all your usual hallmarks, hidden rituals, secret initiations. They’ve been tied to a fringe end of the grail mythology for years.”
Well fuck. “You’re right,” I said. “That does sound like a dead end.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be more use.”
In a fit of uncharacteristic politeness, I got the door for her. “Don’t worry, you’ve been—it’s been helpful.”
“I’ll speak to you soon, Kate.”
“See ya, Nick.” I was way more comfortable with Doctor Bright, but it seemed rude to be formal when you’d been asked to be familiar.
The moment she left I went for my emergency scotch. Turned out I had a lead on the grail after all. Fucking Julian Saint-Ger-fucking-main.
20
Scotch & My Ex
I probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much before I showed up at the Velvet. But I did. Fucking sue me.
Normally—by which I mean always—I’d have expected to find Ashriel on the door, but he wasn’t there tonight. His place had been taken by a well-muscled woman in a denim-on-denim combo that shouldn’t have worked but did. I tried skipping the queue anyway.
“Where’s Ash?” I asked.
“Gone. Been gone more than a year now.”
Well how time flies. “I need to see Julian.”
She did not look impressed.
“It’s important.”
She still did not look impressed. Ignoring me completely, she waved a couple more clubgoers into the building.
“We used to date.”
“How much d’you think that narrows it down?”
Probably not hugely. “I’m Kate,” I tried belatedly. “Kate Kane?”
“Oh, right. Then you can definitely fuck off.”
“Who even are you?” I asked.
“I’m the lady who’s minding this door.” Another few guests filed in past me. “You want to queue, you can queue.”
My mind wasn’t working its quickest right then. Blame the visions, the alcohol and—actually it was only those two things but they added up to a fair bit. I was aware that there was a good chance this person was a vampire, and that if she was, I thought I would probably be morally okay about shoving her through a plate glass window and walking in anyway. But if she wasn’t, I’d probably go to prison for malicious wounding. Also I wasn’t totally sure that it’s okay to randomly assault people if they’re vampires was a rule at all, morality-wise.
I queued.
It wasn’t that late—Dr Nick’s visit had taken me into mid-to-late afternoon, and while the process of fortifying myself to speak to my ex for the first time since I’d dumped her arse over the whole letting-some-prick-exsanguinate-me snafu had taken a reasonable amount of time, it hadn’t taken me past midnight. So the queue was short-ish. It’s just that short-ish wasn’t what I was aiming for. Also I really needed a piss.
The Velvet didn’t have a cover charge, probably because it didn’t entirely make sense to make people pay for entry to a place you mostly used as a supply of warm bodies and fresh blood, which was good because I would have lost my fucking shit if I’d been asked to pony up hard cash to tell my former girlfriend how fucking—I mean, to ask her about the holy grail. Which was what I was there for.
Julian held court on a balcony at the top of a spiral staircase behind a velvet rope. Tonight it seemed that it was being guarded by a pretty young woman in a cocktail dress. Not the sort you’d usually expect to be working as a bouncer, but then this one almost certainly was a vampire, and maybe Julian had decided to make her gallery of sapphic delights look a bit less intimidating from the ground.
“Okay,” I told the guard, having to shout a bit over the music, “here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to say I’m here for Julian. You’re going to say she doesn’t want to see me. I’m going to insist and either we get in an unpleasant fight that you might not win as easily as you think, or I make a gigantic fuckawful scene until her ladyship comes down from the pleasure-dome and talks to me. Don’t you want to skip all the trouble and let me up?”
She sighed. Then stopped breathing. Definitely a vampire. And it was good to know I wasn’t quite pissed enough that I didn’t notice that sort of thing. Although I was beginning to think I’d forgotten my house keys. “What do you want, Kate?”
“You know me?”
“I’ve seen you around.”
She’d probably been promoted from the kittens, which was what Julian somewhat patronisingly called her entourage. “Didn’t she used to use you as a footstool?”
“Sometimes.” There was a lasciviousness to her smile