Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Weddings & Fairytales

I woke to the taste of wine and rose leaves, propped myself up on my elbows and winched my eyes open. Julian was perched on the end of my bed. She wasn't one for staying the night — midnight to six is kind of peak time for vampires — which meant that she'd broken in again. We really needed to talk about that.

She grinned, all blue eyes and bright teeth. "Good morning, sweeting."

"Should I just give you a key?"

She pounced onto the mattress and stretched out alongside me. "If I didn't know better, I'd think you weren't pleased to see me."

"It's —" I checked my watch. Then I checked it again because I was pretty sure it was taking the piss. "It's twenty-five to six. I'd have trouble being pleased to see anybody."

"You've forgotten, haven't you?"

I rubbed my temples. I'd almost certainly forgotten. At that time in the morning I forgot most things. Then I unforgot. "Fuck. Wedding."

"Wedding."

That would explain why she was in black tie. Not that she normally needed an excuse. In fact, by her regular standards a tuxedo was understated. Most of her daywear had epaulettes.

"Give me a minute." I hauled myself out of bed. I really should have got my outfit sorted the night before, but Julian had been visiting, which had left me kind of distracted. Truth be told, I was a bit short on appropriate kit. I could do funerals — and it might have said something about my social life that for a decade at least my friends and acquaintances had been dropping dead faster than they'd been pairing off — but weddings fell right through the gap in my wardrobe.

I turned to Julian. "Is this a frock thing or a suit thing?"

"Do you even own a frock?"

"I have dresses. I have" — I took a mental inventory — "at least three dresses."

Julian sat up, tucking her knees under her chin. "I apologise. Never again will I question your sartorial diversity or your essential femininity. But, honestly, nobody is going to be looking at you."

I sighed. "Yeah, yeah, everybody'll be looking at the bride. Brides."

"Wretched, isn't it?" Julian looked genuinely insulted. "What is the point of being a creature of unthinkable fiendish power and dangerous beauty if you can't be the centre of attention?"

"You get to bang hot PIs. Well, relatively hot PIs. Well, me."

"Don't be so hard on yourself, sweeting. Of the forty-seven professional investigators I've had sex with since 1874, you certainly make the top ten."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again. "Y'know what? I'll take it."

Having thrown every item of clothing I owned onto the bed, the floor, or Julian's head, I went suit. It was more my style and, besides, the last time I'd worn a dress to an event it had wound up getting ruined in a high-speed unicorn chase. To my surprise, Julian actually let me get ready without trying to lure me into an impromptu undead shagathon. I was beginning to think she was genuinely concerned about being late, which was new territory for me since being late was her standing operating procedure. It came with the whole package of being an immortal flibbertigibbet.

We emerged from the bedroom to find Elise waiting for us. Like always, she was up, dressed and looking immaculate while I was still debating whether I could get away with substituting coffee for mouthwash. There was nothing that quite beat living with somebody who didn't eat, sleep, or sweat, and had been purpose-built by a skeevy wizard to conform to unobtainable beauty norms, to make you feel extra specially shitty in the morning. She'd left a French press on the dining table for me. That and a banana. We needed to talk about the bananas.

"Good morning, Miss Kane," she said, "and Miss Saint-Germain. I hope that you will have a lovely time today."

I groaned. "Too early, Elise. But thanks."

"I did not hear you enter." Elise inclined her head slightly towards Julian. "Did you discorporate into smoke and drift through the window again?" Julian got the kind of pouty that needs eight centuries of practice. "You make it sound so prosaic. I'll have you know that I've seduced more maidens with the mist and shadows bit than you've met in your entire life."

"Since I was only animated a year and a half ago and have spent much of the intervening time either in the care of a gestalt rat consciousness or standing in Miss Kane's spare room, that is, indeed, likely."

"Wow" — Julian blinked — "you really need to get out more."

Elise perked up visibly. "Oh, yes, Miss Saint-Germain. Getting out is one of my favourite activities. Why, only yesterday I went to the shops to purchase groceries for Miss Kane and saw many fascinating things. In particular, I met a staircase that moved. It sat next to a staircase that did not move, but I believe there was no jealousy between them."

I drank my coffee. I quietly ignored the banana. "You going to be okay at the office today?" I asked. It wasn't going to win the Nobel Prize for chitchat but Julian was getting that I'm bored and want to say something insulting look.

Elise hadn't quite got the hang of talking to multiple people at once. If I hadn't been used to it, the way her head snapped round would have weirded me out. "I have been working with you for some while now. I believe my skills will be adequate to the task. I will file."

"Better you than me."

"Yes, Miss Kane. You are very bad at it."

Julian, Elise and I left the flat at about the same time. Elise took off in my car. These days it was more our car, or possibly even her car, since it had been completely wrecked in a supernatural duel last year and she'd refused to let me junk it. As for Julian and me, we'd be going by limo, one of the many perks of dating the vampire prince of pleasure. Although honestly I was surprised that it had sat outside my flat this whole time without getting keyed.

"You know," I said, "showing up like this could seriously upstage the happy couple."

"We'll park around the corner and walk in. I'm not a complete narcissist." That wasn't even a little bit true, but I let it slide.

I lay back against the absurdly expensive upholstery. I'd developed something of a taste for sleeping in cars during the narrow window between Elise taking over the driving and Elise discovering hardcore German thrash metal. "Whose wedding is this exactly?"

"Violet. She's an ex." Julian nestled against me. "She's marrying the evil witch she dumped me for. But I'll be on my best behaviour, and refrain from ripping anyone's throat out."

I wrapped an arm around her. "Aww, somebody's jealous." Which, now I thought about it, wasn't really the way I wanted my girlfriend to be feeling about a woman she'd broken up with half a century ago.

"I was," she conceded. "But I'm mostly over it. And anyway" — she arched up and kissed me gently on the cheek — "I moved on."

That was mostly reassuring. But something was still bugging me. "Hang on, when you say 'witch' ..."

"Metaphorically. Sort of. She set me on fire with her mind once."

"That sounds pretty witchy to me."

"I believe she's technically a pyrokinetic. They did all sorts of research on that kind of thing back in the fifties."

I narrowed my eyes. "Who's they?"

"Oh, you know, the usual people. And you do realise" — she gave me her brightest, most impenetrable smile — "that this is technically a date, darling. Not an interrogation."

The limo whisked us through London and out towards the leafy groves of Hertfordshire. The wedding was in one of those hotels that used to be some posh house back in the day. Back when your average rich person lived in a place big enough that you could cast six seasons of an ITV drama just from their servants. At Julian's instructions, we parked a couple of streets away and walked together up the long, gravel drive towards the wedding party.

When we got close enough to see the other guests, it became awkwardly obvious that I was going to be the youngest person there by a good few decades. That still meant everybody else was closer to my age than my girlfriend was, which ... was kind of a headfuck if I thought about it. I tried not to think about it.

Julian unlinked her arm from mine. "Save me a seat, sweeting."

"Woah, woah, woah — you're leaving me?"

"I'm walking Violet down the aisle. Didn't I explain?"

She had not explained. "Isn't that kind of weird?"

"Well, her father died in the early eighties, so it would be even weirder if he did it." She paused. "Although I suppose, technically, he's no deader than I am."

I ignored her transparent attempt to get around me by being cute. "And I'm supposed to — what — make polite conversation with a bunch of nonagenarians?"

Julian shrugged. "It's a wedding, darling. Say how wonderful everybody looks and ask people how they know the brides."

Before I could make it clear that I was not letting her ditch me at her ex-girlfriend's wedding, she kissed me goodbye and danced away into the crowd, leaving me alone and surrounded by pensioners.

Welp. Fuck. I was bad at social functions at the best of times. My usual strategy was to find something to eat or drink, and try to look as comfortable as possible with the fact that nobody was talking to me. Unfortunately there wasn't a wineglass or a canapé in sight: just a bunch of total strangers who I had nothing in common with except a tenuous connection to London's exciting smorgasbord of paranormal bullshit.

Eventually some doors opened, and the crowd began filing in for the ceremony. I went with the flow and ended up in a long oak-panelled hall. From there I was directed to a chair beside a slight woman with short grey hair. I stuck my hat on the seat next to me and took the opportunity to practise my basic social interaction.

"So," I said in my best I-am-relaxed-in-formal-environments voice. "How do you know the brides?"

"I used to work with them."

"What'd you do?"

She smiled and tapped the side of her nose. "All very hush-hush."

Of course it was. Sometimes I thought you couldn't throw a brick in this town without a sinister occult conspiracy watching from the shadows and making a careful note about where it landed.

I glanced around the room. I'm not sure what I'd expected the guest list at the wedding of a pair of ninety-year-old lesbians to look like, but once you adjusted for the fact that almost everybody was over seventy it was a really mixed bunch. The group I was sitting with were mostly hard-edged types, the sort of people who wore suits even if they didn't have to. Some of the guests on the other side of the hall looked like the Rolling Stones circa two thousand and ten and others looked like they'd walked straight out of the day centre my granddad used to go to. Now that I thought about it, it made sense that the sort of person who'd date the vampire prince of pleasure would run with an eclectic crowd.

I mean, if I was getting married the guests would include a celibate incubus, an undead drag queen, a living statue, my dad, who's had his eyes stolen by faeries, the woman who stole him back from faeries, a teenage oracle who'd insist on bringing my arsehole ex, a pack of werewolves, assuming it wasn't too working class for them, possibly the entire Witch Court of London — and that was way more people than I was comfortable caring about. If I'd made the same list eighteen months ago, it would've been dad, Jenny and a bottle of cheap Scotch. Mind you, in either case I'd have to be marrying somebody and that would involve some fairly radical changes to my lifestyle. Because, let's face it, my longest adult relationship has been with my hat.

The ceremony was pretty — well — pretty much like a wedding ceremony. Violet came down the aisle first, with Julian. She was wearing the traditional white wedding dress, and she reminded me a lot of my gran, tall and confident with thick, curly hair. Her wife-to-be, the one who'd set Julian on fire sometime in the middle of the last century, came next. She was smaller, frailer, and walked with the help of a frame, a bald, tattooed man at her side. Her hair was stark white and waist length. She shuffled up the aisle slowly but defiantly.

They made a cute couple in a grandparenty sort of way. I wasn't one for big public rituals, and weddings, in particular, tended to make my teeth itch — maybe it had something to do with the cheating spouses who had been paying my bills for the best part of a decade. In a lot of ways it made more sense this way around — any pair of twentysomething idiots can decide to get married, but these two had actually stuck together for sixty-odd years and in my book that was a way better excuse for a party than just being young and impulsive. They did the vows thing and the kissing thing, and then the whole wedding party tromped out for the reception.

Liberated from her aisle-walking duties, Julian sidled over to me and slipped her arm around my waist. "Having fun?"

"Are you taking the piss?"

She sighed with a level of showmanship you could only get if breathing was an optional extra. "Honestly, you can fight a killer filth monster in a sewer or face down a millennia-ancient vampire queen, but I take you to a party and you go all to pieces."

"Moral of that story: don't take me to parties."

"But how else am I supposed to show off that hot PI I'm banging?"

"I can never tell if you're trying to be nice or trying to be clever."

"I'm trying to be nice." She gave me a frankly smirky grin. "Being clever comes naturally."

We made our way through the hotel into some kind of ballroom. The happy couple waited just inside the door, greeting the guests as we passed. I kissed Violet on the cheek, told her she looked lovely which, to be fair, she did. I kissed her wife — Melissa, I remembered from the vows — and she smiled at me. She had a pretty smile, a mix of fragility and intensity.

"Melissa!" Julian bounced up beside me and took her by the hand. "Congratulations. You look so wonderful today that I can almost forgive the many times you tried to murder me."

Melissa's eyes sparkled. "My memory isn't what it was, but last time I checked you were beating me five to two."

"Three of those hardly counted." Julian turned to me. "Tell her, sweeting, when you drop somebody off a bridge, it's only a murder attempt if there isn't a river underneath it."

I put my hands up. "You know, I'm sensing that this is more complicated than I want to get into. Also we're holding up the line."

"Hang on to this one, Jules," said Violet, "she's sensible."

We moved away from the doorway and found our assigned table. A discreet carafe of blood sat at one place setting. I'd gone with the cauliflower and white truffle soup myself. The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze of speeches, slightly-too-fancy food, and dancing pensioners. I was honestly semi-tempted to corner Violet and compare dating-Julian notes. There were a bunch of things I'd have liked to ask and, while Julian had left not so much a string as a macramé bedspread of ex-lovers behind her, disconcertingly few of them were still alive and in a position to talk. But you can never pin down the bride at a wedding and, anyway, it would have been a slightly awkward conversation. So, Vi, how did you handle the way she tries to kill your former partners?

At some point, between the floofy meringue dessert that I ate for Julian and the coffee I was drinking very much for me, the woman I'd sat next to during the service joined us at our table.

"Your Highness." She nodded coolly at Julian.

"Dame Claudia. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"We've been meaning to check in for a while. Things very nearly got out of hand last year."

I looked from Julian to the Dame and back to Julian. If I found out they'd shagged in the seventies, I was going home.

Julian quirked an eyebrow. "Do we need to have the who-can-snap-whose-neck-like-a-matchstick conversation again?"

"Simply a polite word, Your Highness. We give your council a certain leeway to handle matters as it sees fit. This policy has been effective for some time, but we can make things difficult if we have to."

"Did you not see where I was going with the whole matchstick thing?"

Dame Claudia bowed her head. "I am but a humble public servant." She stood. "This has been productive as always, Your Highness. Good to meet you as well, Miss Kane."

I watched as she went back to mingle. Having been in this business a decade, I really thought I'd have got to the point where mysterious people stopped being inexplicably pleased to see me. Especially when I hadn't told them my name. "Umm ..." I said when I was sure she'd gone. "Do you mind explaining who the hell that was?"

"Intelligence. Six, I think, could be five. They do so blur together, don't you find? Violet was with SOE during the war, then when Atlee shut them down in '46, she was recruited into some kind of secret magic spy conspiracy. They're still around and Dame Claudia is in charge these days. They mostly leave us alone." Julian was uncharacteristically serious for about half a second. "Between you and me, sweeting, I'm in no great hurry to find out what would happen if they didn't."

---

Excerpted from "Fire & Water"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Alexis J. Hall.
Excerpted by permission of Harlequin Enterprises Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---