Blood thumped in Fros’s neck and echoed in her ears. There were two police cars in front of her house and a dozen smells. Material smells like plastic, metal, and exhaust fumes, and emotional ones, like the policeman’s excitement. He wasn’t the only one excited about the body in her house and now, a few seconds later, Fros had no doubts it was a body. She smelled the buttery scent of recent death through the excitement, confusion, and genuine annoyance. As she tried to sniff the air inconspicuously, a burning shot of pure hatred blazed through and she started.
“Anything the matter?” the policeman asked. He had stepped closer to her, his intentions clear as a bell. He was there to stop her from running away.
“Fros?”
Fros glanced around.
“Oh, my God.” Sam came to a slow stop in the middle of the street. “Fros, what’s going on, what happened?”
“I’ve no idea and nobody is telling me,” Fros said. Sam smelled of her usual mild bewilderment which reminded Fros of fabric softener and looked worried as she covered the remaining space between them quickly. “What are you doing here?”
“I was worried about you. I called you half a dozen times and you didn’t pick up.”
Fros patted her jacket pocket.
“I left my phone at home when I went out. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. Officer, what is going in here?”
Before the policeman could answer, the door of the house, already open, opened wider and a man stepped out. He was the source of the annoyance Fros had smelled earlier – a sharp, minty scent – and he was still exuding it, like sweat. He also knew who she was because he headed straight to her.
“Ms Euphrosyne Kirova?”
“That’s me.”
“What’s going on here?” Sam asked nervously. “Why aren’t you telling us?” She was gripping Fros’s sleeve like a drowning woman. Fros gently removed her hand. “Sorry.”
“And you are?” the man asked. He was over fifty if the wrinkles and the salt-and-pepper hair were any indication, and heavyset, easy to take for a retired rugby player.
“I’m her friend. My name is Samantha Harris.”
“Good to know, Ms Harris. I’m Detective Sergeant McKinley and I just finished the initial examination of a murder scene at your house, Ms Kirova. Do you by any chance know someone by the name of Harry Collins?”
“No.”
“Well, we found him in your kitchen, at your table, with his throat slit from ear to ear.”
The shock sent Fros a step back. Sam gripped her arm again.
“It’s okay, Fros, it will be okay.”
“You think it was me, don’t you?” Fros said quietly. McKinley’s smell and the look he shot her before adjusting his expression into a half-interested professional one suggested he had no doubt it was her.
“We work with evidence, Ms Kirova, and the evidence suggests there have been quite a lot of dead bodies around you lately. We would like to ask you a few questions.”
“What?” Sam barked. “What is this guy talking about, Fros?”
“Sam, could you please go home? I promise I’ll call you when I sort this out. Please.”
Sam hesitated. She glared at the detective and then turned to Fros with pleading eyes.
“Are you sure you want to be alone? Do you have a lawyer?”
“I don’t need a lawyer, Sam. I haven’t killed anyone.”
“Okay. Okay, but call me as soon as they let you go.”
“I will.”
Sam and her bewilderment, thicker now, turned and started walking down the street, occasionally glancing over her shoulder.
“I left my phone in the house this afternoon. May I take it with me?”
“Take it with you where?” McKinley asked.
“To the police station. Isn’t that where you’re taking me?”
Something suspiciously similar to a smile twitched on the detective’s lips.
“Only if you insist. I thought we could have a quick chat here while the crime scene people take care of the body.”
Fros tried not to sag with relief. That certainty she had smelled on the detective wasn’t about her, then. Or it was but he didn’t want to come across as the bad cop. In any case, Fros had nothing to hide. Almost nothing. Funny how the only death she wasn’t being investigated for was the one she had actually caused. The two deaths.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, why?”
He peered into her face.
“For a moment there you looked like you were about to laugh.”
“I don’t think so,” Fros said and pursed her lips to hold the hysterical laughter in.
“You have six missed calls from Ms Harris and two texts from someone called Peter. If you promise not to touch anything else you can go and get your phone.”
For a second Fros forgot how to move. McKinley had mentioned the texts from Peter casually but that didn’t mean he hadn’t read them. The police probably had ways to unlock people’s phones. Fros could only hope there was no mention of vampires in those texts.
“Thank you,” she said and started up her path. McKinley’s steps crunched after her. Of course he wouldn’t let her go in and face the corpse alone.
The remains of Harry Collins who turned out to be barely out of his teens if that, with a slight built, black jeans and a blue hoodie, were propped on one of her chairs, the head tossed back to display the gash in his neck in all its glory. The flesh was indeed cut from ear to ear and the windpipe was severed. There was a bloody trail to the chair but little blood around it. It smelled relatively fresh, a couple of hours, perhaps. A man and a woman in protective clothing were doing the same thing around the body that another set of their kind were doing this morning at Fros’s new office, swiping surfaces, taking pictures, peering at parts of the dead body and taking more pictures.
“I’ve never seen this man before. And I’ve no idea who put him there.”
“Right. I thought so.” McKinley nodded at the crime scene duo and picked up Fros’s phone from the table, a few inches from where the grey lifeless hand of the body was propped. He handed it to her.
“Could you tell me where you were around noon today?”
She was being questioned. It felt surreal.
“I was out for a walk,” Fros said. It sounded like a lie even to her own ears. “I like walking.” The clarification would probably only heighten McKinley’s suspicions. Where was Peter when you needed him to discourage police from asking questions.
“Can anyone confirm it?”
“No, but at two I was at the Fine Print Shop and the lady who gave me my order can confirm it,” Fros said, hearing the defensive note in her voice and unable to suppress it.
“The Fine Print Shop?”
“Yes,” she said. “On Tailor’s Avenue.”
McKinley frowned a little.
“That’s in Hackney.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And you walked there from here?”
“As I said, I like walking.”
“I see,” McKinley said and rubbed his chin. “And that order you picked from the Fine Print Shop?”
“Business cards.” Fros took the package out of her bag, wincing inside. This detective was about to learn what she was about to start doing for a living. “Here.”
McKinley took a business card. His frown deepened.
“It doesn’t say what the business is.”
“Private investigations,” she said and clenched her teeth to avoid elaborating.
The detective raised an eyebrow surprising Fros. He didn’t look the sort of man who would raise eyebrows at people.
“That’s interesting,” he said. “Because your landlady said you’re a food photographer. And, I quote, ‘a very decent girl’.”
Good old, rich Miranda, currently on a yacht in the Mediterranean.
“But here’s the thing,” McKinley continued. “I come here, I find the body, I do a very quick check and I discover that you were accused of child abduction by a woman who later died in tragic circumstances, you found a dead body in an office building just this morning, and now there’s a dead body in your kitchen. You’re either extremely stupid, or think we are extremely stupid, or there’s someone out to get you.”
Silence stretched like a gum between then for a few seconds.
“I decided to change careers,” Fros said, sticking to her new strategy of bare-minimum responses. The smell of blood was weighing on her self-control.
“Ms Kirova, can you think of any enemies you might have that could kill to frame you?” McKinley said, serving another surprise. Fros had expected him to start grilling her about the other two possibilities. “An ex with a grudge, perhaps, or a client?”
“You think I was framed?” An entirely inappropriate feeling of gratitude blossomed in her chest, warming her.
“Unless you’d like to make a confession this is my working theory right now,” McKinley informed her.
“I have nothing to confess.”
McKinley nodded.
“So. Any enemies?”
“Not that I can think of.” In the pause that followed, she unlocked her phone and clicked on the first message from Peter.
“Filthy weather down here. No sign of vampires.”
Fros bit her lip. Of course he’d go and mention them. He wouldn’t expect the police to read his texts.
“Is that some private joke?” McKinley said. He stood a couple of feet away from her and apparently had pretty good vision for his age. “About the vampires?”
“Oh. Yes. Peter likes to joke about vampires.”
“So how long have you and Peter been together?”
Fros paused with her finger on the second message. She had no idea how long they’d been together and even if they were together in the sense the detective suggested. It felt like ages.
“About a month,” she said. That had to be right. Rory’s party was on the last Saturday of May. It was the 29th of June today. Only a month.
“We’re done here, sir,” the protective clothing-clad woman told McKinley.
“Great, thanks,” he said and stepped out of their way. “They’ll take out the body right away and you could have the use of your kitchen back.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll get out of your hair too, but if you remember anything about anyone who might hold a grudge against you, do call me, okay?” He handed her a business card with his name and two phone numbers.
“I will.” Her head was buzzing, gently but persistently. “Thank you.”
McKinley headed for the door but stopped at the threshold.
“There’s just one more thing. I’m curious, really.”
Fros turned.
“You didn’t seem upset when you saw the body. And it was the second one for the day. Do you often see dead bodies in your line of work?”
The buzzing intensified and a bitter taste settled on her tongue. Fros jerked back and into the nearest chair. McKinley made to rush to her but she raised a hand.
“I’m okay,” she said, her face turned away from him. Her heart pounded deafeningly as she waited for him to drop dead.
“Are you sure?”
The pounding eased. McKinley was still alive.
“Yes,” she said. “As you said, this is the second dead body I’ve seen today. I guess I’m a bit numb”
“Fair enough,” McKinley said. “We’ll be in touch if we learn anything new. Oh, yes. Does anyone else but you have keys to your house?”
Fros dared to look up.
“Why?”
“Because whoever brought the body here didn’t break in. They let themselves in with a key.”
Fros was running from a fire-breathing Jules, wondering what the hell was taking Peter so long to bring the fire extinguisher, when the buzz of her phone broke through the thick sleep cocoon. She groped blindly in the dark and dropped it. A curse later Fros turned on her bedside lamp and picked the still ringing phone off the floor. The number was an unfamiliar one and the time was twelve-fifteen.
“Hello?” she croaked, still vaguely wondering where Peter was with the damn fire extinguisher.
“Hello, is this Fros Kirova?” a voice as unfamiliar as the number asked. It was a deep, thick, warm voice, a voice you could trust. This put Fros on edge immediately.
“Yes,” she said. “Who is this?”
“My name is Tal. Tal Hoffman. I’m an associate of Peter Granger. A close associate.” He paused for half a second before continuing. “I’m calling because I’m concerned about Peter. When he left for Wales earlier today he said he’d call me by midnight. He hasn’t called yet. Has he by any chance called you?”
“That’s a lot of calls,” Fros said as she swung her legs off the bed. “But no, he hasn’t called me. Why are you worried, Peter is old enough to be able to take care of himself.”
“Not when he’s gone off on a hunt for a monster,” Tal Hoffman said grimly. Grim sounded weird with the warm voice, like honey with salt. The word monster didn’t sound weird. Fros wondered briefly if there was a polite way to inquire of someone whether they were a vampire or not.
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she said. “I don’t even know where exactly he went in Wales. He got a call and followed up on that. This is all I know.”
“I know where he went but I don’t want to go there alone,” Tal said. “I know it’s a lot to ask but…”
“Really?” Fros stood up and tiptoed to the window. A crescent moon hung in the starless sky, blurred by the clouds. “You’re calling me in the literal middle of the night and asking me to do what? Go to Wales to see what happened to Peter when he probably just forgot to call you? Are you sure you two are just friends?”
“Yes.” Now all warmth was gone and the smoothness had turned into a cold blade. “We are friends and we have been since he saved my life. I know what Peter is, in case I’ve failed to make that clear, and I also know what you are, Ms Kirova, because he trusted me enough to tell me about you. I’m asking for your help because Peter has never neglected to call when he said he’d call and because, unlike him, I don’t think the creature he’s after is just some badly-behaved vampire. I think there’s something more than that.”
Fros had forgotten to breathe while she listened. Now she took a deep, embarrassed breath and prepared to say something that began with “Now, you listen to me, whoever you are”. Instead, something completely different came out of her mouth.
“Pick me up in twenty minutes. I expect you know where I live.” She hung up before Tal could respond, trembling with anxiety and fury in equal measure. Peter had thought it appropriate to reveal her secret to his close friend but to not reveal the friend to her. And what if that friend had another friend who he liked to share secrets with? Then in a short while a great many people would know there was a basilisk around. Or maybe it would take just a few people. Maybe this Tal was the one leaving dead snakes and human bodies in her house.
Fros took off the ancient Fields of the Nephilim T-shirt she slept in and walked into the bathroom. As always, the second before the water rushed out of the shower’s nozzle was a second fraught with tension but once the water started flowing Fros relaxed. This was not rain. This was water she could control. It was also nice and warm, and it made her clean.
Twenty minutes later someone who smelled of smoke with a distant whiff of cinnamon knocked on the door. Fros flung it open and faced a man of around thirty-five who was much taller, slimmer, and bespectacled than she’d expected. He also had a neat little beard framing his mouth. Tal Hoffman would fit perfectly in any academic establishment as long as it was reputable.
“What do you know about me?” Fros asked in place of greetings. She had no time for greetings.
Tal raised a restraining hand.
“Hello to you, too, it’s nice to finally meet you.”
“I asked you a question.”
“Peter told me that you’re one of the rarest creatures in the world. And the loveliest,” Tal added with a slight nod. There was another smell under the smoke and the cinnamon. Something old and dusty. Fros imagined time would smell this way if it could smell.
“Do you really think compliments would work?” she said.
Tal grinned.
“No, but I wanted to see for myself.” The grin vanished. “Could we perhaps do this on the way? I really am worried about Peter.”
“Sure,” Fros said and pulled on her jacket. “There’s so much I suddenly want to know.”
Contrary to her expectations, Tal didn’t drive a sensible car befitting an academic. He drove a sports car. An old sports car.
“Really?” She cocked an eyebrow at the car.
“That’s a Shelby Mustang GT350, I’ll have you know,” Tal said with not a little pride. “Peter found it for me.” He opened the passenger door and invited her in.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said when he joined her inside the low-lying car that smelled like time. “Now, where are we going and why? Quickly, because I have a lot of other questions, too.”
Tal turned the key in the ignition and the engine growled to life.
“We’re going to a small village near Cardiff called Dinas Powys,” he said and guided the car onto the street where he accelerated needlessly fast. “That’s where Tina told him to go to find the rogue vampire who’s been killing left and right. Allegedly.”
“And you don’t trust Tina, do you?”
Tal’s mouth twitched into a crooked smile.
“Well smelled. No, I don’t trust her. There’s something fox-like about her, don’t you think? And of course she’s had a crush on Peter for ages and now that he’s with someone else she can’t be very happy.”
Fros paused for a breath in and the one out.
“I haven’t noticed anything fox-like about Tina, whatever this means. She’s always been professional. Are you sure about that crush?”
Tal snorted.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“Okay. So she’d want Peter to be safe, wouldn’t she?”
Tal shot her an amused glance.
“You don’t know much about vampires, do you?”
“I’ve never had to know much about vampires and I don’t regret it. But I do want to know why we’re going to Wales in the middle of the night at a hundred miles per hour. Even if Tina tries to do something to Peter he’s strong enough to defend himself, isn’t he?”
Tal sighed and slowed down a little.
“He said he would call me by midnight to let me know all was well. He does that when he’s out of town for whatever reason. He knows I worry. Today was the first time he didn’t call when he said he would. Now, I would call this reason enough to become concerned enough to call you and ask you to come with me. I might need your specialised help if Peter’s in trouble.”
Something in Fros that had been taut now snapped. She pulled out her cigarettes from the side pocket of her utility pants and lit up.
“Listen, Tal, you and Peter clearly have a history and it sounds like a long one. How about you start at the beginning and tell me everything?”
“Fair enough. I’m good at making a long story short because we don’t have that much time. We should be there in an hour.”
“Unless the police pull you over for speeding.”
“They won’t pull me over.”
Fros took a long drag on her cigarette and watched the jet of smoke fill the car. Tal had made no anti-smoking comments and that was a point she grudgingly awarded him but he was stalling and that was one point taken away.
“I had a junkie father and a junkie mother. My mother died two hours after I was born, with neonatal abstinence syndrome and severely underweight. My dad never showed up but Uncle Peter did. He gave me a name and a home, and he raised me. With the help of a string of nannies and governesses,” he said, paused and added “Well, not exactly a whole string, just a couple of each.”
“Is he really your uncle?” The idea of Peter having a family of any sort sat oddly on Fros’s mind. He’d never mentioned any relatives besides his parents. And he hadn’t mentioned Tal but had told Tal everything about her. They were going to have a serious conversation after she and Tal saved Peter from whatever had happened to him.
“Oh, yes, three or four generations apart. I’m the last descendant of his sister.”
Fros turned to stare at him.
“He had a sister?”
Tal nodded.
“He never mentioned a sister. He told me about a mother and a father but nothing about a sister. What happened to her?”
Tal didn’t respond.
“What happened to his sister?” Fros said, almost certain about the answer.
“He killed her,” Tal said. “She was his first victim after Rudy turned him. But he spared the rest of her family.”
Fros winced. Her first meal had been a drunk her mother had found in a bar and lured to where Fros was hiding in a back alley. Fros was so nervous she almost bolted when her mother killed the man with a quick glance. She then took forever to change because she couldn’t concentrate even though she was hungry. It felt like it had happened ages ago.
“You know everything about him, don’t you?”
Tal shrugged.
“Like I said, he raised me. We’ve spent a long time together.”
“And he has no secrets from you, apparently.”
“If you’re asking whether he tells me about all his girlfriends, no, he doesn’t. But you’re not just the next girlfriend.”
“I wasn’t aware I was a girlfriend at all,” Fros said with an inner eyeroll at the warmth that Tal’s words spread in her belly. With it came worry, long past due. Peter was in trouble. And she had no idea how she could help.
“May I be blunt?”
“Please.”
“He says you’re his soul mate and if you hurt him, please bear in mind that I know how to kill a basilisk.”
For a while Fros was physically incapable of speaking. A white-bordered brown sign saying Welcome to Wales/Croeso i Cymru on it flashed past.
“You didn’t know how serious it was for him, did you?” Tal asked quietly.
“I thought he was unusually romantic.”
Tal barked out a sharp laugh.
“Until a month ago Peter was anything but romantic. Practical and efficient is what he was. But now he’s let his guard down and here is the result.”
“And you’re blaming me for this and you know how to kill a basilisk, which is not exactly quantum physics.”
“I could hardly blame you for his feelings but they did worry me. Thanks for agreeing to come with me, by the way.”
“My pleasure.” She lit another cigarette, stealing a glance at Tal’s grim profile. “Aren’t you going to ask me how serious I am about Peter?”
“Not as serious as he is about you, that’s for sure.”
The grumpy child voice did it.
“You know nothing about me, Tal Hoffman. Just because Peter has told you what I am doesn’t mean you know me, do you hear me? Because you don’t. Even Peter doesn’t, not yet, and I’ve shared more with him than I have with anyone else in my whole life. Sharing does not come naturally to me. It feels like cutting myself open and pulling my guts out for someone to play with. If this makes me look like I’m cold and distant, so be it, I’m used to that. But don’t you dare pass judgments about what I feel and don’t feel when you know zero about who I am.” She angrily tossed the ashes from her cigarette in the ashtray. “What the hell are you grinning for?”
“You’re in love with him.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
For a while they drove in silence, Fros chewing the insides of her cheeks, forcing her imagination to serve some image of the possible trouble Peter could be in. Beheading, perhaps. Or staking. But that was what humans did to vampires in films. What vampires did to other vampires was anyone’s guess but not hers because she knew next to nothing about them except that they stank and were asocial.
“Okay, we’re here,” Tal said suddenly, startling her. He peered through the windscreen, the car slowing down to a crawl. “He should be in the third house on the right.”
“Does he leave you precise coordinates every time he goes out of town?”
“No, I’m tracking his phone.”
Fros resisted the urge to slap herself. Of course he would track Peter’s phone. That’s what people did in the 2020s. Her brain wasn’t working properly. It was probably the two dead bodies she’d had to see in one day. That was a lot higher than her usual corpse witnessing routine, not to mention the corpses she normally witnessed did not have great big gaping gashes in their throats.
“I still don’t know how I could help.”
“You can turn into a giant snake, can’t you?” Tal said as he parked the car by the curb in front of the first house in the row.
“Excuse me?”
He turned the engine off.
“Could I have a cigarette?”
She passed him the pack in silence.
“Thanks.” He lit up and inhaled deeply. “For obvious reasons I’m not a fan of any addictive substances. But I do allow myself a cigarette occasionally and I like the smell of tobacco smoke around me. Anyway, to your question: you can turn into a giant snake and bite off Tina’s head if necessary. I mean, you are physically capable of doing it, even if you have moral qualms about it. Am I wrong?”
Fros closed her gaping mouth.
“Tal, what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a chartered accountant, why?”
Fros laughed. She laughed some more. The laughter kept coming even though she was trying to stop. Two dead bodies and a chartered accountant who liked a smell that for most people with a functional brain was the foulest smell on earth.
“I’m sorry,” she said between blasts of laughter. “I’m sorry, I’ve had the shittiest day ever and you just crowned it. A chartered accountant and a basilisk on a rescue mission for a vampire. What a story.” She wiped a tear and sniffed. “Okay, I think I’m done. So, you want me to turn into a snake, chase Tina – assuming it is Tina that is doing something horrible to Peter – and bite her head off?”
“Basically,” Tal said. “But you can squeeze her to death or whatever works best for you.”
Fros narrowed her eyes at him.
“You really don’t like her, do you?”
“No, I really don’t like her. Let’s go.”
“And what will you be doing while I chase Tina?”
“Bringing Peter to life, I expect,” he said grimly and got out of the car.
You can buy Fang in Fang — The Agency as e-book here.