The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Read online

  The Cost of Magic

  The Ethan Cole Series

  Andrew Macmillan

  All material contained within copyright © Andrew Macmillan 2020

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and scenarios are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  More from Andrew Macmillan

  Contact Andrew Macmillan

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Iona Street, Edinburgh. Home at last. Ethan Cole’s black thoughts fell away as his key slid back the steel bolts securing his door. Head in the game – time to focus. His trip up North had left this place empty long enough. So far, nothing Edinburgh had to offer had been reckless enough to try him here, but he couldn’t be too careful.

  He punched the pin into the digital alarm: 1, 2, 3, 4. The device would make a wonderful distraction for anything that might try to get in quietly. The real intrusion detection device – a hair taped from the door to the doorframe – was intact. His other countermeasure – bells designed to make a racket – jingled from inside as the handle gave way. Of course, all this stuff was really to make sure he had a chance to catch anything trying to get in, rather than to chase it away. He wasn’t called the armiger for nothing.

  He entered his flat, dropping his kitbag which thumped, heavy with ammo, duct tape and other assorted equipment. The oily steel of his shotgun was warm to touch as it slid from his jacket. He ignored his parasite, slithering down in his guts. It always woke up when he got focused.

  He secured the premises. Part of him hoped to find something to vent on, after the business up North. Satisfied there were no tentacle-faced assassins hidden in the shadows of his Edinburgh tenement flat, he dropped into the single armchair in the corner of his living room/kitchen. Home. It was as sparsely furnished as he could get away with and still call the place a home. His weapon rack sat undisturbed across the room, propped against the far wall. Really it should have been down in his makeshift basement along with the other toys, but he used it so much. Besides, privately, he liked the way it looked. Training mats took up most of the wooden floorspace. The sofa and side table sat next to his armchair. In the corner on his right, a rug covered the trapdoor to his improvised armoury.

  The business he’d just left behind flashed in a stream of unwanted memory. Dead bodies and bad choices left a bitter taste, best scorched back down with whisky. On the low table beside him a bottle of Lagavulin 16 sat, welcoming him with open arms. He held it up to his face. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  His phone buzzed in his pocket. It hadn’t stopped going since yesterday. Nessie, his mentor and the closest thing to a father he had, must have caught wind of the disaster that the soldiers of the North were blaming solely on Cole. He’d have to get good and drunk before he spoke to Nessie. That would probably annoy the old man even more, but sober was not the state for enduring one of his lectures.

  The Council had sent Cole up there – he was their man, on paper at least – but that wouldn’t stop them taking delight in trying to prove he was guilty of murder, or whatever the Northern Lodge would accuse him of. Being the Council’s armiger was mostly downside, but Cole’s job of upholding the Armistice was the only reason they tolerated him to live. It stirred. The Armistice was a fucking sick joke.

  At some point the men of the Northern Lodge would come to Edinburgh, looking for their version of justice. Cole wasn’t sure they were wrong. He drank straight from the bottle. Care washed away in a flood of whisky. He’d check his kit back in later; there was food to think about. Gods, peacetime life was dull. Just one meal after another. The cupboards would be bare; they usually were, unless Natalia or Nessie brought stuff round.

  Where the hell was Natalia? He pulled his old grey Nokia from his jacket, his steel-toe boots heavy on his feet as he kicked them off and thought about a message he could send her that wouldn’t sound needy. The phone erupted in his hand. Greensleeves: the only number given a ringtone on his clapped-out phone, and it meant work was calling.

  By the gods, the Council was already getting involved in the bad blood from the Northern Lodge? He should ignore it; he’d had enough shit for one day. But there were no working hours and no days off. The monsters of the city, licensed by the fucking Armistice, didn’t take holidays. He hit the green button.

  ‘Cole, Armiger, reporting.’

  A breath sounded from the other end. Was that Nessie’s breath? The old man breathed like that. He grabbed the whisky bottle as a voice spoke.

  ‘That should be Cole, Armiger, reporting, sir.’

  He spat booze down himself, his legs bringing him to standing.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  His reflexive salute made whisky slosh from the bottle and up his sleeve. Shit, the Grandmaster – head of the human half of the Council and the most powerful mage on the planet to boot – was making this call personally?

  ‘Sir, it wasn’t my fault.’

  The pause on the other end of the phone made accusations.

  ‘Sir—’

  ‘Armiger.’ The Grandmaster’s voice was leaden with authority. Protest waved goodbye, and the good soldier stood to listen. ‘We have no time. The bells of the Pit ring; a beast vampire has escaped.’

  Cole sat down in a daze. He could just make out that the bell was ringing on the other end of the phone. Voices shouted, tinny and unintelligible.

  ‘Sir, how? How could a vampire get out?’ It wasn’t supposed to be possible; the Pit was an unbreakable prison. It was so unbreakable no one had even seen the Pit’s entrance in living memory. He could hear the Grandmaster’s voice barking orders to the Council’s soldiers. He moved to the weapons rack; he’d need a backup for the fist-knives currently sheathed at his waist. Something for puncturing vampires. He picked up his Roman gladius and moved to the kitbag on the floor.

  ‘There are ancient constructs set to guard the Pit; they must have been defeated. We also have to assume more beast vampires may crawl their way out. The Council will contain the Pit. You, Armiger, must contain the beast vampire that is now loose in my city.’

  The beast vampires caged in the Pit were legendary, as were the constructs guarding the Pit, which had been a feature of Nessie’s bedtime stories, many years ago.

  ‘Sir, if the Pit’s constructs have been defeated … I’ll do my best, but—’

  The Grandmaster’s voice scoured harder than the whisky. ‘If you can’t do this, Cole, people will die. A lot of people. It’s you or them. The vampire will feed on the city. It will not stop until it is put down.’

  The Grandmaster mistook him. It wasn’t fear for himself; it was the implications of his failure that covered his back in swea
t.

  Cole was already moving. His parasite writhed in his gut. He ignored It. The kitbag was still packed, but he’d need bigger bullets for a job like this. Hell, he would need an Apache helicopter gunship and an RPG for a job like this. Too bad he only had his shotgun, which he retrieved from where he had left it on the kitchen bunker. The Grandmaster spoke in his ear.

  ‘The vampire will be headed toward the nearest food source. We will send you more bodies to contain it, once the Pit is secure.’

  The phone hung up.

  The kitbag swung over his shoulder. Beast vampires hadn’t been seen in centuries by anyone … anyone except Cole. Mr Lucky White Heather. The shitshow up North had been caused by one of the bus-sized nightmares. They were violence incarnate, slab-headed, with massive, thickly muscled arms. They stood on four, pillar-like limbs, and when they moved, they lowered their arms to the ground, legs working in tandem, making their low-lying bodies look insectoid. He’d seen the one up North for barely a few moments. Its eyes had been burning, violet coals. It hunted by exsanguination, marking its victims out with their own blood, which poured down their faces when it was close.

  Beast vampires had been cast into the Pit, because they were far too savage to live in a world with the laws and rules set out in the Armistice. It watched him from inside his guts, gloating. He lifted his rug away from the corner of the living room. The trapdoor underneath had heavy bull-rings, which he pulled up to reveal blackness.

  The foundations of the flat were damp; the air jarred the heat from his skin. He’d floored the area and even run power down to it, to keep all his very illegal toys hidden and out of the way. The shotgun cartridge machine sat at his workbench surrounded by long, flat boxes of shotgun shells, ideal for secreting around his person. He grabbed the box labelled Ferrocerium/iron mix 100% in his spidery writing and checked the blue shell casings.

  Iron rounds were the ticket. No beast vampire was going to stand up to a belly full of that. He grabbed another three boxes of shells, just to be sure. Iron was useful against a lot of creatures that relied on speed and strength primarily. His red shells were packed with rowan wood and were better against things using magic or mental manipulation, so he left them on the desk.

  He left his main door flat, vaulted the front gate and dashed around the corner to where he had left the Rust Bucket. His twenty-six-year-old Ford Fiesta was quietly decaying in a space nearby. Night hadn’t long fallen. The time of vampires, and plenty of the other scum that infested the city. He jumped into the driver’s seat, praying the engine would start, and turned the key. After a wheezing cough, the engine gunned. He tore off, up Easter Road. The Pit was located in Holyrood Park, in the midst of the city. He wasn’t sure exactly where, but somewhere on the side of Arthur’s Seat. There were a lot of flats nearby; the vampire would head for them.

  The boys lay still and lifeless, throats missing on the barracks floor. He pushed his temples. It wasn’t the time for old failures to visit. His parasite slithered inside him. He bashed the steering wheel, wringing the rising heat from his muscles.

  Traffic was mercifully light. There was a greasy weight on the horizon visible only to Cole and others unlucky enough to be like him. The weight was a slowly swirling cyclone in the clouds, hanging over the hill of Arthur’s Seat. The location of the beast vampire.

  He drove through the lights at the top of Easter Road, heading south toward the park, over Abbeyhill. The cyclone spun faster ahead. The beast vampire was heavy with power. He ditched the car by Holyrood Park gates and ran. It writhed. His parasite. It snaked in his guts, always, waiting to be used. He could feel It stretch to escape, caged by his body and by his gut armour – the protection given to him by Natalia’s own brand of magic.

  Under his feet, the bitter curd of rotten and corrupted black magic slid, always a handbreadth away – all he had to do was reach down and siphon it from the ground. It watched. All armigers waited to find the unsolvable problem. The immovable object that forced them to draw too deeply from the black magic they used. When that happened, the parasite in them would take over, warping them, flesh and all, into a thing of nightmare. One day, Cole’s immovable object would come.

  The mass of the beast vampire weighed ahead of him, much like an immovable object, as he ran flat out toward it.

  He reached the park, dreading what he’d find. There should have been smoke on the horizon. There was none. Nor the blue flashing lights of a civilian response to a disaster. The cyclone spun, its source still obscured by the horizon. The straps of his kitbag dug in as he dropped his elbows to keep his shotgun from falling out of his jacket. He ran as fast as he could, heading to the north end of the park. Just another crazy runner in a park full of crazy runners. Nothing to see here, folks.

  As soon as the first row of flats on the other side of the park could be seen clearly, he knew something was wrong. The feeding frenzy ought to be going on right there. The terrible oily tornado of the escaped vampire spun behind the row of buildings. He would thank the gods for small mercies, but it only meant the vampire was hunting further into the streets. Strange – discernment was not a known quality of beast vampires.

  His was not to question. It squirmed, tightening like a vice around his spine. He ignored the burning in his lungs as he hit the flats. Lights were on, life continued inside in all its peaceful monotony. His heart beat like a jab in the ribs, his hands would be shaking like hell – he couldn’t run this long and hope to keep target accuracy when he got to the vampire. Thank the gods for shotguns and their wider spread: his was a sawn-off, wide bore, double trigger side-by-side, just for occasions like this.

  The tenements of Queen’s Park Avenue flashed by. He rounded the top of the street, clipping some kids who shouted something after him as he turned into Meadowbank Crescent. The cyclone of dark power was ahead, visible now, tinged with a charred green colour. He tore past a woman walking her dog. Where the fuck was the vampire going?

  He finally reached the street where the beast vampire’s dark aura hung. People swarmed from the surrounding houses, bundling their children out the door, climbing into cars. Their fear-blanched faces gazed in the direction of the house beneath the beast vampire’s heavy weight. Not one of those people could have told Cole why they were running; it was instinct, bred over aeons. They couldn’t see the weight or feel the pull; they just felt the aura of death emanating from close by.

  He dropped into a jog. Surprising the vampire would be all but impossible while breathing like a half-drowned rat. The neighbours evacuating was a stroke of luck, if there was shooting to be done, but one double trigger-pull of his side-by-side was all he’d get.

  The house was ordinary-looking. Or as ordinary-looking as a house could be with a great oily cyclone spinning above it. He could see the vampire’s power in the tinge of burned-green shining from the windows of the house. He moved up the drive. The front door was locked and intact. Not a preferred method of entry for him anyway. He snuck around the house, listening at a side door. The only sound was his own laboured breath. The door was locked. He knelt and slid his two thin lock-picking tools into the canal of the locking mechanism. A few twists and the tumblers aligned, allowing him to pop the lock open.

  Fear would root him if he let it. This moment was always the worst, right before it kicked off. There was a soft, tinkling sound of something breaking inside the house, and he breached the door, adrenaline burning hard. Ahead, a long hall. Doors on the right-hand side. He’d have to room-clear, one at a time, nice and easy. No use trying to be a hero – if the beast vampire got the drop on him, it was over. As he moved toward the first door, a pained cry lanced from deeper inside the house. Great. Time to be a fricking hero. He passed the doors he wouldn’t be able to clear. The risk set his back tingling, but the biggest threat in the city was wherever that noise had come from.

  His shotgun tracked the space at the end of the corridor, muzzle visibly trembling. The hall widened out to a set of double doors ahead of him and
an open archway to his left. Very grand for a squat semi-detached. He hurried, approaching the archway as wide as the space in the hall would allow, keeping as far back as he could. It led to a huge room – the walls had been knocked through, leaving some load-bearing pillars. Whoever owned the place owned the house next door as well and had combined the two.

  Under the windows, which sported heavy, metal-lined shutters, a man and woman sat, holding a child close. They drew back when they saw him. How they had escaped the notice of the beast vampire, he didn’t know. He waved at them. ‘Get out, go.’ They shook their heads, pointing upstairs. Their servants’ clothes, the reinforced windows, all said one thing. This was a refuge of one of the city’s licensed vampires – a mind vampire, legally allowed to live in the city under the Armistice. And these people were tithed. They were the vampire’s property.

  A cry sounded, sharp and alarming. Someone was being damaged, and not the kind of damage that was walked away from. Cole turned and left the cowering family. He opened the double doors at the end of the hall as quickly as he dared. His hands still shook, but he’d be steady enough to unload some big-ass buckshot in a straight line. The doors opened to stairs. Fucking vampires. Paranoid bastards were forever hiding around the city in unregistered houses. Another anguished cry sounded. The stairs melted underfoot, thick carpet allowing a silent approach as he covered the angles on his way up.

  Something as wild as a beast vampire might smell or hear him no matter how stealthy he was, but he had to try. At the top of the landing, he heard a rasping, wheezing voice that froze his blood. Adrenaline bled through the fear. The voice came from an open door, several yards down the hall. He padded forward, gun level as he approached. It was a split-second call, stop and listen, and probably wave goodbye to surprise, which was the only advantage he had, or go in, both barrels blazing. A man could kill a Titan, if the Titan didn’t see it coming.

  He stepped into the doorframe. The source of the great mass that hung in an oily cyclone above the house was contained in a man, who was naked and covered in filth. There was also a kneeling figure, and that figure was unmistakably a mind vampire. The vampire’s glamour shimmered to Cole’s eyes; he was bleeding and gouged. Where was the bus-sized beast vampire? He had no time to doubt. The filth-covered man wasn’t even minibus-sized, but he was vampire, and he had come from the Pit – he must have done. Cole aimed, his heart already sinking. The gun roared, kicking with fury. The double trigger depressed further and the gun barked again. Shells ripped into their target.