Page 97 of Only Fangs

I reach out and squeeze her hand. “I need to be alone.” I don’t tell her that she can’t come anyway; she has a wedding to plan. A wedding that I have foisted on her. She would have had another five years of freedom if it wasn’t for me.

“Let me look at the train times,” she says, painting a smile on her face as she picks up her phone. “There’s a train at six minutes past nine,” she tells me. “One change at Edinburgh. Eughh.” She makes a face. “It takes eleven hours.” She looks up at me. “That’s hideous.”

I shrug. “It is the other end of the UK.”

“Let me at least upgrade your ticket for you so you don’t have to sit on the floor,” Clara says as she taps the screen a few times.

I don’t argue with her. “Love you, Clara,” I say instead.

“Love you, Ari,” she replies.

It’s only as I settle into the fake leather seat of the train carriage – and crack open a can of gin and tonic I picked up from the off licence next to the station – that I allow myself to think about him.

The look on his face when I told him he meant nothing to me. That he was just a toy to be played with. He’ll know by now, about my impending marriage to Benedict.

The carriage is empty and so I allow the tears to fall.

I’m not crying for the future I will have to endure with Benedict.

I’m crying for the future I have lost with Brody. And for the pain I caused him. I might have bought him ten minutes – and thank god it was enough for him to make it out of there – but I shattered him in the process.

And I’m crying for taking him to Hele House in the first place. This is all such a mess. I shouldn’t have taken him there. I should have realised Andrei is not the kind of man you can trick. He had this planned all along, or at least the Benedict and Victor element. Brody was nothing to him. I should have realised that. It’s all my fault.

Chapter 50

Brody

I’ve made my decision. It’s the only way. If I can get to Victor I can make a counter deal and then Ari won’t have to marry Benedict. That’s the most important thing. Saving her from him.

“I was using you”. No. I can’t think about that. The things she said weren’t real. They weren’t her. She was only saying them to help save me.

“It was all a lie.” I shake my head to try to rid myself of the image of her, the look on her face as she said that. She didn’t mean it.

Besides, I haven’t got time to fall apart. I need to figure out how to bring Victor here. There must be some kind of manual, some kind of guide for these kinds of things. If only I could access r/VampireLife on Reddit, I bet that would tell me, but they restrict access to keep out the tourists.

Hang on. How would Ari have known what to do? She certainly wasn’t scouring social media; she thought she knew tech but she was pretty much still stuck in the noughties.

In the end, the internet does kind of come to my rescue. Apparently, although my source does appear to be the website of a group called the “Sexy Slayers And Devilish Demon Hunters”, there’s an ancient book called the Arcana that details how to summon a demon. Is it possible Ari has a copy? I mean, I suppose I could ask the SSADDH; they have a local branch just outside Newton Abbot, although I think they’re probably really into swinging along with the whole monster vanquishing thing and it’s not exactly my style.

I’m in desperate need of caffeine, my brain feels like mulch. Perhaps I should pop to Sangers for coffee and bacon and then go and see what I can find at Ari’s. I know she won’t be there, Ivan said she’s gone to Scotland to spend some time with her dad. I feel like I’ve been stabbed through the heart. I wanted us to go to Aberdeen together, I was going to take her for her next birthday.

Ari is still living in the 1950s and keeps a spare key under the plant pot in front of her door. At least I don’t have to wait to be invited in. The flat smells of her perfume and I’m thrown back to those stolen moments in my room before everything went wrong. Was that really only yesterday? It feels like aeons ago, like it happened in a whole other lifetime. I allow myself a moment, breathing her in, imagining what could have been.

But I’m being self-indulgent. None of it matters, not right now. There will be time for day dreams and what ifs and what could have beens later. For now I need to figure out how to conjure Victor. That’s the only thing that matters.

I stand in the centre of her living room and turn in a slow circle as I scan the space. Would Ari have hidden it away where no one would ever find it? Or is it kind of a common item, something you’d find on most vampire’s bookshelves, even if they don’t seem the type. Like my aunt and her dog-eared copy of Fifty Shades, presented without shame as if the rest of the world doesn’t know she’s basically reading porn.

The Arcana is being used, rather irreverently, to prop up a shelf inside one of Ari’s kitchen cupboards. I have to empty all the mugs out before I remove the book to stop the whole thing from crashing down. The demon summoning incantation is on page fifty-nine, sandwiched between a guide to werewolf pelt maintenance and a detailed series of drawings on the preparation of magic mushrooms.

It’s all really rather easy, in a way that is kind of terrifying. It shouldn’t be as simple as whispering a few lines and then saying the full name of the demon you wish to summon.

Victor appears before me. He’s huge and broad, like a professional American football player, with long hair and dressed all in black. He looks like he’s in fancy dress until you notice his horns and that his eyes are silver, shining with all the promise of a being from another world. Oh, and he’s wielding a mace. So that’s good.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asks, looking at me as if I’m a piece of dogshit on his shoe.

“My name is Brody and I wish to make a deal,” I say, trying to inject some authority into my voice and failing miserably.

The demon tilts his dead back and laughs, the sound reverberating through the room. “You?” He points the mace towards me and it takes all my resolve not to step backwards. This guy is fucking terrifying.