was a bit embarrassing how much of my time lately I was spending getting schooled by people who could barely vote. I shut my eyes and did my best to sleep. It was surprisingly easy to let myself drift off, even if I did occasionally find myself having very inappropriate thoughts about the technically-not-a-teenager lying next to me.
“Bit of a weird question,” she whispered in the dark. “Do you mind if I wank?”
“Points for boldness.”
I felt her shrug beside me. “Don’t ask, don’t get. It’s just that this is turning out to be a bit harder than I thought it would and I’m having trouble sleeping.”
I knew exactly what she meant. “Knock yourself out.”
“Thanks. And, you know, feel free if you want to.”
I kept my eyes as firmly closed and my voice as quiet as I could possibly manage. “Thanks back, but I think if we were both—y’know.”
“Then we might as well…”
“Yeah.”
I felt her moving beside me and heard a few soft sounds of her hand working under the sheets. Then I heard her stifling faint murmurs of pleasure. I should have stayed on the sofa because this was getting un-fucking-fair.
“You okay over there?” I asked.
The only answer she seemed able to manage was a short but insistent mm-hmm.
I was this close to asking her if she needed a hand when the screaming started.
13
Blood & Spite
It was coming from outside and while on some level I knew that running towards the screams was a habit I needed to get out of, I was very much the one with the qualifications here.
Outside, the lights in the corridor were flickering, and the shadows were longer and deeper than they had any right to be in any building built after 1472. Sofia’s flat was on a long corridor with a variety of other student lodgings, some single rooms, some shared spaces like hers and Flick’s. The door to one of these swung ominously open.
I heard footsteps behind me and spun around, but it was just the flatmates.
“What is it?” asked Sofia. She was wearing actual pyjamas because of course she was wearing actual pyjamas. They were dark blue and slightly too long in the arms, and adorable in a sincerely non-sexual way.
“Don’t know yet, but I’m leaning towards something very bad. Stay here.”
I crept into the corridor. There was a slightly unseasonal chill in the air, especially noticeable after the, I suppose, equally unseasonal warmth that Sofia’s Apollonian adventures had conjured in her sitting room. The screams had stopped, which I thought was probably a bad sign. Letting my senses sharpen, I was caught at once by the smell of blood—definitely a bad sign then.
What with the misery, drunkenness, and general desire to disappear into a hole in the ground and never come out, I’d got a bit out of my habit of always going armed in case I had to fight a terrifying supernatural monster with a single very specific vulnerability. It was a habit I was going to have to get back into. Still I pressed cautiously inside and found myself in a flat that was a mirror-image of Sofia’s. It was a bit messier, partially because I suspected that most students wouldn’t be anywhere near as house-proud as she was, and partly because there had clearly been a very short, very bloody fight here.
I followed the trail of spatter and wreckage through to something that looked chillingly like the sitting room we’d been drinking and oracling in. Three corpses were strewn on the sofa. And there was Yelena, lying across them like she was shooting a spread for FHM’s 100 Sexiest Serial Killers.
She looked up at me with sultry hatred. “I was expecting somebody else.”
“So is this a kill all your friends thing?” I asked. “Or do you just have a shitty sense of direction?”
“I always said I would take everything from you, as you took everything from me.” Yelena uncoiled from the corpse pile. She wore a wolfskin across her shoulders, and her whole body had blood smeared across it like chocolate sauce in a particular kind of arthouse movie. Then there was the human heart in her left hand. Subtle, ‘Lena, subtle.
I sighed. “By everything you mean Patrick?”
“He was mine for over a century.” She prowled towards me and I was struck by how young she seemed. When we’d last nearly two decades ago, she’d looked like the girls I hadn’t quite realised I was fancying at school. And she still did, which was confusing as shit. “Until