Blood of Angels (28 page)

The boy was safe with his carers, and yet she felt both bereft and frightened for him. She wondered if there was a way to see him again, to check he was all right, for Peg and Jim did not fill her with confidence.

If I were his foster mother…

Well, you’re not. You can barely look after yourself, never mind a dependent child!

Mocking herself, because in fact her parenting skills, or lack of them, had always been irrelevant—vampire hunting was a 24-7 job that didn’t allow the distraction of young family or even the relationship necessary to acquire one—she stood back out of the way of people heading into the pub and tried to drag her thoughts back to the important issues.

She needed to know what so many strong vampires, at least some of them foreign, were doing here. She needed to know if the vampire who threatened Robbie really could get him later, and if he really was her own family’s killer. And…

She came around to it carefully, trying to avoid it and knowing she couldn’t. She couldn’t take the chance.

She turned and retraced her steps back along the road to the alley that led to the pub’s back court. She expected him to be gone. She hoped he’d be gone. She hoped she’d made a mistake in identifying him. After all, it had been dark, and how likely was it to encounter two vampires from her past in one afternoon?

More likely if one of them had made his home in Scotland.

Her heart beat faster as she walked into the yard, hands once more grasping the stakes in her pockets. The dark heap of mostly dead vampire had gone. Which meant, surely, he’d either died or recovered. She swallowed. Neither possibility made her feel good.

She stood still where she’d last seen him, wishing she’d brought a detector, while she quartered the court. She thought the vampires had vanished, but she couldn’t be sure. At any rate, she’d learned long ago never to make dangerous assumptions.

To her left, the barrel no longer sat flush against the wall. There was a gap of blank darkness between.
He could be masking. Any of them could be masking.
She stared hard at the gap between the wall and the barrel, walking slowly toward it until it resolved into a body.

Without warning, a light came on, shining out from the pub wall. Mihaela froze, waiting for someone to appear, but there was no door as such into the yard, only barred windows and the trap through which beer was delivered to the cellar. Perhaps someone inside had just remembered to switch on the light for security reasons.

Mihaela approached the barrel, withdrawing the stake from her pocket. She gazed down at the injured, blood-spattered vampire, illuminated now like some gothic-novel illustration. Pale skin, dark, untidy hair with just a hint of auburn shining through. He wore a rough wool workman’s jacket over his usual jeans and T-shirt; his arm and one leg were bent at grotesque angles, and he stank of enough alcohol to repel a down-and-out. But it was still, unmistakably, the vampire Maximilian.

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