Darker London

Ko and Indigo escaped out of the house long before Imogene crunched back to life, in the cold, concealed puddle of her own blood. Indigo – a minimalist by training – packed light. She’d broken any emotional attachments she had with anything in her room when she’d broken her first neck. “You need warmer clothes than this,” Ko told her.

“Then I’ll buy warmer clothes than this,” she snapped at him, although snapping at Ko did about as much as snapping at a mountain.

( ... )

Lucine had met Peter at the docks along with her new deathless friend Nancy, but she hadn't said much at the time beyond introducing herself and Ko and stating that a vision had sent them there. She'd said she'd like to speak more privately after she and Ko had had a chance to shower and clean themselves up after the long trip from Russia.

But once showered and dressed (now in something less heavy for the milder London winter), Lucine made her way to the hospital and to meet with this Peter, the undying man who'd once been a true deathless. She was understandably curious about that aspect of him, as she was with all the dhampirs and polyy.

The receptionist (not human, good,) had taken her up to Peter's office and there she greeted the man in the door and smiled, reaching to shaking his hand. "Very nice to see you again," she said in English. "I feel much more awake now."

England had not been like Ko expected, although if he looked back on his thoughts about the place he couldn't have said what, exactly, he'd expected. It seemed a little naive to hope to find a place exactly like Izmaylov, but perhaps he had hoped.

He and Lucine were staying at the hospital, with suited him as much as it worried him. The institution was run by a human, a complicated, not-entirely-human, sure, but Ko was still very uneasy with the idea that Peter had any power at all over any of the deathless. That any human should have such influence.

Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if he was the only human involved, but he wasn't. There were so many of them. Every one of them an issue.

A few days after their arrival, which was also a few days into their search for the human auctioneers, Ko bought it up. He and Lucine were out in the hospital grounds, under a low grey sky and a faint drizzle. Even outside he felt trapped, endangered. "There are so many humans here," he said quietly in Russian to his lady. "Does it worry you?"

Ko had never been on a boat before, and he didn’t like it. The ground was not behaving like ground and no matter how accustomed his stomach was to the drops and turns of flight, he was not used to this. He gripped the railing and looked out over the sea, out toward England as they pulled out of Calais. He could have flown this distance; he and Lucine both, and it would have been better, but for Ailbhe’s vision. (He ignored the question of luggage because it ruined the fantasy of flying over a sea he'd never seen before. He'd never seen any sea before, never been totally surrounded by water.)

Despite the hypnotising constant swell of the water stretching on forever, didn’t linger on the railing long, but began to move through the ferry, searching. Lucine had taken the lower decks, either sympathetic to his stomach or (Ko suspected, but not till later) because she wanted him to find the other deathless first.

( ... )

When Ailbhe woke it was in her own bed and with a splitting headache. She tried to sit up but that turned out to be a mistake and she just groaned instead. At the desk on the other side of the room, Irena turned to look at her and said, "thought you might sleep forever."

Ailbhe reached for the bottle of water on the bedside and found that Irena had put a vial of painkillers beside it. She took three and half drained the bottle. "How long was I asleep?"

( Read more... )

Outside the snow of yesterday had stopped falling and it was only just below zero. It was, for the middle of winter, a very nice day. Even Dasha was almost feeling it, having gone for a long walk that morning around the grounds of the convent. It felt good to be outside and in the open, even if it was cold. It meant not being so close to all the other, especially to certain arseholes she'd avoided very hard for the last few weeks.

Avoidance was good. Avoidance was Dasha's best bet.

( I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice. )

The plans for England were coming together carefully, without Lucine rushing any of it.

It had started with a vision from one of her oracles, the doctor Ailbhe who'd been with them almost a year. When she'd come out of the trance she'd clawed at Lucine's arm and told her that it was a hospital full of people like them: deathless, vilkati, zagovornik, veles, moroi, dhampirs.

Of course Lucine was intrigued - another place much like Izmaylov, a sanctuary built up to keep their own safe from humanity.

( Read more... )

The electricity in Izmaylov was misbehaving tonight and outside it had dipped below zero degrees and the sky was bringing down messy sleet that seemed to tear through Lucine's heavy coat. She pulled open the door to the stables and walked through the darkness until she reached the main generator. There she flicked on the torch that lived beside it and then, after refilling it, started the old faithful engine up. The rumble was slow and then it growled into life. From the stable windows she saw the lights on the outside of the main building come on, and then locked the generator's switches into place again.

( ... )

When his car had broken down somewhere up on the road on Mount Karpinsky he cursed and slapped the steering wheel. Useless rental car! He had to blame himself a little - in Yekaterinburg he'd intentionally sought out something cheap, against his wife's reasoning. "You don't know those mountain roads. It isn't like a Sunday drive along Lenina Avenue." He'd brushed he off and called her dramatic, a country girl finally having something to show up on her city-bred husband.

( Read more... )