Thrill of the Chase (Hunters & Heartbreakers 1)

XX - Wells

^^Above: Train station in London, back in the day.^^

Train Timetable, London North and East

May 1890

29 May.

Langdon Wilkes never stopped amazing me with his buffoonery. I couldn't imagine him hunting any more than me going off to university or Naomi entering the theatre. But seeing him in Shoreditch that night, with Cornelius Selling to boot, shattered any notion of what I'd thought was going on.

"What are you two doing here all by yourselves?" I asked him, while Naomi kept an eye on Cornelius. Not as though we thought he was going anywhere — rather, he looked about to collapse. And the ground was not somewhere you wanted to be in this part of the city.

"Rescuing him," said Wilkes, pointing to the tall cage that I hadn't noticed before sitting on the ground. It wasn't a bird inside, but a bat, clinging to the bars with the hooks on its wings and its toes, staring at us with wide red eyes.

"It's a bat, Wilkes. A vampire bat."

"It's Giff," he said.

"The King's Bench father had him," Cornelius said, having overheard us. "He must have forced him to turn and was probably going to leave him just like this."

"Poor Gifford," Naomi said, lowering herself to the bat's eye level. "Hello there."

The bat let out a soft squeak.

"What'll we do?" Wilkes asked. "We sort of...stole him."

"I mean, I guess you technically...rescued him, but..." I rubbed the back of my head. "Let's go back to ours. Then you can explain yourselves without all of this."

I made an all-encompassing gesture to the slum around us. Although this wasn't even the worst of them, the poverty was still on display here: streaks of black on every surface, even the laundry hanging on lines above us, piles of stinking rubbish lining the streets and the alleyways, tenement houses leaning so precariously on each other that one touch would send them collapsing like a pile of matches, scraping scuffling shouting barking coming from everywhere.

There was a screech, a human one, from somewhere above us, and breaking glass. Then running feet, and I looked up just in time to see a bare-breasted woman hanging out of the window above us, shouting in such an unintelligible accent I couldn't make out any words.

She looked down at me and scowled, not seeming to care how much I could see of her.

"Wot're yew gawkin' at, then?" she barked. She gave her exposed breasts a lift and a shake, then ducked back inside.

"Well, that was a show," said Cornelius.

"We should go," said Naomi, trying to sound businesslike. I knew the slums unsettled her, especially when things began to get out of hand. "And bring the bat."

—

Once we were safely back home, I herded the two of them into the sitting room while Naomi cleared off a space on the low table in front of the couch for the cage, which Cornelius carried. The bat inside had been quiet all the way back, watching the city pass with its eyes opened wide. I kept glancing at it, having to remind myself that it was Gifford in that cage, trapped in the body of a bat. It was likely that whatever the vampire father had done to force Gifford to change would be almost impossible to reverse, unless we found another vampire willing to help us. Which was unlikely.

"So how about the two of you start with what possessed you to attempt this?" I said, once Wilkes and Cornelius were sitting on the couch, the cage between us.