Chapter Text
It had been the end of the world for three years now.
From a shattered London rooftop, Amélie Lacroix watched the last of the bombers make one final, lazy pass over the smoking city and rumble back toward the south, ducking and diving to avoid the skeins of anti-aircraft fire and the swarms of fighters that were rising to meet them.
An ordinary human would have seen nothing in the sky but black clouds stained orange by fire, but Amélie was far from ordinary and had not been human for a long time.
She watched with interest as three fighters zeroed in on bomber lagging behind the rest and fell on it like predators on a wounded sheep. Flames sprouted from one of the bomber’s engine pods and it began a graceful spiral down to the ground. The fighters, engines roaring in satisfaction, split off to find new prey.
Amélie shifted some of the rubble she was sat on with her foot, prodding around broken brickwork and splintered timbers with a shoe that had seen better days. The smell of burning timbers and cordite mixed in her nostrils. War’s thick scent: fire and blood, pulverised masonry and scorched meat and burning metal.
From underneath her came a feeble groan.
Another bomber burst and fell in a shower of crimson and light. The fighter pilots were good, she noted. She wished them well.
The night’s chill was staring to creep through her thin peacoat. She noticed, but didn’t mind.
Beneath her, in the rubble: “H… help… please…”
“Shush,” she said gently.
A bomber got lucky. Its gun turret spat fire and one of the fighters blew apart. Steel and aluminium sparkled into the night. A parachute blossomed below it – and then crumpled up as the gun turret fired again. Amélie scowled. That was a low blow, even by their standards.
Some of the other fighters must have noticed what happened to their comrade. They tore the bomber apart and kept firing even as it fell. Czech pilots, probably, or Polish. They always fought the fiercest when they flew, Amélie had noticed. They’d lost the most to the Germans, were eager to balance the books.
Was it even Germans flying these bombers anymore? Amélie no longer knew. Wasn’t sure if anyone knew. Maybe the aeroplanes flew themselves these days. Clockwork brains and alchemical sigils instead of flesh and blood pilots. Maybe they no longer knew why they were pounding the British cities into dust – just that they had always done it.
In fact, Amélie rather hoped no humans were in those aircraft. Because if they were, then the Omnics would have put them in there, and that was a fate she did not wish to consider. Amélie doubted there were many Germans left who would still waste time fighting the British, not when they had demons of their own making hammering on their doors.
Dieu, the Germans had thought they’d been so smart when they’d marched tin soldiers into battle instead of real ones. And it had even worked, for a while. Eastern Europe had fallen. Amélie’s home hadn’t lasted a week against those things, those Omnics. She’d stayed just long enough to see the German elite march through Paris in triumph before fleeing across the Channel to England.
But what happens when a tin soldier doesn’t take its orders? The Germans were finding out. She had heard rumours that Berlin had fallen to the rebelling Omnic legions, that they’d bombed Hamburg into the ground. They said you could hear old Hitler himself on the radio if you found the right frequency, broadcasting from his last stronghold in the Alps, screaming how Germany would never fall beneath the metal tide, ranting to a continent that didn’t have the time to listen.
But some of the machines were still following their old, obsolete commands. And so the skies of London still occasionally burned.
Another bomber fell. The fighters were taking losses, too, but nowhere near as many. Good. Amélie wished them the best.
“P-please, miss… help….”
“Shush.”
There was a part of her that wanted to go up there and join them. Had she been the woman she was a few hundred years ago, full of idealism and hope, she might have. See how the British and Czech and Polish pilots reacted to watching a cloud of bats start tearing apart Omnic bombers. She chuckled, imagining the looks on their faces.
Amélie squinted, pushing her eyes to their limit. If she concentrated she could make out the individual rivets on the bombers’ skins, see the scorches and pock-marks left behind by flack. She wondered if the mechanisms that flew them thought like people, if they were panicking as more and more of them fell.
She hoped so.
Machines like those had butchered her husband in the basement of a Gestapo building. Dragged him in for "crimes against the Volk," for being something most people thought was just a myth. No human had the strength to make a vampire go where it didn’t want to, but the mechanical muscles of Omnics could break even ancient bones with their might.
It would be so easy, she knew. A single thought and she would be up there, fighting amongst them, getting revenge… and getting noticed, she reminded herself with a heavy sigh.
“I can’t feel my legs…”
Amélie looked down.
A bomb had smashed in through the roof of this row of terraces and blown most of them to pieces. This house, on the edge of the row, had had its roof collapse but was otherwise mostly unscathed. Unfortunately for the occupant – a middle-aged man with retreating hair and an advancing gut – the roof had collapsed right on top of him, knocking him half out of the ruined wall and pinning him under rubble. Why on earth the idiot hadn’t gotten to a bomb shelter Amélie didn’t know, but his stupidity was her good fortune.
It was a lot easier when they couldn’t struggle. Or when she didn’t need an invitation.
Not just yet, though. She wanted to see how the pilots got on.
She looked back up. The remaining bombers were fleeing as fast as their propellers could push them, but the fighters were faster, more nimble. Another lumbering bomber spiralled out of control, smashing into one of its comrades as it floundered and sending them both careening out of the sky. Amélie smiled. What was it the Americans said? Go get ‘em.
And then something caught her eye.
One of the fighters had something clinging to its wing. Amélie strained to see it. Even for eyes as good as hers, it was hard to keep it in sight as the fighter dodged and jinked through the bombers’ fire and its own side’s anti-air.
Then the thing moved, and Amélie’s eyes went wide.
It was a man.
A young man in an airman’s uniform, bomber jacket and silk scarf and goggles and all, sat in the crook of the aeroplane’s wing like he hadn’t a care in the world, like he’d been lying there reading a book when the pilot had taken off and hadn’t had the time to jump clear. Amélie felt her jaw sag open. Impossible, she thought, before sheepishly remembering that a vampire of all people should not use that word lightly.
The man trapped beneath her called weakly again for help. She gave him a kick to shut him up, not taking her eyes off the man in the sky.
As she watched, the fighter plane arced down, banking hard toward one of the last bombers. The bomber pulled away, trying to keep its distance, but the fighter caught up easily. For a moment the two aircraft were alongside one another. The young man on the wing stood – quite casually, as if the headwind that was whipping and tearing his scarf out behind him was but a stiff breeze, as if the fighter’s rapid movements as it tore through the sky were nothing more than the jolts of a carriage ride over rough cobbles – and with a thumbs-up to the pilot, sprinted down the length of the fighter’s wing and towards the bomber. He reached the end of the wing, leapt forward… and vanished.
Amélie blinked in confusion.
And then he reappeared again on the wing of the bomber, like someone had edited a film reel. Over a hundred feet between the two planes and he had covered it in a heartbeat.
“Magie étrange,” Amélie whispered to herself in awe. Strange magic.
The airman kept running, full-tilt toward the metal body of the bomber, and just when it looked like he was about to smash face first into its flank he vanished again. The bomber banked around, trying to shake the fighter that was dogging it, and the wing vanished from Amélie’s view.
Then the bomber began to weave drunkenly through the sky, like something was going wrong inside of it. It wobbled and tilted and smoke began to emerge from small holes in its side.
Suddenly the man reappeared, on the other wing this time and with an automatic pistol in each hand. He holstered them with a flourish and began sprinting again, down the wing and towards empty air, throwing out his arms like he believed he might take flight of his own accord. He reached the edge and as Amélie watched incredulously he did that disappearing act again – only to reappear crouched atop a fighter that was roaring past, peppering the side of another bomber with cannon fire. He tapped the glass of the canopy and the pilot inside looked up with a start. Amélie saw the airman grin, wave hello, point to another bomber. The pilot gave a thumbs-up and banked away, following the airman’s pointed finger.
She watched three more bombers fall to this impossible man before they moved out of the range of even her eyes. Beneath her, the old man mewled and coughed, still pinned under the debris of his home.
“Ma’am… please…”
She’d been promoted from miss to ma’am, she noted with a snort.
“C’est Comtesse,” she corrected him.
“Wha…?”
The eastern sky was beginning to brighten. Her skin crawled at the sight. I’ve put this off long enough, she thought. In the distance, the all-clear sirens were starting their jubilant wail. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral rose though the smoke as she took one last look around. Searchlights inspected the clouds for stragglers. She could smell water in the air now, wet soot and ash, the smell of London’s firefighters getting to work.
She bent down, close enough to smell the sweat and piss and fear of the wounded man, smell the rich red that flowed just under his surface. She smiled. Showed her teeth.
He whimpered in fear. There was that familiar hot stink as his bowels emptied.
“Faire chut, mon ami.”
Sometimes she might let them squirm and scream to bring out the flavour, but tonight she was impatient. One bite and it was all over.
And as she fed, she let her mind wander back to that impossible airman.
Two nights later, Amélie Lacroix went to see the doctor.
She had to pick her way over mounds of rubble to do so. The doctor lived in an area that had been ground almost down to its foundations by the bombing runs of the past few nights. Amélie made her way past the empty shells of houses, gutted by fire and blasted down by bombs. They watched her with their broken windows, staring like empty eye sockets. Ragged and singed posters encouraged her to dig for victory as searchlights tracked overhead. The place stank of smoke and decay.
There were few people here. They had either left or had been splashed to the four winds by Omnic bombs when they tried to stay. A few lights flickered in the depths of the ruins – the city’s homeless bedding down where they could. Amélie’s stomach rumbled, even at the thought of the thin and greasy blood those sorry specimens had to offer. She hurried on.
The doctor’s house was immediately obvious. In a neighbourhood of ruins and rubble, it was the only house that still stood, ramshackle and crooked, with jags of brickwork sticking out against the flattened remains of its former neighbours.
Amélie knocked on the door and waited in the shadows that pooled around it. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a homeless woman a few metres down the road, swaddled in filthy blankets and yellowing newspapers. Her stink assailed Amélie’s nostrils and she crinkled her face in disgust. For her part the woman crossed herself and mumbled a short prayer. Amélie raised an eyebrow at that. This house had clearly developed a reputation.
The front door opened. It didn’t creak, which Amélie personally thought was a bit of a shame – in her mind, the door to a house like this should creak. But the doctor was insistent about keeping it well-oiled.
A woman with wadjet eyes watched her from across the threshold.
“Bonsoir, Fareeha,” Amélie said with a polite smile.
Fareeha smelled of spices and sand and glass and fire and a thousand other things Amélie had no names for. Not blood, though. No liquid in her veins. As humans were earth and water, djinns were air and fire. Privately, Amélie found something about them distastefully flashy, even if they were simply as their God made them.
That said, the disguise the doctor had crafted for her was good. Apart from her pupils, which forever reflected a fire that wasn’t there, Fareeha looked as human as they came.
“Good to see you again, Amélie,” Fareeha said, sounding almost as if she meant it.
To say the two of them had a history would be a gross understatement. Decades ago a vampire hunter had travelled from her native Egypt to Annecy in France and departed with one of her own stakes pushed through her eye. The djinn staring her down now was that hunter's daughter – by adoption, Amélie suspected, because what a birth that would have been – and as far as she knew, forgiveness was an entirely alien concept to creatures made of flame.
“And you too.” Amélie smiled, showing just the tips of her teeth. Fareeha stood aside to let her in, but Amélie shook her head. “You have to say it.”
“Every time?”
“Every time,” she sighed. “As I told you last time, and the time before that.”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
Amélie hummed in annoyance.
“Then I give you permission to enter,” Fareeha said grandly, with a condescending little smile.
“You’re too kind,” Amélie murmured, stepping over the threshold and into the musty confines of the house. Fareeha shut the door behind her and the two of them were plunged into pitch blackness. Amélie felt her pupils dilate as her eyes adapted.
“It’s darker in here than I recall,” she observed.
“The bombing cut the gas pipes yesterday,” Fareeha explained. “I suspect it will be some time before the city repairs them.”
Amélie didn’t mind too much. She saw through the dark like it was a clear summer day.
“Not,” Fareeha continued with a hint of smugness, “that it inconveniences us much.”
She extended her hand and clicked her fingers forcefully. All of a sudden blinding bright lights erupted from all around them. Amélie screeched in pain and slammed her eyelids shut as the glow scorched her hypersensitive eyes. She reeled backward and staggered, as though the light had delivered a physical blow.
When she was able to see again, blinking the spots out of her vision, she saw that the gas lamps on the walls burned with the blue-flecked red crackle of djinn fire.
“Are you all right?” Fareeha asked. “Are your eyes okay?”
Amélie might have believed it was accidental, if not for the caustic way Fareeha said "eyes." Subtlety was as lost of an art to the djinns as forgiveness, it seemed.
“You did that on purpose,” she spat. Fareeha shrugged. “Every time I come here it is something new. Last time it was garlic-flavoured cough drops. If you are going to be like this, I shall take my business elsewhere…”
“That will not be necessary,” came a new voice from the end of the house’s narrow hallway. “Amélie, I do apologise for Fareeha’s behaviour.”
Amélie smelled the doctor before she saw her, rosewater and formaldehyde and some alchemical aroma that made the inside of her nose tingle like a voltage was being applied to it. And then, rich blood under powdered skin, charged with latent magic, enough to make Amélie's mouth water.
With a small effort Amélie controlled herself. She was high society – or had been, once. Either way, it was rude to drool on your host.
“She does have a fiery temper,” Angela Ziegler continued as she rounded the corner and leaned against the hallway doorframe. She was dressed in a rumpled white smock with a few stains of various colours specked on it and peered at Amélie through a pair of wireframe spectacles.
Both Amélie and Fareeha gave Angela withering looks. She smirked back at them.
“The pun is the lowest form of humour,” Amélie grumbled.
“Then I won’t ask where the practical joke falls on that scale,” Angela said, glancing at the lamps that had nearly blinded Amélie.
Amélie just growled wordlessly and stalked forward. She felt Fareeha’s eyes on her back and stopped a safe distance from Angela. The last thing she needed was to be tackled to the floor by an overprotective demon.
“Let’s get this done,” she said to the doctor.
Angela Zeigler, London’s finest witch and doctor to all kinds of people who couldn’t have a human practitioner treat their ailments. She had developed a habit of picking through the ruins of the city to see what curios she could unearth. The sort of things that people kept for fear of what might happen if they let them out of their sight but were happy to abandon to the Luftwaffe’s bombs. The type of things that were in families for generations but never seemed to be where you remembered putting them – lockets and charms of bone, diaries that recorded forgotten histories, creatures that were in no biologist’s books.
It was only inevitable then that she would uncover things like Amélie. She had a sneaking suspicion that when – if – they buried Angela, they’d write “couldn’t leave well enough alone” on her headstone.
Angela smiled. “This way, then.”
Amélie followed her into the back room of the house, skirting around pickled shapes in fogged-glass jars and ducking under an arm that dangled on a hook from the ceiling – which she was certain was fake until she noticed the ligaments trailing out of it like wires.
They entered Angela’s study, a room packed high with boxes and files and loose papers. Strange things peeped out at Amélie from dusty shelves and murky corners and the stench of formaldehyde was almost overwhelming.
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Amélie said. “The newspapers say fifty bombs dropped on this neighbourhood last night, yet you’re still standing.”
“The finest wards unicorn dust can make,” Angela chuckled, moving a bottle of something that flowed according to its own laws out of the way so Amélie could sit down. Fareeha hovered in the doorway. “It’ll take a bomb like the Americans are building to bring this house down.”
“What?”
Angela frowned. “Probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. Forget it.”
Amélie shrugged. “N’importe quoi.” Whatever.
“But it’s not just this house I’ve warded,” Angela added with a self-satisfied tone. “Ever wonder how St. Paul’s Cathedral keeps standing, no matter how hard the Omnics hit it?”
Amélie raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re joking.”
“I am not.”
“And I assume you didn’t do something of that magnitude out of the kindness of your own heart? You are taking the government’s coin now?”
“Don’t look so worried. I’m an independent contractor, nothing more.”
Amélie looked troubled.
Angela rolled her eyes. “I’m not about to rat you out to Vaswani, if that’s what you mean.”
Satya Vaswani – Maharani Vaswani, to give her the proper title – was the woman vampire matriarchs invoked to scare their fledglings into making them clean their teeth before bed. From a line of Indian royalty which all but ruled the British Raj, now the crown’s Royal Inquisitor and employed to make sure the British Empire’s less natural subjects still followed the laws of the land. A woman of exacting habits and ruthless disposition, there were rumours she was a vampire herself – use the best to corral the rest, so to speak.
Precisely the kind of woman who would like to hear of a vampire living in the heart of London without permission.
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Amélie countered.
“Now where would the advantage be in that?” Angela chided, as if she was lecturing a slow pupil. “I am quite fond of our little arrangement. I still have bills to pay, after all.”
“And if Vaswani wonders where you obtain vampire blood from?”
Just what the doctor required vampire blood for, Amélie was not certain. What she did know was that her blood was incredibly valuable. There had been a time, she reflected miserably, when vampires hadn’t been as rare as they were, when every noble’s court hid a nosferatu or three. But she was part of a dying breed, it seemed. And what had once been commonplace – her blood – was now worth its weight in gold. For a refugee like herself who’d arrived in London with the coat on her back and little more, money was forever in short supply.
Angela shrugged. “You think she doesn’t already? I’ve made arrangements.”
“You’ve made arrangements,” Amélie repeated flatly.
“If you don’t trust me, feel free to go to someone else.” She scoffed. “Assuming the Omnic bombs left anyone else still alive, of course.”
Anger flapped inside Amélie like a trapped crow. She’d gone to Ziegler in the first place because she was discrete, she was private, and she had offered a good price for whatever blood Amélie could spare. To learn she was now busily building bridges with the government – the very people Amélie had her reasons for avoiding – was unwelcome at best.
But on the other hand, money. It was as simple as that.
Amélie grumbled and rolled up her coat sleeve. The skin of her bare arm was sallow and corpsy in the light from the gas lamps.
Angela smiled sweetly and produced a syringe box like she’d conjured it from the air. Perhaps she had.
“Good choice,” she trilled. “Now, hold still and we’ll have this done before midnight.”
The mantelpiece clock was chiming half past eleven when Angela Ziegler packed up the last of Amélie's blood into an icebox kept in her study. Amélie herself had left half an hour earlier, but Angela had needed to first do some preliminary work to fix and stabilise the blood. Vampire blood was volatile stuff – it wouldn’t do to have half her house catch fire or age two centuries due to lack of precautions.
She looked away from her desk for a moment to check the clock. When she looked back, someone sat in front her.
“Verdammt!” she exclaimed in shock, nearly jumping out of her skin.
The someone grinned. “’ello, Angie.”
“Lena!" Angela patted her chest, trying to calm herself. "What have I told you about sneaking up on people?”
Behind her, the door swung open. Fareeha stuck her head in. “Is everything all right in here— ah. Hello, Lena.”
“Hiya!”
“I’ll leave you two to it, then,” Fareeha said and closed the door.
“You never sneak up on her,” Angela grumbled, shrugging off her smock – now with a few more stains on it, these ones a deep red that bordered on violet – and draping it on the back of her chair.
“Well, yeah, she’d probably roast me alive if I surprised her,” Lena said, swinging her legs idly against the desk. Angela noticed her heels were passing through the mahogany.
“Can you even be burned?” she asked.
“Do I look like I want to find out?”
“Fair point.”
Lena shrugged, adjusted the folds of her silk scarf around her shoulders, and pushed her flight goggles further up onto her forehead. Angela spied the bulge in the front of her bomber jacket as she stretched. The condenser’s tell-tale bulk.
Angela folded her arms. “So, are you here on business or is this a social call? Because if it’s the latter, I should warn you I’m out of tea. I sold my ration tickets for a newt’s eye.”
Lena looked incredulous.
Angela shrugged. “The great crested newt is endangered these days. They’re worth a lot.”
“They’re worth your tea rations?”
Never had the difference between the British and the Germans (Swiss, technically, but try getting Lena to remember that) been more apparent, Angela reflected.
Lena shook her head. “You’re hopeless, Angie. Anyway, I’m here on business.” Her chest inflated self-importantly. “On business from the crown, no less!” she exclaimed.
“You’ve been waiting all your life to say that, haven’t you?”
“Oh, you’ve no idea. I might say it again, actually.”
“Don’t. What is it?”
Lena rummaged in the pockets of her bomber jacket and produced a slightly bent and crumpled envelope with a seal on it that Angela immediately recognised.
The seal of the Royal Inquisitor. Damn.
“So the ‘business from the crown’ is you being a glorified postman?” Angela asked.
“By all means trample on my dreams, Angela, I don’t mind,” Lena sniffed. “And besides, I challenge you to find a faster postie than me. Ink’s still drying.”
She held out the envelope. Angela reached for it, but her fingers passed straight through. “Ah, Lena…”
“Oh, bugger. Hold on…” She squinted at the envelope as if willing it to do something. “Try now?”
Still, Angela’s hand met empty air.
“Hell’s bells,” Lena grumbled. “I’m going to have words with Winston when I get back.” She unbuttoned her jacket, revealing a thin cotton undershirt and a lump of cast metal with a glowing blue porthole in the centre that reminded Angela of a deformed diver’s helmet.
Lena smacked her hand on the metal a couple of times. The device – the condenser, she called it – made an unhappy gurgling noise.
“Okay, third time’s the charm.”
Angela’s fingers found smooth paper. She grabbed the envelope quickly before anything else could happen to it.
“The perks of being dead,” Lena grumbled as she closed her jacket back up.
“Could be worse,” Angela said.
“Don’t I know it.”
Angela turned her attention back to the envelope. She opened it with hands she fought hard to keep from trembling.
Its contents simply read:
Dr. Ziegler,
We know about Lacroix.
If you wish to remain in Britain or her dominions, you will follow my instructions to the letter.
Provide Oxton with her location. Inform us if she contacts you again. Divulge none of this to anyone.
I trust further reprimands will not be necessary.
Satya Vaswani
Royal Inquisitor
Angela breathed out slowly, then glanced up at Lena.
Lena shrugged. “Sorry, love, orders are orders. And come on, you didn’t think you were going to keep one of the last vampires in the world hidden from Satya Vaswani, did ya?”
“It was worth a shot,” Angela huffed.
“Well, you tried,” Lena said, halfway between conciliatory and mocking. “Now come on, love. Spill the beans.”
“Now just wait one moment,” Angela began.
“I’ll tell Lady Vaswani you said that, shall I?” Lena asked with a cocked eyebrow.
“I have my business to consider! And myself, too!” Angela protested. “What if she finds out I’ve sold her out? Fareeha’s good, but I can’t expect her to bodyguard me every second of the day!”
Lena grinned. “I’m sure it won’t come to that, love.”
“You think?”
“Look, I’m not supposed to tell you this…”
“Shall I tell Lady Vaswani you said that?”
“Fair point. But,” Lena continued, emphasis on the ‘but’, “if everything goes to plan,” – emphasis again, this time on ‘plan’ – “everything should work out just fine.”
“I’m betraying an ancient vampire to the British crown in a city being periodically bombed by sentient machines,” Angela said evenly. “And you’re telling me nothing will go wrong?”
“With a woman who’s already dead, you forgot that bit.”
“As you say.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell ya, love,” Lena said. She furrowed her brow, then brightened. “Actually, wait, yes I do.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, my dad told me this one.”
“Go on.”
Lena Oxton, buried with military honours seven months ago, grinned widely.
“Life’s a bitch and then you die.”