!” Lawrence began to chide, but the old man shook his head.

  “No, no, I’m fine,” he replied with great strain. “You go on chatting while your father gives himself a heart attack moving boxes for the girl you fancy.”

  Lawrence’s hollow cheeks flushed darkly, his eyes flickering between his father’s struggling form and Lily’s sudden, impish grin. He flung out his hand towards the dark entrance to the tunnels.

  “Take the first one to the left and keep going down,” he explained. “Look, I have to go. The old dog’s going to do himself a mischief otherwise.”

  “I heard that!” Poppa squawked from behind the box.

  In moments they were gone and Lily was left alone to descend the dark stairs. Concentrating for a moment, she let a small ball of flames materialise in the palm of her left hand, holding it up like a torch to guide her into the shadowy underground of the theatre. As she began the descent, the cold hand of fear threatened to send a shockwave up her spine, but she resisted its icy fingertips. This was the Imaginique – her new home – there should be nothing to fear here, above or below its ancient walls.

  The hospital had called mere moments after Novel left with Baptiste. Jazzy’s release time had been moved up by several hours, meaning Lily and Novel would have to leave very soon if they were still going to collect her. Lily had no idea how long a foundation check in the catacombs was going to take, so the only solution was to find Novel in the tunnels and give him the message herself. It seemed like a logical idea, but the farther Lily got into the suffocating depths of the stone staircase, the more she was starting to wonder if she could manage Jazzy and her wheelchair by herself, and leave Novel to his business.

  At the foot of the very end of the deep staircase, Lily found that she didn’t want to leave it and head off into the new tunnel ahead. Her vicious nightmares of being buried in heavy, relentless earth returned to her and she wondered how Novel could stand the feeling of encasement enough to do this every month. Why couldn’t Baptiste have come down on his own? The elegant gent was surely more suited to darkness and narrow corridors than his employer.

  The tunnel had a hard, echoing floor and every new step that Lily took reverberated into the darkness ahead. She thought about increasing the size of her torchlight, but casting a giant fireball in an enclosed space was an even less pleasant thought than getting trapped in the tunnels. When her steps gave way to the sound of a squeaking, scurrying form, however, Lily felt her stomach do a flip. Rats. Of course there would be rats, because Novel clearly wasn’t bothered about exposing Lily to that sort of thing.

  Slowing her breathing, Lily looked down to her feet. She felt the blood pulse in her veins for a moment, carrying its magical strength down towards the ground. She rose gently into the air, only an inch or two above the echoing floor, then hovered there for a moment to ensure she had her balance. A rat passed by beneath her, but she was steady enough in her levitation to stay out of its way. She began to walk in the air, her steps as silent as a low breeze.

  “So much for lacking precision,” she murmured to herself smugly.

  Lily continued down the long corridor, until the sight of light ahead caught her attention. A faint glow emanated from around a corner some way in the distance. Now confident that she could use her gravity skills to speed back to the staircase if something went awry, Lily strode on through the air, extinguishing her fireball when she found the very edge of the new light source. She was about to turn the corner into the lit space when a sudden noise stopped her.

  Novel. And he was injured.

  “It never gets any less painful,” he said. Every word sounded as though it had come from between gritted teeth. The illusionist’s breathing was stunted and shallow as he heaved out the words. “Ow!”

  “Do you think there will ever come a time when you don’t talk incessantly all the way through this?”

  Baptiste sounded as though he was chewing on something. His usually graceful words were marred by bad manners, and he too was out of breath.

  “I’m supposed to sit here in silence, am I, whilst you – AH!”

  Novel cried sharply, the way Lily did when she dropped something heavy on her foot.

  “You did that on purpose,” he added in a growl.

  Baptiste did not reply. Lily stood for a moment in the half-light, deeply confused. They weren’t checking foundations. She couldn’t imagine what was happening mere feet from where she stood, but the queasy feeling in her stomach had returned tenfold. This was something she wasn’t meant to be overhearing. Novel hissed in pain again, and suddenly Lily didn’t care if she was supposed to be there or not. She lunged forward in the silent air and flew around the corner, eyes widening at the sight she beheld.

  Novel sat in a white throne, his head lolling back as he gritted his teeth. Baptiste was kneeling at his side, holding one of Novel’s arms down against the side of the seat, his face pressed closed against the exposed, pale flesh of his forearm. Lily t
ook in the sight for mere seconds before the men spotted her arrival. Novel raced to snatch his arm back from the MC and in the same moment Baptiste turned to look at Lily, his face a mixture of shock and guilt.

  “Lily, please,” Novel stammered, “I can explain all this.”

  Baptiste’s blood-soaked teeth gave Lily all the explanation she needed.

  PIKETON, 1927

  Theatre For Sale

  “Even Mother approves of it,” Novel said, staring up at the grand gothic façade of the building before him.

  “Are we sure that’s a good thing?” Ugarte asked.

  Edvard shielded his eyes as he surveyed the Theatre Imaginique from top to bottom. The shining eyes of the theatre’s many gargoyles kept watch over the trio with their mischievous grins.

  “I love it,” Ed proclaimed with a proud smile.

  Novel put his hands to his hips and gave a satisfied nod, though his lips remained unsmiling.

  “It was a music hall up until a few months ago,” he explained, “but recently a much larger hall was constructed in Manchester and it put this poor old place out of business.”

  “And you intend to revive it for music?” Ugarte asked. The slight frown in her lip told Novel she didn’t much like his chances.

  “For variety,” he corrected. “The Imaginique will house only the most unusual performers the British public has ever seen.”

  Novel stepped forward and pushed on the heavy double doors at the theatre entrance, letting them swing open as a cloud of dust exploded over the grand foyer. He could already picture the resplendence of the great early-Victorian theatre, even though everything around him had fallen into disrepair. There would be a great golden chandelier – in the true French style – to welcome guests, with a crimson carpet and gilded frames portraying shows that the theatre had triumphed in performing.